Posts by Yes Me 1745 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2008
This is fine, but at the same time re-scale your length unit such that the velocity of light is also 1. This greatly simplifies special relativity, and so much else.
(Not a joke. I was also a physicist once, and Otto Frisch, no less, lectured us on relativity with c=1.)
Yes, fusion energy has been 10 or 20 years in the future since ZETA in 1954.
Thorium-based fission has a better chance of providing safe energy:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/how-a-swiss-start-up-wants-to-reinvent-nuclear-energy/47298052.
"The U.K. Highway Code has been changed to give cyclists priority over motor vehicles..."
No, it hasn't. It's been clarified to make it clear that "Give way" means what it says, regardless of the type of traffic crossing your path, and always has done. I learned to drive in the 1960s and I learned that rule then, and it's never changed. It also applies to horse-drawn traffic, of course.
And it's the same in most (if not all) EU countries too.
"There is no more room on this disc. Please select one of these options to continue"
1. Try again (this option will not work).
2. Reformat disk (this option will work, but then nothing will).
3. Delete previous output files (this option will work, but you will lose your job).
4. Replace operating system with Linux (see option 3).
5. Call support (this option will work... once).
yeah. When I had a job that once in long while generated a call at 4 a.m., I soon realised that my software had to be idiot-proof, however many Ph.D.s the idiot had. I really was my own best defence against such calls.
It was, however, hard to be idiot-proof against hard disk crashes, at least in those days.
Upvote, not because of gratuitous "racist" insult but because the US policy of a trade war with China, including the unjustified attack on Huawei, is the worst possible way of dealing with what should be America's largest trading partner. International trade is not a zero-sum game, as tRump clearly believed, and Biden seems to have some of the same infection. Neither will a self-defeating trade war have the slightest impact on the humanitarian issues of concern (any more than boycotting the Olympics will). Try to actually understand the Chinese world view and then you might be able to influence the humanitarian issues.
Instability in the team is much less important than instability in the language itself.
I love Python but it changes too damned often. Accidentally use a new feature and it breaks your code on older run-times. If Rust doesn't change because it's lost some developers, that's a Good Thing. As long as there's somebody around to fix critical security bugs, we're good.
"voting papers were sent out with second class stamps"
After one experience of that, I switched to a proxy vote, which means finding a reliable friend or relative living in the UK. Fortunately that was before the referendum so I got my vote in. Unfortunately that was not enough to avoid the disaster.
Now, about the actual story here. Where do these idiots get off, claiming that problems caused by Brexit are caused by the EU? By simple logic, all problems caused by Brexit were caused by the UK.
Be careful about comparing this case (allegation of corporate fraud, proven in the High Court) against the other (allegation of espionage by a journalist ). I have no idea which way the Assange decision will go, but it isn't remotely comparable, either legally, politically, or ethically.
As already noted, ARPANET was nothing to with nuclear anything.
"I'm pretty damn sure Tim Berners-Lee didn't come up with the web to make pornography widely available..."
No, it was to make it easier for physicists to share information. But the first killer app was of course pornography (as it was for Unix newsgroups, bulletin boards, gopher, and to a considerable extent classical sculpture, Old Master painters, the printing press and photography).
It remains hard to see how a ban on end-to-end cryptography can be enforced. RFC1984 remains valid.
And the Republican Party isn't intent on turning the USA into shit? And, to do business in the USA, you need a bunch of lobbyists in Washington who cosy up to key members of Congress. Same thing, really.
Huawei doesn't actually need to steal Apple technology these days. They have Android (open source, remember) and they will soon have a whole Chinese hi-technology supply chain too.
The strategic loser here is the USA, and it's mainly self-inflicted: by tRump starting a silly trade war and by Biden not stopping it.
No, the phone companies are not on the hook as long as they don't transmit power on the wrong frequencies. As long as they stay on their allocated frequency without sidebands, they're fine with the FCC.
What's not fine is an altimeter that doesn't properly filter out neighboring frequencies. And you can tell from the FAA's list exactly which planes carry such defective altimeters. Bad new for the altimeter makers concerned - it's their product at fault.
