* Posts by eldakka

2353 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2011

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

eldakka

Re: The Capital?

> Because the Australian Capital Territory needed to have a coast line (for some reason)

The 'some reason' was for a port. Don't forget this was 1915, when airplanes were still mostly a curiosity, and well before they became a significant civilian transport option. In those days, shipping still ruled inter-continental passenger transport. Therefore it was important that the capital territory had access to its own seaport, at least in the eyes of people at the time. Things have changed since then of course, as most passenger travel is via airplane, and as Canberra never developed into an industrial hub it's not like it needed large amounts of its own shipping capability, what was necessary was easier provided through existing terminals in Melbourne and Sydney, especially after road transport became a thing and decent highways were built inland.

Why Microsoft is really abandoning evaporative coolers at its Phoenix DCs

eldakka

Re: Phoenix

> Don't tell me you are one of those weirdos that insists on wearing clothes for some reason.

it's not so much me insisting on wearing clothes, it's the people around me insisting I wear clothes for some reason.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

eldakka

Re: Bing Knows

> It turned out the actual results are severely weighted to the top end of the scale and anything lower than 8 was "bad". It seems this sort or scale and metric is fairly normal in the US and highly unusual in most other English speaking countries.

I run into this problem all the time when doing 'star ratings' for a service I've just received.

For example, on one of the rare times I used uber (like once every 2 or 3 years), after the trip I was given a chance (required?) to provide a rating of the service, from memory it was 1-5 stars.

Thinking that the trip was perfectly adequate - I never felt like I was going to die or get in an accident, the driver was polite and got me to my destination in a reasonable time - I gave it 3 stars, which to me seems the rating to give for an "everything went as expected, it was totally fine" response. But as soon as I selected 3-stars, the app then popped up a "please detail what went wrong with your trip"-type box. I was taken aback, as nothing went 'wrong', it was a perfectly average, accepatable, service. I went back and selected 4-stars, at which point it didn't prompt me for an explanation.

To me, this is totally weird. On a scale pf 1-5, to me, 3 is perfectly adequate, the expected (typical/average) level of service. 4-stars is 'superior' service, e.g., it was raining and the driver got out to escort me with an umbrella and put my bags in the boot in the rain so I didn't have to stand in the rain doing it. 5-stars would be truely exceptional service, like I got in and said "follow that car!" and the driver stuck to the other car like glue, didn't lose it despite dodging through traffic and hails of gunfire from the pursued car. Or maybe I got a blowjob during the trip (which didn't unduly delay me) would merit 5-stars, but certainly not a "got me there in one piece wihout undue delays".

President Biden kind of mostly bans commercial spyware from US govt

eldakka
Black Helicopters

Confrmation that the US has in-house developed superior spyware?

"policy of the United States Government that it shall not make operational use of commercial spyware that poses significant counterintelligence or security risks to the United States Government or significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or foreign person."

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

eldakka

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

I did think that was where you were going, but since the name 'StrongARM' wasn't used but space-separated words, I wasn't sure whether you were alluding to StrongARM or came up with something strikingly similar - but nit identitcal 0 yourself, my bad.

eldakka
Facepalm

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

You missed the opportunity to use StrongARM!

Microsoft freaks out users with Windows 11 warning: 'LSA protection is off'

eldakka

And marketing.

And the entire C-suite.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

eldakka

Re: it doesn't, it won't and it can't

> All installers are required to have a license and it requires 2 years working for a licensed security company before you can apply for a managers license to do the work yourself causing less competition.

How is this any different to electricians or plumbers having to undergo an apprenticeship and earn their 'ticket'?

Just because 100 years ago any bob, dick or harriet could connect their sewage line to the town fresh-water, or set a house on fire or take down the entire neighbourhoods electricity by self-installing electrical wiring doesn't mean that should still be the case and that demonstrated training and education in the subjet shouldn't be required to get a license to do that sort of work nowadays.

