* Posts by StrangerHereMyself

1278 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2020

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Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

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I believe controlling the attitude with just flaps and wings isn't going to work in the thin atmosphere. Reaction thrusters will be needed to quickly correct any attitude errors or they risk the Ship breaking up due to thermal stress.

US Congress goes bang, bang, on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

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Re: Clone

Congress doesn't care what American tech companies do as long as they're being paid off. Also, they seem to have this belief they can regulate Big Tech, even though all such attempts have been thwarted up until now.

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Re: Clone

Like I said before: China will use EVERYTHING at its disposal to dissuade the U.S. from intervening if Xi decides to invade Taiwan. That includes cars, CT scanners, solar panels, drones, computer chips, AI, security camera's, medicines and even TikTok (war is also information warfare).

So it's only logical Congress would want to move to ban the app. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't do so earlier. But when Trump tried to do so everyone, including Biden, was booing him.

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Clone

I chide Big Tech for not having seen the opportunity and cloning the entire TikTok app feature for feature including its look-and-feel. It was obvious to anyone with half-a-brain that the app would eventually be banned in the U.S.

ByteDance was openly mocking the U.S. with their so-called privacy respecting transfer of user data to Oracle servers in the U.S. This project was perennially "in progress" and I suspect the Chinese treated it as an inside joke.

The TikTok netizens need somewhere to go, and currently there isn't anything like it that can fully replace it. Hence, there will be great pressure from TikTok users to halt the ban.

US wants ASML to stop servicing China-owned chip equipment

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

Well, I guess there's no hope for the world then. Let's just prepare for war and slug it out.

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

Neither side can afford to back down and that's what makes this situation so dangerous.

If the U.S. were to back down China would proclaim to have defeated the U.S. and claim world hegemony. This would undermine the U.S. influence in both Asia in Europe since its promises for nuclear protection will be cast in doubt.

Ergo: the U.S. can never allow this scenario to occur. China *must* back down or a nuclear war will be inevitable.

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Re: The United States Of America are going too far...

The problem is that Xi has vowed to reunite Taiwan with the mainland during his tenure. That's a dangerous promise to make since it makes backing off very difficult without losing face.

A war is almost inevitable unless the Chinese people replace their leader with someone who doesn't uphold this vow.

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Sell

ASML doesn't necessarily have to sell less machines with these sanctions, only to different customers.

We need to be on the lookout for the Chinese trying to work around these sanctions. I've heard rumors the Chinese are setting up shell companies in Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines and producing chips and exporting them back to the mainland.

Every company that receives these machines must prove beyond a doubt that they're not directly or indirectly controlled by the Chinese!

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

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Re: Linux Mint

I too think it's far from perfect, but still a whole lot more palatable than Windows. There's so much cruft running on it and Microsoft really doesn't care much about maintaining it properly. Often, junior developers seem to be in charge of updating it, continuously breaking things after updates have been rolled out.

The senior developers have all been moved to Azure and now, AI. Interns are now mucking around in the Windows kernel.

Microsoft seems to believe Windows will survive merely on inertia. I predict they'll be in a for a shock.

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Re: Linux Mint

Any Linux distro can run games. I've got Steam installed on my Linux Mint desktop and can purchase games if I want to (haven't done so yet).

Most people need a desktop to surf the web, read email, access their banking account and print a document every once in a while. Linux Mint suffices for that and is relatively easy to use (but the "autoremove" of kernels and installing of updates is still too technical in some cases).

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Linux Mint

I believe Linux Mint will be the distro that ISV's will eventually rally around. It's the most user-friendly distro so far and seems to work on the widest range of hardware.

It's still far from perfect, though. For example, a family member got errors on startup and it turned out that his boot partition was full. I needed to remove old kernels using "sudo apt-get autoremove". However, the boot partition was so full that it wouldn't boot properly. I had to resort to all sorts of voodoo command line stuff to reclaim enough disk space for it to work.

