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* Posts by bombastic bob

10282 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

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Having trouble getting your mitts on that Raspberry Pi? You aren't alone

bombastic bob Silver badge
Happy

3b+ and 4's seem available enough, for now

If your industrial solution can use either the 3b+ _OR_ the 4, there seem to be enough units available in the short term, or so I've been told by the guy doing the procurement at the moment...

If it's getting better over time (not worse) this is actually good news.

[mostly I just need the Pi touch screen, USB 2 ports, ethernet, and wireless, and CPU is fast enough on 3b+, and then you get flexible with the power supply so it can feed either unit and voila!]

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Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Coat

Re: Add on

naked avatars " Toobin' "

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Pirate

Re: Who is the target market for this?

do kids still say that?

never try to be "Lame Dad" and speak like a teenager, because it will always come out wrong [at least it did when OUR Dads did it].

I still like using hippy jargon on occasion... but mostly 80's. Totally!

[so if you use YOUR generation's jargon, they'll get it and may actually use it themselves when you aren't looking]

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Happy

Re: VR meetings with an EULA and TOS

if I wanted to chat, just give me an IRC client any day

A _LOT_ of open source projects do just that!

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Big Brother

Re: VR meetings with an EULA and TOS

But what happens if Fa[e]ceBAN decides to... BAN your company from their service, because you make rifles, or let certain kinds of speech go uncensored on your service, or gave money to politicians and causes they do not like... (etc.) ?

Yes, this NEVER happens to ANYONE, right? I'm sure people in the board rooms of defense contractors and certain news organizations are just WAITING for this kind of heavy-handed EULA/TOS *LAND* *MINE* which can (potentially) have a negative impact on your JOB.

As for me, I remember a room with a speaker phone only a decade and a half ago, and our meetings went just fine. No cameras, no distractions, just actual discussions between international participants.

I do not trust Fa[e]ceBAN for a GREAT MANY reasons, not just those already mentioned by others.

(aside from the Matrix-like imagining or WoW-like avatars being a major anti-work distraction)

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Microsoft, flush with cash, raises cloud office suite prices for businesses

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Linux

Re: My CD-ROM copy of Office 2013 still installs and works fine

have you read THIS El Reg article yet?

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

Can I pay less if I don't want them?

it doesn't work with cable TV, why would it work with Micros~1???

(I never watch at least 1/3 of the cable channels, and barely watch another 1/3)

At least they should give you 'compensation' discounts based on outages...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Trollface

Re: Remind me again why we chose PCs over timesharing?

it's all because the Redmond Marketeers could sell ice water to indigenous people of the Arctic...

(on a subscription basis)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Trollface

Re: You get what you pay for ...

and I just got done reading THIS El Reg article...

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Boston Dynamics spends months training its Atlas robots to perform one minute of parkour almost perfectly

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Boston Dynamics didn't release any information about their battery life.

the kind of energy you'd need to jump around is kinda like the energy you need to fly a quad-copter.

So if you extrapolate typical quad-copter battery life, maybe similar?

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: When you can train it to do the housework....

Nandroids. heh. Reminds me of Emmy the Robot (web comic)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Terminator

Re: Quick learner

I have to wonder how much paralleliism there is in the robots' learning algorithm.

With a lot of parallel operations, you could power it with a server farm and something a bit better than wifi networking. That'd speed the learning process up, right?

(eventually >256 core CPUs but who knows when THAT will happen... at least one that STILL fits in a robot)

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LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Keeps gettin better

I've used LibreOffice for years and have rarely run into compatibility problems.

Similar experience here, and also with Open Office prior to using Libre. Still I welcome compatibility fixes.

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Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Re: Sumption is wrong

it was an articulation of the rule of law as priority to the whim of the King.

Correct, and in many ways it was one of the first very important political reforms ever made.

In the USA our Constitution says that we have the right to PEACEABLY assemble and address our greivences etc.. So rioting is COMPLETELY out of the question as far as the law is concerned. I'm sure in the UK it's pretty much the same. Using bad interpretations of the Magna Charta to justify lawlessness is pretty stupid.

But rioting gets attention, especially from the media, making these people "attention whores" and not protesters. [similar criticism applies to riots in MY country as well] When you riot, you draw attention to YOU (like a child having a tantrum). When you protest peacefully, you draw attention to YOUR CAUSE (which becomes part of the solution).

A thousand people marching peacefully with signs and bullhorns makes a very big message for politicians. Or maybe just one guy with a sandwich board marching up and down a street [or wearing a Guy Fawkes mask in protest] is a simple enough message that's also both peaceful and law abiding. And it generally draws attention to the message, not to the messenger.