Data-wiring is in the same boat. At first anyone could lay data cable and cross connect it to an electical cable and fry themselves, or advertise they are professional data-cable installers and then run bundles of data in high-voltage electrical cabling ducts, but after a while the government decided it'd be a good idea if people display a modicum of knowledge/competence before being allowed to install it. Seems reasonable to me.

eldakka

> but there's enough competition in the market

Competition? What competition? It's basically a duopoly - maybe 3 players at a stretch. AWS 34%, Azure 21%, Google 11%, Alibaba 5% and it just get's smaller from there. The 3 biggest players between them control 2/3rds of the market. 2 or 3 players is just as bad as a monopoly, as when 1 raises the prices, the others will raise theirs as well to just under the one who raised prices first, so that they are still cheaper than that early mover, but they've upped their prices nevertheless. It happens again and again in limited competition markets. Perfect example is AMD/Intel in CPUs and AMD/Nvidia in GPUs. Once AMD started to get market share they jacked up their CPU prices and GPU prices to be similar prices to the incumbent Intel and Nvidia so they can make the same margins as the incumbents. Once they were satisifed with theior market share gained with lower prices - lower margins and profits - they then jacked up prices to increasze margins and profits. I'm not picking on AMD, all corporations do this.

A new player in the market now would have to spend 10's of billions to build up enough infrastructure to seriously compete with the big 3. 'Cloud' is a huge negative income for years due to the large upfront costs to build out the capacity to be actually useful, something big business and government would be willing to shift workloads to. It was hard enough a few years ago when everyone jumped on the bandwagon to try to compete with AWS. But now these are all bigger - capacity-wise - than they were 5 years ago, so it'd be even more expensive to enter the market in any meaningful way to compete.

Think of the size of the workloads that big government departments or companies have, I'm talking social security agencies, tax agencies (HMRC, IRS, etc.), companies like Walmart or Boeing or GE. The compute resources they require in cloud infrastructure can't just be moved between providers willy-nilly. It's HUGE. Only one of the top three would have the available capacity for say a Walmart to pickup lock, stock and barrel and shift to a new cloud provider. Anyone else would take a year or 2 to build out the capacity to accept a Walmart or IRS migrating to them. It'd be even worse trying to insource it again, it'd take 5 years to build up a soverign compute capacity and and the skiiled staff to run it and do an actual migration.

No, in 5 or so years, when these big organisations have lost all inhouse enterprise IT expertise after having moved everything to the cloud, they'll be trapped, it'd either be impossible to move to another 'competitive' (i.e. smaller, limited capacity) provider, or too expensive (in corporate profit/loss cycles or government budget cycles) and time comsuming (in election cycles - that's the next governments problem!) to bring it back inhouse, the big 3 will jack up their prices knowing the big boys who they make their money from are, effectively, trapped.

eldakka

I'm just waiting for about 5 or 6 years when all the cloud providers triple their prices - just after a significant swag of big business and government services have moved everything to cloud and can be held hostage because it's too hard to move back on prem.

Then I'll be able to laugh at all the CIOs and CFOs who thought 'cloud' was better than self-owned hardware.

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

eldakka

Re: "Don't be evil" is long forgotten

> Ah, the old "it's a private company" argument.

Why yes, I tend to find factual and legally correct (per court-set precedents) arguments persuasive.

> The thing is that the social media platforms are the new "public square"

And proveably factually wrong and and proveably legally invalid arguments as unpersuasive, no matter how much you believe them. Your belief in this legally disproven doctrine is factually irrelevant.

> Are you telling me you think it's actually just ay-oh-kayy for YouTube to censor a sitting MP who is delivering a speech in the House of Commons?

That is not what happened, at all, therefore your question is misleading in the "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" way.

Youtube is not censoring the MP, YouTube in no way intereferred with the MP giving that speech in parliament. It was broadcast live via Hansard question time, there is a transcript of the speech on Hansard, multiple sources picked it up and re-broadcast it. YouTube declined to allow (at that time) re-broadcast on its platform. Let me say that again, re-broadcast on YouTube's platform. It did not go into parliament and instruct the MP to stop talking. It did not prevent the live broadcast on the parliament CCTV system or 'question time' broadcast of that on services that usually broadcast question time. It did not interfere with other broadcasters/platforms re-broadcasting that speech. It merely refused to participate in re-broadcasting. That is not censorship.

> Seriously?

Very.

eldakka

Re: "Don't be evil" is long forgotten

> so it should not be up to Google to censor his speech in the House of Commons, should it?

Google - in this case it's Youtube subsidary - is a private platform and gets to chose what and what not it carries on its platform. It is not a public platform thus has no obligation to carry any material on it.

