Posts by Charles Manning

Re: Social, not technical changes

We live in a different country from my parents, so our kids (now 18-22) don't have the experience of dealing with older people.

A few months back my older son went on an internship to a city where we have an elderly friend. He went to visit her out of obligation the first time, but ended up going back to see her many times and told us: "Old people are so interesting!".

And they are. Screw the stupid stereotypes of leaky bladders and nappies. Old people had experiences that you can learn from if you just make them a cup of tea, STFU and listen.

This old dear had grown up in India, she had been evacuated from Singapore a few days before the Japanese "liberated" it. She had been bombed. She had lived in a little cottage growing her own food (and making a bit of money on the side selling surplus rabbits and eggs) with no lights etc for about a year.

Beats hanging out on Twitter.

Re: Why do they need permission?

GPS is run by the US Air Force.

The GPS bases are thus US military bases.

You need permission from the host country for setting up military bases.

Therefore...

So when the computer driver gets a jail term...

Must the computer remain booted up for the whole period of incarceration so it can contemplate its wrong-doing?

Re: AC They have learned actually

That's even ignoring the issue that "realistic" games are not realistic at all.

Most soldiers don't get one kill in a 6-12 month stint, let alone in 5 minutes. Real war is 99% boredom and 1% living hell. Real war is so damn boring nobody would want to play a real war game.

Microsoft C V1.0

(Well really re-branded Lattice), with all tools (compiler, linker, libraries...) can on 4 single sided, single density 5.25 inch floppies.

Those of us with two FDDs would make make up two floppies, one with the editor and compiler and the other with a linker and libraries.

We'd put the actual code on the second disk.

Coompilation would be a two step process, pausing to pull out the compiler disk and insert the linker/library disk.

When Borland came out with Turbo C that fitted on a single disk and edited, compiled and linked from an IDE, just about everyone dumped the MS stuff overnight.

Re: That's a no brainer...

"' or even better don't install the drivers."

For the most part these drivers can't be installed or uninstalled. They are compiled into the kernel.

The only way you can be sure the microphone is disconnected involves wire cutters.

Can't you mix them?

If you're "thiking *nix" you think of using a bunch of different tools together, hooked together with some bash scripting. Different languages/tools are optimised to do different things.

For example, bash might do the top level scripting, but call awk, sed, perl, python,... to do specific functions.

Can't you do the same with Powershell? Use Powershell for what it is good at and use bash etc for the top-level console scripting.

Re: Wasn't Java suppsoed to remain "open source"

That was the original intention... Java everywhere, by everyone. In the late 1990s, Sun submitted Java to ECMA to become an open standard, but then withdrew that in 1999.

That was at the height of the dot.bomb hype and perhaps Sun thought they had something that would make them very wealthy.

Unfortunately for them , withdrawing Java really gave MS a leg up and allowed them to play their .NET card.

Security stats are all meaningless

These security stats mean nothing, for any OS, when we're dealing with embedded/dedicated systems.

They don't run a whole LAMP stack or the whole of Ubuntu/whatever. No email. No Twitter.

They just run kernel + custom software.

Why did we drill another hole in their planet?

For the same reason we insensitevly call it Windjana instead of the local name.

Interplanetary colonialism.

They'll throw the book at him

Hopefully one of those WW2 naval code books with the lead in them to make it sink fast.

When I weres in the Army some blokes complained they were bored because there was nothing to do on the week end. Next week end EVERYONE got to spend the whole of Saturday moving a pile of bricks (a whole house that had been demolished) to a new pile 100 metres away. The week end after... move it back again.

Thanks guys...

So who do you call?

In them good olde dayes of yore, the NSA were the good guys that protected Joe Sixpack from the Cybervillians.

Now they'd just slap you with a gagging order and use this knowledge for their own ends.

"In other words, what fekking trees?"

When they chop down the trees they replace them with crops. Those crops perform photosynthesis too.

Ultimately photosynthesis is limited by nutrients (CO2 and other), water and light and the efficiency of the plant. Trees don't get any more of these than other crops.

Go watch a hay field being mowed. Tonnes per acre coming off. As much, if not more, than growing trees.

Are you a cad, or perhaps a bounder? Can you bowl a googlie?

Drop by for tea and a bikkie at CSHQ.

Re: This just might be the first nail in x86-64

You can't cover everything in an announcement like this. There are some reasonable assumptions to be made: there might be coffee in the coffe pot and the pastries are eadible.

Since this is ARM, and they clearly understand what they need to do to succeed in server space, the answers to performance/power usage/chip size/cost can be assumed to be high/low/depend on pinning/low.

Of course clocking 32 CPUs and Tbytes of data is going to scoop power, but at least with ARM architectures it is feasible. x86 would have a chip swimming laps in a puddle of solder.

There are many server builders out there who say "gee, I wish there was a processor that had X feature, because we could then make product Y". In the past they have had to hope Intel makes such a part and then actually keeps it in the market.

With ARM they can make their own part if nobody else does. It isn't as expensive as all that.

SPARC does share a similar phylosophy in some ways, but lacks the business accumin and market penentration. It is way easier to work with ARM than SPARC.

Re: Currency manipulation and quantitative easing.

It's bad when foreigners do it.

Re: Returning a favour would be nice

I've found the smae. Retired and older people seem to value service and are intent on repaying you in plates of scones, a leg of lamb or a bunch of carrots.

It's the "internet is free" generation that seem to expect any tech stuff to be done for free and have pretty much no useful services with which to repay you.

Still, It you were charging what commercial support organisations do, you'd be able to buy that bottle of whiskey (and maybe the yacht).

Re: Getting rid of it all by 2018?

" I have so much time for this foundation taking an engineers approach to major problems "

Unfortunatey this approach does not always give the best results. Far too often these solutions don't work because they don't take local conditions and capabilities into account. $1500 toilets, where a $5 spade and a hole in the ground is often a better approach. Or wifi/tablet/gee wizz education solutions where even just $2 on a pencil & paper would be a major step up, not to mention the complete lack of IT infrastructure to suport these efforts.

I spent 30 years in Africa - most of that in rural or semi-rural areas. I shake my head trying to understand some of the ways that first world engineers think they can solve third world issues with the expertise they gain from watching a couple of documentaries.

Re: a paradox

Since there are at least ten ARMs running Linux for every x86, the little penguin better get used to it.

I work a lot with embedded Linux, mainly on ARM, and there are far more people working on ARM than on x86 too.

The Linux ARM SoC world is improving by leaps and bounds - many/most SoCs are not using common cores for peripherals for which the drivers are stabilising. With device trees, a board config is almost getting to the point where just doing some device tree work is enough.

Re: re: "Right now, when a consumer puts Do Not Track in the header, we don't know what they mean"

I think it means they no longer remember what a customer is. Haven't had one in ages.

Re: Give Us...

The term "waste radio waves" is somewhat misleading. If you're sucking up the RF energy then the signal getting to the next house is going to be weaker.

Been doing this for years though - personally since the 1960s- and those before since the early 1900s. It's called a crystal set.

Re: C

>A friend describes it thus: "C is assembly language with syntactic sugar."

The other one is "C is portable assembler"

Like many of these cute phrases, it is wildly inaccurate.

Some does depend on what C you're talking about. K&R C was not much more than assemler in some ways, but ANSI-C is a different beast.