Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Impressive

That was true even before Linus sat down to create it. He was well aware, for example, of Tannenbaum's Minix system. I expect it will remain true for some time to come. Fusion-powered micro-kernels for the win!

Re: Where is

"75kg of human plus a toolkit can adapt to a lot more problems than any robot"

This is Earth orbit we're talking about. Comms latency is measured in milliseconds. The lard-arsed human can stay on the ground and we only need to send the toolkit up there.

Re: a major company which ran the entire factory production on Win3.1

Doesn't Win3.1 count as an airgap?

Re: Exploitable?

Thanks, but I'd much rather have a link to something that is obviously from MS. Your posts so far look like a phish, which I imagine is not your intention!

Re: Why Russia

Not disputed, but LoyalCommenter's point was that this was set in stone and as of this week Britain can scarcely govern itself, let alone its long-lost empire.

Re: The UK these days, and for decades

"But along came and come morons like John Harvey Jones."

To be fair to him, he didn't create the situation where so many public companies in the UK were worth less as a going concern than as a collection of second-hand assets. He was merely non-moronic enough to capitalise on the situation. Maybe he should have "turned them around", but that's pretty much what the original management had spent the previous 30 years failing to do, so what were the odds that he'd succeed?

The 80s happened the way they did because the 50s, 60s and 70s had left the UK with pretty much the same economy that they had at the end of WW2, but without the captive markets of the empire to prop it up. Meanwhile, over the same period, the Germans had been forced to build a modern economy.

Re: shoot yourself now, before you reproduce

I don't know about "this site", since it has pretty wide-ranging articles, but "this article" seems like it would be better without politics, so yeah.

Re: Older media still has its place

Ah yes, but when was the last time you serviced your anti-lock brake system?

If people still made floppy drives and media, probably to rather tighter tolerances than some of the older hardware, there wouldn't be a problem.

But the navy flies planes, the air force launches satellites, and both have ICBMs.

Re: All of that effort

Question: what is the 'bang for the buck' expected at the end of the process?

Three possibilities spring to mind:

1) it turns out that rusty code is no easier to write and/or slower to run. Over time, take-up is minimal and eventually the support is dropped. As a result, we now have a better idea of the properties that a language must have if you want to write a kernel.

2) The opposite. Over time, more and more of the kernel gets rusty and eventually the kernel is just some assembly language routines propping up a lot of rust. As a result, well, same as before except it is C that no-one ever uses again.

3) Something in between, with each language having a well-defined role for different kinds of kernel component. As a result, no-one ever tries to write a kernel without multi-lingual support designed in from the start.

Whatever the outcome, I'm pretty sure we're going to learn something fairly important about how to write an OS. I'm also fairly sure that lesson will carry over to a few other large software projects.

Re: trademarks

Hmm. Wouldn't it be funny if they had to do a reverse ferret on this re-branding because it turned out you couldn't trademark the word "processor" in the context of processors. It might even be worth AMD's and ARM's time to challenge this in court.

Re: wtf?!

I stand corrected. Apparently 1993 (v5) is when Excel acquired a scripting language.

However, I do take issue with your implication that internet integration is required for it to be a fair comparison. Cloudy Excel only needs internet-ready scripting because some doofus has chosen to put an internet between the script and the spreadsheet. This is re-inventing something that we already had, to solve a problem that most of us didn't ask to be created.

Re: When THz

The wavelength of 1THz light in vacuo is 0.3 millimetres. On silicon, probably nearer 0.1. Probably achievable, but you CPU die will have to be a cluster of tens of thousands of essentially independent CPUs, each with many times fewer transistors than we have now because we can't shrink transistors *much* further than we do now. (They are already only a few dozen atoms across.)

Re: Storage ? Transport ?

And if you use CO2 for your carbon source you have waste oxygen to dispose of somehow.

I don't understand the downvotes here. It seems pretty obvious that the only reason for Artemis is willy waving.

If you actually wanted to establish infrastructure or do science on the Moon, you'd use robots. The round-trip latency is only half a second and without the need to support life and bring it back, the deliverable payload is vastly greater and cheaper.

Actually, even if you want people on the Moon, you ought put some infrastructure there first. The current plan is just reckless.

Re: Milky bars are on that guy over there.

That would be round about when the English learned about accented vowels and started pronouncing "caff" properly. That is, not yet, in some circles.

Re: Localised results - but without privacy intrusion?

You know my IP address. That's enough to have a reasonable guess at my country. That's all the localisation that I need, for an ad. If I want anything narrower for a search, I'll say so in the search expression and it's my choice to do so.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Explains a lot.

Re: DST is anachronistic

Still doesn't help you when a politician changes the meaning of "3pm local time" to mean a different UTC timestamp, *after* you've written that timestamp into your internal data.

Re: AI to Humans: "Drop dead!:

Humans to AI: "Hmm, I wonder what this red switch does."

Re: Just more clickbait drivel..

minute fraction of computer users

I know lots of normal people. Really, I do. I don't think I know anyone who doesn't think computer interfaces suck donkey balls. They tell me about it, unsolicited. They ask me if there is a reason. Sadly, telling them that their UX suffering is caused by prima donna designers and willy waving contests in management rarely improves their mood.

the Colorado State Fair's fine art competition

I take "fine art" to imply that the people care about tge level of craftsmanship. Getting the comouter to do ghe painting is therefore cheating. Had the "art" been of the more conceptual variety, it would have been fine.

Re: Unenforceable

Yes, but Telegram might not be so keen on something that *is* enforceable -- all Indian ISPs being required to block Telegram's servers.

Re: What is an "active" cable ?

It sounds like a 1-port hub, which is what a USB-extender cable is.

Re: Found some of the money

interesting to see how the US legal system will deal with this as it's über rich guy versus shareholders

Expensively?

Re: DLP?

Same as they do currently when someone uses tar (with compression) to stream a directory tree to another machine.

Re: And here I thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

Bach in general is bad Bach. Probably true for any other genre, including rap.

Bear in mind that the computers A and B almost certainly list the printer as present (if "offline", whatever that means) whether they are plugged in or not.

Re: Upstream?

The UK has gone from one of the richest countries in the world to, er, still one of the richest. China has gone from total basket case to one of the chasing.

Catching up, by adopting technology and buying in where necessary, is *much* easier than overtaking.

Re: Buy now, Pi later

You can buy a pi4B for £70-80 if you are willing to buy it as part of a starter pack or pi-hole package. Perhaps you feel bad about paying double the price and throwing all the extras away, but they *are* available.