News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

bartkmq

I watched the NASA press conference, where the decision was announced, and Bill Nelson said that the new Boeing CEO promised him he will work with NASA to keep Starliner flying.

It will require quite a significant investment to fix the project, while Boeing is already loosing money on this fixed price contract.

Re:New GPT-3 model: text-DaVinci-003 on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @08:01AM (#33787057)
Well, that didn't work too good.

Reword the text below without using the letter a:

[text]

According to every known law of aviation, there is no way bee should be able to take to the skies. Its wings are too small to lift its hefty little form from the ground. The bee, however, flies regardless because bees do not worry about what humans deem inconceivable. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Ooh, black and yellow! Let's mix it up a bit. Barry! Breakfast is ready! Ooming! Wait one moment. Hello? Can you marvel at how quick they fly?

I mean, building a jet engine from an old car turbocharger is not that difficult, you only have to manufacture the combustion chamber.
Likely true, none of the other recipes on that site seem to have a number after the slug.
SCMP is an independent newspaper based in Hong Kong and was founded by foreigners. "China" (mainland regime) is probably not a fan of them.
This website doesn't look very reliable to me.

  Confirmed: Las Vegas Shooter on Benzos During Mass Murder
  The CDC's Fictional Flu Death Stats and Tamiflu's Lethal Side Effects
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/
Re:RFC: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal Images on Friday February 02, 2018 @07:25PM (#16295354)
For comparison with Alpine Linux:

  base kbd-bkeymaps, xz compressed: 2.8 MB
  base kbd-bkeymaps busybox-extras, xz compressed: 2.8 MB
Just 100 kB more for telnet, no extra deps.

I wouldn't actually want to work in that chroot but for containers it's fine.

What a terrible website. I first thought my ad blocker broke because the site was so visually overloaded. Turns out those are links to actual "articles" of this site.

Seems like they are serious when they say "News... but not as you know it".

Worth noting it's also the first rocket using electric fuel pumps instead of turbopumps.

To optimize the weight they also drop the batteries once they get empty.

Re:Microsoft cURLs too on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:21PM (#16141937)
You've got good points and I admit I'm split on this issue.

In theory i would rather have everything handled by the package manager but container apps provide a few useful advantages:

  - sandboxing/isolation out of the box
  - being able to report bugs directly to upstream
  - It's easier to distribute a small app to all distributions (for some value of all)*
  - much easier to distribute proprietary applications (subjective advantage)
  - much easier to install old versions of an application (sometimes needed)
  - it's possible to record the bandwidth/ram/cpu usage; with a standard package that's quiet difficult
Re:Microsoft cURLs too on Saturday January 13, 2018 @04:15PM (#16141444)
I can think of a few reasons

(1) Use of a different libc (alpine linux with musl)

(2) most builds are not reproducible, rebuilds are needed for security reasons

(3) non-rolling release distros (-> most distros) fork the upstream projects to backport fixes for their older releases

(4) Different filesystem structure (Gobo Linux)

(6) Most distros want to use the build system associated with their own package manager

There are probably many more than that. Most distros don't even try to stay close the upstream repo and instead maintain a lot of patches.

In the future we will most likely have an distro-specific basic system build and container apps (snap, appimage, flatpak) build directly by upstream on non-server systems.

(1) Nat. Gas causes much more deaths per PWh produced (5 vs 0.1 for the US) and still produces quite a lot of CO2.

(2) Renewable + pumped hydro is much more expensive that just producing electricity directly from nuclear. The environmental impact of dam failures is also bigger than that of an nuclear accident.

For example the Banqiao+Shimantan dam failure killed 110,000, displaced 6,000,000. For comparison Chernobyl killed 9,000 to 93,000 (probably closer to the lower end) and displaced ~130,000.

But how high is the cost of generating the energy _plus_ the cost of storing it? And does the wind always have the same strength or do you need to build additional wind farms for times when the wind is weaker?
Nuclears problem is not accidents but irrational fear. For comparison here are the deaths per PWh produced¹.

  Coal       100,000 (US: 10,000)
  Nat. Gas     4,000
  Hydro        1,400 (US: 5)
  Solar          440
  Wind           150
  Nuclear         90 (US: 0.1)
Nuclear is the safest option available and at the same time the only energy source that is stable and scalable. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
I disagree. Brave is targeted at the average browser user. Only ~10% of Windows users use adblockers, 2% on Android/iOS.

