Posts by Chris Gray 1

Summer in Australia means beers, beaches, and bork

weet-bix

Thank-you for introducing me to the "Weet-bix" product. My gran used to send packages of Weetabix from England (arrived sort-of OK), so I thought it was invented in England. Wikipedia put me to rights on that!

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Moon aie

I've read a bunch of science fiction, but I must have missed the one where an AI on the moon enslaves mankind. Some sorta like that, but nothing really close. Can someone privide a proper reference?

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

Sometimes you have to

I used to always buy loose tea, when you could get the sealed tins of it ("Twinings"). Haven't seen those for decades here. If you get loose tea from a tea shop, you'll observe that the small barrel it comes from is not sealed, and the container they put it in isn't either. So, you lose most of the aroma, which is the best part. Gah! I get a brand of tea bag that comes in 3 separate foil bags inside a plastic-sealed cardboard box. Fresh tea each time you open one of the 3 foil bags, which I can re-seal fairly well.

Lepro AMI

Unless you are are running lots of blocking stuff (e.g. "NoScript"), *don't* click into the Lepro website - my guess is that bad things may happen. Instead, search for "lepro ami" on YouTube to see their stuff, with English subtitles.

Hey, I'd pay a bit of money for a cute Chinese girl cavorting on my desk, but she's not getting internet access!

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Can't remember keys...

Thanks, I've cut-n-pasted that from Firefox to a file in Gnu emacs. Had to select menu COPY in Firefox since its not the same clipboard as XTerms use (which is what I run emacs in - I don't want to waste space on a menu bar), and then the usual middle-button click to paste into the emacs buffer.

But, the two kinds of windows I use most are XTerms and Gnu Emacs in an xterm, and those keys do not do those things in either place. :/)

I similarly have a file on my Windows laptop's desktop telling how to use the trackpad - after, errrr, about 50 years of extensive mouse and keyboard use, my fingers just don't work on trackpads. Oh, and did I grumble about the lack of key travel and compressed keyboards on laptops? The windows laptop is faster than this deskside computer, but using external monitor, keyboard, and mouse sounds rather silly. Oh, I mostly use it for running WSL2... not sure what that runs, but X stuff works.

Can't remember keys...

I use the center-click multiple times a day. Did the ctrl-c/ctrl-v stuff even work on things like early SunOs? I hate that method because my horrible memory for plain facts makes it hard for me to remember the keys. Is "c" Cut or Copy? "v" for paste???? I get sooo frustrated the very small number of times I have to use Windows - *nothing* makes sense, so trying to remember them is extremely difficult for me, based on the one or two times a year I need them.

Gahh. Don't get old. :/)

El Reg needs an icon for frustrated old guy!

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Re: This is confusing

Can I paste and have it readable? Probably not....

Here is the Draco source for drawing a circle (Intel 8080 CPU) on a (Godbout?) Spectrum graphics card:

proc nonrec circle(ushort yc, xc, r)void:

int xd, yd;

word negY;

ushort x, y;

xd := make(r, word) << 1;

yd := 0;

x := r;

y := 0;

negY := 0;

while y <= x do

while xd + yd >= 0 do

point(xc + x, yc + y);

point(xc + y, yc + x);

point(xc + x, yc - y);

point(xc - y, yc + x);

point(xc - x, yc + y);

point(xc + y, yc - x);

point(xc - x, yc - y);

point(xc - y, yc - x);

y := y + 1;

negY := negY - 1;

yd := yd + negY << 1;

od;

x := x - 1;

xd := xd + x << 1;

od;

corp;

Re: This is confusing

Read a bit of the text there - interesting.

If I recall correctly, doing sloping lines without multiply/divide is called a DDA (Digital something something). I recall descriptions and comparisons in an early graphics textbook.

But, did you know you can do *circles* without mul/div? And no lookup tables. I did one for my "Explore" system on a CP/M S-100 graphics card. It's probably possible to modify that to do ellipses, but I didn't need that, so didn't try.

