Posts by Dazed and Confused

Re: I'm wondering

Who says the numbers need to be random. If you can get close enough to plant this inside the bosses printer presumably you can get close enough to know some contacts.

Re: sudo apt-get update

But quite a bit on non disti SW also uses the same mechanism. So fir example I can update Adobe stuff on my Linux box at the same time as I can update the SW included in the distribution. Anyone can make use of the same tools.

Re: offline F-35 operations – but only for up to 30 days

> Or the effect of the hyperspace relay in "Foundation"

Or gives a whole new meaning to the term interrupter gear.

Re: All according to plan

> What do you produce in the UK and export ? Raspberry pi, ok, easy, what else ? Serious question WHAT ELSE ?

Well the UK exported 1.2M cars last year exported SMMT, who I guess would know these things.

Re: This isn't an easy bug class to fix

> Well, actually, it wasn't the context-switching that was the issue, it was the IPC (messaging and permissions) which reportedly was responsible for about 70% of the cost

In classic Unix IPC (think SYSV msg queues, sockets, locks, pipes, you name it) the majority of the time is taken up in the switch from userland to kernel land. Whether you want to consider this to be a context switch or not is kind of up to you but there are a lot of similarities. Where you can replace full kernel entry high level code system calls with a lightweight assembler don't need to state save, don't need a kernel stack etc. calls then massive performance improvements are possible, massive as in many orders of magnitude not a few tens of percent.

Re: meek cars and commuting

> This raises another question: will these cars stop for dogs? cats? squirrels?

Run over hedgehogs and I'm coming after you with MrDamage's high power rifle!

Re: The very definition of technical debt

> CoW wasn't implemented yesterday in the Linux kernel...

I should hope not, CoW was a pretty standard feature of Unix kernel's in the very early 90 before Linus even released his first version of Linux. It isn't a new idea and on an OS built around the idea of fork()ing it's pretty essential to performance.

What I don't understand is why /proc/self/mem is allowing writes into a read-only portion of the address space. If you mmap a something read-only then trying to write to it should cause an error. The pages should be marked RO in the TLB and an exception should be thrown resulting in a bus error or segmentation violation.

Re: DMA from temporary buffers on the stack

DMA from a temporary buffer on the stack?

That make Vogon poetry sound appealing

To quote from the late great Douglas Adams "Death's too good for them"

Now there's someone who really needs to Linus tirade.

Re: @Gerhard Mack - several second delay when accessing old pictures on Facebook

Here's the link to the El'Reg article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/13/facebook_calls_for_worst_flas_possible/

Re: Oracle is confident it will win on appeal.

Yeah, so are SCO

cheap adapters

> If you buy a 5-pack of adaptors from China...As a bonus, your £0.99 adapter...

Presumably the adapter is going to need to be the bit with the DAC in it, cheap digital components are easy, but when you want a quality analogue signal out, isn't that when the electronics start to get more pricey?

Re: What's really changed is the development tools

showed Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson they did not need massive resources and state-of-the-art research and development facilities."

But they certainly set about finding the best designers, they head hunted much the best chip designer from where I worked at the time.

Re: So neither...

vi as your shell, The first Unix admin I worked for back in the days of Ultrix 1.0 used to do this since the editing in csh was slightly limiting and with a vi session it's so easy to scroll back through all your previous commands and their output.

Re: How much is a IPv4 address worth

A&A will give you static IP addresses and not bugger about with them for you. You can can have addresses blocks from them too, unless they've now run out.

Re: @Fonant

In theory you're right. In practice most parliamentary candidates stand as party candidates and will only be appointed as candidates if they toe the party line. So (apart from a few maverick MPs) you are still voting for "The Party" rather than a specific candidate.

While this is true the electorate does from time to time kick out senior party appointees in "safe seats". The most obvious example is Michael Bell beating out Neil Hamilton. I think this keeps them on their toes.

Personally I wouldn't mind more coalitions as I think they _can_ .... I quite liked the Conservative/LD coalition, but I appreciate that I might be in a minority.

