Posts by Will 30 21 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
This article is about whether or not the new version of ASP.NET ("ASP.NET Core") will run on both the full (old) version of .NET AND the new ".NET Core". This has been the plan for a long time, but for a few days last week it wasn't the plan. But now it is again.
It's not about making ".NET Core" "backwards compatible with .NET for Windows", whatever that means.
You appear to misunderstand strncpy. It is not a 'safe' version of strcpy, it's something completely different.
I'm not sure whether that helps or hinders your argument that people should learn to code, but it's certainly further evidence that 'c' is a very easy language to make mistakes in.
It's precluded by the physics, for all practical (i.e. affordable) purposes.
HV AC underground cables require so much current to supply their capacitance that after a certain length the entire capacity of the cable is being used to supply charging current and not carry any real power - even below that limit that's a significant source of inefficiency.
HV DC cables require very expensive terminal equipment which is justifiable for very long distances or inter-grid interconnects, but would be horribly expensive within the UK.
Buried cables are also difficult to cool - the 400kV link through Snowdonia to Dinorwig required water cooling to be buried with it, which is another cost overhead cables don't have.
There's no sensible mechanism for a Windows device driver, once installed and running, to 'pop up a message'.
The fact is that FTDI have made an absolutely enormous investment in their drivers (something like 15+ years of plugging away at it now), and have successfully come to dominate their market largely as a result of that investment. It seems legitimate that they should try to interfere with those who seek to freeload on that hard work.
Of course, Microsoft could have trivially produced a sensible user-mode solution to the problem of low-data-rate odd-ball USB devices (i.e. most of FTDI's customers) back in the mid 90s, but for some reason they didn't.
My iPad 2 has been fkd by IOS8 - 3g broken most of the time, painfully slow and crashy apps, etc.
The funny thing is, if they'd tried to manipulate me into an upgrade by blocking IOS8 for iPad 2, then they might just have succeeded. Cynically breaking my existing device is going to have exactly the opposite effect.
If you're really in the UK, in the embedded design business and unable to find work, then you must have done something badly wrong at some point.
From where I sit (in the UK, in the embedded design business), things are frantically busy, I turn work away all the time and all my uk-based subcontract manufacturers are flat-out.
You might find this article interesting:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/004316502320517407/pdf
There are several potential traps in "Parts of England have had their wettest January since records began more than 100 years ago, figures show" - the author of the quote gets to chose the 'parts of England', the period of time ('one month'), the month itself (January), and they've waited until it's particularly wet before they made this statement.
In reality, there isn't any strong trend in rainfall (or flooding) in the UK over the period for which the records exist, and such trends as may be found can be maximised, minimised or reversed, just by the selection of particular start and end points.
It didn't rain at all here (South West England) one day earlier in the week - that means that it was as dry as the driest day ever! Since records began!!! It's tipping it down now, though. Does this sort of extreme day-to-day variation indicated something sinister about climate change?
I am reminded of Richard Feynman's remarks about a licence plate he'd seen on the way to the lecture.
NT3.51 was a bit like this - there was a preview release of the NT4 (i.e. Windows 95) shell, which you could install on NT3.51.
It was a remarkable (at the time) display of abstraction, at a time when there wasn't very much clean abstraction in personal computing.
Nowadays of course we have lots of fantastic technical abstrations right up through the software stack that could make all sorts of great stuff possible, but they're sacrificed for crass commercial reasons.
Umpteen people are exposed to high levels of radiation as part of cancer treatment, and lower levels for medical imaging. It's just not true to say that, in general, there's little known about the effects of exposure.
The few significant leaks of fission products that have occurred have been studied to hell and back. Of course, medical science is a young, imprecise profession with a much shallower understanding of its domain than we'd all like, but that applies across the board, not just to radiation.
They're just issuing advice based on the measurements they've taken and the limits they'd previous set down. What else should they do?
The only dilemmas are those faced by people who wish the limits were zero and want to panic at any sign of any measurement greater than the local background, and by people who wish the limits were higher (especially now they've been breached) and don't want their panglossian version of events tarnished by public health warnings.
It's likely that the limits are unnecessarily low, but the most recent chance to raise them has passed.
You might as well say it was a minor tsunami, because people would still have been moved out of their houses if a major radiological event had happened.
Lewis says "effects on the public look set to be nil", which is just bollocks - being indefinitely evacuated from your house is not 'nil', even if it doesn't imply you're going to suffer some radiation-caused disease. You could have chosen to build a nice strong house on top of a hill, but you'd have still been moved out by the events at the power-station.
I'm not anti-nuclear *at all*, and I even rather liked Lewis' writing prior to last week, but I've read every Tepco and IAEA report since the quake (neither party having any interest in exaggerating the problem), and I don't think they align well with Lewis' output.
The pompous frothing of a Register Hack about journalists exaggerating for effect is also pretty irksome to read. If he really had a serious problem with that, he certainly wouldn't work for El Reg.
Because there's no consequence to being booted out of your house, I've decided that Lewis is moving 20km away from home this afternoon (taking Iodine tablets as he goes). We won't tell him if/when he can come back, and we're going to tip all his milk and spinach away too. But the empty beer cans, used condoms and cigarette ends stamped into the carpet will all be below the levels known to cause problems to human health.
By the way, I must say Lewis, I did like your description of 100mSv/a as the 'reduced' limit. Does anyone know if leaking reactors emit chutzpah?
There are probably lots of good arguments to be made for reviewing all sorts of radiological protection limits, it's just that dramatically increasing them while you're in breach of the current ones makes you look a bit desperate...
(Paris, because she can always move into a hotel when the government evacuate her house)
What makes *me* think the site around the reactors is radioactive is that if it wasn't, a man with a pair of eyes would have been sent to check the water level / temperature in the storage ponds. Perhaps he would be lowered by helicopter if the stairs are all blocked by the explosively destroyed upper storeys, and the collective might of the Japanese fire brigade neglected to bring a long ladder with them.
Of course, he's not going there at all, even in a helicopter, because it's too f-ing dangerous.
A nuclear plant lives and dies by its instrumentation, and every famous nuclear reactor accident (Windscale, TMI, Chernobyl) is a story of operators confused by faulty or inadequate instrumentation - either missing the obvious (in hindsight) for hours/days, or making terrible blunders which make things worse because they misinterpreted stuff from the control room.
I do not look at the pictures of those reactor buildings with their tops blown off and feel the slightest bit encouraged that as soon as the power is back on it's going to be a simple matter of setting a few switches and getting everything back under control from the comfort of a desk
somewhere.
My bet would be that everything electrical in the top of those buildings is now bust - if the explosions didn't break it, and the fuel fire didn't burn it, then air-dropping seawater should have done the trick.
I'd be surprised if it's ever back in control in any way more than "we built a thick enough concrete box around the whole lot that we're not going to worry about what's inside." Much like Chernobyl, there'll be the undiscovered remains of a few blokes in there too.
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