Posts by Tim99
189 posts • joined Thursday 24th April 2008 15:05 GMT
Posted in Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
If God had meant us to use C++
He wouldn't have given us C.
As I started with FORTRAN, you may ignore my comment - It permanently distorted my reasoning.
Posted in Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
Re: The usual non-USA cost bias.
@quod50
You might be surprised to find that the US government spends more per capita on health at $4437 compared to $2919 for the UK. The USA in total spends 17.9% of GDP compared to 9.6% for the UK. This is, perhaps, the price that you pay for having one of the least efficient health systems in the world. You do however spend even more on military spending.
Re: Updates and FDA regs
I have personal experience of medical/scientific equipment controlled by networked PCs being broken by their controlling PCs after auto updates have been installed. The equipment was originally isolated from the Internet as it was "mission critical" - Then the IT support contractor persuaded the powers that be that it should be connected, so that it could be automatically updated because "it could get a virus unless it was updated".
Re: Americans are NOT being terrorized !
@0_Flybart_0
If you are an American, you are perhaps four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist or eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer.
I posted this a few days ago: Ssshhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag.
******The purpose of the "Wars on... whatever" is that there is no clearly defined enemy, and therefore no realistic prospect of ending them by "winning".
The main problem that the US had was when they "won" the Cold War - How could they continue to take over a quarter of their total tax revenue and pass it through the defence system (Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex") to concentrate vast profits into the hands of the very few, without upsetting their tax payers? Their defence spend is about 60% of the total raised by individual income taxes.
US defence spending (>$680 billion ) is about 40% of the world's total. The US spends >4x as much as China, 8x that of Russia and >11x that of Britain.******
So maybe you should spend less on the War on Terror; and more on earthed tinfoil hats and continual monitoring of your law enforcement officers?
Re: There's nothing wrong with copying
Yes, I agree. The shape, size and colour thing should not be a patent - USAians refer to "Design Patents". Don't call them patents - Much of the rest of the world refers to registered designs, or infringing trade dress, which means that it is less likely that these two concepts are conflated.
I really don't want some cheap company using trade dress to put a cheap knock off in the market - Like say an Asian company using similar designs of packaging and product shape to dress their product as high quality European chocolate; or a supermarket's own label that looks similar to a a market leading brand name.
What would also be nice is to get back to not allowing any patent in an agreed international industry standard - Like the LWZ submarine Unisys GIF debacle which caught a product that I developed.
Re: Just one more thing...
@An0n C0w4rd
If you really can't afford $7/week to keep the Thunderbolt display in your depreciation schedule, you aren't the demographic that it is aimed at. Alternatively join the race to the bottom of the market, or enjoy your new career in the fast food industry.
And the winner is?
Please, can the forks just get together and complete the most import fix - Remove the Java RTE.
Re: Perhaps I did Not Sleep Well Last Night?
But, you still went to the trouble of posting...
Re: Act of war
Yes, probably, if it was port 80...
Ssshhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag.
The purpose of the "Wars on... whatever" is that there is no clearly defined enemy, and therefore no realistic prospect of ending them by "winning".
The main problem that the US had was when they "won" the Cold War - How could they continue to take over a quarter of their total tax revenue and pass it through the defence system (Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex") to concentrate vast profits into the hands of the very few, without upsetting their tax payers? Their defence spend is about 60% of the total raised by individual income taxes.
US defence spending (>$680 billion ) is about 40% of the world's total. The US spends >4x as much as China, 8x that of Russia and >11x that of Britain.
An Outlook User
I had a contact who found that it was easier/quicker to phone me and get me to read out the emails that she had sent me, and that I had replied to, rather than her finding it on their Exchange/Outlook system.
She was the admin support person of an IT based organization...
Re: yes
@Nick Gibbons
Civil Defence, as such, continued after 1968; it was still going in the 1970s.
After an extensive training course, my father was given access to a pistol and the key to the local bunker. His qualifications were that he had been an RAF aircrew Observer/Bombing Leader in WWII; and was at the time, the highest ranked (Commissioned volunteer reserve) Senior Local Government Officer in the area.
