Posts by Tom 38

This was all linked in the article:

While this will eventually reduce workload for boot/installation components (grub2 reduces surface area, syslinux goes away entirely, anaconda reduces surface area), the reduction in support burden extends much further into the stack - for instance, VESA support can be removed from the distro.

UEFI is required for many desirable features, including applying firmware updates (fwupd) and supporting SecureBoot. As a standalone change, it reduces support burden on everything involved in installing Fedora, since there becomes only one way to do it per platform. Finally, it simplifies our install/live media, since it too only has to boot one way per arch. Freedom Friends Features First - this is that last one.

Really? For my Dell laptop, I get linux compatible firmware updates for all my Dell components using fwupdmgr. Dell are normally quite good at publishing firmware to the Linux Vendor Firmware Service

Re: They’re Dells. No thanks

Dell Precision or Dell Latitude - there's a big difference.

Personally, I'm very happy with my 3 yr old Dell Precision 5540, still quite a beast.

UHD 630 here happily driving two 4k@60Hz screens and a 1080p screen on a linux desktop.

Re: The general state of the economy

The counterpoint to this is argument is that local shops are thriving in my part of East London. Since the pandemic the barber I went to near St Pauls has shut down, but there have been 3 new barbers open in our neighbourhood (none before covid). Cafes here did mad business during the pandemic, and are much busier still than pre-pandemic, and all the restaurants that shutdown during the pandemic have reopened (more accurately, mutated in to a different restaurant).

Re: Speed up shutdowns?

I dunno 'bout you, but my servers don't shut down and reboot sequentially. They shut downand reboot in parallel, leaving just enough running to carry the load (if a trifle slowly sometimes). Downtime is already nil, at least in a properly run service.

Imagine you rent out your server's compute capacity by the second, and you need to reboot 100,000 servers. You don't shut down all your servers in parallel because there would not be enough capacity to relocate workloads, so you do a rolling restart.

You don't overly care about the wall time it takes to shutdown and restart all these servers, but you absolutely care about the total number of server-hours of downtime that you experience. After all, if each server is down for 2 minutes, that's ~139 server-days of downtime that you can't rent out a server for. If you can reduce that to 15 seconds per server, you can potentially rent out 121 server-days more compute.

Re: Still reeling …

Meanwhile muggins here was holding the headphone cable to the tape player at precisely the right angle to get things to load.

It will be the two screens plus the i9, I imagine that it requires a lot of power.

Yep, the PSU brick that it uses supplies 20V @ 12A for a whopping 240W of power. That's crazy!

My Dell workstation does work off USB-C PD, but it barely charges at all off 65W, and its a trickle charge at 100W (which is the maximum for USB-C PD in the standard) and displays BIOS messages saying that's not enough power and slightly dims the screen. Dell provide a non-standard 135W USB-C PD charger from their docks, which does charge it fully.

Re: "Beijing simply will not tolerate substantial COVID-19 outbreaks"

Omicron is very contagious, but not dangerous

Its not as dangerous. It's still pretty dangerous for some. My father in law has just left ICU after almost a month with omicron, still requires a CPAP machine to keep his O2 stats falling. This week it falls to 70 when he takes the mask off, previously it was falling to 50. He was double vaccinated with Pfizer about 6 months before, but caught it before having a booster jab for omicron.

I'm not saying we should be in lockdowns or mask mandates, but saying omicron is not dangerous is fairly offensive to people whose family are dying from it..

We have district heating at home, hot water at 70°C is pumped to a storage tank in our flat that is kept at 65°C, and pumped around the floor to provide underfloor heating, and mixed with mains to provide a 55°C feed to the kitchen and a 30°C feed to the bathrooms.

Obviously we don't use as much energy in the summer months, but its not zero. Jan/Feb are the coldest months, we tend to get through twice as many kwh as the average month, but August is pretty similar to April in terms of consumption. We still wash our dishes in hot water and have warm showers. Plus the hot water tank is kept at that 65°C, so even if you don't "use" anything, there is always fresh hot water being added to make up for losses.