"Changing the IPv4 header to allow a bigger address space"
That's called IPv6. Once you change the IPv4 header, it's neither forwards nor backwards compatible. So you get a dual stack model, designed for an indefinite period of coexistence. That's always been the design goal for IPv6 and it's working just fine. Usage is around 38% and regularly increasing (says Google.)
No, it's not rocket science, it's simply mathematically and physically impossible.
IPv4 contains no features that allow backwards compatibility from any future version of IP.
IPv6 could have been designed differently (and many different designs were considered) but none of them would have been backwards compatible. You can argue that IPv6 is too different from IPv4 for your taste, but that doesn't affect the mathematical impossibility of backwards compatibility.
Also, IPv6 just works in consumer situations, if your ISP cares to support it. That's been true for ten years in my personal experience, using Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. The problems are that enterprise network ops people generally haven't been motivated to deploy IPv6, and what Geoff Huston says: there are perverse economic effects of the restrictive nature of IPv4+NAT that give some players every reason to resist progress. Consumers lose.
...can really be a problem. Imagine the scene: me, about 17 years old, just completed building a short wave receiver, mainly from spare parts from old TVs. 1960s, so that meant valves ("tubes") and a 250 v DC line at the back of the aluminium chassis, also recycled from a TV. Needed to tune the little ferrite core in a coil (the only component I'd bought new). Picked up the screwdriver I'd made in metalwork at school: neatly milled brass handle, long thin steel business end perfect for the job. Unless you missed the target and hit the DC line. Fizz. Pop. Twitch! Jump!! I was definitely out for the count for a minute. Fortunately I twitched enough to break the contact. More fortunately, there was no RCD in those days so the power didn't go out and my parents never knew. Switched to transistors ASAP.
Yes, 30 or 40 years ago when they were called "Personnel" which reminded them each day that they were dealing with people. At some point (blame the Chicago School economists, Reagan and Thatcher) they rebranded themselves as "Human Resources" which reminds them each day that what really counts is cost minimisation and shareholder value. I don't know how HR staff sleep at night.
"I am still unclear as to their utility."
I can help with that. They are a massive con trick and anybody who gives money for one might as well have thrown the money out of the car window instead. Of course, they are great for the con artists who manage to sell them.
If you would like an absolutely unique copy of the bits making up this posting, I will be delighted to accept your money and I might even throw in a cryptographic token with it.
Surely you know what that means in English:
"Do not, under any circumstances, even think about contacting Microsoft".
Also, Register, what is this new nonsense with <font size="50">RIDICULOULSY BIG FONTS</font>? Some of us look at this stuff on proper computers, you know, not on stupid little smartphones.
So, somewhere on some disk there is a picture of whoever had the damned cheek to photograph the borkage. Soon they will be arrested and -- why not? -- extradited to the USA under the Federal Espionage Act, for revealing some sort of a defect in critical US-made software to their suspected Chinese acquaintances.
"Huawei is not on trial..."
That's indeed the point. Cisco's lobbyists and their colleagues have been lobbying Congress against Huawei for years, not without success, with unsupported allegations about backdoors in Huawei kit. They were particularly successful with this while tRump was in the White House and got enough pols of both sides to drink their Kool Aid. An enormous commercial success for Cisco and other "Western" companies.
BTW, Mr Google informs me that "Cisco has manufacturing facilities in Asia, China, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe."
"What on earth makes you think he will not [get a fair trial]?"
Very few criminal defendants in the US get a fair trial. A large proportion accept a plea bargain instead: they plead guilty to a lesser crime than they are accused of, to receive a lesser sentence. Since sentences in the US tend to be very harsh, this is known to lead to many guilty pleas by innocent or probably innocent people, frightened of the harsh sentence they might otherwise receive.
But even that doesn't work if the US government wants to make an example of you, which is clearly behind their vendetta against Assange for doing his job as a self-employed journalist. Other journalists have released whistleblower file dumps without a whisper of prosecution.
