* Posts by phuzz

6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

Russia hustles to fill impending void left by the ISS

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station

Both of which are Soviet designs ;)

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station

Current ISS is mostly Russian

I'd like to see what you're basing that on.

In terms of mass, the Russian segment (ROS) is roughly 90 tons, and the US segment (USOS) is over 300 tons. In terms of habitable space, ROS is 280m3 and the USOS is 750m3. In terms of sheer size (and visual impact) the US made truss and solar array dwarf the entire rest of the ISS. About the only thing I can see that Russia has led at is number of manned launches to the ISS (70 out of 116).

You might argue that currently the Russian segment is responsible for guidance, navigation, and control, but it's equally dependant on the US segment for power, attitude control, and comms. This separation of responsibilities is deliberate, so that both sides of the partnership have a role in the running of the entire station.

And as I've said elsewhere, none of this is actually Russian work. All of the modules, the launchers, and the human-carrying craft are just slightly upgraded Soviet designs.

When it comes to rocket engines, if you're going to call designs 'knock-off clones', then you might as well go all the way and call practically every rocket a clone of the German A4 (aka V-2). The Soviet Union learned as much from the V-2 program as the US did.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station

which will make it infeasible for them to build their own space station

I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised that if something actually gets launched, it will be a slightly modernised Soviet design*. That wouldn't need much in the way of Western tech.

Russia, as a modern country, has barely improved on the space program they inherited from the USSR. Every time they've tried to create new designs, they've failed. The only reason they're still considered a 'space power' today, is entirely down to the resilience of the original Soviet designs.

* eg, the recently launched Nauka module, is based on the Functional Cargo Block design, dating back to Salyut 2 in 1973. Tellingly, Nauka was due to launch in 2007, but was delayed until 2021.

Boffins say their thin film solar cells make space farms viable

phuzz Silver badge

There's another difference as well. Solar cells are designed to work with sunlight, which has a range of different wavelengths. Power beaming would (presumably) use a single, fixed, wavelength, which would enable the receiver to be much more efficient, and the wavelength can be picked to be less harmful (ie, no UV or higher energy).

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

phuzz Silver badge
Boffin

Re: My two pennorth

Mind you, using Einstein to advertise fridges would have been perfect. He and Leo Szilard invented one.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

elReg were famously blacklisted by Apple's PR department years ago. Apple wouldn't ever respond to them, even for simple queries.

phuzz Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

How big are the screensavers?! All the OS's I have to hand (Win10, 11, Mint21, 22) have around 1 megabyte of screensavers. You'd probably save more space by deleting the stock background pictures.

Now we can blame spacecraft for polluting the atmosphere

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Random thought - tell me ime bonkers (and why)

Ok, you're only slightly bonkers ;)

Having an international agreement on removing defunct satellites is a good idea. Either sending them down into the atmosphere to (mostly) burn up, or punting them up higher into a 'graveyard orbit'.

Clustering old satellites is less of a good idea, as they will bump against each other, and bits of solar panel etc. will break off causing more space junk.

Sending them into the sun is really difficult. It seem like it would be easy, because the sun is very massive, and consequently has a large gravitation attraction. The thing is, the Earth, and everything on or around it is already orbiting the Sun (at over 100,000km/h). To 'drop' something into the sun, first you'd have to burn enough fuel to get it out of the Earth's orbit, but then it would still be going mostly the same speed as the Earth, so it would still orbit the sun, just in a slightly different orbit to the Earth. To get it down to the sun you'd then have to slow it right down from ~100,000km/h to zero*.

* Well, probably you wouldn't need to get the velocity all the way to zero, and you could use some gravity assists, but you'd still need to slow it down a lot.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

phuzz Silver badge

Re: don't forget to unplug your rack before moving it.

Some sysadmins in Germany moved a powered server, (with networking via 3G), 7km via public transport link.

phuzz Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: A pallet jack ...

Properly built racks have the heavy stuff on the bottom

Well that's the problem isn't it, you start out with grand plans, so when you get your new rack you put the UPSs at the bottom, and maybe disk trays next, and finish up with the lightest stuff on top, with space left for future expansion.

