Posts by Flocke Kroes

Hello 'WOS': Windows on Arm now has a price

Re: Local video playback

Local video playback time measures how much the OEM restricted screen brightness when not plugged into the mains.

Toshiba crams 14TB into another helium drive, this time with SAS boost

Re: Helium?

Helium is difficult to contain, which is why He drives took a lot of R&D but it worked. MTBF increased by a factor of 2 to 6 (depending on what you compared against). These are now real results from field tests, not guesses for a new product.

Air drives are not sealed. They have an air filter that can fail. They also suffer in humid environments. Air gets turbulent more easily, wobbles the heads and vibrates the platters as well as raising the temperature.

If a Helium drive leaks there will be a detectable change in pressure so there will be some warning before failure - but I would not bet on getting the 16 hours warning required to image the whole 14TB.

No do-overs! Appeals court won’t hear $8.8bn Oracle v Google rehash

Re: *nix is toast

The SCO group never owned Unix but that did not stop the bankruptcy trustee selling TSG's (non-existent) rights to Unix to some dupe. Novell was bought by Attachmate which was bought by Micro Focus.

Micro Focus is selling SUSE to EQT Partners which will split it out into a new subsidiary Blitz 18-679 GmbH. I have no idea if Unix is moving with SUSE.

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

@JuJuBalt

When a sensible person contributes towards the construction costs of a gym they make certain they are legally entitled to a share of the profits.

Now withdraw your pension plan in cash and tell me which MP you would trust invest it on your behalf.

Re: Money tree

We should adopt the leaf as currency then everyone can have their own money tree.

Re: UK has the resources

Setting up something like eLoran in the UK or a small constellation that only provides UK coverage is an interesting idea. Satnavs can always use the civilian signals from GPS, Glonass and Galileo but when the RAF needs to drop bombs with military precision the only place they will be able to do it would be the UK.

If the planned delivery date is going to be about five years from now I propose 2023-11-05 for the first live ammo test.

Lo and behold, Earth's special chemical cocktail for life seems to be pretty common

Re: So, why don't we still have dinosaurs?

"So as well as having us, the result of billions of years of evolution from the first time that life appeared, there would also be forms of plants, animals and all the rest that are the product of evolution from the second time that life started on Earth. And from the third, fourth, the seventy-seventh, the 2,916'th and so on."

Modern life has enzymes that make DNA replication fast. Early life did not. Nip back in your TARDIS and bring some early life here and it will get eaten before it can reproduce. Perhaps life did start multiple times in Earth's distant past but it cannot do so again while every habitable environment on the planet is infested with organisms selected by millions of years of evolution to be efficient at exploiting their environment.

Drama as boffins claim to reach the Holy Grail of superconductivity

The other suspicious claim

They also claimed a sample was still super conductive at 77°C but they could not find the critical temperature because it was higher than the limit of their equipment. The equipment mentioned in the paper works up to 400K (127°C).

Oh my Tosh, it's only a 100TB small form-factor SSD, SK?

Re: How many electrons per bit?

For 20nm planer flash the number of electrons per level dropped to under 10. 3D nand uses a larger geometry (40nm?) so there are more electrons per level. It looks like about 20 on the graph near then end of this. As far as I know the geometry is not shrinking any more and the extra capacity comes from more layers per die, more dies in a stack and putting the control circuits on a separate die instead of around the edge so the whole area of the die can contain layers of cells.

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

Re: what exactly is the need for a new department

The traditional reason for having separate armed services is to ensure they bicker among themselves instead of deposing the King/government. If the army is looking a bit rebellious you can have the air force drop bombs on them. If the air force is a problem you can send in the army to capture air bases.

A space force that controls reconnaissance, communications and GPS satellites could wreak havoc by sending fake news from these sources. In this case I think it is just a distraction to keep other self inflicted embarrassments out of the news and comes with a big pork bonus.

