Re: How long before...
At least that will make them even easier to ignore.
2875 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007
“Let some neighbor raise the livestock.”
If you insist on raising livestock, let some neighbour raise the male livestock - those are the troublesome ones.
My first boss lived in a village and kept animals. One day as he was leaving he said “Got to leave early today, the goat’s on heat!”
Various people in the village had nanny goats, but only one person kept a billy goat as they are more grumpy and smelly. That day was the day when it was my boss’s goat’s turn to be ‘serviced’ by the one Billy goat.
It doesn't need to be obscure. It can be well documented in your computer's instruction manual, but it just needs to be something you can't leave switched on casually (e.g. lock it away behind a panel, and interlock it with the panel cover so it can't be left on afterwards - it could even be set not to allow a reboot into the O/S until the panel is locked).
For most people, updating boot firmware will be a occasional event, and a process that involves physically unlocking an enable switch is probably going to make people think more than just clicking the 'fill my computer with viruses' OK button on a dialogue box.
While 'fuck' is indeed a very useful word, it is a bit of a cheat to say that adding '-ing' to make it an adverb or adjective helps to make it almost uniquely versatile, as adding a suffix to a word is a common method of converting a word into some other part of speech, and applies equally well to many other words in the English language.
I remember doing embedded code for a 6502, and having to ensure it would fit in an 8K EPROM.
It wrote bit-mapped characters to a graphic display, but I had to choose the words for on-screen labels carefully as, by the time I'd finished the code, I didn't have enough memory spare to store a whole alphabet.
"So why not put it in there in the first place?"
It's being a stroppy requirements pedant...
"Well, you specified you wanted a web server, you didn't specify you wanted one without buffer overflow problems"
"Ok, well, can I have one without buffer overflow?"
"Sure, but it's a change to the specs, going to cost you more"
... On the other hand, I just remembered one of the cancelled Shuttle missions (STS-144) was slated to bring Hubble back to Earth to put it in a museum, so maybe it wouldn't have been deemed worthy of more upgrades after all. Glad it's still up there doing science, even if it is running on vintage microprocessors!
I think the point of the original post wasn’t that Hubble’s 486 used Linux (it doesn’t), but ‘hey, look, some people like NASA still use 486s. Ergo, why can’t we still have an active 486 Linux development process?’
Hubble is a special case though - the last service mission was 16 years ago, next week. If we still had Shuttles doing satellite servicing missions I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Hubble’s computers might have been upgraded again to something more modern (the 486s were, after all, an upgrade from something more primitive). But we don’t have the Shuttle now, so Hubble is stuck with what was space qualified in the first few years of the millennium.
Apart from nostalgia and ‘because I can’, I suspect the majority of 486s still running are special cases because they can’t be upgraded for some reason, and are probably running an OS tuned to that application.
I think the pin change is a myth.
However it does appear that the i487sx does have 1 extra pin for positional registration with the socket but electrically not connected, while there is another pin that indicates that the coprocessor is inserted, and when active, this turns off the i486sx, and the i487sx, which actually is a complete 486 does all the work.
Source:
Dropping 486 Linux support shouldn't affect Hubble, as that runs VRTX for its operating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Real-Time_Executive
Intel stopped shipping the 486 18 years ago, so if you still absolutely need to run a 386 or 486 instead of something more modern, you're probably either running some piece of bespoke hardware, in which case you probably have very specific O/S requirements, or doing it for old-time's sake. I'm not sure Linux's aim is to be in the nostalgia business.
Indeed, the Clapham Junction Accident report comments that while the wire that caused the accident should have been disconnected at both ends, it was only disconnected at one end because access to the other end would have required disturbing the embrittled coverings on all the other wires.
It also points out that the work leading up to the accident was part of the Waterloo Area Resignalling Scheme, modernising equipment that had been installed in 1936 (over 50 years before).
https://www.jesip.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Clapham-Rail-Crash.pdf
"The outage was apparently down to a single unsheathed copper wire shorting out equipment at the ATC facility located to the southwest in Philadelphia."
