Posts by spuck

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: I remember those monsters

The key with inkjet economics is choosing a model that can use 3rd party ink.

We have a Brother inkjet that does have the DRM chips on the cartridges, but they are apparently trivial to duplicate as there are many sellers on Amazon and eBay that offer inks that work just fine.

I can buy a full set of replacement inks (CMY and Black) for less than $15 USD.

Is the off-brand ink shortening the lifespan of the printer? Maybe; it's lasted about 10 years so far, and we've spent so little on ink over those 10 years that when it finally clogs and dies it won't matter.

All that said, my next printer will probably be a laser/LED.

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

I visit lots of places where the door tells me devices capable of "two-way" wireless communication are forbidden. I've always wondered why transmit-only devices seem to be ok...

Re: At a previous orkplace..

It's fine I guess, I don't love it, but I've gotten used to it.

Yes, it takes some time for the hand to conform to the shape of the hammer. The next step is to miss it when it's gone...

It's do or die for Apple AI

Re: Apple is not a software company

They learned that lesson in the IBM PC era, the hard way. Licensing Mac OS to run on clones meant losing control of the hardware specs and eroding the Apple "experience".

If I recall my history correctly, that was one of the first things Jobs quashed when taking the reins back in the 90s...

Controlling the hardware means they strictly control hardware performance and they don't have to plan for every corner case on every possible hardware permutation. Of course, it also meant they could continue to charge premium prices for Apple hardware, which didn't hurt their bottom line...

iOS 27 dev beta [...] dropped today

Is it just me that this "dropping" phrase grates on? When did we decide this goofy slang applied to software releases as if they are rap albums?

Even worse when it's Google doing the dropping: I never can tell if they meant to say they were "releasing" or "rolling out" a new product, or if they are discontinuing it. But of course with Google it's always a 50/50 chance...

Broadcom finds a VMware customer willing to stick around: London Stock Exchange

Re: They just bought themselves 5 years of off-ramp

Well, it is the London Stock Exchange, so you are most correct, good sir. I tip my cap to you.

They just bought themselves 5 years of off-ramp

If I were running a system that supported billions of dollars of financial transactions each day I would sign the check, too.

I'm not even sure I'd read the number on the check first, because as long as it had fewer than eight zeroes it wouldn't be on my list of top 10 things to worry about.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

The bill itself

From the bill itself here's the relevant lines from section 14:

(3) An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual's geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.<>

(4) A commercial entity that operates a website that contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors may not facilitate or encourage the use of a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to circumvent age verification requirements, including by providing:

(a) instructions on how to use a virtual private network or proxy server to access the website; or

(b) means for individuals in this state to circumvent geofencing or blocking.

All I see in clause 3 is a definition that it applies to someone physically in the state.

I'm not sure clause 4 would stand up to a court challenge on free speech grounds, but I also don't see how it will make much of a difference. If I wanted to run a "website that contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors", those minors would have to learn how to install a VPN client from somewhere other than my site.

Utah mega datacenter could dump 23 atomic bombs worth of energy per day

This was met with skepticism by Omdia Senior Research Director Vlad Galabov, who told The Register that “Simple physics suggests that even very large datacenters contribute only a small additional heat flux when spread over kilometres.

I don't understand this statement, at all.

A Joule is a Joule; whether you consider the source of heat a point source or "spread over kilometres", it's the same amount of heat dumped into the atmosphere.

If I have 10 servers stacked in a single rack or spread across 10 racks in the same room, together they contribute 10 servers' worth of heat load to the room and I need the same amount of cooling to remove it.

Whether I dump 10 liters of water on the ground from one bucket or 100ml each from 100 cups while walking a kilometer, "simple physics suggests" it's the same amount of water I'm dumping on the ground.

Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user staring down $30K invoice

Re: The world of AI is demoralising

Some junior dev is going to vibe code something similar in 60 seconds.

Worse still, a senior dev who knows exactly how to prompt will generate a far better function in 5 minutes.

The problem I see is both of these devs will have a very shallow understanding of the generated/regurgitated code. The more we rely on the robot to think for us, the worse we get at thinking for ourselves.

I don't see someone being able to generate great code with little effort being a problem: that's efficiency. The problem is without the experience and wisdom that only comes from thought and practice, the dev won't know if the code he's being handed is elegant or slop.

As someone who's never bought an AI token...

What does $30k worth of AI tokens get you?

Is this like taking the kids to the carnival and buying 10 tickets to ride the ferris wheel, only to find out that each ride is 12 tickets?

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Handwaving with percentages

"Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone..."

When management starts using percentages rather than discrete numbers my BS detector starts ringing.

"600%" could mean 2 members of the board were using ChatGPT in January and now 12 of them have Copilot installed on their laptops.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

No experience running a fab

His Muskiness has a history of mixed success.

