Posts by HorseflySteve

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Re: Hmm ...

Seems like Paul Merton's comment on Have I Got News For You that it would probably be cheaper to demolish Birmingham and rebuild it closer to London is becoming less of a joke day by day..

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: strategy to let America exert control over its allies

The point of having allies is that you hope they'll come to your aid when you need help.

Abusing your allies is a good way of changing their perspective on that arrangement...

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Fiat Multipla

I got stuck behind one of those for 20 minutes driving to work one morning. The bulbous shape was bad enough but when combined with body colour of phlegm, I found it incredibly visually offensive & was very glad I'd had a light breakfast.

Controllers getting no response from Lunar Trailblazer orbiter or Odin asteroid mining probe

Re: Did the front fall off?

For those unfamiliar with the reference, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

The incident referred to was real https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirki_(tanker)#:~:text=The%20Kirki%20was%20a%20210,have%20occurred%20in%20Australian%20waters.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: Well

Yes they did. "can store as much as 400MWh" which is 1.44 terajoules

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

Re: Fast RAM / Slow RAM

@cyberdemon unfortunately that would be even slower than having sockets as you need to wait for the demultiplexed chip to propogate the signals which will *really* tank the performance on the fast bus.

Performance is what this motherboard is all about so, if you really want replaceable RAM, then you have to accept lower performance and use a different motherboard. Sorry, but that's the reality & there's no getting around it at the current state of technology.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Re: Lessons

@ARGO That'll be why my phone is always piggybacking on my WiFi when I'm at home, then....

Einstein Probe finds two stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other

Re: Disappointment

Keep watching Corona Borealis. Tau is expected to go nova anytime now; not a total kablooie but shedding some outer material.

Corona Borealis should be visible in early mornings before dawn, if I've got me celestial mapping correct.

Not all types, it seems. I think the suggestion is that it will be a class 1a supernova as described here: https://www.astronomy.com/science/the-different-types-of-supernovae-explained/

"The larger of the two stars started to expand, as stars do late in life"

It's not just stars that happens to (looks sadly at the dial on the bathroom scales)

One more piece of evidence that we are stardust and, while not golden, apparently increasing in density with age....

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: Elderly like Mint

Last year, my eldest sister (in her late 70s) asked me to help with an old Windows laptop that belonged to her local church. She didn't want any me to fix it, as such, rather to suggest what she could do going forward as it was on its last legs.

I got her a used Asus E210MA laptop from Cash Converters (a pawnbrokers in the UK) for £80, put a 500GB SSD in it and installed Linux Mint 21.3 MATE edition on it.

I also upgraded the LibreOffice so it would open the Church collections/donations spreadsheet that I'd previously moved from MS Office to LO on the old Windows laptop the year before but which was a later version of LO than shipped with Mint so gave a spreadsheet size error on opening it.

That was last May and, to date, I've had just one cry for help when the asus-touchpad-numpad driver got a bit confused and the cursor wouldn't move though the Number Pad mode light was off. I was able to tell her how to recover from that within seconds. I suspect I forgot to increase the driver's sleep parameter when I installed it; I'll sort that out on my next visit (she lives 400miles away!)

Having used Windows PCs all her working life (she was a bank manager & management troubleshooter), she has had no problem adapting to Mint & has handled all updates without any issues.

My experience of Mint MATE is that is that it is very stable, usually just works & fixes are readily available when it doesn't.

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

Getting the popcorn

It's going to be fun watching this battle between M$ & commercial users play out. Large enterprises will, I expect, force some concessions from them but it's the small businesses I suspect will suffer the most.

Single traders may well shift to Linux if they are, or have a family member who is, technically savvy.

I'm just a bystander having retired from work & been M$ free @ home for about 20 years (Red Hat->Mandrake->Ubuntu->Mint)

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

You can even have a distro that boots from and lives on a usb stick I.e. you don't even have to install it on on your PC.

Have a look at Porteus. It's based on slack and still has a few wrinkles but is available for 32bit & 64bit x86, BIOS and UEFI boot and has a variety of GUIs including XCFE and MATE

I wouldn't recommend it for a novice (at least for setting it up) but, for the likes of us here, it's a useful Linux-In-Your-Pocket(tm) recovery tool.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

We may not have to wait that long if there are lifeforms that are sufficiently advanced to generate the detectably organized EM signals that SETI has been looking for for decades.

