Posts by Hi Wreck

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Rental Software

Wasn't the whole point of using a subscription model was to get all the new cruft automagically? Now you have to pay more for cruft you don't even want. I guess that's an improvement in the subscription model itself.

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

The days of running multiple users on a PDP 11/45 with a whopping 256K of RAM, with 64KD and 64KI (split) available to the user (if that) under UNIX V6, are long gone. Good times!

Exchange Online will start archiving your oldest emails before your inbox bursts

replies ad nauseum

Given that the email programs love to attach the contents of a message in a reply, M$ could save loads of space by de-duplicating the entire mess.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

We are all Doomed!

That was COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), the language meant for pointy-haired bosses and those who like to type "multiply" instead of "*".

FORTRAN (Formula Translation) was for the Boffins. And as a historical note, the predecessor to Doom was Adventure. It was quite the dusty deck!

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

Re: Did he choose to retire....

Walked the plank,

Resign or be prosecuted,

You get the idea (See Bloomburg).

Engineering

If only Intel had spent the Billions of dollars they incinerated in share-holder buybacks and other financial engineering on actual real engineering, they would likely not need the bailout from Uncle Sam (CHIPS Act) and might actually have a product that customers want. But Wall Street knows best (until the company is gutted, that is).

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Re: But Toronto sucks

QNX started in Waterloo, ON (just a short drive by distance, but it takes forever on the infamous 401). It was inspired by Thoth (more correctly called Sloth). David Cheriton (who's he?) helped write that. Good times!

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Re: Great...

Most binaries use shared libraries. They can be compiled/optimized for the specific CPU. However, all this stuff that Intel is doing seems to me to be adding lipstick to a pig.

FreeBSD 13.1 is out for everything from PowerPC to x86-64

Re: Question

Mac OS is the Mach (Carnegie Mellon) kernel with BSD Unix tacked on top. Linux is more System V (original AT&T). You can see the differences with the myriad of options in “ps” (ps aux vs. ps -efl) and “ls”. It gets muddled at times, though. Apple seems to want to excise itself of any of the GNU stuff (switching to zsh from bash, clang from gcc, etc.). Mind you, as long as eMacs works, I’m a happy camper.

The ‘substantial contributions’ Intel has promised to boost RISC-V adoption

Re: "vowed to do what it can to make the open-source RISC-V ISA worthy"

The Chinese are very motivated to not be beholden to Intel's processors, and for that matter, anything made in the west. They have boatloads of money to invest.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Oh, boy ...

I chuckled quite a bit about the "difficult to parse" bit, especially since Aho literally wrote the (Dragon) book on parsing.

Oracle's compliance cops now include Java in license audits

Re: Larry, the Putin of the biz software world!

If I recall correctly, Larry has his very own MiG 29, so if the shoe fits...

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping

I could never get into any of the bloated visual IDE crap. Perhaps that's from getting tennis elbow from using smalltalk back in the days I guess. All that space wasted for boxes filled with this and that and the need to click-click-click on a mouse.

Emacs still works like a charm for development and is clocking in at about 50MB of RAM on my Mac. 45MB of that is likely for the framework stuff being dragged in. And if you must use vi, there is vim mode. And yes, I use it on Windows for those rare occasions I actually spin up a Windows box.

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

<quote>IBM 360 assembler is much more powerful and easier to use than "C".</quote>

You misspelled VAX.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Good grief...

Kudos to Apple to shrinking the PCB down to a System-on-a-chip. Welcome to the world where physical chips are becoming obsolete and where companies can now stick whatever bits and pieces they need into a single device and then get TMSC or whomever to churn out countless copies. Seymore Cray recognized memory bandwidth as an issue during the Jurasic era of computing - his machines were a marvel at the time. Shedding an external memory bus allows a lot of innovation in the memory system,. As for bemoaning the ability to plug in other stuff onto a bus, you need new stuff to plug into the new Universal Serial Bus.

Re: There's going to be a shedload of buggy apps

Good grief, what on earth are you talking about anyway? If your application breaks due to cache-coherence, I dare say your application is borked to begin with because it is playing foot-loose with critical sections.

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

Bug Compatibility.

Backward (bug) compatibly for legacy software. Jobs didn’t care, so there were bowls of protest when a new version of Mac OS caused (cough) photoshop to no longer work.

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Re: virtulaization

I would imaging that they would run binary translation rather than emulation similar to just in time compilers for Java etc. Modern Intel machines effectivley do that in hardware now today anyway.

Re: virtulaization

If Job's wanted virtualization, Apple would still be using PPC (or even 68k) chips. The X86 was a bitch to virtualize given the unprivileged access to the processor status word for reads. Kudos to vmware for actually figuring out how to get it done. I suspect it was AMD who fixed that too.

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

This clanger explains Nadella's nickname...

"How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it's going to be about the Microsoft graph."

I guess you now need a satnav to figure your way through "the graph".

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: Ah, the loop

They are. Find yourself a DSP.

Defaulting to legacy Internet Explorer just to keep that one, weird app working? Knock it off

Count me in.

Guilty as charged. I have to use Intranet Exploder to launch some dodgy Oracle application (FFS). IT says they are looking to move the whole mess to some new Web-based thing “real soon now”.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

Priceless...

A "tip" of the hat to the "head"-line writer.

