* Posts by david 12

2331 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Considerably worse than the 90's

Well, I was referring to the ordering system, not the food quality, but it wasn't something I objected to. Much fresher than the home-delivered pizza, and by my preference, better than the bulk-cooked chicken from the warmer at that other franchise.

One of the things McD has done to compensate is they've moved from frozen patties to chilled patties. The product is different, and arguably more "authentic", more like "not from frozen meat", and most people prefer steak from chilled rather than from frozen, but it's not at all clear that chilled ground beef makes better hamburgers than frozen ground beef: many people think the current product is just somehow not as good as they remember, and undoubtably that's partly because the product is more evenly cooked -- less on the outside, more on the inside.

david 12 Silver badge

The original 1960's "McDonalds system" was designed to eliminate labour. The innovative feature of which they were most proud was the elimination of tables: just a walk-up window, no waiters or bus-boys.

david 12 Silver badge

Considerably worse than the 90's

--- and much worse than the 80's.

In the 90's the counters were set with multiple stations to handle the fast turn-around of walk-up customers.

In the 80's, the system used pre-cooked items, you were served off the shelf.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Only been to McD's

There's a lovely MAD magazine illustration ("What really happens") showing how they handle special orders :) A pimply-faced youth crouched down behind the back counter peeling the cheese off a stock-item burger...

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

david 12 Silver badge

Most people should be using SSDs though, and there's little point in enterprise solutions there

Industrial mSATA SLC SSDs are still available. Expensive with tiny capacity, but it's not like there is no point to it.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

david 12 Silver badge

Control channel is in the 2-4 GHz range. Telemetry is somewhere around double that. Regarding aiming: I imagine that the beam is considerably spread out by the time it reaches earth from voyager. From earth, I imagine they just boost up the power until voyager can hear it -- something you aren't permitted to do on microwave base links.

david 12 Silver badge

"endured far longer than anticipated "

I remember the prediction that some of the scientific instruments would continue to operate "at least until 2020". You may argue that 47 years is far longer than 43 years, but I'm unconvinced.

In any case -- little of all we value here | Wakes on the morn of its (47th) year | Without both feeling and looking queer. -- (pace Oliver Wendell Holmes)

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

david 12 Silver badge

Re: I need classic outlook

The problem with IMAP or any other sync-with-the-server type protocols is that your service has to support however large a mailbox you want to keep,

Yes, exactly the same problem with POP, and exactly the same solution: you can download and keep your email locally.

I understand that POP is not exactly the same as IMAP: by default IMAP servers reflect what you have on your local client, and by default POP is one-way, ignoring your local copy. But the idea that IMAP servers must have the same mail as your local mail store is as ludicrous as the idea that POP server mailbox limits don't exist.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: I need classic outlook

With IMAP your client only 'reflects' the data that is on the server.

I can certainly understand not wanting to have the server "reflect" what is on your client -- you may have local storage limits or policies that affect your ability to keep permanent local copies.

But if you have space, every so often you can use an IMAP client to truly download and archive your emails on your own system.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Thank you Reg...

However, it is really the shareholders* who are driving the behavior.

Give me a break. Employees (profit, non-profit and government) generally work in their own interest. Sometimes that coincides with the customers, sometimes with the owners, sometimes with the management. The whole farce that is "executive renumeration" is intended to try to get management interest to coincide with owner interest, but that is notoriously ineffective.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Very Different

Both the 8088 and 8086 were 16 bit processors. Feeble memory-bound benchmark tests ran much faster: the 8086 had a 16 bit memory bus, so memory at 8MHz ran 4 times as fast as 4MhZ memory at sequential access.

India plans 10,000-GPU sovereign AI supercomputer

david 12 Silver badge

Which is to say, "I don't speak Cockney, only BBC". Unlike the surrounding area of Java (which speaks Javanese languages), Jakarta itself (a colonial city which had a population of slaves and economic migrants), speaks intelligible but not identical dialects of Malay.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

david 12 Silver badge

Re: All that work . . .

Singing the old songs?

Pissing the night away

Pissing the night away

He drinks a whiskey drink

He drinks a vodka drink

He drinks a lager drink

He drinks a cider drink

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Article title is a bit misleading

The quoted portion of the headline is quoted from the source.

But FWIW, they just demonstrated that your OpenType web fonts can be silently packed with and used to exfiltrate arbitrary files like /etc/passwd from your web server. That's font hacking.

