Posts by nintendoeats

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Yes, nowadays companies are very socially aware and concerned primarily with the well-being of all individuals around them.

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

Another example, if you are properly trained in firearms (as are all firearms owners in Canada) you learn to always point it in a safe direction and always keep your finger off the trigger unless you intend to shoot. This is true even if you have just confirmed that the firearm is clear of ammunition.

If you always point in a safe direction, you can't make a mistake about whether the firearm was loaded and do something bad.

Samsung reveals buzzword-compliant DRAM ready for 5G, AI, edge, and metaverses

We sell a device, which I will call a potato in the interest of obscurity.

The previous version was referred to as a "smart potato", which made sense because it was a potato that could run Windows or Linux onboard.

The new version, which is essentially the same product with better specs, is a "Deep learning edge IoT device". Evidently the fact that it is a potato is no longer relevent.

Turns out there is something everyone may agree on in Congress: Let netizens use mostly algorithm-lite apps

This is all very nice and everything but...consider what happens when you look at youtube on a fresh computer, not logged into a Google account. It is revealed as one of the stupidest places on earth.

The internet needs heavy noise filters.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: We all know the best Bond film

It sure is now!

Re: We all know the best Bond film

It is my feeling that "my favorite Bond film is OHMSS" is a thinly disguised code for "I do not like James Bond movies".

Microsoft: Many workers are stuck on old computers and should probably upgrade

What a load of horse shit.

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Re: Not a fan of this one

Have you never worked with somebody you feel would have been more effectively employed in the fast food industry?

'Father of the Xbox' Seamus Blackley issues Twitter apology to AMD over last-minute switch to Intel CPUs

Microsoft actually got punished for this; one of the major exploits used to access the XBOX bootloader depends on memory address wraparound behaviour of the intel CPU, which the AMD chip didn't have. If they had stuck with the AMD chip, it's likely that the XBOX wouldn't have been hacked so early on.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

Was this an Indy? I have an Indy with the original drive, and it is indeed not working. I should try this.

Not really important since it would just be to find out what's on the disk of course.

Well...I can confirm that you shouldn't handle RAM while wearing a sweater...

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Good to see

Regression testing on "any supported Ryzen CPU" is not difficult to achieve.

I would also say that testing many configurations is not difficult for Microsoft. I work for a massively smaller company, and we have strategies for continually stability and regression testing a wide range of HW that are fairly effective. For example, whenever a dev PC is retired it gets sent down to the SQA basement and gets hooked up to the SQA cluster. We also buy newer machines, for example because we need to do tests with a new x86 extension.

I'm sure Microsoft can do a lot better than that.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: Nortel clearly learnt from this...

Guys...

Nortel

not Norton

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

For a while I started writing out what I wanted to talk to people about before I spoke to them, to save the embarassing "oh, now that I've explained it it's obvious" moment. I've found that I don't actually need to do this all that often anymore, since I've sort of trained myself to naturally perform this exercise.

What would <FellowEngineer> do...

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: me too

And obviously adjusting the volume with a single knob was far to easy to do by accident. The solution of having this function require a modifier key and an F-key that you will need to hunt and peck for every single time it is needed...that is pure genius.

Never again will somebody accidentally quickly reduce the volume when some jackass has decided that their youtube video about how to fix a door handle needs to have maxxed-out raging death metal played over it.

A practical demonstration of the difference between 'resilient' and 'redundant'

Now are we TOTALLY sure that he didn't twiddle this switch on purpose? Seems like his belt made a good political move.

Re: Big in Japan

Their fault. It should have had a molly-guard.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: The "inspector"

Thanks, that is interesting to know.

Re: The "inspector"

That is so fake. And so 90s. Thanks for sharing!

Re: The "inspector"

May I ask what the SGIs were being used for? I collect them, so I'm just curious about that kind of thing.

Re: The "inspector"

That must have been a very old CPU...I have a Duron machine, and when I first tested it the thermal protection was tripping all the time. Just took a little bit of new thermal paste of course.

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Re: Who is daft enough...

I am with you, but unfortunately we are in the minority.

At this point, the smart thief would disable the wi-fi module and sell it as a network-disabled device.

(would make them rather easier to find and trace by scanning classified ads though)

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Re: Only in Chicago

Oh no! That episode of Columbo with the cheese!

After reportedly dragging its feet, BlackBerry admits, yes, QNX in cars, equipment suffers from BadAlloc bug

If I understand correctly, the memory safety in Rust comes primarily from static analysis mandated by the standard (outside of explicitly specified "unsafe blocks"). So if there is a memory allocation bug in a runtime library, no amount of safety built into the language is going to help right? After all, in the end the compiled code is still just pointers and offsets (with all the usual lack of safety guarantees).

Microsoft fiddles with Fluent while the long dark Nightmare of the Print Spooler continues for Windows

Re: "Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch apps have been replaced by a new Snipping Tool"

It does seem odd, since it's one of the few things in Windows that "just works" and didn't need any messing with to begin with.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

64-bit windows will still run 32-bit programs...what's the problem?

