* Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

3265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011

AWS works on 'urgent' deals for UK customers as £ dips against $

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Re: Balance of trade

If the vote had been a list of approaches (remain, Norway-style deal, complete withdrawal reliant on WTO rules, etc..), remain would have won, hands down. Now we have a slender majority for leave, but no clear majority for any type of relationship with the EU. This is going to be fun.

A bad day for DBAs: MIT boffins are replacing you with a mere spreadsheet

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Re: More automatically generated SQL

That's why we all still program assembly: computers can't be trusted to generate code efficiently.

(Where's the can of worms icon?)

Space prang of cosmic proportions blamed for giving Mars its moons

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I wouldn't depend on JAXA...

...they're making rocket science look every bit as hard as it is.

I say this as a member of the nation that built Beagle 2.

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Re: Are we doomed?

"What are the chances/"

The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one. But they still come.

Chap fails to quash 'shared password' 'hacking' conviction

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I guess the analogous situation is handing a key to someone you know to be a burglar.

'Digital influencers' must disclose paid-for content, says new guidance

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In its guidance...it warned that [a report that is] "not based on a genuine user experience" or "displays elements of bias without appropriate disclosure"...can....mislead consumers into "taking decisions … they would not otherwise have taken"

So that's the tabloid press and Brexit, then.

Not your Imagination: Britain’s other chip giant posts biggest ever loss

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Re: going, going...

Yes, but they get to purchase just the IP they want without having to pay staff redundancies, fill any hole in the pension scheme, pay off creditors and purchase IP nobody wants (*cough* MIPS *cough*). Maybe they have to outbid a few rivals, but they can afford it, and it will still be cheaper than purchasing the IP plus all that "dead" weight. (With apologies to those Imagination staff I know.)

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

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Re: what about RPi?

I know, I know. In these busy days we can't be expected to read an article; all the salient information must be there in the headline.

Prominent Brit law firm instructed to block Brexit Article 50 trigger

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Re: And the house of lords?

"The EU laws are decided upon and drawn up by an unelected council. "

Being "unelected" is not a synonym for "lacking democratic legitimacy".

The European commission is appointed by elected governments and approved by the European parliament. So you have two ways to influence it. And this has parallels in both the UK and the US. In the US, the whole "cabinet" is unelected - appointed by the elected head of state. And the British government can appoint ministers by making them members of the House of Lords.

And while, yes, only the Commission can initiate legislation, the European parliament can ask the Commission to draft legislation as, apparently, can we - if we can get a million signatures on a petition. This was decided upon to stop the kind of chaos you see in the US where both houses start bills and then fight over whose bill gets through.

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Re: Bollocks

Right or wrong, the process could be tied up in litigation for years.

Mystery black hole hides by curbing its appetite

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Re: missing mass (or at least some portion thereof) found?

Here's one example of someone doing some maths. It says a black hole population of 20-100 solar masses isnt ruled out by observation evidence.

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How come this article didn't once mentioned the phrase Roche lobe overflow. It's even in the paper. Come on, my entire existence is devoted to hearing the words Roche lobe overflow.

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Re: missing mass (or at least some portion thereof) found?

The LIGO results have made us take that idea a lot more seriously. But the type of system described here is almost certainly a normal astrophysical system, because it's paired with an ordinary star and because the black hole is too light to be primordial. (We have observational evidence that primordial black holes can't be "light" -- IIRC, under 20-30 solar masses.)

Man killed in gruesome Tesla autopilot crash was saved by his car's software weeks earlier

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Re: er: White truck, white sky

@sabroni On the radio this morning, Noel Sharkey said the Tesla has both radar and ultrasound, but that they point down and would have missed the trailer because it was so high. He was pretty critical of the Tesla having such holes in its sensor coverage and said another, German manufacturer has complete coverage.

What Brexit means for you as a motorist

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Ah, yes, as my old epistemology professor used to say, "an 'actual fact' is any statement proving I was right to vote Brexit."

Unfortunately, there are no facts about the future---there are only facts about the past---that's what makes the future "the future"; all we can do is guess the likelihood of events happening. We may, for example, presume the sun will rise tomorrow, but if a rogue black hole passed through it overnight, there'd be a supernova before dawn.1

So, if you have already decided the probably of things improving equals the probability of them getting worse, then, indeed there is nothing here to learn. But if you want to open your mind to the range of options that might occur and the probability of them occurring, then the article and the ensuing discussion have been delightfully informative.

1: To zeroth order a supernova is a black hole appearing in the middle of a star. A blackhole plunging into a main sequence star would produce similar effect: a massive influx of material, heating it up to ignition point and creating an explosion that rips apart the star.