That they haven't yet found any suggests that either there are no such advanced lifeforms within 50 lightyears or so, or they're using frequencies that we can't or don't detect.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Re: if hardware is twice as fast next year

I had this issue too. I specced my own desktop & spent what for me was a lot of money so I would have a fast, future proof machine that would see through a decade, or so I thought.

Within 3 years, entry level machines outperformed it: Lesson learned.

As to why everyone has incredibly powerful machines, well there are some use cases, such as CAD & physical system simulations a.k.a CAE, that really need them, there are managers that really want them as status symbols, and there are IT departments that want to keep inventory simple by keeping variance to a minimum. Also, just as work increases to fill the available time, so OS and office tool bloat increases to waste the available resources and the hi-spec PC, in the majority of cases, produces no more useful output than the DOS/Windows-for-Workgroups PC did but (arguably) looks a lot prettier and has lots of toys & adverts

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

A consequence of the Peter principle

IME The civil service is full of Peters, bean counters and people who can't get a better paid job in the private sector. Also their masters usually know more about Greek Classics than they do about technology and consider engineers and technologists as mere tradesmen, like the guy that came to fix the washing machine.

Is it any wonder that they can't spot the sales engineer's BS?

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

Meta got the AI they deserve

With any luck, their AI bot will identify Facebook as a purveyor of false and misleading information & shut the entire network down!

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Because they want your work for free

They want opt-out so they can steal your work.

If it was opt-in, they would have to ask, but with opt-out you have to know they even exist to stop them using your work.

There are proposals by UK government to make use of copyrighted work on the internet freely usable to AI techs with an opt-out for copyright owners but what that will truly mean is the death of copyright in UK

Imagine that you've written a really great song and put it on bandcamp or magnatune. Some new start-up AI you've never heard of scrapes it & produces derivatives, then tries to sue you for plagiarism. How do you prove they've actually stolen it from you?

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: Bats..

Only if you're fully kitted out with shin pads, helmet with protective grille and gloves, and then only if it's not raining and you're fairly close to a cricket pitch.

Being out & about having just the bat is likely to attract the attention of the police.

Re: Bats..

@amajadedcynicaloldfart wrote 'baseball was called "rounders" and basketball was called "netball".'

The interesting thing about that is that Baseball is thought to have developed from the British sport Rounders and Netball came from a British woman misinterpreting the rules of the American sport Basketball.

Test credit cards

All card providers have these for payent system testing including, I suspect, trapping & rejecting them for payment at real POS terminals.

See https://developers.bluesnap.com/reference/test-credit-cards

Bats..

Oh, we right ponders do know what baseball and it related equipment is and some of us even play it, in spite of the rather insular view of the "World" in the "World Series" which is nothing like as broad as Soccer's World Cup.

And, TBH, anybody arriving at your location with only the tool for hitting a hard speherical object without the rest of the sport's paraphernalia is almost invariably bad news..

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

"at 6pm tomorrow, the UK grid will have about 500MW spare capacity" for about 45mins judging by the graph, which wouldn't be long enough to charge many EVs unless they're cable of very fast charging.

Re: Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

Well, it seemed like a good idea but they've tried it and found it's impractical or too expensive to implement.

I suspect it's the latter as most old cabinets wouldn't have the required electrical supply capacity for charging even one EV let alone many since they were just connection boxes which don't need power or extracted what little they did need from the 48V DC line voltage

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

Re: This digital voice thingie..

That's probably because there isn't any underground trunking in place or they were unable, for some reason, to use their pneumatic tools the blow the fibre along it if there is.

Putting up poles is considerably cheaper than digging trenches

Re: 'Safely Switched'

The PSTN is/was run on batteries; big banks of lead acid batteries wired for 48V at the local exchange. They provide(d) the supply to operate the line and subscriber instruments.

A few years back, a storm disrupted the electricity supply to the village I live in. I was lucky in only being without power for a day, but other parts of the village were off for nearly 4 days. The phone line worked throughout as I have a wired one as well as cordless.

The cabinet which houses the DSLAMs for FTTC broadband is, unfortunately, powered from the circuit that was off for days so no broadband for the entire time and, therefore, no VOIP and BTs proposal of battery backup router would have been useless.

Mobile signal? Indoors? Don't make me laugh!

