Posts by FIA

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: von Neumann

Are we again permitted to reference or regard Dilbert cartoons without the consequent sanction of external cancellation?

You probably are, yes.

The problem with the digital world is the lack of any patina of time. Comments written 20 years ago are judged with the lens of society today.

Now, I certainly made jokes or comments 20 years ago that I wouldn't do now, either through maturity or simply because they're not socially acceptable any more. (The term 'Gay' to mean 'rubbish' in the early 2000s is a good example) If I expect people to contextualise the things I say, I have to at least give them the same level of respect.

Unfortunately that means we have to also accept it when the person in questions opinions go the other way. I have a friend who's well down the conspiracy rabbit hole. 20 years ago I respected his opinions on things, not so much now. That can be the same with Scott Adams.

Also.. and this is a concept that's long been lost to the ages... but the truth is people are complex, I can enjoy Adams incites on workplace culture, whilst still disliking his views on other things.

The research team generated random numbers 7,454 times in 40 days and found that a truly random number was generated 7,434 times, which they call a 99.7 percent success rate.

I understand the way we use language evolves over time, so I accept I may just be hitting that age, but this seems like a really odd statement.

Are we saying that maths is now open to opinion? (Or is it that it's ever so slightly over 99.7%?)

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Words have meanings after all!

And those meanings change over time and between demographic groups.

Your kids don’t talk like their parents; did you?

(Or to put it another way, your kids ask you for something that you deliberately misunderstand to be obtuse, seems like the words are doing their job just fine. ;) )

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

I'm sure there was a good reason (it was the early 90s, probably hardware), but limits like this often seem really arbitrary to me. They often seem to arise because someone wants to 'be right' more than anything technical.

I have had arguments with people in my career about the length of an email field, because 'who would have one longer than 30 chars'?

I was (what I thought was logically) pointing to the SMTP specs and arguing that we should at least pick a value longer than the max domain name length.

I lost, because winning was more important that accepting that the arbitrary number was wrong and there's only so long you can argue in the face of that logic.

(I don't work there any more.... no-one does).

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: Enough with the laser fusion hyperbole

There's a good (if old now) Brian Cox documentary on the hunt for fusion. At the end he asks all the experts he's talked to how long they think it will be before we get commercial fusion. There's a variety of answers (some now in the past), but the one that stuck with me was:

"There is a 50% chance of it working 20 years after you seriously fund the science".

Probably true.

If we start with the attitude that we're never going to succeed then we never will.

Maybe not writing articles with the implied overtones of failure would help this outlook?

Who knows?

Especially when it's updated to add:

Bradley added that the funding also shouldn’t be classified as a new investment since it “is simply confirmation of the required funding that has always been in our original business case,” and is being doled out “because the STEP programme is delivering on budget and on schedule.” Bradley said there have been no financial overruns, and that STEP is still on track to begin construction in 2029.

So, it's a project that's on target and on budget (On budget like Heathrow Terminal 5 was; but we don't shout about that either...) that's simply being given access to the pre-allocated funds because it's met it's targets? This sounds like exactly the kind of project my tax should be spent on.

Good luck to them I say, for most of my life the UK has been a country that seems equally as full of naysayers as it is talented clever people. Maybe it's time they shut up and let the rest get on with it.

We always shout about failures, never the successes. Problem is, this means most people assume all we ever do is fail.

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 Start Menu updates

There have long been third-party solutions to restore missing functionality from the Windows 11 Start Menu, but Microsoft simply adding a "make it work like it used to" option would be an admission that perhaps, just perhaps, some users were right all along.

'Like it used to' when?

I seem to have missed the 'Start menu was perfect here' memo?

Was it in the NT/95 days? Where there was no keyboard searching and after a few months the thing would extend across multiple columns.

Was it in the Windows 2K days where they added the 'auto collapsing' thing because many columns of menu became unweildy? (This both helped you find stuff and also forget about all that stuff you've installed but used once. Also... you had the fun of nearly finding something just as the menu expanded to fill the screen and you had to start the whole damn hunt again...)

Was it in the XP days where they made it a weird panel, but with some customisation so you could add useful stuff to it? Did this include the search? Did it work? It still had the submenu of many many pages if I remember?

Was it the Vista days? (I assume that had a start menu but I've had therapy since using it...)

Was it the 7 days? (I remember it being okay?, what was the search like?)

Okay, I know it wasn't the 8 or 8ish days? (I've got to stop talking about this and Vista, I can't afford any top up treatment).

