Posts by ScissorHands

Xen to RISC-V port progresses with foundational efforts

That's great and all Vates, and Imma let you finish

But taking care of the technical debt of being shacked to CentOS 7 should be more important

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

Re: Wanna give some examples?

I guess nobody ever told you that object programming is a special case of procedural programming (The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming - Kevlin Henney, C++ on the Sea 2019)

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

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

"in the kernel, the vast majority of it is unsafe."

yes, because it's C. It's ALL unsafe - even the logic that handles the internal data structures, which doesn't need to be unsafe. And the internal data structures is what makes the kernel.

"(gaining nothing). Thus pushback, as there is great risk for very little proposed benefit."

take your blinders off. Logic errors are easier to catch than CVEs. Errors in defined behaviour are catchable with tests, errors in undefined behaviour _might_ be.

"write firmware for hardware devices"

Oxide Computer Company - AMD Zen hardware initialization without a BIOS, IPMI control without actual IPMI, an embedded kernel, I could go on: https://github.com/oxidecomputer

"write applications and bindings to popular GUI frameworks"

Right, that's what's preventing people from using C#, not having proper bindings to Qt. Why not walk and chew gum at the same time? Unlike other memory-safety languages like Java or C#, Rust can be a used as a systems language - which is much harder, but where the gains would be bigger, and it's not something other memory-safe languages can do.

"standardise an ABI"

why aren't you in charge of the Linux kernel? what possible reason could the Linux kernel developers have for not standardising their (driver) ABI?

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

Again with the "unsafe" fallacy?

Having "unsafe" blocks locks down where serious attention must be paid - everything OUTSIDE the unsafe block is safe(r) than before. And that's not considering that safe code can (and should) armor the unsafe block from unsafe calls. So no, just because there is the possibility of breaking Rust's safety protections, and although that's basically mandatory for interaction with hardware, it doesn't render it useless.

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

For starters, bcachefs has nothing to do with Rust and that kerfuffle has happened because the main developer is over-enthusiastic, isn't used to the discipline and compromise of integrating in a larger organization, and tried to push a point-update into a Release Candidate window - found a bug that needs too much intervention to solve? Live with it, put it on "Known Bugs" and try again.

bcachefstools is Rust-related but it looks like another impedance mismatch between Debian maintainers wanting to have full lockdown of all dependencies but dependency handling in cargo being too dynamic; there may be something I'm missing, because cargo packages can be pinned; however, Debian's attitude flows from the Linux model of distro maintainers having to do all the work to keep the dependencies in check, which comes down from the general practice of dynamic linking and is becoming harder and harder, while Rust doesn't have to care because it only does static linking.

Linux is based on two contracts: "never break user ABI" and "we'll break kernel ABI whenever we want, but if you give us your driver's source-code under GPL, we'll maintain it for you to correct for those changes and you won't have to worry about that"; the latter has been a moat around Linux, because it ensures that nobody can create an alternative and have access to Linux's breadth of drivers and kernel modules, forcing all alternatives to wither and die for lack of hardware support. Maybe losing that lockdown is what Ts'o is actually so worried about, that RedoxOS (or Fuchsia) can ever become an alternative to Linux if Linux's driver-level bindings ever become stable enough for something else to be compatible with them...

Kaspersky reveals previously unknown hardware 'feature' exploited in iPhone attacks

Must have been a glowing engineer

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

Is winget supported in Windows Server yet?

I long for the day where I can open an SSH session into a Windows Server and edit remote config files.

There are some options...

https://virtuallyfun.com/2018/02/15/wanted-console-text-editor-for-windows/

where the author examined

Yedit (part of the Yori alternative shell for CMD.EXE)

Watcom VI

Kinesics Text Editor (KIT)

Minimum Profit

FTE

Clone of TurboC's editor called SETEdit (some assembly required)

X2 Programmer's Editor

Personal Editor (PE)

E3 Editor

Thomson-Davis Editor (TDE)

Microsoft Editor (MEP.EXE) - NT port of Z editor

Micro, of course.

However, most can't work with UTF-8, can't first-run from a raw binary like VIM (they need to install dependencies and DLLs) or have an x64 version.

IIRC, only Yori (and one or two of these, can't remember right now) tick all the boxes

Microsoft's 11-year itch: The uncelebrated anniversary of Windows 8

Sadly, that was the last time the core of WindowsNT got any attention. Everything since has been adding layers and rearranging the deck chairs.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

Is the Turbosail used on Jacques Cousteau's Alcyone too complicated? It looks a lot more efficient than these rotors, and it's French!

Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge

Re: Edge has so little market share that they don't matter?

No.

Is there a way to remove Safari Webview from iOS?

Is there a way to remove Android Webview and replace it with another Webview?

The OS vendor has to test against a controlled Webview.

