Posts by Alan Mackenzie

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

Just where is this Sodium going to be coming from?

Sodium metal doesn't exist in nature - at least, not on the Earth. It will have to be produced by something like electrolysis, at great energy cost.

And if it's going to be liquid metal sodium, it will have to be heated substantially, at even more energy cost.

Then, of course, it's highly inflammable, so there will be safety aspects to consider.

This idea is thus going to do little to combat global warming. A much better idea than sodium powered drones might be no drones. Then we wouldn't need such crazy technology.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

The salaries paid to highly qualified scientists in Britain are desperately poor.

A family member of mine is such a scientist with a PhD in chemistry, working at a government funded research institute in England. He's on a three year temporary contract, and isn't even earning enough to be able to rent his own flat. A few years ago, he told me that there had been no promotions, and no pay increases for 10 years. Additionally, of course, a recent Tory government cancelled their pension entitlements without compensation.

All that sends a clear message that science in the UK won't make you a comfortable living. The UK establishment clearly doesn't care about science. Not that it's necessarily any better in some EU countries.

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

1 MW computing racks ....

Madness, sheer madness.

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

And the punishment?

Google is being required to stop committing the crime, but what about punishing them for breaking the law? If I were to be found guilty of a much lesser crime, say shoplifting, I'd be faced with more than just being required not to do it again.

Hacktivism resurges – but don't be fooled, it's often state-backed goons in masks

.... by using default passwords for internet-accessible programmable logic controllers.

Just what are PLCs accessible from the internet for?

Maybe there'd be less malware and disruption if the default for a computer system was NOT to be on the internet, and only very restricted systems for which there were a good reason would be connected.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

90 Minutes to install a patch????

What on Earth are they playing at? You could install a full featured operating system onto a PC in less time than that.

Might it possibly be that they've taken a cue from Microsoft, and they're reinstalling the entire program rather than patching it?

Brits to build ExoMars landing gear after Russia sent packing

Sending corrections.

> ..... and probably as good a reminder as any to use the "send corrections" link rather than posting a comment for such purposes.

This "send corrections" is only available to those who are prepared to allow Google Scripts (aka Google malware) to run on their machines. I block these with NoScript.

I don't understand why The Register does this: it knows who its logged in posters are. If it lets these posters post, why not let them send corrections too?

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

Yes, 50+ years ago, the Saturn rockets worked, taking people to the moon and back again.

50 years later, now, we seem to be stuck with basic engineering issues on a successor to Saturn. What happened to the skills and experience of the 1960s and 1970s that building working rockets has become so difficult once again?

Infoseccers criticize Veeam over critical RCE vulnerability and a failing blacklist

"Blocklist" ???

What's this nonsense with "blocklist"? A blocklist is a list of blocks, such as might be allocated in a file system or any number of similar things.

It took me several minutes to work out what you were talking about. What you were talking about was a BLACKLIST, a word instantly recognised and understood. Particularly when you contrasted it with "whitelist".

We're (mostly) robust adults reading and commenting on the Register. There is nothing whatsoever offensive about "blacklist". Please use it in the future when it's the correct word.

Thanks!

iOS users left refreshing in vain as Microsoft Outlook woes drag on

My email works .....

Email has been a working product for over 40 years. That's adequate time to have got rid of all the bugs, even at Microsoft.

What on Earth can they be playing at? Changing their email software for change's sake?

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Nonsense like MISRA to neuter it

MISRA C, last time I asked on their mailing list (which was over a decade ago) was somebody's opinion on what good coding was. There were no studies showing that programs programmed with MISRA were better (for whatever value of better) than those not.

MISRA bloats source code. A simple `if' statement, for example, expands from 2 lines to 4 lines by virtue of the redundant compound statement MISRA imposes. There are worse examples: try to write a MISRA equivalent of a search through a linked list. It takes three lines in C (the first line being the assignment of the search variable to the list pointer). It would take many more in MISRA C. The only argument against that is that MISRA C is rarely used in applications with linked lists. Bloated source code is more difficult to maintain because one is scrolling the source code up and down more.

MISRA C is used in the motor industry like the bible is used in Christianity. It is taken for granted, and one is expected not to question it.

