Posts by Charles Manning

Why 1024 == k

Because real programmers have sixteen fingers.

Re: Won't someone think of the seedlings?

Apparently the CO2-is-bad brigade have found a loophole in the CO2--is-yummy-plant-food argument.

I was told by one of these anti-CO2 people that the extra CO2 was causing plant obesity and this puts stress on the internal processes of the plant, causing them to be less healthy. He didn't quite go as far as to say that being fat would cause the plants to get diabetes, but the parallel running through his mind was obvious.

I suggested that he could start handing out pamphlets to the plants to suggest plenty of exercise and outdoor activity.

Re: BIOS? it's all UEFI nowadays

"it takes a long time to spin updated processors"

If the security hole is not in the CPU, then it is hard to see how the CPU can fix it.

Sure MS can be sure the driver is OK, but what if the hardware itself is doing the accesses without even the driver's say so?

For a crust I occasionally do work with Altera SOCFPGAs. These are an FPGA and Dual core SOC that sit as bus masters on the same RAM. Since they share RAM, the FPGA can read/write wherever it wants without the CPu being able to stop it.

The FPGA can also access the SOC peripherals (hard ethernet controllers, GPIOs, MMC etc etc) as part of the memory map, but the CPU can limit access onto those buses.

Just like the NSA probably got Intel to backdoor their CPUs it would also be easy for them to backdoor something like an ethernet controller. Most ethernet controller designs only come from a few vendors such as Designware. If Desnware was sufficiently motivated by threats, dollars or partiotism they could easily plant a small state machine in an ethernet controller that acts on malformed naughty packets and goes reads/writes RAM and sends the data out again as an ethernet frame.

I'm not saying Designware are naughty, just using them as a for-example.

The only way to solve these sorts of issue is to design the whole system security from the buses up. That's a challenging thing to do and it can't be retrofitted or fixed by changing from Windows to Linux.

Re: Post-war 90/10 story

The idea that fixing up stuff creates wealth is known as Broken Window Fallacy. Sure a lot of spending goes on, but it does not create value and therefore does not create wealth.

It does create wealth for some players though. USA made a mint (from both sides) selling war goods during the war. They were not bombed to hell, so when their men came back from war they were immediately able to become highly productive - supplying both local demands suppressed by the war economy as well as supplying other countries that were recovering. Since they sold a lot of stuff on tick, that gave them leverage to sell their own goods.

This also gave USA their ability to flex their imperial muscle. They were the only nation that was not hammered and they had all this money to throw around.

But was there really a huge boom in Europe after the war? Not so sure. I have never been to Europe myself, I've spoken to people from both sides of the conflict. The 1950s were a hard time for England, Germany, France and Italy at least. All these countries had post-war rationing. UK only stopped rationing in 1954 - 9 years after the end of the war.

HTF can you say they're booming when there's rationing?

A modern Defender isn't a real Landy either.

The last real Landy was a series 3, and that's even being a bit generous.

If it has coil spring suspension it isn't a Landy.

If you still have your kidneys after a 50 mile trip it wasn't in a Landy.

It it has an automatic gearbox it isn't a Landy.

If it has an air conditioner or heater that actually works, it isn't a Landy.

Of course radar danger was real

Sitting next to unshielded radar is basically the same as sitting in a microwave oven. Radar operators would use the devices to warm their food. Smash out the glass on a microwave an put your hand inside and bits are going to get cooked.

As you say, that've a few orders of magnitude higher than Wifi.

But Mlle Batshit clearly does not understand EM at all. She's gone reclusive and is living off grid in the mountains. EM radiation is worse high up.

I've watched them being developed...

During last year and a bit of this year I was involved in developing a Bluetooth LE (aka BT4, BT Smart) device based on a single-chip BTLE solution from Nordic Semiconductors that runs the BT stack on a Coretex M0 micro.

Of course the chip comes with a board support package (BSP) + example code that is intended to show off how the chip works. The code has clear disclaimers saying that this is for demo purposes. Some of the demos are for remote controls, heart rate monitors etc etc... the sorts of IoT things that people are designing.

They also have a forum where people can discuss issue. That's where it gets scary...

From the forum is is plainly obvious that there are many people developing these devices for market who are just taking the for-demo-only examples, tweaking them a bit and then pouring them into products. Job done.

Some of the blame can possibly be placed on marketing and management. The engineer takes an example, tweaks it a bit and demos the desired product function and shows it to marketing. They get excited. Engineer then says the code needs to be rewritten properly and that will take 6 months. Engineer gets overruled - they want to go into production immediately.

But engineers must cop some of the blame too. Most of these frameworks and protocols are incredibly complex and very few engineers scratch below the surface. They like the idea of just taking a demo and tweaking it because that is the easy path. The really hard work is in taking ownership for full product function - not just the few lines of tweakery.

These low quality BSPs are a huge problem. They encourage people to generate shoddy products.

I suppose I should not complain too much. Fixing up the mess is what keeps me in gravy.

Re: Proof, (if it were needed)

" it's a part of our history and culture"

So is morris dancing, but that's left to community organisations (ie. clubs) and not the taxpayer.

Getting the government involved with these programs tends not to work for at least two reasons:

* Governments tend to measure their action in the amount of money spent - not the outcomes. Therefore spending more is good - it does not really matter what happens.

