* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: C++ Memory Safety?

Thirdly, static analysis is a process prone to raising "consessions", places where there has to be some dialogue between dev and review to say why this static analysis whinge can be ignored. There's nothing formal in the syntax to say "here we are unsafe",

If we're talking compiler checks:

#pragma warning disable/restore

#pragma message

Otherwise the static analysis tool will allow you to disable particular static analysis whinges.

The point is that, to make C++ memory safe there's an awful lot of holes to plug, including in places you can't get to.

Follow modern design patterns and use compiler checks and static analysis tools to enforce them. No, you can't "get to" libraries without source code but you can't in Rust anyway. If you can "get to" libraries with source code then you can run static analysis on the library too and fix flags which are raised, which is more practical then rewriting whole libraries in Rust and causing a whole new set of bugs.

Norway has a month left until sun sets on its copper phone lines

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Universal service obligation

My Google-fu led me to this PDF which explains handwavy USO in Norway (chapter 5) but I'm trying not to think too much about USO telephone connections via fibre without broadband.

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Common Sense Skeptic: THE TRUTH ABOUT NEURALINK - TED Talk 2022

"A hellish and toxic work environment with Musk applying relentless pressure and a culture of blame to the 200 employees at Neuralink for not making his ridiculous claims a reality."

Seems to be a common theme at every business unlucky enough to have Musk in charge.

Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams went down in APAC because Microsoft broke itself

Dan 55 Silver badge

"Users may be unable to search Microsoft Teams"

No change there then, but at least they're finally admitting it.

Redox OS version 0.8 is both strange and very familiar

Dan 55 Silver badge

Anyhow - would you rather have a non-Posix-C compliant OS (i.e. remove strcpy()) or call out to an existing implementation because no improvement can be made when writing it in the language the rest of the library is being written in.

It would be of more practical use to have a compiler switch that throws an error when an unsafe libc function call is found in the code and forces you to change it to a safe version than just swapping in a Rust version of libc and thinking "job done".

By this time, most libcs are well tested and the rewrite using Rust itself would introduce bugs.

Dan 55 Silver badge

strcpy() is irredeemably broken and there is nothing anyone on Earth can do to fix it. Rewriting strcpy() in Rust is a waste of time and shows that the belief that rewriting algorithmically* broken code in Rust will magically make it safe is a cargo cult.

Rewriting strcpy() in Rust is an extreme example of this, but the same thing would apply to other less extreme examples - you just need to fix the actual design instead of writing the same broken design in another language.

* or logically, whatever you want to call it.

Twenty years on, command-line virus scanner ClamAV puts out version 1

Dan 55 Silver badge

Oh gawd, don't give them any more ideas, they'll change everything to PST.

UK's Online Safety Bill drops rules forcing social media to remove 'legal but harmful' content

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Social Credit Score

Yes, I did read it before I posted. This is the point I'm making. Why not read through the factsheet?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: An exercise in pointlessness

However the social media platform only has to take action when illegal content "has been reported or they become aware of its presence" (doesn't often happen for a conspiracy to commit murder) and maybe even then that only appears to be relevant for women and girls. Online Safety Bill: factsheet

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Social Credit Score

The bill does the exact opposite of "enforce the great narrative" but apparently you're still not happy.

It makes it illegal for social media company to not follow the law and makes it possible for a social media company to be fined if it doesn't follow its own terms of service. Let's see if you can work out what the net effect of that is.

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

An exercise in pointlessness

The government said "The Bill will no longer define specific types of legal content that companies must address. This removes any influence future governments could have on what private companies do about legal speech on their sites, or any risk that companies are motivated to take down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions" which is a long-winded way of saying they're doing nothing about lawful but awful posts. Any future government can just change the law again anyway.

Social media companies can be fined if they don't follow their own terms of service so that's hardly going to be a challenge for them. In the very worst case they can just change their TOS and avoid a fine.

So in other words the bill is legally enforcing what is current practice and no more. It seems not upsetting GBeebies viewers is more important than stopping online bullying or plotting someone's death, however in a nod towards dystopia facial recognition is permitted to identify minors, so I'm sure the government consider that a win.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Dan 55 Silver badge

$8chan can't pay staff outside the US

UK and German employees aren't getting paid. Musk was too busy tweeting alt-right memes to transfer the money.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: one account that's been suspended for disagreeing with him.

Musk said the Android app batch called 1200 RPCs. If you stop and think about it microsecond it obviously doesn't. The website doesn't, the iOS app doesn't so why would the Android app? Yet Chief Twit posted this in public, secure in the knowledge that whatever he had heard and misunderstood was completely right and that posting this in public was the right place to talk about this subject. And then he was bothered when the engineer politely told that he was wrong, again in public because Musk started the conversation in public, so Musk fired him.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: One billion users?

This is the guy who said in 2019:

"I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year"

And has been selling self-driving snakeoil every year since 2014, so I think we can take any of his predictions with a pinch of salt.

