Posts by Old Used Programmer

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Re: Wireless Mice

"Butterfly" keyboards?

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

Not the only company....

Medtronic (pacemakers, among other things) shows the use of GPL code if you dig through their documents. However, when one asks for the GPL'd source code...crickets.

Twitter unveils US midterm election integrity plans, upsets almost everyone

In the US, unless you've paid postage on those, putting them in letter boxes *is* illegal. The Postal Inspectors have the highest conviction rate of any US Federal law enforcement organization.

Flash memory vendors unveil PCIe 5.0 SSDs, latest spec for CXL interconnect tech

*Where* did you say?

Ummm.... Santa Clara convention center is in....Santa Clara. In San Francisco, one finds the Moscone convention center. The two are about 40 miles apart.

'Nobody can control TSMC by force': Exec dismisses fears China could seize fabs

As Speaker of the House, she's right behind VP Kamala Harris in the line of succession. Take out Biden and Harris (with no time to nominate and confirm a new VP) and Pelosi becomes President.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Re: IBM Selectric Terminals

Those would have been, relatively early, System 360 console terminals. From before IBM started using 3270 VDTs in that role.

Why Intel killed its Optane memory business

Re: Sigh...

When I need either more than about 32GB of mass storage, or I'm concerned about I/O access speed, I run my Pi4s with an attached SSD.

For ones operating below those constraints, I'm using A1 class uSD cards. What I was hoping for from Optane (based on the early claims for it) was not the better speed, though that's not bad to get, but greatly increased number of times you can write to any given cell. Simply put, SD cards wear out relatively quickly if they are being actively used. Longer endurance in use as a root file system would be a desirable trait.

Sigh...

And here I was hoping that Optane, with high write counts, would make it's way into micro-SD cards. The specs looked pretty good for boot devices for Raspberry Pis.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: To quote Tom Lehrer

von Braun sued Lehrer over that...and won.

Intel’s smartNICs probably aren’t for you (yet) says Intel

Re: It’ll become a class of device

OS on one device, applications code on a different one... You mean like the CDC 6000 series mainframes in the *1960s* where the OS ran on an 18-bit peripheral processor (PP0) while user programs ran on the 60-bit CPU?

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Breaking VSAM in IBM COBOL

I wrote a COBOL program on an IBM mainframe that needed to extend a record in a VSAM KSDS spanned dataset. That's a valid operation (just read the VSAM manual), but it didn't work. I couldn't figure out why not. The systems programmers in our shop couldn't figure it out. The local IBM support folks couldn't figure it out.

So it go sent to the VSAM development group in (IIRC) the Netherlands. About 6 months later, we got a reply. While what I was doing was valid in VSAM, the COBOL compiler didn't implement it. So they were going to change the COBOL manual to say You Can't Do That.

(IIRC, my solution was to read the record, delete it from the dataset, build a new record with the same key, and add that to the dataset.)

Marriott Hotels admits to third data breach in 4 years

Re: clients

The problem with paying the danegeld is that you never get rid of the Dane. --Rudyard Kipling

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Not everyone...

I'm still using Win 7. I'm *considering* building a Win 10 system, but only because it'd be very hard to get a copy of Win 7 and I'm going to be forced to use at least Win 10 at some point, so a low usage machine to get used to it on will be of some benefit. Doesn't mean that I *want* Win 10, let alone Win 11.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Do you correct for locality? For any area controlled by England, the Julian to Gregorian calendar switch took place in 1752. Various other countries made the switch as late as 1923. The Orthodox churches still haven't converted.

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Those sorts of problems usually went the other way by thinking that all "00" years are leap years. It's true for the Julian calendar but not for the Gregorian.

I went around three times with a programmer that wrote a new set of standard date routines at a company I worked at. On the first pass, 1900 was a leap year. On the second pass, 2000 wasn't. The third try got it right.

One of my favorite trivia questions is: Could someone have been born on 29 Feb. 1900? It takes an additional bit of data to answer correctly. You have to know *where* they were born, but many, many people don't know that.

Nvidia, Siemens tout 'industrial metaverse' to predict the future

What's old is new again

My (late...as of two days ago) wife, Dorothy J. Heydt, had industrial VRs in her novel, "A Point of Honor", published in 1998. So it's not like no one thought of the idea before. (Hmmm....wonder if any of the people touting this read her book?)

VMware customers have watched Broadcom's acquisitions and don't like what they see

Don't know if it's meant to mean something....

Rather odd to use a picture of the BCM2836 for the article. That was the original Pi2Bv1.1 SoC. No Pis have been made using them for several years now. The Pi2Bv1.2 uses the BCM2837, same as the Pi3B/Pi3B+ and--in a different guise--the Pi02W.

Drone ship carrying yet more drones launches in China

Nobody mentioned weather

What happens when this ship meets a major typhoon?

AMD reveals 5nm Ryzen 7000 powered by Zen 4 cores

Re: Goodbye GF

Last I heard the Pi4 SoC--Broadcom BCM2711--was a 28nm part. Got source for that 16nm claim?

Robotics and 5G to spur growth of SoC industry – report

About that bet....

Considering there are 4 Pi4Bs running right next to me, yes there is an SoC within arms reach. Never mind the switches and KVM switches.

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Military implications?

