Posts by Lennart Sorensen

'Neural network' spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain

Re: Most Surprised

And stupid naming choice by Samsung causes confusion already.

These are Samsung M1 cores, not ARM Cortex-M1 cores. Apparently the Samsung M1 is a full ARMv8-A processor, not an ARMv7-M.

I was puzzled initially why a CPU with an M1 was a big deal, but the 3W power consumption, and clock speed and then instruction set made it clear it was not talking about the Cortex-M1 but rather some other M1. Very annoying naming choice.

I hate Allwinner's chip names too, with calling everything A# where a lot of them end up matching the Cortex-A# models while not being those of course. Of course Apple is doing it too, although at the rate they are counting up, I think ARM will be long past before Apple gets to a given number.

Your wget is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft

Re: Cool down

As clearly documented at the bottom of the strace man page, strace was written for SunOS and inspired by the trace tool. It was ported to linux later, and then many features of truss were added to it. It did not start out with all the truss features at all.

Mr. Torvalds had NOTHING to do with that. Neither did anything Linux related for that matter.

As for GNU versions of commands, at least they do implemented the required POSIX features, and then add to them. The aliases in this case have hardly any of the functionality of the tools they claim to be. You can treat the GNU tools like posix and they will do what you wanted, you can't do that with the powershell aliases.

Five-storey Blue Screen Of Death spotted in Thailand

Hmm, ftser2k.sys. I wonder if ftdi decided to do "nice" things to a a "fake" ftdi chip user. Wouldn't be the first time after all.

OMG: HPE gobbles SGI for HPC. WTF?

Re: Bye, Bye, pretty SGI

Nope, since SGI got rid of MIPS long ago, and tried to move to the Itanium. What a disaster. So now the company that did the least bad with the Itanium (and consists of two companies that threw away good CPU designs to move to the Itanium) is buying one of the others that was essentially destroyed by moving to the Itanium.

Uncle Sam set to flog Silk Road's Bitcoins

Re: Bitcoins are not considered currency in the US

That was 3 years ago.

This was this year: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/26/ponzi_bitcoin_case_kaput/

It says bitcoin are goods, not money.

TP-Link fined $200k, told to be nice to wireless router tinkers after throwing a hissy fit

Well two years is a LONG time in the electronics market. I would suspect that means the current models that are locked down will NEVER be unlocked, and only new models in the future will have a different design for locking down the radio while not locking everything else.

So really, it sounds like bad news for the current owners of such products.

The result of the new FCC rules is exactly what everyone (except the FCC) said it would be. The FCC of course insisted the rules didn't require locked down firmware, since there were other ways to implement the rules. Unfortunately the simplest and cheapest solution is to lock down the firmware, so that is what most companies are now doing for the US market.

No, the VCR is not about to die. It died years ago. Now it's VHS/DVD combo boxes' turn

Re: Stop making me feel old

Yes DDS tape. And it was total shit for reliability as one would expect from helical scan. About 10 writes and the tape was dead, and you had to do a read verification pass after the write to try and see if maybe it was a good backup.

Re: Tape?

No, there are lots of 4 and 6TB and even 8TB drives that are not helium filled.

Diablo conjures up hell of a DIMM: 128GB NAND pretend-RAM summoned

Re: Data? What data?

Because they made it that way. What they don't say is how they ensure it is erased on poweroff. How would I trust that it is done at poweroff and not at poweron (which would mean it is actually quite insecure, unlike what they claim).

Not interested without proper support

Until they even try to get the drivers for this (and their previous teradimm) included in the OS, I would not touch it. The support could disappear at any time and you could be left with a system you can never upgrade.

I don't see any indication they have even tried to get their linux drivers included in the official linux kernel source. Throwing stuff on github and then ignoring it for over a year is not support.

Microsoft to rip up P2P Skype, killing native Mac, Linux apps

Finally.

The P2P was the worst part of skype. It was the bane of network admins. If you tried to block people running p2p file sharing, you would accidentally kill skype even if you wanted to allow it, and there was no fixed port you could exempt. Such a shitty design. Glad to see that gone.

As for security, well if you ever thought your skype conversations were secure, you were almost certainly delusional.

Juniper: Yes, IPv6 ping-of-death hits Junos OS, too

Re: I'll have a go at translating that into English

And we didn't actually follow the IPv6 spec that said we were not allowed to route these packets in the first place and were not allowed to look at them if someone else had routed them by mistake.

