* Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

3265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011

House Republicans introduce legislation for outright ban on municipal broadband in the US

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Why municipal?

I suspect it comes down to investment. It costs a lot of money to set up. And no matter the good will, poor areas just won't be able to afford it.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

This is an admission private sector ISPs are so inefficient they can't compete with the public sector. If they could offer better service for a lower price, you wouldn't need to ban the competition.

VS Code acknowledges its elders: Makefile projects get an official extension – and VIM mode is on the backlog

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Key collisions - forced decisions

" If it was all you vi users would be touch typists. I know a lot of devs, I can't think of any others who can."

Touch typing doesn't work for `(::x->*d)()` and the innumerable other squiggles languages insist on. It's also handicapped by dodgy autoinsert implementations.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Yes, I grew up on an 84-key keyboard

The arrow keys, page up, page down, etc... are all their on the numeric keypad. You don't need them - unless some app insists on being pissy. (RESPECT THE NUMLOCK!) Get rid of them and there is space for the function keys down the side where the left hand can curl over. But, to be honest, I wouldn't care even if my keyboard was wider still.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Actually, it's Alt+2 in my editor, and has been since at least the 90s, because duplicating the current line is such a useful feature.

One of the things I still lament is the decision to move function keys to the top of the keyboard, rather than keeping them down the left hand side. Up there, they're out of easy reach and that restricts them to less frequent bindings.

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

What this shows is that Google isn't quite as irreplaceable as Facebook. I think Microsoft's Brad Smith was saying Bing would be happy to take up the slack, if Google walked away from the market. And there's probably truth in that - another search engine could be found. Block Facebook and there is nobody in the wings. And, as Facebook has shown, it doesn't depend that seriously on news; whereas Google failing to return news would be a much bigger dent in the service's functionality, and perhaps an existential threat to the Chocolate Factory.

FortressIQ just comes out and says it: To really understand business processes, feed your staff's screen activity to an AI

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Dear Employee,

Please can you train up this machine so it can replace you.

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Trickle down my arse.

I was about to have the same rant. The free market fundamentalists are classic bullies. When they're doing well, everybody should stand on their own laurels and government should be as small as possible.

But as soon things get tough, they're straight to government crying, "Pay for our R&D; subsidise our factories. It'll create jobs for all those people we've told you not to look after and who we said we'd create jobs for if you just cut our taxes (although, in reality, we used the cash to fund a share buyback so our directors' options became more valuable). BTW, did we say that last bit out loud?"

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Every time I start a new project I think, "I must get better acquainted with git and really seriously use it." Then I type hg init and get on with work.

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Wrong analogy

Social media is a tool. We can point at the harm. But we can also find good - for example, a woman tweeting a picture of a school meal provided by a business that's pocketed half the payment. In fact, the whole campaign Rashford has run.

Even the harm is dependent on context. Resisting a legitimate election in the U.S. - bad. Protesting a corrupt election in Lithuania or opposing Putin - good. (It's telling that Myanmar has shut down the internet and that China strongly polices what people say about Winnie the Pooh.)

So regulating it is not like regulating asbestos. It's more like regulating knives or alochol. I'm not afraid of bankrupting firms that manufacture lead water pipes. But I wouldn't want to put fertilizer manufactures out of business just because it can be used to make bombs. Social media is closer to the latter. We need to find way of minimising the harm done while preserving much of the good.

Chrome zero-day bug that is actively being abused by bad folks affects Edge, Vivaldi, and other Chromium-tinged browsers

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Other V8 Users?

It's only a problem if you're loading arbitrary javascript.

That's probably not true for node. (Modulo someone smuggling it into an npm module.) But electron/nwjs might well be loading pages from the world wild web.

Chromium cleans up its act – and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60 billion

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: hang on

Maybe I'm missing something, but "type address in the box marked 'address', and search in the box marked 'search'" doesn't sound all that complicated, and isn't something I've ever had trouble explaining to anyone.

"So you definitely typed it in the address box?"

"What kind of moron do you take me for?! I know the different between the address box and the search box by now, and it's still not working."

"Send me a screenshot."

*looks at screenshot*

"You've typed it in the search box."

