Posts by Ianab

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: overkill

My daily driver is a Sandy Bridge era Xeon, 2 x 6 core CPUs, SSD system drive, 64gb of RAM. Basically cheap Chinese sourced E-waste. Mint is my OS of choice because it drives like Windows, so no problem switching to a Windows machine for support jobs. It does everything I need, and of course I could spin up a pretty decent Windows VM if I needed (but I don't).

We are scheduling to replace some client PCs this year. 8th gen i5s, 8 gb ram and SSDs. Still very capable machines for what they do (local Office / Email and a remote cloud desktop). They have been written down on the books by now, so the upgrade isn't a big deal, just it's not needed for any "technical" reason. Without the artificial end of Win10 support they would run for several more years.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

I'm in NZ, and currently around 70% of homes have FTTP now, and copper lines are to be decommissioned soon, at least in areas with full fiber. That's pretty much every city / town / village by now. Of course there are areas that are never going to see fiber, but they can at least get WISP / Cellular / Starlink for "sensible" prices. They are mostly areas that ADSL never worked anyway.

Cost? When we switched to fiber, from ADSL, the bill was about the same, but we went from ~10 / 2 mbit to 200 / 200. So no brainer there. We since dropped the land line phone, it was never used, and the only calls were from scammers. Changed to a new plan, at 950 / 500 and cost was still the same. Yes it's overkill, but I can download from Steam as fast as my LAN allows. I can shop around if I need cheaper as the physical fiber is owned by a separate company. They just rent the fiber to whatever ISP you choose. ISP then adds on their data costs and profit and charge you. Cost has gone up over the years of course, inflation basically. But because the actual fiber isn't owned by the ISP (and that part of the cost is Govt regulated), I can chose ISPs.

Govt backed the funding for the initial fiber installation, but get the $$ back over the years from the line rentals. But it means that "most" of NZ at least have the option of good broadband. How good depends on what you want to pay.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: I'm Not a Fan of Tariffs, But

Most of the $$ spent by a Govt circulates back into the economy, it doesn't just vanish. It pays wages / rent / supplies / contractors etc, and so goes to support other areas of the economy, and much of it then comes back in various taxes.

While I'm sure there is some waste in the Govt that can be trimmed, but wholesale slashing of spending WILL affect the general economy in some way.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Tuning on the fly?

What I got from the description is that there are 2 ways to handle incoming packets.

1 : Interrupts. Down side of this is that the CPU has to stop what it's doing, handle (stack?) the incoming packet, then complete what it was doing. This obviously delays the completion of the current task, and so the start of the new task.

2 : Polling. The CPU checks the network for new packets whenever if has no current task running.

Neither option is "wrong". But under a heavy workload the extra CPU cycles used to deal with the interrupts slows the process down. Conversely if things are quiet, then the CPU is burning clock cycles polling the network, when it could be "sleeping" or running low power "No-Op" cycles, and get woken up when there was work to do.

The clever part is being able to dynamically switch between the 2 methods, depending on the load. Exact improvement is going to depend on the actual work, but if you could get 10% better response under heavy load, or a 10% power saving when under light loads, that adds up to significant improvement over a whole data center.

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Re: "Everything in Australia is deadly"

Only some of some are less than deadly. Others however are vicious killers....

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/ram-believed-to-have-killed-man-woman-after-bodies-found-in-paddock-at-waitakere-in-new-zealand/news-story/d8916cab438b25e90e26acfb07cc9d3b

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

Re: Several things first

Shutting down the wrong engine is possible, black box will tell the story there. It's also possible they took birds in both engines. As pointed out above, the procedure for a bird strike / engine failure is to go around on the remaining (hopefully good) engine, and set up for a single engine approach. If they had started the go around, and then found the other engine was also damaged, at that point they had run out of good options. So they trimmed the plane for best glide (no flaps or gear deployed), got turned around and came in dead stick, and faster then normal. Only to find some muppet had put a concrete wall at the end of the runway.

