* Posts by Soulhand

10 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2016

Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis

Soulhand

Re: RISCiX

> UNIX did come to the Archimedes

> On the 8th March, 1988, still working for GST in Cambridge, I worked on a "UNIX Kernel Validation Suite" to test the port of BSD 4.2 (and shortly afterwards, 4.3) to the Archimedes

And some time before that (because I left Acornsoft in 1987), I (and Laurence Albinson) ported SysV to the ARM (but not the Archimedes, I forget what actual model it was).

Hence my claim to (minor) fame of having written the first two C compilers for the ARM (the first was a derivative of the A Book on C compiler, the second was a back end for pcc)

I was working the other side of a partition from Paul and team.as they developed Arthur and it was a very interesting experience to observe how it all came togther.

Famed Apple analyst chances his Arm-based Macs that Apple kit will land next year

Soulhand

Re: Arm 1987

> Newton. Apple did invest in ARM.

No. This was for more general purpose computers. They did go on to do the Newtom.

Also, ARM (the company) didn't exist then. It was founded in 1990.

Soulhand

FWIW, Applie were investigating the ARM back in 1987 (not a typo). I worked for Acorn at the time, and provided technical support to them. So it's taken them a while

Welcome your new ancestor to the Homo family tree; boffins have discovered a new tiny species of human

Soulhand

> Small-bodied, but evidently capable of killing a rhinoceros, butchering it, and bringing the bits home.

FTFY

Stealthy UK startup drops veil on next frontier of speech wizardry

Soulhand

Nice rework of a press release. Did you see the tech demo'd? Try it yourself? Is there any evidence at all that the claims are real?

I'll believe it when it actually exists and can be used by someone other than a company employee.

Are Asimov's laws enough to stop AI stomping humanity?

Soulhand

> The 2nd law is flawed

They're all flawed. I don't understand why people are so uncritically accepting of these Laws.They were a literary device, and Asimov was well aware of their flaws and ambiguities. Quite a bit of his subsequent robot stories explore situations and ways that the laws lead to undesirable outcomes (and so the zero'th law was added, but even then, Asimov wouldn't have claimed they were then perfected)

Why do you cry when chopping onions? No, it's not crippling anxiety, it's this weird chemical

Soulhand

Re: £3.25 TWICE the price?

> £0.75/kg in Tesco. I think you're out of touch with the price of things.

Given they are from Japan, it's probably "twice the local price". Which according to https://www.numbeo.com/food-prices/country_result.jsp?country=Japan is about £2.40 / kg at the moment.

'Mirai bots' cyber-blitz 1m German broadband routers – and your ISP could be next

Soulhand

"This appears to be a consequence of TR-069 – aka the Customer-Premises Equipment WAN Management Protocol – which makes TCP/IP port 7547 available. ISPs use this protocol to manage the modems on their network. But the server running on that port is a TR-064 server and thus accepts TR-064 commands."

This is confused. Port 7547 isn't mandated by TR069, although the only port that needs to listen on a router for TR069 iis often 7547, that is for connection requests and should do nothing else than "phone home" to its TR069 server when an authenticated request is made.

Despite the similar numbers, TR069 and TR064 have no connection, and any CPE vendor running a TR064 server on the TR069 connection request port is a) nuts and b) likely to get issues like this. But it's not a *consequence* of running TR069 so in particular, this:

"A Shodan search [login required] indicates that approximately five million devices offer TR-064 service over the internet. While not all of these devices are necessarily vulnerable, many of them are"

isn't true. Having 7547 open does NOT imply a TR064 service is offered. Probably just the TR069 connection request and that's harmless unless you can guess the credentials and near harmless even if you do have them.

VC vampire: Peter Thiel wants to live forever

Soulhand

Eerily reminiscent of Bug Jack Barron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Jack_Barron

Huawei's P9 flagship: There's a lot to Leica

Soulhand

Re: My misunderstanding?

The 300% is because a monochrome sensor doesn't need a Bayer filter. Each "pixel" on a colour sensor is in fact four - one for R G B (and another for G because there are four in the square and they might as well use it for something)

So if you're just using it for black/white, no need for the filter. and all four sensors can be used - hence 300% more than one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter