Posts by bazza

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Re: Or...

One byte spare? Tsk, could have added a whole new feature...

On a serious note, definitely hats off. Its folk like you that gave folk like me a cheap enough machine to get started with. Beer owed.

Need for Speed?

If Python isn't fast enough, it's the wrong language for the application.

Re: Making Python faster

-- " the Python code is likely to be trivial and therefore reliable."

Or some end user takes it into their head to modify the python code...

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

Re: generated headers?

I've no knowledge of the situation in Linux, but what I have seen elsewhere is code generated automagically from documentation (thankfully, well structured documentation). If there are tables of registers accessible by some means in script-consumable documents, this is well worth it. One still has to write code to tweak registers in the right way, but at least the registers are easily accessible without relying on someone manually entering a lot of addresses by hand.

Re: 37 year old interface standard?

Perfect.

For a while the only printer we had was a teleprinter, and it was pretty slow. Printing out a long listing was something to start before lunchtime and maybe it'd be ready afterwards. I can still hear it: chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga ding chugga wham! (that was the carriage return, you could really feel it happening...) chugga etc.

Re: 37 year old interface standard?

RS233 was first standardised in 1960, but that merely formalised what had been around for a long time before then (they had teleprinters using the same basic idea back in WW2). I don't know if you still can, but I remember having PCs whose RS233 ports could be configured to support 5bit Baudot code (teleprinters still being just about recently relevant when the first PCs came out).

Amusingly, SATA has more in common with RS232 than it does with IDE.

Quantum Key Distribution: Is it as secure as claimed and what can it offer the enterprise?

From the article:

"On a QKD system, the mathematics is in some way intrinsically, and necessarily, linked to the actual physicality of the system. This situation is unavoidable, and we would do well to design for and around it."

The thing is, whilst both quantum mechanics and special / general relativity are both theories that have excellent backing from myriad reliable experiments, they do not wholly agree with each other (especially about gravity). What this means with absolute certainty is that one of these theories is incomplete.

And it might be quantum mechanics that is wrong...

So, if one accepts that quantum physics genuinely is fully described by our theories of it, but someone else has a better theory that just happens to have a loophole, then QMKD is worse than useless. A lot worse, in fact.

Re: "magic quantum woo-woo security"

It has been done through the atmosphere, though I'd hesitate to say that it had been made reliable (I don't know).

Re: Asking a company whether they can benefit from quantum <anything> is like...

Er, the semiconductor junctions used to make up the chips that are in the computer you used to type that comment rely entirely on the quantum behaviour of selectively doped silicon.

We've all benefitted enormously from a quantum something.

Sing a song of Office, a pocketful of why: ARM64 version running in a Pi

Microsoft briefly showed off a version of Office compiled for ARM running on Windows, also compiled for ARM, a very long time ago: 2008? "Oh goodie" we all thought, "MS are getting into this ARM thing heavily, we'll all have ARM desktops before too long (glad I kept the old Archimedes)". And what came out was - tada - WinRT.

What a let down.

So 13 years later they finally seem to be getting the idea.

Android devs prepare to hand over app-signing keys to Google from August

Huh?

From the article

Google has said: "Your keys are stored on the same infrastructure that Google uses to store its own keys. Keys are protected by Google's Key Management Service."

Oh goodie. How reassuring...

I have no doubt that Google do an awful lot to ensure the security of such things, and they are probably reasonably competent at it. But is does smell a bit like every single damned egg in one basket, well padded basket it may be... Can you just imagine the mayhem if someone got inside that.

Surely a better way would be to have an interface where the developer holds the keys and provides them to Google as required, to get the same end result. That might be a busy interface, but it leaves the control in the hands of the developer.

Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

Build a New One

It's the quickest and cheapest way, if Hubble is broken and there's science demand that the JW telescope won't satisfy.

IBM's 18-month company-wide email system migration has been a disaster, sources say

Re: Dark, chaotic pit of not being able to access email or calendars

The "no email or calendar" bit does sounds like workplace bliss.

And it is a great pity that a company once famed for employing the right people at a time when every other 1930's company was men-only now has a reputation for ageism.

No Email, Permanently

The BBC had a piece some years ago about a few companies that had a no-internal-email rule. If the person you were emailing was on the same site, you had to walk there or pick up the phone. The report indicated that these companies were thriving.

And it's easy to see why; actually dealing with email is a huge f*****g waste of time, mostly. Get rid of it across the board (internally), and the firm has got itself a ton of productivity back at a stroke.