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Suspicious translations

The thing to remember with automated translations is that there isn't a direct mapping between different human languages and meanings of phrases can be highly dependent on the context of use.

I remember reading many years ago that a common saying in Mandarin translates to English literally as "Mis-enter not like mis-go out", and that that a native speaker wouldn't understand it unless they knew it was used in the context of Crime & Punishment where it would mean "It is better to let a guilty one go free than imprison and innocent one"

And then there's punctuation...

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: longjmp

Longjmp isn't a command I've encountered in any BASIC variant I've used. It sounds very close to the CPU machine instructions where a relative jump opcode would adjust the program counter by +/-128 for loops, jump tables or FSMs, and an absolute jump opcode for anything more which would have used additional program memory and CPU cycles.

A bit too close to the metal for a Beginners language, I'd have thought as you would want to bothered about those sort of things until you started working with real-time or embedded code.

Re: Replace "Beginner" with "casual programmer" and I am 100% on board

@Bsquared "I would love to have a clean, intuitive programming language like BASIC that would run on my Windows workstations and let me hack quick, simple programs together with simple GUIs.."

AutoIt is exactly this. It's a scripting language originally intended for making automation tools but it can do much more than that and it's freeware. When a script is fully debugged and working, it can be compiled to a stand-alone exe.

Have a look at https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/

Re: Replace "Beginner" with "casual programmer" and I am 100% on board

For knocking together quick programs to do simple jobs on Windows PCs, try AutoIt.

It's got some quirks but it's quite powerful.

I used it to make a Product Installer CD/DVD/USB stick that would turn a clean Windows PC & install all the required software & libraries and company branding to make it into an UK MOT emissions testing workstation in less than 8 minutes (<2 minutes with SSD instead of spinning rust) when coupled with our gas analyser and/or smoke meter hardware modules.

I tried using HDD images but preparation took far longer and installation took >30 minutes

Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks

That was Gregor Fisher as The Baldy Man and the advert was for Hamlet cigars.

The Baldy Man character was originally seen in BBC Scotland's Naked Video comedy sketch show & had a spin-off series of his own (2 seasons totaling 13 shows).

@doublelayer I agree with all that you've said. However, my experience with early BASIC did help with my subsequent career which involved writing firmware for small microcontrollers in assembly language as well as designing hardware.

For modern multitasking multi thread applications, especially those with a graphical UI, then Python is a great language to learn on, though I don't like the significant indentation; it seems an unnecessarily easy way to introduce bugs by accidentally deleting a space or two...

COBEST clarification

Just to note that the product I was talking about has nothing to with any company, group or product that is currently using that name.

This was the mid to late 1980s and the product name was an acronym of Crypton On-Board Electronic Systems Tester, Crypton being a well known UK brand of garage equipment (now owned by Continental AG)

Re: Basic will rise again!

"FORD=1TO10"

Data General TS BASIC was like that. It recognised its keywords & ignored whitespace so

FORK = 1 TON STEPH

was syntactically valid

"Did you ever try controlling a nuclear power station with a ZX Spectrum?"

No, but I did make a concept demonstrator of a car sensors system tester that plugged into the wiring harness of a Rover Montego in place of the Lucas Hot-Wire EFI ECU and performed 13 real tests on the sensors in a guided sequence and produced a diagnostic printout on an OKI Microline 182.

It was shown to various people @ Rover group, including the chairman of the board and resulted in a contract for the creation of the real thing, called COBEST, from which the company made an awful lot of money!

This was 10 years before OBD existed.

Re: You had me...

@baudwalk I think that you missed the point Liam was making. Imagine a world without pocket calculators where you've never interacted with a minicomputer and you are sitting at a teletype which is waiting for a BASIC command.

You type PRINT 2+6 & press the return button

The paper feeds up a line and 8 is printed

You have learned how to make it do something immediately.

You type 10 PRINT 2+6 (return), then 20 GOTO 10 (return), the RUN and you have learned (a) how to create a sequence of instructions, (b) how to execute that sequence, and (c) how to waste a lot of paper. You now also need to learnd how to break out of the loop.

