Posts by the spectacularly refined chap

Grandpa-conning crook jailed over sugar-coated drug scam

I'd tend to agree. I was building a small shed about 12 months ago, base was loose stone poured to about that depth or slightly more, into a plastic grid frame. From memory we used 8 25kg "handypacks" at about £4.50 a pop to fill an area of 35 sq ft. Took around 20 mins for two of us to do, probably half of which was simply lugging the bags round to where we were building the shed.

Scaling up by a factor of six gets the cost of stones to around £220 but a one tonne bulk pack would be well under half that. Add at most £30 for HIAB delivery from a local supplier.

Our weed matting came with the plastic base but the same supplier we got the stones from has 10m² rolls for under £12.

Half a man day's labour at £50/hr self employed rates, yes the above estimate looks generous. So with no knowledge of the location or stones used you can't say for certain but certainly worth a closer look.

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

May be easier than a lab in Wuhan...

...the next time they want to microchip everyone.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Re: Just....

If only it was so simple. The issue is that if you want a strong, reliable signal throughout an area that means you will get a weaker, less reliable but still usable signal outside it. That's without considering the effects of distance between the devices, i.e. you may not be able to see your neighbour's access point but you can see his laptop that is connected to it.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

They're all flat...

What happened to properly raked keyboards? I.e. where the actual bases of the key switches are tiered and angled to present each key at the correct height and orientation instead of different styles of keycap for each row.

I get that they're easier to make by building up from a flat circuit board but it means the direction of operation of each row remains the same when the angle they are hit at varies.

Re: Don't get me started..

Why does tenkeyless even exist? Why does 75% keyboards? You're not a pro gamer who needs to get a keyboard into your flight bag, what are you doing?

Because a full size keyboard is too long to fit in a 19" rack drawer.

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

aka The Green Cross Code man.

If you cross him be mindful of those lorries.

Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

Re: Await competition from open source?

Who is going to pay for creating the model, yet alone hosting it?

Open source doesn't really work with projects that need a massive initial investment. It's historically been decades behind the commercial alternatives for e.g. speech recognition, OCR or language translation. AI will be no different.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: Kilo grammes?

I can accept that as a use of an outdated term (CF degrees centigrade), but it is always a single word and always has been.

What happened to the poofreaders?

Kilo grammes?

Is that how the Yanks spell it?

It's KILOGRAMS.

SEC SIM-swapper who Googled 'signs that the FBI is after you' put behind bars

Re: I'm an Author

I've Googled everything from nerve gas types, how to construct a tactical nuclear weapon, napalm and types of plastic explosive. And that was just last Thursday. :P

I remember once I made a Usenet post that mentioned the "World Trade Center" and "US Department of Defense".

The date? September 10, 2001.

I was discussing British Vs American spelling and said how those are proper nouns they don't get translated to British. It was pure fluke those were the examples that came immediately to mind.

Never had any official comeback from it but it beggars belief it didn't pass at least one spook's desk after the following day.

Of course, the day after that the British papers were full of accounts of something that happened at the "World Trade Centre", wherever that is.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: So you forgot how your code worked... hold my beer

I've done that before. The scary thing is when you read the notes and it still doesn't click:

"Yes, I've thought that too..."

"I've noticed that..."

"Yeah, that's the same approach I take..."

"He knows what he's talking about this chap..."

Then you reach the sign off and only then notice it was something you wrote a decade previously.

I'm not sure if it should fill me with confidence or be ashamed of a lack of personal development that I've never found myself disagreeing with me.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Re: Two words:

My Dad did a timing belt change on a Nissan Micra a few years back. Unusually for him he initially went to get it done professionally in the first instance but changed his mind when they quoted £1200 for it. Yes changing the belt means getting the engine out but it isn't as simple as lifting it out - you have to drop the engine and then lift the rest of the car from around it.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Churges and pubs

From my observation it's a rural or semi-rural thing. Whole family goes to church. Afterwards the man takes the kids to the pub for an hour or so while the wife can prepare Sunday lunch without anyone under her feet.

Re: Way Back...

Lots of people die in hospitals too. If you're unwell it's the last place you want to be.

Re: Way Back...

A bit old now but I still like Internet Explorer vs Murder Rate.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Yes, he said that at the very top of the post.

Reminds me I still need to patch up my SE/30. Needed a new CRT which I now have along with replacement parts probably needed by now (caps and PRAM battery) along with some upgrades - MacAlly extended keyboard, memory, 4GB disk... it already has ethernet. If I ever track down a three button ADB mouse for reasonable money it'd be a nice A/UX or NetBSD terminal.

Something about a 9" black and white screen makes them very comfortable viewing late at night.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Doom in Microcode?

