Yeah, okay...
"...But why is it in a sheep paddock?"
Posts by JeffyPoooh
4286 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2013
Page:
Australian astroboffins reveal hundreds of hidden galaxies
LIGO boffins set to reveal grav-wave corker
Google crafts custom networking CPU with parallel computing links
Fleet of 4.77MHz LCD laptops with 8088 CPUs still alive after 30 years
Submarine cable cut lops Terabits off Australia's data bridge
Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!
LinkedIn sinkin': $10bn gone in one day as shares plummet 40%
Saturday 6th February 2016 18:20 GMT
Re: LinkedIn...
WG "Actually I don't 'get' social media at all."
Comment forums (like this one) are absolutely in the category of social media.
So, er, hello there.
This particular example seems to attract a fairly intelligent crowd with a huge range of expertise. Makes it a bit different than many others.
Winning Underhand C Contest code silently tricks nuke inspectors
Friday 5th February 2016 22:44 GMT
Re: The power of backspace
The LIST command should display this:
10 PRINT "YES!!"; REM , followed by (in this example) 13 backspaces.
Resulting in this:
10 PRINT , then resume with "NO!!"
The end result is displayed like this:
10 PRINT "NO!!"
YMMV, but I'm not sure why it would if it meets our one fundamental assumption.
Find&Replace 'Script' vice one-line in-line snippet:
I'm now recalling that I might have had a BASIC code snippet, perhaps starting at (for example) line 1000, which did the searching through memory (in the right area) to find the placeholders and replace them with ^h (using PEEK and POKE). So the previously mention script was probably as simple as RUN 1000. And then delete the snippet, and SAVE the resultant magic code.
Knowing myself, the snippet would have been just one line of code.
Friday 5th February 2016 00:03 GMT
The power of backspace
If one can pack the source code with backspaces, typically by using an obscure placeholder character and then running a find&replace script to replace the placeholders with ^h, then one can completely separate the apparent source code (which is actually just trailing comment text), from the actual source code (cleverly hidden 'beneath' the backspaces).
Here's a trivial example written in BASIC where 'ĥ' is used to represent the ^h backspaces that have been packed into the code by a trivial script.
10 PRINT "YES!!"; REM ĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥĥ"NO!!"
LIST
10 PRINT "NO!!"
RUN
YES!!
With this trick, one can do almost anything. The source code can be whatever you want, because it's just commenting, while the actual code is hidden by the backspaces.
I came up with this evil trick around 1980 or so. A nice example was making LIST appear to do RUN, and make RUN appear to do LIST. Mysterious math errors were fun. Almost no limit.
(I know other languages, but I chose to use BASIC for this example. Forgive me.)
This will probably work with any language that allows trailing comments on a line.
While we weren't looking, the WAN changed
Mall owner lays blame at Apple's door for dragging down sales
Symantec's definition of transformation: Take the profit made a year ago and burn a quarter of it
German Chancellor fires hydrogen plasma with the push of a button
Thursday 4th February 2016 02:32 GMT
How do they plan to get the heat out?
A comment about fusion power and plumbing. Perhaps aimed more at L-M than anyone...
At some point they're going to need gawdawful big pipes carrying away hot medium. Fusion appears to be a very high power density scheme. But there's no point making a gigawatt matchbox-sized device (<- trying to make the point clear), nor (this is for you Lockheed-Martin) a 100MW fusion reactor that "...fits on the back of a truck..."
If it's near gigawatt class, then it needs to be the size of a large building just to have space to interface to the heat-engine plumbing. Unless they plan to use some exotic media like gaseous tungsten in one-inch plumbing, LOL. Not to mention the cold side cooling towers, turbines, generators, transformers, switch yard, offices, cafeteria, parking lot, guard house.
Lockheed-Martin must be envisioning a pretty big truck.
I've not seen any evidence that they (anyone) are working on a fusion concept with a power/volume ratio scale that's practical in terms of allowing room for the necessary plumbing to shift the energy flux out towards the steam turbines.
'Dodgy Type-C USB cable fried my laptop!'
Thursday 4th February 2016 02:04 GMT
Re: Who ever designed..
