Posts by 9Rune5

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

and buy a decent car?

You can't: SAAB Automobile went out of business ten years ago. :( If you want to buy a new SAAB today you'll find yourself stuck in a fighter jet.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

There are quite a few battery parks in operation at this point.

They cannot power many homes for hours, yet they require a lot of space. On a windstill night you have power for a little while and then nothing...

Even if you manage to double their efficiency, it is still not very impressive.

I think their purpose is to demonstrate once and for all just how expensive wind+solar really is. When you combine that with the question of "do you want to buy your natural gas from a Russian dictator?" there isn't any realistic alternative to nuclear power.

If I worked for FSB, I would fund every nut and cook in the west and persuade people that nuclear is bad. Most bang for the buck. I would be surprised if FSB didn't realize the same thing decades ago.

PowerShell pusher to log off from Microsoft: Write-Host "Bye bye, Jeffrey Snover"

Usage of .NET

I wonder if the reluctance against .NET may have been based on a misunderstanding.

For writing shell extensions, .NET was off-limits (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130222-01/?p=5163). Could this have been misunderstood by some to apply to the entire OS?

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: Getting paid by the Koch brothers, or just brainwashed by them?

CO2 levels were around 280 ppm since human civilization began

If you define the industrial revolution as the starting point of civilization, then yes.

If you care to read up on the medieval as well as the roman warming period, and take a few moments to consider the impact of the little iceage on food production in Europe, you may start to see some problems with your reasoning.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Repair

I'd like to see what a better design would look like. A stronger bond between the port and the pcb would increase the chance of breaking the pcb instead. I'm guessing that the next step would be to affix the port to the chassis/frame itself, but with that many pins I suspect it becomes a cost issue. (I am guessing/asking)

I'm watching a couple of repair guys on Youtube, and both xbox and ps suffers a lot of failures with their displayports. (none of "my" guys do laptops or mobile phones though, so I'm just guessing that USB-C would be similar problematic)

Repair

I fear that all USB-C ports are going to be surface-mounted to the main PCB.

My Dell laptop has a powerjack that, granted some digging is required, is attached with two or three screws.

Although my soldering skills have picked up a lot this past year, I'm not 100% confident I could do the job. A hot-air gun might help I suppose.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Progress

I wonder what effect this war will have on post-war society in Ukraine.

It is no big secret that homophobia runs rampant in former east-block countries.

My wife has been helping out as a translator and just casually mentioned that our local pastor is married to a man. The woman's reaction was priceless "he is ...? Oh well, welcome to '2022'!".

If we can help evict Putin and restore peace, then it is my belief that Ukraine is lined up for a great many positive changes.

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

Re: Ukraine is a regional conflict.

Because of Russia’s foreign policy? Look at what they are doing now.

I was asking from their point of view. Why haven't they taken the same path their neighbors did? Why continue in the "USSR Redux" fashion?

I'm aware there are exceptions. Hungary seems to have at least one leg stuck in the past. But they are still miles ahead of Russia.

Re: Ukraine is a regional conflict.

I've been thinking along those same lines.

Although, I wonder: Is the percentage of neo-nazis in Russia lower/higher than in Ukraine? Is it even relevant?

There's also the nagging fact that Putin has managed to antagonize many of his neighbors over the years. Support for Ukrainie seems strong in most of the former USSR countries.

Plus: Why is a stronger NATO perceived as a threat against Russia? Why can former USSR countries, EXCEPT Russia, qualify to become NATO allies? What makes Russia the exception? (the low score on Democracy ratings is my guess -- which is something they should fix as it would benefit their citizens greatly)

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Such memories...

I don't recall ever having a problem inserting a diskette the right way.

USB OTOH...

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

algorithm

The choice of which algorithm to use (or not) should be open to everyone

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1507146276416098307

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

Re: CuriousMarc's next project?

The algorithm has been effective in my case.

