Posts by IvyKing

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Kudos for correct D shell terminology

It warmed the cockels of my heart to see DE-9 as opposed to the incorrect DB-9.

Nvidia's Vera Rubin CPU, GPU roadmap charts course for hot-hot-hot 600 kW racks

Re: Surely, you're joking.

They may have to go to 380VDC busbars, which would reduce current to 1.6kA. Still pretty mental.

Names, bank info, and more spills from top sperm bank

Re: English Humor

Nice to see some classic El Reg humor. Do wonder which El reg measurement units would be appropriate for this subject, think Olympic sized swimming pools might be overstating the Banks liquid assets.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: The economics of not serving ads

It was called Byte Buyer until McGraw-Hill claimed trademark infringement. Afterwards it went by ComputorEdge and my recollection is that lasted till at least 2005 if not a bit longer.

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Shades of JFK Jr. Can't believe that is has been almost 26 years.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Re: Control Data Corporation ALGOL-60

It might very well have a CDC only restriction. The 6000/7000 series machines were not amenable to 7 or 8 bit characters, hence the upper case only restriction imposed by 6 bit characters. String processing on those beasts was -um- interesting, though SNOBOL worked fine.

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: but standards are what make things work

All too familiar with winmail.dat. Wouldn't expect anything different from Microsucks.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

A company I worked for had a junior IT guy fired because he was physically threatening the senior IT guy. We then noticed a number of missing machines, and started wondering whether there was a connection. A few weeks later, a co-worker was looking at a most wanted posting and spotted the former junior IT as one of the people on the posting.

Amazon-backed X-energy bags $700M more for itty-bitty nuke reactors that don't exist yet

Re: SMRs in Canada

You are forgetting that there are very distinct flavors of High Temperature Gas cooled Reactors (HTGR). One is the pebble bed, and the other is General Atomics design where the fuel pellets are encased in pyrolitic graphite that placed in prisms of graphite that serve as the moderator. The prototype HTGR at Peach Bottom could survive a loss of coolant event by simply cooling the outside of the pressure vessel. The larger HTGR's would require some sort of back-up cooling system, but the thermal mass in the reactor allowed for several hours before the back up cooling needed to be activated.

One advantage of a water moderated reactor has over a graphite moderated reactor is that the water pretty much grabs all of the iodine given off by the fuel in a meltdown or partial fuel melting.

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Re: In late 1977 ...

I was at Cal in 1977 and don't recall hearing about any PDP10's on campus, though don't know about LBL. I was aware of two PDP-11s on campus at that time, one in Evans Hall (bought in part to replace the CDC-6400 B machine) and one in Corey Hall. The latter was where I had my first exposure to writing programs on a CRT terminal (Hazeltine).

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: The term bootstrapping, or booting for short ...

I remembering hearing about bootstrapping coming from the Baron von Münchhausen story - this was in the early 1970's.

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

Re: Most significant

I will have to see if I can find a copy Heppenheimer's book.

Having seen some of the processes used to make a large solid rocket motor, the facility for placing the fuel in a single piece case would be quite an undertaking. The process consists of first applying an insulating layer to the inside of the case, then apply the bond liner to the insulation, waiting for the liner to cure "just enough", which then leaves a few hour time span to cast the fuel in the casing There would also be a need for a test site that was accessible by barge as the SRB would likely have been too big to transport by rail. The Thiokol site near Promontory provides the necessary separation from populated areas.

One comment I heard about the shuttle SRB's was that Thiokol did a good job of timing the burning of the fuel between the two SRB's. This was from someone who had experience in the hydraulics for gimbals on rocket engines starting with the Atlas missile.

Re: Tufte book covers this

Basic mistake in the viewgraphs was not showing ALL of the data. Tufte came to mind when I first read about that "oopsie".

