Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
Apparently[1], you could learn the history of experimental hardware, particularly the centrifuges, by reading the scars in the walls of the university basement lab: note how the 4 cm deep gash bisects that strange chemical stain...
[1] "apparently" 'cos I never went down to look - mad science is scarey!
> This is what version control should absolutely not be used for
Uh, can't agree with that "absolutely" - you find an apparent problem with a recent code change and want some more info about it, going for a chat with the person who made the change is the best approach. You can check the issue tracker (linked to from the commit comment, wasn't it - if not, go for a chat...) and then back to the requirements first, of course...
Note that, despite the name of the Subversion command "blame" (which I also believed was chosen as a short command name when devs were capable of talking tongue in cheek), "going for a chat" does *not* mean "chucking blame around" (well, not until they prove themselves to be total &£@+%&).
Get your sword, Coding Style Heretic!
Always have your braces lining up vertically, indent one space (tabs are for barbarians!) inside the braces. Then use your editor's "mark column" and "jump to matching brace" actions to give you a nice vertical highlight when everything matches properly.
Macros, baby, macros.
For anyone lucky enough to have missed it, there was a craze in the 80s to write C that looked "readable", from all the coders who knew BASIC/Pascal/ALGOL/SIMULA and were suddenly presented with a C compiler on the IBM PC (Amiga programmers knew better!). Cue hundreds of headers starting
#define BEGIN {
Even using "FOR" instead of "for"!
The best fun was had with the slight changes in preprocessor behaviour - it seems that some would strip out comments whilst others just did the macro & include expansions, leaving comments in the output. So cue people writing
#define FOREACH(i,n) int i; for(i=0; i<n;++n) // C is weird, starts count at zero
FOREACH (j, k) BEGIN printf(" %d", j); END
Would the numbers appear on stdout? Maybe?
I would agree, except that there is no evidence to validate that assumption in any of the reports on this story that I've found so far.
In particular, please refer to the earlier Register article at https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/medibank_data_breach_worsens/ and the PDF it links to where Medibank describe the state of affairs: there is no mention in that of any loss or encryption of data.
> there is only a limited chance paying a ransom would ensure the return of our customers' data ...
What? What does "returning" it mean?
Was the data deleted from MediBank's system and they hope restore it (corruption-free, of course!)? Haven't spotted where that was claimed.
Maybe their data is like the EMH - apparently the Doctor's data can only exist on one host at a time...
> And then also ask yourself which and/ or which user NEEDS that metadata...
That much metadata is intended not for the Users.
Now, be a good boy and just put the picture from your 'phone straight, they'll know what to do with it.
Remember, render unto Meta that which is meta.
> looks like a spectacularly inappropriate use of AI.
That seems like a bit of an over reaction. Google haven't enslaved a General Systems Vehicle's Mind, forcing it to look at FaceBook image posts all day.
They are just running a lump of code to do a job: a trained tensorflow-lite model which decides which bit of the image to put out in full detail next. Really, it is doing little more than the existing progressive scan does, except instead of having a "top to bottom (skipping k rows), left to right (skipping j columns), repeat with offsets until the whole image is done" co-ordinate generator it has a "pick an interesting bit, pick another until the hole image is done" generator.
So, do you object to using that many CPU cycles "just to compress an image"? Many cycles are used just to generate stuff that someone hopes is pleasing to the eye.
Or do you find the idea of training a ML model to this task inappropriate? It probably kept someone gainfully employed for awhile and one can think of other uses for this or a similar model - how about setting camera focus? Always worth at least trying an idea...
Satisfy my curiosity - what is so 'inappropriate" here?
X := my past performance at judging the desirability of a fashion item, taking into account its practical application, apparent cost of materials, durability etc.
Y := apparent similarity between myself and other El Reg commenter, based on vaguely remembered posts
f(a) := likelihood person of class 'a' follows a comment written like this to the end
Z := ratio(f(fashionable young person), f(commentard))
Combining X*Y with Z and weighting for "how many sleeps before Christmas" implies: Huawei are going to sell lots more of these than any of us can believe.