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

david 12 Silver badge

I tried using a CF card, and writing was unbelievably slow. OK for a data drive, not suitable for an OS drive.

david 12 Silver badge

As it's a gigabyte mobo

Just now replacing two capacitors on a Gigabyte P4 motherboard. (WinXP) Turned off for probably 5 years, but the capacitors must have been on the way out when the PC was shelved.

I don't actually need that MB, but it seems like a fun thing to do.

I'm running applications that require direct hardware access: written for 3:11, they transferred to Win95 because Win95 virtualized the 8086 I/O machine langue, then transferred to XP using an unsigned driver for I/O bus access. Because of the cost of driver signing, the generic port drivers never made it to Win7, so were still using XP.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

david 12 Silver badge

somewhat surprisingly gets the route better

There's an XKCD for that :)

https://xkcd.com/2617/

India buys a third of the world's wearable devices

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Assange didn't spend seven years "confined" in the Ecuadoran embassy

I note that "confined" is also how the treatment of illegal immigrants is described.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

david 12 Silver badge

Re: 1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

My dad was offered a bunch of money to certify an expensive business-critical system. He was already too old for that shit: he explained to them that, if the system was not Y2K compliant, the dates printed on the optional paper copies they didn't print would be incorrect, and since they didn't care about that, they could just wait and see.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: So much new code?

a huge amount of new code out there

It will be an error in the date validation code in an interface. By report it's a problem with the credit card interface. Date calculations within a program are pretty much a solved problem, but interfaces between disparate systems, using 3rd-party channel definitions, are not a solved problem, so you have validation applied at the interface. And yes, there is still a lot of new code being written for applications connecting to backends over interfaces. The whole IOT space is new, and the BTB space is still evolving.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Plus, years that are divisible by 25000 are not leap years.

Note that in 24999 years, the solar and astronomical calendar will have diverged by half a day, and the extra leap adjustment will suddenly make it wrong by half a day in the other direction. That won't help people. We mostly care about the cumulative effect, so after multiple 25000 year periods, and we don't even see any benefit at all until another 12500 years after the adjustment.

They've already effectively decided to stop using leap seconds, partly because of the predicted problems caused by skipping seconds. No reason to expect anyone to want to shift everything by one exceptional day in 25000 years, even if we are still using the same calendar.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

Nuclear powered submarine would be another good environment in which to test this

You do not get a normal sleep cycle in a Nuclear powered submarine. You get shifts, and people get chronic sleep disruption.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

As I had to learn when recently auditing interest calculations.

But February does have 30 days!

That's the 30 day interest calculation method. Annual interest is divided by 12 to get monthly interest, monthly interest is divided by 30 to get daily interest, March 31 gets no interest, March 1 gets 2 or 3 days interest. Still sometimes used for contracts (typically with annual compounding, fixed amounts, and daily interest required for point-im-time valuation).

If you are doing (another example) minimum-monthly-balance, monthly compounding, it doesn't matter how many days are in the month, and the 30-day month assumption just gives you value for the days in the first fractional month of a contract.

That interest method (and others like it) were designed for people doing calculation by hand, but still exist today because they are in standard contracts.

Sometimes markets switch to a new standard contract, but often there is no real reason to do so, and it takes a very long time.

This is why you use a date library for financial calculations.

Chinese PC-maker Acemagic customized its own machines to get infected with malware

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Modifying source code?

A big chunk of the Chinese electronics industry is basically open source -- schematics, layout, components, documentation and software. The entry bar is low, because everything is available for copying. There's no requirement that the producer actually understand any particular part of the process -- just a production company, not a design company.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Clean your own house first

The next step would be to actually use the judicial system to lock up criminals rather than letting them off with barely a slap on the wrist.

The only three countries with higher incarceration rates are El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan.

Your selected "solution" is ass-backwards, and creating the problem it seaks to solve.

david 12 Silver badge

Remind me, what is it called when you take an economic class and blame them for all the crimes ever committed by their group?

There was nothing to choose between Hitler and Stalin until they went to war with each other: allies, both "post socialist" socialists, both committed to the elimination by execution.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

david 12 Silver badge

sodium incandescent lamps

Sodium lamps aren't incandescent. They are vapour-discharge.

They have to be hot enough to vaporize the sodium, and have sufficient current to maintain the arc: they aren't dimmable.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

Are they not there to try and sort everything out?