Arbitrarily low power loss, all the way to perfectly zero as follows...
Latching (magnetically held) relays, one to isolate and the other wired to reverse polarity. A solar powered supervisory circuit examines and corrects the polarity, before connecting it. The supervisory circuit triggers the system off in the event of a sudden reversal. A parallel diode eats the reverse pulse for the milliseconds needed. Perfect. And ZERO loss.
As that's impractically expensive, just use a low R-on FET. Really low loss.
Lights out for Space Vehicle Number 23: UK smacked when US sat threw GPS out of whack
Thursday 4th February 2016 01:37 GMT
Re: 'precision docking of oil tankers, as well as navigation'
Mort offered "radio travels a long way in 13 ms"
Even in the corrected 13µs (as opposed to 13ms), it's on the order of 13,000 feet. About a foot per ns.
It'd be a pretty poor navigation system that depends on absolute time, as opposed to relative. Typically, it's all relative timing.
Wednesday 3rd February 2016 16:36 GMT
Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC) - $1500 price class
Their sales should take off...
Amusingly, the CSAC has a pin to input the GPS 1pps signal (a pulse precisely aligned with the exact 'top' of each GPS second) to discipline the atomic clock. So any system design would likely still have a connection back to the GPS Time.
Life just got a lot more complicated for system designers.
They're alive! Galileo sats 9 and 10 sending valid signals
Wednesday 3rd February 2016 16:30 GMT
Re: Clock Sovereignity
A later story clarifies that GPS Time itself was slipped by 13 us due to some errors back at GPS HQ.
In that case, I withdraw my previous suggestion (just above). If the GPS Time signal is present, then it is not unreasonable to assume that it's 'the' standard.
Even if you had a local atomic clock for comparison, one would naturally assume that the local clock had gone haywire before you'd assume that the GPS Time had glitched.
The only exception would be if one had an array of atomic clocks (like at a National Lab); then one might be able to make the correction assumption.
13 CubeSats to ride mighty US lifter
Why the Sun is setting on the Boeing 747
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 13:19 GMT
Re: Really?
x7 "...four-jet fares even worse because of the risk of uncontained turbine failure, or an engine fire, taking out the adjacent engine. That's not possible in a trijet."
You've ignored the several tragic incidents where the failure of the tail-mounted engine took out the tail control surfaces or the systems that control them.
As far as I know, that's one of the fundamental reasons that tri-jets are no longer a favoured design architecture.
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 13:14 GMT
Re: Some dodgy facts in there
"But the fourth engine gave the plane a significant safety advantage in that it would retain much greater propulsion power if one of the engines failed."
A more significant failure mode for the tail-mounted engine involves its somewhat-uncontained failure leading to damage to the tail control surfaces, or the systems that control them. There's a list of such incidents; most of which ended badly.
In hindsight, putting an aircraft engine in the tail is about as bad a conceptual design error as bolting a spaceship *beside* its large External Fuel Tank.
Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs
Random ideas sought to improve cryptography
Monday 1st February 2016 23:36 GMT
Re: Way back when
"...infinitely long, yet reproducible, random sequence."
The nice thing about infinities is that they can be endlessly compressed. Unfortunately, they're still infinite.
Here, look up some YouTube videos on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
Start with Mathologer, then Vsauce.
Bring a bucket to carry home the exploded bits of your brain.
Only a tenuous connection to this thread, but still very entertaining.
Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment
Monday 1st February 2016 23:10 GMT
20kw
Put the 20kw server in my basement. In Canada.
You pay the server power bill. I get free heat.
I get to sleep with the window open, even in February.
In summer, we might need to run a pipe from the lake.
Summer is often one week in late-July. Rest of year, air cooling.
I've offered to store old fuel-rods from nuclear power stations.
Tens of kilowatts of free heat in winter, worth the neutron flux.
How Symantec scuppered Veritas sell-off six ways to Sunday
Loons in balloons: Google asks FCC to approve Net plan
Most of the world still dependent on cash
Sunday 31st January 2016 16:49 GMT
Re: Eh?