Lancaster
@Darryl
We don't need to get a Lancaster on the moon - As any fule kno - Picture Link
Although getting the bomb there might be a problem...
Non-American history Lewis?
[According to NASA, the mighty blast briefly "glowed like a 4th magnitude star ... the explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT". For comparison that's twice as much explosive as one would find in a US Air Force nuclear-bunker-busting MOP superbomb]
Or, alternatively, a bit less explosive power than a 1945 British "Grand Slam" bomb (6.5 tons TNT equivalent).
Cf: The 1944 "Tallboy" bomb - 3.5 tons TNT equivalent; and the 1943 "Upkeep" bouncing bomb - 4.4 tons TNT equivalent. All of which were carried by modified Avro Lancaster bombers. A Grand Slam weighed 10 tons - Normal Lancasters could carry 6-7 tons of bombs. This compares to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress which could only carry about 2 tons of bombs over a similar range. The later Boeing B-29 Superfortress with a crew of 10 could carry ~9 tons.
An interesting paper exercise after WWII compared the performance of these heavy bombers with the 2 crew, smaller, wood/composite construction de Havilland Mosquito which could carry nearly 2 tons of bombs at a speed about 1.5 times faster than a Lancaster (The Lancaster had a normal crew of 7).
Re: statistics, statistics ...
So, would you stand on a busy road if statistics said that you had a 1 sigma chance (1.0SD - 68.3%) of getting run over? Perhaps you would continue to stand there until more research (3 sigma) suggested that you had a 99.3% chance of being run over? At what point would you agree that it is dangerous - 0.67SD 50%; 1.64SD 90% or 2SD 95.4?
As an aside - I have been involved in using science where the legislation was constructed such that to avoid prosecuting someone who could have been innocent, the data had to be defined to 6.47SD (>99.99999999%).
Re: Samsung took over the Nokia market
@joeW
"Nobody cares about your opinion. Nobody."
Well, you obviously do...
Re: K : £90m.. its not going cost us anything..
@Matt Bryant
You have summed up one of the definitions of the "sunk cost fallacy" (sometimes called the sunk capital fallacy). Wilipedia link
I came across it when I was running a scientific enterprise for a banker. He had bought a laboratory that lost (a lot of) money. I had just got it to the point where it was breaking even and stood a reasonable chance of making a small profit. He killed it - When I asked why he told me about sunk capital. The point was that even though we had spent the money, it was unlikely that any future effort we put in was unlikely to make a reasonable return. It was better to write it off and spend time and money on something else, rather than to continue just because he had spent a lot of money (and we had spent a lot of time and effort) on it.
<-- I raise a beer glass to one of the best bits of business advice that I was given...
Re: They'll just not be a part of the standards body
"They'll just not be a part of the standards body and sue everyone later."
Er, No. You have to publish the patent. This is better than the Unisys LZW submarine patent when everyone was asked to pay for GIF technology years after the "GIF standard" was agreed. Link everything2.com
Hence the development of PNG.
Don't open the bubbly yet Lewis
A slight problem, mentioned obliquely in the paper is that CH3HCOO reacts strongly with oxides of nitrogen to produce PAN (peroxyacitylnitrate).
This is not good. It is one of the more unpleasant compounds in smog, a strong lachrymator (severe eye irritation), that also damages vegetation, and is suspected of being a major cause of respiratory complaints. Wikipedia Link.
Lots of work was done Investigating these materials in the 70s and 80s as they were a major factor in the notorious LA smogs.
Ubuntu Server?
For goodness sake people - Just read the Debian documentation and do it properly...
Re: Whatever.
@AC - 19:56
" Apple users will buy the product with the biggest advertising budget. "<br>
So that would be Samsung then: The cost of selling Galaxies.
Re: Alternatives are free
LibreOffice requires Java for full functionality - You could just be replacing one attack vector with another.
