* Posts by vincent himpe

802 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2006

Remember Norton 360's bundled cryptominer? Irritated folk realise Ethereum crafter is tricky to delete

vincent himpe

we really need to do away with these ununderstandeable eula's.

make a simple one.

This software is licenced for usage on x machines . it is not sold : you may use it but do not own it, you cannot resell it. The program is best-effort and may not cover every possible usage case. you will not sue the manufacturer for anything that could be cause by the use or misuse of this program. The program contains technology developed and protected by various means (copyright, trademark, patents). you may not disassemble or peek under the hood (except where allowed by law) . The manufacturer certifies the program only does what is advertised and does not contain any non-declared functionality (spyware). By installing and using the program you accept these terms

what more does there really need to be in there ?

RISC-V CTO: We won't dictate chip design like Arm and x86

vincent himpe

what was wrong with MIPS ?

it's also free to implement your own core. proven architecture used in many hi-end workstations, dvd players, and others...

vincent himpe

Re: If only it were 8 cents

You mean Keil toolchain ? there's others. IAR ...

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

vincent himpe

Re: They need a fault light

Error : there are errors.

That's why the lunar lander had a master alarm. if the software fucked up that would trigger.

vincent himpe

early compiler days

after 5 minutes of compiling :

error in line 1 : missing semicolon ...

The problem is the compiler compiles all the subroutines and other 'includes' first. They are all fine as they are part of a tested and tried library.

once it built all those object files it starts on the main file... which has a missing semicolon in line 1.

Those were the days i acquired an innate hatred of any language that uses semicolons for end of statement. use the damn <cr> or <cr/lf> that sits in the source file.

If a statement is too large to fit on 80 columns , use a continuation character. you will need very little of those.

And code the compiler so it understands when = means assign , and when it means compare. The logic is not that hard : when you are in a logic test ( if / while/ do until / case statement) it means compare' , otherwise it means assign. and don't give me that ' i want to assign in the logic yadda'. That is cryptic to read ( and even then the compiler should be able to figure it out . the logic is recursive after all). Code should be easy to read and write without requiring a degree in literature.

Typical. Crap weather halts work on subsea fibre-optic cable between UK and France

vincent himpe

if only...

they had French submarines. They could lay the cable without having to deal with surface chop...

coat -> exit

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

vincent himpe

Re: DarkBasic

I Never understood the adversity to basic. It has the same command set as any other programming language out there. (we're not talking runtime libraries here ! . only the elementary constructs)

- you have subroutines (functions that don't return anything) and functions

- switching logic : if-then-else-elseif / select case

- looping logic : for-next, while and do-until

- you have all the elementary operators , mathematically (+-/*^and sqrt, rounding and sin cos and other stuff. many other languages aready need additional libraries for trig stuff) and boolean (and / or / not)

- you have all datatypes : integers and floats , multidimensional arrays and strings

Basically all you need and have in any other language (pun intended)

On top of that:

- simple , easy to understand plain english keywords.

- No mindfuckery with whitespace for flowcontrol (like python) and the endless associated tab/spaces problem in the editors.

- No need for all the braces and semicolons like C and many others. why do you need to tell the compiler a statement ends ? it can't figure that out by itself ? and why can't it use the implicit <CR> or<LF> at the end of line instead of me having to explicitly type it ? Ok, ok i hear you : long instructions.. statistically speaking there is less long instructions than short ones. So you need less 'continuation' characters' than 'termination' characters. Besides, if the instruction becomes that long it can't fit in 80 columns: time to carve it up in multiple shorter chunks. it only improves readability and understandability.

- No endless crap with having to help the compiler with = / == as the compiler knows exactly when it means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'. (any language can do that. the decision tree is very simple and many language much older than c could already do it)

- you get a runtime library with string handling and many other things. automatic bounds checking, no memory overruns in arrays or strings as those their length stored upfront so the runtime can throw an error if you step out of line.

What's there not to like ?

All these other languages are nothing else but Basic in a different form made more complicated requiring more compiler handholding and less bound checking and more curly braces, semicolons and other stuff that makes it look like a mathematicians wet dream.

vincent himpe

Re: They all require 'GOTO' operations at processor level.

