Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> await the manufacturers response to my query
This is a reaction that one sees quite often to the "OS ties BT and location together" issue - Amazon reviews for pretty much anything with BT are chock full of annoyed comments.
Looks like it is up to us to keep telling everyone that the manufacturers can do nothing about it, it is a problem baked into the 'phone OS and everyone should also be sending their complaints direct to Google (probably Apple as well - I have no iOS to check), plus BBC Watchdog, your local Privacy Activists etc. Complaining in public about things like this - one good thing that Twitter could be used for?
And stop buying things that use BT to talk to phones. Agreed, that is a problem if every damn diabetes test device uses BT instead of having its own *legible* display (wish Boots didn't seem so damn proud of those devices, putting them at the top of the display shelf).
Catch-22
Old Android (don't know about iOS) used to let you use Bluetooth without switching on location.
But I bet your diabetes app has been built with a copy of the SDK that - pointlessly - demands a newer version of the OS, preventing a downgrade (or just a cheap old phone to run that app).
As for requiring a valid location: probably the latest OS is getting stricter just to squeeze as much out of you as possible.
Because leaving something - anything - due to abuse is not "power" to those being abused, whatever it may look like to those who are lucky enough to not have been in that situation. No matter that "you are better off out of there", they have still had something taken away from them by bullies. The depth of reaction to that will vary, but it isn't going to feel positive.
Excuse me, but to proper English-type people, as the great Neddy Seagoon would put it, billion == bi-million == million * million, trillion == million * milion * million and do forth.
The weird ideas that billion == thousand * million came from the Yanks. For unfortunate reasons (i.e. managers and politicians like to use big words) there has been a creeping rot from the 1970s to the 2000s to abuse the language and cause bloody mayhem as the school text books started disagreeing with each other!
To say we do not know what a billion is is a vile canard!
wrote of the computer of the future (from the p.o.v. of the 70s and early 80s) as being a "hairy smoking golfball": a golfball to keep the size down and internal interconnects short, hairy because of the need for massive numbers of external interconnects and smoking because of the power needs. To beat this, aside from using his junction, we had hopes for novel architectures, which would filter down to the everyday users.
Now the lasting effects of the Japanese Fifth Generation Hardware projects are that people think database access languages are sensibly called "4GLs"!
Radio Times published an article on the future of computing (by a serious CS bod) which criticised Blake's 7 for having one big computer, Zen, instead of thousands of processing nodes scattered around the ship: whilst our systems do have a few processors on the periphery (in all the hard drives, SD cards and Apple charging cables) we've still ended up with a massive central lump containing a pile of jumped-up 8080s in the centre of the system. We have managed to shave some of the hair off by switching to serialised data lanes but live with the worry that the sodding huge cooling fan will stall and it'll start to smoke. Ok, some of us do also have significant processing power outside the CPU - in a second honking great lump that is even more liable to smoke! But even though GPUs are a good adjunct to the beastie at the centre of the box, their general architecture isn't brand spanking new.
It would be really good to see some interesting machine architectures on the market, even if they are "just" old ideas finaly come to life. Especially if we can *really* see them: there is a lot more interesting stuff hidden within the x64 devices than we actually get to directly play with.
> visa holders dancing to his merry tune
Well, at least one of the (I presume) pro-Elon (or glorious sarcasm) responses agrees, although it seems modern dance rather than old-fashioned ballet:
>>He is looking for coding athletes
Do you think anyone who can say that has *any* idea what programmimg entails? This same twitterer also clearly understands the advantages of Stockholm syndrome:
>>He is looking for mindset alignment
https://nitter.net/RLCJR1962/status/1593796351552266241
I worry how the Muskovites are going to cope once reality hits them.
Musk buys himself a mountain, stands at the peak and starts wildly lobbing (snow)[1]balls down. They hit the slopes and start gathering speed, getting more and more destructive as they go, crashing into anyone trying to live on the slopes - some get flung away, the rest are left battered and worried. All the guides that used to pay Musk so that they could use the slopes to sell to the touristst see what is coming and abandon the mountain.
Musk stands at the top, making snowmen and showing them off to the World ("This one is buy-a-blue-tick", "This one is called hardcore-software"). But the snowmen just topple down the slopes as well, increasing the mayhem below.