@Alan Brown
"If you're finger pointing at the welfare state it'd be far more "correct" to point the finger at pensions and pension perks (free busses + cheap trains, power, etc all cost, but they don't show as coming from the welfare budget)"
No. Power costs, bus and train travel doesn't - There is a Public Service Obligation to run trains and busses during the day. If you were running a transport system to make money, you would only run it on popular routes during peak times. There is a huge capital cost to owning fleets and infrastructure that is only used during a small amount of the day which is why the subsidy is paid.
There is almost no additional cost in allowing pensioners to travel for free, as the staff and vehicle costs are almost the same whether the bus is nearly empty or half full of pensioners. This is why "Eligible older people are entitled to free off-peak travel on local buses anywhere in England." Link gov.uk, and "The Railcard discount isn’t available on tickets for travel during the morning rush hour (peak time), Monday to Friday (excluding Public Holidays) for journeys made wholly within the London and South East area." Link senior rail card.
It be argued that these "perks" can save money as they can help towards the physical and mental health of older people - Unless of course you really want to reallocate more wealth back to the wealthy, destroy the welfare state, and encourage the "unproductive" to die...
Re: Bullet proof, but not B.S. proof.
"...logic looses."
I believe that the word that you want is "loses", unless you meant that logic is set free.
"ORIGIN Old English losian ‘perish, destroy’, also ‘become unable to find’, from los ‘loss’.
Usage: The verb lose is sometimes mistakenly written as loose, as in this would cause them to loose 20 to 50 per cent (correct form is … to lose 20 to 50 per cent). There is a word loose, but it is very different—normally an adjective, meaning ‘untethered; not held in place; detached’, as in loose cobbles; the handle was loose ; set loose." (OED).
Mongo is web scale
Obligatory link: Transcript and Flash
Frankly, some of the stuff that is being set up for this could be done with SQLite sqlite.org link...
Re: Really?
I am an OAP, and a volunteer helping teach other OAPs computing - So far all of them hate Windows 8 - Except, maybe, those few who only seem to want internet access (so we might as well get them using iOS)...
OK, This is just click-whoring
OK Lewis, we know that it is all a conspiracy, and that the nasty science people are in league with the UN, the Illuminati and the lizard people; to get us all to pay more taxes to implement a dastardly plan of world domination by conspiring to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
May I respectfully submit to El Reg that we have a new icon called the TW*T where the * can be either an "A" or and "I", or even better we call it the TWAT-TWIT (or maybe the TWIT-TWAT) that we can use it to identify similar articles - The troll or extraterrestrial explanation icons really will not do for such drivel.
For this post I'm using the beer icon, because I really need one after reading it.
Re: I got this one.
@Destroy All Monsters
"I hope we can fall back to "Foxconn rebadger"."
Yes, but ( according to Wikipedia), that could be:-
Acer Inc. (Taiwan); Amazon.com (United States); **Apple Inc. (United States)**; Cisco (United States); Dell (United States); Google (United States); Hewlett-Packard (United States); Microsoft (United States); Motorola Mobility (United States); Nintendo (Japan); Nokia (Finland); Sony (Japan); Toshiba (Japan); or Vizio (United States)
Re: That's ok, we don't want your browser.
@Andy Prough
Perhaps most fanbois don't really need Microsoft. I run Debian and several Windows instances in Parallels on a couple of Macs. On these machines, I use Windows about once a fortnight for a few minutes to help maintain shrink wrapped (Windows) versions of software that I wrote. I find that OS X and Debian cover all of my needs, and that I don't use Windows for any other purpose.
Admittedly I have retired and am now spared the festering frustration that is SharePoint, Exchanges, Windows Server and Office - Although I do volunteer to maintain some Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 and 8 machines at a Council run over-50s centre (1200+ members), and am profoundly grateful that I no longer have to do this sort of thing for a crust...
Access SQL
@km123
Access can/does use a SQL: Link - Access SQL
It works surprisingly well and can be ported (sometimes needs dialect modifications) to SQL Server, Postgres etc.
I would however recommend SQLite for students - It runs on almost everything...
Hari Seldon
Is this sort of stuff the start of psychohistory?
Re: Database de-normalization Tradeoff
You wrote:
"In the end a competent database developer knows what tradeoffs to make to ensure scalability whilst maintaining code manageability."
