* Posts by AndrueC

5077 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: They do.

Openreach already share poles and ducts. They charge for the privilege but as a concept that seems reasonable and knowing Ofcom (who forced BT to do this) the pricing is probably in line with industry expectations.

Where it goes a little bit wrong is if the alternate company finds that the Openreach poles/ducts are full or blocked. In those cases whoever is laying the cable just digs their own duct or installs their own pole. There appears to be no mechanism to force Openreach to sort out the issue nor to encourage the other company to rent out their new ducts/poles.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: History repeating itself

No that wouldn't be a goodie thing at all.

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: 30 years later...

I've found this while doing a bit of research this page. It provides some interesting information on the original PC design and might explain the comment I'm remembering.

Elsewhere the article also mentions that the IBM PC uses the DMA controller for memory refresh. What is omits to mention is that DMA channel 0 is the one used for memory refresh in the IBM PC, which makes memory-to-memory DMA quite problematic, given that channel 0 would be also required for memory-to-memory transfers. You can do memory-to-memory transfers, or you can keep the DRAM refreshed, but not both.

[snip]

As an aside, using the DMA controller for memory refresh has an implication for IBM PC initialization. Although the PC has no complicated memory controller and no memory timings to set, immediately after power-up RAM can’t be used because it’s not being refreshed yet. During POST, the BIOS sets up the DMA controller (and timer, which is also involved) to perform the refresh function, but until then, there’s no RAM, and therefore notably also no stack.

Given that OS/2 2.0 kicks the BIOS out perhaps it (re)programs the refresh rate. Perhaps IBM discovered that on clones they didn't get the DRAM refresh rate they were expecting. Another possibility is that OS/2 was just more sensitive to overclocking.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: 30 years later...

I used Warp to develop DOS programs for data recovery. It was really handy because if you crashed the VDM (not uncommon when you're processing corrupt data) you could just open a new one. No rebooting required which allowed you to have other applications running on the desktop. It also supported low level BIOS calls but there seemed to be a bug in that it spun the floppy when you were accessing a device with an ID of 128 or higher. It even supported ATAPI in a VDM.

As for compatibility I remember a discussion on CompuServe about that and the IBM engineer in the thread wrote something like:

"When we program(?) the refresh rate of RAM we expect that we will get what we ask for not something 'fairly close'."

It's too long ago to remember exactly what they were saying. I think they said OS/2 read the configuration information from the mboard then reprogrammed the refresh rate but they might have just been saying that they assumed that the configured value was correct when they used it for something else.

Mind you I also remember issues with joystick support because IBM had followed the spec and expected the joystick to be set up for bi-directional communication where most - understandably - were input only. Also with printers. IBM initially assumed that all printers were bidirectional for flow control.

Whatever the issues I never had any problem installing or running Warp on clones. One of my favourite memories is of me downloading messages from CompuServe in the background (multithreaded thanks to Golden Compass) while I was playing Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix in a VDM.

I also remember getting a set of floppies out of the blue one day. It turned out that I'd reported a superfluous '.' on the splash screen and when the bug was fixed I automatically got the version that included the fix. That quite impressed me. Another time I remember they issued a patch to work around that fact that a DOS golf game of the time hammered the sound card with thousands of samples a second.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Wellll

But so what? I understand that it was a tragedy for the families involved but I struggle to see why it should be seen as anything more than that. They paid their money, they were told multiple times in the contract that it could kill them. They all surely had enough money to find out how dodgy it was (several people backed out precisely because of that).

For me it only becomes a problem when people are unknowingly dragged into the tragedy. So if a private space craft falls on a populated area and injures or killed people that needs regulation. But if a bunch of rich people choose to take the risk of going to space then good for them. It will spur further investment in space and if they die - whilst being a tragedy for friends and family - it just helps redistribute their wealth.

AndrueC Silver badge
Go

Re: Who gives a sh**

If it encourages more investment in space then I'm all for it. As a species we need to be investing more. So many resources out there just waiting for us and yet we continue to fight over the scraps of resources down here.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Meh. All water has already passed through thousands of digestive systems over millions of years. And as for 'fresh water' lakes and streams - do people think that the fish get out to go to the toilet?