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

So the thing is...I've done this by accident when I was living in the middle east. Yes, it blew out the fuse on the 110 circuit. But what I found in my case was, the 220v circuit still worked fine (for many years in fact). So if you are in this situation, it's worth checking...not that one should give a customer a computer like that.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

What I meant was this: there is a philosophy (to which I prescribe) that software development is 100% a design exercise. When you write code, you are really specifying a program design to be executed by the computer. You must "design" a program that implements the requested UI.

Thus is laid bare the logic of my original statement.

They are effectively saying "hopefully it won't take as long to design as it took to design".

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

I think the potential pitfall with tethering crypto to something useful is this: when the bottom falls out of the market, the useful thing stops. You also have to be careful to pick something that won't eventually stop being useful.

That said, I agree with the sentiment.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

So there shouldn't ever be webapps then?

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: re: And people say 'there is no justice'....... They're right!

And the "doing anything other than sitting in a corner crying, because you are afraid that otherwise you will do something that upsets the mob for half a second" rate.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Would you rather people hide away their racism, or talk about it? You can't effectively argue against somebody who doesn't have a voice. I believe that racism as a guiding principle is truly wrong; I therefore do not fear people expressing racist opinions, because I believe that I will be able to effectively argue against them.

Re: Speechless?

In that region of the world, some of these prejudices run very deep. Their origins lie long before the modern North American nations existed. I think it's difficult to appreciate how that feels...I certainly don't claim to understand it.

That sounds entirely plausible. And maybe the guy is a prick, I don't know. All I'm left with is a perception that somebody is being punished for expressing a positive message.

I don't know if this essay was in earnest (or wasn't a bit nuts), but surely it is a good thing to be hearing people say such things? Role models for the capacity of the individual to discard bigotry? To acknowledge that the values they were raised with might be wrong?

To me, this man is just an abstract concept who might as well not actually exist. Those words are very real though. I will therefore judge the message rather than the man, and the message sounds pretty good.

Gung-ho tank gamer spills classified docs in effort to win online argument

Re: In the public domain

GOOD.

There are times when I believe it is appropriate to cycle on the sidewalk, but the fact that people treat it as the default is dangerous and they ought to be shot.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Connecting a PC to a reactor

TMI did fail safe. It was a financial disaster, but there was no human or environmental cost. It was just very expensive. It didn't even affect ongoing operation of the other reactors at that site.

Fukushima is obviously much worse, but I would argue that Fukushima is an example of how good Nuclear safety is. Considering how many things went wrong and the circumstances they were under, the harm was remarkably light. If the comparison is to fossil fuels...deepwater horizon is comparable IMO.

Chernobyl: Soviet Russia. Nuff said.

Re: Been there - on a Nuclear Power Plant

But there is plenty of room for error. All the safety things, the years of design work, the obsessive documentation, the anal policies, are about creating room for error. Note how this didn't cause any real damage.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

Sorry, yes, did know that. pre-coffee.

I'm imagining how much I would have cursed at you, come the day I came in to replace the monitor (since both the graphics card and the monitor would have needed repair).

But, I think all of us who have worked with pin/hole connectors have done this.

Re: Most common fault was Magnets

People who exclusively use laptops (read, most people).

Re: Your headline reminds me...

I...how is a vaxen making anybody money in 2021 outside of major infrastructure?

We already had this story!

WANT NEW STORY! WANT NEW STORY!

*hides under the covers while crying loudly*

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

The last time I used IDE was yesterday, on a Pentium 1 board. I accept that the penguin cannot support my hobbies forever, if only there were 12 other operating systems I could run on that machine :p

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Re: Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

Given the reasons that Concorde was ultimately shut down, I don't think this is true, unless they can bring down the operating cost significantly. I don't think many airlines want to buy a high-price plane that you can only fly over water.

Uncle Sam sanctions Chinese AI outfits for links to Xinjiang Uyghur human-rights abuses

Certainly not. In fact, I do not use any program or service that tags my photos, for pretty much this reason. I merely concede that it would be really useful if I did, because tagging photos is deeply tedious.

Cool uses of machine learning:

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Quality control of difficult to quantify objects

Tagging my photos

Scary uses of machine learning:

Pretty much all the other ones

Focus on the camera, mobile devs: 48MP shooters about to become the sweet spot

Re: Why the obsession with MP?

The small size of the image sensor and lack of an adjustable aperture are also big problems. The circle of confusion doesn't go away just because you have a lot of pixels, nor does the amount of light hitting the sensor somehow magically increase. There is also a huge restriction on what kinds of photos you can actually take because a phone does not have aperture adjustment; this is of course irrelevent because most phonetographers don't know what that means.

The software seems to be pretty good at giving people "the photo they want, not the photo they took" which is fine if you are not really interesting in photography.

I do wonder if the aperture problem is going to be partially solved using IR cameras. One could judge the depth of each point in the image, then apply blurring to simulate different DoF. I would be surprised if we don't see that soon (or it isn't being done already).