Posts by timrowledge

Energy trio wants to pipe gas from coal mines to keep datacenter lights on

Strange how increasing the electricity supply for EVs is completely impossible but doing so for AI is no problem

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

Re: Tulsi Gabbard?

The worst DEI hire; Demented. Evil. Imbecile.

Re: common sense

Ah yes, the staggering intellectual perspicacity of Polly Putin. A truss lettuce would serve us better.

Re: as what they’re told isn’t evidence based and is done entirely for the ‘feels’.

The thing about ‘common sense’ is that it’s usually neither.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Re: No more grasslands in the Sahara / Viking farmers in Greenland under threat

Solar cells are recyclable. Windmll parts are recyclable. Your bullshit is recycled crap

Nobody with any knowledge is, nor ever has, insisted that the warming is solely due to CO2. Everyone who can summon more than 2 brain cells knows that methane is rather powerful. And that water vapour is important.

Only shit-for-brains denialists obsess solely about CO2.

Re: Global warming is predicted by the laws of thermodynamics

“ neurologically divergent”? Surely you mean “ neurologically inert”?

Re: I look forward to . . .

Nope.

Re: I look forward to . . .

Not even good at lying.

Re: I look forward to . . .

Oh, you mean that solar intensity that didn’t actually change? I’m not saying that you’re lying or that you’re not lying, but the panic in the climate denial field is very real and very obvious.

Re: I look forward to . . .

You missed the “except for high earners “ part. In other words, the sort of people that will tend to own those” superfluously huge and over-powered thus gas-guzzling vehicles”.

You also seem to have missed the advent of EVs that cost rather less than your fantasy $100k.

You also seem to have missed that 4 of the 10 largest wind farms in Canada are in Alberta. Including the largest.

So all in all, a bit of a miss.

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

How’s the weather in Moscow tovarisch?

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

If only you whiny twerps that constantly complain about why you won’t buy a Pi… ah, crap I’m just too bored with you to bother.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: A novice does not know the difference between RAM and disk, and they should not have to

What format? Well, the one I need in memory in order to use the information it represents. All I care about is my data going somewhere and coming back the same. What happens in between is irrelevant. For all I care it could be converted into big endian just so long as it comes back as proper little-endian.

Re: A novice does not know the difference between RAM and disk, and they should not have to

Yes, files do exist. I’m not convinced they need to. Why isn’t a storage thing (disk, ssd, network connection, magic container as yet unknown) just a chunk of memory space? Files are merely one possible abstraction for storage. Allow for 128bit addressing and we could cover most plausible scenarios. 256 bits would address every atom in the observable universe which ought to even handle Windows 29 downloads. An acquaintance by the name of Ted Nelson worked on number systems for that a few decades ago.

Re: A novice does not know the difference between RAM and disk, and they should not have to

I don’t want a *novice* having anything at all to do with the payroll software except possibly reading the code as part of learning about it.

And in the bigger scale, I hate having to think about anything to do with files; a barbaric idea that the system should handle for me, preferably with a good (and hidden) database. My stuff should just be there as and when I want to fiddle with it.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Re: America has gone down the toilet

Don’t be obtuse. Actual Satan would have been a better choice than convicted felon and traitor Trump.

The squeeze is on. Rich buggers thought they’d get to run the nuthouse and are finding out that when you give the levers of power to truly evil people your paltry multi-hundred-billion bank accounts are as nothing to the holder of the serious legal powers and weapons. FAFO suckers.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: 386

I was lucky enough to completely miss the 386 era for personal machines. By ‘87 I already had an Archimedes (one of the handmade prototypes) and just floated past the whole thing. Except for managing a project that supported ObjectWorks & VisualWorks on Windows 3.1 , NT 3.5, and OS/2, but I held on to my RISC OS world all through that for sanity’s sake. For the windows stuff we had to run a sortakinda screensaver approach in order to get any responsiveness. On os/2 we had constant nightmares with device drivers that didn’t. NT was almost bearable by comparison; and it was quite fast on the Alpha box we had. I do remember with horror that one os/2 test machine just decided to dive deep into some sort of disk garbage collect navel gazing for hours. And hours. We left it to see what would happen and a *couple of weeks* later it just stopped and sat there looking all innocent and ready to go.

Re: floppies

Wow -works on an iPad Air 13 except for only being able to use the left paddle. At least that’s a way to avoid getting hooked!