Copilot pane as annoying as Clippy may pop up in Windows 11

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Re: Closing Windows

They don't seem to be flocking towards Mac, though.

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Re: Closing Windows

Until the wheels fall off the cart. For most home users LibreOffice suffices.

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Closing Windows

We're in the twilight of Microsoft's Windows dominance. The company is only introducing unwanted features in Windows that fatten its bottom line (or inflate its stock price) and ignores the needs and wishes of its customers.

All this AI shit is only added so Nadella can claim his $100 million bonus for having inflated the stock price. Nothing else.

How long until the customers start to vote with their feet?

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

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Re: Why?

During WWII cryptography as a science wasn't that well developed. Today it is and there are a myriad of ways to protect and secure communications with no hope of anyone breaking them in our lifetimes.

If the Germans in WWII had used only slightly better key management and key rotation schedules we might never have been able to break their classified messages, even with those newfangled computers and such.

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Re: Why?

WebEx claims that it supports E2EE, but it must be specifically enabled at both ends. If one of the participants failed to do this the call was probably insecure and only provided TLS point-to-point encryption.

I'll be anxiously awaiting the full report on how this breach occurred.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

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Flag waving

I propose a "flag waving" mission where we land, pick up some samples in-situ and launch those into orbit to rendezvous with a Return Orbiter which will transfer the samples to a reentry vehicle and fly back to Earth. This is essentially the same architecture China is using for its Sample Return Mission and has a pretty high probability of success.

The scientific value of such a mission will be much less, but it's either that or spend countless billions (we literally don't know how many at the moment) on getting MSR to the launchpad.

Or defaulting and allowing China to return samples first. I personally don't think this is a big deal since if Musk lands on Mars with Starship he could return literally tons of Martian rocks. The Chinese success would quickly be forgotten.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

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Re: Are the United States

Too bad having the largest economy doesn't make you a superpower let alone the leading world power.

I doubt China will even attain the crown of the largest economy if the West decouples from it.

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Re: Are the United States

I believe the U.S. (and the West in general) will prevail.

I'm already cueing that Queen song on my CD player: "Another one bites the dust!"

"...And another one down! And another one down! Another one bites the dust!!...."

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Re: Are the United States

China is trying to gain a military advantage over the U.S. with almost everything you can imagine. AI, medicines, customs CT scanning machines, telecom equipment, TikTok, satellites and yes, even cars.

The goal is to intimidate the U.S. to prevent it from intervening when they invade Taiwan. China will then claim this as the defining moment of the beginning of their world hegemony having defeated the U.S.

The U.S. is doing EVERYTHING in its power to prevent this scenario from becoming a reality and this will mean the complete decoupling with the Chinese economy by all Western nations. As time marches on the U.S. will slowly but surely strangle China economically.

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Re: Came to say the same thing

Many people seem to be ignorant of the fact that EU-built vehicles are now mandated to have an Emergency Call system installed which sends and records your GPS position continuously. No, they can't prevent your car from starting but I don't want my movements to be tracked by anyone.

For all I know car companies are going to sell this information to advertisers which sell it on to LEA or intelligence agencies.

It's a creepy world we live in. Orwell would be surprised if he were still alive.

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In that sense Chinese cars may even advantageous because they also sell cheap, no frills cars with nothing but a radio and an electrric heater. No electronics (save for the charger / motor controller) at all.

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Excuse

This is just an excuse to limit the import of Chinese EV's, which I think is a good idea. But why beat around the bush? Why not just impose huge tariffs or outright ban the import of Chinese cars? China hasn't exactly abided by the WTO rules either, you know.

The car industry is simply too important to cede to the Chinese.

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

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It amazes me that they're still making money somehow.

Is it just momentum in the sales of mainframe services, software and replacement hardware? Or is it something else? I mean, their Quantum stuff isn't being sold currently AFAIK.

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Replaced

"Replaced by A.I.!!"

