* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Tom 7

Re: spot the difference

OOps I lied - the Sinclair Scientific says 3.14159 and the calculator itself thinks pi/2 is 1.563

Tom 7

Re: spot the difference

IEEE 32 bit float gives 3.14159274101257324 as pi.

Not sure what the Sinclair Scientific calculates it at but it did have 3.12415926 on the case.

Tom 7

Re: spot the difference

Pi could easily introduce rounding errors!

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Tom 7

Re: Snaps noy (yet) essential.

I've disabled Snap and will continue to do so. I find it very instructive to git clone and make and then wonder about all the bizarre libraries people use. It often speeds things up enormously because the snap is never configured for 16 threads or whatever CPU/GPU I'm pissing about with,

Tom 7

Re: Shell-shock-trauma (of sorts)

That's when experience meant you didnt write things experimentally - you pretty much had the code or whatever worked out in your head and debugged there before opening a new file. And you could move the cursor to anyhwere in your file by some keystroke involving line number and position on the line...

Tom 7

Re: Shell-shock-trauma (of sorts)

Ah the good old days - before security became a noticeable problem. Running things on other peoples xterminals - upside down, reversed left to right or melting.

Farewell to two pivotal figures: The founder of Inmos, and the co-creator of MIME

Tom 7

Re: I think the eternal question I've never really understood about the transputer is

It came at a time when the major problem in computing was segmenting in DOS/Windows. I imagine if someone had stuck 16 of these on an IDE card and written some games/graphics handling software for them we would be in a different world now. The company seemed to go for MOD and big customers seriously restricting the number of people to get to play with it and make inroads into a new world.

Its easy to diss the company's handling of their product in hindsight, many wrong turns were taken in the 80s - 8088 for the IBM PC and not the 68008 is probably the worst - but these toys were new and no-one knew what games they'd be used for, and who would have predicted games would have more effect on PC development direction than millions of engineers and scientists and a few warmongers!

Tom 7

Re: What A Shame

Assuming the transputer was the future (probably not) then it was the company that killed if off by not selling it to the PC market. It needed a huge number of people playing with it to really make it work - not just a few MOD shops.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Tom 7

Re: Optional Chargers

Seem to have about 10 of the bloody things. Mind you they seem to be fragile little unrepairable buggers - nearly broke my wrist trying to plug in something into a socket that already had an earth pin in it more than once.

What is fun is some chargers seem to be pathetic - good for overnight phone charge, and others will do it in a couple of hours. I may have to get some of those glasses with magnifiers and led lights so I can read the microscript on the chargers before use!

Microsoft: You own the best software keyboard there is. Please let us buy it

Tom 7

Re: That was dissapointing

I have a feeling it might be possible to write language dependent keyboards. Code is ideal for some predictive text and I used to use swiping commands 40 years ago so it should be possible to come up with some multi-fingered commands for inputting language features. I guess I'll need to write it on the PC to start with!

Tom 7

That was dissapointing

when they said software keyboard I was hoping for a keyboard for writing software! Which all the ones I've tried on a phone are pretty shit at. And as for the predictive text, it makes it almost impossible.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Tom 7

Re: Rockets...

I was in the town of Malcesine on Lake Garda when they had a festival. They simply held the sticks of rockets in their hands to launch them. Hundreds of men were doing this - possibly due to the rather nice 12p a bottle RIcc.io Rosso Spumante local red champagne with a plastic cork. Never quite had the guts to try it myself despite seeing so many people doing it without any signs of injury.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Tom 7

I didnt say do the work you were set. Just do something. My motto is laziness is the mother of invention so if I cant bring myself to do something I've been told to do cos my bolshie switch is jammed on hard I'd write some code to make my life easier - often the code I'd been told 'we dont have time to write so do that the inefficient way without it'. Or just some code that intrigued me. Just something to keep you active and the day passes far more quickly than swinging the lead. I'm not a team player but if making things easier for the team will make my life easier then so be it.

Tom 7

The stupid lazy make life worse for themselves. The day really drags when you avoid work. Knuckle down to something and you're home in no time!