Re: Most significant

The book "The Challenger Launch Decision" mentions that the O-rings did re-seat after lift-off but turbulence from high altitude wind shear caused the to unseat again. If it wasn't for that wind shear, the launch would have been another near miss.

The book also mentioned that the team did a plot of air temperature at launch versus O-ring damage with the result that no obvious trend was noted. The fatal flaw of that plot was it only covered launches with ambient temperatures of less than 70ºF, where plotting all of the data showed no damage when ambient temperature was above 70ºF.

As for the non-segmented booster proposal, I would wonder about how they could pull off making the casting of the solid fuel grain.

SLAP, Apple, and FLOP: Safari, Chrome at risk of data theft on iPhone, Mac, iPad Silicon

Firefox?

IIRC, Firefox uses a separate process for each website, so should be more resistant to this attack than Safari.

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

In my opinion, the bug finding virtue of open comes more from the experience of porting software to different platforms then from the multitude of eyes looking at the source. One example was the bug in yacc that was found after 3-+ years when the OpenBSD group was porting to a new spin of the SPARC processor.

Microsoft admits January's Windows Update broke USB Digital to Audio Convertor

If that's the case, then USB-Class-C must really terrible sound.

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

Getting around MacOS backwards incompatibilty

I've got three DVD-ROM sets of magazine issues for which have 32 bit Mac interfaces. These collections do have Windows apps as well, and Wine or Crossover Office would make these DVD collections usable again.

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Re: What a load of bollocks

With respect to Sweden's neutrality during WW2: The US was officially neutral for the first 2.5 years of WW1, but there it was blatantly obvious that they were giving deference to the Allies. Another point was that Sweden and Switzerland were able to stay neutral due to having well equipped armed forces. Look up the history of SAAB.

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

Paterson vs Kildahl

Tim Paterson's libel suit was tossed because the judge ruled that Paterson was a public figure and thus his suit needed a higher burden of proof, i.e. malicious intent, for a judgement in favor of the plaintiff. Tim would likely have prevailed if he was not considered to be a public figure.

86-DOS copied CP/M's API but not the code in the same way that Linux copied the UNIX API but not the code. CP/M was written in PL/M, 86-DOS was written in SCP's assembler and thus would involved a lot more work than simple copying.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Umm, ALR beat Compaq with the 386

From what I remember, Advanced Logic Research (ALR) shipped 386 machines shortly before Compaq. FWIW, I bought one of the first Compaq boxes in fall 1986 and the original motherboard had an 80287 as Intel wasn't shipping 80387's. Another unique feature of the 16MHz Deskpro 386 was the use of static column DRAM instead of using an SRAM cache as on the 20MHz Deskpro 386.

An annoyance with the ISA bus 386/486 machines was that DMA only worked with the bottom 16MB of RAM. This was one place where the PS2 machines were better than the clones, though that went away with the introduction of the EISA bus, then later with Intel's PCI bus.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

You apparently have some problems with reading comprehension.

The incident occurred in the early 1970 if my memory hasn't been garbled by way too much caffeine. The point I was trying to make was that the two digit date format was causing problems WELL BEFORE Jan 1, 2000. As I recall the woman did get her driver's license without too much trouble - an appearance at the DMV was enough to show she wasn't three years old.

1980 was the year zero for DOS, so 2108 will be the problem year for computers still using the DOS date/time format. Tim Paterson did well in encoding date and time into 4 bytes, the time format allotted 5 bits for the hour, 6 bits for the minute and 5 bits for two second chunks. The four byte limitation was from repurposing the 4 bytes used for date on the CP/M File Control Block as one of the goals for QDOS was to make it very easy to port CP/M software to DOS.

