Posts by Mage 9273 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
Yes, you can make a radio with about four 7 µA transistors. You'd need a bit more for the audio drive, though you can use a ceramic disk as used in a beeper as the earphone. A single 1.5V button cell to power it.
Or you can make an entire radio in an IC using DSP with only a low pass filter on the aerial (up to 30MHz or 40MHz), or a bandpass filter (probably any 40MHz band from 40MHz to 2GHz) using the ADC as an aliasing mixer.
"And there'll be a human output in every corner of the galaxy." No, unless 'human' is a generic term for tool and language using sentient creatures rather than homo sapiens. Perhaps we shouldn't be speciest.
Interstellar space is like a quarantine system. Unless there is physics we don't know about. A generation ship is theoretically possible. No evidence that cryogenics does anything other than kill mammals. Some sort of hibernation with a short awake period every few months might be plausible.
SF needs starships. It doesn't mean they have to exist in the real universe, though it would be interesting if they did.
Really?
Crap and erratic support on apps for copy/paste, printing, external storage, non-USA keyboards, custom key layouts, network resources etc.
It's more like Win 3.0. Barely, at least you didn't have to BUY a file manager for win 3.x.
Android is a work in progress that has been crawling in terms of developing useful to user rather than useful to Google features.
Android is pointless on eInk Readers and maybe only to make vendor "spying" easier.
The eInk is inherently only suited to reading and annotation, yet most are useless for actually getting the notes back to PC. Yet they put things like share note/higlight to Facebook, but not email nor ability to easily read back on per book basis.
I've an Android tablet and phone. The phone is convenient for reading eBooks, yet I've not found a single really good (i.e. actually better than Kobo H20, Sony PRS350 or Kindle eInk) ereader app.
The ability to search, organise, categorise, import the books is terrible. New eReaders in some cases worse than early ones. Homescreens almost dedicated to marketing. Worse than 1980s document management systems.
No point in Android apps in general on an eInk screen. They are best for reading. They could do with better reading apps and book management. This has not improved in 12+ years.
I've used maybe nine models of eReaders (one oddly was LCD not a tablet like Fire) and tried loads of Android apps. Aldiko not too bad.
I should not need Calibre to manage my "library" and eReaders.
But unlike Win 10, you could easily customise XP to be more like Win9x / NT4.0, without installing anything.
Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7 allowed extensive customisation and turning off or even uninstalling all the crap. You can't do much on Win10 which reminds me of Win 286 or Win 3.0 or Gem on a monochrome screen with a Hercules card or maybe EGA card in mono if I'm generous. Do the Win10 GUI designers know NOTHING about GUI design?
Linux Mint distro + Mate desktop + TraditionalOK theme sounds like a better idea.
Also unlike locked out Win10 desktop customisation (Vista was more flexible), most Linux distros have a wide choice of desktops and themes for them, W98, NT4, Vista, Mac OS, Win10 and other styles of GUI & Desktop free. Including traditional X or Mac OS9.
Because AI is 99% hype, and Advert personalisation/Targeting is just fake snake oil to get companies to spend less on TV/Radio/Paper/dumb billboards and more on Internet and also smart video billboards no doubt sniffing to see have you WiFi/BT on.
I'd be very suspicious of ANY training of Machine Learning models. Just a special type of database. What do they do with it afterwards? How anonymous is the human curated data used to train it when it's deployed. By definition it's NOT real learning, it's storing the input data and then using pattern matching on the later queries to give outputs. Otherwise it would be useless.
Strangely I HAVE disabled ALL 3rd party cookies. The browser has a setting. It should be the default, but isn't.
I have never ever experienced any lack of functionality on a website from doing this. The proposal is about the 1st party cookies needed for log in like these comments, multpage forms and shopping. Because of a flaw in the original design of the website concept. One of a number, according to Ted Nelson. See Project Xanadu :)
There is a good reason why very low temperatures are needed for superconducting that doesn't collapse as you increase the current or magnetic field, or for it to work at all.
Any material that works near room temperature and a useful current density is likely to be unusual. Simply an alloy of gold and silver isn't going to work.
(Gold, Silver and Copper alloy is actually Electrum and gold is poorer alone than silver, poorer than copper).
It will be great if this can be replicated and is real. Not looking good right now.
The eInk is VERY Niche. Serious high consumption readers, or people reading outdoors or traveling without ability to charge (weeks of use!).
Most eBook consumption is on phones, over 50%. Convenience and you have it already
Then Tablets.
A decent eInk reader can ONLY manage books and costs same as phone / cheap tablet. Kobo seems best for proofing/annotation as with Calibre you can get the notes on a per-book basis. Can't get them off my Nook or Sony at all. I can only read ALL notes of all books in one file off my Kindle.
