* Posts by bjr

86 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Sep 2011

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Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

bjr

No big deal

People run distros not Linux and the distros all have their own LTS policies. They don't use the standard LTS kernel they fork their own and maintain it for as long as they like. If all of the major distros agreed on same LTS kernels and all worked to maintain those kernels then the mainline LTS kernel would mean something. But they don't do that. Redhat has their LTS kernels, Ubuntu has theirs, Google picks a kernel for Android every year, and they all maintain them for as long as they see fit. It doesn't make sense for the mainline Linux project to waste resources maintaining kernels that hardly anyone uses.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

bjr

Ubuntu

Because of CentOS RHEL was the default distribution for third party software. If a company needed third party software they choose RHEL because you knew it was either your only choice or was the primary platform for the software you needed. That's not true anymore, everything is available on Ubuntu and in many cases Ubuntu works better. I used Fedora and CentOS for over 20 years, all of my new systems run Ubuntu now. The older hardware with CentOS7 will continue to run it until they are decommissioned. The same is true for my clients.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

bjr

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

That's idiotic. Google might know every step I take but all they want to do is send ads to me. They don't have a gulag, they don't shoot people. The Chinese government does have an extensive system of slave labor camps. They do shoot dissidents.

Sony responds to inflation with $3,700 gold-plated 'Walkman'

bjr

Doesn't Sony have any lawyer's

What Sony has built is technically known as a litigation generator. Claiming that the case material has any effect on the sound quality of a digital music player is such an obvious fraud that they should attract plaintiff attorneys like bugs to a porch light.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

bjr

Depressing, the X15 flew higher in 1963

It's been 58 years since the X15 flew to 67 miles and 60 years since Alan Shepard made his flight. If someone had built an airplane and few it 120 feet on a beach in 1963 no one would have cared except the mother of the Cub Scout that did it. Branson's flight was only to 50 miles and Bezos will just be taking the worlds most expensive pogo stick to a lousy 100KM. Even when Alan Shepard made his flight it was basically just a participation trophy, Yuri Gagarin had already orbited the earth. Both of these efforts are just a colossal waste of resources and money. You can get more zero gravity time for vastly less money on Nasa's vomit comet. Virgin has at least used their technology to put a couple of satellites into orbit, Blue Origin has accomplished exactly nothing and they've knee capped ULA with their failure to supply an engine to replace the Russian engines that they have been using. As someone who watched Alan Shepards launch in his first grade classroom and is now old enough to collect Social Security I find this extremely depressing.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

bjr

Shag carpet compatible PCs

In the early 90s I developed a hardware diagnostic for Macs which we sold off to a much larger company that did PC diagnostics. During the hand over one of their support people told me a story which is directly germane to this one. He received a call from a user who said that his PC wouldn't turn on. The PC had worked fine in the kitchen but it didn't work in the living room. He asked the usual questions, is it plugged in?, yes, is the cord in the back of the PC plugged in?, yes, do you have a switched outlet? he didn't know. So the support guy suggested that he plug a lamp into the outlet to see if it's live. The user wouldn't do it because if he unplugged his lamp it couldn't see anything. The support guy went around in circles with the user who refused to flip the wall switch or plug in a lamp. Finally the support guy asked what kind of carpeting did the user have in the living room?, shag carpeting. That's your problem, your PC isn't shag carpet compatible, take it back to the kitchen and it will work fine.

Infosys fires employee who Facebooked 'let's hold hands and share coronavirus'

bjr

Can't shout fire in a theater

India has no first amendment but even in the US which does this would fall under the "Can't shout fire in a theater exception", i.e. speech that causes an imminent threat to the safety of others is not protected. Clearly this falls into that category, encouraging people to deliberately spread a deadly virus, even if done in jest, poses an imminent threat to the safety of others.

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

bjr

There can only be one standard

You can't have different standards depending on the race of the poster for the simple reason that you can't possible know the poster's actual race, if David Duke writes a post using a Black vernacular is it OK if he uses the N word because the post sounds like it could have been written by a Black person? The answer is that a word is either OK for everyone to use or for nobody to use but on the Internet you can't discriminate based on who you think the speaker is. In real life you can make those distinctions when you are face to face because you actually know who's speaking but you can't possibly do that online. The best you can do is establish community standards for individual forums and groups, but once established those standards have to be applied to everyone.

