* Posts by Dickie Mosfet

25 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Feb 2023

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Is that the end of it all?

It's not just a statement from FTX's new management—it's a lawsuit.

BBC: FTX: 'King of Crypto' parents sued over missing millions

SBF's parents will be deposed by FTX's lawyers before the court case, at which point we'll find out exactly what they knew. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that one.

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Is that the end of it all?

"(Joseph) Bankman, according to FTX, was right in the thick of a whole bunch of FTX business—what sounds like just about everything that did not involve the actual trading of crypto and minting of coins. The suit says that SBF’s father directed where company payments would go, picked out charities to benefit from his son’s largesse, entered into and terminated contracts, hand-picked the company’s outside counsel, made hiring recommendations, and authorized expenses. The suit also says that some of FTX’s expenses wound up paying for really nice things for him and Fried."

"FTX’s new management says that Fried, SBF’s mother, used ill-gotten funds from her son’s businesses as a piggy bank for her political action committee. The PAC, an operation called Mind the Gap that tries to get Democrats elected to office, and its supported causes received “tens of millions” of dollars from Bankman-Fried and FTX executive Nishad Singh, the complaint says. (According to the Federal Election Commission, Singh’s portion amounted to $1 million.) Singh’s contributions, it notes, came directly out of FTX’s coffers. It details a money-in, money-out cadence in which Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund sent money to Singh and then, within a day, Singh sent similar (or even identical) amounts directly to Bankman-Fried’s mom’s PAC. Singh has admitted to campaign finance violations. Maybe Fried, SBF’s mother, was entirely unaware of and disconnected from this operation. But an August 2022 email cited in the lawsuit includes Fried explicitly explaining to her son that he could use another FTX executive to make PAC contributions in his name, “but that has its own costs and risks.” Not a great thing to have in writing!"

"Other parts of the lawsuit sit somewhere between outrageous and very funny. The suit says that Bankman, SBF’s father, was at one point drawing a $200,000 annual salary from FTX but that he thought he was “supposed to” be getting a nice, round $1 million. He emailed his son, according to the suit, “Gee, Sam I don’t know what to say here. This is the first [I] have heard of the 200K a year salary! Putting Barbara on this,” he added, calling in the boss’s mother. The suit says that shortly thereafter, Bankman-Fried made a $10 million gift to his parents out of funds from Alameda Research (FTX’s sister hedge fund), then had the couple put on the deed to a $16.4 million Bahamas property with funds “ultimately provided” by FTX."

Source: The Parent Flap: Sam Bankman-Fried’s folks were allegedly tied up in his crypto empire—including some of its shenanigans.

Good news: HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools. Bad news: It broke

Dickie Mosfet

Re: It's 2024

James: I haven't seen that episode of Grand Designs, but now that you've whet my appetite, I'll certainly look out for it.

It sounds very much like an old episode of Sarah Beeny's "Property Ladder" whose featured property refurb could have been reasonably described as a complete train wreck...

Property Ladder S04E01

(The comments section should give you a taste of just how jaw-dropping this one is.)

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Repeat after me:

> So where are the examples of medium or large organizations successfully making the switch and realizing these significant cost savings?

Wikipedia has some interesting examples... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters#Businesses_and_non-profits

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Dickie Mosfet

Re: According to Portage...

When I were a lad, your windowing environment shipped on seven 3.5" floppy disks...

...and there was still room for Solitaire, Minesweeper and a clunky word processor.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Dickie Mosfet

Re: “ perfect for capturing the energy of heavy weights being dropped down a shaft”

I don't want to sound like one of those "Oh, I already invented that" type of guys, but it did occur to me several years ago that those vast, disused open-cast mines could be sub-divided using a steel framework into hundreds of "lift shafts", each containing a gravity battery.

However, such a scheme would take a long time to recoup its investment cost—although its relatively simple mechanical and electrical construction means that it would probably enjoy a very long lifespan.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Dickie Mosfet

The good old Kingston DataTraveler

Upvoted for giving the Kingston DataTraveler a mention.

I have a silver 512MB DataTraveler II that I bought in 2006 (Image) and a 2GB DataTraveler 100 (Image), and they're still going strong.

(I think I also have a 2GB DT G2 somewhere that's still sealed in its original blister pack)

You can still find DataTraveler sticks on eBay with the separate plastic end-cap. I imagine that they're old enough to be using the original SLC chips.

Raspberry Pi on IPO plans: 'We want to be ready when the markets are ready'

Dickie Mosfet
Joke

Re: Pi 4 vs 5

Dave Bowman: "HAL, open the cat flap door."

HAL9000: "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

Dickie Mosfet

Re: And what could possibly go wrong

"We've always tried to run a business that does interesting work and makes money, and I don't think those imperatives are going to change. We will keep doing the same stuff. Certainly while I'm in charge."

So why go down the IPO route at all? If Eben Upton wants to keep doing the same stuff, just keep doing the same stuff.

If the company floats, and a huge American/Japanese company vacuums up 40% of the shares and demands multiple seats on the board of directors, Eben won't have much of a say anymore.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Dickie Mosfet

Turn a Raspberry Pi into a BBC Micro

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you can download a RISC OS disk image, copy it onto a micro-SD card and boot your Pi from it.

