Posts by Richard 12

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

A Sony Bravia then

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: Stupid "Fixes"

No, it's evangelists writing checks Rust can't cash, and that always annoys technical people.

If they were pushing it as a "safer C", that'd be fine. It is.

But it's being pushed as a safer C++ too, when it is explicitly unsafe for most nontrivial C++ applications.

No, that's not true

Rust is a safer C.

It is nowhere near ready to replace C++, and probably never will be.

That's one of the reasons people get annoyed. The evangelists are conflating totally different languages, one of which Rust simply absolutely cannot replace due to completely missing features such as inheritance.

Composition is often the right answer and there are definitely people who abuse inheritance, but without inheritance there are many things like GUI and plugins that become impossible to write "safely", as the compiler cannot verify memory layout for you.

On the other hand, Rust is often better than C and it is also helping to improve static analysis tools for languages using the LLVM back end, which is good.

AI's thirst for water is alarming, but may solve itself

Re: Why?

They're built where it's cheap to build them.

Semi-desert is generally very cheap land, far from people likely to complain about a big ugly building.

Then they often pay far below the normal prices for their power and water via various sweetheart deals.

Re: Capitalism doesn't automatically equate to greed

Stop letting them externalise the cost.

If the cost of running a swamp cooler included the cost of refilling the aquifer, they would use something else because that's far cheaper than refilling the aquifer.

13 days into the outage, will Kaseya's Traverse trip back to life today?

Re: "they just put the clock on the round table" ...

You had water?

We just had a stick, and me dad sent my brother and I over the horizon twelve times a night to check the time.

Were a long run at midnight.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Over the years, I have come to regard you

As people I ... met.

NASA's solar sailing spacecraft is tumbling – but that's part of the plan

Re: How do you steer such a craft?

You can always use an etheric keel and rudder.

More seriously, to go closer to the Sun you need to slow down the orbit, thrusting along your direction of travel.

In a circular orbit that is exactly perpendicular to the radius. In a highly elliptical orbit that vector can be a little towards or away from the radius, although unless the ellipse is extreme, it's basically perpendicular.

Thrusting radially does not (alone) raise or lower your orbit, it only adjusts the elements by a small amount, as it's by far the least efficient direction.

Of course, if you adjust the elements to interact closely with something else, then that will significantly change the orbit as momentum is exchanged.

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Microkernel

I assure you that the scheduling code has been changed quite a lot in Windows, Linux and macOS over the last few years.

There have been some pretty significant published changes recently in both Windows and Linux to better handle higher core counts and support heterogeneous cores - 'Performance' and 'Efficiency'. Going back a little further socket affinity was a rather major change.

macOS changed entire hardware architecture, so they almost certainly tweaked it too.

There is more going in the depths than almost anyone realises.

Re: Summary

It's possible to build a house out of Lego.

That doesn't necessarily make it a good idea.

Re: New kernel seems like a good idea

I don't count Arduino as being an OS, I consider it to be a "bare metal" hardware abstraction layer. One could run an OS on top of the Arduino HAL, though most projects won't need to.

On the other hand, one can certainly argue about when a HAL becomes an OS.

Re: Why don't the old farts believe in the miraculous powers of the new shiny?

The point is that in the kernel, the vast majority of it is unsafe.

Thus what would actually happen is that some large proportion of it gets rewritten (introducing errors) and wrapped in "unsafe" (gaining nothing).

Thus pushback, as there is great risk for very little proposed benefit.

If you want to prove the language works well for low-level, write firmware for hardware devices.

And if you want the language to be generally adopted, write applications and bindings to popular GUI frameworks.

And if you ever want it to replace C, standardise an ABI.

Re: Redox

I'm not sure you can really make that comparison.

Going from nothing to "enough of a working prototype to demo in a friendly controlled environment" is a far smaller task than handling sufficient edge cases to actually be production ready.

I've seen a great many projects that demo brilliantly, then vanish because getting production ready is a lot of work - and it's a lot of detail-oriented, often thankless work.

Re: Don't conflate bcachefs with bcachefstools and both with this issue

Rust doesn't have to care because it only does static linking

Wait, really?

This Rust in the kernel project was dead before it started then.

No dynamic linking means there's no possibility of plugins.

Drivers are dynamically loaded plugins. So Rust cannot do driver interfaces.

It also means it cannot ever handle the parts of nontrivial applications that have the highest risk of memory safety related issues.

Re: New kernel seems like a good idea

Plus the hard-real-time group, like VxWorks and FreeRTOS.

Re: Could have been worse

In my experience, all the people advocating for Rust barely understand C++ at all.

I don't know whether those people actually use Rust themselves though.

Re: Other problems

Packing like that causes highly variable latency, with the worst case being extremely long.

Sure, average throughput is improved, but it's r e a l l y i rritatingwhenth i n g s vary between fast and slow.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Re: The bubble will burst.

