Posts by Scene it all

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

They could at least release an "update" that replaces the app with something taking up about 100 bytes...

Re: I've just uploaded my music collection to...

And cars these days come with USB slots where you can plug in a thumb drive with many GB of music, audio books, old radio plays, etc, and play them through the "entertainment system". On my car (a Chevrolet), you can search by all the usual tags: artist, album, folder, genre, etc.

I wish I had kept all my old Goon Show recordings...

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Re: Ah Nano

I use emacs for serious programming. For quick fixes to /etc files and shell scripts, I always go for nano.

Re: Cult?

Finally, an explanation for the popularity of Java that makes sense. But I have had my epihany and no longer will have anything to do with Java. All my programming is now in Lisp.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

IBM was smart enough with the 360 series to put the "emergency power off" knob up head-high on the front panel, and you had to PULL it. However, the "LOAD" button (basically "reboot") was conveniently just a few inches above the desktop where you could hit it with your coffee mug.

Smoke on the Tyne: Blaze at BT exchange causes major outages across North East England

Re: Fire suppression systems

I was talking to the machine room supervisor at the place I worked back in the late 70's, and they had one of those Halon systems. When it was first installed, they tested it, presumably with something other than the real Halon gas. The supervisor told me that it is so vigorous that the incoming jets of gas would knock tape reels off of desks. The entire building shook.

We had to be careful when snaking cables under the elevated floor to avoid stirring up the dust which might set off the smoke detectors down there. If two detectors smelled "smoke" at the same time, the whole fire supression system would activate. They had placed colored sticky dots on the ceiling just above where each detector was located so that people armed with floor-suckers would know where to stay away from.

As the FCC finally starts tackling its dreadful broadband maps, Georgia reveals just how bad they are

The "freedom" is all on the part of the ISPs. They get to choose where and how to offer service. We get to choose whether to have service at all, or not.

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

I think a better test is to ask the applicant to interview the interviewer, as though they had just been assigned to a project and need to nail down all the requirements. She what questions *they* ask. I remember a situation in real life where there was a lot of back and forth about which sort algorithm to use on some data before merging two transaction files. This was in the days dark ages of tape drives when "sort work volumes" had to be mounted by operations. My boss noticed the question that nobody had asked: "What is the modal sort size?" That is, how many records do we need to sort. So he added some logging to the *existing* way this was being done to find out how many transactions were in a typical weekly run for this application.

The answer was "zero". So he replaced the whole job step with an in-memory bubble sort, requiring no manual intervention at all.

Re: The ultimate chalkboard moment

She died just this past February, aged 101. Two NASA facilities are now named after her.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Maybe it is like that Dilbert cartoon where the boss wants 160 hours per week of effort. He says he expects the applicant to work nights and weekends, and maybe other family members can help out too.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

My long experience in software development at big companies leads me to beleive that those "closed source to protect our intellectual property" claims are bogus. The real reason is, "our code is such crap we would be laughed at".

America's Team Telecom urges FCC to do something about that 120Tbps fiber line between US, Hong Kong

Or they seem shocked, SHOCKED, that large businesses have close ties to the PRC government. Well of COURSE they do! That's how they run things there.

We cross now live to Oracle. Mr Ellison, any thoughts? 'Autonomous self-driving computers eliminate human labor, eliminate human error'

AI optimized for what?

One has to wonder what Oracle would train this AI to optimize for. Possibly increased profits for Oracle?

"Beep beep, I see you need more storage - I have automatically ordered some for you, beep."

The human error will be in signing a purchase agreement for this.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Einstein vs Newton? Where the hell did that come from?

Newton did a lot of his best work while quarantined at home because Cambridge was closed due to the Plague.

Here is the way to position this to employees. "Ok, would you go back to work if there was a gunman standing outside the factory who is going to shoot every 20th person walking out the door? Each day? Because those are the odds your boss is gambling with. Enjoy your bonus."