Hearing the rumbles getting louder, Musk finally looks down and notices that there is now an avalanche approaching the town in the foothills, but they haven't realised it yet. When it hits, the power will go out and all the townsfolk will be left in the dark, unable to find each other. And they will blame Musk, because they saw his snowmen.
Musk leaps into action, and does the only thing he can: he leaps into his helicopter, flies to the city and finds someone who will sit in his big chair on top of the mountain. Then, as the town disappears, Musk points up and shouts: "You see that man on top of the mountain? It is all his fault! I was over here, playing with my cars, when your lights all went out."
According to the linked-to article, the Tesla is reducing the amount of cooling given to the AMD processor - guess what happens if you don't provide adequate cooling to a big CPU!
The article also says that other Tesla models use an Intel device that isn't overheating - because it has a lower TDP. Which doesn't mean that the Intel device is better, it means that some engineer(s) decided to bung in a different part without comparing the specs and without knowing how close to its limit the Tesla's cooling system must be! The latter alone is not a comforting thought.
As already pointed out in comments here, having failed to notice what could go wrong, they also failed to set up the AMD device to protect itself (by starting to throttle from a lower temperature before overheating causes more a dramatic response).
So, to answer the question "Is that AMD's fault?" - nope; pretty sure they publish the TDP of their devices, so it is then up to Tesla engineers to read *all* the relevant spec sheets and put two and two together.
Unless, of course, the Tesla internal spec sheets don't accurately describe the limits of the cooling system...
My current PC is in a case that is 50cm tall - which is shorter than the one I had in the 90s. This wasn't the largest case available, but it makes a nice addition to the desk - the laptop cradle fits nicely on top, keeps that out of the way.
Last job, had three 50cm tall towers arrayed under a desk.
Do people *really* keep their tower PCs sitting on desk tops? Hope they remember to keep the castors locked!
Came looking for a Friday On Call, nothing to be seen.
But, Lo, here it is, shyly peeking out of Personal Tech.
Come on out, we're not going to hurt you, everyone is nice here.
(Leaps onto very short "story", demanding to know if that is all we're getting, I waited a whole week for *this*?)
Collaborative document:
Markdown (or force a minimal subset of (La)TeX) with the file maintained in the VCS of your choice (I still like svn 'cos TortoiseSVN is simple enough for the non-techies: update and commit, simple words).
Build machine (or cron or a never-ending Windows dot-bat) gets latest copy, tops and tails with cover sheet, contents, headers & footers, bibliography etc then formats it into PDF and HTML on the shared drive (whether that is LAN fileserver, DropBox or whatever) and website.
For big docs, one input text file per chapter/section.
For people editing on their phones & tablets, the tricky bit is the VCS - can probably bodge that with the Build job and per-person shared folders. Merge conflicts still painful.
Confluence - or pretty much an Wiki-style environment - is good for collaborating on a Page or set of Pages that are going to mostly be read online, but trying to get a proper "document" out of it is (was?) a pain in the backside. A document with the correct Corporate coversheet, dictionary of terminology, contents, appendices, index etc, that you can send off as a PDF to the auditor.
I've got a pile of programs and scripts that can (well, could - 99% chance the format has changed again) collate Pages and add the missing bits to spit out a usable PDF. But only from a Confluence dump - trying to get it to work "live" within Confluence wasn't working (then I left the job - if there was still a free self-hosted tier I'd be tempted to keep this code going, but the Cloud kills).
I must get around to using one of these "IDE"s one day, they sound awfully clever.
> the IDE would highlight any attempt to pass an int as an argument to a 'char *' parameter
Gosh, just like my compiler, eh? Well I never.
Sorry, bit snarky, but having had arguments because someone's IDE would require fewer keystrokes for him, if only we'd rename every member variable in all of our sources (no-one else seemed to have this trouble). Someone else demanding we redo the build system because he didn't know how to make his IDE invoke our existing makefiles, And so on over the years, I get a bit twitchy when someone praises IDEs a bit *too* much. Not that I want to see Hungarian notation, no sirree.
Guess I just like using separate editors, debuggers, profilers, compilers, build tools and so forth, mixing and matching to fit the job, rather than one super-duper do-it-all IDE. Or, worse, more than one IDE 'cos they target different parts of the system!
