Posts by swissrobin

Re: Source code

Js has the problem that the language is very unruly. Optimising js by JIT compilation is challenging as a result. If you write your application in C/C++ or Rust then the compiler knows very much what your source code means and can do much better optimisations.

Then the browser doesn't need to contain a JIT for webasm because it can know exactly what each opcode means at browser compile time and so can be optimised at that stage.

At least that's what I understood the article to mean.

Re: Phablets - "Hey look at me!'

I am sure your 'phone is discrete but is it discreet?

Re: DOA

The Synology RS814 is a Marvel 1.3GHz CPU and it can sustain full gigabit bandwidth read/write to its drives. So I am not convinced your somewhat arbitrary assertion is correct.

They're just sick and fed up of seeing terrorists use encryption to hide their plans!

I don't follow this much, but I don't recall anyone showing that terrorists had used encryption to hide their plans, nor that the NSA has foiled any such plans by decrypting sneaky terrorist plans.

Of course most of my knowledge on how terrorists organize themselves comes from Four Lions, so probably not representative.

"people who are _accused_ of bombing marathons get the right to silence"

Isn't that the point of being accused rather than guilty - your accusers have to prove your guilt and you don't have to help them do it?

Re: One of these things is not like the other

They are like each other. They are just not the same as each other. Nobody said they were.

Re: And the winners are...

If they're not too depressed to notice ....

Re: Apple "rots"? The Reg is losing all credibility

Surely it was just taking some liberty to be able to talk about rotten apples ... not exactly side splitting, but hardly constitutes a jihad.

Re: Bah!

It's nothing to do with HTTP. It's the domain name system specification that controls this part of the URL. That system is hierarchical - so if you own theregister.co.uk then you can simply start to serve up:

www.bankofscotland.co.uk.mumbojumbo.theregister.co.uk

as it's underneath your registered domain.

Earlier in the comments someone suggested the browser should intervene anytime you try to follow a link with nested TLD. I would concur this makes sense; I am slightly concerned that some of of the funkier TLDs might legitimately appear buried in legit URLs (much like Scunthorpe can match a rude word filter), but I guess you could allow the browser to be told about exceptions.

In any case it's clearly a better solution than colour coding/masking out bits of the URL.

P.S. it would also make sense to have some heuristics about url length - if it contains 20 dots, it's probably not something you want to follow, etc.

P.P.S. Also agree that the browsers, if they're going to help, need to intercept dodgy URLs before they submit the request, otherwise it is quite possibly too late (malware delivered by javascript exploit on front page of scam site).

I think that RAID arrays are going to become a thing of the past; as drive units get bigger and bigger (and perhaps less reliable, perhaps not) you are going to see people migrate off RAID and onto the fancy data redundancy across disparate drives systems. These will cope better with drive failure and huge drive rebuild times because they are designed to do that. At 10TByte in classic RAID you're looking at 1-2 day rebuild times, ignoring whatever bandwidth is lost to the application.

Also I can see a lot more journalling going on rather than overwriting the same old block repeatedly; sort of treating the HDD like a NAND.

Maybe not though ... I'm no storage guru!

Re: That's all folks...

"Let me guess, you have several legacy programs that were designed for Windblows 9x/2000 and they barely run on XP, let alone Windoze Vista, 7 8.x and the vendor is no longer around."

If that really is their problem, I would have thought by now they would be running these legacy apps in some sort of sandbox - like a virtual machine or similar container type technology, hosted inside a modern version of whatever OS works best for them?

That could be an excellent product - "XP/IE6 in a wrapper" - probably a violation of the license agreement to migrate the running OS into such a wrapper, but if they choose Windows on the outside, I cannot imagine Microsoft being too bothered by that.

Re: For the LULZ!

Pretty much agree with that.

If this was your disk in your computer and some finger trouble, s/w glitch, or similar made the disk unusable, you would need to reach for your backups.

If you didn't have backups, you would need to reach for your coat.

Doing IT for real is a pain in the backside - which is why I don't do it :-)

Re: I thought a recent court case went the other way

Forget landfill Android ... landfill inkjet printers ... their current pricing model is so daft that you would be forgiven for thinking that it is indeed cheaper to throw away the whole printer and just buy a new one each time the ink runs out (as stated above). The EU, ignoring whether they give a crap about this anti-competitive behaviour, should take some note of the number of printers in HP's "recycling" program.

