Posts by vincent himpe

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

Anything AI produces should be Open Source

Free, as in free beer. and Free as in do whatever you want with it.

Of course, the AI should only be trained on a codebase that already fits that description

Another week, another leak for Boeing's Starliner crew capsule

Re: uncrewed

processes ? what processes ?

BepiColombo power struggle could leave probe short of Mercury's orbit

Re: the [...] SEP system has been "glitchy" for a while.

Are they looking for Jinnan 't onnix ? I hope it's not the room temperature water version

Space insurers make record-breaking loss as orbit gets cramped

Space insurance

Essentially gambling. They gamble they can keep your money. Space is hard. If it blows up, it blows up. Better spend money on the design so it doesn't blow up than to gamble with it.

EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs

Re: E-con-nomics

Traditional car makers don't make cars anymore. That stopped long ago. They assemble them from bits and pieces they buy elsewhere. Engine controllers from Bosch, Valeo instrument clusters, Wabco ABS systems, Magneti Marelli alternators. Some of them don't even make their own engines anymore. They buy them from other makers. Engineering is nonexistent. The difference between a model 2024 and last years is 2 extra cupholders and a new ugly pastel paint that looks like something my 3 month old daughter produced after filling up on formula.

European Parliament votes to screw repair rights in consumer toolkits

we'll switch to 008004. muhahahaha

See if you can solder that.

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Run linux they said...

It's very secure they said...

You can see all the source code so you can check for yourself they said...

Unfortunately so can every miscreant on the planet. That bit they left out...

Since the repositories are open it's relatively easy for anyone to modify it. That bit they completely overlooked.

Opening the source is putting the cat next to the milk. Yes you can keep watching the cat...

Allowing anyone to meddle with it, is spoon feeding the cat.

I'm all for open source , live and learn, but lock down the modifications hard. In order to be allowed to make a change use a traceable and verifiable id and lots and lots of other barriers. Better check it's your own cat...

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

Re: what runs on the users machine

Yes and no. The cost of developing these things is staggering and the user base too small. Silicon tools have always been rentware.

Others like Solidworks and Altium are not rentware. They keep working but are frozen in time. You pay a subscription to keep getting updates, new features and bugfixes. Maintenance essentially.

You don't lose your work. I have a 3 year old license of Solidworks. It still works fine. I don't need the latest and greatest. Same for Adobe Creative Suite. Altium is the same deal. It keeps running but is frozen in time. That one i keep up to date as i make money of it. Silicon Design tools are true rentware. Stop paying and it stops working. This is akin to silicon testers where you pay for "test time" : you pay by the hours the machine is running so it is in everyone's benefit to test a given component as quickly as possible.

Re: what runs on the users machine

You clearly have not read my post. Try running CAD applications like Catia, Solidworks, NX , Altium and the likes. That doesn't work over remote desktop or on Wine. Adobe tools ? Rhino ? Anything GPU intensive with realtime 3D doesn't work over a remote desktop or in a browser.

The funny thing is that, traditionally, heavy CAD was always *NIX based : HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. The only ones remaining is Cadence and Mentor, although the PCB tools also have gone windows.

The remaining (commercial) Linux based tools are VERY picky on what distro. Mainly only specific versions of RHEL. Try it on anything else and you get no support at all. You are on your own, don't complain if you encounter issues. You can't do work like that. you are spending more time second-guessing and fixing the apps than actually doing productive work. Application users are not coders or sysadmins. That's a different world. There it DOES work. Outside that realm : not so much.

The Linux desktop ecosystem is simply too fragmented to cover all ifs, thens and buts. Every UI is different, using different runtimes and different libraries. They don't even use the same install mechanisms. Patch and Break. The application manufacturers don't want to deal with it. Windows is easier. Most windows applications are version agnostic. There may be a minimum version but that's mainly it.

The same is true for browser based apps. Remember the misery with having to make websites that could work in IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Opera. For many years you had to code HTML differently and detect the browser used. Fortunately that has mostly gone away. Almost every browser these days uses one of two cores.

Re-unify all the linux UI's around a common core , and have one package installer. That way anything can install anywhere and run anywhere, just like Windows and Mac.

But that goes against the grain of the entire Linux world. And that is the issue. It is too fragmented and too hard for the app developers to support all permutations.

Please don't start about source or open-source. The source of these applications is not available and never will be. And the knock-offs are not the same. Similar isn't good enough. Data exchange and translation are a forever headache and time-hog.

The (desktop application) business world doesn't work that way.

Linux has its place. But not on the desktop. Not until they solve some base things : making sure the existing apps can run. I understand that from a system admin perspective linux has certain advantages. But the desk worker has nothing to do with that. He/She needs to be productive. They have nothing to do with the OS. The OS is only there to run applications and access file systems over a network. We will run the OS required for the application pool needed.

