Posts by ganymede io device

Brit MPs: Our policies are crap and the political process is in tatters, but it's Twitter's fault, OK?

Re: Twitter is to blame!

Douglas Adams write in RatEoU. Chapter 28.

"The major problem --- one of the major problems, for there are several --- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarise: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

And so this is the situation we find: a succession of Galactic Presidents who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they very rarely notice that they're not.

And somewhere in the shadows behind them --- who?"

Low-power chips are secret sauce behind long-life wearables

Re: Lower end

Casio AA-85 or A-201 with module 103.

It had an app for testing your sanity.

http://bluethunderhelicopter.com/the-casio-aa-85/

As Douglas Adams put it

""... so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

unboxing

I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles

such are promises. All lies and jests,

still a man hears what he wants to hear...

and disregards the rest.

Mine's the one with mumbles in the pocket.

The off-brand 'military-grade' x86 processors, in the library, with the root-granting 'backdoor'

Rise of the centaur

http://www.cognitivefilms.com/rise-of-the-centaur

Qualcomm still serious about Windows 10 on Arm: Engineers work on '12W' Snapdragon 1000

Re: Targeting Win-10-nic is a mistake

I read it as "win-ten-nic" to sound like "ti-tan-ic".

Fire breathing Snapdragon in boiler room number 6.

Google-free Android kit tipped to sell buckets

.. utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think smart watches are a pretty neat idea ...

New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'

Fetlang deserves an entry here

http://wiki.c2.com/?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage

Fewer than half GCSE computing students got a B or higher this year

Zero based scoring

Why are the new GCSE scores 1 to 9 (9 is best) ?

The Germans are proud to say they received "eins" = 1 which is their best.

And anyway, Edsger Dijkstra argues from research on bugs found using the Mesa programming language that numbering should begin at 0.

Can we move to 0 to 7 (or even 0x0 to 0xF for failed/ungraded) when the GCSE computing scores switch to numbers from letters ?

A perfect exam paper's answers would have 0 errors.

At the feet of the Great Monad, or, How the functional programming craze plays out

Holier than thou

Philip Wadler notes in Propositions as Types, that lambda calculus as introduced by Alonzo Church at Princeton could be used to communicate with aliens to show intelligence. While sending a C program

might not work as successfully as in Independence Day.

You'll get a kick out of this: Qualcomm patents the 'Internet of Shoes'

Was Puma RS patented?

Puma RS Computer Shoe from 1986.

Not quite prior art.

http://uk.complex.com/sneakers/2015/03/puma-killing-it-in-running-science-for-over-80-years/1986-puma-designed-the-worlds-first-apple-compatible-shoe-nearly-30-years-ago

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue79/IBM_Personal_Computing.php

Cambridge wheels out latest smart city platform, ready for devs

Re: Finding a problem to solve?

If you've waited at a Cambridge bus stop at congestion times you will know that the matrix displays show the predicted timetable arrival time of the next 2 or 3 buses in minutes until arrival time, then a hopelessly optimistic "due", and finally the predicted bus vanishes into thin air as it approaches the bus stop coinciding with its entry vanishing off the top of the display.

No buses are ever shown as "delayed" or "cancelled".

.

Google to Chrome-plate our shops with creepy mood-sensing AI signs

"The strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession."

Shevek's thoughts on the department store.

Ursula K Le Guin - The Disposessed

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

Re: Somebody explain this please...

1 ADR in ARMH on NYSE (american depositary receipt?) = 3 ARM.L shares in London.

ARM has long had Japanese investment

or the fourth investing partner that joined 1993 Nippon Investment and Finance (of Japan)

http://www.arm.com/about/company-profile/milestones.php

Tsinghua Unigroup of China have increasing shares in UK's Imagination (and other global tech).

With easy credit no wonder Softbank have bet on the horse with the best form.

Alice, Bob and Verity, too. Yeah, everybody's got a story, pal

I tried differential analysis on the double-transmitted apparently plain-text that begins "to secure my gotta-getta-double seat" but there's no hidden message to decipher - just unfixed errors of typographical composition like missing "to her" in " to invite her to her next Anne" and a missing "to" in "not to write his password on a post-it,"

Shame, I was looking forward to throwing hashcat at it. Right, back to re-implementing keccak style sponges to hide some more secrets in plain sight.

US rapper slams Earth is Round conspiracy in Twitter marathon

Thomas Dolby, The Flat Earth

"please remember...

the Earth can be any shape you want it

any shape at all

dark and cold or bright and warm

long or thin or small

but it's home and all I ever had

and maybe why for me the Earth is flat."

