Posts by TheWeetabix

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

Well, that’s a new and interesting way

To release vulns into the wild…. Unless they’re planning to double up on the Q&A to read all that code that no one wrote….

Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission

Re: Hmm...

Actually, that’s self excluding, if I see no bad reviews, I know that they’re being curated.

IBM Watson zombie brand shuffles forward with new AI lab in NYC

Only IBM

Could purchase a company, rename it, and use it as an example of “organic growth” all within the same year….

How blind are their investors??

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Dethkoffee. The idea morning drink FOR MAYHEM.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Re: This is what I keep saying

Well, I mean come on. It’s not that hard, in order to take orbital photographs, we just need to get a rocket into space. Its all been done before!

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Re: Best line?

Just to be yet more pedantic, if you are invoking the name of Xmodem, you cannot complain about a blistering 4kbps.

Re: Got off lightly

Who knows where the vending machine machine operator is getting those crisps from, or for that matter who owns the vending machine… I’m sure the PFY has side interests…

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Slow news day?

With that Type of Joke, the real Key is to Depress expectations until the CLICK happens and they Spring back with joy.

Not my best but no coffee yet.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: Once again, the BOFH wins hands down

When the steaks are great and the chips are down (in the fryer)….

Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus

So the value of someone’s life is tied to the value of their home?

Swiss boffins admit to secretly posting AI-penned posts to Reddit in the name of science

Nothing better to do

Just gonna dilute the voices of real victims and doge responsibility…. Riiiiiiight. Sounds more like they need an audit of their grant spending.

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

Someone sat

Presumably with glee, on something for 6 years, in plain sight, and no one noticed.

Makes me wonder what it’s going to look like after the next version of Windows ends security patching.

If I recall this isn’t the first time (https://www.securityweek.com/critical-flaw-magento-ecommerce-platform-exposes-online-shops/amp/) a problem was caused by caused by poor upstream controls. IIRC the lead dev handled his publicity poorly too.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

As I understand it, some equipment, particularly some radars and slope beacons, only turn on when pinged by an approaching plane on a specific channel.

I feel

Perhaps you have stolen my joke, ser.

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: Shouldn't have been unexpectected.

Repeatedly non-enforcing a license for years can in some jurisdictions be grounds for losing the ability to enforce that license in the future. I agree with you. I am just pointing this out.

This is why

I use vi.

Re: Sceptic

Just to be a pedant, there are several legal precepts that more-or-less state “if you fail to use or enforce these provisions for years, you can lose the right to suddenly enforce them to the detriment of someone else.” Domain squatting comes to mind, as well as patent troll legislation.

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

Re: Not a good option for much

Both proxmox (in cluster mode with HA options) and Xen Clown Posse, pardon me, cloud platform, can do the same tricks. XCP definitely requires more devops time.

Once bitten…

I moved everything I touched that was ESXi + SAN/NAS and moved to proxmox + ceph and have t looked back. Proxmox support might seem a little steep, but when you consider that the software is free (and quality) and that their support team is *utterly* top notch (with a huge, healthy community support family) it’s a huge savings. Terraform works so well with it that its heartwarming. It runs on plain Debian, which makes things like administration (or kludges) much more familiar. (For instance, using nut to manage a clean shutdown).

Are there downsides? Sure.

Pmox runs on Debian, but you can’t lump them with other Debian machines. Since we have root access to the hostboxes, we may be tempted to install monitoring software, sometimes this can cause problems. (Vector, im looking at you).

Ceph! (the distributed storage “subsystem” requires some self-education. Its an entire application suite on its own.) Ceph is *worth it* even at home, but it’s quite a thicket.

The gui and cli usually-but-not-always have analogues of the other’s commands, particularly with ceph.

Occasionally, Support can be a bit stroppy. In classic German fashion, they won’t answer a stupid question, but they will let you know. Still worth it.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Just the math

So…. ~30TB of tape vs a ~30GB disc alternative. Since most of us can do basic powers, you will realize you need ~1000 discs to fill that tape.

If we assume our worst case outcome, we have one long linear “tarchive” for a back up, now if I have two full back ups, am I more likely to have two dead tapes or more than two dead discs?

If we assume our best case outcome, I stick the tape in the drive, and if there’s some damage, it uses proper parity/EC and incremental math to fix the problem, or I use the second back up. With the discs, I am stuck swapping one every few minutes, and if one of them is damaged, we may have to go hunting for the parity data.

If we stretch that parity data out, I might wind up having to split my back up across two tapes whereas you would end up having to split that back up across 1100 discs if we had 10% more parity.

Incidentally, a disc mini loader that handles far less than 1100 or 2200 CD sized media units cost the same as a pair of singles or a dual-slot tape drive that can do the entire back up in one swing, requiring one change of tapes if we do a double back up (Which is the only way to do a backup).

Then, of course, everyone does a hash/crc check of their backup the next morning, right? Slap the tape in the drive let it check a handful of files and compare everything. Now, how the fuck do I do that with 1100 discs and get anything else done in my day?

The pint is for after I swap tapes.

