Posts by Dagg

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

Re: Trump doesn't think

it needs a step to the side as well.

Lets do the time warp again...

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: Just once...

You need to understand that accountants are not economists.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Optical media stable?

You need to be extremely careful with tape. I've had issues with humidity causing the tape to stick together and then de-laminate when it was played. These were old DC600 cartridges that had just been stored on a shelf. I would assume that these newish tapes are stored in an environmentally controlled area.

And just watch out for hurricanes/cyclones etc.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

Re: My father too

My father in law was also "just" a radio operator in one of the "Y" stations. Only found out after he died. I would have loved to talk to him about it.

IBM US cuts may run deeper than feared ‒ and the jobs are heading to India

Been there got the scars

I used to work for IBM and my team was outsourced to india. The quality of that indian team was way below pair. They would always answer yes, always confirmed they understood when it was all total BS!

According to ibm, it was my fault as unknown to me I was meant to remotely train them (WTF) I resigned immediately. F*ck'm

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

Stop using agile, your code will last longer.

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

They are actually looking at using induction through the skin to charge/power it. Similar to a mobile phone charger.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

Problem was not the small number of fixed fonts fixed the problem and a proportional font stuffed up the indenting.

Re: transwarp performance

In a college project (30 years ago....God, I'm old!),

Bloody whipper snapper; get off my lawn!

"resistant to change when said change means they must change."

The other thing I've seen is a new developer fresh from some training course on some new language/library/tool set/ etc comes in and rewrites a block of legacy code in new whatever then leaves and you end up with a maintenance nightmare.

If it 'aint broke don't fix!

Re: C is the new COBOL

C can be readable, but smart alecs programming like it's 1981

Exactly!!!!!!! Sorry for all the exclamation marks but this is so true. I have maintained legacy code where some idiot developer FW who loved using used l1 and I1 that is (lowecase L)1 and (uppercase i)1.

When he coded the font may have shown them as considerably different but in Courier New they are close enough to be a major pain!

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Remember

Age and treachery always overcomes youth and beauty...

Federal judge tightens DOGE leash over critical Treasury payment system access

Re: One of them hasn't even lasted a day

These days that's down to 24 minutes...

Is that the attention span of an orange one?

Re: One of them hasn't even lasted a day

twat didn't specify a sexual preference

What about species? Dolly the sheep anyone...

Amazon-backed X-energy bags $700M more for itty-bitty nuke reactors that don't exist yet

As with most SMR projects in the United States, X-energy's design has yet to receive approval from America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

and

X-energy didn't answer questions about whether it has a working reactor yet.

So, nothing to see, all smoke and mirrors...

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Re: Considering the Orange Oaf's track record with paying out...

I wonder how many will still be gullible enough to take the offer.

Take the money and run, you can always come back as a highly paid consultant and do the same job for more money. I've seen it here in Australia many times with a conservative government "cost cutting efforts"/"too many public servants" mandates.

Re: Rule 1 of paying people to quit...

...people who are good and can easily find another job will take it.

With the consulting companies. Her in Australia I used to work for one of the big 4 and every time we got a LNP (conservative) government in they started letting go the public service. The company I worked for would then hire the good ones of these people and when the gutted public service started engaging consultants to do the work of the people it no longer had we would just step in.

Money, Money, Money...

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

Actually you are wrong it is defiantly not the doctors.

When I had a car accident in the US I asked the nurse "what the hell is going on?" her comment was "are you a kiwi?" "Yes", she said "same here, they are NOT trying to cure you, they are just making sure you can't sue them!"

And she "said it was the insurance companies that determined what treatment could be paid for"

So you are wrong.

Intel debuts laptop silicon that doesn't qualify for Microsoft's 'Copilot+ PC' badge

Intelligent Windows PCs

Oxymoron anyone...

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Re: Why?

What happens if the memory access is live, IE an array overrun from a user or database entered value. This cannot be detected at compile time, so what happens in the production system?

Re: Why?

Rust will block them

So what actually happens say in a production system?

Re: What's the point?!

Safe rust code does not have memory safety bugs, because it can’t.

So what does it do if I try to write to array entry 101 when the array only has 100 entries?

Prevent the write and continue

Crash the program

What? Because in both those cases the result is not good in a production system.

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

Don't cross the streams

And they did, enough said

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

Shirley you must be kidding. As the saying goes you can choose your friends you can't choose your family.

I've seen many an xmas lunch where by half way through the afternoon one half of the "family" was ready to kill the other half. I've seen my wife have a punch on with her younger sister. The sisters partner and me both stayed right out.

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

Because sometime (actually most times) it is not the final destination that is important, it is the things you learn on the journey.

Australia passes law to keep under-16s off social media – good luck with that, mate

Re: Fat Chance

Albanese : “…sending a message…” - usual weasel words when he already knows it is not going to work.

Actually it was Dutton that originally came up with under 16 laws and Albanese could see that any attempt to stop them would fail. That is why it passed as both major parties agreed on it.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Re: Lost In Space

payphone

In Australia all the payphones are now free and come with a WiFi hot spot.

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

All we will need to add is some sort of radioactive giant <insert chosen entity here> throw in Bruce Willis and we are a go...

Re: It seems to be the American way...