Consultants are there to have somebody to blame. As the rats desert the sinking ship, more consultants are brought in to fill the spaces, until all those with original responsibility have escaped.

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

david 12 Silver badge

If they knew what error was going to happen, they would have fixed it before release.

Because they didn't find that error before release, they didn't know it existed, they couldn't give a specific educational description for it.

So what you get is a generic error message: "something went wrong". No, that's not educational, but it's not worse than "Generic error message, but we will spell it as Out of Memory because we are guessing that might be the problem".

In this case, it appears that the patch breaks the recovery system, because that's the fix they have announced. They didn't expect it to break the recovery system, so they didn't include a message describing how it broke the recovery system. The generic error message is not educational, but it's not worse than failing to detect that it's breaking the recovery system (if you remember your history).

Google co-founder Brin named a defendant in wrongful death complaint

david 12 Silver badge

Airplanes fly. This is the normal delivery method. Part of the reason disassembly and shipping by sea is not the normal method is because disassembly and subsequent re-assembly is vastly more risky and error prone than just adding extra tanks.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: More than surprising

On the other hand,

The plaintiffs are just trying their hand. If they can just get a jury to find Brin or Google 1% responsible, or 0.1% responsible, or 0.001% responsible, each of the defendants will be on the hook individually for the whole judgement. If they can just frighten Brin or Google with the threat of a jury judgement, they can get Brin / Google to payout to make the case go away. If they can just frighten Brin or Google with the prospect of legal costs, even if they win, they can get Brin / Google pay to make the case go away (in the American system, winners still have to pay their own costs)

This is what all the emotive language is about. Plaintiffs are threatening that a jury will find some small amount of responsibility out of sympathy, regardless of facts.

If the plaintiffs thought they had an actual case on the evidence, they would not choose to go public with the emotive language, they'd be looking for a quiet settlement.

Giant leak reveals Chinese infosec vendor I-Soon is one of Beijing's cyber-attackers for hire

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Realistic threats

Quite apart from the consistent failure to find any such functionality,

You've got that the wrong way around -- they didn't fail to find snooping software after focusing on Huawai; they focused on Huawai after finding snooping software. Not in handsets, in systems. Delivered in a software update.

Huawai wouldn't be the first company to have their software compromised by a third party, so perhaps it wasn't their fault, but that's what destroyed trust.

Rice isn't nice for drying your iPhone, according to Apple

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Maybe isopropyl alcohol ?

Or just use Silica Gel Desiccant

I've got large bags of Silica Gel Dissiccant (kitty litter). The problem is the same as rice: you need to tightly bag the desiccant to prevent the dust getting into your mechanical connectors.

Of course, after you've tightly enclosed everything it takes a while to dry out. It does become very dry, but for drying something that's wet, you're better off just putting the device somewhere with good air flow.

Duo face 20 years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

david 12 Silver badge

Re: A bit harsh?

I don't believe in [...] letting criminals with bad motives live.

Yes, the world would be a better place without people like you.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: A bit harsh?

20 years is the threat used to get people to plead guilty. The court system mostly lacks the funding to actually have trials for offenses like this.

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

david 12 Silver badge

Peak power price

We recently had wholesale power prices peaking at 50 times normal levels due to a system failure, which continue with a sustained blackout due to hard limits on power availability.

At that price, it makes sense to switch to battery power, even for those stations that aren't blacked out. And it frees up power to go to people who don't have battery backups.

Australian supercomputer 'Taingiwilta' comes online this year with [REDACTED] inside

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Ask a silly question...

and an intrusive security clearance process:

For security clearance, Americans have to report "overseas travel on a foreign passport" -- the Americans already know where you've traveled on an American passport.

Australians have to report "overseas travel". And not just the destination, you have to have the dates. As you can imagine that can get difficult by mid career even for native Australians, ("I was working in London, and I visited France ... and Belgium ... on ???") even for the ones who don't have migrant parents. Not to mention that 1/3 of Australians were born overseas.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Badly managed for years

And it's totally incomprehensible why they would do this.

Office politics. Not the only example from MS. MS is so big that individual products have internal champions, and rise or fall with the success or failure of their sponsors.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

david 12 Silver badge

$3000

That was part of the reason (the main reason) I didn't stay with OS2.

MS and third parties brought the price of Windows development right down, but IBM stuck with trying to make a profit out of developers

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

just how big a step up in performance the 286 (10Mhz) was over the 8086/8088(2MHz)

Actually, 6MHz and 4.77MHz (original). Or 8MHz and 8MHz (volume).

