Posts by Jason Bloomberg

Re: Agile Software Development.

"Sure I would. My team are so crap it would never get to the end of the runaway, let alone ever take off".

The oldies are the goldies.

Re: This is good.

If you could power a pi on 3.3V alone it would simplify running it off battery considerably and allow for the use of more efficient power supply circuitry.

Indeed. Saying it's aimed at "space-constrained, battery-powered applications" is rather laughable considering the Pi range is so at odds with being battery powered, requires external hardware, and that loses any space savings the board may offer.

There are probably quite a few people who wanted a 3B+ with reduced size, cost and power consumption, but won't find the reduction in memory size acceptable. I would guess that decision was made so they did not cannibalise their 3B+ sales.

Re: So the police bear no responsibility ?

An unarmed Brazilian plumbers wearing a very thick coat in summer ( potentially hiding a suicide vest ), jumping over turnstiles and running away from the police, ignoring calls to stop.

That was all proven to be lies. Along with the lie of the police claiming that the CCTV was not working when it was.

This is why Fake News and Alternative Facts are so dangerous. Or lies and demonisations as we used to call them.

Re: Shock horror - it's not running XP!!!

"NT 6.1 SP 1 - That's commonly known as Windows 7 SP1 ..."

Well I've learned something I didn't know, or more likely been reminded of something I'd long forgotten. Thanks ->

Re: Chuck that toad in the Tower of London

You're not seriously suggesting that anything the ICO is investigating actually influenced the public vote to leave, are you?

You're not seriously suggesting Banks spent £6 million and engaged in deceit and lies if what he was doing did not?

He may be a serial liar, a crook and conman, but he's not an idiot.

Re: Pour encourager les autres ?

The way Trump is approaching it; it could well escalate and end in real war.

Trump's strategy seems to be to push it to the brink, take some small concession, then step back and claim a comprehensive and decisive victory - USA! USA! MAGA!

But that only works if the other side does blink first. If China or others are themselves willing to take it to the brink, won't back down, that creates a difficult and dangerous situation.

Small Basic was a part of Microsoft's efforts to help get kids coding and it was reasonable enough in that respect. It was a cut-down Visual Basic so of little interest to anyone outside educational fields.

Given its target audience, its limited functionality, and the inevitable slagging off Basic and Visual Basic gets, as well as Microsoft themselves, it's not really surprising they didn't try and promote it to the wider community.

It's actually not a bad offering. It is extensible so can be used for things it was never intended for. It even allows a Windows App to use an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi as a remote GPIO device.

Re: Think of it this way

They *could* be doing it 'correctly' but choose not to. Why? Why mislead people into thinking they are getting playstore content?

That is the unanswered question. I don't mind side-loading when there's informed consent but cannot approve of hiding that under "Get it from Google Play" when that's not the mechanism invoked, and especially when the downloaded .apk is different from that which does come from Google Play.

It's straight forward deception as I see it.

Re: One third porn?

I'm hoping porn sites will start carrying amusing cartoons and interesting articles to read like good old-fashioned printed mags did.

I coded my own RSS feed fetcher which converts feeds to local HTML pages in just a few lines of Python so I am also mystified why Mozilla is struggling.

I guess taking data and simply presenting it in a different format just isn't enough for them these days.

The real aim is simply to build the rocket so tall, that you can climb up a ladder from the launch tower straight up to the ISS.

Wouldn't it be easier and even cheaper for the crew of the ISS to simply lower a rope?

The one with the "25% off at B&Q" voucher in the pocket.

Re: To some MSDOS was an major leap forward.

<grumble> Huh. People these days just don't know how lucky they are!!! </grumble>

Kids today can still have all the joys of working constrained bare metal on the Raspberry Pi GPU, which neither Broadcom or the Raspberry Pi foundation have officially documented, if they care to.

That's got video, serial and I/O capabilities. I wonder if MS-DOS could be ported and cajoled to boot on that?

Re: My perspective

£1.50 for a 13amp plug?

But comparable to what other high street stores were wanting.

No, Maplins couldn't compete with on-line for price but nor can most retailers. And, with China "shipping for free", there's no longer "it's the same once you've paid postage". Only "it's instantly yours to take home and use" which is what usually has people paying £1.50 for a plug or more from anywhere they can get one.

The problems for Maplins were multiple but I believe it was mostly that they were tipped over the edge and there was never going to be any way back. In fact it's quite impressive they held on for so long when others facing similar problems and competition had folded far earlier.

Re: I downvoted him

On the other hand, you might expect that if you take on that sort of job, you'd at least get the support you needed to do it well. Which, apparently, is not something Facebook deems necessary.

Burnout is pretty bad in any job but having to deal with full-on horror all day long it's probably going to be particularly bad when that hits.

At the very least it seems Facebook have failed to put in place adequate systems, monitoring and relief which would avoid their employees reaching such a state.

Re: Hmm

"And no one even knows what leavers voted for beyond "leaving""

Noooo! Are you telling me the result was leave but you dont know what that means? We voted to leave, to go, not to remain... but you find it ambiguous? I am not quite sure how to explain this better but the result was to no longer be in the EU aka leave.

And we are leaving so what the fuck are you complaining about?

It is you leavers who cannot universally decide what "leaving" means, are disagreeing with each other over what "leaving" means, are showing "leaving" is ambiguous.

But, go ahead, blame remainers for leaver's inability to agree on what "leaving" means.

Re: Good for him.

The man has taken a good hard look at the toxic way he sometimes communicates and plans on taking a break so that he can come back with a more positive and productive attitude.

I can't help but think that this may be partly why he decided to holiday in Edinburgh while the Linux kernel dev summit was happening in Canada.

Unfortunately the organisers deciding to move that to Edinburgh may have thwarted his plans for getting the break away from it all he desired and deserved.

Re: Work out-of-work

"You're in Edinburgh you say? I'm in Canada. It's lovely. I think there's been some kind of mix-up".

The one with the plane tickets in the pocket.

Re: What we would actually need...

BTW you can actually buy processors which are so tightly speced and so simple in construction that you can make reasonably sure there were no malevolent actors involved. The 6502, the Z80 or the ATMega microcontrollers are prime examples for this.

My recollection of reality was that many of such devices had unused opcodes which could be used for all sorts of fancy, undocumented and unintended things.

Of course, they could have been more tightly designed, invalid opcodes could have been prevented from actioning, rather than the designers not caring what the outcome was to ease the silicon design and its footprint

But I'm with you on principle. A minimal RISC should be easy to verify and should fly at clock speeds obtainable these days. But then we'll be back into the "more opcodes, with each doing more, would make it even faster" debate.