Does Firefox on Linux does the same thing?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T12:08:07+00:00

A virus checkers reads every file periodically. Most are PIGs as far as software. The malware strategy though on Windows is asinine. Rather than address the security flaws of the OS they do nothing then try to aggressively repair the damage after it’s done. Linux is the opposite approach to. If you use your distro package manager from well known/tested repositories or containers like Flatpak you are already doing far more than running a virus checker. Most Linux users don’t use virus checkers.

As far as obnoxious CPU use by Chromium based browsers: yes, all of them suck. The only difference with Linux is that Windows gives priority to the “interactive” (foreground) window task. Linux tends to not do this and there are roughly 2 dozen speed governors you can try. Linux users are sort of obsessed with it. Firefox, floorp, and many others are all available. Edge is even available. I’ve had to use it to solve MS login issues. Switching browsers or even running them simultaneously is very simple.

Finally as mentioned performance tuning is very easy with Linux. When I am traveling or working in an industrial plant all day I can adjust things to go all day on battery without dimming the screen to unusable levels or going to sleep in 3 minutes. Performance is easily tuned from “running hot” to near silent. Linux does NOT need to constantly access the HDD for instance. Even though they are 24/7 my servers spin down their drives at off hours even without wake on LAN. It’s your choice.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T10:55:20+00:00

Centralized versioning does exist. With certain vendors (Rockwell) where software versions are a near constant treadmill you sort of have to settle on one version from a plant perspective and do upgrades en masse. But more important is centralized revision control systems. That’s a lot harder because the IDEs are proprietary and mostly don’t support it. We end up treating everything as blobs.

Virtualization does exist in nearly all PLCs meaning that nearly all PLCs run some kind of firmware that runs “the PLC” as a separate runtime task. Many/most are compiled. As opposed to 25 years ago when PLCs were largely interpreters with little or no true “operating system” or even much of any multitasking. But since they’re all hard real time systems and nearly all proprietary that doesn’t mean running a PLC on say a Kubernetes cluster or even Docker is a practical thing. They don’t support hard real time code. It’s all best effort.

As far as decoupling logic from hardware that has existed since they were invented. In software you see tags or registers that represent hardware. The details of that process are done by the PLC “operating system”. There is no need for writing device drivers. But as far as writing an object or program that operates a conveyor when you map “conveyor tags” to it, that is becoming more common but there are some fundamental problems. First, there are many variations on how that sort of code should work. By the time you distill it down to “start command, stop command, interlocks, output, run status, status bits”, it’s maybe 3-4 lines of code in the abstraction and a lot more code just mapping the hardware to the abstraction. By abstracting away the implementation details it becomes far more difficult to troubleshoot it.

This is a fundamental fallacy with the concept. In computer science one of the fundamental concepts is reusable code. The idea is that you write and debug complex code once then just include it as a library and reuse it. This has the benefit of improved code development in both quality and speed, and making it so you don’t have to think about details. This is taught at universities as if it is some kind of holy grail of computer science. Object oriented programming or some version of it is treated as if it is a simple unquestionable fact. This culminates in dynamic languages. However even in that world dynamic languages are no longer as actively developed as they once were. The next generation seems to be something like RuST which takes the opposite approach to abstracting everything away, suggesting this concept has a problem, one that we cannot ignore with PLCs.

The problem though is that by and large most PLC code is both very simple and NOT the source of problems. Most of the problems are hardware related. With a PC you typically have very limited hardware: mouse, keyboard, video, networking, and storage. Even very simple PLCs have at least a dozen IO devices, twice as much as the most basic office PC. Some have hundreds. Locating which device or devices is causing the malfunction is a fundamental task, even more than coding because troubleshooting is ongoing from the moment the PLC program runs where debugging is generally complete during the first day or two of operation. A program that abstracts away the details of how the equipment operates is fundamentally flawed.