Fun times. Now I need the old geezer icon again!

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

May well be quite successful

All of this is my opinion - I have no inside contacts at Lego.

1) These are in no way intended to be replacements for Mindstorms or PowerUp. They are greatly improved replacements for the 2x3 light and sound bricks that Lego has been using for years.

2) If you read the article by Lego (https://www.lego.com/en-ca/smart-play) you can find some history of how these were developed. The "chip" inside the 2x4 brick (*NOTE* Lego pieces are described via (short dimension) X (long dimension) (optional X height), just like lumber, plywood, and other construction materials) is an ASIC, not a fancy CPU with lots of RAM and Flash.

3) They are intended to make kid's play more interesting and exciting. They are *NOT* intended for computer geeks. Lego fans might get some if they are interested. I'll likely buy one set just to play around with, but that'll be it - I'm not the target audience.

4) Geeks might buy some to strip the parts out of the SmartBrick, and sell the Lego pieces.

5) The protocol between the ID tiles (2x2x1/3 with no studs) and active minifigs, and the SmartBrick could be released, or geeks will figure it out. That'll likely allow things like different sounds and light patterns.

6) The choice of initially going with Star Wars makes good sense. That theme has some highly recognizeable sounds - lightsaber, TIE fighters, wookie calls, etc.

7) These are an excellent answer to what Lumibricks does (I have the Ore Factory and love it), but what you could do with this new SmartBrick system is going to raise things to another level.

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

Non-standard kiosk?

Looks like that "kiosk" is hacked together out of cardboard and an old tablet or something. We have lots of Wendys in Canada, but I doubt regulations would allow that kluge. I haven't eaten at a Wendys for a fair while, but I recall a regular burger with no condiments (I know, I'm weird!) was pretty good. I liked the milkshakes.

All aglow about DCs, investors launch $300M at microreactor startup

Could be appropriate

If you get on their order list early enough, these *could* make sense. A lot would depend on the regulatory situation where you want to put it. If there are no regulations (maybe the used-to-be-orange one will wave his, er, wand, and make them go away) it could work. In many places there are lots of regulations concerning wind power, and it does take time to set up, even after you've made it to the head of the queue. Gotta get your datacenter running before the AI bubble pops!

Old-school rotary phone dials into online meetings, hangs up when you slam it down

Re: I have some old phones

The POTS exchanges were quite forgiving. I had read somewhere that you could dial using the hook plunger thing. Just tap it N times to dial an N (10 for 0). Worked fine.

Soooo, when I wanted to dial out for a 300 baud modem, just do the same thing in simple code - the hook switch in RS-232 is available. Aaand, you didn't need any kind of modem really, since 300 baud was slow enough that even an 8-bitter could implement a "bit banger", where the RS-232 TX line is simply bounced up and down with the proper timing. Just remember that the start "bit" is 1-1/2 bits long, and you need a couple of off bits between bytes. For incoming, you just counted properly (depends on your CPU speed) and then sampled to see if it was an incoming 1 bit or a 0 bit. Wait for the start bit between bytes, and you stay in sync. Sample at the middle of the data bits. Pretty much how UART chips did it.

LisaGUI recreates Apple's innovative computer OS, without emulating it

Expandable?

Thanks for the article Liam! This old fart didn't know much about the Lisa, and had just assumed it was "conventional" in operation.

Question though: could someone other than Apple add a document kind and the code needed to handle it? If not, perhaps Apple invented the "lockin" concept before Microsoft. :/)

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Try it on earth.

Surely it wouldn't be hard for the Chinese to ship one of their docking adaptors (without space station attached!) over to SpaceX, so that SpaceX could hack up a variant of what they use that will properly mate with the Chinese one?

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: Type checking and compatibility

I've read on stuff for formatting comments here. I don't have a badge, so I can't use < pre >. Gonna try anyway:

Nope, nor does blockquote or code (I don't know that one)

Any other suggestions I can try?

As a programmer, posting little code snippets is a natural thing for me.

