* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Tom 7

Re: Three-way comparison - long overdue

But others will tell you that's too complex.

Tom 7

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

I've always found computing to be non-orthogonal. OK I grew up with lots of different languages but C and C++ were my main weapons and C++ has its history writ large in its syntax but its all logical as far as I can see. There's a rational use-case for everything in it, it might not be your rational use-case but you are free to write your own language which will magically become as complex as C++ once you've added solutions to all the rational use-cases and as 'ugly' to the majority of users.

If a language is simple enough for you to know all of it then its not complicated enough for modern use. If you are using bits of a language you dont understand RTFM.

Tom 7

Re: Is C++ becoming too large and complex?

That will be because computing is too large and complex for you.

Amiga Fast File System makes minor comeback in new Linux kernel

Tom 7

I think, like many seemingly superior offerings, by the time it had all the security and other things required for a modern operating system it would be, well like a modern system of some form.

The Amiga was good because it wasn't using 8086 small model compatibility, something MS-Dos did which lost computing a decade as a result.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Tom 7

Re: Perhaps

Which is why I never have a phone you cant remove the battery from.

Tom 7

Re: Perhaps

If you drive a screw in to thread depth with a hammer IKEA would be out of business as anything other than a meatball and firewood provider.

Anyone else noticed that the top countries for broadband speeds are well-known tax havens? No? Just us then?

Tom 7

Re: Move to Spain

The weather is mostly better. I fear the summers will be too hot for normal people and may lead to the place being burned down.

Tom 7

Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

We're not a proper tax haven yet. We will be next year but one where no-one pays tax because they arent earning anything.

Qualcomm flexes latest Arm chipset for laptops: Snappy performance and battery life if you can put off your upgrade long enough

Tom 7

Re: There won't be laptops with 25 hour battery life...

If there are I'd be interested in one.

Sounds like the black helicopters have come for us. Oh, just another swarm of FAA-approved Amazon delivery drones

Tom 7

Re: I've ordered Amazon same-day exactly once

I ordered Amazon same day once. Only to be told it would be two weeks for delivery. And then 6. It was the start of Covid but I was surprised it went from being in stock to sold out after I coughed up.

Tom 7

Re: Great

Its not the university as such - its the spoilt rich parent of spoilt rich kids who dont want their offspring rubbing with the hoi-poloi who may discover the spoilt rich kid probably didnt achieve the grades they did.

Tom 7

Is that a European or an Asian parcel?

Either way I find this hard to swallow.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 56-year-old satellite burning up in the sky spotted by sharp school kids

Tom 7

Re: ?

Friction occurs as the air passes along the edges of the incoming object. However at the front the compression of air is what causes the massive temperature rise. This results in temperatures far higher than we can achieve in an oxyacetylene torch - and you've never say one of those frictioned its way through the safe door.

You Musk be joking: A mind-reading Neuralink chip in a pig's brain? Downloadable memories? Telepathy? Watch and judge for yourself

Tom 7

The rudest thing possible.

Go stick your head in a pig!

Life with Amazon's fitness band: Upload your half-naked pics to see how fat you'll look without exercise. You now sound stressed – relax!

Tom 7

Re: For those of you concerned about your privacy...

I'm too unfit to manage chafing. Will just sitting and sweating do?

Tom 7

Re: Putting the HAL into HALO

I'm boldly itallicked OK?

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Tom 7

Re: We've been there before

So MS are indulging in rhythmic gymnastics in an attempt to insert their ring in your ring!

Tom 7

Plain text is plain text. HTML is not necessarily what you think it is.

One thing about HTML is style sheets and javascript. One idea behind them is the recipient can use their style sheets to enhance accessibility amongst other things. Its also possible to completely obfuscate the content by a simple change to a style sheet which can move a word forward or backward in a message.

In the same way I would never be dumb enough to send a legal document as a PDF to someone to print and sign I would never expect HTML to look exactly like it does on my machine because I cannot guarantee how it appears - you must have noticed how web sites fail to display sometimes as the CSS or javascript doesnt load for some reason Its not safe enough for important things.

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

Tom 7

Re: However, he also got a reputation...