Oh yeah. 8048 and 8051. i still use 8051's ! i program them in intels PL/M language.(the same language used to write the CP/M operating system.)

The page jump is beneficial as you don't have to reload the entire 16 bit address. The address bus is multiplexed into two bytes so you save a processor cycle if you only need to do short jumps.

That PL/M language is specifically designed for the 8051 ( and later also for the x96 and x86 series as well as the i960). it has constructors where you can assign routines to specific register banks so you don;t have to waste cycles on moving data in and out of routines. since the 8051 has 4 register banks i typically use bank 0 to make a small operating system, nothing more than a pre-emptable scheduler in like 200 bytes of code and 20 bytes of ram) . it has hardware timers to fire off interrupt that switches threads. The remain 3 banks are used for three 'threads' , each in their own bank.

Thread 1 handles all i/o of the program : keys, displays , leds, serial. input hardware interrupts set flags and create software interrupts (can be pre-empted). and output is a time scheduled task attached to a hardware timer. so all I/o is time driven and takes a fixed amount of processing time. the whole thing is near real-time deterministic.

Thread 2 nd 3 are for the real application. the beauty of this is that i can swap threads without needing to perform context saves . I can pass variables without having to move them. This saves a tremendous amount of cycles and code. Both of which you don't have a whole lot of in a machine with 8K rom , and 256 bytes of ram

vincent himpe

Re: DarkBasic

Dijkstra ? isn't he that guy that wanted to abolish the GOTO ? a goto is nothing but a jump instruction.

Kinda hard to make a processor that can't execute a jump ... you could only write linear programs. no calls, returns , subroutines, functions, loops, if-then , do while constructions.

They all require 'GOTO' operations at processor level.

BrakTooth vulnerabilities put Bluetooth users at risk – and some devices are going unpatched

vincent himpe

Re: Naming?

That relationship dates back to the time when the norwegians bought 100 tanks from the swedes so they could invade finland. Upon delivery they found out they were septic tanks...

Western Digital unveils 20TB OptiNAND hard drive, pledges 50TB to follow

vincent himpe

Re: Old fart rant inside...

Ahahaaaah. LOL. SI -facepalm-

Let me tell you a joke about SI

The international System of Units aka SI. from the International Bureau of Weights and Standards (BIPM)

Hold it right there.

International System <=> SI

International Bureau of Weights and Measures <=> BIPM

It is in reality:

Systeme Internationaux (sorry, don't know how to create the french accents)

Bureau International de Poids et Mesures

So we've all been using that wrong all these years. "The international system" "SI"

yeah, mon lecteur DC utilise du CD .. ( disque compacte) (courant directe) as they say over there. (my Compact Disc player uses Direct current)

Second joke. The SI specifies that MULTIPLIERS are UPPERCASE , and fractions are lowercase.

so:

Multipliers:

T = Tera

G = Giga

M = Mega

Fractions

d= deci (1/10)

p = pico

n = nano

Hold it. What about Deca (x10), Hecto (x100), Kilo (x1000) ? They are multipliers too. Ah, mais oui, those are lowercase. WHY ? Because we're french. We like exceptions. Our language is built on exceptions.

Ok, but what with the single letter prefix rule, doesn't that cause an issue with deca (x10) and deci (1/10) ?

yes, so for deca we will use TWO letters : da

So we have a "systeme international" where we use a single character to indicate a multiplier or divider. We use uppercase for multipliers and lowercase for dividers, but deca hecto and kilo will use lowercase (despite being multipliers) and deca gets two letters (despite the standard using one letter everywhere else).

You've been a wonderful audience , next up a monkey riding a monocycle while reading shakespeare.

vincent himpe

Re: it's crap

it's not base8 math. it's base 2 maths. To control 1 kilobyte you need 10 address lines to generate 1024 unique binary codes. For Mega this becomes 20 address lines. Giga is 30 address lines.

Since each control line is binary it has two possible states.

hence :

kilo = 2^10

mega = 2^20

giga = 2^30

vincent himpe

Re: Old fart rant inside...

Can we cut this crap once and for all ?

That kibi stuff should never have been created !

It has been understood, all the way back from the early days of computing that kilo, in computing world, means two to the power of 10

case in point :

If i buy a dimm (ram) module that is 1 gigabyte it is two to power of thirty bytes = 1073741824 bytes. not 1.000.000.000 bytes.

