Posts by david 12 2362 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
Over the last 20 years, their thriving open-source electronics community has (1) only used Chinese documentation, and (2) only worked with Chinese partners.
Perhaps the CCP likes it this way: perhaps the community just can't be arsed dealing with foreigners. Probably a bit of both.
WATS, -- Wide Area Telephone Service -- was the name and brand given to the service that permitted free/local incoming calls. It allowed your friends/ customers to call you for free / local.
"Free" because in the USA, local calls were free (included in the subscription, base rate). Only "long distance" calls were charged. (Although the "local" area was not large).
In the USA, telephone trunk lines typically ran alongside railway trunk lines, and (originally) connected a series of independent telephone companies. Long distance calls were routed on standard routes (the same way railway box cars would be routed) and charged standard rates (the same way railway box cars would be charged), with the standard charge collected at the start and distributed among the independent rail / phone operators.
Come Christmas, when the long distance lines were all busy with people making family calls, my ancestor, a shipping manager who knew every railway siding in the USA, with gross disregard for the charging errors, would call his brother on the other side of the USA by working his way from one operator to the next by instructing them to divert along little-used local connections following little-used local railway routes.
Amazon has very high staff turnover in most of their warehouses. Most of the workers are casuals, and are gone in 6 months.
One of the reasons they continue to get new workers is that it's easy to get a job there.
It's possible that the USA will eventually run out of new casual workers who have never worked at Amazon, but unlikely. There are more who leave school every year.
The term used more often in the original memos is "Bakery sales and valuation"
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/66297/P1-3-Bakery-Sales-Valuations-Perforating-and-checking-current-data/
The job is working out the value of bakery sales, which I guess must be used for planning bakery lines.
And they same to have had different bakeries (locations?) for different lines. I remember when bakeries in Australia were consolidated from one in each state: evidently there was a previous round of consolidation.
I've been using Edge for a while, including development builds for a while, and I didn't like the feature where when you dragged a URL from Edge to the desktop, it created an 'Edge' shortcut instead of a generic URL shortcut. I'm glad that MS removed this feature from Edge. Tied shortcuts for OS features I can live with.
In the old days, you could fix up your unix code and recompile it for a different unix, and that's what unix mavens meant by 'portable'.
.NET went the same way. No, you can't just take the program and run it on a different platform: you can take the source code, modify it, and recompile it for the other platform.
Good enough for unix in the 20th century, but not compatible with the Windows model expected by users and developers (cf SFU).
Internet Explorer blank screen indicates that the system is using a "cross platform" Open Source Java Script Library. Which long ago made the deliberate decision that "will not support IE" means "will detect IE and refuse to load".
It's become commonplace now for corporations to use "not supported" as an excuse for "will deliberately break" (viz Adobe Flash), but it started in the Java Script frameworks.
You don't want to have the laity reading and understanding computer science. That would be like writing programs in BASIC instead of c. What happens to the beauty and strength of the liturgy? Next thing you know, ordinary people will be forming their own opinions about computer security!
One of the reason why the 'Quakers' were unpopular with the English establishment is that they were implicitly and explicitly anti-authoritarian: they used the singular/informal 'thou' instead of the plural/formal 'you' even when talking with or about the aristocracy, refusing to recognize the 'royal we' used by their social superiors.
The Holy Trinity is, of course, 'thou', "How great thou art.." because the holy trinity is of course, just One.
"Not to mention junior doctors..."
Fortunately, critical care is provided by nurses, who are supposed to have regulated hours for just this reason. When you have to worry is when you hear about nurses working double shifts. Because stuff like drugs, meals, and patient checks are supposed to be tightly scheduled, and stuff happens if the nurse is tired.
Doctors are more self-scheduling, and can take 10 filling out paperwork, coming back to the critical decisions when they feel more alert.
(Based on reported research rather than personal experience.)
Just because NTFS is in Linux doesn't mean that NTFS in Linux is any good. There are infinite possibilities for how content and meta content is arranged on the disk. I've got NTFS disks in use with existing drivers on the old kernels, and meta information, which under Windows would be placed in blocks, is scattered like stars in the sky, and just as ineffable. Because this meta information, of various types, refers to and is referred to by direct addressing, it is unmovable except by the file system, not under user control
c:\ProgramData is the replacement for AllUser AppData. It has become the default installation folder for all kinds of content, exactly because it is unsecured.
