Posts by martinusher

Re: I must be a bit thick

Specifically, what's returned from a C function is whatever is in the processor's accumulator. If you're planning to use a value then return it explicitly. "Original" C had some lexical shortcuts that allowed things like implied 'int' types for function but we're talking really, really, old versions -- Ur-C, if you will. Code needs to be maintainable so it needs to be explicit so that someone can maintain it, often years in the future.

I've always had a sneaking suspicion that a lot of coding problems stem from people not being able to type properly. They'll do literally anything rather than throw a piece of code away and rewrite it. My suspicions are reinforced by the stereotype of someone coding on a laiptop -- those keyboards are "for occasional use only" they're they wrong size and shape for anything other than hunt and peck typing.

Re: ESU only delays landfill.

Its the M$Office. They don't actually need it in all its 365 glory but the C-Suite are very good at laying down directives that everyone else has to cope with.

For day to day stuff Linux "WksGrt". Its easy to set up, easy to work with and so on. The one thing that Linux has never dealt with well is DRM -- licensing. This is what has given Windows the edge time and again, they have ways of stopping computers from doing stuff that vendors desperately need while Linux lacks any kind of closed system licensing enforcement. (It would be easy to add as well.)

One other thing that Linux lacks is locked/immovable disk tracks. This seems to be part of their license management and it has the rather irritating side effect of prematurely aging disks. I don't know how this translates to solid state disks and I don't particularly want to find out because whatever they do it won't be good.

Re: Another frivolous case

There's a medium sized elephant in the room that nobody's talking about.

There' is no such thing as an 'aspiring actress' who's a minor, especially if the person is from another country. There's just no visa category for them. The process for sending children off to the US to go to school -- a legitimate activity -- requires active participation of her parents or guardian and someone to act as 'in loco parentis' to manage the welfare of the student. (The way its done at my wife's school is that the child ends up with a host family who usually has one or more daughters at the school.) Its a bit preposterous to assume that some minor girl is going to be allowed into the country to stay at some random person's place so they could 'aspirigly act' -- the closest our kids would get to showbiz would be the school play.

We live quite close to Hollywood so we know all about the myth of Hollywood. (We also live adjacent to the San Fernado Valley which as most Reg readers won't know is a major hub of porn production.)

Anyway, there's an expectation of a payday....but, seriously, I hope Amazon dukes it out. This sort of thing needs to be discouraged.

Re: In a way it simplifies things

I went the same route. I'd inherited a Laserjet 3300 years ago and it worked perfectly but for one glitch -- if the scanner bulb aged then it would not reset the scanner properly so wouldn't print. This was a bit frustrating since I rarely, if ever, used the scanner and the official HP fix was to replace the entire scanner assembly ($$$$). I did get a replacement bulb for it and essentially dismantled the entire printer around the old one to put it in, that gave me some years extra life, but eventually after a power cut it failed to reset. So out it went. Replaced by some Chinese make that doesn't seem to bother with subscriptions and stuff (I would have changed to a Brother -- had one years ago, it "worked great" but they seem to have swallowed the subscription KoolAid).

The missus, the original owner of the Laserjet, got an HP ink jet. Pile of (expensive) trouble, that thing. I think that I'd rather go back to a fountain pen than buy another HP printer.

The thing is, laser printers have been around since the mid-1980s and they're still fundamentally the same unit as they were 40 years ago**. The amount of intellectual effort that's gone into stuff to make sure it just doesn't work is amazing.

(**Corona Data Systems had one for a PC in the mid-80s.)

Pascal was designed to be a block structured language primarily for teaching. It required just a single pass compiler which was ideal for the university CS departments prior to the universal availability of PCs because the compiler could run on the front end processors belonging to the university mainframe, accommodating numerous students while not impacting routine use of the mainframe. This made the language ideal for implementing on an early PC, the sort of thing that had very little memory (~56K was the norm) and just a floppy disk or two (early disks would have 330KByte capacity only). The COM file restriction would have come from not needing to make a full blown linker/locator.

TP worked far too well. Its still around in some form as Delphi (you'd have to go back many versions to see the resemblance, though).

Re: Unions don’t fight for you

In the US unions also provide the job coherence and benefits that you'd lack working as an individual. This might not register with people in the UK where there's still a vetigal health service and social security net but in the absence of meaningful benefits you need to band together to organize those benefits since as an individual you're relatively powerless. Its the same when you negotiate with an employer -- as an individual your power is limited, as a group you can talk to employers as peers.

The recent SAG/AFtA strike was an example of a union that exists to benefit casual labor since employment is just for a single project and changes to tools and practices were driving wage rates down to unsustainable levels. Its a good example because a star, a name in the business, can employ an agent to negotiate on their behalf, they sell both their skill and their name. The thousands of others in the workforce don't have that power, hence the union.