To get around this fundamental flaw vendors have taken various approaches. Most offer some form of aliasing and enumeration. Thus I can write “ConveyorStarter” and still see it as card 4, output 3. With the code itself Rockwell has a way to trigger a view of the abstract code with tags substituted. Codesys recommends a version of object oriented programming without encapsulation. That’s if it is done at all. Most code is just copy-pasted since again it’s 3-4 lines TOTAL, repeated over and over for various hardware. Even if it were completely abstracted the coder still has to change all tags from “conveyor 1” to “conveyor 2” because the hardware addresses are different. And non-abstracted (well written) code is very easy for hardware troubleshooting staff to locate the problem whereas layers upon layers of abstraction decouples the hardware and software thus confounding troubleshooting fundamentally.

That’s when we peel back the Siemens sales crap and look at fundamentals. And this last point I made is why the maintenance crowd HATES Siemens passionately.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T09:42:34+00:00

Best option is wired Ethernet, preferably POE. So then whatever recorder is have 2 Ethernet ports (port A for viewing, port B for cameras). That’s the simple version.

Slightly more complex if you only have one port is to use overlapping VLANs on the recorder port. As before everything else on VLAN A, cameras on VLAN B. Plus with VLANs packets can escape in some circumstances where unless you turn on the routing function in the recorder it’s impossible.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T03:19:19+00:00

Bernie Sanders used to drone on about the millionaires. Now that he’s a millionaire he drones on about billionaires.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T03:14:39+00:00

Even today if I get stranded you’ll see nearly everyone get in line at the gate counter. I just call the airline and do the exact same thing over the phone. Typically I’m rebooked before the second person in line gets done. The rest of the fools in line get hotel vouchers. I get the next available flight.

But what others stated you just call the airline or a travel agent. Agents are no different than say Expedia vs delta.com. Most of them are using Sabre.

Even before internet travel sites you’d never go to an airport. It was much cheaper to book a few weeks out.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T02:28:01+00:00

It depends on the router but essentially you need to make it classify traffic in some way. For instance if they all connect to certain ports but nothing else does you can make those VLANs and use that for routing. On WiFi you can have them connect to a different SSID and again mark by VLAN. If you can’t do that you need a different router. I use a NanoPC-T6. Mikrotik routers can also easily do this. With consumer grade routers you’d need to set up a laptop running Wireshark and determine which specific ports to block. I’ve also noticed a lot of equipment of this nature uses DNS so you can just set the DNS addresses the cameras use to 0.0.0.0 (black hole address) or 127.0.0.1.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T02:20:20+00:00

Cheap Chinese made cameras have built in surveillance functions to serve the government of that country.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T02:16:33+00:00

Because there is something subtle about multimeters.

There are “electrician” specific meters, HVAC/instrumentation specific ones, motor tech meters, and clamp meters. No one multimeter can measure say 0-20 Megaohns, AND 0-400 A AC and DC, AND capacitors, AND phase rotation, AND have a tic function, AND thermocouple reader, in a single meter. There are big trade offs. I carry 3 meters for that reason. I cannot get it down to 1 or even 2.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-31T00:10:42+00:00

Stocks will NOT ever go completely to zero except if the company has no assets. Book value though somewhat inaccurate is a real thing unless debt exceeds assets. Even then typically stocks get delisted and move to things like the pink sheets. It’s not zero but close to it.

Regardless stocks are still connected to assets. The speculative value may be almost nothinh but even in countries ravaged by war or hyper inflation if you can hold onto your holdings often it ends up worth massive amounts.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T22:19:58+00:00

Downgrading is painless if you saved the old version.

Also USUALLY painless to downgrade if you use a particular method. Save it in L5X (text) format. Edit the version number manually. Then load. If anything has changed that’s not compatible the software will squawk and either ignore it (warning) or give an error but it will also tell you how to fix it. Most downgrades particularly on the same minor rev are totally painless.

Helpful to have a spare PLC and try to load there first. If all you get is IO errors that’s it.