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

I'd argue that the NHS needs a committee of IT and medical experts to agree a data standard for patient records and communications

Already a solved problem. Let me introduce you to HL7 and friends.

My preference is for the up and coming FHIR as it supports XML and JSON and is RESTful.

NHS Digital now also offers standardised APIs for accessing data across different systems.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Lol. Reminds me of a licensing system I was involved in a couple of decades ago. They'd made the mistake of having the license expire at midnight CST, Not a good decision for a product sold internationally.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: That's just career-ending embarassing!

Exactly. C# has TimeSpan. Java apparently has Period(). C++ appears to have std::time_point.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

My Casio G-shock went 28, 29 and is now showing 1st. I remember that the manual for my first Casio digital watch bought in the early 80s said it knew about leap years and would be good until something like 2100. At the time knowing what I did I couldn't see why it would have a problem beyond the year 2100 but I suppose Casio's marketing department felt that 'it'll calculate the date correctly forever' to be too broad a claim.

So..yeah. I don't understand why this year has suddenly sprung a problem on the IT world and if I think about it I become increasingly alarmed. I only retired in August so surely things can't have gone to shit that quickly?

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Modifications

Um..no. It was published in a magazine aimed at the young computer enthusiast. The Amstrad CPC was an 8-bit Z80 based Microcomputer sold in the early 80s.

As published the function worked according to the protestant version of the Gregorian calendar (it was a UK magazine after all) but the line of code that handled that calculation was followed by several similar lines commented out with information as to which sky fairy sect they related to.

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

Why is this a problem? I spent 35 years as a computer programmer and never once encountered a problem with February the 29th. One of the Amstrad CPC mags back in the 1980s published a BASIC function that could tell you the day of the week for any date going back hundreds of years. It could even be modified to handle the various leap days when the Gregorian calendar was adapted around the world (eg;in protestant countries 11 days were removed from September in 1752).

If anyone's code is confused then whoever wrote it made a right bog of it.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

That's a little worrying. There is (or was) a chap with the same name as me and the same approximate age living in my relatively small town. I found out when I went for my first 'over 40s MoT' several years ago. There was another chap in the small waiting room and when the nurse called out my name we both stood up. She had to double check her notes and ask the month of birth to differentiate.

I think I have slightly more confidence in the NHS not confusing us since despite the complexity of their systems (I have a fair bit of technical knowledge on these) our NHS Numbers should keep us safely separate. But the Police..not so much.

He attended the MoT wearing a pink shirt and a tie though so what that says about his proclivity for crime is uncertain. Clearly not a rough and tumble scrote but management... um.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: In the absence of files...

So do I *have* to have Word installed, as it is described as the "owner" of the file that you sent me? Or can Libre Office be used? What if I have both installed, because I'm supporting Users who each choose a different program?

'Owning application' in this context only means 'the application responsible for managing that collection of bytes on this system.'. If someone sends you a file you open a compatible application and import it - or as now when you try to open the file in your mail client the operating system suggests a compatible application.

Is that SVG file "owned" by Inkscape or by the web browser from which I used "save link"? What about the SVG file I created using Inkscape but want to view in the browser?

The file is owned by Inkspace, the link is owned by the OS and would contain sufficient information to identify the original data and its owner. The browser would talk to Inkscape to render the SVG (and register its use of it) or offer to adopt a clone of the data for you. If you modify data linked to by or from another application you get prompted whether to notify the other application or just make a copy and update that.

If you uninstall an application:

* Any application that has registered and not released a link to data will notified so that it can decide how to handle it (clone its own copy or warn the user that it won't be able to render the data moving forward).

* You are asked if you want to keep orphaned data and if so it remains on your storage along with whatever metadata identifies the original application.

There might have to be an ability for the OS to provide access to 'orphaned' storage so that applications can search it and take over ownership of the data in some fashion. Although an application ought to be able to mark data as 'for me only' for security reasons as below:

Although the above seems complex it's better than the current system where if you uninstall an application you can lose access to data without realising it. At least here there is something that is responsible for and tracking each data object. This also improves security because it prevents applications from opening data objects willy-nilly. An attempt to open secret_db.sql with - say - a hex editor will be impossible because you can't navigate to it. The only way to access that database is to ask the owning application and that will (we hope) prompt the user for confirmation before allowing it.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: In the absence of files...

