Posts by Roland6 10727 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
>Electrolysis remains the least efficient way to create fuel from water
However, given the wind doesn't always blow, a process that collects energy and thus supports an asynchronous energy supply is probably a good choice, even if the conversion efficiency is not as high as what is achievable from using natural gas as a feedstock.
>The most interesting thing I find is that there isn't a dollar quote anywhere to be seen.
The most interesting thing I noted, because it wasn't mentioned is export licencing and prohibition...
" "industry-first" quantum-safe cryptography, the stuff that even pesky quantum computers can't crack."
That suggests the z16 is capable of creating stuff that is uncrackable by quantum computers and thus the NSA... Which would suggest the US won't want this technology reaching undesirables such as China and Russia...
I suspect the malaise infecting IBM is also infecting many other big companies, with the activist investors et al not really being interested in the product, just in the financial numbers and what they are doing to the stock price.
Part of Apple's wilderness years can be attributed to its senior executives having no concept of how innovative technology companies work and being overly focused on short-term shareholder returns - under Job's they perceived that Apple was spending too much on product development and not enough on directly competing with IBM/Microsoft.
I suspect this executive rot is also a contributor to the product development mess Microsoft are in with Windows...
>or maybe these prices are to keep the non-profits from going to open source products
In many cases they don't need to do that, brain dead existing customers are doing just fine. For example the NHS insists on forcing Teams on everyone: partner with the NHS and you have to use Teams, Onedrive etc.
They can't use Zoom, which is causing problems with patients as all video appointments have to be via Teams - they even expect someone in their 80's who has had a stroke master the technical details necessary to set up Teams so that they can attend an appointment with their consultant...
And I mean technical details not just click on this link, like they've been doing with Zoom...
>I’ve also never met a non profit that keeps a server less than 5 years so I’m guessing you’ve worked with much bigger ones!
The NFP clients of mine (sub 50 users) are looking to migrate from WS 2012R2 & Exchange 2013 all on hardware that is at least 7 years old.
interestingly, moving to MS365 creates a whole host of new problems; none of the small IT Support businesses that grew up with SBS that I've had dealings with have any real understanding of MS 365 and cloud - WS2012 was probably at the limit of their comprehension.
>This is the right time to update our pricing. Although there are still questions and uncertainty, we see clear signs of economic recovery around the world. Moreover, over the past few years our competitors have increased prices, in some cases aggressively. We simply have a better story and proven track record of reinvestment in the product and consistently delivering new value to our customers.
So MS are justifying their price increase by implying that to remain competitive they also need to 'aggressively' increase prices. Even though they have a better story and track record of reinvestment at a lower price than their competitors. I suggest this is a clear message that MS have switched from being price competitive to gouging their customers and users.
Finally, just because there are signs of economic recovery, doesn't mean you customers, especially the third-sector customers who are the customers here, are flushed with cash, or have MS switched to a use now and pay if/when you've benefited from the "economic recovery"?
Yes, MS have been playing games with the grants.
In March they still had a reasonable grant for on-prem Exchange 2019, only the only on-prem server with a reasonable grant was 2022, with no downgrade rights; only problem MS haven't given any commitment to supporting the use of Exchange 2019 on WS2022...
Your solution works for some file types, however, for others such as media players, its a very poor solution and for others like modern browsers that are really containerised OS's with a set of bundled app's a non-starter.
One of the things that irritates me, is how Edge thinks it is a better PDF reader than a dedicated application like Adobe, Foxit et al. so constantly asks if I would like to reset my defaults to Edge...
>I'm pretty sure that locating leaks could be quite accurate
I suspect locating leaks is relatively simple, once you've identified the small segment (sub-100 metres) of the 1000's of miles of pipe in each operators distribution network.
The trouble is with all these add-ons is that they increase the number of connections and so due to the number required, massively increase the likelihood of introducing leaks in the new Blue poly pipes...
Also s learnt with car engines and airplanes, the sensors themselves fail in "interesting" ways and so introduce a new maintenance requirement.
> but that won't even get you a down payment on a mainframe.
Back in 2002 I brought 2 top of the range Z-series for a client for a £1 each. the laugh was that my previous experience was in the non-IBM systems world, so everyone thought I would choose Sun Starfire...
Okay the annual support etc costs were another matter, but I've never been able to purchase even a single x64 server for £1, let alone 1,000.
My UK bank failed to detect as fraud the opening of online shopping accounts with two different supermarkets on the same day and the purchase of circa £300 of groceries from each for click-and-collect in towns miles apart and miles from where I lived and miles from a transaction I made shortly before the shopping fraud (and was probably the one where my card was scanned).
