Posts by Warm Braw

Re: You've got mail

With Eudora, it was literally something to crow over and you even got an audible cue when there was NO mail...

My experience of "enterprise" software suggests that the most effective tactic might be to offer it free to anyone willing to install it.

Re: ..without using his network tech

Why did the auto/truck industry invent their own thing

CAN bus goes back to 1983 before Ethernet was an obvious universal standard. It also has some characteristics that make it more robust in an automotive environment.

The bus arbitration works rather differently. In Ethernet, the sending station listens to its transmitted frame to check whether it has been stomped on by another station transmitting simultaneously and randomly backs off is so. With CAN, the potential transmitters are synchronised and the frame begins with a (unique) ID. If several nodes transmit simultaneously, they continue to emit ID bits until the transmitting node with the lowest ID is determined and that node gets to send the rest of its message without everyone having to delay and retry. That gives you a priority mechanism - low IDs get to grab the bus ahead of high IDs - that's intrinsic in the bus and doesn't require back-offs or an intelligent switch to reorder packets.

Re: has anyone told those that are building the line?

Oxford-Bedford will likely get built/upgraded. Beyond Bedford seems unlikely at present. Rail services in general are more likely to be cut. Welcome to Austerity++.

Re: "I can't go out today and license a RISC-V core,"

they're really not interested in open source

The Pi originally shipped with a huge binary blob containing Broadcom proprietary code. The size of that blob and the amount of closed-source code diminished over time.

The Pi team will have to speak for their own motives, but it seems to me a crucial part of the Pi's success has been in getting the price right and if that meant some foot-dragging on fully-open licensing that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable trade-off.

I wonder if Nodding Doris knows that a different arm of her own government is intent on preventing people being able to challenge the malign effects of rogue algorithms.

But presumably those particular malign effects feed back into party coffers.

Re: Why would anyone…?

Personally, I just leave everything in the sink. It's much greener. Considerably greener than it was a couple of years back, certainly.

Re: Fines? Fine.

Except that there are often multiple cases. If you believe your IP is being infringed, a common remedy is to bring an action in a country where the disputed products are being sold to prevent their being imported. You might want to do that in a number of markets. If every time you try it a court in China issues you with a legal order to desist until the patent validity has been determined by a Chinese court then the fines will soon mount up.

And if they were not a deterrent, they would soon be raised to a level at which they would be.

Re: Everything is a paid for extra

Can't find any evidence regarding bandwidth, but the following seems to apply to users:

The SonicWall SMA and SRA appliances are licensed for a specified number of concurrent devices / connections, but you can expand this by purchasing additional users

Source.

Re: New this would happen

I only got £10! I now feel undervalued. I wonder how that's factored into their retention algorithm.

all binary files should have a specification which mandates the use of a magic number

That's also a bit of an anachronism now that most file systems are capable of storing arbitrary metadata: we just need some consensus about how to use it.

Re: four gigabytes

I have an elderly Dell Mini-10, which scores high on portability, but only has 2GB of memory. It will run Linux adequately - including support for the TV tuner and MPEG-2 "accelerator" card and would probably run it better with an SSD. However, it struggles with much in the way of web browsing owing to the memory constraint, so Chrome is actively contra-indicated I suspect.

Re: This is one of the reasons

I do wonder why people keep describing it as a 'walled garden' when the razor wire and machine gun emplacements have been visible for so long.

Re: Anyone got an popcorn ?

Actually, there seem to have been first Gazette notices for compulsory strike-off in both August and December 2021, both of which were discontinued shortly afterwards. A notice was filed yesterday reporting the termination of a director appointment back in August of last year and a filing changing the registered office address is dated today. That seems more like there's an intention to keep it going.

Which is interesting, because if this is their website (it doesn't have a company registration number or address or phone number), all that phoning around netted them only 163 "happy clients".

Re: A timely reminder

In fact, a significant chunk of the NHS has always been run by private businesses. Pharmacies are private businesses, as are (most) GP surgeries and dentists. The issue is making sure the private interests are subservient to the public interest.