Yeah, Explorer has a number of deficiencies with respect to the primary file system it encounters:

* Doesn't report on named streams.

* Doesn't support paths longer than 260 characters.

* Doesn't allow creation of links although it can show them in a different colour and follow them.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: In the absence of files...

Documents still have labels and can usually be tagged, often multiple times which the file and directory model doesn't really accommodate - e.g. does that record of the Project Alpha budget belong with the Project Alpha stuff or the financial stuff - why, it's both.

Both Linux and Windows NT support the concept of links. It's a bit poorly presented in Windows but it exists so both can make a file or directory appear in multiple places in the tree assuming the file system supports it and for both OSes the most common file systems in use do support it.

Having pointed that out however I don't disagree with the idea of doing away with 'files and directories'. Or at least hide them away as belonging to a particular application. If another application wants that data it has to go through the owning application.

So instead of having a 'Word document' you have a Word application and other applications can query Word about the data it owns (which is basically DCOM, OLE et al only we hope better). How Word chooses to store its data would be application specific but I think that the concept of files and folders is a bit too well known and useful to be dispensed with so most application would use an OS provided API for that. With this fancy new memory it's possible that API could be more streamlined to make the bytes appear to be in RAM (ie; no need to load the data into memory to act on it). But here's the thing about that - Windows and Linux already offer this; it's called a memory mapped file.

None of this seems revolutionary to me. Under the covers some optimisations might be possible ie; memory mapped files wouldn't need paging but for most programmers it would make little difference and if it's largely all possible anyway why isn't more popular? Is it because of the hacks required to do this with current hardware design as the author might argue or just that in the battle of survival of the fittest files and directories won out.

An interesting discussion for sure.

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

AndrueC Silver badge
Unhappy

I still get spam sent to my dedicated Avast email address. I pointed this out on their forums when it first started many years ago but I was 'shouted down' and told that there were many valid reasons why an email address that included the text '.avast' could've been found by spammers even though I was not receiving spam from anywhere else.

Leaked or sold..they had clearly violated my privacy.

Microsoft veteran on how to blue screen your way to better testing

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Better testing

Linux and Mac both have an equivalent - Linux has panic and iOS has (or used to) the sad face icon.

However for the record it's been many years since I've seen a BSOD from a Windows machine. They have been very rare events for me since Vista and from what I remember that turned out to be an errant video driver.

But it's not all good news. My Windows 10 mail server use to randomly freeze. From looking at the event logs it was mostly moaning about a lack of virtual memory and pointed out that the top few processes were between them consuming a few hundred megabytes. Making it shut down every 24 hours helped a bit but it still did it. When I dug into the logs further I noticed that WSUS was often downloading an update shortly before the freeze. On a hunch I added more RAM taking it from 8GB to 16GB and since then it's been fine. All a bit strange since all it's doing is running a mail server, TVersity and Logitech SqueezeServer.

Hey ho.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

I took this picture while touring Devonport Docks back in the 1980s. At the time I thought I was recording a derelict due to be scrapped. Now I'm not so sure.

Edit: Hang on, is that a shark fin in front of the wreck?

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

HMS Vanguard leaving HMNB Devonport last year after a seven-and-a-half year refit.

That's what it looks like after a refit? Christ on a crutch what it did it look like before?

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

AndrueC Silver badge
Facepalm

The UK's former state-owned telecoms giant

That was over 40 years ago. It became a PLC before most of your readership were even born. Don't you think perhaps it's irrelevant now?

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

GetNextCacheId()=>++GlobalCacheID;

It worked okay in testing!

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Imagine if your bank said "Sorry, we lost your $90,000 savings because we don't have doors on our safes, the password to the box with the money in was 1234 and we haven't updated our CCTV since 2000."

