Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

It depends on the size of data-space. The story oversimplifies - there must be thousands of bits of data on a completed form. You're not going to land on the magic sequences by chance anymore than there two documents will end up with the same SHA-512 hash by chance.

Re: 'Peak Netflix'

All the more reason to take advantage of the current situation until they do!

But it just changes the grazing period to ${contract_length}. Then the question becomes have they got enough content that will keep me occupied for that period? No. I'll wait till you have.

Re: "manufacture qubits at scale"

Supposition "A" - that the scientists and engineers are clueless morons.

Or supposition "B" - you don't "entangle atoms in an engraving process" but build machinery that can produce entangled electrons as needed.

A clue as to which might be true is that entangled ensembles are short-lived and easily disrupted by the environment, even at a few kelvin. Another is the paper itself which includes lines like "A [Quantum Dot] device is similar to a transistor, taken to the limit where the gate above the channel controls the flow of electrons one at a time."

Re: Help me understand....

As you say, there is plenty of regulation around banks and pension funds and the like which is designed to prevent this. But that's grown up because of decades of abuse.

In this case, what was needed was enough delay in the system so that humans could recognise what was about to happen.

Re: Type confusion

Until we've seen the bug, we don't really know what's gone on.

But Chrome is C++ so the compiler will tell them if they've got function invocation wrong. It's got to be a bit more subtle than that - probably concerned with one of the javascript interpreters or compilers.

Winning the rat race...

If you're a rich shit who can more or less buy whatever you want, it's really annoying to find their are limits on what you can say. What's the point in investing all the time and effort getting rich if some poor guy can still control you?

Re: French court freezes out non-French competition

I don't know about France. But in the UK this is a myth. According to the most recent data (Table2), 2.5% of FTSE100 companies are owned by pension funds and 1.5% by insurers. A whopping 58% are owned by foreign investors (here's looking at you, Vladimire and Mohammon).

Re: Waiter! There's an ad in my gnome!

If you don't like Firefox, you could use Chrome. Or you could fork it and write your own version.

On the substantive point: there is very little you can do about an app that doesn't want to use the OS look and feel.

There are really two groups of users. There are "natives" who stick to one platform and one theme, never see another one, and want everything consistent with their choices. And there are "cosmopolitans" who see the app on lots of platforms and want the app to look and behave consistently on both. Guess which class the devs fall in.

You're right: nowhere in the article does it explain what MDN is.

It's the Mozilla Developer Network and it's a site that documents the webs' standards. At the moment, it's the best site for web docs on the web. Hopefully monetisation and corporatisation won't ruin that. (I don't want tutorials, I just want an easy to digest version of the standard along with a link to the standard.)

I actually, thought MDN had been spun off from Mozilla and none of the money would go to help Mozilla. But it appears the spin off is a separate organisation called Open Web Docs, and that:

Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla. Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these additional funds into open source projects contributing to MDN but it is still in early stages.

[Press release]

"Where do you get this idea?"

The article itself:

Looking for all the world like a quadcopter, "these fans are just so much more massive than other Mac fans," said iFixit, "and the heat sink positively dwarfs the M1 Mini with more than six times the weight."

The Ultra version of the Studio is beefier still, thanks to a hulking copper heat sink.

Undoubtedly the CPU and GPU elements contribute a lot of the heat. But I don't care how low power the RAM is: if you put that much in that small a space at the kind of speeds its running then the heats going to build up; regular M1s don't need cooling that epic.

Re: Symlinks are the underlying problem.

You catch me at the exact moment I'm reaching that conclusion - having to sort out a mess that's been caused by symlink spaghetti getting knotted.

Re: It's so nice when I can say

"Linux is all about choice."

Most people don't know enough to make meaningful choices and just want a working computer.

Re: Lightning Protection

Yup, we always had to as kids. I can't remember the last time I did it because, if I'm honest, I've never heard of an aerial being hit and it's just one of those habits I unconsciously fell out of. (Although, if the lightning gets close, I will turn off and unplug my desktop computer - to protect against power surges.)

I'll stick my neck out and say I assume an aerial is only grounded when plugged in. Which would mean, while connected, you can get an upward leader from your aerial to the clouds. But there are probably far more attractive leaders - from trees and aerials higher up the hill.

TL;DR if you're aerial is one of the tallest structures around because you are at the crest of a hill with no nearby trees, then it's probably still worth unplugging it when the flash-thunder interval is under 5s (1 mile).

Re: Actually...

The shared state is in the CPU itself. In this particular example, it's the transition between kernel and user space that's being exploited and having one thread per process wouldn't stop that.

I was going to say something similar. To have merit, the language has to enforce it. If I write function(a:int){...} I want guarantees a is an integer. Comment-type-hints have been discussed on TC39 forums but never got anywhere.

Have they stopped them dispensing notes, as well?

That it's true is what makes it funny...

Re: just make SVG work so I can see graphs

SVG works well in all recent browsers and there should be no problem displaying simple graphs; I use it for much more sophisticated stuff.

The problem is it's an absolute pain to use as a dev due to early design decisions. (For example, `element.r.baseVal.value` and hope that it's using the right units.) They anticipated and solved many of the problems but in doing so made the common use cases complicated, and have been left stranded by recent innovations. And that's before we get to the issue of hand building paths.

But many of the improvements don't lie in the SVG Working Groups remit. (`Path2D` should have a method that returns the path, for example. )

Re: App Store Pricing

$700k? Dream on, for most apps.

That's crackers!

Or, as I call it, hot water crust pastry (minus the baking powder). 10oz flour, 3oz lard, 1/4 pint of milk or water. A pinch of salt. Lard and milk/water brought to the boil and mixed in with flour and then kneaded through. It's left to cool.

That which is not used for the pie will be folded over several times, like puff pastry, to trap air, cut up and cooked as pastry biscuits. To a British audience, they look and taste like cream crackers.

Re: Palladium challenge contest

F1 has now cancelled the Russia GP.

I haven't see the show. But that's the legitimate, bona-fide money-making use case: Hollywood. WMD can only kill. Deepfakes of dead actors can make money, even if people can abuse the tech.