One wonders what effect shifting to these slower, less capable, chips will have on Russian military hardware. What, for instance, does the yet to be mass produced T-14 Armata tank really need? All of this especially in light of their obvious need to replace a lot of--at least nominally--"smart" munitions that have been expended flattening Ukraine.

Yablochka redux?

One does kind of wonder how the chips benchmark against a Raspberry Pi 4... Be embarrassing to be beaten by something that inexpensive.

Bing! Microsoft tests search box in the middle of Windows 11 desktop

The more I read about Win 11....

....the less I want to have anything to do with it.

Will this be one of the world's first RISC-V laptops?

Re: Some serious questions.

Recent models of Raspberry Pi manage to boot from alternate devices and pretty much everything else uou mentioned without a BIOS. So...no. Not needed.

Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub

Re: First Amendment

Petitioning for a redress of grievances doesn't guarantee you'll get the redress you want...even if it applied in the first place.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

The joys of writting error messages...

I once logged an error message in a program where it should not have been possible to get to. The message was "Committing seppuku! Arrrgggghhhhh!" followed by the program terminating. One of my fellow programmers on the team managed (somehow) to trigger it. He came to my desk, looked accusingly at me and said, "You wrote this, didn't you?" I had to allow as how I had, so we went over the code together to figure out how he'd managed to trigger the message.

RISC-V CEO seeks 'world domination' by winning over the likes of Intel

That RISC-V TRS-80 M100....

...is pretty slick. I say that as someone who owned an M100 and an M102. Lot cheaper than the original, too.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

Like the politician in Texas (James Stephen Hogg) with a daughter named Ima Hogg?

Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right

Another use...

How long would it last as the "system disk" in a Pi?

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

Re: And Ukraine might wish it could brick all Antonov aircraft used by Russia.

Where does the DC3/C47/Skytrain/R4D/Dakota fit on that list?

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

Oh...THAT business model

"...potentially undermine the App Store's business model."

Yup. They really, really want their 30% cut.

India: It would be fab if Intel and TSMC built plants here

Re: This is nonsense

When the UN was set up, the USSR *insisted* that Ukraine, and several other SSRs, were independent countries and--therefore--entitled to their own seats in the UN.

Supercomputer lab swaps lead-acid UPS batteries for alkaline gear

Re: li-ion

Can't be as bad as a Titanium fire. Ti burning in air: 20% Titanium oxide, 80% Titanium nitride. Add CO2: Titanium fire plus a cloud of soot. Add water: Titanium fire and a Hydrogen fire.

India inks tech pact with EU – only the US has the same deal

Re: Scam call centres

Same thing occurred to me... It would be extremely welcome in the US as well.

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

Re: Earthquake-resistance? Tornado resistance?

That's what ran through my mind. But, then, I live where there are earthquakes so thinking about lateral resistance comes easy.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Never ...

See "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman".

Russia bans foreign software purchases for critical infrastructure

What's old is new again

Pirating copyrighted material? USSR did that for decades. The main thing that stopped the practice was the realization that by joining the international copyright union, they could prevent Russian works they didn't want others to read from being published outside the country.

AMD: Our latest, pricier mega-cache Epyc processors leapfrog Intel’s

Already exists

Linux (in the form of RPiOS32) runs quite nicely on 512MB systems.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: USA change its date format ...

Considering that an ancestor of mine commanded the Brig'O'War Notre Dame, I have suspicions about where the South Carolina Navy got the ship...

Ukraine invasion: This may be the quiet before the cyber-storm, IT staff warned

Re: FUD - Fear, uncertainty and doubt

Da, comrade.

Internet backbone provider Lumen quits Russia

Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

I think you mean WW1. The only biplanes in use in WW2 (that I know of) were the Fairey Swordfish (famed for its part in sinking the Bismark) and some Italian biplane fighters, with a top speed about 250MPH. Apparently Hurricane and Spitfire pilots were a bit embarrassed to admit when they shot one down. (Though at that, they were faster than Ju-87 Stukas, which flew about about 190MPH.)

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

A good reason for the Finns to take a serious look at joining NATO. Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire and I don't think they want to turn the clock back that far.

Machine-learning model pinpoints dying power grid components

Is that you HAL?

So long as it doesn't make you go out into space to replace a "failing" component that is not--in fact--failing...

Ukraine's IT sector looks to business continuity plans as Russia invades

Nice idea but...

Events are showing that to be an excessively optimistic scenario. Putin is clearly interested in overthowing the Ukrainian government. All of it.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Re: Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good

The parts Frank wrote belonged to the company only if he'd signed a "work done for hire" agreement. If not, what he wrote belonged to h8m.

Re: PKZIP

<Instant Stop> <Insert> 4900796 <release/start>

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Return code ignored

Alternatively...

An amateur programmer writes the code to use himself. (Knowing what the inputs are supposed to be.)

A professional programmer writes the code for other people to use. (Knowing that random users will put in just about anything and having to deal with it.)

Dear chip designers, if you're struggling to get components made, try 28nm. Supply set to overtake demand

Good news for Raspberry Pi

The Pi4 SoC (BCM2711) is a 28nm part.

Hardware boffin starts work on simulation of an entire IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe

Re: Keep your eye on the (changing) ball

The S/360 workaround is the execute instruction.

Re: Keep your eye on the (changing) ball

Never ran into the COBOL ALTER GO TO construct, huh?