Well I'd be shocked and surprised that my bank was keeping my savings in its vault ;)

That's not how banking has worked for hundreds of years. When you deposit $90,000 in a bank what you're actually doing is giving them $90,000 in exchange for a promise that should you ask them for some money at a future date they will give you some of their money. Once deposited the money belongs to the bank and you are reliant on contract law and possibly their good will if you want to get it back ;)

I wouldn't expect any bank to just leave the money to rot in a vault. I'd expect them to use it to make more money. If I'm lucky I might even get a decentpaltry cut of the profits in the form of interest.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: Ain't Gonna Happen ...

Why else are traders and brokerage houses screaming for systems with lower latencies, paying fortunes to get and maintain them, and paying fortunes to be connected to the same subnet, and same switch as the computers processing all this data?

It's more because they can make a profit from price changes. It's all about exploiting the delay between a purchase and the effect of that purchase being reflected in the market place.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: until the Cybertruck is scheduled for a full wash

Mine gets at least one a year, whether it needs it or not.

Mine too - when it gets serviced.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

If we find an asteroid that's on a collision course with Earth can we call it 'Arse'?

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

AndrueC Silver badge
WTF?

Re: In my misbegotten youth....

I'm not complaining, using Windows 11 means I get well paid to just sit down and wait half an hour for it to boot every time. I reboot Windows 11 whenever I want to relax.

Eh?

I used to power down my work machine at the end of the week (I put it in standby at the end of the workday) and on Monday it booted and was ready for me to login within twenty seconds. And this was a machine that had BitLocker active. It was also a relatively elderly clone - must've been five years old. I missed the last upgrade cycle because everyone knew I was about to retire. Heck - when I was working I could boot the machine, launch three instances of Visual Studio get Docker running two Linux instances (PostGres back-end and an Elastic Search server) and be ready for work in 10 minutes.

My personal laptop is the same on the rare occasions when a Windows update requires me to reboot it.

You appear to either be running on really, really shitty hardware (in which case I don't understand how you even got Windows 11 installed) or else there is something very wrong with your computer. Malware or a virus perhaps?

Cloudflare joins the 'we found ways to run our kit for longer' club

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

"At the time, we had enterprise customers, but we hadn't operationalized repeatedly and consistently landing them,"

Maybe they struggled to understand what he was whittering on about.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: IPv6

I made my mail server(*) accessible over IPv6 several years ago. It wasn't all that difficult. Using a competent ISP that has supported dual-stack IPv4/6 for over 15 years helped of course.

(*)Sits in my spare bedroom.

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "Rust will stop you using data after it's been freed"

You can fix a lot of memory issues in C++ by using RAII and keeping as much as possible on the stack or fields. Make good use of const & and implement private copy ctors by default.

And FFS use proven libraries eg the STL and friends.

The thing I found with C++ is that if you're lazy it's easy to screw up. But if you make the effort and invest it in libraries (yours or proven external ones) it can be safe. Its downside is that a lot of developers lack the skills or management won't give them the time to do the job properly. In that respect languages like C#, Java or Rust win out.

It's all well and good to say that C++ can be safe in the hands of a competent programmer but unfortunately the world doesn't have enough of those. Quite frankly it doesn't have enough 'vaguely competent' programmers. For all our sakes we need to use languages that support and assist mediocrity in the people using them.

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: "Security is a process, not a product. Nor a language"

A degree of paranoia helps. I spent fifteen years in data recovery and developing software for the same. You eventually learn where to put your gatekeeping logic and to be infinitely suspicious of any data structure that you have obtained from external code or external data. You might think that you've just read a directory record but it could actually be any old crap and lead you on a not-so-merry dance ending with a crash. I wrote applications that processed hundreds of gigabytes of partially corrupt data and needed to run for a couple of days (this was in the 90s). One thing you don't need when there's a customer waiting to get their data back is to arrive in the office at 9am and discover that your data extraction failed at 11pm the previous day.

It meant that I missed the other half of the equation which is passing your data safely and securely to external code but it's a good starting point.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: >but the problem may also exist in 737s already being used by airlines

Good point. Didn't it used to advise against using Windows to operate a nuclear reactor?

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: >but the problem may also exist in 737s already being used by airlines

It works for Microsoft. Sorta.

At least as far as we know faults with MS software has never caused loss of life..