Re: why they need it

This is not about Mars Attacks! The US has plenty of military assets is space already for reconnaissance, communications and GPS. The plan is to separate these functions from existing armed services and create an extra chain of command, payroll and admin that spends an additional $8 billion on bureaucracy. The bonus feature is to let certain voters think they are getting a copy of / replacement for NASA that is not infested with libtards.

Which is worse ...

... dumping $8x10⁹ down the toilet or the proposed logos?

How evil JavaScript helps attackers tag possible victims – and gives away their intent

Re: What if you don't allow JS at all?

Although there are many attack surfaces the vast majority of browser malware depends (depended?) on javascript at some point even if the flaw being exploited was not in javascript itself. If you are a little fish disabling javascript makes you considerably safer (unless lots of other little fish find the off switch). If you are a whale then it could be worth someone's time to create some software just for your unusual configuration.

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

Another reason do disable javascript

I do not usually put much thought into javascript because I have kept it disabled since it was first dumped on the internet. Now that I know javascript can connect to arbitrary ports on localhost I spent a few seconds thinking of a way to abuse the capability. The glaringly obvious attack is to connect to the X server because there will be a valid authentication record in ~/.Xauthority

[Frothing at the mouth snarling rant aimed at programmers who created this advertisers' wet dream without spending even a few seconds considering the collateral damage any time they add a "cool new feature".]

X protocol is a pain to implement. So awful that the server and client code is mechanically generated from the definition. A reasonably clever programmer could use the same technique to create a javascript X client for malware. Too late, already happened.

NAND we'll send foreign tech packing, says China of Xtacking: DRAM-speed... but light on layer-stacking

Bandwidth / Latency

Speed is a bit vague. 3Gb/s measures bandwidth. DRAM's valuable feature over flash is low latency. If they want to claim a similar "speed" to DRAM they should demonstrate comparable latency.

Dear alt-right morons and other miscreants: Disrupt DEF CON, and the goons will 'ave you

Re: What's in it for them?

Is anybody nervous about people finding out elctions can be hacked?

Re: Excellent

There are plenty of stories about Trump having a copy of Hitler's speeches. That never worried me before but I just found evidence he can read.

Basic bigot bait: Build big black broad bots – non-white, female 'droids get all the abuse

Re: Last time I checked Spain was in Europe...

US racists can be really strange. A friend of mine is black in the UK but in the US he is English.

This hot Summer has turned me a bit brown. If I dyed my hair black how would I be treated in the US? Last time I was in Florida some of the locals understood my few (European) Portuguese phrases better than my English accent.

Cheap NAND nasty: Flooding market with chips threatens prices

ASP is an Egyptian snake or Average Selling Price. NAND is a first name in India or logic element that only outputs false when all the inputs are true: x nand y equals not (x and y). Flash can be made out of NAND or NOR gates. NOR flash has better endurance but NAND flash has a much lower price/bit. 10% drop QoQ means something will be 0.9 times what it was three months ago - misinterpreting that is a bit of a stretch. 3Q18: third quarter of 2018.

So Mr Nand Flash from India has a pet Egyptain snake that will slowly climb down a tree in the second half of this year.

Make Facebook, Twitter, Google et al liable for daft garbage netizens post online – US Senator

Re: I wonder...

Imagine some children entering a school through a metal detector which bleebs for each of them. There are three bored security guards paying no attention as children with bigger and bigger guns pass. Finally a child passes without setting off the metal detector. Two guards rush in and rugby tackle the child. The third grabs the child's backpack and pulls out ... a video game.

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

Re: Obviously...

Microsoft have been shits for a very long time but the comment I was replying to was about 25 years of hate. I started with TᴇX on Unix before OS/2 existed. One large project with Microsoft Word sent me running back to TᴇX and these days I prefer python/reportlab. I was aware of OS/2 and WordPerfect battles but as they did not affect me directly I do not know if they are a good match for the 25 year time frame. OS/2 started 31 years ago and the last release was 16 years ago. Perhaps it is a reasonable fit it MS started their attack 25 years ago and you are really persistent at holding a grudge. WordPerfect started 39 years ago and much to my surprise is still going. Did Microsoft's hate against WordPerfect start 25 years ago? Have they done anything about WordPerfect in the last five years?