It's up to people to adapt to the limitations of there tools not the other way around. There is no such thing as artificial intelligence, that's a marketing term, what computers do is pattern recognition and there are limits to what that can handle. If certain words are banned in a particular forum then you just can't use those words even if you use them in everyday life. You can't sail your car, unless you own an Amphicar, if you drive your car into a lake it will sink. We accept that cars can't sail on water and we have to accept that computer moderation will never be more than a list of banned words, you just have to adapt to that.

In a touching show of solidarity with the NBA and Blizzard, Apple completely caves to China on HK protest app

bjr

Has anyone asked Tim Cook why he's covered with blood and honey?

Has anyone asked Tim Cook why he's covered with blood and honey?

US soldier cleared of taking armoured vehicle out for joyride – because he's insane, court says

bjr

Re: How things have changed

Met a Lufthansa pilot years ago who said that Lufthansa flys Boeing's because they were very impressed by the B17 during the war.

FBI and immigration officials trawling US driving licence databases for suspects

bjr

Re: How is the different from a wanted poster?

It's exactly the same thing, they are comparing a picture of a wanted person to their database of photos, in the case of a wanted poster they are using the memories of thousands of people instead of a computer. They aren't searching through the database for people who look guilty, they are trying to find a specific individual.

bjr

How is the different from a wanted poster?

I don't think there is a 4th amendment issue here, your face isn't considered private because you expose it to the world everyday. A wanted poster accomplishes something similar, in that case it's humans who do the facial recognition not machines. If someone recognizes a person on a wanted poster they notify the authorities who then take further investigative action. In the case of using facial recognition software to scan driver's licenses it's essentially the same thing, i.e. the computer is given the picture of the wanted person and scans through the photos looking for a match. If a match, or matches, are found the next step would be to hand it to a human who will make a determination if further investigation is warranted. The facial recognition match is not going to be used as evidence in a court case, it's no different from a tip that's phoned in and it's no different than scanning through the goverment's fingerprint database.

The use of this technology is something the states will want to limit. The states have competing interests that they need to balance, catching criminals and maintaining safe roads. Making sure that all drivers on the roads are qualified, even criminals and illegal aliens, is probably higher priority than using drivers licenses to identify criminals, but that's a determination that each state will have to make.

Fibaro flummoxed, Georgia courts held for ransom, and more

bjr

Re: Lake City IT boss fired for ransomware payment

Backup is job one for any IT director, even if there are budget constraints something else should be sacrificed rather that backup. Just in the normal course of events hardware fails, disks in particular fail all the time. Catastrophic events have to be planned for, a lightning strike could wipe out everything in a building. If you've planned for these events then you should be able to recover from anything. There should have been offsite backups going back years that could have been used to restore their systems, failure to do that should certainly be a fireable offense.

Worried ransomware will screw your network? You could consider swallowing your pride, opening your wallet

bjr

It should be illegal to pay a ransom

The social costs are too high to allow anyone to pay a ransom because paying the ransom ensures that the criminals will continue to victimize other companies. The interests of the victims and the interests of society as a whole are not aligned, the victim's primary goal is to save their company even at the expense of future victims, societies interest is to stop it from happening at all. The only way to stop it is to make it illegal to pay the ransom, if nobody pays then it won't happen.

Essex named sexiest British accent followed closely by, um, Glaswegian

bjr

Re: No accent?

The TV networks in the US use a homogenized Midwest accent that's become the standard for much of the US, if you don't diverge much from that we would say that you have "No Accent". Outside of the South regional accents have become much diminished, they still exist in small pockets but not nearly to the extent that they did fifty or more years ago. I've lived in Massachusetts for over 40 years and in that time I've only met one person who used the stereotypical Boston accent. In parts of the South people still cling to the Southern accent as part of their identity, but even then it's not as pronounced. President Bush the Younger deliberately used a Texas accent but it was part of a political calculation because the Bushes are really New England Yankees, his grandfather was was the Senator from Connecticut, he was born in New Haven Connecticut, went to prep school in Andover Massachusetts followed by Yale in New Haven and then Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. Being a Yankee is a political liability in Texas, which was part of the Confederacy, so he adopted a Texas accent, it made him sound like more of an idiot than he actually was. I don't know if his accent would have seemed odd to British ears, I suspect not because when I see a Brit playing an American on a British sitcom they always seem to sound like retarded Texans, it's never the standard American accent, but fair is fair, on American shows when someone does a British accent it's always Cockney, or more specifically Dick Van Dyke's Cockney chimney sweep in Mary Poppins.