Taiwan claims ‘breakthrough’ in EU semiconductor cooperation talks

Tom 7

Re: I don't get the China invading Taiwan hype

So why did China deliberately overfly Taiwan this week? Have no doubts they regard Taiwan as theirs and they will do what they can to get it back CF Russia and Ukraine. Its not what YOU think its what they think and China thinks Taiwan is theirs by right.

Algorithm spots 104 asteroids in huge piles of data

Tom 7

ADAM::THOR

I wonder how long before we get space name space conflicts!

I hope they extend it to the point I can point my 16 incher at the sky and not get half blinded by starlinks flashing by. Though I'm guessing I cant afford the go-pro update!

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Tom 7

The long term viability thing is quite important when it comes to pensions. It seems the only things that are expected to last as long term investments are property and fossil fuels. It aint going to end well!

Tom 7

Musk seems at the bell end peak of the bell end curve for these people. He's trying to buy twitter and Trump!

Tom 7

Re: Not even that

Mostly it doesnt contribute to inflation because its taken out of the economy and hidden offshore in tax havens. But it doesnt contribute to the UK economy either.

Tom 7

That would be better for the company, employees and shareholders. However not for the other embedded parasites who will of course either undermine or corrupt the new execs.

Tom 7

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

Except you dont get starter homes - a place like this would be 4 or 5 bedroomed luxury houses.

Tom 7

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

Golf is a good walk ruined. Fishing is a good sit fucked up!

Tom 7

Re: Warning: Old-Git Post

I'd imagine the costs of the social/sports clubs largish companies had were probably 1/10th of the costs of the team building (Ha!) courses people get sent on now!

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

Tom 7

Re: In-Shop Backups

We had one dept in a dark corner of the building that ran their own little obscure system and ran their own backups to a tape machine. When called on to help with a problem I was rather surprise to see the absolutely drop dead gorgeous girl in charge of backups pop the tape out and put it back in again. Turned out they'd only got one tape and when the system got big enough to need two tapes they just popped the tape out and put it back in again when the machine asked for Tape 2. Not surprisingly the problem was solved and due to the application of the absolutely drop dead gorgeous girl in charge of backups protocol the whole thing was solved with immense dedication and thoroughness, Indeed the protocol even now slows my typing to a crawl as no PFY or even BOFH wanted to leave her presence faster than necessary or even consider incurring her displeasure. In her 'defence' she was actually very good at her job bar the backups, which were probably handed over to her to prevent PFYs getting lost or malfunctioning for the rest of the week,

Tom 7

Re: Drop and go

It's always amazed me the number of people running DBs that dont seem to understand they can pretty much disallow almost anything in their DBs. Its almost as if management and sensible security are somehow at odds with each other.

NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain

Tom 7

Glooming battery problem

shirley!

Declassified and released: More secret files on US govt's emergency doomsday powers

Tom 7

Re: Presumbly the UK has similar plans

But sometimes responding to the killing will lead to less lives lost overall and so that should be the course taken. Ukraine fighting back has probably saved millions of lives in countries bordering Russia.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Tom 7

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

I met someone who ran mail services and he actually said he got paid for handling RTS so no reason to remove people from the mailing lists!

Tom 7

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

Been here 16 years now and still get spam phone calls for the people that lived here before us!

Tom 7

Re: Not really spam but...

Its a bit weird given everyone in the US born recently seems to be legally obliged to have a first name that is unique amongst all USAians. I recently communicated with one Uuendji, pronounced Wendy!

Tom 7

Re: Not really spam but...

At one time I got my broadband from a small ISP that eventually got swallowed by someone larger who then stopped the mail server so me@oldISPdomain.com stopped working. There are several accounts on various systems around the world that I cant change the email to because it sends a confirmation mail to the old address before allowing the new one, and of course they never read any mail sent to their admin account!

Tom 7

I use Thunderbird and its generally pretty good. I've been on googlemail since 1999 and only rarely use the web interface - generally only when its decided it wont let Thunderbird access it and I have to re-connect. One 'trick' I use to avoid spam is I still use @googlemail.com and not @gmail.com. almost all spam seems to use gmail for some reason which makes it really easy to filter.

