Posts by Orv

Re: May I recommend rsyslog?

I vaguely recall that from a legal standpoint a contemporaneous paper log was considered more reliable than a digitally stored log. Computer forensics was still new to most court systems at the time.

Re: Hypocritical

You MIGHT be overestimating how much affection the average American has for Elon Musk. While his business achievements are popular his personal behavior really is not.

Re: Torvalds declared: "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple."

I had corruption issues with Reiser, but I later found that machine had a defective disk controller, so I can't really blame Reiser for it. Reiser certainly broke more spectacularly than other filesystems, though.

Re: Sleep well, you're fine.

Indeed, transferring all the rights to a copyrighted work is actually fairly involved and has to be done quite deliberately -- even paying someone for something doesn't make it a work for hire and transfer copyright, unless there's a contract in place stating it does.

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

I'm genuinely curious if you know of an example of a lawsuit that went this way. It's not a scenario I've heard of before.

Personally I prefer BSD because while I like having my source code open, I also like to keep the possibility of later monetizing my projects. With a BSD license I could add proprietary features and charge for them, without having to release them for freeloaders to use.

Re: Hypocritical

I'd think the overhead of FUSE would outweigh that, in the ZFS case, but I've never benchmarked it -- maybe FUSE is more efficient than I would think.

FreeBSD's stack is highly consistent and stable, but you're right, my experience is it's not quite as fast. This may partly be interface-dependent, though -- FreeBSD's driver support is not as comprehensive as Linux's.

As a sysadmin I really like FreeBSD, everything is straightforward and easy to maintain. It has a nice, clean init system, multiple good options for handling package updates, and I've never had a failed upgrade between releases. (RedHat, on the other hand, requires you to reinstall to upgrade.)

Re: Hypocritical

Ken White (aka Popehat) has also written at length (and often amusingly) about this topic.

It's actually extremely hard to win a defamation case in the US. Truth is an absolute defense. Also, the statement has to be such that a reasonable person would conclude it was true -- which means satire and general puffery are protected.

To give you an idea of how hard it is to win, the guy that Elon Musk publicly called a pedophile sued him for defamation and lost.

Re: Super slowmo

Revoked lists have their own issues. The server with the revocation list becomes a single point of failure. If it's down, do you block *all* https access until it comes back up? If not, DNS spoofing can override the whole system.

Re: I understand

...aren't one-off jobs why we have "at"?

People have suggested it. The problem is the ADS-B system is easily overwhelmed by too many aircraft in one spot. Also a typical aircraft ADS-B transmitter costs thousands of dollars, which might be a problem for drones that cost a few hundred.

Re: not subect

Also, if you're piloting a Cessna and bust a flight restriction, it's easy to punish you for it -- just watch where you land and arrest you. There's a big problem with drones flying in restricted areas without any way to identify the pilot.

Re: There are, I...

I always wonder how motorcyclists arrive at their destinations without going deaf, personally.

Re: 1000 cycles?

I wouldn't overthink the cycle issue. There are companies using Teslas for livery service, and one of them recently published their maintenance logs. The upshot is you *might* need to think about a battery replacement at about 300,000 miles -- at which point most ICE cars would be junk anyway.

Re: Still a problem though

At home charging speed isn't nearly as important. Generally you're charging the car at night, so there's at LEAST 8 hours of downtime. My daily commute can be taken care of with just Level 1 charging, although I switched to Level 2 because it was less of a strain on the house's electrical system. (16A from a 240V/30A circuit causes quite a bit less conductor heating than 12A from a 120V/15A circuit.)

Re: Still a problem though

Here in SoCal it's less of a problem than you'd think, because the distribution system was designed to cope with daytime A/C loads. Charging at night, when those loads are lessened, is heavily incentivized. My nighttime rate can be as low as a third of what I pay during peak hours.

Re: Still a problem though

I think in current DC fast charging schemes the car's electronics are mostly bypassed, and power is delivered directly at the pack's charging voltage.

Even Level 2 charging doesn't generally use transformers, at least not ones operating at 50/60 Hz. It uses switching type power supplies like you'll find in a modern PC.