He did not have a history of running a reusable rocket company, an electric vehicle company, a satellite internet company, until he did those things.

But he also didn't have a history of running Solar City, the Boring Company, Twitter, or a self-driving taxi company, and has not done well at any of those things.

Not that it counts, but my vote is to to wish him well and allow him to spend as much of his own money as he wishes to give it a go.

I don't think the citizens of Texas should be obligated to subsidize the attempt.

VMware claims Cloud Foundation on track for world domination

Last time the VMware sales droid visited our shop, he tried this approach. We kept trying to tell him the huge increase in licensing cost from our Essentials bundle to the VCF bundle was a non-starter for us.

He dismissed our concerns, trying to convince us that we really weren't seeing the big picture: if only we understood how much more value VCF offers, with its ability to run containers, bundled software-defined network and storage, we really would be morons to not take advantage of such a bargain!

I tried to point out that all of those features may be worth something to someone, but as we were trying to purchase renewals on existing hardware they really didn't offer us anything this year. I tried several times to show him that all we really wanted was to purchase just those products we were already using.

He wasn't having any of it. I realized after a few minutes that I was pissing in the wind and wasting both our time trying to convince him otherwise: he had his sales points and marching orders and we were just the lowly customers who he had called together to inform us of how much we needed their product and just how much we would pay to have it.

I think I had the about the same level of smugness when I let them know we would not be renewing at the end of our support term. I'm sure we won't be missed.

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner

> We've come full circle.

again.

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

That's all true, but what you're describing is a hobby, not a business.

Internet services don't run on positive vibes and utopian intentions. They will need to earn money some way to pay for infrastructure and salaries. If it's not free, the number of people who will be interested drops hugely right from the start.

And I'm still not sure how this "social network where you can't add people you aren't standing next to in meatspace" is worth anything... If I want to talk to people I already know, my phone does that without installing another app and convincing the other person(s) to also download said app: I just send them a text or call them.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: This actually happened to me!

Not a single lesson learned?

You didn't learn to bandwidth-limit untrusted lab computers?

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Re: The obviously correct decision

The two biggest problems (for me) that sudo vs. root access solves are:

1) Controlling knowledge of the root password. If there is a root account that can be used, I can't guarantee who knows and who doesn't know the password. You can prove that Alice knows it by asking her to write it down or type it, but you can't prove that Bob doesn't know it in any way. If Charlie knows it and leaves the group, then it must be changed and re-communicated to the remaining staff.

2) Non-repudiation. If "root" did something on the system, I can log that it happened but I can't prove who "root" was at the time it happened.

But then again, this is for me, and these are not problems I'd worry about on my RaspPi in a non-critical role.

Your point about the attack surface expanding by multiple user accounts having access to sudo, if those user accounts have bad passwords, is a good one.

Re: The obviously correct decision

Yes, but you don't need to allow all users to run sudo.

Orbital datacenter startup CEO admits launch economics don't fly, presses ahead regardless

By "cheaper power", you mean: building efficient solar panels that can withstand launches, building satellites and rockets, filling the rockets with rocket fuel, burning the rocket fuel to put the solar panels into orbit, recovering the rockets and refurbishing them after launch, then constantly managing the satellite orbit to optimize sun exposure while also cooling the electronics, and eventually watching it all burn up in reentry? Are you sure that power is cheaper than $0.20/kWh?

As for the NIMBY factor... How many satellites are we talking? Just to make it fun, let's say there are 10 million of them we want to launch. To place them on earth, we could find any number of 5x5 km plots of land in the middle of several deserts around the globe, where they could be installed hundreds of km from anyone, where no one would be impacted.

Placing datacenters in any of those remote locations would still be easier and cheaper than this crazy idea of launching them into space. Yes, there are challenges with cooling in those places, and there are challenges with access and maintenance, but any of those challenges are so much more solvable than doing the same thing in space.

Anyone who thinks space is easier in any way just doesn't understand the magnitude of the project.

But I think that's the point: people can understand what a hot day is or what it means to have a 500 mile drive for a technician to repair something-- they have a gut feeling that putting a datacenter with 10 million nodes into the middle of the Sahara desert would be so difficult it would be infeasible. By abstracting it away into a realm that people don't really understand, it seems to be easier to bamboozle potential investors who can be dazzled into thinking it can happen.

Launching electronics is a hard problem, but many of the challenges are solved hard problems, like connections that withstand launch forces.

But the whole reason we launch electronics in satellites is because being in space is a necessary condition for the job they need to do. The hurdles to get them there are not cheap or quick, but given enough money and time, we've solved how to do it so we can do things like space-based sensors, communications relays, etc.