Tom 7

I used to have a lot of fun managing Exchange. One of the best learning experiences in coding going through the virii!

That and discovering a few lines of VB and I could read anyone's emails!

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Tom 7

Re: Next time

Downtick for "dilutes the salt". That's what the tequila is for.

Deepfake attacks can easily trick live facial recognition systems online

Tom 7

Re: The Shaman was Right

I recently got given steroids for a lung condition. I had to retrain a voice translation system I'd been playing with.

"These things dont change" except when they do.

Tom 7

Re: Artificial Mimickry

As someone who has had his face rearranged by a pavement after a few drinks and know a few people who have had facial injuries through car accidents and muggings I'd be disinclined to use facial recognition for anything more important than a piece of paper.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Tom 7

Re: Just a quick question.

I worked for an international company. I simply put all the text in a DB table with a language column. The I created some stored procedures to read the text from the DB in the chosen language, defaulting to English if the chosen language wasn't there. A procedure to show them which text wasn't there in their language and a user that had the rights to modify their language comments.This of course worked in English too so the salesbods didnt have to get on my back every time they came up with something stupid. Did the same with CSS for their view of the site for the webs stuff.

No professional translators required - everyone got control of their stuff and I didnt get woken up at first Adhan in Istanbul. Giving people responsibility for their part of the business has many many benefits.

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

Tom 7

Coolings going to be a major problem.

I doubt you would be able to run the systems for long in an airless environment You'd only be able to run things when your in the dark and can use radiative cooling,

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Tom 7

Perhaps an acoustic coupler was not the best idea!

Tom 7

I wonder what D.A's carbon footprint is!

Turing Pi 2 crowdfunding goal smashed within a day

Tom 7

Re: I'm guessing that...

I ran one on a Pi Zero W for the home network for a while. The I forgot I was running it and went 64 bit. Might have another play!

Infusion of $3.5bn not enough to revive Terra's 'stablecoin'

Tom 7

Re: And People Still Fall For This?

A yankee friend of my dads got a Rolex and it was pointed out to him that he was still wearing it while helping us wash up after another drunken dinner and he said 'Its waterproof to 660 feet' and my mum pointed out it was half full of washing up water. He indignantly returned it to the shop who refused to accept it leaked and said be must have left the button out. It took him an hour of argument for them to get a glass of water into which the watch was lowered and rapidly filled. About a year later it turned up in the shop again with 'no fault found' and he wisely demanded another glass of water for the faultless watch to bubble and fill.

Never have too much confidence in your product or you're whole company can look arseholey.

Arm CPU ran on electricity generated by algae for over six months

Tom 7

Re: No need to charge your phone any more

I always wondered about those see through handbags of a few years ago!

Tom 7

Re: Productisation

No need - BOFH tech will mean walking on the lawn results in muscle spasms that launch you back from where you came!

Windows Subsystem for Linux gets bleeding-edge Ubuntu

Tom 7

Re: How about NTFS fix?

Be interesting to see this one out. If it is fixed then of course you only need on windows license to feed all your NTFS data out to Linux. Or is windows licensing based on available bandwidth now?

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

Tom 7

I take it they rotated the 3d image

given the damn thing would be edge on to us.

Demand for GPUs used to mine crypto 'disappearing', says ASUSTeK

Tom 7

Re: Not Only That

You really think they will introduce ranges of hashes that have already been used?

Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts

Tom 7

Why is it a shitty idea? I manipulate documents using a variety of methods. I dont use Acrobat but running a script within Acrobat is no more stupid than running one outside of it. Its running acrobat I would have concerns about, well that and using Pointless Document Format. It seems more a case of crossing that bridge when we back up several decades and hit it again.

LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality

Tom 7

Re: The use I wish someone would put the iPhone's LIDAR to

Photogrammetry is what your looking for.

Nvidia open-sources Linux kernel GPU modules. Repeat, open-source GPU modules

Tom 7

Re: Is it the End of Days, or is Hell just quietly freezing over ?

I think its more likely they realise that if they want their gpus in the big machines it might be better to let the people who make the big machines have a chance to add the optimisation for the big machines so they can sell a few more to people who might want to make their own big machines,