Quest VR glasses back on sale in Germany – but watchdog has eye on Meta

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Separation ?

It was only a competition complaint, not a privacy complaint. There's no chance whatsoever of FB keeping things separate, it's what they do.

That said they're doing this worldwide, so FB must have some research which shows that people are staying away because of the Facebook login.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Dan 55 Silver badge

Also in the news: "Musk to abused H1B visa holders: I am your tormentor"

A new round of layoffs just happened at the end of this week, as opposed to those that happened at the beginning of this week. The excuse was the kangaroo court code review and they got just 4 weeks pay off after opting into Musk's circle of hell.

He kept a lid on how his companies were run up until now, but who would buy a Tesla after seeing shitshow?

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The brexit gift

How many died from not getting vaccinated due to propaganda by certain European leaders while they still tried to steal more vaccine from the UK we dont know.

So, apart from repeating your baseless shrill accusation that "nasty EU stole our vaccines" (hint: court found they didn't), you're claiming that fewer people in the EU got vaccinated due to European leaders' propaganda (hint: there is increased clotting in certain age groups with the AZ vaccine) however the the UK's vaccination level is hardly world beating. Note, I've set the date to 10/10 because it seems the UK has recently stopped reporting its vaccine level.

Also worth pointing out that EU countries continued to offer AZ targeted to safe age ranges. The UK did too, but as they put all their eggs in the AZ basket, other age ranges stalled while they found supplies of other vaccines.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The brexit gift

Try reading this:

Rödl & Partner: The Vaccine War: AstraZeneca vs the EU – A Fact-Check

Conclusion here:

This provision – an assurance to the EU, in effect – expressly excludes AstraZeneca from prioritizing the UK supply. In doing so, as expressly admitted to by the CEO (Pascal Soriot: ‘first come, first served’) AstraZeneca risks a material breach of the Contract. Consequently, AstraZeneca may feel obliged to shift its priorities between its customers.

Ultimately it may be for the courts to decide under Belgian law if AstraZeneca has met its ‘Best Reasonable Efforts’ obligation. It is evident that the dispute will lead to some form of dispute resolution or renegotiation as the ‘urgent’ circumstances of the pandemic require it.

The matter ultimately highlights the importance of careful drafting in commercial contracts in order to avoid disputes such as this.

And then, sadly, the wheels fell off the AZ cart when the blood clotting problem for certain age ranges was discovered by the EMA. It took a week or two for the MHRA to come to the same conclusion but it finally did.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

This, I believe, is what happens when a timescale isn't set in stone in an agreement, perhaps due to a failure when negotiating it.

If one side isn't keeping the letter of the agreement and complains the other side isn't playing fair because it isn't keeping the spirit of the agreement, it's pretty preposterous. But that's how the UK rolls these days.

Perhaps if the UK started keeping the letter of the agreement, then both sides could start looking at keeping the spirit of the agreement.

If Apple's environmental rhetoric is meaningful, Macs and iPads should converge

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: macOS is dying

Unsigned ARM code doesn't run on ARM Macs, unless you ad-hoc sign it yourself from the terminal, see here.

So this is a barrier which will put off customers pushing developers to pay the Apple Danegeld.

Dan 55 Silver badge

If Apple wanted to reduce the environmental footprint of a Mac...

... they'd make them fixable again, instead of converging them into another iDevice.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: macOS is dying

I'd have thought it was obvious, any effort they've put into macOS over the past few years is to iOSize it. That way Apple spend less effort on development and the rather meagre selection of software in the Mac App Store can be bolstered by iOS apps which sort of run more or less on the Mac.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: Alexa: why does nobody like you?

So looking forward to Amazon washing its hands of an avalanche of electronic waste worldwide when they decide to pull the plug.

Windows Subsystem for Linux now packaged as a Microsoft Store app

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

So what's the improvement in the store version?

Forcing devs to have an MS account?

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Polled or Trolled?

What could possibly be dodgy about a poll result on $8chan?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Of course Trump won

Then various people on Twitter never RTFM or actually tried the options in Mastodon. I expect they're just repeating any old nonsense they've read.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Requirements

Good job this voting and unbanning was decided by recommendations from Twitter's moderation council and advisory groups just the way that Musk announced a month ago.

And then when Trump said he was bigly fine where he was he unbanned Kanye West and Andrew Tate, again in line with Twitter's non-existent moderation council and advisory groups' recommendations.

And let's not talking about breaking down Twitter and rebuilding it in his image. It's almost as if Musk is a chronic narcissist who needs everyone's appreciation or something.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Reorganisation

An excellent 8 and a half minutes.

Google looking outside the usual channels to fix security skills gap

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Widen the optical

If he said "We've hired all the infosec people with experience we can find, we need to hire people without any experience but who have an interest in it and train them up" it'd save everyone's time, instead of giving Stanley Unwin a run for his money.