It deffo wasn't the early 10 days, they brought it back then and that's when everyone got shouty. (I think later 10 got better if I remember correctly?)

Am I the only one that doesn't find the current one too bad? I tend to search these days so it's not that often I go poking through it.

I did recently install NT4 in a VM and got very very lost though. I hit windows, typed, and nothing happened... took me a good few minutes to remember how to find things.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Personal view.

X11 is built for a networked environment.

This for me is the problem, X11 is both built to be a networked window manager and also not very good at it.

Using X in the late 90s on the universities X terminals was eye opening. I didn't realise something so professional could be so slow! (I'd been spoilt by things like RISC OS). It wasn't that much quicker on the nice new DEC Alpha's we'd just got.

The real kicker for me was when I first got DSL in the 2000s. I used to SSH to home from work and run RDP across the SSH tunnel. It wasn't quick (this was in the days of 512kbit down and about 64kbit up) but it was usable. I could log in to my home box and use Windows.

So I thought I'd see what X was like across the same link. I think it finally drew some of the window after a few minutes, but it wasn't what you would call usable, and considering it was designed to be used in this scenario, when compared to Cyrix's efforts to networkify GDI it stood up poorly.

I know it's a joke, but the chapter on X in the Unix hater handbook makes some very good points.

I get that it's not the same software from the 70s, it's not even the same software from the 90s, it's now a glittery, beautifully reflective turd, but it's still at it's heart an unopinionated windowing system that doesn't even define window controls. (Because who needs consistency?)

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

The Windows Sandbox C: drive has 2.61gig used on a fresh boot.

So I assume that's about the size of a cut down but functional Windows 11 install.

If it can’t double our money, we’re not building it, Intel Products chief says

The average gross margin of all the companies on NASDAQ exceeds 50% for the last 15 years. It's normally around 60%.

Is this sustainable though, or is it a symptom of the richest getting richer, which does seem to be pissing people off a bit more nowadays?

The gross margin (of companies on the NASDAQ) was 42% at the start of 2010 but over 60% by mid 2014. This seems a very rapid increase, can this level of return be sustained?

If you focus only on maximising profit then you tend to minimise risk and innovation.

Cops want Apple, Google to kill stolen phones remotely – so why won't they?

Re: Not sure what the cops want from Apple here

Because, as hinted at elsewhere, activation lock isn't what they want, as that requires the owner to take action.

They want the ability to issue an IMEI and have that banned globally.

Useful for stolen phones, also useful for annoying people governments don't like. (Not that they'd ever do that).

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

I know this is going to be unpopular, but I'm quite looking forward to this.

I've found the recent changes to notepad have actually made it useful (It's gone from the 'last resort' to 'oh it's just a quick edit, I'll use notepad'). Mind you part of that might be other editors seeming to become more bloated. (For example, Jetbrains released 'Fleet' as a lightweight text editor to solve this issue... it takes 4+ seconds to load on my 12 core 128MB machine).

Also, as I actually find Markdown quite useful a lightweight text editor that supports it with preview is desirable. (Otherwise you need plugins for heavy weight stuff like Visual Studio Code or Rider).

It's not adding formatting to plain text, it's adding a rendering engine for a commonly used simply markup. Assuming it still loads quickly I'm all for it.

What would a Microsoft engineer do to Ubuntu? AnduinOS is the answer

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

> Then go to the headmaster and explain what you have done.

I absolutely stand by it.

You poor delusional fool you!

Both Vista and ME were tolerable and useful after they'd been out for a while and received some updates. Vista SP1 is perfectly serviceable *on a well specified PC* -- meaning at least a dual-core x86-32 with 4GB RAM, of which there would be 10% it couldn't use but that's a Microsoft choice -- or on a for-the-time high-end Core 2 Duo with 8GB.

I would argue the same is true of Windows 11 and Windows 10, neither are the same as when released, and both are useable.

My issue with modern Windows is tracking, but that aside I think the OS is usable and snappy. A lot of the slimming down done for Windows 7 has carried over, so on modern hardware it tends to fly.

(To be fair on modern work hardware it crawls, but that's my work putting horrible IDS systems on it and setting everything to paranoid).

It introduced the Windows compositor, a major new feature, also the basis of all subsequent versions. Win7 is just Vista with minor tweaks, and everyone loved 7. People are nostalgic for it now.

It did, the first version of it. Which had a giant round robin lock in the re-draw loop.

This means the more windows you open the slower your machines UI goes, and if one of the programs gets paged out or crashes you can have periods where the whole desktop appears to hang as it's waiting for the lock to timeout.