Re: history lessons

It's interesting that Unix was a direct counterblast to Multics (hence the name) and in terms of having a "language alongside" they both developed on very similar paths - in the case of Multics the language was (roughly) PL/I. There's some very interesting stuff here about the bootstrapping processes for the compiler.

I've not tried writing serious Rust code in anger, but my initial impression is that is falls between two stools: on the one hand it's trying to have many of the features of LISP or JVM/.Net languages, but without the convenience that comes from the managed environment and garbage collection, and on the other it doesn't directly have the language constructs for dealing with hardware directly. That doesn't mean you can't extend its capability in either direction with macros and compiler directives buried in carefully-crafted crates - but at the cost of a very steep learning curve. I don't see that it makes simple things better or hard things easier.

Re: Lingo / Wordle

I think it started in the US. There were a number of versions in different countries. I remember watching the Dutch version in the '90s. They managed to keep it going for 25 years and then revive it, so perhaps there's time for the NYT to get its money back.

Don't people need to do more...

The laptop I'm using at this moment is probably inferior to currrent Chromebooks but it's quite adequate for routine software development, circuit design, communications, administration and even some light video editing. However, it struggles once you start opening a lot of web browser tabs.

I don't have a Chromebook, but I suspect this may be the flaw: running the front end of your applications in JavaScript on top of a complicated and unwieldy document object model that wasn't really designed for UIs means that in reality you need better hardware than if you're primarily running your applications natively. I suspect the lower margins for Chromebooks are inevitable because of this.

And that's before you start weighing the limitations and inflexibility against whatever the advantages are supposed to be.

Re: Missing options

A repeated announcement of "mind the sap".

I suppose it was inevitable that would get posted before any other comments had been made.

Re: Wonderful!

The Hercules simulator has been around for a while (though it simulates S/370 and later, not S/360). However, since S/370 is a superset of S/360 it will boot both MVT as well as MVS along with a selection of other IBM OSs.

There's a list of available operating systems here and a list of the compilers for MVS, MVT and others here.

Re: Polkit

The basic problem here is that there is a historic all or nothing privilege system and the mitigations for that (like polkit) involve running significant chunks of code in an elevated privilege context in which any error is potentially very serious.

A long-standing bug with similar consequences was found in sudo.

I don't think RedHat is responsible for a fundamental design error made in the 1970s - or possibly earlier.

Re: £58,207 annually for someone based in London

I was getting something approaching this 15 years ago working as a developer (albeit senior) in the public sector in London.

However, think how much you'll be able to earn when you quit the job after twelve months and get to pick and choose which of the exciting portfolio of companies makes you the best offer.

Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

I wouldn't normally defend the use of Excel for anything that you couldn't otherwise do on squared paper*, but there is an argument to be made in this case.

Often, the biggest issue with exercises of this kind is determining whether the data you want actually exists, whether the responsible people are capable of collecting it and whether you can learn anything useful from the data when they do.

It may well be worth finding the cheapest possible solution for collecting trial data before you build an elaborate system to collect information that doesn't exist or isn't comparable across different locations.

*Though I suspect some may struggle even with that.

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

Actually, it is, in the sense that IPv4 can be carried through an IPv6 network without any loss of information. The optimistic assumption was that the backbone would convert to IPv6, and then the hosts, using IPv4 addresses before the IPv4 address space ran out. At which point, IPv6 addresses could be assigned to new hosts.

The flaw in this reasoning is that the protocol designers didn't operate the networks and hadn't accounted for the inertia resulting from not wanting to invest in change when it wasn't immediately necessary.

I was never a particular fan of IPv6 technically - and it's increasingly behind the times - but it works. I was always concerned about the likelihood of the transition not happening in line with its designers' optimism and that considerably more needed to be done on the presumption of long-term coexistence. The trouble is we're now running out of kludges, especially for things like push notifications and always-on devices, and they're become significantly more painful than simply moving to IPv6 for all its problematic legacy.