Posts by jotheberlock

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Re: oxbridge

'Oxbridge /BA/' - so arts degrees, not the techies (well, I say that, I'm a techy and my degree's in history, but by and large).

5% of the cloud now runs on Arm as chip designer plans 2023 IPO

Re: The death of CISC?

It did die, pretty much, a modern desktop x86 CPU is RISC-like internally (and despite being a bit ugly, x86 isn't as CISC as say VAX anyway - importantly, for example, you don't get multiple memory operands in an instruction, or some of the wacky stuff like being able to do *******< some pointer> in hardware, in one instruction, which plays hob with modern caches/memory .

(On the other hand, fixed length 32 bit instruction sets /also/ didn't entirely stick around - hence ARM Thumb and MIPS16 - because once you get to a certain point instruction decode becomes much less of a bottleneck anyway)

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: Modern Slavery

Most employees are theoretically replaceable - skilled ones take months to hire, then months to learn your stack, before they can become nearly as productive as the previous guy, even assuming you haven't hired a lemon which absolutely does happen. And they still won't have the years of experience of both how the systems and the company works. Employees can't be swapped in and out like lego bricks and if you think so you are the epitome of a terrible manager.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

I had a boiler in a house I rented a couple of years ago labelled 'Made in West Germany'. Still worked fine.

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

What on earth is a 'buyers' premium'? They're charging you for the privilege of them charging you?

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

Any language on Linux (or MacOS) has to learn to talk C, to talk to libc, unless it wants to do raw syscalls which is unusual on Linux and flat out unsupported on MacOS. That's how Unix works.

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

It does, though, if you're on any form of Unix. Calling procedures are defined by what was originally the Itanium ABI. Windows has its own thing, but either way there are two standard calling procedures, Windows and Unix (including MacOS, it does the same thing as Linux) for x86-64. That's as much as, well, any platform has, VAX included as far as I'm aware.

Nvidia revives canceled RTX 4080 as 'new' 12GB RTX 4070 TI

Re: 12GB

I mean, fine - but that's RAM. Not GPU memory. They aren't the same thing.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Re: Labor Labour

I generally make a snarky comment relating to Australian politics when that happens.

Now-frozen crypto-lending biz Celsius accused of devolving into a Ponzi scheme

Re: A strange business model anyway

You what? Most of the Boomers I know got to take early retirement, state retirement age used to be in the early 60s, it's us younger people who are going to have to work themselves into a grave.

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Re: give it hundreds of gigabytes, rather than tens.

Not that this excuses quite that big a driver (maybe NVidia Experience is on there too?) but bear in mind graphics cards are much much more complicated than they used to be, most of it in userspace. There's going to be a complete optimising compiler on there for the shaders, after all.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Re: Thanks.

COFF to ELF....

(Windows, of course, still uses some of it, that's the COFF bit in PE/COFF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable)

Oracle offers migration path for Solaris 10 apps

Re: A lot of Solaris boxes still around

HP-UX/Itanium is /definitely/ dead, though.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

You could always use Scheme, which guarantees tail call optimisation (specifically so you can write that sort of recursive code functional programmers etc find so elegant...)

A C compiler can do it too but you're not /guaranteed/ it'll do it, so not something you'd want to rely on in production.

How not to attract a WSL (or any) engineer

Canonical is based in the UK, where you are not able to go to an employment tribunal in the first two years of employment except for the most obvious of reasons (e.g..being outright told you're being fired because you're black) - so until you hit the two year mark you can be fired about as easily as in the US although your notice period is more likely to be a month+ than two weeks.

A 'reform' introduced by New Labour at one year and then doubled by the Lib Dem/Tory coalition, so thanks to all three major UK parties there.

GNOME Project retires OpenGL rendering library Clutter

GLX has been a thing since 1992 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLX - though granted not used all that much.

That's a signature move: How $320m in Ether was stolen from crypto biz Wormhole

Re: So, ETH was lost to bad code, and now new ETH has magically been added

And yet this sort of thing seems to happen way, WAY more often to crypto people than people relying on SWIFT. Funny that.

