Posts by twellys

Intel spices up its FPGA game with open source and RISC-V freebies

Re: Giving Away Free Stuff?

No, Intel (Atera) were bundling their own Nios2 32-bit CPU for ages before. With Risc-5 advertising that 32 or 64-bit, free, and a potential of customers for Risc-5, then it's a no-brainer for Intel.

As FPGAs are an expensive way of doing things at scale, I agree. However, FPGAs have their place:

* Cheaper than ASICs for small/medium runs: Medical/Industrial/Aerospace/Test

* Re-configurable: Any prototypes

* Massively parallel: Crypto farms

As for Intel & AMD buying the FPGA companies, both Intel & AMD have incorporated their FPGAs as part of their CPUs - c'mon they don't want to re-spin their CPUs for every exploit they find?!

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: I'll Miss It

+1 - WordPad opened Unix-type text files superbly (not like NotePad which didn't)

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Question

'Coz when the shit hits the fan, you need someone act as a fall-guy

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Well, I make the trip down to Cambridge each week from Yorkshire (Wetherby way) 'coz I'm a grunt, sorry, contractor. That journey is around 150 miles.

However I get your point of not knowing if there's stock, although you can telephone the shop before you go. Also there's the petrol/diesel/train fares/etc. to consider - Saying that though are there any museums (Computing Museum / Duxford / etc.) or other things in the Cambridge area as well? Just a thought, that's all.

Or you can go in person to the RPi shop in the centre of the universe* to get your mitts on RPi kit, including the 8Gb RPi4

* RPi Universe**

** = Cambridge, Unicorn Kingdom

CERN spots Higgs boson decay breaking the rules

Re: You just broke ....

You haven't had your morning coffee yet, have you?

UK health minister confirms data platform worth £480m will replicate Palantir dashboards

Ah, Palantir will obviously display their platform...

Which is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

The CES tat bazaar: Bike desks, AI-powered bird feeders, and the smelloverse

+1 ROTFL!

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

Re: Grow a brain

... and I thought that Holmfirth was where the fountain of youth was, so they could do racing down the Dales in bathtubs!

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

HMRC have switched tactics...

For IR35 and VAT (Making Tax Digital), HMRC have switched tactics from prosecuting the little person to strong-arming big companies and big departments.

* IR35: Instead of the contractor, it's now big companies or umbrellas who decides the PAYE/VAT/etc. - so HMRC can fine or prosecute the big companies.

e.g. HMRC fining DEFRA and MoJ - https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/defra_moj_ir35/

* VAT - Again turning self-employed/small businesses doing their own VAT, it's now the big accounting firms.

* Any case, the umbrella/accounting/big companies, if caught by HMRC, can dump most of it on the self-employed/contractor/small businesses

Win-Win eh?

I hear the Income Tax is next...

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Re: This is the best advertisment

+1 (Devuan here - although used Slackware exclusively until had to switch to RHEL6 for work...)

Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

Re: Déjà Vu

Tsk tsk el Reg - reusing stories again?!

Physics Nobel Prize in a superposition between three quantum physicists

[...] sequenced the genomes of Neanderthals and discovered Denisovans

Ah, B Ark then?

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Re: $1,217.00

Ouch!

Re: Because we can?

I was going to say the same -mega cooling needed!

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Classic!

NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers

Re: They're still around?

I'm thinking FPGAs that Microchip aquired from Microsemi (which in turn acquired from Actel).

There's a couple of FPGA families that are Rad-Tolerant.

Dell and Ubuntu certify latest model of XPS 13 ultrabook

Re: I had hoped from the photo...

Ah, Dell are counting on the ZX81 users of yore!

The Raspberry Pi Pico goes wireless with the $6 W

While the Pi 4 Model B remains resolutely sold out at time of writing...

The Pi shop in Cambridge (UK) had Pi 4 Model B (2, 4, & 8G) and Pi Zero 2 W last week ('coz I bought some of them) - but the shop is not on t'interweb (probably why it's got some stock!)

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Open Look?

I'm surprised no-one has talked about Sun's Open Look (olwm/olvwm) that didn't have a task bar, didn't have a start menu, et al.

(and Sun keyboards had their own keys for Cut/Copy/Paste on the left hand of the keyboard - Very Useful!)

Also, I remember using olvwm for Linux when using Slackware 3.*... (Middle Aged person alert!)

Samsung unveils hardened SD card that can last 16 years if you treat it right

Ah, Dave 126 beat me to the punch!

Typo: It's -25°C

[Unless Samsung knows more than us about climate change...!]

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Literally a legend

+1. RIP Sir Clive

In the lab: Robotic AI-powered exoskeletons to help disabled people move freely without implants

Re: Why walking ?

The leading cause of disability in the UK is a stroke. Stroke survivors struggle with manual wheelchairs because stroke affects half of the body. That's why walking is important for them.

(I'm stroke survivor of 21 years)

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Re: Typo? Or me being dense?