If i buy a microcontroller that has 32k of ram and 64k of rom it has 32768 bytes of ram and 65535 bytes of rom. not 32000 and 64000

There is not a single semiconductor manufacturer that uses that kibi-wibi bullshittery. Even the flash chips in that SSD use two-to-the power-of metrics.

They should have left kilo and mega and giga alone instead of renaming it wibbly-pippi-wippi.

What they should have done is create something like FakeMega FakeGgiga, or MarketingGiga or even simplier : Megalies, Gigalies , Teralies.

How big's that drive ? " 1 Fake Gigabyte aka 1 Marketing Giga. or the 1 Gigalies.

Marketing.. never trust any marketing specs.

A Whopper of a bork for seekers of pre-flight nosh

vincent himpe

all i see

is a skateboard and some vertical text ...

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

vincent himpe

back in the day...

pi was "three and a bit"

Or better, apply B.S.Johnsons mathematics and just makes circles where the circumference is exactly three times the diameter.

now we got pi , can someone do e ?

China stops networked vehicle data going offshore under new infosec rules

vincent himpe

Re: I long for the days of yore...

Gell your computer/phone/tv and get off the internet. they all fall in the category you do not want

Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a 'pay what you want' basis

vincent himpe

Real men know every flipflop in their processor and can tell you exactly what ram chip is broken if given the memory address. They can look at a pci transaction dump on a logic analyser and tell you what program initiated it. Based on the shape of signal on the line they can tell you the drive strenght of the i/o buffer and the impedance of the trace on the board.

Real greybeards can lay out the board using nothing but tape , a knife and a transparent foil , and they will etch and drill their board in their garage.

My first 'computer' was a self-etched single sided pcb eurocard in rack (10cmx16cm standardized boards that have a din41612 connector with 64 pins and fit in 19 inch racks. ) contraption based on a Motorola 6802 and had a whopping 512 bytes of ram. The 'bios' was initially 1k and could scan a 20 key hex keyboard and drive a 7 segment display with 8 characters. Programs were entered by typing in hexadecimal values into memory locations and then pressing the run button. I had an i/o card with 16 inputs and 8 outputs.

Later on i added a uart card with another 4k rom and 4k ram and i had an integer basic system that could hook up to a terminal .

vincent himpe

Hey, you were a novice once too.. It is this "look i am using linux so i am elite' attitude that makes people stay far away from it. Mac has its fanboi's but linux has stark raving mad fanboi's. One kind thinks they are elite cause they are artsy and wear black turtlenecks, the other cause they know how to type a command at a prompt.

When presented a new unfamiliar system you have to learn things, and you will have questions. Being belittled when asking a question is enough to turn you off. That is the problem with a lot of the linux community. This "Go away noob, this is a forum for elite users." attitude.

You ain't elite until you designed your own pcb, hand soldered it, and wrote your own bios. Like Bunnie did. Or can troubleshoot and restore a machine down to component level using oscilloscopes and logic analyser like curiousmarc. Or revive the apollo computer and rebuild it's software from half readable tapes, listings on paper and rope memory modules, and then fly the lunar lander simulator running the actual computer like mike.

Anything below that and you are just a user like anyone else.

and no, arduino's and rPi's don't count.

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

vincent himpe

ditch the damn thing

Engines don't fire when they need to, fire when they don't need to. Direct command possible when flying over Russia.

25 Year overdue contraption full of hardware and software bugs. Slap a sticker on the docking hatch 'Return to sender, Defective', undock it, send it back to origin. may it burn up in pieces.

Credit-card-stealing, backdoored packages found in Python's PyPI library hub

vincent himpe

Re: Application Overreach

Something like a physical thing ? like bits of paper with pictures of dead presidents (or other people) and a few watermarks hidden . If i hand one of those to you , you can't steal more of mine as they have no relationship to each other. Maybe someone should invent one-time-use payment tokens.

vincent himpe

Re: But.. you have the sourcecode right ?