Apart from having an OS that is on your side Linus Torvald came up with the best excuse ever; "I haven't used Windows in years but I can dual boot your system if you like!"

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Tom 7

I've never used Tik Tok

and if Oracle buy it I never will.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

Tom 7

Re: Just unplug it

Good job there is no such thing as a rechargeable battery!

Teen charged after allegedly taking food delivery biz for a ride: $10k of 'fraudulent refunds for stuff not delivered'

Tom 7

May we suggest it order some business intelligence software

Only if it can afford intelligent managers capable of understanding and using the software. It never ceases to amaze me how confused high paid executive officers are confused with things like stock control. Most of them would be delighted with their cut of sales to the lad and would not be happy to lose it.

What would you prefer: Satellite-streamed cat GIFs – or a decent early warning of an asteroid apocalypse?

Tom 7

Re: Poor Countries?

My wireless BB is a lot cheaper than Musks offering. I somehow doubt rural Africa is going to turn into an economic powerhouse because it can watch netfils and disney simultaneously when all it really need is access to local markets which wont be able to afford Musk either.

Tom 7

How about my telescope is ground base as am I and the other dozens of kids who sometimes use it.

RasPad 3.0 converts Raspberry Pi 4 to a tablet – be prepared for some quirks

Tom 7

Re: Absolutely amazing...

Maybe thats the limit of your programming ability. Its certainly more usable in capable hands like my 5 year old.

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

Tom 7

Re: Cupertino getting notions of apotheosis again.

Fruit trees benefit from seemingly savage pruning from time to time.This includes branches, ring barking where a ring of up 9/10ths of bark around the tree is removed. Root pruning is also an option. It is thought the near death experience forces them to be fruitful rather than just CO2 stores.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Tom 7

Re: The elevator did it

I used to work on a GEC4000 that could spot lightning 30 miles away, despite being quite far inside building with lots of stuff you would think shielding, though of course it could have been serial line for one of the other computers acting as an aerial. As the summer storms used to come up from France is was often a lot better than the weather forecast as to what was going to happen. Friday afternoon - blank screen. hot humid air, sunny skies? Reboot and see if you can get to a a good save point and then leg it home and down the pub on the docks to have a beer or two while the storm rumbled over the sea full of lighting and eventually a cold wind would spill over the quay which would signal the time to get into the pub and order 4 pints so you could have something to drink in the lightning flashed dark as the power went out.

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Tom 7

Re: A "'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice" Moment/Event Horizon:-)

http://acqnotes.com/acqnote/tasks/small-disadvantaged-business

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Tom 7

Re: With great power comes great incompatibility

I remember the joy of managing to ease a two pin plug into a socket in a very posh French hotel though there was an ominous click as it got fully seated. After a pleasant weeks work and some serious food we packed up to leave on the Friday morning and the boss popped in to jolly me along and saw the lead hanging out of the socket. I'd packed the laptop and PS and decided the lead wouldnt be coming with me without some serious problems having realised it was the wrong plug and the ominous click was the metal end dislocating. I'd even unscrewed it to check and decided to pretend I'd forgotten the lead. The boss looked at it and just grabbed and pulled yanking the socket and ten foot of ducting all the way up wall and some rather nice plaster architrave where it disappeared into the ceiling void. I was heading out through the door at the time and I might have escaped to the lobby if I hadn't stupidly pissed myself laughing which meant I had to stand their looking stupid while he blamed it all on me!

Pew, pew, pew! Our galaxy is shooting cold, gaseous 'bullets' of high-speed matter. Boffins are baffled

Tom 7

Blobs?

Barney McGroblets shirley!

Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

Tom 7

TBF the torrent of tweets is not much better.

Dido 'Queen of Carnage' Harding to lead UK's Institute for Health Protection because Test and Trace went so well

Tom 7

Re: How Dare You Criticise........

Nope, no-one in the Gruniad has a decent word to say about DidZero. I think most feminists can see through the tories promoting her far beyond her abilities as an anti-feminist act to make women look utterly stupid and incompetent.

Tom 7

PHE was introduced by the tories, presumably to provide some form of interference to make life difficult for the NHS only they found some useful things to do,

Tom 7

Re: Hmmmm.