DeepSeek disappears from South Korean app stores over privacy concerns

..... the software breached "local" privacy laws.

No, it most assuredly did not. If anything, it breached NATIONAL privacy laws. South Korea is a nation, not some minor local borough, please.

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

Re: Relievedly

For pity's sake, DON'T "tape a couple of their fingers back". That's physical abuse, and could possibly lead to permanent injury. Robert Schumann, the composer, tried this on noticing how awkward his pinkies were when playing the piano. That was the end of his career as a pianist.

Got a telescope? Bid farewell to ESA's retiring Milky Way mapper

Surely they could have said "deactivated"? Or maybe they meant "pacified". Satellites can get violent. Who knows?

Uncle Sam now targets six landlord giants in war on alleged algorithmic rent fixing

Here we go, once more, yet again.

Nowhere in this despicable account is any mention of getting allegedly illegally fixed rents reduced back to what they should have been. Far less, the restitution of the excess payed by renters over the past years.

No, instead, we get talk about (at least one of) the guilty paying a paltry settlement to a regulator. Cost of doing business.

Until we start seeing substantial gaol sentences for the directors of such firms, this type of criminality will continue.

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

To Liam: Clarification over the state of the Emacs project vis-a-vis CC Mode.

Hello, Liam.

Yes, it is true that I have resigned from the Emacs project, and I have to say I'm not proud of my actions which, together with the actions of others, led to the disagreement which forced me out.

CC Mode, as well as being a part of the Emacs core, is also a stand alone project. I intend to continue running that stand alone project, and will cooperate with the Emacs core maintainers to ensure that bug fixes and fixes for language changes (e.g. the three yearly C++ standard) filter through to Emacs itself.

I will no longer be participating directly in the development of the Emacs core, that's all.

Incidentally, there are new modes based on Tree Sitter in Emacs which are faster (usually, but not always) than the corresponding CC Mode modes, and though they still have rough edges, it's not inconcievable that these new modes will someday supersede CC Mode and other traditional major modes entirely.

Emacs continues to be a useful and supremely user friendly (as contrasted with beginner friendly) program.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: What does "upsell" (noun) mean?

Many thanks!

What does "upsell" (noun) mean?

Upsell (noun)? I've never encountered the word before. Is it part of some USAmerican dialect?

It made it hard for me to tick one of the three boxes on the quiz.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: This'll be down voted...

I'm not down voting you, but I'm curious - don't you use any scripting languages for the small problems which crop up, day to day? Something like bash, or AWK, or Python, or Perl?

For example, to count the total size of files in a directory, using bash and AWK would look something like this:

ls -lrt | awk 'tot += $5; END {print tot}'

. I don't doubt you could code this in Fortran, but it would be much longer, more tedious, and more error prone to write.

Re: I've taken out union and some other things that I rarely use

I think union is little used, and will continue to be little used. MISRA frowns on it, for one.

In that (rare) 400,000 line project with lots of unions, you'll just have to go through it getting rid of them, one by one. Or stick with C. So what? The developer of this language has experience in embedded systems, where there are indeed some legitimate uses of union. There will surely be some adequate replacement for it.

As for that big chunk of memory you need to zap, if you declare it in a function (I'm guessing here), it will be freed as part of leaving that function. What's the big deal?

It sounds good to me. I think we should wait for the language to become available before anybody condemns it.

Re: Variable Names : Case Sensitivity

Having lots and lots of ways to spell a single variable is worse.

AMD teases its GPU biz 'approaching the scale' of CPU operations

Re: 4-bit Floating point?

Thanks for the elucidation!

So this 4-bit floating point can contain just the following values: 0, 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, 1, and their negatives. About the only sensible arithmetic you could do on these would be comparison, and (to a very restricted extent) multiplication and subtraction. The overflow and underflow bits (if such exist on this architecture) will be in constant use.

Maybe it's no wonder that current "AI" can produce such wacky results.

4-bit Floating point?

There was a reference in the article to 4-bit or 6-bit floating point. What does this mean?

A 4-bit data structure has just 16 possible values. This is a bit constrained even for an integer. How many of these 4 bits are the exponent, and how many the significant digits?