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

eldakka

Re: PMSL

Paranoia - as well as being a dick - are pre-requisites for working in security.

OpenAI CEO warns that GPT-4 could be misused for nefarious purposes

eldakka

Fraudulent Manipulation and Manipulative Fraud?

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

eldakka

Re: But...

> I maintain equipment for a charity that doesn't have a full-time person to do it.

To me, that's a perfect use-case for cloud. Any organisation that doesn't have enough equipment that would warrant several full-time IT employees if it was on-prem anyway is a good fit for cloud. As long as they understand cloud. e.g. cloud doesn't automatically give you HA, backups, cross-site backups, multi-zone availability, multi-national availability zones. All of those are optional, paid-for extras. As long as they understand that and pay for those extras (backups for example) they are expecting, then go ahead.

eldakka

> Yes, these can be done on-prem, but it took our IT team a good few months to get another test environment up and running. They are busy AF, we are busy AF. Company does not want to hire more people, so cloud might be the way to get around it.

Well, yes, but that seems to be a work-around for shitty management, not necessarily a good technical decision...

eldakka

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

> I guess you could spin down VMs during the night, or move everything to containers and kubernetes, but that's a really huge pain-in-the-ass,

Why's that a pain in the arse? You use the same technology as the cloud providers, run your own on-prem clouds - OpenStack or whatever - and you get that same effect. I mean, the cloud architecture, K8s, dynamic workloads, micro-services, etc., there's nothing wrong with that. Makes perfect sense (for appropriate workloads) whether it's on someone else's cloud or your own.

> Also, what about patching the OS?

What about it? We patch OSes on thousands of servers automatically as it is now - after testing it to make sure it won't break current production systems.

> Patching firmware and routers?

We already do this on hundreds if not thousands of devices now.

> Negotiating deals with comms providers? Economies of scale?

My organisation has 20k employees, hundreds of millions of customers ranging from individuals to multi-nationals spread literally in every country in the world. We already have economies of scale and negotiate deals with comms providers. It's not that hard to negotiate deals with comms providers, if you have enough data flows that standard business plans don't cut it, then you are probably big enough to deal with that anyway.

> Once you've got a budget approved it could take many months to get all the hardware ordered, racked, provisioned and then get the OS installed and the applications put on top of that. With cloud you can get all that on the same day.

Right, and while you wait for those millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in hardware, you can begin your 2 or 3 year RnD process - and PoCs - in the cloud, and once finshed there move it onto the on-prem hardware. I mean, a project that requires millions of dollars of hardware usually has some RnD lead time - do that in the cloud.

> If your company decides to change direction you can shelve a project after 6 months and just stop paying.

Since the hardware has already been paid for, there isn't any ongoing payment that needs to be stopped. You just stop using the equipment, and shut it down if you want to save electiricity. And I'm sure that hardware can be re-tasked to the other project that was on a 6-month wait (though, as above, they should have been doing their RnD in the cloud while waiting, so shouldn't really have been waiting as they had stuff to go on with anyway and should have placed their orders well before they'd actually need that hardware since) but can now use this hardware instead and cancel the order they had placed for hardware.

> Likewise, if some campaign blows up and works out 10x better than expected, you can fairly easily spin up 10x on cloud.

Absolutely, and working on-prem doesn't preclude this, as if you use on-prem cloud architecture then moving workloads to cloud or back again once the campaign stabilises and you purchase the hardware to bring it on-prem after its temporary cloud residency is (relatively) easy as long as you planned that from the get-go (i.e. don't use cloud services that you don't have on-prem, if you use DB2 on-prem then use your own DB2 licenses in the cloud).

Also, sack your analysts, they aren't worth shit if that happens.

> Which is why it's growing so fast, compared to on-prem.

There are many reasons its gorwing fast, the biggest of which is it's the current C-suite buzzword, and we all know how the C-suite fad cycle works. It's aso great for short-term expenses shifting, so it can be used to make it look like a company is reducing it's IT overhead - thus gaining bonuses for the C-suite - then the C-suite can leave with their bonuses before the monthly Opex of cloud over a period of a few years exceeds what Capex of on-prem would have cost. The exact same reasons these companies who are making $10's billions in profit are panic sacking 10's of thousands of staff so they can look good to their shareholders and earn their bonuses rather than caring about the long-term future of their companies.