Maralinga still poses posed an actual threat to the locals

It has not been cleared up correctly and is still hot.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Re: Ta Ta Firefox

I did have this a year or so ago and it was caused by a rogue screen card driver update.

Once I removed the driver and reinstalled the correct one I've not had any issues.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

That is actually a serous question

So what exactly does it do in Rust, and how is that safe?

That is actually a serous question. What actually does happen?

* Does the whole program crash immediately?

* Does it throw an exception?

* Does it just block the access and blindly continue?

The answer to this is extremely important in a production system. And the impact of the resolution will cause an issue depending on the function of the actual package.

* Game

* Word processor

* Banking

* EFTPOS

* Retail POS

* Realtime - industrial process control

* Realtime - nuclear reactor

* Realtime - fire control platform

* etc

So will someone who know rust please indicate how it will respond?

Re: Why?

Yet, converting to Rust now might be a wasted effort

Yep, with you on that one. Spend considerable time and effort upskilling in Java and never managed to use it. There was way more work and money in C/C++.

Re: Why?

Rust has guaranteed backwards compatibility Yea, right until the next version is released and a previous feature is deprecated...

Re: No, of course I've no idea if this remotely resembles the actual syntax used...

So... the problem is if there is an error in the source code it will just be transferred into the destination code. it's just GIGO

To actually fix any potential memory errors will require extensive refactoring. This will require access to the original high level/business requirements that were used to create the original code. You will also require ALL of the subsequent change requests and process changes.

And then you will need to try to track down the wildcard changes that you cannot find any reason as to why they were made.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

I'd be putting it down as overtime

This was IBM there was no such thing as overtime. You were meant to do it for the love of the company. C*nts

You use the same one that Schrodinger's cat is stored in.

It is only when you open it do you know how much you managed to save.

Should be justifiable homicide to kill morning people!

I've worked for a few bosses that insisted the office started early and then berated me because I had a BAD attitude. I used to work for IBM(bastards) and they loved so called breakfast briefings and breakfast meetings. These were always arranged to occur before work hours so they were getting your time for free. They used to justify this by saying look we give you free food. Bastards...

Re: There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

In Britain it's called summer time

Nah, can't be correct. I've lived in Britain and I can remember summers that never occurred. The weather was just cold, wet and cloudy and they still had daylight saving. For those non summers they should have cancelled the "summer time" or at least asked for the money back!

Re: cross border data collection nightmare.

I used to look after a server which collected data from different time zones. The whole DST issue was a nightmare. In the end all data was stored with UTC timestamps.

Major issue in Australia with each state having its own timezone and only the southern states having daylight saving. In some cases parts (far west of NSW) of one state adopt the timezone of next door state.

So not only do you need to store datetime in UTC you also need to store the native offset from UTC.

Re: Leave the clocks alone

I'd much rather go to work in the dark than come home from work in the dark.

Don't know where you are in the UK, but I was in the midlands and mid winter it was drive to work in the dark, see the sun barely rise above the horizon mid morning the set mid afternoon then drive home in the dark.

I'm now living in Australia and the southern states have daylight saving and it is a waste of time, The state of Victoria maps to North Africa in the northern hemisphere and daylight saving is a complete waste of time.

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

Re: Who're you gonna call?

must be a Gen-Z hasn't heard of backup...

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away

Why not build the data centres next to a large hydro or geothermal generation system. They did that in the south of New Zealand for an aluminium smelter when New Zealand had no aluminium ore or any need to use large quantities of aluminium. What it did have was large quantities of cheap electricity generated by hydro power.

These data centres don't need to be located in the middle of a city, all the need is a high speed fibre link to the rest of the world. Geothermal generation in Iceland...

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

Re: Cost!

They have a running functional nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights.

Re: Power containerisation

Can't they need to be near a large body of water for cooling. Sydney harbour would be perfect. Put them around the harbour at 5 km spacing. Perfect!

Re: Cost!

There's private sector interest, but there are some serious regulatory and legal hurdles to get over.

Here in Australia the Coalition has stated that they get rid of these to make it easier for nuclear. But still no private sector interest... Read what you want into that!

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Fusion power is available

It is just not controllable! H-bomb anyone.

Or you can use the big fusion reactor in the sky.

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

Re: Outdated

Nope, wrong dialup was extremely flaky. I remember back to the early days of ATMs and EFTPOS terminals. That is why they used AS2805/ISO8583 which overcomes the double commit problem.

Re: Double entry bookkeeping

The only original reason for a double entry system is you only needed to add, no subtraction was required. From what I remember this was to do with the use of roman numerals.

In sales/ledger/account systems you don't need a double ledger but each transaction is recorded against each sale/purchase/banking etc.

Re: Roll out new point of sale system, get petty crime wave?

previous accounting system - Capture - was also buggy

Yep, I wonder if Capture was the foundation/data-layer of Horizon.

Re: ...and it was open to abuse.

Post office terminal sent a sales transaction to head office. Head office sent an ack packet back. Ack packet didn’t arrive at the terminal. Terminal retransmitted the transaction. Head office logged it as a second sale.

WTF!!! This is the classic double commit problem. I remember being taught all about this in compsci and working with it in EFTPOS using AS2805/ISO8583.

The standard approach was to send a request and if the response did not arrive in time a reversal was sent. The original requests and responses could be discarded but the reversals had to be stored and forwarded. Total F*ckwits