I can't help wondering whether some marketing fantasy has entered here.

Sketchy financials send Supermicro auditors running for the hills

2020 .... "widespread accounting violations," .... $17.5 million .... without admitting wrongdoing.

Here we go again. Firms breaking the law and settling with a corrupt judiciary without admitting guilt.

Maybe, just maybe, if the directors had been properly prosecuted back then, and replaced (one way or another), the firm wouldn't be in the mess it's currently in.

Just how badly do company directors in the USA have to break the law before actually being charged and hauled up into court?

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

"DST" is a purely American term. In Britain it's called summer time. The article is about Britain. Why use the (somewhat ridiculous) American term?

Bitwarden's FOSS halo slips as new SDK requirement locks down freedoms

Re: The balance tipped.

> Never contribute to a FOSS project that asks you to sign over your copyright.

I would advise rather the opposite. A project that requires you to sign over your copyright, such as GNU, is serious about remaining free. That's providing the pertinent licence is also seriously free, such as GPL2+ or GPL3+. The GNU project has serious lawyers on its staff.

What exactly are you planning on doing, should some large corporation violate your retained copyright? Invest your life savings in (possibly) travelling to the USA, living there, hiring expensive copyright lawyers and initiating procedings? Not really. You'd have little alternative but to roll over and do nothing.

UK's Sellafield nuke waste processing plant fined £333K for infosec blunders

Here we go, yet again.

This penalty isn't even a slap on the wrist for an entity the size of "Sellafield Ltd." (which I've never heard of, despite being aware of what they do and where). The radioactive waste they are dealing with is seriously nasty stuff. How come the directors are not facing gaol sentences?

There might as well not be any laws mandating data security if this is all that happens when they are broken. The judge has effectively said "Just carry on doing what you've been doing, and don't worry too much about it".

Uncle Sam lends $1.5B to reignite Michigan nuclear plant in 2025

Re: Clean energy?

> But running the thing and generating electricity, that is pretty, pretty clean.

Apart from the small problem of the waste material, which remains radioactive (more so than the ore the fuel was made from) for several hundred years.

Don't get me wrong - I'm in favour of nuclear power. The damage it causes the Earth is less than that of fossil fuels. But to say that it is "pretty pretty clean" is, I repeat, an exaggeration.

Clean energy?

Nuclear energy may not contribute (much) to the disastrous climate change that is happening, but to describe it as "clean" is something of an exaggeration.

T-Mobile US to cough up $31.5M after that long string of security SNAFUs

Here we go again.

Yet another big USA firm guilty of criminal negligence, and rather than the guilty serving time behind bars, their shareholders pay a "fine" equivalent to a few cents per victim (the victims here being those whose data T-Mobile allowed to be stolen). Just a cost of doing business.

The justice system in the USA appears to be purely for the little people, the masses. The "elite" know they can break whatever laws they like without meaningful consequence.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: If Linus had known Rust 30 years ago ....

> .... and it supports "trait objects", where you can ask to create a fat pointer instead of a normal pointer, with the fat pointer being a (*struct_instance, *interface_vtable) struct under the hood.

Do we really want things like "trait objects" and "fat pointers" in an operating system? The code is difficult enough to debug as it is, without introducing opaque abstractions. I think you're making my point for me.

Besides, even if the OOP in Rust is light weight at the moment, there's no guarantee that it will stay that way. The language isn't even standardised yet. What's to stop some clever person adding C++-style OOP to Rust "because it makes programming so much easier"?

> Linux is written in GCC's extended GNU C dialect, which is no more standardized than Rust, and the Rust team have a policy called the v1.0 Stability Promise which is akin to Linux's "don't break userspace" rule.

Is it really? I wasn't aware of this. I believe Linux has been built using Intel's C compiler. Can you give me an example of the use of non-standard "GNU C" in, say, Linux 6.6.52? That is, a file name, line number, and a short description of the quirk? I'd be most interested to see this.

If Linus had known Rust 30 years ago ....

.... and had written Linux in Rust, Linux would have remained a personal project, and gone nowhere.

Rust is just too complicated and difficult a language to learn easily. It's even got object oriented stuff in it; who needs OOP in a kernel? C's simplicity is what propelled Linux's development in the early years and likely still does.

