* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Take the bus... to get some new cables: Raspberry Pi 4s are a bit picky about USB-Cs

Tom 7

The 'official' PSU seems to work fine on mine. For my own amusement I am going to mount the thing on a baseboard along with keyboard and mouse and some mains sockets on a lead and a few attachments so I can put a 21.5 inch monitor on it or fold it all down for transport. I hope they fix the USB problem but its still the best portable I've ever had!

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

Tom 7

Re: On Waking Up

If you

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Tom 7

Re: Go and have a barBQ

Bill Gates used to send a lot of mail to colleagues at one place I worked.

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

Tom 7

Re: Any laws being broken?

Just because some people are bribe-able doesnt mean everyone one is.

Openreach needs to snap that BT umbilical cord, warns Ofcom

Tom 7

Why would you want 900Mb/s

My dad got B4RN fibre installed. That's 1Gb each way for £30/m. Apparently the equipment to do this and the bulk purchasing of bandwidth means its not worth them fucking about with ADSL or other bits of kit that will require replacing in a few years after the customer has been squeezed and can be squeezed again. Talking to locals I reckon I could host around 2 or 300 small business web sites at my house on that and provide working hours support for them for about a 10th of what they pay for what would be a far better service than they get. Given the fibre is probably capable of much more than that just changing bit at each end I could go quite big - except there aren't that many businesses within 'sensible reach'.

I could do some serious wealth creating and train up a few people to do shit other than bloody wordpress.

Tom 7

Re: Fibre

We probably do have the technology - I left some of it in my desk at MH when I left. I am still amazed when talking to FO engineers that we actually had the technology at the end of the 80s that is still leagues ahead of what the market seems to offer, or a fuck of a sight cheaper if not both.

Tom 7

Re: Mobile is faster

Nowhere in my house gets more than 1 bar for 4g. As a yokel though we got a free external aerial and now we are getting 30MBps in the evenings and twice as much during the day. Though it may be dropping out when one of those 20' high hay-bobs goes past the LOS which can be quite frequently during a silage frenzy.

Best of all we have switched our phone over from BT and it looks as if they will get openretch to fix the copper which BT couldnt get them to do for some reason.Which will make those 'Hello BT calling to tell you your broadband is going to be switched off' a lot clearer!

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

Tom 7

Re: Not bloody fair

It doesnt appear to be on at my local alas! Another problem of living in the sticks.

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

Tom 7

Re: Trident

BT still employs the staff - they just seem to insist they dont leave the galley until they really need a piss.

Tom 7

It's far better for the Northern Powerhouse that you should drive down to London and get a plane that flies back over your house to get to the US for some reason.

Tom 7

Re: I suspect the crew at Bruntingthorpe might want a word...

I'd rather it was fixed properly so we could see it flying more than once.

Tom 7

Re: We seem to be slowing down a bit.

I've heard it was nearer 4% towards the end. Did their economy a power of good though!

Tom 7

Re: 11 years from Lancaster to Vulcan

The rate of technological growth is inverse to the rate of management theory growth.

Tom 7

Re: Looks knackered

I have the bomb aimer from a Heinkel Bomber. It has been used for 60 years to turn the equatorial mount on an 6" reflector!

Tom 7

Not old enough.

My granddad was engineer on the R33. Recently we've found his engine maintenance manual. There is one in storage somewhere if only we can track it down!

Tom 7

Re: 4 + 4 + 4

I was at a friends funeral and a Lancaster flew over and did a circuit in his honour. Still rips me apart thinking about it. Sort of welds the memory into your soul.

Oracle goes on for 50 pages about why it thinks the Pentagon's $10bn JEDI cloud contract stinks

Tom 7

Re: A choice of Evils?

That is precisely why there is only one winner. The other option for the DoD is to write an open-source API rule set that everyone can use if there isn't a suitable one already available.

Then Oracle would just refuse to use it which wouldnt be a bad thing in the long run.

