Posts by Dagg

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Re: Pandora's Box, again

Maybe that inside Pandora's Box is schrodinger's cat

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Re: Longevity in the US

Scotland: Death by deep-frying

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Re: Photography today = digital manipulation

Look at the glorious pictures on the wall

Ah, yes just like in the movie "Falling Down"

Boffins concoct interference-busting radios

Re: Selectivity

Exactly, mixer-first architecture was what we used in late 70s and 80s, Low/high pass filter (depending of local osc freq), wideband diode ring mixer, xtal filter and only then amplification. Meant you could sit close to large signal without overload.

Microsoft swears it's not coming for your data with scan for old Office versions

Re: Industry-standard software applications

I suspect that you would have used Windows devices.

Mix, the tills were windoz the back end paired store servers were AIX boxes with mirrored databases. Cloud is still a risk if you can't access the cloud, little things like a backhoe cutting the fibre cable.

Re: Industry-standard software applications

In a few years the "industry-standard software applications" and user management will all be in the cloud allowing us to use any operating system/desktop as long as it has a supported browser.

Yep, no cloud access from one of several faults means a nice single point of failure. In my long life I've seen this happen too many times. A major retail store that I was involved in actually got to the stage that each till (PC with scanner and draw attached) could standalone. Backed up by the whole shop being able to standalone.

US sanctions drain Huawei of homegrown advanced chips

Re: American trade protection

Ok, so it is bad when America does it to China, but good when China does it to Australia...

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Time is an illusion

Ah, that explains why the friday lunch hour is always 2 hours long.

Eggheads show how network flaw could lead to NASA crew pod loss. Key word: Could

"TTE is also used in aircraft and energy generation systems"

This means that anyone that has access to said aircraft or generation system could just plug something in.

Maintenance engineer per say... Even someone like a cleaner in the cockpit of an aircraft.

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

Re: Another EU bad idea

Apple's magnetic Qi connector

But you do realise that apple will change it for the next phone release and force you to buy the latest shiny shiny version...

USB-C plugs and cables don't melt!!!

Ohms law watts = volts x amps. On a thin cable if you use a higher voltage with the same current you get a higher wattage.

Re: Ouch - who left that plug there?

nah, the Type I as used in Australia and New Zealand is much better..

Much lighter and smaller with same voltage and current and no need for a built in fuse.

And best of all hardly ever sits pins up as the cable normally exits on the back.

Australia asks FBI to help find attacker who stole data from millions of users

Re: Right to be forogtten

a govt API to do identity verification

What do you mean! Do you actually want to trust a government! No frickin way...

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Re: Just wondering

capture the moisture from the air and convert it into fresh water

The process uses sulphuric acid and electrolyses the resulting acid mix. At no stage is the water ever "fresh".

Re: Just wondering

If they're going to pull water from the (relatively) dry atmosphere rather than take what little groundwater there is there to support the locals, won't that affect how much water ends up in the ground for those locals?

The problem is that it is a desert, there is no ground water! The locals rely on bore water which is high in mineral content and comes from rain that fell years ago and in a different place.

Microsoft finds critical hole in operating system that for once isn't Windows

Re: Obvious question

The BIG issue with that is you would need to change ALL the calls in the legacy code and then carry out a extremely comprehensive test.

This of course will take a lot of time and money. In a commercial world who will be paying for that! Better to just keep the old code in place doing its job and only, only replace / rewrite when you have to.

Refactoring old code to remove all the dangerous calls to things like memset, memcpy, memcmp, strcpy, strcmp etc will normally end up in a complete rewrite as the old legacy code will have had the boot prints of multiple developers over the years it has been in production. Some of those developers have been good and others well...

Some of the stuff I've worked on has been over 30 years old and has been so bodged and patched that most of the job is just trying to work out what the code does. In some cases there have been bits of code that have been logically commented out because they provided a function that is no longer needed.

This problem is not specific to any language one of the worst legacy systems I was involved with was written in COBOL.

One rule I found useful is "If it is not broken don't fix it!"

Re: Obvious question

Its called legacy code! There are billions of lines of old legacy code that is still being used. Keeps old farts like myself in a job.