Also because it's perfeclty suited to startups and their unknown requirements (because they are startups) and so startups don't have to worry about dealing with physical infrastructure while they are still small - and still working out what the hell they are going to do.

It's great for RnD and PoCs before you commit to spending money on hardware.

IMO cloud is absolutely suited for any business (or other organisation) that doesn't have enough use of IT resources to justify having several full-time hardware/infrastructure IT people, e.g. DBA, network specialist, server iinfrastruture specialist, etc. If you can get by with one of your employees IT-nerd children helping out every now and then, then absolutely cloud is the way to go. And those types of small businesses still make up the most types of businesses.

Once you get to the size where - if it was on-prem - you'd have a dozen of so full-time IT staff to look after it, it's probably getting big enough that bringing it on-prem would probably start to look cheaper than cloud.

eldakka
Thumb Up

Re: Shakespearian question?

> You "Kind of" went off of Joni Mitchell after she "Kind of" went off of Spotify? It may not have been your intent but the implication is that while you can choose not to listen to her music because of her choices, she cannot exercise her right to withdraw from Spotify because of their choice.

Spot on. Or as I would put it "the hypocrisy is strong with this one".

The fact they don't see the irony in their own statement is rather telling.

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

eldakka

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

I know, replying to own post, but hit post too quickly (even accounting for the fact I did edit the above post to add the last paragraph).

I was also being facetious in saying "Unless, of course, some distributions have started to remove 'tar' ?", pointing out that if they only want Snap to be used - hence banning Flatpack from out of the box installations - then they could take it further and ban 'tar' as well, as some people still do distribute tarballs, therefore tar shouldn't be available out of the box either.

The point of distributions like Ubuntu is to make average-user desktop Linux easier to use as a windows replacement for the masses than more hardcore distributions like Arch, Gentoo, LFS, etc. If that is the point, banning OOTB other package managers is going against that purpose. One would thing that to make a user-friendly Linux, that they'd want to include all the major package management options as part of the OOTB experience.

eldakka

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

> * What keeps track of what it puts where?

It's a tarball extracted into it's own tree, you don't need to keep track of what it puts where, as everything supplied in the tarball is under (for example) /opt/firefox, and if for some reason you need to keep track of it, thats what environment variables are for (FIREFOX_HOME=/opt/firefox).

> * How do you keep track of what depends on it?

It's an end-user application, a browser, nothing should depend on it, and it if does, that's what environment variables are for (put /opt/firefox/bin in your PATH).

> * How do you know what it depends upon?

Mozilla wrote and compiled Firefox, if they don't know what it depends on how did they compile it? Everything it depends on (libraries etc.) should be in the tarball, with all dependencies relative to the executable ( ../lib for example),

> * How do you upgrade it if you don't know what it put, where?

It's a tarball, you untar it over the top of the previous tree, "cd /opt; tar -xvaf ~/firefox.tgz ", done.

> * How do you uninstall it?

rm -rf /opt/firefox

rm -rf ~/.firefox (if you want to delete userdata as well)

> * How do you keep it online and know where to find it, so a million client machines or instances can fetch it when they need it?

Not sure what you mean by this, as 'keeping it online' is having a place to download it from, wget https://mozilla.org/releases/firefox/latest/firefox.tgz ? (made up URL, but you get the idea)

Being a tarball doesn't disable autoupdate (if that's your thing), as the autoupdate can download the latest version tarball and extract it.

We are talking about Snap and Flatpak specifically here, which (as I understand it) are basically used for application-type distribution/packaging, which basically include all the dependencies inside the bundle anyway. If you're going to do that, why re-invent the wheel? Just use a tarball.

I'm not saying there is no use for package maangers. I'm responding to the OP who said that using Snap means Mozilla doesn't have to have a different package build process for each flavour of Ubuntu, I'm pointing out that that advantage isn't limited to Snap. Can use a completely inclusive tarball, or do what IBM does and write their own cross-platform package manager (IBM Installation Manager) that they then support one package system (IBM Installation Manager) across Linux, Windows, AIX, irrespective of distribution.

eldakka

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

> It's useful for certain things, such as allowing one Firefox package to run on all Ubuntu versions instead of rebuilding it for each version.