The software I had problems with were cross compilers. I do not know why the did not work with NT and XP, but Microsoft's technical support was particularly unhelpful. They said: "God hates you."

Oops: dinner time ... got to AFK

Re: Obviously...

I did notice the icon, but that is not how things were at the time. Although the Linux kernel pre-dates NT, practical Linux distributions arrived at a similar time. PCs came with DOS/Windows/95/95/98/ME bundled. NT cost extra and if you wanted Linux you near enough had to assemble your own PC from supported components. To start with, Penguins were few and far between and likely to have dual boot machines.

I think the hatred (from both sides) started around the time of XP. Microsoft decided that home users would use a cheap DOS based OS and that business users had to buy XP. Linux was a minor irritation because it was came with all the software you needed for free, had a proper CLI and better GUI but few people had even heard of it. Microsoft knew they had to crush it so they could charge monopoly prices for XP.

For me it was no contest: my legacy DOS software would not work with XP but did work with DOSEMU on Linux. Microsoft trying to trash the boot loader to prevent dual boot systems was not appreciated. The hate came from Microsoft forcing EOMs to bundle their OS with new computers. That could be avoided by building your own desktop but Linux laptops (when you could find them) had the extra cost of Windows without the price reduction from crapware. The FUD and lies from Microsoft got tiresome really fast, went on for years and became SCO vs World.

At some point, Microsoft noticed they were fighting the wrong battle and their real problem was Android - Linux with the best bit (the license) circumvented. My own hatred for the Microsoft tax faded years ago because I no longer need a desktop, Vista meant I got my laptop cheap and now that it is starting to fall to pieces I am building a sturdy wooden modular replacement from components. (That project is more because of EOMs deciding that I have to buy thin and fragile than anything I can blame Microsoft for.)

Microsoft celebrates a bumper financial year ... by making stuff pricier

Re: Marketing support

Decades ago manufacturers were tired of paying Microsoft tax so the created their own compatible alternative to Windows. Microsoft's response was to put up their prices by a large amount and offer "marketing support" funds to OEMs who bought a Windows license for every computer they made. This brought the effective price most of the way back to where it had been for OEMs who paid the tax (all of them). The other options would have been to distribute their OS, maintain it at their expense an pay Microsoft for the privilege or to lose most of the customers because they would not be able to supply Windows machines at a competitive price.

Intel tried the same trick with AMD, but it did not work so well. There is no Intel data format that locks your data to their CPUs. Intel did put an AMD detector followed by some random crash code into the output of their compiler in the hope that programmers would ignorantly make their software Intel only. This trick got widely publicised back in the day and might make a come-back now that AMD have competitive CPUs.

Microsoft will price their software just below the perceived cost of switching to Linux and their users will pay that cost every year. I have not seen any reason for that to change.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Re: Tracking pixels

Yes, but I did not see the point the the same site tracking me repeatedly on one page, with the pixel in places I remember seeing adverts on ages ago. There are also width and height markers in the URL that match the column width.

It seriously looks like half an attempt was made to show adverts on browsers with javascript disabled: the page code is working but the ad server is just returning 1x1pixclear.gif

(Hint to advertisers: I will not make an effort to block a static image that does not cover the text but if it moves you get blocked for years.)

Searching for adverts

I browse with javascript disabled so what I presume are adverts on the Register show up like broken links to pictures. I checked the HTML and the adverts have a <noscript> section containing a simple <img>. wget can get it. identify tells me it is a 1x1 gif with a transparency layer. The gimp shows that the pixel is transparent.

That advert is a bit to cryptic for me. What are they selling?

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

Re: ... it's the lack of applications

Not a problem I have ever had with Linux. If anything the problem has been picking the best out of at least three good choices.

It has been a couple of decades since I last used Windows, but if I recall correctly you had to spend money, find out if the product worked at all then repeat until you found something acceptable. If you did, your requirements could change next year then you would find no source code available and any new features would come at monopoly prices with your data locked into an obfuscated format.

