Posts by anoncow

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

Re: Place your bets...

"a lot of their other patches were rejected as invalid"

I have read the thread, have you? "A lot" is simply wrong. I saw one where they followed the api documentation to the letter. The documentation says:

* If this function returns an error, kobject_put() must be called to

* properly clean up the memory associated with the object. This is the

* same type of error handling after a call to kobject_add() and kobject

* lifetime rules are the same here.

so they submitted a patch to change a kfree to a kobject_put as the documentation directs. The patch was reviewed and accepted. In this case, the documentation was wrong.

There are precious few others. The count might be up as high as two by now. Against this there are a lot (objectively true) of real bug fixes where maintainers either NACKed the revert or said they would just have to do the fix over again if it was reverted.

Re: If these things never became commits, then whats being reverted ?

They are indeed double checking hundreds of patches, and what they're finding is a lot of good patches from that university.

Re: "The project" isn't some impersonal machine or device; it's people.

"since a very large number of patches have to be rolled back..."

Doesn't look like that: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/21/454

Maintainers are mostly NACKing the propoosed reverts, or stating that no harm is done.

What is true: a large number of patches need to be reviewed. But that was always true, and arguably review has gotten slack lately. Howls of protest over the simple proof of that isn't going to fix it.

Re: Place your bets...

These researchers didn't "get caught", rather they published a paper. Over the years they have published a lot of good and valuable papers and submitted many patches to fix real kernel bugs and otherwise improve the kernel. See for yourself: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/21/454. (Maintainers replying to these proposed reverts are pretty much all saying "don't revert it, it's a good patch" or "it does no harm".)

It is clear that these guys are not bad guys. They have done good things for Linux, and they were in the process of trying to do another good thing when they made a mistake. Why has an angry mob now set out to destroy the careers of these good people? Surely we are smarter than that.

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

Re: Personal Usage

He may not actually know how to operate a printer.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Re: Topical

Maybe a weird look from the dog too. It would mean approximately as much.

The average Linux developer is an order of magnitude more skilled than the average Windows developer. You do the math.

Good news Flash lovers! Microsoft won't be disabling it by default (so long as you use IE or old Edge)

Re: Google.

Much less than 10%.

Boeing's 737 Max woes trigger BEEELLIONS in losses – and that's just for the latest quarter

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

A bulldozer would be a nice solution. Just bulldoze that decrepit old museum piece of a deathtrap airframe into the nearest deep pit.

In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

Re: That's a couple of pretty misleading lead paragraphs there.

"Rust had nothing to do with that"

You don't know that. Sometimes a language platform will make a given approach practical and pleasant to implement, compared to tedious in some other language. This effect is seen regularly when migrating a project from C to C++, though you would never be able to convince a dyed in the wool C diehard of that.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

"<racist rant>he pilots did not perform as well as could be imagined<racist>"

It's hard to overstate how slimy your post comes across, and how wicked a person you must be.

Here's the problem with a bunch of software hacks commenting on an aviation issue: regardless of the relative strengths or lack thereof of the development and testing methodology, this software would not have been needed at all, were the Max 8 airframe inherently stable. Which it is not, with horrific consequences.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Re: yes, well, but...

The reason that both Linus and I home in on that quote and heaped abuse upon the idiot who posted it is, it's an idiotic thing to say. Along the lines of "water is lighter than air". Yah, you can bore everyone to tears trotting out some case where water really is lighter than air, but oh please. Save that for when you really feel the need to be ignored at a party. Same goes for Chinner's unadulterated idiocy, followed up by wasting an enormous amount of bandwidth attempting to buttress that indefensible position.

Re: yes, well, but...

It's clear that you have only the most tenuous grasp of file system basics. Minimizing write latency is not the primary goal of a filesystem, rather, the goal is to minimize operation latency. That is why nearly all write IO on Linux is buffered, not fsync. Simple fact, which apparently escaped you.

Now if you want to talk about synchronous IO, that is interesting. Just don't labor under the delusion that this is the most important aspect of file system design. And for the record, XFS and by extension Chinner, suck at sync IO.

Nice thing about Linus, he understands caching. As opposed to Chinner, who is clearly challenged.

Re: yes, well, but...

Maybe you think Chinner is right because you didn't read what he posted, or read it and didn't understand. I quote: "the page cache is still far, far slower than direct IO". No, wrong. Idiot.

There may be specific cases were that isn't a bald faced lie, but in general it's just that: a bald faced like. Chinner. Just ignore.

Re: Nothing new...

Yah, well. Maybe. You have to keep in mind that Chinner can be a bit of a dull thud at times, and a flipping dickhead on top of it. Pay attention to what guys like Jan Kara have to say, or some of the less aggressive ext4 guys. Chinner is all politics, all the time, and sadly unsocialized. Makes Linux look like a pedigreed gentleman by contrast.