Google readies Pixel for the masses, but are the masses ready for Pixel?

bjr

Been very happy with Nexus and Pixel

I'm currently using a Pixel 2XL, got as soon as it was available. The hardware has been flawless, Android Q has some Bluetooth problems but that's to be expected in an early beta. Prior to the Pixel I had the Galaxy Nexus, the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 6P. The only one of those that I was unhappy with the the Galaxy Nexus but that was Samsung's fault not Google's, they treated it as a red headed step child. I would never want to go back to that . I don't see a way to guarantee a clean version of Android with frequent updates than for Google to build their own phones. I'm running Android Q now, the S10 won't get it until the middle of next year and it probably will never get Android R, the Pixel 2XL will. I would like to see Google attempt to me more competitive with their hardware, they are still stuck on one camera while everyone else has at least two cameras, the 4 might get two but the flagships from other vendors have moved on to more than that.

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

bjr

Helene and Leda

Not so hard. Helene of Troy was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, so there you have two, Helene and her mom Leda.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

bjr

Re: Tunnels

I can't believe that was 27 years ago, it feels like yesterday. I was in Chicago that weekend and the Loop looked like something from a Twilight Zone episode, it was completely deserted and from the street level there was no sign of what had gone wrong. For those who don't know, here's what happened. Chicago has a vast underground network of coal tunnels that were built in the 19th century. These tunnels connect to almost every major building in the Loop, originally they were built to transport coal but every new utility, from phones to fibre, uses them. Unfortunately the tunnel system runs under the Chicago River and one day in 1992 a contractor was driving a piling into the riverbed punched a hole into the tunnel which promptly caused the river to drain into the basements of every building in the Loop, it was months before the mess was cleaned up. If anyone had a data center in their basement, and I bet there were a lot of them, they would have been completely destroyed.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

bjr

Lisa was more minicomputer than PC

My ex-boss ran the Lisa team, he went from Data General, where I worked for him, to DEC and then to Apple to run the Lisa program. After Apple he went to Sun where he was VP of engineering and then came out of retirement to run hardware engineering at Google in Google's early days. The Lisa team came from DEC where they had been building minicomputers so Lisa had the capabilities of a minicomputer of the time, it was not a personal computer it was a workstation and it's price was similar to the prices for Sun's and Apollo's workstations, the problem was that Apple was a personal computer company not a workstation company, it's customers were individual's not corporations. The Lisa was a multitasking machine, the IBM PC wasn't, Lisa had a real OS, the PC had DOS which was basically just a program loader. Given the cost of memory and the limitations of microprocessors at the time IBM made the right call, the PC, which cost about $2500, could only do one thing at a time but it worked. The first Mac was designed to be much cheaper than the Lisa but it couldn't even compile a program, for that you needed a Lisa. Memory prices were dropping quickly at the time so that by the end of the 80s you could get a whopping 16M on a Mac which could do a lot on it. Unlike LIsa, the Mac OS wasn't a true multitasking OS, it did what was called cooperative multitasking, but Macs were a lot cheaper than workstations, which ran UNIX a true OS, and they were a lot better than PCs but they were also about twice as expensive as PCs.

make all relocate... Linux kernel dev summit shifts to Scotland – to fit Torvald's holiday plans

bjr

I think that when they found out that Torvalds was going to be in Scotland every thought that it would be more fun than Vancouver.

bjr

Re: New! It's the elReg trip advisor

Did the Edinburgh festivals about 15 years ago, it's a fantastic experience. Went to a mix of fringe and non-fringe performances (one staged opera and several concert style operas), for those who don't know it's actually five different festivals at the same time, the largest is the fringe which are small shows, some amateur, some professional, I loved all of the ones I attended, plus there are a couple of professional festivals where the performances are on a much larger scale but the number of productions are small. The only downside of Edinburgh was the food which was pretty poor. Has the food been fixed? I remember London in the 70s and 80s and they really did live up to their reputation for terrible food, but that's not true anymore so I believe that Scotland could be fixed also, has it?

