* Posts by Steve Todd

2644 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007

Inventor of McDonald's iconic Big Mac dies

Steve Todd

Re: Guilt complex

American lawyers would take that as an admission of guilt, and sue for a billion or more. CEOs have to take that kind of thing into account.

Happy days for second-hand smartphone sales

Steve Todd

Re: The used market is an opportunity to profit?

There are also opportunities selling official parts, certifying referb and repair companies etc.

Kids' Hour of Code turns into a giant corporate infomercial for kids

Steve Todd

Re: Minecraft as a way to force Win 10 in education

@Rob 44: Erm, isn't that an enditement of Microsoft programming?

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

Steve Todd
Stop

When was the last time

That a business presentation needed 10 or more hours of power, more than 1TB of data and a hard wired network connection? Worst case you need a video cable, and maybe a VGA adapter in the unlikely event your client is really behind the times.

Google: If you think we're bad, you should take a look at Apple

Steve Todd

Do they still not understand

That market dominance is the important factor here. You can do what you want (within limits) providing you don't hold a dominant position in the market. The moment you do additional rules apply. Since Google have a 75% market share in Europe those rules apply to them.

Brexflation: Lenovo, HPE and Walkers crisps all set for double-digit hike

Steve Todd

Re: Cause and effect?

Unfortunately most international trade is priced in USD. Oil for example, even if it never goes anywhere near the US, is priced in USD per barrel. Most electronics manufacturing happens in China, who wants to be paid in USD. Result: computers and other IT equipment goes up in price.

Walkers may have a hard time justifying their price increase (energy costs will rise, as will the cost of imported potatoes, but that adds up to a cost price that has changed by small fraction of the exchange rate delta), but HPE and Lenovo have a fair point.

Tesla to charge for road trip 'leccy, promises it will cost less than petrol

Steve Todd
Stop

The Model 3

Was never going to be included for free charging anyway. That was made known up front when it was announced. Only the Model S and Model X were down for "free" charging (the cost had been factored in to the list price).

Oh joy. You can now buy a gold plated quadcopter drone

Steve Todd

Above Ground Level is important here

It's perfectly possible to be under 400 feet AGL, but at an altitude of over 5000 feet. Having a drone which is able to take off in those conditions is kind of useful.

Dynamic IP addresses are your personal property, CJEU rules

Steve Todd

Property?

Erm, no. Personally Identifiable Information, yes. The combination of dynamic IP and time is personally identifiable.

The EUCJ is saying that the German government can't require the ISP to store that data as doing so contravenes the EU convention. They do seem to have little idea how easy it is for a computer to combine together the IP and time to link to the subscriber, but that's another point entirely.

Pocket C.H.I.P. makers go Pro with cloud-linked ARM-flexing module for IoT gizmo builders

Steve Todd

It has some stiff competition

The ESP32 for example is a twin core, 32 bit SoC with built in WiFi and Bluetooth, but can be purchased as a module for about $6. There's quite a bit of effort to make it programmable from the Arduino IDE (not my ideal choice I'll admit).

Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA. Repeat, Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA

Steve Todd

Altera have been using ARM for a while

The Cyclone V SE has been shipping with them for a couple of years now. Intel meanwhile have specialist Xeon parts with FPGA fabric on them.

I'd guess that the design work for this was underway pre the Intel buy-out so there's nothing particularly noteworthy about it having an ARM in there. I understand there are specialist Xeon models out there with FPGA fabric also. No real change yet.

EU turns screws on Android – report

Steve Todd

Re: does size matter?

Yes. Once a company reaches 50% or more of a market they are subjected to different rules to prevent them abusing their dominance. As Android constitutes around 80% of the mobile OS market, and the reason for that dominance is down to the size of the Play store, then restricting access to that store unless you follow a set of rules that Google lay down, including insisting on bundling Google apps, constitutes abuse of power.

One-way Martian ticket: Pick passengers for Musk's first Mars pioneer squad

Steve Todd

Roughly 150 tons of fuel are joined to the stack by the second launch. It's that which will be consumed to boost to the specified 6.5km/s transfer velocity and slow down at the far end. It's the size of the fuel budget that gets them the speed, and nothing to date has had a budget anywhere close.