What these people did (trying to storm the castle) just makes them look like idiots.

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China reports local chipmaking boom with output up more than 40%

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Pirate

your point about human rights failures is "not wrong" of course, but the method should be simpler: build competing factories elsewhere, i.e. no more "all eggs in China's basket".

In 2021 there are 2 additional reasons to do this. One, China has proven themselves to be an unreliable part of the supply chain. Two, the manner in which they (the CCP) just "shut things down" without warning, damn the consequences. The combination of the two suggests they can't be trusted.

(other places in the world exist where tech investment is likely to pay off BETTER)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

Re: Quality

my recent experience with a chip shortage (in which a Hong Kong chip dealer offered to sell them for over 20 times the normal price in very limited quanitities) on an otherwise popular (yet single-manufacturer) device that had good world wide supply at design time [my solution was to re-do the firmware to accommodate inverted-logic and save tens of thousands of dollars] suggests that China may pick winners and losers until they've completely cashed in on the disaster.

And last I checked, China was STILL a communist country.

seeing the chip making FINALLY recover though is still "good". But I hope the recovery is TOO LATE to stop manufacturers from building chip factories elsewhere.

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Cassini data from last decade reveals insights into 'diffuse' nature of Saturn's core

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Coat

Re: To check their results ....

because of that joke, they changed the planet's name to "U-rectum"

(ok that little 'Futurama' shout-out was screaming to be seen/heard)

(coat, please)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Boffin

Re: odd

"recent" in cosmic terms could even be "when the asteroid belt formed":

So Jupiter swallowed a rocky planet, and Saturn acts like a proto-star. Interesting.

gas giants being more like proto-stars and less like planets actually sounds VERY plausible.

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WhatsApp pulls plug on Taliban helpline, shuts down official-looking accounts

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Meh

"follow the money" ? I don't think it's that bad or that simple. More likely they have no REAL motivation to "bother with" places like Afghanistan. Not like it affects THEM.

(human nature and Occam's Razor and all of that sort of thing)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

Re: The Abiding Self-Destructive Problem in a few simple words.

I think it's simpler: do we REALLY want big tech and social media to be our NEW THOUGHT POLICE? Do we REALLY want to surrender control over communication in our society to *THEM* ???

I say, NO WAY IN HELL!

However, it would be better for them to get the ACTUAL police involved, when crimes or the appearance of things _LIKE_ terrorism are involved.

"Hey look, we have a bunch of people on our social network claiming to be Taliban and it looks like people are using this as if they ARE" - then let the cops or even the military get involved, and if a court or some other REAL authority shuts it down, fine. "Due Process", society run by LAW, and all of that. This might mean some local authority gets to have control over local stuff on social media, and gets worked into the administration of the media services, but that would be MORE like REAL LIFE.

However, letting a techno-oligarchy "just decide for us" to ban (or not) content based on THEIR FEELZ???

NO. Just No.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

Hard to tell how the Taliban will rule

not really. They've 'ruled' the same for a VERY, VERY long time. Rewind 20 years and the only real difference between then and now (from their perspective) will be how much better the Taliban now are at manipulating the media and big tech and "the world" with their B.S..

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Big Brother

Re: "We're obligated to adhere to US sanctions laws," explained a WhatsApp spokesperson

There are apparently NO such sanction laws involved in many of the alleged 'cancel culture' bans done by FB and Twitter and Google (and most likely their 'pwned' companies as well), but there ARE some apparent ideological similarities among many of those allegedly victimized by alleged 'Cancel Culture' bans, allegedly done by these companies. At least, that's the perception.

Yeah no ginormous glowing hypocrisy here, nothing to see, move along...

So when will sanction laws coincide with the whims of Big Tech? Would that become a GOOD thing or a *REALLY* *REALLY* *BAD* thing? (See icon)

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Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Bah. I've done more.

Years ago I found some code for a Pi calculator written in C. There was no author attribution that I remember. I ended up publishing my modified version (which included a bug fix and some significant speedups). The thing that makes mine different is that it is MULTI-THREADED. But the speed benefit is only about 2.5 times, due in many ways to the limits of just how much parallel stuff you can do in the basic algorithm.

In any case, my updated modified threaded version can calculate 1 million digits of Pi in about an hour and a half on a typical amd64-based system. Since it's roughly an n-squared relationship, it implies that this algorithm could calculate 63 trillion digits in about 6 billion hours. Not very impressive, yeah.

