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Comment Re:WHAT? (Score 1) 737

at the cost of suns rays.

Which bit of the above did you not bother to read and/or understand?

Or perhaps I could suggest that creating electricity by wind and/or water power is trivially achievable, once you know it can be done and that the requirement exists...

... which is why I have no qualms about my place in a post-apocalypse world. I can sow, reap, hew, sew and, in such an environment, come up with at least two answers to any question beginning with "How can we...?"

Comment Re:Amazon costs are relatively fixed (Score 1) 119

The downside, of course: if Amazon has an outage, you have an outage and you won't be able to do anything about it.

Not just Amazon - what if your ISP has an outage? Checked your connectivity SLA recently?

What's your plan if some joker puts a back-hoe through a fibre trunk 10 miles away? Road-trip to Starbucks?

Comment What the f**king f**k? (Score 4, Insightful) 383

"GUIs are walled gardens in that features available in one piece of software is not available to other pieces of software.

Never mind it should be "are" not "is", under what circumstances would you ever be surprised that the features provided by Excel are not available in PhotoShop... with the exception of cut/copy/paste?

Did I miss a meeting where meretricious twaddle on this site became de rigour?

Maybe I should resign my ID...

Submission + - Malware now hiding in graphics cards (scmagazine.com.au)

mask.of.sanity writes: Researchers are closing in on a means to detect previously undetectable stealthy malware that resides in peripherals like graphics and network cards. The malware was developed by the same researchers and targeted host runtime memory using direct memory access provided to hardware devices. They said the malware was a "highly critical threat to system security and integrity" and could not be detected by any operating system.

Comment Well, not quite... (Score 1) 133

While the Apple ][ documentation was so complete that it included Woz's annotated 6502 assembler source listings (I still have my copies in storage), the provided documentation was less extensive for the Atari 400/800 and Vic-20/C-64...

However, that's not really the point.

Those old-school bits of tin had no abstraction layers, so for coders to make any use of them beyond the basic (pardon the pun), they needed to address the hardware directly. I still remember having to load assembler routines on the Apple in order to toggle the speaker port sufficiently often to get actual musical tones (as I am equally old-school).

This really is not the case today - you only *need* that level of *hardware* documentation if you're going to write low-level OS drivers, and that's really beyond the scope of the project in question. The documentation of the abstraction platforms that sit on top of this Pi hardware are extensively... extensive, and are more than sufficient for most educational situations.

In addition, part of the learning process is discovering and understanding the limitations of the platform you're using, and deciding if you want to progress your learning further...

         

Government

Submission + - British naval power massing in the Gulf as Israel prepares an Iran strike (telegraph.co.uk) 5

skipkent writes: Battleships, aircraft carriers, minesweepers and submarines from 25 nations are converging on the strategically important Strait of Hormuz in an unprecedented show of force as Israel and Iran move towards the brink of war.
Western leaders are convinced that Iran will retaliate to any attack by attempting to mine or blockade the shipping lane through which passes around 18 million barrels of oil every day, approximately 35 per cent of the worlds petroleum traded by sea.
A blockade would have a catastrophic effect on the fragile economies of Britain, Europe the United States and Japan, all of which rely heavily on oil and gas supplies from the Gulf.

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