Posts by joeldillon

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Dogs do unconditional love. With cats, in my experience, it is usually very conditional (on Dreamies/Temptations)

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

'Send email' would have been a bit of a tall order for most shareware users in the early 80s, to be fair.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: @VicMortimer

We had by modern standards sky high income taxes for people on very high incomes after World War Two and you know what? By and large they did not all just leave the country.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

PostScript was essentially in the FORTH family. Long since generally replaced by PDF, but you'll still see it around now and then.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

'Just invent better algorithms!'

Sounds like the hardware engineers designing the Itanium, relying on the software guys writing compilers to do sorcery to make their stuff go fast. It is, um, not that easy, it's like 'just make denser silicon!'.

Dell sheds ten percent of staff for the second year in a row

'tech businesses often trim the teams that work on older products'

Surely that's also a layoff? Unless the implication is they're being given a nice haircut down the salon.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: All is not what it seems?

To be fair, Microsoft/Intel in the mid 1990s were targetting at best low-end servers. They didn't need 64 bit addressing yet for things like fileservers, whereas high-end scientific/database computing etc on Unix workstations did.

Intel trying to push everyone to Itanium shows they knew back then that they needed a 64 bit solution. They just chose the wrong way to do it and fucked up the execution, letting AMD in.

Re: Progress

If I remember correctly, in early UNIX /usr was actually that - as in home directories were directly under it. Not sure when the move to /home happened.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

So, err, is 'Linux royalty' basically just Greg Kroah-Hartman here?

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

Re: Coolness aside

PostScript is Turing complete (and an actual language). PDF (the core spec) is intentionally not, though of course that goes out the window once you allow JavaScript.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re: Cut e-waste?

Well, the interface changes /eventually/ but both ISA and regular PCI had a fairly long run, within which you'd have wanted to replace your motherboard anyway. You're not going to be able to keep the same computer for 30 years and have it stay up to date.

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

WSL1 was an NT kernel personality. It worked, but only sortakinda, which is why we now have WSL2.

This is /not/ an NT kernel personality because it turns out that wasn't actually fit for purpose, it is a tightly integrated virtual machine and does not rely on the NT native API; it runs a full, actual Linux kernel.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: An industry insider comments...

The PostScript function generator (which is Forth-like, not LISP-like) is very specifically limited to a small number of operators such that it is not Turing complete. In particular you get no control transfer instructions other than, iirc, if/else.

Not sure that PDFs as a whole are Turing complete for similar reasons. It's just a really complex spec.

The spec is something like 1500 pages. Even if it weren't for the scripting, that's a plenty big attack surface, unfortunately.

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

DTT (as in over-the-aerial television) is going to go away in a decade or so, at which point yes you will definitely require some kind of net connection because it'll all be TV-over-IP including BBC1 etc.

Re: Nobody asked for this...

Paper maps don't come with GPS and compass, though. I do find that's made life a lot easier and more reassuring for me if I'm walking around somewhere I don't know, so, I guess, props to tech for that one..

Thousands of AI agents later, who even remembers what they do?

'Agentic'? Really? We're just making up words now I guess.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Re: BASIC was my first language as well

I never worked with an actual name-branded Forth but in a couple of my first jobs I was working with PostScript, which is Forth with the serial numbers filed off. You can still see elements of it in modern PDF.

Buckle up, admins – Windows Server 2025 officially hits GA

Re: Windows Server... Now that's a name I haven't heard for a long time...

Waaaay back in the NT4 days Windows Server had a different default scheduler in the kernel, more suited to batch-oriented/background service type stuff than maintaining a snappy UI. Would be surprised if that's still true or significant today though.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: x86 Train Wreck

You'll definitely get a machine trap (as in SIGILL by the ttime it hits userspace), I don't see why you couldn't do in-kernel fixups, it's just a bunch of extra work.

Re: "amid growing adoption of competing architectures"

Sure you do.

Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

'Any decent compiler should strip out any extraneous characters, assuming the code is indeed being compiled beforehand and not interpreted at run-time.'

- not quite sure what this means. You literally can't put a bunch of tabs (or spaces) in machine code or even bytecode, that's what a compiler is producing after all.

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

Re: I'm doomed

Sure, I'll just go out there and try and find me someone who'll pay me to work in Standard ML. 'I've never had a job working with functional languages' is kind of the norm, not the exception.

So....just like your C++ example then? There are essentially two C++ ABIs, MSVC and the various Unixes (these days mostly meaning gcc+clang), all of which these days follow architecture-specific variations of what used to be called the Itanium ABI.

Meanwhile Windows and the various Unixes can and do have different C function calling conventions on the same architecture (x86-64 for example) in exactly the same way.

Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split

Re: If you stop making the thing that made you..

ARM very specifically does not produce (or sell) chips. Just designs.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

My first compiler was Modula-2 as well (and looking on my bookshelf it was indeed FTL Modula-2 for the Atari ST) - because it cost 50 quid and commercial C compilers cost twice that. Remember when compilers costed money? :)

Re: Sinclair QL wasn't 16 bit

Early 68ks - I assume the 68008 too - had a 16 bit ALU. Yes you cao do 32 bit integer operations on them but it'll take twice as long; internally they are actually and for real 16 bit even if the ISA wasn't. This did get fixed later on, of course.