But down with Hungarian notation, anway: long, pronounceable, names for the win.
Almost forgot:
> This is the trap of FOSS
Why is this a "trap"?
Are you referring to some commercial program that is only available on a commercial/non-free OS and having a FOSS counterpart would mean you could get away without the commercial OS, but you can't find such a FOSS program? Or an alternate commercial package that runs on your OS of choice?
You are correct that Open Source Software tends to be all about the programmers solving their own problems: "scratching their own itch".
But I do find your examples to be backwards to my experience. Everyone wants to work on office packages, that is why they are there? Really? How many office packages are there (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, ??) and how many of those were actually started as FOSS when someone had an itch to scratch? (Hint: neither of the two I mentioned).
On the other hand, proper text editors for programmers, there are far more of those than wordprocessors. And highly functional (but not at all pretty) packages for consistently formatting text into convention posters, publishable papers, formal reports, books etc.
If you look back on the old collections of FOSS that were passed around on floppy and CDR, you'll find that most of it (once you skip past the games) was written by and/supported by scientists, researchers and the like. Lawrence Livermore Labs was a name I became very familiar with, good software came from there (no doubt still does). We knew about this because, well, you bought a CDR and that was pretty much all of the FOSS available; indexed alphabetically, you couldn't escape knowing about it. Which was a refreshing eye-opener: prior to that you only heard about programs if you happened to read a newsletter or paper that mentioned a new release, or it by word of mouth (literally - Usenet, and access to it, came later!)
Now, with so much available, perhaps you are only aware of the stuff that is publicised, reported on (El Reg included), that everyone knows about and/or what you yourself have looked for. There is still a very rich vein of FOSS outside of the mainstream, but in an odd turnaround we are back to word of mouth and occasional random references in El Reg comments to obscure packages.
Having said that, sponsorship is always going to be useful, so long as there aren't too many strings.
Unless we have a scheme to keep changing what the deepfake detector looks for, so that it becomes impossible for the deepfakers to learn, at least in a short time period (which determines the rate that things are changed).
My suggestion: we all learn about microexpressions from a series of Derren Brown specials on C4, who also publishes a book of "One Thousand Facial Tics You Can Practice At Home". Faced with a deepfake of yourself you just have to demonstrate that the video shows the wrong tic for the claimed timestamp.
This is only a hurriedly dreamt up scheme (literally, at gone midnight) so you may find some flaws in the protocol, but they can be fixed. For a start, how to let the detector know which is your correct tic on that date? Clearly, we will need a NGO to keep a register the detector can consult - this would be OfTic. High profile targets, like politicians, will be served by a formal governmental body, the Ministry of Peculiar Faces.
Finally, to ensure against faking whole-body videos, we will of course rely on selecting random gaits provided by the Ministry of Funny Walks.
Well, all the easy and successful data transfers to & from all the phones, tablets and ereaders in this particular household are done using cables.
Just find it a lot easier to plug into a computer and use the big keyboard, mouse and screen to manage moving files around: the computer has one nice consistent interface and can see the file servers and DVR without having to piddle about with installing more apps that may or may not connect this time.
Actually, I tell a lie: the calendars get synced by WiFi to NextCloud - and even though each calendar change can hardly be measured in kB the number of notifications that they failed to sync is bleeping annoying.
Your mileage may vary. Data over cables can go up or down.
and added to the KPIs on the management dashboard.
Heard in the morning standup:
"Can you explain why none of you have played IceBreaker once in the past two months?"
"Well, we were talking about this over our daily tea and buns run, and all we decided that"
"Don't talk back! You are going stop wasting company time on buns and start playing IceBreaker! We need you to be building up your relationships within the team!"
I'd assumed that the two paragraphs about KIR and use of Group Policies would just be copy and pasted verbatim into these articles, but no, they are slightly different each time.
Thank heavens for that bit of editing, or we'd never be able to tell these MS stories apart.
Hmm, as a life-long Brit, I don't associate "toot" with "fart" - it would rather ruin the phrase "toot your horn" and you'd have to stop telling younglings that Percy the engine goes "toot toot".
At the risk of taking this too far (too far, on El Reg? Is that even possible?), I'd point out that a "toot" describes a sudden short sound and what kind of self-respecting fart would that be!