It is a problem in summer having all these pipes full of hot water throughout the building. The communal hallways carry the pipes, and are all internal with no cooling, so you can step out into a furnace.

Re: Hmm.

Hey! what's with the time stamp of "5 hours" when I have only just posted this and I am unable to edit it.

This actually gets returned from the server as (slightly reformatted):

The custom JS function rolling_time() changes this into a relative time based on data-epoch. So it is your browser that thinks you are in Hyderabad, not El Reg

Re: Copied from Python

Commenting from a Python POV - type hinting is great for two reasons - static analysis is cheap and finds bugs, and secondly it allows editors to provide more robust auto-completion.

Well engineered code says what arguments a function takes and what it returns, its a minor concern to add proper type hints to something, and the value gained from adding them increases exponentially as the proportion of type hinted code increases. It's universally a good thing.

Re: Turn and Turn about / The (US) patient system is broken

The industrial revolution in the US was based upon the IP theft of things developed in the UK. Slater the Traitor stole Arkwright's designs and took them to the US.

I see your alacritty and raise you kitty

Re: New wine in old bottles

I remember getting an old (pre-AMD) ATI not quite top of the line graphics card, when they were first released, they had too much of the "good" silicon so they were selling the cheaper version with the same chipset as the absolute top of the line card.

All you had to do was pop the heatsink and fan off, connect a trace that had been cut on the side of the chip using a pencil or some solder, and you had the full card for the £150 less.

Found it - early Radeon X800 Pro could be turned in to Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, or more accurately "Graphite Edition"

Re: Repeating:

Lyrics slightly changed to...

dum dum dum dum dum dum TWAT! ah-ah He'll hit every one of us

Re: Ah, yes.

I've had this one before when visiting the US - the trick I used was to have 2 weeks working attending meetings and training, then have the holiday part, followed by a final day back in the office. I say "day", but I turned up at 9, ate some pastries and had my final alleged "tea" and then took a cab to O'Hare at 10.

Re: Finally.

The phone companies do ensure there is no interference, but the manufacturers of the radar altimeters assumed that there is nothing in the bands around the ones that they are supposed to use and allow those bands to bleed in to what the altimeters are reading.

As you say, less of a problem in other places since they are using slightly lower frequencies so the altimeter's assumption still mostly holds, but its the altimeters that are faulty, not the 5G masts.

Re: How easy?

Can't speak to SUSE/btrfs snapshots, but I've tried it out with Ubuntu/ZFS 21.10 - there are hierarchical filesystems - everything system related is in partitions under rpool/ROOT and every user's home directory is a separate partition under rpool/USERDATA. Snapshots of rpool/ROOT are taken when you install/update packages, and you can rollback the system independently of the user data - you can even directly boot an older system from the snapshots without having to fully rollback to it. Incidentally, this is the main pain point with the snapshots - snapshots are cheap to take (virtually free), but rebuilding grub menus when a snapshot is taken is slow as hell.

I'm not sure if there are automatic snapshots taken of rpool/USERDATA, but a couple of features are probably missing before it makes it to mainstream. Ideally, USERDATA would be fairly continuously snapshotted, every minute or so, with the system automatically dropping snapshots so you could easily look at your files 1/2/3/4/5/10/15/30/60 etc minutes ago, with Nautilus UI integration to have a slider to automatically change your view of a directory.

Putting the daily snapshots on an external FS that has some kind of matrix/reconstruction support seems like a winner.

I know of many people (particularly in education in the US, weirdly) who use ZFS snapshots for all their servers. Each server in each school in their district sends snapshots to a remote ZFS master storage for backup/restore, and when they need a replacement server they just restore the previous snapshots centrally and then send the new server out. The central ZFS server is their hot backup, and they only need one set of LTO backup hardware rather than one in each school.

Pedantry*: a "queue" is a noun, you can "enqueue" something, you can "dequeue" something, but you cant "queue" it.

* Probably incorrect pedantry, these days you can verb** anything

** This is a trap

Re: Wall Street?

But web3!!