Re: Applications that, often, only exist for the microsoft

That's the backend. i'm talking front end, that what runs on the users machine. Linux is fine ticking away in a server room somewhere. User facing ? Not so much.

Re: Repeat after me:

Would that be : the ability to run EXISTING APPLICATIONS without hassle ?

Businesses don't use operating systems to do work. They use applications. Applications that, often, only exist for the microsoft operating systems. There may be "similar" applications but they are NOT THE SAME. Retraining the workforce , changing business operations. Not going to happen.

I'm in the technical domain. Catia, Siemens NX, Solidworks, Altium and lots of other CAD. sorry bub , windows only ... Running it under Wine doesn't work.

Sandra Rivera’s next mission: Do for FPGAs what she did for Intel's Xeon

full circle (twice)

intel spun of their CPLD as Altera, bought it back, now spits it back out.. That's twice...

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

Re: there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

I tried Wine. Doesn’t play nice with CAD aplications like Solidworks or altium. Same for things that need parallel port access (yeah i have several device programmers that still run off a EPP port so i need to keep some machines around with an ich9 or old style pci slot.). Wine is not emulation, it’s also not complete.

Re: there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

Ok. So recompiling the source is required. Any idea where i can get this “source” for Solidworks, adobe illustrator, altium designer, rhinoceros, dataman and hilo programmers and all the other software i use ?

I think you can see where this is headed : nowhere. There is no “alternative” to windows cause you simply can’t run applications. Switching applications is not an option. I’ll stick to windows 10 for now. All my software runs fine on windows 7 or later.

Re: there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

All the programs i use are 64 bit. (none will run on 32 bit versions like XP or 7 in 32 bit) .

Re: @vincent himpe - there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

i only want to change the OS, so i don't need Microsoft anymore. I don't use any Microsoft applications (no office) , only their OS to run applications built by others. The file browser is about all i use from the OS to do basic file operations like moving , copying , renaming.

there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there

Can i bring my existing set of application binaries and/or and installers ? I'm interested. This would probably interest many other people too.

I keep hearing about these alternatives a lot, but i must be looking at the wrong ones since i can't run any of the applications i already own. Please help ?

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

where is the time

a bootloader had to fit in the first 512 bytes of a floppy.... now something is considered "small" if it "only" needs 3 gigabyte of storage.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Re: Thanks for nothing

the safest device is one that is switched off and stays off

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

i know places where they have CNC drills (Excellon) that are still driven by paper tape wired to a NOVA or a PDP-9 ( not an 11 !). some machinery is very long life and very expensive to replace. it's completely amortized , will outlive its users.

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

Re: Let's go Brandon.

i happen to live in such an area. (Behind yosemite : Madera) The only grid is the electrical, strung from wooden poles (that get hit by cars and at least one a year there is an outage.) Own well, check. own septic, check. propane? have a tank. Cell phone ? spotty at best. The "denser" areas have comcast (tv and internet) and that is your only option. even ADSL is not available. you are lucky to get POTS. The only internet options are Hughes net (very expensive and 10mb/s if you are lucky. if it rains: adios internet) or the newer mobile internet over 5G ( that also raises lots of protest .. ooh 5G we're all getting irradiated and tracked) and that is also spotty (see cell phone coverage). It's all farmland and homes as spaced very far apart and in clusters of 2 to 10. So starlink would be perfect. Have one access terminal and share with neighbours. Starlink has the ability to do that. Thy have been doing it for the tribes. One terminal and a network switch. https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-access-to-spacexs-starlink-and-says-its

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: Encoders

and how many supercells are there in the pack ? not thousands.

Again , i can't speak for every manufacturer how they do it. I only know how the ones i worked for did it. I've worked on several, for cars, space (launcher, rocket and payload) and aircraft. Same for the encoder. You can use contactless encoders that sense the magnetic field ( not hall ) . Use rogowski coils for current and melexis field sensors for rotation. I'm well aware how BMS systems work. . Matched cells in a supercell, each individual cell bonded with a fusable wire. If the cell shorts or is mechanically damaged the fuse will blow and the cell detaches from the pack. Voltage does not change but the max current does. During charge the cell voltage will climb faster for this supercell and the load balancer will kick in on this supercell first. This gives you feedback of how many cells are lost in the supercell. There are techniques to determine the overall state of the chain.

Re: Encoders

Some technical information to get rid of misconceptions:

1) Encoders are not used for rotor position (for exactly the reasons you mention : slipping. The three phase motor has a PWM drive mechanism using half bridge topology. A hardware block monitors the current in each winding. The hardware can predict, based on the currents, when the magnetic field will cross a pole. For a very short time (called the commutation window) the PCM drive to the winding is stopped by tristating the H-bridge. A voltage comparator checks when the polarity of the back-emf changes. At this eact point the rotor has passed the winding and commutation in the H-bridge resumes.

