Posts by MacroRodent

Re: TL;DR but what is it with ****ing developers

They ask for country code and had the expected county code starting with a + already filled in. It then refused the accept the + as it only allows numbers

Heh. Copy-paste coding. The net is rife with examples where a phone number is supposedly "validated" so that + in front is not allowed. Eg. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2386054/javascript-phone-number-validation

I too encounter this all the time. There is a legit workaround: "00" is usually acceptable as an alternative to "+", but not in all countries. In fact, the "+" notation was introduced precisely because of the variation in international prefixes. (But probably there are some moronical web sites that forbid also phone numbers stating with zeros).

Re: For more details....

> I think the glass pyramid idea was dropped because of the technical difficulties of filming a large piece of light refracting material.

According to the "Lost worlds" they next planned a transparent monolith with the 1x4x9 dimensions, and actually cast it from Lucite (whatever that is, Clarke claims it was the largest block ever made of that material), but as you note, filming the transparent object convincingly was too difficult, and they switched to black. In the book version of 2001, the monolith is still transparent (to be precise, the version the ape-men encounter is transparent, in later appearances it is black).

> Must find my, by now, yellow copy of The Lost Worlds...(No, it's not for sale!)

I hope I still have my in my attic, under tons of other stuff. Got to check.

The Singularity

We have clearly reached the Singularity. No, not the Kurtzweill one, but a situation where the combined complexity of processors and OS means every patch creates at least as many bugs as it fixes. From now on, there is no reliable computing, unless you are willing to simplify radically.

Re: Simples

What is even worse, even many multi-statement code sections are going to be similar, because sometimes there is just one or very few ways to do something, or the code section in both programs may have originated from a common source that is in the public domain, or liberalry licensed.

But no doubt this will be a gold mine for IP lawyers.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

In my first computer-related job in the 1980's, me and other trainees had among others the task of printing and mailing monthly reports to branch offices around the country from a line printer, with ink ribbons that resembled Torah scrolls. I recall the printer itself rarely caused grief (apart from the regular need to change the scrolls and clean the print head), but whoever had written the reporting software (for the Honeywell Bull mainframe) did not bother to sort the output by office. So we implemented a manual sort algorithm on the mailing room floor. That was to most time-consuming part. But I guess trainee time was cheaper than CPU time in those days...

Re: I would have thought...

I wondered about that too. If every device has its own global IPv6 address, it should be easier for the cops argue some particular laptop was used for something naughty. The alleged criminal cannot so easily claim the IP address was actually used by someone else's device, like a neighbour or a "wardriver" who has managed to break in into his WLAN.

Re: C fun

OK, looks like I'd be in the same situation you were. What's the problem?

Missing keyword "case" before each enumeration constant name. Without it, the names are interpreted as labels for use with goto statements.

Re: Lame name options IMHO

"Robusta" could have been nice: it is a variety of the coffee plant, and also associates with robustness, something one wants in an enterprise platform.

Re: Security appliances memory errors and programming bugs

What was the name of the CPU and chipset that fails if you try and double free a region of memory?

Uh, it is not the CPU or chipset that fails, but the program. A double free is a common blunder in C and C++ programming, which leads to a crash or other undefined behaviour, which may be exploitable as a security vulnerability.

Re: Arm A53

I'm afraid that does not help much, since what we need is an in-order CPU that is also fast!.

Re: Six Earthsea books

Of the later series, I found Tehanu good, but wish she had stopped there. The last one spoils the Magic by its explication of the relationship between humans, dragons and the land of the dead, and the writing is not up to her former standards.

Despite this minor grumble, she was one of the greatest, and influenced me much. Rest in peace.

Re: Horse carts vs delivery trucks again.

Who's going to write the code to allow the AI in the trucks?: humans.

Who's issuing the instructions?: humans.

Actually, many of those jobs can also be automated in the future, so that few if any humans are needed...

Even if not, those employ much fewer people than was needed for driving the trucks: Once the code is written and electronics designed, they can be replicated automatically and with next to no cost.

Re: No is the answer and it remains that way

I'd love to see an algorithm that only works if a "good guy" uses it.

Note I wrote "half-way credible", not "credible". For example, always make the crypto implementation store the user's key on the device or data stream but encrypted with a key known only to the good guys. This may well bamboozle people who forget to consider who all will have want to have these master keys (UK? US? China?), and can they be trusted to keep them secret. (And like you point out, will the custodians remain the good guys?).

Re: Speculative execution

so we need to program with small local memories and explicit communication between processors to get performance. Using more specialised processors can also help somewhat.

Sounds like the Transputer from the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

Re: Samba is still relevant? Yea!

File shares do let you use large files without downloading it all when reading and uploading it all when writing. With OneDrive, Dropbox etc your local storage limits what remote files you can use. So the discs are huge these days? Yes, and so is the amount of crap that accumulates on them!

Also, if you need to log file accesses, you can do it with Samba down to painful details.

Raise the Itanic!

So far as I can see the only sure way out of this is to not use speculative execution. Welcome back to the Dark Ages of CPU architectures. Things will get very slow...

Or use explicit parallelism with wide instructions, like Intel Itanium...

Enclosed fairing (Re: Obviously the solution is....)

- an enclosed fairing. The extra weight and wind resistance can be mitigated with an electric motor.

Doesn't work (except in California or other warm climates). Unless it is heated vigorously, it will quickly get fogged in cold weather! The energy required would need either a heavy battery, or some fuel-burning heater. Both pretty much negate the whole idea of a bicycle.

Re: Way to damage your own credibility

Yes, disappointing. Many years ago, I even sent the project a small donation, as I was using their patch, and they appeared to be good guys. I wonder what happened?

Simple Criteria

The big question in all this is, who defines hate speech?

I think a pretty clear criterium is, does it advocate violence (either physical or mental) against a person or group. An example. Free speech: "The ABCD religion is so stupid". Hate speech: "All adherents of the ABCD religion should be expelled from the country".

Muddle through

IOW, if Franklin really is right, then human civilization is essentially doomed.

He is both right and wrong. These things are not absolutes no matter what the extremists say. Civilization will just muddle through in the middle, as it has always done.

Pentium I

No need to go all the way to 286. The original Pentium and Pentium mmx did not spekulate. They just executed two adjacent instructions at the same time, if the pair satisfied certain conditions. Fun for compiler writers.

Re: The most disturbing thing...

Is that either one of these supposed defenders of "freedom" felt it necessary to implement blatantly anti-freedom bullshit like "trademarks" in the first place

Unfortunately, if you don't get a trademark, someone else will, if you are succesful, and then hassle you with it. In the early days of Linux, there was a guy who had nothing to do with Linux, but trademarked it anyway! This caused a lot of concern for the real project. Eventually this was settled so that Linus Torvalds got the trademark. (see eg http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2559 )

Re: Jumpers

> OMG welcome to the '90's when moving jumpers on the MB* was an absolutely almight b******g p-in-the-a!!**

You did not have to do it very often, and after you got the settings right, you could be sure no mere software could reach out with its clammy fingers to move the jumpers!

Re: Economy

It ought to be criminal to sell expensive devices without a user-replaceable battery.