The point is that people CAN read the sourcecode, but DONT. Concept of a library : a chunk of code ready for reuse. When you go get a book from the library , do you check nobody has inserted some additional pages ? changed a paragraph or two ? No, because it's hard to do that in a book. Should be the same with code libraries. Keep it open and accessible and readable but lock it for 'write'.

vincent himpe

Re: But.. you have the sourcecode right ?

i implied nothing ! Having the sourcecode is good. I am merely highlighting the issue that 99.9% of the users work in the following mode : i need to do xyz , is there a library ? yes ! , download , study API and figure out how to use it to solve their problem. They don't look inside. In an ideal world they should not need to. That is the principle of a code library. A chunk of reusable, vetted code, maintained by a gatekeeper. I am a librarian (for a corporate CAD library). Every day i have to fight off the hordes moaning why it takes so long to 'release' something to the library and why can't we change xyz, it would fit better for their application. it's only a small change... Well , it would, but it would also break hundreds of existing designs ! if it is a mistake : we will fix it. If it is an inconvenience for you: live with it, everyone else using it is happy. Every request leaves a revision trail that is fully documented about what was changed and why. Only two people can alter the library. Parts go through a vetting process where their status is elevated from Design , to prototype to production. Only when a prototype has been built and verified to be correct does it get released. The end result is a library of parts you can trust to follow their specifications. That doesn't mean they are usable for your application, it only means they follow the specification. A new revision means there was an alteration to the specification.

The library behaves like a WORM (write once, read many) any alteration is logged and cannot be removed (you can undo it, but you cannot remove the previous one. it leaves a trail and the data is there to inspect. No committing something, then removing it and posting an updated version. You can only post newer versions.

The current model does not work. You can state that the end responsibility is the end users, but that too is bogus. You cannot expect every developer to understand ever line of code in the application he is working on.

The whole intent of a library is to reuse and speed up development. For that , the library needs to be trusted. And that is the pinch point. Too many people can fuddle with the libraries. Each library should have a closed group of maintainers and only they can post updates.

This lack of gatekeeping , combined with the popularity of library xyz makes them enormous honeypots. slip in some malicious stuff and let it spread. Nasties used to be small binaries dropped into a working machine, now they are lines of source code hidden in public libraries.

vincent himpe

But.. you have the sourcecode right ?

first : Apparently some people did read it and found this issue, kudos to them !

The bigger question is : why did it not get read BEFORE the commit. It makes me wonder if / why there is no gatekeeper. This distributed review process does not work. Banking on the users to review the libraries is an utopia. 99.9% never read the source packages, they got enough work with their own development , let alone inspecting and understanding the inner workings of a library. That's why you get a library in the first place ! if you have to spend time going through the entire library's code, you may as well build your own library. And every time there is an update you can start over.

There is no responsibility for OSS. Any time there is an issue there is a bunch of handwaving and a statement along the lines of "it's open source, you can read it". Basically use at own peril.

Because of the widespread usage of libraries, and the lack of centralized vetting, this is a tremendous honeypot for miscreants.

Of course i will get flamed for this, as it exposes a big painpoint. Yes we got the source, but in reality, who reads it ?

Russia says software malfunction caused Nauka module to unexpectedly fire thrusters, tilt space station

vincent himpe

essentially a 25 years old software bug ...

It took em 25 years to scrape enough money and get enough parts to cobble this thing together. Once launched they find out the engines don't work when they need to , and work when they don't need to. Someone mixed up two red wires ? Ditch the damn thing before it does more harm.

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

vincent himpe

Re: All very well but

so you tell me you drive 800 miles without even stopping for a piss or a bite to eat ? bravo. not many people can do that. Me, after 2 to 3 hours of driving i need a coffee or a pit stop. And those are just long enough to put 250 miles on the battery. So off we go.

vincent himpe

different perspective.

Waiting 20 minutes while charging is a loooong time, fueling up is so much faster.... except they go stand in line for 40 min's at costco cause the fuel is 10 c/ gallon less. And they keep the engine running while standing there , cause, you know, ac and all that stuff.

My average daily time spent charging is close to zero. That is , the time i have to be actively involved in the process.

Fueling up requires active time usage on my part : driving to a station, waiting in line, waiting while it is pumping the fuel, more time spent while paying at the terminal.

With electrical that is a non-issue. Whenever i am home it is plugged and charging. Solar during daytime, from my battery storage at nighttime or from the grid. I do not have to sit there and wait in line. I plug it in and go do other things.

