Posts by Martin Howe 56 posts • joined 30 Apr 2010
"Who knew I'd still worry about some odd EISA driver on alpha, after all these years?"
Thanks for doing so, Mr Torvalds, I do like to play Doom on my 1997 AlphaServer now and then - just for old time's sake :) Gets a bit hard if it can't see the SCSI controllers :)
This. For day to day, I'm using a 2008 Dell 490: no TPM, no UEFI. With 16GB RAM and an SSD for the system drive, I can open 16 tabs in Chrome at once without it complaining. A lowly Ti550 is fine for the older video games I play. If I were still using Windows, this wouldn't run 11 at all. From what the article said about 21H1, I'm not even sure it'd run later versions of 10. But it works. Fine. Fast.
It's such a shame for those people with perfectly serviceable PCs who aren't tech savvy enough to move away from Windows and are thus forced to spend money on something they don't need in order to get something they do (or will, in 2025).
I love these machines; they look like they could have come right out of Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet. Born the same year they were, I didn't have Lego kits of them as a child; however, for my 7th birthday, Mum made me a birthday cake in the shape of one, complete with mini swiss rolls for wheels, strips of marzipan for tracks and blue icing (don't think there was much choice in fancy food colouring at the local Tesco in 1972). That was almost as cool as the real thing :)
Don't forget Stephen Morse with '1MB is a lot for 1976'; indeed it was, but not having 32-bit segment registers (even with lower 4 bits forced zero to begin with) as a priority? Maybe making SI and DI 32 bits, like having a couple of 16-bit index registers in 8 bit CPUs? That decision alone has cost us a hell of a lot of progress :(
I don't remember, as both cats I mentioned passed away ages ago; however, given Siri was an Asian Self (Lilac) and thus essentially a Burmese, it could explain her weird addiction :) Another one, Felix was part Burmese and part RB and he was a devil for eating anything odd; at my Dad's wake, we had to have the flowers at Mum's house in the conservatory, visible through glass, as Mr 'bloody' Felix would try to eat the petals :)
Fond (well, kinda) memories of the six-monthly disassembly of my Gateway laptop to remove the customary 10mm wedge of cat fur from the fan vent. Freddie loved sitting next to the computer, just where all that lovely heat was coming out. And it wasn't even a gaming laptop :) Still it was a good design, MX8716B; made 2007 and still going in 2016!
Then there was the time I received a frantic phone call from mother 120 miles away; the monitor on her computer was dead. Power light showing, caps lock on computer goes on/off when toggled, etc. Checked VGA cable - cat teeth marks all over it. Siri (short for Syringa Superba, her pedigree name - this was long before iPhones became popular) loved it so much, Mum had to fit hot water pipe cladding around all the exposed mains cables in the house, and the network cable too.
Yep, just googled that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXR5 . Never seen it before. Given that PAT is part of my job these days, I would surely notice it :)
Link to image in question (don't do it at home folks!):
https://www.vinyliciously.com/images/uploads/HAWKWIND---PXR5-2015-UK-Grey-2LP-2.jpg
I must say how depressed I am at the "you can't opt out of taxation for schools, the NHS, etc" argument. The TV licence has *degenerated* into a tax, whereas when the BBC had a monopoly, it was simply a fee.
Schools and the NHS are *essential* things that any government should be doing. TV is not. It is entertainment. The best way to do it would be to split the BBC into the 'TV for Consumers' arm, and make them have ads like the other channels (hence no need for the licence to raise money), who IMO, they have degenerated into being no better than.
The other issue is the cost, a one-size-fits-all when nowadays, much of the BBC's output literally isn't worth watching; at a massive £3-4 a week (for a minimum wage earner that *is* massive), one is forced to continually pay for rubbish just to get the few gems; since the BBC is no longer special, it's time it was disestablished and made to pay for itself; in which case, it should realise that no commercial entity would be allowed to get away with that.
For the rest, such as the World Service ... well when I can stop laughing at the idea that the UK is still a Power of World Importance (tm), maybe HMG should pay *that* from the FO's budget :)
I guess the bottom line is that the BBC is no longer the paragon that it was and shouldn't therefore be allowed to keep the privileged position that it was only permitted due to being one.