You are a assuming there will be another free election. I somehow feel with the electoral services privatised the chances of a fair election are long gone,

Tom 7

Re: Am I the only one

Cho! Its spelt Dee Eye Dee Zero.

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Tom 7

281TB. Cant wait to index that so I can search it in less than a day.

And here comes the outer join...

Psst, you want us to design you an Arm chip? 'Cause we can do that, says RISC-V processor darling SiFive

Tom 7

A bit more AI friendly stuff

which appears to be in the pipeline, if its low enough power I can see these being handy in extendible compute engine type jobies.

IBM takes Power10 processors down to 7nm with Samsung, due to ship by end of 2021

Tom 7

Re: POWER 10

"Somehow the term "AI" loses its mystery if all it comes down to is matrix maths". I have a feeling when we work out how evolution wires lots of these simple matrix maths engines together your jaw will happily move back to lower than a snakes belly mode. Well assuming you can actually grasp how it works that is.

Where there's a .mil, there's Huawei: Pentagon allowed to keep using Chinese tech deemed too dangerous for everyone else – report

Tom 7

Re: Backdoors -- user flavour content...

Ooh you are awful! But I like you!

Tom 7

Those last two words are never going to happen.

Tom 7

Re: "That hasn't however, stopped the US and other nations . . ."

I think your mistake was assuming that because the military in the US got the money that somehow meant you would get equipment at ground level. Its a very naive viewpoint to hold these days.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Tom 7

With one of fhose you should be able to cook yourself for dinner!

Tom 7

Re: Magic?

Its quite freaky how putting an SSD in an old machine can make it usable again - assuming you remember to make a bootable partition small enough for it to use!

Tom 7

Re: Magic?

I used to have a drive that wouldnt spin up on its own but slid out of its rack you could rotated around its spinning axis by hand and it would start up ok. I think I got a good 8 months more use out if that way - disks were considerably more expensive then.

Tom 7

Re: Remote rebooting...

EIV but by phone. There is a condition called Engineer In Vicinity whereby a machine that fails regularly will function perfectly when the engineer with eye-watering charges is in attendance. I had a Superbrain II that failed to boot from disk or exhibited some disk problem. The engineer was called and it booted flawlessly about 30 times and flawlessly passed a multitude of tests, Forms were signed and the machine functioned flawlessly until (in the days before mobile phones) the engineer drove past the security for her 3 hour drive home only to be called back to repeat the process the next day.

Tom 7

I was hiring a jeep in the Caribbean while suffering from jetlag. It was an automatic (?) and I started the thing and attempted to manually put it into gear which involved my left hand reaching for the gear lever and it being LHD opening the door while simultaneously trying to push down the non-existent clutch unbalancing myself and falling out onto the floor next to the nice lady who had just rented me her lovely new car!

Tom 7

Who the fuck invented traffic alerts? I used to drive down from Herts to the west country to go diving many weekends, 6:30 on radio 4 there was normally some pretty good comedy. It would invariably be interrupted by a traffic alert from some pissant station two hundred miles away and of no relevance and I'd manually switch back to R4 to hear the studio audience dying of hysterics and then miss the rest of the program arguing with the missus about turning off the traffic alerts in her car as I've never heard a relevant one. Why the fuck I'd want to hear about a Norfolk tractor accident in Dorset is beyond me,

Tom 7

Recently got 4G BB. Can be intermittent in the silage season - the tractors using the road with those massive tedders cut the signal!

Tom 7

Re: even before PFY

I had a tower with a big heatsink and big fan. The fan was running fine but the damn thing was still overheating. All looked good - shiny fan blades seemingly whizzing round but holding a bit of tissue nearby indicated little airflow. Unscrewed the fan to find the heatsink was chock full of fine yellow dust which turned out to be from the foam in the comfy old chair a couple of feet away. In the right light you could see a little puff of the dust coming out from the cushion as you slumped into it heading directly into the air intake on the tower. For some reason the stuff only liked to stick on to aluminium which it did with relish. Took about two hours to scrape it all out as I hadn't got any thermal paste to hand and didnt want to pressure wash it in situ! Turned the cushion round so the leak went into the chair body and all was well,