Posts by joeldillon

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

A fairly large chunk of the low-level Windows desktop environment is in the OS (by which I mean the kernel), architecturally, and has been since NT4. Not that kernel and OS are synonymous; glibc on Linux is userspace but you'd probably still call it part of the OS.

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Re: AI is now top of my list...

Hmm well I do assembly language programming on a hobby basis because my hobby is my own compiler (well it actually generates straight machine code, to be fair). Writing assembly is a fairly niche thing even with small microcontrollers these days given you can program a Cortex-M purely in C.

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: I only use Windows for work

The point is, quite obviously, that if you're running Linux you won't need the video in the first place because it's a non-issue.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

Re: no shit sherlock

What do the Australian Labor Party have to do with anything?

(It's LaboUr over here)

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

Would they have the range for #2? I guess if it is a one way flight maybe....

(But think of the absolutely bonkers fueling situation for Black Buck in the Falklands war, they needed to top up like 5 times in flight I think)

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

'Now, if only a retro version of the Start menu were also available. PROGMAN.EXE anyone?' - OpenShell still works for me. :)

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'

Re: How refreshing

You realise this is originally a British website, right? We can talk about maths here without scare quotes rather than "math".

Everything is 'different on Windows': Zed port delays highlight dev friction

Re: It is part of the Microsoft business plan

I don't think this sort of thing is intentional so much as that Windows is the last mainstream non-Unix OS remaining. And why should it be required to be a Unix?

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

You're complaining about a document being misrepresented and you have 'tharter' in there? ;p

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

'We're seeing strong recognition of this shift among your fellow UK IT decision makers (ITDMs)'

So well a) that's a lie, isn't it, but b) who on God's green has ever talked about 'ITDMs'? Making up acronyms is not going to make you sound more convincing.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Re: You missed the point

Canonical tried to do more or less this, it was called Ubuntu Touch and noone wanted it.

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

Re: Registration required

As an employee, I don't want my boss asking me why he's getting a call from you.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

While this is awesome, I'm not sure a 7 year gap is 'near contemporary' by the standards of the time. There's only 5 years between the Speccy and the Acorn Archimedes!

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

So was Hitler.

Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Re: 2038

time_t has been 64 bits on 32 bit Linux for many years now.

Workday promises to grow workforce slowly and differently after shedding 1,750 jobs

I wonder what 'in different geographies' means here.

Are you a big AI business vendor making terrible AI business decisions? We can help

I would be um somewhat surprised if Windows 3.1 let alone 95 was 'largely' assembler. DOS, maybe.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Not that it would actually do any harm, but I'm not sure what you'd get from rebooting after installing WINE. I don't believe it has its own kernel module or anything, right?

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.