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

bjr

Re: Right to be forgotten

If you've been convicted of a crime it's a matter of public record, why should if ever be forgotten? The nature of your crime matters, a teenage joyride isn't likely to effect your future career prospects but a conviction for fraud should and will. Assuming that ABCs crime is something that will interfere with his ability to setup an investment firm, then don't his future customers have a right to know if he has a history of securities fraud? I'm pretty sure his conviction wasn't for public urination, it was for somethihg serious, if it wasn't why would he be putting up such a fuss? The public has a right to know, the "right to be forgotten" is a piece of EU nonsense.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

bjr

Hard drives have had a good run, 62 years so far

The IBM RAMAC was introduced in 1956, 5MCharacters on forty 24" platters. It's really amazing that a mechanical technology from the 1950s has managed to hang on this long. Vacuum tubes were gone within a couple of years of the introduction of the RAMAC, core memory was replaced by DRAMs 40 years ago, tape is long gone. My guess is that SSDs will still be more expensive than hard drives for the next few years so the hard drive may be able to hold on until it's eligible for full social security.

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

bjr

Re: The song the headline refers to...

The Mort Saul version was "He aimed for the stars but he hit London"

Micro Focus offloads Linux-wrangler SUSE for a cool $2.5bn

bjr

Makes no sense

Is there a mistake in the reported price? It makes no sense to pay $2.3B for a 25 year old company with revenues of $164M, it makes even less sense for an also ran like SUSE. Redhat is trading at 8.25X revenues, at that multiple SUSE would be worth $1.3B. But SUSE isn't Redhat, it's 1/18th the size of Redhat, it's essentially irrelevant and has zero potential to disrupt anything so you would expect a much lower multiple, frankly I think the price is too high by 10X.

Google gives its $1m Turing prize to, er, top Google bods: RISC men Hennessy, Patterson

bjr

Silicon valley view of the world

Hennessy and Patterson got all of the credit for RISC but there were others who preceded them. The IBM 801 project, which lead to PowerPC, was built before either the MIPS or SPARC chips, I remember reading the 801 papers in late 1982 and thinking that they were doing the correct thing. However before any of them there was Seymour Cray who was the original proponent of simple architectures. Cray machines weren't Reduced Instruction Set Computers because he had never complicated them in the first place. The CDC 6600 and the Cray 1 were examples of minimal instruction set machines, the CDC 6600 was contemporaneous with the IBM 360, the machine that could be considered the first CISC machine. There were other simple instruction set machines in the 60s and early 70s, the DEC PDP8 and the Data General Nova, both design by Ed DeCastro, however those machines were simple by necessity, cost was the driving factor which at the time meant simple. Cray's machines were simple as a matter of philosophy, they were designed to be the fastest computers in the world and the way Cray achieved that was by using very simple instruction sets and running them at very high clock rates (for the time).

Google's answer to the Pixel 2 XL CRT-style screen burn in: Lower the brightness

bjr

It's a great phone

I have a Pixel 2XL and all this whining about the display is nonsense. The blue shift is a complete non-issue, it only occurs when you look at the phone at an extreme tilt, it doesn't exist when you look at the phone at a normal angle. This time of year we don't have much sun where I live but people on the forums who live in sunnier climes report that they can read the display in bright sunlight, a little blue shift because of a polarizer is a great tradeoff for the ability to see the display in the sun.

As for the colors, they are great. When I first got it they looked washed out but I've since install the 8.1 beta and now the display looks fine. Comparing my Pixel2XL to my Nexus 6P side by side, I don't see any significant difference, if anything I like the 2XL a little better. All other aspects of the 2XL are as good as everyone says. The photos and videos are fantastic. Android Auto is much more reliable than it was on my Nexus 6P. Another really important feature is that it works great as a phone. Nobody every mentions phone calls in the reviews which is strange because these things are called phones, but the voice quality and the ability to hold a call is vastly better then it was on my Nexus 6P, that maybe due to Verizon having treated the 6P as a step child because they didn't sell it, or it might be that the Pixel 2XL really is that much better, but it's night and day better.

