Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

ARGH!

This is very breaking news. Tim suffered a stroke a few years ago and had been in poor health, so this is not terribly surprising. Obviously he is best known as Frankenfurter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he was also quite good in Clue and any number of other shows.

He will be missed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/tim-curry-star-of-rocky-horror-picture-show-and-clue-dead-at-80/ar-AA2aZ3Yl

A true Queen of Country, she was taken after a brief battle with cancer. Type of said cancer was unrevealed in the article that I read.

There's just too much of her story to go into. She was star of the recording studio, stage, movies, etcetera. Saturday Night Live appearances, The Porter Wagoner Show, the Grand Ol' Opry, there's just too much.

But there's one thing that has made a huge difference in this country: The Imagination Library. She started it up 31 years ago. To quote the web site: "Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is dedicated to inspiring a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, through funding shared by Dolly Parton and local community partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland.

Inspired by her father’s inability to read and write Dolly started her Imagination Library in 1995 for the children within her home county. Today, her program spans five countries and gifts millions of free books each month to children around the world.

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.

The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

She will be remembered for a tremendous number of things. I hope the kids today and tomorrow who haven't been directly exposed to her music and other media learn of her through her Imagination Library.

https://apnews.com/article/dolly-parton-death-country-icon-87156f3e6a1547b88bf414529b644ad3

https://imaginationlibrary.com/

Swift, more formally named the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, is a gamma-ray observatory that was launched twenty-two years ago with a two-year expected life. Needless to say, the science community have more than gotten their money's worth out of it. Sadly, its orbit has decayed to the doomsday point where it will re-enter the atmosphere later this year and that will be that for Swift.

But wait! What is that I hear? Hoofbeats of the cavalry coming over the horizon?!

Less than a year ago, NASA awarded a contract to Katalyst Space Technologies to try to mount a rescue mission. They got $30 million to try to save the observatory, which cost around half a billion dollars when it launched in 2004, almost $900 million in today's dollars. That is a good investment.

Katalyst's spacecraft, named Link, launched in early July. It's described as being about the size of a refrigerator, has three robotic arms, maneuvering thrusters, solar panels, and enough fuel to boost Swift into a higher orbit. And things went great - initially. Then something went wrong, and Link started spinning uncontrollably. Two of the three reaction wheels stopped working, along with a couple of lesser problems. They tried to literally reboot the craft, but apparently that did not improve the situation.

(Reaction wheels are like gyroscopes: heavy wheels that rotate at high speed that point in different axes. By braking and accelerating different ones, you can more easily re-point the spacecraft to different directions without spending as much fuel, or do it more quickly while burning more fuel.)

And now NASA has pronounced the mission a loss. And Swift will die.

That doesn't mean that the money has been wasted: it was a very high-risk gamble and it didn't quite pay off. Still, a lot has been learned from the production and launch of Link, and it means a lot to a subset of the space industry that is trying to develop platforms that can boost satellites to higher orbits to extend their operational lifetime. They're also hoping that, given time, these service satellites will be able to refuel and effect repairs and possibly updates on satellites.

That's a lot of ambition, and I wish them success. It'll take them a while to achieve it, but it's better than all of this crap up there de-orbiting on a regular basis and polluting the upper atmosphere.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/nasa-calls-off-mission-to-rescue-swift-gamma-ray-observatory/

You've heard me rail against relying upon The Cloud as your sole source for anything. As the phrase FAFO goes, a PBS station in St. Louis is FO that they should have invested in either a local storage network - and 50 TB isn't really that much, or a second or even third cloud provider for redundancy.

The station, Nine PBS, uploaded TV shows, video, and other data going back 70 years to a company called Open Source Storage (OSS). Over 11,000 files. Nine PBS claims most of the data is irreplaceable.

