Posts by Jason Bloomberg 2912 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2008
I started out as a developer using 6800 and really couldn't see the appeal of the 6502. Though I used it courtesy of the BBC micro I never had any love for it. I could however see the appeal of the 6809 and Z80, especially with the latter having support for DRAM.
By the time I would have been using those the 8080 had become a thing and the rest was history.
nobody died
I do know people who did die, and some who got seriously injured. We came close to losing my own brother through a mishap "just climbing trees".
I am all for duty of care, protecting people from inevitable harm, but I do feel risk adverseness has played a large part in how things are, and especially pursuit of zero risk.
Looking back I did some really stupid things I wouldn't want others to do. Perhaps the change is because we can now stop children doing the same, have alternatives. I am not sure they are always the right ones.
People tend to forget that ALL smart meters have a remotely operable contactor that can be used to disconnect you for a variety of reasons..
Or don't or didn't know because electricity suppliers and others lied about that. I was explicitly lied to that meters couldn't disconnect a supply.
I did wonder how they did it. It seems the favoured method is a motor driven cam which can rotate, will open and close adjacent 100A-plus contacts. That allows the motor to be powered down once the task is completed.
I will likely be forced to accept a smart meter once they adopt tariffs which have discounts for those; which, in reality, will be significant punishments for not having one.
Governments have to step in to prevent people who do harm themselves from harming others, because only they can do that, others cannot.
People are rarely only harming themselves. They consume resources which could be used elsewhere and tax payers end up paying to mitigate the harm they have done to themselves and others. And there are plenty of more nuanced examples.
The only time I ever have something I am watching on pause is when I am away from my TV, no longer watching it, am taking a piss or shit, making a cup of tea, or stirring a pan on the stove. For me it will be as pointless and as ineffective as all the other ads I never get to see.
I still hate the idea though. We will have to hope they thought this was a good idea for a patent, not a good idea to implement.
And I say that as someone who is quite proud of having developed 'video present' detection for a video auto-selector which switched to usually off equipment when powered on, and back when switched off again.
That was intended to be a convenience for the user. And, importantly, the user could disable that functionality.
Code reuse is an essential part of programmer productivity.
True. But I do despair when devs choose the lazy option of dependencies rather than implementing without when they should be easily capable of it. I accept it's always a balance but when someone is using Python and imports "numpy" and "struct" just to extract a 32-bit entity from a bytearray I have to roll my eyes.
Could we compromise on Machine-Generated Random Bollocks?
I'd prefer, and would excuse the all-caps, UTTERLY UNTRUTHFUL LYING BULLSHIT HALLUCINATORY AI GENERATED CRAP.
While "lie" may technically require intent I am pretty sure most people will take uttering falsehood and untruth without intent as lying and therefore a lie in their stride.
So what do Yanks call their bums then?
"Fanny" I would have guessed, given "fanny pack" being used for what we'd call "bum bags", and the American "shake your fanny" for "wiggle your backside".
But maybe that's fallen out of fashion?
I wouldn't object to the airship being called "The Flying Fanny" for the American market. We can snicker and they'd not understand why.
Labour's mistake was they expected people to pay for ID, something like £85 each I recall.
Had they paid people to have one, the greedy and gullible fools would have taken them up on the offer, and they could quite easily have made life very difficult for those who didn't.
Luckily there was third party candidate at the next general election though that didn't work out so well in the long term.
For the brexiteers, brexit was always about making us the 51st State, making us subservient to America, ideally an America run by Trump and his kind.
Our race to the bottom is intended to facilitate that. Brexiteers don't care how damaging that is to Britain or her people.
The nonsense about Sovereignty and Taking Back Control were just lies to get what they ideologically wanted.
The west complains vociferously about China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, while falling over itself in the rush to criminalise those who are aggrieved at what Israel is doing to Palestinians.
I don't feel at all comfortable being told that expressing the view that "it is okay to kill innocent people" is free speech, is essential and must be tolerated in a democracy.
I much prefer the times when we not only rejected people who spread such sentiments, but did something about those who did.
Sounds to me like someone who doesn't have access permission tried to login to a PC or app with their credentials and it automatically sent an alert to whoever deals with such things as well as popping up "Access Denied".
I might also speculate that it was some menial member of staff enticed by a promised wad of cash from our typical media scum.
It seems whatever the clinic has in place it's doing it right. But that's not surprising given their need for reputation and their high-profile client base.
a cunning smart card based system for ensuring that tower crane operators could only operate cranes within parameters defined by their level of training and certification.
That's an inherent problem of automated enforcement; there's always some means of defeating it if determined enough.
When it comes to providing 'additional protections' to what already exists it's a different matter.
It's the difference between protecting others and protecting people from themselves.
I think it's because the public appears, to a large degree, to have bought into the hype. Manufacturers can see money to be had so are simply encouraging on-going buy-in to the hype, may even have fallen for the hype themselves.