More recent x86 can indeed use its on chip cache in place of RAM. That's been the case for 20 years or so for early boot stuff.

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Re: "anyone still making new"

From memory there were definitely two aspects to it, both kernel module to be loaded and changes to how userland is compiled. A quick search reveals no_fancy_math is itself a GCC flag to avoid sin, cos and sqrt functions.

In software those would naturally be Taylor series, to calculate to the limit of precision could take a hundred or more primitive floating point ops.

As you say a trap would be processed without user context, even though it occurs synchronously, which among other things means it is not counted against the process's CPU time. Possibly a half and half approach was taken, trap the simple stuff but ignore the stuff that takes all day. From memory those instructions were present even on the 8087.

Re: "anyone still making new"

Did NetBSD ever actually mandate an FPU on i386? I recall the discussions from the 3.0 or 4.0 era, where essentially support was turned off by default. If you wanted the FPU emulator you needed to compile it yourself and enable appropriate build flags. From memory it was more than a custom kernel build, the userland also needed to be compiled with the appropriate flags set to avoid particular instructions. From very dim memory you're looking at the NO_FANCY_MATH build parameter if anyone wants to search the NetBSD mail archives and try for themselves.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: rotating cat

Good point but the cat would still feel that, it would be -1G neglecting aerobraking compared to what it is used to. If that was a human it'd probably make you feel your intestines were in your stomach and your stomach in your diaphragm.

Dammit, now I'm going to have to find out where I can buy a couple of hundred cats...

Re: rotating cat

I've seen that one too but it struck me as a lousy explanation. I prefer the one I'd heard before seeing the episode, namely the cat instinctively tenses up when it feels acceleration on it. At terminal velocity there is no more acceleration and so the cat relaxes.

That explanation does not require the cat to understand Newtonian mechanics nor have an instinctive understanding of flight and aerodynamics.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

Re: Notice to Air Missions

I thought that too, so I looked it up, Wiki says in the US it was Air Men, then changed to Air Missions but that change itself ended this year presumably because of Mr Fart.

Here in the UK it's supposedly a "Notice to Aviation" but that doesn't account for the M. I assume that it a typo and it's "Notice to Animation" so presumably Nick Park is on the cc: list.

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computer SpiNNaker overheated when coolers lost their chill

Re: EE Department + 100 Pound of Material

Come back when you've built one for a million core supercomputer.

Re: EE Department + 100 Pound of Material

I think he could do it himself, he's a hardware guy. Among other things designing the ultimate ancestor of that chip powering the Pi and he (literally) wrote the book on the architecture.

Perhaps he understands something you don't?

Re: and nothing of value lost

Furber doesn't do hype, this in a research project and decades in the making. Lumping it in with the LLMs that have been pushed over the last few years simply demonstrates your ignorance.

If he wanted to there isn't a semiconductor company out there that wouldn't bite your hand off to hire him at rock star wages. That he chose to spend the second half of his career in academia on projects he sees as interesting and worthwhile instead of raking in the millions should tell you all you need to know.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services is still my favourite to emulate. With rdesktop you can get any resolution you need. NT 4 on a 3440×1440 monitor looks great. So much screen real-estate (the whole purpose for getting a large monitor).

I found it looked long in the tooth even 10-15 years ago. Modern software started assuming higher colour depths long before at least 1080p resolution. With NT you had 256 colour on terminal services and that was your lot. 2000 upped it to 16 bit colour which while not photorealistic at least always looks usable and gets you off those awful indexed palettes.

Tariff-ied Framework pulls laptops, Keyboardio warns of keystroke sticker shock

Well yes. Higher prices, poorer quality and less choice. We Brits voted for it in 2016.

We're doing bigly well from it now.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

For the same money...

... at least assuming $1=£1 ... I can get a lot of 50 Dell Wyse 3040s on eBay. Used, but they tend not to break. It may take a day to derive a stateless Linux or BSD that interfaces with MY OWN infrastructure, e.g LDAP and so on. A bit of work but big savings and in the broader picture likely a lot less effort than trying to integrate these while dancing to Microsoft’s tune.

If you want manufacturers support the Axel Palatine "zero" clients are wonderful if you can host them, in terms of maintenance they are but one step up from serial terminals but the user gets a fairly rich experience. Last time I checked we're talking perhaps £100/seat new.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: Handwaving

Which is an equally handwaving response.

"Boss, you know that £40,000 server we have, can we get another two of them please, one for backup and fail over and another we can play with to see if those systems work as intended?"

"No."

Where do you go from there? This is the default condition rather than the exception in the real world, so get used to it. You can either brush it under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist or you can manage it. There are effective mitigation strategies that can be employed to de-risk such situations but you need to acknowledge their existence first.