What's wrong with a tarball that includes all the dependencies? Unless, of course, some distributions have started to remove 'tar' ?

Adobe's $20b buy of Figma in crosshairs of Europe's antitrust cops

eldakka

Dylan Field, Figma co-founder, says users have nothing to fear about price hikes, and says the app will remain free for education users.
This statement is so misleading. How can a person who will no longer own something make such authoritative statements about what the new owners will do with something once they own it? Once Adobe owns it, they can do whatever they like with it (within the law obviously). That's what it means to own something ...

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

eldakka

Re: Steves Failure

> And we all want to work with a guy who goes out of his way to maximise the damage and embarrassment caused by the mistakes of the people with whom he works.

You don''t work with the boss, you work for the boss. Never forget that. The boss isn't your friend. The boss is the one who bears the responsibility, that's why they get paid more and have titles like "boss". It is the bosses responsibility to ensure work is carried out as required, and they do that by providing unambiguos, accurate, complete instructions, and it is the employees responsibility to carry out work as specified. It is not an employees job to cover for a managers own fuck ups. It is not an employees job - especially outside the employees area of expertise - to decide the boss is wrong and ignore them.

eldakka

Re: Dishwasher vs sink washing

I wash my pots and pans by hand, most of them while I'm cooking (the ones I've finished with that is), and most of the others get washed before I've sat down to eat, while they are still warm and clean easily. Anything big like that that isn't washed before I've sat down to eat is either going in the fridge because there are leftovers still in it, or can be washed tomorrow while making that nights dinner.

I put all the small stuff (cutlery, plates, glasses, cooking utensils, plastic storage containers, etc.) in the dishwasher, and if you don't put large objects like pots in the dishwasher, you can put a lot of the smaller stuff in, so I only need to put the dishwsher on every 3 or 4 days or so, overnight, to be unloaded while doing breakfast.

eldakka

Re: Not Questioning Military Orders from Above

> The "obvious" answer to this problem would be to have the general speak directly with the driver, but that solution went against military protocol.

Which driver? it's a convoy, probably dozens of drivers, hundreds if not thousands of troops under that general's command. It's not possible for someone in that position to know what every soldier under their command is doing at every moment. It's not "military protocol", it's sensible compartmetalisation. All large organisations, whether military, commercial, govermental, do this. The general would have ordered some colonel to arrange the convoy trucks, and the colonel may have appointed a couple major's or captains to look after certain parts of the convoy, major one in charge of the first half dozen trucks, captain one in charge of the last half dozen. Then the major would have told an NCO "I want the trucks in this order, with driver and a couple guards per truck" and the NCO would have turned around and ordered individual soldiers to individual positions "You, driver, first truck, you driver second truck" and so on. So the general wouldn't have known which driver to contact to order to change the convoy's route.

So the general would have ordered the colonel to have the route changed, who also doesn't know who the driver is, he'd have orderd the major to get the route changed, and so on. And you can't have everyone plugged into everyone's comms nets, it'd be chaos, unnecessary data for a squaddie to filter out when a general is ordering someone in a unit 5 miles away to do something. So you'll have segmented comms too, with a web of nets, a staff net, convoy command net, squad net, etc.

Now, I'm not saying there wasn't a comms problem, there was, it sounds like it was badly organized to have the ability to pass on commands to the lead driver fast. But that's not a "military protocol" problem, it's a planning problem, where there should ahve been arrangements put in place - outside the normal ones - to get orders to the lead driver more quickly.

eldakka

Re: Steves Failure

They both failed.

The manager failed by getting the details wrong, and failing to realise when being repeatedly asked to confirm.

Steve failed, first by dint of the fact that in none of his four requests to clarify the work needed, did he ask for clarification as to why the manager wasn't asking for them to be sorted by last name, or for a justification for sorting them by first name.

And then Steve failed even further, because the result of his actions was to force two of his colleagues to spend an entire day fixing things, which was bad for both the company and the individuals involved.

I disagree.

This was entirely, 100% the managers failure.

The manager asked a random staff member who usually doesn't do this particular job to do a job they don't routinely - and thus not trained in the methods and procedures the employer uses - do. Therefore it was 100% on the boss to ensure someone who doesn't usually do that job was given clear, concise, complete and accurate instructions on what was to be done.