One more thing, why would anyone want to have physical nav buttons? they are a complete waste of space. My 2 year old Nexus 6P didn't have nav buttons and it doesn't show any burn in, neither did my 4 year old Nexus 5.

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

bjr

Phony story

Everything about this story sounds phony. Polaroids in 2017, where would you buy the film? A Paris bar, maybe Salt Lake City but not Paris. The beaches in France have been nude since the 1950s, it's doubtful that the bartenders would bother offer anything for a simple tit flash in Paris and even if they did why would the management feel a need to apologize?

Concorde without the cacophony: NASA thinks it's cracked quiet supersonic flight

bjr

BS

The Boeing SST was canceled because of environmental reasons, specifically SSTs damage the ozone layer. It was also clear that they were going to be white elephants. The airlines didn't want them, they wanted the 747. France and Britain had to hold a gun to the heads of their flag carriers to get them to take the Concorde, eventually they just gave them the aircraft.

Ex-Waymo engineer pleads the 5th in ongoing Uber law fight

bjr

His stock will all go back to Uber

IP indemnification is standard in any contract there are surely clauses in the purchase contract for his company that not only stated that his company had full rights to everything that they sold to Uber but also requires the officers of the company to support Uber in any litigation that might arise. Even if he's innocent of stealing Waymo's code there is no dispute that he refused an order from a judge in the Waymo-Uber lawsuit. Uber will demand all of the stock and other payments that he received from the purchase of his company, he'll undoubtedly fight that but he'll lose because his violation of the contract is absolutely clear.

El Reg straps on the Huawei Watch 2

bjr

I thought this category was dead

I bought a Pebble when they came out and hated it so much that i switched to mechanical watches, I don't even want a quartz watch on my wrist, it's wind up watches for me until there is a real breakthrough in smart watches.

Until a watch can completely replace a pocket phone there is no point to them. To do that voice recognition has to get nearly perfect, Google Assistant has made great strides but it's still no where near reliable enough to be your only interface. You also need much better batteries, if and when Lithium Air batteries become viable you will be able to stuff a large enough battery into a phone that you will be able to run LTE and GPS for a few days which is the minimum requirement, it will be a few years before we have good enough batteries, maybe longer. Finally they need to stop looking like crap, a tiny Samsung S8 (i.e. piece of curved glass where the entire surface is a screen) would be appealing but something that looks like a Casio from the 1980s is utterly unacceptable.

Why Uber threw top engineer Levandowski under self-driving bus

bjr

Hes truely and rightly screwed

Staying out of Folsom should be his only objective right now. His lawyers should make a deal with Waymo for a license to the IP in return for his Uber shares (assuming he really has $250M worth of shares). Alternatively if Uber really was complicit in his theft of IP then he should be making a deal with the California state's attorney office to throw Uber under the self driving bus in return for a reduced sentence.

Do we need Windows patch legislation?

bjr

Somebody should be fired at your NHS

MS supported XP way longer than they should have and when they did stop support that gave years worth of notice. Anyone who is running 70,000 copies of XP in 2017 should be taken out and shot. If they have some software that is XP dependent that they can't replace then they should be running it on XP VMs, if a VM is compromised you can switch to a backup copy in under a minute. In addition to being resilient to attack a VM can run on modern hardware, it's not limited to antique machine like native XP.

Uber engineer's widow: Stress and racism killed my husband ... Uber: Let's make flying cars!

bjr

Re: "Just 8.8% African Americans"?

