Posts by Eecahmap

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

Has no one seen _Saturn 3_?

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Re: Lithium...

So the chemtrail conspiracy theorists are actually right?

/s

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

I'm glad I went with two parity disks in the Synology NAS I setup last year.

I'm still sad that I went with Synology, after their vendor lock-in shenanigans.

Posting AI-generated caricatures on social media is risky, infosec killjoys warn

Sorry bankers. . . .

Butchers and candlestick makers safe for now?

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Re: The problem with scanning ...

Enter Pournelle's CoDominium.

British government caves on datacenter approval after legal challenge

Would that the Vogons had been held to such standards. . . .

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Re: You should not be running MacOS older than Sonoma in 2026

I kept my Hackintosh going until 2021, when I rebuilt it with Devuan.

I kept my now-very-old Macbook Pro going with OCLP until that, too, became a chore, and switched it to LMDE.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

My fourth-generation i7-based desktop started life as a Hackintosh. When that became too bothersome, particularly with the games I wanted to play, I switched it to Devuan with Cinnamon and have been happy there for years and it hibernates perfectly almost every time.

My laptop, which came with Windoze 11, has LMDE (also using Cinnamon) on a second SSD for daily driver use. I wish it could sleep and hibernate better (it panics too easily after waking from one of those), but it's still great for my use.

I keep thinking of switching to MATE or KDE, but every time I try them, they aren't *better* than Cinnamon. Xfce is the fallback in case of trouble with Cinnamon.

6G isn't even here yet but mobile industry wants triple the spectrum

Modulation methods

Instead of gobbling up more spectrum, they should be required to put some of their juicy profits into improving the bit density of their signals, and not tie up those new methods in onerous patents.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

The Nine Billion Names of God

'“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he

added, in an afterthought, “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It was due about

now.”

Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see

Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always

a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.'

(With thanks to A.C. Clarke)

Dear Jesusbot . . .

. . . please protect us from your followers. Amen.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

That cuts across the grain. . . .

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Tell that to the people trying legitimately to leave the country, but arrested and detained, nearly incommunicado, for weeks anyway.

Generative AI isn't just a matter of life and death. It's far more important than that

SF did it already

"It is impossible to gauge the effects of such ideas."

Someone hasn't read the Heechee saga by Frederik Pohl.

NASA won't name the Shuttle picked to move to Texas

Re: Ease of transportation

The best choice to give them is Columbia.

Radio geeks reveal how to access crucial hurricane data after US Department of Defense cut it off

Re: Nerds: 1 – Trump Administration: 0

Trump is anti-science. It's a documented fact, and made clear during COVID-19, when he wanted to slow or stop testing people for infections.

Cloudflare fesses up to config change that borked internet access for all

Re: That's one way to promote rapid resolution

It was a Nagant M1895, so easily suppressed.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

How's your ICCU holding up?

Re: Asylum

He could raid the sofa cushions to buy one of Trump's gold card visas.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: Elections matter

It's a good thing there's no such thing as karma.

There is on Reddit. . . .

If the Buddhists are right, there is karma, but the payoff in this case doesn't come quickly enough.

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Weird AI

I read this as "Alpocalypse" and wondered what Mr. Yankovic was up to these days.

Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later

Re: Bah and Double Bah (BDB)!

A CDR for every CAR. . . .

Re: 25 years?

I still want Harry Harrison's molecular memory.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Office relocations

A now-defunct company for which I once worked hired movers who didn't know computers. Management had decided that the new server room would be the one with a huge transformer in the middle of it, and the movers set one of the file servers on that, thus scrambling the hard drive contents.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: 37.85G ISO

> Does the kernel fit on twenty floppies these days?

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12M Apr 25 10:07 vmlinuz-6.12.25-amd64

This is from today's update of my Devuan-based desktop.

If they're 720KB or larger, yes.

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Re: Oh, IRC in there as well...

I'm a latecomer to IRC - 2002 - and still use Irssi, together with GNU Screen.

Even Google struggles to balance fast-but-pricey flash and cheap-but-slow hard disks

Re: The New Mechanical Turk

That takes me back. Nearly 40 years, but it takes me back.

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Try this with all network services off:

"Hey Google, enable mobile data".

Doesn't work with either assistant.

Choose your own Patch Tuesday adventure: Start with six zero-day fixes, or six critical flaws

And Windows Update is still slow

Just to satisfy curiosity, I didn't boot any of my test VMs, Windows 10, Windows 11, Devuan Linux (pegged to the unstable branch) for a month, to see which one would update fastest. Devuan unstable is pretty much Debian unstable, lots and lots of packages over the course of a month.

