Posts by Tom 7

Re: I'm reasonably sure they don't

It is difficult to think up ways of crapping on software when you think you've spent a while building it - always best to get someone who doesnt know what they are meant to be doing - I remember blowing up a piece of bulletproof code in 1983 or so that we were going to pay £1/4 million for because we forgot they were coming to demo it until the day before and had to scramble to get something together for them to demonstrate how good it was on our stuff.

I used to write automated scripts to wander around the code libraries and throw random shit at them and see what happened - this modern stuff can be a bit difficult to do that with but you can often add an interface type layer specifically for accepting random shit.

And always remember running in a debugger solves almost all code defects so make your live code launch itself in the debugger.

Re: I've always wanted to know

In the early days - when there were less than about 5k devices on a chip there was not a lot of automation available and many hours were spent laying out stuff and you would learn what bits looked like. Worse than that - I used to layout NMOS on a tectronic storage scope which wrote on a green screen with a very bright stream of electrons that left a glow that was a bit brighter than the dark green background, After a long day on one of these you could stand in the pub and whole parts of the circuit would literally flash before your eyes!

Towards the ends of the eighties a huge amount of CAD had been developed and you would only hand craft (and hence recognise) repeated parts to get the maximum utilisation of space and these parts would stay with you for a long time.

I worked on some (for then) ultra high speed bipolar and the high (relatively) power consumption meant chips didnt have too many components and were largely pad limited the pads the connecting wires were attached were on 100u 'grid' so you could spend a month or more trying to shrink some part of the circuit by 10 or 20u so the whole chip size would drop 100u and you could get another 15 devices from a 4" die. When you spend that amount of time on something you remember it.

Not sure what its like these days - wanted to get into it again but they wanted £40k just to see the process details FFS.

Re: two class system

Electric self drive would require nowhere near the ventilation or escape routes combustion engines do - the possibility of them organising as a group means that they could far more easily escape from a fire situation - no idiots leaning on their horns and refusing to reverse out of the way. You really wouldnt need much more than tunnels a bit larger than the 'standard' vehicle size over sub-Thames type distances.

Re: This doesn't make sense.

I'd weld its shut and add several other gates too.

Re: I guess there must have been no wind?

Do you people never get out? Wind is sneaky - and fractal! Any obstruction you might imagine is a windbreak is really just something to add more chaos to the system.

Re the stupid question

Put it this way - the sun is huge. The pressure in the core and consequent density of the plasma is equally fucking huge so the chances of things banging together AND fusioning is really high even at the lower temperature.

On planet earth (I used to live there once) we can only get small amounts of relatively vapour like plasma and the only way to get a usable amount of fusion is to get it really really really hot so they bang together more and stand a higher likely hood of fusioning.

Its really really hard to do and may not be feasible but like all good science should produce some fantastic by products - I'm hoping for some decent coils for my next set of headphones!

Re: I suppose a lot of us would like to know...

@mikey - have a look in $Windows.~BT - you will find a nice winbloat file that is waiting for you to upgrade to w10 whether you want to or not.

Just a little smaller than this fully functional rasbian system I'm typing this on.

Re: Luggable

I think luggables were all used up in the first gulf war - they were the only things denser than uranium that wasn't gold.

Can the search head tell me how to turn off all that collection stuff

that makes Google+ completely unusable?

Re: horses for courses "[...] languages with optimising overrides [...]"

Shit optimizers need checking too - simple unit tests should pick that up. Its the whole development environment that needs to work - including the Fuckwits Up Top who claim all the glory and none of the shit. The number of places I've worked where some FUT has got a bonus for implementing a time saving shortcut that has added years to the project and then got another bonus for removing the shortcut and everything has started progressing again.

X7 - Claughton

Used to play in a monitoring bunker in Caton - just down the road. No food but loads of cider and beer!

Re: Core routers caught fire

failover routers were next to them (DOH!) also also burned.

Re: Do they think we're daft?

High-end tech skills in public service have surprisingly high value. I worked at a small council and got job offers - not to do anything but prevent me being around the council office taking the piss out of their extremely expensive efforts to lever even simple tasks away from the council and into their profitable grasp. The unfortunate thing was they were worse than we were at doing the job, incredibly worse.

But their lawyers were brilliant at running rings round the councils, once they had made the decent ones offers only idiots like me (who actually have a smidgen of self respect left) could refuse.

@ Charlie Clark

"As for the service provider: I'll use whoever I think offers the best service in a free market."

Best of luck with that - I've got only one option since BT bought out EE as they are now the only one whose signals reach here!

Re: Britain as a Digital Powerhouse

Can they get you by the short and curlies if you've had a brazillian?

Re: The PC is dead

You mean those machines that are found on the accountants desk but never the engineers.

Re: Privatisation

@Veti - because it took them that long to get round to destroying Martlesham Heath.

Re: The article author is part of the problem.

They do pay their employees though, and their employees pay income tax. In fact in most cases the employers pay the income tax on their employees salaries "as they earn".'

No - they largely pay the minimum wage so their employees pay no tax and are almost certainly in receipt of some government subsidy like housing benefit. The number of companies that are subsidised to rip us off is rising by the hour!

Re: Oops!

I'm surprised it was so obvious. I'd imagine most of the payments for favours were done in banks in foreign climes that, for some unidentifiable technological reason, it is not possible to monitor or prevent cash flowing in and out.

Re: People are in Denial about C and C++

Don't worry - someone will work out a way to do buffer overflow in rust and it will become commonplace.

Outside the M25

they all suffer from extreme agoraphobia.

Faust - given freely out here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14591

Re: Desparate or Greedy

Re the Hindenburg - I do wonder whether H2 is not the ideal solution - with an inert gas enclosure and detectors. The Hindenburg was leaking gas at a rate the would have dropped it into the sea quite quickly so He would not have made it much safer.

H2 would be so much cheaper - and far more buoyant, and more importantly you can make h2 impermeable and inflammable membranes but not impermeable for He.

I should add I discussed this with someone who flew as an engineer on the R103 and he was pretty much convinced that by the time H2 would become a problem its really a question of how hard you hit the ground irrelevant of what gas you were using.