Time has caught up with you, BBC; now here's your coat - there's the door!
And for computers and such - I work for a charity shop that sells a lot of second hand electrical stuff on eBay (yes we can and do PAT everything) and the eBay side has been a lifeline for us as we're a small charity and may have to close the brick-and-mortar side of the business or scale back opening times.
Long story short, we've been prepping Latitudes and Optiplexes like there's no tomorrow for the last couple of weeks and already sold £200 worth of monitors and nearly £1K of laptops. Of course our stuff isn't suitable for the legalistically bound big corporates, but we seem to be acceptable to small businesses. (Ironic, since most of the recent stuff was donated by a big local corporation, sans HDDs of course).
Indeed. One of my many jobs at work is in the charity shop arm of the business, selling stuff on eBay; we acquired an old machine that sorely needed to go to the recycler, but the c. 20 year old (!) Foxconn motherboard, complete with a 120MHz Pentium 1, was still ticking away fine. Was even Y2K compliant and accepted a date of 24 Jan 2019 without issues. We sold it for nearly £100 on eBay!
Windows 7 seems to have evolved into the sweet spot for Windows OS. A bit like how all automobiles, bar a few special cases, have four wheels, a steering wheel, a shift stick or drive setting handle, and brakes.
Why change what works so well until something truly a huge step up, something that makes the pain of learning something new justifiable, becomes available?
Change for changes' sake makes no sense. The only thing obviously lacking in Windows 7 is a good touch UI for non-desktop use, but that could added on as an installable component for those who want it.
So by what objective metric is Windows 7 supposed to be outdated?
Thanks - that took me a couple of re-reads but it helps a lot.
To save anyone else the re-reads, the key is the number 256, the number of values a byte can hold plus the memory accessed in the second step need not be protected memory.
1) Access kernel memory to put value in register.
2) Speculative execution subsystem tries to execute as if (1) was OK. It will then speculatively execute "memory access at address **in non privileged memory areas that we have legitimate access to** of which the register forms part of the resolved address (as an index/scale/whatever to a base address) that causes **one of 256** pages to be pulled into cache. It doesn't matter what data values are in these pages, nor which pages, as long as the pages are accessible to us and there are *exactly* 256 possible pages that could be accessed. It is the fact that the data values are now in cache that matters. They could be the number of fleas on your cat, number of bugs in the Pentium FPU, doesn't matter.
3) (1) faults due to privilege level. (2) Is "thrown away" as fault prevents the CPU getting to it "in the real world", **but the cache lines involved are not flushed**".
4) By using timing analysis to find out *which* page was cached, that's also the number in the register and that number was loaded from kernel memory and used in an index register of sorts **before (2) was thrown away**. Thus, you now know which number is in the address in kernel memory.
At least, that's how I read it in simple terms. Ouch!!
Please can anyone give me a simple explanation of how knowing where data is in memory and/or whether it is currently cached or not, allows an attacker to actually access its contents if they don't have the privilege level for the memory addresses in question? Does the underlying caching mechanism *not* check bounds, privilege, etc? Does speculative execution not also do so? Bit rusty with architecture so would appreciate a simplified explanation of the one on the website - thanks.
In today's interconnected and industrialised age, patents make as much sense as medical doctors treating sick people for evil spirits.
Problem 1 - Novelty, or rather, the lack of it. Too many ideas are easily imagined by reasonably clever people who are bombarded with information daily on the internet; the days when only a "competent practitioner of the art" could come up with something novel are for the most part gone for good. True novelty is rare.
Problem 2 - Discovery vs. Invention. Many things such as software, business processes and computer architecture are essentially mathematical abstractions and are as such discovery rather than invention. These should not be patentable in the first place.
Problem 3 - Abuse of patents. Company A buys IP for B, not to use B but to prevent it competing with product C, even if B might have been better.
Problem 4 - Prevention of composition. Patents prevent ideas being used as components. For example A=B+C. A is novel in itself, so is B but C is already patented. A never exists or gets compromised. Consider some of the early steam engines that had exactly this problem.
Problem 5 - Absolutist interpretation of IP ownership. A patent owner can charge as much as they want for a licence or even simply refuse to do so. There's no concept of knowledge being used to wider benefit to the world as a whole, at a reasonable cost.