> ... embedded devices ... It doesn't matter though, as they are single purpose devices
For j.random IoT thing, true.
But some less fashion-driven embedded devices do have long production lives and/or long contractual support lives, where you do have to worry about being able to source equivalent parts after the first choice processors went EOL. If the new part isn't software compatible then your costs just went up (painfully, as even if the original devs are still hanging around they've probably forgotten all about that code).
So, if these two succeed in ousting even a noticeable chunk of ARM devices from made-in-China products isn't that going to make them the Number 1 in terms of installed RISC-V base, putting them in prime position to drive the adoption of processor extensions and hence reduce the fragmentation? As in, everyone elses extension choices become bit players as far as application developers are concerned.
So rather than being concerned about the fragmentation problem and waffling over it, if they just plough on as fast and hard as possible, they simply get rid of the problem and can push towards whatever is needed to supplant their remaining ARM devices.
Which gives us all a better RISC-V landscape for running our applications over multiple products and gives Arm some healthy competition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_(company)
> Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England.[7] ... Since 2016, it has been owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
Good enough for me.
All together now: Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free
> to protect me from ..
No, to protect *others* FROM YOU
> For me personally that risk/reward ratio just doesn't add up
Not risk/reward, this isn't some kind of monetary bet that you have voluntarily entered!
> I now see hardly anyone in England wearing them
So, everyone else is ignorant and/or an arsehole, therefore you can act the same way they are, with a clear conscience.
Except that you've entered into discussions on the subject and been given answers, so you don't get to use the "ignorant" excuse.
Shorter version:
Tummy Trouble (SASS) : caused by too hot curry
SASS-2 : caused by catching 'flu
SASS-3 : caused by catching a very fast football in just the wrong way
All three have the same major symptoms, hence get the same descriptor, but have three distinctly different causes.
SASS-3 was described as "novel" because it turned out it wasn't a football but a medicine ball and no-one had seen anyone manage to kick one like that before.
Just in case anyone else is as confused as this poor chap:
The name "SARS" is a description of the *symptoms*, not the *cause*:
Sudden (it happens without prior warning symptoms)
Acute (it acts on a short time scale - you die or you get over it quite quickly)
Respiratory (the bits you breathe with are affected the most)
Syndrome (Mr Incredible's nemesis - no, sorry, it means there is a group of symptoms that all relate to this and you get a selection of them: e.g. total loss of smell, difficulty breathing but this time you didn't get the muscle aches).
A while back, the world had an outbreak whose identifying characteristic symptoms fit the above description and that is how the medics described it when asked by the TV sofa dollies: who promptly decided that that was a *name* not just a description of symptoms and ran with it. If we'd had sofa dollies back in the day then Shingles would be LOIS (Late Onset Itchie Scabbies).
When we got another outbreak with similar symptoms, the condition got, surprise, the same description and the medics, sighing as they talked to the media, said "No, we have no proof that it is the same disease as the previous SARS" so guess what it became known as? Yup, SARS-2.
In between, MERS got tagged as a Respiratory Syndrome coming from the Middle East.
Remember, SARS and MERS are just descriptions of symptoms - they do *not* say anything about the *cause* of the symptoms. Consider: if we had only discovered in the last few years that a large group of people had a long-standing wet cough, distinctive yellowing of the epidermis and smelt foul then that would also be described as a Respiratory Syndrome - chronic, not acute, so Chronic Respiratory Epidermal Smell Syndrome or CRESS. Aka Smoker's Cough.
The *cause* of SARS-2 is a *novel* (as in, we had not seen this one before) virus which is in the family of coronavirii, which was discovered in 2019, hence COVID-19 (which is actually just a convenient abbreviation for the actual name of the disease agent, which is - skip that, this comment is too long already).