Same thing going to work : arrive, plug it in and go work. (OK, not all employers have chargers yet but that is coming. Just like every parking lot in scandinavia has engine block heaters)

On the occasion where i do a road trip that requires a charger : i plug it in , get a coffee , go do number 1 or 2 , grab a bite to eat and i'm good for another 4 to 5 hours on the road. After 4 hours of non-stop driving it's time for one of the aforementioned activities anyway. And those activities are long enough ( Starbucks can get very busy and you spend a good 15 minutes for a cup of joe .. ) that there is (almost) no 'idle time waiting for the charge.

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

vincent himpe

Re: what a pile of drivel

of course it is not your bog standard graphite .. although that actually performs very well.

If you find a metallic foil with black slippery , semi shiny surface that can be scraped off ( kind of like those scratch-it lottery tickets) : that is a graphite based TIM. Intel uses (or used ) those for awhile with the XEON processors.

https://industrial.panasonic.com/ww/pgs2/soft-pgs

That site has nice graphics and shows some easy to understand basic principles and problems with grease (like the pump-out effect)

vincent himpe

Re: what a pile of drivel

Initially i was not very keen on the Arctic stuff as i could not find a real datasheet that shows measurements and compound composition (the composition is typically published in the SDS : safety data sheet).

Anything that has not "measured according to a standard procedure" engineering curves, and data, is useless. You can't compare it. My product floats according to the brick test. But that one there is better cause the cat prefers sleeping on it.

But, i found it: https://www.arctic.de/media/bf/b7/b1/1597063298/MSDS_MX-4_EN_20181026%20English.pdf

It turns out that this is a combination Alumina 50% / diamond 5-10% blend , hence the better performance.

The gizzly stuff is only alumina and zinc oxide. They don't publish any real technical data(at least none i could find). Just a statement "as tested by overclockers guide" which means nothing. This is akin to "The cat likes it". Since nobody knows the cats decision making procedure it is useless.

vincent himpe

Re: what a pile of drivel

If they are properly bolted down they will not move. That's why these heatsinks are spring loaded. The thermal expansions and contraction during the heat cycles need to make sure you don't break the barrier.

The elasticity of the pad compensates for that. The same goes for the thermal compounds ("grease" as it is wrongly called). There remains enough of carrier to allow for this. The stuff is at the same time tacky enough and elastic enough it can overcome this movement without issue.

If you gave it a whack , and it shifted .. by all means replace it. Then again ... what nutcase gives the heatsink a whack ?

The space shuttle issue had nothing to do with moving. The o-rings became hard when it was cold and lost their elasticity. As the booster ascended the gaps between the stages widened and the rubber o-ring (actually not rubber. They were Viton (tm) (a fluoro elastomer) made by Morton Thiokol.) could not compensate. It becomes rigid at low temperatures could not expand fast enough, leaving an opening where gas escaped with the well known resulting explosion. Vibration had nothing to do with it.

Your laptop ,amplifier or graphics card is not subject to nearly such strong mechanical forces.

vincent himpe

Re: what a pile of drivel

The Registers is a good publication, but once in a while they totally do a cock-up. Especially when it comes to the deeper points of engineering. And that is not entirely their fault. The internet is full of half-truths and misguided information. We live in a cargo-culture world, where even schools propagate cargo-culture.

When;s the last time you went "Ok kids, let's all gather our amplifiers and other electronics today. It's time for the annual thermal grease swaps on the power transistors..."

That is just not being done. Why would you do it on your graphics card or laptop ? I've got equipment (Hewlett Packard test equipment) that is 50 years old and still has the original paste from when it was built. Works perfectly fine.

If you break the thermal interface because you needed to remove the heatsink or replace a component, by all means wipe the damn thing clean and reapply , sparingly, new thermal grease.

And don't fall for the oxygen free reverse electron spin tinseltown compounds they charge 20 times the price for.

Stick to the known brands like Parker , Laird , Loctite. The good stuff is around 3 to 4 watt metre-kelvin and around 250$ per kg. So a 10 grams tube should be about 2.5$. Some of the fancy-pants stuff ( which is nothing but repackaged of the above. There's ain't that many companies that make this stuff) sells for 10 times that price !