You got the thing to do something without needing to start a editor that you don't know how to use, save the file somewhere, compile it somehow find where the compiled result is & run it only to discover when you do that you accidentally type PRONT instead of PRINT and all you get is ERROR 02 - SYNTAX

Remember BASIC was intended as a tool that allowed complete novice to learn how to make a computer do something useful with immediate feedback and the line numbers were a brilliant method to distinguish between immediate and sequential execution.

I don't have to imagine the scenario I described at the start as I lived it...

T

Re: GOTO

There some really fun tricks in the ZX Spectrum ROM, like the USR function for calling machine code routines from BASIC, which :

evaluates the argument to an absolute 16 bit value & puts it into the BC register pair,

pushes the address of the routine to returns the BC register contents to BASIC as a floating point value on to the stack,

pushes the BC register contents onto the stack,

executes RET

The RETs might not look like GOTOs, but they are...

I learnt Data General Time Shared BASIC at college in the 70s, then Sinclair ZX BASIC & QL SUPER BASIC before moving on to Z80 assembly & later C but I've never forgotten that, at the bottom of all that high level procedural stuff, it's all just loading a Program Counter with a new value which is a GOTO whatever you call it

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Or, for The Sun readers..

Phew, what a scorcher!

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Don't fine them or release the LLMs

Get injunctions that order that the LLMs be turned off and training data deleted. Threaten company board of directors with jail for contempt if they don't.

I know that's probably not legally possible but I can dream ..

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

I can't think why your comment has been down voted.

Having been in the position of looking after my elderly mother as she succumbed to dementia following the death of my father, whilst also working full time as a senior design engineer and looking after my horse & dog all by myself, I know only too well your pain and why you don't regard it as topic for humour.

Surviving on 3.5 hours sleep every night for 2 years was certainly no joke!

Bluesky too opaque about user figures for Euro watchdogs

As an aside...

If to message on twitter was to tweet, and to message on X is to Xcreet, then what words do we use describe the act of messaging on Mastadon and Bluesky?

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Re: Lost In Space

You,'ll be lucky to find a payphone here in the UK. Most have been decommissioned as the only people using them were calling drug dealers or prostitutes, according to BT.

The one & only phone box in the village I live in now houses a defibrillator.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Re: The bit of the brochure which gives me the shivers:

<hand raised>

I wrote a program for the above mentioned DG Nova system that used 8KB of core storage which caused a bit of a problem as multiple people started to use it since the Nova only had 10KB of core & the disk/core swapping caused it grind to a halt when user number exceeded 3

Unsurprisingly, the system technician asked me to make it smaller but I didn't know how to chain programs as subroutines so I devised a scheme where subroutines in text files were loaded as program modules that overlaid each other (literally overlays).

For this to work, every overlay module had to have *exactly* the same line numbers....

Re: Thank you

My first experience of programming was in Fortran IV on Glasgow College of Technology's IBM360, submitting packs of punch cards for overnight batch runs. Very frustrating when you make a typo on one of the cards & find out when picking up the results the following day!

I quickly discovered the Time Shared BASIC running on the Data General Nova that they also had, and the joys of interactive programming.

That led me to Sinclair BASIC on ZX Spectrum at home, then Z80 assembly followed by C at work.

I'm not a programmer, I'm an electronics engineer but, what I learned from BASIC programming stood me in great stead in my career.

So, thank you indeed, Professor Kurtz, for all that you unknowingly did for me, I will not forget you.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Murphy's Law also *loves* demos

This is also as known as Cohen's law:

"If it can go wrong, it will at the demonstration"

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

"I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave"

.. and the sooner he does that, the better. What an arsehole!

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

It does sound a bit familiar to me, so maybe it's a regurgitated quote or paraphrase thereof from some sci-fi film.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Bad comms as well as bad practice =

Why didn't they just ask the engineer who checked it out where he left it before they signed off the plane, unless his medical appointment turned out to be with a pathologist?

Do they not record who checks tools out?

Even then, the guy that told him to leave it in place should have been aware of where "in place" was...

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

about:config in FF Android

Sure you can, but I don't want to use beta or nightly builds and it seems totally arbitrary to disable it in the stable build.

Ambitious overclocker cools Raspberry Pi 5 with liquid nitrogen

Actually, the 4 Yorkshire men sketch pre-dates Monty Python. It was first performed on "At Last the 1948 Show" by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman (who collectively wrote it) </pedant>

Mine's the one with the "Do Not Adjust Your Set" script in the pocket.