Then after a few years of "temporarily" adding new kit, and replacing old junk, squeezing in another UPS, and wedging a network switch in the side to "just get it working for now, we'll tidy it up later", and you've ended up with a rack that would wobble alarmingly, except that it's tied to the rack next to it with a completely undocumented web of cables, some of which don't seem to have a beginning or end, just one unbroken loop. Oh, and only half the equipment is actually screwed into the rack.

The most permanent part of any network is the equipment you jammed in temporarily to bodge fix something quickly.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Tech support call

A pal spilled a cup of (fortunately unsweetened) coffee over her laptop, and sensibly immediately pulled the power, and asked me to check it out before she tried to power it back on. Fortunately it just required a small bit of cleaning and fired right back up.

However, it did smell strongly of coffee, which I hate, but my friend was entirely happy with.

Microsoft gives unexpected tutorial on how to install Linux

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Windows isn’t needed for all home use any more

I think (but I'd love to hear from someone who knows more) that it's only 'Onedrive for Business' that uses Sharepoint as it's backend. The 'personal' version of Onedrive uses something else.

Now you've got me wondering which version basic M365 subscriptions include, I'm pretty sure it's the 'personal' version, but of course Microsoft don't make it easy to tell.

Anyway, I've got the day off today and this is getting dangerously close to 'work' ;)

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Windows isn’t needed for all home use any more

Just been setting up Onedrive on Mint and it works pretty well tbh.

phuzz Silver badge

Some people will try and tell you that this is the portent of a change in direction at Microsoft.

It's not though, this is just more evidence that Microsoft is so big, that whole departments therein have opposite priorities.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: embrace and extend?

Microsoft once had a strategy they called "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", which became a catchphrase for many people.

(See also IBM's 'FUD' for an earlier example)

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

phuzz Silver badge
Gimp

Right click the taskbar

Go to 'Taskbar settings'

Near the top there's a toggle button to deactivate it.

Just to save anyone else the five seconds of work it took me this morning to deactivate copilot after it showed up.

I wonder if Window's telemetry shows them how long between a feature being installed, and when it's deactivated, and maybe there's a dev at Microsoft somewhere looking at the sub-five minute timestamp for my computer. I imagine a single tear falling down their face.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Advert

Basically they get a bunch of trees (you might have to ask your parents what they were), and mash them all up with some chemicals, then press them out to make these thin white sheets called 'paper'. Then you use a robot to put paint on them so they look sort of like a screen. It's quite like e-ink, but you can only use each 'sheet' once, then you have to throw it away!

A 'news paper' is when the painting robot downloads the main stories from a news site and 'prints' them onto the 'paper'. A bit like a screen-grab, but less convenient.

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Why

It depends what you mean by 'compatible'. Compared to Windows/OSX less applications will run/install without problems on every variant of linux. On the other hand most of those problems can be fixed with just a bit of web searching (because someone else will have had your problem, and posted how to fix it), so in that respect you get more compatibility than Windows/OSX.

To put it a different way, if you have a Windows XP program, it might not run on Windows 11, and definitely won't run on OSX, but if you have a Linux program built for (eg) Red Hat, you can probably get it to work on your (Debian based) Linux Mint install, but you're going to have to do some fiddling.

TLDR: It depends

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

phuzz Silver badge
Trollface

Re: ctrl-alt-arrow and ... cats

They disabled the shortcut, but you can still enable it via the driver control panel. While someone is away from their desk for a few minutes for example....

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Whoops !!!

To their credit, VM are ok at this. Putting the superhub into 'modem mode' is just a couple of clicks in the web interface, and a reboot. Honestly, the reboot is the longest part of the whole process.

Then just plug in your own router and you're golden.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Dirt

I've replaced the keyboard on more than one laptop because it was too filthy to clean.

phuzz Silver badge
Devil

Re: Ah.. the joy...

I went to uni in Exeter, my local bakers sold Devonshire pasties, "none of that Cornish muck in here!".

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Dirt

As far as I'm concerned, keyboards and mice are consumables, and if I get a particularly gross example I'll chuck it in the bin without a second thought.

Ubuntu's 'Mantic Minotaur' peeks out of the labyrinth

phuzz Silver badge

If Ubuntu's new encryption system is based on LUKS, then it would still be possible to unlock the disk in a different computer (or in a different OS) as long as you had the original recovery password somewhere.