From the article: "Nine PBS’ most recent contract with OSS ended on March 6. Nine PBS says it couldn’t get a response from OSS about renewing the contract in February. The station claims its contract gave it 30 days to retrieve data at the end of the contract. However, Nine PBS says it abruptly lost access to the data when the contract expired. The channel says it then learned that OSS had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State and had ceased operations. As of this writing, the Colorado Secretary of State’s business database says that OSS formed in 2021 and is delinquent." OOPS!

OSS bought server storage from Iron Mountain, a reputable firm for all sorts of archival storage, and used their Denver data center. When OSS ceased to exist, Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain and offered to pay to get their data back. Iron Mountain refused, saying basically that Nine PBS was not the owner of the hardware nor the company buying services from them, which I think is a reasonable response, albeit sad. Naturally this led to lawyers being launched. A judge ordered Iron Mountain to preserve Nine PBS's information, and on Wednesday ruled that Iron Mountain must had over the data.

Again from the article: "In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, Current reported today. The judge also said that Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients.

Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee “who is willing to help,” the report said. If complications arise, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled. Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates by September 14."

Iron Mountain's position, which I agree with, is they provide space, electricity, and connectivity for the server rack(s). They have no user/administrative access to their client's computers, which makes it impossible for them to fulfill a request such as Nine PBS's. Otherwise it's single-stop shopping for any government request that comes along. I would assume this is probably standard practice for any multi-tenant hosting facility.

I'm glad that there's progress being made and that Nine PBS may get their data back. I do hope that they've learned their lesson and will multi-home their backups and not have a single point of failure in the future.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/

From Doonesbury's Say What:
Percentage of Democrats who believe they could beat up Donald Trump: 75

Percentage of Republicans who believe they could: 33

This is not a difficult fight! Ankle stomp, grab hand and twist. Pretty much over.

Need I say anything about what industry is buying all of it? Also, it's most likely sold out for the next five years. You should forget about buying a DDR5 rig and learn to be happy with a DDR4 setup, which apparently memory is pretty cheap for.

That industry cannot fail or contract too soon!

But that is, in and of itself, not really going to provide any relief. Let's say an AI provider fails, and for discussion's sake, all of one data center is owned by that company. So the contents of that data center go up for sale, and you're able to buy an AI server for a screaming deal, loaded with huge amounts of memory and storage.

And most likely the memory and storage isn't compatible with your current equipment. AI servers are much like crypto mining rigs. They're highly optimized for doing very specific calculations and transformations, and won't be plug-compatible with existing equipment. Really serious hobbyists will probably be able to get them to do something useful, and I'm sure someone will port Doom to them, but they won't be useful to a casual user aside from being a dust-collecting museum piece.

I saw a video of a guy who managed to buy a high-speed video card designed for crypto. It was a previous generation card that had been superseded and was too slow for then current needs. He was really looking forward to seeing how fast it would perform on video benchmarks. There was only one problem: IT DIDN'T HAVE A GRAPHICS OUTPUT PORT! All it did was crunch numbers really fast, it didn't output video! THIS is the sort of kit these AI servers are going to be stuffed with.

None of the memory makers will build additional plants because of the risk of the bubble bursting while they're mid-construction. If they break ground with funds committed, all another supplier has to do is lower their price a little bit to destroy them. And the lithography machines required to make memory wafers are insanely expensive! I would expect the people who make those require payment fully in advance. And some AI companies aren't able to buy as much memory and SSDs as they want: they were late to the game and the more established companies already were existing customers and had priority with contracts. These kids that are new to the show won't be able to grow as fast as they'd like, to which I say GOOD.

Another interesting thing to note is that the automobile sector is being very hard hit as cars are so increasingly computerized. I would expect the aircraft manufacturers will feel the same hit. Makes me desirous to make my 2015 Subaru last as long as possible: 186,000 miles on it right now.

GOVERNMENTS are also being hard hit as they need increasing amounts of computers, this is making their costs go up. I can't imagine they're very happy as they have to deal with tight budgets.