If this had of occured with the staff member who would usually do the filing, then I would agree, that person should query the boss with their reasons behind why they are querying it ("we usually do it by lastname, are you sure you want it done by first this time?"). But some random who doesn't usually - and based on context apparently had never - do that job? No, why would it be assumed they'd know the 'proper' way to do it if it's a task they'd never been assigned to do before?

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

eldakka
Facepalm

Re: I hadn't realised just how little these chancers have actually achieved so far

Missed edit window. That should be 169 successful returns of fist stage boosters, not 149.

eldakka

Re: I hadn't realised just how little these chancers have actually achieved so far

Sure, if you ignore the 204 successful (206 total, 99% success rate) Falcon 9 missions, setting a record of most launches (48) in a calendar year (2022) using the same family (Falcon 9), the 149 successful returns of first stage boosters, 145 re-flights of used first stage boosters, the 5 successfull (100%) Falcon Heavy launches with all returning both the side boosters (3 times the center booster failed recovery - 2 crashed, 1 landed successfully on the drone ship but due to high seas was damaged on the voyage back in, and 2 were planeed expendable center boosters).

Microsoft is changing how it handles device diagnostic data to keep EU sweet

eldakka

That means, in compliance terms, that Microsoft will process the Windows diagnostic data but the organization will control it, with their IT admins being the ones responding to their end users' data questions.
WTF? I'm the data controller for something that Microsoft demand's be collected? Fuck off. That's what I'd tell my workplace too. They'd need to assign a business unit - a legal one - to oversee that at the very least, not the IT administrators. IT admins are neither the controllers or processors, they're just the ones following orders to configure it a certain way. Whoever is issuing thoise orders are the controllers.

Just disable telemetry/diagnostics, problem solved.

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

eldakka

Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

> I had my suspicions on that count too, but let's bear in mind that you'd likely have to put the effort (and quite possibly a lot of money) even taking it to court to get them to agree with that, if they did.

Right, perfectly valid for SMEs. But don't forget here we are also talking about mult-billion dollar companies being affected, and even more affected that would likely be willing to take Oracle to court. I work for an organisatoin that has over 20,000 employees. A few years ago when Oracle first came calling about Java licensing, we spent millions migrating to non-Oracle JDKs (e.g. J9), and reducing as much as possible where we have Oracle Java installed - we used to have it on every users desktop for browser-based apps that required Java. In some places we couldn't get rid of it entirely, at least easily, as it was required for things like SAP etc. in browsers that required Oracle Java for some reason. However, because of this, we managed to reduce the licensing hugely because we only had to pay per installation/active user. So we ended up paying like 200 or 300 user license for it. But now> if we have to pay licenses for the entire 20,000 staff? My organisation has revenues of 10's of billions of dollars. We also use other Oracle products extensively, like the Oracle DBMS. But we also have a lot of DB2 and SQL Server. And we are in the midst of migrating a lot of stuff into a hybrid/on-prem cloud infrastructure, which would be a perfect time to rip out Oracle products in favour of alternatives such as DB2 or Postgres were it makes sense.

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

eldakka
Coat

Re: Power or energy?

Thanks for the coherent explanation.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

eldakka
Angel

Re: 52nd in population - they just want attention

Tension between densely-populated urban areas and sparsely-populated rural areas has existed ever since America became independent. the first cities 5000 years ago in Sumeria.

FTFY.

JEDEC reportedly set to formalize Dell laptop memory standard

eldakka

Re: Only one module?

While that is an efficient spend pattern capacity-wise, doing it that way breaks dual-channel performance. The memory bus falls back to single-channel mode, which, hey, may not be very important in a laptop, RAM capacity may be a greater priority. But if performance matters (e.g. gaming laptop), then you want dual-channel operation, which means using identical sticks of memory in pairs.

eldakka

Re: License fee

> Remember the RAMBUS debacle.

Sure, the RAMBUS bus never took off, but the RAM you use in your computer today - assuming it's some variant of DDR SDRAM - the manufacturer had to pay royalties to RAMBUS for it. DDR is covered by RAMBUS patents, despite it actually originally being made as an alternative to RDRAM, they made it so similar they had to use the same techniques as RDRAM to produce an alternative to RDRAM. Patent suits followed, which RAMBUS won, and all DDR RAM is descended from RDRAM and pays royalties to RAMBUS.