Users have a goal: they want to access a resource. DNS addresses, like IP addresses, have become behind the scene gubbins that they don't really care about.

Missing GOV.UK web link potentially cost taxpayers £50m as civil servants are forced to shuffle paper forms

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
FAIL

Re: I'm still mystified

"I don't think a government more competent than one containing Boris Johnson, Gavin Williamson, Mat Hancock and Liz Truss is a "hypothetical utopia" we can only dream of."

And what's amazing is they've achieved all this incompetence while leaving MVP Chris Grayling on the backbenches. You'd think any government without Grayling (reminder: he's a man who lost an election rigged in his favour) would be two orders of magnitude more competent than one with him.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

"Taxpayers will be livid at this totally avoidable largesse."

I think Mr Fone (really?) needs to look up the definition of the word "largesse". Or is his complaint that people are able to change their address without being charged by the Home Office?

We'll explore Titan with a methane submarine, a methane submarine, a methane submarine...

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: At -179C

Well that's altitude control solved. Heat to the bottom: melt your way lower. Heat to the top: melt your way higher. Normal running means tacking up and down.

It probably works in the horizontal plane, too. Heat to the front: melt your way forwards. Etc...

I haven't thought about any pressure issues.

LowKey cool: This web app will tweak your photos to flummox facial-recognition systems, apparently

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: OK, but

Did you look at the full size photos? The woman on the right is particularly badly hit.

UK Prime Minister Johnson knows not when 400k+ deleted records from police DB will be back

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Not yet engineering

It doesn't matter if the code is verified if, despite all the thrashings, the standard it's verified against misunderstands the problem or is incorrect. Because an oversight or omission in the specification means the verification won't be worth the bold font its printed in.

Come on, we've all been round the block enough to see code perfectly implement a spec that contains a flaw no one has recognised. It happens even in standards that have been thrashed out by field leaders in international standards bodies.

And, also, what you're asking for requires management to respect IT and give them the time.

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Look at that thing in the sky! *thwack*

"I'd still rather a drone fell on me than a helicopter."

If you're dead, you're dead. It doesn't matter if it was a 13kg drone or a 11 tonne chinook that did it.

And drones are demonstrably more likely to drop out the sky - because the pilots have less training, easy access to a kill switch, and aren't sitting in the beast putting their life on the line.

And because drones are cheap, we're likely to see far more deployed far more often. So overall, the risk to bystanders from drones, while small, will probably end up greater than the risk from helicopters.That said, drones will probably still be safer overall - because when a helicopter crashes, there are guaranteed humans in the accident.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Do Thales make police drones too?

It was aquabraking, not lithobraking. And I don't know how big the pond was,* but if it was the back garden variety then the operator had a pretty good aim and the military should higher them.

*I've googled it, and it's bigger than a cul-de-sac. This is where too much information spoils a joke.

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: What about

I'll add it to my order of smooth, frictionless surface and light, inextensible string - two new SI units.

UK Space ponders going nuclear with Rolls-Royce: Hopes are to slice the time it takes for space travel

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Pirate

Do you not think having another sun in the outer reaches of our solar system might be, uh, "problematic"? (Particularly if the people we borrowed it from got upset.)

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Joke

"Solar power is not very useful unless you are reasonably close to the sun."

Can we not just take the sun with us?

Apologies for the wait, we're overwhelmed. Yes, this is the hospital. You need to what?! Do a software licence audit?

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

IBM managed to earn the moniker of both "best" and "worst".

It was the best of audits, it was the worst of audits, it was the audit of wisdom, it was the audit of foolishness, it was the audit of belief, it was the audit of incredulity, it was the audit of Light, it was the audit of Darkness, it was the audit of hope, it was the audit of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to court, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest auditors insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Alert

Re: So Leave have left?

How much longer before the .UK domain has to be dissolved?

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Why terrifying?

In my limited observation, it's because where parking is available it is for one car. But there's probably two adults with a car and possibly a teenager and/or post-university student each with a car. We've organised the UK so that most working adults needs one.

Disclaimer: I don't have a car.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Joke

Re: Best of both worlds

"Question, though, how do you convert the fusion end products into electrical current?"

That's the easiest task of the lot - you just capture all the neutrinos...

