* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4531 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

US senators seek input on their cryptocurrency law via GitHub – and get some

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Countering symptoms rather than the cause

The problem is many people are ignorant enough to fall for Ponzi schemes. If some magical law were created that prevented fools from being separated from their money by this scheme then a new scheme would be created. There are two solutions: I propose teaching critical thinking in schools to reduce the quantity of fools. A more politically and religiously acceptable solution is to ban education so fools do not have money in the first place.

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

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Re: Democracy

The damage was done by a Republican senate when they refused to accept any SCOTUS judge selected by Obama. This let the next idiot pack SCOTUS with the most disgusting arseholes he could find. As is typical of Republicans, they delayed the damage until the democrats were in power knowing that much of the electorate are so abysmally ignorant of how their government works that they would blame Biden. Even the SCOTUS judges are aware of just how awful they are. They tried to do this in secret and threw a tantrum when evidence of their activity was leaked.

NASA circles August in its diary to put Artemis I capsule in Moon orbit

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RocketLab are catching up, NASA are exiting the business

NASA has caught returning bits of space craft with parachutes and helicopters. RocketLab has made one catch but had to drop because the load was swinging more than expected.

Space Shuttle SRBs descended under parachutes, splashed down and to some extend got re-used. Electron rockets have descended under parachutes, splashed down and some components have been re-used.

NASA has sent payloads to Lunar orbit. RocketLab will send a payload to NRHO on the 27th (Lies, damned lies and rocket launch schedules).

NASA used to re-use the main engines and payload fairing on a heavy launch vehicle. RocketLab has started work on a medium launch vehicle with a fully re-usable first stage and fairing.

RocketLab are making early progress on a rocket that could me more cost effective than Falcon 9. NASA are close to launching a rocket over 6 times the cost of a Delta IV heavy (first equal most expensive rocket in history).

NASA are moving out of the launch business. In future they will buy commercial launches for everything congress does not require them by law to launch with as many shuttle-derived components as possible.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: What are the betting odds?

Not as high as is needed for a sustainable presence on the Moon.

The boosters may be well past their sell by date but that is because it takes time to measure the shelf life of a solid rocket and there was not a real opportunity until these two stood idle for ages. There is a limit to the number of cryo-cycles the main tank can survive. This gets misleading reports because the figured quoted is often the number allocated for a particular activity, not the maximum over the full life cycle. The main tank is actually very re-usable - as long as the use does not include launch. The engines are ex-space shuttle so they really are good for multiple launches. The upper stage is a Centaur and those have been flying successfully since 1963. Orion is sufficiently past its sell-by date that bits of it have already failed. The good news is the life support system cannot fail as it was never installed. The first zero-g test of life support will be with the Artemis 2 crew.

All stages of launch have actually been tested. Although the wet dress rehearsal ended early the bits that were missed were tested during the earlier green run. The remaining issues are:

1) power and duration limits on the fans that would scatter hydrogen so a hydrogen leak cannot lead to an explosion

2) the hydrogen leak in the quick disconnect arm.

3) a fault that would only show in a complete end to end test but not in individual unit tests - like that could ever happen.

There is a bad chance Atermis 1 will not fail until the solid rocket booster recovery parachutes are discovered to be missing and the main tank recovery fails because of lack of propellant for a boost back / entry burn.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Very exciting!

I think we are looking for different lights.

A single SLS is $2.2B - ignoring R&D costs. Add in $568M for the ground systems, $1B for Orion and $300M for the service module and you get to $4B per launch. Maximum cadence is at best 1/year and the wheels fall off that after three launches (Artemis IV requires a new upper stage and a badly over budget and delayed mobile launch structure).

For comparison a Crew Dragon on a Falcon Heavy could do SLS's job for $250M with multiple launches per year. A crew Starship would be <$100M and many launches per year.

