Posts by Flocke Kroes

Re: Intel Pi

Not going to happen any time soon.

Intel got to the top the same way every CPU maker before them: build something cheap, sell huge numbers to divide the design costs of version N+1 down to insignificant. Their challenge for the past decade has been to stop cheap ARM CPUs doing the same thing to them. Intel have the most expensive manufacturing process in the world. ARMs get built with a manufacturing process that is one or two generations old and still give excellent performance per watt. When Intel make small CPUs it reduces their output of high margin big CPUs. If Intel design too small, people will buy cheaper ARMs instead. If they design too big, people will buy Atoms instead of Core. The Intel solution is a compromise with extra hurdles to buy and use Atoms.

The only reason Intel would make something like a Pi is if they lost effective monopoly pricing on Core and Xeons. That will happen when you can slot your phone into the shell of a laptop (keyboard+trackpad+display but no CPU). The desktop equivalent would to to plug your phone into the USB C video/charge port on you TV which presents a bluetooth keyboard and mouse as USB devices to your phone. Add an ARM alternative to Xeon and Intel's high end margins would be cut to the point where making cheap CPUs does no additional damage to their revenue.

Re: Orange-faced, tiny-handed, self-serving...

Having an orange face does not mean someone will make a bad president. Having small hands does not mean someone will make a bad president. Unfortunately, being self-serving is a requirement for being elected, with bonus points for acting like a fuckwitted moron.

I must admit that when I see 'Big John' on the left, I lower my expectations, switch from reading to skimming and hover the pointer over the down vote button. This time, his comments were short, to the point and I agreed with them 100%. Please try to read what is actually written, not just who writes it, otherwise there will be violent liberal mobs handing out summary beatings. Please try to listen. Consider the possibility that someone you dislike might actually get something right once per decade and that politely explaining why you believe they are mistaken stands a better chance of changing minds than a verbal clue bat.

Re: Why WHY WHYYYY..

Before RDRAM, memory manufacturers had come up with several different replacements for SDRAM. Intel decided to make their CPUs compatible with none of them. The message was clear: you spend money on R&D and Intel will ensure it is money down the drain. The unique selling point of RDRAM was the patents. In return for creating a market for RDRAM, Intel could use the patented interface to connect their CPU to the north bridge chip. Everyone else making north bridge chips could be bled dry with patent royalties by Intel while Rambus trolled the memory manufacturers.

For some reason, memory manufacturers did not immediately leap under the bus. RDRAM did not arrive in quantity until months after Intel paid $1B to Micron. Even then the speed was terrible because RDRAM was difficult to manufacture and the latency was appalling because RDRAM was defective by design. For an added bonus Intel CPUs could only operate RDRAM at a few different speeds which did not match the speeds that could be manufactured in quantity, so the CPU had to select the next speed down - which turned out to be a big step down to the lowest available setting.

All this was abundantly clear in advance to the techies that lived through it. Some PHBs got burned by the memory translation hub fiasco, but I am not convinced that many of them understood exactly what was defective or why Intel had been so determined to create a spectacularly bigger cock-up than the FDIV bug.

The obvious answer to 'why WHY WHYYYY..' is that Rambus have tremendous expertise in selling bullshit to PHBs, and the PHBs at Microsoft do not understand just how badly Intel got crippled and burned (although - to be fair - AMD were able to let that huge opportunity painfully drag itself past them).

Get your popcorn, sit back and get ready for a giggle. A mosquito has got into bed with a leach. I would like to think that Rambus can deliver an even bigger train wreck than RDRAM, but I doubt Microsoft will commit themselves to filling a black hole with cash quite as enthusiastically as Intel did.

Re: dummies

Do it yourself crash testing for dummies.

"When do we get a non USA operating system bumping off windows ?"

You get a non-USA operating system when you install Linux. As for bumping off Windows, Microsoft are trying really hard. Despite their best efforts users are putting up with slurpware. The exact death date for Windows will be a matter of opinion as governments will keep it on life support long after it is brain dead.

Re: Marco van de Voort

I did not say everyone should create their own distribution. I made a toy distribution years ago. I learned a great deal from doing so, but it was a huge time sink. I am sure there are dozens of people on the planet who would benefit from taking the time to create a distribution, but it is not a course of action I would inflict on any but the most hopelessly clueless commentard. There really are hundreds of distributions, and unless you have a really strange requirement, half a dozen of them will almost certainly be a far better choice than spending the time required to create your own.