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Conceptually makes sense. The big issue, at least in my case, is that the conversion factors are continually changing. So, they could not be compiled into a "program". Even if you only ran the "program" right after updating it, you'd want the updating to be automatic, so you would need your "compiler" able to go fetch them from whatever authority maintains them. (Is there such a single authority? I'm a bytes guy, not a money guy.)

Re: Valgrind

Thanks to both of you for bringing up Valgrind. Caused me to read a bit more on Wikipedia, answering my question about whether it worked on C sources or on binary files. The fact it uses the latter is good, since it should work on binaries produced by my Zed compiler.

A friend ran valgrind (Memcheck I think) on my earlier Zed stuff and found one uninitialized variable, easily fixed. It also reported a problem that I was not able to track down - the badness seems to have been going through my bytecode engine's memory.... That *should* have been OK, but it would have required some "interesting" hacks to try to chase it further.

Now that I have "zedc" the standalone compiler, I should be able to valgrind it (biggest program I have used it on so far is 2K lines of Zed). Valgrind the compilation, then Valgrind the test program - whee!

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Ok, I was wondering if that type of size change was what you had in mind. You need to also pay attention to the signed/unsigned attribute. If the starting value is signed, then the sign bit will be extended as needed. If the starting value is unsigned, padding 0 bits are inserted. You *do* need to be fully aware of when you are expanding numerics, but most code never has to worry about it. Whether or not you check for loss of value on a size reduction will depend on the "level" of your programming language, and then on what it's rules are for specific situations. I've avoided that issue in Zed by only having low-level sized types. 'uint' and 'sint' are only ever 64 bits.

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Disagree, at least as far as strongly typed compiled languages are concerned. Type 'bool' is true/false. If you want more, then feel free to add such a type to your programming language, but the historic use of the simple 'bool' is very strong.

In my AmigaMUD programming language, type "status" had values "success", "failure", "continue" to deal with attempts to do things in the game world. What you need/want depends on what you are doing and the context. Leave 'bool' alone.

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Fun! How much do you use it? I put a full "Measures and Units" facility into my Zed language. My thought is that could help folks doing scientific, etc. programming. I've never used it myself. :/) The only run-time aspect is that of finding a good scale factor for output. Took a bit, but found my fun example: (Sorry, don't know how to format stuff for El Reg comments!)

proc

BttF(bool useLightning)void:

var ampVec := getCurrentCurrents(), totalCurrent := 0.(A);

for i from 0 upto getBound(ampVec) - 1 do

totalCurrent := totalCurrent + ampVec[i];

od;

float(V) voltage := if useLightning then 1_000_000.(V) else 12.(V) fi;

/* *How* many jigga-watts?!!?! */

con power := totalCurrent * voltage;

Fmt("Power = ", power, " [", power :: gUs, "] {", power :: gUsn, "}");

corp;

Output:

Power = +0.121006e+010(A*V) [1.21(GW)] {1.21(gigawatt)}

Re: Type checking and compatibility

Compiled language don't do the kind of type conversions that run-time-typed languages do (can't say about Python - its years since I did a few experiments with it). I've actually used both Algol-W and Pascal (long long ago), and neither does that sort of thing.

The problem with not declaring a type for variables is that the variables can then be used in expressions, and then you don't really know what is going on without finding the variable's declaration and carefully evaluating the type resulting from the expression assigned to it.

By declaring the type of a variable you reduce the effort needed to understand the code - you only need to look at the declaration to know - not any later uses. Taking the type from the initialization expression can be difficult for a human reading unfamiliar code.

One of the minor quandries I have when programming in my Zed language (new, compiled, strongly typed, to native binary) is which form to use for simple declarations. "bool flag := <bool expression>" and "var flag := <bool expression>" both do the same thing. But, with "var" (more often "con" when it is something that won't change later in the code) you can setup multiple simple variables of differing types on the same line. With "bool" starting the declaration you can only setup "bool" variables. Most languages I know have these niggles.