It seems to me that we have let the children play with our important data. Here is a reply I wrote on another thread several years ago:
"I spend the first 10 years of doing DB stuff normalizing everything. When I become pretty good at it, I spend more time denormalizing some of the stuff I had carefully normalized. This may not be good advice to the 'separate data, logic and presentation' people - It works well for us old farts who were taught how to use constraints and triggers and 'use the database to do the heavy lifting'. It may still be a useful idea to manage the PHP, Javascript and RoR types who put logic in their presentation layer stuff and break things."
I'll need my coat while I wait for the bus to go to the retirement day-centre...
Goods & Services Tax
Yes Simon, we who are fortunate to live in the Antipodes do often get ripped off. Some of this is because of our relatively small population, some of it is because of our long supply chain: As explained to me many years ago when I imported goods: a $100 item imported into Oz may have an importers markup of 30%, a distributer/wholesaler markup of 30%, then a retailers markup of at least 30%. Now adding local taxes could give a final price to the punter of ~$250. A direct import from an internet supplier including shipping would have the final price of ~$130 (At the moment, a personally imported item of less than $1000 has no tax payable).
Now as for your Apple price: "An example of the discrepancy can be seen in the price of a 16GB WiFi iPad with Retina Display. In the USA the fondleslab costs $US499. In Australia it's $AUD539."
As you say, the fondleslab punter pays AU$539; - Now using your numbers, in Oz we should pay US499/1.03 for currency difference = AU$484.46, add our 10% GST (Like VAT, but cheaper) and we get $532.91 - I think I could probably afford the 1.14% difference...
Re: Ring was too expensive
@Pet Peeve.
You could connect MAUs together by using main link connectors...
You try and tell the young people of today that..
...and they won't believe you (4 Yorkshire men, Monty Python).
I lost skin, literally, on Token Ring, Ethernet (the major contenders) and ARCnet/Star net.
Back in the day, just as the IBM PS2 was shipping, we had a couple of IBM PC-LAN/ LAN Manager networks that used Token Ring. The performance was generally very good on things like shared database access. The bad points were the cost of the cards, cabling and hubs; and the thickness of the cabling (It looked as though you moor a boat with it). We had a "proper" installation done by our telecoms/networking engineers over a weekend to replace the ad-hoc taped cables snaking around the building that we had put in to get the system working. On Monday, nothing worked - The engineers had used normal twisted pair POTS cabling. When asked why, the lead engineer said "Oh, your thick IBM stuff is very difficult to install, it wont even bend around corners. It's just twisted pair - Telephone cable is twisted pair, so it doesn't get interference." - A week later it was replaced with proper cabling, but they were the last Token Ring systems we could get our internal engineers to install.
10BASE2 - Really easy to set up. No hub needed, you could use 10BASE5 trunk to get longer lengths than 600ft. The bad news was that the cheap Netware NE1000/2000 cards that we used on client PCs tended to jabber and flood the network with malformed packets - So, Bob Metcalf, collisions WERE a problem. Other "features" of 10BASE2 networks were office staff moving a desk and taking down the entire network by damaging or unplugging the cable; terminating one end by connecting the cable directly to the card without using a T-piece; and noise from not grounding a terminator (or grounding both terminators and getting an earth loop).
A simple cost/performance benefit would generally come out in favour of Ethernet. In the end we had standardized on DEC, *NIX, Netware and PC equipment, so other than having to connect to the odd large IBM system, cheap Ethernet worked fine.
Shouty icon... Old Ethernet engineers know why.
Re: It's called a slash
[No, it's actually called a "solidus"!]
OK, way back in the day - I was told by someone, even more ancient than I, that the char 010 1111 47 2F was called a virgule.
Bob Bemer ("The Father of ASCII") refers to it as a "regular slash (or virgule or slant)" www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/BACSLASH.HTM (1950s/60s?). The terminology "slash(solidus)" came later.
Historically solidus tended to be used by people who wrote script with a writing instrument, printers tended to use the word virgule.
Isn't that fascinating?
People who spend more on a phone may spend more on phone calls/data downloads.