SLS is slurping up budget that could be spent on space suits, a Luna rover or a moon base while at the same time restricting Artemis to one launch per year. That will strangle any hope of a sustainable presence on the Moon. At the current rate of progress NASA astronauts will eventually get to the Moon and will be able to look at the window where they will see Jared Isaacman offering to let them borrow a space suit.

The only way Americans get a sustainable presence on the Moon is if they write to the politicians and ask for a Moon program instead of this SLS "jobs" program. The light I am looking for at the end of this tunnel is the proper cancellation of SLS, and not a re-naming as happened with Constellation/Ares.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

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Re: Fit in faring

According to the Starship user guide you can have 8m tall with 8m diameter + another 9m tall tapering to 3.6m diameter. Mass limit is at least 100,000kg. We do not have final specs on HLS Starship and that may have stretched tanks and landing engines that cut into the payload space and mass. 4x 10kW of fission power comes to a piffling 6,000kg.

If you are only landing and not returning a Starship would not need the stretched tanks and you avoid the difficulty of unloading your nuclear reactor from inside a fairing 30m above the surface of the moon. The bad news is you then have to get about 170kW of heat out of the fairing. About 8,000kg of radiator would be sufficient but you could cut that down considerably by using the Starship as a radiator and a big fan inside the tanks to spread the heat with the ullage gas.

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

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Re: Don't Forget

The complaint is not about price competition. It is about RF interference. _If_ "funding secured" can be believed this time, you would have the choice between paying a medium amount for a Starlink service that doesn't work or a large amount for 5G.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

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Re: So when one of these things is junked ...

Disconnect and remove is not enough. What you need to do is discharge the battery so it contains less energy to start or maintain a fire. Recycling would be a good next step. Last time I checked this was difficult because battery technology changes fast enough to obsolete potential investment in recycling before a likely payoff.

Brave Search leaves beta, offers Goggles for filtering, personalizing results

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Re: DuckDuckGo quirk

Might be, but I stopped using general purpose search engines for images ages ago. More likely to go to https://www.alphacoders.com/ or https://www.deviantart.com/ - except for a regular search for idiot. He is down to 7 of the first 20.

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Re: redefine the relevance of search results

I browse with javascript disabled. There are certain javascript only sites like pinterest that litter search results and it would be handy to exclude them with a configuration file. I will give brave search a try and take a decision later.

I think goggle is a really stupid name for this product. If their target audience misreads the name as intended it will drive them away. Duckduckgo may not be the most intuitive name but at least it is imaginative.

GitHub's AI code assistant Copilot takes flight. And that'll be $10 a month, please

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My first thought:

$10/month to turn it on. How much to turn it off?

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

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Re: Cult

I thought questioning a cult's leadership was the first thing you should do. If the result is termination of employment, firstly you got your answer and secondly you are better off.

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

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Re: "a recall of 830,000 Autopilot-equipped Teslas"

He cannot be President or Vice President because he is not a natural-born citizen of the USA. Other political offices lack that requirement and some offer effective protection from charges of securities fraud so it would not surprise me if he ran for some other office.

Several days have past without him making a stupid tweet so perhaps his lawyers have convinced him to STFU before he digs himself into an even deeper hole with Twitter. (More likely the PEA for Boca Chica has got his focus back on rockets.)

SpaceX and OneWeb bury the satellite constellation hatchet

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Re: Great news for GPS

I always thought it was to support Roscosmos. Roscosmos had a large number of Soyuz rockets under construction to launch OneWeb satellites but the money to pay for them evaporated when OneWeb went bankrupt.

For GPS to work, the receiver must be able to see at least four satellites each sufficiently above the horizon to avoid the signal going through lots of atmosphere and each in very different parts of the sky. This means the satellites must spread their signal over almost half the planet instead of just the area beneath them. A broadband satellite concentrates its signal on the area beneath it. A broadband receiver focuses its antenna at the patch of sky with the nearest satellite in it. A GPS receiver needs to receive signals from most of the sky.