It's a good number for tech. If you look at the population of engineering schools, especially elite engineering schools, second and later generation Americans as a whole are under represented. Immigrant and first generation Indians and Asians are there in huge numbers and even among so called "White Men" you will find a disproportionate number are either immigrants from or first generation former Soviet Union. I've been in tech for 40 years, my generation, Boomers in general parlance, are better described as the Sputnik babies in tech, was the only group of engineers who were mostly native born. The US has never been good about producing it's own engineers, it's always imported them whether it was Bell or Tesla in the 19th century, or the Indians and Asians today. For a single short period between the launch of Sputnik and the moon landing the US put aside it's natural fear of math and produced a single generation of native born engineers, after that the trend has been to return to it's natural state where about a 1/3rd of the engineers are immigrants or first generation. If you apply a .66 multiplier, to represent the percentage of multi generation Americans, to the percentage of Blacks in the US population you get .66 * 13.2 = 8.7, so the Uber number is right on the money.

Microsoft raises pistol, pulls the trigger on Windows 7, 8 updates for new Intel, AMD chips

bjr

This policy allows Intel to clean up the x86 architecture

Intel's and Microsoft's dependence on each other has had a significant negative effect on the performance of their respective products. In Microsoft's case they introduced a lot of x86 specific dependencies into Windows which made sense at the time they did them but in the long run made it very difficult to port Windows to other architectures. When they did the ARM port they cleaned up that mess so WIn10 is now much cleaner than older versions of Windows. On Intel's side they've had to maintain backward's compatibility to every generation of MS OSes. As a result modern Intel processors carry around a lot of obsolete instructions and memory management modes that should have been removed years ago. With Microsoft enforcing a policy that only Win10 is supported on Kaby Lakes and beyond Intel is now free to do a much needed spring cleaning on their architecture.

Half-baked security: Hackers can hijack your smart Aga oven 'with a text message'

bjr

Re: Incredibly inefficient - not

I'm confused. Are you saying that in Britain it's common to heat a house with a kitchen stove? In the US we haven't done that since the 19th century, we have proper furnaces that heat the house and kitchen stoves or ovens that are designed to cook dinner, they don't heat the kitchen let alone the house.

Microsoft's in-store Android looks desperate but can Google stop it?

bjr

Google has too little control not too much

The problem with Google is that they exercise too little control not too much. If you want timely OS updates you are restricted to Googles own offerings, Nexus and now Pixel, if you want better or cheaper hardware then you are stuck with last year's Android OS and a layer of unwanted OEM customization's and duplicate services. It's not in Google's interest to challenge Microsoft's approach to providing and alternative ROM because all that will do is peak the interest of anti-trust authorities. This effort will fail because there is no compelling reason for a consumer to choose MS over Google's native services. If Google were doing a crappy job then there would be an opening, but they aren't. Google Maps are the gold standard in navigation and Google Assistant is as good or better than any alternative. It's great that MS is trying to compete because it keeps Google on their toes, but it's hard to see how they could possibly provide a full blown alternative.

Stop lights, sunsets, junctions are tough work for Google's robo-cars

bjr

Re: Roundabouts...

We have rotaries (the American name for roundabouts) in Massachusetts. A machine would have one advantage over a human, it would know who has right of way. All we poor humans know is that the law changed a few decades ago but we don't know how. Either cars entering the rotary had right of way before and now cars in the rotary have right of way, or maybe cars in the rotary had right of way and now cars entering the rotary have it.

Microsoft promises free terrible coffee every month you use Edge

bjr

You dont' know what bad coffee is

You are obviously to young to know what bad coffee is if you think Starbucks is terrible. Before Starbucks American coffee was swill. I'm old enough, 62, to remember what coffee was like before Starbucks. We didn't know how bad it was and my parents generation, who had been through the Great Depression and WWII, didn't care. They only cared that it was cheap and plentiful and that's what was sold in the US. I found out what real coffee tasted like on a trip through Italy in 1980. I was young and staying in cheap pensiones. In the morning they gave you a cup of coffee and it was nothing like the mud that was served in the US. Even the most expensive restaurants in the US served awful coffee. The only place that I knew of that served a decent cup of coffee was a mafia hangout in the North End of Boston. Starbucks changed all that. Starbucks changed the culture so now there are craft roasters everywhere and anyone can make an excellent cup of coffee,

As for Microsoft, it's truely sad that they have to pay people to use their browser, and it's a sign of real desperation that they have to give away $5 cups of coffee, that's real money, as opposed to giving away cloud storage space which is virtual money.

IoT puts assembly language back on the charts

bjr

Are there chips with no development support?