I wonder if you can build a house out of inkjet printers ...

Re: Android being open source

It depends on whether you want to know how, say, the graphics hardware works or how the baseband processor works. Both of these can "see" all your data. Neither of them have source code available for a typical handset that you buy in the shops.

You cannot completely recompile the entire software stack for the phone you actually use (yes, you can make your own Android build, but it will either have no useful graphics capabilities, or you'll be using somebody's binary blob).

Do you know that drive failure rates follow a bathtub curve?

Re: Bandwidth?

I understand that a clean PC won't be able to get a virus by acoustic network. It's obvious that the computers can talk to each other using speakers/microphones.

I must be misunderstanding your "laws of physics" point - can you elaborate?

Re: Do not buy stuff from adverts

"So, see an advert, do not buy the stuff being advertised. At some point those smart algorithms are going to figure that one out."

They'll figure out that they need to advertise the competition's products to you ...

Re: Power

I think the standard calls for 50mA max on the 5VDC pin, but what's the betting that Dell's monitors will supply much more than this (I am talking about their monitors that have USB ports on them). I suspect the Dell device will need 5W = 1A to operate.

Re: Before this case is settled hardware within the form will be upgradeable

Agreed. Packaging high density electronics into elegant form factors does not allow for gratuitous interconnects. To make a modular system you will always have redundant stuff - stuff that is there to enable as yet undreamed of modules to work - and that makes your telephone bigger.

If there was wasted space in the handset, the handset would instead be thinner/smaller/have longer battery life.

Re: lol

There was a case of a Harry Potter book being given early to a few people (by mistake) and the publisher taking out some injunction preventing them from reading it. Obviously hard to enforce, but they still got it.

So I would guess that it would be possible to gain a similar injunction preventing you from viewing your "early" DVD, though maybe it depends on which country you're in.

Re: FFS can we please speak English

Apparently harder than you would have liked:

For fuck's sake, it's not difficult is it?

Re: Effect on WP

Osborne as verb = LOL.

Bing might still exist, just be operated by somebody else with a different cost structure such that it could make some money out of it. Even if they renamed it, bing.com could still direct you to their pages. So probably small impact on WP owners.

Re: Surely they're ALL of this age

Ma = millions of years (M = million, a = year).

Re: logical

Spelling evangelize with a Z is acceptable in British English (as well as obviously US English).

Wikipedia has an interesting piece of it, should you be interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#Greek-derived_spellings

Re: Ethernet

I think the point about the 30% is that by not providing an optical drive they might be driving people towards online purchase of movies, box sets, etc. Apple would make zero out of a doovde/blurry sale (Amazon, OTOH ...) whilst they make some % of any download from iTunes, which is probably the download place of choice for iMac owners.

Whether or not it's true, I don't know, but that is the point that was being made.

As for leaving out ethernet, it's debatable. For an office environment full of creatives copying around big files you have the think WiFi bandwidth, which is inherently shared between everyone on the same channel whether or not they happen to be in your office/company, is going to be a squeeze.

A cabled Gigabit ethernet connection will have much higher limits.

I would certainly want an ethernet connection for a desktop office machine.

Re: Worthwhile Features?

Grr. It's vs its ... apologies.

Re: I bought my last mobile phone two years ago

Without re-reading all of the comments and the article, I think the tone of both is mockery-to-meh on the interested in buying it scale.

So whilst you might not belong here, it's not because of your apparent indifference to this particular product.

Re: Razor thin margins - @Steve Todd

Manufacturers do "bin" parts for temperature and speed grades, but I don't know of any silicon manufacturer that produces parts that are in some way not to spec and then sells them "cheap". So the 1.5GHz Industrial temperature range part will be rarer (and thus more expensive) than the 0-70c 1.0GHz consumer spec part.

I do know that some unscrupulous people manage to get their hands on "failed" parts, package them and sell them as new in counterfeit packaging - SD cards are a classic example of this.

If you have evidence of a silicon manufacturer that sells sub-standard chips cheap, please tell us about it as it would be very interesting to know who and what products it affects?

Re: Truth or consequences

Actually, the university is very unlikely to give a flying F word.

