Posts by Loud Speaker 595 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2015
However, if your ISP can disconnect you from your own data, then court orders don't enter into the discussion.
I company I was in some years ago was destroyed because their ISP had lied to its parent company about the volume of business it was doing, and multiplied our debts by 10 (together with those of other customers) to explain where the money had gone. If your cloud floats away, you are toast.
5G?
Laugh, I nearly ... I suspect it is really Tony Hancock that is the minister.
I live in London, and rarely get 5M!
I can see the fibre cabinet from my front door - it is about 5 parking spaces away.
I asked the Openreach guy when he was going to connect me, and he said
"%$£&^ Xpbwg %&$*!!!!!" - a good deal more informative than BT's customer
service.
It was "Strike F1 to continue ..." thus inspiring the (marginally later) variant:
"User error ... Strike user to continue"
which the marketing droids insisted we remove from our software. I am sure it cut down on the support calls, and I seriously doubt it affected sales.
Over the years, I have found that suitably dented, rusty, white vans tend to get plenty of space on the road.
It still amazes me that people try to overtake full sized artics on roundabouts. They can't see anything in the mirrors while turning, and may need at least two lanes to come off. (And occasionally roll over).
There is a very big roundabout quite near me like this. It has an exit from a major industrial artery which is followed immediately by a very sharp single lane exit into an industrial estate. Artics have to enter the roundabout in the outside lane, cross to the inner lane on the roundabout, and then drive almost pass the single lane exit to turn in. Cars and bikes try and pass them on the inside all the time - result: "squelch".
an Allegro - never was there a more mis-named car
No. It was a spelling error. A previous owner had corrected it on mine to "All Aggro"!
It was exactly right - needed a repair every week. However, the week before it was due for an MOT (which it would have failed on almost everything) it was stolen! The thieves must have been really sore!
The significance of the article is: even if they were tiny LEDs under the paving stones, they would consume 100 times the energy produced.
As for the suggestion that you could increase the energy people use to walk by 25% and they not notice: I think the average person would recognise the feeling of wading through treacle or walking across a ploughed field.
Actually, judging by the annoying nature of the communications, I'd say there is a strong need for an acoustic coupler - which was basically a foam filled wooden box to keep the bloody noise in.
As for sending data as audio - I think that was standard practice in the 1880's - it certainly pre-dates Morse and his code. And RTTY is a lot better at sending asynchronous ASCII.
So what happens WHEN (not IF) EVERY lightbulb on the market is "smart," candles are nowhere to be found and they ban lamp oil as a fire risk?
You have obviously not been to a 3rd world country (where nothing works properly, even without the aid of the Internet): People learn to ignore the problems, and just get things done.
The whole point of CISC was to save memory. No, No, a thousand times NO
The whole point of CISC is to save memory bandwidth
The first real CISC was the PDP11 - and you can see it clearly in the instruction set - the object is to fetch as few bytes of instruction from memory and then do as much as possible before you have to do it again! It doesn't matter a toss how fast your instruction cycles are if your CPU is sitting there waiting for the loads and stores to complete so it can fetch another instruction.
Sure you can make the problem harder to identify with gloriously complicated caching and pipelining, but the physics remains the same.
CISC was the winner because main memory is DRAM (slow as hell) while the CPU's internals are static RAM - massively faster - and the communications between them are a serious bottleneck. L1 and L2 cache help - a bit - but "ye cannae break the laws of physics, Captain".
Both factors meant that the CPU was probably kicking its heels whilst the I/O happened, so reading less data and burning the wasted cycles on decompression was a win.
This was, of course, true of Windows up to at least XP.
It was almost certainly not the case with VMS (I used it, but was not familiar with the code). However, Unix was around from before 1978 (when I first met it) and most definitely could do proper DMA transfers and multi-threading of tasks where the hardware permitted. I know: I wrote tape and disk drivers for it (in the 80's).
And I am bloody sure that Alpha assembler could do bit twiddling with little more pain that x86. I have written assembler for both. C compilers might have been less good at it.
The Alpha architecture allows you to write and load microcode routines at run time - so you could implement the bit twiddling instructions yourself and load them when your program loaded. Great for implementing database joins, etc. Of course, you have to know what you are doing to write microcode. This might be the real problem.
If you open the average tablet, you will find stuff made from (approximately) ...
1 cup of desert sand (glass, silicon in the chips)
1 cup of oil (the plastic parts)
Barely enough aluminium and copper to make a thimble from each.
A match-head size lump of other stuff (gold for plating contacts three atoms thick, dopants for silicon, etc)
As far as land-fill goes, they are on a par with a 20p "environmentally friendly" supermarket shopping bag.
And the plastic case can be recycled - although the cost of doing so is probably at least four times the cost (to the environment) of making new plastic.
If you want to do something useful with your life - try to find a way to use old iPads as house construction materials.