Re: Still a problem though

Most of the danger can be avoided if you make sure the connection can never be made or broken "hot." This is how all EV charge connectors (even lowly 240 volt Level 2) work; there's a low voltage pilot connection that makes after the high-voltage one, and breaks before it, and signals the charger to cut the flow.

There'd also be a stronger magnetic field from a 1000 amp cable, but a back of the envelope calculation suggests it's still three orders of magnitude too small to erase a credit card. ;)

Re: Newton - MessagePad

The closest we came in that era was the Handspring Treo series of PalmOS phones. They were nicely integrated, not just a phone taped to a PalmOS device -- for example, SMS and phone calls were handled by PalmOS apps, and PalmOS apps could use cellular data. But the market for such things at the time was not that big, and their hardware was a bit flimsy.

Re: The AI Effect

Very cool, but not really related to consciousness. ;)

I think part of the problem is no one can agree on what consciousness *is*, exactly, or how to test for it. Until we can answer whether a chimpanzee has consciousness, or a raven, trying to create it in an AI is pointless -- we won't know it when we see it. As was noted above, we've essentially defined it as something unique to humans, which makes it a bit tautological.

Re: This May be Apocryphal...

Yeah, having installed servers using a server lift, I will never again try to do it without one. Even setting aside the weight issue, servers are awkward and have odd center of gravity issues when you try to balance them.

Re: This May be Apocryphal...

I once saw three guys trying to deal with that situation by sitting on the forklift counterweight. Then they thought maybe they could balance it across two undersized forklifts. At that point I decided I had urgent work to do elsewhere in the building.

Re: Details

Generally you want to run any printer somewhat below its rated capacity. There's usually a rated monthly max that's the highest amount the manufacturer will warranty, but the machine may not last much past that.

Re: 3.1 metres in height

I'm guessing it came in multiple, palletized pieces. But painful experience taught me that a standard pallet will not fit through a standard door. ;)

Re: ""Four grand for a printer!?" and I always wondered wtf she was buying."

Even black-and-white printers can reach that price level if the usage is heavy enough. Printers have a certain rated monthly output. I work for a large academic department and we average somewhere around 400,000 pages a year. We have two large Ricoh high-speed printer/copier/scanner units that according to my inventory sheets cost about $8,500 each. They're each around 4' long and just fit through a normal doorway; they weigh over 400 pounds.

I've often said that a lot of what people think of as "government waste" or "red tape" is actually the result of rules put in place to prevent any appearance of fraud or self-dealing. Corporations just accept that a certain amount of money and equipment will walk out the door, and write it off, but that's not acceptable when taxpayer money is involved.

Re: Great

A fragmented app infrastructure plagued WinCE from the start, and meant that Pocket PC devices were mostly relegated to specific single-function jobs, like scanning packages. In many cases apps had to have a separate build for the specific CPU and screen format of every device, or they wouldn't run; there was very little commonality between different manufacturers' products. The platform persisted mainly because PalmOS was only suitable for low-power tasks (intentionally, since the first Palms ran off alkaline batteries.)

Re: Software Engineers

Oh sure, if you're just changing the bulb. However, wiring in a new fixture can only be done by a licensed electrician, who must complete 2000 hours of apprenticeship first.

Re: Making a stink about a.....stink

Some places in the US have taken to passing ordinances to protect agricultural operations from that kind of attack.

More recently some of these laws have been used by legal marijuana grow-ops to shut down people complaining about the smell of weed, which I suspect was not the intent. ;)

Re: Making a stink about a.....stink

I used to go to a glider operation that had that as a concern for a while. Eventually, though, all the property around it ended up owned by club members, which effectively solved the problem (and let them go flying much more conveniently.)

Re: I can see why smoking was banned!

Not sure I understand your point. Alcohol's actually got fewer BTU's per unit volume than gasoline. It also needs a higher concentration in air to burn. It's less susceptible to detonation in engines, though, which means the engine can have higher compression and make more power for its size.

The main hazard with alcohol is it burns with a clear, invisible flame. On the other hand, since it's water-soluble, it's easier to put out a puddle of alcohol than a puddle of gasoline; you can just dilute it with water until it won't burn anymore.

I wondered that too. I've never noticed hard boiled eggs having any particular odor. Maybe it's what they were seasoned with?