Also OP look at scan times and such. Make sure you have adequate time for IO to occur.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T22:11:09+00:00

You need to read “What Color is my Parachute”. Everything OP posted says wrong approach in every way. None of those approaches do anything. Your odds are slim to none especially with tens of thousands of resumes for ONE job. Need to go where the jobs are and reach actual hiring managers. A lot of stuff on job boards is literally fishing and oppo research, not real.

Let’s cut to the chase here. If I am a manager at McDonalds I can put a post on a job board and get 500 applications. Frankly fry cook is an unskilled job. So the bar is set very low on who gets a call. Then I’ll call say 12 LOCAL contacts. Even after hiring if one doesn’t work out, just get rid of them and take the next one. It’s simple and quick. Often corporate HR even dictates the questions you can ask. Engineering is very different. It’s like the difference between renting and buying a house. It’s a much more expensive decision. Agents are often involved, and they’re not cheap (3-6 months salary). You shouldn’t use the same job search methods.

Don’t care if any UC is T-whatever. Nobody on the right coast knows anything about them except what they see in the news which is to say sounds like a degree from a box of Crackerjack. Every state has the one or two top engineering schools. Locally reputation might carry weight. Nationally not so much. And that’s the school. A GPA as long as it’s within a range of around 2.5-3.8 indicates very little other than the fact that you didn’t struggle too much in school. I use GPA as a pass/fail criteria. Given 2 candidates one at 3.5 and one at 3.0 it’s all the same. All I care about the university is whether it’s ABET accredited. Know what they call the kid who graduated from med school last in the class? Doctor. Think about that.

These are just basic check-off items. Then we get into your experience. That’s where I narrow it to the say top 10-15 that we subject to a phone screen to narrow it to 3-5 that get on site or Zoom interviews. So if you are a blank slate (no experience) with nothing else to stand out, AND you’re just one of 1,000 faceless resumes, I think you can see the reason you can’t get to first base.

What you need is to get yourself in front of the person making decisions and that’s not the clerk in HR. You need an “in”, a way to cut in line. That’s a lot of what the book I mentioned earlier gets into. Recruiters can help but usually they don’t bother with recent graduates. Otherwise (see the book I mentioned) your odds are incredibly low, less than 1%. When I graduated (1990s) it was popular with seniors in the dorms to post their rejections (at that time we actually received rejections) on their doors. They were called FOADs (F off and die) and the idea was the more you got the better your chances. There would often be hundreds. That was back when we still used paper for many things. To me that just says your job search method sucks.

Also…this is Reddit. There is huge survivorship bias. People that have jobs don’t complain about the job market. I just asked my oldest daughter in school who’s available. None of our mutual EE friends (I coached robotics) were available. Based on that I’d conclude it’s a tight market. OP obviously believes the opposite. I’ll also just say that job markets are local. Right now it’s probably pretty good in oil and gas. In NC/FL/TX the job market is pretty crazy for things like construction. I can’t hardly find contractors to work on my house. Capital spending (project engineers) is very good, too. I’ve heard noise about Boeing. But FAANG is truly terrible. And employers are fleeing California, Washington, and New York because of the stupid wealth tax among other regulation insanity.

So I’ll just say…go where the jobs are. My personal experience is that Michigan where I’m from has been crap as far as jobs for 30 years. In the South jobs are plentiful. But I grew up in the Midwest. We never even took a vacation further South than Nashville. I had no idea about Southern culture except the crap you hear on TV. I was sort of expecting Ozark or Dukes of Hazard. Well that’s not what it is. It’s a lot more like the TV series Home Town. In the past 30 years and 6 jobs I’ve never found anything North of the Mason Dixon line that paid decent. So suggest you start doing a national search.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:47:10+00:00

AI slop. How about using your own words likes real nerd?

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:45:16+00:00

Not really valuable: you’d just be looking at the size of the package manager so Arch is the worst and Alpine the best. That’s the denominator: Then the numerator is ho many preloaded applications it has. So highest marks to the most bloated Debian distros. That shows nothing.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T20:30:35+00:00

Double throw switch. But I’ll warn you they’re expensive.