((Liam: progress is slow - currently I use "gcc" to link the compiler, and in my latest experiments it crashes something call "bfd" which seems to be part of "ld". My old route of creating several .a's and linking with those still works fine.))

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

Re: See that carboard box

On a long enough mission 'nauts might get used to tubes of flavoured mush. Then, coming back to Earth and trying to eat all this stuff with weird shape and *textures* might actually be a problem. Recognizeable hunks of animals and plants - Ughh!

(At a Christmas dinner years ago, a family friend would eat slices of turkey breast, but wouldn't touch wings or drumsticks. Turns out he was OK with stuff as long as it wasn't physically recognizeable.)

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

That's Big!

Wow, that's a lot of memory for one user. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M

Now that's a small operating system.

(Cynics said CP/M was just a "program loader", but that was enough for quite a few situations.)

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Ernst & Young

I had to read 1/3 of the way into the linked report to find out what the f**k EY is. Come on El Reg, not everyone has the same knowlege set and interests in detail as you do. EY = Ernst & Young, a big accounting firm.

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

Re: Settings to disable (UK)

I got it different too (Canada).

Thanks to El Reg for pointing this out. I turned off nearly everything. Signing in was weird - it didn't work at all, but then I tried a direct URL for my "account", and that worked, on the second try. They *really* don't want you to go away - I've never used LinkedIn to look for a job - it was just an online group for ex-employees of the second-last company I worked for long ago. Wheeeee!

"App"? Wot's that? :-)

SpaceX Dragon gives International Space Station a kick up the orbit

Watch for it

When the time comes for the ISS to meet is makers, you should be watching. There is a bit of a competition among various alien races as to which of them can nab it to use it as spare parts. Or a museum piece...

AMD Ryzen CPUs fry twice in the face of heavy math load, GMP says

Goes back a ways

A friend of mine has run a lot of multi-precision integer arithmetic loads. I don't know if he has ever used GMP - he wrote his own library in assembler (and yes, we glued it into Zed). His computers only last a couple of years - he runs them *hard*. Sorry, I have no more details.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Amiga 4-Ever

Been working on Draco's successor for quite some time. Getting there. I now have a compiler written in itself that generates X86-64 code on Linux. The language is huge, but quite Draco-like. I took some time a couple years back to try porting Amiga Empire to it. One or two routines in the world generator compiled without change. Stalled on trying to have a single server handle all the clients directly - will need to do something like "inetd" on my Linux box, or maybe use "vfork". A very out of date version of the language is here:

http://www.graysage.com/Zed/New/

Note the "http" - I haven't gone to the effort to support "https" yet.

Amiga 4-Ever

I just checked and there are no Amigas in my closets here. I did pass some on to a friend who was going to put them in one of his storage lockers. Don't know what he has left - his life has become *very* busy.

A1000 - first off the official monitor wasn't available, so the store loaned me a green-screen one. Very slow BASIC Mandelbrot in shades of green. Long live the keyboard garage! The SOTS (Slap On The Side) hard drives never worked, so the store and I agreed to an upgrade:

A2000 - eventually got the 68020 board turning it into an A2500.

A3000 - workhorse - eventually bought a second as backup, but never needed it, but see below.

A4000T - bought this *after* I heard that they were going under - I was in the middle of a lot of programming and did not want to switch machines at that point.

At times in there I would be running Amiga Empire or AmigaMUD with two modems. Another period I ran the Amiga UUCP package and was a forwarder for news/email.

I got an ethernet card at one point - that would have been for an A3000 I think. Work let me put it on the network in their machine room, so it was running Empire or AmigaMUD (both??) right on the internet for a while.

It's been quite a while since I had UAE running - I don't think ever on this current Linux box. Probably good - saves lots of time! :-)

Real estate agents use the power of AI to command plumbing, layout to disappear

Re: Pictures disappeared?

Yeah, I went and looked just to see them. Sigh, looks like reality is back. :-)

Doesn't look too bad really, but that neighbouring business is a bit close. No matter, the house is on the wrong continent anyway...

