* Posts by Graham Cunningham

132 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2008

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The wild world of non-C operating systems

Graham Cunningham

Re: Apollo OS

I started work at TI in 1985 and was absolutely wowed by Aegis running on a few B&W DN320s and colour DN660s. With optical mice on checkered aluminium mouse pads, as I recall. Quite a step up from my BBC model B.

8-inch floppies ftw! ;)

'We gave it our best shot' Nvidia CEO tells Wall Street after failed Arm deal

Graham Cunningham

Re: Imagine waht $1.36B would have done?

Not very much, I imagine. TSMC, Samsung and Intel have annual capex north of $100B.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Graham Cunningham
Joke

Re: Pronouncing...

Stop carping about the pronunciation. It's clearly "koi"...

Sir Clive Sinclair inspired me and 'whole load of others' at Arm, says CEO Simon Segars

Graham Cunningham

Kit form!

I learned that the ZX80's UHF modulator's heat sink could sink more heat than my 15W soldering iron could produce. It took a second soldering iron to un-stick the first one. :)

Saturday start for NASA's Lucy probe on its 12-year quest to map Jupiter's Trojan asteroids

Graham Cunningham

Re: Beware!

Wait, "books"? I only read The Mote in God's Eye.

Wikipedia to the rescue, it seems "The Gripping Hand" is what I'm missing?

Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to boffins studying complex systems, organic catalysts

Graham Cunningham

Re: "This is the first time the Nobel Prize has been awarded for [..] the study of climate change"

Just checking: I assume you mean "good that it has now been done" rather than "good that it has never previously been done"?

Spent Chinese rocket stage set to make an uncontrolled return to Earth

Graham Cunningham

Especially....

... if it actually burns up your garden?

Sure, your app is crap, but Windows won't tell. Promise

Graham Cunningham

Pavlovian response...

I just tried to click the billboard to dismiss the popup! :D

From book shop to tat bazaar to cloud behemoth to grocer, what's Amazon up to now? Augmented-reality hairstyles

Graham Cunningham

+1 for the sub-title.

Jensen Huang's kitchen gets another viewing as Nvidia teases Arm-powered supercomputing chip Grace

Graham Cunningham

Also...

Credited with identifying - and coining the term - "bug".

Microsoft to supply US Army with 120,000+ HoloLens units in contract worth 'up to $22bn'

Graham Cunningham

Just a heads-up...

Presumably they meant a "head-up display". Unless its function is to merge all alerts and warnings into a single general warning, in which case I suppose "unified heads-up display" might mean something.

Scottish rocketeers Orbex commission Europe's largest industrial 3D printer to crank out 35 engines a year

Graham Cunningham

Metric tonne?

As opposed to some other kind of tonne?

Salesforce likes to play the diversity nice guy in public – Black ex-employee claims the reality is quite different

Graham Cunningham
Joke

Sys Adkins

Is that an example of nominative determinism? Are people called Adkins more likely to work in IT?

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

Graham Cunningham

Delete?

It would be nice if Control Panel -> Uninstall a Program offered a way to remove SfB.

Twitter scores a first for big tech after being fined €450,000 by Ireland's data watchdog for violating the EU's GDPR

Graham Cunningham

after being fined

I see that being fined was a first, but what first did they score "after being fined"?

Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.10, warns devs not to send 5.11 code too close to Christmas

Graham Cunningham

Re: bye bye 2038->1901, I'll not miss you at all.

@AC Thanks for the workings. I assumed it was unsigned and rolling back to 0, so I learned something today! :)

Graham Cunningham

Re: bye bye 2038->1901, I'll not miss you at all.

@AC, am I missing a subtlety in your post? Unix epoch is 1970-01-01 00:00:00 - 2038-01-19 03:14:07

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Graham Cunningham

It's nearly Christmas...

... Kevin might be home alone.

When it comes to taxing tech giants, America is out, France is in, Canada and Indonesia are going their own way

Graham Cunningham

I am sure it is too simplistic, but mandating a minimum tax bill as a percentage of turnover, not profit, in each jurisdiction would seem to reduce the ability to game the cost structure to make the 'profits' appear in a tax haven.

Uncle Sam passes comms act that sets aside $750m for the development of OpenRAN

Graham Cunningham

Re: description, please

Then again, not everyone who reads here is expert in every sector of the industry...

Oh Mi: Xiaomi shows off 80W wireless charging, claims battery fully fat again in under 20 minutes

Graham Cunningham

S.I. units

14.4kAs

Just saying. ;)

Two out of four ain't bad: It's been a weekend of mixed emotions for rocket fanciers

Graham Cunningham
Joke

Also gets around any single-use plastics/metals regulations...

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Graham Cunningham

Processor?

The Wikipedia article on Battlezone goes big on the 6502 as used in the various home computers of the day, for example. "The Atari ST port contains large parts of the original 6502 code which is emulated in real time.", but a Google search accords with my recollection (as a youthful microprocessor design student in those days) of the original being a 4-bit bit-slice implementation:

https://www.osnews.com/story/131695/inside-the-am2901-amds-1970s-bit-slice-processor/"

Irony, thy name is SANS: 28k records nicked from infosec training org after staffer's email account phished

Graham Cunningham

Eh, what?

