* Posts by martinusher

3564 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2015

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

martinusher Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Don't need a slit trench. They used a sort of hydraulic shuttle here which pushed its way through the ground. Its not perfect -- it came close to the surface at one point and mercifully missed any utilities -- but since the fiber is in a tough orange pipe, a bit like an oversized hosepipe, its really easy to spot.

Just rolling it out on the ground is organized incompetence.

US CHIPS Act set to electrify semiconductor scene with billions

martinusher Silver badge

Just pouring bucketloads of cash (which we don't have)(not that will stop us) into the usual suspects isn't going to change anything. It will end up in endless management, bonuses all around and stock buybacks. We know this because its been done before numerous times, both here and elsewhere.

The problem has taken decades to build up and is endemic in the way we operate business. Boeing should be a headline example here -- a giant, well run engineering company with a boat load of cashflow gets taken over by professional managers -- money people -- who proceed to strip and divest and (naturally) squeeze investment in order to boost profits and so share prices. Any glitches in this process are covered by a well oiled PR machine and its evil twin, political lobbyists. These also serve to tamp down any competition because, as we all know, its a lot cheaper to buy politicians than it is to develop aircraft. The business runs on OK for a decade or two but eventually cracks form and start to be obvious. Since the business is "too big to fail" -- strategic -- it has to be propped up one way or another because by this time the 'core' is now too weak -- business units divested, infrastructure sold and leased back etc.** -- to remedy itself without massive investment that's most definitely not coming from Wall Street.

(**Sale and Leaseback is a common form of corporate asset stripping but I don't think Boeing has gone this particular route. But remember this is just a 'for instance'.)

So the problem is "How do you remedy a cancerous corporate culture that's unable to adequately compete without enforcing some kind of monopoly?" The way we've done this in the past is by the arrival of new markets and players that are able to overshadow the mighty corporate giants (e.g. IBM being reduced from 80% of the global computer market to ???). We can't do this that easily these days because a lot of the competition is foreign and can't be as easy intimidated as the Japanese were in the 1980s.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Too much tech?

YouTube has numerous lock picking videos. To some people opening safes and picking locks is a hobby.

Secrets are like backups. You're well advised not to keep them in one place, especially not a well marked safe with "Important Company Secrets" marked clearly on it, and it might be useful to keep some in some place and some in another. But then our lords & masters and their advisers still think that having "the blueprints" gives you access to the secret.

NASA missions are being delayed by oversubscribed, overburdened, and out-of-date supercomputers

martinusher Silver badge

Buzzword Bingo, Anyone?

The material quoted in the article is an object lesson on how to write a lot without saying anything in particular except for the underlying message "Give us more money". Take this beauty, for example:-

"Identify technology gaps, such as GPU transition and code modernization, essential for meeting current and future needs and strategic technological and scientific requirements;"

Maybe its just me but as soon as anyone uses a term like "Tiger Team" I know they're full of it!

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

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Same arguments as with Huawei.

>networks/customer data

You realize that all this information is readily available?

The PRC might be interested in the details of the lives of its own citizens but in terms of what's happening here in the US their interest would be at best trends and opinions, the stuff that got commoditzed years ago, readily available to anyone with the money to buy it.

The penny's dropped here anyway. Its gradually filtered through to the DNC that alienating 137 million people, a lot of whom are likely to be Democrat leaning, "in an election year" isn't a particularly smart move. Getting it under US ownership via a consortium headed by Steve Mnuchin, a former Treasury Secretary in the Trump Administration, isn't likely to do much good either (even if ByteDance was willing to sell) -- it reeks of old geezers trying to be trendy, a sure turn off.

Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinking about buying TikTok

martinusher Silver badge

Can't have foreigners making money here.

I'm not into social media, I think its fundamentally evil, but its popular and generates revenue. Revenue that should be going into US corporate pockets, not those foreigners. So out comes the "National Security" canard -- its perfectly OK provided we can make the money off it.

Same with Huawei. Its a competitive threat so had to be taken down. Its not just the Chinese,either. Anyone remember what happened to Japanese motorcycles in the 1980s? We couldn't ban them outright, too obvious, so we just taxed them. Same with anything else. (Japanese semiconductors.) We've had a go at Airbus more than once. Its the same tune, just different words to the sng.

Just to demonstrate how low we can go here, the lobbyists are pushing for a $20 billion spend to replace "Chinese Cranes" at our ports. I don't know why we bought cranes from China, we should be able to make them locally, but I suppose there's more money in derivatives than cranes or something.