Tom 7

Re: Oracle would not complain about the DoD contracting from one supplier alone

They're going to get a shit load of grief from Oracle for not giving them part of the contract. Can you imagine the two or three orders of magnitude more the DoD would get from Oracle if they had let them have some of it?

Tom 7

Re: One line summary of 50 pages

I'd rather they wasted their time leagalesing than writing any more code TBH.

Tom 7

Re: Maturity Gap

Probably one of those social media champions posting the result of a scheduled toilet break.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Tom 7

Re: Don't go back to Windows!

Talking of thinness am I the only one that noticed people putting their thin machines on books or other risers to prevent RSI.

Tom 7

Re: Not having a 'Plan B' is madness

Last time I had to restore from backup (dd can be a bitch after a few pints!) it took me 3 hrs to restore but 3 days to install all the bloody apps I use from time to time. Some of them I've never worked out how I got them to compile in the first place!

Tom 7

Re: Customer service?

That explains why they never have indicators!

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Tom 7

Cutting corners I'd imagine.

We tend to use some pretty accurate FP maths even when something less computationally involved would do when we model 3d worlds. I'd hazard a guess that the AI has spotted where it doesnt have to piss about with 64bits and can just leave it out for a few cycles.

I used to work on electrical cct simulators which couldnt be arsed to calculate lots of shit when it wasnt necessary - saves a shitload of CPU not working out fuck all to 20 decimal places.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

Tom 7

Re: Time passes...

I've some pictures of you shagging a goat. I'm going to publish these and all your friend (sic) will laugh at you. The only way to prove its not you is to photograph you shagging a goat so your friend can compare them.

Tom 7

Re: Time passes...

These are

Tom 7

Re: Time passes...

I've eaten baby goats - bloody lovely! However I do feel these people should be made to look at pictures of me eating baby goats naked ala clockwork orange. They'd soon get an understanding of the concept of consent.

If they lived.

Look out, Titan. Plutonium robots from Earth are on their way

Tom 7

Re: Flight of the Dragonfly

But, Shirley, a powered glider is an aeroplane*.

*Replace aero for whatever the methane equivalent is. Farto?

You know whose kit for 5G is Huawei better? Go on, have a guess, says UK mobile player Three

Tom 7

I dunno, When I worked at Martlesham Heath we were successfully testing 9.6Gb parts in 1990. We beat the US and France to making parts for fibre-optic submarine cables. We surprised the hell out of Motorola by making parts using their process far faster and better than theirs. If privatisation hadn't closed research down I dare say the Chinese and US would be complaining we were adding spyware to our parts and they were going to kill us all with radiation.

Buckminsterfullerene sounds like the next UK Prime Minister but trust us, it's in fact the largest molecule yet found in interstellar space

Tom 7

I thought is was Goth space-people drifting about aimlessly.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Tom 7

Re: systemd

There is a 64bit Devuan for the pi3 which I would imagine may run on this in a few days.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

Tom 7

Re: The post is required, and must contain letters.

I wonder if in this case, maintaining 386 support basically means not deleting it. For 99.99% of things its merely a compiler switch.

Tom 7

Re: To Everything There Is A Season...

I dug out a pi-zero I hadn't run in a while and upgraded it. Seems to run a lot faster than it did. I was brought up on machines that were not very responsive and find you work a lot better when you have moments to think between actions. The path of least resistance is not necessarily the best.

32 bit has a long long way to go yet! Pleased Ubuntu is getting out of the way TBH.

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

Tom 7

Re: When will I be able to put it on my fridge door ?

A bit like the bit it the H2G2 only the chain mail would travel through the hostesses body!

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Tom 7

Written on paper

and taken by the Computer Club President to a computer miles away from school and the results returned a week later for fixing and sending off again*, 1975 I dont think I saw a real digital computer for 2 years after starting to program them!

* and now MBAs can get the process down to that sort of speed again!