Re: Playing the "Enviromentally Responsible" card

I don't know about Canon, but OEM HP ink cartridges include a paid return envelope for you to return the empty cartridge.

Re: Blue Christmas

My big WFH upgrade was a single 4k monitor, but 43". Its like having 4 x regular sized monitors in one, and my laptop can drive it, another external 1080p screen and the internal display no problem, so its like having 6 regular screens.

Weirdly, I got this at the start of lockdown in 2020 for £380, its a proper iiyama monitor - just IPS, I'm not gaming on it - but now there doesn't seem to be anything in this style anymore. I think if you want something like that, its got to be a TV now.

Its a real pain when I go back to the office and its just a single external 1080p screen and the laptop, I'm used to my vast amounts of data on screen now.

Re: Typo?

Panspermia is fringe science, its hardly one of the leading theories. Abiogenisis is by far the more popular theory.

Not really but laborat, parum spei

Re: No print? No buy.

100% agree! Our HP inkjet (£30 when new) ran out of ink again, and I refused to pay £35 for another black ink cartridge, and over the strenuous objections of my dear wife bought a £130 Brother MFP laser.

It's starter toner does 700 pages, or twice as many as the HP "XL" ink cartridge, a replacement 3000 page toner is £25, the drum is rated for 12,000 pages, it holds 250 sheets in a proper tray instead of the awful 10-15 page top feeder system on the HP (that constantly had paper jams), it prints duplex, 30ppm instead of 2, worked flawlessly with linux, android, windows..

Just wish I had got it instead of getting the HP originally.

Re: Tesco

Well I have three Tesco clubcards, one on my phone, one on a keyring and one physical card, my wife has another couple with the same member id - however all of them scan the same way at the till - qr code. If I was running a project to provide the same clubcard in multiple physical formats, I'd for sure be doing something so that I can see which format was being used rather than just the member id.

Loyalty cards are literally about tracking usage, you can't use a loyalty card and then bitch about your usage being tracked.

Re: NHS Data Slurp As A Threat

I'm sceptical of anyone posting things on the internet who feels the need to capitalize entire words, so I immediately thought nah, can't be sharing postcode, must just be postal region. Did some research and it actually is worse than that - its the full postcode, date of birth and NHS number.

That's not anonymising data, its just using foreign keys.

Re: "They docked at the ISS this week."

The Uranus Experiment: Part 2

Re: I'm glad it's not just me

This is verging in to internet-taste-flame style territory, but I quite like Seinfeld. The characters are delicious - they are mostly amoral and never grow as people, and the situations their lack of morality gets them into is usually some excellent farce. Most of the humour is based around their morality, which makes it very human and timeless.

The other great thing about Seinfeld that has made it more durable is that there is very little in terms of long term story - as I said, these characters don't grow or evolve - so each episode is fairly standalone. Therefore, you can watch any episode in any order, George is still George, Jerry is dating someone new each episode, Kramer is nuts. You don't have to track if they were "on a break".

Re: Shenzen, Shanghai, Beijing

Chinese steel is made with Australian iron.

Re: Office half full or office half empty?

The so-called flexi fares on National Rail that were announced are an absolute joke - you only save a few pounds over buying singles. It should be radically different.

Eg, Chelmsford -> Liverpool Street, carnet of 8 days = £220, 8 daily returns = £250, monthly season ticket = £414

Branching and merging is an edge case

Tell me you're not a software engineer without telling me you're not a software engineer.

Re: Hmm

Many countries and test centres were running tests at 40+ cycles, and thus giving positive tests to people whose exposure to covid-19 was so tiny that they could not possibly be infected or contagious, or who had pervioulsy had covid-19 and were now healed (again with 0 chance of contagion) but still had stray bits of busted covid RNA in their bloodstream etc.

Or are at the start of their infection, which is why its actually done like that, since they are the most important cases to catch.

It does slightly irritate me how Branson's stuff gets depicted as rich playboy going on jaunts to space. Yes, that's one of the benefits, but mainly he's trying to build a cheap way of slinging small satellites into orbit.