While there are definitely good things being done with neural networks and LLMs, AI slop is the thing that's really powering this ridiculousness.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/113004/memory-capacity-for-all-of-2027-has-reportedly-been-booked-and-sold-with-no-more-dram-or-hbm-available/index.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/08/09/0547220/ramageddon-2027-memory-capacity-reportedly-sold-out


But here's the interesting news: from a WaPo article, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle Expect a Negative Cash Flow of $125 Billion Next Year!

OUCH! They're throwing so much money into AI that they're all diving deep into negative cash flow? I'm so glad that I have no direct investment in any of them.

From the WaPo article: "Free cash flow, which measures the cash left over after paying expenses and AI infrastructure costs, is now expected to shrink to almost nothing for the five companies combined in 2026, and decline again to negative $125 billion the following year... AI spending by Amazon and Google pushed the companies to an ignominious milestone: They lost more cash in the past three months than any other large U.S. companies, according to S&P Global data. Investment analysts expect Elon Musk's SpaceX to show even worse cash bleeding this week."

SpaceX is down bigly since its IPO, but they did raise a lot of cash to continue its operations. Tesla is also down bigly after its earnings report last week. Breaks my little heart.

Did you know that 'boat' is an acronym? Stands for Bust Out Another Thousand. Though I'd always heard the definition of boat was 'a hole in the water into which you throw money'. Looks like we've found another application for the term.

NO AI COMPANY HAS YET TO PRODUCE A PROFIT. THEY ARE ALL LOSING MONEY, AND BIG INVESTORS ARE STILL POURING CASH INTO THEM IN HOPES THAT THEY'RE FUNDING THE ONE THAT WILL MAKE IT BIG. They are generating revenue, but no where near where their expenses are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/03/one-chart-shows-incredible-reversal-american-tech-companies/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/08/08/1727226/microsoft-google-amazon-meta-and-oracle-expect-a-negative-cash-flow-of-125-billion-next-year

Very interesting. The study followed 3.1 MILLION Danish residents for EIGHTEEN years! That's an awful lot of data! They found that an 11.5 decibel change in road noise next to a house, like living next to a freeway or very busy road, increased the chance of contracting Parkinson's late in life by 3%.

Note that decibel changes are represented on a logarithmic scale, so it's hard to explain exactly how much louder that increase is.

We've known for a long time that toxins increase the risk of neurological disease, this is the first documentation that just noise can increase it. Personally, in my very unprofessional opinion, it's not the noise per se that's causing the increase, it's the constant stress of the noise. I live literally on the top of a mountain on a dirt road, I'd be surprised if more than a half dozen cars pass my house per hour. There's a two-lane highway over half a mile away - it can't be seen from here - we only notice it when particularly loud vehicles go by or sirens tear past. It's pretty placid up here. We definitely notice the change in background noise when we go to The Big City and stay with friends or in a hotel for a few days and hear the constant traffic whizzing by.

I think this will be a definite Good Thing with the increased adopting of electric vehicles: lower audio stress for everyone.

The report was published in JAMA Neurology (Journal of the American Medical Association).

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/23/road-traffic-noise-parkinsons-disease-study-health

This is pretty much unprecedented, and the company itself wasn't really expecting it. They were hoping to clear the launch tower, some 100 meters, and instead got 450km (280 miles) into orbit! The only difficulty experienced was when the third stage separated from the fourth: there is a pause before the 4th stage ignites and there should be some separation between the stages during the coast, I'm guessing a short burst of retro-rockets on the 3rd stage, and something didn't happen and the 3rd stage was a bit close when the 4th stage ignited. It didn't cause any problems and the rocket continued normally.

The rocket, the Vikram-1, launched Saturday from an island in the Bay of Bengal at ISRO, the Indian Space Agency.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/indias-first-privately-developed-rocket-reaches-orbit-on-dramatic-debut-launch/

It was a heck of a game! Spain's offense absolutely dominated for most of the game, but Argentina's goalie was an absolute wall. He was incredible and deserves recognition for it. I would definitely say he was better than Spain's goalie, but Spain's defense was a little better and Argentina had problems getting shots on goal. Poor Messie did not have a good game, I don't know if he was tired or was holding back some to let the rest of his team shine.