Boffins debunk study claiming certain languages (cough, C, PHP, JS...) lead to more buggy code than others

Re: poor tools can't be blamed?....sure, sure, suurrrrre

Assembly? Surely you jest. Today's compilers will do a far better job of scheduling instructions than all but the most experienced assembly programmers, and when the architecture of the machine changes (including our beloved Intel x86), it takes a lot less time to recompile than to recode. Put a steak into it.

Apple in XS new sensation: Latest iPhone carries XS-sive price tag

I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text..

Perhaps being a pain in the arse to check a text while driving is a good thing.

How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

Re: Ahem

Everyone knows “X” sells!

Donkey Wrong: Arcade legend Billy Mitchell booted from record books amid MAME row

I look forward to watching the do-over on twitch

Not. If I wanted to watch grass grow, I would rather watch golf.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

The only fly in the ointment...

...is running legacy windows code in a virtual windows machine. All the native OSX stuff is an update from the App store or recompile away.

The wait is over: MoD releases latest issue of Ship Paint Monthly

WTF

I cannot fathom the relevance of this article in the register. It brings new meaning to the words rusty bucket

WTF ... makes mobile phone batteries explode?

Re: Mars bar

Einstein would disagree.

HP doorsteps Apple shoppers at the altar of dreams

Dave and Bill

Are likely spinning in their graves today. It is indeed ironic that Steve Jobs looked to HP as his source of innovation.

Fujitsu's billion-dollar ARM supercomputer delayed by up to 2 years

Re: Delay ... but so what!!

Have an up vote. I always thought that the Strategic Defense Initiative was always know to be impractical, but rathe a ploy to bankrupt the then USSR in a mad dash arms race.

Re: Delay ... but so what!!

Have an up vote. I always thought that the Strategic Defense Initiative was always know to be impractical, but rathe a ploy to bankrupt the then USSR in a mad dash arms race.

Fujitsu picks 64-bit ARM for Japan's monster 1,000-PFLOPS super

Re: Legacy code in scientific computing

Code generation for a RISC machine is easier too since you don't have to worry all of the funny non orthogonal instructions.

Ericsson set to lay off thousands of workers over summer – report

I think you mean Alcatel. Er, wait a minute...

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

What is the world coming to?

The mighty pound of sterling silver is now reduced to cheap plastic, er, excuse me polymer. And its likely made in China too.

We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever

Batteries

Batteries will drive the replacement cycle. Of course, once they last more than two years, this too will change.

Microsoft makes Raspberry Pi its preferred IoT dev board

Re: Self-foot-shooting again, Microsoft?

What would putting Windows on these devices give me?

Clippy.

Thanks for playing: New Linux ransomware decrypted, pwns itself

Re: Crypto-101.

Minimally drand48(), or better yet random(). rand() has been known to suck for eons. However, it is available on Windows because it is part of the C standard, whereas drand48() and random() are not. Perhaps the malware authors were striving for maximum portability?

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

Re: closer

The last 8 columns were for the sequence number so that after you dropped the card deck on the floor you could run the mess through the card sorter to get your program back.

Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost

Re: Actually, a success for consumers, I think

> Caused Intel to get off their arses and seriously up their game in the mobile space.

Except that Intel has practically no presence what so ever in the mobile (phone) space.

Drop-stitch: Microsoft's 3D Photosynth app sinks into oblivion

Obsolete?

With iOS supporting pano photos since who knows when, perhaps it's just as well not supporting something which isn't needed. Google has a spooky new pano thing though which stiches photos you have taken, regardless of when. You WILL be assimilated.

Microsoft SLASHES 7,800 bods, BURNS $7.6bn off books in Nokia adjustment

How prescient

http://computernewsreport.com/2010/microsofts-funeral-ceremony-for-windows-phone-rivals/

Wait a moment...

Security world chuckles at Hacking Team’s 'virus torrent' squeals

Re: Pozzi

Sheese - I read that as Ponzi, another despicable character. Ponzi was a "an Italian businessman and con artist" (wikipedia for Charles Ponzi).

Amazon just wrote a TLS crypto library in only 6,000 lines of C code

Re: I applaud this and hope it is clean. However we could have written this in Perl in 1 line.

You beat me to it. However, you failed to mention that those brainiacs submitting to the OOC could write this all in one statement of C code.

Cortana threatens to blow away ESC key

How quaint

i would have thought one would simply utter "cortana" to summon Cortana. A dedicated key? What were they thinking?

NetApp consciously uncouples from 500+ staff

Conscious uncouple

One can only hope that whomever penned that missive will be among those who were given the high jump.

C++ Daddy Bjarne Stroustrup outlines directions for v17

#pragma?

Surely there must be a #pragma to force Fortran IV, er, gcc 2.95 mode?

Microsoft dumps ARM for Atom with cut-price Surface 3 fondleslab

Re: MS is trapped

It's not the kernel that's ossified, it's the applications. Windows itself suffers from 'junk DNA' which has accumulated throughout the years resulting in the bloated mess that exists today. The windows kernel has run on a variety of platforms in the past, and will continue to do so with windows 10, as MS plans on running it on pretty well everything. The brilliance of Apple (and DEC for that matter when moving from the VAX to the Alpha) was the ability to translate legacy code to a new architecture (rosetta for Apple). Furthermore, Apple deprecates code faster than most people change their underwear, so old applications either adapt or die. If MS had allowed legacy x86 cruft to run on ARMs or Itanics [sic], perhaps the x86 would have sunk to it's most richly deserved place on the bottom of the ocean.

Microsoft unveils API to break hardware/software coupling in switches

Just what CISCO wants...

Interoperability in the secret sauce.