Posts by Tomato42

As Europe hopes to double its share of global chip production, Intel comes along with $20bn, plans for fabs

Re: gimme gimme gimme UK

Same way they "built" one in the US? That they "inexplicably" stopped building as soon as the Orange Menace left Washington?

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

Re: PATA / IDE are still supported

I've been using PATA disks till last year, they were presented to the system as sdX devices, so I'm pretty sure it won't affect anybody that's running hardware less than 20 years old

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Browser Profiles

yeah, running an application (even a GUI one) as a separate user on Linux is relatively simple if you are at least a bit advanced: sudo will handle both

linking different profiles is not a good idea; then if your YouTube account gets banned (because the "AI" glitched) you loose access to gmail

OK, you're paying data charges in the EU, but you can still roam free in, er, Iceland

Re: Mobile reception is pretty good actually

The Icelanding ring road (No 1) is over 1300km long, one cell definitely isn't enough.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Re: Depressing

Why I can imagine it being useful in development, it's not necessary, as such it really should require informed consent with the default being opt-out.

‘What are the odds someone will find and exploit this?’ Nice one — you just released an insecure app

Re: aren’t fully confident that code isn’t free of vulns before going live in production

Oh, I'd love to see the formal proofs of the device drivers. And I mean a real device, like a SAS HBA, not a RS232.

Re: aren’t fully confident that code isn’t free of vulns before going live in production

you can do formal proofs for single functions/methods, not for a whole application

Re: This security feature is annoying, disable it

how do they plan to move their customers offshore?

Russia spoofed AIS data to fake British warship's course days before Crimea guns showdown

Re: Just a FYI

Russia signed off Crimea when Ukraine gained independence. If it was such an important asset and integral part of Russia they shouldn't have given it off. Nobody forced them to do it.

No change control? Without suitable planning, a change can be as good as an arrest

Re: You forgot the 4th

you really think anybody would go through such ordeal to fix a typo or do any other small changes?!

Good news for pentesters and network admins: US issues ransomware guidance asking biz to skill up security teams

Empowered?

"empowered security team"

oh, so it has a snowflake's chance in hell of being successful?

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

Re: Good

I do want to hear about it for the last time though, that he was locked up in prison, broke, serving life sentence.

What to do about open source vulnerabilities? Move fast, says Linux Foundation expert

Re: The problem with testing

Shame you don't know why Turing introduced his machine. Here, learn something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing%27s_proof

Re: The problem with testing

You may want to brush up on computer science history, there was this bloke, Turing, that showed rather conclusively that there are algorithms you can't mathematically prove to be correct.

What we can do, is formally prove correctness of small pieces of code, not whole applications.

Re: The problem with testing

Also, it requires a completely different mindset than writing code and the associated unit tests.

Not only is it hard to switch to the "attacker" mindset when writing tests for security critical code, in my experience many programmers are incapable of doing that, especially for code they written.

US cities and towns purchase AI surveillance kit linked to China's Uyghur abuse

Re: Outrage over the human rights abuse in China

Da Camrade! Whattaboutism! It will shov dem!

Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

Re: It's all fun and games...

One of the rules actually enshrined in the constitution is the freedom of association. It doesn't matter why Facebook or Twitter don't want to associate with the Malignant one, they're completely in their right to do so.

You can't have it both ways, either Twatter and ISPs are common carriers or they're not.

The fascist party fought long and hard to ensure that they aren't common carriers, now they they're upset by the effects of that.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Re: Just about every developer has wanted a native package manager in Windows

one doesn't preclude the other

or you forgot the "./configure && make && make install" joke in your other jacket?

Re: Funny

except the fact that BSD kernel is in MacOS is of less relevance than the Linux kernel of Android

Re: Oh, the irony

you're completely ignoring the power of marketing, network effects and abusing dominant market position

Re: Restarts

you're right to think that it would cause a disaster

that's why it doesn't work like this

if a file is opened in exclusive mode, then nothing else can open it, but executing an application doesn't do that

The difference between Linux and Windows is that you can delete (unlink) an opened file on Linux, you can't on Windows. Such an unlinked file behaves normally for the application that has it opened (it will sync to disk, can be freely read and written to, and data is sent to disk, so you're not limited to RAM), but it doesn't have a name associated with it. As such, no other application can open it.

If two applications do manage to open same file at the same time, then they will see the same contents, so writes by the one application will be visible by the other, and vice versa. There is no way to "fork" a file and have two applications see different contents of the same file, that's a copy, even on ref-linked file systems like btrfs or zfs, so the new file needs to have a different file name.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: Gaming laptops

they're not dumb, they are a desktop PC you can put into a single backpack

Help wanted, work from anywhere ... except if you're located in Colorado

Re: I want to know the salary rang

Sure, performing work in middle of London or on the South Pole will be more expensive when you have to physically be in those places. When the work is remote, the work or its value doesn't change depending on where it's physically done.

Microsoft bins Azure Blockchain without explanation, gives users four months to move

It's also quite low on VMS, and mostly for the same reasons.

Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence

Exactly, there are artists that not only give you access to all the intermediate stages of creation of a drawing (as PSDs usually), but who also actually stream the whole process!

And all that happened before this particular money-laundering scheme was a twinkle in the eye of the parasite that came up with it.

Streaming mad: EC charges Apple with abuse of dominance, distorting competition in Spotify case

Re: There has to be a way to balance this

There is middle ground, but the cost to Apple of distributing an the keeping the app updated is more like 1% or a fraction of percent of the in-app subscriptions, for an app like Spotify.