"Unfortunately, it's very hard to verify a cashless system. If the publican believes that they took £1000 but the cashless provider claims they only took £900, how do you prove it? With cash you do a recount of both ends - till roll and contents. Can't do that in a cashless system."
In Canada, it's nearly universal that the debit card system prints out two copies of the debit receipt. One copy goes in the till. If there's any discrepancy, then they can check the paper copies. Otherwise, just file them for 90 days, then shred.
Sunday 31st January 2016 16:44 GMT
Re: Eh? Taste of Tasmania
They're doing it wrong.
A good debit card system takes about the same time as making change. If one uses bonk-pay cards, then it's faster; in fact there's nothing faster.
The system should provide the option of paper receipts for both parties. Every transaction should have a unique number assigned. It should be completely auditable.
Did these people roll out their own flawed system?
Sunday 31st January 2016 16:29 GMT
Re: The title should be
"...still to poor..."
too
Read up on how M-Pesa changed the lives of many in Africa. Replace a monthly seven-hour bus ride back to the home village to deliver cash, getting robbed and murdered of course, with a mobile e-transfer back to the family.
The efficiency of the system will save them enough money to buy a water filter. And more food. And fix the roof.
Sunday 31st January 2016 13:05 GMT
Failure to mention Africa's M-Pesa mobile-phone based e-money...
No mention of M-Pesa.
No mention of Africa.
No mention of mobile.
Kinda leaves a huge gap in the article. Obvious to anyone that's paid even the slightest bit of attention to the topic. City workers able to send e-money home, minus the 7-hour bus ride. It's huge.
If The Register actually paid Out-Law (Pinsent Masons) for this flawed article, can you get a refund?
Or send them their fee via M-Pesa.
AI no longer needs to fake it. Just don't try talking to your robots
Saturday 30th January 2016 18:07 GMT
DO-178, IC makers liability
Impose the requirement for DO-178 documentation, as it should be. Being obviously life-critical. That'll slow 'em down a bit. How do they plan to document the 'machine learning' sub-systems? Hopefully somebody imposes some adult supervision into this industry before they're let loose.
Have the chip makers signed-off on this application? They're in danger of being pulled into any product failure liability lawsuits. A failed chip, self-driving car mows down children. Could get expensive. Will they impose standards for 'screened' parts?
These sorts of issues will delay this for at least a decade beyond what some people seem to think.
Thursday 28th January 2016 23:28 GMT
Re: Two accidents when humans "had chosen to take the wheel"
I can't understand why so many seem to suddenly develop utter faith and innocent cow-eyed naivety when considering results from the coder drones that'll be programming these self-driving cars. Almost everybody is assuming utter perfection and some new transportation Nirvana.
In fact, there will be some ex-Symantec, ex-SAP, ex-Airbus autopilot, former Android, etc. coder drones bringing their own unique set of frightening 'talents' to the party.
Did they issue Kool-Aid that I missed? Why is everyone abandoning their critical thinking skills, and entering a dreamy trance?
Once these things become somewhat common, it's going to be at least ten years of comedy and chaos. The nightly news will have a regular segment. Obviously.
Israeli drones and jet signals slurped by UK and US SIGINT teams
Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules
Saturday 30th January 2016 16:50 GMT
Re: Safety?
@stucs201 "...the Defender and it's predecessors..."
It's "its", not "...and it is predecessors..."
The Defender could only be (much) worse. So the point revealed in the video remains valid.
FACT: Big dumb SUVs generally have very poor crash safety. Too many people have wrong ideas on this point, which is exactly why Fifth Gear had to make the video. In the USA, they did a similar test of old and new Chevy, with the surprising to some result.
Anyone that assumes that 'big dumb heavy' = 'crash safety' is just hopelessly ill-informed.
Their confidence in their daft misbelief is just aggravating.
Ignorant fools in heavy vehicles. Not good. Too common.
Friday 29th January 2016 18:10 GMT
Truncated history
"...the Defender can trace its roots through the original Series vehicles back to 1948, making it one of world’s first four-wheel-drive vehicles."
Did we forget to mention the inspirational role played by the WWII Willys Jeep? Nearly every other history of Land Rover mentions that little factoid at the beginning.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
