* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

Tom 7

Re: Ticket master

That would be because Ticketmaster bought them up! You only just fed the mouth that bit you.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Tom 7

Re: attempt at art

Those aborigines have ruined lots of overhangs in Australia!

Tom 7

Re: "...the Department won't reveal its location "

You are assuming that it, unlike most art, has any noticeable weight at all,

Apple's global security boss accused of bribing cops with 200 free iPads in exchange for concealed gun permits

Tom 7

Re: Why didn't he just buy out of state?

Under federal law, private-party sellers are not required to perform background checks on buyers. Private sellers are also not required to record the sale or ask for identification.

Apparently you have to be from the state the gun show is in - but the above seems to suggest that the seller doesnt have to check.

Tom 7

Re: Why didn't he just buy out of state?

I was under the impression you can buy a gun at a 'Fair' without any need for registration or anything else.

Intel chief pens congratulatory letter to President-elect Biden urging work on immigration and domestic manufacturing

Tom 7

Thats till about till the heatdeath of the universe at prison pay rates.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

Tom 7

But the power savings are unbeatable

when switched off.

NEC to sell the accelerator cards it puts into supercomputers – for about $11,000 a pop

Tom 7

2.45 TFLOPS for $15000

or 4 TOPS for $60 for a Coral. OK apples and oranges but seems to be some disparity.

Come to think of it the GPU on the pi Zero is 24Gflops so 100 of them (<$1000)

Tom 7

Re: Pi??

You can add a PCIe bus to a Pi but you need to solder stuff the the main board.

Linus Torvalds worried Linux kernel might get messy around Christmas

Tom 7

That would be the sensible thing so Xmas will go ahead with free common sense. Sorry free of common sense.

Tom 7

Re: Call me silly

I'm waiting for people to complain they cant read the binary logs their fridge magnets are filling up the cloud with.

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Tom 7

Re: I found the learning curve

And its the make a complicated problem seems simple that means real live dead people fall off the bottom of XL files.

Tom 7

Re: I found the learning curve

Writing simple software for simple problems is easy. Writing simple software for complicated problems is a lie.

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

Tom 7

Re: What ads?

I got the impression they were going to insert the adds into the video. A little harder to stop.

BBC picks SiFive RISC-V chip for Doctor Who programming-for-kids kit – with Jodie Whittaker narrating

Tom 7

Re: Because?

You could stick a Pi Zero in a plastic case with a lot of LEDs and other stuff for far less.

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Tom 7

Re: What about that special Friday?

The White House got its name when they had to paint it to cover up the burn marks from when the British set fire to it.

Google yanks Apple Silicon Chrome port after browser is found to 'crash unexpectedly'

Tom 7

Re: We have become spoiled

I was surprised last week when I crashed Firefox. Not sure what killed it but I was on a FB group with 2500+ members and was trying to scroll to the bottom so it may be lack of memory (I've only got 16G). Even so it shouldn't crash but that's the first time in as long as I can remember - and given some of the shit I write in JS its bloody extraordinary!

Behold, the Ultimately Large Telescope: A revived proposal for a 100-metre liquid-mirror star scanner on the Moon

Tom 7

The spinning fluid can be on top of the nearly formed shape and with the right fluid can be far more accurate than any solid mirror. A structure that approximates the parabola when spun seems to me something that can be constructed with relative ease and a thin layer of the fluid floating on top will provide as near perfect a mirror as you can get. As for what you are looking at I'd imagine the secondary mirror shown in the image would be replaced with a movable 'receiver' that can be moved around to provide a few tens of degrees of potential targets. That's a lot of potential targets.

America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables

Tom 7

Re: Frayed knot

What do you think the sun is for?

Tom 7

Re: Frayed knot

At least we'd be safe from space ants.

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Tom 7

What we need is a new cookie monster.

Not one that eats cookies but one that eats just enough of them to make them taste really bad with apple sauce.

Other evil empires exist.

Can it be bad to totally screw up their advertising targeting?