Handwaving

It is of course very easy to give a handwaving assertion that a full restore should be tested and tested regularly, but in many cases there is a very practical barrier to that.

Just where are you to going to restore this backup to?

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Shellcode bytes in sequential order

"Shellcode" in this context means the payload used as first point of entry - it's cracker leetspeak. Generally small and difficult to paraphrase. It's the kind of thing that in e.g. a buffer overflow attack you would place in the buffer in question before overflowing the buffer and executing it.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

The advice from our local fire service is not to have a smoke detector in the kitchen as they actively detract from fire safety - if the smoke alarm goes off you want people to pay attention to it rather than sighing "not again".

Free Software Foundation rides to defend AGPLv3 against Neo4j license add-ons

The courts reserve the right of interpretation to themselves. There are times when they will look at the intent of the parties (i.e. correspondence between the parties over terms can inform the court of the parties' mutual intent) but in this case that does not seem to be relevant so it comes down to the wording of the contract and the interpretation the court decides. In the case of a standard boilerplate as opposed to an individually negotiated deal (as here) there is precedent that the court's interpretation of ambiguity is to prefer the second party rather than the drafter or the one that imposed the terms.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Re: Hole reuse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3OKixwUFS0

Re: Hole reuse

That was a sarcastic "if only..." advert. For Heineken or something with a similar brand ethos.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Some weird doublethink here

But courts will not generally consider the ticket price, that is to be agreed between the parties and once the sale is made that is the end of the matter.

In order to claim compensation you must show that not only were the facts misrepresented, but that has worked to your disadvantage in some way - the compo is redress for that disadvantage, not "punishment" for the misrepresentation - that is not within the scope of a civil suit such as this.

If your assertion in one breath is that the difference makes no difference to the extent that customers can't distinguish between them you have an uphill job to show in the next that the customer has been disadvantaged by the very difference you have claimed is not noticeable.

"I could have bought something different and spent less" is not an argument the court will consider - you decided what to buy, how much to spend and if you want to sue you have to show how the difference has worked to your detriment.

Some weird doublethink here

So on the one hand the plaintiff's case is that customers can be duped because they can't tell the difference. On the other they then allege this difference-without-a-difference is significant enough that customers deserve compo.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: one mandatory parameter for format is the drive letter

Only came to DOS at version 3 but there must always have been some form of prompting and interactivity: consider a single floppy system. When entering the command you will need a system disk (or at least a disk with format on it) inserted and only after it has loaded can you swap for the disk you want to format.

Equally you couldn't simply assume the current drive or else you would never be able to format previously unformatted or bulk erased media as you wouldn't be able to set it as the current drive.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Obviously but specifically the Windows 7 "era" of Windows PE is what is interesting.

Alternatively it may simply be they are keeping the interface simple for an instance where it doesn't matter and makes things simpler. Aero requires DirectX which is a big subsystem in and of itself, and drivers for the specific GPU in use. Basic works fine (albeit slowly, but who cares for an installer?) using generic VESA instructions and treating the screen as a dumb framebuffer.

I somehow doubt they would be willing to another kernel maintained to address the quirks of modern hardware JUST for an installer.

Re: Oldie but goodie

You could boot and install SunOS from a tape drive. On a SCSI controller it had no driver for, on to a disk on that same controller. OpenPROM and Open Firmware were designed from the outset to be extensible. No driver for that device? Well the firmware driver for it is written in Forth, we'll just carry on rolling with that in our own hosted implementation when the main OS goes up, the user can install a native driver later.

Where is the boundary of the operating system exactly, especially since the very same firmware was also the boot manager and kernel loader? The endless debates over when Windows became an operating system (as above) are utterly meaningless when considered against all the other alternatives.

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Bi-fold surely

It's a Z shape, not a W.

A regular phone doesn't fold so call it 0-fold.

Other foldables fold once and have one hinge, so 1-fold.

This folds twice and has 2 hinges, so 2- or bi-fold.

So where does tri- come from?

International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15

Re: "The Cupola was one of the last major US contributions added to the ISS"

It's been going on for years, here and elsewhere. I've lost count of how many times I've seen references to the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

Re: ChatGPT/copilot failure rate 100%

Each time I had a question it completely failed. I only went there three times with actual questions, didn't grasp the topic. And came up with solutions with are either invented invented nonsense, or programming solutions which contradict and cannot work. It is still just a mix-and-match tool. If no one had the solution to your problem posted on the net, "AI" won't make it.

Just this, it's similar to Google 25 years ago - before it went crap. Ask it a question and it'll give you an answer. If you're lucky it may in fact be correct. What it will not be is presented in the proper context.

