Posts by vincent himpe

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

of course they will offer payment...

but since the other party can't accept it ... winner winner.

Astra fails, sends NASA's Tropics weather satellites back to Earth

Re: "Space is hard."

ask the whale .. or the petunia

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

universe to webb telescope :you wan tot study me ? i throw dust in your face !

US Copyright Office sued for denying AI model authorship of digital image

"human being". so a monkey or an elephant (they make paintings) cannot own a copyright... They cannot be considered author nor owner so those paintings are basically fair game.

I'm going back to the planet i came from and i'm taking all my idea's with me...

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

no sppliances ? -fail-

so if my refrigerator, dishwasher, garage door opener or tv breaks i'm SOL.... even my blender. bye bye margaritas ...

luckily i still have my soldering iron.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

Re: systemd

In soviet linux you are the computer and you emulate the system in your mind. The cat ate the last mouse and the monitor only shows empty wodka bottles.

Re: @FirstTangoInParis

real programmers go straight from pencil written opcodes to mask rom. and it works right first time. if it doesn't : it was spec'd wrong

which distro ? which UI ? vi or emacs ? systemd or not ? what color scheme ? what package manager ?

once you answer all of that then find out the application you need doesn't exist on linux....

Linux Lite 6.0: It's quite pretty, but 'lite' it is not

how many more package managers do we need ?

Why can't we have a simple setup file like on windows or mac ? Applications should be distributed with everything they need and not have to pull in a metric crapload of other stuff. they should also install in their own container and not throw their stuff everywhere or modify the system.

To run x you need to first install y, z, q , p , r (but only 2.9 unless your kernel is 3.21.4.q.left and the wind comes from the east on a tuesday , but not in april or if the year is divisible by 5 , unless your neighbor just made a fresh cup of tea.. then it is ok to click cancel to proceed -facepalm-

.

There are so many flavors out there. this only runs on that, this thing only uses that package manager ... it's infuriating. Self deploying is what we need. without dependencies or prerequisites. the install package contains everything.

California Right-to-Repair bill quietly killed in committee

they did it wrong

They should have mentioned guns. Right to repair guns (and other stuff) . It would have passed in the blink of an eye

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

I like option 0

1) Avoid all the niche efforts.

2) Firstly, they're small.

3) Not many people use them

4) You'll have difficulty finding people to ask for help

5) third-party hardware and software probably won't work out of the box

6) and if you ask the vendor for help

7) game or a graphics card or a printer

8) Stick to the mainstream."

Windows and MacOS it is then.

1) not niche

2) not small (trillion dollar companies)

3) many people use it

4) easy to find someone who knows

5) third party hard and software do work out of the box.

6) There is an actual vendor as opposed to pet projects made in somebodies spare time

7) ooh . que the binary blob crusaders.

8) windows and MacOS it is then.

Then gain, already knew that. Linux on the desktop . Lol.

Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m

what's the function of that giant metal ball ? burning money ?

DuckDuckGo tries to explain why its browsers won't block some Microsoft web trackers

we don't track*

use us, everyone else is evil

*except where contractually obligated.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

braille packages doesn't do any good unless you have a braille interface so they can "read" by touch.

With the current cpu horsepower i'd expect that speech to text, and text to speech would be way more advanced by now.

doesn;t have to be alexa. speech to text. dictate the letter.

blind people don't even need monitors , why do they need a full blown graphical user interface ? think about it !

This is like making shoes with an attached staircase bolted on top of a car ... so you drive upstairs

Isn't that the real problem ? Should we maybe rethink how to build a user interface for disabled people ?

Alexa is far more useful for blind people (as a user interface) you can talk to it and it responds. no keyboard, mouse, monitor needed.

Re: Such a chatastrophy

all this can easily be solved by living next to a river or creek. just make sure you are upstream from the neighbours.

Re: Such a chatastrophy

Quote : Breaks.

That's my main gripe. why can't they make a car that does not break ? Then gain, the repair people may not like that...

