Posts by cnsnnts

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: A lovely obit

> "Algorithms+Data structures = Programs"

By the time I picked up Wirth's text book I had already read a number of books about programming. What immediately struck me about "Algorithms+Data structures = Programs" was how next to the description of shell-sort was the calculus to determine the efficiency of the algorithm, similarly for quick sort and so on. I now realised that this wasn't just a computer book but a Computer Science book.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Re: There are lots of Russian companies that moved their head offices to supposedly safe countries.

... and there is me thinking I shouldn't be panicked into uninstalling Kaspersky because I have my Acronis backups to fall back on.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: Consumer Rights?

The advert I know about says Chromebooks are "the laptop with built-in virus protection."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-WPIZcTGpI&feature=youtu.be&t=23

The advert also clearly shows anti-virus software pop-ups appearing on the "other" machines

In practice this means passive protection from sandboxes, secure boot, hardening, making some important stuff read-only. and loads of other stuff

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

There is no active AV of the type that is necessary on MS-Windows machines, that depend on a supply of signature data to keep up with the current threats.

Yes you will not gain protection from new vulnerabilities that arise and are exploited, but you will remain as protected as you were before.

It is not the machine that changes, but the environment.

Ideally Google would make their support of Chrome OS extend well into the life of the longest living devices. The concern their is that this would hold back feature updates across the stable due to increasing complexity of feature development and testing for so many platforms.

Google should work with the manufacturers to make the support life of the products more visible at the point of sale.

Brit chip biz ARM legs it to Softbank for $32bn

Re: Expect a few spin-offs

HR don't call them livestock anymore since they started to expect straw and a roof over their heads in winter. Human capital is the preferred term.

Relevant Dilbert:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2002-08-05

http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-01-25

'Boss, I've got a bug fix: Nuke the whole thing from orbit, rewrite it all'

"... I honestly cannot figure out why anyone would do this."

Have you never had an email from someone where they replied to the last irrelevant email they got from you instead of typing in your email from fresh?

Have you ever checked the document properties of a report or presentation and found they relate to a completely different document, author and company because someone just grabbed the nearest thing and recycled it?

Code that won't re-compile?

Or a fast track to dismissal on competency grounds.

Along with the manager who didn't put efficient rules and practices in place to make sure that all software written could be be built independently of the author and their development environment.

Linux lads lambast sorry state of Skype service

Re: But does it work in Linux?

It only works for messaging, No audio or video calls.

Re: But does it work in Linux?

The web client only supports messaging on Chrome OS. No audio or video calls.

Picking apart the circuits in the ARM1 – the ancestor of your smartphone's brain

And the 8086 was designed to make porting code from the 8080 relatively straight forwards. So all the applications (Wordstar dBase, etc.) that ran on CP/M were quickly ported to CP/M-86 and MS-DOS/PC-DOS computers.

For some reason the software on the Archimedes seemed to before much more advanced than that for Win/x86 machines. E.g. ImageFS - open an image file as a folder and drag and drop multiple alternate formats that seem to be present inside, SparkFS - another installed file system that mad Zip archives behave like folders, Artworks - real time updates of graduated fills as you dragged a pointer around the screen, Techwriter - takes too much description but people seeing how it works would invariably get angry saying "why doesn't my computer do that!"

Re: 8086 was also 8080 compatible too IIRC

You would set the segment registers the same so that the text and data spaces occupied the same 64K.