Laird Tputty 508 , Parker Chomerics Therm-a-form have been the staple for many decades.

I've been in electronics for almost 40 years of my life ( i etched my first circuit board when i was 8 years old) and it boggles my mind if i read some of the stuff being pushed out there.

vincent himpe

what a pile of drivel

replacing thermal pads because they 'age' ... total and utter nonsense !

Do they leak an oily substance ? yes, some do.

Does it matter ? no, not a bit.

Thermal pads or thermal grease is an emulsion made from alumina (aluminum oxide) suspended in a carrier material.

The thermal properties are determined by the alumina. The rest is just a carrier to be able to manipulate it.

You only need very little paste. Heaping it on works aversely. It is not a refrigerant. It's a transfer material. One that has worse properties than then materials it is trying to transfer between. Yes, you read that right. The heatsink and the copper slug on the device have much better thermal properties than the alumina.

Why do you need it then ? because, at microscopic level, neither the heatsink nor the heatslug on the device (processor,gpu) are 'flat'. They contain pits. The thermal compound fills these potholes and lowers the thermal resistance. When the device goes hot for the first time the "oil" goes fluid , the alumina particles settle under pressure and that's it. Components mounted on a heatsink where paste is used will always be mounted "spring loaded", either by special retaining clips made from spring steel, or using split-washers under the screw, or the heatsink itself spring loaded. the reason is what i came to mention before : at first operation of the assembly, the first time this stuff gets hot, the oily carrier goes liquid , squeezes out, while the alumina particles remain trapped. the carrier material is a very bad thermal conductor, you want it out of there.

The same nonsense goes for statements like "this paste is totally dried out , let me replace it".

It MUST be dried out ! That's when it is most effective.

Aluminum has a thermal conductivity of 230-ish watts per metre-kelvin

Alumina is 30 ...

Copper is 401

Oil is 0.1

Now you get it why you want that oil out of there ?

As for the thermal pads : they need to be compressed for the same reason : get the carrier out of there and compress the TIM ( thermal interface material )

There is a tendency to go away from alumina based materials and go to carbon based material ( a material called Vertical Carbon ) or graphite.

Carbon, under certain circumstances, is a much better thermal conductor than most other materials out there. Diamond, which is the crystalline form of carbon, can handle 2000 watts per metre-kelvin. Nothing else comes close to that apart from graphite. There are some exotic materials such as magnesium oxide, boron nitride and aluminum nitride that perform very good. Some of these are actually used inside the semiconductor package.

And yes, you can actually buy thermal paste that uses , industrial, diamond . It is used in cooling applications for high performance lasers and processor modules like for IBM Z-series mainframes.

The quest for faster Python: Pyston returns to open source, Facebook releases Cinder, or should devs just use PyPy?

vincent himpe

Re: C and then some

i still cannot understand why C is such a popular language. C was designed for a register based processor (pdp-11 is a register based architecture) . x86 is NOT a register based architecture. The damn thing fits like pliers on a pig. C on ARM (or 68k or powerpc) produces much better and denser code than on x86.

vincent himpe

let's run an interpreted language on a virtual machine that runs on another virtual machine and shoehorn that onto another virtual machine that runs on an operating system... that may sit in another vm ...

Gimme back my 8k floating point basic interpreter that ran directly from ROM. Those were the days... i'm getting old. we need 5 billion transistors and 500 megabyte of code to print hello world.

Stealthy Linux backdoor malware spotted after three years of minding your business

vincent himpe

wait

As linux users (and especially the admins of servers) , aren't you supposed to read and understand the entire sourcecode to your running install ? Isn't that why we have open source in the first place ? So you can inspect it before running.

Adobe co-founder and PostScript co-creator Charles Geschke dies, aged 81

vincent himpe

Re: Sadly for many ...

flash was a macromedia invention ... if i remember

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

vincent himpe

Re: if it works...

a billion transistors and a million lines of code for a lightswitch...(those wifi thingies are almost all esp8266 based. that chip has several million transistors, add the ram and rom you hit the billion) and it could all have been done on an 8051 with 4k of rom and 128 bytes of ram...