> cross checking is both tenuous to deal with, and a good thing
Did you mean to say "tedious to deal with"?
You did? Good, good, just checking (We've got enough trouble from the anti-science brigade without giving them fuel around peer-review being fake!)
Hmm, the most salient Chief Twit Tweet on this subject would appear to back up your descripton:
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577428272056389633
> Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app
However, when you say
>> This is not Musk deliberately burning Twitter to the ground
keep in mind that many an arson investigations revolves around identifying the type and source of the accelerant.
> WrongThink against the current narrative
Sigh. You were doing so well, then the paranoia slipped through in the last sentence.
Seriously, if you actually *want* to be taken seriously, re-read your comments before posting and edit out lines like that.
Alternatively, instead of using narrative, just call dissenters "sheeple" - saves on the typing.
You rail against misinformation over Covid (which, oddly, we are still learning about, one reason that advice changes) but you can't even be bothered to report accurately snd honestly about diseases we *have* gained a lot of knowledge about:
> Polio vaccine pretty much lasts your whole life.
The standard Western-style Polio vaccine regime - when you have completed it, all 5 doses[2] - provides good[1] protection GIVEN THE LEVEL OF EXPOSURE YOU ARE LIKELY TO ENCOUNTER IN AN ALMOST COMPLETELY VACCINATED POPULATION. If there is a bad outbreak in your area, you go and get a Polio booster!
Which is why a polio booster is on the recommendations for travellers.
[1] good, not perfect
[2] some places only do 4 doses, cheaper that way - remember, this is NOT some magic guaranteed shield against Polio, it is all a numbers game!
> "The sad thing about .NET open source is that we still call it third-party open source..."
It *is* third-party open source. So is Linux, Python and other stuff used on/with AWS. Different third parties in each case, of course. What is sad about that?
> "...That should not be the case."
So, Amazon is - going to try and buy .NET Core?
Yours etc, Confused of Tunbridge Wells
> We have two Eaton 3S Mini UPS 36W backups....
Very sensible.
Nicely illustrates a big problem with the move to VOIP in all the homes: the lucky few on fora like this one at least know that we should be considering backup power; we'll even pick up hints about part numbers to look for.
But do we really think that the kit offered to the average home owner will come with power backup as standard - or as an optional extra? Will Granny know enough to even consider the question?
And if Granny has to go looking for an UPS herself, who'll explain the terms used (take your example: a 36W unit, but over what time period? Does it store 360Wh, enough to keep going overnight -just- or is it 1Wh and goes out after one brief shining moment?)
Got NextCloud installed at home and shared calendars & contacts working with our phones & tablets - so far, so good.
Having done that, it'd seem to make sense to get a few other useful plugins to leverage the resource investment in the installation (!) but in all honesty I look at articles extolling the virtues of one thing or another and am left confused: most seem to just say "Plugin X is a workable replacement for Other Company's Y", whilst the site for Y mostly tells me it'll "fit in with my lifestyle", whatever that means.
Ok, file sharing we understand the concept of, but, um, it is running on the same home server, we can see all the files already. We rarely collaborate on processing words (different interests). Well, it does have bookmarks to to out svn and BugZilla home pages with icons, which is a nice reminder.
So, serious question: any suggestions for NextCloud features that are worth a look at for a small household setup?
> that was stated in the pile of paper that comes with a new machine and which is the first to end up in recycling
What you are promised in that pile of paper never seems to be fulfilled.
Still waiting for the golden sun-kissed beach and golden sun-kissed lady[1] that the EeePC promised. Even sent in the little card with name and address and everything.
Now I'm starting to doubt that they'll be shipping the crowd of adoring rock fans with the MIDI extension cable.
[1] For the sake of inclusion, I'd put a note here that other models are available, but then that'd just be even more people disappointed at the lack of delivery.
