Posts by tango_uniform 22 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jul 2019
This partly explains why the US military budget is so large. US DoD contracts have requirements for source material and assembly sovereignty, making acquisition more expensive than just going to the lowest bidder, who might be Chinese. Keeping certain industries semi-mothballed by giving them minimum production contracts is a thing.
I'm wrapping up a telecom server build that uses some pretty old software images. DDR3 ECC sticks on the open market are now going for double+ what they were a year ago. Older Xeon processors are also getting scarce as people like me, who don't need AI-class compute, scrounge for stuff that'll just work.
One of the saving graces of the older RAM and CPU might be that they use older imaging nodes so can be made on older fab lines. Hopefully, lines that aren't too busy cranking out support silicon for the newest and best motherboards.
If you want to learn C, try doing end-user support for a C compiler publisher. I did that in the late 80s for a company that wrote C compilers for a bunch of architectures while I went to school. There's no better teacher than looking at someone else's busted(?) code, divining what they were trying to do, whipping up a corrected version and shipping it back to them on the floppy they mailed to us. Yes, support by mail correspondence. At least until I convinced company to allow me to set up a BBS for support.
I still like looking and these concoctions of unhinged art and teasing out their secrets.
I know that Dell and Lenovo made half-hearted attempts to support Linux users, but it was just that, a sop. Until we get some sort of major buy-in from the hardware vendors, Linux will remain a fragmented, reluctantly supported option that won't get much traction at the Big Box retailers. That's where it needs to be to shift users away from Windows.
I thought violence was the last refuge of the scoundrel, or was it the incompetent? I'll need to look that up on Wikipedia...
The BSDs, and I've run them here and there since the early 2000s, are all like raw steak. Yes, you can eat it right off of the foam tray, but it takes a skilled cook to get the best out of it. And some butter.
There have been a number of Ukrainian cyberattacks against Russia during this conflict. They've hijacked television production and distribution, taken down banks' networks, ATMs and card payment systems, defaced and pilfered data from private and government enterprises (including some pretty big data dumps, like the recent publication of bomber-factory data) and messed with Russian electrical, POL and telecommunications systems.
It's a fairly symmetric fight, with the edge, I think, given to Ukraine. Their entire country knows they're in an existential fight. The Russians are trying keep their civilian population from thinking the same way so "business as usual" is in play. That makes them a little softer, IMHO.
Been unable to remove the very expensive wax from a Xerox printer,
Ah, those old dye-sub printers. Had a few in a department that did pre-press stuff for a few years. If the printers weren't regularly used the heads would clog. I found that you could remove the heater/tank/printhead unit from the printer and stick it in the oven (on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper) for an hour at low heat to clear it out. Wasted wax, but consumables weren't in my department budget.
Re your point #2...Atari made a number of B/W and color vector-graphics games. Tempest was followed by titles like Black Widow (a dual-joystick shooter that was one of my faves since I also loved Robotron from Williams), Space Duel and, of course, Star Wars. See here for the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_arcade_games
As the hardware got better, raster graphics took over since they can do the one thing that's tough on any vector display: textured area fills.
Ah, the crux of the issue with Crowdstrike...why do you need it at all? Maybe some CxO in Mahagony Row fell for the marketing? Maybe some faceless "cybersecurity" auditor recommended it as best-of-breed? Maybe some insurance underwriter demanded it?
The way I see it, most of this garbage should already be part of the OS, not some add-on. BUT NOOOO...we have to "let the market determine what's best". If Microsoft hadn't been forced by legal decree to write in hooks for 3rd-party "security products" we'd have a smaller pool of idiots to blame for this kind of cock-up. A pool of one: Microsoft. Certainly, that'd sharpen up peoples' principals knowing that trusting Windows means trusting Microsoft, and only Microsoft, with your crown jewels.
The way it stands now, people will throw whatever 3rd-party product that promises to make up for the lack of Windows security into their infrastructure and sleep well at night knowing that all that money they spent doing so isn't going to Microsoft, but to a vendor that is "smarter" and "more agile". If that were the case, why aren't these vendors PUBLISHING safer, more more secure OSes? See the problem?