Steve Todd

You can do it in a lot less time than that, providing you start out with enough thrust. Elon thinks that the right balance between cargo capacity and safely transiting the distance is 80 days. Add more passengers and it takes longer, less and you can do it quicker.

Video service Binge On 'broke the internet' but 99pc of users love it

Steve Todd

Mr O still doesn't understand net neutrality

The objection is to ISPs giving preferential treatment to services that pay them for the privilege. The reason being this discourages new companies and services as they are unable to compete on a level playing field with the established players.

It doesn't matter that, in the short term, consumers like the product. In the long term it's against their interests.

If we can't fix this printer tonight, the bank's core app will stop working

Steve Todd

Re: Same thing happened to me...

Reminds me of a company I was working at many years ago where they found a secretary touch-typing her boss's emails from her screen. When asked why she said the laser printer they had given her was broken. The fix? Load it with paper.

Zombie Moore's Law shows hardware is eating software

Steve Todd

There's also Altera's version in the form of the Cyclone V SE. You can share memory or talk to the CPU via the AMBA interface.

There's even a cheap(ish) Dev board in the form of the DE0 Nano SOC.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&No=941

Steve Todd

Re: The software is still there

Talk to nVidia or AMD. Their GPUs are a mix of dedicated hardware and stream processors. No one said hardware could do everything, but there's a lot of performance to be had by offloading the right bits of a task to it.

Steve Todd

Re: Nothing wrong with the chips.

@boltar - so you're coding exclusively in assembler and hitting the hardware directly are you? It's the compiler, hardware abstraction layers and library code that slows a modern program down compared to days of yor. All of those are good things in terms of productivity.

Even ripping those out you still have the basic problem that a CPU is designed to execute a stream of instructions, one at a time. There are assorted techniques used to make this as fast as possible, but it's still effectively a sequential process. Hardware is good at tasks that can be either pipelined or run in parallel (or both). If the workload is suitable then hardware can implement it thousands of times faster than the best written code.

Steve Todd

Re: I Call BS

You're not getting it. Software will not be going away. What will be happening is that progressively more work will be offloaded to hardware, at least some of which can be soft-configured (which is the whole point of FPGAs). "Patch Tuesday" will contain updated soft configurations as well as traditional code. There's also the matter of the driver stack that connects the software to the hardware.

Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat?

Steve Todd

Re: Tesla does have a weird reputation...

The problem with the Topgear review was that it didn't represent what happened during filming. I've no problem with them saying it caught fire/ran out of charge etc if that's what actually happened on the day, but to misrepresent events isn't on.

I can understand, in part at least, why they don't like electric cars (the G-Wiz is wretched for example) but Tesla are pushing them to the point they compete fairly well with Petrol (usable range, good acceleration and handling, not a track car), and that should have been more accurately portraid.

FBI overpaid $999,900 to crack San Bernardino iPhone 5c password

Steve Todd

Re: I'm not sure how he thinks this will work on an iPhone 6

From a hacker's point of view:

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Mandt-Demystifying-The-Secure-Enclave-Processor.pdf

Does that help?

Steve Todd

Re: I'm not sure how he thinks this will work on an iPhone 6

I'm not sure where you get some of this from but :

1) the secure enclave is a physical not a virtual processor. It has 4MB of its own flash memory directly on the SoC die and runs its own OS.

2) the details are quite well documented, as are the APIs used to access it. See for example https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

Steve Todd

Re: I'm not sure how he thinks this will work on an iPhone 6

But the key to the data on the flash is maintained in the secure section of the A7 and higher. Once the secure section decides that the maximum number of attempts are reached (it is a separate CPU with limited connection to the main system) it destroys the key and the data is rendered useless. It doesn't matter how many copies of the data you have, the copies still need the AES key in order to read them.

