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Comment Re:Do you need gigabit to a household? (Score 1) 85

I'm paying for 100 Mbit, and am getting 90 up and down at 8 PM, (I just checked). When things are draggy it's the server at the other end. What advantage would I get from faster? I have one TV and it's not 4K.

We probably don't need gigabit, but we do need a reasonable lower limit to officially be "broadband" and to measure what counts as "Internet being available to everyone". I have a house where the best internet you can get is a dual bonded DSL connection that totals 12MB down and 2MB up. I don't count that as broadband as while its okay for basic video consumption when I am there, it's not enough for video conferencing, and it is certainly not enough for remote security cameras. There are lots of folks where DSL is the only option, and if you are on connections this slow, I wouldn't want that to count positively in "State of the Internet in America" statistics. It's a valid debate as to what the "minimum" should be to count as broadband. I would personally say somewhere in the 20-30MB up and down range.

Comment Re:Seriously stupid (Score 2) 11

If you've got a multi-billion dollar company, it's not rocket science to have a live backup system in place that can just be switched over to. Just keep it two system updates behind and ready to switch over at a moment's notice.

Doing that would be harder than rocket science. Behind applications there are databases and databases have schema. If not databases, then data access layers and those layers have interfaces. Since system updates can contain schema or interface updates, you can't always just roll back the system without also rolling back the data. Rolling the database back to a time two application versions ago would would lose a lot of information that shouldn't be lost (tickets, seat assignments, aircraft and crew status and locations, etc.)

Not all application updates have database schema updates and sure those can roll back and forward, but database schema does change from time to time and those upgrades are really hard to roll back without also rolling back data state. Even if you are storing data an unstructured or low structure database, it is still really hard to ensure that older code can handle newer schema and conventions that may appear in the database after some newer software has it's way with your data.

Comment Why is this a blind spot? (Score 3, Informative) 47

The real malware is the code that is performing the DNS queries and assembling the results into other malware. Sure, this mechanism would bypass normal code scanning on Internet downloads, but that code scanning should have already caught the code making the DNS queries and executing the resultant binaries.

Comment Re:Who buys CDs these days? (Score 5, Insightful) 93

And even if you buy the CD, don't you just stream anyway, or download files?

I do.

I do this so I can rip it myself and have a single disc FLAC image - absent any compression, watermarking or DRM that may be in downloaded files, and present the proper gaps (or lack of gaps) between tracks.

Comment Re:I hope he recreates the "Han (Score 1) 130

I hope he recreates the "Han shot first" scene whereby Han and Greedo realize their first shot didn't do the job so take a second, and then a third, and getting frustrated both start mass repeat firing.

Smoke eventually obscures our view, and after several seconds the firing stops. The dust clears, and we see an exhausted & wobbly Han and Greedo barely standing among the ruins of a completely demolished cantina.

Realizing their guns are too hot to both hold & function, they toss them aside, and catch a breath. Then Greedo points to Han and says, "You shot first!". Han replies, "No I didn't, you did!", They then start a shouting match as the camera backs away from the flattened cantina to reveal the desert with nothing but their echoing arguments.

That would be epic.

Comment Let ChatGPT do the grading? (Score 2) 68

If every student gets a ChatGPT account and ChatGPT individually remembers the prompts, answers, and related context for each student over their time at university, ChatGPT should be able to have a pretty good idea of how the student performs.

Maybe this is about gathering data on students.

Perhaps the professor could ask, "Given the following students in my class, open up their chat history and individually evaluate how much they have learned. Consider how the prompts they have entered correlate to the syllabus and to lecture transcriptions on file, and evaluate if their follow up questions indicate that they were seeking further knowledge or if they where simply trying to complete assignments. Consider if the kinds of prompts entered would be generally considered insightful and indicative of learning or not."

Comment Re:Enshitification in Action (Score 2) 71

How can they claim that a) the support contract has expired, but b) Broadcom still has a right to audit the customer? They seem to want it both ways, and judges do not usually agree with that.

I think the claim is that "You don't have a support contract with us but you are using (patched) releases of our software that were only available after your contract expired. You are not licensed to use these versions, so you must have obtained those newer versions illegally, knock it off."

I am not trying to apologize for Broadcom, and I think what they are doing to VMWare sucks, but you asked "how can they claim this?", and I think this is how.

Comment Re:Best to move on (Score 3, Informative) 71

I have/had 122 sites running on ESXi free and using a scripted management solution that kept me from having to use vcenter. I am in the process of migrating all sites to Proxmox and so far LOVING proxmox over vmware esxi. Superior in nearly every way especially for someone using scripting to manage the locations like I do.

While I like and use Proxmox as well, there are features it doesn't have that VCenter does. A prime example would be the ability to automatically power down and up nodes in a cluster as needed depending on load, as well as dynamically moving VMs around within the cluster to "even out" the load.

And yes, I agree that VMWare should be a considered a dead end product that everyone should avoid if possible, but it still has enterprise features that don't seem to be available elsewhere yet.

Comment Re:How about a weight mile tax for everyone instea (Score 1) 273

I see no reason such taxes need be fair or in any useful way reflect cost of individual contributions to road wear.

From this comment and your others, I see we significantly disagree, and that's okay. I am curious however, if you don't feel that the cost for road maintenance should be proportionality paid for by those causing use/damage to the roads, how do you feel road maintenance should be paid for?

Comment How about a weight mile tax for everyone instead? (Score 2) 273

Since usage damage to roads is directly connected to vehicle weight, why not eliminate the fuel tax and replace it with a pure weight mile tax? Meaning that you pay a cost per mile driven, per pound of gross vehicle weight. Odometers would be checked during annual or biannual vehicle inspections, and the tax would be assessed as part of vehicle registration.

The state of Oregon has a version of this for EVs currently. You can either pay an EV registration surcharge or you can opt to pay per mile. Last time I checked, if you drive less than about 6,000 miles a year, the pay per mile option was cheaper. If you only drive in Oregon, you can use the odometer, if you drive out of state and don't want to pay for non-Oregon miles, you sign up with a tracking service that monitors if you are driving in or out of state.

We already do a version of this for big trucks

Yes, there would be privacy concerns with various implementations of a weight mile tax in cases where the tax rate might vary based on where you were -- such system would require tracking. But if you drive around with a cell phone, you are being currently being tracked, and many (most?) modern cars are already collecting and reporting location information.

A weight mile tax (as a replacement for all other fuel or other "special" vehicle class based taxes), would be fair and appropriately spread the cost of road maintenance out to those who use the roads. It eliminates politics about fuel sources (at least with respect to taxing for road maintenance).

Comment Re:Darkness.. (Score 1) 99

How is it a "Dark Future" when China uses domestically produced chips? As an American who is not invested in chip fab stocks, this won't impact me at all.

It depends on if we end up also using Chinese produced chips in our infrastructure, business, and personal systems. I am not enthusiastic about the possibility of Chinese controlled backdoors in those chips. I am also not thrilled about potential backdoors in our chips, but if there is going to be a backdoor, I would prefer domestic over foreign.

Comment Re:One word (Score 1) 114

There is absolutely no reason why internal systems need to use trusted certificates, and this will basically end that practice.

Being pedantic, but I assume you mean no reason for internal use of publicly trusted certificates. From a security point of view, it's a bad idea not to validate certificates on internal systems -- you need to validate them against your internal CA of course, but failure to validate would open you up to internal threats.

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