It might be interesting to see what the actual numbers would be...

(and since the Swiss algorithm is apparently using 64 cores, they must've found a better way to introduce parallel calculations)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Re: Pi calculations are all very well but

how about a video instead?

(10,000 digits of Pi by Hatsune Miku - I think this is the original one)'

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Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: a single DVD image?

why not a single DVD? Traditionally this has been the case. Subsequent DVDs just have other packages on them. I normally do a net install though, so I burn a CD (or just use the IMG for a VM) with the net installer and let it rip for a few hours downloading and installing. Net install is usually pretty small, WAY less than the size of a CD. But the DVDs typically have a live system which sometimes makes fixing things easier.

I should probably verify it but chances are it's still the same as it's traditionally been.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Strength & Weakness

I haven't seen a "Big Ender" build of any OS for quite a while. Used to be thought that Big Endian would run faster on certain hardware and be advantageous for networking. I'm pretty sure ARM can still do it or maybe that was just ARM32. But if it doesn't matter for performance, might as well keep it the same, yeah. Still might be a fun comparison test. Every time you need to flip byte order (htons, ntohs) it adds to the execution time and footprint. On "Big Ender" systems, for these kinds of function calls the compiler doesn't need to generate any code.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

sysvinit has been outdated for some time

'outdated' - I do not think that word means what you think it means...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

I ran into this very problem when making it possible for an RPi (using Raspbian which is based on Debian and has systemd) to act in several wireless modes including AP and Wifi Client, and during startup you have to tweek things LIKE resolv.conf - I think the utility might have been 'resolved'. It's unnecessarily confusing, though (typical of things related to systemd).

The fact that you can still work around systemd to make something cool happen is pretty good. I just hope that the remnants of more 'traditional' network setup do not disappear. Assuming that the future direction will be MORE choice for init systems, it's looking ok.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Linux

from the article: Support for init systems other than systemd

so the DEFAULT is to use systemd, but apparently easier to switch it out for something SANE.

(I was somewhat impressed by this in any case, a happy surprise)

Still using Devuan, which is based on Debian, but I'd think that Devuan maintainer's job just became easier.

You could kinda say that default Debian comes with GNOME, just like it comes with systemde, and forget that there's a Mate and LXDE (and others) desktop setups available, too.

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Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Happy

Re: WHat Three Words - commercial algorithim that cant be shared without license payment

A "tourette" version. heh.

In some places, making a parody version of "What3Words" might be considered "fair use".

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Microsoft emits last preview of .NET 6 and C# 10, but is C# becoming as complex as C++?

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Cross-platform UI?

a generic WebKit-based cross-platform frame for HTML-based 'apps' might actually help...

(I've been kicking this idea around, and it could be written in Python if you don't need real features)

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

import gtk

import webkit

import gobject

gobject.threads_init()

window = gtk.Window()

window.set_default_size(800, 480)

window.fullscreen()

window.connect("destroy", lambda a: gtk.main_quit())

browser = webkit.WebView()

if len(sys.argv) > 1 : browser.open(sys.argv[1])

else : browser.open("http://theregister.co.uk/")

window.add(browser)

window.show_all()

gtk.main()

and then, you wouldn't need complicated installers, monolithic run-times, etc. [other than webkit and python and the other supporting packages that could be loaded with something like pip if you use pythyon. otherwise, an open source C/C++ program compiled for your OS]

eh, but what do I know...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Trollface

C# came from a late-1990s project within microsoft called COOL (C-like Object-Oriented Language)

I was thinking more like a place, with lots of flames, pitchforks, and tormented people screaming...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: native targets

And both are designed with adding new CPUs in mind.

Yes. I have actually DONE it. xmega32e5 is one of them. The gnu tools people are really happy when you give them a quality set of patches for new CPUs. I haven't done LLVM yet but might need to some day, and the same for gcc, if I stay cutting edge with microcontrollers.

You know, it might be REALLY COOL if Micros~1 were to make their windows build tools compatible with either LLVM _or_ GCC (including MAKE FILES), or maybe BOTH, and then simply made headers and "binutils" tools and 'import' libs available, and THEN switch their build environments to use THEM instead. The LLVM and gcc compilers and binutils very well may have advanced better than Micros~1's compilers and tools, and could be more widely accepted given the additional CPU support.

They could also submit patches for 'ld' to do Micros~1 stuff, like debug info, resources, manifests, DLL support, whatever. "Developers Developers Developers Developers".