Re: The electron taught me a real lesson

Surely the real optimization would be to just render a bitmap of the finished crystal to the screen? :-)

Pointless optimizations are my pet hate :-) Leave the code doing the obvious thing until such time as it doesn't run fast enough, then go and optimize it, if you must.

I like all the RISCOS links and chat - I am too old to have had RISCOS whilst I was a school boy - we had a Commodore Pet and a 380Z :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_pet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z

So I think I'll get hold of a Pi and give it a whirl :-)

Re: One Smart Thing

"Meh. Being in technology, I actually don't know of that many businesses that use Microsoft."

There may be appetite for non-MS stuff in tech companies, but move into the wider world of non-tech business and you'll find MS most everywhere.

Re: Bin Laden

Actually, wasn't he just "at home" when they finally "found" him?

Re: POWER did rule in the HPC field.

Sure, but that's thanks to the algorithms and engineers that deployed and analysed them. The PowerPC is just another calculator - it's not like it's 10x or 100x faster than another calculator built in the same era. So whether Rolls Royce use a PowerPC or x86 "super" computer to do the number crunching isn't going to change the fact that you can enjoy a quiet flight.

Unless of course you really are saying that the PowerPC is the only CPU that we can do this number crunching on in reasonable time .. . in which case tell me more.

Re: re. photo of V-NAND package

Assuming you're serious ...

That's a development or presentation DIL (dual in line) package. The window allows you to "see" the die.

Back in the 70s chips actually looked like that, of course, but these days chips are packaged in much smaller devices - like the ones at the top of the page - where the gap from contact to contact is approx 0.5mm instead of 2.54mm in the DIL package.

The main use for windowed packages like this in years gone by was to allow you to UV erase EPROM before EEPROM and flash came along (these are electrically erasable, so no need for a UV eraser).

A lot of the procurement that goes on by tender is for equipment and services, rather than IT development. Sure the IT development stuff is doomed to costing beelions with a reasonable chance of failure, and not just because it's the public sector.

The equipment and service purchases, on the other hand ought to provide the buyer with a good route to selecting the best product at the best price. Unfortunately they are often written up to favour a particular product or supplier, because really that's what the customer wants to buy and the tender process is an irritation that needs to be dealt with along the way.

Rightly or wrongly, if you are not the pre-selected winner, you are going to have cause to complain.

Re: Mostly true

"plus all the parts would have to be shipped from China or other parts of the Far East where they are made, adding delays to the process."

Shipping the parts vs. shipping the finished product - makes no difference - in fact if the working capital is yours, there may be a small advantage in shipping the components into the final sales region vs. shipping the finished product.

In any case there is no real reason why the chips couldn't be made in US/Europe too - as the process technologies change, so new fabs must be built and this provides an opportunity to relocate them to the new regions if it makes economic sense to do so..

Our customers do low volume manufacturing in the UK (measured in 1,000's of units per year, so not troubling Apple :-)) - we got some quotes to do the complete manufacture in Asia - all things added up, it was no cheaper. Your mileage may vary, especially if your volumes are much higher than ours.

Re: I'm No Fan

"Oh and I am NOT suggesting "buy only apple", I am just suggesting to be careful about what one does buy and use."

It's pretty tough when buying these types of things ... who sells good stuff and who sells rubbish? The people that make and sell this stuff have no qualms about applying CE labelling, the double isolation symbol, etc., with no actual safety testing having ever been done. They copy the enclosure of real parts, so it's hard to tell what's what.

For Apple users, if you buy a product from an Apple outlet it is going to be fine (ignoring the very unlikely chance of them having been duped by their own suppliers).

For the rest of us, if it came with your telephone and you bought it in the UK from one of the carriers, it'll be OK.

If you buy a Belkin product from a reputable outlet, you'll also be OK. I cannot think of another name brand off the top of my head - there might be one.

If you buy a no-name product from a PhoneShop type of place I think you're risking it - they can source product from wherever and they'll go for maximum margin whilst assuming that the safety stuff is all fine.

Anything from eBay, Amazon, a market stall, etc., I would say you're asking for trouble.

The only way to be sure is to buy 2, crack one open and look inside, but unless you've got a reasonable grasp of the safety standards, that won't help.

Is it worth risking your life over £20?