"GNOME 2 was reasonably good for people without eyesight"

on the risk of opening a flamestorm : Why do they need a graphical user interface ?

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Re: A great tool

Now they do the same with python... let's make a program to solve xyz, which then becomes a maintenance headache as there is no specification of what it should do, and has never been verified to do actually that.

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Re: Fighting the wrong people in the wrong place

Drivers run on the OS side. Firmware runs on the hardware. The os interacts with the driver, the driver talks to the firmware on the device. Even if you had the source to the firmware there is didly squat you can do with it as you have no idea how the hardware works and you don't have the toolchain or compilers to build it anyway.

Firmware is detached from the OS

You need that firmware irrespective of what operating system you run. That firmware is not part of the operating system , it is part of the device.

Good luck getting the source code to the firmware of a hardddisk or even your mouse or keyboard.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: Microsoft's dominance stems from their documentation

but but but ... there are all these user forums no? Where everything ends up in endless discussions of Vi vs emacs, KDE vs gnome and what color scheme is best...

Oh you are using flavor x of linux , should be using flavor y...

It's 2022 , can we move past it?

People use run operating systems. They use applications

The operating system is just a layer to run programs.

Sometimes the application you want to use is Mac only. Sometimes it is windows only. If it's open source good chances are it runs on all.

The above distills as follows

- if you have a Mac you can run native mac and open source programs.

- if you have a windows box you can run native windows and open source programs.

- if you have linux ... you can maybe run open source provided you can find the right package installer and the right flavor of linux. (yeah yeah i hear you , you can compile it from source. but 99.9% of computer users don't know how to do that)

So why do you need linux on the desktop ? (as a average user)

looking at the stuff i use on a daily basis linux has nothing to offer.

Some are windows only. Solidworks , Altium ,Office. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom , Illustrator others are ported to windows or exist on both platforms ( Altera/Intel FPGA software, several cross compilers, notepad++, inkscape ,daVinci video editor,) I use plenty of stuff that comes from the linux world, but as a windows port.

I find these endless discussions about what flavor-du-jour OS is best a waste of time. The best OS is the one that runs the programs you need. For some that is Linux, for others that is MacOs and for yet others that is Windows. To each his/her own.

It would be nice the have programs that do not depend on an operating system. Run anywhere. Then you would have a real fight at hand. The best OS would simply be the fastest, most stable and secure. OS makers would compete purely on the performance of the OS, not on the basis of available applications.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Now there's an idea. if we fit every cow in the world with a network transmitter. And we make inter-cow data exchange using line of sight lasers. No need to shoot stuff into space. Easy to maintain : grab the cow , replace transmitter. Use the horns as antenna masts.

The Cow Network.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

First take away their user account ( or at least set it in read-only mode) , then call them into HR ...

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

Re: gcc Experience

15 years. you have not even broken the 2000 barrier. the OP is talking mid 80's ! that's 35+ years ago !

provided you have enough closing parentheses for opening ones , got all your semicolons in line and told the compiler every time when you means assign and when you mean compare. ( = versus == )

I still cannot understand how so many languages cannot figure this simple thing out. This was solved in many older languages than C. Even every , often scoffed on, Basic compiler/interpreter can do it.

Re: C of the '80s

So we'll build it for an imaginary computer with an imaginary instruction set and then shoehorn that imaginary binary onto real hardware ? -FAIL-

THAT is the problem with all those catch-all compilers (and languages) we have today.

They compile for something with an architecture that does not exist and an instruction set that does not exist.