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Happy

In my old age, I really do prefer C

In My Bombastic Opinion, good C++ code looks a LOT like good C code.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: "the ability to use operators on generic types."

IMO generic types are the bane of proper programming.

C++ recently added 'auto' for this purpose, primarily for use in templates.

However, outside of a template, explicit typing should be used for a number of reasons, not the least of which is knowing for sure what code will be run given a particular data type.

If you don't know what you're working with, how can you possibly write the proper code to deal with it ?

yeah, what YOU said.

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Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Forty years ago

yeah normally I would be using debug prints if no symbolic debugger is available. That's an old school method that still works very well for kernel and microcontroller debugging where you often can't put soft debug breaks into the running code...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

5150

wasn't there a Van Halen album titled '5150' ? (1986 'Van Hagar'). By then the IBM PC had been around for a while...

(5150 can also be a police code for a crazy person, possibly a reference to California Code 5150 for committing said person to an asylum)

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COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Pirate

Re: Forgery

In the USA, "showing your papers" like it's to a KGB or other "secret police" operative is, in my opinion, UN-AMERICAN.

And my private medical history is NOBODY! ELSE'S! BUSINESS!!

Whether or not I've had the disease, a vaccine, multiple vaccines, or not, THOSE decisions are supposed to be between me and whatever physician I choose. "My Body My Choice" right?

Might as well stamp 666 on my hand or forehead. No, wait...

Other countries can do what they want. But in the USA I'd like to think that we still have CIVIL RIGHTS. And I see any attempt at a "vax passport" as VIOLATING them (regardless of whether or not I've been VAX'd or already have natural immunity).

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Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Megaphone

Re: More like Chunderbird, amirite?

it feels like it's stuck in the 90s

Well, other than using the 'f' word FEEL, I would want MORE things to be "stuck in the 90's" if it means

* 3D Skeuomorphic menu-based multi-pane interface WITH NO 'HAMBURGER' MENU

* Keyboard+Mouse UI centricity unless you WANT it the other way for some reason...

* sensible menu hierarchy

* tabs where it makes sense

* extensibility

* can turn OFF HTML MAIL (which is EVIL and a YUGE SECURITY CRATER)

</rant>

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India's return to space fails after first locally built cryogenic engine experiences 'anomaly'

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: getting LOX + anything to light up takes SOME doing

LOX plus most things will burn if ignited, yeah. LOX plus SOME things explodes into flame immediately. But most simple chemical mixing won't burn without help.

LOX + Kerosene or LOX + Liquid Hydrogen probably needs to be ignited properly, especially at cryogenic temperatures. BUT... if you pump in hydrazine FIRST, it would act like a primer charge, and then you shift the fuel over to the main one once the fire is properly burning. Other chemicals may work better or be more reliable. Same concept.

I understand that some jet engines require a starting sequence where something "not jet fuel" is used to light them... propane or similar in at least one case. Once lit, you shift the fuel over and it stays lit. That kind of thing. A Rocket could need that sort of thing to light the engines.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: apparently needed more on the ground testing before putting an expensive payload on it

true, but if this 2nd stage has never flown before, why risk a perfectly good satellite in the process??

(some bean-counter probably *FELT* it was a good idea, yeah...)

then I'll stand corrected in saying that you ALSO need to do some flight testing before putting payloads on it. But I thought that was obvious and didn't mention it. If I had, I'd be too wordy and accused of being Captain Obvious. No way to win.

But proper ground testing would take most of those other things into consideration you know. Vibrations and resonances can be simulated. The thing is, they never said exactly why the thing did not start. It could be everything from bad wiring to bad controllers to turbo pumps not starting on time, or lighting the fire on the main engine just didn't work.

Apollo's 3rd stage not only had to start, it had to be re-startable. Similarly for the command module. THAT kind of tech is what I'm thinking about here. (and that WOULD be rocket science). By now the patents have run out. I'm sure they can be researched.

(and they SHOULD be able to test for nearly all of that on the ground)

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bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

apparently needed more on the ground testing before putting an expensive payload on it

just saying, if you want the thing to light, you need to make sure it'll work with sufficient on the ground testing. it's the kind of thing NASA has done a LOT, after all. Granted, getting LOX + anything to light up takes SOME doing, especially if the engine is designed to be re-started in space.

But i expect it COULD have been tested on the ground, first. Tested ENOUGH TIMES to be signed off as "reliable" at any rate.

Confidence in this new engine is a *bit* lacking.

(and they didn't give any details as to why, either - pumps failed? No arkie sparkie? Not enough accelerant if THAT was used? Or maybe they just do not know???)

