Comment Re:So fellow wage slaves... I'm curious (Score 1) 110
Frankly, I posted my question in hopes that some bright boy had come up with a better approach than setting up (and managing) our own CA.
Comment Trump - the gift that keeps on giving (to Putin) (Score 1) 108
Putin has to wake up smiling each day since November 2024. If Trump had lost the election, Russia probably would've lost this war by now... and Putin, his life.
Personally, I don't believe that Trump is an active Russian asset, controlled through blackmail or some other means. I think he's just an incredibly vain and stupid man who Putin can completely manipulate with ease. I mean, come on - how does a phone call that's supposed to be about pressing for information on that pneumonic plague death turn into "Hey we're loosening the sanctions and accepting 2.5 million barrels of Russian petroleum"?
Comment Re:Nice weasel wording (Score 2) 86
I was afraid for a minute that an infinite number of refrigerators had been hacked.
I understand that's to be the premise of the next DC Universe reboot.
Comment Re:Stop hooking standalone things to the internet. (Score 2) 86
There are multiple layers of stupid here:
1) Connecting these devices to the open internet is stupid
2) They were connected to the open internet so that "maintenance companies" can remotely control them - but those companies weren't remotely keeping the firmware up to date?
3) Why is it even possible to set a refrigerator to 50C?
Comment Well, that's just terrible. (Score 2) 54
It often gets proposed for the purpose; either by people who overestimate it or with that little sneer at 'paperwork' that assumes that plausible nonsense is fine because whatever the 'paperwork' is it must be a fake problem imposed for stupid reasons, so it really deserves syntactically plausible nonsense; but is an exquisitely bad solution. Not only does it replace actual data with plausible nonsense in places where, surprise surprise, someone was actually maintaining records because something matters; but lowering the cost of bullshitting a report to close to zero removes one of the main incentives for process improvement.
If bad process hurts you can only really maintain it through fairly disciplined commitment to an oppressive, unreasonable, management approach that rejects process improvements out of hand; or the cultivation of a profoundly dysfunctional organizational culture where as many FTEs as possible owe their paychecks to nonsense requirements and can be recruited to defend them.
If bad process just means spinning up the nonsense printer with a cynical smirk; why bother even looking at what the process was intended to do; or getting your hands dirty with what records are important and what records are just historical accretion? Just prompt for a prompt that tells the bot to do them all, and some extras if you want to look diligent, and call it good.
Comment Good grief (Score 5, Insightful) 54
If any story ever deseved a #whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag - this is it.
Comment So fellow wage slaves... I'm curious (Score 1) 110
Those of you who have to handle this as part of your job: how are you guys planning to deal with devices where automation does not appear to be possible? Older multifunction printers, for example?
Comment Re:Must be network congestion... (Score 2) 13
I've been sending DHCPDISCOVER packets for 25 years and have yet to get an offer...
Perhaps someone forgot to configure the server? In any case, you're a lot more patient than I...
Comment I'm a fan of Bond films (Score 1) 50
This is NOT making me feel good about the next film...
Comment Poor guy (Score 4, Funny) 50
I hope this principled stand doesn't derail his nascent acting career...
Comment Re:Is this a software or hardware implementation? (Score 1) 93
Comment Is this a software or hardware implementation? (Score 1) 93
I suspect that it's mostly my ignorance that is to blame; but what I don't understand about implementing memory compression(especially the schemes that try to do it transparently with high speed general purpose compression/decompression in hardware) is how you compensate for the fact that the amount of memory you need is no longer predictable without significantly more effort(potentially untenably more if you are using RAM because latency is critical).
With normal uncompressed RAM it just demands RAM in direct proportion to its size. Potentially hideously wasteful if there's some memory-backed XML-spew log that would zip down to 10% of its nominal size; but predictable unless you've got memory safety bugs. If you are compressing your RAM suddenly you've got some uses of RAM that are functionally uncompressable and require 100% of the space their nominal size suggests they will; other things might compress exceptionally well and save you 90%; and some might change unpredictably from moment to moment depending on what needs to be stored there.
When you are doing FS compression and dedupe for backups and stuff that is normally manageable; on average enough compression is possible enough of the time that you can safely assume that you'll do better than you would if you just didn't try; and you can just keep an eye on how quickly the big SAN appears to be filling up as versions accumulate and (if tapes or other fixed-sized media are involved) just change the backup media more or less quickly; do you do that for RAM? Just use the big slack area for FS caching or something you can drop on short notice in case a burst of incompressible data comes in? Do you essentially have to rebuild how your entire workload handles RAM so that it considers, at least approximately, how well a given use of memory will compress ahead of time?
Given the sorts of files and data structures you commonly encounter I can easily enough believe that compression is worth the trouble a lot of the time; but unless you are leaving a lot of slack in your available RAM it seems like a situation where, under certain circumstances, you could go from being fine because most of what is in-memory compresses well to suddenly needing as much physical RAM as you do logical RAM because you have a bunch of already-compressed or incompressible data would markedly increase the complexity or potential for things to go wrong.
Comment Re:We're seeing a pattern here (Score 3, Interesting) 54
The One Percenters are starting to worry about getting Mangione'd by the people they exploit.