* Posts by jake

26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

jake Silver badge

"I think this contraption needs a lot more work, but eventually musicans will become obsolete."

Not until the contraption gains a self/id/soul/ego. Which is never going to happen.

jake Silver badge

My first thought was ...

... that it can't be any worse than autotune.

And then I thought about it, and realized that it will be. Much, much worse.

Has anybody ever used the phrase "popular music winter"?

Not really a "git orf me lawn" moment. At least not yet. If you like music, be afraid. Very afraid.

Old-school hacktivism is back because it never went away

jake Silver badge

Re: DDoS is not "hactivism".

I didn't say they didn't know what they were doing, I said they don't fully understand the tools.

Any dumb-ass can break all the store-front windows on Main Street using a 22oz framing hammer, but that doesn't mean he knows how to frame a house, nor does it make him a carpenter.

jake Silver badge

DDoS is not "hactivism".

DDoS is vandalism.

The perps are not "hackers", they are script kiddies using stolen tools that they don't fully understand.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

jake Silver badge

Re: Why bother with a big lump of concrete ?

To say nothing of the fact that brick housing is a bit of a problem in Earthquake Country.

jake Silver badge

Re: So what's stopping all that energy ...

I've seen a ground-strike take out all the plugged in electronics in three properly wired houses[0] surrounding the strike point ... strangely enough, an identically wired fourth house was closest to the strike by about 20 feet, and yet remained untouched.

Lightning is funny stuff.

[0] Post-Korea tract housing in Santa Rosa, California.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: So what's stopping all that energy ...

Have a beer for when, not if.

jake Silver badge

Nah, one slab. Bottom floor, common area for family. Next floor up, kids bedrooms, a couple baths. maybe office space and/or a large common landing. Next floor up, master suite.

Note that I'm assuming off-grid, so no electricity wasting by heating of water at point of use, and no electric heat and cooling. All that is covered by a GSHP. The single slab, as described, should be able to handle that overnight, even in northern climes (how much juice do you use when sleeping?). During the day, the PVs recharge the slab, and handle electricity needs for the house. When the sun is not available and the slab is discharged, an appropriately sized propane generator handles the house's needs, including recharging the slab.

Works for me, but I'm not using concrete/carbon for my electricity storage.

If you're not properly insulated, start there ...

jake Silver badge

0.5 meters (just under 20 inches) does not get you below the frost line in much of the US. The only house I have owned on the East Coast required over twice that for a foundation (42 inches, to be exact). Granted, it was a perimeter foundation, not a slab ... They have a fetish for basements in that neck of the woods.

jake Silver badge

I don't follow.

jake Silver badge

A rather small single story home. Can always go up.

For my fellow Yanks, that's about 1,000 sqft ... In ElReg Units it's 4.7168 NanoWales.

jake Silver badge

So what's stopping all that energy ...

... from bleeding off to ... err ... ground?

Presumably you can't use reinforcing steel. Where do I put my Ufer ground?

Can I bolt an auto lift down on it? (I won't ever own a garage without a lift again. HIGHLY recommended.)

What happens if the dawg lifts his leg on the corner of the foundation? Every day for a decade?

What does it cost to dig a 45 cubic meter (60 cubic yards, close enough) hole in the ground, and then fill it full of this mixture? (60 yards of concrete, delivered, is kinda spendy. I'm sure it'll cost a lot more with the carbon in it. To say nothing of the cost of testing, then disposing of 60 yards of material removed from the hole.)

What happens when it develops a huge crack, right down the middle? (With a block that big, you know it will.)

And last, but hardly least, How does the above price compare to equivalent energy storage in LiFePO batteries?

I won't mention size ... but the LiFePo batteries will easily fit in a space smaller than a tack trunk.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

jake Silver badge

To be fair, the numbering of releases in the world of Linux seems to be driven more on the whims of the maintainer than any coherent notion of progress.

jake Silver badge

"How do "properly set up systems" get properly set up in the first place?"

Competent administrators ... or, in the world of Linux, competent distro maintainers.

"Do they come like that out of the box?"

Honestly? I haven't checked recently.