Back then I used to regularly hear people swearing at Microsoft Word because it messed up reading Microsoft Word documents (created by other versions of Microsoft Word). The fix was always simple: use openoffice (now libreoffice).

Here we have a technical decision being made by politicians. Anyone else smell pork?

The excuse is a reason to stay with Linux

I thought one of the features of GDPR was that employees were not supposed to keep customers' private data on there home computers. If Microsoft's incompatibility makes that difficult then Lower Saxony should stay with Linux to avoid accidental disclosure.

No big deal... Kremlin hackers 'jumped air-gapped networks' to pwn US power utilities

What are they waiting for

Clearly it is time for the US to team up with fancy bear and properly secure banks, voting machines and nuclear missile launch controls.

UK.gov commits to rip-and-replacing Blighty's wheezing internet pipes

Basic marketing

If your product is good, sell it to people. If your product is poor, sell it to businesses so they can 'add value' to their product by bundling yours. If your product is completely fubar and will soon be redundant, get it mandated by government.

Starlink OneWeb

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Re: Project FEAR

There is genuine reason for fear. Pretend there are thousands of possible good Brexit deals. I am afraid that the UK government are too clueless to negotiate any of them.

Were is your pension fund invested?

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

Re: Testing Standards...

Yes: There is a guy with a micrometer. He gently measures the thickness of each new iThing design and it passes if it breaks.

Trump wants to work with Russia on infosec. Security experts: lol no

Does not need fake news, just a distraction

Like getting 30/30 on a test that includes things like drawing hands on a clock faces to represent given times and identifying animals from pictures.

Re: Tee hee. Trump is to Putin as --

You do not have to guess. Trump's tax avoidance scheme was available on the internet before the election: he made such enormous losses that he has not had to pay tax for years. If you have plenty of time ask you search engine for "Trump Russia money laundering". There will be enough results to keep you reading for days then you can try: "ZTE Indonesia theme park".

Indictment bombshell: 'Kremlin intel agents' hacked, leaked Hillary's emails same day Trump asked Russia for help

Re: Brexit bus disowned next day

Which next day was the £350M/week for the NHS promise was disowned? I cannot find any disclaimer from when the bus started driving around. Farage waited until after the result was announced. Boris was still defending it in January of this year. Perhaps our local Brexit commenters would like to provide a link to when a major Leave campaigner first admitted that the campaign promise ridiculous. I talked with people right up to the day of the vote who could not believe something a politician would have painted on the side of a big red was obvious lie. The lie got votes.

So far Leave commenters have yet to point out a single benefit to me that they expect to get negotiated. I will happily continue to poor scorn on any long term Brexiteer commenter here who cannot point to one of their own comments vigorously excoriating the £350M/week pledge before the referendum. Leavers without such comment were either complicit it in the lie or too ignorant to express an informative opinion.

Jean+T-shirt, suit and tie, evening dress and wellies all the same to me. I judge by results.

While secretary of state Hilary used private e-mail server, which was against the rules at the time and should have led to a severe reprimand from ... the secretary of state. A bunch of Russians allegedly nick an publish thousands of e-mails, but none of them are grounds for a conviction. Nothing new exposed.

Trump publicly asks the Russians to break the law to help him win an election. A bunch of Russians get indicted for nicking thousands of emails but we already knew the Trump campaign had strong Russian connections so nothing new exposed.

Dress them how you like, they are complete failures who got caught.

Re: may undermine their choice for the White House

Last year when half the commentards were calling Trump a corrupt spoiled brat who couldn't pay his bills supporters would leap to his defence. Do the same today and you barely scrape two down votes. Last year when commentards mentioned Russia doing something naughty there would be prompt replies saying "what about ..." Do the same today and the what-abouters are still here.

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

Re: "Python can be a fraction of the number of lines as a program which does the same thing in C."