More and more internal Windows components (edge://) will depend on that Webview, and it could have advantages, since Teams/Edge seems to be faster, slimmer and less buggy than Teams/Electron.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Why I Use Vivaldi

Gecko, in any shape or form, is not designed to be composable. Every time I asked someone always told me to go away, all you can build on top of Gecko is a web browser.

Now Servo has been designed from the start to be composable, but Mozilla kicked it out without a proper JS engine, which looks kind of fundamental to build applications on top of it.

Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more

No need to wait 15 years to decide using C is worrying right now.

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: Also

You mean there's two of us?

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Have you tried switching it off and on again?

This is rich, considering the article is explaining how everything being a file (a POSIX concept which the main author of NT railed against on the record) prevented Optane from being really useful because it HAD to be a file and HAD to be handled as a filesystem (secondary storage).

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: Appeal

Civilized counties don't extradite to any countries that have the death penalty. Period,

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

"Shell of an Idea," the Untold History of PowerShell

https://powershell.org/2020/01/book-shell-of-an-idea-the-untold-history-of-powershell/

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

Re: history lessons

Good thing then Fuchsia is using Rust in earnest.

Re: Fashions

You mean 75% of the Rust code being initializing and setting up the HAL environment so your logic can remain the same if you swap RP2040 boards? Not worth it in this case, since the logic is so small, but have a larger thing to do and you can port it by just swapping values on the "bloat" section.

Write well, write once.

Toaster-friendly alternative web protocol Gemini attracts criticism for becoming exclusive clique

Re: Simplicity

Blazor = porting .NET to WebAssembly so it runs in the browser; writing webapps in C# instead of JS(+NPM+Angular+React)

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

Re: I would like to say No.

More like no phat capacitors on the printer, since it lacked a CRT...

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Re: Another Work Experience Placement

Like vi, it's the power of "what's in all boxes by default when you sit in front of someone else's computer"

If it's 32-bit, you can still run EDIT.EXE (it's supposed to be in there somewhere).

For 64-bit, I still haven't found anything better than gvim's standalone executable (there's also joe).

There's hope for Tilde, if someone ports it to Windows...

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Re: "VERY different"?

Well, they followed CUA but the radioactive-green checkmark on "OK" and the lipstick-red X on "Cancel" were totally a Borland thing; they show up in an old app and I go "Hi, Turbo C!"

If you used Windows standard controls (and later MS Foundation Classes) you could get the same look between apps. Of course, since MSFC took too long to show up, Borland beat them to market with its own UI widget classes which were VERY different from basic Windows.

Re: Great, a replacement for gvim on Windows

That page is very, very old. The more recent source I based my experiences on is https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/02/15/wanted-console-text-editor-for-windows/

Great, a replacement for gvim on Windows

Because although Microsoft is moving to the command-line, and supporting SSH administration of Windows Server, a good CLI text editor for modern Windows is 404 in the base install. Which means I usually have to resort to gvim; and I've tried everything:

- YEDIT: not a real installer, not a self-contained executable, and not signed. The same author wrote what is by far the best alternative to CMD.EXE (YORI).

- Open Watcom VI: still exists in GitHub, unbundled from OpenWacom, but doesn't support UTF-8

- Kinesics Text Editor: needs Admin permissions to install, no UTF-8

- FTE: needs very old MSVC libraries

- Thomson-Davies Editor: no UTF-8

- Micro: Go port of Nano - but that's Nano, not CUA

>checks Tilde website

>no Windows binary

aw shucks.

Gnu Nano releases version 6.0 of text editor, can now hide UI frippery

Oh the humanity

Image that, Windows users can't use nano and have to use gvim.

Amazon Appstore melts over Android 12 'Snow Cone'

Oops, I broke it...

Microsoft agrees to have the Amazon App Store on Windows 11 to enable Android compatibility

Google breaks the Amazon App Store.

There is no relationship between these two events. I'm sure of it.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

You're the one that broke RFC 1122 by one byte and since the BSD TCP stack was (is) the de-facto standard, broke everyone that foolishly followed the RFC, aren't you? Own up!

AlmaLinux Foundation chair says he stepped down to highlight value of community status

I hope there's room for both Alma and Rocky

Because none of them have set the world on fire but Rocky has the celebrity, the hardware vendors and it's american; the survival rate of European Linux has been less than a snowflake in a flamethrower (with the exception of SuSE).

How Windows NTFS finally made it into Linux

Re: Is this for systemd?

You mean Microsoft's equivalent to Apple's HFS Resource Forks? From 1985?

It's amazing, a company tries to support advanced functionality and because everyone else can only think in flat files the advanced functionality is a mistake.

It's like UNIX "everything's a stream so just hack at the bytes" vs NT "everything's an object and you should use methods to handle them" - idiots try to hack at NT objects because that's the lowest effort option and get surprised when they blow up in their face, so that's *obviously* Microsoft's mistake.