Gone

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Re: Is it any wonder IBM are going extinct if this is their math ability?

I suspect it should be exponentiation: 25.4747*pow((18-10.2),1.81) gives ~1049.

Incidentally, what calculator are you using? I copy and pasted 25.4747*(18-10.2)*1.81 into a console and got 359.6518146 (At any rate, it should be an exact result with no more than 7 decimals since it's multiplication of rationals.)

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Me too. But then the whole competition thing is very hierarchical and I don't need to prove myself.

UK digi strategy on ice post Brexit results - sources

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Re: @Doctor Syntax

"The odd thing is that in these here parts (S.West) most farmers seemed to vote leave"

I do feel sorry for the poor dears: having to spend all that time filling in forms and complying with the bureaucracy in order to get their EU handout.

Sarcasm aside, 43% of EU law is focused on agriculture and the environment. I imagine it is quite onerous. But if that changes post-Brexit then animal welfare will decrease, our food will be less safe and the environment will be more polluted.

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Re: In a few years agricultural land could be a goldmine

"In a few years time there may be no one prepared to pick the crops."

The year after that everybody on JSA is called to a work-focused meeting. They are then told to get on a coach and go pick crops or be sanctioned. Et voila, our transformation into Victorian England is complete.

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Re: With the £ sliding and the FTSE down

Price rises depend on how much hedging the trader has in place. For example, an article in El Graun said fashion retailers probably wouldn't be affected until Spring/Summer next year.

Basically, the UK economy is going to slowly deflate.

Tor onion hardening will be tear-inducing for feds

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Re: Hopeless...

I looked up the definition of "Turing machine". Security isn't mentioned.

Translation: I think this means Alan Turing is responsible for all computer security problems because, as we all know, you can't bolt security onto a working project; it has to be built in from the start.

Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me?

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Re: Suspenders?

According to God's own dictionary, a garter is "a band warn around the leg to keep up a stocking or sock. ■ N. Amer. A suspender for a sock or stocking." While a suspender is defined as, "Brit. an elastic strap attached to a belt or garter, fastened to the top of a stocking to hold it up. 2. (suspenders) N. Amer. a pair of braces for holding up trousers."

That's almost as transparent as 200 denier black stockings. But I think we have garters and suspender belts. But you uncivilised rogues don't know what a garter is and call suspender belts garters. I may be wrong as I wear, um, tights...

Laser probers sniff more gravitational waves from mega black hole smash

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Re: Dark matter

Yes, but primordial black holes could be created during inflation. And for us to have overlooked them, they'd need masses in the range 20-100M. (For reference, the upper limit for stellar processes is around 30M.)

Friends with benefits: A taxing problem for Ireland in a post-Brexit world

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"...that the cherished British tradition of reasoned argument and respect for one's opponents seems to have gone out of the window. How British is that?"

About as British as a broken bottle in a bar room brawl.

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Re: "reject the referendum result"

"Once the result is in, whatever it is, that's a big chunk of uncertainty removed."

If we vote "stay", then the uncertainty goes. But if we vote "leave", then it's 2 - 10 years more uncertainty as we negotiate the divorce.

Lester Haines: RIP

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El Reg simply will not be the same.

Judge slams BT for blaming engineer after 7 metre ceiling plunge

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Re: Very weird

@Roland6

Agreed. Pretty much the only new information is that a jury of our peers found BT guilty. Otherwise we know no more than before it started.

Microsoft's paid $60 per LinkedIn user – and it's a bargain, because we're mugs

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"But unless we start acting rationally..."

Have you met the human race?

Microsoft buys LinkedIn for the price of 36 Instagrams

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Re: Medusa Was A Mere Dilettante

"...and then sells them off for the price of the Carthage."

RIP ROP: Intel's cunning plot to kill stack-hopping exploits at CPU level

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There's a XKCD for this, but I can't be bothered to find it.

"This is perhaps the one industry where everyone expects you to deliver a unicorn by yesterday and make the demand with a straight face."

Look, you have a working horse. How much harder can it be to add one little horn? It doesn't have to have a spiral or anything; a plain horn is fine. Just get me a unicorn and be a bit more positive about it.

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Re: System + User Stacks

I'm too young to have programmed a PDP-11. (*flutters eyes attractively* - hey, eyelashes are one of the things don't sag with age.) But I'm talking about two stack pointers accessible simultaneously via their own dedicated instructions: PSHS, PSHU, PULS, PULU. We're not talking about a stack in SMM mode or kernel mode that the CPU switches to on an interrupt or at the call gate. Imagine if AMD had introduced rsp2 and push2 and pop2 instructions to go with it.

