* Posts by Eecahmap

90 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2019

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

Eecahmap

Re: Bah and Double Bah (BDB)!

A CDR for every CAR. . . .

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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?

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

Re: Swamp

The fourth one should have stayed up.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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?

Eecahmap

Asimov had the answer . . .

. . . in "The Last Question".

Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threats

Eecahmap

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

Only if there's a Schwarzenegger Amendment.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com

8-inch, even.

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

"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

Eecahmap

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'

Eecahmap

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

Eecahmap

Use MFA with sudo.

The product I supported in my last job, BoKS, can do exactly that.

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

Eecahmap

Re: And furthermore

So hurry up and bring your jukebox money.

In Debian, APT 3 gains features – but KeepassXC loses them

Eecahmap

"This has made a lot of people very unhappy and been widely regarded as a bad move"

I see what you did there.

US faith-based healthcare org Ascension says 'cybersecurity event' disrupted clinical ops

Eecahmap

Re: Ascension - a "faith based" healthcare organization must have better protections than most

You can trust that they are in your face with religion. I know firsthand.

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Eecahmap

Re: Alternative

My 2014 Intel Haswell desktop is much more stable with games via Lutris and Steam on Devuan than my 2023 AMD Ryzen 9 laptop on Windows 11.

Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

Eecahmap

If it's like my previous employer, then the constant drumbeat was "cut costs" and "switch to Microsoft monoculture".

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

Eecahmap

Re: Alternative to Player with USB support?

I've had generally good luck with VirtualBox. Perhaps it'll work for your use case.

Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy

Eecahmap

The Stainless Steel Rat . . .

. . . for President.

It was done in fiction, decades ago.

Ex-White House CIO tells The Reg: TikTok ban may be diplomatic disaster

Eecahmap

A while back I bought Pimlical through the Google Play store. Pimlical is the current offering from the author of the long-ago popular Palm Pilot app Datebk3 and then Datebk4, which I also used back in the day.

I changed phones, and didn't use it for a while, then decided I wanted to try it again. Gone from the Play store, because the author didn't want to play Google's games any more.

No recourse but to buy it again, directly from the author.

No, thanks.

Singapore improves the AI it uses to detect smokers

Eecahmap

Re: Version numbers...

"Multitronic units one through four were . . . not entirely successful."

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

Eecahmap

Re: without it (also) running as a systemwide init thing?

I choose zero modules. Why won't he respect that?

Eecahmap

Replacing one friction with another

"On the other hand, by supporting systemd, we reduce the friction and problems that KDE and GNOME developers face currently, they build their UIs to work with systemd and so we can run them as they intended to. The APIs provided by systemd are actually needed to run a modern smartphone UI on Linux: there isn't really an alternative out there."

systemd is friction incarnate, keeping me from controlling the hardware I own.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Eecahmap

I used GParted in the latest Knoppix (now several years old) to resize an EFI Windows 10 installation to make room for that wonky update that needed more room for the recovery partition. It went fine.

How to weaponize LLMs to auto-hijack websites

Eecahmap

But can it teach matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe?

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Eecahmap

Re: One word ...

A few years later, though, you'll need something like Colossus to protect you from an interstellar threat.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Eecahmap

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

I reboot my home Linux boxes at least as often as when anything in /boot is updated. I don't want a borked update to the kernel or initrd to cause trouble later.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Eecahmap

Where's my share of the sale?

To the author: I've been a licensed ham for 34 years. I didn't receive anything for the partial sale of 44/8.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Eecahmap

Re: Lovely

I never had a 6809-based system, though did lust after the CoCo series.

It's too bad the 6809 fell out of production, as I think it would have made a better retro computing platform than the 65C02.

Still, I find the Commander X16 appealing.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Eecahmap

Cinnamon beats Windows for UI quality.

Eecahmap

Veracrypt

I doubt it will work with Veracrypt, either, which is how my old Macbook Pro's Windows installation is encrypted.

I did the manual resizing steps in my Win10 VM, and they worked, but I haven't yet decided to try it on the MBP, because I'd have to unencrypt first.

Edit: I did have to move the EFI partition after resizing the C: partition, as this VM was converted to EFI after initial build. I used Knoppix+Gparted for that. . . .

After that, there was enough room to make a new, bigger, WinRE partition.

Mike drop, DXC-ya later! Lawrie immediately ejects as CEO from IT outsourcing giant

Eecahmap

This didn't age well

Will there be a Mike number three?

As lawmakers mull outlawing poor security, what can they really do to tackle online gangs?

Eecahmap

Is this just a modest proposal?

Issue letters of marque and reprisal.

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