Yeah, the only common point is "landing gear".

If the 2nd flight had just taken off, then the problem would have been a failure to retract. Crew ran the checklist for that, got the gear locked down again, and returned safely. All good, everyone safe.

The fatal crash seems to have multiple factors. Bird strike(s) (a compressor stall was caught on video as it made it's first approach). Then a very hasty turn and landing attempt, with no flaps / gear / spoilers deployed. So factors Other than just a landing gear fault. A single engine failure or problem lowering the gear (or even both) isn't a reason for hasty crash landing. When those things happen, the crew declares an emergency, but has time to circle and properly prepare for landing, maybe even burn off excess fuel to reduce the landing speed and fire risk. But if BOTH engines had failed, then it was a matter of looking for the least worst place to crash land, and they got it wrong.

Then there is the issue of a concrete / dirt wall for the navigation lights at the end of the runway, that the plane ended up hitting, while still doing ~150 mph. Most airports have those systems on lightweight structures that will sheer off if hit by an overshoot / undershoot plane, or practically at ground level just short of the tarmac. Either way it's not the proverbial "brick wall on the motorway". Wellington (NZ) airport has it's issues, but if you crash landed like this you would probably end up with a mostly intact plane in the harbor, with a some chance of surviving.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Re: Not an AI Problem

Click bait headline or not, the AI was supposed to summarize the actual article, to save you having to read it all yourself. If it made up an extended version of the click bait, then it failed at it's supposed task, which was the actual article content. It's sort opposite of a "useful" tool at that point, as now you have to actually read the article to double check what the "AI" told you about it.

It's a basic problem with current AI, it creates a "word salad" by association of words and phrases. It creates plausible sounding sentences, but has zero actual understanding of the actual Real World.

The Glue and Pizza possibly came about when it came across text that says, "Using mozzarella helps glue the other ingredients to the base". Now it associates the words "glue" with "pizza" when it mixes up it's word salad. Not very intelligent.

Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability

My telco here in NZ is going with Starlink to initially offer TXT coverage "on eligible mobile plans and compatible phones". Vague on exact details, but realistically TXT transmission is tiny in data terms, and the phones will only switch to Sat connection when they loose terrestrial coverage. Although there a large geographic areas that lack coverage, there's also hardly anyone in those areas. So 99% of TXTs are still going to go through the land based network. They claim voice and data will be available in the future, but no specifics on costs there. Possibly you will need to be on a more expensive plan for that feature?

Previous comment stated that it's going to cost billion for the satellites. 100% agree, but I think the plan is to get a billion folks to chip in $1 a month extra. Pretty soon you have got those billions of dollars. Starlink doesn't just serve the US now, so the cost is being spread across every country they are active in, and that's a LOT of people paying their ~$100 a month, and the individual Sats are in use (and earning income) for most of their orbit, not just when they happen to be over the US.

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

If the old school hardware runs a current Linux, then it's still a supported OS, with all the updates etc.

Wife is running an AliExpress special with a 12 core Xeon and 32 gig of ECC RAM and a NVME SSD. Not officially Win11 supported. Was running Linux just fine, until a Roblox update update broke things. That's a "mission critical" app, as she plays it with the kids. So I ran it up with Win 11, which also ran fine. Not supported, but it's a 12 core CPU, bulk RAM, a SSD, and a 4gb AMD GPU, so it's not a potato.

Until... Daughter installs "Teams". Not sure what crap was going on, but it crippled the machine. I suspect it related to MS sign-ins, and running a local account. So a but of putzing in the APPS section had Teams off the auto start, and "Insight" bloatware binned. Machine runs fine again.

But the Mrs did acknowledge why I like Linux, and I acknowledged the Roblox issue. If Roblox decide to allow Linux use again, using Wine or Proton etc, she would happily switch back. Because why they heck should installing Teams cripple a perfectly good PC?