Problem 6 - FUD. So many legal battles are about patents because it's not always clear whether a patent is valid, if it applies to a particular product, and so forth. Worse, we expect non-scientists (i.e., Judges and Juries) to decide such things!
Basically, patents are only sensible now for things that are novel AND require huge investment to make or market or distribute. E.g, drugs. Even there, there is a case that medical technology patents should be regulated, as people shouldn't die just so that others can make profit.
What I would like to see is this:
*Patents abolished for anything that does not need significant investment.
*Patents abolished for anything that is ultimately a mathematical abstraction.
*A legal right to use any idea as a component of another (cost to be arbitrated).
*No right to hold a patent unless the holder actually uses it.
*Specialist patent tribunals to arbitrate disputes over the above.
Probably not comprehensive or perfect, but it would be a starting point.
PS: Also, the concept of Prior Art to be explained to every lawyer in the world. With a 2x4 to the head. Especially those working for the USPTO :P
The Death Star. Just THE DEATH STAR. (OK it was an oblate spheroid, but close enough)
The Borg cube is very efficient in terms of volume usage, but if the DS were that shape, the audience would likely not accept it as a spaceship. (Though given how weird most stuff in SW is, who knows?)
Free ad papers are usually local to a district or a small chunk of a county. Local TV tends to focus on a whole county or even several counties. Local TV that is as local as the free ad papers would be great; however, I can imaging it being almost impossible to fund, so it likely won't happen.
In picture as given, she looks like any other lawyer, or banker or stockbroker or whatever. Dressed smartly; although she quite clearly would look beautiful under the business suit and glasses, she's not making anything of that in this image.
If dressed improperly in court, that's a matter for the judge. Move along please, nothing to see here.
Not for me they're not - their screens are too small for the things I do and I'd trust the cloud to keep my data safe the same amount I would trust al-Qaeda. Oh and I'm a mostly NON-mobile power user, not a kid hooked on blingy games or a stockbroker updating their share options on the train :P
and the people want him BACK? Sounds very "Assange". After all Assange hasn't been tried yet, but there seem many people who believe him guilty but still support him as they don't want to admit how serious the alleged offences are. The public love a bad boy :(
Ever since I first read it in Elektor as a teenager, ye olde canarde about gas/coal/oil power stations rears its tired old head again. Oil, Gas and Coal will run out. A switch to renewable will be required in the future.
A generation of electric cars needs to be bedded in by that time. Having them run (ultimately) off fossil fuels in the meantime does not make pollution any worse but does facilitate it getting better in the long-term.
This is no different to refactoring a large software system under the hood so that when "The Great Event" occurs, the internal infrastructure is already in place.
Forgive my ignorance, but don't they have Law in the USA? OK, so it won't really be a helmeted jackbooted thug beating the shooter to the floor with a huge stick while shouting "TEN YEARS, CREEP!".
But surely the Police out there can at least arrest these people? Surely the Courts can sentence them to a gun ban? As I understand it, for those folks that must be worse than the Death Penalty. If they violate the ban, jail them, five years per violation. When a form of criminality becomes widespread and the Law becomes disrespected, draconian measures are the only way.
... Stallone was willing to keep the helmet on, but the studio overruled him, having paid "big" money for a well-known star. He regards the film as a lost opportunity for the Cursed Earth scenario among others. The opening montage of 2000ADs was his idea.
Wonder how much of that is true?
... welcome our new green, capacious overlords. Well I would, but unfortunately they don't see our district as worth conquering :(
Many things that used to be luxuries have in the fullness of time become ubiquitous and have in practical terms evolved, more or less, into a right. Running water? Electricity? Sewerage? Telephone? 56K? Well it's arguably time for decent broadband speeds to be considered as such.
Realistically, it will require government intervention and take years for unprofitable areas to be served, but that's no excuse for telling people they should move from their loved homes to get it. Sure the cabinets shouldn't be sited insensitively, but that should apply to any street furniture.
Even with LLU we will get no more that 6Mbps, so if BT want to put a cabinet on our street, let them. Oh and it will give the cats somewhere else to sit :)
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