There were precursors to the Y2K problem in the form that dates from the 1800's could do goofy things. Back circa 1970, a woman in California was denied a driver's license as the software used by the DMV showed her as being 3 years old instead of 103 years old.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: DOS memory limit

IIRC, the 900K or so limit for MS-DOS on the SCP machines was for program memory. I suspect the difference between ~900K and 1MB was from what DOS and IO.SYS took up. The original SCP monitor resided on a 2K EPROM, though might have been larger on the SCP machine(s) used by Microsoft, but not much larger. The monitor had an elementary debug capability that was expanded a bit with the DOS DEBUG application. The SCP assembler was very fast, with a 60K source file assembling in a few seconds.

86-DOS assumed the use of a serial terminal, with cursor control doing anything more advanced than <CR> and <LF> being the responsibility of the application, i.e. pretty much the same as CP/M. I remember setting Vedit for use with the Televideo 925 terminal and getting my first exposure to a screen editor.

86-DOS also assumed that the time of day would be provided by an AMD 9513 with a resolution of 10ms, which is reflected in the get_time function call.

DOS memory limit

DOS could support 900KB on appropriate hardware, such as the S-100 systems made by Seattle Computer and others. MS used an SCP system to link the linker as the link process required more memory than what was available on a PC. The 640KB limit was set by the IBM PC's use of ROM BIOS and memory mapped video.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: Cant compare..

There was another motivation besides national pride. One Apollo landing was within walking distance of a Surveyor lander, at a range of 240,000 miles. The hint to he Soviets was that the US could land a warhead within the radius of the fireball created by the warhead.

Are Copilot+ PCs really the fastest Windows PCs? X and Copilot don't think so

The term "PC" predates IBM's 5150 by several years and the 5150 was marketed as the IBM PC.

China starts building world's largest fully steerable radio telescope

Re: Very Interesting

I suspect it was done for bragging rights. The improvement over a 100m dish is about 2dB.

OTOH, a single big dish may have advantages when trying to capture an extremely weak signal or a very broad band signal.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

Re: Muppet

I've been following telecom regulation for several decades - back in the days of Ma Bell, funding for last mile access (AKA universal service) in part came from large consumers of telecom services through long distance rates. As for your access to the internet, does your ISP pay rent for the easements needed to route fiber or cable from the ISP's network center to your house or office?

Since the likes of Meta and Google primarily make their money by being able to send content to customers, it does make sense for them to provide some support for the last mile access.

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

NatLamp Radio Dinner?

Anyone remember: "you are a fluke of the universe, you have no right to be here..."

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

What???

Windows NT was ported to a number of architectures including MIPS, Alpha and SPARC, so I would expect that old code to be easily ported to ARM.

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

Re: "poised for (short) commercial flights"

It does look like the Swiss suicide pod with rotors.

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Re: QNX, to compete, is going to have to have a very convincing selling point.

Your memory is correct, modules in the OS could be updated while the machine was still running.

I used QNX 4 and 6 at work for a number of years, impressions were more positive than negative. IIRC, version 4 used ksh as the default shell, the NFS implementation worked well, the "worst" thing was Photon was unique to QNX and wasn't widely supported. The default text editor for version 4 was Vedit, which brought back memories of micro-computing's early years.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

Re: Acrobat

Ahem - BSD is Berkeley Software Distribution, Blue Screen of Death is BSoD.

Amazon's nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal

Re: Seems clear cut to me

On a total impact basis, CCGT is probably cleaner than most wind and solar installations, especially when taking into consideration the energy storage needed for wind and solar.

Re: Seems clear cut to me

More like:

Amazon: We want to take away stable and reliable power from other customers

Representatives of other customers: Not over our dead bodies

The quick and relatively clean solution is to build new CCGT plants, another solution is to tell hyperscalers to stock up on batteries and deal with intermittent power.

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

I would be in favor of making removing the allergen information a capital crime if it resulted in someones death. Also feel the same way about swat'ing leading to a fatality.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Re: M4 Minis and MBP's, no Studios

For M4 Pro, looks like up to 8 P cores, 6 E cores and 20 GPU cores along with up to 64 GB of memory.