What happens with difficult, complicated programming languages is that everybody learns just a part of them, and gets by with just those parts. Trouble is, different people learn different parts, making it difficult to maintain other people's code. Just look at C++ as an example (which intentionally gets more difficult and complicated every three years).

Rust in Linux is a bad idea. If a new language must be introduced, it should be a simple one, possibly with Rust's ideas applied to C, rather than to difficult, complicated languages.

Besides which, the language isn't even standardised, yet. Using it in Linux is creating maintenance time-bombs for the future.

With billions in UK govt IT contracts about to expire, get the next vendors to act right

Who?

Who commissioned and paid for this research? That is surely pertinent to the whole story.

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Helium?

What was the purpose of the helium they were carrying? I mean, if they simply didn't have it on board, it couldn't have leaked. What was it for?

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

A Serious Question for the Editors

Did The Register at any time during the pandemic come under any pressure from authorities to restrict the content of users' posts? If so, details would be welcome.

Intel enlists Morgan Stanley to defend against activist investors

Intel shares have lost nearly 60 percent of their value since the beginning of 2024. ....

No they've not. They've "lost" 60% of their PRICE. Intel's value to society will be largely unchanged in that time.

The relationship between a company's share price and its value is at best a correlation.

Intel is in a temporary bumpy patch, having just committed themselves to long term investment. I sincerely hope it doesn't get asset stripped by these so called "activist investors".

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Well, I just got myself a new machine about a week ago, with a Ryzen 7900. I was betting that there would be problems with the new generation of processors, and the speed gain wouldn't be that much anyway. Maybe I was right on the second count. But perhaps I could have got myself a cheaper processor by waiting for the older generation to fall in price. Nah, not worth the bother!

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Re: Eternal T&Cs? - Ahem

> Did anyone actually read all of it (software licences)?

Actually, yes, I did. I've read the GPL2, GPL3, MIT, various versions of BSD licences, .... That pretty much covers everything installed on my PC.

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

The Russians ....

... on the ISS must be thoroughly bemused. They must be thinking "how difficult can it be to get a space ferry system which works, something we've had for ~70 years, now?".

Why the delay?

The thrusters on the Starliner capsule don't work reliably. Given that they've already spent two months trying to fix them, it's clear they're not going to be getting fixed. In effect, they don't work at all.

So, assuming the astronauts aren't expendable, there's no question of trying to bring them back to Earth in that capsule. They'll have to wait until a Dragon X has been fitted out to take them.

As for Boeing, it seems their space division has had it. As the late great Richard Feynmann put it, nature can't be fooled.

Texas sues GM for selling driver data to analytics, insurance companies

... and a slap on the wrist settlement to follow.

Where is the intention to punish all involved in this criminality? Who's going to be going to gaol?

Ah, nobody! There won't be a trial, there'll be a settlement for a few dollars where GM don't admit wrongdoing. And there'll be no requirement to destroy the illegally collected data.

As for compensation for Texan drivers who are the victims, here. Hah!

Yes, the USA. The best justice money can buy!

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Re: He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

> Then you're doing OO badly.

That seems to be a "no true Scotsman" defence of OO. I was talking about the OO that I encounter in existing programs I need to debug and/or modify. I would agree with you, though, that OO can be helpful as long as its essential features aren't overused.

> Those data objects are "dumb" with little to no business logic. The business logic is all in service classes. Those data objects rarely use inheritance, and the service classes the same.

What I, as a C programmer, would term data and functions.

> Inheritance is not something that most classes need, and it should be made clear that ... it's to be avoided where possible.

Couldn't agree more. Just as the goto statement should be avoided where possible in C programs. Though for advanced users, there are legitimate uses both for goto and inheritance, as you point out in the bit I elided.

I think we're in violent agreement regarding most of these things. It's worth pointing out that Paul Graham, the Lisp hacker, once wrote he had never once used the OO constructs in Common Lisp, despite these being full-featured. OO is a _choice_, not a necessity.

Re: He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

Difficulties are _not_ caused by debuggers. They're caused by fragmented source code - source code where things you need to look at, rather than being in one place, are separated into several, or lots of different places.

