Posts by Wayland

Re: And still

Drone tracking looks more impressive in the same way as a loo roll shortage looks more impressive than a shortage of paracetamol.

Re: First a slingshot & some water balloons...

Annoying machines that people hate tend to get smashed up. Since a drone can't be made of steel plate if it's to fly then they will have to have them shoot back.

You don't need to be ashamed of suggesting they might chip everyone to make sure we've all had our vaccination. They do this for pets.

The cunning part is how they get us to demand that it's done.

The Daily Mail show lots of photos of perfectly good food piled high in bins with the story being about panic buyers throwing away unwanted food. It was obviously a setup because some of the food was tinned. There is no reason anyone would got to the effort of chucking out tinned food in the middle of a crisis.

However it had the desired effect The readers went nuts raging at the hoarders and panic buyers. It would be a tiny step to get people dobbing in hoarders. They are already dobbin in people who leave their house too often.

Re: Can someone explain why an SSD needs a clock.....

It's probably 40k hours where k = 1024

That's 32k + 8k

"Never attribute a bug to malice when stupidity works" - you're too soft.

32768 a number I remember well. It was the location of the first character on a Commodore P.E.T display.

POKE 32768,65

would put an A there

It's actually 2^16 so the 16th address line on a 6502

65 being the ASCII code for A

It sounds like there must be some sort of clock inside these SSDs because why else would it be counting hours. Also perhaps it's supposed to die when that number runs out but it was either supposed to be a bigger number or a slower count.

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

You need to be careful what drives are attached when installing Windows 10, it will use all of them.

Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"

Macruim Reflect seems to Clone W10 perfectly. I ignore those partitions.

Re: SDDS

Never give your enemy the benefit of the doubt.

Re: – a tiny window of opportunity –

I used to shoot wamprats no bigger than that.

Re: Choice

"Obviously, enough people on non MS OS's have decided it does have a use or it would not exist."

That's obvious you've not thought this through. These corporations are quite capable of murdering things people find useful because of a less than obvious long term strategy to shape the market rather than shape their product to the market.

Re: Choice

Personally I like the contributions Microsoft is making to Linux. However that's the first stage, embrace. They extinguish it in one of that later stages.

Re: Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft?

Microsoft have always been capable of this, it's just a sensible business decision right now.

Re: Fuchs-ya

The operating system would need to be really really useful to require virtually the whole machine's capacity. The idea of the OS is to support the application programs which are the whole point of why you have a computer, not the OS.

Re: COBOL

I'm 55 and when I was a lad we used C and looked down on COBOL as from the stone age. Now I appreciate that different languages are focused on different jobs. C is close to the hardware which is what you want when programming hardware. COBOL is about processing business data and assumes all the technical stuff about the machine it's running on has been handled already. Trying to write business software in C is horrendous because C can do almost nothing without a library. Calling library functions in C is messy.

Re: COBOL

C is a very useful language as an upgrade or interface to assembly language say in small embedded systems. I was using C on a Z80 based embedded system and it was a lot easier than assembler we had been using. C++ is trying to be a proper high level language and there are much better ones for that job.

Re: "anything you can do in software you can do in hardware"

GPUs are the co-processors of our time. I remember Intel sold the maths chip separately and it made a big difference. GPUs don't integrate so cleanly into the computer as co-processors. The CPU had hooks for either calling software or hardware if present. The GPU has to be specifically loaded with a procedure and data and set on it's way. The load/unloading process is more work than many of the tasks so it has to be a really heavy task to make it worth the effort.

I can see AMD more closely integrating GPU tasks into the CPU now they are putting mini VEGA cores onto RYZENs.

Re: Arent' FPGAs only re-programmable a finite number of times?

You can build an entire Galaians machine in logic and then reprogram it to be a Defender machine.Not just the glue logic but the 6502 and the video chip in programmable logic. There is a whole geekdom where they do this sort of thing.

Re: MiSTer is a modest success

I think we all (1980's techie teens) like to imagine improvements that we could have made to our home computers of the time. I often imagine what the Dragon 32 would have been like with a better video chip and a memory controller. It was possible to write code for that which could be run at any memory location without a linker.

Oh yes people do blame the whole of Linux when something fairly obscure does not work for them on one distro. The difference with Microsoft is their screwups have a bigger effect. Microsoft also use their position to dictate to the market. This can be a good things such as in security but bad if it's used to force business to use them not through choice.

Monster ווו

I used to contract that way. When ever they needed a mod to a program I'd price it up and they'd write me a purchase order. I used to have a whole bunch of POs on the go at the same time. Different departments would write me POs. Sometimes they'd just send me a PO and one line saying what they wanted done. These ranged from £300 to £5000. I could do the work on site or back at my office. I could get my employees to do the work.

You'd think I'd have been immune from IR35 but when it came out the client panicked and tried to get everyone on an IR35 contract.

Re: BAe

Tax is robbery. Notice how the companies don't want to challenge IR35 because of the HMRC threats and in the case of BAE they pass the threat on down to the contractors.

Nobody wants to be taxed or else it would be a voluntary contribution. So if anyone is to be taxed then it should all be the same rate. The big companies should be on PAYE as well as the small ones. Why should they only get taxed on profit? If they have equipment and labour costs then pay tax first and pay those expenses with what remains. Then if there is any money left after that then pay corporation tax on that.

Yes it sounds unfair but then tax is robbery. Now perhaps you get why it's perfectly justified to do anything and everything to avoid paying tax.

Re: I told my Dad I use Kali

With the Coronavirus pensioners can now wear masks as well as hoodies. You won't be able to tell the Kali users from the Coronavirus carriers.

Re: Positive Diversions

Surely this is just the type of skill West Midlands Police want to clamp down on. How can you be sure she won't turn bad and use this skill to rob Lloyds Bank? Shoulda kept her dumb.

Re: Be a government informer! Betray your family and friends! Fabulous prizes to be won!

Even if these tools were totally illegal use then it would still be immoral to call the police on your child. At least talk to them about it and see if you can resolve it without calling the cops.

Typical police though, want people to snitch to give them some easy arrests.

Re: Why use Windows?

We built one of those signs using a Raspberry PI and ran the slideshow in LibreOffice.

Re: AC cos I'm ashamed of saying something nice about Vista

PC World still sell laptops with 4GB RAM and a HDD. Web browsing seems to require 8 and the OS seems to need an SSD.

Re: AC cos I'm ashamed of saying something nice about Vista

The turbo button made a noticeable difference on my PC AT Clone until I took the cover off and notice it was not connected to anything.

Re: AC cos I'm ashamed of saying something nice about Vista

I serviced a Vista machine with 256 RAM but adding a 1GB stick transformed it into something that worked OK.