Posts by timrowledge

Decomposed dinosaurs make Texas a top destination for AI bit barns

Re: Death and Texass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis suggests that rather more prosaic screwups were the major issues, with the insta-blame spouted by Abbot and his lackeys being just a bit wrong. Overall I think one could be rather suspicious of the entire energy related cabal and their race to profit from the death of 246 people (I’m sure you didn’t intend to imply millions).

I know there are smart Texans; I’ve worked with some. but as a body politic Texas has to rank near the top of the All-time Stupid McStupidly League

Re: @TVU

ErsatzKing Donold has been *very*vocally spouting that solar energy is bad; almost as bad as wind. After all, it takes god-given profits from his oil buddies.

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Re: It's a time thing...

Oh, pretty please.

I get really annoyed by the way my x64 xubuntu-box misbehaves. PiOS does a much better job of just working for me.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Re: So...

Surely you mean the $640k question?

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Re: Raspberry Pi laptop

The advantage is that it is ARM and not horrible X64. I consider that important; maybe you don’t.

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

Re: Chips?

The only part of it fabricated in America is the lie that any of it is made in America

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Phone down

I generally found that providing a really interesting challenge was appreciated. Getting sysadmins to provide what I needed to run my RISC OS machines at Silicon Valley research labs gained much attention and interest.

70Mbps? Good grief. I have an actual underground laboratory in the rainforest on a pacific island and I get 1.5Gbps for roughly quid /month

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

It’s stupid to forget that coffee shops are a branch of theatre; the drink is (an albeit very important) part of a total deal that should include social engagement, pleasure, smiles, relaxation, maybe even a little flirtation.

Still browsing like it's 1999: Fresh tools that keep vintage Macs online and weirdly alive

Re: Quality HW

2012 iMac is my main machine, with several pi 4 & 5’s for squeak development work. I should probably think about upgrading someday

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

It still is in many ways. No annoying user account stuff confusing you. It’s all your machine, not some unknown geek named ‘sudo ’ or whatever . Fast, usable UI, albeit in need of some decent graphical design.

If only somebody could work out how to add a few bits (and remove a whole load) from Linux to get to a similar state of grace.

For strange reasons (likely just typo/laziness) my Silicon Valley address & business name got put on the Acorn list of US distributors and I got quite a few calls asking to buy large numbers of the cable box & virtual network computing devices - like “we want to buy half a million, what’s the deal on those” type calls. Passed on to the proper people but never heard back.

OpenBSD users are the vegans of the OS world

The point here is that x64 is intel-world and ARM is, thank the Great Googley-moogly, not anything like that.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

It’s just Artificial Bloody Boris Johnson.

Faintly plausible sounding blather until you actually look at it and then you realize it’s utter garbage

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!”