For pedants: yes, you can produce electrons - via reverse electron capture or neutrino absorption; it's a form of beta decay where a neutrino slams into a proton and converts it into a neutron and an electron. You see it in astrophysical environments, especially supernova.

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Linux

Re: 20 year old tech...

At least you have mud. We're knee deep in water...

And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won't slurp your data

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Not Free

*cough* <details></details> *cough*

:-P

But, in answer to the original question, consider something as a simple as an upvote: javascript can notify the server and tweak a text string in the page. The alternative is waiting for the server to rebuild the page (with any subsequent changes because it didn't record the state of the page when you fetched it) and then transmit it wholesale back to you, and then the browser then flickers because it's not the same page and the browser doesn't attempt to work out whether there are tiny changes or it's a 100% different.

Microsoft is designing its own Arm-based data-center server, PC chips – report

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: AMD <3 ARM too

Revisit ARM when ARM is owned by Nvidia?

Developer beta for Huawei's Google-free HarmonyOS is here – but you may need to Google Translate the docs

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Even if a truly excellent alternative to Android existed, history suggests the world would carry on using Android. (Look at that list of failed mobile OSes. Or look at the desktop and Windows.) Android has inertia.

And, as an app developer, two OSes are fine, thank you very much. If you're gonna faff around with another OS then I'm going to wait till it's an established platform with a clear pool of users safe in the knowledge that (1) you won't go all in but will also offer other android devices; and (2) that users will likely recoil from the non-android devices, even if they're cheaper, because they won't have all their apps; and that (3) every non tier-1 developer is likely to make the same calculation so I know I won't miss the boat.

Government intervention in the market changes that equation. This goes two ways: either Huawei collapses as a mobile manufacturer or they make it work. And, as a dev, I can see that straight away so I'm already paying more attention than I would if it was another upstart nerd fantasy. Even if China banned Android in China, they'd probably still be selling Android in the west and it would take a good while for China-OS to make inroads. But if Biden keeps up the pressure on Huawei, they have no choice but to make it work. And if they're succeeding, and play their cards right, other manufacturers might join them and try and throw off the Google yoke.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

This could go either way. It may well be a footnote in history. But it could end up that Trump fired the gun which holed Android and sank the global American tech hegemony.

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Expectation value

It's got to be multiples of the savings. If the punishment amounts to twice the savings but there's only 1 in 10 chance of getting caught, do you bother?

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also installed backdoor

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: That's nothing

What if I'm already a monkey? What does it do to me then?

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Coat

THIS WAS SO SERIOUS I HAD TO GO ROUND TO MY EIGHT-FOUR YEAR OLD NEIGHBOUR AND SEE IF SHE COULD COPE WITHOUT GMAIL.

YES, I DO NEED A COAT - IT'S RAINING AGAIN.

Raven geniuses: Four-month-old corvids have similar cognitive abilities to great apes at same age, study finds

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Linux

Re: tasks testing addition and understanding of relative numbers?

Carrrkkkk?! What kinda dunce, are you! Four minus three is karrrrrkkkk!

Don't give up on Planet Nine yet: Hubble 'scope finds just such a world a mere 336 light-years away

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Was I the only one...

"...it is hard to see how it can be known to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit..."

Well, it's Marie Kondo moments are what suggests there might be a Planet 9. (Also, it's pretty steeply inclined so it won't have to do much cleaning.)

But clearing out an orbit amounts to a mass limit without anybody having to say exactly what mass a planet has to have. (Remember Pluto is less than a fifth of the mass of the moon.) A super-earth is going to make the grade.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Was I the only one...

Well, this planet is ~3500 times more massive than earth, and is presumably around the diameter of Jupiter. Planet 9 is expect to be 5-10 the mass of the earth.

And while not quite heavy enough to ignite deuterium, this planet should still be bubbling like a witch's cauldron, which helps when you're looking in the near infrared. Whereas our planet 9 is probably icy and, if so, may be covered in soot.

Moreover we found this planet by looking in on another system. The region of interest was maybe a hundred milliarcseconds in diameter. We're trying to find planet 9 by looking out from our solar solar across the whole fucking sky.

But, apart from all that, I don't see why we haven't found planet 9 every bit as easily...

