Posts by david 12 2373 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
In the United States, patent applications filed before November 2000 were not published and remained secret until they were granted. Publication is the benefit the public gets from granting patent monopoly rights.
There was legislation to change that in 1995 and 1999, and the whole (American) system was re-worked in 2011.
Star is a criminal group.
Funded by millions in cash from embezzlement and similar white-collar crimes.
There was a suggestion that Star and Crown should be compelled to return proceeds of crime: predicably, that suggestion went nowhere.
(Not to mention the massively expanded pawnbroker (aka "receiver") industry that came along with the casinos)
(some old typewriter convention or something), and still doesn’t.
The VT105 (1978) was a CRT ("Glass") serial terminal from DEC, important in the development and use of unix from AT&T and VMS from DEC. It implemented fixed 8 space tabs.
I don't think the VT52 (1974) had tab support at all.
Earlier mechanical TTY's didn't implement Horizontal TABS, or implemented TABs with optional extra hardware that provided typewriter / card-punch "programable" tabs
I can't count the number of wasted hours I've spent trying to find bugs in c or BASIC or Fortran or Pascal trying to find mismatched brackets (or end, or ; or next)..
The pages of hardcopy print out with a pen matching up braces. Poring over compilation failures flagged --at the end of the file --, not where the error was. The logic errors caused by dangling IFs.
It's like people who complain about the error-prone nature of electronic spreadsheets: they weren't around in the era of paper spreadsheets, and they never grok that electronic programs have eliminated far more errors, and far more serious errors, than they have created.
- you can *type* however you please, just don't leave the bleeping TAB characters in the source code
Oh sure, you can say that now, but when I started, a source document containing tabs was smaller and faster than one containing spaces. Faster to load, faster to page, faster to cursor through. And when your character count got to 65536, the larger document containing spaces wouldn't load at all.
Anyway, separate comment: I'd still like having tab characters in my source code. Even when all my indentation is spaced I like having tabbed comments and tabbed assembly language. But, since I started with card punches, the data-entry should "eat" tabs as you go past them, like a typewriter does, rather than pushing them out (overwrite rather than insert)
Correct about the meaning and function of tabs, but that '5' space convention was not generic across different hardware, and the 5-space business rule wasn't in my typing books.
A contributing factor might be that some typing books were actually tied to specific typewriter manufacturers. If the typing book or style guide was intended for use with a typewriter that had only 5-space tabs, it was going to teach 5-space indentation.
The article sounds as if this has been corrected though.
No, PEP 8 is a very old PEP (the giveaway is the single-digit number), and it's a readability guideline -- people who came from backgrounds where tabs were not used because they were conventionally 8 spaces were convinced that tabs should be 8 spaces, and wanted to inflict that on people who insisted on using tabs -- both because 8 character tabs were righteous, and to stop people using tabs.
The insistence that the python interpreter does not match tabs to spaces just fell out of the parser, and seemed right to people who took their entrenched views of programming from what they were familiar with (something the Python mailing list really suffered from in the early years).
they would have had to pass through several earlier screens
The judge has never had to do application support, (of course), or critical-system support, but still, it's sad to see in a judgement that kind of ignorance about the way people and systems operate.
Users click through screens. Systems which cannot allow clicking through screens are built to prevent that by adding 2nd party or 2nd factor input -- repeated data entry is an example. Systems which do allow click-through should be backed up by systems to handle the inevitable errors.
Does this mean you could pay a solicitor to e-file paperwork in a case and get it settled in your clients' favor without the other side even knowing?
If it stands, this means that you could pay a solicitor to e-file paperwork in a case and get it settled against you, if you have specifically authorized them to settle, even if it was an accident and you had clearly communicated that their permission to settle did not include just giving in and throwing the case away.
To be clear, I think this is bad law, and elevates the interests of the court above the interests of the parties, but it is well known that special cases make bad law, and this was clearly a special case.
A problem here is that the courts (lawyers) have pretty much given themselves (lawyers) immunity to negligence liability, so proceedings against the legal companies insurance are going to be a tough ask, even in a case like this.
