* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Samsung unveils 512GB DRAM CXL module in E3.S form factor

Tom 7

The end of the motherboard?

Just a PCI5 bus and some IO that you plug cards into?

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Tom 7

Re: Great news

The suggestion that it stifles illegal innovation seems like slam dunk.

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

Tom 7

Re: Parallel processing

It should be a lot easier these days - in fact IIRC I read a program in a Prolog book that solved a similar problem as it really is just another aspect of resource management and logistics and, while I never quite got round to picking apart GPU code I'd imagine its been done for that so is probably available for C++ already.

Tom 7

I still vividly remember the day I wandered around at BTRL and in the lift well, on pallet with a trolley under it stood a 1024 transputer hypercube. No one around. It was a good 10 minutes before I managed to stop myself trying to work out how to get it into my car and there was still no-one else around!!!!

Tom 7

Re: Blimey, pt II

I think my MK14 came with 128 bytes. I wish I knew where I'd put it as its the most valuable computer I own!

Tom 7

Blimey, pt II

I ran linux on a 4MB 386 and it functioned quite well on some tasks, the swap disk being a bit slow. I've played with minix and its quite capable though it does lack shit to play with. If this is stable then there's a whole new world of pocket computing that even MPs cant compete with.

Tom 7

I've got a chip that I crowdfunded which I thought was something close to a transputer but 30 years on - relying on fast interprocesser communications to get the real grunt. Unfortunately its in a 16thC intricately carved oak cabinet thingy and a door has jambed so I cant get to it to reveal its true name*. It is interesting to see that people are looking down this path again. We should have enough data/code sets to get an idea it its useful.

*the cabinet might** be worth more than my house so I'm not going to try and break into it.

** I saw something with the same style of carving on it go for £15k and it would fit into the small bit I cant open!!

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Tom 7

Re: College Tales...

I miss those days, not the fixing the bloody stuff but the joy of watching someone falling face down as they passed a desk that someone had moved so the cable turned into a tripwire.

RAD Basic – the Visual Basic 7 that never was – releases third alpha

Tom 7

Re: Other BASICs

Just had a quick play with Gambas. Could be dangerous!

Shareholders turn the screws on IBM and its gag orders

Tom 7

Re: Agreed

Well for now anyway. Given the hatred for Lefty Lawyers and traitorous Judges I can see it being overturned soon.

Tom 7

Does it involve oranges?

Tom 7

Re: "there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company"

My Dad uses to have a book on the origin of uk words (auth Partridge?), as a teenager f**k was often referred to. It was an eye opener on a rainy day when you flicked through it bored. Butterfly, originally a Flutterby changed between the two names several times. Words come from other languages and this islands penchant for sarcasm changes the meaning of things regularly and a simple mistake by someone important can change the meaning of a word to something else altogether. Sounds silly but then the Spanish (Castillian) lisp was adopted because the royal line was so inbread their own faces didnt fit.

Tom 7

Re: "there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company"

Mister - a small insignificant container of water that when squeezed produces a smokescreen like fog.

Tom 7

How ironic it would be if shareholder needs got rid of NDAs

They'd have to stop shareholders voting!

Did you know Twitter has an open-source arm? This is what it's been up to

Tom 7

Re: Code release before project killed.

Chaff? Here's some code we've either just about to or have stopped using for you to plough through while we attack you from another vector.

Tom 7

Re: email address as ID

I had BB and email address with a small ISP that was bought up and they put up prices so I left them and was cut off immediately. The number of sites that insisting on sending email confirmations to my old email address that I had to somehow acknowledge before I could change made The Scream look like a holiday photo.

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

Tom 7

Re: Access is not the problem

I'm not sure things graduate from the access front end capabilities. I implemented pivot tables and that seemed to be beyond the limit of most managers understanding. I spent some time isolating the access front end from the DB - as I said all date was read or input via an API of stored procedures so users couldn't randomly lose data in tables of their own creation or delete others. I've long said laziness it the mother of invention Access was the lazy, but fucking useful, way of giving users controlled access to their data - even if the permissions were controlled at the MSql server end. Interestingly no-one complained about not being able to access other peoples data through Access but when I tried to implement a system agreed by management where data (including documents) was restricted to 'owners' and permitted readers the excuses used to access other peoples data when they were on holiday/sick were interesting to say the least even thought there was a clear and easy to implement policy for just these events.

Tom 7

They know the private users will become addicted and when employed get their companies to buy them their daily hit.

