Posts by david 12 2868 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
But not historically informative. The English traditionally drank beer. They only really moved to tea during the hungry years when the English population grew faster than the English food supply, and people couldn't afford beer.. The upper classes were irritated of course: tea was a rich woman's drink, these poor people were aping their betters.
It doesn't say where he was dialing from. In the US, local call areas are sometimes quite small. In Aus, downloading OS/2 updates might have meant calling the USA at international rates. I don't know what the situation was in the UK at that time, but large call charges aren't totally implausible.
I suspect that it depends on which web sites you have open (and how many). For me, FF gradually sucks up memory until my machine becomes unresponsive, and I have to kill the processes. It's been doing that since FF moved to independent processes, which was years ago. Maybe 15+ tabs, mixture of news, retail, technical etc, so all JS heavy.
IEEE 754 is explicitly specified. Every compliant toolchain will produce exactly the same output for the same input.
From one of the background papers for the 2019 standard:
"Unfortunately, the IEEE standard does not guarantee that the same program will deliver identical results on all conforming systems. Most programs will actually produce different results on different systems for a variety of reasons."
https://grouper.ieee.org/groups/msc/ANSI_IEEE-Std-754-2019/background/addendum.html
For more simple generic information on IEEE-754, you can look at Wikipedia
The truth is that M$ never wanted to promote interoperability with another system - it wasn't in their business interests.
My DOS 2 documentation included documentation for writing disk drivers. So no surprise that the NT documentation also included documentation and sample code for writing disk drivers. If you wanted to read your disks from Windows, you could write your own "open source" drivers for your "open source" drive systems.
The lack of MS closed-source support for ext partitions in Windows speaks to the lack of demand for and feature set of ext when compared to NTFS
Remember "embrace, improve, extinguish? The truth is that, unlike Java, or BSD networking, the ext file system didn't have anything worth embracing.
You thought Americans would be less likely than yourself to understand a quotation from a book written by an American?
On the evidence here and other places, most Americans don't understand the quotation.
I note that in the original, the reference is to Topsie's ignorance of God and religion. The conventional understanding, and original quotation of the phrase, was to indicate Topsie's lack of parents: she assumed she "just grow'd" by spontaneous generation.
The way it is now most often used by Americans is to indicate rapid or explosive growth of a company or social enterprise.
I wonder how they are going to measure the fullness of a bin. Weight?
My council measures rubbish by weight -- amount of weight reduced by recycling measures-- but collects by volume.
I'm required to bin the heavy waste separately, then they use that as an excuse for reducing the volume of other waste collected.
Result: ratepayers compressing their "soft plastic" waste to get it into the new smaller bins.
Descenders are part of the English glyph system, improving legibility.
Word shape recognition is how competent readers read English.
It is unfortunate that, knowing this fact, educators tried to teach beginner readers to start with word shape recognition, since using pictographs is a poor method of teaching and learning reading, and is inherently limiting.
They gave up on using PCB transformer oil, like they gave up on using non-flammable propellants in spray cans, because non-flammable = persistent. I think that they are unlikely to be using a non-flammable oil.
Not volatile like petrol, or even like diesel, but adding to the fire load in your home, like storage of cooking oil -- slightly more dangerous than wood or cotton, because as well as being flammable, those are self-protective insulating materials.
When I was a kid, country buses were required to come to a full stop at railway crossings. The driver would open the door and his window, look and listen, then proceed across.
Every crossing. Every time.
On the basis that he got a better idea if a train was coming by stopping, looking, and listening.
It's not too much to suggest that (Supervised) Full Driving cars do the same, on the basis that the full-driving system isn't very good at looking and listening. Just stop. Force the driver to take over at that point.
I was specifically talking about the air crash investigation process -- the primary function of the investigation is to find learnings to stop it happening again.
The same as the self-driving crash investigation process has been. -- The primary function of the investigation has been to find learnings to stop it happening again.
Now, we get the clamor for punishment, and the question "What took California so long, given that autonomous taxi operations started in the state?", and the response "When corporations do something wrong, all politicians who have regulatory purview of the said infraction, are manhandled to fix the laws so they don't apply"
The same clamor that we frequently get when there is an air landing crash with fatalities: Why aren't the pilots in jail? Why aren't there criminal penalties for the airline operators?" You may not have noticed this, because you've been watching "Air Crash Investigation" instead of reading the local press, or watching local-language YouTube, but mostly because there haven't been any such recent crashes in your country.
You see the same thing when there is an airplane crash: the demand that everyone be punished.
The desire for entertainment and revenge -- the public popularity of hanging and whippings -- causes denial, self defense and blame shifting.
We've been in the development phase of self driving cars, when it was more important to find true proximate and ultimate cause of faults.
Now, the ignorant and stupid (as demonstrated here) don't care about reducing casualties and improving traffic: they just want to see someone punished.