I was reasonable to ask to WFH in early days of COVID, says fired engineer

eldakka

Re: This doesn't look good for him.

The article doesn't mention it, but Massachusetts is an "at will state". This means basically anyone at anytime can be fired.
The latter is not true.

One cannot be fired contrary to law, such as racial/gender/disability/religous discrimination reasons. Which is why the plaintiff is accusing the company of many of those things as the basis for his firing.

AI lawyer to fight first legal case in court, startup claims

eldakka

Re: How is an AI legally a lawyer?

This does sound periously close to practicing law without a license.

It'd be one thing for a lawyer in court to use this to augment their arguments, in which case it'd be operating under the law license of the lawyer using it, but a non-lawyer using it in court sure sounds like the AI would be giving legal advice without a law license or under the auspices of someone who has a law license.

Strong support for Snap and Ubuntu Core as Canonical meet IRL

eldakka
Holmes

Although Canonical does not track downloads, installations, machines running snaps or anything else

An early-access version of the Steam game store has been available as a snap for about six months, and the company told us it has been installed over 100,000 times already, even before its official release.

Canonical wouldn't have to be tracking downloads/installations to be able to get how many times software that requires an online connection to a single destination (Steam) to function. Canonical could have gotten the nformation from Valve via Valve reporting back to Canonical how many users are connecting to Steam via the Steam Snap package reporting to the Steam server metadata about the client - client version, O/S, etc.

After long delays, Sapphire Rapids arrives, full of accelerators and superlatives

eldakka

- is "the most tested and battle-hardened CPU that we've ever delivered in the industry"

How can something that's just been released be battle-hardened? That'd be like Putin calling the recent limited-mobilisation conscripts as "battle-hardened troops". I think Intel's marketing wonks have sniffed a few too many fumes.

Microsoft Teams: A vector for child sexual abuse material with a two-day processing time for complaints

eldakka
Coat

Re: Now everybody in MacD is staring at me

> *mops laptop keyboard*

Probably not the best thing to say when talking about child porn ...

Peekaboo: Once-hidden galaxy revealed to be window into cosmic history

eldakka

Re: You don't say?

> Because it is so far away the light we see originated billions of years ago when the Universe was young.

What makes this galaxy exciting is that it is an example of an extermely metal-poor galaxy that is very close, 20 million light years away. This means it can be examined in much greater detail being so close. It is not billions of light years away.

eldakka

Re: Age vs stellar size

> But nothing says that smaller Pop III stars couldn't have been born in less dense areas that weren't so massive and would have much longer lives.

Physics says that smaller Pop III stars couldn't have been born.

For fusion ignition to start, certain conditions are required. Those conditions can't be met such that a small Pop III star can form. The purer the star in terms of hydrogen and helium and no heavier elements, the bigger - more massive - a star has to be to meet ignition conditions. Throw in more and more impurities ('metals') the smaller and smaller the star can be to undergo ignition.

Of course, this also depends on what your individual definition of 'small' is ;)

Taiwan bans state-owned devices from running Chinese platform TikTok

eldakka
Facepalm

Re: PS

> So, once more: is anyone else seeing their posts in these articles being (increasingly) delayed by being moderated before they appear?

The Register doesn't (or at least historically hasn't, things may have changed recently, but I haven't noticed) moderate posts in general.

A user account can get flagged for repeated 'reports', in which case it gets put on the naughty list whereby all posts from that user get moderated (that is, held up until a staff member gets around to allowing the post to go ahead or rejects it) until The Register decides to take the account off the naughty list.

They never offer an explanation of why one has been put on the naughty list, although reasons one can be put on the naughty list (besides the obvious of abusive behaviour like bullying, stalking, issueing threats and so on) include using comments to point out article mistakes instead of using the "report a problem with this article" link. They don't like being called out 'publically' - in comments - for typo's, misstatements, or just plain wrong articles. Of course, this depends on the individual author of the article and how it's pointed out in the comments, if a joke of it is made (e.g. a pun) then that can be fine, but saying (to the article author) "what!? You're wrong, you said X when it's Y you idiot" can get you put on the naughty list pretty fast.

