Posts by Gordon 11

how much faster it would be because you'd optimise code at compile time rather than runtime. That struck me as being a "better" way to do things

That was the theory.

In practice we tried out a system for an HPC application. On running the compiler with an analyser for ~10 hours overnight the result was <1% improvement from not using the analyser. With no guarantee that it wouldn't actually be worse for a different input. And it wasn't any faster than the 64bit MIPS systems we had.

And this application's code was updated about once a month

It just wasn't worth the effort.

Then AMD came along with amd64 and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Re: Not for me, thanks

Two features that I use a great deal appear to be missing:

* ability to pipe a range of lines through an arbitrary pipeline of commands

* multiple copy/paste buffers

Re: The language is not that important

FORTRAN also supports the very wired concept of multiple entry points to a given sub-routine.

This is not weird. PL1 (or at least PRIME's SPL) allowed this.

All that is required is to know what you are doing. If you don't. why are you "writing" code in the first place?

Re: Computer O Level

Back in those days doing all that and only getting a C sounds like something bordering on psychopathic by the exam board.

Nowadays it would have to be a C++ at least.

Re: What gen?

I must be imagining the fact that I have 21H1 installed on two 3rd gen and one 4th gen Intel chipped devices then.

I have it running on an i5-2500K in a 9-year old desktop.

Perfectly fine (as far as Windows is ever "fine").

Was creaking 2 years ago, but replacing the HDD with an SSD fixed that.

Neither does the venue check in but no check out fill me with much confidence

Re: Unfortunately ...

Trump can't be charged with Treason, because our Constitution only provides for that charge in times of War.

There's been a ceasefire for ~65years, but no declared peace.

Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

Basically what has come to pass for being locked down to long.

I think you mean, "for being locked down longer than they would like".

An even longer lockdown was actually needed.

Re: Begging for Trouble

Can't imagine why anyone ever used an ISP email account.

All I want is some place that lets me download via IMAP and send with SMTP.

This TalkTalk migration seems to be affecting all of their legacy domains. And whereas OneTel seems to have a valid SPF record after migrating, Pipex does not.

This follows on from Pipex having an invalid MX record earlier this year (it pointed to an Alias, which isn't allowed and some other ISPs refused to play ball as a result).

No doubt a result of lots of GUI admin tools, and hence less understanding of the underlying reality.

I can never understand why people read email in a browser, rather than 'modern' it seems totally antiquated to me.

I expect a mail server to be able to supply the mail data, and then I may run whichever mail client I wish to display it to me in whatever way I can persuade it to do, in a way that best suits my needs/wishes.

Similarly, why do people assume that mail is sent from an application by a user typing at a keyboard?

I have a few dozen mails sent to me every day by the background process that check the health of my systems and backups (and this is just for my systems at home - when I worked I had far more doing similar things there too). How would I get that to work with OAuth (or similar)?

Re: memory's the 2nd thing to go

Re: memory's the 2nd thing to go

The first being memory.

It used to be the mouse balls....

Re: POTUS Supporters

Apparently 8% of UK voters in a survey believed 5G spread coronavirus.

Some of them believe there is no Coronavirus at all, and the whole thing is just a ploy so that the Government can implant a tracking device in everybody (and every body) under the guise of a vaccination.

The fact that this would require every NHS worker in the country to be in on the scam seems to pass them by.

Not sure what they think has happened to those who have died.

Re: Hasn't it been able to do this for ages?

Perhaps the difference is that "toggle a switch" bit. Which might mean it can become a router on its own, rather than requiring you to set that up on the system directly connected to it. Although how this works with a USB-C hub is something I'll need to get my head around. Perhaps you need one with a Ethernet port, then plug a switch/hub into that and then plug any other system into that.

Re: SCO Unix

What about trying rm *.o, but leaving the shift key down for slightly too long after the "*"?

It becomes rm *>o - definitely not what was wanted. I ended up left with just an empty file called "o".

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

RAID is a perfectly adequate backup.

Not if your system, or machine room, catches fire.

Re: Edge in 1809

Some people have found Edge will not load websites if IPv6 is not enabled on their system after installing 1809. The current fix being to enable IPv6.

Surely a simpler fix is not to use Edge?

Re: Mains powered clock

Is there such a thing at all nowdays? It is cheaper to throw in a quartz osciallator or a real time clock than to measure grid frequency.

Unlike a quartz clock it never needs to be reset (unless there's a power failure).

Re: carbon monoxide as byproduct???

CO2 for plant growth CO for asphyxiation.

Re: Leading by example?

...they just want their blue(?) passports back...

Essentially it added higher-level abstractions (databases, menus and reports) to what previous languages had had

What always amazed me was the unwillingness of academics and managers to believe that you could, and should, write commonly-needed functionality into callable library code.

Re: Inivitably!

Nope. There is no option to turn it off completely in the GUI. Windows 10 ALWAYS warns you it's going to reboot for an update with an option to postpone.

In my case it was "worse" (it didn't really matter to me, but it could have done so).

Last night I asked my laptop to look for updates. It reported it had found none. I then looked at the Microsoft blog page about how to force an update (happy for my laptop to go first...) and suddenly the update page (open next to my browser) decided it had two updates - an Adobe Flash one (again) and Windows 1709.

That was the better part of 3 hours (and that's on a system with an SSD).

So it downloaded them and installed them. Except the 1709 download failed to install, so it downloaded it all again. This time it installed OK and I was left with a Restart option. Whcih I selected and 3 reboots later I had Windows 1709. I then had to go in a patch the registry to switch off auto-login on accounts with no password (which MS always decides to reset for me...how kind) and remove the login page image.

Re: Silly "private" dns stuff abounds.

Yes, reserving ".localhost" and ALWAYS returning "no such name" is probably a good idea.

".localhost" is a DNS zone, and as such can have a large number of sub-entries (although putting in a wildcard match would handle returning a consistent reply with one config line).

"localhost" is a key within a zone (roughly - it will depend how you have your name resolver configured). So if you have name resolution configure to search zones, say, ".me", ".info", don't have a specific "localhost" entry defined, look for "localhost" and someone has defined "localhost.me", then you'll get that record.

Re: Signed Integer

Uh, for an absolute value, why would you store that in a signed integer? In what scenario is a negative time since epoch useful?

Well, I was born before 1970, so it's useful to represent my date of birth.

And dates BC(E) are also times before a data point.