Re: org.chromium.cras[s] indeed!

"A programming language designer should be responsible for the mistakes made by programmers using the language."

Seriously! Humans have an amazing ability for stupidity. To paraphrase Einstien "the universe is finite, human stupidity is infinite"

The phrases I love hearing are:

"Well it appeared to be a good idea at the time"

"Whoa did not see that coming"

"No one would ever do that/ be that stupid"

"This is only a quick and dirty fix it doesn't need to go into production..."

Re: Surprised that strcpy still exists in any code base

One of the major reasons is legacy code. I was involved in the maintenance of a very large retail system that had its roots in MS-DOS.

There were still large parts that used strcpy strcmp etc. No one wanted to refactor those as they worked. However we did have warnings maxed with warnings as errors and just added a define around each call to hide that specific warning.

The other rule was if you had to make any changes in that area which meant it would be tested you were to change the strcpy/strcmp etc. The preferred fix was to replace the char * with a std::string or CString.

Smartphone gyroscopes threaten air-gapped systems, researcher finds

Re: Let me see....

Morse code used in the 2nd world war was about 10 words per minute but it was the quality of the information NOT the volume that was important.

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Apathy is the problem

Not only that the house is "across the road" so the house with the teenage girls is visible from the public road. Are there any security cameras on the public road?

What about dash cams in cars driving down the "public" road.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: Carbon costs of Nuclear

You will require considerably less concrete for a window farm and there is no waste to entomb and hide away somewhere safe for 10,000 years.

The issue is you can't recycle a nuclear reactor as the material is contaminated and must be entombed. At least with a window farm it can all be recycled.

Carbon costs of Nuclear

One thing that needs to be concerned is the actual carbon costs of the concrete required to build the nuclear reactor and then to entomb the waste.

Also just look at the true cost benefit.

£250k

Not sure where you get your costings from. But here in australia most installations ate about 6-10kw at about $6k so 30kw of cells would be about $30k and batteries are a similar cost per kw. so for a 30kw system (which BTW is extremely massive) would cost about $60k AUD about £35k.

Also not sure why you would need 30kw as here in aus most installation are around 6kw

SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe v Wade

Re: The left no longer understand what democracy means.

killing a pregnant woman earns you TWO murder charges in any state.

This 'law' just exposes the pure hypocrisy in states like Texas where a pregnant woman gets done for driving an express car lane where you must have two or more people in your car.

So a foetus is a person for murder but not for car pooling but if you kill that pregnant woman in a car accident the foetus is counted against you in vehicular homicide.

Beam me up Scotty...

Behold this drone-dropping rifle with two-mile range

Re: Tubes

Only the Magnetron has a chance, klystrons are minimum output and only used for local oscillators.

And a marx generator which is just a voltage multiplier would be extremely unsafe to use.

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

Re: Why Nuke Plants Are A FAIL

Also the big issue is the current nuclear solution is more expensive than renewals and battery storage.

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: Where were the procedures ?

Just once I would actually like to see the bloody BA's specify actual NFR's (non functional requirements) that would allow the dev's to design and develop against.

I would also like the bloody project managers and the rest of the pointy haired ones provide the infrastructure that would meet the NFR's.

I remember one project where they would not provide a UPS to develop and test with so that when it went into production it was on a wing and a prayer and first power fail it didn't detect that it was running on battery and crashed damaging the database. Doh!

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

Re: On a more serious note....

most civilian deaths

Actually I thing that the American civilians are responsible for the most civilian deaths - their own civilians...

Re: @Pete 2 - wolf in sheeps clothing

Effectively, the zone around the islands was now a free fire/live fire zone

You mean like schools in America...

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Re: Tricky technology

Don't you mean peasants...

Re: Tricky technology

Yep, just like cats

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Assembler. And before that, nightmare territory of having to program directly at the per-bit level, by "literally" throwing the switches.

I loved those switches. Hand translating your code, loading it into the console via the switches and run.

Later once you had a tape you would manually enter the boot loader and run. Happy, Happy Joy, Joy. Real hacking.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Nothing new...