The difference is that old Google would always present the source material front and centre, if the first result happened to be a passing reference that just happened to trip the issue at hand it was easily dismissed. There would generally also be a ten minute read discussing the issue in the round. The problem even there was people couldn't be bothered - far too time consuming - as opposed presumably to going to a library and reading a book on the issue, perhaps actually gaining some insight along the way. So you end up with the single sentence answer used as the definitive without the underpinning to establish if the answer is complete or appropriate or even if the question makes sense.

AI, at least in its current form, is exactly the same but more difficult to diagnose because of the surrounding verbiage. Sure it all looks relevant, but a critical eye often shows it to be nothing more than "Here's what else I know about that topic". No indication as to if your question omits some key understanding that you didn't know to ask about in the first place.

Last summer work was really pushing Copilot - they must have spent money on it - so I figured it was worth playing with. At the time I had just built a new shed from flat pack so asked about lining it. Each time I asked I got a different answer - "So I have the outer skin, the insulation, the breathable membrane and the inner lining, what order to they go in?" would give one. Asking where the damp proof membrane goes gives a different answer, often omitting the breathable membrane unless lead to do so. Following that up with a query about an air gap gives yet more contradictory results. By the end the lining was going be 8" thick and use a third of the interior volume of my shed. Decided to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about instead.

On a similar vein I've just set it a delibrate trap that demonstrates exactly my point: "how do i change the spark plugs on my diesel car?" The answer:

Changing the spark plugs on a diesel car involves a few steps. Here's a general guide to help you through the process:

Preparation: Make sure your engine is cool and disconnect the battery to avoid any electrical issues.

Locate the Spark Plugs: Refer to your car's manual to find the spark plugs. They are usually on the top or side of the engine2.

Remove the Ignition Leads: Carefully remove the ignition leads (thick, insulated wires) attached to the spark plugs. It's best to do this one at a time to avoid confusion2.

Remove the Old Spark Plugs: Use a spark plug socket and an extension if needed to unscrew the old spark plugs.

Prepare the New Spark Plugs: Check the gap on the new spark plugs using a feeler gauge or gap tool. Adjust if necessary according to your car's specifications1.

Install the New Spark Plugs: Apply a small amount of anti-seize compound to the threads of the new spark plugs and screw them into place. Tighten them with a torque wrench to the manufacturer's specifications2.

Reconnect the Ignition Leads: Reattach the ignition leads to the new spark plugs.

Reconnect the Battery: Once all the new spark plugs are in place, reconnect the battery and start the engine to ensure everything is working properly.

Would you like more detailed instructions or a video tutorial to help you through the process?

Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight

Re: flight time

It's more than that, it ceases to be "free" the instant anything moves, i.e. if something "falls" under the simulated gravity the natural tendency is to slow the rotation unless that is compensated for. Conservation of angular momentum.

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

Re: How does the back end support this?

You've never NOT had a bottleneck, unless you paid for a no-contention ISDN, DSL or a leased line, and even then there are no real 100% guarantees.

There is a world of difference between what is technically possible or even commercially available and what you get given in a consumer package that is tailored for superficial claims and a low price.

Of course it's possible. These days it will most likely be via MPLS, if you have two sites already on the same cloud you can ring up your provider and say "we want X Mpbs between these two sites" and they'll give it to you, often the same day if you need it urgently since it is essentially a software reconfiguration. They will guarantee you not only the bandwidth but the latency as well.

Yes, that is GUARANTEED, not aspirational - if you don't get what is specified that is treated as a fault. In the short term it may mean less capacity for the plebs that don't pay for those quality of service guarantees but you'll get what you are promised.

Commercial networking is a whole different world away from home networking toys and services.

Intel rakes in €515M from EU after ancient antitrust fine nixed

Nothing is "fit for purpose" since the expression is entirely meaningless*. Purpose is an abstract noun.

You begin with a false premise. If there was no verb form it would be impossible to REpurpose anything.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Schoolboy error

I visited the UK with my kids and wife a few years ago when they were toddlers.

I've heard of child marriage but marrying a toddler?

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: This keeps happening.

SAGE are the science advisory group to central government. I would hope they wouldn't waste their time with IT and financial auditing in local government.

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

Re: I think I'll wait

Until someone comes out with something that is Intelligent!

I can buy a goldfish at my local pet shop. I'm sure there is somewhere similar near to you.

NASA has just two Mars Sample Return mission lander options left

Simple really...

...attach big rocket motors to Mars and send it on a collision course with Earth. We'll have more Mars samples than we know what to do with.

Of course the rocket would have to be quite large but given his Muskness's ambitions seem to be limited only by the size of his ego there is no problem there.