Posts by David Roberts

AMD FX-6300

Just checked, and this is the chip in one of my machines.

I bought it (after looking at a lot of benchmark data) to upgrade an ancient system on the basis that it would match my old Core i5 2500k in general performance without costing anywhere near even a cheap Intel processor with similar performance.

I know that this lawsuit is USA only and that it doesn't cover this particular 6 (or 3) core chip but I have no issues with how the chip is/was described.

In my general purpose PC the processors are mainly idle, anyway.

Fascinating

How many people base a crtique of genetic sequencing on a single photograph of two people with different hairstyles.

Perhaps they checked with a man in the pub for a second opinion?

Speaking as someone who is regularly mistaken for a twin when my brother is a year and five months older than me. Could have just been an exceptionally long pregnancy carrying the second twin, of course..........

Seeing is believing.

Doorways and walls?

In earthquake country you are recommended to stand in a doorway because it can be safer.

Not sure if this is protection against ceiling collapse only, but if you look at aftermath photos, quite often the door frame is still standing when all the walls have fallen down.

In which case your back door may provide additional security. In certain extreme cases, obviously.

Having a bad week

Twinged my back and on pain killers so somewhat spaced.

I bought a Black Friday bargain bluetooth speaker and kept thinking "I know there's some reason I shouldn't have done that.".

Now waiting for it to charge before playing the linked track by steel....and thinking "Steelers Wheel? Steeleye Span? I'm sure I know that wierd looking guy holding the blue knob...".

Sigh.

Modem song. :-)

One thing about Virgin Media is that the engineers come out for free.

None of that "If it turns out to be your fault you are in deep shit!" malarkey.

Happened to me twice; first time when I removed a rats nest of legacy BT wiring by the front door. Turns out that VM link into your current internal wiring as well as providing their own master socket. Second time was when the builders went a little too deep when extending the drive and scraped the buried cable. $Deity knows what it would have cost if Open Reach had been supporting the connection.

Me again.

I didn't mention the Atari 520 (or is it a 1040?) STE in the loft somewhere with 4 Mb memory which was scrapped from Sun workstations, an externat HDD (8") in a box the size of a stack stereo component (I think the drive was ESDI) plus colour and mono screens, games and office utilities (I learned spreadsheets on a Lotus 123-alike. Backwards compatability means the commands still work today), plus a Lego compatible robotics kit and a load of Lego (which may well be worth more than the computer). Oh, and somewhere there is a dot matrix printer to go with it.

I'm scared to fire it all up in case it doesn't work.

Oh, and on a non-computing front I had rickets as a kid (blame rationing) so my parents bought a sun ray lamp. Still in the loft. Works by creating a mercury arc light with real mercury. Puddles of it. Looking at the wiring I would be reluctant to fire (!) it up now but it is still a bit of awesome technology.

Who would have thought

That racial and religious discrimination was not solely the province of the WASPS?

For India specifically, I understand thst there is/was a caste system which institutionalised discrimination.

I think that we are lucky in the UK at the moment that discrimination is not the issue that it was 50 or more years ago.

Cloud simplifies security

Eggs, meet one basket.

Erm

Is where the 'art is.

Comeroid?

Sounds painful.

Long time ago

But when I was doing bid work the advice was that if you weren't involved in writing the requirements it was usually a waste of time bidding.

I assume many sales people from many suppliers were shoulder bumping to get their USP included.

Kudos to whoever swung the "of course, you will need the highest level of accreditation" knowing that they were the only ones who could meet it.

Hard to counter with "it doesn't really need to be that secure" - not a positive message.

Clothe the naked.

Well, yes, I do that nearly every day.

The exclusions are rare and probably obvious, but a nerdish need to try and be accurate forces me to qualify that statement.

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On the subject of Christianity (or not) I thought the New Testament was a replacement for the Old Testament and so the term "Old Testament Christian" was logically incorrect. Still, you look for the words which support your chosen views, I assume.

Clamshell?

I rarely make or receive phone calls on my Galaxy S5 but when I do I really struggle with the microphone. Other end can rarely hear me. I assume this is because the microphone is behind the pinhole at the bottom, not helped by the soft case, and the tiny speakers are at the back.

What would be nice would be a phone with a decent sized microphone and speakers. Clamshell so the speakers are by the ear and the microphone folds round to be near the mouth. [No I don't want to carry round a headset just for the couple of times a month I may need to make a call.] Bigger speakers and microphone don't play well with the screen side nor with the edges of ever thinner cases. How about a phone which folds backwards so you can hold the speaker and microphone on the back of the case next to your ear and mouth? Just like a real phone.

Cynical, moi?

"Industry 4.0, in which the vision is that traditionally profitable manufacturing industries will give their profits to a tech sector desperately scrabbling to find the Next Big Thing and hoping that industrial sensors might be the jackpot."

Possibly the author is not fully enthused by this?

Auto updates in the broader context

My Android devices update the applications automatically on a regular basis, so in this context auto updates are probably a very good thing.

However Android usually gives you the choice when to update the OS.

Whilst you are still in scope for an OS update, of course.

Support for consumer versions of Windows is a real pain in the neck for Microsoft. A one off payment back in the mists of time and the expectation of continuous free support until the heat death of the PSU and beyond. In itself this is not a sustainable business model.

The proposed solution - force migrate everyone to the same version of the operating system and force everyone to stay up to date - probably looked good in theory. Only one version to support and the prospect of a subscription model in the misty future to offset the enormous cost of ongoing support. As far as I can see that isn't working out yet.

Eventually something has got to give; the constant expectation of free software and support amongst consumers is going to be up against the eventual realisation that ad-supported software isn't giving advertisers value for money. Who then pays for the "free" software?

IoT is the prime candidate for automatic security updates. However the security implications of giving write access to devices on your home network to some potentially fly by night cowboys are not good. This is another case where pay once and expect free support forever will not cost in.

TL;DR we're screwed.

Is that Adolf Hitler

Looking out of the window in the left hand side of the picture?

Naval surplus depth charges?

Or home constructed with a pressure switch.

These cables seem to be so few and so vulnerable that you would think that someone would have worked out a way to target them by now. Not me guvnor, honest, just idle speculation,

Then again huge trawlers must be a danger, and I have vague memories of ships dragging anchors in storms picking up cables. Where is a submarine lair with real submarines when you need one?

You would also think that one strategy in the WW3 that people are speculating about in other threads would be the selective cutting of submarine cables to force data through intercept points on backup routes.

Now thoroughly depressed thinking about our planet and information addiction which is only enabled by a limited number of vital but vulnerable arteries.