Microsoft wasn't joking about the Dev Channel not enforcing hardware checks: Windows 11 pops up on Pi, mobile phone

Re: You're nuts

Say what you want, but it's undeniably the case that Windows has been requiring less hardware, not more, as newer versions have rolled out. I'm currently running 10 very happily on hardware on which XP was a bit of a dog.

Leaked print spooler exploit lets Windows users remotely execute code as system on your domain controller

Ooooops

The print queue is required, and must contain letters.

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

Re: How come ...

What is this, a call for something like the RAM add on for the ZX81, or Sinclair Spectrum? Good grief, try one of those to see how bad an idea it is.

This would be a massive backwards step in computer history.

Hubble memory errors persist despite NASA booting long-idle backup payload computer

Re: Have they tried

Always worth asking, but I think that in this case they have tried that.

Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates

Re: We need ReiserFS back...

'fraid not...

Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions

And, one would think, it would be a matter for minimal review, in terms of time.

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

They've got the cargo. That's the hostage. And sure, they can make the ship go anywhere they want. The last thing anyone is going to want is a ship that cannot be manually controlled.

A container ship can have several $billion's worth of cargo on board. That's too much to be lost or even interrupted on a routine basis.

Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

A large part of a merchant mariner's time is spent on maintenance, including maintenance of the cargo (eg refrigerated containers). That will have to be going on regardless. There is also watch keeping.

A lot of the business reason behind such labour is insurance. A well run ship has cheaper premiums. A ship that is crewless is going to be expensive to insure.

Another part of it is piracy. Most ships routinely go through the Malaca strait and the western Indian Ocean to Suez, both places where piracy can be a problem. If word gets out that there's $billions in cargo sailing past with no one on board to defend it, then the pirates are going to be having a terrific time. Their grins may even be enough to make those Canon cameras let them on board.

Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

Re: Engines?

Depends on the engine and its intake.

Concorde didn't need afterburner to sustain Mach2, but did need it to get there. The SR71 did need AB to sustain supersonic speed, and in fact if heavy it could not even get supersonic in level flight; it needed a shallow dive to get there. Both depended entirely on variable inlet geometry to be efficient at high Mach numbers, gaining in efficiency as speed increased, both being thermally limited rather than power limited, both being hopeless gas guzzlers subsonic.

And, really, nothing has changed. No one is likely to beat the SR71 inlet efficiency because it was the ideal design. And the compressor design in such an engine is still a horrible compromise.

Re: Dreams make great things

I'm impressed that TGV lines don't have to be very flat. Train like that are quite good at going up and down hill, so long as changes in gradient are sufficiently gentle. Once up to speed the hills and valleys aren't really going to have a significant effect.

Re: What baffles me about Concorde

Concorde certainly had a lot of what was then very high tech electronics.

Totally primitive by today's standards of course, but strangely enough that gave it far better longevity than anything modern. So long as someone somewhere is making discrete transistors and passive components of almost any specification, the electronics could be repaired. It's far harder to keep modern electronics in service.

Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images

Well, this idiot here doesn't appreciate SystemD because it's more often than not a source of enormous difficulty. At least I could fathom my way through SystemV, but the lengths to which you have to go to find out what the hell SystemD has done now is truly irritating.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Perhaps though it may push them towards using WhatsApp, Signal, etc, where the providers are publicly dead set against giving the police any assistance whatsoever.

RISC-V boffins lay out a plan for bringing the architecture to high-performance computing

Re: OpenRISC

Risc-V is the underdog, but I fear that it always will be.

I just can't see why any company would take it on as a tool to try and achieve market dominance in any existing CPU market segment. To achieve that would take a lot of money and time, and a lot of nerve, unless they already were a large incumbent in the industry.

Look at how long it's taking ARM to get into the server market; years and years of trying by various ARM licensees, and there's still very large customers who still won't even look at AMD (who are at least compatible with Intel), never mind giving a whole new ISA a try.

Nor can I see an academic collective being able to do things fast enough for it to challenge a well resourced, well practised company.

People who sell or run software for a living are collectively very conservative. Even if someone came up with a compelling, gonna-be-market-beating Risc-V offering, a large part of the existing software owners / runners would be content to wait for Intel / AMD / ARM to catch up and stamp all over it.

Has RiscV Got What Makes A Super Super?

I'm not convinced. What a supercomputer these days needs is SIMD cores closely coupled with fast memory interfaces and fast low latency interconnecting fabric. The CPU ISA that is used to orchistrate it all is comparatively unimportant, so long as it does not produce much heat itself.