Just putting that two-letter acronym in your press announcement will pump up your stock price.

Europe probes Microsoft's €15M stake in AI upstart Mistral

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Inevitable

I believe the domination of AI by large tech-companies is inevitable since the investment needed to power and develop AI is humongous (requiring many billions in GPU's alone) and only the largest and most credit-worthy companies can finance it. There's not enough venture capital available in Europe to finance a large AI start-up.

So essentially tne EU is spitting into the sea.

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

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Other GUI

I'd rather see a novel Linux distro with a unique self-drawn UI instead of them continuously repackaging and altering Qt and GNOME and reinventing the wheel a thousand times.

RedoxOS too is becoming more palatable since it's focusing on getting Linux and BSD software to run on it. I see a bright future there.

US military pulls the trigger, uses AI to target air strikes

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Re: Killer robots

Missiles are too expensive and can only be used to attack high-value targets (ammunition and fuel storage, factories, command and communications centers). We only have a very limited supply and can't easily make more (and the government is unwilling to pay for huge stocks) and lead times are high.

We've seen that in Ukraine attacks on high-value targets haven't really changed the situation on the ground since we don't allow Ukraine to attack targets in Russia. The Russians still hold their ground and you need enormous amounts of "dumb" ammunition and manpower to break the deadlock.

Killer robots could be used to break the deadlock, if they work as advertised.

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Killer robots

Killer robots will become a reality. Why? Because the U.S. DoD is too afraid China will built them first and thereby gain a military advantage. Ergo it's therefore a foregone conclusion they will be built and most likely are already being developed.

And it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the U.S. were to deliver them to Ukraine in the near future.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

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Unprovable

His remarks are unprovable and therefore completely moot.

Terrorist attacks may have led to right-wing government is more European countries, but that's not equivalent to the reconstitution of Nazi Germany and the repeat of the Holocaust. The world has changed. Israel is now the home of the Jewish people and it (supposedly) possesses nuclear weapons. Even if the brown-shirts were to return Israel would stay safe.

I personally believe we should define clear borders for surveillance and snooping in our society. Politicians will always claim we need more to "keep us and our children safe" but their motives are repression and identifying people who could stir up trouble and unrest.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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Or politicians :)

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I've been hearing the same story for 40 years or more. I can still vividly remember my dad telling me not to become a programmer in the early '80's when he showed me an article on so-called Expert Systems. People would tell them what they wanted and it would produce a complete working program as if by magic. We all know how that fanned out.

I believe there's a deep desire among companies to replace these expensive and obnoxious software developers, as we can see with all the hypes (Expert Systems, Lo-Code, AI). It will eventually become reality but only when computers have matched human beings in intelligence. And I believe we'll have different problems on our mind when that happens!

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

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Re: Failure

These companies will learn from their mistakes and eventually get it right so I'm hopeful of the future.

Mind you that it took SpaceX four or five launches to get something into orbit and it almost bankrupted the company.

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Re: 90 degrees better than Japan

I was wondering if it was possible to push the lander upright with its steering rockets (located on the top and above the center of gravity). May not work, but what do they have to lose?

The mission as it is is a failure. Might as well give it a try.

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Failure

I see this mission as a failure. Tipping over makes the lander more or less useless and reduces the transmission rate to a crawl due to the antenna's not being aligned properly.

Also, the horizontal speed component, although minor (about walking speed) shouldn't have been there. This means sub-par engineering since even the first Surveyor lunar lander (launched almost 55 years ago) got this part right. In fact, the Surveyors were so primitive that all the computing power for it was actually based in Houston and the lander itself was remotely controlled, despite the 1 or 2 second delay.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

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Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

They're not going to extract much money from me or my family members, since I've migrated them all to Linux Mint.

Seeing Windows run dozens if not hundreds of processes and services which I have no clue what they do makes me think the operating system is untrustworthy and insecure.