Biden tackles trade loophole used by cheap Chinese e-tailers

Re: UPU

From what I've observed they are air freighted in bulk to NZ, with local courier labels already printed on them. Obviously the pallet of packages must cost to airfreight, but it would spread over 100s of individual orders, and probably on a Chinese airline. Then they would have a "bulk customer" contract with local delivery companies, and pay the cheapest local delivery rate they can negotiate. The "return address" is a warehouse in Auckland. And because the whole pallet is "GST Paid" it clears customs quickly as they don't have to assess individual packages. So with AliExpress at least you can track the "Left China", "Arrived NZ", "Cleared Customs", "Out for Delivery" happening a day or 2 apart.

So end result is the tax is paid, and delivery costs are similar to what a NZ based company would pay. I don't buy a lot, but it's handy to be able to pick up small computer parts that are harder to find locally.

Some small cheap items do come standard post and no tracking, but that's usually things that fit in a padded envelope etc.

Scenario in NZ is somewhat similar. Everything imported or sold in NZ attracts a 12.5% GST (similar to VAT in the UK). Now if you import $1,000 of widgets from China, you have to pay the GST before it's cleared. But there is naturally a threshold where the tax isn't worth collecting, and most Aliexpress / Temu packets fell in that category, so no tax was paid on them. This means the stuff imported by local shops was taxed, but stuff bought from a Chinese (or any other foreign web page) wasn't. Temu gets an unfair advantage over local retailers, and the Govt misses out on tax revenue.

Solution was that if an overseas company gets over a certain threshold of sales to NZ, (maybe $100,000?) then they have to register with the NZ Tax Dept, and collect that tax at time of sale. Now some small time web site that only does the occasional small order to NZ still slips though the cracks, but that's a legit loophole. The BIG online stores that are getting thousands of orders a day basically comply, and collect the tax at "checkout".

I guess the "stick" is that if Temu doesn't play the game, then their parcels get held up in Customs until they clear the due taxes.

Temu might not WANT to do this with the US market, because adding the tax makes their widgets and assorted tat more expensive to buy. But there is zero reason they can't. They already have this sort of function enabled for NZ clients.

The future everyone wanted – in-car ads tailored to your journey and passengers

There is some finite number. My tolerance varies, depending on how annoying the adds are, and if I could actually use the item they are selling. But there are many Companies I WILL NOT deal with because of their advertising. I mean I put up with adverts if I'm getting a free service, like OTA radio. Sling adverts on something I'm paying for??

When my car starts slinging adverts, that limit will be reached instantly.

Re: "let's file this patent before the competition just in case"

Peril sensitive sunglasses. When they decide you are going to crash they go black so you can't see your impending doom.

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

Re: "The division is bleeding billions each quarter"

I appears the problem is they are NOT making things. Spending 9 Billion operating a FAB would be OK, if it made 10 billion in product to sell. But currently it's not making new chips for Intel, and no one else seems to be buying (yet). So they are trying to sell product that they haven't worked out how to produce yet. Hence bleeding $$.

Intel Arrow Lake to be made elsewhere as 20A process node canned

Re: high volume production

That was my thought. The "Not ready for production" and "We have working units" aren't mutually exclusive. But maybe only 1 in X chips on each wafer are actually "good", because Gremlins that need to be worked out in the process? Broadcom probably want to see a 90% yield, and some real world testing to show the chips don't over-volt and kill themselves. Once the process is reliable and proven, THEN they sign the contract.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Below Deck

From what I have read, there were 2 super yachts moored offshore, at night and in a normally sheltered spot. The captain of the other boat has been interviewed and basically said a sudden squall / waterspout rolled in, and they had to start their motor to maintain position in the wind. Once it blew over, the other boat had vanished. They launched their tender and were first on the scene to pick up the survivors, who had reached a life raft. I assume it was one of those automatic ones that release and inflate if the ship sinks?.

Where I live squalls similar to this occasionally roll in off the sea, with waterspouts and small tornadoes. Not the huge super-cell things things they get in the States, but small, short lived squalls. They can be violent enough to wreck houses, bring down trees etc. Strong enough to be scary.