Somebody here turned me onto AvE's channel. From there I accidentally dropped onto the 8-bit guy's content (sadly, his excellent 'Tech companies of Texas' series did not attract adequate viewing numbers, so he discontinued it). That earned me a recommendation to get to CuriousMarc's stuff, and by then the damage had already been done. Hooked, hooked and hooked.

A year ago the 8-bit guy mentioned Mouser a few times. Turns out they ship stuff to Sweden. It wasn't even a paid advert, but mission accomplished. Have bought quite many boxes from them since.

Re: CuriousMarc's next project?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that this piece of hardware will be easier to restore than the AGM.

The AGM restoration; I was only going to watch five minutes of the second episode. I ended up sitting through the whole thing (30-odd episodes?).

It is mindboggling how much good content there is on YT. The production value is usually sub-par compared with commercial TV, but the actual content is pure gold in comparison.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Re: students can't learn Fortran ?

In my experience, a code base will degrade over time.

It is only recently (a decade ago) that my team started doing code reviews. That isn't 100% true as we did them before that, but it was only around 2011 that we finally got access to tools that made code reviews viable (through pull requests). With gated check-ins we finally had a way to formalize the process. (Tooling is important!)

So on that project, there is a clear watermark between the 'old-school' code and the new code that put generics, LINQ, ORM and other nice stuff to proper use. The original team had used this project as a way to familiarize themselves with C# and it showed.

But in the end patching the old mess was deemed unviable. Especially as we wanted to target a new platform. We were going to do a complete rewrite, but in the end our company was sold off and we were put on other teams (where we face the same kind of decisions and are indeed rewriting everything from scratch).

Having recently worked on a Python-based project, I cannot stress enough that I will avoid dynamically typed languages like the plague in future projects. If there is any chance the code base will live more than a couple of years, I'm going to have a say in what dev lang to use.

As for Fortran, I have never been exposed to it. I've read good things about various compilers and I do not believe performance is much of an issue. I do believe that the language hasn't evolved much over the past couple of decades, and I doubt it makes any sense to choose Fortran for a new project in this day and age. But I could be wrong about that! It would be interesting to see a comparison of 50 lines of code that is considered to be best-in-class Fortran code and what the equivalent Java/C#/Pascal code would look like.

Taking the average

We need to know how much CO2 can naturally change within a century.

Within longer time frames what mechanism would keep CO2 from increasing violently one 'moment' and decreasing nearly the same amount the next? I would find it very strange that within a 1MY timespan there won't be several spikes along the way.

Re: I just have to LAUGH at the level of cluelessness here...

My wife is from Georgia. Her mum and brother still lives there.

We sent her brother a snow brush for his automobile more or less as a joke, but for the past couple of winters he has had good use for it. They cannot remember having had so much snow ever. His neighbors were impressed, because they had never even seen such a brush before.

The coast of Georgia has certainly had more snow than what I've had on the west coast of Sweden in recent years.

YMMV.

Re: I just have to LAUGH at the level of cluelessness here...

First you need to define the term "climate change".

According to Cook's metastudy (2012?), the term implies "man-made".

Unfortunately I do not think they answered the question on what term to use when discussing the changes in climate that happened on Greenland a millennia ago. I doubt very much that anyone thinks those changes were caused by any mammals. So what label to use?

The climate has never been static, has it?

Now that we've learned that many climate scientists are awful software developers -- how much faith exactly should we put into the climate models they've developed?

"Dynamically typed"

That feels like a monumentally bad idea.

If you are in such a hurry that having a compiler bothering you when you get your types mixed up impedes your "progress", then you must be doing something wrong.

HP finance manager went on $5m personal spending spree with company card

I blame the toner

She must have mistaken toner for black cocaine and after snorting half a kilo of it; madness ensued and here we are.

The real crime here is that toner costs more than cocaine.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: And the other half will follow...

I can't speak for every city everywhere, but around these parts the major cities have a broken down infrastructure that fails to scale.