Re: Optical media stable?

The fact that it’s a proprietary process owned by a company that’s already gone bankrupt once makes me question a few things. I see some of the competitors in the space have also done bankrupt. At the very least the media would need to be readable in commodity hardware, but LTO is an open standard from top to bottom, and this is both proprietary and appears to have competing standards. If they end up, settling on a standard for both chemistry and technology, yeah I suppose the larger discs would be a good contender for smaller back ups like home or small office. You still need some kind of disc flipper if you want to take more than a couple hundred gig of back up whereas nowadays you might need to swap tapes once for a 30Tib array.

Re: Optical media stable?

Well, that’s one way to blow the dust out of your drive.

Re: Dubious tape economy

And the fact that we were able to tell what had happened so many years later shows you just how durable those tapes can be.

Re: Only $1M?

Well, you see cloud storage is free, Mom pays for it.

Re: Optical media stable?

I think even that that’s pushing it, I mean we’re still using tape after 70 years, when was the last time we used a CD? 20 years ago? or a DVD? 10 years ago? I have 15 year-old LTO tapes and written DVDs, and I’ll bet my ass the tapes have a higher recovery ratio.

Nevermind the whole “R+W R-W” nonsense that never birthed an actual archival format.

Nevermind twice that modern CFS/incremental/rotating tape backups. Most of that is inaccessible to any current optical storage, and the portions that do work would go through an absolutely incredible amount of media, with their attendant higher error ratio just through sheer units of media.

Nevermind-on-the-gripping-hand pretesting media, I can test and read back a tape, but there is a reason DVD and CD media (both R and RW) had a “write test area“.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: Wow!

TIL! Amazing!

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Fiver

Western Canada, actually.

Re: Not computer related NSFS

I laughed way too hard of this. Wait for me, I’m gonna get my coat as well.

Re: Confidential.....

Depends on the diameter of his wrist, shirley.

Re: Fiver

Forgive what makes me a truly silly question, but in which English is wun not pronounced one?

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Time to hire

Some reverse engineers…

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Re: Where in Whitehall is the still small voice of reason?

This might qualify as one of the silliest comments I’ve ever seen on here and that is saying something when jellied eel is around…

Please finish your high school IT courses before wading into this debate, mkay?

Use my taxes to pay for your own… How democratic.

Come now, we all know politicians can’t operate unless it’s with a separate set of rules.

Meta accused of Llama 4 bait-and-switch to juice AI benchmark rank

Next

They are going to take a page from automobile manufacturers, and invent a new vertical for each and every release:

Best new light truck

Best new light sport truck

Best new sports utility truck

Best new sports utility vehicle

Best new cargo utility vehicle

Etc etc.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

American-style problems

Someone: “Lets feed that AI the Constitution, Bill of Rights, The Bible, and the whole reason WWII happened.”

Someone else in a hat: “What kinda woke leftist shit is that thing spouting? That thing needs an adjustment.”

Re: Leans left - from a US perspective.

“Having trouble getting enough protein in your diet? Have you considered giving away or renting one of your children? Florida has relaxed child worker protections.”

Re: SO

When you have to “correct” something so that arguments about human rights can *include* statements like “except for immigrants” or women or other crap, that’s not fixing a bias, that’s making accommodations for republican feelings.

Remind me, what is it your party chants about feelings again?

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

Re: Fear Not

You’re absolutely right. All of those should have been fully investigated and charges laid. Now, about holding Trump to that same standard? What are your thoughts on that?

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

Oh I just woke everyone up laughing at this. Well done. Bravo.

As that is the most common element in our crust, you may be smelling scorched earth, which I believe is the BOFH’s Eau de Cologne.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: other options

Funny, your “who runs production on linux” seems awfully close to assuming what OS they run…

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

I think you have that about 170° off correct.

100-plus spies fired after NSA internal chat board used for kinky sex talk

Re: not the other meaning

… at the edge of a cliff.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: Rollout stopped because...

… including BingPilot suggestions on how to use less crunch as your battery depletes.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

Fairly Sketchy Directions?

Oh, Deere! FTC sues tractor maker, alleging decades of monopolized repairs

Re: It won't

That’s how conservatives use that phrase yes, because they are constantly working to avoid taking responsibility for things and figure everyone else is too.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

This support offering was intended

… to allow us to cut out customer service staff.

A 15 minute delay is a “support offering”?

So they did enough “market research“ to discover that people didn’t use their online offerings, but didn’t do the same amount of market research to figure out a 15 minute delay was not the right method?

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

I rather enjoy how

The original memo states mentioning increased call volumes, but since that’s clearly a lie, they ended up putting in messages about increased weight times, with only the implication, not explication, of call volumes.

I think that’s the same kind of implication they use when they imply they will give you support.

Never mind how they’re going to use the “reduced call volumes” internally to reduce jobs but “increased call volumes” externally to keep bleeding people off to useless solutions until they get frustrated and stop trying.

How very “used car saleman”.

If it worked in the first place

I would have been using it for the last 10 years instead of avoiding it like the plague.