Steve Todd

I'm not sure how he thinks this will work on an iPhone 6

With the iPhone 5 and earlier the AES key and try count are stored on the flash chip. Reloading that chip with a copy will reset the count of tries. On the iPhone 5S and higher (anything with an A7 or newer) the key information and count are stored on a secure area of the CPU chip. Taking an image of the flash memory will have no effect on retry counts or prevent the key from being erased.

Brave telco giants kill threat of decent internet service in rural North Carolina

Steve Todd
Stop

Re: business perspective

Do you not see the difference between it being unprofitable for a company to provide a service and the company getting laws passed to prevent local residents providing the service for themselves?

Either it's not profitable, in which case the company should have no interest in the area, or it is, in which case they should be providing a decent service.

VW Dieselgate engineer sings like a canary: Entire design team was in on it – not just a few bad apples, allegedly

Steve Todd

Re: 376 MPG

The current world record is actually 12,600MPG (US), but that's at a steady 30km/h and the vehicle is highly impractical for daily use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-car_II

US Congress blew the whistle on tax-dodging Apple, claims Europe

Steve Todd

Double taxation

That's the reason that companies don't want to repatriate foreign earnings to the US is that they will first have to pay corporate tax on the profits (35% at the moment as I understand it), then any money paid as dividends is also taxed at another 15%. If Congress were to fix that then there would be more pressure from investors to bring money home.

Tesla driver dies after Model S hits tree

Steve Todd

He must have come off the road at a hell of a clip

The Tesla S has one of the best ratings for crash impact out there. If the car went off the road, into a tree, sprayed batteries about liberally and caught fire then the driver wasn't likely to have faired any better in a conventional car.

Steve Todd

Looking a little deeper

It seems that the car it's self didn't catch fire. What did were the battery modules that had been flung free by the impact.

The second, and unverified fact is that it was a 2013 model without Autopilot fitted.

Star Trek's Enterprise turns 50 and still no sign of a warp drive. Sigh

Steve Todd

Reactionless drive?

Even were it possible, a craft powered by such a device still couldn't travel faster than light. If the author understands e=mc^2 they should realise that only by converting a body completely to energy can it reach the speed of light. As the craft approaches the speed of light time dialation effects become apparent. The acceleration experienced by the occupants remains constant, but to an external observer it reduces. As they approach light speed their time slows to zero as does their acceleration.

The whole hyperspace/wormhole thing in SciFi is a plot device to get around this problem.

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

Steve Todd

MiG fighter?

Try an Areo L39 (Czechoslovakian jet trainer that can be bought comparatively cheaply once the old eastern block fell apart).

It's OK to fine someone for repeating a historical fact, says Russian Supreme Court

Steve Todd

Re: Fact-checking, we've heard about it

Even China is getting hacked off with the behaviour of North Korea, as can be seen in their voting in the UN, and North Korea is one of their client states. I wouldn't hold that up as an example (though I agree that the "news" companies are far from neutral).

If you want to build your own Nvidia-powered self-driving car – or hack one – here's a blueprint

Steve Todd

Re: Real Programmers...

You do realise that the author of that article declares anyone who doesn't write unstructured FORTRAN on IBM mainframes not to be a real programmer? I doubt you qualify, and neither do 99.9999% of the readership here.

Pascal in this case is a GPU family code name, not a language BTW

Google's brand new OS could replace Android

Steve Todd

Re: Lost my interest and lunch at C++

OOP isn't about making things faster, it's about isolating functional blocks from each other. C++ will let you write bad code, but done properly it can produce robust, testable code that isn't much slower than raw C. If you think otherwise you're doing it wrong (and yes, I've seen an awful lot of programmers who claim to understand OOP who don't)

£1m military drone crashed in Wales after crew disabled anti-crash systems – report

Steve Todd

Re: GPS ASL

GPS isn't accurate enough for a precision approach. You need a base station station transmitting position corrections (DGPS) for that, or the new Galeleo cluster when they are up and running.

Russia is planning to use airships as part of a $240bn transport project

Steve Todd

Helium is a byproduct

From natural gas fields. The shortage is only in the capacity to extract it (and as the price climbs the incentive to extract it increases also).