Regardless, Spain was undoubtedly the superior team and scored in the 106th minute! There were two other goals by Spain - none by Argentina - but there were fouls with both of them and they did not count. I'm not clear what happened the first time, the second was an off-sides.

The only downside to the event was at the end when a buffoon with bad hair, an ill-fitting suit, and a scowl participated in handing out the medals to the two teams. He even tried to photo-bomb the winners at the end and had to be lead off by whom I presume was the head of FIFA. I imagine the players, being professionals, are used to the occasional downsides of problems with the venues where they play.

I understand this particular clown was a big supporter of Argentina and gave their country an awful lot of money in the not distant past. Bummer day, dude!

I didn't get to watch any other games, but this one was scheduled in a time slot that was very convenient for me to catch, so I did.

ETA:I forgot one very nice thing - Spain is simultaneously holding the World Champoin title in both men's and women's football! That is incredibly cool!

Oh, and the guy with the bad hair got massively booed when his face was shown on the Jumbotron during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner!

Oops! Once again, MS fails to correctly implement a documented in plain sight security standard. Not the first time, certainly won't be the last.

I'm going to let the article speak for itself, then do some add'l commenting:
"According to a Fedora community blog post, upgrading to Fedora 43 and the newer Dovecot 2.4 mail server unexpectedly exposed what could be an ancient Microsoft Outlook security problem involving unencrypted POP3 connections. If true, some Outlook users may have believed their email sessions were protected by SSL/TLS while the client silently continued using insecure plaintext connections instead.

That is not a small allegation.

The issue reportedly surfaced after Fedora 43 administrators upgraded Dovecot and discovered that newer versions no longer allow plaintext password authentication over non secure connections by default. Suddenly, support calls started flooding in from Outlook users who could no longer connect to their mailboxes.

What made the discovery especially strange was that affected users allegedly had SSL/TLS enabled in Outlook. Yet many of those same accounts were still connecting over port 110, the old unencrypted POP3 port, rather than port 995, which is typically used for encrypted POP3 traffic.

According to the report, Outlook appeared to ignore the SSL/TLS selection entirely in certain configurations and continued sending authentication traffic over insecure connections without properly warning users."

SO. New distribution of Fedora Linux and a newer version of their Dovecot mail server, and Linux tries to make sure that everyone sticks to published standards to that they play well with all other software that sticks to published standards.

And Outlook installations suddenly start barfing. Presumably on networks using Window PC clients and Linux backend servers. The Outlook clients appear to be configured correctly and show their little padlock symbol, which we're all trained to believe that all the encryption is up and running properly. Yet internally, things are not well in Outlook Land. People were running older Outlook configurations, not realizing that standards had changed or just not bothering to update old clients or servers. The Dovecot servers got updated to new standards, which barred badly configured clients from connecting, such as old and incorrect Outlook servers/clients, and BOOM.

The bigger problem is that POP3 is a very old standard and not really useful for our multi-device world. The newer and much better standard is IMAP. Under POP3, the first device to access an email message pulls it off the server. I have two laptops, two PCs, a phone and a tablet - all of which read my email. Now, in Ye Olde Days, back in the '80s perhaps, you probably only had one computer. If you had a work PC, you may not have accessed your personal email on it because you usually had special software to call up your ISP for mail. IMAP is designed for multiple devices to access your mail: it leaves it on the server until deleted, remembers whether it is read or unread, and remembers what folder you've moved it to if you did that.

Yet we still frequently have to configure that POP3 information when we set up an email client!

Makes me glad that I almost exclusively use web-based email.

https://nerds.xyz/2026/06/fedora-43-outlook-security-bug/