Re: This is a real problem....
Think of it as a gift .....
Posts by Blue Pumpkin
121 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007
We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem
Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland
Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot
How do you teach a robot dog new tricks? Throw it a string of hex, a crayon, and a canvas
New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT
Thursday 28th December 2023 22:42 GMT 
They just missed a trick
.. to invent the AI bot subscription at a cost of a few million $ per year.
Would bring them more money than paying the lawyers for what will no doubt be perceived as detrimental in the long run.
I mean, does the NYT actively not want to have any influence over the future ? Or prefer to leave it to the likes of antisocial media ?
Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come
Tuesday 19th December 2023 21:08 GMT
Re: Vasa Syndrome
And the museum is fabulous and an unmissable visit when in Stockholm .... https://www.vasamuseet.se/en
Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI
Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers
Monday 11th December 2023 18:55 GMT 
DoomOps was done a long time ago ...
But was generally not good for the server : Doom as a tool for system administration
Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor
HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'
Thursday 7th December 2023 21:17 GMT
Re: My Mum caught me on Tuesday night
There comes a point in time when you have to announce to people that their technology has gone to the other side and they have no choice but to renew. Even if it's not quite true, but just to keep your sanity ...
If only it were equally simple with central heating ....
Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec
Thursday 7th December 2023 21:02 GMT
Re: Chromebooks sell to education...
Outlook is available on the Mac.
And it's an even bigger piece of crap than the Windows version, despite having been around for over 15 years ... so I wouldn't get your hopes up.
Thankfully Microsoft does (or did) a version of Office without Outlook that they charge less for ...
Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC
Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections
Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids
Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93
Tuesday 24th October 2023 21:06 GMT
Re: $2 million. The struggle was worth it.
Sure, they want to run a business like lots of other people.
But being shat on by bigger unrestrained monopolistic companies with can make that difficult.
Was software patenting the right way to go ? Probably not, but what other effective avenues were available ?
The patent world of the 60s is not the patent world of today.
French IT behemoth Atos facing calls for nationalization as it tries to restructure
It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde
Tuesday 24th October 2023 20:25 GMT
Re: 3 experiences with Concorde
As a kid I remember the Concorde maiden flight from Tolouse. Followed not much later by the humungous - at the time - launch of the 747. It was a great time for planes :-)
There is also a Concorde at the Seattle Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, that you can walk through. And as you say it's tiny. In addition there is also a walk through of a previous version of Air Force One - maybe 707 based - I don't remember - someone will tell me.
All in all a great place to go - a whole day will not be enough.
And if you're there, the visit to Boeing at Everett is just awesome, a cathedral of engineering prowess.
Though I guess there are no more 747s
CERN swaps out databases to feed its petabyte-a-day habit
From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?
Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'
Friday 11th August 2023 10:02 GMT
Re: I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom
Tastefully decked out with demotivational posters from despair.com …..
On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs
Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal
Unidentified object on Australian beach may be part of Indian rocket launcher
Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris
Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday
AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots
Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology
Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads
Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes
Thursday 20th April 2023 22:22 GMT
Crazy, the distance is ~650km.
A current high speed train could do that in 3 hours - competitive with the plane given all the faffing around at airports as you point out.
And with a much higher density of around 800 to 1000 passengers per train.
And a much higher frequency - you can do at least 4 trains per hour if not more.
Not forgetting the added bonus of not being in a plane.
However, an overnight sleeper does have its charms, though usually at a price.
LLaMA drama as Meta's mega language model leaks
Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday
Saturday 21st January 2023 21:51 GMT
Re: ICL / Three Rivers PERQ
Ha ! I remember those - I was an undergrad there at the time.
They turned up from the Science Research Council (before Engineering crept in) and were followed by a couple Sun-1 workstations and a Sirius PC.
I think they were originally billed as Smalltalk machines though I am not sure how they ended up after ICL got to them. Though it could be that the Computer Science department wanted them for other stuff than other users …
Saturday 21st January 2023 21:31 GMT
Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?