So I just downloaded the latest Slackware installation DVD ISO, burned it to appropriate media, and installed it on a completely blank computer, accepting all defaults.

Everything works out of the box. I would not hesitate to use this system as a loaner for MeDearOldMum, should her computer HaltAndCatchFire. All I would need to add is her printer, near as I can tell, and thanks to CUPS that's handeable via GUI. (Note that I'd have to add her printer regardless of OS; she's afraid of plugging in hardware.)

"No, they need tweaking."

Slackware 15.0 doesn't seem to. Perhaps your distro maintainer is incompetent?

jake Silver badge

"why leave your desktop powered up if it's not doing anything."

Convenience. With the monitors off, the thing doesn't draw enough power to matter.

jake Silver badge

init can be restarted at your choice of runlevel, at least on any sane version of *nix ... look up telinit.

jake Silver badge

Re: That WSL comment...

"Ironically WSL doesn't use... systemd."

Yes, it does.

That link, for the non-pointy-clicky inclined:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-is-now-available-in-wsl/

jake Silver badge

Re: And Pottering continues to screw up Linux for its primary purpose....

"Seriously none of SystemD's supposed improvements have much relevance to the hordes of headless VMs or cloud instances that are the overwhelming majority of the installed base...."

It also does absolutely nothing for the hoards of Debian and RedHat derivative desktop users who will never even touch the init system because they probably don't know it exists, but even if they did they'd be afraid to go near it. All the while massively increasing the initialization system in size and complexity, thus dragging in many bugs that should have been unnecessary ... to say nothing of increasing the size, scope and number of potential attack vectors. FOR NO GOOD REASON,

jake Silver badge

Re: Once again

"most of all because it constantly and inexorably grows like a particularly aggressive cancer whilst becoming harder and harder to avoid."

Yep. As I said here, over 6 years ago.

That's why I call it the systemd-cancer ... Consider: it takes root in its host, eats massive quantities of resources as it grows, spreads unchecked into areas unrelated to the initial infection, and refuses to die unless physically removed from the system, all the while doing absolutely nothing of benefit to the host.

jake Silver badge

Re: Once again

"frankly it's garbage."

IMO, it's worse than garbage. It creates more problems than it pretends to fix, all while fixing things that weren't broken in the first place.

jake Silver badge

Re: Usecase?

"But then I'm not saying it is actually good."

It's a solution looking for a problem.

jake Silver badge

"I do wonder if the increased speed is truly worth the extra complexity, though."

And if there is any reason at all for this kind of thing on MeDearOldMum's computer. Maybe 1 person in 100,000 might, possibly, make use of this kind of thing very occasionally and perhaps 1 in 10,000,000 on a daily/weekly basis?

So why inflict it on the vast majority of users? Implement it as a kernel module, and allow those that need it to load it.

jake Silver badge

"I have two desktop machines running Linux and I only ever reboot them when I do a kernel upgrade."

Exactly. The whole "faster reboots" thing was a red-herring right from the git-go. Everything surrounding the systemd-cancer has been bullshit and bluster from the beginning.

jake Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

"Who is this change helping?"

Marketing. "LOOK! WE HAVE SOMETHING NEW!!!!! YOU MUST BUY (into) IT!!!"

And lo, the sheeple flocked for their masters ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

It's a file system. Logically placing the files into subdirectories according to their use only makes sense.

A library uses the Dewy Decimal System[0] for a reason, EVEN THOUGH that system has evolved over time as our knowledge has increased.

Why people think that such a complex system that evolves over time as capability is added to that system shouldn't become more complex is beyond me.

[0] Yes, I know, there are other ways of storing books in a library. UDC, BISAC, LCC, etc, all have their merits and problems, but anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together should have no issues working within their frameworks. Note that none have become more condensed over the years.

jake Silver badge

""The Reg FOSS desk is very happy that he hasn't had to edit an init script in many years, and does not miss such things even one tiny bit, but all the same it's going to irk some people.""

This is a null argument, and always has been. A properly setup system very, very rarely needs tweaking. I can't remember the last time I needed to tweak a startup script on any of the computers that help to run Chez jake.