The leaked image of the Mini looks like a shrunken Studio, would rather have the existing chassis.

M4 Minis and MBP's, no Studios

The scuttlebutt is that the M4 Minis and MBP will be announced in the next two days (Tues and Wed), with the Mini being redesigned. A couple of open questions pertain to the M4 Pro, how many cores and how much memory will be offered? The open question on the Mini is how badly will Apple screw up the design of the Mini? A lot of folks, including me, like it just the way it is.

Boffins explore cell signals as potential GPS alternative

Heck, if the NDBs had a sufficiently accurate transmit frequency source and the NDB (ADF?) also had a sufficiently accurate frequency reference, one could use Doppler shift of the various NDB signals to get a good read on position. I don't think knowing the headings to the various cell towers will get anywhere close to GNSS accuracy, but it would be a god way of detecting GSS spoofing.

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Re: POSIX.1 vs POSIX.2

I don't think it really matters for POSIX compliance in what language was used for writing the code to implement the OS. What does matter is that the OS have a C compiler that will compile POSIX compatible C code successfully and that the resulting binary does what it is expected to do.

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Re: Hmm...

The proposed maneuver sounds like something out of the Dyna-Soar (X-20) project from the late 50's and early 60's. I think the intent is to be able reduce the amount of fuel needed to change an orbit.

Mozilla patches critical Firefox vuln that attackers are already exploiting

Re: Yes but...

Apparently Sequoia does prevent apps from accessing intranet (LAN) hosts unless specifically given permission to do so. I would be curious if it blocks access to the default route address as that is typically used to administer the router. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run especially if the reports about Safari not being affected are true.

One more reason to wait to update to MacOS 15.x.

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: "Whatever x86 apps I threw at it just ran. Swiftly."

Probably the main reason for Rosetta 2 working so well was Apple's push to convert all of the x86 software to just using the AMD-64 extensions. This made translation much easier as Rosetta 2 didn't have to deal with all the cruft dating back to the 8008 that became part of the 80386 instruction set. That and adding a couple of instructions to the M-series that handles some of the unique aspects of their amd64 implementation.

Chinese cyberspies reportedly breached Verizon, AT&T, Lumen

The US Government mandated wiretapping function has been a concern amongst security researchers since it was first implemented. Surprising to see how long it has taken for the FBI to admit a breach.

If you're excited by that $1.5B Michigan nuke plant revival, bear in mind it's definitely a fixer-upper

San Onofre was closed in part due to pressure from the state. The plant could have been fixed for the cost of the solar thermal plants that were built along the I-15 corridor near the CA-NV border and would have produced considerably more energy.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

The speed of light can easily be measured by experiment, though one needs to be aware that the measured speed of light will depend on the media that the light is traveling through - a high vacuum gives the most consistent results. There's also observational data suggesting the the velocity of propagation for gravity waves is equal to that of light to within 1 part in ~10E15.

With respect to Covid, masks and vaccine, it is misinformation to imply that a gauze type mask will work anywhere near as well as a properly fitted N-95 mask and that vaccines prevent infections completely - what they do is prompt the body to respond much faster to any infection. In the spring of 2020, there was significant evidence that Covid spread much less rapidly outdoors than indoors, but many governments were forcing people to stay inside.

US govt hiding top hurricane forecast model sparks outrage after deadly Helene

Re: My heart goes out to all the people affected by Hurricane Helene

The publicly forecast track was reasonably accurate, and the only significant improvement would have been another 24 hours or so prediction for the location of landfall and strength at landfall. The rainfall over the mountains in North Carolina was predicted.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

The 5MT warhead for the Spartan ABM was designed to maximize X-ray output. Seems to me that would be a good start for any asteroid deflecting nuke.

The X-rays would be mostly absorbed near the surface and thus vaporizing a layer of the surface facing the nuke. One question in my mind is whether the rubble pile construction of many asteroids would hold together if the nuke was close enough.