Frozen food = Frozen warehouse (e.g. walk in freezers)

Chilled food = Chilled warehouse (e.g. walk in fridges)

Ambient food = Ambient warehouse (just a warehouse)

UK minister tries to intervene after Government Digital Service migration mangles Ministry of Justice webpages

Re: Why GDS has turned webpages into PDFs is a mystery

So: GDS = Crayon Department??

British govt emits fuzzy vision for UK version of American boffin special forces group Darpa

Re: Been there, done the privatisation already

I was going to say the same - DERA => (DSTL &) QinetiQ => QinetiQ sold off and apparently their HQ is the US...

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Shipley

The Embedded SW and Electronics are actually in Saltaire (West Yorkshire), in Salts Mill (UNESCO World Heritage).

(I was working there ~10 years ago for Pace plc - now Arris/CommScope)

Uncle Sam says it's perfecting autonomous AI-powered drone, vehicle swarms to 'dominate' battlefields

C'mon - Klunk is the inventor, Dick Dastardly is the middle manager who messes it up!

... I'll get my coat^H^H^H^Hflying jacket!

UK tech spending in 2020 will be hit harder than in France or Germany with little prospect of growth next year – analysts

Re: BREXIT ... The prize that just keeps on giving

For some reason, I hear the Flanders & Swann song:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vh-wEXvdW8

NASA mulls going all steam-punk with a fleet of jumping robots to explore Saturn and Jupiter's mysterious moons

Trailblazer!

Ah... obviously very similar to the Spectrum's Trailblazer (https://worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0005368).

I'm ready NASA! NASA!

(As I have played Trailblazer!)

NASA?

...

The UK's favourite lockdown cheese is Big and Red but doesn't require a stinking great audit after consumption

Re: Wensleydale

Heresy! :)

Personally, I like slab of Wensleydale with Xmas cake - Lovely

I think Wesleydale's fame is partly to do with one man and his dog films in Bristol. Because that though, I have tried Stinking Bishop.

Snapping at Canonical's Snap: Linux Mint team says no to Ubuntu store 'backdoor'

Re: Debian and Debian derivatives

+1 for noticing - Now downloading!

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: I agree ...

Thanks for the tip - I was struggling to comprehend a pins constraints until now!

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Re: If only!

+1 I'm also a Devuan devotee too!

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Re: I was using Slackware linux.

I love Slackware - I really do...

.. but I haven't the time to manually update the individual packages at present, so I'm doing Devuan instead.

Re: Sad to see it go

Yep, my demon account (~1997 to ~2005) was dial-up

wibble-wibble-wibble th-unk th-unk!

In my case, I was using Slackware linux.

Don't panic! Don't panic! UK IT job ads plummet as Brexit uncertainty grabs UK tech sector by the short and curlies

So true!

Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

Re: Not Cosmic Rays

I agree entirely. Personally, I think the MCAS was classed as a DAL-D device (Device failing is minor inconvenience), so safety critical requirements were not needed.

Now, FAA have, I think, upgraded the DAL to DAL-A/B (Device failing is hazardous or catastrophic), causing to add many checks to the process. One of those checks is to simulate bit-flips/stuck-at faults etc. (That's why I reckon the MCAS is a SRAM FPGA because the most common bit-flip failures is in the State-Machines).

YMMV

(Have done > 7 years doing DO-254, going up to DAL-B in severity)

UK digital network Openreach takes 15 electric vans for a spin

UK digital network Openreach engineers take 15 electric vans for a spin on their rounds

So how are the milkfloats holding up then?!

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

Re: "This measure is expected to impact 170,000 individuals" . . .

Again, I got emails for work from Nederlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark & Sweden.

Although Denmark & Sweden are expensive places to live, the rate is worth it.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

I'm just wondering whether Boeing classed that as a DAL-D whereas it should be a DAL-A?

Microsoft's Edge gang pops a head above the parapet to give Linux fans a strong 'maybe'

MS tried to get IE on Unix platforms (Sun et al.) around ~1999.

It was very slow, and crashed. A lot.

(I was maintaining a Perl webserver, so wondered how IE displayed our pages)

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Re: OO performance?

Erm... I saved a logic analyser run in csv (16k lines), for my colleague to analyse on they Mac using Ofiice 365 a couple of days ago. Excel barfed repeatedly...

Brit aviation regulator is hiring a space 'n' drones manager

Re: I can do this

Comics, tsk! I actually saw a video on Moon exploration, so I'll get my CV in.

Think it was "Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out"...

UK Tory party pledges 'digital' charter, wants Verify to back online gov

Compulsory Relationships and Sex Education classes

Monty Python:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejaWq2TXRXE

'Nuff said...

UK.gov throws hissy fit after Twitter chokes off snoop firm's access

Re: They don't want to go after terrorists, they want to go after tourists

Classic!

Chilling evidence emerges of Kilocat weapon

Yep, up-voted because it's a super lineout!

Hubble spies supermassive black hole in surprising spot

Just creating another Earth inside...