Posts by ocelot

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

Doing a summer vacation job at the University,

I was once chastised for leaving part of a 132 column fanfold printout listing hanging down over over the front panel air intake vents of the prized departmental ICL PERQ personal minicomputer ..

It was riskier because that computer had the wonderful "BYE OFF" command that tripped its circuit breaker power switch with a satisfying clunk after flushing files to disc.

So I would walk off last thing in the day leaving the computer doing something, and then it would spend some time doing whatever while trying to suck in a listing rather than cooling air.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

I met Copilot code once, somebody who subscribed personally to gain access thought it would provide them with a solution to a problem.

It did.

It spewed back a slightly modified part of a somewhat outdated version of part of the Boost library.

But the person concerned did not understand the theory behind the algorithm, and why the code it produced was in fact redundant in the particular use case.

Now if I can just get an AI to summarise all the AI generated messages and then auto-reply to them. Simples, and my time will be 100% saved, as I wont even have to read them.

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

I think 1978 should be 1878 for Muybridge's capture of a moving horse.

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

AI : No matter how you serve it, Spam in a can is still spam.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

I remember it being said when the Z80 came out, that people would still be writing new code for it in 50 years time.

And so it has become.

I was able to do software development on a Research Machines 380Z that the school bought, and hardware and software development on a friend's Z80 powered NASCOM 2 back in 1978.

But for various reasons, my own hardware was 6800 then 6809 based then I bought a BBC Micro with a 6502, then ended up as an ARM assembly language programmer . So the Z80 gave me my start.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Oh and the smoke

I once managed to push the 50 way SCSI IDC connector in upside down on my own machine despite the locating notch . The 5 volt termination power shorted to ground and the middle two cores of the cable from the computer to the disc drive went up in smoke.

I kicked out the SCSI cable on a file server....

Once upon a time I worked at a place where there was an Apollo Domain ring of workstations.

For some reason the powers be that had fitted some external SCSI discs storing general user files to a slightly higher end tower form factor machine.

It was sitting under a table in a general office space, and I stretched my legs out and kicked the cable..

I was sitting at the machine because my simulations ran faster on that machine.

Gradually some peoples files stopped saving .. as their machines network caches filled up as files ceased to be written any more..

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

I once wrote an NTP server based on borrowing the PTP time counters in the network interface MAC of an STM32F407 microcontroller - discovered an amazing 63 bit high resolution timer hiding in there that could be clock rate tweaked up and down in steps of about 10^-9 seconds per second. I lied to it about the LAN interface using PTP and it fired up this timer.

It hooked into a GPS module that was specifically not a precision timing module - there I found a proprietary timing message that lied about the time shift between GPS time and the 1 pulse per second - it lied and produced a sawtooth value designed to confuse people who bought the $10 GPS rather than the $100 timing GPS.. so I ignored it.

I never trusted it 100% but it used to be able to tell me the CPU clock frequency was something like 167.999995 MHZ instead of 168MHz ..

I dont think it suffered that negative time glitch .. but who knows..

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

The elephant in the room

A lot of mines fill up with water . So either you have lost some efficiency through bouyancy and friction drag moving weights in water .. and have a short lifetime of any equipment because the whole thing is going to be running in often corrosive acidic water.

And in many mines below the water table you have to spend constant energy pumping water out, lifting it up against gravity. Water which naturally reaches the bottom of the mine shaft without you extracting energy as it falls.

Physics wins. Or chemistry.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

At one stage we had a round the beers discussion , and decided that we should create an architecture called "two-fingers" which could run ARM or MIPS assembly code.

It didnt survive the night.

Washington left with chip on shoulder after Huawei exposes export loophole lapses

The future will probably show that In fact the sanctions are speeding up China's race ahead of the USA by making them actually create technologies they previously imported.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

I have to feel sorry for the engineers

Despite the high level aims of the mission being mixed with politics as usual, I have to feel some sympathy for the ordinary engineers and scientists who lost their hardware, after so many years.

And I can so easily imagine Boeing in its current state managing exactly the same end result through messing up.

Out of nowhere, India requires PC and server makers to get an import license

I can still remember the time when India previously managed to strangle its electronics and computer industry by insisting on local manufacture..

AMD says its FPGA is ready to emulate your biggest chips

Always the same.