So if RiscV wants to get into the HPC business, it'll need those things. And the problem is that getting software math kernels for SIMD cores right take a lot of very specialised care and expertise...

China's ISCAS to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022 as nation seeks to cut reliance on Arm, Intel chips

Closed Source

Where this won't help is with running closed source software that they also consider essential. It's no good having a domestic IT ecosystem where every machine is binary incompatible with the rest of the world's if you sometimes need to run their software (eg CAD, or silicon design tools, big important software for big important jobs).

So they can't achieve full independence without somehow reimplementing the software tools they will still rely on which cannot be got simply by cloning a repo.

Can a 21.5-inch iMac beat the latest-and-greatest M1 model in performance? Kinda

AVX?

I've had a reasonably good rummage around, but have been unable to find anything definitive about whether or not the M1 silicon has the equivalent of Intel AVX. Anyone out there know?

Little tidbits like this article suggests not. I don't know if Blender uses AVX or not. Given how Rosetta is supposed to work you'd think that a statically translated Blender would, if the M1 silicon were up to it, be at least comparable to running on Intel hardware, but it wasn't. So perhaps Blender does use AVX, and perhaps M1 is rubbish in that department.

AVX512 is a seriously chunky piece of kit. I know that similar SIMDs are bolted to ARMs (Fujitsu do for their latest supercomputer), but I don't know if Apple has bothered to or not.

Microsoft flips request to port Visual Studio Tools for Office to .NET Core from 'Sure, we'll take a look' to 'No'

Not Many Options

I can't see what they can possibly do, other than something like a brutal big bang "Office 2022 is now .NET Core", or whatever. This is the kind of thing that Apple just do; announce a breaking change, and go through with it no matter the consequences. I've been constantly amazed at that eco-system's ability to just keep dying a little, everytime Apple does it.

It's clearly untennable to leave Office stuck with .NET Framework when MS are actively encouraging the entire .NET world to go to Core. Also, saying "Can't they eat Javascript" has got to be some sort of perverse joke; cross platform it may well be, but then WTF is .NET Core supposed to be all about?

Anyway, I thought that all this COM stuff was supposed to solve this kind of thing. So far as I can see, the only way it can be this screw up is if the COM Add-ons are (as the article hints) run purely in-process. But the Wikipedia article on COM says that "COM objects can be transparently instantiated and referenced from within the same process (in-process), across process boundaries (out-of-process), or remotely over the network (DCOM)." So does MS have a really simple option, changing the add-on architecture to use out-of-process instantiation without anyone really having to change that much of their existing code bases? If that were even mildly feasible, surely doing that ASAP is a good idea?

Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

Sigh...

From the article:

"No one at Google googled Bobb, it seems."

They've got a bit of a habit of not using their own tools.

The guy who announced Google Protocol Buffers admitted on stage to never having heard of ASN.1, a well established standard and technology that does exactly what they wanted GBP to do, only better.

They're writing Fuchsia and are ending up with an OS that is remarkably similar to QNX, probably having spent more money doing so than it would have cost to have bought Blackberry to take control of QNX.

So what, one might ask? Well, if Fuchsia is to expand their opportunities for $billions revenue, and if that's to come on stream in the next few years, you have to compare that to the cost and time scale of having bought Blackberry to get QNX, and the revenue streams that would have come in with it as well as the the earlier arrival of the revenue streams Fuchsia is supposed to generate.

And when you do that, so far Fuchsia is representing a lost opportunity cost of tens of $billions. Throw in the fact that had they bought Blackberry they would then automatically have a presence in half the world's in car entertainment systems, and it's a massive miss.

So, permitting their engineers to go off and have fun writing an OS just looks fantastically ridiculous from a business point of view, especially as Fuchsia's technological descriptions is comparable to QNX's.

They've certainly not searched for anything about brand loyalty / fragmentation / inertia in messaging tools usage by real people. I've lost count of how many they've stood up and withdrawn.

Nor have they apparently done much searching about what safety critical software development actually means, in terms of what it has to achieve, who you have to convince that it's done that, and how you have to go about showing them that it has really been done. If they had, you'd think that they would not have bothered lurching into the self driving car malarkey.

Nor do they seems to have used their own services to see how good their service is. Cough cough Google Music - - > YouTube Music.

Why This Is a Problem

The problem with this is that it shows, perhaps only to a small group of people who notice these things (eg TheRegister readers), that there is an significant immaturity to how Google / Alphabet goes about its business, outside of its core business of search, map, YouTube.