I've saved about €700+ of paper & toner by proofing /annotating books on my Kobo H2O Aura original. Very very niche.
Spent a fortune over 25 years ago on printing copies of my first novel. Now written 20+ without printing at all. I "print" to eBook. Also webpages and PDFs (hence having Kindle DXG, 9.7" and 6.8" kobo). I wish I could have afforded the Sony A4/Letter eInk with pen. It was just under $800 when they remaindered it. Too niche to succeed.
A tablet is handy if you don't have a laptop / PC location 24/7. I have three decent tablets. Except since upgrading to a phone with 6" screen and web browser much faster than netbook or tablet, I don't use the tablets. If I need more than the phone I use the laptop.
I have a Win10 10" tablet with docking folding keyboard, the phone is more use, or else I use the Lenovo E460 running Linux (version with 1920 x 1080 screen & decent GPU and i5-6200 @2.3GHz), some tablets cost more and are crap in comparison.
Tablets are a mature niche market.
Some big phones now faster than many tablets, 1/4 price (from €100 without contract but network locked for 9 months). A decent laptop 1/2 price of high end tablet.
Actually I may be confusing LAN Manager vs NT authentication. Win9x may have had nicer GUI, but Win9x/ME was still essentially win3.11 + Win32s and all the 32bit options and media stuff revamped. No security, no creation of named pipes, no VDM or WOW (used native x86 / DOS/win16) so CPU had to switch mode. Direct X was a kludge to allow easy porting of DOS games, originally no OpenGL (but it was on NT).
Bloody Cheek. It it had the desktop GUI/Customisation of XP / Vista / Win7 instead of locked into Win 2.0 on a Hercules card, then there would be no need. Win10 is a dumbed down garbage GUI, designed for monochrome laser reports, not usability. Breaking everything they learnt about GUI from Win 3.1 to Win7. Vista or XP you could make it like Win2K / Win98 / NT 4.0. Yes the "so called" artistic types might think that looks old fashioned, but it's PRODUCTIVE to know if a button is pressed or not. It's productive to instantly spot Tabs, Buttons, default button, links, menus, one off selectors, scroll bars etc rather than have to guess or hover on everything. These GUI designers should have to do real work, and on an 800 x 600 screen, yes "ribbons" and menus that hide less frequently used items, or automatically re-order by usage are ABSOLUTELY evil.
Indeed. They use your IP address, the WiFi point, perhaps mobile base (not sure). Since I know where I am and rarely go anywhere and can read my large selection of maps, I don't use Google Maps or Google Search (the one not in a Browser). I have them disabled. It's icing on cake for Google if your GPS is on. I have that off too as I don't wander about outside or sit at windows. GPS is 1.4GHz and from Satellites, so rarely works indoors away from windows.
I've known that Google is maliciously gathering personal info for years. The WiFi data capture during Street View driving was part of it. They don't need that now with so many phones running Android with BT, WiFI and Mobile data left on. I only turn on WiFi when using Play Store/Updates/Viber, maybe less than 10 min a day on average. Rarely ever use Mobile Data. It's not just Google. I took off Kindle app and use a different eReader. It was generating popup errors about unable to connect even when I'd not used it since last power on. Aggressive fetching of Advert content and reporting in Apps. So now I don't use ones that do that. I only use BT (enable) on phone/laptop to test a gadget. BT Keyboards inferior to USB. BT earphones or audio adaptor to HiFi inferior to 3.5mm stereo jack + cable due to extra latency & extra codec pair.
It's terribly sad that we have to cripple the use of our own gadgets due to Corporate greed and dishonesty. Did you know that Luddites didn't oppose machinery? They thought that instead of lower pay and worse conditions (weaving), the Industrialists making much more profit from mechanisation and automation (Jacquard programming, automatic shuttle etc even without steam) should actually treat the workers better than home manual weavers.
Over 20 years ago. People ringing a Fax number and sending page feeds. Then the fax machine couldn't receive till reloaded with roll or sheets.
Spam from travel companies was expensive for people using either thermal ribbons or thermal paper and moderately expensive for inkjet.
No, it would be REALLY stupid for many residential users of email, who can only send via their ISP's SMTP and also people using loads of email addresses on their personal domains that are automatically forwarded to some other mailbox.