This is nothing new. It has been done in harddisks for 20 years. It's called a torque optimiser. No need for magnet sensors, magnetic couplings.

It used to be you needed access to the center tap of the motor but there is a solution to create an artificial center tap using a resistive bridge and some sample and hold amplifiers.

2: There is no thousands of sensors in a battery pack. i can't speak for all batteries but the ones i know of have only a few tens. the heat gradient over short distance is not large due to the thermal conductivity. Also the cell topology not a parallel lump of strings. you would lose the stirng if one cells goes out or if the fuse blows. They are a single string- of parallel cells. more like a heavy chain. each cell has its own fuse in the form of a bond wire. if a cell gets damaged the fuse will pop and the cells isolates itself from the parallel bank. In practice they use banks and chains made from banks. if you make strings of individual cells you would lose the entire string. if a single cell goes out in a bank the rest of the bank still works and does not interrupt the string so you don't lose the string.

The battery management system can sense the loss of cells in a bank and instructs the balancer circuitry to take this into account.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Long ago, in a design center far far away .. (chip design that is. running on Calma and ComputerVision systems driven by a Data General Nova . this is late 80's)

One day we found that the computer running the workstations had rebooted. Shruggingly written off as a one-time event. A week later the same happened. And the week thereafter and the week thereafter ...

Every thursday morning we found the machine had restarted. Strange. Service was called in and they couldn't find anything wrong. It couldn't be a scheduled job : the thing didn't have a clock or a way to schedule things. Files were saved with a version number that incremented upon every save. No time/date stamp.

Next thursday the sysop stayed late to monitor the machine from his desk in the aquarium. This was the era where the computer rooms were all floor to ceiling glass walls so you could proudly display the hardware to visitors. We users called it the aquarium. The sysop always said the fish were on the outside.

Somewhere late the cleaning crew for the office got in and sure enough: one of the cleaners entered the "aquarium" and started dusting. The nova machine had a nice ledge with a bunch of toggle buttons. out comes the dusting brush .... and mystery solved. It turned out there was a problem with the machine. One of the toggles was a halt/reset and it was a bit "sensitive". They replaced that front panel , and then put a piece of perspex over it, and told the cleaners to only collect the printouts but not dust anything in there.

Note : if i remeber correctly this things was a Nova 3

Linux 6.4 debuts after literally unremarkable development push

PCMCIA

Pulse code modulation central intelligance agency ?

or

People Cant Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms ?

The Balthazar laptop: An all-European RISC-V Free Hardware computer

Re: escape meta alt ctrl shift

meh, why all those keys ? use a stenograph keyboard. better even : only a 1 and 0 key. use binary encoded ascii.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: When I were a lad

ones and zero's. sometimes we didn't even have zero's, we had to use the letter o. or i if we ran out of 1's.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Sure ...

The day commercial software has been ported to it.

There simply is too much software that is windows only. And no, alternatives are not an option. Businesses use application xyz and will not switch to something different. The invested time and money and retraining is simply too large and disruptive. Hardware and OS is much cheaper than retraining the workforce

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

Re: Nothing much against Win11 but can't see the point!

Os's don't have any value. The programs that run on it do. The OS is nothing but a layer between the hardware and applications , manages memory , storage, peripherals, a user interface and connectivity. Most of it (except the user interface) is invisible.

A perfect operating system would completely stay out of my way, let me run the applications i need, keep my data secure ( not only from external influences but also from hardware failures). It would eb invisible, need no configuration and just work. Windows 10 Enterprise comes pretty darn close.

I use the OS needed for the task at hand. I run NX, Solidworks, Altium and a bunch of other CAD and technical software. Windows. 7 year old Zbook G3 Win10. works like a champ.

I surf the internet , do online banking , create some videos and edit some photos : MacOs on a Mac ( a used one, 2015 model)

Social media and other spielerei : ipad

Phone ? that's for making phone calls. (and email / text if really needed, or the odd quick picture)

Windows 11 ? no thanks. Both my laptops are not able to run it. Don't need it, the applications run fine on 10. They even run on 7. So until the performance really becomes sluggish , or the applications absolutely need 11 , there will be no hardware upgrade. And if there is an upgrade to new hardware, by then there will be machines available that can run it.

Linux kernel's eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses

oh goody

read mouse coordinates, alter to the location of the "YES" button then send click ,or spacebar . keylogger ? check !

Ransomware gang threatens 1m-plus medical record leak

most vulnerable

the patients ? or the hospitals ?

The patients have no say in this. it's the stewards of the data

PyPI warns of first-ever phishing campaign against its users

it's python

pythonesue should be physhing...

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

what ?

no Ook ?

what has the world become.

