Posts by Tom 7

Find a local CoderDojo and take a gun.

And audio.

I've just trashed my microSD setting up a new install so cant check this without wandering next door and I cant be bothered but are these not set to local access only? You cant log into them unless you are on the machine or you have set them to be externally accessible?

Given the standard ISO does not have SSH enabled it would work exactly like current standard headless setups: either you just copying one youve set up with a new user or your booting the standard install ISO on something with keyboard and screen before sending it of headless into the world like a rich politician.

Re: Russia = Ouroboros

Well, that and the fact that anyone with the technical know how not in the forces has legged it!

The main problem with fusion is you need things to get hot, very very very very hot. In fact so hot getting the energy out if it is difficult. While this method may look good I dont think the lithium is going to melt so much as vaporise. As indeed would anything near the target plate at the power levels require to be a powerstation.

And wasnt lithium the reason Castle Bravo was a bit more energetic than they expected?

Re: Unhelpful comments

I was amazed to discover the Z80 had a set of shadow registers so you could actually write a multitasking operating system on with relative ease but then you'd have to redo all 8080 software that was machine updated to it!

Re: Unhelpful comments

TBF there isnt room for gravel filled emergency off ramps in most cities so soft road furniture it is. I say soft as in my old village one house got pissed off with pissed teenagers coming over the 16thC humback bridge too fast and taking out their garden wall so managed to get some cat iron bollards to defend it and all it achieved was it launched a car over the wall into their living room!

Re: Comments are bugs, too

# fix for bug report 93315 http://localhost/projectnumber1/filecurentlybeingred#BR93315

is sometime the best way to do it - and its sort of bidirectional too in the sense you can hop from the place where the bug fix is defined to the code if you grep and or ASP a lot.

Re: Unhelpful comments

There were some old info you could get on how to implement really useful machine code side effects to do things that weren't in the least bit obvious from the assembler. I've been looking for them recently but either my googlefoo is going to hell or they have been lost like tears in the rain. I found a few bits of really weird stuff in device drivers and when I used to step through code to find out how to get past the need for dongles or bits not in the normal parts of floppy disks.

Re: Unhelpful comments

Comments are always contentious. I did have a bit of a battle with someone who was trying to use me as the excuse why his bit of the system wasnt working when all the bits he'd asked me to do were. He changed the rules so basically comments had to be so detailed someone who had never programmed could follow it. So 300 lines of device driver became so large it wouldnt assemble on the machine he thought I had to assemble on. But of course I could cross assemble it elsewhere and copy the object file over et voila. It was around this time I realised he'd spent two years there being paid a fortune to code something without actually knowing how to code but somehow he'd decided to make me the fall guy - even though I could have actually helped him if he hadn't tried shitting on me - the thing he was trying to code could be achieve by basically cutting and pasting the data from a large document into the DB and putting it in the right drop-down lists at the right time. However he chose to fire me while I was away at my mothers funeral and I was told not to come back to the office or contact anyone in the company or legal action would be taken!! He managed another year before the Director finally sussed out his childhood friend was just a con artist and sued his balls off!

Re: Extra credit

TBF to the guys in Mumbai Exchange was a pile of shit early on. Cant say how it is now but I worked at one place that had a support contract and they'd spend 3 days sending me MSDN numbers to read and try to fix the database corruption that seemed to occur fairly regularly. On one occasion the last resort DB repair program could fix the DB even after a dozen runs or so but I'd discovered the Exchange API by then and used that to basically read out message after message and put them into a new DB and then renamed that to the old DB name and rebooted the system and the corruption was gone. The VB code I wrote was about 30 times faster than the MS db cleaning engine and seemed to get all the existing messages out - Exchange just would just leave corrupted bits of data in the DB from time to time and then fall over them, and sometimes their repair program would too.

And the best thing was I discovered I had access to everyone's mail. Not that I read (many of) them but I learned that security has to be put in at the start and not added on later.

Re: No, sorry

"which actually are about free speech for billions of people." Well speaking is allowed, but those whose speech is preferred by the advertisers will be heard, not the billions of people.

Re: Water companies in England

You think it would be a good idea to knock down parts of cities to build solar farms? I've also noticed nuclear power plants are built far from their customers too. Perhaps there are good reasons for some things.

Its not like someone hasnt invented the grid or anything. The pylon bits only lose 1.7% - the 'domestic' side loses between 5 and 8%. So maybe knocking down parts of cities and sorting that out would make some sense.

Re: Trickle-down economics

The unions in the 70s were merely asking for wages that covered the massive increase in the cost of living due to OPEC raising the oil price. The tories basically managed to blame them for something that happened in the Middle East and the poor idiot voters believed them. We're going to be seeing a lot of that coming soon due to brexit and Russia. If you can explain to me why someone has to run their lives at a loss working for a company simply because the company thinks it has a right to their cheap labour I'm sure I could do with the belly laugh your explanation would give me.

Re: Not an unequivocal union fan - but I applaud this

Ford had the sense to pay his workers enough to actually buy the things they produced. Its nice when your market is a lot larger!

Re: Best of luck with that mate

httpsed://

Re: WFH is here to stay

Judging from the local FB group I think its safe to say not working in the office is going to be quite common. Several local businesses are shut due to covid and several events this weekend have been cancelled due to the staff being ill. Two restaurants I know of the chefs are ill for at least the second time and in one of them I know they were both fully vaccinated AND have had the flu like bug before.

I'd not go back into the office unless you are sure you're going to get sick pay because you sure as hell are going to get covid (again).

The first machine were coded in binary - there was a website you could run a Baby (the first modern electronic computer!) but the code its was written in no longer runs on a browser but basically the binary code was set on switches and loaded into the memory, then the next bit of binary code was loaded and stored and once the program was loaded you set the start address and hit the run button. I would say its worth while for any programmer to try and get a grip on how a simple CPU works (or worked). Basically its a quite simple arrangement of switches and registers and a bit of logic. Laziness being the mother of invention the next thing that came along was assembly language where mnemonics replaced the binary codes and then they were changed into binary and entered. Then someone came up with the idea of an assembler that took a text file and converted that into binary and ran it. Once we got to that point (and allowing defines and macros and including other files etc ) we were pretty much where we are today - computer languages are really just smarter machine independent assemblers with attitude.

http://www.visual6502.org/ can show you how the code works in silicon! But there are other 8080 virtual machines that you can easily run to see how assembler works!!

Re: Anyone remember ...

Operating Systems Design and Implementation, by Tanenbaum seems to available as a free PDF these days. Worth a read, The book you mentioned is free to download from the link you gave which is nice - there are later editions available too!

Re: Ghosts in the machine

I think the core Lisps were generally built around SECD machines which I guess you easily implement in machine code (CAR and CDR were taken from the machine code of the IBM704), Or equally simply create a hardware implementation of it. Symbolic Lisp Machines made machines with that in mind but never quite got round to doing it fully in silicon.

Re: Jupiter ACE

The Dragon32 had a Forth OS IIRC . Small, tight fast and with a complete lack of software.

AI enabled?

That's a new marketing piece of bollocks I've nor heard of before!