If it's just quick sketch type of stuff anything with a big enough screen should do as high quality drawing of Sammy stylus solution is not needed for most uses.
Have you tried one? You can draw schematics and annotate them with values on a Samsung Note phone. You cant do that on the competition. I believe it is a combination of high-res digitiser, and the stylus providing pressure data, but what would I know, I have only used it.
As for using pencil and paper, sure, but with the Note, you have it in digital form, and can dump it to LTO tape for archiving. Probably not useful for a one man carpenter, but if you have 1,000 engineers in the field, its a very different proposition.
It is very nice to be able to send a photo of the circuit to a colleague, and have him sketch the required changes, and send it back - especially if you can do this while on public transport (eg while waiting for a train, not in a bus going over speed bumps :-).
As an ex Samsung user, I can state that none of my family was prepared to buy a phone without a removeable battery and SD card, and we sure as hell wont be buying one with no headphone socket either.
Who cares about thin when they can have battery life and dual SIM? (Now a Huawei user).
[replacing screen in a Nokia 6120 as I write this].
How can ISPs properly account for this?
That is not their job. If I use a bus to get to the train station to take the Eurostar, do I blame British Rail for the slow bus? NO.
However, if the Eurostar somehow only achieves 33MPH all the way to Paris, and they blame it on London Transport, I would expect "questions to be asked".
I think you will find RAM is quite a bit faster than in the days of a PDP8. Did you ever use an 8S?
And self-modifying was actually quite useful in dedicated purpose low power microprocessors. In fact, with FPGAs, we can also have self-modifying hardware.
However, now that the average phone can outperform a Cray, what is worth implementing? One does have to wonder quite where sanity lies!
Personally, I am not going to buy a smart watch till it has a SCSI interface and tape backup. (At the present rate, I expect that to be before 2020).
The UPS in the next room to me has 18 off 12V batteries in series. Given that a 12V battery in good condition is actually 13.6V, it is approx 245V, and not the 12V you describe. The battery pack connects to the rest of it via a 50A fuse.
However, there is a complete absence of lithium, and it has yet to reach the speed of a milk float.
"1 reformat and install the Linux distro of their choice. Or, if they're up to additional work, BSD." Just how I, as an average computer user who spends most of his time in MS Office and a web browser, want to spent a Sunday afternoon.
The average Linux install takes me about 40 mins - on a clapped out old Core 2. BSD can be installed in under 20 mins in most cases.
The problem with BSD is more the learning curve to admin it. However, admin is also the main problem with Linux. Joe User cannot do the admin role. But he can't do it for Windows either.
In reality, some other family member does it, and, increasingly, there are family members who realise it is far easier to admin someone else's Linux machine than someone else's Windows machine. Massively easier.
In the end, that will be what kills Windows.
The Windows XP segment isn't going to shrink very quickly. It clearly consists of users (or applications) that are happy as they are.
They are clearly going to have to disconnect from the Internet to stay happy.
Fortunately, there are no device drivers for the Wifi interface in my XP laptop
Just in case anyone here doesn't know, there are quite often "violent incidents" at carnival, however, the amount of violence is low compared to even ONE cup final. Bear in mind that the attendance is the equivalent of fourty (40) cup finals, the weather is usually hot (unlike at cup finals), and there is nothing else in London to do that is free, is extremely low compared to what would probably be the case with no carnival.
The Police antipathy to carnival has on many occasions been intentionally stirred up by the way the police on the beat are managed: eg (historically) keeping the police in confined spaces without adequate food and drink until after the press have gone home, employing police from areas where there are no black people, issuing them with walkie-talkies that can't connect to the London system, etc.
The police generally tend to act as if anyone who is not wearing a blue uniform is a criminal, especially if black. They also seem to think that because they (the police) are able to coordinate their actions, the carnival goers, most of whom know only a few people there, are able to do the same, and act "in concert". So they assume that if three guys on a street corner have a "barney" then the other million or so people there are somehow involved.
Who polices the police? Do I need to ask?
.gz and the app won't work? Sigh
My SO has a Lenovo - which came with backup software, which was used regularly (though not frequently), as it needed a large bunch of DVDs, which grew and grew - not something to encourage frequent backups.
One day, said Lenovo failed. It was replaced under warranty, and a restore attempted. No luck, same error code every time.
A very long phone call later, the error code was explained: the software will only restore to the original PC the backup was made from. No way to recover the data to another PC, stored in a proprietary format, and encrypted.
Within hours, Linux was installed, and all backups since done with tar to tape, and tapes rotated using GFS, with archives occasionally. Her sister is quite happy to accept the odd DAT72 tape for offsite storage. Hell, she even has an LTO tape of my stuff in her cupboard too. And yes, several files have been recovered more than once since. And now the Lenovo is due for replacement, migrating all of /home/* will be quite painless.
Sometimes, the old tunes are the best.
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