Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: Yet another uncomfortable truth

I'd argue that there are established standards and methods. The issue is that they are not enforced and are seen as a cost by those holding the purse-strings.

We have building standards and inspections to make sure unscrupulous builders don't cut corners and build unsafe structures, but we have no equivalent in software engineering. This isn't because the correct techniques aren't known. SOLID, design patterns, test-driven development, Agile (done properly) and so on. It is because the bosses tell us, "just make it work, I don't care how".

The problems start at the requirements gathering stage as well. Adequate security needs to be designed into software, otherwise it gets bolted on afterwards as an afterthought. Again, nobody wants to pay for proper analysis before a line of code is written. Would you let a builder loose to build you a house without getting an architect to draw up plans first?

The root of the problem is that doing things properly isn't required. Not doing it properly is often cheaper, so there is a financial pressure on businesses to cut corners to compete. I'm all for legislation that says commercial software should meet certain regulations, such as requirements being fully documented and signed off by a professional business analyst, security considered at the design stage and specified, segregation principles followed, code documented, and so on.

We'd all end up with better software, and most developers I know would love to be given a decent spec to work from without having to do the analysis as we go along.

Re: welcome to the new world...

Nothing managed to weasel its way in?

Re: "push everything into the Cloud"

In this instance, it looks like a cloud of smoke...

Apologies if that was what you were getting at and I explained your joke...

Another reason (besides cost) to buy old "brown" furniture rather than modern chipboard and plastic tat. It takes a lot more to ignite a lump of wood than it does plastic, and the porous chipboard / MDF will act like a wick for the flammable melted plastic to add to your problems.

Re: a warning sign that your child is turning into a naughty hacker

Well, I'd start off by guessing that they're not even doing anything to hide their MAC address.

Re: a warning sign that your child is turning into a naughty hacker

It's a stone cold classic, and you know it.

Anyway, the whole point of hacking is to produce something unexpected or novel using the tools you have. OK, so Rickrolling isn't exactly novel, but I bet it was unexpected!

Re: ...-boffin

The problem with the verb to hack is that it can be used in different senses, to hack together generally indicates something positive and creative, to hack apart tends to feature more heavily in true crime magazines.

Re: SSD

I have to say, I've never had a HDD fail on me. Looking back at my records, the last one I bought was a 3TB job back in 2013, which has been used constantly since (now as a secondary disk to a primary SSD). I have two other HDDs in my desktop, which are both older, by several years, and others in a box in a storage unit somewhere which are only not used because their capacity is now laughable and / or they are IDE disks. The oldest probably dates to the turn of the century and I fully expect it would work if I still had a motherboard I could plug it into.

People talk about spinning rust failing, but the only components I've had fail in the last 20 years are a cheapo PSU, a 4GB stick of DDR3, and the power supply circuitry on a second-hand Dell laptop.

Re: SSD

A quick calculation shows that, at optimal speed of 480Mbps over USB2, a 500GB hard disk is going to take around 2.5 hours to copy over. In reality, you could be looking at closer to 100MBps on a laptop USB port, so somewhere North of 11 hours. Doable if you REALLY need to clone that drive, and have a good book to read, but a reinstall onto the clean SSD will probably be quicker and also give the opportunity to remove cruft and make sure all patches are installed.

Re: SSD

The reason for that slowdown could well be the amount of system RAM. Frequent swapping on spinning rust slow things down significantly. With Windows 10 and all its bloat and things you can't properly turn off like "Cortana", you need a lot more base RAM just to run the OS without it slowing down.

Even modern cheapo laptops often come with only 4GB, which is woeful these days. The first thing I'd suggest, before replacing the HDD with a SDD is popping the back off and putting another stick of memory into the empty second slot, or even better, replacing both with higher capacity sticks. Just make sure you get the right sort (laptop memory != desktop memory, DDR3 != DDR4, etc.) and I'd recommend getting the fastest RAM the system supports.

You'll probably find this negates the need for the system to be at 100% disk usage right off the bat. You can then think about replacing the disk with a solid state one, but that will likely come with the ball-ache of reinstalling the OS and copying all the files over.