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Tom 7

Re: Its the updates

I remember when C# and ,.NET came out and promised to end DLL hell. I wrote loads of really useful stuff that wouldnt work under the first major upgrade. And you couldn't run the two on the same machine. Really pissed me off.

On Linux you just modify the paths and order to various libraries/headers etc and you can run as many different mixes of things you want.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Tom 7

Re: Small point

She may be moderately bright. One thing about wealth is it buys an education for people that doesnt seem to involve real learning and I've met a couple of rich kids with qualifications well above their education that have made up for it afterwards.

Tom 7

Re: Small point

Boring facts: A flail mower consist of a row or rows of fairly heavy steel J shaped picks fixed on a hinge to an axle so that when spun at high speed so the bottom of the J would be travelling left as typed acting like a blunt chisel is can cut through most vegetation and if it cant the hinge allows it to move out of the way and then centripetal force will fling it out again for another go on the next rotation.

Bloody effective at making hedges look shit but rectilinear and not in the way any more. More importantly they are cheap to run so (like pothole repairs that are not done) you save on your council tax and ruin the countryside (and pay more overall for wheel-rims and suspension etc).

I have about a mile of hedge on a shared access lane and its flailed every year and it is not good for the hedges in the long run but its hard work with a hand held hedgecutter!

Powers of stash and rebase fall into the hands of noobs with GitHub Desktop 2.0

Tom 7

Re: Ignorance is not bliss.

Its more that most things are more complicated than a gui user can handle.

New twist in underworld of alleged code, data theft: Two, er, boffins accused of trying to steal, uh, a river model

Tom 7

Re: "If the Old River Control Structure Fails: A Catastrophe With Global Impact"

The thing is the levees which control the water supply enabling the river transport also prevent a massive amount of natural fertilizer to be spread on the plains during floods, The cost of that is absolutely enormous.

Zorin OS 15 nods at Ubuntu and welcomes Windows escapees

Tom 7

Re: Will give it a try

I thought I'd give it a try then I realised its so long since I used windows I probably wouldnt have a clue if it was a good replacement!

Auditors slam FBI for shoddy testing of facial-recog tech. But no big deal. It only has 641m images on its systems

Tom 7

Re: Metrics

I've done some playing with AI. One thing that struck me was that there seems to be no not-sure option in most of the open training sets. Most of the algorithms seem to give various confidence levels but none I've seen reject things. This means pictures of white noise with a touch of red in are identified as robins after training on birds, not because they look like robins but because that's the closest match and it has no option of 'haven't a fucking clue mate' so it chooses the highest probability match. If you give it that option it seems to help reducing false positives but I haven't the experience, the data or the computing power to rest further.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

Tom 7

Re: And we are all still alive.......

So were the guys who went into Chernobyl.

For a few days.

Tom 7

Re: What fraction of a gram ?

I'd be more worried about its surface area as that will determine the amount that is released by your digestion into your bloodstream. Its only petroleum product after all - the stuff you can spill on a piece of ground and stops all plants growing for 20 years!

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Tom 7

Re: Mac houses wont care but...

I should have added "and it uses more bandwidth updating itself than I do using it".

My work computer would be doing about 50GB a day updating all the software on it,

Tom 7

Re: Mac houses wont care but...

If I wanted a computer to do some work on it I wouldnt put fucking android anywhere near it.

Tom 7

So that's how people eat American cheese - drown out its flavour!

Can't quite cram a working AI onto a $1 2KB microcontroller? Just get a PC to do it

Tom 7

Re: And I do wonder how this would work on a Pi Zero

Gurgle goo goo!

Tom 7

Re: And I do wonder how this would work on a Pi Zero

Where do you think CAST got their name from?

Strewth: Hackers slurp 19 years of Oz student data in uni's second breach within a year

Tom 7

That will really come in handy for fraudsters in a few years

when they finished paying for working in London bars!