Those well known English Council software failures are tied to particular operating systems? SAP requires a specific OS? Oracle?
The problems the Germans will have moving away from MS software are unlikely to be because of server applications, and, as I asserted, less likely now to be because of bespoke PC applications. Any departments using Microsoft Dynamics are going to switch, but that's the whole point of the change -- not an unintended consequence that is going to derail the project.
One of the reasons this will eventually be successful is that in-house development has all but disappeared. Anything you want to do, there is already a (commercial or free) app that does it. Once upon a time, porting your in-house Excel or Word (or Visual C or FoxPro or Delphi or SMB or .COM) app wasn't really possible. It's still not really possible, but all those Finance Regulation, Money-market Valuation, Scheduling, Resource Allocation and Mail-Merge apps are available off-the-shelf now, and mostly have been for decades. Once you've moved off the in-house apps, system compatibility is no longer a issue: at worst, you just select a different supplier.
Learned that lesson at university. Why I make mistake typing, correct it, and then fat-finger exactly the same mistake, it's time to give up on the late-night assignment typing and go to bed.
Later on, when I was working fully-flexible hours as a developer (typically a mixture of 10-hour and 4-hour days), any hours after 12 I might just as well go home: I wasn't achieving anything useful.
Evidently KPMG Accountants NV, (the KPMG parent firm with franchises in other countries) is a PCAOB registered firm.
I don't know why KPMG Accountants NV choose to register with the PCAOB: perhaps they wanted to do work with American companies, or with NV companies working in America. But it was their choice, and they agreed (or pretended to agree) to abide by PCAOB rules, including PCAOB fines.
It's like F1 (motor sports) or Champions Cup (rugby). If you want to be in the game, the game has fines for cheating.
We don't buy genuine ink, and we don't buy HP printers, but we do have a problem with counterfeit components -- things that claim to be SGI, or TI, Infineon or Vishay, but aren't.
I'll buy "Golden Elephant" brand ink, but I don't want anything in the factory that /claims/ to be something that it isn't, even if the claim is something hidden inside. I've got enough problems with that already.
The fix is not using RUST to run second-language scripts. Using multi-layered scripting like that always presents horrible attack surfaces.
Programmers do it because "it's the unix way" and they are used to it, but honestly, that's a terrible excuse.
Long distance passenger service was discontinued when first-class mail moved from rail to air.
US post office had contracts for transport of mail, requiring fast, regular, high-priority trains between all major centers, including trans-continental. Passengers were just gravy. When the mail contracts were lost, passenger services stopped within days.
Light rail and local-rail built-out also extensive, and was funded out of real-estate development. It was not built for 100 year life (as some heavy-rail developments were), and when it reached end-of-life, and needed re-capitalization, decisions had to be made. It's fair to say that a transport system associated both with real-estate speculation and exploitative railway barons did not have any friends at the time (my ancestor's home-town government was proud of killing the light-rail system for that reason), but the re-capitalization costs for light-rail were greater than for road busses anyway.
That's not to say that the running costs for Bus systems were less than those for Light Rail, although that argument has certainly been made. American government generally, and even more so local government, has been and continues to be notorious for choosing deferred costs over capital costs.
American building codes are partially written by people ...representing people that would have to spend more money if the codes were more strict.
Land is cheap in a lot of the USA. You can get some tar paper and sticks and put up your own home, and it still cost more than the land did.
And it's not just the cost of materials: doing it yourself, there is a premium on complexity and additional rules.
What do the make roofs out of in the US if they have to be replaced after 10 years?
They don't.
They make roofs that have to be maintained at 10-15 years, and re-skinned at 20-30 years. The 10 year replacement requirement is an insurance company scam to avoid payouts to people who didn't do the 10-15 year maintenance.
Paper? Even a thatched roof should last about 25 years.