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It's time to decentralize the internet, again: What was distributed is now centralized by Google, Facebook, etc

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Megaphone

Re: Bullshit article premise

These are just large sites. They're not the internet, and the internet is not "centralized" around them.

* Google services are often integrated into a A LOT of web sites, from gummint sites using ReCAPTCHA, to 'analytics' and "log in with your google ID" that I see way too often, everywhere.

* Amazon AWS is used by many for web stuff, and Amazon marketplace includes many businesses I often deal with directly.

* Fa[e]ceB[an,ook], unfortunately, has a HUGE PILE of users worldwide, and these people actually use FB for NEWS and other information. It means their censors can screen out what they do not like and do not want their users to see. And too many business managers/owners think that using their services helps them.

* Google search prioritizes things in sometimes GROSSLY UNFAIR ways. Use a different search to see what they had [allegedly] been doing to breitbart.com for example...

* GDPR and all of the excuses why these companies can not apparently comply with it.

When you look at the overall market share, and observe that the companies who have it are not only in a posiition to censor and filter and cancel, they are apparently DOING THAT VERY THING, and many of us regular people have been complaining about it, LOUDLY, and then nothing gets done about it. We are at their mercy. And they are AWARE of it.

From the article: central platforms can suddenly change policies to shift users away from the content being provided by a creator

This is another way of saying 'Cancel Culture'

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Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Unhappy

Re: Bold move

I'd rather they just put the UI back to what it was *BEFORE* *AUSTRALIS*

That would be BOLD *AND* SMART!!!

(But I guess they don't wanna disappoint the 2D FLATTY FAN zoomer kids that would be screaming about it on tw[a,i]tter like they're a big majority of people but are really only 11 or so very loud cyber bullies...)

and maybe THAT is why REAL USAGE does not match the predictive model quite so much.

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The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

bombastic bob Silver badge
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Meh

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

to some extent this is true. On FreeBSD and Linux I have no trouble running DOSBox, or virtualbox with 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit versions of windows, using the kvm. The thing is, it's apparently possible (with amd64 architecture) to run in a 32-bit context alongside of 64-bit context. Windows apparently does NOT even attempt this. But I think virtualbox's kernel drivers DO manage to make this work. Also Micros~1 "Virtual PC" seems to do it ok. Not sure if you can still get that, though...

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

on the 64-bit systems you can use an emulator that boots a 32-bit version of windows, THEN run the 16-bit code. That's pretty much the only option for 16-bit binaries though.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Would need a 32-bit Windows?

I leveraged Win32s for single-threaded 32-bit executables, and wrote hybrid 32-bit/16-bit code that accessed flat memory (Global memory handles pointed to contiguous memory blocks making this possible). Some of my 16-bit hybrid code FLEW by writing sorts and memcpy utilities that used the 32-bit code for some things. You did not need to use Win32s for USE32 ASM code though, as it was still 16-bit with USE32 prefixes.

but people forget the performance problem that segments had under protected mode - 16 cycles to load a new selector. Ew.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: old sites

they load in 2 seconds without 200 javascript libraries

I try to do this with my own stuff

* use <style> section and embedded 'style=' rather than gargantuan style sheets

* minimal script (if any at all) and always SELF CONTAINED

* tables for overall formatting.

it's simple, easily maintained, and self-contained. It loads fast, displays consistently, and doesn't break when some idiot decides to "withdraw" his contributions.

Yeah but when things make too much sense, they get overwhelming disapproval... I wonder why that is? Maybe the same reasons why some contractors seem to ensure job security through obfuscation, or lock their clients into solutions only THEY can maintain, etc. etc.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

maybe that old sottware was just written PROPERLY. My guess, they statically linked things like C runtime. heh.

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bombastic bob Silver badge
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Devil

Re: Maybe Windows 3.1 was a sweet spot?

windows 3.1 had a lot of good going for it

* same UI as its predecessor (which sold zillions of copies)

* fixed the big bugs and included things like 'toolhelp' and common dialogs to help development do better

* a general focus on benefits to customers and developers (still trying to sell it)

* lean and mean where it made sense (it had to run on 16Mhz 386SX with 4Mb of RAM)

Too bad Micros~1 has seemed to forget lessons well learned back then. I was at the PDC where the 3.1 beta was announced, too (in Seattle as I recall). The '95 beta (Chicago) conference was in Anaheim (Gates actually rented DIsneyland for a night and Penn & Teller did a magic show on another night).

Yeah, those WERE the days... "Developers Developers Developers Developers"

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