I've picked apart output of several compiler for embedded systems. Sending "Hello world" to a serial port. strings are null terminated like c.

in pseudo code :

string = {"hello world",0x00} // 12 bytes of rom space , null terminated string (11 chars + null)

MOV DPTR #string. // load the address of the string into the data pointer

:next_char

SNZ @DPTR // skip next instruction if not zero

JMP exit

:wait_for_port

SBC SCON,02 // Skip next instruction if bit clear register Serial CONtrol , bit 2

JMP wait_for_port

MOVI TX @DPTR // send character to TX register Move with post-increment DPTR

JMP next_char // see if there is something else

:exit

I've seen compilers that produce this : ( because they did not know the MOVI instruction)

MOV TX @DPTR // send character to TX register Move with post-increment DPTR

INCR DPTR

or this (because they did not understand DPTR is a hardware register and treat it as a variable)

MOV TX @DPTR // send character to TX register Move with post-increment DPTR

MOV A, DPTR // move DPTR to accumulator

INCR A // increment accumulator

MOV DPTR,A // move accumulator back

On a harvard machine you have dedicate mov operation that change depending if you are moving

ram to ram

ram to register

register to ram

io to ram

ram to io

rom to ram

rom to io

I've seen compilers that take that string in rom , allocate 12 bytes of ram , copy the string from rom to ram and send it out. Slightly smarter ones do it character by character but still need a rom to ram copy first.

Those are clear examples of the misery with generating intermediate machine code. They have one print function that is designed to take a ram pointer. Try to get a string from rom and it needs copying over first.

Optimization is not something to be done afterwards. Optimization needs to be done first. see what instructions are in the machine and map the source in the most efficient way.

Jump tables are a prime example of that. Switch case statements can easily be translated into jump tables. Depending on the selected branch all you do is add an offset to the code pointer so it lands in the jump table . There it finds a single move operation with the new target.

Your switch case statement translates to a constant speed operation (one ADD , one JMP), no need for testing anything.

Now, i do realize this is different on machines with different architecture or dynamically loaded programs. The above is just an example of how bad compilers can be when doing the compile to imaginary machine"

It pays to take a look at compilers that make code for one and one system only. They can heavily optimize for the architecture. Portability is in the source code, No need for an intermediate layer.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Umm

What's wrong with Goto ? your nicely crafted C code gets translated into assembler.... which is full of 'goto'. JMP operations in all their flavors and variants are nothing but a goto.

your nice do loops and while loops and switch cases all get converted to JMP operations.

Any complex case statement gets converted to a jump table.

There are even specific instruction like SZ : Skip next opcode if A register is zero .

SZ

JMP true_label

JMP false_label

if the register is zero the next instruction (jmp true_label) is skipped so the JMP false_label is executed

if non-zero the next instruction is executed. so it jumps to the true_label.

There is your if-then-else.... nothing but a conditional goto

All your subroutines and calls and any other stuff is translated into nothing but Goto, simply because that is how processors work !

C fits like pliers on a pig for most processors. The concept of heap and stack and streams works on a pdp-11. Not so much on any other architecture. Tape and punch card streams have gone the way of the dodo. Its all block access these days.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Re: "COBOL-2002, which introduced object oriented programming"

object oriented APL ... you'll need a 790 key keyboard...

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

so

after inventing the keyboardless screen (tablet) they now make a screenless keyboard ?

next patent : combining one of each into a device.

FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years

single tasking ?

LOVE IT ! . no background tasks, annoying popup crap, updaters, spyware or other nags that steal cpu cycles from the program i am running !

Microsoft details 'planet-scale' AI infrastructure packing 100,000-plus GPUs

deep thought...

planet size ?

surely a design by mice...

Putting on my Joo Janta Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses , turning on my Somebody else's Problem generator and getting out of here with my infinite improbability drive.

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

Re: @not Irrelevant

People don't run operating systems. People run applications. If an application is tied to one operating system that's where the problem lies. Some stuff is windows only. And for some of those applications there simply is no equivalent on other operating systems.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

printout

on paper. you can ocr it when it needs restoring. but use acid free paper and stay away from soy ink. calligraphy on sheepskin worked for thousands of years. chisel and granite if you need longer.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

in the good old DOS days

i wrote a program to do some data logging on a piece of lab equipment. It ran on a machine that only had floppy drives. Data was stored on drive B.

if the disk was full it would keep coming back to the same dialog. Disk is full. please replace the disk. The program would not proceed until it had successfully saved the file. The machine would not go on so the operator was forced to replace the floppy. doing nothing kept coming back to that screen. (the data was actually stored temporarily on the first floppy. it was copied using a dos copy operation and then removed from the first floppy. So even if you power cycled the machine you got the prompt as the temp file was still there. The first floppy was not accessible by the user ( hidden inside the machine).