Oracle's Larry Ellison claims his Sparc M7 chip is hacker-proof – Errr...

@boltar

So would you like to rewrite all the cryptography explanations with an all male cast too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characters

Lotus F1: 38°C? Sand in your Vblocks? Must be building a data center in Bahrain again

Repetition, hesitation, deviation.

When watching F1 most laps are exactly the same. In that spirit this really interesting quote on page 4 stood out as a repetition from page 3

"From the car, we are looking at a range data sets from sensors, from temperatures, strain gauges, pressure sensors, displacements, RPM, and so on. Pretty much anything you can measure. For example, the upright in each wheel has a triple axis accelerometer on it, we measure brake disk and caliper temperature, brake pad displacement along with brake (hydraulic) pressure."

Holy litigation, Batman! Custom Batmobile cars nixed by copyright

Cars of the people

James May was seen driving a Batmobile in Hemel Hempstead yesterday

http://www.tringtoday.co.uk/news/james-may-spotted-in-hemel-town-centre-in-the-batmobile-1-6971458

Now car hackers can bust in through your motor's DAB RADIO

Mechanical hack

Bananas up the exhaust pipe - it worked for Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop.

Android's sun sets on Eclipse

development tool user stories

http://www.ihateeclipse.com/

Thank heavens for the silicon chip: A BRIEF history of data

"Try to think of a computer application that doesn’t manipulate data. It is a crucial test because it is impossible."

Muhammad Ali said "Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

The nul device driver.

The Windows System Idle Process.

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Sometimes fonts and layout DO matter

It's fascinating to realise that the first Hugo award winner, Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man", experiments with fonts and layouts on the page to describe telepathic conversations.

Written in 1953.

ARM gives Internet of Things a piece of its mind – the Cortex-M7

and the low power part of IoT is also forms part of a focus point for investment in UK innovation. The government funded Technology Strategy Board (aka InnovateUK) has a £3.5m competition for funding business collaboration with the title 'Scaling up energy-efficient computing'.

https://www.innovateuk.org/competition-display-page/-/asset_publisher/RqEt2AKmEBhi/content/scaling-up-energy-efficient-computing

POW! Digia straps Qt into ejector seat, gleefully pulls handle

A set-to box.

Is that what happens when the family fights over who holds the remote control of the set-top box?

New Bluetooth tech lets you control 4 BILLION lightbulbs at once

How many Kiwis does it take

I don't know if they plan to use Bluetooth but building energy management has huge potential.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/07/kiwi-power-cuts-usage-high-demand-help-uk-energy-crisis

ARM lays down law to end Wild West of chip design: New standard for server SoCs touted

Re: Lock in the insecurity?

I answered about changing modes already using an Architecture Reference Manual from 2000 (so for 32-bit chips up to architecture 5TE pre Cortex).

As for "I loved that sparc had a hardware stack that would never run code",

the more recent ARM Architecture Ref Manual says about version6 of the architecture "APX and XN (execute never) bits have been added in VMSAv6 [Virtual Memory System Architecture]",

So setting the stack pages in the MMU to be read-write-execute_never (with a no access guard page for demand driven growth maybe) gives a hardware stack that will never run code like your beloved sparc.

Re: Lock in the insecurity?

ARM architecture reference manual ISBN 0-201-73719-1 page A4-65 "Any writes to CPSR[23:0] in User mode are ignored (so that User mode programs cannot change to a privileged mode)."

You might want to read chapter B3 Memory Management Unit section on access permissions too.

How do you think Linux VM works?

Vladimir PUTIN officially HARDER than CHUCK NORRIS

Re: Chuck Norris could whoop Putin blindfolded

"he probably has some of those fancy poisoned daggers in his shoes."

That's okay. Taekwondo is a practised barefoot.

Germans purge selves of indigestible 63-letter word

RkReUAUG maybe 63 but it is 65 characters long when using a keyboard that does not support umlauts.

Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz

Scottish SF master Iain M Banks reveals he has less than a year to live

crossing The Bridge, imbibing Raw Spirit

As Gurgeh observes in The Player of Games

"the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change."

Whether that includes licensing the rights and rules to a games publisher remains to be seen.

Uni profs: Kids today could do with a bit of 'mind-crippling' COBOL

horses for courses

I had professors who were experts in COBOL, APL, FORTRAN, LISP, Pascal and Prolog. They were each inspiring. But it was the LISP advocate who pointed out the flaws in the Pascal implementation, the dynamic scope rules of APL, the implicit typing of FORTRAN, that Prolog's backtracking was cleverer than your formulation and that if you write the plain English command: 'DIVIDE cake INTO 3 GIVING slices.' it is not a valid COBOL statement. He also carefully explained that garbage collection and list traversal in LISP were not for free.