The wide spread and lack of focus means that GPS requires more power than a satellite can practically provide. The extra power comes from amplification by the atmosphere - which only works in some narrow frequency bands. If OneWeb had got a world wide allocation for a GPS band it would have hit the news.

Coinbase CEO cuts 1,100 jobs, warns of 'crypto winter'

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Big ask

You are asking people who have more than enough money but still want more to stifle their fear of missing out now in return for benefits to other people in the future. Try exploiting their strongest personality trait (greed) instead:

NFT wash trades separate $2.9M from foolish trader.

DARPA wants to refuel drones in flight – wirelessly

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Federal Acquisition Regulation hurdles.

Specific requirements plus a tight deadline. To me this smells like a company already has these components ready and someone with a budget at DARPA has decided to fund them but needs to jump through the appropriate FAR hoops.

Meta slammed with eight lawsuits claiming social media hurts kids

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Re: before / early internet

Back then, getting onto the precursors to social media required some kind of intelligence test and the false positives got drowned out by people with a clue. Round about September 1993, the barriers to entry crumbled and the ignorant out numbered those with the ability to recognise lies/fiction.

One key step in getting the internet back is to teach critical thinking. Getting people to ask the important questions like "How does he know?", "Where is the link to the peer reviewed study?", "If the Earth is flat, why is the internet not covered with selfies from the rim fall?".

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Investors are strange

The first time I saw my browser fill in my name and address on a website I went to considerable effort to ensure that it kept no record of my name or address. Investors value a company at $300M because they say they can do something that browsers do unless you make the effort to stop them? Please can I have $300M for making tree leaves rustle when the wind blows.

Symbiote Linux malware spotted – and infections are 'very hard to detect'

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Re: Attacks LD_PRELOAD

Simple answer: Static linking creates a different type of file that the dynamic linker does not understand:

Create hello_world.c and compile it with: "gcc -o hello_world hello_world.c" then run: "file hello_world" and you get output like:

hello_world: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=8ff789376a00beebceecf9d11428eed4fd02622b, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, not stripped

Now compile it again with: "gcc -o static_world -static hello_world.c" and run "file static_world":

static_world: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (GNU/Linux), statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=93e4e42fed15a9819b3df716d95c8f60e4bdc796, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, not stripped

Note that hello_world has an interpreter (the dynamic linker) but static world does not. hello_world can be executed via its interpreter: "/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ./hello_world" and it runs fine. Try "/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ./static_world". I got a Segmentation fault - the dynamic linker (which is the thing that uses LD_PRELOAD) does not understand static executables at all and promptly dies of confusion.

It goes deeper: even if the dynamic linker did not crash and did load the libraries from LD_PRELOAD for a static executable, the dynamic libraries would have their constructors executed but would not be able to redirect calls inside the static executable. Static calls know where the required functions are and go straight there. Dynamic calls read a function pointer variable that initially point to a function in the dynamic linker. The dynamic linker looks up the name in the loaded shared libraries (and loads more if the name is not found) then updates the function pointer to point at the shared library function then calls it.

That is a lot of complexity but hello world is about 16kB and static_world is 780kB (using puts, it would be worse with printf). If every executable is static you are going to use a lot of memory and really thrash the caches.

Complicated answer: Some functionality is implemented by dynamic libraries unless you pay close attention. The obvious example is the name service switch in the C library. If you did not do anything clever, user data is stored in /etc/password in a simple human readable file. You could store it in a database and the C library would provide functions that hide the difference to programs by loading a different shared library.

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Detection is trivial

Create a process with one of the hidden names and look for it with ps. If you do not find it, you are infected.

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

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To be fair ...

There were actually three deaths at Fukushima. The other two were power station workers who were washed out to sea by the tsunami.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

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Re: So

A have a TV with a network interface that I will not connect to my network. It has been working fine for years. When it dies of old age I will be looking carefully at reviews to ensure the replacement works without a network connection. By that time I may have to repair the TV's wifi antenna with wire cutters so it does not connect to the neighbour's ISP supplied router with a password sold by the ISP to the TV manufacturer.

