Posts by DrXym

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

If Starlink can't cope with a thousand people camping in a field then how would it cope with many tens of thousands in a mid size city? This isn't an excuse.

As for doppler shift, this is already a thing. The satellites are constantly moving towards or away from you. It might be a technical limitation of the 1st gen terminal that it's not designed for trucks / boats but that has nothing to do with roaming per se.

Re: "If Starlink detects a dish isn't at its home address, there's no guarantee of service"

People moving around with their satellite dish are most likely moving to places with less contention, not more. e.g. someone driving out of a city to go on a camping trip. I very much doubt it makes any difference to contention in those sparsely used areas.

And if there were some potential for abuse then I'm quite certain that Starlink could stop it with a reasonable usage policy, e.g. roamers only get 30 days in a year or more aggressive bandwidth throttling.

Re: Why

You aren't comparing like with like. Inmarsat uses satellites in geostationary orbit 22,000 miles away. There is only a dozen of these satellites spread around the earth so they are expensive what with high contention and limited bandwidth. Starlink satellites are in low earth orbit constantly moving over the sky. That means that regardless of where you are on earth (barring the poles), you're going to have a multitude of satellites overhead. You could be in the middle of the ocean, a desert, a city, anything with a clear line of sight and there will be one overhead.

Now it may be that the 1st generation of Starlink terminal (dish and box) isn't so great if you mount it to a boat because it is not gimballed & motorised. But if you're stationary in a marina, a campsite, or a cabin in the woods then there is absolutely no reason the existing dish shouldn't function exactly as it does at home - lock onto a passing satellite, handshake, authenticate, internet happens. Any additional charge imposed for "roaming" is nothing to do with any technical issue, it's merely a cashgrab.

Re: Many certified experts have warned for this

I'm not understanding the paranoia here. If your computer uses UEFI and it exposes useful info (e.g. serial nrs, BIOS info, CPU temperature, fan speed etc.) then why shouldn't systemd provide a mechanism to read that information?

I also read an interesting comment this morning that Musk is borrowing billions to fund this acquisition and that the payments & interest on this sum of money would exceed Twitter's annual net income. So buying Twitter is loss making plan straight out of the gate.

Unless he can find some way of growing the business or bringing in new revenue he's basically pissing money down the sink for the sake of his own vanity.

Stuxnet got onto Iranian machines most likely because either someone found a USB stick in the carpark or deliberately brought one in to cause the attack.

Re: I have just one question

It definitely should have been and the message constantly hammered home - train your staff, protect your network even if it inconveniences you (e.g. splitting accounts, development, marketing into separate siloed subnets), perform regular backups (which don't overwrite previous backups), keep your software up to date, hire people whose job it is to take this stuff seriously, get rid of software that may compromise your network (e.g. Kaspersky), and be vigilant.

And for governments and their ilk - produce security guidelines, conduct security audits on internal networks & services as well as critical infrastructure providers (energy, health, infrastructure etc.), and require the same of all suppliers.

None of it is rocket science and hopefully the last few years of malware / ransomware attacks have acted as a clue to many businesses.

Re: As Kaspersky has been deemed persona non grata in the USA

A pretty obvious choice then isn't it? People who use Kaspersky at this moment in time with the threat of cyber attacks looming are off their rocker. Any company or individual with a lick of sense would have uninstalled it by now.

Re: As Kaspersky has been deemed persona non grata in the USA

5 thumbs down from people who think it a great idea to use software from a hostile adversary to protect their computer.

Re: As Kaspersky has been deemed persona non grata in the USA

Why? Because using Kaspersky is like allowing a mental patient to shave your balls.

Re: That's the future

Hydrogen is a horribly inefficient way to capture energy. It takes about 4x as much power to turn water to hydrogen, store & transport it, and then turn back to power as it would to store in a battery. I bet there is also potential to "greenwash" hydrogen produced from fossil fuels.

So maybe it is the future in particular niches where the power would go to waste if it wasn't sequestered, but it's not going to displace battery tech or other forms of sequestration any time soon.

Re: Finally- a solution for the homeless

Not really. There are numerous speedy ways to erect structures with modern materials - prefabricated wood / concrete, blocks, timber, concrete formwork. If it were some basic design you could probably have it poured or assembled on site quite easily. There are even companies like Huf Haus where they can literally put up a prefab house in a few days.

Secondly sticking up the walls is only part of construction. The fit out (i.e. insulation, plumbing, electricity, windows, doors, plastering, roof, paint, floors, fixtures etc.) can take 10x as long as the shell of the building. There is also laying the foundation which has to be done regardless of the form of construction.

Re: Fascism 101

It's also funny how many of these Russia boosting idiots are also COVID deniers and MAGA enthusiasts. They've spent too much time in the company of bots.

Re: Fascism 101

George Galloway is throwing a hissy fit because his Twitter account is tagged as Russian state-affiliated media. He's threatening to sue them even though only moments before proudly showing Sputnik & RT in his bio before removing them. I hope he does because I could do with the laugh.

What is sad is he still exists on YouTube. I caught a bit of a livecast where he was basically throwing cold water on the idea that anyone could possibly know if Russia tortured and executed people in Bucha. Despite more than sufficient evidence to convince any reasonable human being that they did.

Despicable doesn't even cover my views of him.

Re: Windows needs C++, and non C OS need a cool factor

The Win32 APIs are C, not C++. I've written plenty of software where it's basically processing WM_ messages from a loop.

The likes of MFC, ATL, QT, wxWidgets etc. are C++ but they're still using Win32 underneath it all.

These days Microsoft have semi-deprecated Win32 for UWP. And while you can still write C++ with UWP it has a mess of extensions to the language to do so. So IMO it's not really C++ per se.

As for Rust, there is huge interest in it from bare metal development all the way up to servers. I'm only aware of one kernel in Rust, reactos, but the progress made on it demonstrates it more than capable in that role. It's also used for webassembly development, webservers, databases, crypto, embedded devices, IoT etc. etc. Probably its weakest area at the moment is actually in UI development. There are plenty of frameworks (eGUI is very cool), but nothing that comes close to something like QT.

Re: BCPL over C

I've never programmed in BCPL but code samples look like it would be easy to parse & tokenize into an AST and spit out machine code. Far more so than C. That's probably why it enjoyed some early success, especially when C was kind of an ad hoc mess until ANSI C put some semblance of portability onto it.

Once that happened the reason for BCPL kind of died with it. I know AmigaOS 2.0 began the migration to C and I wonder what compiler they used. I remember using Lattice/SAS C on the Amiga which was pretty good but there was also an Aztec C which wasn't so great.

Re: In terms of popularity [ ... ] Rust is eclipsing C++

That has to be the silliest straw man I've read for some time.

Rust can call C and C can call Rust. It's not even hard to do. There are even explicit language constructs for it so that function names aren't mangled and structs are packed the same way. It can even be used in kernels and against bare metal. That is not "fuck C" by any stretch, since if you have C code that works you can just call it. If you have new code in Rust you can call it from C. I call OpenSSL all the time from my Rust code. No biggie.

So if you love C so much, then that's fine please continue using it. Nobody is forcing you to write in Rust even if the reasons others may do is obvious and self evident - i.e. less bugs in compiled code, more scalable thread safe code.

Just keep writing C. Or you could go on a ridiculous ill-informed tirade every time Rust is mentioned. Somehow I expect it'll be the latter.