Python has a buffer protocol that effectively wraps pointers and allows you to experience all the joys of debugging double free, use after free and memory leaks - if you want to.

Importing python modules is a bit like including a header file.

You can emulate macros with string templates and the codeop module - if you want to.

All python methods are virtual functions.

What I like about python is that programming styles from different languages are (to a varying extent) supported. I can pick the style best suited to each part of the problem and the interpreter will not add pointless road blocks to send me in the direction Bjarne Stroustrup knows is the only possible way to solve a different problem.

Unit Testing! :-)

Why did C++ re-purpose the auto keyword to mean "the type no sane person can type in correctly even given five attempts and a type checking compiler with enormous error messages"?

Re: And people wonder why ...

Actually people who disagree with the project leader can fork off. If they are right then others will switch to the fork and leave the old leader behind.

Re: Reinventing a more limited wheel

No because this is not about comma lists, which have very context dependent meanings in both languages. It is not about the comma operator, which in C means calculate the left argument for side effects and return the right argument (in python, the , operator creates a tuple of the two or more arguments). This is about expressions, statements and assignments. Both languages have contexts where an expression is permitted but not a statement, for example C: "while(expression) statement or {statement list}" and python: "while expression: statement or indented block". The difference was that in C assignments are expressions but in python assignments had to be statements. (Both languages allow using an expression where a statement is expected).

The new feature in python is an extra assignment operator (:=) so assignment expressions are now possible. In the past, converting C: "if (a=b) {...}" to python required the assignment to be in a separate statement from the condition making it abundantly clear that the programmer did not intend C: "if (a==b) {...}". Python will now allow: "if (a:=b): ..."

This has clearly caused a blood feud between different styles of language designers. On one hand, some people think that best practices must be forced down the throat of all programmers because some of them have to create insane code when the language allows it. Other people think that programmers that dumb are going to fuck up no matter what the language enforces, so the language should rely on the sensible programmers' self discipline to follow best practices and not get in the way when a programmer has an outstanding reason to do something odd.

Before you reply that clearly python has lacked C's assignment operator for years, there are plenty of things that C++ has attempted to copy from python (or whatever language python copied from), and often still struggles to get close to tolerable.

FCC caught red-handed – again – over its $225 complaint billing plan

Re: Swamp

Trump made a few explicitly clear election promises/threats including putting businessmen in charge of the regulatory bodies intended to limit the bad behaviour of their business. He gave contradictory reasons for doing this, and his voters selectively heard the reason they wanted to hear:

A) These businessmen understand the subject and will make America great again by removing regulatory barriers to prosperity. (To understand Trump voters, hit yourself on the head with a brick repeatedly until you think he was talking about your prosperity, not his friends.)

B) The Federal government is so corrupt that the only solution is to make it so corrupt that it will destroy itself. (To understand Trump voters, hit yourself on the head with a brick repeatedly until you think the resulting power vacuum would be filled by something better than the current system.)

I think he has made a good effort to follow through on this election threat but has been limited by the FBI bringing charges against some of his first choices. (A) is well under way but I think it is a bit too early to critisize Trump for not showing progress on (B).

Up in arms! Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V smear site after own staff revolt

Re: It bears repeating: programming exclusively in Java considered harmful.

C does not require pointers to 8-bit values. It requires sizeof(char) == 1 and that char has at least 8 bits. TMS320C40 has pointers to 16-bit values. I programmed it just fine in C. You could have pointers to 32-bit values and C would still work just fine. Programs written in C and many other languages assume pointers point at 8 bits. That causes those programs to crash on exotic architectures where the assumption is not true. It is not a fault of the language. It is either a decision taken by the programmer to support only the most common hardware or (far more likely) the programmer had no idea that pointers could point at anything other than bytes.

If you create a new architecture where pointers point at things bigger than bytes, large amounts of software will not work on it without some programmer going through the source code and fixing every part that assumes pointers point at bytes. This will not just hurt programs written in C/C++. The software I wrote for TMS320C40 had a small quantity of ASCII strings. These wasted one byte per character because the extra code required to implement pointers to bytes would have been bigger than the potential saving. Build a bigger general purpose CPU with 32-bit chars and you may save on pointer size but now byte streams cost four times as much memory or a huge performance hit from emulating pointer to bytes in software (while bringing back either 64-bit pointers or 4GB address space.)