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: Kernel 6.16 and ancient AMD processors

Mine is an FX 8150, and I have no graphics card. The only games I play are things like Minesweeper and Solitaire. I can view YouTube videos just fine. Old-style software developers don't need fancy graphics - its just overkill.

Rampant emoji use suggests crypto-stealing NPM package was written by AI

Hey!

Hey! *I* write good comments. Usually. And no emojis - emacs doesn't support them, as far as I know. My phone has a billion of them, and most I have no clue what they are supposed to mean.

Sh!t happens, so Microsoft is paying biz to flush its carbon sins underground

Huh?

Why would any reasonable government (and I know this doesn't currently include the USA) *allow* someone to bury biomass? Most, if not all, biomass can be turned into plant growth. Plants take raw CO2 out of the atmosphere, add moisture to the atmosphere, reduce the albedo of the land - causing cooling, can provide food, and some even provide much-desired shade. And then to allow this ridiculous practice to serve as a carbon credit???

In lots of places, you should just mix it with the ubiquitous sand, then throw some seeds into it.

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Re: File Explorer is now a productivity sink

Yeah, but the Delete option is now in "more options". It's pretty much the only one I ever want - I've never been a Trashcan user, even back in my Amiga days.

Also, what on earth does "Copy by path" (or whatever it is - I'm safely back on my Linux box) do?

Great!

Thanks for this! I've sent the URL to some friends/family.

I had to get a Win11 laptop to access my local government healthcare pages to see test results, etc. (WSA also runs my new programming language compiler just fine, so it's a good test, too!). The number of "F*** O**" shouts was quite high on first use, but after I went through everything in settings, it was reduced a lot. I had gotten about half of what you suggest. I've never used a local Search capability, so that didn't show up (maybe I removed it from the bar thingy). I can readily find *my* stuff - on Linux its programs with weird names that I can't find (very poor memory for fact-like things), so I rely on menus to help there.

Vintage computing boffin releases expansive Intel 286 test suite

Another world

Fascinating that there are folks doing this. I was an Amiga-oid back then and was impressed by the demo scene stuff I saw - I'm guesssing there are folks keeping that stuff available as well.

Boffins detail new algorithms to losslessly boost AI perf by up to 2.8x

Recurse!

If the drafter is just a smaller model, could they have an even smaller drafter for the main drafter?

It's turtles all the way down...

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

FRED only

What the article said is that the communication is only between the controlling locomotive and the FRED. The FRED is only on the last car of the train. So, only that one radio link needs to be updated. What I don't know is how the FRED actually controls all of the freight cars ahead of it. My guess is that its the same way as the brakeman in the caboose/brake-van did - open the valve on the air line, letting all the air spew out. With no air pressure, all the brakes in the train will activate - eventually.

My understanding of this comes from being a model railroad fan, and so watching lots of YouTube videos. At least here in North America big trucks are the same setup - let the air out and the brakes all activate. You have to connect the air hoses before the brakes on a trailer will release.

The days of manual brake wheels on top of boxcars, etc. are long gone.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Types!

The programming language geek in me says that if the SQL query language was strongly typed, that bad command would be invalid. The WHERE clause should be Boolean. "value - 1" is not Boolean.

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Every dichotomy is a false dichotomy

My parents had a small holiday trailer (caravan) when I were a young 'un. Boggled my mind that burning propane made the inside of the little fridge cold!

Excellent!

Good progress. Even better would be more progress.

Also, I've thought for years that direct thermal power generation would be a godsend. It already exists, but not for practical use. The article here mentions that the "CHESS" stuff works for it too. Here's hoping that that aspect can be made practical.

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Fake

I'm very far from an expert here and have somewhat poor vision to boot, but...

Looks like a cardboard model against a simple backdrop. Look at the fastening of the fins at the bottom.

China’s trying to slim down, which will fatten the smartwatch market

Psychological?