Has Andrew a long spoon?
Irrespective of the argument, it is probably a good idea for the rest of us to default to a position opposite to that of Murdoch's...
It's called a slash
From the article: "Type a forward slash and all the available menus show up..."
It's called a slash. There are slashes and backslashes. Microsoft needed to call it a forward slash when they had confused everything by using a backslash in directory paths.
The only reason to use a backslash Is as an escape character on a proper computer :-)
Re: I always thought...
It was called 1-2-3 because it could be used as:-
A spreadsheet (OK, that is why most people bought it);
A database (Shudder, I still find people with thousands of rows of business critical information stuffed into a spreadsheet);
A wordprocessor (Yes, really. I had several colleagues who used it to write letters).
Interesting threads in the Independent
It is odd that many of the people who comment on this debate are convinced that it is a conspiracy by badly paid scientists to unlock the keys to research funding and personal wealth when you have people like the Koch brothers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to persuade us that nothing is happening and it is business as usual - Or, that something might be happening; but that we should all wait until more research is done - Or, that something is happening and it will to be to expensive to fix - Or, that something is happening; and it is too late to fix it....
Link - Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science
Link - How the Kochtopus stifled green debate
Link - Top climate scientist denounces billionaires over funding for climate-sceptic organisations
I live in Western Australia and only need to go outside to see how the climate has changed in the last 20 years across an area about 3X the size of the UK (For Americans, that's bigger than Texas, the whole state is about 1.5x bigger than Alaska).
I chose the icon because we get a lot of bush fires. Now let the flaming begin...
Re: flame on
More likely, as with most other giant project cock ups, to be down to older Gen X "managers".
These are the people with MBAs and a qualification in a soft subject, who took over the management of engineering and development from the older baby boomer and pre-war generation engineers and scientists.
Their main motivation tends to be short-term stock gains to obtain massive bonuses for themselves and their sociopathic C-level bosses at the expense of the longer-term future.
Breaking/Braking
"transmission, the suspension, the breaking"
I think the author meant a device to slow a vehicle, rather than damage it.
Re: This is the same guy
Yes, we could all still be using floppy disks...
Re: Prison drone
Some of us expat Poms agree with the sentiment that us migrants are a good thing - "As it puts up the average IQ of both countries".
Beer, because I am about to have one, as it has cooled down to 'only' 93F.
My Favourite Little Spiel
Yay. Time for some unnecessary self-praise here. For the last couple of years I have been boring the crap out of everybody who expresses even a slight interest in computing by saying: -
"Most computers will have no keyboard, or will have no screen".
Most people will have an Android/iOS/similar thing that will talk to some *NIX thing.
Re: Linux
@AC 22:52 10th January
"And you couldnt be more wrong about performance. Windows Server 2012 is a long way ahead of Linux in terms of performance - for instance 16Gbps throughput as a fileserver and 1 million IOPS on a single VM - as mentioned above. Linux simply can't match those numbers."
Hello, is that RICHTO? Here is my reply to an almost identical post 5 weeks ago:- Link
Re: Licencing hell
@RICHTO
"So find me a Linux Hypervisor that scales to 1 million IOPS on a single VM like Hyper-V does then.
I will give you a clue - there isnt one...."
Some of us, who did this stuff for a living, might wonder why you would go to all of the trouble and cost of running a single VM on a single *NIX box when you would just scale and tune the box using the native OS...
But then people who have years of experience on Windows/Linux/UNIX/Netware/VMS/etc., know about stuff like that so we don't just slot in VMs everywhere because the nice salesman recommended it.
Re: Angling to get another Brit into a US Court?
@AC 14:57
"Bill and Dave's life's work has not been squandered; HP may be going through tough times at present but it will survive."
Much of Bill and Dave's life's work was split of into Agilent Technologies in 1999, which seems to be doing OK. Maybe the Board thought that they would screw up the newer computing stuff?
Re: Bouncy
No, Zebedee is mounted on a large spring:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_JQDfuMZi0
http://wallpapers.free-review.net/16__The_Magic_Roundabout_-_Zebedee.htm