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Many, many, years - and two countries ago - a customer visited my office to discuss a new feature request. We worked our way through what might be involved, all that stuff. Agreed 10 days work, finished the coffee, and he left to return to London. I had an inspiration and before he got out of the car park I had finished the feature. Definitely a good afternoon/

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

What does a pi do better? Well, it had an ARM cpu. That, right there, is a significant value difference to me. It’s also smaller, quieter, more flexible and oh yes, has an ARM cpu.

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

Re: Not just Electronics, Cars and Oil

It’s useful where you need stiffer materials.

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

Well we know that is nonsense because the Tory scum would never have allowed the education authorities money to fix anything.

“”but the increased weight causes some elements to wear out faster.”

So please compare the weight of a Tesla 3 to. BMW 3.

ORLY? You’ve heard of traction control, right? Pretty much universal in EVs

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 cranks up the power – and the heat

Re: Not for me

I feel quite confident that this didn’t happen

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: "Anything can happen in the next half hour!"

Umm, StingRay

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: It's not the electric motor

Tesla started using li-ion 12v batteries around late ‘21.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Millions of people who keep macs for 3-4 years (or longer - my iMac is 2012 vintage) say “what the actual fuck are you whining about?” It’s not a Windows machine.

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Re: Fabulous progress...

Well, almost. And in a while it will apply a bit more, and after another while a little bit more, and....

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: __obvious_solution__()

No. Just, *no*. Please go and find your medication and ensure you have completed the correct dosage for the day. Any time the answer is Python, it can reliably be assumed that the question was just plain daft.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

So just who owns most of the major media outlets? Do please name six that are owned by left-wing billionaire elites. All the ones I ever come across are owned by utter bastard right-wing whackaloons.

Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Re: Hands up who hasn't made an offer to buy some part of Intel

Me neither. But then ever since 1986 I’ve been telling everyone that an intel x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Re: Point

But then you have an intel x86/64 machine and as everyone with decent taste knows, an intel x86 is a waste of perfectly good sand.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Actually the Good book says ,,,

No, there is no argument there; the answer is clearly StrongEd.

And the original version of the book started “in the beginning there was the word, and word was KABOOM!”

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

If you need ‘extensions’ then you are never going to actually make it safe. A sensible language doesn’t require you to think about memory allocation or freeing

SpaceX blasts being stuck in bureaucratic orbit as Starship approval slips

Re: Welcome to the real world...

When that’s the best way to make a civilization work, fuck yes.

If you don’t have a decently functioning civilization then none of your money or freedom mean anything because some nasty bugger will come along, scream “you money or your life!” and take both.

So suck it up buttercup and pay your dues.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix

I had an R260(?) with 8Mb for a while, part of working on the Active Book stuff. I think. It was an awful long time ago. And the Active Book had a sorta-Unix at bottom.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Mine was a really simple one I wrote in NS32032 assembler for a board I built, with a Pluto graphics processor and a VAX 11/730 as a disk server. And a Beeb, just because. And a 6dof input thing I made. A whole 2fps!

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: They keep talking about making more than just an Autocomplete, and yet...

“That feels like we're making slaves.”

Well, yes. That has been the intent of them with power since time immemorial.

Re: Wrong Question?

A colleague refers to them as”large liability models”which seems about right to me

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: "How much?!?"

1990 called and wants it’s stupid jokes back

Re: Vision

No, blame people for saying dumb things

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

“Running SmallTalk80 and some very nice WYSIWYG editors.” Small point of pedantry here “Smalltalk-80”. We were doing nice font properly spaced documents around 1972.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

It ran very nicely on my prototype ARM3 machine. I used it for a lot of business paperwork and eventually even my part of a mildly successful programming book. Computer Concepts did quite well with it.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

My iMac 2012 is still just fine. Like this ‘13 iPad. And iPhone 4. Just a little care and things can work for quite a while.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

Jellied eel is a regular purveyor of nonsenses and best ignored or blocked

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

And imagine my startlement when a young woman that worked for me (being in Silicon Valley at the time) explained that she needed to go home to do some soddering.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: systemdOS

“As noted elsewhere, we're rapidly heading toward systemdOS”

I think you meant system DOS...

Raspberry Pi unveils Hailo-powered AI Kit to make the model 5 smarter

Re: Love a piece of Pi

If you have unused Pi, donate them to a suitable club, maker space, school or whatever.