"With the bare end of the old wire lying near to the terminal which had once been its home and with the other end still being connected to the fuse, there existed a potential for disaster... That potential was tragically realised when other work came to be done in the same relay room two Sundays later on the eve of the accident"
That second quote is from Anthony Hidden QC's Investigation into the Clapham Junction Railway Accident, which occurred on 12 December 1988 killing 35 people, and injuring 484, 69 seriously.
Have people not learned in the intervening 37 years that bare wires and safety critical systems are not a good combination?
I remember in the early 90s programming the T800 in assembly code for image processing. It sat on an ISA bus card in a 486-33 PC and ran rings around the host processor. It took a while to get used to programming a CPU with an evaluation stack rather than traditional registers though - a bit like working with an HP calculator.
No, not that T800 ----->
I keep promising myself that one day I'll get my Atom working again.
Apparently they go for silly money these days, but mine's so hacked about from sticking various bits of electronics in it in the 1980s, or hanging out of the back (just like Acorn encouraged you to do!) that I doubt I can get it back to 'original' condition now, so when I do get it going it will probably be some Frankenstein's monster version of an Atom.
From a general public point of view, it really wouldn't have the same attraction as the Sinclair/Acorn battles of the original film. Clive Sinclair was (somewhat cruelly) portrayed as the pantomime villain in that one, I'm not sure there would be the same scope for amusing conflict in the ARM story.
I'm surprised they didn't take the opportunity to name their salesperson fembot the Chery 2000.
When we replaced our washing machine, drier and dishwasher over the last decade, each time it was finding the best non-smart version.
To my way of thinking, if your main interaction with a device includes putting stuff in or taking stuff out of it, having it connected to the web is superfluous. Sometimes I wander over to the washing machine to see how long it has to go, albeit in the knowledge that the number on the front panel is a lie anyway, and the last few minutes are somewhat elastic.
I can see some point if you're running a commercial enterprise and have to monitor multiple devices, or for quality assurance/food safety you need to keep a log of your fridge temperature or suchlike, but for home use much of it is just unnecessary bells and whistles.
Even though I believe the comment referred to giving Trump an excuse for taking Canada, your point is still pertinent.
Naturally a peace deal with Russia staying in control of its current seized land, which stretches as far as Kherson, is a terrible idea.
It gives them time to regroup and in future push on to Odesa which would give Russia total control of Ukraine's Black Sea coast, give it easy access to start more shenanigans in Moldova, and bring NATO countries much closer to the front line.
Still, when their army contains a large number of conscripts who may not be particularly tech savvy, or particularly military savvy, probably the less prominence given to 'don't load random apps or update them from random sources, they might be compromised' stories, the better.
On the other hand, if they're not tech savvy, they're probably not reading El Reg anyway!
"Additionally, out-and-out jokes will be preceded by the following graphic warning: [JOKE ALERT]"
24 years ago, this was a joke, in 2025, real life Twitter has now decreed:
"From 10 April, accounts which impersonate another user or person must use key words such as "fake" or "parody" at the start of their account names." as Twitterati are no longer capable of recognising parody when they see it unless handed it on a plate.
I get the feeling that might have been said with a hint of irony.
Gosh - is it really over 24 years since https://www.theregister.com/2001/02/01/the_color_of_irony/ ?
Really it's looking at the part of the motor cortex that controls speech (vocal chord muscles, etc.), i.e. the mechanics of speech. I suspect it is a somewhat easier (although still hard!) job to model the intended activity of the vocal tract from that, and hence the phonemes that would have been produced, than the far harder task of deciphering arbitrary thought patterns into a rich vocabulary higher up the chain.
"these thoughts could be vocalised unimpeded by this technology and cause much mayhem."
I think the processing here is on the output side of that filter rather than the input, so you can fortunately still think stuff without it getting picked up and synthesised.