I can see how a moored boat that wasn't "battened down" could be heeled over far enough to start taking on water, and if the occupants didn't get out in time, they went down with it.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Simple rule

And you always spent 5 min with some tape and pen, and label those random patch leads. That 5 mins can save an hour of panic later

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: > The LAST person who should be blamed is

My understanding is that as it's a routinely updated file, when the system rebooted the software would automatically check for a newer version, download the non-borked version, and the system would be fully functional again after a minute or so? Obviously it needs a more serious software update to fix the underlying bug and stop this happening again, but you can wait a few days for that (while testing it properly)

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

Re: The fly in this ointment is...

If it's that seldom, does owning a capable vehicle actually make economic sense? Owning a more economical vehicle for 99% of your use, and hiring maybe a hybrid SUV for those occasional long trips with luggage is perfectly sensible.

I think what they are trying to show is that many families with 2 or 3 vehicles could get by with "One Less", and potentially be better off. Mostly in denser urban areas, with good Uber coverage AND useful public transport. Even the ability to rent a car occasionally. My Sons are city dwellers. One owns a car that he leaves with the wife, and takes a train to work, they could afford 2 cars, but don't need a 2nd vehicle / expense. Other Son lives AND works central city, so public transport / Uber is all he actually needs, and doesn't actually own a car.

As others point out though, many of us don't live in that scenario. No Uber, and practically no Public transport in our small rural town. Others regularly DO tow heavy loads like horses / boats / portable machinery etc, so actually need a vehicle that can do it. But millions of people probably have more vehicle than they actually need.

FTX's $24B tax bill written down to just $200M

I have to think the original tax assesment was based on SBF's huge but imaginary profits?

When the dust settles and there is actually only just enough funds to pay back debtors, then the real profit, and hence tax liability, is MUCH lower.

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

Re: For what stats are worth...

The stats do sound plausible though. There are basically no new Win10 machines being produced, but some of course have died / been upgraded. So a small but significant number of new Win11 PCs being sold. There has been no compelling reason or rush to upgrade, so the change has been gradual. We support a number of smaller businesses, and are maybe 1/2 way though getting sites onto Win11, basically through natural attrition, new units either came with Win11, or are new enough to upgrade. Planning for more machine replacements over the next 12 months, so the trend will continue. Basically what happened over the Win7 -> Win10 upgrade process. By the time Win7 aupport ended the machines running it had been depreciated to zero value for the company, and they could be binned.

Re: Browser market share stats are not reliable

Or dig out an old Win7 vintage PC or laptop and just have a play. It will be plenty good enough for testing, and with a cheap SSD and another stick of RAM, probably good enough for light everyday use. Mint is my distro of choice becase it has a "Windows Look and Feel", making it easy to swap between it and Windows. Because I'm a PC bottom feeder, I don't have a machine that will officially run Win11. Dual 6 core Xeons, but they aren't new enough. It should run Linux of some sort until it actually falls apart....

Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth

We had clear sky over most of NZ and the lights really put on a show between about 5 and 9 pm

A collection of pictures on the local new site.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350275189/photos-aurora-lights-new-zealand-skies-after-space-storm

The pictures from any decent camera show a lot more light than the eye can detect. but it was certainly visible to the naked eye.

Intel tells mobo makers to go easy on the BIOS settings amid CPU instability reports

Re: Don't enable

Problem is that the Mobo makers made Ludicrous Speed the default.

Default should be what the chip makers guarantees to chip to run at. If you as the end user wants to tweak things up from there, that's on you.

With older systems, the first thing you did for weird problems was reset the BIOS to defaults. But if the defaults are flaky....

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

Re: Weather conditions are for Earth

I wonder if a more reliable long range system might include a geostationary satellite to receive the laser signal, and relay that down though the weather and clouds via more reliable short range radio.

I understand Starlink are using (or planning to?) laser for sat to sat relay for coverage where they have no ground stations, but the down link back to Earth is still radio, because clouds.

