Posts by tomalak

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

Re: Thank goodness I'm retired...

Yes it's annoying having to use words isn't it

Re: Note to self ..

These things don't have internet access. They're not a hobbyist website. They're core nodes in a telecom network. It's national infrastructure.

This is a really shocking faliure.

However.

If your bus timetable / iPad / etc is really that important, why do you have no redundancy? No backup? You're relying on one carrier, one network? That's pretty silly.

Bet nobody will learn from it either. Just blame somebody else (O2) and wait for the next outage.

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

Re: Volatile?

And then you have a new bug, because volatile does not erect a memory fence so your data access is unsynchronised. What you should really be doing is surrounding both the get and the set with MUTEXES ... and then volatile has no further effect anyway because the mutex prohibits the optimisation you were trying to avoid. Conclusion: volatile is irrelevant for multi-threading. (It still has value when you're reading from a memory location populated by some low-level piece of hardware ... say it's mapped from a PIO or something ...)

Think Fortran, assembly language programming is boring and useless? Tell that to the NASA Voyager team

Re: Srsly? Didn't have a passport?

Indeed. It's not as if you'll be commuting to the heliopause.