We dunno what's more wild: This vid of Japan's probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt

Re: That's no asteroid

It is an updated version of Hayabusa1, which performed a similar mission 15 years ago. Both are shaped like cubes with solar panels hanging off one side and various sensors and antennas in other places. Propoulsion is by ion engines, hence the large solar panels..

The winners and losers of infrastructure clouds revealed: AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba get fatter

I see too much cloud as being like too much imports. The US eliminated large chunks of its in-country manufacturing capacity because "doing it in China is cheaper". Which is fine until something comes along that makes importing the stuff back impossible. Things like COVID19, and the need to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels. Then you are stuck not having control over your essential resources.

Scaleway disarms its ARM64 cloud, cites unreliable hardware as the reason

I'm thinking the boards. Poor quality control in soldering, etc? Poorly thought out cooling?

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

I havn't pushed it. The measurements I have seen indicate that a t2.micro's network throughput is about 100 Mb/s. My comments about bandwidth for on-premise installations was because if you end up with 100 people using the service all at once, it can add up and your organization's internet connection might not have been sized for that kind of bandwidth. You can save bandwidth by telling people who are not speaking to turn off their camera.

AWS charges for EC2 instances by the *minute*. So as long as you have a Machine Image saved with all your settings, you can STOP your instance and the charges stop. Then when you need it again, you START it with a simple command line. You have to have ddclient or some other DDNS mechanism set up because you won't get the same IP address back. There is a monthly charge for storing the machine image, but it is under $1 per month.

A minimalist AWS EC2 instance "t2.micro" with 1GB RAM seems to handle 2 to 3 Jitsi users at a time, at under 30% CPU and 50% memory usage. Any more than that and I would use a more powerful instance type with more network bandwidth. The advantage of doing this on a service like AWS is I can easily scale the resources up and down as required, and no capital outlay. Plus the people I talk to on it are all over the country.

For a business using it for work-at-home, on-premise real hardware servers may be the way to go. But check bandwidth requirements.

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

Re: I disagree

Not to mention the climate effects. Once people see that life continues under COVID lockdowns with considerably less airline and car travel, it will be all the easier to accept similar restrictions long term for reduced Carbon allowances..

Re: Your company's IT director was asleep at the wheel

Another plus for laptops is that they are already set up for two-way videoconferencing with the built in camera and microphone. Most laptop keyboards however are crap for extended typing and programming but you can always plug in a quality USB one.

Meltdown The Sequel strikes Intel chips – and full mitigation against data-meddling LVI flaw will slash performance

Who's next to be decapited

Cannot cut off another's head

Until he's cut his own off,

-- W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado

Log us out: Private equity snaffles Lastpass owner LogMeIn

Re: Ouch

With a backup on an SD card in your home safe.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: It's the most (energy) wasteful time of the year

$10 mechanical timer bought at Target, with the little plastic buttons you pull up or push down to select when you want it on. One for the inside tree and another weatherproof one for the outside lights.

Re: they kinda missed a trick here?

There is always the DIY approach. I needed a front door camera, so a USB camera now peeks out of the window above the door, and is connected to a Raspberry Pi3 near the door, with a 10" screen attached. The same Pi also fetches pictures from two IP cameras overlooking the front yard and uses Artificial Intelligence (TensorFlow) to recognize, for example, when the Mail has been delivered. It has no reason to connect to the outside world. The new Pi4 is easily capable to do things like this, and speech recognition too.

Here's a bit of Intel for you: Neri a day goes by that HPE doesn't feel CPU shortage pinch

Re: Shortages

Some server-scale RISC-V designs would be welcome, just to avoid any charges of "stealing" US technology. Linux already runs on it; just need to tweak drivers for whatever interfaces they put on it.

SPARCs fly as Oracle recharges Arm server processor designer Ampere with $40m

I've got a low-end RISC-V processor on an "evaluation board" and I drool over the 5-core faster model that runs Linux, but I would like to see what the server-scale implementations look like. Alibaba has announced a higher-end 16-core chip but it is intended for IoT applications.

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

or IBM 1401