GitHub Copilot may be perfect for cheating CompSci programming exercises

Re: how many times has your boss asked you

ah ,maintaining slovakias prime lens manufacturers codebase. Father Jack will drink to that !

how many times has your boss asked you

- to write a recursive Fibonacci sieve ?

- hand calculate the eigenvector of a matrix ?

- solve an integral ?

- make a perfect 1inchx1cinhx1inch cube using nothing but a hacksaw , a file and a ruler. ?

the answer : NEVER

Industry spends billions on dollar to have cutting edge tools to do that work. Draft it in solidworks, send it to CNC.

Copilot is nothing but a tool that does the tedious repetitive stuff, so you can focus on the real work. So yeah, allow it in the classroom. Teach them how to use it to their advantage.

Too much time in education is spent in memorizing stuff that can easily be looked up, and solving little meaningless puzzles. You might as well fill out the sudoku and crosswords.

Teach the APPLICATION of things and show how it is used in the real world.

Drop a bunch of abstract formula and the students can solve them. Give them a real world problem and they don't even know what formula apply.

Microsoft looks beyond the US with Windows Subsystem for Android

great

now we'll have to wipe flappy bird off the machine , next to minesweeper and clippy...

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

archaic technology

there really is nothing better these days ?

Self closing pitot tube ? once on the ground the opening closes itself so nothing can get in, not even dust.

Airpressure opens it. A sensor lets you know the tube did not open. Five fold reduntant sensors so if one malfunctions the flight can proceed. As a plane speeds up on the runway the air pressure opens the entrance. There could be a motorized override to perform selfcheck or open in case of issues. Airpressure and motor should perform an active open function. Motor can not "close" the intake. if the intake does not close after landing : flag maintenance error.

i don't know. just freewheeling here.

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

So it is ...

a brown note. the harddisk craps itself.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

i see two root causes

- no testing of the applications : blame on the city authorities

- apps not running on other browser : blame on browser makers. Yes, you read that right. Browser makers.

first convince all application makers to port their stuff to linux

Then we'll talk.

Linux on the desktop works if all you do is browse the web, write letter , dabble in spreadsheets, and email and some video conf. Code writing and developing for linux will work fine as well.

Step outside that and its crickets. Heavy cad (mechanical , board design , electronics) , development tools for fpga and processors, debuggers, emulators, tracers, test equipment . It's windows and windows only. You may find some niche stuff but you are shortchanging yourself if you go that route, those tools are not up to par with the real thing. The industrial stuff is all windows based. and that stuff does not work well under wine or even in a virtual machine. CAD heavily relies on workstation grade graphics cards like Quadro's. You don't want layers of foreign software in between. Quadro's are bought because of their specific drivers for the high-end applications.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

milk the cow

That is what manufacturers are gunning for : milking the cow. Soon there will be a day where even furniture will be on subscription. Wanna sit on the chair to eat breakfast ? Pay to retract the huge screw sticking out of the middle of the seat. Pay per minute. Don't pay in time and the chair will literally screw you.

India's central bank calls for cryptocurrency ban

I'll trade 1kg of fishes (head and tail removed) for 1kg of bread.

anything else is not worth the paper it is printed on or the flipflops that store the bits...

Dmitry Rogozin sacked as boss of Russian space agency Roscosmos

the trampoline works ...

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Gary Lives !

At least his OS does ... time to dust of my PL/M manual ...

A language where you can write things like

if if = then then then = else else else = if

There are three variables : if, then and else. The parser understands what is an operand and what is a variable. It also understands when = means "assign" and when it means "compare" . Take that, c and all those other language that still cannot make that distinction.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

not taking anyone's side here. but why is it so hard for twitter to give the numbers ? you'd think that a company that is monetizing data mining (that's what all social media platforms do ) would know exactly what is going on so they can optimize revenue.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

as long as the plane comes with a couple of air to surface missiles.... get the riffraff off the road and out of my way

well... there's gas , and road tax. they are recurring costs to use the car you already paid for...

typed from my smartphone , on a cellphone subscription and other subscriptions

it's become and endless "milk the cow" game and finding more ways to milk.

if you don't pay in summer they turn them ON

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

cloud computing ?

CLOWN computing !

i learned this long ago. i had a roku 1001 audio player. they pulled the plug on it and decided to go the video way.

from then on : no more devices that need the internet.

Surveillance ? get a NVR on-premises. yes you can contact it from the outside world , but there is no command and control server. the machine has its own harddisk and does not need internet to record. Amcrest

America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers

Re: Not enough EE’s to expand onshore chip design, Why?

recently ? you must not have used FPGA then. Terasic had FPGA development kits for 50$ , in 2001. that's 21 years ago....

They have kits today with huge FPGAs for 100$. that is still cheaper than a computer.