I find it hard to believe that assembly code is ever necessary anymore. I started programming in the 1970s when memory sizes were just a few K (PDP 8s had 4K max, PDP 11s and Novas had between 8K and 32K, a monster PDP 11 system had 256K of mapped memory). When you have only 4K of memory then every bit counts and there is a reason to use assembler. You can do a lot of work in very little memory but at the expense of supportablity, i.e. not only is it hard to read your own code, let alone someone else's, but if you are really aggressive about writing tiny code you would end up with something as fragile as crystal. One common trick was to hold a state bit in the CARRY flag for several instructions. You could write code that would leave the CARRY unchanged so that you could do a branch later. Of course if you were to ever try and modify code like that you would break it.

C took over in the early 80s because it was almost as efficient as assembly code but it was portable and it was far less fragile. The slogan at the time was "C, all the power of assembly languages with the ease of use of assembly language". After 40 years of Moore's law I can't imagine that there is any device out there that has so little memory that you can't do a better job with C than you can with assembly code.

Even in remotest Africa, Windows 10 nagware ruins your day: Update burns satellite link cash

bjr

Should be running CentOS or some other LTS Linux

They have no business running WIndows in circumstances like that, they should be running a long term supported Linux like CentOS which will never do things behind their backs like Windows. Updates could be handled entirely with DVDs or USB sticks.

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

bjr

Went back to a mechanical watch

I bought the Pebble when it came out, it was only $125 so it was worth a flyer. I quickly determined that the smartwatch features were useless and it was also terrible as a watch (display was barely readable), now I'm back to wearing regular watches, in fact I went back to wind up watches because they are the farthest thing from a smartwatch.

When gen 0 or 1 technology is introduced you can usually imagine what it would be like when the technology catches up to the promise. The first PCs were pathetic compared to the mini computers of the day, but it was obvious that in a few years they would be able to as much or more as those refrigerator size minicomputers could do. I thought the same thing when I got a Palm Treo, it included a browser that hinted at what a smartphone would be able to do once the screens got better, the network faster and had a better processor. In both of those cases there were already jobs that they could do well, in the case of the PC they could do word processing and spreadsheets which was enough to justify their purchase, the Treo could do e-mail and phone calls well which was reason enough to buy one. In the case of smartwatches they don't do anything that the phone in your pocket doesn't already do except that they don't do in anywhere near as well. I once thought that a wrist phone that replaced the pocket phone that we carry now might make sense but I've come to the conclusion that a wrist phone can never be more than a niche product (BTW some Android watches are wrist phone capable). The problem is that a 1 inch screen is essentially useless for displaying anything more then the time, it's a limitation of human eyes and it can't be fixed with better 1" screens. The same is true for touch input, human fingers are the limitation, you will never be able to use a 1" surface for any thing more than a swipe. The only user interface that can work well on a watch sized device is speech. The limitation here is that talking isn't private, it's OK to talk to your device at home but it's awkward in public. I do use OK Google in public but only for very limited purposes like making an appointment (in that case the person that you are setting up the appointment with is the only other person there), or maybe looking up a movie time but even that is a little bit awkward. I can't imagine doing much else with speech in public, even if it wasn't embarrassing it would be a mess if lots of people tried to talk to their wrists at the same time. Fitness bands are a different story, they supply an additional set of sensors that can't be put into the smartphone itself because the smartphone isn't in contact with your skin. That's an example of a new technology that provides new capabilities, they aren't competing with an existing device.

Official: EU goes after Google, alleges it uses Android to kill competition

bjr

The EU ins in Apple's pocket

Apple makes more than 90% of the profits in mobile phones so why is the EU picking on Google which provides an open source platform and has no restrictions on competitive apps in the Google Play store?. Apple is closed source, won't license their OS to any other manufacturer, and severely restricts competition in their app store, but the EU has shown no interest in them. There are hundreds of Android phone manufacturers, they are all free to fork Android if they want or to use CyanogenMod if they want, they do it in China and in the West Amazon has done it, most don't do it because consumers prefer Google's services. But even with Google's own phones, I have the Nexus 6P, you are free to install competitive services. I prefer Google Maps but I also have Sygic on my phone (which I paid for) and I've installed Here Maps for a while which is free. I don't like Chrome so I've installed Firefox, AdFree Browser and Opera. The Google launcher is primitive so I've install NovaLauncher (I have the Pro version which costs practically nothing, there is also a free version). If you want to replace Google Now with Microsoft's Cortana you can, it's in Google Play. If you want to install a competitive app store you can, I also have Amazon's app store on my 6P because I wanted to install Amazon Video which they don't make available through Google Play (that's Amazon's choice, they avoid sharing revenue with Google by doing it that way, on the iPhone they are forced to share revenue with Apple).