Cisco warns IPv6 ping-of-death vuln is everyone's problem

Well at least Linux appears to correctly validate the TTL must equal 255 on ND packets, and has done so at least since 2.6.12 (when it started using git in 2005), since the check was already in the code at that point. Apparently a number of other OSs out there, especially on routers used by ISPs and telcos on the other hand seem to be failing to follow that requirement in the IPv6 standard. How unfortunate. Of course just because linux checks doesn't mean someone didn't use linux on a router and use a 3rd party network stack or hardware accelerator that does the wrong thing.

Samsung: Don't install Windows 10. REALLY

Re: If proof is needed...

Well I have upgraded an Asus EEEpc 1008HA (from mid 2009) to Windows 10, no problem. I just upgraded a 10 year old Core 2 Duo (P965 chipset) as well, no problem.

Certain device makers are just terrible at updating drivers. Broadcom has been pretty bad. Samsung is terrible (just look at the pathetic state of their tablets, which hardly ever get any of the updates they promise).

Of course if you want to avoid support for your hardware going away, best bet seems to be running Linux. Strange how we got to that state.

This is what a root debug backdoor in a Linux kernel looks like

Re: Mr

The only way to remove it is to patch and rebuild the kernel without the code that creates it. /proc is virtual and not a real file system you can change.

And the file is 0 length since you activate it by writing a string to it (with echo for example). Since it is virtual, the file size will not change from doing this.

Vinyl LPs to top 3 million sales in Blighty this year

Re: The irony is

So you are saying if you listen with a crappy system it sounds worse than if you listen with a good system? A good system with digital will be even better than the analog.

USB-C adds authentication protocol

Re: Security?

That would be wrong. USB type C will allow a single cable to carry both power and data. It does NOT make a single wire within that cable do both. The author of the article is wrong. Of course all USB did that but power was expected to only go out a USB host port, not in, while type-C allows both directions (as the new Macintosh devices take advantage/abuse of).

Re: I can't wait

Oh good, so it was standards compliant. USB 1 and 2 explicitly allow up to 500mA and no more. USB 3 allows 900mA. Of course you can support more, but that's all the spec requires a port to support.

IEEE delivers Ethernet-for-cars standard

Re: Ethernet for real time?

Ethernet hasn't had collisions since we started using switches, so that is not much of an issue any more. Temporary block in the switch though because some other packet is currently being sent out a given port is still an issue though. And there are Ethernet extension standards to deal with bandwidth reservation and such for those cases where that matters.

Linux lads lambast sorry state of Skype service

Except NetMeeting actually used SIP, as in the standard that existed long before skype barged in with their own stupid peer to peer protocol.

SIP does have the issue of not being a fan of NAT on firewalls which has become rather common for just about everyone. It is an old protocol after all. Some firewalls do manage it OK though it seems.

Re: Just hack your own version per the open source spirit

Ekiga is one of many SIP clients. It is a quite nice one. Of course SIP predates skype by many years and being a standard, it is supported by lots of software and hardware. But it is slightly harder to use than skype, but on the other hand it isn't evil and proprietary.

WD CEO: We ain't getting Unisplendour's $3.8bn. But we'll buy SanDisk anyway

I love that they got the year of their special shareholder meeting wrong consistently everywhere in the press release, while getting the year right for everything else.

Debian 6.0 about to take flying leap off long term support cliff

Re: LTS is a joke

Debian follows the FHS (File Hierarchy Standard) and any upstream that doesn't will be fixed before being packaged. Upstreams that think they know better than everyone else and go their own way are best avoided. Just too much of a hassle to deal with things that want to do it their own way.

So no, the upstream wordpress is not better. It's wrong and actually hostile to proper packaging and installation.

Re: LTS is a joke

Trying to maintain security while using PHP is a joke. The Debian LTS tries to do security updates pretty quick with limited resources. This means things like firefox (well iceweasel) are out (It is just hopeless to try and keep up with the security problems in that), and I can imagine PHP being neglected too given how fundamentally insecure it always is.

Khronos releases Vulkan 1.0 open graphics specification

Re: OS X and Windows?

It doesn't matter what Microsoft thinks. If intel, AMD and Nvidia all support it in their drivers, then it doesn't matter if Microsoft officially wants to support it. They already did it back when OpenGL wasn't what Microsoft wanted, and they are doing it now with Vulcan.

'Unikernels will send us back to the DOS era' – DTrace guru Bryan Cantrill speaks out

Re: 80386 vs 80286

Then Pentium Pro was perfectly capable of running 16 bit code the same as any other x86 and is fully compatible. The issue people had was that it wasn't very fast at 16 bit code compared to 32 bit code (which is what it was optimized for with the new microcode pipeline). So 16 bit code didn't run any faster than on a Pentium, while 32 bit code was much faster, so if you ran DOS or Windows 3.1, then you might as well save your money and get a Pentium instead. The PII and later improved on the 16 bit performance again and were hence much better upgrades.