Even if they don't use LUKS, then I assume Ubuntu will still have some sort of 'recovery key' that you generate at install time, as that's how every other full-disk encryption does it.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Moving House

I got rid of all my CDs recently, even though they had massive sentimental value to me, purely because I didn't have space for them any more, and I never listened to them.

I do still listen to the music of course, because I ripped them all to MP3 years ago, and no one can stop me from doing that.

There is alternatives between 'horde physical media' and 'streaming everything'.

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

Re: @jmch

There's an advantage that paper money always has over a digital currency, even after a complete banking crash.

In such a scenario, both digital, and paper cash would be worthless as currency, but at least you can wipe your arse with a banknote :)

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It doesn't always smoke though

A user decided to set a BIOS password on their (company) laptop, which, of course, they had forgotten by the time they handed it in for a new one.

As it was still in warranty, the solution was to run the terminals of a 9V battery across the mainboard a couple of times until it wouldn't boot, then ring up the support line.

Thanks for sending out the replacement mainboard so quickly Dell ;)

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

phuzz Silver badge

USB-A will just fit in a RJ45 socket. A user taught me this, when they came to ask me why their device wasn't working...

phuzz Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Plausible...

I was thinking to myself "4Gb is overkill for an ATM anyway, all they need to do is display a GUI and contact the bank's database, it's not like they need to run a web browser".

Then I realised, I bet a lot of ATMs do have to run a web browser, to display adverts etc.

I'm sure that's fine, with no possible security implications whatsoever...

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

phuzz Silver badge

Re: so the government and the red-tops can crow that the 'number of asylum seekers is dropping'

It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.

Iain (M.) Banks

phuzz Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Legacy??

MS Access has always used Jet as it's database engine. (Well, in 2007 they changed the name to "Access Database Engine", but it's still basically Jet.).

Mind you, a spin off from the original Jet is used as the database behind Active Directory, Sharepoint, Word, Exchange and Windows Search among other things.

If you work in IT, on average, you're never more than two metres away from a Jet database.

Windows File Explorer gets nostalgic speed boost thanks to one weird bug

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

Re: just get Linux already

if you want to get rid of Microsoft Windows, why WINE?

Because using Linux exclusively is going to drive you to drink ;)

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Bluescreens

BSoD's are usually bad drivers, when they're not bad hardware (dodgy RAM will crash any software), but badly written antivirus or anticheat can also be the problem.

CrowView: A clamp-on, portable second laptop display

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "Portable Display" means what?

Isn't that Arzopa monitor more expensive than the one being reviewed?

I'm all for 3D printing things, but if I can spend less money and not have to bother....

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

phuzz Silver badge

Re: So LibreOffice it is then.

Notepad++ is a fantastic text editor, but Wordpad fills (filled) a different niche of being a very simple word processor.

They're both designed for different, although superficially similar jobs.

Personally I can't think of any simple word processors like it, all the alternatives are full-fat.

Microsoft calls time on ancient TLS in Windows, breaking own stuff in the process

phuzz Silver badge

Some devices are so old they only support old standards, and the manufacturer has given up supporting them. That leaves you with the choice of either finding a way to work around it (segmented network, keeping an old browser around to talk to it), or buying a newer device.

I'm thinking in particular of some APC power distribution units we have, which don't have firmware updates available, but upgrading them will involve unplugging the power to several devices, not all of which have reliably redundant power supplies. (I've been burned before by supposedly 'redundant' PSUs which fail when they have to support the load they're supposed to be rated for).

Fortunately we don't need access to their web interfaces more than once every few years, so they can be left without networking, and we have an old laptop we can plug in if they ever need a tweak.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

phuzz Silver badge
WTF?

Ah, art imitates life.

I was once doing some desktop support at a customer's office (fixing Outlook iirc), and I'd got as far as the desk of one of the PR people who wasn't there at that moment, giving me the opportunity to get my work done without distractions. However, as soon as I tried to use the mouse, I found a problem. Someone had sellotaped a two pence coin to the bottom of the mouse, meaning the optical sensor only worked intermittently. I pulled it off, and got on with my work. As I was finishing up, the user came wandering back to their desk, chatting away on a mobile phone the whole way. I outlined the work I'd done, and mentioned that 'someone' had stuck a coin to the bottom of the mouse. They replied that they had done it "so that the copper would protect me from the harmful electromagnetic radiation".