Red Hat signs off last set of numbers before it is likely gobbled by IBM

Re: Pink Slip Linux

Will RedHat change IBM's culture? That's funny. Very funny. Can hardly hold myself back from spitting in my keyboard. Any more good ones?

Re: Pink Slip Linux

I'm totally ok with Redhat getting sliced, diced and ground to bits in the proverbial IBM meat grinder. And sow their fields to salt while at it. After all, they gave us Ggnnnnome and Sssystemd (insert Sytherin sounds here) Oh, and RPM... and the ultimate evil: -> Rpmbuild <-!!!

Red Hat can just shrivel and die and the Linux ecosystem will just get out from underneath its cold dead thumb and grow faster than ever before. A pox upon Redhat and a pox upon Redhat's smarmy salesmen who think that copying Linux is stealing from Redhat.

Apple iPhone sales down by double digits, Mac sales knifed by Intel CPU 'constraints'

Re: Frankly, I'm going to downvote myself

I'm glad you aren't bothered by the notch, but for me it's unspeakably ugly. Never will own a phone with one of those, there are much better alternatives.

Re: Nobody wants to acknowledge

2700X makes the 3570k look old and shabby.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

Re: Just to clarify what MCAS really does.

The issue _is_ the aerodynamic instability of the airframe in near stall. If it were not unstable then there would not have been any MCAS and all those people would still be alive. Just retire the 737, it had a good run but by today's standards it is a scary piece of junk.

Re: Here's a Thought...

Even better thought: retire that disgusting, outdated hack of an airframe and go through the proper design and certification of one that isn't an obsolete deathtrap.

The A in AMD stands for 'Aaaaannnyway...' Q2 is gonna be good, chip biz vows, after dismal Q1

GDDR6 is decent but HBM2 would be awesome.

For your main disk you mean. Nothing beats a raided pair of 10 GB spinning disks (normally spun down) for archive, backup and media storage.

AMD is up massively over that last two years, the good news is already priced in.

At $293 for the 2700X it's awfully hard to go wrong. Timing the CPU market is usually not a winning game, just get what you need when you need it. I'm still going strong on my 1700, that is still an awesome amount of computer compared to the 4 core, no hyperthread intel chip it replaced.

AyyyMD had an Epyc quarter: Server chip shipments 'more than doubled' Q3 to Q4

Re: Simple

The clock is ticking until Intel also divests its fabs. They can do it sooner and get a decent price or they can do it later as a fire sale. Guess which one Intel is going to choose :)

OpenAI bots smashed in their first clash against human Dota 2 pros

Smashed, really?

It was actually very back and forth until relatively late in the game. "Smashed" grossly mis-characterizes what actually happened.

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

Re: A SSD on a Sata III...

"makes about as much sense as driving a supercar around with the hand brake on"

For bulk SSD that trades off access time against density, SATA still makes perfect sense. 600 Mbytes/sec is a beefy transfer rate compared to physical disk, but the big win is zero seek time. Use M.2 for your system disk.

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

"To encode 4 bits you need 16 distinct voltage levels, no?"

Right, and so L)evel has always been a gross misnomer, it should be B)it. A multi-bit flash cell has 2**L voltage levels, using the highly misleading L)evel terminology.

Like this: https://www.cactus-tech.com/assets/images/e/MLC-NAND-Cell---4-States-of-Electrons-9a049c6e.png

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

"I know some phycisist will probably come along and point out that this is misleading, inaccurate or oversimplified"

I would add: magical.

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

"it's a technology people are comfortable with, therefore it's superior in every important way"

So true, I just love my Clark Nova typewriter. And my Sony Walkman, what would I do without it?

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

You are a bit confused about the distinction between analog and digital. At the nanoscale, its all analog (and at femtoscale it's all digitial again that's a bit deep for this post, just google quantum number). Those rather alarmingly analog-looking traces are coerced into representing digital values via thresholding and latching effects. Ever seen an ether bird? It's a bit like that. A wind-up clock is like that too: the spring is analog but the tick is digital.

Multilevel cells likewise rely on thresholding and latching effects, there is just more than a single threshold value. Still digital by nature, just like single level cells, Maybe the threshold voltages or whatever get closer together in multi-level and risk more errors, or maybe not. Single level logic gets shrunk and packed together as tightly as possible, which also increases the risk of error. Given the same number of bits stored in the same area, it is far from clear that multi-level cells have the higher risk of error, it may be just the opposite.

Re: No story here

But wait, what would TheReg be without premature clickbait? It's the entire reason we come here instead of some reputable site, isn't it. Here I am, for example.

TheReg is partially right, even with its trademark suspect reasoning: hard drives are already mostly dead in PCs. Well, except for the really cheap ones and that island is steadily shrinking. And except for media packrats who rely on hard drives to archive their porn collection.