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Musk signed a 100% specific performance clause. The lawyers are already looking at new yachts and second holiday homes.

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Re: hey, what's $1 billion to the world's richest man?

Elon already signed the contract - without doing due diligence. He specifically waived due diligence. He signed and broke the non-disclosure agreement. This is not a normal or even sane big business deal. This is epic scale Dunning Kruger: Musk thinks his ability to sell electric cars and launch rockets means he is better at contract law than Twitter's (and his own) contract lawyers.

Twitter's bot percentage figure is based on a published methodology. The method is reasonable and for all I know was carried out properly. The sample size was low so the resulting figure is not 5±1%, but more like 5% x or ÷ 2. A larger study will probably arrive at a different number but will not be evidence that Twitter lied, only that an inaccurate number was honestly reported. If 5% is demonstrably the wrong number it still does not matter because Musk waived due diligence.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: hey, what's $1 billion to the world's richest man?

$1B is nothing compared to the specific performance clause. If Musk walks away from the deal for any "due diligence" reason (that he signed away) he has to make Twitter investors whole for the money they have "lost" from not being able to sell their stock at $52.40. The obvious way to do that is to sell Tesla stock which will trash its value even faster than it is currently falling.

If you want to evade the consequences of securities fraud on that scale even being Attorney General of Texas will not save you.

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

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Careless wishes

Between 20 to 30 percent of new customers are buying printing in this way but HP would like that figure to be closer to 50 to 60 percent.

I would increase the price to non-subscription new customers until I drove three quarters of them to competitors.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

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There used to be a reason ...

Many many years ago it was hard to buy a computer without paying Microsoft tax. Years ago it was hard to buy a laptop without paying Microsoft. You could buy without Windows installed but you would still be paying the license fee bundled with the hardware. It was in theory possible to claw back the money from the vendor, but the vendor would not get their money back from Microsoft.

These days avoiding the Microsoft tax is a minor inconvenience and as far as I am concerned Microsoft exist only to provide entertaining articles on TheRegister.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

What if the number of distros increases?

Every day I ignore over 260 of the distros currently listed on DistroWatch. I am sure that with no extra effort I could ignore a thousand or even ten thousand. Likewise if the least popular half of those 270 distros disappeared, perhaps 300 people would notice, 200 would care and most of them would find they ended up better off. I did a very brief check of the top end of that bottom half and found:

a) Distributions that are so young that the creator has not got bored of it yet.

b) Distributions that have not been updated for at least 5 years.

c) Single purpose distributions like GParted Live.

[GParted Live is a disk partitioning GUI that fits on a CD business card. There was a time when I would have found such a thing useful. These days I can put a full fat distribution on a µSD card, in a full size SDHC card converter, in a USB→SDHC converter. Far easier to carry around than a USB BlueRay player and a powered USB hub (so it will work with the old low power USB interfaces).]

Musk repeats threat to end $46.5bn Twitter deal – with lawyers, not just tweets

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Re: supposed to be smart

He is smart when it comes to running a rocket company. He is an absolute genius at sounding like a clueless angry half-wit on Twitter.

If he wanted out of the deal the smart thing to do would be tweeting ways to make Twitter more profitable. That would send the share price higher than the offer and the Twitter board would be looking for a way out. Thinking while typing is not one of Elon's skills. He really needs to take the SEC's advice and get adult supervision on the internet.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

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Lower spec Arduinos only. There are plenty that are too fast. All Raspberry Pi's are banned, including the Pico.

10Mb/s networking is allowed in half duplex mode but full duplex hits the sanctioned speed. Dial-up and ISDN internet are in but broad band would require a wide interpretation of "up to" to be slow enough. (Starlink is way too fast)

Floppy disks are OK but all hard disks with an IDE interface or better are out. ST-506 and ST-412 hard disks are slow enough. Forget PCIe, PCI and ISA cards. CD-ROMs are theoretically OK up to x16 speed as are x1 speed DVDs but I do not remember any with a slow enough interface.

