So last millennium...
Posts by Paul Crawford
5636 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
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A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes
Online retailers delaying sales of Raspberry Pi 4 model until 2023, thanks to a few good chips getting scarce
Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery
Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line
I remember enjoying EDI when it was the smaller cousin, few queues, OK cafes air-side, plans usually on-time or sometimes you arrived early and it was cleared for landing no problem.
Last decade or so the increase in numbers, the forced march long route through duty-free, and added security theatre, made the whole thing suck big-time. Quite pleased to hardly fly any more!
Apollo 17 samples yield fresh insights 49 years after mission left the Moon
Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)
Is VPOTUS Bluetooth-phobic or sensible? The answer's pretty clear
Telecommand is not usually encrypted, but it is normally authenticated. If the command receiver does not get any usable messages for a certain period it (should) assume that the key might have been corrupted so it can revert to unauthenticated commands (i.e. ignore the digital signature).
While that might seem open to abuse, it would be unusual for a working system not to get regular commands even if they are just to dump status, etc. Also it takes a good bit of hardware to have a go at such a link, more so if deep space!
Google advises Android users to be careful of Microsoft Teams if they want to call 911
Re: Teams is nearly the worst product Microsoft have ever released...
I made the mistake of trying to install the Teams app on Linux once. Utter shit-show of a product and you have to have a MS account just to get on to other people's invites.
Now just use Chromium 'web' mode, still shit but less messing with my computer. MS are so utterly incompetent they can't even support a non-Chrome browser.
Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits
OK, boomer? Gen-X-ers, elder millennials most likely to name their cars, says DVLA
Actual metal being welded in support of the UK's first orbital 'launch platform'
Or can it offer something else that a group small-sat or rideshare can't provide from SpaceX?
Yes, it can send small groups of satellite in to other orbits faster/cheaper than booking the whole Space-X payload. I think one of Skyrora's selling points is the upper stage can be shut-down and re-ignited several times, allowing you to deploy payloads in different (so some degree) orbits from the same basic launch.
Whether that turns out to be enough of a USP to make the business work remains for the market to decide.
The Omicron dilemma: Google goes first on delaying office work
Re: The losing battle
Working from home, and all other lock-down measures were never about STOPPING the virus.
All they do is bring the infection rate down to a point where (a) you can possibly manage hospital admissions and (b) buy time to develop vaccines to reduce the number/impact of infections and/or drug treatments to mitigate the worst impact of the disease.
They are far from ideal due to the other economic and metal health impact they have, but to ignore them and 'go Brazilian' on COVID is not really such a good option either.
Re: Safely reopen?
The number of deaths "due to Covid" by which we can only realistically count those with no underlying health conditions** in the first lockdown was around 4400
Try telling that to friends and families of the 170k-ish dead in the UK, on indeed those still suffering from "long COVID".
Yes, many were elderly and had health conditions but avoiding dying before it is absolutely necessary is kind of a human goal.
Utility biz Delta-Montrose Electric Association loses billing capability and two decades of records after cyber attack
New UK product security law won't be undercut by rogue traders upping and vanishing, government boasts
Re: rogue traders will find it harder to sell substandard products
Make the store front liable?
Going to be tricky but eBay and Amazon might clean up their act if they have to fund the fix/replacement for anything they handled.
Overseas supplier? Make Visa/Mastercard pick up the tab if the store front does not pay. Very quickly they will stop selling to the UK which would be a victory of sorts, given how crap most IoT stuff is in the first place. At least less landfill for future generations.
Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not
Re: The language is not that important
it's odd that Assembler did not appear in the efficiency list, it's actually way more efficient than any language if the writer does a good job
With super-scalar processors where your pipeline delay/blocking depends on other stuff that is running it is REALLY hard to beat any decent optimising compiler for speed. Where assembly is justified (to me at least) is when you have to access very CPU-specific features, but that is really unusual out side of writing for an OS, or embedded microcontroller. Even then, you are probably better to wrap it in a simple function to call from your choice of C/C++/Rust/etc used for the main code.
Re: The language is not that important
FORTRAN also supports the very wired concept of multiple entry points to a given sub-routine. Most other languages only support multiple exit points (e.g. 'return' in C).
Converting such a routing in to C is far from simple and elegant, though you could have several dummy functions that call the main one with a goto jump value. Oh, I feel dirty just thinking about it!
Re: I wish this madness would just stop
'C' is the universal assembler, it lets you do all of the low level things you need to do in an OS, etc, including foot-shooting without having to learn assembly for a given CPU. There are many ways to make safer-C, such as enabling and responding to compiler errors, using static tools such as Coverity, and dynamic tools such as Valgrind to check things are going well in your memory-use department.
But the world runs on cheap, and good programmers are not so cheap and take longer to build, test, document, and retest their code. How many companies actually give a fsck about that?
It is quite fascinating to see rankings of different languages by the 3 key metrics shown, even though we know that different applications have aspects that favour one or another.
Still, as a part-time C & python programmer I will probably stick with them as they cover most of what I need and life is getting short for learning a new and unusual language that really only promises a bit more security for my C side. And there is always apparmour as a bit of a backup.
Visiting a booby-trapped webpage could give attackers code execution privileges on HP network printers
When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere
China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later
It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?
We had DOS software I wrote around 1992 still in use controlling hardware, but now using dosemu on Linux as that also allows you to permit direct hardware I/O if you want.
Many years ago we also submitted a patch for dosemu so it could be configured to mirror the host Linux time, which is then nice and accurate due to NTP. DOS is still ~55ms steps, but good to see it is always within 60ms of true time.
BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?
Reviving a classic: ThinkPad modder rattles tin to fund new motherboard for 2008's T60 and T61 series of laptops
Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research
For generally available software then yes, the version numbers should be included just in case.
Must it be open source? No, but it needs to be reproducible so your data run on my machine using XYZ's software gives the same result. And the method(s) used also possible with something that is open-source in broadest sense (i.e. can be inspected, need not be GPL or any other specific license).
Alleged Brit SIM-swapper will kill himself if extradited to US for trial, London court told
Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say
Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should: Install Linux on NTFS – on the same partition as Windows
Re: the irony is
I don't know if it is "based on" directly or just the main guy (Dave Cutler) was involved in VMS and generally anti-UNIX in outlook.
ACLs have many good uses, but the downfall for Windows was the effort/knowledge to use them well, so for years the default was bent-over and lubed-up following from DOS' lack of any real permissions, whereas Linux started life as a multi-user system so the bit-map permissions were the norm and sufficient for many cases.
New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space
Re: Nice
That sort of thought has been considered before. I suggest a read of:
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
He covers how at one point dimethyl mercury was considered, that is something you really don't want to deal with. Not ever. Really, not EVER. A world leading specialist in the toxic nature of heavy metals was killed by what seems like a trivial accident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
Brits complained a bit less about connectivity when they were allowed to go outside and see people in the flesh
Re: Oh...
It would be interesting to see the split of VM customer complaints by the infrastructure, VM's cable versus Openreach lines.
I'm on VM cable and <touch wood> it has been stable and reliable for almost two decades (blueyonder when I signed up), with only occasional issues and they are usually fixed in a few hours (couple of days the time to modem died).
Just to add, I put my VM 'router' in to modem mode and have my own OpenWRT router using another DNS, might be a factor as well!
BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself
UK aims for 'openness and fairness' in its AI Strategy – unless we're talking about favoured contractors
Zuck didn't invent the metaverse, but he's started a fight to control it
As System76 starts work on its own Linux desktop world, GNOME guy opens blog, engages flame mode
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