There is no excuse for the EUs behavior.

Vinyl LPs to top 3 million sales in Blighty this year

bjr

In 1983 I bought an Edison cylinder player and a couple of Victrolas, my father was incredulous, he said "what do you want with those things, I tossed mine out in 1948 when they invented HiFi?. I feel the same way about those kinds buying LPs today, I disconnected my turntable in the 1980s when they invented the CD and then I stopped listening to CDs when streaming was invented.

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

bjr

Terrifyingly poor performance

It's a go-cart, 0-60 in 10 seconds, top speed 60!!!. I don't see how you could drive this on a highway without getting rear ended. I like the idea of supercaps instead of batteries but I would have coupled them with a small conventional engine and bigger electric motors so that the performance would have been acceptable and the range unlimited. Who is going to buy (or rent) this thing, it's performance is awful and as everyone else has pointed out it's hideous, it looks like a Citreon who's mother had Zika.

Windows XP spotted on Royal Navy's spanking new aircraft carrier

bjr

Re: Better The Devil You Know

The Zumwalt, which was launched last week, uses Linux. Why would the Royal Navy choose XP when the US Navy is using Linux?

Carriers are in service for at least 50 years and they go decades between refits. It makes no sense for a new ship to use an OS which EOLed before the hull was laid. You need an OS that can be maintained by a defense contractor who understands the life times of military systems. It's easy for a defense contractor to maintain a Linux variant, not so much a version of WIndows let alone a really terrible version like XP.

Aurous shutters for good, will pay $3m damages

bjr

Party like it's 1999

Where si the demand for a piracy service in 2015 when there are so many legal free or cheap ways to get all the music or movies that you want. If you are willing to listen to a few ads Pandora and iHeartradio are free and they have really great apps that are much easier to use then downloading a pirated mp3. If you don't want the ads the monthly fee for Pandora is very reasonable, Spotify only slightly more. The same goes for a Netflix subscription, the month fee for Netflix is which is only $10 a month.

Who owns space? Looking at the US asteroid-mining act

bjr

It's science fiction but maybe it will help to get things moving forward again

Nobody is going to be mining anything in space in our life times so the details of this law are irrelevant. However it is a statement that it's time to try a private approach to space exploration because governments have failed utterly. It's been 46 years since the moon landing and 60 years since Sputnik and where are we? America can't even repeat Alan Shepard's sub orbital flight let alone go to the moon again. The Russians can still put men in orbit using their space jalopy's, the 50 year old Soyuz, but they have nothing new. In 2017 if all goes well Space X will return America to 1965 where we can put a capsule in orbit. But Space X and Blue Origin are breaking no new ground, they are just building updated V2s like everyone else. Until something radical happens like space elevators, rail guns launchers, Bussard ram jets or some other sci-fi technology nobody is going to be doing any asteroid mining nothing in the solar system is worth millions of dollars per gram. which is what it would cost you to bring something back from an asteroid.

Apple's Watch charging pad proves Cupertino still screwing buyers

bjr

Re: Don't understand the rage

Actually BMW does exactly the same thing. A battery for a BMW is $500 (FIVE HUNDRED FRIGGIN DOLLARS for a battery). You can't just go to Sears and and get a Diehard like you can for every other car brand you have to get a BMW battery which has a chip in it that has to be programmed by the dealer.

Elderly? Disabled? You clearly need a .38" Palm Pistol

bjr

Lincoln was killed with a derringer

John Wilkes Booth used a derringer to kill Lincoln so anyone who says this can't kill is simply wrong. This thing is basically a derringer with modern ammunition.

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