* Taxpayers see this waste and get resentful. Instead of supporting efforts they tend to oppose them.

Re: Suicide rates

An upvote to you for applying some rational thinking.

"Admittedly I don't have the upper body distraction she has"

Well I do have moobs that would compete with hers.

Unfortunately that just causes people to avert their eyes and makes them look at my shoes.

Re: And what happens to the vapours?

Don't worry, Apple will parent a way to make the vapours condense into a cute holographic-looking rainbow.

The Greater Good

Sure, we must think of the Greater Good, but that needs to be balanced with the individual good too.

As Tim has pointed, out, much - perhaps most - of the capital that individuals own is in property. That capital value is underpinned by a controlled scarcity caused by zoning laws.

If the cities were to rapidly open up huge tracts of land for development through re-zoning then, in the short term at least, land prices will be driven down.

That sucks for at least the following reasons:

* If your house devalues from, say 600k to, say, 400k then that 200k shortfall is still real money for the individual. They're still paying mortgage on a 600k house that is now only worth 400k. Some people will end up owing more than the property value.

* Cities charge taxes based on property value. When property values go down, they have a hard time pushing up the charges to compensate.

So how does one act in the common good without ripping off the individual?

"As usual, you can count on Intel to fix these in the next version of the Stick."

Intel never, never follow through. That's why the embedded systems industry hate them with a passion.

Why don't we get this anguish about garbage collection?

We hear nonsense like: More than 50% of facebook users are female, therefore more than 50% of facebook programmers should be women.

Well women create more garbage than men, so by the same logic most garbage collectors should be female.

Let's stop obsessing about what's in a person's pants. It is what is in their brains that matters.

From the 1960s to the present, the medical profession has swung from male to female (70% of UK medical students are female). Why did that not happen to engineering?

It's probably down to just pure correlation. For example, autistic tenancies a often associated with engineering and with being male.

Further, intelligent women are often guided (by mostly female guidance councillors) to go into political/leadership roles (eg. womens' studies and politics/law) rather than engineering.

Re: "Oh, and in really bad times, gold is useless as it cannot be eaten or worn."

"If we're into shotgun and baked bean territory, you'll damn well have to be prepared to use the shotgun."

More to the point:

You have to be prepared to eat the baked beans!

Re: Good.

But is it enough?

In the 1980s when I got into computing many of the programmers were basically filing clerks who showed some gumption and were then sent on a 3 month COBOL programming course.

When I left University in 1983, a new grad would emerge with a large % of computing knowledge in their head.

The programmers from the 1980s are mostly going to be retiring before 2025. As many of my generation start to pop their clogs early, or head to management, or whatever,... the skill reservoir is depleting.

Since then, complexity has increased immensely. The level of skill you need to be productive has increased dramatically. Nett result is that we get effectively less skilled all the time.

Now a degree is just enough to get you a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It takes many years to get to proficiency.

Will the sprogs of today be able to spin up before the older generation give up?

Re: Idiots

You see compliance costs, someone else sees revenues.

The reason these daft things keep progressing is that they slosh more swill in the trough for the 'experts". The "experts" are never going to say we don't need these measures, because they're the people gaining from it.

Re: Ah, spirit copiers.

"Bandas died out because they won't breed in captivity..."

Yup, once they've sniffed each other they're too drunk to get it up.

Thalidomide???

Yup you should stop drinking sugary drinks like Thalidomide when you're preggers. It goes straight to your hips.

Top Secret security

4 million is only 1% of the population.

There are about 2 million active and reserve in the military. They won't all need TS, but many will.

Then there are a whole lot of contractors, people in the arms industry, programmers, engineers, support staff + politicians who also need TS.

Given the US spends over $600BN per year on military, it's quite easy to see there's a lot of paper flying about that needs to be controlled.

Then we have all the alphabet soup agencies: CIA (20,000 employees) , NSA (30,000 employees) , NASA,... + all their contractors who are not employees...

Pretty soon it all stacks up.

Re: I'm Mullah-levels of mad

But still you support them by buying this shit.

MS don't care a damn who bitches and moans, so long as you keep buying.

Yes I realise that you personally might not be buying the stuff - a company does. But you choose to be a BOFH there. Enough BOFHs start demanding "mental danger pay" or taking stress/sick leave for working with MS products and the management will take notice and eventually look for alternatives.

But, hey, if you think yelling into an echo chamber is going to help you feel better then by all means just carry on.

Brewing in SPAAAACE

I'm trying to work out whether brewing would actually work in space.

As yeast grows and dies it rises and sinks through the beer with different yeasts doing different things.

No gravity would imply no up/down rising/falling. Would the yeast actually function properly?

Perhaps we need to work out an XPrize mission to find out. After all, this is very important; sending a mission to Mars and beyond with no beer would be seriously bad for morale.

Re: a ha ha ha ha ha :(

"We know about this flaw now,"

Yes we know about it. We also know how drugs get into prisons, yet every day prisoners around the world get stoned.

Security is like virginity and balloons: one prick and it's gone. One little vector is all you need.

Sure Windows has more vectors, and they're likely easier to attack, but basically we have a situation that you just have to assume anyone can get to anything they want to.

Not much different to the physical world really. Locks can be picked, cops can be bribed. Blackmail and threats will get a sufficiently determined and resourced person anything they want.