Tom 7

Access is not the problem

The Access DB was. However once you RTFM and discovered you could connect to 'real' databases Access became a really useful tool. Until the other tools in the dept got the yips at anything Access. I modified about 50 or so Access apps around the company once to use the data from MSQL 4.2 via stored procedures so I could modify the DB structure without having to re-write all the apps. After I moved on someone panicked and got rid of the apps and never managed to replace them before the company did something drastic though I know not what as is been totally subsumed by what was a lot smaller company when I was there.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

Tom 7

Re: Metaverse metafictional metaphorically

I got one that wanted elevators ticking. Not a single picture of a moving staircase anywhere.

India reveals plan to become major RISC-V design and production player by 2023

Tom 7

Re: Curry in the sky..

Turn the aid off? You mean let India drift further towards Russia?

NASA's modified Boeing 747 SP SOFIA to be grounded for good

Tom 7

I've looked at where is webb pretty much every day this year.

Up till the 28th! Woop woop snoopy dance first light!

Can we buy Sofia so we can pop out and see things like meteor storms that seem to make it cloudy in the UK?

MIT's thin plastic speakers fall flat. And that's by design

Tom 7

Re: Bass response...

You can make your own for a lot lot less if you fancy a Ken Dodd hairstyle!

Tom 7

Re: Bass response...

They didnt go down very low though - below 100hz or so its mainly harmonics and not the actual note. The 63s are a bit better down to 60hz. I've got a pair of each and the originals on the valve amps sound superb but its a bit of a con. But then you need a large room to allow the wave to even get going.

Outside tests on seriously expensive ribbon mike and full freq analysis of output not just normal db graph.

Tom 7

Re: Interesting tech!

The lowest string on bass guitar is 41 Hz. Most so called hifis dont get down there and as for sound bars no chance. Size is extremely important when it comes to lower notes - simply to stop the sound going round the back and cancelling itself out!

Tom 7

Presumably a part of a hemisphere

could be used to focus the sound.

Not that I'd want to wander around with what might look like an exploded bra while boogieing down the street.

BT starts commercial trial of quantum secured London network

Tom 7

Re: UK government has signalled its intent to develop the country into a "quantum-enabled economy"

Secure porn downloads in the house then!

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Tom 7

Re: Alternatives to C

What's wrong with it? You may find the bit you thought needed fixing was fixed many many years ago. Computing is big. Very big. Most programmers only ever cover a small part of it and give up on other bits too easily.

Algorithm can predict pancreatic cancer from CT scans well before diagnosis

Tom 7

So finding a diagnoses a lot earlier is a big problem? I dont think so. It would be really good to find out what is triggering the diagnosis but not knowing is not really a problem though I am really looking forward to them finding out the answer. It may be however, that ML is actually a lot smarter than humans in certain situations.

Supercomputer lab swaps lead-acid UPS batteries for alkaline gear

Tom 7

More environementally friendly?

It depends what you were intending to do with them. Lead Acid are pretty much 100% recyclable. TBH I'd be more than happy to have them here - the ones that still function I can make use of and those that dont I can easily sell to for recycling.

Elon Musk's Twitter mega-takeover likely imminent

Tom 7

Re: Lord High Muck

No, he drained the swamp to replace the mosquitoes with face eating leopards.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Tom 7

Something that sweeps the skies clean? - Spacekeeper Willie Waver!

Tom 7

Re: For those

Prune the dead wood from their budgets? In the UK the dead wood is the people in charge of the budget. Aint gonna happen for a while yet.

Take this $15m and make us some ultra-energy-efficient superconductor chips, scientists told

Tom 7

Re: Déjà vu

The JWST just needs to be colder than the electromagnetic radiation it is trying to receive. Josephson Junctions rely on a superconduction. We've seen that at 203k!!! Quantum Computers might need 4.2k but a Josephson Junction computer can run a lot warmer than that. If its power loss is low enough (and if the whole thing is superconducting then we're talking EM radiation alone) then its quite feasible to run a whole data centre in a very small volume with very little cooling required compared to a 'full size data centre'.

Tom 7

Re: Déjà vu

IIRC Josephson's Junctions need superconduction not 4.2k so we could be up to 203k or so. The thing to remember is the bigger you go the less it costs per unit volume to keep it cool. They're up to a million or so junctions on a chip at the moment so around 68020 level of complexity so I'd bet we're close to a point where we could see some useful stuff in the pure digital realm - I think most of the cryogenic goes to quantum computing stuff but there does seem to be a digital option opening up as a result, I cant find any figures on gate switching power but I can imagine it could be very low and it might be possible to replicate a whole datacenter computing power in a small cool room.