Re: Honestly....

You've got to believe it. They'll spout all sorts of BS to the customers and workforce but the financial world is one of truth (because if they don't speak the truth then there are invariably consequences). It might be varnished to make it opaque, it might seem too unreal to be true but this is what's driving our businesses, and through it our society.

Its not "short term" either. Its nothing to do with printers, they're just the tool, the vehicle, that drives business. They're monopolizing a space, monetizing it and then defending it from anything that might erode or threaten it.

(This is why people like Elon Musk are given such a hard time. They're destabilizing but they unwilling or unable to join the flow. So they'll be the harmless eccentric, the maverick entrepreneur, the business to take down (take over / short / bankrupt) and then its WAR. I'm not sure if Musk truly understands the forces he's unleashed. One way we can all help is refusing to participate -- have no opinions, take no sides, just leave the capitalists to fight it out among themselves. (Its the same with China, BTW -- they want a piece or at least have the place subservient to their needs, to be the low cost profit generator. If it refuses to behave itself -- submit to the "rules based international order" -- then it is, once again, war. By participating in their war we're effectively fighting against ourselves.)

Re: Actually, I kind of agree with him

>will you please take a hike you transphobic bigoted loudmouth, do the right wing "news" sites not have forums..

????

The whole problem with Musk's interview was that he was being asked questions of the form "When did you stop beating your wife?". Its not journalism, its actually a form of propaganda and its quite transparently so. He got a bit frustrated with this, rose to the bait and provided the media with its "Gotcha" moment.

This type of interview is designed to appeal to people like the writer of the sentence I copied. Its a sign of a successful propaganda campaign when people are trained to have primarily a gut reaction to ideas -- you'll typically find them emphatically in favor or against something without being able to articulate why. That's why you get these streams of invective and short, catchy, names for things. It also doesn't belong in technology and science; one of the characteristics of working in these fields is being able to hold a lot of different, sometimes contradictory, bits of information and make sense of them.

Anyway, someone points this out and gets a stream of nonsensical insults as a response. I suppose I'm "right wing" as well -- actually, I'm not, I belong well to the left of people like Corbyn and Sanders having grown up in an age Where There Was An Alternative. Anyway, I'd suggest stopping and thinking before barraging (downvotes, of course -- off you all go.....sigh......)

Re: Dontcha love the US court system?

The idea of 'taking into consideration' isn't known here.(US)

There seems to be a universal law of engineering support, at least for the consumer / low end. It runs something like "If the person providing support is knowledgeable enough to understand what they're talking about then they'll probably have a higher paid job in engineering proper".

Back in the early 80s I was investigating Production Systems, an early form of "AI" that automates questions and answers, for this purpose. The engineering problem was that if a machine was sufficiently complex to be not easy to understand then part of the design process would be trying to figure out how to make it supportable. Its common practice then as now to just build it, assuming it won't go wrong and if it does need support then its "someone else's problem". The snag with this is that understanding gets replaced by religion, complete with a hierarchy of priests who interpret the sacred books for the masses etc. This can be pretty neat if you're the designer (because you become "god"!) but its actually pretty awful engineering. Designing a machine that's both complex and supportable is far more difficult than just designing a complex machine -- anyone can make things complicated (see Microsoft) but making it accessible.....that's a whole different game.

Re: "the civil aviation sector of terrorist Russia"

Ouch! 66 downvotes and counting merely because you stated something that doesn't fit the propaganda wall.

If I recall correctly there was a four year period where the areas in the east were subject to a rather nasty civil war that killed about 14,000 and displaced an estimate 2 million. This shouldn't have happened because of the initial Minsk agreement but as its been recently stated -- openly, officially -- all this Minsk business was about buying time to build up forces in Ukraine.

Anyway, I'm not here to debate the "SMO" or whatever we want to call it. I'm here, once again, to point out the obvious propaganda tropes that are pushed on us from every direction. Two popular ones demonstrated here are that Putin is a dictator who's population lives in fear of him -- everything is "Putin" etc. This dovetails with exactly the same tropes that are used about China. Both are 100% false and if we -- "the West" -- want to get anywhere interacting with these countries (and a good chunk of the rest of the world) then we've got to recognize that they're not fiefdoms, they're bona fide countries.

As for democracy and as on, you should look to Ukraine as an example of democracy in action. Its essentially a dictatorship, everything is done by decree with all opposition banned (even the Orthodox Church is under attack because its "too Russian"). There are no personal freedoms, conscription is reinforced by a ban on travel if you're a relatively young male. The place was an outstanding example of endemic corruption before the SMO/War/Whatever started and it hasn't improved any since then. But Zelensky is 'our' guy so he's pumped up in the press, feted by our politicians and so on.