I dunno. A massively parallel 8/16 bit integer maths unit could be useful for real work.

Assuming it can be configured to actually give correct answers.

Curved does make sense

As long as you're always watching alone, and can place your chair in exactly the right place.

For everyone else, it's a hindrance.

True, but the 'smart' then moans all the time, despite being plugged into a STB dingle dongle which does everything I actually want.

That's why I didn't want a 'Smart' TV. It might start out useful, but it'll become obtrusively stupid long before the panel wears out.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: 5G sucks here

May be under Connections, Mobile Networks, Network Mode.

It should be somewhere, but where?

Re: From the article:

An increase in DALYs means people diagnosed with the condition are surviving for longer, in better condition.

An increase in incidence means it's being diagnosed more often. That could be more people are getting it, or that people are actually diagnosed and getting treatment instead of simply dropping dead.

Of course, it's Gen AI which means the whole page is utter bollocks with no basis in evidence, just random comments on Reddit.

AT&T sues Broadcom for 'breaking' VMware support extension contract

Re: "Significantly more difficult," you say?

Just imagine if they couldn't play the recorded "Your call is important to us" messages anymore.

NHS dangles £1.5B carrot to be outfitted with everything from PCs to printers

Because some high up manager would have to accept that they are redundant.

Mercury probe BepiColombo thrusters are acting up, but science marches on

Re: 7 year "itch"

It takes a really huge amount of delta-v to do what they're doing.

Electric propulsion with its really crazy-high exhaust velocity is basically the only way we can do it at all.

Chemical propellants would have massed so much that it simply wouldn't have been feasible to launch in the first place.

On top of that, I'm not even sure there are chemical propellants that remain sufficiently stable at the temperatures Bepi will reach.

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

Re: Why so complicated?

I don't consider trivial to be the same as easy or quick.

A long list of trivial things is still a lot of work, it's just not work that requires rare skills or particularly special knowledge.

"Compile this massive codebase" is often trivial (click one button), but may take several hours to actually complete.

"Fix the errors and warnings after updating the compiler" is often trivial, but may take a long time to do.

And trivial fixes often require a lot of nontrivial work to actually find.

Re: Why so complicated?

It sounds like the major parts were the lack of GUI, requiring a remote development environment to be set up, and the custom(ish) filesystem.

Everything else appears to have been relatively trivial - at least, far easier than moving from one version of Exchange to another.

SETI boldly looks beyond the Milky Way in latest alien hunt

Re: how to exploit zero point energy

We know our best theories are wrong. That's why Physics is still exciting.

We have one set of theories that works extremely well at very small scales and high energies, and another that works extremely well at much longer scales and lower energies. But neither works at both, and they barely overlap.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Nobody knows how "thinking" works.

Anyone claiming otherwise is a charlatan trying to sell you something.

What we do know is that LLMs don't think. They cannot, because every interaction is a one-shot deal.

The Black Box is photocopied, your prompt is fed into the photocopy, a result is provided and the photocopy is destroyed.

It didn't think, because there is no opportunity for self-reflection.

Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome

Re: 2 Much Drama

Large price rises make customers look seriously at alternatives.

That's always been the case.

Virtualisation is one of the easiest things to transition, because the actual applications and end users cannot even see it - by definition.

The only affected parties are the actual hardware (is what you've got supported by Nutanix etc?) and the IT support team.

The x3 and higher multipliers mean a lot of customers will be better off elsewhere even if they have to hire a few more people.

The RoI is relatively easy to calculate, and you know that whatever commercial platform/support you switch to is going to be bending over backwards for your custom and is getting a lot of experience in moving workloads away from VMware.

It seems unlikely that Broadcom will actually make a profit before impact.

That's fairly typical of large mergers, as everyone involved in the decision making has short term incentives. They make bank within the first week (sellers), month (middlemen), six months or maybe a year (purchasing VPs).

They couldn't care less if the whole room burns down two years later, they've already banked a ridiculously huge bonus and moved on.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

It's more than hoses

The suit is really part of the seat, it's shaped to fit the wearer to the capsule crash couch so they don't flail around too much during the spam-in-a-can phases of flight.

You absolutely don't want a seam in the wrong place, it could break your arm at splashdown/impact. And if the helmet doesn't support your neck properly...

It's probably too early to standardise the crash couch systems, as there's very little experience as to what's actually a good idea and what merely looked good on paper.

This is a lot more difficult than docking adapters as it involves squishy humans, who come in radically different sizes and aspect ratios.

SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years

Re: Over-reaction

It didn't do what it was expected to do, so an investigation is required to make sure there's no additional heretofore unforeseen risk elsewhere in the flight plan.

- eg if this was a landing leg failure, perhaps the leg could have fallen off earlier in the flight, or during a contingency flight plan if that had been necessary?

Once the mishap is sufficiently well-understood, they'll return to flight, probably with minor procedure changes - eg replacing a cotter pin after fewer flights.