I'm not advocating for the demise of Windows but simply pointing out the rather obvious fact that a Zero-Trust Architecture means you don't trust anything, INCLUDING ALL OF YOUR SOFTWARE AND SERVICES VENDORS.
I'm hoping that this is a wake-up call to those who think that writing a check means that they don't have to think about security anymore.
Will Slack go after Google Meet bundling into Google Workspace, once they've slayed the Teams dragon? (They may not have too, what with Google's penchant for killing off products...)
This just smells like sore loser BS to me. If the Slack-jaws fully competed in the office automation and collaboration space (like Google does) then they might have a point.
By your logic, because I have worked and that's contributed to the American economy, then I am responsible for those who are unjustly put in Guantanamo Bay just to silence them.
As an ugly American, I DO feel responsible for what my government is doing. Anything less is an abdication of my civic duty.
Putting civilians on the social chopping block because of government they have no control over is running amok is pressuring the innocent to indirectly affect another.
And we've reached the crux of the matter: Russian citizens seemingly don't have any control over their government. There is no innocence in Russia, just degrees of cope.
FOSS is built on reputation. Reputation has many input variables. If project leads are making reputation calculations that others don't like, then the whiners can fork off and compete.
Aye, that's a fair point. And Windows servicing has never been light-weight. It's made worse now by Windows Defender wanting to scan everything while the installer is working. Still, once Windows is up to date the incremental updates don't take very long to install if you have decent network bandwidth. But, yes, it can take the better part of a day to get a new Win machine caught up, and hours more for things like InTune packages to get pushed down and set up.
So, we get to read about the poor fit and finish of Windows 11 only to go on to hear about the poor fit and finish of a few Linux distros. And the main complaint about Windows is the need to update out of the box? I run a lot of Ubuntu infrastructure and see update notices from apt weekly, it seems like. "sudo apt upgrade" leaps from my fingers with almost unconscious thought on Ubuntu boxes that are not under automated management (i.e. staging/test machines). The point is that our OSes, services and applications are all dynamic things, regardless of who codes them. Heck, even FreeBSD pushes out the occasional update.
I've got a 2021 P15. I joke that I have to wear steel-toe boots when carrying it, in case I drop it on my foot, but it's otherwise been a faithful (and muscle-building) companion. I swore off anything that didn't have a "real" Ethernet jack. No Macbooks or ultralights for me, I guess. The brick-like form factor also enabled the use of SO-DIMM slots and NVMe slots under old-school access covers so there's some chance of keeping the ole lump running past its warranty. It's nice that we can still find current laptops with such features. You do have to compromise...
Depends on what's happening over at Rackspace. If they've got mailbox issues then inbound emails (if they're hitting the Exchange infrastructure at all) could be getting bounced with 550 status (no mailbox found for that address). SMTP is pretty resilient, but it only takes one cranky MTA to bung up mail flow.
One with some experience running on-prem Exchange could conclude that Rackspace was slow on the patching process. There were some pretty significate exploits in Exchange this year.
Sprint's selling their 800MHz portfolio to Dish, according to reports. This makes sense as they've not rolled it out very much and there's not enough of it to be good for IMT2020 (5G) stuff. It's mainly used as a gap-filler in problem coverage areas where 2.5GHz stuff couldn't propagate.
The bigger news here is that Dish looks like they're getting the FCC to extend the deadline for them to deploy on all the 3.5GHz spectrum they bought so they could well be second in the race to "real" 5G. This has got to piss off VZW and AT&T and may well be the beginning of an inversion of the US cellular market.
The few bozos left moaning about "choice" and "higher prices" that they see coming are going to get steamrolled. The fact is that Sprint likely was heading to some sort of BK/restructure event. These blowhards should shut up and keep an eye on the new T-Mob to see if they keep their promises they made to the DoJ and FCC.