Anyway, I think the whole TikToc thing is just a way to alienate about 130 million voters, a group most likely to be Democrats. Congress has repeatedly demonstrated that they're -- to use British parlance -- "a bunch of self-interested wankers" who don't deserve the time of day, much less our respect and votes, so to retain the status quo they've got to find a way of getting people to not vote. This is as good a way as any.

International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

martinusher Silver badge

Re: "brought cybercrime to the forefront of discussion among CEOs and boards of directors"

>A dozen or so renditions by special forces snatch sqads

..and there lies a big part of the problem. You can't have your government behaving like a bunch of terrorists, especially extra-territorially. Its not only a drag to have yet another annoying teenager killed by a cop because he was "holding a gardening implement" (potentially a weapon.....but, seriously?) -- calling the cops shouldn't be life threatening -- but having the cops dressing up in tactical gear and acting all the time as if they're in a war zone is not the way to public cooperation.

We've been plagued with real and attempted cybercrime for decades now. Government does little about it because preventing it and tracking down the puerps doesn't involve breaking down doors and bashing in head, it requires a certain amount of finesse and intelligence to combat.

Incidentally, when you start this whole 'cops as special forces' things you get Mexico, the criminals organize. When they eventually outgun you then you get Haiti. Life is not a videogame -- GTA's fun but not how most people want to live.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

martinusher Silver badge

Ah! Memories!

>...and the team that remains is faced with trawling through reams of decades-old documents to deal with unanticipated issues

I remember 'documentation' -- I'm about the same vintage as the Voyager originals (but still upright, more or less) and how we used to have to write reams of it as part of the process of designing software. So old fashioned, so quaint. These days you're supposed to clone a project from GitHub and watch a couple of ad-hoc videos. (There's nothing inherently wrong with GitHub, of course, apart gnawing misgivings about corporate parentage / patronage but a quick video doesn't have the same 'je ne sais quoi' of actual documentation -- many videos are surprisingly content-free!)

For those who don't quite get it, actually writing documentation is an important step in the design process. We're not talking about user manuals or repair documents, that stuff is best left to professional writers, but being able to crystallize out your ideas and get the straight before writing any code can shorten the actual coding and testing phases dramatically. (....and yes, I've had to do this in the dark days before word processors....)

Chinese chap charged with stealing Google’s AI datacenter secrets

martinusher Silver badge

Re: On a national level...

>launching an unprovoked war ....

Careful! An 'unprovoked' war might be, say, invading Iraq for the second time but if you've been following the news at all you'd know that Russia / Ukraine has been simmering for some time. Its one of those things that's probably left alone.

The important thing to bear in mind is that wars cost a whole lot of money that we don't have (because we -- the US -- have been everywhere and anywhere for the last umpteen years and we're basically broke). However, our MIC -- the proud sponsors of Ukraine's lobbying efforts in DC, BTW -- need the business so we're trying to figure out how to take these monies. The justifications you read about are just propagandistic softening up. The central bankers have to a man (and woman) advised very strongly against such a step because while it might be OK to confiscate the national treasury of Afghanistan (or even the PRC if you go back to 1949) as "holding it in trust" such a move against Russia would signal that any nation's assets are up for grabs should they displease us. Financial markets hate uncertainty and creating it will just destroy the market......and yes, there are alternatives.

>unjustifiable mass slaughter,

Careful! Once again, events have overtaken the propaganda. "Mass Slaughter" might be a term better used for Gaza......again, its a minefield best left unsaid in a tech journal.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

martinusher Silver badge

Re: AI?

The one thing that humans have a hard limit to is time. This affects how much information they can consume, or in your case how much music and how many videos its physically possible to listen to or watch in one lifetime. Even a super fast computer will take a noticeable amount of time to write to 32GBytes of memory.

I can see a use for very high performance GPUs in gaming environments where you're creating detailed worlds in real time (and where the detail glitches for the most part will go unnoticed). LLMs are useful but when I played around with them I found that they generated material which either took a long time to consume (read) or took me a relatively long time to utilize. (I don't get involved in Marketing so generating reams of BS in real time isn't something I need to do -- everything I do has to be verified and checked.)

The history of performance oriented computing has been for the most part applications soaking up surplus computing power, often with meaningless, if pretty, visual effects on graphical desktops. (For those without state of the art hardware its just a mess -- nothing works properly so its a constant fight to get anything done.) Adding more power is useful to sell more computer but I doubt if it will increase the quality of work, it will be just adding yet more monkeys and typewriters.