Once in RiscOS, press F12 to bring up the CLI and type "BASIC". This runs full-screen, Mode 7 BBC BASIC directly on the Raspberry Pi's hardware (not emulation).

Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu-s2EV8FrY&t=205s

Good info for booting the Pi directly into BBC BASIC: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=120673

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Backwards

That's ignoring that there is no official "for schools" release (which would ideally drop kids into a robust environment with simple tools ready to teach, rather than a desktop and command prompt).

This is a source of some frustration, as I see again and again techies decide something is "educational" based on arbitrary convenience for an experienced developer...

^This. I have a couple of Raspberry Pi's and I think that they're fantastic. But how in the world did a Unix-alike machine gain the label of "educational"? Would my 12-year-old self be motivated to wrestle with the cryptic commands and labyrinthine directory structure of Linux? Or would I have just given up and decided that this computer lark wasn't for me?

Thankfully, the first computer that I ever experienced (ZX Spectrum) booted straight into a simple command line for the BASIC programming language. No OS commands or directory structures. Just type 'LOAD ""' and press 'Play' on the cassette desk.

I recently watched a BBC Horizon episode called "Talking Turtle" from February 1983 about Seymour Papert and the LOGO programming language. By the end of it, I couldn't help feeling that when we threw out the 8-bit machines, we lost the best way of introducing children to the magic of getting a computer to follow a list of instructions.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

Dickie Mosfet

Re: IBM's doomed operating system

"Get it straight from some of the people involved in making the decisions"

Bob Cringely pretty much did exactly that back in the 1990s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMtZFwqPHc&t=2213s

Dickie Mosfet

Re: IBM's doomed operating system

"Even when I first started using OS/2 2.1 in 1993 it was expensive to buy a system with the required 8MB memory"

As a point of reference, my first PC was bought in the summer of 1992 for my first year at university: a Wang 386SX-20 with 2MB of memory and a 40MB HDD for £499 from Morgan Computers.

(I would have liked a Mac, but the base model was £799, which was ludicrous for a computer with an 8MHz CPU and a 9-inch screen.)

Windows 3.0 would (just about) run with 2MB of memory, but preferred 4MB. 1MB SIMMS were £35 each—but you had to buy them in pairs. And £70 was a lot of money at a time when a pint of beer cost £1.30.

Eventually, I found an affordable compromise: Morgan were selling 256kB SIMMS for £5 each, so I bought four of those, giving me an extra meg for 20 quid.

Dickie Mosfet

Re: IBM's doomed operating system

IBM wanted the most popular DOS apps of the 1980's—Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase—to be ported to their own operating system first, and then MS Windows later.

But computer journalists and the buying public took a shine to Windows, as it was less resource-hungry than OS/2 and didn't replace the MS-DOS that they were all used to (and still needed for older apps).

So while Microsoft's biggest application software rivals were focused on porting their apps to an OS that people weren't buying, Bill Gates realised that it was now or never: bail-out of the OS/2 project, quickly port Word and Excel (and later FoxPro, which would become 'Access') to the Windows platform, and then promote Windows 3.0 and MS Office like there was no tomorrow.

By the time that Wordperfect and Lotus realised that they needed to pivot to Win 3.0, they'd already lost. (MS also allegedly kept some features of the Windows API to themselves, which didn't help.)

In 1994, OS/2 Warp 3 was released which was faster, more compatible and needed fewer system resources. But it was too little, too late. And a year later, Windows 95 was released.

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Slower Version

Thank you for the clarification, David!

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Slower Version

I'm sure I heard somewhere that the earliest IBM AT PC's, which shipped with a 6MHz 80286, could be given a very cheap speed bump by replacing the 6MHz clock crystal with an 8MHz equivalent.

Once IBM heard about this, either the design or components were changed to prevent this from working. IBM weren't about to let anyone have a quicker computer without paying for it!

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Dickie Mosfet

Now that you've mentioned Wirth's name, you've reminded me of the 1983 send-up of programmer culture, "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL": https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

[Not sure how to hyperlink if we're not allowed to use HTML]

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

Here's the argument for sticking with monolithic architecture (with extra humour and sarcasm)...

"Death by a thousand microservices: The software industry is learning once again that complexity kills"

https://renegadeotter.com/2023/09/10/death-by-a-thousand-microservices.html

[Not sure how I'm supposed to hyperlink if I can't use HTML]

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Dickie Mosfet

"This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so."

Ummm.... Wasn't Linux released in September 1991?

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Dickie Mosfet

I can lose myself for hours in those old BYTE Magazine PDFs. As you progress through the years, you can see a shifting emphasis:

• The articles from the late 70s are concerned with building your own hardware

• The articles from the early 80s are all about writing your own software

• And then from the mid-80s, it's all about stuff you can buy off the shelf

I must say that the recent development of the CB2 microcomputer (http://cb2.qrp.gr/) and the Agon Light (https://www.thebyteattic.com/) are tempting me to travel back to a time of 16-colour screen palettes and 4kB memory chips.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Dickie Mosfet

Re: Xerox and foolishness

"Dealers Of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik is well worth a read. You can usually pick up a cheap, used copy on eBay or Amazon.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Dickie Mosfet

"It all makes me pine for the days of RiscOS when everything the app needed was in it's folder and spreading yourself across the OS was rude."

[GoboLinux has entered the chat]

https://gobolinux.org/