Re: Simples...

export ? all other programs call that "save as"

Right-to-repair laws proposed in the US aim to make ownership great again

Re: No business like Agribusiness

make that an 8 track... they are behind the technological curve

Comcast fixes broadband cables 'peppered' with holes after Oakland drive-by shooting

Re: Wow.

better: mandate insurance. Each gun needs to be insured for owner liability. to be paid just like car insurance : every 6 months, per gun.

the insurance industry would destroy the gun industry ...

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

all you needed was win95 and solaris

we had big filers running solaris and samba

grab a windows 95 computer , hit escape to bypass login screen. make new user on the windows box named 'root' with blank password

Connect to filer by mapping network drive.

Drag and drop folders around. copy a bunch of pictures from windows to the filer.

all that stuff was done by 'root'.

The cause was a bug in solaris whereby it did not re authenticate. it said you are root over there, so you are root over here...

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

Re: Pre order now - WiFi 8 availability soon

ooh .oooh .. oooh .. i know something .. Wireless USB ! that went nowhere...

Or Bluetooth. A technology that will replace all wires so you can send your pictures wirelessly to your printer. By the time it as ready we all had 3 megapixel cameras and it would take 1.7 minutes to send one image to the printer. Bluetooth is only good for earpieces and some small stuff. It was deemed problematic for mice and keyboards as it is a power hog. a bluetooth device could only run for about 2 months off a set of batteries. same batteries would run a 458MHz keyboard for 5 years ... ( bluetooth needs an always on radio link. only later revisions solved that ...)

nope.

my whole house is wired and anything wifi is switched off. why ? so the neighbors can't bog down or leech off my network !

That is the problem with wifi. you may have high bandwidth but there are only 11 , 15 or 16 channels in the spectrum. ( depending on where you live). I can see at least 20 different routers so some of these are 'sharing' a channel ( time multiplex) .

Re: You can pry the ethernet cable out of my cold dead hands!

you can have my 75/1200 modem when you pry it out of my cold hands ( or when i move to bora-bora to spedn the rest of my life on the beach , far away from anything IT)

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

here is some free software

after a couple of years : can we get some money for it ? we like to eat too.

THAT are the problems ( giving away stuff for free and needing food ) They are, highly likely, mutually exclusive. Once we solve that the market will thrive.

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

Re: 'CFO's

Those are government, not businesses

and just like that ...

reality struck a blow.

What did they expect ? They flog this stuff as 'free' and then complain when you don't get paid. Like it or not the world does not work that way. Nobody will throw peeled grapes in your mouth out of the goodness of their heart. They may pay you if they need something only you can provide. If you offer it for free .. don't come crying.

The only concept that did work (to some extent) was shareware.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: how hard can it be

Who says the clock has to rely on gps ? there is plenty of other systems out there.

And time is not a problem only in gps. we had a year 200 problem and the unix year rollover problem is also looming... many programs have trouble with time/date stamps. since all computers ( well, most) these days are 32 bits .. two words can give you to-the-second time.

how hard can it be

5 bit for hours (24 format), 6 bit for minutes , 6 bit for seconds , 5 bits for day (0 to 31 where zero is invalid), 4 bits for month , 3 bits for day of week . gives 29 bits. the remaining 3 can be a checksum , an am/pm flag (even though we have 24 hr format) and a leapyear flag.

This gives one unsigned 32 bit number. if you don't want to muck with signs : ditch the am/pm flag and leave msb always at zero.

The second 32 bit number is the year. (starting at 0). The sun will be halfway to going supernova by the time we run out of bits ...

Come on , get it done.