Filing NeMo: Nvidia's AI framework hit with copyright lawsuit

martinusher Silver badge

Never heard of them...

How is knowledge passed from person to person? How do we learn?

We read material written by others, of course. We're not allowed to copy the material directly (except under well defined situations and with attribution) but we freely use the knowledge. Its how society works.

Why should a machine be any different? Its true that the typical LLM seems to be the equivalent of monkeys with typewriters -- very fast monkeys -- but in essence its just mimicking human behavior. There are real issues there but they're not ones of copyright.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

martinusher Silver badge

Oh please!

Don't they teach people about things like the water cycle any more at school? I learned about this when I was 8. For those that missed out -- all water's recycled. (They used to say that our tapwater in London had been through eight sets of kidneys on the way to our tap.)

Its part of the infection of American Ignorance that spreads like a stain over the planet -- and especially the UK which for some bizarre reason seems to like copying everything we do in the US. America is still very much the throwaway society -- there's always another tree to cut down or lake to drain, 'new' resources with anything 'used' just thrown away. So naturally recycling wastewater -- eeew!, the thought's horrible. We have to have our pure, spring water -- even if there's a dead animal in it upstream (just don't tell us....).

Beijing plans at least three new rockets – maybe reusables too

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Good to see China "innovating"

In case you've forgotten before SpaceX the standard launch platform from America's ULA used Russian rocket motors.

SpaceX has led the way with reusable boosters and its only a matter of time before everyone's doing it -- there's compelling reasons, both engineering and financial, to do this.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

martinusher Silver badge

Shouldn't be a problem

The issue seems to be forklifting too much code into things that don't need it. Most programmers seem to be focused on customer level code, what could be called "bells and whistles" rather than spending time to get to exactly what a particular unit needs and how to customize the software so it has those facilities and nothing else. Here it doesn't help that Marketing invariably demands that products phone home so the demand external communications capability from products that shouldn't need them. I don't have many IoT like products but the ones I do have need me to have an account on a manufacturer's website to get the thing configured and often to use it. This might make good business sense for someone but its a nonsense from the security and reliability perspective -- it introduces all sorts of potential weaknesses and points of failure into what should be a simple remote control. I've had things rendered useless by manufacturer's insistence that I have 'an account'.

Adding layers and layers of security isn't the way to go. My smart devices need to dumb -- they should have just enough smarts to do their job, no more, no less. I do not expect them to be able to be readily upgradeable, especially silently over the air, and I don't expect them to be able to execute code in any form that wasn't part of their firmware.

US politicians want ByteDance to sell off TikTok or face ban

martinusher Silver badge

Obvious, really

The problem with ByteDance isn't that its Chinese owned so much as depriving American companies of their God-given right to extract as much revenue as they can from whatever they can get their hands on. Tictoc is obviously a bit of a bust in that respect so It Has To Go. All this security risk is just BS for the 'rubes. (If you don't believe me then there was a report last week that the government is intending spending $20 billion to replace cranes at our ports because the Chinese ones pose a security threat. Exactly what is never told to us so I presume they're expecting them to start attacking us like "Godzilla meets Transformers".)

Our (Federal) legislators do a very good job of behaving as if they're pawns, bought and sold by a web of mostly dark money. They are, on the whole, utterly useless. If they disappeared overnight into a huge hole in the ground I doubt that anyone would notice outside the Beltway.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Why does anyone buy Apple?

Apple is nicely designed, functional, bling that might seem a bit overpriced but it all works. For many people that's all they need.

Unfortunately its also nicely designed American bling. So the actions of the US government appear to have caused a bit of a problem for Apple -- I'm waiting for the official report in ElReg but it appears that their sales in China have dipped by about 25% year on year, despite their price cuts.

You might not like Apple (I don't, for a start) but they are the home team and we'd miss them if they went away. (Personally, I'm more interested in Huawei and Harmony OS... Andriod's getting a bit klunky for its own good, iOS is, as this article tells us, far too interested in Apple's interests to truly reflect what customers need and, anyway, my English background means I always root for the underdog, especially if its a later generation technology underdog.)

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

martinusher Silver badge

Isn't business wonderful?

I recall reading a history of lithography recently that said that ASML came about due to the acquisition of lithographic technologies from a US company. This is fundamental to how the US exerts control over ASML in that one of the conditions of the sale is that the company would abide by US export regulations.