Now that most people have realized this, there is no going back.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: Politicians arse about face again

I'm starting to think that the idiot senator, deep down, doesn't want his own bill to pass. Free publicity and in the end no real harm done.

DST is an abomination. As the sun approaches the apex, it is noon. Some deviation is expected where the time zones meet, but more than an hour? A line must be drawn.

As for software -- we do strange stuff with time all the, ahem, time. Yes, some of it will break, but most will be because of a lack of updates. Better find out this way than await pwnage by some random Russian hacker.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

In theory, theory and practice are the same.

However, on its website we note that the company says users should "aim for 8 to 12 characters" and use "symbols… or special characters."

Virgin probably supported longer passwords before they got hacked by a lazy hacker who fine-tuned their settings.

Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?

I'm actually super surprised Georgia hasnt already moved to retake South Ossetia.

No can do. The majority of the people there do not welcome the Georgians.

That is what started that mess in the first place; people rebelling against their Georgian overlords. Depending on your world view, Putin either took advantage of the situation or liberated the ossetians. Or both.

Either way, the Georgian military would have to fight not only the russians still stationed there, but also the locals. And they run the very real risk that Putin will simply take Tbilisi at the end.

It is my belief that Putin sped up the negotiations by showing that it would be easy to capture Tbilisi. Georgia folded and two regions are still in play (Abkhazia is rarely mentioned, but my Georgian wife says Georgia have no control there). I think he wanted to repeat that strategy now, but met with a more substantial opposition. Georgia was burdened with a weak president (these days a jail bird), but Ukraine seems very different in this regard too.

There are fundamental issues at hand. At what point can a group of people secede? Why was it okay for Taiwan to secede from China? Why was it not okay for Catalonia? Why was it not okay for South Ossetia? Why was it okay for Kosovo to secede?

That leads to the question of what happens after mass migrations. Is Abkhazia a muslim region? Since when? Same goes for Kosovo. First dibs? Majority rule? What?

It seems NATO and Russia both answer these question depending on what gives them a chance to expand their territories. The Swedish diplomat Carl Bildt, to name one, had opposing views on this. It would be interesting to watch him debate himself into a corner.

(Either way, Putin needs to stop his aggression -- the situation became too messy the minute the idiots shot down that passenger aircraft back in 2012 or so)

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Re: Easier games to play

Absolutely.

However, for most developers multithreading was a way to relatively easy carry out multiple IO operations in parallel. (because the OS' async functions were cumbersome to use, so for 80%+ of us those functions were never an alternative)

async/await solves that in a comparatively elegant fashion.

Plus, Task.Run() makes it easy to include CPU intensive operations (as a separate thread) within the same paradigm.

Re: nice article, but...

Delphi gave you the option of linking everything in, but you could distribute runtime dlls just like you could with VB.

However most of us kept things simple and actually preferred linking in everything. At least we had a choice. Odd thing to criticize a tool because it gives you a choice.

As for non-standard look; that too was optional. Again: There was a choice.

Back in 2009 I made a simple screen reader that would extract strings from edit controls. It worked wonderfully with all apps, except apps written in VB. VB's text entry control is anything but standard. I had to OCR that thing. There was nothing Windows standard about VB. Just because you were limited to ugly GUI with VB doesn't mean it was a great tool. (And MSFT never learned how to make a decent form designer -- feel free to check out how tab order is solved in Delphi)

Re: Easier games to play

I can only imagine what you would feel about a tool like reSharper which surely is the ultimate in hand-holding (and also a tool that saved me countless hours while refactoring other peoples' code).

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

tweet

Am I the only one who tweeted "'There's no Intel Code Phrase' @intel #i11" today?