The problem with email goes much deeper, a lack of any whitelisting and blacklisting in the design at the start. Retrofitted adaptions break email. Only some completely different system will solve it. Then there is the change over problem (see IP4 and IP6). The designers of email learnt NOTHING from the exploits of optical telegraph/semaphore (the Clacks was real once and spanned Europe at time of Napoleon), wired telegraph, analogue phone (POTS), POTS & Fax with caller ID (it HAS to allow spoofed return numbers due to PABX/Network design limitations on sending from one line and receptionist handling reply on another number as well as other issues.). ISDN was designed to interwork with POTS inc Analogue Fax as well as do digital voice, fax, data etc. So was still "broken" regarding lack of whitelist & blacklist mechanisms inherent to design.
There is no sensible reliable way to separate malicious from innocent email. You can sanitise by having no scripts, no remote content and display the real link for all link text (why do you need to hover and see status bar?). Plenty of stupid valid emails have also links that don't match text because the EVIL legitimate companies are using tracking and cloud services etc not on their own domain, IDIOTS. Paypal, my bank, my ISP all have such idiocy.
Monthly is irrelevant. When needed is the issue. Also no assurance an update on Car, Phone, PC, Coffee Maker, TV, Sound Bar etc won't brick it or reduce functionality or reliability. Even eInk ereaders from Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble have all had automatic updates that have reduced the usability or functionality. Even Apple and Microsoft laptops etc.
"your car (if you've got one of the new 4G-connectivity)"
The 4G is irrelevant. Bluetooth, an accessible diagnostic port, WiFi, GSM, 3G, RF Key fobs and even DAB have all been used to hack cars. The Replicating BBC R4 on a local low power DAB TX with a background malicious payload is mental. Who'd have thought that data picked up on the radio could be fed into the management system to put on the brakes?
No doubt it's all true. Also though a sample of ONE and we don't know how the application got on the phone.
It's what is called anecdotal. We need a bigger sample of cheap Chinese phones. Send me your cheap Chinese phone to test and a fee of $15. I'll return it if it is clean your reply paid package, otherwise I'll hold it as evidence till we get the miscreants prosecuted at which point the phone will be cleaned and returned.
It's probably a cheaper service than your local phone repair shop. UK customers after 29th March 2019 need to allow an extra six weeks each way for customs, unless you send it via Turkey, Kenya or Hong Kong.
Tesco pulling their Credit Card service from Ireland.
One of the AdvantCard letters supposed to be after a Tesco letter, it was a week or more earlier.
Next AdvantCard letter blames postal service for mixup. How likely are we to trust their customer service.
Tesco had one of lowest interest rates. AdvantCard has one of highest in Ireland. Regulator approved the move of customers.
I may have spelled the new card company wrong.
Everyday lying from BBC, Water Board, Eircom, Three, County Council. Almost every Global company. It's an epidemic. It used to be just politicians and con men,
Also Satcomms less than 20W. Microwave oven 800W.
Inverse square law on distance and power.
You'd eventually give someone cataracts pointing decent Radar at them. SatComs is typically 100th of the average power of radar.
Even Radar can't cook people. Even though a microwave oven basically uses a magnetron that's similar to some historic Radar systems. You'd have to hug the radar dish.
There is a law in Ireland:
"Theft by finding".
One is legally obliged to hand anything you find to the Garda.(Police). What happens next depends on what it is.
Also in many countries you can't take items from a skip or bin without permission.
Unless the Copyright has expired or the holder has explicitly labelled/given it as Public Domain, then it's copyright. CC, GNU, FreeBSD and Apache etc are all just copyright works using a specific licence text to vary the rights from the default. Any copyright holder can define custom rights, though a legally tested template is best.
It's ALWAYS been true that if you downloaded something copyright you can't then simply re-share it on another site.
The only bizarre aspect aspect to this was the initial ruling saying it was OK to violate copyright. Then the attempt to claim it shouldn't have protection as it was a too generic photo. Sometimes that can be true of patents and registered designs. Rarely photos.
A School website isn't the same as photos cut out of a magazine and stuck on a poster or scrap book in the class room, or school hall. That's a kind of Fair Use. A public facing website is publishing, just like printing 10,000 leaflets and handing them out in the town.
Pacman in 1K was impressive.
I gave away my Jupiter ACE maybe in 1984. The novelty wore off once I'd learnt Forth. It certainly wasn't much use for anything else, though I did a tester using HW I/O and Forth for something in work. I forget what it tested.
The ACT Sirius One in work was nicer than an IBM PC, but I couldn't afford anything at that time at home with floppies, never mind an HDD.