Even worse is the realization that hardware has bent to the whims of almighty C.

Wrong, C was based on the machine code and hardware for a PDP/11.

Could be worse, could be based on the machine code and hardware from on old (stackless) IBM mainframe like COBOL.

Hackers weigh in on programming languages of choice

Re: 93 percent have five or more years of programming experience

Try ALGOL 58, coding sheets, punched cards..

Microsoft: Russia invasion of Ukraine ‘unlawful, unjustified’

Re: Microsoft could best help ...

Actually that remark was sarcastic you just didn't realise.

Re: Microsoft could best help ...

Jake you forgot to add the sarcasm tags so the septics could get it.

Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?

Actually one way to lose a war is to open another front. Just as the Nazis.

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

Also the problem may be environmental. A nice piece of rust where two parts of the antenna mast are joined can act as a diode and mix several different xmitter signals together and radiate spurious signals across a wide frequency range.

Depending on the physical distance it could even be a bit of rusty fence!

Re: Protectionism ?

I haven't looked at the allowable 5G C band emissions or the input specs of radar altimiters, so I can't say if the concerns are valid or not.

One issue that hasn't been brought up is where the 5G service has a xmitter or antenna fault and is splatting spurious emissions that may appear in the radar altimeter receiver passband.

Something like a dry joint or corrosion in a connector can make a nice little diode mixer.

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

Re: You have to wonder

Actually "do not eat me" would work better!

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

Re: Dumping the cloud

The Cloud centralises computing and allows greater use of greener energy

And also a single point of failure! I remember being in my local pub and the accountant crying into his beer because the cloud had gone down / offline what ever and he couldn't get the payroll done.

Yep ALGOL was the start a language that wasn't controlled by a card column location.

I remember using ALGOL-60 on a B6700 so much better than FORTRAN.

ALGOL is the ancestor of languages like PASCAL, C, Ada etc

Beijing wants to level up China's software industry, with an emphasis on FOSS

Re: Too much anti-China rhetoric

rein in the sino-phobic rants

Maybe after china stops trying to destroy the Australian economy...

My personal experience, once a bully always a bully!

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

pdp-11 the 1st true love of my life.

014747

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

Re: Scott Morrison, Australia’s leading political troll

Totally agree, I don't trust him or his government.

Here in australia the politicians can troll as much as they want they are covered under what they call "Parliamentary privilege".

This ability "to unmask anonymous online trolls" means they can go after the whistle blowers etc that show just how corrupt and incompetent the government is.

Scotty from marketing is trying to use this so he can ignore his promise to create an integrity commission as the last thing he wants is anyone looking too closely at many of things that he and his government have done.

From the studio that brought you 'Mortal Wombat' comes 'Pernicious Possum'

They are not small, cute or can make good pets

These are the australian brush tail possum and may be small and cute in austalia but in NZ particularly in the south island and around Dunedin they have grown big. In aus they are 2-5kg but in the south island they can be up to 14kg with extremely nasty sharp teeth and sharp claws that carry some very nasty bacteria.

One rule we used was if you are opening the shed or outside dunny and you hear something inside is get the hell out of the way as if it is an adult possum it is going to go through or over you to get to the outside. And it is highly likely you will come off badly!

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Re: Off-grid is a tale told by an idiot

Think about how many batteries that would take.

Bugger all, In Aus as a rough guide (as at January 2021) a 5kWh battery system fully installed would likely cost around $5000 – $9000, a 10kWh battery system could cost $7500 – $12,000 the 5kWh battery pack is about the size of a large suitcase and mounts on the outside wall.

Most roof top solar is between 3 and 6 kWh so matches the batteries nicely. I have a small inner city house UK terrace style and I can fit 3-6 kWh of solar panels no problem.

Re: Survivor

Nuclear is the only viable near-term solution.

How? When it takes 10 plus years to implement. Here in Australia roof top solar is booming and with a house battery you can go off grid.

When ever I hear about a nuclear solution my immediate thought is cost benefit

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: Not really concealing anything, more like technically accurate shorthand.

FCIP

Fecal Cerebral Interchange Problem