No I did not notice memory memory requirements stabilized at about 4GB. I typically work on the small size. My largest machine is 2GB with most having considerably less. On this site you will find an unusually high proportion of people who would have problems being limited to a 32GB address space. Quadrupling the size of all bytes streams would increase memory requirements for many users, not just the extremes who are over-represented here.

Garbage collection is a serious problem for me as it causes programs not to run in a deterministic amount of time. One of the great benefits of C is it does not inflict garbage collection on me unless I choose to use a library that provides garbage collected objects.

The OS kernel (written in C) could map blocks of memory to the same address to support dynamic type tags inside pointers. It would thrash the memory translation caches, but those could be increased in size at considerable expense of transistor count. C would have no serious problem extracting and comparing a type encoded into pointers. Your pointer type fields inside pointers could be implemented right now in software with existing hardware. Go off and implement it and we will see if your plan provides real benefits over storing dynamic type in the object.

It is extremely possible to implement modern efficient garbage collection in C or any Turing complete language. (Python's garbage collector is implemented in C).

Modular arithmetic is an option selected by programmers (or selected for them by default). If you want overflow detection the option for gcc is -ftrapv.

Leatherbound analogue password manager: For the hipster who doesn't mind losing everything

Re: Or better yet, be in a safe

You put strange things in a safe. I would go with a 3D printed handgone with some ammunition, a dozen little transparent plastic bags of rat poison, PFY's cattle prod with conductive handle and trigger and a home-burned DVD of the Eurovision song contest.

GIMP masks font downloads, adds horizon fix in new build

Blame the leeches who pretend that 'computer implemented invention' is not a synonym for software patent.

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

How wine was done on a Pi

Debian/Rasbian can handle installing a full set binaries for architectures different from the actual hardware. Install x86 WINE and all its x86 dependencies. QEMU can the emulate x86 for all of them and your windows application (it could emulate x86 for a linux kernel too, but that is not required for this task).

This demonstrates a whole pile of things: how awesome QEMU is, how efficiently software was coded twenty years ago to handle the hardware of the time and that a Pi is fast enough for a wide range of tasks even with an emulation layer getting in the way.

Is it possible to buy a retail Intel CPU for less than the cost of a Pi?

Foot lose: Idiot perv's shoe-mounted upskirt vid camera explodes

Re: err...

The goal was not to take pictures but to get away with doing something naughty. Demonstrating a level of stupidity sufficient to enter politics, the twit failed to get away with it by firstly confessing to a clergyman (mentioned in an article elsewhere) and then following the clergyman's advice by talking to the police.

Automated payment machines do NOT work the same all over the world – as I found out

Re: @Triggerfish

... until muggers take your card and demand your PIN.

When I was in China the town had a limited supply of cash machines and only a one of them was any use to foreigners. I waited about ten minutes in the dark while three disreputable locals tried to use it. They took turns with the same card. They had the right PIN but the machine only stocked hundreds and none of them typed in a big enough amount. As I am tall and athletic they decided I was not a safe target and eventually walked off. The rats were large and athletic too, and considerably braver than the muggers.

Koh YEAH! Apple, Samsung finally settle iPhone patent crusade

Re: phones banned ...

The law moves really slowly. By the time any phones got close to being banned they were end of life with new versions already on sale.

Re: Neither side won?

The lawyers won big time.

Remember there is a cost to using glass to the edge of the device, four rows of icons and the colour black. For Samsung, the cost was about $500M. For Apple, the cost was in increase in the price of Samsung displays. For Apple customers the cost was inferior displays from other manufacturers.

(The rectangle with rounded corners and photo-shopped aspect ratio was a case heard in the UK and the UK enforced its ruling on the rest of Europe)