The thing is, the people who do notice these things and understand their cause are then deterred from ever working for Google. And they're probably going to be the most mature, sensible engineering types who Google actually need to stop them getting it so wrong so often. Throw in the fact that their HR apparently can't spot an apparently homophobic antisemite before appointment, despite owning the very tools that would have revealed that to them, does not paint them as a good company to work for.

And this has suddenly become a critical problem, probably. With the G7 signalling an end to the creative tax efficiency measures employed by companies like Google, that might put a huge dent in their profit from search ad revenue.

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Re: Reminds of silent disk corruption a few years ago

Yes I remember that.

It was for reasons like this that Sun developed the ZFS file system. It has error checking and correction up and down the file system, designed to probably give error free operations over exabyte filesystems.

Modern storage devices are close to being such that if you read the whole device twice, you will not get the same bits returned. 1 will be wrong.

Re: How do they know this is new?

Silicon chips do indeed wear. There's a phenomenon I've heard termed "electron wind" which causes the atoms of the element used to dope the silicon (which is what makes a junction) to be moved across that junction. Eventually they disperse throughout the silicon and then there's no junction at all.

This is all related to current, temperature and time. More of any these makes the wearing effect faster.

Combine the slowness with which that happens, and the effects of noise, temperature and voltage margins on whether a junction is operating as desired, and I reckon you can get effects where apparently odd behaviour can be quasi stable.

Sigh...

I think there's a few people who need to read up on the works of Claude Shannon and Benoit Mandelbrot...

Re: Brazil, here we come...

How are your ducts?!

Code contributions to GCC no longer have to be assigned to FSF, says compiler body

Re: Apple and GPL

See my comment above. I said that every holder of substantial copyrights can sue. I also said that this is in fact a problem in some cases, as there have been instances where one copyright owner sued when the rest wanted to continue negotiating license compliance.

And I guess the situation with multuple copyright holders being involved is that there's absolutely no compulsion on any of them to agree, or give way. The only way round it is to re-write the relevant sections of code.

I guess Google's "fair use" win concerning the Java APIs counts in such instances. If one half of an OSS project undertakes to write-out the other half's contrinbutions (e.g. to settle an impasse in a license discussion), they can do so. A black-box rewrite of the offending modules doesn't also have to re-do the interfaces for those modules, even if the creators of the interface were the other guys who are now being sidestepped.

Re: Apple and GPL

This is nothing to do with the acceptability or otherwise of the GPL, copyright, or the Berne convention. This is all about accurately and unambiguously defining what the license to copyrighted material is.

I have read the GPL. It says:

"To [Apply These Terms], attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found."

Of the three things suggested there, the GNURadio project has done only one. An SPDX-License-Identifier tag does not by itself (and certainly not without an explanation) qualify as unquestionably fulfilling the other 2. (With deliberate misinterpretation to demonstrate the point), what is an SPDX License, and why would something called GPL3 identify it?

This is why it is "safest" to do as the license text recommends, and why it is less safe to do otherwise. I'm wondering why the FSF allows a project it holds the copyright for to ignore the most important part of the FSF's own blessed license text.

I've yet to hear of a judge who has ruled that an SPDX tag is legally binding. Can you point to anything in the Berne Convention, or any law, or case history that says it is?

Re: Apple and GPL

Plus, clang/llvm is a whole lot better from a technical point of view as a tool chain. Gcc is very long in the tooth.

Re: Apple and GPL

The multiple copyright holder aspect of the Linux kernel is seen as an unresovlable problem for that project. It's stuck on GPL2.

Re: Apple and GPL

Where it could get interesting is if someone rolls out a "fair use" defence. If the FSF is suing, but all other contributors are not, or aren't expressing support for the case, that would make a "fair use" defence more potent.

It might not potent enough to win, but these things accrue. Eventually the FSF's share of the copyright ownership will decline to a point where they could not claim to be representing a majority view.

How Bad a Job is the FSF Doing Anyway?

There's some interesting things going on these days. For example, the source code for the GNURadio project - FSF owned - now simply states who owns the copyright, and what project the file is part of. There are spdx tags in the files, but nowhere in any of the source code files does it say in clear and unambigous terms what the license conditions are (an spdx tag is just a word, it's not a license statement).