> I think many would prefer Office to disable/grey out functionality not supported by the user-set default document format
In my experience (which admittedly ignores some features, for the sake of a simple life) that *is* what Office is doing.
In other words, *all* of the features you've used *are* supported when e.g. saving an ODF file and the message is just there to give your FUD a boost.
Having said that, sometimes it is necessary to generate an obviously less than capable format, such as RTF, to feed a particular process. In those cases it would be good if *all* of the wordprocessors would grey out the unsaveable options. That would save arguments and mean one doesn't need to beat writers into using WordPad (!) instead of their beloved wordprocessor.
Come 20th December and a flood of 2-day shipping offers for a rare, mint-condition-box iPhone*
*auction only includes box, which is in "mint" condition**
**was only printed on 18th December and we put in fresh ink*** cartridges
***well, we call it ink - just don't touch the box with your bare hands, ok
> I have used 3D printed parts for more than a decade and have a 3D filament printer sitting right here next to me. One thing that any experienced materials engineer knows is that feedstock is a huge issue. The moon isn't homogenous material on the surface ... needs processing ...
But how do these problems change as you go up in scale? This is talking about making roads, landing pads and other large scale structures, which are going to behave grossly differently to the filament printers you are used to. Non-homogenous regolith? Dig up a mass of it, crunch it up over a sieve and stir well: may be all the processing required. Extrude it through a meter-wide nozzle or roll out a nice thick layer and sinter it a frickin' huge beam (maybe just from a thin but massive solar reflector, two weeks on and two weeks off).
Even the existing Earth-bound house-sized 3D printers may be working at a small scale compared to their Lunatic plans.
On Twitter - great, now I've read more tweet replies, including this doozy (just sharing the joy with you all):
----------+
SpaceX:
Standing down from launch of ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 1 to allow for additional pre-flight checkouts; now targeting Thursday, December 1 at 3:37 a.m. ET for liftoff
Reply:
https://mobile.twitter.com/hasbeensilenced/status/1597819885480206336
12-1 3:37. Where do y’all come up with the numbers? 13:13 there’s possibly a potential for bad luck with that launch… just sayin.
---------
Can you spot where he got the two thirteens from?
Anyway, despite the tone of the headline (I know, red top) no sign (yet) that it'll need anything drastic, like a roll back, so fingers crossed for later this morning.
Although I have mixed feelings about commercial landers dropping off rovers: how long before "testing the properties of the regolith" becomes "varying the albedo of the regolith - oh, look, a giant Nike swoosh, who knew that was going to happen?" (Yes, it'd take a long time to draw big enough to be easily visible, but if it is all alone with no kind of atmosphere then it can just keep on going, two weeks on and two weeks off)
The wife let hers lapse when she retired and without it we can't see what the paper says about generating holograms :-(
The easy-read announcement does mention that the device uses the LEDs to tune the cavities in the device, which is then illuminated by a laser. So would the cavities be tuned to effectively create a diffraction pattern which the laser illuminates powerfully enough to generate a visible hologram in the same way as a diffraction pattern on a photographic plate is used? In which case the pattern of LEDs (hence cavity tuning) only need be refreshed at the overall frame rate (24 fps for R2-D2) and according to an old colleague, calculating those diffraction patterns has been a solved problem for quite a long time (though how much CPU needed to do it real-time?)
Or is it talking about some wild method of changing the tunings super-fast in order to generate the complex wavefronts directly, not relying diffraction?
Or something completely different from classic holography (but not, just a really, really god Pepper's Ghost)?
> There is that, but it IS still a spy tool from the CCP
Don't deny that.
But from the point of view of the majority of the people in the world who are part of neither China nor the US, we're seeing *both* lots gathering the same information on everyone (or having a damn good try at doing so).
Any particular reason to be happier about one side rather than the other?
(And, yes, the UK, France, Kenya, Tuvalu and all the rest would probably also like to get the same info, but so far only two players have managed to get massive numbers of people to voluntarily install the apps).