But when it comes to datacenters: even if we assumed they could be launched for free I just don't understand what job they do that would be performed better in space than on earth?

Now introducing the additional costs that designing for space, launching, maintenance, and lifespan being in orbit introduces, why are we doing this again?

Re: Not a rocket scientist

So all we really need then is a rocket that doesn't use fuel! Solar panels and positive thinking would be a much cleaner energy source. <eyeroll/>

Instead of using that natural gas to launch a rocket, I wonder if someone could invent a way to produce electricity to power a GPU on earth? I know, I talk crazy sometimes...

"The constellation approach to run AI inference makes sense, but as of today, the economics of launch don't quite work yet," he said.

Please, someone explain to me exactly _why_ a constellation of small satellites to act as a datacenter makes sense.. got "great sense" or "sometime in the future" sense, just any sense at all?

From where I sit, the only people it seems to make sense to are the people who want launch satellites for money.

This is like asking the tire shop owner if he thinks you could use new tires.

AWS ponders selling its home-grown chips by the rack-load, has almost sold out AI capacity

<quote>“There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” he added.

The CEO also revealed “two large AWS customers have already asked if they could buy *all* of our Graviton instance capacity in 2026,”</quote>

I know there is some overlap, but demand for the cheapest-possible AWS EC2 instances isn't the same as demand for bare ARM processors.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: $50

No, no, you're doing it wrong.

The $50 bill is just held to the back of the passport with a rubber band. Sometimes your "emergency money" comes back with your passport, sometimes it falls off.

Never once did I offer money to the officer, Your Honor!

Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why they changed it, I can't say.

Want to be the IT Crowd for the BBC? An £800M contract beckons

Can I just submit my proposal here? Let's see...

30,000 users world wide, that means 30,000 Chromebooks... no, wait, let's order 25,000 Chromebooks and offer BYOD and hot-desking and pretend it's a perk. That will keep costs down.

Now, for content management, because we know BBC==lots of video content: I suggest a single YouTube account.

Where do I pick up my cheque?

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

They don't need to be mutually exclusive...

Your AI rollout isn't failing – your employees just hate it

Just because your AI rollout is failing, doesn't mean your employees don't also hate it.

Re: mandated AI

160 hours is a few more than 7 days...

My first job out of university, the official leave policy was you got no PTO at all until your 1st year of employment, at which time you got 40 hours, and went up from there with seniority.

Luckily, my boss realized the official policy was crap and allowed us to take whatever we needed, within reason. We were salaried, so as long as stuff got done, we came and went as we pleased. You know, like adults or professionals (take your pick).

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

Seems a long way to go...

Does it work? I've tested DOOM, Warcraft, SimCity, Stronghold, Commander Keen, Oregon Trail, and plenty of other period-accurate titles. Lots works. There are still gaps.

I guess it depends on what "works" means to CheezWeasel, but there are plenty of corner cases ahead beyond "loads executable from disk into RAM and turns over execution to it" to be 100% (or even 80%) compatible to an existing DOS means.

Everyone needs a hobby so hack away and enjoy, I say.

They didn't say the company is starting to manufacture devices that run DR-DOS; they might have been building them on the same base since 1992, for all we know...

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Re: Let's see Artemis II successfully deliver a crew around the moon and back

Yes, you have a fair point here... not sure why I connected 01 April to the entire month of April.

From what I see online, typical astronaut quarantine is 14 days pre-flight, so I guess we'll see when they go back into quarantine.

Let's see Artemis II successfully deliver a crew around the moon and back

Not to be the Grim Reaper here, but Artemis III launching a crew to land on the moon in 2028 depends a lot on Artemis II succeeding.

That flight has now been delayed several times, for a total delay of almost 3 years (and counting). In an article written yesterday I read that April 1 is the next targeted launch date, but in the same article it said the crew has been released from quarantine to continue training-- which means they will not be ready to fly in 3 days.

It's like they're still engineering the thing, which doesn't bode well for a successful flight in the next month.

HP says memory’s contribution to PC costs just doubled to 35 percent

Re: If you think that's bad....

I had a quote from Dell two weeks ago for an R6725 for ~$24k. Last Friday the same specced system on Dell.com lists for $55k.

Pricing is so volatile right now Dell is now offering us quotes good for only 14 days. Lead times are estimated at 18 weeks. A server bought today might be delivered in July, unless things slip.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Made me smile

The only time I was faced with the COBRA choice, I had up to day 59 to enroll, but then another 30 days to pay the premium or give up the policy. I left that part out because I don't know if that 30-day payment window was specific to my situation/policy, rather than the 60-day enrollment that is guaranteed by law.

So I really was only at risk for 1 day; I had to sign up by day 59 but then had until day 89 to pay the premiums for days 1-90 if I wanted the policy to be in effect.