There is no need to go back to PS/2 keyboards. USB1 is slow enough even at full speed. Video is a problem: 640x480@60Hz black and white looks OK at first sight (18.432Mb/s) but the extra bandwidth required for overscan would take that over the 20Mb/s limit. Colour or grey scale really cut into the resolution or frame rate. ZX Spectrum graphics might just fit under the limit even when you include the "4bits/pixel" output rate.

Police lab wants your happy childhood pictures to train AI to detect child abuse

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I agree, but I am astounded to hear about police and an AI project seeking permission.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

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Re: How about not using Windows?

Forget about a Linux port of some commercial software. You will probably find a dozen free software projects promising to do the same thing. Three might work and about 1½ could be good.

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Re: OB1 Error

Clearly the consultant mistook some of the sheep for lobsters.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

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Re: much more safer to operate!

Solar causes way more deaths per kWh than nuclear. Coal power pollution kills people down wind. Coal power also releases nuclear waste. There are traces radioactive isotopes in coal and because it takes a huge pile of coal to run a power station the amount released is larger per kWh than the nuclear.

Death reports from non-nuclear power do not make the news because it would be a boring every day occurance.

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Re: Does anyone want cheap and reliable energy?

Each fission releases about three neutrons. For a stable reactor you want exactly one of them to cause another fission. Some of your spare neutrons will decay to stable protons. Others will get stuck in other atoms which could transmuted them into short or long term nuclear waste. If you put you long lived nuclear waste in the path of your spare neutrons it becomes either short term waste or fuel for your Jupiter + Saturn space probes, which are sometimes solar powered these days because of a shortage of nuclear waste.

Believe it or not, nuclear physicists have already thought of this. I am surprised it was not mentioned in the counter arguments.

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Re: Economies of scale

The economic advantage of smaller reactors is that one module is always down for maintenance so you maintenance team are always productive instead of being active say only one month per year for a single large reactor.

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

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Re: If "Musk" does eventually buy Twitter...

One reason Tesla was overvalued because Musk fans were buying and not selling. If Musk fans are not Trump fans...

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

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Polar coverge

Starlink shell 4 is at 97.6° inclination. When full it will provide polar coverage. I think there are few few satellites in shell 4 already but lower inclinations are getting priority because of population density. If the US DoD hands Elon a crate of money I am sure shell 4 will become a priority.

Linus Torvalds debuts 'boring old plain' Linux kernel 5.18

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Re: feature activation

I remember. At first there was only a 486 - at a really high price. There was considerable push-back against that price. I am sure 486SX was released as a way to off-load partially defective 486s as much as to capture the market for those balking at the price. I doubt it was the original plan because the first generation motherboards had no socket for a 487. Intel went to a lot of trouble to create a market for the 487 which was cheaper than a 486DX despite being essentially the same chip. The lower price of the 487 showed that the refuseniks had a genuine reason to complain about the price. Intel got their money anyway from thinner margins on two chips instead of a thick margin on one.

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Re: Turing test

amanfromMars 1's early posts never used to get up/down votes but these days it frequently gets ±3. What has changed?

a) The travesty generator is improving (some of the +4 posts were remarkably coherent).

b) There are more people here unable to recognise a robot.

c) People know it is a robot but up/down vote anyway.

Does anyone know if the up/down votes get fed back into the algorithm?

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Re: feature activation

There is a possible use for this that is not awful: Imagine you want your own small custom accelerator integrated with an X86 CPU. You could get a small number of CPUs made to your specification for a large amount of money or you could have your accelerator included as standard but deactivated by default - for far less money. There were rumours that the NSA did exactly this in the past and their secret x86 extension would be available to anyone who could guess how to switch in on, what it was for and how to use it.