Re: Windows/NT must be 20 years old at least.

Well I think they called it NT 3.1 since it shared the look and feel of Windows 3.1 and could run Windows 3.1 applications.

Re: "Operating systems these days..." @Herbert

Actually the 68020 was the first version to support an MMU, and the MMU was an external chip. The 68000 and 68010 did not have any support for an MMU. The 68030 was the first to be available with the MMU built in (and many variants did not include it).

But at least they were 32bit chips with a flat memory model (OK, only 24bit supported until the 68020, but the register were 32 bit even before that), unlike the horror of the x86 family.

Linux is for everyone that wants an OS that works on pretty much all hardware and is scalable. FreeBSD is way behind in both those areas. And then there is the horror of the BSD user space which is just intolerable.

AMD's 64-bit ARM server chip Seattle finally flies the coop ... but where will it call home?

Re: The future can't be prevented. Only delayed.

No gigabyte has been showing vapour-ware for a long time too. You can't actually buy any of the nice arm servers gigabyte has shown, while you could actually get a hold of a development system from AMD. That is still the big problem for all the arm servers: You can't actually buy the damn things.

Got a pricey gaming desktop from PC World for Xmas? Check the graphics specs

Re: Not a Ti

Well HP list the 860-008na as having a 980 Ti, so I don't see why the 860-078na could not have one as an option.

Apple pays two seconds of quarterly profit for wiping pensioner's pics

Re: It's official now.

If you wait until the device is broken, it may not be possible to do a backup anymore.

BlackBerry to bug out of Pakistan by end of year

Blackberry only holds the keys to the servers they operate, not the ones enterprises run themselves. It seems when India was demanding access, blackberry put a server in India for consumer users there so that India could make requests for access to that data for users in India. This of course didn't do anything for access to messages for corporate users since they tend to have their own blackberry server with their own keys. Seems India thought that was good enough for them. Sounds like Pakistan wants a lot more than that which no one has ever gotten. If you want to access the messages going to a corporate blackberry server, bring a warrant to the company, not blackberry. I seem to recall blackberry said they would leave India too when they were demanding everything until they got a clue and accepted what blackberry said they could provide.

Mobe-maker OnePlus 'fesses up to flouting USB-C spec

Re: Maybe true

Well they are clearly not doing the right thing. It doesn't matter if the cable works with the phone. In 6 or 12 months you will grab that cable when you need one for some other device and potentially cause a fire or damage to something else because of it.

So they have only half done the right thing and half done the wrong thing.

After all I doubt the cable has a giant 'For use with OnePlus 2 only' sign on it. And their next phone might very well NOT work properly with this cable, assuming they stay in business long enough to make another phone.

BitLocker popper uses Windows authentication to attack itself

If you use it with the boot password (which I honestly thought everyone did), then it probably is a good replacement for truecrypt. If you use it in stupid mode because it would be so awful if you inconvenienced the users, then it isn't.

Re: Passwordless Bitlocker?

The fact it allows windows to boot from an "encrypted" drive without asking for the decryption password certainly indicates that such a problem exists.

American robocallers to be shamed in public lists

Given most robocalls I get (in Canada) are from fake numbers, what use is a list of numbers?

Smartmobe brain maker Qualcomm teases 64-bit ARM server chip secrets

But will you ever be able to buy one? Gigabyte has shown of both x-gene1 and thunderx machines, at least one of which has prices and preorder options at various dealers (and has had for 3 months) but can you actually buy one? No, of course not. If we could, we would buy one today (or maybe two).

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

Re: I remember Windows 95, too

Weezer - Buddy Holly and Edie Brickell - Good Times videos were on the windows 95 CD. No idea what the plus pack CD had on it.

Re: The public accepted Windows 95

Well one big thing Microsoft also did right in windows 95 with the new UI was to also include program manager for those who were not ready for the new UI. You could run windows 95 with the same program manager UI from windows 3.1 if you wanted to. I never saw anyone do it, but you had the choice. Same when they later did the new colourful stuff in XP, there was the option to stay with the older look if you wanted to. Windows 8 was the first time you were force fed a new UI with no option of saying "No thanks" and sticking with the previous UI until you got used to it (and no one will ever get used to the dreadful UI of Windows 8, which was a shame given the improvements in every other part of windows 8). With windows 8 Microsoft managed to simultaneously make a new UI that was awful and not give people the choice to not use it, rather than as in the past, make a UI that was usually considered better and give the option to stick with the old one.

So what are you doing about your legacy MS 16-bit applications?

Re: @1980s_coder - Start asking the developers pointed questions

Well actually the Alpha never did 32bit mode either, it was 64bit from the start, just like the Itanic that killed it (well that, along with totally incompetent management and infighting at Digital).