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Tom 7

Re: How

When EE took over Orange they turned my voicemail back on. I got a voicemail message and went straight to turn voicemail back off. Now every time turn my phone on I get a message saying I've got a voicemail and should I be dumb enough to click through it tells me I dont have voicemail services. I occasionally get EE involved and they just tell me to turn voicemail back on and read the message and delete it - this will of course cost me money (PAYG as no signal in house) to get rid of something I never wanted.

Looking forward to this new google free android though - if they get on for my 2014 phone!

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Tom 7

I've had the pleasure of opening a box left in the print room to discover its absolutely full of blank cheques AND the knowledge to print them so they could be cashed. Just a moments temptation - nothing to match the finding an XK8 convertible with the engine running far enough away from the bank where the owner was getting some cash from the cash machine to get in and drive away cleanly and without recognition.

Tom 7

Re: Sightseeing where it's not generally permitted

I did some student apprentice with the NCB before Uni and at one pit we had 300ft lighting rigs around the storage yard and had to climb up that and change the bulbs. By the time you've climbed up the ladder you are too knackered to be scared.

Tom 7

Re: Computerized billing ...

I was flown to the US as an 'unaccompanied child' and I was looked after by drop dead gorgeous air hostesses (I was 11 but many parts were doing test runs) and spent 20 minutes in the cockpit of a BOAC VC10 with the pilot and co-pilot and blond bombshell. Fortunately the geek in me was more powerful than the testosterone self test so I didnt get slapped and enjoyed all the technical stuff. I have always wondered if all those switches did in fact work.

Alas no sexual harassment I can retrospectively sue for,

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

Tom 7

Re: "Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long"

I prefer the Laziness is the Mother of Invention approach. Something pisses you off or makes your life difficult? Fuck it over with a bit of code and or a checklist. My major bugbear in python is the fucking indentation - so a small bit of python or whatever run as a macro to check its a multiple of 4 or tabs or convert one to the other depending on project convention on IDE file save and that's about 5 hrs saved a week on one project I played with that took forever to get to your code and fuckup. Adding preprocessing in make was a a great time save too.

Computers are really good a finding your mistakes - make use of it.

Tom 7

Re: "Why not? K&R is ~250 pages long"

But it is as with all trades, if you program any language for years 24/7 you learn to write defensive code, so it is actually not needed.

And in moving to any new language you take that experience with you. I was just relieving lockdown boredom by (for some reason dont ask me why) looking at Fortran and someone in the comments here mention Fortran book of stupidity and I though perhaps he should read more than one book. Or add the bits that cause him problems.We're using computers FFS, get them to do the work if you cant be arsed.

Shock news: NASA lunar ambitions might be a bit too... ambitious

Tom 7

50 years age we hadn't invented anti-engineering. Business Science is the antithesis of progress and we need to check we can do what we did with primitive technology years ago with MBAs in the build process. I fear it may be impossible now.

HP: That print-free-for-life deal we promised you? Well, now it's pay-per-month to continue using your printer ink

Tom 7

Re: print-free-for-life plan was "an introductory offer,"

Or Oxycontin from your doctor!

Here's a little Intel: Beware of Linux graphics vendors bearing gifts of shared code – open-sourcer

Tom 7

Does this include the new Pi4 driver?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-update-merged-to-mesa/

Ericsson warns investors: This Biden fellow coming into the White House may look to resolve China trade dispute...

Tom 7

Re: Not accurate

When China gets its own Eastern District of Texas Court to award Chinese companies patents on different coloured software with rounded corners then we know they have truly joined the US in destroying any chance of a free market.

Tim Berners-Lee asks everyone to do new biz a Solid and let him have another crack at fixing the Web's privacy

Tom 7

Re: And if there is

It doesnt need to be an image - you can do this at app level.

Tom 7

Re: And if there is

Only other people using it would need to adopt the services. Its mostly going to be peer to peer and your ISP need do nothing. All you need outside your home/office is DNS or DDNS*. It doesnt replace the current web, but it allows people to sidestep it if they desire, and many do. For social networking which most people want there is no need for some bloke to come and shout over your shoulder in the pub,

*and only if your home hosting - Id imagine many would be happy to have it in the cloud once its been shown to be secure.

