Posts by joeldillon

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.

Looking for a great value broadband deal? War-torn Syria will do you proud

Re: The "problem" of FTTP is that it makes the old copper network valueless all at once

Not the first election he's ever won though, is it? He was Mayor of London twice in a row, for one thing. Something something Garden Bridge...

RISC-V business: SiFive and CEVA join forces to enable the development AI-amenable, edge-oriented processors

Surely ARM would be a better example of 'you need a licence to implement their ISA'? Other than AMD, who's making x86-compatible chips?

Don't pay off Ryuk ransomware, warn infoseccers: Its creators borked the decryptor

One byte?! If you had to you could just append all 256 possible combinations of that byte until you find the right one, surely.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

If we're going to be all French about it, the term is ordinateur (and, I believe, doesn't have the previous assocation of meaning a human who calculates things).

Class-action lawsuit claims DXC 'selectively timed' job cuts to inflate short-term profit target

Re: "Being made redundant"

It's incredibly easy to be fired in the UK if you've been employed for less than two years, since before then you can't go to an employment tribunal for anything other than the most obvious discrimination (i.e. an employer straight up saying 'I'm firing you because your'e black'). Thanks New Labour/Lib Dems/Tories!

Windows on Arm keeps low profile at IFA as Intel takes swipe at platform's compatibility problems

Re: "Almost 40 years ago I ported applications"

No mate, it really wasn't. So many different weird Unixes back in the day.

What does SIMD have to do with it? How many applications out there have handcoded assembler SIMD stuff for different CPUs? You don't need that for most stuff.

What universe are you living in where most Gnome or KDE apps are written in Java?

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Re: 20 years is a lot of time.

There are still industrial automation systems etc running things like Windows NT 4, yes.

Coin-mining malware jumps from Arm IoT gear to Intel servers

Technically '686' processors /are/ x86, not an 'and'. That's what the x is for you see. Presumably the binaries are compiled to run on anything from a Pentium Pro on up, but wont necessarily work on your 386/486/OG Pentium that you are definitely using as a server in 2019.

Clutching at its Perl 6, developer community ponders language name with less baggage

Re: Why exactly is Perl any worse than Python?

But did you ever get any paid work writing perl?

Looming US immigration crackdown aims to weed out pre-crime of poverty. And that may be bad news for techie families

You already need to pay a £100 a year NHS levy as an immigrant to this country (for the first five years before you can apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain) on top of your taxes and your ~£2000 visa application fee (cost to the Home Office to process, about £250). If you're married to a UK citizen, that UK citizen has to make at least £18k a year so that he can support you if need be (no accesss to benefits). If you're over here on a work visa you need to make at least £30k or no visa for you. Trust me, Theresa May was well ahead of our transatlantic cousins on this one.

When the chips are down, buy a software biz: Broadcom snaffles Symantec for $10.7bn

Sophos isn't an acronym, it doesn't need all caps. It's a transliteration of σοφός , ancient Greek for 'wise man'.

Alibaba sketches world's 'fastest' 'open-source' RISC-V processor yet: 16 cores, 64-bit, 2.5GHz, 12nm, out-of-order exec

Re: Cheaper chips?

I'm not sure what 'LEON is based on SPARC' has to do with anything. That's just as much a general purpose RISC as any other; one could also say 'RISC-V is based on MIPS'.

Learn Bluespeak with IBM: Internal buzzword-bingo memo schools staff on this newfangled thing called The Cloud

Re: Lovely

Oh no, not extremely important client Anonymous Coward. Whatever wouldl Debian do if you switch away from it? They would be undone! Bereft! Living on the streets in a cardboard box!

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Re: Money and people sadly lacking

I'd be interested to see a cite for the lack of reserve power, given that the carriers were supposed to have been designed with the option to fit catapults and those catapults were indeed intended to be EMALS.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

It's a microkernel OS, the whole idea is that more or less /everything/ runs in userland drivers included, so it's no surprise the graphics driver does too. That's fine; it's theoretically better in terms of reliability etc, historically the problem with microkernel OSes has been poor performance because of all the extra context switches and the added overhead of RPC calls between driver processes instead of just jumping to another function inside the kernel.

That said, as noted, virtually all of the GPU driver is in userspace on all modern OSes anyway; the kernel bit is just enough to transfer the data and gpu code into the gpu and kick it off. Why on earth would you want e.g. the shader compiler or the OpenGL API in the kernel when it doesn't need to be?

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Oddly enough, Kylix was actually a wrapper around Qt, under the hood; obviously carefully set up so you couldn't get to it directly. I think this was before Qt was available under the LGPL, but after it was available under a 'noncommercial use only is free' licence, so I guess it's a matter of opinion whether it was proprietary at the time.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Re: Android vs Robot?