I'm running MacProxyPlus (a fork of MacProxy) on a Win7 computer. MacProxy rewrites HTTP so that you can view new web pages using a very old browser. Originally, so that you could use your Mac Plus. But as per the readme, "Despite its name, there is nothing Mac specific about this proxy. "
So I posted information on how to get the proxy running on Win7. To which I got a very nice reply: "Win7 is out of support"
The glue is what holds them in place as they go into the oven.
No, it's not that simple for 148 solder-ball connections, and yes, as the solder melts surface tension is supposed to pull the chip into alignment,
But yes, you can glue chips onto the board upside down if they are loaded incorrectly, and yes, there were also some through-hole pards that needed to be glued down before going through the wave-soldering oven.
The sensor is *never* at the hottest part of the CPU -- if it had a sensor there, it wouldn't be the hottest part.
My (old) M/B throttles at 85C, the CPU on it self-throttles at 100C, the hot spots on the CPU are supposed to be around 150C
The electrical grid wiring is mostly steel,
The overhead transmission grid wiring is mostly steel by weight. By volume, it's majority Aluminium.
Underground cables don't need the steel core, so they have a solid aluminium core.
The residential grid may be copper in your area, but new lines are steel/aluminium like the transmission grid.
For the semiconductors I use, the hot-spot die temperature is around 150C. That's a rise over ambient of 130C. Reduced by 65% that's 45C rise, for 70C measured,
Going the other way, the "die temperature" your mother-board utility shows could be safely increased from 85C to the maximum that the package supports, around 150C: the power could be doubled or trippled, (0.35*2 = 70%, 0.35*3 = 105%)
I'm not sure that "walking with phone" is as much of a problem in Japan as in other countries.
Japan "used to have" ?? a cultural norm that walking while doing something/anything else (eating, smoking, using the phone) was wrong.
Someone who has been their more recently may wish to comment.
A university I was associated with wanted to get rid of MS Exchange and Outlook. There was some Holiness and Moral Superiority involved. So they did a complete change over to Notes. That worked so well that months later they went back to Exchange. The next year they switched to gMail, which wasn't as good as Exchange, but by that (later) time had improved enough to be good enough.
UEFI was never intended to make security better. It's a way of decoupling the hardware from the OS, so that any OS can run on your hardware, and your OS can run on any hardware. Generically, this is an increase in the attack surface.
It is possible that this was motivated by a desire to break the WIntel monopoly. I'm not aware of other motivations.
Here is what MIT (source of the reference implementation) has to say:
Version 5 of Kerberos, however, does not predetermine the number or type of encryption methodologies supported. It is the task of each specific implementation to support and best negotiate the various types of encryption. However, this flexibility and expandability of the protocol has accentuated interoperability problems between the various implementations of Kerberos 5. In order for clients and application and authentication servers using different implementations to interoperate, they must have at least one encryption type in common. The difficulty related to the interoperability between Unix implementations of Kerberos 5 and the one present in the Active Directory of Windows is a classic example of this. Indeed, Windows Active Directory supports a limited number of encryptions and only had DES at 56 bits in common with Unix. This required keeping the latter enabled, despite the risks being well known, if interoperability had to be guaranteed. The problem was subsequently solved with version 1.3 of MIT Kerberos 5. This version introduced RC4-HMAC support, which is also present in Windows and is more secure than DES
I'm old enough to remember that MS has faced a lot of criticism for not maintaining compatibility with unix servers that support only a limited number of older security protocols and common encryption types.
And just another nail in a coffin with the lid already well nailed down.
MS target markets are enterprise and entertainment. Neither market has any use for vbscript, and for enterprise anything that expands the attack surface is a clear negative.
I've worked with too many developers who were convinced that their own familiar scripting system (shell, python, PHP, Perl, JS, etc) was the only "right' way to do scripting, and should be smuggled into production, to have any sympathy with people who think that VBS is "inferior'. But that's what "Personal" computers were for: you could put your own stuff on it and do your own stuff.
software just hogged 100%
It's interruptible. If it's not 'hogging' 100%, it's the OS sleep loops that will be "hogging" 100%. It has to share with other applications, but can't exclude them, and can be set to a lower priority if you want to bother. Real problems are programs that do OS calls that include high-priority wait loops.
... and it is subject to this problem once every 6 months, if the scheduling overlaps the timer reset. If there were another 8 bits in the counter, the reset would only happen long after the power ran out. That is also not a simple solution: it's probably a hardware counter, and even if it's not, adding another byte to a software counter is as complex as adding another counter. Which is why the genius boffins at ESA need to rethink this one.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1470475/
[i]Probably few gaps between scholarly knowledge and popular conventional wisdom are as wide as the one regarding National Prohibition. “Everyone knows” that Prohibition failed because Americans did not stop drinking following ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and passage of its enforcement legislation, the Volstead Act.
...
Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect. They rose after that, but generally did not reach the peaks recorded during the period 1900 to 1915. After Repeal, when tax data permit better-founded consumption estimates than we have for the Prohibition Era, per capita annual consumption stood at 1.2 US gallons (4.5 liters), less than half the level of the pre-Prohibition period.[/i]
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