Every time somebody sets up to emulate chips with FPGAs, by the time you have completed the circuit boards of the emulator product, partitioned your design and synthesised it to the FPGAs, there will be a general purpose computer available that can simulate your design at comparable speed.

I used to dabble with this technology back in the 1990's : millions were spent on a commercial custom chip emulator with hundreds of what were state-of-the-art FPGAs fitted in a box. We bought bigger FPGAs and built an emulator with about 10 FPGAs, I hacked together some design partitioner code. .. and then the company bought a computer that simulated the new device at a sensible speed for a fraction of the price.

Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

I notice when backing up to a 512GB WD SSD in a small metal case that it maintains a high transfer rate and then drops to a crawl when it gets hot to touch. Leave it to cool down and the transfer restarts ..

So I think the problem exists for even quite mundane SSDs

Rate of disruptive tech and science discoveries has slowed over the decades, claims study

We used to play a game at Philips Research back in the 1990's of seeing what was the most stupid idea you could get patented.

I think I managed to get a patent for WiFi over wires ....

This was following one of our managers managing to get the "Red button (immediate hot link to other content) " patented on a TV remote control... not really disruptive tech.

However, what used to happen is that the disruptive ideas often came from people whose understanding covered a wide field of knowledge and were able to synthesise new ideas from a wide range of sciences.

These days scientists are more narrow specialists and have less training in areas that let them think outside the box.

Its really why people like Elon Musk succeed and scientists dont - he knows a dangerous little about many technical things and has imagination and money to tie them together with ever stronger bits of duct tape until they fly or get thrown out for being a total disaster.

Computing's big question for 2023: How many more questions can we endure?

Re: One thing or the other with you lot!

Prompted by that - I think that the best CEO for Elon Musk's Twitter who wouldnt stand for stupid nonsense should be somebody's mother who has a no-nonsense approach to parenting.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

A long time ago in the early days of Linux Kernel Porting in Philips Semiconductors

We were using SD cards for booting our early ports of Linux kernels onto Philips ARM9 SOCs .

The SD cards used to die with monotonous regularity.

Eventually we worked out a theory as to what was going on, partially guided by reading patents from the big name SD card manufacturers.

When an SD card is formatted in the factory it is FAT16 or FAT32 formatted.

It turned out from the patents that at least some of the flash controllers would do flash write levelling by directly using the DOS FAT File Allocation Table data to decide what was used and unused data on the card.

If we formatted the card with a Linux file system, in our theory, the FAT region (left untouched in the Linux partition and format ) still reported a basically empty card to the wear levelling - so almost any sector was fair game for a rewrite.

Our ext2 file systems would get trashed by something as we kept on writing yet another root file system or system start up logs.

What we did to solve the problem was to keep the FAT formatted partitions.

Then allocate a large data file using the FAT file system.

Then loopback mount the data file as an ext2 formatted file system. (whatever we had as state of the art in the 2000's )

Activity in the loopback mounted file system would then appear as random writes to the FAT file system, wear levelling would "realise" we meant to use the allocated blocks in question. So it never went and trashed our file systems.

We just arranged our Linux machines to boot from FAT ..

We were much happier with our SD cards after that, they lasted a lot longer.

I wonder if this is still going on - direct mounting SD cards as Linux file systems causing problems with the SD cards embedded controller assuming FAT formatting and wear levelling by stealing your data. .

As an aside, at another employment we found that the Samsung EVO 3D Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology SD cards were head and and shoulders ahead in write cycle lifetime, ahead of even some special "robust" industrial Single Level Cell (SLC) tech flash cards.

We were investigating loop writing video and audio into a storage device as a black box and we wanted years of lifetime. The Samsung cards would have delivered.

Amazon tells folks it will stop accepting UK Visa credit cards via weird empty email

Bye Bye Amazon

We now have a good reason to cancel our Amazon Prime, and only bother with Amazon as a last resort. Thanks.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

For that, I have a camper van

My home office is a 1974 VW T2 Camper Van.

It originally cost about the same as that desk.

For that I get a cooker, a fridge, a desk, lighting, a private space, a space for a load of biscuits.

Internet is both wired and wireless.

And I am left handed so putting a tablet in the desk to the right would not be useful. Also I would probably smash it with a coffee cup.

And what is more, I can relocate the whole thing to anywhere I like where there is a decent 4G mobile signal.