Now the technology's on the move again. This is quite a normal process in international business. you run out of room (and markets) in country 'A' so you set up shop in country 'B'. Unfortunately the logical choice for a new facility would be in.....pause for dramatic effect....China since its the only country with the resources, infrastructure and personnel to host such a large scale undertaking. Siting the facility anywhere else would first require significant long term investment first because they either lack the necessary components or their resources are already maxed out.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

martinusher Silver badge

Foreign Influence?

Blathering on about "foreign influence being a threat to American democracy" just makes us look silly. After all, by far the biggest foreign influence operation on our politics comes from organizations like AIPAC and its not exactly hiding.

What they're trying to insinuate, of course, is that "Ye Olde Axis Of Evil (TM)" is exerting its malign influence which is really a shorthand for "advocating any policies that AIPAC and friends don't like". The techno-veneer -- all that AI and malware and what-have-you -- is just a smokescreen, a load of noise (UK -- "codswallop"?) which has absolutely nothing to do with reality.

Our political choices at the national level are very limited this year. Its either "Trump" or "!Trump". Both choices are unsatisfactory but only one espouses true self-immolation so I daresay that I, like a lot of other voters, will go for "!Trump". Personally it won't affect me one way or another who wins but I think it would be in the country's best interests not to elect a dictator -- he's not the world's brightest bulb but he's a first rate enabler and some of the people lined up to profit from him are truly evil (and 100% fascist). (However, if you want to be truly alarmist then its likely that if we carry on as we are doing that the world, as represented by BRICS+, is going to sail on without us leaving us with the only option to assert our dominance being "Global Thermonuclear War".)

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

martinusher Silver badge

Re: "you'll start seeing a new user interface on eligible Windows 10 devices soon"

>I can't for the life of me understand why dumping users on a continuous learning curve is considered good practice

The devs that write this stuff tend to be the sorts that only "the latest" is good enough for them.

I call them "enthusiasts" -- they tend to put their interests of the customer's and they're always ready to justify whatever they're doing using "security" and "enhanced user experience". Dissenters are ignored as know-nothings, outdated dinosaurs. It's always been like that which is why its essential for management to keep it under control -- if not, you end up with a half finished pile of features that are no use to anyone.

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Furtive Frog and Wanking Wallaby

There was an article in this morning's Washington Post about the problem of real authors being crowded out by near lookalikes wares that were quickly created using a LLM.

So be careful what you wish for, it may already be available on Kindle....

(Those of us of mature age will remember the kid's show "Magic Roundabout" and one Jasper Carrot's telling of a tale from it.... https://youtu.be/fCaeCPpsXV8?si=01YrcgKj46BJdlmf )

Sandra Rivera’s next mission: Do for FPGAs what she did for Intel's Xeon

martinusher Silver badge

Re: FPGA's

The main barrier for entry for hobby/small scale work** is that a typical FPGA is a BGA with a bazillion pins. Unless you've got the capability to work with these parts you have to use some kind of evaluation board.

The parts themselves are quite cheap, cheap enough to use in production equipment (usually <$10). A typical commodity FPGA might have a bunch of RAM in it and enough cells to build a processor from plus enough logic to build custom peripherals for that processor.

(**I think it was Microchip that pioneered the ultra low cost of entry route. These "hobby projects" are not only good training for engineers but they often become products in their own right.)(I remember the Good Old Days when setting up a FPGA or firmware development project would cost serious money, It seemed like the H/W engineers working with Xilinx were spending more time fussing over libraries and licenses than actually doing design work. I mentioned Lattice before because they seemed to be putting the effort in to get their tools and parts to a wide market -- and the parts are definitely 'contenders'.)

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Dead End

I'd guess the real problem is that they're so busy addressing the high end of the market (those incredibly expensive parts that the aerospace types of this world love) that they forgot that there's an even bigger market in commodity parts.

Both Xilinx and Altera (sorry, I've always known them as that) have quite high barriers to entry which leaves a space for upstarts like Lattice. Sure, their parts service mainly the smaller, cheaper, end but 'small' and 'cheap' are relative, they're still more than adequate for a huge range of applications. The tool costs are hobby level so the main barrier to entry has been the sheer investment in time and effort needed to move from the established brands, a move that's then encouraged by the established brands fiddling with the types, costs and availability of parts used for years.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

martinusher Silver badge

What problems?

Everything in our house worked just fine yesterday. A lot of the bits and pieces are quite old so even survived the 2000 non-leap.