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

We only had 4MB in my day

Courtesy of the very first BOFH story (http://www.lysator.liu.se/jokes/bofh/bofh1-11.html):

"Well, let's see, you have 4 Meg available"

"Wow! Eight Meg in total, thanks!" he says pleased with his bargaining power

"No" I interrupt, savouring this like a fine red, room temperature "4 Meg in total"

"Huh? I'd used 4 Meg already, How could I have 4 Meg Available?"

I say nothing. It'll come to him.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

NT4 was stable for me. My daily beater was never powered down and I measured months between having to reboot (due to service packs or similar).

I did experience a few BSODs when forced to install Norton Antivirus -- it had a bug that triggered a BSOD as soon as someone inserted a floppy.

Stability at my home computer was better due to not installing any antivirus products.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

Want to play our game? Read these 50 pages of legalese first.

A year ago I got hold of an XBox. For the kids naturally.

Last month we installed Need For Speed I think it was. I had to page through not one, but two very long documents before we got to the menu. Just pressing the down button without reading took me at least two minutes.

I think they did it that way because their game isn't very good. I have no idea as I left the controller to the kids and went and did something else.

Maybe they should make a game where you have to first read the Terms of Abuse followed by a quiz where you have to answer questions that pertain to the text you just read. Answer all the questions correctly and they won't sue you.

LAPD cops who preferred playing Pokémon Go to tackling robbery can be fired, appeals court rules

Police Quest III: Revenge of the pokemon

Sigh. I miss Sierra On-Line.

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

Re: Recycling?

My guess is that the chips have some tamper proofing on board in a (vain) attempt at making it more difficult for third-party suppliers to recycle these. The irony of this situation is so thick you could insulate a huge building with it.

I find it interesting that on the Internet there will always be trolls around that will take the other position.

But when debating cartridge based printers, there is an universal agreement that the printer OEMs are pure evil. They will indeed be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

BTW: Hey Canon! Care to explain me why a defective print head means the scanner unit cannot operate? Or why running out of ink in the first place immediately fried the print head? (up to that point no streaking on the page had been observed, but I'm sure Canon wasn't wrong in claiming it was empty -- they would not lie, would they?)

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Ono

Yoko -- a hero to everyone who types (or sings) in ALL CAPS

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Been using it for a while

I absolutely love it. The first thing that launches as I log in is the new Terminal.

Mine is set up with a nice little logo in the upper corner to differentiate different systems. My ssh session to my synology box has a synology logo. My Ubuntu WSL2 installation has a penguin, and so on.

256 color VT-102 support and modern looking (unless you switch to the 'retro' look).

Re: Windows used to run on top of DOS

You could exit to DOS from Win95, but at that point you are left with DOS. None of the Win32 API would be available to you and you'd be hard pressed to find many differences to MS-DOS 6.22.

Wind turbine maker Vestas confirms recent security incident was ransomware

Re: Solution

Last year I learned to avoid using domain admin accounts.

If the attack somehow manages to escalate to local admin privs, they can then rummage around in memory and find password hashes belonging to any domain admin that had come this way recently. Several VMs were thus hit.

We had an old asp.net app running that was using a third-party component that received an important security update a year prior to the attack.

Our original plan some years ago involved a full rewrite of said asp.net app, but priorities changed and no hands were left on deck.

A colleague reverse-engineered the attacker's code and got the decryption key, but we already had good backups, so no need.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: I second that request.

Trickle vents on windows are seen in just about every UK house. You won't find them in many other countries

I think it depends. I built a house in Sweden four years ago, and most of my windows have a little trickle vent. My ventilation system simply pumps out the old stale air, utilize some of the heat from that air, and fresh air is sucked in through the trickle vents. The floors are heated by the air pump.

Some choose the more expensive system where the ventilation system is solely responsible for replenishing the air. A separate air duct carries the clean (and heated) outside air to each room. I'm guessing there'll be no trickle vents in those cases.

Either way, our houses are heavily insulated for sure and not very relevant to UK houses as you point out.