Actually I'm with you on that one. Our 1 modern example of a coalition was a good thing, even if it then wiped out the LD party at the next election since many of their voters had voted against everyone else rather than for the LDs.

However I think we were lucky.

Can you imagine a Tory/UKIP or Corbinite/SNP coalition?

In many countries that routinely have coalitions extreme parties very effectively block out sensible moves they happen to be against.

Re: Software development

The only difference was that the programs did far less and were thus far less complex, so I suppose to that extent they were less buggy but definitely no less buggy in terms of "bugs per kLOC"

Anther advantage that the code of yore had was that it was typically fresh and had been built end to end by the same team, so there was a chance that someone understood it. These days programmers are often building on top of ages old code which no one fully understands (on a line by line basis, coz it's just too big).

I know HP used to still show part numbers active for a couple of generations back worth of HW to cope with these issues. The end customers used to complain like mad that they could never buy the latest HW because any attempt to modify an order for the new version would put them back to the start of a multi-year buying procedure.

Re: So what does this do for Italy?

A great many Italians citizens, who are not prejudiced.

Like you seem to be.

You're right, I missed off the smilie, the comment was supposed to be ironic.

Re: But...

> Elon Musk can do ... and apparently can walk on water

If you put enough lithium on your shoes, you too can walk on water

or least stay afloat for the while before you catch fire in a really pretty colour.

Re: environment nose

> I for one welcome an all-digital solution for this.

You've got digital ears? Wow

Re: I think, on balance,

This reminds me of the old Russian joke about not drinking, "Do you actually live any longer?" NO, it just seems that way.

From my perspective I'd have thought that being sexually inactive is more likely to cause an early death, nothing worse for the old ticker than a life of constant frustration.

BTW, have you got this whole story the wrong way around, or was that a massive typo?

The study found that older men who had sex once a week or more were “much more likely to experience cardiovascular events five years later than men who were sexually inactive.”

This is saying that men who make the beast with the 2 backs get an extra 5 years before the ticker gives up since there is clearly no point in still being alive any more.

Re: At least the switch was still there

OK, on closer inspection the computer room wasn't quite empty.

The BT router was leaning against the wall, it wasn't connected to anything and the cable had just been pulled physically out of the connector.

There was also a VA disk array which presumably no one wanted enough to pay the shipping costs.

The "they" were the people who owned all the kit, "the bosses from the US"

I suspect that the John was part of the reason they'd taken all the kit away.

(PS. Oh bo!!065s the spelling checker in this copy of Firefox is F*&^ed)

Re: Disregard for consequences

Since he's clearly off in La La land, wanting a law passed to make it mathematically possible to have 3 key encryption systems where it is impossible for anyone except the FBI to ever find the third key. Why doesn't he just press to have a law passed that would force all law breakers to immediately hand themselves over to the nearest law enformance agancy. If the member of the public is unsure where they've transgressed some law, then they should no doubt have to hand themselves over anyway and probably pay for a lawyer to find out what law they have a trangressed so that they can be prosecuted.

Re: "...ISPs would be forbidden from implementing any traffic control at all"

> 1) It's not your internet. It's the ISP's network.

The sign above the door say "Internet Service Provider" therefore they should be providing an "Internet Service". It doesn't say "My Network Service Provider, plus any bits of the Internet that I feel like granting you access too"...

The problem is simply that tax authorities worldwide have been trained to negotiate with the rich, by the rich running governments. Now we have truly independent 'well off' eurocrats doing what's right for the ordinary people instead.

More likely these "truly independent" eurocrats have been motivated by a different set of "rich" who are running other governments/EU bureaucracy. Presumably ones who are managing to benefit from this particular arrangement.

As we've recently seen ex "truly independent eurocrats " have managed to fine very lucrative jobs the moment they've stopped being eurocrats.

This makes believing they are truly independent a little more difficult.

The good news is

That lawyers are very likely to find that a lot of their "work" gets replaced by computers.

They won't be quite the first against the wall when the techno revolution comes, but they won't be far off.