I have, however, had to make custom startups for various clients over the years. For most of those, the systemd-cancer was shown to be more of a hindrance than a help. As a consultant, I have to show my clients why I was going with either BSD or Slackware instead of the kitchensinkware boutique Linux varietal that they had been sold on.

The systemd-cancer causes far, far more problems out in the real world than it pretends to fix.

jake Silver badge

"It's very close in my world."

Try Slackware or Devuan (or both) for your (primary) desktop first. You already know them.

Note that I usually go with BSD on the servers ... habits of a lifetime.

jake Silver badge

BSD works nicely. Are you familiar with it?

If not, at your age you might want to stick with Linux.

Devuan and Slackware do not use the systemd-cancer. Try 'em. They work.

jake Silver badge

Re: something else to shout about

"hater", Prop. Noun, often used by the under-educated (usually teenagers) in order to attempt to put down actual educated people (usually adults).

Translation of 'hater' into English: "Everybody who doesn't agree with what I have faith in, despite the fact that I (me, personally) actually have faith in the belief of the given faith, and can't actually offer up a real, honest scientific argument confirming it's existence."

Alternative translation: "I hate adults. They don't know anything!".

Meta says it'll ask Euro peeps nicely before hitting them with personalized ads

jake Silver badge

Re: Bugger off!

We decline, but thank you very much for the offer.

Perhaps they'll manage to drown themselves mid-Atlantic?

jake Silver badge

Ads?

What are these things you call "ads"?

Seriously, advertisers ... Does YOUR grandmother/mother/daughter/granddaughter ever see ads? Why? Why not?

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

jake Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

"You are assuming a very earth-like biology for these aliens which requires oxygen, water, salt and animals as food."

Nope. The first three are important chemicals for industrial purposes. A creature's base metabolism does not alter their chemical properties.

I added the last one mostly for shock value (for small values of "shock", at least in this forum), but then again you never know until you know, and we just plain don't know.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

"Everything else isn't hard to find and often easier to harvest from smaller moons/asteroids over getting down and up through Earth's gravity well."

Not a lot of liquid water[0] or free oxygen[1] on the smaller moons & asteroids. Nor salt[2].

[0] Melting ice for transport is prohibitively expensive. As is cutting it into blocks and physically placing them in the hold. Water is used in almost every industrial plant in existence here on Earth, I see no reason why aliens would not find it as useful as we do. And ours is free for the pumping, thanks to the fluke of our location with respect to the Sun.

[1] Oxygen is a fairly dangerous chemical in it's free state, binding explosively with many other chemicals. For that reason, it's a very important industrial chemical. Our atmosphere is probably a rarity in the Universe, making it a treasure trove for visiting aliens. Probably.

[2] You don't need to be told how important a chemical salt is ... Again, I'm sure aliens will find it equally useful, even if it's not required for their metabolism.

jake Silver badge

Re: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Absinthe makes the heartburn stronger?

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Don't tell me, show me.

"4:04? Why not set it to 5:00, so it can be 5 o'clock somewhere?"

Because this is not "somewhere", it's "here". Also, because it's always 5 o'clock somewhere there is no need to set a reminder.

Oh, is that the time? Have a beer :-)

That, and because explaining jokes takes the edge off them ... even when I can see that joke from where I type.

jake Silver badge

Re: reverse engineered tech

Nah. Us humans came up with all that.

The incremental steps learning what we now call solid-state physics, starting in the early 1800s, are easy for anyone to research for themselves. There are absolutely zero huge jumps in knowledge, it's all micro-steps at a time. Yes, things have become smaller/faster quite quickly, but that's just scaling ... a transistor is still a transistor, regardless of size.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Four reasons that I can think of:

1) Plentiful free oxygen.

2) Plentiful liquid water.

3) Plentiful salt.

4) Angry Apes are tasty.

Not necessarily in that order.

jake Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Strangely enough, as a pilot I can see the crashing happening more than you might think.

First of all, any intelligence that can manage interstellar travel would have long ago given up on the idea of computerized auto-pilots as a bad idea in confined areas such as a planet's airspace. They will in all likelihood be under manual control. If the people [0] doing the flying are used to maneuvering in the vacuum of space, or in a very tenuous atmosphere like that of Mars, perhaps an atmosphere as dense as Earth's would cause trouble, especially with their reflexes.

jake Silver badge

Re: "it needs to have oversight"

"They reported nonhuman biologicals."

In other words, the drone crashed into a tree and got splinters.

More likely, the "vehicle" was a drug smuggling submarine, any "alien pilots" were from one of the drug cartels, and the "non-human biologicals" were cocaine, fentanyl and/or pot. Throw in the military rumo(u)r mill (kind of like the kid's game of Telephone[0], but on steroids), and Bob's yer Auntie.

Perhaps appropriately, my spall chucker wants me to change fentanyl to entangle.

[0] That's "Chinese Whispers" to you Brits.

jake Silver badge

Re: Millions of Parsecs

"The House of Representatives?"

No. Near as I can tell, being stuck in the past does not break causality.

jake Silver badge

Re: Is there a Hunter Biden story people need distracting from

"well they are spreading lots of bullshit around to divert from the orange twat being a stoopid fucking criminal."

FTFY

Matches his so-called "base"[0] quite nicely, no?

[0]Base; adj., Of low value and having inferior properties.

jake Silver badge

Re: Nonsense

"must visit in person but to largely only do so in country areas of the US"

People keep saying this. It's not true.

Rather, apparently they only visit (and crash) in areas completely under the control of the US military, in sooper sekrit locations out of view of civilians and where the grunts picking up the pieces don't carry cell phone cameras.

jake Silver badge

Re: "it needs to have oversight"

"US politics is now concerned with very little else than conspiracy theories."

To be fair, most of the nutjobs, wackos, outright loonies and complete idiots are confined to Congress. The Senate is still relatively sane, being composed mostly of professional shameless liars who actually know they are lying and can sometimes be convinced to change their minds, if it'll get them votes or money.

jake Silver badge

Re: Don't tell me, show me.

I wouldn't know. I barely have enough spare time to waste here on ElReg. The likes of Reddit are right out.

Japanese boffins slice semiconductors from diamonds – with lasers!

jake Silver badge

Re: Diamond wafers

The diamond is the semiconductor.

Don't worry, nobody's cutting up the Crown Jewels any time soon, these diamonds are grown using chemical vapor deposition.

I've seen diamond FETs in operation in the lab. It's going to open up some fun new tech once the boffins get a good handle on it.

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

jake Silver badge

Re: The X sign is now an ex-sign

He is also going to have to pay the cost of the initial permit, which he tried to ignore.

Elon's a putz. He's just looking for free advertising. I'd recommend not giving it to him.

Or, in the words of my now aging peer group "Please Do Not Feed The Trolls!".

The Press will not listen, alas.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

jake Silver badge

"Is it?"

Yes, it is.

"Do you really think these "free" services are a) actually free"

No, I do not. The advertisers are paying a pretty penny for access to the merchandise (that would be the users, for those not paying attention).

"b) philanthropic activities?"

Don't be daft. twitter is^Wwas a for-profit organization, and the shareholders liked it that way.

"And who said anything about "forever" apart from you?"

Implied in your "fucking about with service used my many millions worldwide is a pretty dick move" comment ... I agree with you, it IS a dick move. But WTF did those millions expect? "Free" tweeting for life? Not on your nelly ... it's only "free" so long as the advertisers are happy. With the current Boss seemingly intent in running the joint into the ground, and the advertisers grumbling ... well, do the math; It's not exactly calculating Hohmann transfers.

jake Silver badge

"a lot of things could come under that. Linux, for example."

Linux is not a "service". The ability to tweet world-wide is.

I'll have access to the latest FOSS Linux kernel until roughly the heat death of the Universe, or I get bored, whichever comes first. I'll have access[0] to the twitter servers until Musk takes his ball and runs away home with it, and I have absolutely no say in the matter.

[0] Note that this is strictly an example; I personally never bought into the world of twits.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

jake Silver badge

Re: "Pretty" Considered As Unimportant!!

"It did, but for some of us it did so far too late."

So when out driving, after you choose a branch in the road you never change your mind and turn around to take the other branch?

jake Silver badge

Re: What's not to like?

EMACS has a great text editor!

I shell out to vi all the time when I'm running EMACS.

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