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Was I the only one...

"...super-Jovian planet in the sort of a highly distant orbit proposed for Planet 9..."

It's HD 106906 b that is eleven Jovian masses - bordering on brown dwarf.

Our proposed planet 9 is a super-earth - thought to be 5-10 times the mass of the earth. That's what makes it especially fascinating - we'll get to see a super-earth close up. The first question being whether it's gaseous or rocky.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Was I the only one...

Look, it's over. It's finished. It's not a planet.

And the real planet 9 would be way cooler - mainly because it would be that much farther from the sun.

You've got to be shipping me: KatherineRyan.co.uk suggests the comedian has diversified into freight forwarding

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Joke

website redirected to an Australian shipping company

Ahhh, another benefit of an Australian-style Brexit! Getting in the spirit, earlier I see.

Google Chrome's crackdown on ad blockers and browser extensions, Manifest v3, is now available in beta

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

"Remember when common people used to create small websites about their personal interests?"

These days they do it on Facebook, rather than the raw web.

Boffins from China push quantum computing envelope for 'supremacy' in emerging photon field

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Usefulness ... ?

"you'll have a hard time to simulate the result of my dropping a ball through it (assuming a proper degree of imprecise and therefore hard-to-model nail positioning on my part)"

If we are allowed to measure your board, then it doesn't matter where you hammer nails. The ball is classical. The nails are classical. The board is classical. We can simulate this to very good approximation with the kind of computing power that is being deployed here. TBH, shining an array of lasers pointers would give us a good indication; there's no beam splitters doubling the number of balls nor constructive and destructive interference of these balls - we only have to worry about classical spin, air resistance and frictional losses.

Anyway, Scott's thoughts were this one doesn't have a currently foreseeable use but Google's was done using a practical quantum computer.

Bare-metal Macs-as-a-service come to AWS. Intel for now, M1 silicon in 2021

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
Coat

"The cloud colossus has revealed that tenancy will be for a minimum of 24 hours."

Coincidentally, that's exactly the amount of time it takes the simulator to start up. Yeah, I want my coat. I'm going for a very long walk while it boots.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: What is the use case for this?

Cross platform development. I might fire up my "late 2014" mac mini for a day (good case) or a couple of weeks (bad case) every 2-3 months. Most of the time, it's switched off.

Amazon aren't the only people to offer this, so I had already looked at equivalent services trying to work out whether they were a better deal than buying a new one - as mine won't run the latest OS. If I spend £700 on a new one, instead of spending £250/year renting, then it'll be the third year before I squeeze a profit. And I'll be on three year old hardware, rather than the newest.

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: The guys that "found it"

Wow! Thanks.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

This is why we can't have anything nice...

Which makes me think it was thieves. Probably for scrap metal. But maybe they were trying to fence it to a rich collector.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: The guys that "found it"

Do we know when that photo was taken?

Physicists wrap neutrino detector in cosy blanket to shed light on the Sun's secondary fusion cycle

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

It helps to remember astrononmy is an old science.

I think the usage was coined long before we knew about the big bang, that space was expanding or even that there were galaxies, and before we knew atoms had nuclei (remember the plum pudding model?) let alone that nuclei could fuse.

It's probably because of where absorption lines are in the spectrum. So we looked at the sun and saw lines for hydrogen, helium and other "chemical metals". (In fact the helium line was initially though to be a line for sodium - a metal.) It was only later we discovered non-chemical metals were much more abundant.

And it remains the case that most stars are hydrogen, helium and rounding errors. (Yes, that's because of the big bang, but you're looking at it backwards - if the big bang had produced a different pattern of elements it wouldn't matter provided stars had ended up as we see them today.) And when you look outside stars, helium becomes irrelevant; you find ionised hydrogen (HII), atomic hydrogen (HI), molecular hydrogen (H2), free electrons, magnetic fields and pretty-coloured soot.

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Astrophysicists love approximations

And there's a question mark over helium - it's a bit suspiciously non-hydrogeny to not be a metal.

Social isolation creates craving in the same brain region as wanting food or addictive drugs, study finds

Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

Re: Yeah, surprise me.

You forgot the arthritis that makes walking 10 yards seem like completing a half marathon.