This is (I like to believe) a respectable technical journal, not some propaganda broadsheet (we've got plenty of hard news outlets for that). The story is merely that some Ukraine bunch of eavesdroppers think that Russia's civil aviation sector is about to fall out the sky because sanctions have prohibited the sale of spare parts for the planes. Its possible, I suppose. Anyone bother to ask the Russians?

> I don't think there will be many people who want to install W11 on something really ancient and low-powered!

What's meant by 'ancient' and 'low powered'?

The complaint that you constantly hear is that the operating environment is consuming most of the system resources so you have to constantly add resources to keep the system stable as 'upgrades' add to the system even though the actual work you're doing hasn't changed much. The FUD for this is that its all about 'security enhancements' but as we (programmers) all know the problem of continually adding complexity is that it makes it increasingly harder to test and so guarantee that they system is bug free. So the entire system just exists to feed itself. In effect, its a parasite.

Which is why there's a tendency for people to go "Oh sod it -- I'm just going to use Linux". Which explains why the pressure is on the C-Suite to mandate Windows and Nothing But Windows. But for those of us who need to get work done......

Re: USB

Two common ways of providing USB support on a product are to use the hardware and driver stack provided by the device (microcontroller) manufacturer or to include a FTDI chip that turns the USB port into a serial port.

Re: I would have retained the original names

After about the 100th reading it loses its amusement/shock value.

Re: lore

All those parentheses is not that much of an issue with modern editors. However, one early version of microcomputer LISP (Old enough to be built for CP/M) hit on the idea of using the square bracket - ']' -- as a "close everything parenthesis". It was useful and really just a typing shortcut, it didn't alter the syntax of the language.

BTW -- My problem with LISP is that I can never think of anything to do with it. I'm also aware that all this list processing involves indirect references, something that's 'mostly harmless' for older computer systems where the memory speed is similar to the processor clock, but awkward with modern processors. But then most of my work's been with real time / embedded systems where elegance of the top level code takes a back seat to determinism and efficiency. (The idea of "Embedded LISP" -- possible.....but seriously?)

Re: Kill it with fire

That just proves who's got the better salespeople.

>various people have created ternary computers

What's that got to do whether the idea is patentable or not? All you have to do is file it and let the system do the rest. (Depending on where you live you can always amend the application to include any ideas that might broaden its scope).

The next stage in the game is wait for a Big Tech to use something like it. You could sue them but what you do is typically hand the thing off to specialists who are financed by investors -- often hedge funds these days -- who work for a percentage (most) of the take.

(ElReg missed a good story a week or two back when there was the annual conference of the patent troll industry -- yes, it is an industry, that's what they call themselves -- down on the Gulf Coast.)

Re: Stating the obvious

...and there's the fine print.

The phrase "greater safety than a person" is important. People make mistakes driving all the time resulting in accidents that cause damage, injury and death. We lose literally tens of thousands of people to auto accidents every year. Anything a vehicle can do to reduce this toll is welcome but the criteria we use to judge machines is obviously far more strict than that we use to judge people, I suspect just because "Musk" is involved (who personally designed the entire vehicle range and all its systems?).

The real problem with Tesla cars is that they're really expensive to fix, even after a minor fender bender. A relatively minor accident can write off the entire vehicle even though the vehicles should be simpler to build and so cheaper to fix.

BTW -- I'm not a Tesla fanboi, I don't own one, don't own Tesla stock or anything like that. I am an engineer, though, so I recognize what they're trying to do and I don't react emotionally to whatever their CEO is up to this week. (In the "anti-semite" stakes Musk is a non-starter compared to someone like Henry Ford -- he was not only an open antisemite but he fired members of his workforce who were Jews back in the 1920s. Musk, as far as I can tell, has just stated some "inconvenient truths". Details....details.....)

I read a year or two ago that Google's AI researchers had used AI to quickly determine a protein molecule's shape, something that's usually a tedious trial and error process that can take many months. Once you have the structure then its (apparently) quite straightforward to build something that can manipulate it.

Now, I wonder if AI can manage what we know as "unintended consequences"?

Re: It was a DSP

You'd be insane to use a TI DSP of any family for general purpose computing. Its not what they're sold for. I'm used to the 28C family, the ones used for motor and power control. Although some of he newer ones feature ARM cores the original ones have a really naff 16 bit processor (and to make it more of an acquired taste it was a true 16 bit machine, no byte support). This wasn't so important, though, because the parts were all a collection of highly specialized, very efficient intelligent peripherals that needed the processor to set everything up and monitor the system's operation.

A general purpose processor could probably do just as well but not at TI's price point.

Re: This, coupled with YouTube's recent blitz

If youTube's recent changes are anything to go by "prepare for chaos". A couple of weeks ago I started getting "you have to turn your adblocker off to view videos" notices. On a Chromebook that was not running any Chrome extensions at all. Initially I could fool this by pretending to turn the (non-existent) adblocker off but a week later it had turned into a countdown, "you can watch three -- no two -- more videos", that sort of thing.