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

>Sadly few developers understand the difference between these concepts.

Its part of the library/framework. I just forklift the code (or the AI does it for me).

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

martinusher Silver badge

>Why anyone would still invest their hard earned dollars in IBM stock is beyond me.

Individual investors are on the whole not at all interesting. They're after big funds, usually funds investing pension contributions. These not only represent huge amounts of hard money but also work purely by the numbers (so if IBM could do away with physical product and just make numbers then that's be fantastic). (My theory of business is that "All corporations tend towards the IRS (HMRC -- UK) business model. All collections, no product.....")

martinusher Silver badge

What, again?

Honesty, if its February (just), Thursday or whatever it must be time for IBM to announce redundancies....

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

martinusher Silver badge

Re: "Perform a hardware factory reset"

You know that you can save and reload your router setup? At least, I can do this with mine and that setup is in plain text so its easy to scan and check for weirdness.

There's no reason for a home router to require remote anything. In addition, the ISP should be monitoring their end to keep a lookout for attempts to compromise the network's equipment.

But I suppose its easier, and more profitable, to go on about Russia, the Kremlin, Putin, China and so on. Even as law enforcement discovers a major botnet being run from Coventry.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

martinusher Silver badge

They forgot something

The advertising forgot to mention that you needed to bring your Apple Vision or similar headset.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Space Karen

However, the net is closing and this is the subject of this complaint. This seems to be the main difference between W10 and W11 -- 10, the account's optional "but recommended", 11 its mandatory but if you can work at it there's a workaround. You can bet that 12 will remove this loophole -- or make it just small enough to be able to avoid legal pushback.

Don't let popular dislike of Musk blind you to the problems with Windows and other modern software. The days have long passed where an adequate profit can be made from making and selling a product. These days this is just the loss leader, the come on to get you on a subscription treadmill. Even that isn't enough so you have to be monitored closely for other revenue generation opportunities, be they direct through sales and subscriptions or indirect by reselling what's learned about you to a broker.

I don't like this not just because its intrusive but because its a misuse of processing and network bandwidth. Profligacy will eventually come at a cost because eventually commodities like bandwidth are going to have to be monetized a lot more than they are at the moment -- currently it appears to be free, you use as much as you can your hands on (or rather, you don't use it, your advertisers and data collectors do). The party's got to stop sometime.

martinusher Silver badge

Simple, seamless....

In one of the regular Linux/Windows comment streams you hear about how fiddly Linux is to set up and how you need to be tech savvy to do this. Its not true, of course, although it might have been a couple of decades ago. Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, installing a working version of W11 seems to be the fiddly one. You can -- and most people will -- submit to Microsoft's data mining / user monetization because its easier and there will be a bit of computer left over for you to do whatever with. But its got ridiculous.

Musk the resources to seriously challenge Microsoft. Its probably never occurred to him to do this before because older versions of Windows have worked "just well enough". But W11 appears to be a tipping point.

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

martinusher Silver badge

The seeds of their downfall are already sown. They can't sell their product to China, they're only allowed to sell a downgraded version. So the Chinese will have to resort to either making their own or coming up with an alternative form of vector processor. (The only thing that's stopping them is our certain knowledge that the Chinese can't invent anything, they have to buy all their advanced stuff from Great White Brother and then steal the designs....)

They will. When they do there will be a competitor that being a Generation Two model will probably perform better, cost less and use less power.

Its happened before numerous times. There's no reason to believe it won't happen again.

martinusher Silver badge

Logic seems a bit flawed

Being able to code is a bit like being able to write in a language such as English. Its an important skill for communicating but just as being able to write English doesn't make you a great (or even mediocre) author being able to code doesn't make you a programmer. As with English relying on generative AI produces very high quality imitative output; there may be some original gems in there but by and large its just rehashing what the machine's seen before (that is, been trained on). Coding, being a restrictive set of language skills compared to a human language, is going to be even more formulaic. Useful, but its really missing the point.