Imagination GPU cleared for RISC-V CPU compatibility, licensed to chip designers

Re: I'm curious

Their GPUs aren't historically based on MIPS, its just Imagination also, separately held the MIPS licence (for CPU purposes). I guess that might have changed since since GPUs generally have moved away from VLIW, but I doubt it.

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Re: "relatively modern programming language"

For what it's worth it's not really 'the specific C++ compiler' any more and hasn't been for years. Windows has its own ABI, everyone else uses the relevant CPU-specific variant of the ABI originally developed for the Itanium 20 years ago (so, g++ on Linux and MacOS, clang on similar, basically everyone else outside of maybe some ancient commercial Unix?)

I am not sure 'subsystem' means what you think it does. It's a program that can run Windows programs. It's not a subsystem with kernel integration in the sense WSL is on the Windows side, for example.

IBM bosses wrongly sacked channel salesman after Tech Data joint venture failed, tribunal rules

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

Try going to an employment tribunal in your first two years' of employment. You can't. You're out of luck, it's not legally allowed, so an employer can basically fire you for whatever with no comeback.

Blair brought in a 1 year limit for 'flexibility' under New Labour and the Lib Dem/Tory coalition extended it to two years so basically all three national parties have screwed us on this one.

Upcoming Intel GPU to be compatible with Arm

Re: Compatibility?

I would assume what this really means is 'Intel will provide ARM drivers and official support'. The only actual issue I can think of between CPU and discrete peripheral would be a 64 bit peripheral where the CPU is 32 bit and can't generate 64 bit reads/writes (or where the peripheral has > 4gigs of mappable memory that the CPU needs to talk to directly of course - GPUs maybe?). Endianness is certainly a pain but not theoretically insuperable.

Microsoft's UWP = Unwanted Windows Platform?

Or you can use Qt which sits on top of the Win32 API on Windows and still gives you a nice modern programming environment and as a bonus works basically everywhere else as well.

Re: Unpopular opinion

I mean there's just a smaaaall difference here in that all the Unixes were made by literally different companies. This is all Microsoft! It's all the same company, they should be able to fix this.

Give us a CLU: Object Oriented Programming pioneer arrives on GitHub

Re: Oh no

I mean the whole thing with PostScript is it's a complete programming language, not just a graphics file format - removing the Turing completeness was one of the points of replacing it with PDF. You'd need a full-on PostScript interpreter running in the browser to guarantee being able to render arbitrary PostScript, and that has security implications etc just as with Java applets back in the day.

Tachyum's Prodigy emulator achieves first boot, runs Linux and says 'hello, world'

Re: Transmeta

I don't know about Clive but it has been tried in a research setting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor

Never really panned out though.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

I'm sorry, MFC?! That was terrible back in 1998 let alone now.

Qt I'll give you.

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Re: REM

It's not 1950 any more, lot of us prefer coffee these days (especially coders)

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

I'm curious why you think x86-64 isn't an 'actual' 64 bit processor. It's not just 64 bit addressing, it has 64 bit GPRs and ALUs too, just like MIPS-64, Sparc 64, PowerPC 64 or indeed AArch64.

And as, indeed, AArch64 shows quite clearly, the ISA isn't the main constraint on increasing performance; we would not all be suddenly using 10GHz CPUs if MIPS had won out over x86.

Qualcomm pays $1.4bn to acquire ex-Apple and AMD Arm server chip engineers (and the biz they set up)

Or they don't want to risk having to rely on ARM IP now that's going to be NVidia IP, of course...

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Re: They need to clarify...

The ROC is also known as 'Taiwan' and shouldnt be subject to any sanctions from Trump, is the point. It's a whole other country (whatever China might sometimes claim).

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Re: Obscurity and gauntlets

They can also run HP-UX.

Even 2020 cannot bring forth the Year of Linux on the Desktop

I am shocked, shocked I say, that ESR was spouting bullshit.