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Re: Gradual retreat of the von Neumann machine...

Or back to a code segment, a data segment, and a stack segment. And because different index registers defaulted to different segments, you tended to stick with it. The thing was, we all hated it. Ideally you had all four segments pointing at one 64K window (a .com file). Otherwise, it was lots of jiggery pokery. The 386 was a breath of fresh air because you could use a flat memory model. But as I understand, it permissions were attached to the segment, hence the need for the NX bit on the page table.

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"To summarise, if you had wanted to introduce this feature about 40 years ago, it would have been trivial and (quite probably) implemented purely as a compiler code-gen strategy."

All hail the 6809 and its two stacks: the "system" stack and the "user" stack. Great for forth (the computation stack and the return stack) but useless for much else. It did function as a useful extra index register. though.

Get ready for Google's proprietary Android. It's coming – analyst

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My memory of the case was that the court said APIs are copyrightable in principle, but it could nevertheless be fair use to use them, and chucked it back to the lower court to decide. The lower court has now said, "Yup, it was fair use" and the senior court will have to decide whether that decision was sound. But just because the appeal court agreed with Oracle the first time, it's a mistake to think they will agree a second.

Firefox 48 beta brings 'largest change ever' thanks to 'Electrolysis'

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Coat

A bigger hole is needed.

It's okay downvoters, I was only joking. I know that Windows 10 really takes 20 hours to install, not 20 minutes.

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Joke

Re: At last

Are you sure that wasn't a Windows 10 install?

Oracle to sue cloud sales 'whistleblower' for 'malicious prosecution'

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Deserves more upvotes.

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Re: Classic tactic

And more bluntly: intimidate.

Jaxa's litany of errors spun Hitomi to pieces

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Escape? In our moment of triumph?

Hitomi worked within design parameters until an error lead to them exceeding those parameters.

And however small the risk of a torpedo up the jaxi, the consequences for the death star were catastrophic. (And they had the father of the space wizard on their side so they full knew what was possible.) So maybe, just maybe, they should have provided some mitigation: something that might have limited it to explosions in the interior and a loss of power rather than the destruction of the entire station. Or, if the reactor really was that dangerous, maybe they shouldn't have put it at the centre of the bloody station. Maybe they should have put it on a nacelle.

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Re: So-

They subcontracted to the same company that built the Deathstar.

Planet 9 a captured alien, astroboffins suggest

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MikeBrownFacts

Mike Brown an create a planet by merely saying, "It exists".

Want a Brexit? Promise you'll sort out UK universities' £1bn research cash loss

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Re: The answer is...

I'm not good at creating wealth. But I'm really good at creating losses. Huge fucking losses. Can I still comment?

Catz: Google's Android hurt Oracle's Java business

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Aha, an isonomikos!

Is the supply of lawyers in the universe held constant, then?

UK needs comp sci grads, so why isn't it hiring them?

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@AndrueC

Most people can bash out "chopsticks" on a piano. Few people can play Rachmaninov. Same with coding, I think.

Disclaimer: I have ZERO qualifications in Comp.Sci

Inter-bank system SWIFT on security? User manual needs 'revamp’

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Alert

As I've said before, we really need an icon for "We need an icon for..."

Work begins on Russian rival to Android

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Joke

Re: Building a more secure system than Android shouldn't be hard

Since that burglary in the street last week, we've all learnt that locks are no longer able to securely defend our homes. So we have all done away with locks on all windows and doors.

Blocking ads? Smaller digital publishers are smacked the hardest

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We need a cultural shift towards paying for stuff.

I suspect we'll be adding advertisements to our app shortly because desktop sales are sinking and, despite a six-figure user count, not enough people are upgrading from the free mobile version. Initially, the advertising will be a stick to push you towards the paid version. But if the advertising revenues look solid we'll move more of the content to the free version -- on the assumption the more content we provide, the more people will use it, and the better advertising revenues will be. As I say in the title, if you don't want advertising, you need to start paying for stuff.

And I'll hold my hands up and say I'm as guilty as the rest of you of not sticking my hand in my pocket. And yes, I run ad blocking in the browser.

A UK-wide fibre broadband investment plan? Don't ask awkward questions

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Re: Well you say that

Have you checked you don't live in a Baba Yaga hut?

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All your points are valid. But why should a private company care about any of that?

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Trollface

This complicated, expensive, time-consuming problem MUST have a simple solution.

But, waaa, I want faster broadband! And, waaa, it should be easy - it's just idiots laying cables! And, waaa, I want somebody else to pay! And, waaa, a commercial organisation shouldn't be maximising shareholder returns, they should be maximising my quality of porn!