The ironic laugh was, talking to the fraud department they knew about the click-and-collect scam, yet their system didn't flag such transactions and they thought my wife shopped at those supermarkets when the evidence from the account was that my partner regularly shopped in person at another supermarket.
I detected the fraud when the bank sent an unexpected SMS message to tell me my account was overdrawn.
>if language has poor impedance-match with interfaces designed for C then you should either not write programs which actually use these interfaces in language
This was a problem, and probably still is a problem when combining code from different languages. Eg. COBOL, Fortran and C. I suspect combining Rust and Swift with C, given their common form doesn't present the same challenges.
>The point is simple: C is FAST in execution, but it may not be the best place to START implementing a design!
That applies to all programming, hence why professional software development organisations will have adopted a Structured Design Methodology and toolset.
>I believe this was because they had decided to support too many variants of Unix (DEC Ultrix, SunOS, HP UX, AIX, DG UX, and Windows and VMS too).
In addition to bugs this caused another problem: position in the porting queue.
I remember bidding with one vendor's Unix box and then switching to another due to slippage in the DBMS porting. This also meant platform vendors were caught in a difficult situation, particularly on big bids, where Ingres/Oracle etc. were necessary to win bids, vying with each other to encourage suppliers to give priority to their port, so that they could pass the demonstration stage.
I suspect once you get outside the Wintel/Linux PC platform, these considerations still matter.
I remember the size of output being a big talking point in the articles comparing C compilers. If memory serves me correctly one compiler gave a surprising result - an executable of almost zero bytes. On investigation the optimiser had determined that the source code performed no function as it took no input and returned no output and thus had optimised out the entire module...
Yes, there were a variety of compilers for the PC, I seem to remember Aztec-C being one of the better ones.
Not only were there language differences to trip up the unwary - I suspect some were there due to them taking differing approaches to handling the x86 segmentation model but there were also important differences in the libraries, such as what happens when you moved a file pointer beyond the end of the physical file - a condition not defined in K&R.
However, the author is just showing their ignorance. Yes porting C intended for Unix to another platform such as the PC/MS-DOS PC wasn't simple (in fact just getting the source off the Unix box on to the PC wasn't trivial) . Porting a C program from say SunOS (BSD) to NCR (System V) in the 1980's wasn't a simple recompilation and things weren't much better in the 90's, for example the Bull DPX/2 200 and 300 both ran System V on 68030 but as the 300 was SMP, everything had to be recompiled and retested (for one project we used a DPX/2 200 as a comm's processor as it had a certified X.25 card unlike the 300 at that time.
Similar issues arose with other languages such as Cobol, Fortran, Algol-60 and Algol-68, as all had vendor introduced differences and extensions.
>You think it would be a good idea to knock down parts of cities to build solar farms?
There really isn't a valid reason why the majority of UK homes don't have a 3.5KW array of panels. And if we had a government that actually invested in the UK, all of those panels could be made in the UK.
In my part of the country there are acres of new build warehousing/distribution going up, none have solar panels on their roofs (nor do they have skylights, hence are perfect for covering in panels)...
I see near Norwich some bright investor has decided it would be a good idea to cover acres of farmland/countryside (equivalent to 65 football pitches) with solar panels to provide electricity to a new business park consisting of your standard built barns...
Additionally, vertically mounted wind turbines can be usefully deployed in the urban environment.
However, the above requires a mindset that favours distributed and local rather than big and centralised; which doesn't sit well with the typical UK government.
>Its not like someone hasnt invented the grid or anything.
Remember the grid is layered, only the large offshore solar farms are actually connected to the pylon network, everything else is local - but not necessarily local to the wind farm. So near me are two wind farms, however, neither link to the grid at a point that is directly beneficial to the housing and businesses in their immediate surrounding area..,
>an experimental power plant, one I actually visited, that ran on cow manure
There is a reason why biofuel suppliers are locating their plants in farming areas.
Tomorrow Water''s idea makes logical sense, unlike your typical UK green energy project that locates fields of solar panels, wind turbines etc. miles from the purported energy consumers.
Anyone here taken a deep dive into the ARM architecture to determine it's instruction set is biased towards C or some other language and non-Unix like OS's?
I ask as from the discussion so far this platform hasn't been mentioned, perhaps because it is designed for Unix/Linux and C.
Agree you are technically correct: the 8088 was the 8-bit 8080 chipset compatible version the 8086.
Funny to think that back then the upgrade from 8-bit to 16-bit architecture was as big a jump in circuit board complexity and cost as moving from 16 to 32-bit and then 32 to 64-bit.