Yes. The "traditional" roof in the USA was wooden shingles (because, unlike Western Europe including Britain, the USA had not run out of wood), but by ~100~ years ago, they had moved to oil-impregnated paper (cloth, but the cloth is basically paper) shingles (like "Linoleum", aka "Lino", commonly called "Bitumen" or "Asphalt"). Like a thatched roof, it needs to be maintained, you start to get leaks and loose shingles, and if you don't fix that, you get damage to the (wooden) substrate. Like Lino, you get wear and tear on shingles, even on your roof. They crack and tear, get scuffed, get mold/lichen, and they are very thin and light weight. The shingles are just a cheap skin, and with weathering, the skin needs regular replacement.
The odd thing is, they are so used to using a skinned roof, that you see the same construction even with ceramic tiles: The tiles used just as weather proofing and decoration on top of a standard plywood roof.
Not a remote-meeting user. My wife's organization uses Zoom, and she hates Teams -- probably mostly through unfamiliarity, perhaps because she only gets to use the free client version of Teams.
I'm seeing a love-hate relationship here with Teams, but not much about Zoom. Doesn't anybody else use Zoom anymore? Why not?
Also, out of random curiosity, for all those who don't believe in divorce for religious reasons... if you marry someone who is using an assumed identity, does it still count? You agreed to marry someone named "Woods" not "Keirans" so are the vows still considered valid?
In the USA, laws vary state-by-state.
Here in Aus, the legal rules are more inclusive than the religious rules: in the Christian churches, (RC, Anglican, Lutheran, Brethren, Baptist etc), if your intention is to be married, you are married, even if you broke canon law or sinned in the method. According to the government, you are married even if you didn't intend to get married, if you've done the married things: living together, maybe joint accounts, certainly children.
In no case would "using a false name" invalidate a marriage here. It might be evidence that no marriage was intended (which could affect your religious status), and would certainly raise the suspicion of Bigamy or Rape (which would affect your civil status), but by common law (which still has some relevant effect), you can use any name you choose for anything other than opening a bank account or getting a drivers license.
10 year hardware refresh cycles cause far less of an issue with Linux than MS.
But in practice, that hasn't been the case where I work. The actual debian/bsd/ubunto distributions have been on long-term kernels, but the update channels have gone off line in a couple of years, unlike the "out of support" windows versions.
I'm just saying. "Could have been done different": real life is messy.
Fake news stories and doctored pictures weren't new in 2016. They weren't new even in 1916 (See WW1) or 1816 (Monroe defeated Federalist Party candidate Rufus King)
I don't blame Clinton for the stupidity and ignorance of her supporters, but cripes, this is the outcome of the effort the American education system puts into 'civics' ?
python3 needs round brackets around the arguments to print,
"Real" python is written in c, and at the time of the change from 2 to 3, language design was dominated by the c coders. Part of the aim was to clean up Python by removing features that had been inspired by BASIC and Pascal, and were strange to the c programmers.
The narrowness irritated me at the time, because they knew nothing about mathematics, and were convinced that the c math library design decisions were the only possible way to correctly handle floating point numbers
With the TA's tied down to the track as usual, and the train expected in 5 minutes. My university can't pay grad-students and TA's on time to the nearest month in any average semester, so this is just business as usual.
If management or their PA's aren't getting paid -- that would be off track.
Wiin2K sever is still on a factory machine here. I do like the interface better than Win10, or any of the BSD / Linux machines we have, but it's also had the advantage that it's really easy to port to new hardware.
Win2K only has enough resources to add maybe one new set of unused motherboard drivers (WinXP is better), but swapping the disk drivers and kernels is easier, and when the USB ports fail (a typical hardware fault), 45 minutes to add the new drivers and pop the HD into the new machine. Boot, clone the HD to a new HD, and ready to resume production.
This is not a speculative execution hack. It's a DDR memory exploit.
It's specific to specific chipsets because it's a timing and addressing exploit, and timing and addressing is specific to MB design and processor design.
The problem arises because of the memory density of modern memory. The solution is to use secure memory, and there are and have been partially-successful attempts to make memory more secure, by doing things like increasing the refresh rate.
Not surprisingly, secure memory runs slower, hotter and more expensive. I guess you could design a memory system that had a small cache of secure memory, but that runs counter to current attempts at security which randomize location, so that critical code is more difficult to find in memory.