On the other hand, this is the company that damaged the FPU on the 486 (486SX) so they could charge extra for an undamaged 486 (486DX) - or sell an upgrade 487 (a 486DX that would only operate if it was connected to a 486SX that was shut down). I fully expect to see CPUs sold with a free time limited speed up - with an expensive license fee to extend the time limit.

Much to my embarrassment, this type of thing has been around for years on the Raspberry Pi. You need to pay extra for the MPEG2 and VC-1 hardware decoders. This is because there are parts of the world where the software patents (spit) have not yet expired.

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

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Re: How are we supposed to know who's British?

Don't need to. Just delete the data for everyone you cannot prove is some other nationality.

The same goes for Google. They do not need to know who I am to delete what they know about me. They can simply delete records for all people they cannot identify. These days, that list must consist almost exclusively of people who do not want to be tracked by Google.

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

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Re: You're whinging about a 6.5 pound laptop?

For years there has been a fashion for making laptops as fragile as possible. This has been presented as a desirable quality in reviews. I consider OP's language to be extremely mild and understated. I can understand that for some people a laptop is a device for demonstrating the owner's style, taste and disposable income. Being busted does not really hinder that purpose. Commentards here are more likely to think of a laptop as a tool for accomplishing work. Repeated whacks with a verbal cluebat have failed to get the message across: many techies would prefer a laptop that can easily survive common accidents. It is amazing that the discussion remains so calm and restrained.

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Screwdriver storage solution.

AMD reveals 5nm Ryzen 7000 powered by Zen 4 cores

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Re: Goodbye GF

Hello GF! Raspberry Pi 4s are currently 16nm. Perhaps on 2023-03-14 we will see a 10nm Pi 5.

Deepfake attacks can easily trick live facial recognition systems online

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Re: Artificial Mimickry

On the other hand isn't this the criterion for being appointed a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit?

Repairability champ Framework's modular laptop gets a speed boost

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Re: tinkerers and developers

High up on my wish list is no CPU > 10W, No CPU > $50, no separate GPU. When a mugger looks at my laptop I want him to think "That is far too cheap to be worth the risk of getting whacked on the head with" - from which you can deduce a use-case I consider important. If I need something that can bootstrap gcc in under 5 seconds I will ssh into a cluster.

If framework come up with something with a screen big enough to match a full size keyboard I will be very interested.

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

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Re: WTF?

"De la terre à la lune" was written in 1865. The first demonstration of a centrifuge was in 1875. The first centrifuge big enough to spin a human was built in 1933. Despite that, animals died from acceleration in the rockets built to test the viability of human space flight around 1959.

This is way more ridiculous than getting humans to the moon via cannon would have sounded in 1865. A better comparison might be trying to do an orbital launch with a battery powered steam rocket in 2021.

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

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Re: Some serious questions.

The most obvious advantage to users is the lack of an Intel Management Engine, AMD Secure Technology or equivalent.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

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Re: The curse of overchoice

Choosing a distro: write some distro names on a piece of paper, pin it to a message board and throw a dart. Experienced Linux users probably tried two of three then selected one based on personal preference. They gained more and more experience with that one and now loudly proclaim that their choice (mine=Debian) is the best for all sorts of spurious reasons but the real reason is they know how to use it better than the others. A good choice would be the same as the person who is most likely to help you. If that person does not exist: Heads=Ubuntu, Tails=Mint.

I asked DuckDuckGo for "Mint ISO", and the link below the two pointless adverts was what you are looking for. "Ask a search engine" will probably get you something usable 8 times out of 10. Asking on a support forum will get you a "stop wasting my time" unless you make tiny effort yourself first.

That Mint page gives you a choice of desktop environments. Picking one is exactly like picking a distribution but with the extra bonus that it is even easier to change your mind, install several and try a different one each time you log in.

Once you have picked a desktop environment you can download an ISO by torrent if you know how (saves Mint much of the cost of bandwidth) or scroll down to an https mirror near you.

You got lucky this time as I had a minutes to spare, but next time make a tiny effort or you find other Linux users can swear worse than Linus used to.