BTW - I'm speaking from experience here, I've been on the naughty list at least three times over the last decade (one of those for at least 6 months - sill don't know why), I assume (since I've never been told) that it was for pointing out something wrong in an article and not using the 'report' link. And I can tell you, - as you've found out - being moderated spoils 'witty comeback' - type comments when it gets held over the weekend (quite reasonably there aren't staff hanging about on the weekend to go through moderated user posts) so it 'appears' 3 days after being posted, sorta loses it's impact ;)

My posts appear pretty much strait away as I'm not on the nighty list at the moment (knock on wood), so no I haven't noticed any particular slowdown.

If you actually see on your "My Posts" list on a comment "Awaiting Moderation" then that means most likely that your account is actively on the naughty list.

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

eldakka
Coat

Re: drivers sitting waiting for multiple orders

> I'm not sure why they call McDonald's "fast food", as in my experience it's neither.

I don't me, for me it seems to often go right through me pretty fast.

eldakka

Re: I really dislike UberEats

> Also, some will also cover speeding tickets just to meet that 30 (or 60) minutes pizza delivery time that many customers expect... those tickets will also increase the overall delivery costs.

And how do they cover the loss of points on the driver's license and the eventual license suspension for 12 months - thus putting that driver out of delivery work - when enough points are accumulated?

Mozilla, Microsoft drop TrustCor as root certificate authority

eldakka

Re: over-the-counter medicine

> Not being a native speaker i assumed over-the-counter would cover thinks like dietary supplements that do not have special restrictions but can be sold like other food and behind the counter being things only a pharmacists may hand out (and in some cases only when you have a prescription).

The phrase written by @VoiceOfTruth was (emphasis mine):

> Do you trust an over-the-counter medicine ...

The key word is actually medicine. For something to be labelled a medicine it has to be approved by the relevant countries equivalent of the FDA. Dietary supplements are most definitely not medicine, in fact it would be illegal to label them or advertise them as medicine. That's why they are called supplements rather than medicine.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

eldakka

Re: Nonsense, he wrote

While I get what you are saying, I view this particular example as user error:

>then I had to wait while a friend faffed about with his Apple thing trying to pull up the email with the tickets then display the tickets, then get the QR code to an acceptable size to scan

I've used emailed boarding passes for flights before, and while I'm waiting for boarding to start or while standing in the queue, I bring up the email and adjust the zoom level before I've reached the staff doing the scanning. Even if I'm still sitting and waiting for boarding to start, I still have that email open and just switch to something else to occupy myself while waiting, and just have to switch to the email app where the boarding passes is open and waiting. It's no different from digging around in your bag for your paper boarding pass and putting it in a convienient place - clothing pocket or at the top of the bag - while waiting.

But yeah, after using the electronic pass a few times, I did go back to printing it out as on the whole I do find it less faffing about.

eldakka

Ten years later, Apple fused the Macintosh, PageMaker, a laser engine, PDF

<pedant>

Are you sure you don't mean PostScript (PS) ? PDF didn't come around until 1992, with PostScript being what 1985's PageMaker (and the lasers of the time) used. PDF is based on PostScript, but it is a later development.

</pedant>

eldakka
Coat

Re: I'm a caver

> Taking any electronic device down a cave is risky enough: mud, water, drops or getting crushed going through a squeeze.

I'm not sure a laser would do any better being taken spelunking than an inkjet ...

Square Kilometre Array Observatory construction commences

eldakka
Alert

Re: You can run but you can't hide

> Too late, now stray radio signals will come raining down from the skies, from constellations of hundreds (soon thousands) of Internet-serving satellites. No need for local, ground-based pollution anymore...

It'll be tens of thousands, Starlink alone has license for something like 30,000 satellites, and various competitors between them are planning a similar number.

Microsoft 365 faces more GDPR headwinds as Germany bans it in schools

eldakka

Re: Office - open or closed?

> No problem. I'll just go right back to Indeed.com and tell them that

That's just a stupid comment.

Indeed.com seems to be a jobs website that requires a potential employer to sign up to and list an available job on. Then when an applicant applies for the job through indeed.com, it supplies to the employer the job application - apparently based on your comment in a MS proprietary format.

Therefore it's simple, as an 'advertiser' on the platform, you tell them to offer ODF as an option for receiving applications in, or you just leave the platform. Indeed.com isn't a monopoly, it doesn't provide a unique service that no-one else offers. Just don't use them, problem solved.