Samsung, others test drive Esperanto's 1,000-core RISC-V AI chip

Tom 7

Re: A bit late?

No I dont want one to run Linux, I want one to run AI. And I want RISC-V not nvidia tensor which will be astronomically expensive compared to this I would imagine.. And I have no idea why you are getting on your high pony.

Tom 7

A bit late?

Is that a bit late on their schedule or are there other >1000 64 bit low power core chips that I could get hold of?

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Tom 7

Re: Go Forth and prosper

Dr Dobbs is probably the main reason some things didnt sell. Not because it dissed them but because it was full of 8080/Z80 machine code for loads of routines and stuff. If you wanted to learn via plagiarisation and you had access to it (as a lot of kids who were at uni or had parents at one) you could just spend a couple of hours copying the code to A4 and then typing it in at home!! ISTR doing that with a pico-basic for my MK14 SC/MP base machine.

Tom 7

The thing is the ZX80 was more or less plug in and go. Didn't the Microtan need a backplane/psu and keyboard so you were paying double before you got on your knees in front of the TV.

Tom 7

The QL was great because you could write 32 bit code on it. They said then no-one ever got fired for buying IBM but I still swear the IBM PC put computing in holding pattern that it didnt break out of until Windows NT because almost everyone bought IBM!

Tom 7

Re: Where it all began...for some

The Dragon was certainly a better quality machine but the 6809 lacked the volume of software the z80 had accumulated. I was coding in C in my Speccy while a friend of mine was hacking around in Forth. The games were probably better on the Dragon but for learning stuff that rubber keyboard gave access to a lot more.

OpenBSD 7.1 is out, including Apple M1 support

Tom 7

Re: OpenBSD is Faaast!

I've liked it when I've played with it - the only difference I found with other Linuxes was a lack of pre-built software and the odd library missing for some of the more obscure software I dip into occasionally - though that is becoming more common on big Linux distributions anyway.

Engineers up the torque to get Lucy's solar array latched

Tom 7

Putting on my manager hat

just bloody fix it!

Machine-learning models vulnerable to undetectable backdoors: new claim

Tom 7

Re: "Said one individual on Twitter"

I frequently read very large tomes, ~300 pages of technical shit in a day. I can manage maybe 3 tweets of a 10 tweet stream of unconsciousness before losing the will to live. It's almost as if someone has found the antidote to writing.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Tom 7

Re: Too early.

I've always thought the main potential advantage of computerised driving would be the potential of co-operative rather than combative driving. When stopped at traffic lights on green (ok amber) the first cars in the queue set off, then the following etc until the ones further back just start in time to stop at the next red lights. A complete block of cars that can make it through the lights starting simultaneously would gain a much higher average speed between lights, the timing of the lights could be much reduced too.

Though to be fair who is going to want to watch TV at all soon let alone on the way to work which can be done at home.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS arrives on everything from a 2GB Pi to AWS Graviton

Tom 7

Re: Alpha, Beta, ...

Missing? Or just they're having trouble with it because its not really suitable?

ASML CEO: Industrial conglomerate buying washing machines to rip out semiconductors

Tom 7

Re: Going to dust off those Spectrum 48K skills

Spectrum 48K? You cant afford a Spectrum 48K!

Tom 7

Re: Interesting

My local washing machine repair man used to collect PIC chips for me. The older machines had them socketed in as I guess they were learning to program them and needed to upgrade them during production as the worked out bugs and stuff. Now you can get one for love nor money!

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Tom 7

Re: Heres a suggestion

I've taken to switching TV channels when certain adverts come on and frequently I dont go back cos I've found something better. I've even taking to going to bed early to read having set the TV to record what I wanted to watch and the following day I can skip past 20 minutes of adverts. The kids seem to do the same on their various devices, or if the app wont allow they just switch to another app while the ads are on. I get the impression marketing may have just shat in its own bed and we are soon going to lose some really crap channels.

Scraping public data from the web still OK: US court

Tom 7

I have a twitter account - unless they lapse. I was doing a big data course and it needed to do some tweet collecting and so I joined and I played with it and have not logged in since. I'm note even going to log in to delete my account,