Its become more muted in the last few days but, seriously, it looks as if Google has lost it. They are churning out code that is obviously not tested using tenuous algorithms to detect stuff that's not there (while failing to detect stuff that is). Essentially wasting cycles and space on my system to show me advertisements that I'm not interested in because their Adsense code is quite obviously Nonsense. I'm skeptical of the entire Internet advertising ecosystem anyway -- its like a huge Ponzi scheme of belief where nobody questions it because one tremor or breeze is likely to bring the entire house of cards down -- but this has convinced me that the players really haven't a clue what they're doing, they just think they do.

If you stop and think a bit you'd realize that "Taiwan" is effectively part of China, its not really an island populated by foreigners but an island populated by Chinese, and Korea is in the same neighborhood and shares a lot of culture and history with China. So the idea that Taiwan and Korea could develop something while China couldn't is, frankly, ludicrous.

All we are doing with our sanctions and entity lists is disturbing the normal flow of commerce. It will mess the Chinese around a bit but since the regime has been imposed on them it gives them a national focus, a sense of purpose. It also deprives us of valuable markets. Since the goal of the BIS is to "keep China five years behind" then it won't affect their military capability one bit (you don't build weapons with unproven technology, you use mature technology.....assuming you want the stuff to work). Ultimately all we're going to do is turn our customers into our competitors. Smart move.

Re: Seems mean...

Its not really Brownomics because -- surprise! -- exactly the same thing happened here in the US. Companies like those pension pots but hate the long term liability they represent.

Its not just a Microsoft problem. Its actually a 'programmer' problem.

I've worked with numerous programmer groups over decades and one thing they all had in common was an inflated idea of their own capability and general disdain for everyone else. They were always obsessed with "the latest", invariably over promised and under delivered ("Phase One" being a common concept) and they always had the lion's share of resources and all too often the management's ear. Us engineers really didn't get a look in -- we were very much an afterthought, mainly because the requirements of embedded work meant we had to perform all sorts of tests on our work, including actively looking for faults (...and we couldn't just blame things on bad compilers, bad OSes and so on -- stuff just has to work**).

I'd like to think I was just unlucky but I suspect that this systemic arrogance may be a hallmark of the trade. It certainly explains why releases of Windows are so exciting -- you really have no idea what's not going to work after each update. (Linux tends to be more reliable partly because its modular and partly because its built using a more 'embedded' mindset. The Linux community also tends to reject complicated Windows-y "its going to be wonderful, eventually" code because any new stuff has to demonstrate visible progress over what it purports to replace. With Windows you don't get the choice -- you get what you're given and if you don't like it, tough.)

(**I've made a pretty good living rescuing embedded projects that had got 'programmered'. Generally the kind of complexity and good intentions that characterize convoluted user code cause project failure in the embedded world. You'd be amazed at how complex people can make fundamentally non-functional code!)

Re: Xitter has problems policing hate speech ?

>If I post one antisemitic and one Islamophobic tweet, do they cancel out ?

Interesting concept. Unfortunately in today's world where words tend to have rather flexible meanings you never know what you'll get labeled with. For example, 'anti-semetic' according to many means "any criticism of Israel or Zionism". In some European countries this even has the force of law behind it -- you can literally get convicted of a crime for expressive an opinion. The 'arabs' (a bid tent, literally) have taken a leaf out of the Zionist's book and are countering in kind so now you've got to be careful what you say to avoid treating on two sets of toes.

Some would say "Let 'er rip and let the chips fall where they may". Its a very American concept which is why Musk subscribes to it. I actually agree with him -- not necessarily his opinions, of course -- but I do believe people have the right to say what they think with just the one caveat that they have to own what they say.

Re: pluralities

Probably as novel as 90% of patents (especially 'software' patents).

The significance of this is that it is a public assertion that China has patents, too. Lots of them. We're so used to the line that they 'steal our IP' that we might need reminding from time to time who's IP we're talking about.

The American justice system doesn't work like that. They'll bust him for something even if its merely "looking at me in a funny way". What they usually do is overcharge -- they pile on the charges with the penalties mounting up consecutively until the miscreant (victim?) is looking at huge amounts of jail time. This is used as leverage to get the person to plead guilty in a plea deal. Assange will get busted for something -- anything -- because if he's not then a whole bunch of prosecutors need to justify the time and resources spent on this person.

Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

University degrees are not vocational qualifications. We were told this when I started my engineering degree -- the degree gives you the tools and background to learn and you learn by working hands on for a few years.

So as far as graduates go, there's a big difference between "I aced my coursework" and "I got by -- just -- because I was messing with stuff all the time".