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Re: I think he's probably better than the last two, and possibly the last three

Look what they did the moment Queen Elizabeth II toddled off.

It definitely did make a difference. It's not perfect, it's not even good, but it's better than nothing.

Re: I think he's probably better than the last two, and possibly the last three

It's really important for leaders to have someone who can safely tell them when they're being an idiot.

That's the true role of the British monarch.

Re: "It looks like he didn't comply"

France can arrest him because he's a French citizen, in France.

The CEOs of those other companies would need to be prosecuted by their respective nations, or extradited. I suspect you can guess exactly how an extradition of (eg) Zuckerberg would go.

Incidentally, that's also why the Russian embassy are being ignored. He's a French citizen, which means it's none of their business.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

Back then that was fixable, it's not as if C was actually standardised at the time either.

Even while I was at Uni we were taught a toolchain-specific dialect of C because despite there being a Standard by then, nobody actually fully complied.

That said, I never used Pascal in anger until Delphi, by which time it was already long dead. I don't think I even have access to that toolchain anymore, not without setting up a VM, anyway.

Re: Honourable mention

I'm pretty sure Pascal lost entirely due to braces.

Begin ... End takes longer to type and uses four times as much memory as {...}.

Back then, both of those things really mattered.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Leveraged buyouts should be illegal

Buying a company and loading all that debt on the company you just bought is just insane - there's really no reason it should be possible to buy a company using its own money.

It has never gone well for the employees or customers.

Salesforce mulls charging per AI chat as investors sweat over fewer seats

$2 for infinite liability

Yay?

CrowdStrike's meltdown didn't dent its market dominance … yet

Re: What period does this cover?

So the actual period really does not include their failure.

Seems it happened a week and a day before the end of the quarter.

Anyone starting their contract that week probably actually signed a couple of weeks or months before - and probably wouldn't be expected to make payments anyway as Net 30 is a usual term.

Existing customers will all be locked into contracts that take six months to a year to cancel, so of course the effect starts Q3 for new customers and for existing customers in 2025 Q2.

Ah yes, the article also says that

Intel's Software Guard Extensions broken? Don't panic

Well no, but TSMC's capacity is already sold so AMD won't be able to buy much more of it.

Enterprise SAP users split between on-prem and cloud as migration challenges loom

It's ERP

I don't want "innovation".

I want boring competency and the ability to keep absolute and total control over my data. I definitely don't want it to be randomly exposed to other tenants or the general Internet.

And I definitely don't want to end up losing access to all my business critical data because somebody else forgot to do something important. Or caught fire.

Those are existential risks. Nobody sane does that!

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

Re: "another firewall on top of that firewall?"

Africa is rather populous.

China has a long history of building out infrastructure in many of the poorer countries of sub-saharan Africa. It's a great example of "soft power".

There's a few cellular networks already, but the land area to cover is really huge so power and backhaul is a major issue when trying to build those out.

Power isn't too bad as solar PV works well, but backhaul...

Satellite Internet access is pretty much the only way to get widespread coverage - and the local infrastructure is extremely cheap as the base stations can be built wherever there's decent power and backhaul already.

Blue Origin sets October 13 for first New Glenn EscaPADE to Mars

That's a very tight deadline

Blue Origin seem to be doing the "simulate like crazy" approach, unlike SpaceX's "toss something in the air and see where it explodes", so I guess it's possible.

I really hope they succeed, but that timeline really seems to rely on there being no unforeseen consequences, which is quite unlikely.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

I'm seriously considering not using Windows 11 at all, as Valve has made gaming on Linux a reasonable proposition.

Only trouble is that I don't know how well VR works with Linux. It's already irritating getting it to work under Windows, where supposedly the majority of effort has been expended.

Watchdog warns FBI is sloppy on secure data storage and destruction

Report says it's not possible to identify theft

Statement says no theft has been identified.

So, that's ok then.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

It's very vague.

Do they mean the City of London, the Greater London metropolitan area, or the Bay of London in Orkney?

At least we know it wasn't London in France, Ontario, Arkansas, Ohio...

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: it's just that new equipment always brings new problems

Those wireless PressIt and ClickShare things are absolutely horrific.

There are ways to do wireless video, but none of them involve a USB dongle with a button.

Under pressure from Europe, Apple makes iOS browser options bit more reasonable

Re: Groan

Apple's restrictions mean that it's basically impossible to support iOS or macOS long term.

Apple forces you to send them a copy of literally everything before you can sell it, moves the goalposts every single year, and almost never documents anything. iOS is all of the above and worse.

I've lost count of the products and companies that Apple has killed by either restricting/removing the APIs (sometimes with a replacement, sometimes not, never with much notice), or even suddenly releasing their own version - after having several years of visibility into the product it was about to kill.

If you can't make a profit in the first year, you cannot afford to release anything for Apple platforms. The cost of merely continuing to exist is massive.