Posts by rivimey

National Public Data files for bankruptcy, admits 'hundreds of millions' potentially affected

At what point do people start taking information security seriously?

I used to think that once big companies started losing big money the shoddy practices would cease, but apparently not: here we are. I also think that software developers need to be (more) regulated, such that a developer asked to (or under time pressure) create shoddy or ill-tested code has the backing to say no, in just the same way a civil engineer asked to create an unsafe building must say no. However, I don't see that happening soon either.

What, then? When will people with clout (e.g. business owners, regulators, investors) say enough is enough and do something to stop the plague of crap code and crap security practices? (excuse the french, please :)

Resource burden of electric vehicles set to triple by 2050

Re: The “science” seems off here

The batteries in my solar array have a guaranteed life of 25 years with an assumed charge/discharge cycle every day, and the Q4 car is similar IIRC.

UK vehicle financing tends to be 4 years before buy/return decisions, so likely 12 years before even possibly being scrapped.

I think your numbers are suspect...

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: MacOS Unix server?

Today, MacOS doesn't but the article noted that the Unix server was in the days of NeXT, not modern macOS.

Re: Fork

The special bit about vfork was that it deferred the allocation of physical address space to the new process and use CoW semantics to optimise future page allocations. Consequently, using vfork made much better use of memory for some use-cases because only memory that had to be allocated was allocated.

Both fork and vfork provided the process with the appearance of a new address space. Fork did so from the get-go, creating a physical copy of the original process' data and code, VFork simulated this using the MMU.

In both cases, while the new process could read the old process' data the moment either process wrote to a page the address space diverged.

The main benefit of vfork within Unix at the time was that in most cases a fork was followed almost immediately with an exec, which replaces all code & data with the new program, leaving only the process table (file descriptors and so on). Consequently old-fork was very wasteful, and vfork was used whenever possible. ISTR some instances where vfork semantics were not sufficiently similar, hence retaining both calls, but forget what those were.

German budget woes threaten chip fab funding for Intel and TSMC

Re: Neither settlements are secured

"the Americans and many Brits who are mentally stuck in that socialist/communist swamp."

From where I sit, *some* Brits are stuck in that swamp, many others are 100% in favour of the social/human model. The Brits in the swamp are generally fully signed up to the capitalist model.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Why?

Still a spoiled ballot is nearly the same thing as not voting and is ignored by our FTTP, much as I would wish otherwise. While other forms of protest will take more effort they will be far more effective.

Re: A chance for the new king to show what he's made of?

The ability of the King to actually refuse to sign a bill into law is very limited indeed, mostly by convention but also currently the monarchy is relatively weak and there are enough people in the media who would take extreme umbrage.

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

Re: Missing the point ?

As others have said, there's real benefit to multiple smaller reactors rather than pne massive one. Though I do wonder whether the unit size might be somewhat larger than is mentioned in the article.

Re: As a serious thought...

My understanding is the reactor is not pressurized so nom not high pressures.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: nice story

For "clicker" substitute "clinker", which is a congealed residue from burning coal that contains more impurities, like sodium, potassium and calcium. It typically forms sponge-like lumps that can have sharp edges when cool. As far as I know, such clinker is no more toxic than the coal it came from, and may be less so.

Fly Ash is quite different, resulting from the burning of crushed coal. Coal is crushed to enable more complete burning, but the residue of this is typically a very fine ash that can cause significant health issues when breathed in, and can form dangerous slurries if wet. The ash, like clinker, forms with sharp edges but because it starts so small the individual particles are small enough to do real damage in the air and in water, being very abrasive. Properly disposing of Fly Ash is very necessary.

As for radioactivity - well Carbon has several common isotopes anc the process of burning will often result in some localised concentrates forming. It is not significantly more dangerous than being in an area with granite bedrock.

'Sharp' chip inventory correction looms on horizon, warns investment banker

Re: This report doesn't seem to reflect the real world...

If you're going to redesign a module to use a new part, why would you not buy sufficient quantity of that to produce a batch at the time you decide on the new part, rather than wait N weeks till you've done the design work? In former days, waiting would make sense, but now it definitely doesn't!

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

Re: Memory problems

Back then it was "well known" that the Linux kernel used the available memory much more thoroughly than Windows did; I am unsure of the exact cause but I believed then that Linux would proactively buffer files and use swap processes more aggressively.

The result was frequently to discover bad memory fairly quickly with Linux (usually via segfault) while with Windows it would only show up as a BSOD every so often, which had so many other causes it was considered unremarkable.

The standard answer at the time was to "run memtest86" (later memtest86+) to discover which bank was faulty.

David May, parallel processing pioneer

Transputer Sonar and other heroes...

I did stuff on transputers doing sonar processing as well, while I was at GEC. 4K point FFTs calculated, stored and displayed in real time when the PCs of the time struggled to do 256 point.

I still cannot get over people who say you can't program in parallel: what have the hardware engineers been doing for the last 50 years. What they actually mean is that the way people go about programing at the moment makes it very difficult... but that way is not the only way.

I was hoping the article would mention another of the heroes: Prof Peter Welch, who has backed CSP and Occam for as long as they've been around. Working from his base at Kent University he has pushed message passing and the CSP way to over generations of students from Europe and beyond.

And finally, others have mentioned the transterpreter, but there's also other projects: see www.wotug.org for more details!