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

vincent himpe

Re: Not a translator

jup. there's only about 4 million speakers of real 'flemish' and then there are like 300 dialects.... The rest is Dutch and some south afrikaans (but that is so altered it is a language on its own. Even real 'dutch' is hard for flemish speakers.

The toughest to deal with are the chinese. When in a meeting you need to come to a conclusion and they answer 'basically yes' ... that can mean any of the following

- we have not understood a word of what you said, but we agree with the provision we may alter anything and everything later.

- we agree but we can't tell the higher ups, as that would be impolite , so we don't agree

- we don't agree with anything at all. So 'basically yes' , which translates to 'no'

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

vincent himpe

Re: Blinkenlights

yup. as a deuteranopy sufferrer myself (red/green colorblindness) i lost count on how many battery chargers i have taken apart to replace those red/green ( in one package) LED's with red/blue contraptions of my own ( two 0603 leds and three recycled resistor pins)

cable/dsl router/ modems are the worst. they have like 8 led's and call all blink red, green or red/green. grrrrrr.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

vincent himpe

here's an idea

We all need to go through those body scanner yes ? Have a built in scale in those. Walk up, insert your ticket , As you are being scanned you are being weighted. your ticket comes out the other side. The scanner takes a snapshot of your ticket and can correlate the weight to the ticket. the computers do the rest . Anonymous as nobody gets to see the individual numbers except the total for the flight by the pilot.

vincent himpe

guesstimating

69kg's ? have you looked at your average couch-potato these days ? they better have a 100% margin of error on these calculation programs. Fancy a flight full of pensioners in their floral-curtain dresses like 'Violet and Daisy Bucket' and their pot-bellied 'Onslow style' husbands ... not a chance that falls in the 69 kg range.

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

vincent himpe

switch to chocolate milk

chocolate is good .

Excel-lent: Microsoft debuts low-code Power Fx language... but it is not really new

vincent himpe

why this continuous creation of new languages

just gimme basic. it's worked fine for over 50 years, is easy to read and there's no shenenigans like semicolons, curly braces , case sensitivity and indentation driven flow control.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

vincent himpe

De-bar , behind bars and barred

vincent himpe

have them run an apology video 24/7 for a month.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

vincent himpe

Re: At Jenny, re: config files.

Back in the good old dos days the boards also had jumpers to do the address mapping. And the config files needed to match the settings. That kept the riffraff out of the mashinene nicht gemacht fur das gefingerpoken un mittengrabben. Der dumbkopfen mussen keepen their hands in their pockets.

Those were the days a sysadmin always carried a boot floppy and a screwdriver. Now all they do is sit behind their screen coffee slurping while remoting into a machine somewhere halfway the globe.

Nearly 70 years after America made einsteinium in its first full-scale thermo-nuke experiment, mystery element yields secrets of its chemistry

vincent himpe

Transmutation ?

in this day and age ? That's how we ended up with covid and stuff. Haven't they learned nothing ?

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

vincent himpe

Re: Programmer's arch-nemesis!

it's all fun and games till you find out the cpu and hardware actually leak ...

vincent himpe

Re: WordPerfect for DOS

and norton commander, and all the Borland 'Turbo' languages ide's and so many other programs.. even windows 2.0 was all white and blue.( ok white background and blue text / buttons this time )

Decade-old bug in Linux world's sudo can be abused by any logged-in user to gain root privileges

vincent himpe

Re: How is this possible?

bingo ! We are still stuck in a world where the compiler needs a ; to figure out the end of statement and cannot derive when = means 'assign' and when it means 'compare'. Both problems were solved in languages much older than C. The problem is the people that developed the c parser. Their coding skills were only mediocre. That is now the standard we have to deal with... The same goes for null terminated strings. You are banking on the presence of a marker. If that marker does not come the thing goes wonky. Strings should be arrays with a header describing their size. You cannot read past the end and the end is known before the first character is read. The same misery happened with integers. It depends on the hardware what size they are. That has now been solved with uint32 in32 and other types.

Apologies for the wait, we're overwhelmed. Yes, this is the hospital. You need to what?! Do a software licence audit?

vincent himpe

Sorry guys ..

we'll have to switch off the ventilators, patient monitors , heart/lung machines and defibrillators due to missing licenses ...