Posts by Christian Berger

Re: Time for NUMA, Embrace your Inner CSP

It's fascinating how normal UNIX commands would be a good fit for CSP architectures.

Re: feature request

"In fact, why not make native code run as well, straight over email, it would be super neat."

Outlook used to have that feature, you could embed a sound file in your mail which would then be saved to disk and played... even if it had the extension .exe. (Explanation: The Windows API-Call to play a sound internally maps to the API-call to execute a program. So you could convince Outlook that it's a sound via the MIME-Type, but effectively you could send a native program.)

Re: It's a problem with "Open Source" vs "Free Software"

"Any software simple enough to be competently maintained by a single person is probably insufficiently complex to handle all the tasks handled by a modern desktop environment."

Actually that's what people thought before UNIX, too. What's lacking is simply the right way to tackle the problem. Imagine instead of Wayland and X11 we would have chosen something simpler, like a virtual file system (Plan9 like) or perhaps a graphics and sound extension to the terminal.

There are features you write explicitly, and there are features that get created by having some orthogonal features which implicitly create a whole new range of features.

Re: It's actually not _that_ dangerous

The German Bluray release actually includes an interview with the producer in which he tells about safety specialists who, in all seriousness, see this as a safety instruction film. It is actually shown as a safety instruction film in many companies.

Simple

Statistics will give you metrics you can use to make decisions. Neural networks give you weird metrics and do decisions for you.

It probably is, at its core

I mean we are talking about 1990s software dealing with ill-defined binary formats here. It has to deal with all the workaround of bugs in the software creating Flash files. It has to be able to parse long dead file formats in order to maintain compatibilty. All of that was written in the 1990s with its typical code quality. I'm sure that the current developers are scared about touching it, as it might bring weird side effects as bugs in that code might have been used by some files out there.

Re: Wasn't VMS...

"As a result Windows NT was actually based on PRISM not VMS because it was actually capable of 64 bit from the beginning, they just didn't have 64 bit Intelx86 at the time."

Well yes, but apparently Windows NT for Alpha wasn't really 64 Bit. At least that's what people said back then.

Re: Funding?

"This depends... Sometimes the receivers need special hardware to receive the data. If said hardware is lost/scrapped you need to re-create it."

There's specifications for those instruments, and typically they have some way of giving you raw IQ data at a given fidelity. This is essentially laboratory equipment and therefore rather flexible by design.

Re: Another lease extension for the life of copper access

"I wonder what law there is on copper data bandwidth increase ?"

Well there is the channel capacity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity

which gives you the maximum amount of data you can get through a channel, giving it's signal to noise ratio.

If you have a bare cable, the SNR is limited by thermal noise in the receiver as well as the maximum allowable power before the cable leaks to much.

If there is an amplifier in between, it's usually the limitation as it has a maximum input power as well as its own noise.

So in reality your SNR is somewhere in between 20 and 50 dB, which is 1:100 to 1:100000 in linear units. That roughly translates to an overall channel capacity of 1-10 GBits/s, depending how rotten your network is.

You can, BTW, estimate your SNR by looking at the picture of an analogue TV channel. If the image looks perfect, you have around 40-50 dB SNR, if you can see noise you are below that, and at 20dB you can still see the picture through the noise, but it's not preety.

Re: StatCounter = irrelevant, amateurish

Yes, the best example was that weird >50% share of Windows on the Internet which everybody knew was obviously fake.

Back in about 2014 or so I did conduct some research of my own on a camping holiday. Of about 100 laptop I've seen, about 80 were running Linux (usually Thinkpads), 18 or were Macs (usually with stickers on them indicating they were paid by the employer, and about 2 ran Windows.

Re: Flight Delays

Yes, it's probably something you could model manually rather well. Essentially, just like with the weather, you could probably boil it down to some non-linear differential equations which can then be solved for the future.

Re: FFS - Measure the risk first

Well atomic clocks are not "a few pounds", that's some serious investment.

However it might be a good idea to have some fibre-based clock distribution network.

BTW even if GPS would drop dead by now, the effect likely will take days of not weeks before it actually affects DVB-T transmissions.

Plus there's always more

The main goal seems to somehow make people believe that encryption is something bad or something that should be avoided unless really necessary.

Again, in the past several markets have converged on the PC

Today people do things they used to have seperate devices for on a PC. Where you previously had some dedicated word processing system, some games console, a VCR and an actual computer, you now have the PC as a more-or-less universal device. That is mostly because a decent PC can be had for less than the price of a good display typewriter, or a PC running Linux or some BSD is just as good as an old unixoid workstation, but at a fraction of the cost. Same goes with games consoles. You can now play computer versions of all the popular video games like Pong.

However now tablets and mobile phones undercut the price of PCs. For consumers who just want to have some "Internet Terminal" those are just as useful. So naturally some of the old markets are going to move away from PCs.

I think the term you're looking for is "cloaca".

actually no

It's just ignoring obvious things, like that people won't use the quick charge option for an overnight charge, or that it's trivial for cars to detect an overload condition of the network early on and reduce their charging speed.

Re: so Desperation

Well if you're good at assembler your're likely one of the people who will write decent code in any language.

There is a lot of disagreement on what's a country

I remember the Austrian Children's television asking themselves that question back in the 1980s and they got widely divergent numbers depending who they asked.

For example back then the Vatican didn't have it's own country code, so for the postal company it wasn't its own country.

Yes, and on the disadvantage side

You have lots more complexity for virtually no advantage. The current implementations probably still have lots of unfound bugs of which many likely are security critical.

Re: Trivial? Hmmm.

"For instance, one might need to program X-Y-Z axis motion with millisecond accuracy to control log and saw movement in a sawmill."

Yes, but a millisecond is a long time in a computer, and any cheap microprocessor will guarantee you timing that precise easily. In the end 99% of it is nothing more than control loops with the desired input changing at times. The actually complex stuff is not done by the SCADA people, the complex stuff is done by the people working out the best processes. Whatever they find out usually is just a bunch of numbers the SCADA people code into their software. (or have as settings)

They are already using it for decades.

Traffic analysis, even of encrypted traffic has been done for decades if not centuries. Workarounds for it also have been deployed for those times. A good example are "number stations". Those broadcast messages encrypted as numbers. If they would broadcast only when something has happened, the opponent could determine the amount of "chatter". Therefore they broadcast at precise schedules.

A simmilar thing has been done during the cold war. You make a passenger plane steer a bit into enemy country, then look at where you suddenly get radar pulses from you previously didn't. Those are previously hidden radar stations. If your enemy is rather stupid you can even find new radio communications links being established.