And that's already on top of the huge margins they have on the sold hardware.

> There's a reason the "freemium" model didn't exist

yes, 'cause we called it "shareware"

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

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

what will happen is that all the stuff from U of M will get ripped out, and then from that stuff other people will consider what's valuable, what's not, and re-submit the good stuff

Filipo Valsorda

> pointed to Kroah-Hartman's remarks about rejecting future contributions from University of Minnesota email addresses and argued that making trust decisions on the basis of email domains rather than confirmed code correctness is a more noteworthy problem.

Mister Valsorda doesn't understand the ban at all, just because somebody isn't banned doesn't mean they won't go through peer review before the merge.

What happened, is that UM proved themselves to be wholly untrustworthy, both on the "experiments on humans", and "keeping researchers from doing unethical experiments" fronts.

Money can buy you insurance against network break-ins but investing in infosec hygiene wouldn't go amiss, says new NCSC chief

what? and have the middle management without features to show they implemented?! you want to completely destroy their careers?

Windows 10 Insider build fixes the fix it sent out to fix the fix that broke printing? Afraid not, but here's a new Notepad icon

Printing?

Printing? In Windows? Broken?

One of the days that end in 'y', I guess

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

what? You're trying to say that microservices that use blockchain in a devops managed environment don't solve all problems?! but how could that be!?

Re: Bottom line.

too often the MBAs give developers a screwdriver, hear developers complain, understand that the problem was the colour of the handle, while in reality the job was to hammer nails in

Google looks at bypass in Chromium's ASLR security defense, throws hands up, won't patch garbage issue

Re: shoddy

but then you won't get a solution that uses NodeJS, WebAssembly, AI, blockchain or other bullshit du jour for the suits to pad their resume to jump ships before the projects burns down

that's "bad practice"!

The chips are down. We need your support, semiconductor industry tells US President Biden

Re: The case for government intervention?

I don't think semiconductors can be classified as non-strategic any more. Far too much depends on them. Yes, that means staying on the forefront like the 7nm node now.

The question is how to structure the taxes or subsidies that doesn't result in the CEO getting a bigger yacht so they can have a place to keep their small yacht and the taxpayer getting the short end of the deal

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

Re: Is big better?

riiight, because where the code is publicly hosted is an iron-clad defence against this

Re: Is big better?

I don't see how MS "dominating" code hosting is a problem, especially when every developer has a full history of the code on their machine.

They are providing service for free (have you tried Github Actions for CI, it's bloody fast, completely unlike Travis, even before they kneecapped it). If they do that just to have better integration with Visual Studio, then I don't care one bit; don't use it, don't need it.

Now, as a maintainer, my biggest issue is the backlog of issues that demand attention, so I'll use the hosting that is most popular, most well known so that I have chance to get people to help me and to minimise the barrier of entry to new people. Spending time maintaining a mailing list server, hg server and MoinMoin wiki doesn't help with any of that.

So yeah, good on ya SDL.

No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone

Re: No edge is a bad design

but, but, but, if we try really hard, maybe we will come with better amount of wheels in a car than 4!—all the "designers"

Re: Yes

well, maybe you make yourself a new cup of tea 8 times a day, I do it 2, 3 tops, by the time I want another it's completely cold

also, I don't know about your kettles, but all the ones I ever used required 400ml or 0.5l of water as a minimum, so you always have to "overfill" it if you just one one cup

so, while wireless charging is a pointless gimmick, the argument that it's overly wasteful is barking up the wrong tree

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

Re: Cisco hasn’t explained why you’d run fibre to the desktop

we're talking about people that are running fibre to the desk, that's not niche?

Re: Future-proofing needs a better crystal ball

SFP switches are cheap because half the logic is in the modules

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

Re: Nope

many people are buying those stocks just make those pigs squeal, with the full intention of just burning this money for the resulting shadenfreude

Peasents making money?

That should be illagal! — hedge funds and illionaires

What happens when the internet realizes the stock market is basically a casino? They go shopping at the Mall

Re: Reading the Runes in Between the Lines ... Karma Sucks Big Time

sorry, but what?! what kind of pension provider makes pension money by shorting stock!?

Gamestop was already at the bottom when it started, *that's why it was shorted so fucking much* nobody with half a briaincell would invest long term in it, and if they did they got out months if not years ago.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

Re: I wonder what sort of machine you get for less then £200 per unit.

microSDs are ok if you use them as the floppy disks of old; to move files around. They really are not good enough to install and run applications from (even the ones specifically advertised for app load performance on phones). It may work if you have massive amounts of RAM to cache, and the installs are write once, don't modify later; but it's a terrible experience either way.

I tried running Linux of off top of the line SD card, with 16GB of RAM, and while after everything loaded the machine wasn't much worse to use than with spinning rust HDD, the software updates were taking forever (like literally 6-8h to install ~200-500MiB of updates).

Re: I wonder what sort of machine you get for less then £200 per unit.

64GB of storage?! with Winfail? how it will have any space left after 2 updates? let alone after installing anything more taxing than notepad.exe

smh

Re: Can only trust myself

I believe the term of choice is "muggle"

Loser Trump's last financial disclosure docs reveal Tim Cook gave him $5,999 Mac Pro, the 'first' made in Texas

depends what you're looking for in the wine, if you like sweet, then Tokaji Aszú is the best you can buy, for dry wines, both Furmint and Egri Bikavér are very good, with the latter being the more bold choice.

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

Re: SI

we do multiply units without adding a character between them... you know, like with Nm