This wasn't fixed until WDDM 1.1 in Windows 7 (Where things were lovely and snappy again).

The architectural changes between Vista and 7 are small, but they're very impactful.

ME was a valid product for its time. It was up against NT 4 (no USB, no FAT32, almost no power management or PnP) or Windows 2000 (i.e. NT 5, needing at least 128MB RAM and ideally 256MB for real productive use, all-compliant hardware, and for good results 2 CPUs.)

I will confess to never actually using ME in anger, 98SE was my last DOS based OS, then it was NT4 and 2K. ME always reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons where they're explaining that all the ilnesses Mr Burns have are wedged in a doorway so it somehow works.

Re: "reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11"

Windows ME and Windows Vista were both much better than Win11.

Wash your mouth out sir.

This minute.

Then go to the headmaster and explain what you have done.

VMware price hikes? Between 800 and 1,500%, claim Euro customers

$100 x 15 = $1,500 - Year 2

$1,500 x 15 = $22,500 - Year 3

Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms

Re: Take A Look At The Diffie/Hellman Protocol........

<sigh>

I wish we'd never taught you lot about parley.

Arrrrrr.

Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms

No it doesn't.

FFS I get hyperbole is a thing, but there's a limit surely, even on this site.

<wanders off to berate the weather...>

Re: Take A Look At The Diffie/Hellman Protocol........

And you trust the other party is who they say they are.... how???

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: Good article

...unfortunatly Toad of Toad Hall doesn't seem to have any other solutions. (Well, except for us all going to the pub to sing Rule Britania).

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

C> COPY CON: SOMEFILE.TXT

If you don't remember this, then you're lucky.

^Z

1 file(s) copied

C>

Re: "superseded Edlin"

Ahhh nano, the editor that should be a lot easier to use than it is...

I recently discovered 'micro' on *nix... haven't looked back.

Re: I think there's a lot to be said...

'There's a lot to be sed' surely?

Re: a bit of a bloater

The version shipped on the Win98 based recovery disk I have is 69902 bytes. It requires no other executables.

The Text-based User Interface (TUI) application is reminiscent of its predecessor but also features nods to the modern world. There's mouse support, Unicode works, and menu options have keybindings. Word wrap is supported, as is Find & Replace.

To be fair, the DOS version has all of these except word wrap (and probably Unicode; haven't tried).

European customers report Oracle Cloud identity outage, Big Red is silent

Well, if we’re being pedantic, no. It’s two; possibly more. ;)

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

Re: I'm an Author

I'm British, grew up in the 8bit 80s... a ZX81 -> Commodore +4 -> Acorn Electron computing history has left me unable to spell 'Centre' with any degree of consistency.

I still have to think about 'colour' every time too.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: The most remarkable machines of my lifetime

Your legs must be fucking knackered!!

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Ahhh... the inevitable scramble for puns begins. (I prefer the less oeufert ones myself).

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Windows is subscription based, that's the problem. They've stopped asking for cash and now ask for ongoing telemetary in return for ongoing free updates.

All they would have to do is add an extra SKU that you paid for that omitted the telemetary. (They have it, it's Windows Server with the desktop pack installed essentially).

Thing is, it probably needs a company the size of MS to actually do this and weather the storm, as if we really don't want more and more of our lives being sold for advertising we are all going to have to re-learn that things cost money, even intangable stuff like software costs someones effort and time to produce; and lets be honest... writing good well tested software is even more expensive, as testing and bugfixing cycles take the most time and effort.

Right, but there are people who like Windows, but don't like all the advertising and telemetary. For those people a subscription may be apropriate.

Personally, I'm happy with Winodws as an operating system, I'm not interested in moving to linux or a BSD on the desktop, but given the option I would take fewer 'Install Candy Crush' or 'You must have a MS account' popups for a monthly subscription.

I get that writing and maintaining an OS doesn't come for free, and I'd like an OS that isn't written to cost as it's primary motivation.

Ideally MS should realise there's an opportunity here and do a 'Home Server' or 'Enthusiast' edition, which would basically be server with the desktop installed by default. The bulk of their money comes from OEM preinstalls, but the good will they would get may be worth the effort. (Plus... they'd be charging for it.. so it shouldn't lose revenue).

Isn't monthly rental what some people want?

i.e. you pay for Windows with money, like in the old days, rather than your telemetry and personal info, like now.

This would be assuming your paid for Windows was advertising and spyware free, like in the old days, and not that MS would attempt to double dip like other companies do these days.