Terminators specifically were difficult or impossible to distinguish from humans though? That's literally their point, so that Skynet can infiltrate the human resistance.

That said, android just means 'man-like'; it can also be used to distinguish robots with two arms, two legs and a head (but still metallic) from other robots, i.e. C3PO is an android, R2-D2 is not.

There's Huawei too many vulns in Chinese giant's firmware: Bug hunters slam pisspoor code

Re: Not an investigation

Is it really that surprising to you that a company could be bad at and not care about security? No need to even get tin foil hatted about it being done intentionally. Maintaining security costs money and some companies will try to get away with skipping it.

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

'There is its version of Wikipedia – which, by the way, relies almost entirely on voluntary contributions to function'

To be fair, that also describes the actual Wikipedia. It's kind of their whole model, even.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

Re: To Everything There Is A Season...

'Linux had the first 64-bit OS'

What? The DEC Alpha and OSF/1 predate the existence of Linux itself let alone its 64 bit support.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

'A refrigerator in more developed countries have doors, and are made of stainless steel or are painted white, whereas in less developed countries where electricity is scarce, pots and pans are used to store food. Image-recognition models, therefore, won’t know that these simple storage objects are, in fact, refrigerators simply because they haven’t been taught that during the training process beforehand.'

Hang on how is a pot or a pan a fridge?!

Dissed Bash boshed: Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' 10.15

Linux has become so ubiquitous as to be nearly synonymous with "unix-style OS", though, and I say that as someone who was maintaining AIX/HPUX/Solaris boxes up to a couple of years ago. Even then it's pretty common to have some variety of bash installed somewhere on the box.

(Also, Solaris is the most ubiquitous commercial Unix and its default interactive shell is bash in version 11)

Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report

ARM isn't a publicly traded company (nor, for that matter, is it British-owned any more)

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

'and in many cases the entire filing process takes only a few minutes, as opposed to the hours and sometimes days that an American IRS filing takes.'

In the UK, if you're just some random schmoe working in a salaried job without stocks and shares etc to worry about, there is no filing at all. It's automatic.

Packet's 'big boy' servers given a shot in the Arm with 32-core, 3.3GHz Ampere CPUs

Re: had news about arm

Assuming gcc isn't missing, you're not that limited if you're willing to put the work in.

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

Who did Marx shoot and kill?

Crowdfunded lawyer suing Uber told he can't swerve taxi app giant's £1m legal bill

Firstly, the UK does not have a 'federal government'.

Secondly, HMRC is only going to prosecute if it feels like it and if it thinks Uber has broken the law. This chap was trying to hurry the process along a little.

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Re: what if you're multiracial ?

You would be expected to pick 'mulatto', I would assume. I'm surprised they didn't go the whole hog and add quadroon, octoroon etc.

I wonder if this is anything to do with firing all their more experienced employees and replacing them with people in 'low cost countries'. Cultural and linguistic differences can cause this sort of problem, unfortunately.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Re: Apple PC

I think we all did, mate. Please link to the announcement on Intel's website.

Alternatively, rumours aren't the same as facts.

Hmm

Given the number of web/backend developer types I've seen who develop on Macs and then deploy to Linux servers, I'm not sure Mr. Torvalds is in the right here. Different operating systems seems a much bigger stretch than different ISAs.

Accused hacker Lauri Love loses legal bid to reclaim seized IT gear

Re: Moral

It's not like he could afford a lawyer either, though.

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Can't speak to WSU, but the POSIX subsystem was an incredibly basic POSIX.1 implementation that was included only as a box ticking exercise for the US government and was pretty much useless in practice.

Boffins debunk study claiming certain languages (cough, C, PHP, JS...) lead to more buggy code than others

Re: poor tools can't be blamed?....sure, sure, suurrrrre

Assembly for systems programming?! (outside of the very start of a bootloader or OS kernel, of course). How is life back in 1966?

World's favourite open-source PDF interpreter needs patching (again)

Re: "Tavis wants people to stop using PostScript"

Because running perl embedded in a printer in 1985 wouid be...optimistic? Resource constrained embedded environments are a strong suit for Forth-likes.

Re: Hardly surprising.

It really isn't an extension of PostScript, more a restriction. PostScript is a Turing-complete Forth-like language. PDF supports a tokenised subset of that, omitting, for example, fairly fundamental things like loops and also programmer-defined functions (which seems to be part of the vulnerability in this case?)

Look out, kids. Your Tinder account is about to be swamped by old people... probably

If I recall, the Ashley Madison leak showed their numbers were more like 99.99% male, and most of the rest other than the bots were, ah, professional ladies...