Hard drives are alive and well in server farms. While SSD continues to nibble at the edges, the economics of mass storage that doesn't mind 10ms latency are compelling. That amounts to the vast majority of data storage in the world. With the likelihood of further improvements in areal density, it will be many years before hard drives are as dead as tape.

Dell goes on Epyc server journey with AMD

Re: Check out the pricing

Something is wrong with your price information. "The R6415 starts at $2,179.00". Maybe you are looking at pricing for a 32 core unit? In which case, £4,438.88 is not too bad. Would be less now because the previously rare 32 core parts are in better supply.

Apple leak: If you leak from Apple, we'll have you arrested, says Apple

A *black* Apple for the logo pretty much sums up the corporate culture. Anybody in their right mind going to bite on that?

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

Re: JP versus other SF authors

I can confirm: not the only one.

Linus Torvalds pens vintage 'f*cking' rant at kernel dev's 'utter BS'

Sorry, Linus is right

From time to time Linus shoots his mouth off in a way that is totally inappropriate. This is not one of those times. Technically, Linus is exactly correct. He could have posted without swearing and that would be nice, but there's no burning issue, this time. So: "it's a f*cking disgrace that you are in denial about the fact that it's the *checking* that is broken, not the code, and are making excuses for shit". Right. Pinpoint accurate but better without the swear words. Good for you, for tilting at that windmill.

ARM talks up fresh CPUs and a GPU, all tuned for AI

Re: Another non-GPL GPU

Is this a "FSCK YOU ARM!" moment?

Huawei missed memo that PC's dead – so here are three new notebooks

Linux?

Do they boot Linux? Do they?

Intel loses its ARM wrestling match, kicks out Atom mobe chips

Re: thats convergence taking a hit. :-(

Here's the equation: Neither Android nor Ubuntu care a wit about X86 compatibility, even a modest power saving is worth infinitely more, and there is a practical certainty that 86x prices will be jacked to the moon by the one source supplier given any significant success. Only Windows care about x86 now, and the Windows on mobile is looking bleak indeed, never mind the present. On server, desktop and high end laptop, nobody wants a crippled x86. So the future market for Atom rounds to zero, and no tears shed.

Re: Collateral damage?

You put your finger right on it: Windows Phone dead ==> Intel Atom dead.

Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Re: open source people universally hate Miguel.

Count me among those who initially respected him for his enthusiasm (and not for his coding or design skills, which are quite obviously deficient - I give you Bonobo as just one of many examples). But now I regard him as a cynical profiteer whose agenda is and always was to undermine anything non Microsoft. As for his motivation, I can only speculate, but I do know that money talks, and talks especially loudly to those of weak moral character.

As McAfee runs for US President – we ask a crucial question: Will Reg readers back him?

Pro and con

Pro: he can shoot back at any would-be assassins

Con: he might deal drugs off the front lawn of the white house

'I don't recognise Amazon as a bullying workplace' says Bezos

"Escalate to HR"... a sick joke. Could Bezos really be that out of touch, or is it just rhetoric for consumption by clueless outside investors? Everyone in the the business for more than a month knows that HR is just the enforcement arm of management, and always takes the side of management.

Silicon Valley sides with Samsung in anti-Apple patent war

Re: Apple vs Samsung

"They design their own CPUs"

...they don't really. They combine circuits that they buy from ARM, mainly fiddling with the IO circuitry and top level geometry. It's a long way from "designing a CPU", which would involve for example, design the ALU, including complex circuitry to handle such challenges as superscalar instruction dependencies. In terms of CPU design, this is roughly analogous to Apple generating content for a video game using Maya, while somebody else with considerably greater skill develops the game engine, which Apple licenses. Much as Apple licenses the ARM core, and multiple IP cores that support it.

Why the USS NetApp is a doomed ship

The US navy could not be construed as battered or beaten in any way at the end of the second world war. In fact a new heavy carrier was commissioned about every 60 days from 1943 on. At the end of the war the US navy was the most powerful on the planet, by far.

Xiaomi: It really ISN'T a biz-miracle idiot tax like Apple

Re: What makes Apple interesting

They make a tidy profit on the hardware and then clean up in music, books, videos and apps, while the others have to make do with low margins

Apple has to make do with eroding market share. Seems suicidal in the long run, or at best, not in the interest of shareholders.

The point is really anyone can make and sell cheap Android handsets - the problem is many people will and the profits end up down and down towards zero. The only real difference here is they have a limited term cost advantage - but they are still making little or no net profit.

You exaggerate the importance of windfall profits. Any profit that provides a suitable return on investment is more than satisfactory. Any profit at all is better than expected while growing. After all, the name of the game in tech is to survive and grow. Think Walmart as opposed to Ferrari. Who is richer?