Um, whose testing process is at fault here, Android or MS? In any case, a test suite that doesn't include checking that emergency calls work in all possible circumstances is not fit for purpose. I dare say several liability lawyers are studying this case night and day looking for the torts.
I suppose the quick fix would be to take your SIM card out? I think that would work in most countries.
"tried to graft static checkers onto C and C++ "
With the emphasis on tried. A great opportunity was lost in the late 1970s, by which time the requirements for a safe programming language were known and the world was ready for "high level assemblers" that were not hardware-specific. Sadly the world chose C, instead of picking one of the various safer systems programming languages that were proposed then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(programming_language)
(The first thing about Mary, I'll tell you cause you asked
Is she don't like when people are always livin' in the past
You know, talkin' 'bout the good old days and how things might have been
If some folks had been different how things might be better now for them
That's what you learn when you've known Mary long as I have)
"Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer."
And often not. The Z3 did not store its program internally in its working memory (the "tape" in a Turing machine). Zuse did not know about Turing machines until after WW II, in fact. Anyway, Z3 was not Turing-equivalent in that sense (program and data stored in the same memory). Eckert and Mauchly invented that idea, von Neumann wrote it down (and knew of Turing's work) but Williams & Kilburn at Manchester actually built the first computer with an internally stored program (running in June 1948). Wilkes at Cambridge built the second one, EDSAC.
Zuse was an inventor, as was Atanasoff. But it took all of those named above to actually build the first two.
You are close to the real danger. All governments would love to control content on the Internet more than they can today. Probably not to the same extent as the Chinese government already does, but still. It's no different than their historical desire to control what's in the newspapers, on the radio, and on TV.
So a proposal from China that asks for too much, that they can tone down and then sell as the result of a great diplomatic success, might be just the ticket for many governments.
The danger doesn't lie in an openly announced conference. It lies in a much more shady organisation calling itself the Internet Governance Forum, and in the ITU in its own Dark Tower of Mordor in Geneva.
20 years of annual reviews and 100 patents and after all that they concluded that he was no good. Boy, they could have saved 19 years' salary and all that legal expenditure on the patents. What mismanagement. All that waste on R&D. No wonder sales are down.
(If there was a Sarcasm Alert icon, I'd have used it.)
What does make sense is vehicular remote control jammers. They are a real thing and are apparently used by vehicle thieves - if the remote is jammed, the driver may believe they've locked the vehicle when they've actually left it open. A lorry park seems a very likely place for a remote control jammer to be used, and of course it's the same frequency band. What I don't know is the range of such jammers.
(I sometimes park in a supermarket car park that is right next to an automatic car wash. Apparently some car washes operate remote control jammers to avoid nasty surprises inside the car wash. There is a region of the said car park where I have to manually lock and unlock the car - the remote simply doesn't work, and if I had an RC drone I bet it wouldn't work either.)
You actually mean you gave ICL money and they gave you an actual One Per Desk? Amazing! I didn't think anyone ever did that. (Apparently some did, though, if I'm to believe Wikipedia.)
Where I worked the ICL rep was desparate to give us some for free but couldn't find a single taker. Everybody wanted a Mac by then.
"Rust is not now, and never will be, machine language. It's a systems programming language."
Which is exactly what C was designed as, but unfortunately, just before structured programming, strong typing, and OO became mainstream thinking. There have been dozens of attempts at fixing this and Rust really looks like the best of the bunch.
"incompletely tested programming lingo"
Really? I don't think so, and Rust is so much more idiot-proof than C or C++ that this seems like a very wise move. As for performance, Rust is good; pretty close to the machine, but protecting the programmer against their own stupidity. By sacrificing backwards-compatibility with C, Rust does what C++ should have done.
As Lance Corporal Jones would say, "Don't panic! Don't panic!"
I understand from Al Jazeera that South Korea is having a supply chain crisis because they are out of urea, which apparently is required to make South Korean diesel engines go. (I am not making this up.) Connecting a few dots, it seems to me that SpaceX can turn used diapers, or nappies if you prefer, into a new business opportunity.
My coat too, please.
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