"We are working to ensure that no other information was compromised"

"Ensure" is a very reassuring word. But how, exactly, can that be done? How are they going to unleak any other information that they find was leaked? Did they, by any chance, mean, "We are working hard to figure out whether any other information was compromised"? That is a necessary, and more achievable, but ultimately much less reassuring aspiration.

Peer-to-peer takes on a whole new meaning when used to spy on 3.7 million or more cameras, other IoT gear

Graham Cunningham
Pint

Peer-to-peer

I see what you did there! ---->

Uncle Sam says it's perfecting autonomous AI-powered drone, vehicle swarms to 'dominate' battlefields

Graham Cunningham

Re: Wow...

Sorry @AC, but your level of self-awareness probably disqualifies you from writing this code. Position calls for unprincipled and unscrupulous code authors.

Graham Cunningham

Brad Andac

"Dr. Sobeck, Margo, they were smart to get out of Faro when they did. But not one of us took it as a warning sign. Just told ourselves they weren't cut out for the BTRI cabals - uh, that's Better Than Rapid Innovation. Better at competing. Better than the next guy. A better killing machine. Isn't it just amazing how a century-and-a-half of science fiction did nothing to swerve our species from the path of doom?"

The results are in: Science says the Solar System's magnetic heliosphere looks like a deflated croissant

Graham Cunningham
Joke

Looks like DNA was right all along...

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Green_Arkleseizure

https://alienencyclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Green_Arkleseizure

Hope I don't live to see the Great White Hanky!

Co-inventor of the computer mouse, William English, dies

Graham Cunningham

Re: Trackerball?

I remember the military applications well.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command ;)

Elite name on Brit scene sponsors retro video games preservation project at the Centre for Computing History

Graham Cunningham

Omg

I have no touch whatsoever on the inertial controls!

Graham Cunningham

Investment

I spent a year's university grant (remember those?) on a model B, a 100kB single-sided 5.25" floppy drive, and a 14" portable TV, primarily motivated by seeing an Elite demo in the bookshop on St. Vincent St, Glasgow.

Graham Cunningham

hahahahah!

Floppy drive noises on F10 launch!!

Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol

Graham Cunningham

repeating?

ever-increasing!

Astroboffins map engine of a solar flare: Magnetic mega-fields and Earth-dwarfing blankets of electric current

Graham Cunningham

Re: Watts

277 thousand kWH for one rarebit seems beyond "well done"...

[Edit] Ah, you meant ~3M rarebits...

Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!

Graham Cunningham

Loyalty

Polish heroism, rewarded with duplicitous assurances from the self-serving British government of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_military_alliance

I'm sure today's incumbents would treat our continental allies more honourably. Oh, wait....

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a charred white dwarf star blasted across our galaxy by an ancient semi-supernova

Graham Cunningham

Alternative ending:

"will keep traveling through the galaxy alone, until it eventually uses up the rest of its fuel and dies."

-->

"will keep traveling through the galaxy alone, until it hits something."

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Graham Cunningham

Re: Meanwhile closer to Earth...

Oh wow. And props to the guys who spotted Venus @ 12:24 and all the guys who labelled the solar eclipses. I wonder whether Trump / Putin / Xi get a sense of Total Perspective when they see this?

For years, the internet giants have held on dear to their get-out-of-jail-free card. Here are those trying to take that away

Graham Cunningham

Re: Censorship is bad mmkay

Have an upvote, but... automated flame wars?

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Graham Cunningham

cwt

y/w :)

US Air Force wants to pit AI-powered drone against its dogfighting hotshots in battle of the skies next year

Graham Cunningham

Faro Automated Solutions, anyone?

Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021

Graham Cunningham
Joke

dot "engineer(ing)" or dot "scotland"? Strange range of choices. Like comparing spanners and oranges.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

Graham Cunningham

"from the northern Canadian coast, across the Bering Strait"

Uh? Has that moved too?

Nineteen mysterious invaders from another Solar System spotted hanging around the outside edge of ours

Graham Cunningham

Mining

Did anyone look at that picture and immediately think of Orichalzine mining?

GCC 10 gets security bug trap. And look what just fell into it: OpenSSL and a prod-of-death flaw in servers and apps

Graham Cunningham

Re: El Reg (or the readership) really has changed

I have no problem with acronyms being explained, even if I already know them. Unexplained acronyms needlessly put up barriers to visiting readers who may be new to the subject matter.

And now, here's Cli-Mate 9000 with the weather... Pattern-recognizing neural network tries its hand at forecasting

Graham Cunningham

Re: Model Fish?

Food for thought. Or indeed, to Ponder.

+1 for making me google the error code.

Need a special something on which to spank $3,500? HoloLens 2 is finally shipping

Graham Cunningham

Holopromise?

Wondering where the strontium in your old CRT monitor came from? Two colliding neutron stars show us

Graham Cunningham

Re: Unique naming

And element #1 is named after the nearby Scottish Hydro, now SSE. ;)

Google: We've achieved quantum supremacy! IBM: Nope. And stop using that word, please

Graham Cunningham

Boggling

53 Q*Berts is truly a mind-boggling proposition. That is all.

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