For most prior 'must have' nonsense there have always been plenty of naysayers stepping up to say why it's bullshit and they aren't buying it, in concept or with cash. Currently they aren't being seen nor heard by the public.
Unless current 'AI' proves itself I expect people will eventually come to the conclusion it's not as good as they imagined it would be and will eventually be seen as just another over-rated fad.
"240/4 could be added to those pools to help “large private Internets that require more address space than is available in the private use address space designated by [RFC1918] during the dual stack transition to IPv6."
Perhaps I am missing some nuance but large private internets can use 10.*.*.* - That provides nearly 17 million unique addresses.
"Analysis of global internet traffic suggests Amazon and Verizon Business use it internally, too."
Does it still count as internal use when it is global internet traffic?
Not having a 90 minute commute each way has done wonders for my blood pressure.
I can't disagree but I do miss listening to CDs during the journey. I know I could power-up the Hi-Fi any time I want but it's just not the same. So not the same I think it's been over a decade since I listened to any recorded music.
I'm one of those lucky ones who works permanently from home. The only real downside is it's a bit like doing jail time if you are single and don't ensure you have a decent social life. On the plus side I hardly noticed the pandemic restrictions.
The other thing I miss is calling other drivers "wankers". But there are enough opportunities for that as a pedestrian. Or get some strong ale in and just shout in the local park.
I guess it won't be long before the supermarkets are networked with government databases so suspected miscreants can be welcomed as they step out of the store by armed police.
Insert something about "thinking of the children", "drugs", "terrorists", "immigrants" or whatever here ...
So why wasn't the infinite ping-pong of updates not noticed during testing?
I fell into the same trap when I was developing proof of concept code for a mesh network where packets were broadcast to systems which broadcast those onwards and I soon experienced the network flood I had neglected to consider. But it was immediately obvious what I had unwittingly done, what I had overlooked.
But why, on flippin’ earth, has it taken this long to become the MEGA story that it always was?
I guess it's like everything else which never breaks through to collective public consciousness.
I am quite surprised the ITV drama has finally succeeded in making the public aware of what many others have known for years, but am of course extremely glad it has.
The real question is how people can remain so ignorant of, or turn a blind eye to, things they really should be aware of, should have an interest in, have an informed opinion upon.
"All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing" - or something like that.
If I send my fully automatic car to pick up the kids from school, I should be just as responsible.
If I am fortunate enough to be able to employ a chauffeur go pick up my kids I don't see why I should be responsible for the crimes they choose to indulge in while doing that.
Regardless of whether my chauffeur is a sack of meat or a box of electronics.
Hard to remember but I am eternally grateful to coders who report "use --help" rather than give me what I want when I use -h, especially when not specifying arguments gives me the help I was after anyway.
It's whether the second argument, ala "npm install", is a command or an option which mostly catches me out these days.
As to getting re-elected, I think only the Dunning-Kruger wing of the party believes that's remotely possible.
And me, and others who fear that Starmer will be deemed such a damp squib that voters splitting between Labour, Lib Dems and Greens will allow the tory scum to win the day.
Every party which gets elected with more voting against them than for inevitably claims a mandate, pretends "the will of the people" is behind them and supports whatever the party decides than what voters voted for, and that nonsense is going to continue while we retain the first past the post system instead of some better from of democracy.
Throwing the switch is always a stressful moment even when I have checked, double checked, triple checked, that it's not all going to end in a puff of smoke, have had others run their own checks.
He was lucky it didn't become another reminder of why it's never a good idea to have people working long hours, doing double shifts, being put under intense pressure to meet deadlines.
Raspberry Pi's recommendation to switch to X11 or even stay with their Bullseye release for some problems encountered isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of Wayland.
I can accept all the white paper reports that Wayland is better than X11 in any number of ways. That it doesn't yet do what X11 can do remains a huge obstacle for me.
Calista doesn't want to spend months in jail waiting for her trial and taking her chances with the U.S. judicial system
Maybe she'll choose to be a martyr to the cause. Or perhaps she'll just set up bed in RISC-V's Switzerland board room and wait for the extradition request to come in, laugh along with the rest of us at whatever ludicrous grounds America offers to support that.
But even sending her to Guantanamo and water-boarding her day in and day out won't sop RISC-V being a thing.
America increasingly seems to be more than one sandwich short of a picnic.
"Dismissed all copyright violation claims made by McKernan and Ortiz since neither of them registered their work with the US Copyright Office"
I always thought the Berne Convention provided Copyright Protection at the instant of the work's creation, that there was no explicit need to register a work to secure Copyright Protection.
Is this just another case of 'Welcome to America'?
I'm not sure how this news means RISC-V isn't going to be amazing.
That SiFive have decided to shift their view of where their future lies doesn't affect the future of RISC-V itself. There are other companies out there working on RISC-V, and likely more to come, so there should be plenty of opportunities for those fired and others who have an interest in it.
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