Intel overhyping flash-killer XPoint? Shocked, we're totally shocked

Steve Todd

Re: Specs

You're confusing servers with workstations. Workstations spend most of their lives waiting for users to tell them what to do. Servers can get thousands of requests per second, in which case the time it takes to transfer the requested data from disk to memory is important.

In case you hadn't figured, this is a server class product (read expensive).

Clinton outphished by Trump

Steve Todd

Afghanistan was a Bush initiative

As a response to 9/11 lest we forget (and for reasons that aren't very obvious, Saudi Arabia had far more to do with backing the attacks). Having made the mess (partly due to equipping the Talliban in the first place) at least the US committed to clearing it up.

Seagate inflates 12TB helium drives, floats them to IT bods to test

Steve Todd

Re: How big is the case it comes with?

I'm not sure where you got the idea of helium embrittlement from, I can't find any reference to it myself (to the contrary, even when ion beam implantation of helium is used there doesn't seem to be a problem).

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

Steve Todd

Re: Members of the the House of Lords agree

Except that Greenfield isn't talking about WiFi being unsafe, she's talking about large amounts of Internet usage by kids, and her colleagues don't agree with her

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3196340/Baroness-Susan-Greenfield-slammed-Oxford-colleagues-misleading-unfounded-claims-internet-damages-children-s-brains.html

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Steve Todd

Re: Missing option in survey @alain williams

"How does the screen narration work in your superior OS?"

Since its been part of OS X since version 10.4 (VoiceOver, which is also included in iOS), and it hooks in to Braille displays at a system level also, then apparently quite well.

Tesla's splitting with sensor supplier

Steve Todd
Stop

Re: Getting Distracted

The supercharger network is still a bit thin in the UK, but an 80% charge in the time it takes you to pop in to a service station for a coffee and to use the loo isn't much of a limitation.

Steve Todd

Re: Getting Distracted

The other point is that, as volumes ramp up, the cost per kWh of the battery packs falls. In 10-12 years a replacement pack will be far cheaper than it is today.

Your petrol car also contains consumable parts (oil, spark plugs, filters, belts etc) which are going to add up to rather more in maintainance over that period.

Steve Todd

Re: Getting Distracted

How often do you drive more than 250 miles in a day? When you do, do you stop off for a coffee break?

People make far too much about the range limits of these cars. I have a friend with a BMW i3, with a range of around 90 miles on a charge. He manages quite well even with that, and he makes a long journey twice a week with it.

Seminal adventure game The Hobbit finally ported to the Dragon 64

Steve Todd

Re: TI99/4A

The 99/4A was intentionally hamstrung by TI marketing. They didn't want it to compete with their lucrative mini market, so they gave the CPU (which had a fair bit of grunt for the day) a tiny amount of fast RAM and made if request the rest from the video chip. The result was like slow motion.

Tesla's Model S autonomous mode may have saved a life

Steve Todd
FAIL

Re: PR stunt

Someone stepping out in front of you, at night, dressed in dark clothes and not at a crossing point counts as "too fast for the conditions" now does it? The glare was only a distraction here, not what would have been the major cause of the accident (stupidity on the part of the pedestrian).

The car was physically able to stop inside of the required distance. The driver failed to spot the issue partially because of distractions, but mainly because the pedestrian seems to have gone out of their way to make themselves hard to spot.

MPs tell BT: Lay more fibre or face split with Openreach

Steve Todd

Re: Apples vs Oranges

In the same way that you (normally) don't have enough cash to pay for a new house or car. The company borrows money for capital projects that will be repaid over 10 or more years. That way we get our shiney new network/house/car now and it is paid down over its expected life span.

Steve Todd

Apples vs Oranges

£10bn over 10 years (of which £3bn was in broadband) works out at about £1bn per year. They made £2.664bn in ONE year, so they are investing 37% of their income, not making a loss.

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

Steve Todd

Re: ARM chips in iPads?

The standard ARM licence lets customers bolt together their standard bits of IP, and combine them with third party designs (you want a PowerVR graphics core rather than a Mali, certainly sir). The architecture licence lets them roll their own cores, with changes to things like the execution units (for higher IPC) or the memory manager (for higher throughput).