Posts by david 12

few ciggies & some cash

Classic drug-related crime. In nicotine withdrawal and no money for cigarettes === service station done over for "carton of Marlboro and all the cash in the drawer"

Re: They won't be able to market this.

are exactlly

but but - they're for hot laptops --

Re: CDT?

Just put the time in GMT and if they don't like then we'll send in the Royal Navy's finest gunboats

No need for the gunboats. This was part of the agreement 300 years ago: we would use metric, and they would use GMT as the reference time.

Odd things like this continue: the "metric" pipe thread is British Standard Pipe, and the "metric" chain sprockets are 1/4", 1/2", 3/4" etc ...

Re: and the Bay City Rollers reforming

Iron Maiden is still playing the same kind of music. The problem the BCR's had was that they got sick of doing choir music ("Bye Bye Baby is a choir number), but didn't want to split up. So they've tried to do Blues, and Soul, and Rock -- as performed by a choir. They could've maybe been the Corrs, or Celtic Thunder, or a grown up version of The Choir Boys. But they wanted to be James Brown or Ray Vaughn, and that didn't really work as a choir group.

Good catch. I notice that several posters here had followed the lead from the article and thought that AM meant Amplitude Modulated, rather than "AM broadcast license".

But wrong in the detail. The Digital Broadcast stations in the USA are not "Internet Radio", they broadcast from the same locations using the same power supply, and they carry the mandated public broadcast messages.

What I don't know about is range. Can someone tell us if the US digital broadcast system has same/better/worse coverage than the AM broadcast technology?

Re: This was billed as a modern way to run an exchange, instead of an old-fashioned central platform

A big advantage is that it puts "off market" transactions "on market". So it's not all "low latency". And by distributing the market and the record, it makes both the market and the record more robust.

But actually, latency is a plus for market operators like the ASX. Low-latency trading is where the money is, but it destroys the value of the marketplace, so there has to be the balance. Hence the other markets with guaranteed latency. (Or attempted guarantee)

Re: Talk about burying the lede!

I don't think I agree with you. The Register is able to use "short paragraphs" as headlines, as they did in this case. A newspaper would have been limited to 4 or 5 words, but The Register was able to give us the whole story in the headline. What followed is context, in expanding order of detail.

Re: Juicy deets

My Linux mint install doesn't require me to have any sort of an account anywhere.

I take it that you mean that your Linux mint install defaults to a local account, and that you normally hibernate the login.

It doesn't really matter though: the web is amazingly efficient at identifying users. I myself have a lot of identifying features turned off or not installed -- which makes me immediately identifiable as "that user who has most of the identifying features turned off"

Re: And now, what's really up with this.

The actual definition of the fraud is different in the USA than in London. As I understand it, the only fraud he could be convicted of in the UK is the one where he said "valuation meets American accounting standards". Because the UK accounting standards for stating the true value of the company are much looser, and (absent the fraudulent statement about American accounting standards) would throw the responsibility on HP

To be clear, even in the UK, pretending that the stated value was according to a specific named standard is fraud. In the USA, he'll be judged on the other half of the alleged fraud: the technical value of the standard.

In the abstract, this seems sensible to me: the British courts have decided that he is guilty, and that the case is best judged in the USA.

Re: USB

Based on "secret military technology", it's really a military system. Like GPS.

I see that you have equated "assembly language" with "architecture" -- something I would not do, having spent too much time with machine code and abortions like gcc assembler.

And I hardly see how the inclusion of BCD commands in the architecture and assembly language made it a "bad" assembly language and architecture: It's not like you needed to use Binary Coded Decimal for anything other than Binary Coded Decimal.

Anyway, I'll spring to the defence of the architecture too:

Your dislike of segmented and small-register-set architectures is noted, and not idiosyncratic, but I'm glad that the marketplace disagreed with you and your friends. Segmented architectures offer hardware as well as memory-management advantages, which is why they are still so widely used in all kinds of microprocessors. The Intel approach, and the Intel assembly language were part of the reason the architecture was so successful. My observation about Large Register Set architectures is that they were designed and sold for applications that used HLL compilers rather than assembly language, and that for mixed-language coding, the larger the large register set is, the better -- but that's an entire set of assembly-language coding problems that just goes away when using a stack-based design like the 8086.