The 68000 is just a more-or-less revamped PDP-11, though this is not to belittle it, as the PDP-11 is one of the greatest (if not the greatest) CPU designs ever IMHO.
The 68000 hit the streets in 1981/2 which was already behind Intel’s 8086/8 which had started coming on stream at the end of the 70’s and were therefore more widespread.
It’s a shame, as the Intel legacy has been, and continues to be, such a millstone that nobody can get rid of. Intel tried twice, once with iAXP32 and the again with Itanium. Both failed miserably having cost huge amounts.
Worse still the i86 family didn’t get any better until the 386. The 186 was the all in one system on a chip that should have been the obvious choice for building PCs, but it was as flawed as the 286 which IBM did use in its PC-AT. It’s virtual memory model was broken and only fixed to become usable in the 386 - the days of memory extenders were finally over.
But by that time the software investment was too great to switch - only the non MS world could take advantage of better processors or build their own - Apple, Apollo, Sun, Stratus, Tandem, Perq to name but a few, now all fallen by the wayside.
Although the 68000 did have a proper virtual memory co-chip its arrival was too late to stem the wave of the IBM PC and its clones.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions …
You can hook your MIDI keyboard up to a website with Firefox 108
More and more CS students are interested in AI – and there aren't enough lecturers
Friday 8th July 2022 20:22 GMT
Re: more CS students are interested in AI
Proper computer science is just a specialised branch of maths :-)
The Donald showed us that.
Do students still study things like Taylor series and numerical and operational analysis, or have we consigned them to ‘just include this library’ ?
However, maths is not enough if you actually want to build a computer as engineering ≠ maths.
The wild world of non-C operating systems
Tuesday 29th March 2022 20:37 GMT
Re: Jupiter ACE
A fully fledged FORTH implementation does everything including its own disk I/O.
I wrote a FORTH interpreter/compiler whatever you call it for the 8086 in assembler and it came in at under 8KB - which at the time was a big plus when memory was more expensive than programmers.
FORTH - quirky definitely, elegant yes in lots of places, but maintainable, usable .... not so sure :)
An open-source COBOL contender emerges
Thursday 17th March 2022 21:28 GMT
Re: "COBOL-2002, which introduced object oriented programming"
You don't need object oriented FORTRAN, or ever will .... as we knew in 1982
You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual
Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register
Saturday 10th July 2021 22:11 GMT
Re: Or...
"The market for this was big enough that several companies were making dedicated versions of this chip with the Basic interpreter masked into ROM on the chip itself...."
Hey that was me - for one of them at least !
Cramming a Tiny BASIC interpreter coded into 4K of ROM on an 8051 in 1982. Took me a week to reorganise my assembly code to get down from 4099 bytes to 4095 in the end.... those were the days
The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun
'Biggest data grab' in NHS history stuffs GP records in a central store for 'research' – and the time to opt out is now
Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'
The JavaScript ecosystem is 'hopelessly fragmented'... so here is another runtime: Deno is now a company
React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components
EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data
Wednesday 2nd October 2019 20:36 GMT
Re: What have the Germans ever done for us?
Sauerkraut and Rhineland wines are wonderful .. sounds like you just haven’t experienced good ones.
As for aristocracy the choices are limited - Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Glukcksbergs who are all related anyway, so hardly specifically German or a choice.
And then there are Messrs Hilbert, Reinmann, Gödel, Gauss, Krebs and Koch, to name but a few...
Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal
Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?
Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest
WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet
Friday 24th May 2019 17:51 GMT
Re: I was fine with the first indictment
FFS read some history and at least get the basic facts correct
The Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, took the UK into the EEC in January 1973.
The referendum of 1975, under Wislon's government, who backed leave, was whether or not to continue to stay in Europe.
The electorate expressed significant support for EC membership, with 67% in favour on a national turnout of 64%.
The referendum result was not legally binding - because referenda / ums are not, they are public opinion polls to assist parliament - however, it was widely accepted that the vote would be politically binding on future Westminster Parliaments.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