You're stuck inside, gaming's getting you through, and you've $1,500 to burn. Check out Nvidia's latest GPUs

You mean 'up to' 14GB, if the only thing you're working with is tensors, which isn't going to be the case, surely?

In the frame with the Great MS Bakeoff: Microsoft sets out plans for Windows windows

I mean,

a) Motif is a GUI toolkit while Xt is a set of tools for making a GUI toolkit (with Athena as the reference barebones GUI toolkit that shipped with X11), so it's not really comparable. Motif doesn't extend Xt, it sits on top of it.

and

b) Nobody since has used Xt. Gtk doesn't use it. Qt doesn't use it.

Nvidia may be mulling lopping Arm off Softbank: GPU goliath said to have shown interest in acquiring CPU design house

Re: This could make sense

And, y'know, the layoffs.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Re: I'm prepared for the down votes

You shouldn't be drawing a gun on someone unless you intend to shoot them. Being 'a ranty bitch' is, strangely enough, not a good reason to threaten to murder someone.

'Boutique' ISPs: Snub the Big 4 AND get great service

Err

It's an article about alternatives to the big players, not about the consumer broadband market in its entirety. Plenty of other articles on this site if you want that.

HOLD IT! Last minute gifts for one's nerd minions

Disenfranchised? They won't let you vote?

Disenchanted, I think...

Android hackers mull rooted mobe app marketplace

Google turns a blind eye to GApps?

Not quite true. They specifically asked the Cyanogenmod team not to include Google Apps directly into Cyganogenmod (as is their right of course), which is why Google apps are a separate, optional part of the install.

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

I note that an empresario is a Spanish land agent. Perhaps he meant impresario?

Windows 8 fondleslabs: Microsoft tip-toes through PC-makers' disaster

x86 monogamy? Short memories

Microsoft has happily ported to non-x86 platforms when they felt it suited them - at one point Windows NT ran on Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS, if I recall.

Eurozone crisis: We're all dooomed! Here's why

A UKIP column on the Europe on theregister? Really? What next, the BNP on immigration policy?

New plastic telescope ammo machine gun is light as a rifle

*shrugs* Personally, I'd always assumed the reason that rifle squads/sections don't have a half a dozen machineguns each was basically cost more than weight. This wouldn't change that.

Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars

The argument at the time was that Trolltech hadn't realised Qt under the LGPL (so people could write commercial apps with it). Not that that was what people actually objected to, of course; what they really meant was 'I hate C++ and everything to do with it' but 'Gnome is more free than KDE!' (because you can write closed-source software using it, forsooth) was a far more acceptable rallying cry.

Now, of course, Qt is under the LGPL so it's exactly as free as Gnome/Gtk. And I've been a happy Kubuntu user for many years so I don't give a flying fuck about this Unity/Gnome 3 mess.

Google SHOCK! Snaps up Motorola phone biz for $12.5bn

Is it possible Google might simply stop making Motorola phones?

Or at least only produce unlocked developer ones aka Nexus One? They could simply fire most of Motorola's hardware guys, not be in competition with their ecosystem, not lose money selling phones, and still reap the benefits of the patents.

Behind Apple's record sales are signs of desperation

Err

Since when is Meego a 'cloud-based operating system'?

Nokia: Keep codin' for Symbian and Qt!

You can still write Qt apps on Android

Fortunately, there is a port of Qt for Android. You need not throw all that knowledge away. :)

Shuttleworth sees fewer clouds in Ubuntu's future

Actually

Qt is still owned by Nokia. Only commercial support has been sold.

Memo to iPad mimics: No one wants a $799 knockoff

The best value Android tablet right now is the Nook Color

'Currently Android tablets are sharply divided into two categories -- sub-$200 junk and wayyyyy too expensive. I suspect the first vendor to find a happy medium will do very well.'

Barnes and Noble are this vendor, albeit accidentally. Their Nook Color sells for $250 and once rooted is a very practical and usable Android tablet. You can even run Honeycomb on it. And, indeed, they are selling like hot cakes.