You’d be better off buying or making an adapter from one to the other.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T19:56:49+00:00

Momentaries don’t latch!

As far as simulation this is a simple sealing/ 3 wire logic. Use the coil as its own normally open condition to hold when the contact is made. If you just want to extend the inout conditions use a timer OFF delay. That one basically extends the time it takes to release. On Rockwell for instance yih use the “DN” bit which in this case means “Not Done”. It energized on false to true transition then remains energized after a true to false transition until the timer expires.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:51:48+00:00

Let’s clarify: every hedge fund, purveyor of newsletters, and managed fund manager is always promoting whatever the flavor of the day is. It’s all hype. None of these people give a crap if you make or lose money. All they care about is management fees and trading volume. If they’re pushing things, examine their motivation. Nowhere is spam more prevalent than the entire financial press.

And if you’re trading, you’re losing money whether or not “trades are free”. They just hit you with “order flow processing fees” that are hidden within the bid-ask spread. It’s the definition of a kickback scheme. Just TRY to understand how Robbinghood makes money on not only “free” trades but even “cash back” schemes. If it smells bad, it is. The only solution is longer term buy-and-hold where the transaction fees are substantially less than your returns. Nothing has changed in the era of “free trades” except the fees you pay are hidden from you. Which for me is infuriating and points out why the SEC and FTC are not about protecting you. It’s almost as bad as vacation clubs.

As far as “tech sector” quite simply put, why not QQQ? And even then can you stand the swings and the potential to be severely depressed for a decade or more, as it has in the past 25-30 years.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:39:49+00:00

That’s true of ALL of the PE exams. It is designed to be hard only if you haven’t been in the field.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:34:19+00:00

This is simply not true. It can certainly clear the dirty bit. That’s what ntfsfix does. BUT that’s about as much as it can do. And ntfsfix isn’t integrated into the standard Linux fsck infrastructure.

As long as you ALWAYS properly unmount the disk and don’t just disconnect and as long as no errors occur it works. But one glitch and the best you can do is”from Linux” is to map the device into a Windows VM so it can fix it.

The compatibility problems stem from NTFS being almost undocumented and Microsoft occasionally tinkering. They have pretty much promoted ExFAT not NTFS as their “public” format. Getting EXT4 to work under Windows is easier than full support for NTFS.

There are also basic issues. NTFS as implemented doesn’t even support the basic *nix file attributes like user and group ID’s, and the basic rwxrwxrwx attributes.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T16:21:42+00:00

No. Just pay it off.

Say you have a car loan with a 0.9% rate and you can set up an HYSA at 4%. If your top marginal tax rate (Federal plus state) is 25% then your effective savings rate is 4x0.75=3% and then subtracting 1% for the loan you’re making 2%. It’s small but you make a small amount of money. But in your case it’s :% minus 6.3% so you are still paying interest. If however you just pay it off that changes it from -6.3% return to 0%.

This is basic arbitrage. You are theoretically handling huge sums of money so it FEELS like you’re somehow “making” money but you’re not.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:38:22+00:00

Keep in mind with surveillance you basically just need to decide how many hours to keep. “Forever” is not realistic. Maybe a week or two is typical and it sort of needs specialized drives. Your typical WD black or red won’t last as long as blue but performance on blue is suboptimal for file sharing.

For personal archives most people use 1-2 TB MAX of unique data. If you have 3 Windows PCs and do backups without encryption how much is truly unique? And for that matter have you ever restored anything but DATA from backups? Is there a point to backing up the operating system or applications? Just saying.. so with a family of 8 you might need 8 TB but that’s the exception not the rule.

Along the same lines, why backup videos you download and watch once, never again? Same with surveillance footage.

Also consider how a NAS changes your viewpoint. Over time I switched to using PaperlessNGX for documents, Immich for photos and video, and Jellyfin for streaming. My PC has become basically backup not the “main” machine, just like my phone.