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Wrong

I don't want or need an AI PC and these hypes are making me think I should leave the IT world behind. I'm sick of all these hypes (microservices, cloud and now AI) which are only being pushed to increase the stock valuation of companies like Microsoft. They don't care about what the user needs or wants.

A friend of mine mentioned that after 30 years Windows Notepad still doesn't have tabs, but there will soon be a version with "AI" built-in it so it can tell me about what I wrote down. Duh! Who needs this shit? No one, of course.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

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Reason

This is the reason why I deleted my AWS account as soon as I had used for some purpose. The last thing I want is for someone to steal my credentials and racking up a $100K bill with crypto-mining.

I once read an article about some guy using AWS and making programming mistake and ending up with a $30K bill. Fortunately for him AWS forgave him the bill, but it made me extremely hesitant to use AWS or any other cloud service. Even if you're using the "free" tier you can still rack up a huge bill.

No cloud for me.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

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Re: Why?

Because it has nothing to do with Oracle, it's their resellers who are doing this.

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Incompetence and corruption

That City Councils keep buying software from these drug-peddlers is just inexcusable. It all boils down to incompetence and corruption. Somewhere, someone is getting his pockets lined granting these companies these lucrative contracts.

The excuse is always that they're buying standardized software, but almost always they want modifications which make the solution 100% bespoke and prohibitively expensive.

It would be much better to fund some UK company to develop the software, keep the rights to the code and to open-source it, so other City Councils can use it too.

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

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Re: Frying pan

I don't see any reason why the U.K. Government can't release software under an open-source license like GPL or even MIT / BSD.

They might be unwilling for some unfathomable reason, but there's nothing preventing them.

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Re: Frying pan

The only way to avoid lock-in is to write the code yourself or pay someone to do it and to retain the rights to the code.

And governments know this but they're too corrupt or incompetent to do this. They come up with all sorts of excuses ("We don't have the time", "We don't have the necessary skills") but this is merely to hide the fact that someone's being paid off one way or another.

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Re: Frying pan

The U.S. government, by law, cannot claim copyright on anything it produces. The U.K. government (and most other European governments) can.

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Frying pan

This reminds me of the adage: "Out of the frying pan into the fire!"

SAP isn't any better / cheaper than Oracle, there are just different faces holding the whip.

Why can't they just use open-source software. Or better yet, make their own software and open-source it. If often claimed governments should publish the functional specifications for the software they need and fund the open-source community and maybe some ISV to build it.

Apple promises to protect iMessage chats from quantum computers

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Unproven

These newer post-quantum algorithms are all unproven in the real-world and several PQ ciphers have been shown to be insecure over the years.

As long as Quantum Supremacy isn't attained, I wouldn't want to switch over to these new algorithms.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Wonder

I wonder if this leak about a Russian nuclear satellite killer is really a smokescreen for something else.

I believe the U.S. intelligence agencies may have detected Russia opening its nuclear arsenal and dispatching nuclear weapons for use in Ukraine. This "leak" is really telling the Russians: "We know what you guys are up to!" and it wouldn't surprise me that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is quietly being inspected and put into a state for near-term use.

Stay tuned!

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

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Re: Illegal invasions

By not declaring the invasion of Iraq in 2003 ILLEGAL the U.N. has forfeited all credibility. Period.

Apple makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union

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Re: Security and safety guarantee?

Apple has a reputation for a secure platform to live up to. They cannot live up to that reputation if other vendors make sloppy mistakes in their handling of browser security.

Also, customers have a certain expectation of security when they encounter a, what they believe, is a native home-screen app but which is really a web app. When other sloppy vendors break that trust it damages Apple's brand.

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

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Re: Mint

Most people don't seem to realize that Windows isn't that easy to use either. It's just that over three decades a lot of people have learned how to use it or can rely on some acquaintance or family member to solve problems for them.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

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Re: We need a new Unix

They want you to statically link and all system calls are through IPC messages (like all microkernels).

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