Tom 7

Re: And if there is

I hope I'm reading this right (I've been working on similar for my own amusement and may be overlaying my ideas). Its largely a set of standards. So Australia can demand a backdoor in a product, but as you have a personal server you control you can then add on the encryption to block it. It doesnt even have to be in your country.

As for the "would require massive and widespread adoption" this is a problem even FB started with. All it takes is a product (and that only needs to be surprisingly simple) and the instructions on how to set one up at home (click here and choose which router you have and this is how to configure it...) and there's two or three hundred people in my town of 2000 who would jump at it.

Missing Alan Turing memorabilia to be returned to Blighty from the US, 36 years after it went walkabout

Tom 7

Re: We didn't deserve it

Neither did a thief.

Tom 7

Re: As it should be

Have you ever tried to gain access to stuff they have archived away?

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Tom 7

Re: Logistical Challenges

And a huge potential for leaks. I do wonder whether using air to push rather than pull would not be a better idea - you'd stop things banging into each other and the likelihood of killing a pod full of passengers is a seal goes on a journey and sucks all he air out.

You can forget your fancy ERP customisations because that's not how it works in the cloud, SAP's Oliver Betz tells users

Tom 7

Re: Not wrong

If you have spent millions having SAP consultants obfuscating in SAP so your business is no longer in your control....

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Tom 7

Re: Well, you say that but ...

Basements is weird. A mate of mine inherited a 15thC cottage with a massive earth cellar seemingly just dug into the ground. It was dry as a bone even when modern cellars on the same street flooded. One neighbour even offered to pay a small fortune to drill into the earth walls and floor to see what they'd done 600 years ago that worked so well. Didn't occur to him it might spoil the seal.

Tom 7

Re: Rain? Luxury!

TBF water from that height could probably do the job. If you dont believe me try dropping a plastic bottle of water from height onto concrete and see how fast it shoots out the sides on impact.

Tom 7

Re: Rain? Luxury!

After some cheap mods in a 10 story privatised block of flats emptying the bath on the top floor would suck so much air down the pipe it would empty the u-bends and stink out your flat until you refilled them.

America's democracy on the brink, Brexit looming, climate crashing... when better to get the first fast radio burst from our own galaxy?

Tom 7

Re: Oh...

The sun turns 2*10^11 tons of matter into energy a month. The moon is only 400 million times heavier than that. I dont think it would be much of a shield to that kind of energy in a millisecond or so. Trinity only converter 0.9 of a gram of matter into energy so that would be at leasy 10^13 times the size so I'm sure we'd notice it for a few seconds anyway. We should rename 10^13 the billiard in memory!

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Tom 7

Who the fuck is doing this

25 years ago I was encrypting passwords in the browser so that we could have no clue what the customer was using and so possibly sue us as a result.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Tom 7

Re: Apparently still negotiating

If there are a number of areas where it is in both party's interest to prevent immediate disruption it is almost certainly be in one of the 27s interests to veto it. And when I mean in their interests I mean they will benefit more from vetoing it than they would allowing it. As indeed the 18 month reprieve could be vetoed.

Linux Mint pushes out its own Chromium build to help users avoid Canonical's Snap Store

Tom 7

Re: Snaps R Us

They're useful for playing with things but have no place when established software meets established OS.

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Tom 7

Re: Not in the enterprise

I found hanging the Pi off the back of the telly and using a BT keyboard/mouse combo was quite successful. Though of course the TV control and Keyboard obey Pauli's Exclusion principle and are never simultaneously within reach.

Tom 7

Re: NO OpenGL ES 3.2 still ?

That really grinds my gears!

Tom 7

Re: Built into a keyboard?

Do you get all those IO pins on the Atom?

Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence

Tom 7

Re: You know you need coffee when..

Sorry number 5 do you need help?

Tom 7

Re: DSN Now

Why are tthose two in Canberra on fire?