If only that were true. However, decades of research and centuries of observation have shown that "severity of punishment" has no significant effect on crime. "Detection" has a significant effect on crime, Timelines have a significant effect on crime, and as the old joke goes "first you have to get their attention", but almost nobody commits crimes believing that they will be caught, so the difference between "overnight in jail", and "death penalty" is completely irrelevant.

WWW is a folder on the server that runs HTTP. HTTP was the protocol provided by the service, that allowed you to download files from the server. WWW was the folder you put the WWW files in.

"we pushed that system out of the data center into the parking lot"

My dad reckoned that was standard for nitrocellulose film back in the day. The operator was in a booth hung of the back wall partly for that reason (you can still see the design on old theatre buildings). Anyway, when the film caught fire at his High School, the projectionist pushed the fire out the window, pulled the fire alarm, and called the school office on the other side of the campus.

The school office pulled the fire alarm on the other side of the campus, and the fire dispatcher quickly formed the opinion that the entire three-story school, full of hundreds of school-age children, was on fire from one end to the other.

Massive fire response that moved every fire company in town.

To install without PIP: I download some python modules, put them in a directory/folder, and add that directory/folder name to the python sys path.

I do this when, because of old/small equipment, I am unable to use the encryption required by PIP, or total lack of networking.

When they work, PIP and Conda manage dependencies. Frequently they mis-manage dependencies: I can't believe how unbelievably bad they both are at managing dependencies: I can only believe that my use cases must be outliers. I guess that for people who aren't managing obscure modules on fleets of obscure systems, both must work ok.

Installing either way, either by hand or by using PIP, used to work much better before the python ecosystem acquired so many dependencies. PIP is a particularly obvious example, but lots of stuff I use requires TLS 1.3 and a handful of other library packages just to load, even for local filesystem operations, because it includes networking or authentication in the feature list.

"all but eliminated ..sites not using a certificate from search results"

Gave preference to https (higher ranking). But "all but eliminated" is a bit strong? Ourt HTTP website is still the highest ranking (first) website for our brand name on both Google and Bing.

Re: If I was him...

It wasn't my downvote - I couldn't be bothered -- but if you think that waffle about "$100 per individual chip should do it" passes for humour, then you must be very easily entertained.

Re: Dodgy stats

All modern clients support IPv6 and this is what matters

Actually, clients supporting IPv6 matters not at all (except in China, where 'security by obscurity' is laughed at).

What matters is that the internet backbone is moving to IPV6 -- where it makes sense.

Re: Media Conversion

because there was nothing

My Dad never did fully adjust to the 'smart phone' option.

So he was using punch cards till the day he died. Handy shirt-pocket size, and don't wad up the way plain paper does.

Re: but...

I LIKE TO hallucinate! :(((((((

I had this discussion with someone with a much different circle of friends. I was telling her that I didn't like the side effects of my (medically prescribed) drugs, but could understand that some people might enjoy them. She immediately informed me that there was no "might" about it -- her acquaintances did indeed choose the roller-coaster of hallucination, speeding, fear, and elation.

The real issue here was that MS was not updating the block list on Windows 10 or Server 2019, which are no longer receiving OS version updates.

Because the 'driver block list" was tied to the "service pack" release, not to the "anti-virus protection update" release.

Re: Its the Colorado....

"Goodyear" was one of the companies that located in Phoenix back in the 60's, when nobody much lived there. Phoenix has since grown from almost zero to 5 million. In the process, the Goodyear plant has become a suburb! (My Dad worked there)

Re: How secure *IS* your system

It was pretty much the design intention of the system. These were micro computers. aka personal computers.

unix was an odd exception, and that really was part of it's claim to fame: it became popular as a network operating system. Even Windows, when that came out, had no networking until "Windows for Workgroups".

and that requires a supply of cold water.

Or use a closed-circuit power generation system using alternative phase materials.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/19/supercritical_co2_sandia/

Re: Inevitable, given current standards

That's harder than you might think. The helicopter doesn't have temperature sensors on every possible part of every possible part, and it doesn't have timers on every possible action.

How do you know if the engine is "hot"? Which part of the flight sequence starts the timer? If it's all so smart, why does it even need a pilot?