I looked at them, the mobile phone still up by their ear, the copper-coated steel coin, and just politely suggested that if they were worried about EM radiation, they should probably close their curtains* and walked off, heroically resiting the urge to either laugh in their face or start crying at the state of the world.

Honestly, that level of ignorance would probably come across as 'unrealistic' if Simon included it in a BOfH story.

* After all, the sun produces an enormous amount of harmful UV radiation. It's certainly the most dangerous electromagnetic radiation that most people encounter on a daily basis.

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

phuzz Silver badge

People tend to complain about the things they think are worse.

That's what they want you to think!!!111!!

/s

(Although to be fair, historically governments have tended to lie about, and cover up, the impacts of nuclear disasters, so some scepticism is warranted.)

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

phuzz Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Hold on...

If someone is found to be unfit to stand trial, but the court thinks they may be a danger to other people, they can be 'sectioned', and locked up in a secure psychiatric hospital. In some ways that's worse than prison, because there's no set sentence, or possibility of parol, they're locked up until the doctors think they're no longer a danger.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Act_1983

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

phuzz Silver badge

Re: The real problem with Concorde.....

the fundamental problem with Concorde is that it outperformed most, if not all, US military jets

It's not just the speed, it's the range too. Concorde could supercruise at mach two across the entire Atlantic. An F-22 can go faster, but not for as long.

I've heard that the average Concorde pilot clocked up more supersonic hours in one year, than every USAF pilot put together.

Tornado Cash 'laundered over $1B' in criminal crypto-coins

phuzz Silver badge

He's not been jailed for anything, he's awaiting trial and he's being charged with deliberately writing code, specifically to launder money, knowing full well that it would be used for illegal purposes. His lawyers say that he had no idea that it was going to be used for money laundering.

I don't know exactly how the Dutch legal system works, but I assume the prosecution will have to prove he intended to use the code for money laundering 'beyond reasonable doubt', and if they're taking it to court they presumably believe they have enough evidence to do so.

SmartNICs haven't soared so VMware will allow retrofits in old servers

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Is CXL pricing really as keen as claimed here?

If all the network communication is flowing through the device, then it might be possible to hack it directly via malformed packets or something, and then use that as a way to attack the rest of the server.

For example

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

I've had that exact problem with Epson receipt printers. The job prints fine, but for some reason that information never makes it back to CUPS, which keeps re-trying the job. As the printers are attached to cash drawers, this also results in the drawer going DING and shooting open, which can be a bit of a surprise.

(This is also fun for pranks, I knew a colleague had a cash drawer set up on a test bench, so I remotely sent a print, then messaged him to ask if I'd managed to surprise him. I certainly had, especially when the cash drawer had sprung open, and shoved the computer right off the desk :)

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

Re: Tabla Rasa

So you prefer to take the sensible, forward-thinking, approach to problems? Clearly not management material!

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Door Access Readers

If "going equipped" isn't a law locally, then they can still find something else to charge you with. At the end of the day, it's the cop's word against yours.

Chinese media teases imminent exposé of seismic US spying scheme

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I'm very dubious about this

GPS has a similar system, but access to the high precision signals was opened to the public in 2000. That access could be removed though, if the US government wanted to. Galileo also has a high-precision signal that is limited to governments.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I'm very dubious about this

Yes you can get information about large earthquakes from anywhere, but only sensors in China are likely to pick up, eg, a weapons test there. Having access to local sensors gives much better resolution and sensitivity.

It's like the difference between spying on a building with a surveillance satellite vs someone with a camera in a building across the street.

Cumbrian Police accidentally publish all officers' details online

phuzz Silver badge

Re: For all the billions spent on giant...

"The PR department has complained it takes too long to publish to the website, so we need you to create a shared folder they can just drop the files into. Yes I know it's a bad idea but the head of PR is sleeping with the boss who is breathing down my neck so just get it done."

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

Re: How?

There are technological solutions to human error, but I believe the BoFH holds most of the patents on them, and you also need a good supply of quick lime.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

phuzz Silver badge
Trollface

Re: I like Americans…

Yeah, but you've gotta laugh, because the only other option would be crying.