And you can't tell me all of these people want to see ads, most of them probably just don't know about adblockers (or find them to difficult to install on mobile).

Brave solves that problem because they present a finished solution that simply works for the user.

The comparison between Chromes and Braves (Electrons) internal details may be interested for developers but the average end-user just cares about the speed difference between Browser X and Y as they come out of the box.

Re:Filecoin 2017 Q4 Update on Friday January 12, 2018 @07:06AM (#16132261)
Because you need the files to do proof of proof-of-storage and get your coins (back).

But as the OP said there's currently no proof-of-will-to-distribute-storage so you can save money by just sending the proof-of-storages to the network and never actually provide bandwidth for the distribution of the stored data.

>You can't just

Why not? (Serious Question, I want to learn.)

Re:Mocker: A crappy imitation of Docker, written in 100% Python on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @09:20PM (#16120988)
There's also Bocker, a minimalistic Docker implementation in 100 lines of bash¹.

[1]: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

Re:Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15 on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:08AM (#15969172)
Have you tried using DNS66 as adblocker? It's implemented as local-running VPN and doesn't require root. I'm using it since a year or so and quite happy with it.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/ https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66

Re:Alpine Linux 3.7.0 Released on Friday December 01, 2017 @10:48AM (#15824503)
Alpine is a nice if you're looking for a really small os with an large number of ported packages. I use it as a rescue system for my main linux os.

Only negative thing I can think of is that that their support forums¹ are full of spam. [1] https://forum.alpinelinux.org/forum/4

Re:Alpine Linux 3.7.0 Released on Friday December 01, 2017 @10:43AM (#15824459)
What does EFI support mean? I remember booting Alpine on an UEFI system a few months before this update so it can't be support for that. Is it maybe related to efistub?
I'm sure the biometric data harvested from these pictures won't be abused by three letters agencies.
Re:Cortana is really bad on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @09:04PM (#15762267)
For Linux users I can recommmend FSearch, which is inspired by Everything Search. http://www.fsearch.org/
Re:Extensions in Firefox 58 on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @09:57AM (#15748209)
Does anyone found an alternative to "BackTrack Tab History", an extension that copies the history of the current tab to newly opened tabs? The author thinks he won't be able to port it to Quantum.
Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:29AM (#15248354)
He defines 'vanilla' to mean 'build from upstream with little distro-specific changes'. So what does this have to do with making Python 3 the default python interpreter? I bet this symlink is not even part of the python source code; it's always a choice made by the distro maintainers.

Arch is known to be always cutting edge even if this sometimes means breaking stuff so this decision is not exactly surprising.

Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:37AM (#15247850)
I guess that's the magic of the Arch Wiki¹. Even if not using Arch I often find it far more useful and up-to-date than the wiki of my own distributions (Ubuntu and Manjaro).

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Migrating_between_archi...

Re:Why I Fell in Love with Arch Linux (2015) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:31AM (#15247775)
I'm a big fan of the Arch User Repository (AUR). But Arch itself takes too long to configure and breaks from time to time so I switched to Manjaro which is based on Arch but has its own repos with more config files already prepared for you. Also it's not rolling release but updates once a week which allows the maintainers to check for errors before they reach the users.

Because of the AUR I actually think Manjaro can be more user friendly than distros like Ubuntu. While using Ubuntu I remember constantly having to deal with PPAs which were broken/outdated after every update. On Manjaro I can just hit 'Install' in the GUI and don't have to worry about PPAs. I even found a package specific to my university that sets up the Wlan and other things. On Ubuntu finding such an unknown, rarely used package would be much harder.

Re:First image of SpaceX spacesuit on Thursday August 24, 2017 @03:41AM (#15088326)
This suit is only a flight suit and can not be used for EVA as it lacks a life support system and heat exchanger. That being said their EVA suit will probably look similary cool so you're still right ;)
I think you do not need one anymore. The patent were filled in 1997, that's now 20 years ago.

See: https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/0/05/mp3pat...

The last two patents seem to be related to an encode optimization and are not needed to write a decoder.

Which means it is possible now to include an MP3 decoder in GNU/Linux distros, etc. without paying the $2,500 fee.

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