The aim of the Library of Alexendria was to have every book in the world.
Not "a copy of every book ever written".
The only copies of every book existing.
They did this with an acquisition policy that included borrowing books, then just not returning them.
So when it burned, it wasn't just one of the largest book collections existing, it was a collection of many books that existed nowhere else.
If the burning of the BL was comparable, more shame to them.
Fujitsu has already announced the end of their main-frame business ("by the end of the decade"). They can't offer new long-term contracts even if they wanted to, when everybody knows that business is gone in 5 years. And without new contracts they have to start lay-offs now in all their main-frame divisions.
Yes, there is a path for international terrorists to take over your truck. More to the point, there is a path for drivers to over-write the speed and distance logs.
"Honestly officer, I'd only been on the road for an hour when I fell asleep, veered off, and collected two cars killing 7 people"
Criminal record information is classed as ‘sensitive information’ in the Privacy Act 1988. You can go the other way -- given a name you can get a list of all pleas and convictions -- but apart from that, data held by the police about people is probably not generally releasable. In fact, even police members are not allowed to just go browsing the police records.
However, press releases about court convictions are probably non-identifiable to avoid problems when appeals are, or are likely to be, before the courts. (And there may also be other charges still before the courts)
The probably could have, but look at that pole: are they gonna run a conduit up the side of it? Dig a hole into the power conduit and run up inside with the power cable? Then they have to run the antenna clear. And what happens when the council wants to replace or modify their luminaire?
Plus they probably need permission from the pole owner operator to do that, even if permission is automatic. Plus the whole set of additional safety regulations.
Long term, it might make sense to design light poles for 5g service, particularly because there are people who /do/ care, but totally understandable that it's not a realistic option for that kind of light pole.
Modern electronics can be really quick. While I think the available literature is marketing BS, milliSeconds are invoked and I sure can cut-off CAT-size power much faster than that.
The marketing says 500 Hz, 75% square wave, so 0.375+ ms. I was surprised it was that slow, (I guess they are trying to keep radiated-emissions down), but a typical 50-60 Hz earth-leakage protection device typical breaks at 20-30 ms, so 0.4 is evidently good enough, even at the higher voltage.
From the description, it's an unbalanced voltage, grounded on one side. That means there's a serious corrosion risk somewhere. I wonder how they handle that?
Well, I was referring to the ordering system, not the food quality, but it wasn't something I objected to. Much fresher than the home-delivered pizza, and by my preference, better than the bulk-cooked chicken from the warmer at that other franchise.
One of the things McD has done to compensate is they've moved from frozen patties to chilled patties. The product is different, and arguably more "authentic", more like "not from frozen meat", and most people prefer steak from chilled rather than from frozen, but it's not at all clear that chilled ground beef makes better hamburgers than frozen ground beef: many people think the current product is just somehow not as good as they remember, and undoubtably that's partly because the product is more evenly cooked -- less on the outside, more on the inside.
Control channel is in the 2-4 GHz range. Telemetry is somewhere around double that. Regarding aiming: I imagine that the beam is considerably spread out by the time it reaches earth from voyager. From earth, I imagine they just boost up the power until voyager can hear it -- something you aren't permitted to do on microwave base links.
I remember the prediction that some of the scientific instruments would continue to operate "at least until 2020". You may argue that 47 years is far longer than 43 years, but I'm unconvinced.
In any case -- little of all we value here | Wakes on the morn of its (47th) year | Without both feeling and looking queer. -- (pace Oliver Wendell Holmes)
The problem with IMAP or any other sync-with-the-server type protocols is that your service has to support however large a mailbox you want to keep,
Yes, exactly the same problem with POP, and exactly the same solution: you can download and keep your email locally.
I understand that POP is not exactly the same as IMAP: by default IMAP servers reflect what you have on your local client, and by default POP is one-way, ignoring your local copy. But the idea that IMAP servers must have the same mail as your local mail store is as ludicrous as the idea that POP server mailbox limits don't exist.
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