(chosen icon was the closest I could find to "hot air")

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: Another tale of secret dealings and shady contracts

I wonder if those kind of clauses is a step-up from simply describing in detail how your existing system works and asking other vendors to basically copy the user interface verbatim.

One of our customers did something like that a few years ago. And to make matters more confusing: They could not keep using their old system, because the vendor had pulled support a long time ago.

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

My wife inherited my Dell Precision 5510 bought in February 2016.

There is nothing wrong with its CPU. It has 16GB memory and a SSD. It runs beautifully in 4k UHD touchy glory. I felt a bit cramped though and wanted 32GB memory, but there is nothing wrong with my old laptop.

Except... First the monitor hinge broke. I got on ebay and finally tracked down the part. I nearly bought a part that had the exact same problem, so I know the problem was not unique for us. (and btw: first time replacing the palm rest case took me about two hours I think)

Oh and "honey, the charger doesn't...charge". So it turns out that Dell, in their infinite wisdom, are running some sort of voodoo on their power bricks. If this voodoo isn't exactly right, the machine slows to a crawl until the battery runs out. I have a new wall wart on order and in the mean time we're sharing my new brick that came with my new Dell.

I am sure you can manage to keep a laptop in pristine condition better than me, but... At least check the price of a replacement battery before you buy anything. Those things are consumables and rather expensive.

If you expect/want a computer that lasts for longer; Just get a desktop. But not a Dell as they stopped using standardized parts. That way you can easily swap out the stuff that breaks or the stuff that becomes obsolete along the way. A different OS is not going to change that.

(that said, there is a company specializing in a laptop design that offers swappable and upgradeable parts -- that might be something worth checking out)

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Re: I hate DST.

This is a technology oriented web site - why are you buying clocks that don't adjust themselves automatically?

Yeah, put a black tape to cover the microwave oven's clock and put a modern clock next to it. Great idea.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Scamming or scanning?

My Pixma ran out of ink and then loudly exclaimed it required "service". Of course it also shut down the scanner part, rendering every "function" in its multi-function configuration useless.

Pissed off? You bet I am.

I'm not an environmentalist, but I still feel upset when I see respected brands being reduced to manufacturing garbage.

At the very least they need to be forced into providing information on how to reset the printer and provide parts that we can replace.

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Re: Weetbix

I saw the picture of a weetabix with some red currant and that is why I clicked on the article. I harvested about three liters of currants from my garden this summer and most of it was put to good use in a weetabix bowl filled with milk (sadly Swedish milk only contains 3% fat, but that is another story).

but not entirely quite like them in Norway once

Kvikk Lunsj.

Et tu, Samsung? Electronics giant accused of quietly switching SSD components

Re: Is it such a big problem in this case?

It is my belief that the cache is not DRAM but rather SLC flash. So the slow flash uses a smaller fast flash as cache.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: Memory

(i.e. the address pin mapping)

I am guessing you might be referring to the A20 line.

On the 386 (and 286?) you could reach an additional 64K that was off-limits on the 8088 and 8086.

EMS would be useable from an 8088 I think, so the 5150 should have been able to access a whole lot more memory (albeit in a paged fashion).

XMS OTOH required at least a 286. I believe XMS worked through protected mode. (the 286 being capable of addressing 16MB in protected mode)

(But my understanding of these things could be very very flawed. I was about twelve when I started using the 5150)

Some more AST love (was Re: Memory)

The 8-bit guy used to work for AST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hdazA-VUf0 (If any part of you is a little bit nostalgic, then do not click that link! I've spent hours watching his channel!)

Memory

RAM landed in 16 or 64kB flavours and could be upgraded to 256kB

Maybe if you limited yourself to the mainboard, but an ISA expansion card from AST added 512KB as well as a real-time clock with battery.

China reports local chipmaking boom with output up more than 40%

Re: Quality

Dunno about ICs, but I'm worried about Chinese capacitors.

E.g. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-supplies-101,4193-5.html rates Japanese caps the highest.