If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

Re: This is madness

Asking Google to sell off Chrome is stupid. Stopping them from getting that monopoly made sense, but that ship has sailed - and regulators did fuck-all. Even when Google were distributing it like malware and using their search monopoly.

That's how regulation works, it stops something after the fact and the improvements take a while to filter through.

But to not bother is just forcing the internet down IE6 mark II.

No thanks.

Chrome doesn't make any money directly. If it's really worth the insanity of $50bn

I dunno, control over the source code that browses the internet seems fairly valuable. Especially if you have a business built on data collection and advertising. I can see that contributing to a few bn of yearly revenue. (Especially when you controll all the levers in the black box that works out how much people owe).

There's a reason MS wanted the IE monopoly to continue (okay, that was more tied to getting Office everywhere, but it's the same underlying proposition).

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Re: Another day, another attempt to force this on us

I'm not annoyed in the least, but perhaps I write poorly and the tone comes across in a manner unsympathetic to my intended means of communication.

Fair... as someone who's often told to stop being so angry (I'm not) I understand. ;)

Rust also uses the C library like everybody else. So big deal, you can call C from your favourite language and still not get any benefit over just using it directly.

(Assuming you've not compiled without it, yes..) but you're conflating a binary interface with the underlying language. The standard C library doesn't actually have to be written in C, so long as the calling conventions remain consistent.

The benefit is in the code I've written, not in the code I'm calling. I shouldn't just abandon writing memory safe code because I may at some point call some assembler that came from a source file written in a language that wasn't.

Also, the standard C libary is heavily used, so is well battle tested, but that doesn't mean code that calls it is, or has to be written in C. You seem to be saying that because a part of a thing is written one way then there's zero benefit from attempting to improve the other bits? If I fix the heater in my car I have a better overall experience, even if the engine is still shit.

Re: Another day, another attempt to force this on us

Find a Unicode conversion library in rust which has a sane API and allow you to determine what proportion of the input was successfully converted - https://thephd.dev/the-c-c++-rust-string-text-encoding-api-landscape

Maybe you could learn it, then help make it better? Nothing is ever perfect from the get go. Or is rust not allowed to evolve decent libraries like C++ has?

Also... you're criticising a library... not the language at this point... you might as well say C is a shit language because Motif is a clusterfuck, or that Java is shit because of Java.Util.Date....

I'm a shit coder, so I'm learning rust, as it makes my programs better.

I'm also old, so have a lot of ingrained 'knowledge' from years of other languages.

I'm finding learning Rust hard, in a way I've not found with other languages I've used. This is mainly because of my ingrained experience... there are structural norms I gravitate towards that aren't great. It is making me a better programmer though, not just in Rust, but in other languages I use.

However it is also just a tool, I don't feel threatened by it and I don't understand why we wouldn't try and make things better. (Getting angry at rust is like getting angry at a lawnmower because scythes still exist... it's fine to have both..)

When I was a young developer I thought C was 'the language' and all other languages were toys, and if you shot yourself in the foot you were just stupid.

I was wrong; my foot is full of holes.... it's actually nice to have a language that will catch a lot of the stupid mistakes.. because after 30 years of programming I still make them... as do a lot of programmers, because as it's already been said.... most programmers are not very good.*

However, if you are a good programmer, don't worry, there's enough C and C++ around to keep you in work for the rest of your life, but really don't let new things annoy you, either ignore them or embrace them, don't get angry about things you can't change; you'll get an ulcer.

_{^* ...or are constrained by work time pressures, are tired, disenfranchised, underpaid; or just make mistakes now and then...}

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

Re: and nothing of value lost

The man is basically a self taught CPU designer. Thought 'Oh, these computers look interesting, I'll go figure out how to build one...'.

Absolute legend.

There a long but interesting interview on Youtube here.

Re: and nothing of value lost

Yeah! You tell them AC!!

And don't let that constant siren noise distract you either, it's just the irony alarm, but don't worry, we put it high up in the rafters so you don't have to worry.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Re: Bollocks

I suspect this exists in the void between people who are rich enough to have a whole house system, but not quite rich enough to pay for the really really good stuff.

I believe it was some piece of Control4 equipment. (I get the impression that this is the low end of the high end home automation stuff, my friend is often not that complementary about it).

Re: Bollocks

I'm in the UK so there's a lot less HVAC.

However a friend does home automation stuff for 'rich people' and he's often moaning about it all.

A recent example, a customer lost all their lights, turns out an £800 piece of equipment had died after 5-6 years. The customer was annoyed and decided to just rip it all out.