There is a COPYING file in the repository, but is simply a stock copy of the GPL, there's nothing in it to say that it applies to any of the accompanying files. In fact at the bottom of the GPL text itself it tells you to put a piece of text in your source code files to indicate that the GPL license applies, which the GNURadio project has now stripped out from its source code. The project README.md does not say that GPL applies. The CONTRIBUTING.md file says that it is GPL, but the source code itself doesn't restate or confirm that.

So as far as I can tell if you download the head of GNURadio today, you get a whole load of source code that makes no effective and binding statement as to what license applies, and a gratis but apparently purposeless copy of the GPL.

Ok, so you and I know what spdx tags are for, but they do not amount to a clear and unambiguous assertion that every single English reading human being on the planet can be expected to understand. Put an spdx tag in front of a judge and they're going to say "this is just a word". AFAIK an spdx tag all by itself, in isolation, shorn of the GPL recommended text, has not been established in court as an adequate assertion of license conditions across all (or indeed, any) jurisdictions on the planet. I'd venture to suggest that your average judge would read the text at the bottom of the GPL, would see that said text is missing from the source code, and would draw some negative conclusions from that omission.

My overall point is that license assertion practises as weak and as lazy as this are asking for trouble somewhere down the line. That trouble may never actually turn up - it's hard to see anyone actually being motivated to exploit the weakness - but that's not something that should be relied upon. What's the point of assigning copyright to the FSF if they're then not going to police projects they own to make sure that the copyright and license is being asserted as fully as possible?

Refurb your enthusiasm: Apple is selling an 8-year-old desktop for over £5k

Re: To be fair...

Provided one doesn't want sustained throttle free performance...

Unfixable Apple M1 chip bug enables cross-process chatter, breaking OS security model

Re: iOS vs macOS

Yes they are, but anyone looking for malicious apps communicating in standard ways (sockets, IPC, etc) wouldn't ordinarily be worried about apps accessing the s3_5_c15_c10_1 register.

Now they will be!

US Patent Office to take only DOCX in future – or PDFs if you pay extra

As with any "standard" the challenge is to understand what it means. The XSD schema for all MS's formats are public and curated by the library of Congress. You can download these schemas, get a code generator from someone like Objective Systems and automagically end up with source code in a language of your choice that is able to parse the files from an unzipped docx, turning each one into an object(s) in your program. There's also binary blobs for jpegs, etc.

The tricky part so far as building a word processor application is in understanding how to render all that on screen / paper. Understandings vary...

However, I suspect that the USPTO isn't interested in rendering any of it to screen. If all they want to do is search and compare content, then all they need is the parsed objects. And that is well understood thanks to the schemas.

So all in all, not a bad idea.

The simplicity of parsing the docx files shows up in various places. Beyond Compare, the best comparison tool on the planet in my opinion as a paid up user, does a really neat job with docx comparison, showing just the text differences. It's curiously useful to be able to do that.

Re: USPTO

Let's be charitable. This move may improve the quality of their work. We could even wish them well with this endeavour.

(I'll leave the choice of icon up to your imagination)

Re: You want interoperability?

It's also a bit tricky to attach a copy to a physical working example of, say, a comb over. Staples? Or glue?!

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

Re: monetize applications.

That's a little short sighted. You've omitted Active Directory which, although it was preceded by things like NT4, NIS and Netware, was a very significant improvement on all of them and nothing else has come close since. The fact that they used some open tech to build it too makes it more significant, which the *nix world has embraced in the shape of Samba.

The Fuchsia is now. Google's operating system lands on real-world consumer devices, starting with 2018's Nest Hub

Re: Google started the development of Fuchsia in 2016

It's a message passing OS, so you'd think that it would go the same way as anything else that Google has done with communications.

I've long puzzled over why they've done this instead of just buying Blackberry to get hold of QNX. But this isn't the first time Google has written something new rather than adopt something extant and suitable...

Waymo self-driving robotaxi goes rogue with passenger inside, escapes support staff

Exposed to Danger?

It turned out of a side road and then stopped, leaving him vulnerable to the first inattentive big truck driver crashing into the vehicle from behind. OK, it looks like the traffic was not going very fast, but had it happened it would have been a pretty hefty impact.

All in all, there's clearly a lot of room for improvement. However, it seems that from the glacial pace of progress they're pretty much out of ideas from this point forward. They might code up some specific behaviour for this specific situation, but that just underlines the impossibility of covering all situations; for a start they can't even know what those all are.

I doubt that this incident will quell the enthusiasm currently driving the continued investment in the field, but at some point there is going to be no point carrying on.