Multi-tasker Musk expects to reduce time at Twitter, seek another leader

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: And there we have it

Now he's told the remaining people who aren't allowed to work from home and have their building access disabled until monday, to email him a list of their commits over the past 6 months, to send him 10 screenshots of code, and turn up at 2pm.

The only people left at this point will be visa holders dancing to his merry tune and hoping they get that job offer soon.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Substantially less by the looks of it

It probably won't last past the traffic generated by the first goal scored this weekend.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

80 hour weeks

As he's got so many children anyone would think he'd be promoting family friendly policies.

Microsoft makes a game of Team building, with benefits

Dan 55 Silver badge

At the speed Teams runs at it'd be like playing Driller on the C64.

Twitter refugees seek asylum in an unusual place: The Matt Hancock app

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Thank goodness for "tooted"

They've just changed it back to posted.

The story says it was a condition of receiving funding from an American YouTuber and the German guy in charge didn't know it meant anything else.

Tesla reports two more fatal Autopilot accidents to the NHTSA

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: I still don't understand how they get away with this!

What do most people understand if a car has "Full Self Driving Capability"?

They've gone and done it again - first they sold something called Autopilot which was not even close to what people understood it to mean and now they've done the same with "Full Self Driving Capability".

And they're still flogging the snake oil with what their cars will be able to do as they have done for the last decade and still want their customers to beta test unfinished software, which is fine if you're beta testing a web browser but not fine at 70mph down a motorway.

Icon is what Teslas seem to be doing lately.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Autonomous cars

Doesn't stop Musk promising the same things year after year.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Dan 55 Silver badge

That's the thing, isn't it? After the obligatory three or four versions, MS finally knocked together a good enough copy and made it available for free which is enough to paper over the rest of the deficiencies.

So it went with IE, so they did with OneNote, and so they're doing with Teams.

You're either bought out by Apple, Microsoft, or Google or you just get trodden underfoot. Perhaps Evernote's management were lucky.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @A. Coatsworth - Waste El-Reg Space

I wonder who NAFO are shitposting then.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Easy choice Elon

Maybe he's playing 4D chess and is going to leave again tomorrow with another three months pay.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Easy choice Elon

Not an easy choice for those on H1B visas.

And let's see what outragous conditions those who leave have to sign up to and if he actually pays them without going to court first.

Also, Musk is still a dick.

NASA's Artemis mission finally launches after faulty Ethernet switch delayed countdown

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Flawed

Your "huge track record" is five crew launches to the ISS so far, the first one was two years ago.

SpaceX employees see Musk as a liability and until he's gone NASA needs insurance.

IBM to fire Watson IoT Platform from its cloud

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Sad

What about that doorbell scoping your place out on the opposite side of the road?

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sooooo....

Because apparently he can't talk to his employees without getting a wrong answer, misunderstanding them, and/or firing them, so now he's asking random people who use Twitter how it works.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Remind me where the procedure is in a REST call.

One is CRUD on a data orientated view, the other is calling functions by name and passing parameters.

If you wanted a generic way of calling REST APIs and RPC APIs, you could use the term... API.

None of us here have any idea whether it's a SQL database or flat files or in-memory storage behind the scenes, and it would make not a blind bit of difference to the REST interface, the web frontend or the Android app as REST is data orientated.

Now Musk's claim was the app was poorly batching > 1000 RPCs to render the home timeline. The app guy said it was bollocks and other guy confirmed it and a minute of thought would tell you that if an app were batching > 1000 REST calls then that would be a spectacularly bad design that would have been thrown out right near the start of the development process.

Then Musk went on to pull microservices and stopped people who were using SMS authentication from logging in. In a complicated service such as Twitter you do actually need microservices or Twitter would have to go down every time a new feature was deployed.

It seems Musk is the Stack Overflow programmer.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sooooo....

I do. Remind me where the procedure is in a REST call.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sooooo....

I guess it's because Twitter uses a REST API, not an RPC API.

Perhaps a bunch of employees are now working 80 hour weeks redoing all the APIs to be RPC APIs so Musk can say he's right.

Country that still uses fax machines wants to lead the world on data standards at G7

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A fundamental misunderstanding

Given that the NHS is going to export everything it's got to Palantir, there is also a total failure to recognise the need to comply with the legislation at government level too.

As usual, world beating (as they are so keen on saying) on paper, the subjects of the legislation have no idea about it or, worse, they do know about it but know they'll get away with not following it as nobody lifts a finger to enforce compliance on the ground. See also: Environment Agency.

Fixed link.

Dan 55 Silver badge

All they need to do is offer one of those standard off-the-shelf pop-ups and if the user unticks a category then do as they ask because it's their data in the first place. Apparently it's rocket science, maybe Musk could offer some help when he's finished at Twitter.

University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Tricky things, computers. I didn't get where I am today by seamlessly migrating systems

No true Comp Sci department would ever sully their hands with real-world problems.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why Does El Reg Have A Picture Of The Assembly Hall Of The Church Of Scotland......

Quite easy I would have thought... Germany and Scotland.