As Google sets burial date for legacy Chrome Extensions, fears for ad-blockers grow

Re: If Your Business Depends on a Single Platform

Linux devs don't have to wonder; unless they keep up to date with the dependencies, their programs break with the next version of each distro. There was a time where you couldn't compile Samba from source on RHEL7 because of a missing library that had been marked as "deprecated" and "WONTFIX" by Red Hat. Samba!

Re: Toy extensions won't mess with their revenue stream.

So said the users of the original Opera and even of Edge. All you lot had to say then was "not my problem". Now it is your problem as well.

Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04

Re: Linux phone

Where were you when the Nokia N9 needed users, back in 2011?

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Re: Linux on the desktop

Of course it doesn't suck. Gnome 3 blows.

Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

Ubuntu != Debian

If you don't install the "desktop" option in the initial installer or in taskel afterwards, NetworkManager and systemd-resolved aren't active.

Again, not if systemd-resolved is off, which it certainly is on a Debian install where you don't install the desktop/GNOME options (my Debian installs always start with only two activated options on tasksel, SSH Server and System Tools, the rest I'll install myself, thankyouverymuch)

Imagine that, a system where there's a common sensible configuration framework that allows you to apply the same principles to several system administration tasks.

No it isn't [/Cleese]

There must be something missing with your .conf, whenever I edited my resolv.conf the change was immediate.

In fact, for all the gnashing of teeth about systemd, base Debian netinstall is free of NetworkManager and Systemd-resolved out of the box, you have to go out of your way to activate them.

Of course, if you pile up "Desktop" and "GNOME" (phear!) in tasksel, all that cr*p starts to come to the surface...

Open Compute Project to design open silicon and optics in Strategy 2.0

The scale issue cuts both ways

OCP hardware is so different from anything else in a datacenter and needs so much specialty support that it only makes sense if you're deploying several rows of racks or you have a greenfield deployment; if you have just two or three racks it doesn't make sense, and Inspur won't return your calls anyway.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Can you elaborate, AC?

Horses for courses, but twins

Given their backgrounds, I'm expecting AlmaLinux to be popular in the webserving/VPS role, and Rocky on the HPC/Scientific/hardware integration role.

VMware’s incoming CEO promises to change ... almost nothing

I've heard that before...

It must've been at Kodak. How's Rochester, these days?

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Good idea, badly communicated and implemented

Mob rule is amazing. It's opt-in. It has been clearly stated and disclosed. Compared to Microsoft, Muse Group has been a model citizen. If you're worried about being silently activated after you opted-out, do you audit the source code of each and every patch you apply? Well, you should then. Might find that's all you do, and unless you're being paid to do just that, you won't get anything else done. Enjoy your bugs. Fix them yourselves, it's open source! Fork Audacity. Fork it from orbit. It's the only way to make sure.

Even a pop-up offering to send a report after a bug doesn't catch many categories of bugs, and most people hit Cancel on those anyway.

About the Google and Yandex integrations, they leave me uncomfortable, but should Audacity, which survives on contributions, spend contribution money creating an analytics platform?

Where's the open source and free as in freedom analytics platform with a worldwide CDN, guys? Isn't open source the solution to all problems?

Re: opt in issue solving

It only happens 0.0001% of every bug occurrence, because 99.9999% of users don't report bugs. Makes it hard to know about bugs, which is the first step in solving them.

A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it

Re: I remember

That 70% percentage I quoted of vulnerabilities because of memory/data-race/side-effect? Microsoft et al. That's why they are firefighting it right now with Rust and have sponsored the Rust Foundation while developing an in-house equivalent codenamed Verona.

Apple is working on a Rusty Swift and although Google went to the trouble of hiring the best minds in language development to create Golang, they're still using Rust inside the Fuchsia kernel.

Re: Rust to the rescue?

Look around. You may think all that software was reliable but how stringently was it tested, really? Did you have fuzzers back in the day like we have now? If you need to recompile it today, how much of its behaviour was defined by the choices of the previous compiler about what to do on the several places where a language has "undefined behaviour"?

Re: Rust to the rescue?

Rust (or any similar language) can't help with errors in code logic. But it definitely helps with 70% of existing errors, which are of the memory/data-race/side-effect variety and that usually can't be caught in development, only in production. Rust ensures, at least, that if it compiles, it's mostly free from those.

Cue everyone complaining that Rust is hard and the compiler is slow...

Re: Yet another uncomfortable truth

Several forests have been decimated to produce MITRE code standards, but nobody follows them (Minimal Viable Product is the law of the land, security be damned) and even following them to the letter, C and derivatives should be classified "Unsafe at any speed", even (or especially) legacy code. Rip it all up and start again with GC/RefCount/RAII languages.

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to make sure.