We may already be at a critical place in coding anyway, be it done by humans or machines. I've been looking at a project's code recently and I noticed that it was primarily built from ready made components -- that's fine, we're supposed to do that -- but at the same time its 'core' seems to be missing. This isn't unusual, though, because I've seen similar assemblies in other projects, so I start to wonder whether this is normal and its me that's out of step. The problem is that if a subsystem just stops working for no apparent reason (invariably resource depletion, of course) there's no easy way to debut this, waiting 72 plus hours for the system to fail and then trying to figure out what's wrong isn't very efficient. Here, no amount of fancy editors, code completion, AI or even 'languages that are guaranteed to be memory safe' will help you -- system correctness becomes a matter of faith. (In real life, at least the life I used to lead before I retired, you had to actively go looking for trouble, there was no point in running the code overnight and hoping for the best.) Anyway, judging by the general behavior of those 'apps' that infest my phone, modern Windows and what-have-you I'm probably in the minority so I'll just retreat to my vacuum tubes (valves, to you lot) and at least keep my fingers warm. But I reckon if we don't deal with this.....

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

martinusher Silver badge

Failure is an option

Given the nature of these missions its got to be assumed that a perfect landing in exactly the right spot is going to be an outlier, something that's worth working towards and trying for but unlikely to happen. The design should accommodate this. It will mean that its going to have redundant payload (Murphy's Law being what it is, once you design the thing on the assumption that it could tip over it will always land upright) but that's the obstreperous nature of machines.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Mmmmmm

I think that security updates are the least of your concerns. (That's assuming you don't keep sensitive information on your phone).

This article is worth a read (or ElReg's attention):-

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/how-your-sensitive-data-can-be-sold-after-a-data-broker-goes-bankrupt/

The broker has what it claims to be "the world's largest dataset of of real people's behavior" -- location information and so on, its their company's product and its primary asset. The company appears to be bankrupt not because of a faulty business model so much as from financial fun 'n games. Naturally people ("legislators") are pounding the table demanding that "laws should be passed" and so on but this is the reality of our lives. We're bought and sold as raw material....and we think that somehow 'the latest' will protect us. It never has.

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

martinusher Silver badge

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

The other balloon that was shot down around the same time was a hobbyist balloon that belonged to a club in Chicago. It was on its second circuit of the globe.

Which brings to mind an interesting question. These spy balloons follow the Jet Stream and so pass over various other countries including Russia. Nobody else seems to be bothered by them.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

martinusher Silver badge

Only part of the plan

Even in Europe if you're planning a trip off the beaten track and you're not familiar with the area then you need a lot more information than just an online map. Once you're in a large, sparsely inhabited place then you're really risking life and limb to stray away fro main roads. You need some local knowledge about what's likely to be passable at what time of year, likely weather conditions and its really smart to never go alone.

I live in nominally densely populated Southern California. You can literally walk from the city of LA to areas where you can get into potentially life threatening trouble due to geography and/or climate (and people do).

Rivian decimates staff to put a brake on spending

martinusher Silver badge

Re: margins on small cars are thin

There is only one new car in the US that costs < $20K, a Mazda, and that's being discontinued.

Average cost of a new vehicle in the US is $49K. We're trapped here because a lot of the US needs cars because of a lack of transport infrastructure. What this means is that the average age of cars in the US is increasing, its 10 years or so now, since people on the whole don't have the $700+ per month "average car payment" to burn and we don't have the sorts of regulations that force usable cars off the road (usually in the name of reducing emissions).

Focusing on expensive but profitable SUVs leaves manufacturers vulnerable to inexpensive competition. We have tools in the US to restrict competition and especially imports from places like China** so I don't expect any relief soon.

(**Its OK for manufacturers to import components or even complete vehicles and resell it at a decent markup but direct competition.....not allowed.....)

A path out of bloat: A Linux built for VMs

martinusher Silver badge

Re: More comparisons needed...

The PC was a very useful platform but caused a huge leap backwards in computer architecture. Much of the history of the PC could be described as "waiting to catch up" which it never quite did because of the huge number of people who grew up knowing it and its software as a 'computer'. The mass became so large that the tail is now wagging the dog -- its now comparatively rare to find people who don't think of a computer primarily in terms of a keyboard and screen attached to a processing unit.

I count myself lucky because I grew up in a time 'before PC' (and those dreadful BASIC based single board units). I didn't fully understand what I was experiencing but I was exposed to the concepts you describe and it stuck with me (because, fortunately, I dived off into the real time world and so avoided a lot of Windows voodoo).

A lot of this is now moot because of the ready availability of very powerful processors and memory for pennies (a PiZero would probably give a 1970s mainframe a run for its money). This has taken the incentive out of paring systems to what's actually necessary from what's easy to build. Bloat, though, does lead to reliability and (eventually) performance problems, problems that might get hidden by every more powerful hardware but will never get solved this way.

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux uses 9P and why both IBM and Intel hated VMs

>Did IBM invent the hypervisor?