They are, but over a few million miles they aren't laser pointer dot accurate any more. The beam will spread slightly, and so the detector receives less photons, so you have to slow the data rate to where it's sure that it's 0 or 1 each pulse.

The beam when it arrives back at Earth isn't the same ~1mm beam that left the probe.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Re: Take some credit

To be fair Apple didn't switch to their new Arm CPUs "cold turkey". They already had much experience with them in their phones and tablets, and things like compilers and software libraries already existed, and they would have programmers on staff already familiar with the architecture. Now I'm sure it still cost $millions to port their OS and software to the new silicon. But it it wasn't a "start at square one", and there were sensible economic reasons to make the move. Their new ARM chips are more power efficient, and I bet they cost a lot less than they were paying Intel for their previous CPUs.

So Apple had both the resources ($ and staff), and a technical / economic advantage to swap over.

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Re: Trying To Stem The Tide Of Defections To LibreOffice

I would suggest you are right.

There is probably a small, but non-zero, base of users that do NOT want a cloud based Office suite, and if they had to, they might go with Libre Office. So they either have to kiss that revenue goodbye, and increase the Libre user base, or continue to sell a Stand Alone version, which retains the users, and still makes some profit.

So yeah, they aren't doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.

Alphabet just banked $3B by stretching life of its servers

Only down side I can see is that it will take longer for decent CPU / MBD combos to come up on Aliexpress. I do like being able to pick up a 12 core Xeon, 32 gb of RAM and "new" motherboard for about US$100

I'm sure Google have done the sums on the potential power savings by updating their gear, and it's probably millions of $. But spending $100 mil to replace , and save $10 mil on power is the sort of sum they are looking at.

Personally, my dual 6 core Xeons don't really gets maxed out, so it's not like a newer CPU would affect the power bill much.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

100% agree. Disaster recovery planning means asking "What if....?"

Most of our clients still keep their live data local, and then Backup to a dedicated cloud backup service. It's a scheduled task, and keeps multiple generations of backup, like old school tapes, so we can go back X months for versions of files. It's been tested, and used "in anger" to recover from accidental or malicious deletions, so we know it works. It's also a locally based company, and we can get phone support if needed. It's an automated process with their own client software, and emails the status to both the client and our office each morning, so you get a notice if a scheduled task hasn't happened, or has fallen over for some reason. It's actually better than manually doing backups, as we have had situations where a user has been changing tapes / disks each day, but the backup never actually worked. And no one knew....

But if the backup service shuts down tomorrow, for any reason, live data isn't affected, and we can implement a new backup plan, even if it's something like a USB hard disk as a temporary thing.

Another client has their main business system hosted on a AWS cloud. Each night the system makes a local backup of the database to a backup folder on the cloud server. Obviously that alone is not good enough, it's a single point of failure. So we copy that backup file down to a local server overnight, and add the file into the backup of local files and emails that are sent to the local cloud provider. So the backup exists in 3 different physical locations, with versioning and 3 months of history on the final cloud backup. So again, as you say, there are backups in 3 different physical locations. So far we haven't had to recover anything from the AWS system. but if the whole virtual server "went away", it would be rebuild-able. AND prior to the AWS, the clients building took a direct lightning hit, and the backup system saved them then, once they got power and internet back on, and a couple of new PCs / network switches / UPS units.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Re: 5TB of solid-state storage

Reading the research paper they wrote, there are 5 x 1TB SD cards. One plugged into the Pi, and 4 more via USB adaptors, and those are hidden under the Pi. So a total of 5TB, all in microSD cards. It seems that speed of saving the data wasn't critical. The Pi units would fire up periodically and check the main storage for any file updates, and just copy down any new or changed files, then go back to sleep.

I assume the 2 other USB dongles are the GPS receiver and Sat modem. Those along with the 9V battery lets the unit phone home once it lands so the boffins know where to look for it.

Pretty ingenious really, and it actually worked in the real world test.