Object oriented programming is very good at causing this fragmentation. OO programmers think they have done a good job by "hiding" abstractions. This aggravates the difficulty in debugging, because debugging necessitates boring into these abstractions and understanding their implementation in detail. If a class is implemented by inheriting from a super-class, possibly on several levels, that is severe fragmentation when it comes to debugging.

You may say that the super-classes are bug free, due to them being properly designed and tested. I would reply that there's no such thing as a bug free piece of software, only ones whose bugs have not yet been fixed.

There's a tendency nowadays to emphasise the ease of reading or writing source code. This is misplaced - the emphasis ought to be on ease of _debugging_ the source code. OO methods don't help, here.

Re: He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

> I like the basic ideas of object-oriented programming to organise and structure code....

seems to lead inevitably to

> you often have a devil of a job finding wherever the real code is hiding.

In short, OO programming leads to difficult to debug software. As Martin Fowler put it in his book "Refactoring", which assumes OO is the standard way to program: you no longer pass arguments to the functions which need them. Instead, you keep data in _objects_, which have _methods_ for extracting data, sometimes recursively, so that you pass these objects to methods which somehow have ways of getting to the needed data. He admitted this openly, without any discussion of the difficulty in debugging this causes.

Some OO languages (C#, I'm looking at you) prevent individual data items being passed by reference, thus forcing an entire objectful of data to be passed into a method rather than a pointer to the single item which is to receive a new value. This greatly hinders analysis of what data is used where, particularly when some data item gets a rogue value.

I thought I liked the basic ideas of OO programming too, until I saw what they did to debuggability.

Intel's legal troubles mount after plunging stock sparks yet another court battle

These shareholders should grow up a bit.

It's well known that the price of shares can decrease as well as increase. These (?ex-)shareholders knew that when they bought the Intel shares. They bought high-tech shares in the expectation of high returns, seemingly disregarding the high risk that goes with such returns. Now that the price has gone down, they want to be compensated (?by other shareholders) for their own lack of caution. They want their cake and to eat it, too.

This case should be dismissed by the judge at the first opportunity.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Rust, or ....

For security's sake, is it more important to get away from C and C++, or would avoiding Microsoft Windows be a more productive first step?

And the very best of luck to anybody ?seriously proposing rewriting Linux in Rust.

US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid

Re: Prodding the bear

The offences Assange was accused of in Sweden were laughable, and without substance. He actually left Sweden with the permission of the responsible prosecutor. He was entirely willing to be questioned by Swedish law enforcement whilst in the Ecuadorean embassy; the powers that be preferred to libel him as a suspected rapist rather than clear up the business.

It should be borne in mind that spurious accusations of sexual offences are standard procedure used against whistleblowers in the UK and USA and likely other places, too. So are the personal attacks on the whistleblower's character and reputation, the effect of which can be seen in several posts on this thread. The disparagement in this comment section is highly uncalled for. None of these posters have any realistic knowledge of Julian Assange's actual character.

What we do know is that he bravely exposed evidence of massive criminality and corruption at the heart of the USA establishment at unknown risk to himself. All those calling for more bad things to happen to him are in essence calling for an end to investigative journalism and free speech.

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Inadequate snail's pace regulation.

The problem here is that any regulatory activity to quash Microsoft et. al's antisocial behaviour happens at a snail's pace. On some complaint being made on, say, data protection or competition law, it takes 3 years to "investigate" it, followed by another 3 years of "enforcement" attempts, by which time the original complaint has long lost relevance.

What is needed is for the regulators to be able to issue orders for immediate cessation of the the alleged breach, and THEN for the 3 year investigation to begin. If the regulator loses the case, no compensation should be due to Microsoft, etc.

Then, I think, we'd see at lot less of what goes on today.

Japanese space lasers aim to clean up orbital junk

Some details, perhaps?

Just how long will this laser satellite need to be targeted on a single item of junk to de-orbit it? If it's less than a few hours, perhaps the system would be workable. If it's a few months, then it would be hopelessly impractical.

I'm disappointed not to read such things in the Register.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.

"Digital" is not the same thing as "online".