Other games put 50GB of content into user \ roaming \ appdata, either because they haven't noticed AllUser, or because they want a different 50GB for every user. Putting 50GB into 'roaming' even I can't explain.
The problem is that for users, stuff that wants admin permission is another irritating popup. Unless they know enough to be scared of admin requests, in which case it's even worse. So developers look for someplace to drop content, and they find places where they /are/ permitted to drop content, and it's OK, because if it wasn't OK, then the OS wouldn't let you do that, right?
If the software doesn't work, then dump it. If it costs to much, dump it. If exams don't work, them dump exams. If watching students causes anxiety, then don't watch.
But don't just conflate everything into one big objection to 'surveillance' , ignoring the weaknesses of the individual supporting arguments.
Frankly, the people I worked with who had the biggest objection to exams, and proctoring, and evaluation, were academics who knew that bad exam results demonstrated bad teaching ability, bad pedagogy, and lack of content.
You would think that, what with COM being specifically designed as a cross-platform inter-processor network protocol, you could arrange to communicate between 32 bit and 64 bit processes. And you can. But only if you create a 64 bit object to do so.
The problem is that (with a few exceptions) MS had no interest in exposing even their own 32 bit objects as 64 bit objects.
This means that any VBA project which used external objects -- one of the prime use cases for VBA -- is automatically broken when run as a 64 bit process.
Knew a science/math teacher who had morphed into 'the computer guy' back in the day. Much to his disgust, the main use of PC's in the school was to teach typing.
So the typing teacher walked into the 'business studies' classroom, switched on the first computer and *BANG* it died. OK, that was loud, but she recovered and bravely approached the second computer. *BANG*, it died. That made her even more edgy, but *BANG* and *BANG* This is not a technical person: she's a typing teacher and this was the 1980's. She approached my friend severely shaken and almost in tears.
Unknown student had switched all the computers to 110....
IPSEC on Windows used to be /much/ easier to set up, before security concerns led to separation of function and strict walls between kernel and user. Kernel functions have really limited ability to pop up debug information, and user functions have really limited ability to query kernel functions. Which, for a secure channel, was clearly intentional. It will be interesting to see how wireguard survives the translation.
For the rest of is, it was often the case that IT couldn't or wouldn't tell us what was banned. Our salesman was trying to communicate with an acquaintance as a client, and d'd if they could work out why his email had been deleted. By cunning testing of small parts of the message, they worked out that "a large international cigarette company" had decided to block and discard any email containing the magic phrase:
Just do the right thing
". I have to wonder if some bright spark decided that San Jose to Corvallis was best relayed via Myanmar."
Least Cost Routing is done automatically -- in the short term, it doesn't require human intervention at all. The only 'bright sparks' involved are those approving the cost of the telecom contract on the buyers side, and those approving the cost of the telecom contracts on the providers side.
The 'print spooler' is the system that manages print jobs for multiple users on multiple computers. It needs to have some kind of super-user permission to do that.
If it was a new service, it would probably have some kind of special default user, but back in the day all the critical parts of server infrastructure were "SYSTEM".
High-end network printers have their own computer, OS, and spooler services: the Windows Print Spooler as was common at the turn of the century, implemented all that stuff on a Windows Server, and a cut-down version was implemented on workstations for printer-sharing.
>Hansard does not record Mr Skinner using the work "crooks" at all,
At the option of the house, Hansard does not record things that 'never happened' (were withdrawn with exceptional circumstances). So there is a small open possibility.
More commonly, heckling is not reported unless the the member with the floor responds. So Mr Skinner may have used the word 'crooks' many times, and simply not been reported.
The big step that opened up computers to a vast array of people who began to write software that now powers just about everything we equate with the modern world was Dartmouth BASIC. At the time there was a split between the SF idea of computers as intelligent thinking machines, and the real world idea of computers that they were big calculators, tabulators, or accounting machines. The world of computing laughed at Kemény for wanting to put computers into the hands of humanities and social science undergraduates: they laughed at Kurtz for thinking it was possible.
The BASIC compiler that Dartmouth built was complex, fragile and engineered by a brilliant programmer. In the 80's, any undergraduate with an interest could write a BASIC interpreter. The difference was "Principles of Compiler Design".