"Making demands from upstream". I had to wait a while before I was calm enough to respond to this without a foul mouthed screaming rant whilst brandishing an iron plated clue bat. You are not entitled to demand anything ever. You can politely offer you opinion on which way you think a project should go. You can politely tell others why you think one distro is a better choice than another. You can offer money to people capable of creating a change in your preferred direction. You can download the source code, fork it and prove to the world that your way is better (or - as I have discovered - there is often a damn good reason not to try to do it that way).

All the people screaming and swearing and demanding the removal of systemd achieved bugger all. The Devuan maintainers sat down in their comfy chairs and got on with something constructive (They are close to getting into the top 100 on distro watch). By all means follow their example and create Vortux, or use one of the Ubuntu derivatives that does not use MIR.

"Ubuntu is too big for any package or application maintainer to not support." Round objects. Canonical is quite capable of creating packages for any application they want. Application maintainers have enough on their plate without doing anything non-trivial to handle specific needs of any individual distribution.

A very brief search showed that distribution makers were not particularly bothered by Canonical creating MIR. They were peeved by Canonical making statements about competitors to MIR that were not particularly true.

"I read it in a book"

Has anyone tried asking if all books are infallible sources of wisdom?

I prefer "the test of truth is an experiment". Shajar Abid is welcome to eat radium until he gets cancer then cure himself with his magic honey.

Re: Americans preparing to repeat history

This time people are making sure the repetition happens ASAP.

I am certain Microsoft have a reasonable understanding of how you feel

The obvious way for Microsoft to deal with your dissatisfaction with their newer operating systems is to back port full telemetry to their earlier offerings.

Re: We'll follow as usual

If only there were a presidential candidate who promised to 'drain the swamp' ...

Last time this came up

Joe Biden proposed a law mandating back doors in all encrypted communication. He also plagiarised Neil Kinnock's speeches. The result was steganography software which created output that resembled a Neil Kinnock speech.

Re: Will any Minister be sacked for this?

QE? Do you really mean quantitive easing, or the second big 'bail out the banks by printing loads of money' known as QE2?

@tom dial

Until today, I had not read the section on the Ukraine in the Democrat and the Republican platforms. Both are really waffly with vague commitments. I think they are both too fuzzy to call one stronger than the other. The Republicans did weaken their platform concerning the Ukraine. I looked for evidence of something similar from the Democrats. All I found was criticism of Obama's stance from Republicans.

Do you have something that shows the Democrats changed their tune at least as much as the Republicans did?

Re: Hmmm

Call all you want. They will not answer. The cowards are hiding.

Re: ULA

ULA's plan is to recover only the engines, so the other bit to go wrong is the explosives to separate the engines from the fuel tank. ULA are a bunch of rocket scientists so they have the technical skills for mid-air retrieval. They would need an astronomical budget. As they have a proven record of getting billions from the US government, I would not scribble 'impossible' on their plan. I would go with 'ambitious with a clear smell of desperate', 'expensive' and 'will get delayed at least five years'.

Re: Oh right,

For me, the giveaway was transmitting their command in 3.2 seconds. Including start and stop bits they would barely get two bytes per second. "d x.pdf\n" would require at least 4 seconds even without authentication and error correction.

You are overestimating PHBs

Finding the relevant PDF is well beyond the ability of a PHB. If a techy left one visible on his computer or left hard copy lying around the PHB would not even try to read it. The more likely scenario is a PHB got hold of a sample battery and enclosure, measured them with a ruler and decided that they ought to fit together.

Other possibilities

Theresa May lacks the skill to recognise competence.

Theresa May does have the skill to recognise competence, so she picked Amber Rudd instead.

Re: Really ..

"I really just want people to be aware that this is a president who's clearly more concerned about what people think of him than doing things of substance,"

I think people who made even a small effort to investigate Donald are relieved that he is more concerned about what people think of him than doing things of substance. Douglas Adams caught on years before the rest of us.

The USA sank so low precisely the same way the UK did.

Re: Interesting, but..

I have been given "we own everything you ever think of" papers in the UK before. The task of getting the it signed was offloaded to a minion, presumably because the boss was afraid of hearing my thoughts on the matter. I read the document on company time. By the time I finished, the minion wandered off. I put the document in the round filing cabinet under my desk and no-one ever mentioned it again.