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Activating four computers on a ship in a river in Borneo

I can remember being shipped out with four new PCs that had not had their Windows copies properly activated back at base.

So I can remember having to borrow a portable Irirdium sat phone, write down all the codes on the screens of the PCs. Go upstairs onto the top deck, into the tropical sun, over where the engine room vents were roaring away blasting extra-hot air.

The deck had a clear sky view otherwise, so I could phone up Microsoft in Singapore and recite and recieve all those many digit numbers over a semi-intelligible voice link.

Fortunately the activation codes were copied down correctly and the machines worked.

That was quite a nice assignment - the accomodation was a four star hotel , the commute to and from work on the ship was in a jet boat taking about 2 hours. For the first half of the journey I had 3G connectivity going down the river from Samarinda in Borneo. So I would sync up with the servers back at base and develop software, had to swap out the SIM from the Blackberry to my Nokia N95 to use as a modem. While my colleagues sat around dead bored.

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

That now leaves a space for a more capable radar/telescope to do the jobs that Arecibo did better than any other.

Whether it is built in the same place , or somewhere else .

Start planning now,

That now leaves a space to design and build a more flexible radar capable telescope for doing all those jobs that Arecibo did.

Start planning now.

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

Re: What's the need?

Its the support guaranteed in return for some payment that makes a product more attractive to corporate users, who dont want to end up using project for their users messing with installing 'free' software.

Red Hat also included indemnity from Microsoft in return for the support payment. Also attractive to corporates.

I would always prefer a model where there is a 'free' version that ANYBODY can use, STABLE, support and a pa 'LTS' version that a company can base its business on.

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

Re: Guinea pigs and some tropical fish

We used to have guinea pigs that occasionally wandered the house. On one occasion I came across a chewed mains lead with a just-exposed live core behind a fridge.

That guinea pig lived many more years, and chewed cables were never a problem again.

Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse

I can remember similar : on a project requiring extreme frequency stability and type approval, we installed a state-of-the-art Temperature Compensated Crystal Oscillator with a ceramic encapsulation.

We installed it on a PCB with a plastic case around it.

On test, it functioned perfectly until somebody turned on the light in the test chamber and it hopped frequency.

Turns out the plastic case and ceramic TCXO encapsulation was transparent to infrared light from an incandescent bulb.

Dixons fined £500,000 by ICO for crap security that exposed 5.6 million customers' payment cards

Still running Windows XP in Jan 2020 on their tills.

The number of obsolecence warning pop-ups flashing over the user interface when I bought a phone there the other day was scary.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

My printer crime was worse: 37 years ago I was leaning on the central heating radiator in my student room and I wondered why it felt 'live' and my hand 'buzzed' as I rubbed my hand over it.

Turned out that it was earthed and EVERY mains earthed metal object in the room was live.

Problem turned out to be

1. Earth wire had disconnected in the mains plug feeding a 4 way power outlet strip powerin the entire room.

2. The 1950's Creed teleprinter I was using as the printer on my M6800 based computer generated a lot of mains borne interference from the motor that it used to turn all the cams inside for the mechanical 6 bit decoder.

So I fitted a mains suppression filter and for some bizarre reason I soldered the can of the filter to mains live rather than earth....

Result was all the time the printer was powered from the mains, the room was live.

I fixed the wiring and lived.

Around that time I often picked up live equipment by the live wiring and carefully put it down again.

The most painful was an open chassis Motorola 12 inch CRT monitor where the line output transistor was placed exactly where I put my hand to move it....

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

Quantum Programming With Stack Overflow

I have sometimes used SO for "quantum programming" where people post bits of wrong code asking a question .. Filling in all the known wrong solution space ..

Eventually I find the solution by specifically avoiding all that code....

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

No, the sky will not fall in

I was around working on low level GPS hardware at Philips Semiconductors around the last GPS week rollover.

Even then , the average handheld GPS managed to rollover and keep going.

Even a very old Garmin GPS40 single channel handheld achieved lock with fresh batteries after the rollover, with correct date , time amd position.

This was a GPS that had been stored for years in a boat. The new owner of the boat had just completed a purchase of a replacement in a yacht chandlery when I walked back in with the old pre last rollover Garmin GPS40 working properly....

Any GPS that has memory of last week number last time it had a fix and sees it going reliably 'backwards' can infer a rollover and add 1024 to the week number.. ignoring just getting a rough idea of time from an RTC ...