Since graduating I like to think that this breadth of education has helped me learn and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of a various assemblers, C, Perl, Rexx, Natural, Python, C++, Java, Haskell, C#, Go and the next 700 programming languages.

Firm moves to trademark 'Python' name out from under the language

"This not a Python Community Trademark, this is a dog license with the word dog crossed out and 'Python' written in in crayon"

Android gets tipsy on Wine, runs WINDOWS apps

Re: Could you "compile" an x86 binary to run on ARM?

Yes you could.

But the world experts in this kind of technology: Transitive, who started at University of Manchester, are now part of IBM Power Systems division.

Maybe S2E's RevGen -> LLVM IR ->Thumb2 + Wine as shared object? + an indirection despatcher.

"bigger..."

Possibly not for code. ARM's Thumb2 instruction set was designed to improve code-density. That's never been a stated goal of x86 family which has become ever more baroque, constrained by its instruction encoding format (Prefix/overrides) Opcode Mod Reg R/M Sib Displacement Immediate.

Java open-source frameworks 'pose risk' to biz - report

different JNI

"without any mingling of difference languages, also scored highly on quality."

You mean 'different'.

On the other hand, is the output of 'diff -e' a difference language?

"Mixing Java with C or C++ lowered the score"

JNI - like being a blind brain surgeon using barbecue tongs.

Beats me how CAST can analyse that for quality.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum FAILS latest radio noise rules SHOCK

You could debug with a transistor radio

Tight loops produced a different noise (more whine than ticking hum) on a nearby transistor radio than main control loop of a program (presumably DRAM refresh cycle rate changed), so I was able to find errant code by listening to the radio tuned to some interfering harmonic frequency on similarly Z80 equipped Jupiter ACE.

I always assumed the cause was the plastic case not providing any shielding.

Slideshow: A History of the Smartphone in 20 Handsets

My first smartphone - Sierra Wireless voq

A curvy tri-band GSM handy with flip out qwerty keyboard, SD card memory expansion. Windows Mobile2003 but voqMail apps quite usable if not quite integrated and could even do VPN access

They didn't do W-CDMA so did not succeed in the important US home market, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/sierra_sued_over_voq/

Remaindered items were a eurozone bargain. Thanks expansys and other savvy importers.

US teens confess to 60-a-day texting FRENZY

"teenager awake from 7am"

That's a sample size of zero not 799.

Unless that includes when they were clubbing all night

Punters to favour Smart TV over 3D TV

W I D E screen

52.9m Smart TVs

versus

48.2m 3D TVs.

well the screen is 4.7metres bigger so it's no contest.

Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars

bigger faster spelt right

That's surely Cortex-A9 not some margarine brand.

And it has 32 to 36 bit virtual/physical mapping to provide more than 4Gb RAM

Anti-PowerPoint Party vows end to death by slides

More than a Talking Head

Proof that PP is a tool ?

http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/views/eeei_still6.php

Otellini: ARM servers 'ain't gonna work'

Large enough cake

"and who is going to write compilers....."

Both Intel's ICC and ARM's RealView-CT use the Edison Design Group C frontend.

ICC will compile the Linux kernel and warn about more issues than GCC compiler

RealView armcc/tcc will compile the Linux kernel and warn about more issues and produces smaller code than GCC compiler, even the CodeSourcery ARM GCC compiler. But the ARM EABI standard means there is more freedom of choice so you can obtain a compiler from another vendor for all or part of your server's code. For eaxmple, IAR have just released an ARM EABI compliant toolchain. By working with CodeSourcery, ARM may even avoid Intel's old Unix86 iBCS' fate, swept away by Linux ABI and LSB.

With ARM for servers you have not only have a choice of silicon vendor, but also of tool supplier.

It's all about the ecosystem.

Use of Weapons declared best sci-fi film never made

abnormal distribution

Applying Fitt's Law (not a novel), would the close proximity of the choice 'Use of Weapons – Iain M Banks and the button 'Yes, please bring that soon to a cinema near me' have any relation to the skewed distibribution?

Not only is Use of Weapons hard to film, but I think Iain M said that he's been asked about the Player of Games rules by computer games coders and screenwriters but the rules are unfortunately and perhaps deliberately incomplete.

Me, I'm planning to listen to China Miéville talk about Embassytown. His last novel Kraken would make a very watchable movie.

'