Could be worse. I have been offered "A legal dispute is grounds to withhold payment" together with "Withholding payment is grounds for a legal dispute".

Re: Puzzled, as usual

Please take a look at the pretty Feynman diagram. On the left you can see an electron and a positron getting closer together, annihilating each other and the energy being conserved as a photon, then the photon decaying into a quark/anti-quark pair. From another point of view, an electron is happily moving forwards through time when it hits a photon, and bounces backwards through time. From our point of view, an electron going backwards through time is an anti-electron (aka positron). The same sort of thing is also on the right of the diagram: an anti-quark happily moving backwards through time bounces off a photon and ends up going forwards through time where we detect it as a quark.

Really going back in time??? I have no idea, but the pretty pictures help remind physicists that single quarks (and leptons) do not just appear out of nowhere alone. Any time you get a quark you also get an anti-quark.

If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed that the entire galaxy is made out of electrons and up and down quarks. Where are all the positrons and anti-quarks that must have come out of nowhere with them? Physicists have been looking for ages. They are not behind the cushions on the sofa. Have they been stolen? I blame the budget cuts.

Darwin didn't fix this in mokeys

Experiment shows monkeys will pay for monkey porn. (To be fair, looking at monkey porn did not cause their bank accounts to be emptied. Clearly a follow up experiment is needed.)

In Terzian's alternate universe ...

... a subpoena for a specific piece of information about one customer of a company can only be handled by handing over the company's entire collection of data to the police and hoping that it eventually comes back unmodified.

What uncomfortable truth?

We have some words from a politician determined to portray himself as either clueless or malicious. A politician's job involves making unfounded allegations, finding no problem then taking the credit for fixing it. People who were not born yesterday will remember FAST telling us that pirate DVDs fund terrorism. They had a duty to turn over evidence of terrorist funding to the police, but they provided absolutely nothing. In real life, DVD pirates had paper thin margins because they had a piracy problem. If there is real evidence of Google funding terrorism, send it to the police so it can be dealt with.

Part of my pension fund is invested in Google. The same is probably true of millions of others in the UK. I think Google should concentrate on paying cash out in shareholder profits. Part of doing that is rewarding youtube contributors - which they do - so they will create more cat videos and provide hours of entertainment for hundreds of millions of people.

I can see why the government would want to put a stop to that.

Re: Does the extra hardware weigh a lot less than the extra fuel for Falcon 9?

Probably.

The rocket equation is really horrible. The basic idea is fuel+oxidiser go down, payload goes up. At the start, most of the power is used to accelerate the remaining fuel+oxidiser in the wrong direction. As the rocket goes up, things get worse - more an more power has to go into dealing with the fuel+oxidizer going very fast the wrong way. Near the end of the burn, you are lifting a big empty fuel tank. Recovering a Falcon 9 first stage requires an extra 30% fuel+oxidiser. The reason SpaceX is pays for the extra fuel (and reduced payload) is that it costs 1% of the launch fee and recovers a stage 1 that costs 25% of the launch fee.

ULA's initial concept did not include recovering the engines. In order to look remotely credible they had to bolt some kind of engine recovery onto their partially developed design. Some bombs to blow away the fuel tank, an inflatable heat shield and a parachutes should be much lighter than the SpaceX solution. Explosive bolts have been around for decades, so the separation should be as easy as rocket science. The inflatable heat shield is an old idea with one successful 3m diameter test (the shield on the video looked about 25m across). Catching tiny payloads with a helicopter sometimes used to work, and a pair of rocket engines are easily small enough to be carried around by a big modern helicopter (How much do helicopters and drone ships cost?).

ULA's plan is not bat shit crazy. It does have plenty of R&D cost and enough development to keep ULA out of the cost competitive launch business until well after the first reusable Falcon 9s get retired.

[SpaceX should be launching Echostar 23 about now. No landing this time.]

Re: It only makes it easier to crack...

I thought all L337 |-|4><0r$ used p455\^/0Rd-0|\|3

My favourate: '; DROP TABLE users /*

The last time I used MS Word ...

... the layout changed depending on the selected printer driver.

For the last decade or so I have been using reportlab. Bye bye WYS is POM dependent.

Re: ???

From the decription in the article I would have gone with "used social engineering to install a RAT". It looks like part of the story came via the BBC where I bet they "used technobabble because they do not know any better".