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

Re: Now end Windows

I wasn't asserting it was a development of the POSIX personality as such, which as we know was a fairly useless tickbox exercise, just that it used the same mechanisms just as e.g. the OS/2 personality did.

But you've done way more research on this than I have, so in your case I am happy to bow to authority. :)

Re: Now end Windows

WSL1 literally was an NT kernel personality, as was intended for NT to support from the start - and it wasn't that great, for compatibility and speed reasons, which is why WSL2 came along with the whole hypervisor thing.

Personally especially now there's X11 integration I find Windows 11 with WSL2 to be a pretty usable Linux, it's my usual development setup.

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

'The board is actually the first to use a cost-optimised variant of BCM2712 (designated BCM2712D0), which removes all the non-Raspberry Pi-specific logic from the chip.' - wait, like, what is being removed here, then?

X.org lone ranger rides to rescue multi-monitor refresh rates

Re: Probably no one or anyone

I think you'll find that was House of Cards (the original UK version not the US remake)

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

' IMO means nothing goes in the kernel unless it absolutely must go there. The kernel is no place for a fancy anti-virus tool.'

Andrew Tanenbaum and the other microkernel advocates lost that argument in the 1990s (to Linus Torvalds among others). Some (many) things do go in the kernel which in theory need not do but for efficiency reasons do.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

'Balneum non est, sed latrina' :P

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Re: Slow

Rage128 register-level programming docs are/were fairly easily available (I wrote a Qt/Embedded driver for it back in the day). The fact that it has a framebuffer, even if unaccelerated, is most of the work. Once you get that far, implement bitblt() (and its hardware, it should look the same on a Mac as on a PC) and you're most of the way to not-horribly-slow mode.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Complexity Raises Learning- and Enthusiasm-Barriers

Modern (64 bit) ARM is a fairly clean RISC in my experience (by which I mean I've written a compiler backend for it for my hobby project). Only really weird thing I've come across is how it encodes immediates for logical operations, I still need to get my head round that, otherwise it is if anything cleaner than ARM classic and definitely more fun to target than Thumb - 16 bit opcodes come with compromises.

How much compiler optimisation do you think the standard Python interpreter is doing (not one of the weird implementations nobody actually uses)? That's just not Python's focus, for example. Something like Rust or Swift will be competitive but most people writing in not-C are writing in something that isn't trying to be a compiled native code language with C-like performance.

Re: New Cow Theory?

Should have done a history degree, worked for me, lots of spare time to learn how to write C on my own time ;)

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: "we're not gauging but we're charging"

'Open' in the older sense of 'open standards'. If it were actually open source this wouldn't be possible.

Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick

'2023 now has the "second-highest total for the sector ever" with only 2001, the year of the "tech bubble" recession, having more. That year, 168,395 cuts were announced in technology.'

Well, we're only halfway through July so seems quite likely we'll have more than that by the end of this year.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: FVWM

I was running plain old twm for a little while in the 90s because that's what came with the X source and I needed to do a build from scratch to support my particular S3 Virge model. Fortunately I found Afterstep fairly quickly.

Version 100 of the MIT Lisp Machine software recovered

'Today, though, thanks to Apple Silicon Macs on the high end and RISC-V on the low end, RISC is enjoying a renaissance.' - errrr. I think you'll find there's a bloody ton more ARM chips out there, and they've never gone away in an embedded context. Not everything is a PC, and PCs are not being built with RISC-V.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: Small Rural AM station?

Didn't Usenet start out distributed over UUCP, which in fact precedes the ubiquity of the internet? Phoning up a remote computer over a modem link need not involve TCP/IP.

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

The first not-BASIC, compiled language I ever learned was Modula-2 - because the compiler for it cost I think 50 quid for the Atari ST (remember paying for compilers?) and the cheapest C one was 100.

In praise of MIDI, tech's hidden gift to humanity

Re: Foresight is a wonderful thing

Or cheap but business-oriented motherboards, for that matter. Lot of old keyboards out there companies are too cheap to upgrade.

Linux kernel 6.1: Rusty release could be a game-changer

Re: Better Security, nearly always makes things a bit more complex.

With all due respect I have been hearing about the Mill/Belt thing for /decades/ now and nothing has ever been released. Maybe let's worry about it when it's more than posts on Usenet?

LockBit suspect cuffed after ransomware forces emergency services to use pen and paper

Re: Another victim of Putin's war

I mean, given Russia's been conscripting people? I wouldn't want to hang around there either.

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

Re: Rosetta

While this is absolutely true....what's your point? Alignment rules and 64 versus 32 bit ness apply to the size of loads and saves from memory, not the size of the instructions themselves.

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Re: K'in eejets.

Which country on earth do you live in where 2% beer is standard, Saudi Arabia? Even in America, notorious land of 'piss close to water', even Bud Lite is 4.2% abv.

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Point of order (because I had one of these in my very first job out of university) - the iMac /originally/ came only in Bondi Blue, the other colours came out later.

Ex-Imagination Technologies boss tells UK Foreign Affairs Committee: Britain needs to stop overseas asset stripping

Re: And who will pay ?

ARM, for one example, was already a large, well established and profitable company. It didn't need to sell itself to Softbank to raise money, it was doing just fine as is.