The big step in performance was the 8088 to the 80186, where a big stack of the original microcode was implemented in silicon, so operations that took 20-25 cycles now took 2-3 cycles.

Clock speed on the 80186 was limited because the silicon also included peripherals (DMA), so it was power and clock limited to around 10-12MHz.

The 80286 was a hotted-up (bus speed) 80186 that was cheaper to produce. They dropped the peripherals (DMA etc) off the 80186, and got the bus speed up to 20-25MHz. So late models were twice as fast as an 80186, which was 5 times as fast as 8086

I've always thought that the real reason the 80186 isn't listed as a processor "generation" is that IBM never made an 80186 PC, but whatever: in spite of the extra processor commands in the 286, Intel lists the 186 and the 286 as the same processor generation.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Twas ever thus

Imagine if instead we had sent all the most devoutly religious and morally upstanding people to a foreign country - what a place that would become !

Partly through not being able to get sponsored jobs at home, some of them did come to Aus -- Sydney is still a famously / notoriously evangelical ("enthusiast") branch of the Christmas and Easter established church -- much to the irritation of some of the Rum and Real-Estate army officers that came out at the same time.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Chilling Effects

because there is no possibility at all they they will get their hands on the adult versions

Just like we should have no laws about murder, because some people commit murder anyway.

Straw man invented by you: nobody else has suggested that reason or justification for school attendance rules, phone restrictions, rent laws, or laws against murder.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Our Moon Is A “Quasi-Moon”, Too

No -- unlike Zoozve, the motion of our moon is retrograde wrt the sun.

david 12 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Zoozve orbit

Since Zoozve is not orbiting around Venus, the concept of "orbit" is a bit nebulous. But the shape described in returning to the starting point is bean shaped. The envelope of beans is also bean shaped, and if traced with a decaying phosphor, the wings sort of appear to beat like a butterfly.

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Zoozve orbit

All the animations seem to be bean-shaped, but apparently Zoozve actually orbits the sun, and only "appears" to orbit Venus, due to it solar orbit going inside / outside Venus. As I understand it, Zoozve actually has an almost elliptical orbit around the sun, intersecting the Venus orbit, almost (but not quite) synchronous with Venus. Is there an animation of that?

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Zoozve orbit

Kidney seems a bit more elegiac, but after seeing wikipedia's animation, my only thought is: that's a bean

Feds dismantle Russian GRU botnet built on 1,000-plus home, small biz routers

david 12 Silver badge

Feds .. FBI ... DOJ

Feds were able to ... similar to what the DOJ did

The FBI are an agency of the DOJ, which is a Federal department. "The FBI were able to ... similar to what they did".

In both cases: the same FBI.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

david 12 Silver badge

"Late in Wirth's career, he became a passionate advocate of small software."

That's true, but a bit misleading. Wirth's early-career Algo proposal was for small software, against the competing proposal for big software.

And, like his Oberon example, his idea for Algo/Pascal/Modula was that the "small software" should include everything that was necessary (and nothing that was not). That's why Oberon is a compiler including an OS, or an OS including a compiler

In Pascal, like Oberon, his language explicitly included "everything that was necessary and nothing that was not", as he explained to anyone who listened. It wasn't a new idea that came late in his career.

FWIW, c and unix represented the same idea, implemented as a kludge rather than as a design. unix was the necessary part of multix: c was "a small language of 32 keywords". Wirth's Pascal was a complete language, including I/O. Ritchie's c was part of the "unix programming environment", which implemented I/O in the unix library (still part of the definition of unix, although the definition is now deferred to the c standard). They agreed about smallness: they disagreed about implementation.

NASA lost contact with Mars helicopter Ingenuity, then managed to find it again

david 12 Silver badge

Re: Linux On Mars

-- and that it has available around 100 times more compute power

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

david 12 Silver badge

Re: SanDisk FTW IMVHO YMMV RTFM ISKWYDLS

* If I only use 20% of the capacity of a multi-level stick, will it just write to 1 bit/level of the cell

It's been suggested that if you just leave such a device plugged in for a while, it will re-write as a background task, converting all the single-bit cells to quad-bit storage. So maybe not giving a resilience advantage?

If the first 25% of storage is fast, and then transfer slows down, then you've hit a re-write wall.