They were even more annoyed when my friend politely pointed out that all the lights in the house routed back to this one central location, so if he wanted it ripping out he'd have to have the entire house re-wired.

A few months later the other componenet in the system failed. That was another 600 pounds.

At least with the Hue stuff I use I can just turn the lights off and on and it wll work like a regular bulb.

Now, lets not get on to the popular home automation systems. I will just say that as an IT professional if you could design a H/A system that allowed extensions that couldn't randomly crash the entire system you could probably clean up in the market.

Re: Bollocks

The problem is buying your home automation gear from an advertising company that treats it's customers as the product.

Buy gear from the specialists and you'll have a whole different set of problems to deal with. ;)

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: I'e already said this

And if people are letting games dictate their life, well, they are not serious people and nobody cares if they keep making poor choices in life.

This seems very judgemental.

How do you unwind?

Oh... shit... it's Golf isn't it.... sorry. :(

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: Sceptic

Visual Studio Community is free for individuals to develop commercial applications, and small companies (less than 250 PCs) can use up to 5 editions of it for free.

SQL Server express is free and usable in production. (I expect there's limitations, but I've not looked further).

I'm not sure why you'd expect Azure to be free, altough it does offer (like Amazon) a free tier for experimentation.

Re: Sceptic

Do you have examples?

I always thought this was with things like trade marks, (Tannoy, Hoover, et. al).

In this case it's a breach of the contract you've agreed to when using the software. I'm not sure those kind of contractual breaches have a time limit do they?

Re: Sceptic

>Microsoft develop a code editor, which they release under a very permissive licence for no monetary cost.

Yes, but they did this because their code editor was based on the open source Atom editor (MIT licence).

Yes, this is how open source works I think. :)

They have also continued to licence it under the MIT licence, something which they do not have to do. (They could've closed sourced their modifications as the licence allows this, much as Apple does with some of their changes to FreeBSD).

Microsoft did not develop VS Code from scratch.

I didn't mean to imply they did, I'm sorry if I gave this impression.

It still doesn't change that Codium are breaking the licence terms though.

Re: Sceptic

From paragraph 6:

Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published. But it hasn't enforced those terms in its C/C++ extension with an environment check in its binaries until now.

(Emphasis mine).

You are correct though, I said 5 years, when I should've said 4 and a half. Apologies. :)

Re: Sceptic

Okay, I'll bite... how is this an example of either a broken promise or being "mule-kicked solidly in the crotch"?

Microsoft develop a code editor, which they release under a very permissive licence for no monetary cost. They also provide an extension to this editor, which is closed source, but again is available for free so long as you accept the licence terms. (Presumably so they can collect the telemetry in exchange for it's use).

Those terms, for the last 5 years, have prohibited running the extension against a fork of the editor, but haven't been enforced.

Additionally, a third party has allegedly been breaching these terms to enhance their own product. I.e. Not only are they taking the code developed by someone else as they're completely entitled to do by the licence that party used, but then they're also trying to have their cake and eat it too by taking the stuff they're not supposed to have, because attempting to profit off others work is fine when it's a big evil corporation??

So, explain to me how MS is at fault here? They've not removed the source code, or changed the terms of the extension in 5 years. The only 'promise' in effect is the terms of the licence, which they seem to now be enforcing.

If it was MS and they'd broken the GPL there would be hell to pay, why don't they get the same respect?

Or is their free software somehow not beholden to the same standards?

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: But it has no lasers!

Yeah, the UV thing is okay so long as you're not a clubber.

I've got no lens in my eye so have no natural UV filtering, which means I can see more UV than most people... (black lights look very bright purple to me).

Unfortunately if you're in a nightclub where they're using UV to make things glow it really lights the place up... the beads of sweat running down the walls are a particular favourite thing I'd rather have not seen. ;)

Re: But it has no lasers!

Is it just me or does the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum get a disproportionate amount of love?

Re: A one hit wonder

So a homing missile (that is designed to be immune) how much does that missile cost compared to this device?

Boeing's Starliner may fly again, pending fixes to literally everything

Re: Complete BS

To quote Butch Wilmore: “I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point. I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't. So there we are, loss of 6DOF control, four aft thrusters down[…] I don't know what control I have. What if I lose another thruster? What if we lose comm? What am I going to do?”

ISS resupply and trash pickup craft postponed indefinitely after Cygnus container crunch

Re: It is curious

Because without them you’d just hitch a lift with….?

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Re: It's safer, actually

That actually makes it safer!

It makes it less deterministic, and makes it easier for a use after free to go unnoticed. Not sure that’s safer.