Essentially an 8080 designed by people that left Intel.
the 8085 was Intel's answer to Z80. The bankswitch on Z80 allowed fast context switch to a scheduler for Round Robin multitasking. Ultimately it was CP/M that made 8080/Z80/8085 popular along with Wordstar and Supercalc (vs Visicalc on the Apple II). The CP/M computers tended to be more business orientated with 80 column displays, monitors rather TVs and at least one 5.25" or 8" floppy. The original PCs. No surprise CP/M was ported to 8086 and the bought in MS clone (MS DOS / PC DOS) was the main OS for IBM PC. The 8086 / 8088 wasn't a "real" 16bit CPU like later 80286 (which ran Xenix and UNIX), being basically an 8080 with segment register for addresses outside the 64K byte block and a few 16 bit instructions.
Whatever about 6502 vs Z80 (or 8080/8085), the 8088/8086 was crippled junk compared to almost all other 16 bit CPUs. No comparison to 68000 or indeed some 16bit parts IBM used. The IBM PC wasn't really meant to be the success and industry standard. Sadly it was and it held back mainstream PCs till maybe NT4.0, Windows 2000 or XP, because Win9x / ME was a garbage OS, basically Win3.x shell with Win32s and Explorer lipstick on the pig. Win9x had the evil 8086/80386 pseudo 16bit/32bit hybrid architecture under the hood which is why it ran so badly on the Pentium Pro compared to "real" 32 bit NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT3.51 and NT4.0
I used the Z80 in many projects and also some CP/M desktops (last was the PCW8256/PCW8512). However the 8088/8086 based PC and MSDOS made me wish the 8080/Z80/8085 had never existed.
The PIC was originally a peripheral for I/O on a more powerful CPU. The onboard EPROM and later Flash memory coupled with cheapness and Zero extra chips meant it was a success for simple projects. The Flash version of original PIC1684 still sold last time I looked. Using Basic, C or JAL on a PIC18Fxxx that only needs a capacitor and socket to be a USB slave and can be reprogrammed easily in circuit means the simple PIC still lives despite some ARM Cortex as cheap as 50c.
Who would use an x86-64 Intel/AMD part today for anything portable if you didn't need legacy Windows applications?
The ARM was born from Acorn's use of 6502 and their horror of x86. So in a sense the 6502 won. There are more ARM CPUS made in a week than x86 parts in a year. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to be the modern take on BBC Micro (6502). It's little more than an ARM CPU for a phone /tablet on a breakout board. A brilliant alternative for projects unsuitable for either a PIC or a full $200 tablet. Choice of various OS (RiscOS, various Linux distros and if you are bonkers, an embedded Windows that can't run any regular Windows applications, the Linux has ARM versions of Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox etc, most of what is common on an x86 laptop with Linux)
DAB, DTT and Mobile use SFN that need tight timing. For years they have stupidly been using GPS because it's actually very cheap than alternative. External aerials then and coax to pipe the 1.4GHz signal to receivers is possible.
However it's really stupid, because then you have a single point of failure for multiple terrestrial networks that can be turned off by a single person in a foreign country or go off line due to a solar flare or be locally jammed by vandals.
Only in the minds of people with low engineering knowledge.
Rollers, barges, wedges, A-frames, basic geometry, astronomy, ratios and Zero concept all known to Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. The Greeks formalised theories later for the geometry that the Egyptians used.
There is no mystery as to how the pyramids were built or aligned. Nor Stonehenge or Newgrange (much older!).
This is Woo of highest order. ANY regular structure has resonances. RF and Acoustic Anechoic chambers are hard to build.
Not a valid comparison as C# is based on MS J++, an MS implementation of Java, not Javascript. A complied language, like Java, usually to a p-code (Byte Code) running on a VM (.net engine, which was derived from the VM used for VB6). I've heard that VB and Java VMs were inspired by the p-machine, the VM or runtime interpreter used for p-code, the output of the UCSD Pascal compiler. Original MS Basic (CP/M and Apple II) was port of Dartmouth Basic, a scripting language intended as a cut down beginner's language based on Fortran (ForTran compiled). Clue in name, Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
Javascript may have a C / Java like syntax, but it's got little else in common with Java (bad name) and more in common with 1980s scripting languages.
This is a good improvement.
Unknown and Any are concepts dating from 1970s in strong typed languages and used in Modula-2 in 1980s.
A variable of anonymous type (usually an array defined in the variable declaration) was not assignable directly to any apparently identical variable.
Byte was assignable to anything same size (like Any), An Array of Byte (a magic type) could be used as a parameter. Size, High and Low inside the function or procedure would allow identification of number of bytes or Array bounds safely.
Sadly Modula-2 was often taught like Pascal with no explanation of Import, Export, Opaque Modules, extra stronger typing, magic types and co-routines. I used to write DLLs in Modula-2 as my environment / compiler had no visual GUI support. The GUI part was then done in VB6.