However, the point is IBM chose Intel...
>The idea was that the resulting machines would run Prolog natively.
Back in the 80's people weren't so fixated on one chip architecture, so you had chip designers building chips to support hihgh-level languages including the "AI" languages which naturally had a different architecture to chips designed to run conventional languages like C.
Obviously, if you look at the development of the Intel x86 family you see in each generation it provided better support for structured stack-oriented procedural languages (i186), OS's (i286) etc.
Linking to the related article on C and Rust/Swift, it would seem that Rust/Swift et al need to get closer to the chip and ensure the silicon and microcode directly supports key language features.
>The 8088 / 8086 was really a superset of 8080, hence the awful 64K segments and no 16 bit flat addressing like all the true 16 bit cpus in early 1980s.
Blame the IBM PC which used the Intel 8086 in preference to Motorola or National Semiconductor (who's architecture and instruction set was perhaps the best of the three), and the rest is history.
I don't remember K&R saying very much about design, in part because they intended only professionals who by definition should know what they were doing and hence know you need to design before you code...
It took others, such as Alan Feuer with the C Puzzle book, to spell out just easy it was to write powerful opaque code.(*)
My favourite interview question back in the 80's to prospective employees professing to be experts in C was to ask them to walk me through:
i+++j;
There are similar pointer expressions that can catch the unwary.
(*)Back in the 80's I had a collection of these books and papers, we coded them up and included them in our tool's test suites, to confirm correct implementation of K&R.
>That is, it began as a GCC extension but is now a standard and, even if it weren't, LLVM has put a lot of work into matching GCC on Linux and MSVC on Windows for interoperability's sake.
All this is in Rust's and Swift's future, take note. ITs relatively easy to create a (new) Standard, harder to maintain it over the decades as the capabilities of system platforms improve and people use the language in ways not envisaged by the original language creators...
>Therefore, they have to support 176 different targets (x86_64-uwp-windows-gnu, x86_64-uwp-windows-msvc, ...) just to "speak C to C"
It will be the same for Rust et al unless the language is only intended for a single CPU architecture, say x86-64, in which case they won't replace C on other platforms such as x86-32 and ARM.
Looking back, probably a mistake was to define the POSIX API's using the C syntax, as per the Unix reference manual...
Goto line number was a feature of Basic.
However, on the i86 architecture you wouldn't actually know the final location until the code had been linked and located and thus whether pointers etc. had been resolved to 8, 16 or 32 bits and thus opcodes likewise selected to support 8, 16 or 32 bit operations...
Fortunately, the Intel ASM did implement labels so you could Goto <label> and the linker and locator would do the math and add the missing bits.
I think you misunderstood, the code could be expressed properly in the assembler, but not in PL/M, which was used for much of the system. However, even in assembler, the warning was don't take the function the opcode is performing on face value, read the manual and understand what it is doing with this flag. Obviously, the comments against the assembler re-inforced what behaviour was being triggered by this seemingly mismatched sequence of opcodes.
Interestingly, because this code was a key part of a safety-critical infrastructure (people would die if it failed), I used it to explore C.A.R.Hoare's ideas on formally proving the correctness of programmes and thus gained first hand experience of the assumptions and limitations of the method. So in addition to the code there were several dozen pages of formal working that explained in detail the multiple intertwined logic threads in the code.
Well it seems the current HP management aren't much better than the previous, although they didn't offer such a high premium.
"Currently, there are more than 90 million rooms, of which less than 10 percent have video capability. As a result, the office meeting room solutions segment is expected to triple by 2024," HP said
Trouble is, the majority of those rooms were successfully used for Zoom, Teams etc. so explain why they need a Poly solution.
Interestingly, for a client I've spec'ed up a modern video meeting room/studio, it was very obvious that the traditional Poly conference/meeting solution wasn't fit for purpose. However, I can see some being attracted to the idea that to have a video meeting the participants need to go to a specific room and sit in a specific seating pattern.
>There's no benefit to using blockchain in a stock market.
I would suggest there is every reason to suggest that there are many negatives to using blockchain in a stock market...
The whole point of blockchain is to decentralize record keeping for transactions between parties that have no reason to trust each other.
This suggests effectively the stock market replaces central transaction processing with distributed transaction processing, which given the volumes and timing critical nature of the transactions, suggest things can only end badly...
>So I am thinking about upgrading to something newer! Since some £200 jobbie off Ebay will pay for itself within a year or so...
There was a frequent contributor a few years back on ElReg who made a case for buying new as opposed to reusing old servers because of the energy efficiency improvements and so the price difference would tend to pay for itself through energy bill savings.
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