Samsung S6: You might get a Sony camera in it - or you might not

Looking at the pictures in that test, the sony sensor does appear to have a tendency to make things quite purple in some cases that the samsung does not, but is perhaps a tiny bit more detailed in some of the shots.

The summary of the difference does appear quite accurate.

Now of course it is a cell phone. What are you doing taking pictures you care about with a cell phone anyhow? Get a proper camera.

IBM details PowerPC microserver aimed at square kilometre array

Re: 12 actual and 12 virtual cores

It is a 12 core CPU with the ability to run 2 threads at once on each core. No different than what intel does with hyperthreading on many of their CPUs.

So 12 physical cores, 24 virtual cores. Your OS would see 24 CPUs.

For Windows guest - KVM or XEN and which distro for host?

I have no experience with xen, but at least the kvm information says that while device passthrough is supported, video card passthrough is NOT. A few people have managed to get it to work with some patching work done.

I do see some documentation on it having been done successfully with xen however.

I agree with other people on BTRFS. The developers say it isn't ready for production use. Of course if your machine is just to run games and do some hobby work, then that might be good enough.

I too would avoid AMD graphics cards. I also personally am a Debian fan, and have no interest or appreciation for the commercial linux distributions.

Top Microsoft bod: ARM servers right now smell like Intel's (doomed) Itanic

Re: Dinosaur MS

In the server area, most people really don't care about Windows. Serious server users run linux and ARM will run that just fine already.

Re: @ThomH

The P4 was a bad design. It was obviously designed to aim for the biggest clock speed number because that's what intel marketing wanted. The fact it was lousy at running existing x86 code that had been optimized following intel's own recommendations didn't matter to intel. As long as consumers were buying the machine with the biggest GHz number, intel was happy with the P4. Only when they ran into leakage issues and overheating problems and discovered they wouldn't be able to scale to 10GHz like they had planned did they throw the design away and start over using the Pentium-M/Pentium3 design and create the Core 2 by improving on the older design. Only the new instructions from the P4 were carried over, netburst was dead and well deserved. The Opteron/Athlon64 destroyed the P4 in performance on typical code at a lot lower clock speed and power consumption. intel has made a number of stupid blunders over the years, but they do eventually admit when things don't work and recover quite well by changing course and they have the resources to pull it off. x86 will be around from intel long after the itanium is gone.

Also MIPS never tried and SGI bought into the Itanium idea and killed development. It still does well in embedded markets where almost all wireless routers are MIPS based although a few are ARM. Alpha (owned by compaq owned by HP then sold to intel) was killed off, and had failed because digital had priced it out of the market to protect the VAX market that eventually was killed of by competition from everyone else instead. PowerPC hasn't failed, it does great it the markets that use it (lots of engine computers in cars are powerpc, as is lots of other embedded systems, and IBM has rather nice servers). Itanium failed because it was slow and stupid.

Apple changed to x86 because no one was making powerpc chips that fit their needs. IBM was making high end server chips which used too much power for a desktop, and freescale was making embedded chips which were too slow for what the desktop needed. Nothing wrong with PowerPC itself, just the server and embedded market was vastly more interesting (and a vastly larger market) than tiny little Apple's measly desktop market. It is the same reason Apple moved from m68k to PowerPC in the first place. m68k wasn't getting faster any more.

ARM64 (well aarch64) is very much a 64bit extention to the existing ARM 32bit design a lot like AMD extended x86 to 64bit. All 64bit ARM chips are perfectly able to run existing 32bit ARM code and a 64bit ARM linux system will also run 32bit arm applications with no changes or recompile needed. This is not a new thing. Sparc went from 32 to 64bit, PowerPC did it, Mips did it, x86 did it, PA-Risc did it, and now ARM is doing it. Nothing complicated about extending an architecture from 32 to 64bit while maintaining backwards compatibility. Only a few architectures were 64bit from the start (Itanium and Alpha that I can think of).

The Sun Niagara is a Sparc, not ARM. Sparc itself is fine, the Niagara design, not so much.

All the ARM chips so far have been perfectly sane. Itanium was not a sane design for a general purpose CPU. it was assuming compilers would become able to do compile time scheduling of parallel instructions, and that didn't happen. I vaguely recall seeing a paper a few years ago that actually proved it can't be done, so what intel hope for is actually impossible if I recall correctly. And if I recall incorrectly, it is still a very hard problem that has not been solved. So as it stands, the itanium is a terrible CPU design and rightly deserved to die. It is an enourmous shame that it caused MIPS to give up designing high end chips, made the Alpha go away, and certainly hurt sparc (powerpc seems to be doing OK). I don't personally miss PA-RISC.