Re: ZX81 option for Raspberry PI?

The Pico, which has the RP2040 on board, has some nice features, such as programmable state machines, IRQs, lots of GPIOs, I2C and SPI, and built-in PWM. I've not looked too closely at what the Pi has, but I reckon you could get the two talking to each other at a fair old rate, and have the Pico offload heavy tasks to the Pi, and the Pi offload complex control tasks to the Pico, in near real-time.

Re: ZX81 option for Raspberry PI?

I was thinking of using the Pi as a development environment for the Pico. The toolchain can be made to run on Windows, but it's a bit clunky, and from the documentation, it's pretty clear that it's Linux first, Windows/Mac second. I could set up a dual-boot partition on my desktop machine, but it would be just as easy to keep it all separate and have a dev environment on the Pi instead. Experience tells me that such things run a lot more smoothly with plenty of RAM, and whilst I doubt I'll be trying to do anything fancy like virtualising hardware on a Pi, or running anything as heavyweight as Visual Studio is on Windows, I feel like it should have the headroom...

Re: ZX81 option for Raspberry PI?

I'm toying with the idea of either getting a Pi-400, or the Pi-4 desktop kit. The Pi-400 looks nice, but appears to only be available with 4GB RAM, whilst the desktop kit is available with 8, and I'd like to be able to use the Pi for hardware hacking...

It reminds me of the also possibly apocryphal story of the AI trained on chest X-rays to spot cases where a chest drain would be beneficial. It was given a nice set of X-rays to train on, which had been vetted by the thoracic consultant, half of which were cases which didn't need a chest drain, and half were cases which did. It worked really well, and picked up all the ones needing a chest drain. When tried on real data, it didn't perform so well at all. It turns out that those training images from patients who needed a chest drain had already had one fitted (for ethical reasons!), and the "AI" was matching the chest drain in the X-Ray and not the symptoms.

Re: Adolf

Indeed, the cost of forgetting is that someone else will come along and do the same things again and nobody will recognise what they are up to and stop them.

One might even suggest that those so intent on us forgetting the past are the one who wish to repeat it.

Re: Pie?

The Pico is "bare metal" controller. It either runs a MicroPython interpreter (which is compiled to the native machine language) or a machine language file compiled from C/C++ which is flashed to the device either through the onboard micro-USB, or through the debug lines. It only has 246 kilobytes of RAM, so any OS you might try to run on it would need to be very small indeed.

It has a lot in common with the home computers of the 1980s in this respect, except it runs about 50 times faster and has somewhat more storage. This leads me to wondering if I could get a port of Elite running on it, it has enough GPIO pins to wire in a joystick...

Re: If you need to change the lightbulb, stand on your shoulders.

Updating will probably also require fishing out the mouse and keyboard from a cupboard, which, if they are in a cafe will by now be covered in a thin layer of dust and grease which no amount of Swarfega will get off your hands again.

Re: Pie?

Oddly enough, I've recently been playing with the Raspberry Pi Pico, which can be had for the princely sum of £3.60 (slightly more if you want someone else to solder GPIO pins onto it for you). Whilst it doesn't have enough memory itself to buffer anything more than a few hundred pixels square at 16 bits colour depth, there is a demo VGA board available for it for £18 which will read from an SD card.

I reckon you could cobble something together to drive a couple of HD monitors with a fixed display for less than some punters pay for sausage rolls in a week. No OS required at all, let alone a Windows installation, and you could tape it to the back of the screens.

Re: I see the domain streisand-effect.co.uk is not yet registered.

touché

Re: Big Red Bus

Expect a 50% hike in registration fees to pay for it...

Re: Typo? Or me being dense?

Chilled (circa 4°C) != Frozen (circa -15°C)

edit - after posting that, the other replies before mine showed up!

Re: Colossal Cave

A hollow voice says, "PLUGH"

Re: OK, but how DID they sell millions?

Ah yes, griefers, there so you have to put the game in single-player mode. Elite: Dangerous I'm looking at you. Oh well, at least it's not Eve Online, which is griefers and spreadsheets, for when one full-time job isn't enough.