EST 7:09PM
President Reagan authorized the development of GPS - a civilian navigation system for civilian airliners - in 1983, after the Soviet Union shot down an airliner. The first satellite was launched 6 years later in 1989, and the constellation was complete in 1994
It didn't take 10 years just to notice that civilians were permitted to use an existing military system: it took 10 years to develop a new civilian navigation system suitable for airliners.
Electronics and Communications weren't at some kind of dead stop during the 1980's: like computers and networking, satellite technology completely changed in the 1980's. The GPS satellite launched in 1983 was not 1970's military technology: it was new technology, developed for civilian airliners in response to the loss of a civilian airliner that went off course and was shot down.
9:30AM AEDT
The military was able to piggyback on the back of the new civilian navigation technology, as they always have: the Allies collected civilian maps and photographs of Europe prior to D-Day landings in Europe, and removed road signs in Britain for the same reason. And the development did happen inside the "Military Industrial Complex": this is the well known method of pork-barreling and industry protection in the USA, but that's much to the disgust of the military, which would like to appropriate all of the 'military' budget for military purposes, rather than having it used for things like developing a civilian navigation system for civilian airliners.
Lynch is alleged by the US government to have CLAIMED TO HAVE followed standard American business practices. Which is part of what made his behavior illegal in the USA. The American courts have ACCEPTED THAT Lynch represented that his statements were following American standard business practice, and that HP accepted that representation.
I'm not barracking for either side: I don't know if it was reasonable for HP to expect a British firm to respect American law, or if the American courts got it right, or what British courts will make of the same allegations.
If the Americans were alleging that Lynch had /actually/ followed standard American business practice, he wouldn't be in court.
10:51AM AEDT
>HP a hick from the country first time in the big city <
In amongst all the he-said / she-said, there's a little bit of interesting international finance: the American laws are different than the English laws.
The Americans (claim to have) depended on the representations made by the English. In the USA, those false representations were illegal, which is why they didn't need an audit report and why there has been an American conviction. In London, those representations were only illegal if they contained specific false facts: just making up BS is only business as usual.
Two countries divided by a common finance system.
8:18pm AEDT
> just forward the searches to Google, then strip out all the adverts in the results and replace them with THEIR own adverts. <
This is what HTTPS is designed to prevent.
Oddly enough, HTTPS was backed and promoted by Google, and most of the worlds web browsers are now based on technology developed and funded by Google.
7:14 AM AEDT
A landfill site full of rotting garbage is a low-oxygen environment. Soft Iron doesn't rust in landfill. Neither does Copper/Chrome/Stainless Steel.
And since I've found it impossible to adequately compress garbage or recycling by any means, and, as I've read, you can walk away after getting compressed in a garbage compactor truck that you've been tipped into (while sheltering in a skip), I'm not inclined to think that a disk drive is likely to be damaged by that method either.
#12:25 15 Jan 2021# UTC
...an odyssey that began in 1995 with the introduction of "Microsoft Passport.", marked also by the "Internet Tidal Wave" memorandum from B Gates.
Passport got massive pushback at the time, because of reluctance to hand authentication to a company like (now) Google or Facebook ....
#2:27 18-12-20#
You don't have to be imagining "armed conflict" to have a reason for developing your own technology or to have a reason for pork-barreling your own industry. Sometimes it's useful to pretend that "armed conflict" is your reason for supporting what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex", or sometimes, as with maps and GPS, it's just something that everyday civilians find useful. As with the Chinese, Indian, Russian, and European "positioning systems"
The English maps were traditionally provided by "Ordinance Survey" -- a branch of the military. But American maps were traditionally provided by "Geological Survey" -- a branch of the mining industry. Governments support GPS services for all kinds of reasons, and "Armed Conflict" is by no means the main reason for subsidizing your own development in China, Russia, or India.
20 odd years ago, you would have known that, if you really wanted it, you already had this functionality. It was very effectively hidden in office 95 and 97, but the ability to write functions using the native function language of Excel, as it existed in 4 and earlier, was still there.
The only language I've used without syntactic white space was FORTRAN, in which GOTO100 and GO TO 100 were the same statement, X=SUM SX was the same as X=SUMSX, and accidentally hitting the . key instead of the comma key gave you a legal statement meaning DO50I = 10.1 instead of DO 50 I = 10, 100
I'm not aware of any person who's actually /used/ a language without syntactic white space who wants to go back.
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