During those 90 days, I had to take a child to the ER. It turned out paying the hospital directly for that visit was still cheaper than the COBRA premiums would have been, so I never did elect to pay for the policy, but it was a good thing to have available in case of a catastrophe. If the ER visit had been more serious, or if someone in my family had been injured or needed surgery, etc., then I would have paid.

Good luck!

Re: Made me smile

If you have insurance through your current employer, check into the possibility of COBRA coverage from them. An interesting thing about COBRA is you have 60 days to enroll and pay the premium. So if you are willing to roll the dice a little you can wait until day 59 to sign up.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Placebo

A mate of mine was deployed to Afghanistan, and he tells the story of how the company medic always made sure to have a pill bottle with M&Ms or Skittles in his kit. The locals knew the Americans had medicines they did not, so when travelling through villages they were often stopped and asked for medicine. The medic would knit his brow and think, then offer a "red one" or a "blue one" to best address whatever malady the person had.

When he told me this story, I wasn't sure what to think. Obviously the medic wasn't able to sort out and actually address real problems on every stop, but was he doing more harm or good with this charade?

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Re: "Well, as you're on site...."

But how quickly it can go bad, when you get into something that isn't your responsibility and don't end up actually fixing it...

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: Engineers Tried to Stop The Launch

American Scandal also did a quite good 5-episode season on the Challenger disaster: https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/58/

Their episodes are dramatised to keep them entertaining, but I believe the facts are all there.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: Could be worse

Or by anyone who could buy a luggage lock and take it apart to see what shape the key should be to open the TSA side... a great system, all the way around.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

It's been a few years, so the details are blurred, but a mate of mine once told me one of the more valuable tools in the engine room of a steam-powered ship is several good, solid broom handles. That way there is always something conveniently nearby to wave around looking for the source of steam leaks, rather than a hand or arm, which could mean almost instant amputation under the right conditions.

Another grisly rabbit hole to go down: high-pressure injection injuries

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

So you will never drive a Ford either, right?

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Erm

My grandfather was a farmer who raised cattle for both beef and dairy. My young eyes were opened the day I learned what it meant for him to "service" the cows to produce the next generation.

Service Desk, indeed.

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

But not the full list of your old software, which you need to repurchase (process takes at least 2 days) and install on your own time. As for the standard stuff, and the settings. No they are apparently not allowed to do that in advance of pick up (you get given a specific appointment to come and pick up your hardware, so it's not like someone drops in unannounced to collect new hardware!). So really an excellent use of company time.

This sort of waste of time used to bother me to no end. I realized it was hurting only myself to stew over how inefficiently the powers-that-be wanted me to use my time, but then I realized: they're paying for 8 hours of my time every day, so if they want me to spend them in stupid ways, that's not my concern. But I refuse to give up my non-paid personal hours to make up the difference in the form of unpaid overtime.

Want me to spend 90 minutes of high-salary engineer time waiting for the helpdesk to figure out how to plug the now-mandatory MFA token into the USB-C port that this old laptop doesn't have? Fine. It's no more or less useless than a team meeting where we sit around rehashing what we decided or couldn't decide last week.

This week, my division had our "all-hands" meeting where the division director spent 45 minutes showing us the PowerPoint presentation that he was going to send to everyone by e-mail later that afternoon. Then they decided that 25 minutes of everyone in the division's time was best spent participating in a series of "fun" poll questions like if would rather live in a Star Wars universe or a Lord of the Rings universe.

So that's fine; I'm off to lunch afterwards, on time. I guess any actual work will wait for the afternoon. Or tomorrow, if I can't get to it before 5:00. Your call, management.

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

The corollary: You get the behavior your measure.

Joel Spolsky wrote a great article about that in Inc. magazine back in 2008. (now behind a paywall, but a link here)

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

Yes, I usually view the keyboard as both a user-customizable choice and as a consumable.

Often the mechanical interface to the user is a weak spot, so I see this as a huge step backwards, to have the expensive, "compute-y" part of the computer be inseparable from the "interface-y" part.

At my work, we (employees) have the option to choose a wired/wireless keyboard and mouse, in either normal rectangular or ergonomic formats. When either wears out, you pick up a new one with no questions asked-- we're talking less than a $40 expense.

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re: A reminder

Perhaps the CEO of each company deploying driverless cars should be the registered driver, responsible for any infractions/crimes that the cars make? Whose control are they under, ultimately, if not theirs?

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Frogger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5etwHVarNgI

Server virtualization market heats up as VMware rivals try to create alluring alternatives

Gartner thinks this moment is therefore an opportunity in which VMware users should contemplate [...] the alternative virtualization platforms that will make that possible.

If cost or worry about the uncertainty about what Broadcom is going to do is important to your organization, that moment was over 2 years ago.