Posts by cb7 283 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2017
I'm still trying to work out why the radar system in all the Teslas that have been involved in "autopilot" crashes (and there have been a few, some unfortunately fatal), didn't detect the obstructions up ahead and slow down/stop.
To me it seems logical that radar obstruction detection should take higher priority than image recognition and if working properly (how hard can that be?) would deliver a rather basic safety function that seems to have been missing in each case.
Remote workers at small logistics companies for example have to print waybills etc remotely from their central system.
Windows Remote Desktop sucks for remote printing.
Google Cloud Print worked flawlessly, even with older non cloud ready printers. And for free.
Right now I'm at a loss as to what to migrate to.
I know GoToMyPC works, but it ain't free. And they keep putting their prices up.
For the first proper PC I built for myself, I used an Athlon XP 3200+. It worked out cheaper than the Intel equivalent at the time.
I outgrew it and ended up with a Core 2 Duo which later got upgraded to a Core 2 Quad equivalent Xeon. Now I'm running an i7-6700K as AMD weren't competitive 3 years ago.
For customer builds, I really want to buy more AMD, but a couple of niggles keep steering me back to Intel:
1. Stability. It's taken a whole years worth of BIOS and AMD chipset driver updates to yield stable performance for serious work like AutoCAD. And I've got my fingers crossed that we're out of the woods now.
2. Reliability. In my 35 years with computers, I've seen more completely dead AMD motherboards than I have Intel. And that's despite AMD having less market share over the years.
3. IPC. AMD still lags Intel when it comes to single core performance and raw clock rates. The gap is much narrower now with Ryzen so I'd be prepared to look past this were it not for the more serious points 1 & 2 above.
I also can't help but wonder why so many WiFi adapters don't maintain stable connections running on Ryzen boards as they do on Intel.
Don't just take my word for it, look at some reviews of Ryzen based laptops.
I know AMD have really done a lot to catch up with Intel when it comes to bang per buck and I really want AMD to do even better. I just hope they can improve on the areas I've mentioned above, because these really are crucial factors for long term success.
From a distance it looks like Java was a big pile of doggy poo. Nice concept, but flawed execution (oh dear). And in a GUI world, Java was clunky.
And now, again viewing from a distance, it looks like Google helped make it much more ubiquitous than Sun or Oracle ever did.
So now Oracle think, fuck me, how dare Google make all this money off of our ideas? Quick let's sue them so we can have some of that yummy dosh.
Meanwhile Google think, hang on, we did all that work to make it work on phones and tablets from a plethora of vendors. Why should we share our yummy cash with Oracle? Who even cares that without Java, we didn't really have a viable starting point for portable code on "our" devices?
It's possible I may be far off the truth, but this is how it appears to me, viewing from a distance.
I bought a 1TB SSD yesterday to slap into my son's Xbox One for the princely sum of £88.98 with free next day shipping. Yes, it's SATA and not PCI-E, but some NVMe drives are available at roughly the same price as well now.
A few years back, I recall Apple charging £400 to go from 128GB to 256GB on one of their devices. When the retail price differential on 128GB was around £50 if that. That's when I realised what a rip off Apple gear was. And looks like still is.
After getting fed up with unreliable performance from a BT-Hub5 re-purposed as a WAP, I recently dipped my toes into the dedicated WAP world with a Ubiquiti Unify AP.
I was a bit disappointed at having to use Java to run the local controller, but this is only needed to get the AP up and running or if you want to tweak settings or monitor performance etc.
Once the AP was up and running satisfactorily, I've not had to run the controller again. The AP just sits there doing its job, so I'm happier with it than I was with the old BT Hub.
But now this.
So what other well performing, reliable, industrial strength alternatives are there?
How many BT customers are also on the receiving end of "There's a problem with your computer" type scam calls from Indian sounding "Ruperts"?
BT won't admit it of course, but me thinks, as a minimum, customer names and telephone numbers have been stolen from their customer database by an ex BT Indian call agent or two and used to set up the fake Microsoft Tech Support scams we're all so familiar with.
I don't see the relevance of using TOR or a VPN.
The smut server needs to see you on camera so it can verify you're over 18 by checking the imagery against the gov register.
All it'll need to circumvent it (assuming it ever gets implemented) is a virtual cam that sends imagery of an OAP.
I thought "end to end" meant message sender to message receiver.
In any case, that's irrelevant. Everyone who uses WhatsApp and accepted the default switch to WhatsApp backups getting stored on Google Drive now has their precious messages stored in unencrypted format on Google Drive.
The "backdoor" is in plain sight.
The only problem is Thunderbird isn't quite industrial strength. It slows down considerably once you get to multi GB mail storage (a necessity for some businesses) vs MS-Outlook on the same hardware. Searching, sorting and general navigation all get much slower on TB.
I recently recently replaced a 486SX board in a CNC milling machine with a 486DX one.
It was still booting from a 3.5" floppy (connected via an ISA I/O card) because previous attempts to get it to boot from a 2GB CF card connected via an IDE to CF adapter had failed.