I like the step counter and the heart-rate monitor. But you can get step counters right on your phone, I think. So, I'd say it is mostly psychological - having a thing on your wrist that you know is tracking stuff could be a subconscious prod to *do* something.

Also, you might be a weirdo who likes to change the watch-face every day.... :-)

I've stuck with the main face on my current watch, since it has the most info right there, plus a tap to bring up the phone call stuff, and one to bring up heart-rate monitoring right away. Darn thing often gets the outdoor temperature wrong though - that's the fault of the app on the phone, however. Oh yes, they all have different control apps. :-(

Go with the cheap ones

The things are cheap enough on Amazon that you can afford to do just that. You'll have to fiddle with your phone settings to switch to a different watch, however. Just go with some generic Chinese brand - you can get smartwatch's for as little as $15, and the quality seems to be pretty good. Just think about your requirements - for example, do you require it to be able to answer/make phone calls through your smartphone? The $15 one doesn't have mic/speaker so can't. Slightly higher priced ones can. All do heart-rate tracking, step counting, blood oxygen level. All of the ones I've encountered have far more exercise/fitness stuff than anyone needs. The $15 one tries to do blood pressure monitoring, but I think it was reading high for me.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Re: X11 over network connection

Ah yes. Long, long ago I took a somewhat-longer-than-usual Christmas vacation with my parents. They of course had a windows computer, not a proper Linux computer. My email then was on my own domain on my home computer (gee, just like now!), and I didn't attempt to allow email access remotely (POP/IMAP). So, I exported my usual session over X. I put a Linux distribution on a USB stick and booted the parent's machine from that. Slow, sure, but access to the X-session at home was all I needed it for. Made my stay much pleasanter. And yes, I only did it a couple of hours a day.

Upvote!

Where do I upvote the article? :-)

A bit off-topic, but triggered by Liam's discussion of menus, etc.

Gnome has no title-bars? Yikes! No wonder I expunged it long ago.

I'm a person with a horrible memory for raw facts. The main reason I like menus (of any kind) is that they LIST OPTIONS. That can readily remind me what the names of the tools I need are. I'm afraid this is especially useful on Linux where geek programmers invent weird and hard-to-remember names for their programs/tools.

I spend the vast majority of non-browser computer time with a shell window and an emacs window. The "search tools" that various systems have are often useless to me since I don't remember the name of the tool I recall using - and I also might not recall the proper search terms to find the tool by function.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Fine for me

I've used Firefox for a long time. Something different back in my Amiga days, but I think that's about it. I'm not a heavy browser user, although it is open for a good percent of the day. The one significant plugin I use is "NoScript". I block things like tags.google.com, and anything from a social media site. Google searching works fine, as does YouTube - I even have a little-used channel there. I normally have only one tab open (two now - one for the comments, one for main El Reg) - speed has never been a problem for me.

I hit the website incompatibility issue with the government's healthcare portal which I needed to use. That caused me to buy a Win-11 laptop so I could access it. Also need the dam Teams viewer tool occasionally.

As RHEL clones hit version 10, Rocky and Alma chart diverging paths

I'm too old!

Thanks for the link to your older article, Liam. I saw the amd-64-v3 and had no idea what it meant. A google search was not enlightening. The cpuinfo command on my old system includes

CPU family: 21

Model: 1

Model name: AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor

Stepping: 2

none of which is a "version". I did push harder on Google search and it popped up an AI reply that said the V3 comes from the Ryzen 3rd generation cores. So, my perfectly good computer is not new enough to run these Linux versions - FX family is too old.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: Incredible

I'm with you on that! I was in the middle of software development when they went under - working on an A3000. I thought about it a bit and then went and bought an A4000T. Worked with that for several years before getting a PC and Red Hat Linux - I *really* didn't want to have to change at that point, and I was employed, so could sort of afford it.

Datacenter biz wants to turn heat and carbon waste into biomass for sale

Milkshakes!

Add a bit of flavour to the produced goop, chill it, and you've got lime flavoured milkshakes for McDonalds! I'd go for one.