I might be missing something but I've always thought that a hypervisor was just a marketing term for 'operating system'. The concept of running a system on top of a system is possibly alien to people who grew up with the ubiquitous PC, Windows and what-have-you but it was commonly understood well before that. This might be the reason why Intel was 'furious' -- its bit like Ford discovering that someone had patented something called a 'wheel'. (This doesn't mean that a product like VMWare isn't useful or valuable, a lot of work's needed to make the theoretical concept a practical reality. But its not unique -- those of us who's worked with industrial systems are familiar with 'real time' extensions to Windows XP, a set of 'drivers' that converted XP into a hard real time system.)

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

martinusher Silver badge

Peace and Quiet at last!

The morning usually starts with junk calls -- real people use text or emails.

Today has been quite peaceful. Maybe its just wishful thinking on my part because I'm a T-Mobile customer. Maybe not, maybe the spammers all prefer the AT&T network.

Back in the Good Old Days the Bell System was very prosaic but primarily designed for reliability. I'm not so sure about modern cellular equipment. I've always treated cellphones as 'nice to have' but since coverage where I live has always been hit and miss (mostly 'miss') its more useful when we go to the urban areas and experience real coverage. (We usually got our cell service through WiFi at home but once our Internet provider started reselling cell service our phones became unreliable. A picocell fixed this.....but.....we shouldn't have to have to mess around like this for an essential service.)

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

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Russian diplomacy:

>formerly under Russian domination. Nobody understands why.

Its simple, really. You just have to look at the wider historical context. Post-WW2 is actually a bit different. Prior to WW2 many of these countries had right wing governments that were not just bordering on outright fascist but also were rabidly anti-communist. (Participants in the "anti-Comintern" pact, a sort of early version of the Cold War.) When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 they did it with active participation of a couple of the larger countries and a certain amount of acquiescence from the smaller ones. (The Baltic States provided a lot of the personnel for concentration camps, for example.) Since this period saw the elimination of any kind of political opposition -- literally, if you didn't get out fast enough -- when the Red Army returned it not only had a huge area to administer but a dearth of people to administer it. (The West had a similar problem but solved it by rapid 'de-Naziification' of thousands of local officials etc.) So they grabbed anyone who could be thought of as reliable, ending up with 'communist' governments in Eastern Europe of dubious competence. (Well, they were hardly likely to want to re-introduce the same people who advocated invading them in the first place, were they?)

Its all well known, well documented and well understood but apparently not so much in places like the UK and US.

martinusher Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

>the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany being allies at that time.

Even that's a bit more complicated than it looks at first glance because Poland was an active participant in the carve up of Czechoslovakia so by mid-1939 was a de-facto ally of Germany. Realistically it had ceased to exist because it was the orange pip squeezed between two much larger powers. Germany was after its "living space" in Ukraine and whether or not Poland was in the way or not was irrelevant. Naturally in our recent past it suits us to describe the USSR as an "ally" of Germany, it paints a picture that makes it all clear cut to people who have neither the time nor interest to really understand the history of that area.

All this stuff is well documented by historians, contemporary sources and so on but unfortunately most people get their information from things like movies and sound bites.

martinusher Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

Things started heating up after 2014 and Maidan. You might recall that there was some kind of nasty little civil war going on in the east, one that resulted in an estimated 14,000 deaths and up to a couple of million displaced by February 2022.

(I've always wondered why it took Russia so long to react with a "SMO" or similar. But I think it was the combination of the systematic imposition of sanctions and general attitude to / attacks on Nord Stream 2 that finally galvanized them into action.)

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Seems perfectly elementary to me :|

When I see codes like that I tend to think "punched card".

Anyway, we all know the main skill needed for this sort of thing is "999999 [System Manipulator]".

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Twas ever thus

Its the Americans' fault, again.

They used to be a nice set of far off colonies where you could dump miscreants but then they went and declared Independence leaving Britain with a bit of a problem. So they tried sending their transports to some awful mosquito infested hole down under.

One of the ironies of history is that yesterday's infested hell-hole is today's highly desirable real estate in both Sydney and on the East Coast of the US.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

martinusher Silver badge

Daily Emails are a luxury

I came over to the US to work in mid-1984 in a time when the Internet didn't exist, (snail) mail service was slow** and international telephone calls 'rather expensive'. My wife was about 7 months pregnant with our first child so I returned for the birth, got back here, she spent her maternity leave here and then I endured some quite long periods -- most of the next 2 years or so -- with very sporadic communications. It wasn't a fun time at all for me but "needs must".