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Stuffed Turkey

IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is much more complex than a simple gateway.

My ISP (IDNet) has been offering dual-stack IPv4/6 for nearly 20 years now. The main reason I'm not switching to FTTP with an altnet is because neither of them that are available currently support IPv6. Any ISP that doesn't at this point in time is clearly lacking technical expertise and I for one wouldn't trust them with my connectivity.

Thankfully Openreach should be coming here soon (maybe this year) at which point IDNet can upgrade me to FTTP.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

I did find somewhere better. I retired. And my employer lost the 2nd most valuable developer on the team (the most valuable had moved to a better job a few weeks prior).

AndrueC Silver badge
Stop

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

Bring your own granules in then. Or your own Cafetiere. Is the difference really worth four or five quid every time you want a cup of coffee?

Someone willing to pay £10 a day for coffee could save a lot of money making it themselves. Approximately £200 a month in fact.

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

Same here it's cheaper and likely healthier to make your own sandwiches at home and no way in hell would I ever pay the ridiculous price coffee shops charge! Every office I've worked in has had perfectly adequate tea and coffee making facilities and they cost nothing.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: A calculator...

Maybe :)

I would say it's part of the OS if applications have to rely on them and/or are expected to rely on them. For example MSCORLIB.DLL. A lot of applications rely on it because they run on .NET but you don't have to develop for .NET to run under Windows so is it part of the OS?

Or the Visual C redistributables. They ship with the OS but I wouldn't consider them part of the OS either. You can develop applications without them as Borland ably demonstrated.

Without knowing exactly where the problem lies it's hard (for me) to decide if it's an OS problem or just a Microsoft problem but at present I'm leaning toward the latter as it appears to only impact a few apps.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: A calculator...

It doesn't sound like an OS problem to me. It appears that someone has built some of the apps (or a library that they jointly rely on) using an unfortunate compiler/linker option. Of course it depends where you draw the boundary. Is the calculator app part of the OS just a free application that ships with it.

That line blurs a bit if the problem lies in one of the common runtime libraries but I still don't think we can blame the OS unless core functionality is impacted.

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: STRAW MAN ALERT

And the support for ancient applications and even old operating systems is probably a significant factor in Windows' security issues. It increases the attack surface, complicates the API and requires resources to be diverted away from current core functionality. It doesn't help that MS has shown itself to be bad at planning for the future and keeps having to change direction. How many UI frameworks are we up to now?

Calculating Pi in the sky: Axiom Space plans to launch 'orbital datacenter'

AndrueC Silver badge
Boffin

Oh dear. You're completely wrong.

I suggest you research the Apollo 13 incident with particular attention to the crew nearly freezing to death. It was not because space is cold. The exact opposite in fact. It's so difficult to get rid of heat in space that craft are designed to be inherently cold and to rely on heaters to compensate. In space a cold interior can easily be warmed up (if you have energy which was Apollo 13's problem). A warm interior on the other hand is a right bugger to cool down.

Maybe also ask yourself how and why a 'vacuum flask' works ;)

Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

AndrueC Silver badge

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will fly no more, but is still standing upright

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Air today, gone tomorrow.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Bought my S10 summer 2019. I don't intend to replace it until the battery becomes useless. It's currently managing to last two or even three days so that's fine. And if/when it fails I'll try and get it replaced. My S10 does everything that I need a phone to (apart from having an easily replaceable battery). Nothing that's been released since offers anything else I want.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: Upside down?

Surely the thrusters would be underneath and therefore (if the craft is upside down) now pointing at the sky. Firing them would at best drive the craft nose first along a furrow.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

AndrueC Silver badge
Joke

Re: 2038?

I have to say I'm not particularly concerned about the year 30828 though.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

AndrueC Silver badge
Happy

The original Elite story was written by Robert Holdstock. Who went on to become one of the best British SF/Fantasy writers of his time. The Mythago Wood series has to be essential reading as an example of how to merge the two genres.

I played Elite on the BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad CPC 618. Got to Elite on all three platforms.

I refused to play the Commodore 64 version because of the stupid Tribbles and because, well, as a Spectrum owner I was obligated to hate the Commode :)