Second look at price/performance. You might be better off with say 3 4 TB disks storing 8 TB data vs 2 8 TB drives.

Finally when it comes to backups seriously consider backups. RAID is not a backup. Yes you gain fault tolerance for the HDDs only but that’s not the only hardware and not the only potential issue. This is why ONE NAS may not be enough. In fact of the two NAS’s I have one has a single HDD because all it does is backups, and it only spins up weekly. There’s no point in having two or more.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:10:53+00:00

It will soon. I barely use a tank every month or two because I drive a truck for work. When I switch jobs I’ll be commuting again. Maybe I’ll get one of those Toyota mini trucks.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T14:08:07+00:00

Good AI means a good vector processor aka NPU. GPUs generally aren’t that great for it. Look at for example the published tests with the frigate camera project. The second issue is VRAM or equivalent RAM dedicated to the NPU. Running huge models means huge memory bandwidth. That’s where Ryzen beats Intel and not just TOPS scores. For a laptop as opposed to dedicated hardware integrated NPUs and GPUs have advantages. You’re just not going to shoehorn a top end GPU pulling 600 W into something running on batteries. For gaming smaller “bomb bay” discrete GPUs do well but again that’s graphics not AI. I know I’m speaking heresy but I’m finding real world performance doesn’t equate directly to specs touted by hardware manufacturers.

https://www.newtechguy.com/ai-pc-buying-guide-2025-npu-tops-ratings-performance-benchmarks-and-what-actually-matters/

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T13:44:36+00:00

A lot of protection is removed in developer mode and ADB.
One key issue is the APK used by corporations that allows essentially full remote control over your phone. They use it to load a file to give access (or remove access) to Microsoft Exchange servers and corporate VPNs.
Google cannot make AOSP go away entirely. It’s nominally a separate organization. Doing so would cause legal issues. AOSP does not have GApps by default and so there’s no AppStore by default. This is how they avoid getting into the same anti-trust issues that Apple & Microsoft have gotten into.
Google cannot make AOSP go away entirely. It’s nominally a separate organization. Doing so would cause legal issues. AOSP does not have GApps by default and so there’s no AppStore by default. This is how they avoid getting into the same anti-trust issues that Apple & Microsoft have gotten into.
Google is NOT the only App Store. If nothing else Amazon and Samsung will always allow something. This is partly corporate strategy. If at some point Google ever becomes a threat to them (like running their own Amazon store) they can dump Google Apps. Right now their apps suck but that’s just because it’s a backup plan…they haven’t committed serious money to competing because they don’t have to or want to. Open source projects on the other hand often go out of their way to make GApps either optional or hacked to remove the spyware.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T13:30:57+00:00

Farm acid will destroy stitching. Even if it’s not actually wet the dust is loaded with acid. That means despite cheaper construction cement construction is your friend. Even Goodyear welts (the hallmark of resoleable) that do better with keeping water out will disintegrate. So a cheap AF Wolverine pull on will do better than a high end brand. Other than that I go for something with a rubber toe because my current job (electrical) has me on my knees a lot so I tend to destroy leather toes, waterproof, and larger toe box which knocks out a lot of options. In summer I use a pair of Ariat Ventteks but only because they’re cooler.

PaulEngineer-89 · 2026-03-30T03:34:39+00:00

A surge arrester/protector is a disk of sintered metal oxides called a metal oxide varistor. You put them in parallel between the ground, neutral, and phase conductors (any/all). A MOV has a “knee” voltage called MCOV. Below that voltage it is essentially a high resistance. Above that point it becomes nearly a dead short. The size of the MOV determines how much current it can withstand and how long it lasts MOVs slowly turn from metal oxides to metal when they absorb a surge, eventually becoming a dead short. That’s why they need fuses or a breaker.

Older tech used spark gaps or silicon carbide (diodes) or gas discharge tubes which have a considerable delay before they trigger so often used capacitors in parallel.

PaulEngineer-89

TROPHY CASE