Working away from home when you have a family sucks but lots of people do it. It might stress a marriage but it shouldn't break a decent one. (We've been married for give or take 50 years, not atypical among our age group.)

(**BTW -- Back then the USPS's idea of "Air Mail" was to truck mail from California to New York and then fly it to the UK. Seriously. It used to take a week or more. I discovered this when there was a strike on the East Coast which forced the USPS to load the mail onto planes at LAX for Europe. It reduced the delivery time to 36-48 hours.....)

Dems are at it again, trying to break open black-box algorithms

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Smoke and Mirrors

We all know that seeing source code isn't a viable option -- you'd have to reverse engineer it to figure out what it does and how it does it and "that might take some time". What is important, though, is to standardize how the code works and especially identifying systematic biases. The code and possibly the platform its run on have to be clearly identified -- its not enough to just produce a print out (its the court system -- it might even need to use a fax somewhere) and state blithely that the information is correct, it has to be provably correct and consistent. (Bit of a stretch for a lot of modern software....)

FTC asks normal folks if they'd like AI impersonation scam protection, too

martinusher Silver badge

Trust someone to turn a problem into a business opportunity

The ultimate goal of any scammer is to get hold of your money so the obvious way to fight scams is to make it a lot more difficult for people to rapidly transfer sums of money. It amazes me at the amount of detailed information one needs to give a bank to get a loan or a mortgage but when it comes to transferring money from a person's account to some obscure overseas location that's completely out of character they'll not only do this instantly but also claim to have no knowledge where the money went or who got it. (They often cite 'confidentiality' which I think is Bankerspeak for "f**k off" or words to that effect.)

Fraud is like malware. Rather than erecting an ever more complicated maze of countermeasures, especially ones that require someone to pay a percentage as 'insurance', why not just fix the underlying problems? Apart from buying groceries and the like there is absolutely no need for any payments to be Right Now. The only reason this has sprung up is accountants keep on harping on about interest on every sum, business having got so wound up with debt and debt service that even the tiniest crack in the system would cause the whole edifice to collapse.

My response to this is to play the 'old' card -- paper trails -- for anything that doesn't involve credit cards. (Credit cards, as we all know, have their liability for misuse shifted to the provider rather than the user, a huge defense against fraud since its their money that's at stake.) Slowing down transactions is the key to making life difficult for scammers because if something's too good to be true -- its something you need right now -- then it probably is too good to be true.

Quest Diagnostics pays $5M after mixing patient medical data with hazardous waste

martinusher Silver badge

Re: Quest takes patient privacy and the protection of the environment very seriously

Quest is a huge corporation with offices, collection boxes and labs all over the US. I'd be very surprised if some office, somewhere wasn't in compliance from time to time. That's why you have checks and balances, enforcement and so on, it keeps people honest.

I'm not a great fan of mega-corproations, especially in fields like health-care, but this idea that "They're a big corporation, we can take them for everything we want" seems to be endemic. Its usually companies like Tesla ("anything Musk") or Amazon that's bearing the brunt of this but its not only ineffectual, its missing the point entirely. Criticism seems to be driven primarily jealousy rather than a considered view about whether the way we allow corporations to dictate social policy is a good idea.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

martinusher Silver badge

Step away from the keyboard......

Our notions of what a computer is, and by extension what an operating system is, are clouded because everyone knows that a computer has a screen, a keyboard (or other HID), a shell or other UI software and so on. This notion has done immense damage to the field of computing because the systems we interact with as people are just a subset of computers as a whole -- yes, its a big, important, subset but its still a subset.

To answer the question about what UNIX is, or was, we might want to ask ourselves about the business the Bell System (which became AT&T) was in. Ultimately their core business was telephones -- point to point communication -- and to manage that they needed phone switches ('exchanges' in UK parlance). US switches were designed as a crossbar matrix which is best controlled by a small computer, one that runs a quite complex algorithm to determine the best path a circuit might make trough the matrix (or, more accurately, matrices). This, plus countless other diagnostics, accounting and management functions is a complex task that's just not suited to ad-hoc software or the kind of batch systems that characterized business computers. A system like UNIX is an obvious fit -- its both modular and flexible, everything about it just logically flows from the requirements of a computer that has to do work in the real world.

So my guess about what UNIX is could be "An operating system designed from the requirements down that's rooted (non-filesystem sense) in the real world".