From clicking power on, to forcing the update, to rebooting and then shutting down, with all three on the same SSD, and updated serially:

Devuan: 13 minutes (included installing a new kernel and linking in the Nvidia and ZFS packages)

Windows 11: 31 minutes

Windows 10: 34 minutes

SpaceX loses a Falcon 9 booster and scrubs a Starship

Re: Swamp

The fourth one should have stayed up.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

The author's mistaken premise

The author mistakes "new" for "better".

systemd is new. It is not better, and never will be as long as it has visions of embracing, extending, and extinguishing.

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

Re: I'm sorry, *what*?

The wording "you can no longer able" reminds me of many e-mails I've received from people living and working in south Asia.

Like losing the distinction between "few" and "a few", I suspect it's considered a correct construction in that part of the world.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

My home media server is on kernel 6.11.10 and Nvidia 390.157-10.

Someone out there in Debian- or Devuan-land is tweaking the Nvidia packages so they'll compile and link.

Like others, though, I've switched to AMD GPUs, and haven't bought Nvidia since 2014.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Asimov had the answer . . .

. . . in "The Last Question".

Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threats

Re: "fear of upsetting the next US President"...

Only if there's a Schwarzenegger Amendment.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

After hit-or-miss results with more niche (and more expensive) ergonomic keyboards, I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I'm on my second, and bought one more, for backup, before they discontinued them.

(I use a Logitech M100 corded mouse.)

Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz

I finally got a second SSD for my laptop that came with Windows 11, and put Linux Mint Debian Edition on it.

Wake from sleep is more reliable now - Windows would frequently switch off the backlight right at the point it wanted my password, and I'd have to type Ctrl-Shift-Win-B several times to get it to come back.

All my games work fine with either Lutris or Steam.

Judges not impressed by Amazon, SpaceX's attempt to have NLRB declared unconstitutional

Re: Oh, our favorite free speech proponent with so many fans and followers is again ...

Aren't you describing "at-will" employment, which is the case in 49 out of the 50 states, and not "right-to-work"?

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Re: School rules

should not != must not

"Should 'not'" is quoted in El Reg's article. Is that accurate?

Double Debian update: 11.11 and 12.7 arrive at once

Re: unsure about debian

The video card in my DVR is a GT 610, an Nvidia Fermi-chipset model, and the 390 driver is the last in the Devuan package archive to support it. Someone in the maintenance pipeline has been nursing it along; version 390.157-8 compiles and links with the 6.10 kernel series.

This card's stock fan is loud, so I rewired it to run on 5V. I don't drive the GPU hard enough to need the fan to run faster than it does on 5V.

Every time there's an update to this driver package, I make sure to download all the associated .deb files, in case they disappear from the repos.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

After 22 years, I finally scripted something to start Screen when my home server boots, and setup my windows as I like them.

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Re: I'm presuming this won't arrive for Windows 10

Maybe this processor series is the new Itanium.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to [e-mail]

8-inch, even.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

A 680MB download. . . .

Back in the day, my favorite word processor was Wordstar something-dot-something (maybe 2.x) on my TRS-80 Model I. Clearly a port of the CP/M version, it was the only word processor I used on an 8-bit computer that could handle files bigger than memory (48KB, in my case). I ran it on both floppy disks and HDD - my first was 5MB.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

OCLP

If you rely solely on Apple, that's sort of true.

The people who maintain the OpenCore Legacy Patcher are great.

My mid-2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro is still running a current macOS release (Monterey), thanks to them. On an SSD, it's still usable. Forget using an old Mac with an HDD unless it's in a server role, where snappy interactive performance may not be needed/desired.

I have another one running Windows 10, via Bootcamp drivers, which is, sadly, better-performing than any macOS release. It's even still usable as a light gaming rig.

Once Windows 10 support goes away, I'll either let the old MBPs go or switch them to some Linux distro. Hopefully one of them gets the trackpad support right. So far I haven't found such a beast.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

"Fluent"

It'll be a few years before the word "fluent", in this context, earns the right to drop the quotation marks.

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

Does anyone else see this . . .

. . . as a pathway for the emergency of artificial general intelligence?

If DNA replication errors lead to mutations, some of which lead to successful offspring, then why couldn't a long-running piece of software, if big and complex enough, possibly lead to a moment of self-direction?

It may take a long time, but. . . .

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

In this game of pigeon chess, don't be so sure you aren't the pigeon.

World's first RISC-V laptop with Ubuntu preloaded touts AI smarts and octa-core chip

Re: And furthermore

So hurry up and bring your jukebox money.