I wrote a generic Quicksort for any type were the parameters were source & destination and a compare procedure.
You could then sort arrays, DB records or data in files (the destination being a new file), or create an index table, all according to the functionality of the Compare passed as a parameter.
There may be more to it, it was 30 years ago!
I did also use C++ from 1987, a more elegant syntax for declaring and using objects (also possible in Modula-2 as it could have private member functions), but otherwise inferior PURELY due to the AT&T insistence on C backward compatibility. If I had a fiver for every C++ program I've debugged that was really a C program with maybe an occasional "object" badly implemented.
Nice that Scripting languages have caught up with mid 1970s computer science.
Modula-2 was good also for writing device drivers even on Win32 as the libraries had named pipes and all NT security features.
800nm geometry for first Pentiums. About 14nm for current 2017 - 2018 production (probably smallest feature, not geometry in traditional sense). Intel seems to be struggling with 10nm.
Actual chips are very much bigger than 1/10th mm despite being called microchips, though single discrete transistors might be only 1mm across and much smaller than an EPROM, RAM or CPU. My kids examined EPROMS with their microscope 20 years ago.
You can view some bacteria with a "toy" microscope.
A grain of sand is huge :)
by DEFAULT, EVERY browser should block every 3rd party cookie and javascript.
Some domains should be always blacklisted.
User can whitelist, once off.
Why do people have to install noScript (used to use it), uMatrix (current on Firefox on all my platforms), uBlock etc?
Far more effective than AV SW and speeds up rather than slows computer use!
NT 4.0 was running fine as server for us with about 20M RAM. But screen was only 800 x 600 @ 8bits.
XP needed about 90M RAM. Each SP needed more RAM. Double buffering a 1600 x 1200 @ 24 bit or 32 bit screen adds a lot more RAM usage and slows it.
AV software or crapware slowed XP, otherwise it didn't "slow". I have a laptop I only stopped using regularly 18 months ago with XP, bought in 2002 and re-installed once in 2003. It never "slowed down". Its 1.8GHz P4 & 1600 x 1200 screen is still superior to average laptop sold in a supermarket with win 10.
I have some Win10 gear, but everyday use is now Linux Mint, Mate desktop and customised TraditionalOK theme on Lenovo E460.
That article has some glaring errors. DR GEM, IBM, MS & Apple all copied Xerox more than each other. Lisa (the pilot Mac :) ) not Apple II had any step forward in HW & SW. The Apple II was dreadful and a success mostly due to Visicalc. I had one, as well as later RM380Z, ACT Sirius 1, original IBM and Apricot.
NT 3.51 was better, no GDI in Kernel. There was even a preview version of the Explorer shell. But MS wanted people to buy upgrades.
Also why there was no retail SP for USB on NT4.0. I had a preview of the cancelled SP that the USB worked. MS was worried the SP with USB would hurt Win2K sales, yet it wasn't completed. XP is finished version but was rushed and by SP3 got bloated. Also some stupid gratuitous GUI / location changes on W2K and then XP.
W7 is simply a SP fix of Vista, because by 2003 (NT5.2) lost plot on Vista (NT6) development.
Now NT (aka Win 10 and really win 7.2 as Win8 is really Win7) is pointless.
Why not compare with Xenix, OS/2, BSD Unix, AT&T UNIX and VMS resources?
Comparison with MS-DOS/PC-DOS, Concurrent CP/M, CP/M 80, CP/M 86, Intel ISIS II, Apple II DOS etc is pointless.
Curiously there was an MS OS/2 which included MS LAN Manager in 1989, is that why NT starts at 3.x? Also NT ran OS/2 text mode (console) programs on OS/2 subsystem, MSDOS command instead of NT cmd on an NTVDM, and 16 bit Win 3.x programs using WOW translation of 16 bit WinAPI to 32 bit NT API and NTVDM. So NT 3.51 & NT4.0 ran Win3.x & win95 mixed 16bit/32bit mixed programs faster on the Pentium Pro than Win95 did. Win9x killed the Pentium Pro.
NT was held back for 10 years by success of Win9x and badly written windows programs that ignored security APIs and needed Admin mode. Properly written Win32 programs, even written for NT3.1, worked fine on NT4.0, Win2K, XP, Vista/Win7 without being Admin.
"real reason for the extradition request was to get him into a country with few legal protections against onward extradition to America."
Sweden is LESS likely to extradite to USA than UK is.
The UK could have extradited him, but let him be on bail instead.
The real issue is that he didn't want to be questioned in Sweden. There was ZERO risk of Swedish extradition to USA.
He's abused his position in Wikileaks and brought it into disrepute.
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