Then I realised it was because DOS v7 FDISK could only see 504MB of the 2GB CF card even though I could put in hard drive User Type 47 parameters in the BIOS to define a 2GB drive.
Once a put in numbers to keep it below 504MB, it started booting fine. The whole OS easily fits on a 1.44MB 3.5" floppy and user programs tend to be less than a few KB, so the loss of usable capacity isn't a problem.
My point is, a 4GB drive/card may be "too big" for older systems to handle without careful consideration / testing of any workarounds employed to get it working.
Plus Flash memory loses data from charge leaks over time if not powered up. Not a problem for magnetic media, though magnetic media does have its own longevity issues.
Now there's a kid with real talent.
Sounds like he would have put the money to better use than TalkTalk
His skills would be better put to use as an ethical hacker than wasting away in some cell probably growing bitter and twisted.
Send him on the course he wanted to do first - though he'd probably be able to teach the teachers a thing or two.
This is what's wrong with the "justice" system in this country.
It really depends on what you use the machine for.
If you do a lot of video encoding, the speed increase could be significant, but then some of that could also come from a graphics card upgrade.
In day to day use, some of the speed increase comes from the faster storage interfaces the newer chips support.
The i7-9900K is around 2-3 times faster than your chip:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-870/4028vsm961
Yes, it mandates voice service not copper, but why else would they develop a compromised product that relies on the existing dropwire from a fibre pole instead of replacing the dropwire with something better?
It seems like penny pinching.
"Homes passed" can portray a false picture of how many homes could be on Superfast broadband. It doesn't help when your local cabinet has fibre, making your home one of those "passed", but you're the 325th customer from that cabinet who wants VDSL but you can't have it because the cabinet only has capacity for 324 lines.
used to paint a better picture of how many homes could get faster broadband rather than how many actually do. Sometimes there isn't
When is FTTP not Fibre To The Premises?
When it's Fibre To The Pole.
That's why they say homes passed :-D
If you then replace the drop wire with Cat 6, you could in theory get 1Gbps symmetric at home. But they're only aiming for 300Mbps to start with because they're too cheap to replace the 60m odd of twisted pair copper dropwire. And of course the analogue phone service still needs to run. For now. That's another Universal Service Obligation.
"Norton Security: because we know that every browser, application and website is a virus just waiting to happen, so we block everything."
I stopped recommending Norton Security years ago when I found it was stupid enough to block itself from going online because the subscription had expired.
"Xhamster, beeg, txxx and others with URLs that are too explicit for a, er, family-friendly website"
I can't believe I've been pr0n surfing for over a dozen years and have only come across two of those three today! How is one supposed to find these darn things? Google clearly isn't the best search engine in the world
I predict many tech unsavvies will end up buying new PCs when Windows 7 reaches end of support next year.
Especially with all the nag pop ups Microsoft will no doubt push out.
If Intel really are predicting flat PC shipments with that coming up, they're either being stupid or know they won't have sufficient volume to keep up with demand. I wish I hadn't sold my AMD stock.
"They can’t patch all of it, because the only way to completely get rid of it is to completely get rid of speculative execution in caching, and if you do that, your shiny modern Core i7 performs as well as a ‘286"
A slight exaggeration, but I'll say it again. There's merit in developing cheaper memory that doesn't need 16 clock cycles to get dressed everytime it's asked to go fetch some data.
"Arizona is flat, its roads are straight, and new, and well marked, and the climate is dry and sunny. It's the perfect test-bed for getting machines to learn how to drive cars."
Except the rest of the world isn't flat, with straight new, well marked roads where it never rains or snows.
If self driving cars are developed in only these conditions, they'll have to go all the way back to the drawing board to teach them how to cope with curved roads with inclines and less than perfect road markings. Where rain, hail, sleet or snow is a part of evryday life. Heck there may even be salt on the roads or even potholes.
Or something totally random that fell off another vehicle or blew on to the road from elsewhere.
I can understand devoting R&D to increase bandwidth for GPUs etc., but why not work on inventing cheaper memory with lower latency too? I know SRAM already exists, that's why I added the words invent and cheaper.
Just think how much cheaper, simpler and faster (and more secure) CPUs could become if they didn't have to dedicate precious die space to all that L1/L2/L3 cache, branch prediction and speculative execution type malarkey.
And before you say it, I know it's hard. But like all good solutions, once it's done, everyone will shake their heads in amazement and bewilderment as to why no one did it sooner and instead spent billions on coming up with convoluted cache and speculative execution type arrangements.
Maybe it's just my feeble brain power, but it seems like the explanation goes from describing a way to determine memory locations for the kernel or other sensitive areas to somehow being able to read said locations.
I, perhaps mistakenly, thought modern OS' didn't allow programs access to memory not allocated to them?
Could someone cleverer than me please explain, in plain English?
This is a sincere question.
I recently found that HP don't stick to the Power Delivery spec for some of their recent laptops. So despite using a USB-C power connector, you can't just plug in a USB-C charger from say a Lenovo laptop and expect it to work.
So much for a "Universal" standard as you say.
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