It didn't make it into Fedora 40. Too many test failures.
Posts by Paul Floyd
35 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jan 2007
What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?
Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it
You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors
Debian never fails to disappoint. The Purify condiitonal compilation should heve been a red flag.
The correct fix for the Valgrind errors was to
a) #include <valgrind.h>
and
b) change "#ifndef PURIFY" to "#if !defined(PURIFY) && !RUNNING_ON_VALGRIND
If adding a dependency on valgrind.h is too much to ask, Valgrind has a suppression mechanism for things like this.
Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?
KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04
Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains
Re: Improvement?
> replacement hardware -- Windows 3.1 doesn't run well on modern hardware
You are quite likely missing the point there.
I'd say that there is a good chance that this is running on old kit with something like a custom adapter card (perhaps as old as PC-AT format).
Windows 11 doesn't work well on ancient hardware.
BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown
Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC
Nah
Generally I would expect compiled code on the amd64 architecture to be smaller than anything ARM based.
I don't think that Apple can claim with any honesty that current macs have the same or less bloatware than previous generations (my rough estimation of bloat based on the number of processes that are running after booting is that it has quadrupled over the last 15 years).
It could be that Windows and the Unix-likes are horribly ineffecient and that the super smart Apple engineers have managed to fit a quart in a pint pot. But I don't believe that either.
My theory is more prosaic. Apple can't be arsed with the cost and effort of modifying their designs and are happy enough overcharging for their current offer.
Phones and tablets are a diferent story but you can't extrapolate from a phone to a desktop.
Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama
Re: Opensolaris anyone?
Why did Solaris take off in a big way? SunOS had been doing well enough on M68K, but when SPARC was released it wiped the floor with the competition. Still, relatively low volume and high profit. Fast forward about 10 years to the late 90s. Chips like the Pentium III have now caught up with the SPARC (chips like the Ultra SPARC II) but are cheaper.
Skip forward another 5 years to 2003 and AMD releases the Opteron. By now the SPARC is no longer competitive on cost/performance. But at that time Sun had a big opportunity. Sun already had several years of experience of 64bit OSes, the V9 SPARC architecture having been released about 8 years earlier. Sun also released a 64bit amd64 version of Solaris 10 in 2005.
Though Linux had already supported amd64 for a few years my memory was that it was all very flakey. Sun did push fairly hard for amd64, but also they had done some serious damage as already noted when they dropped Solaris 9 x86 for a short while. Even though Sun was selling Opteron workstations and servers, most customers were using them for Windows or Linux. And though the writing was on the wall, Sun was still making most of its money from SPARC and couldn't bring themselves to switch focus to amd64. OpenSolaris was too little, too late. And finally along came My Little Pony and finished the job off https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/04/jonathan-schwartz-sun-microsystems-tweet-ceo-resignation.
Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris
Recipe for RSI
French typists may be faster
But for software development (especially the C family of languages) the keyboards are a nightmare.
# - right next to the enter and shift keys on a UK board, AltGr-3 on a French board
\ - next to the left-shift on a UK board, AltGr-8 on a French board
Square brackets and braces aren't on adjacent keys, instead they are symmetric bu spread over the number row.
Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary
It can be worse in other languages.
English is mostly un-genendered when it comes to (pro)nouns and articles. Inclusive French seems to be getting more common. Stuff like 'iel' instead of 'il' or 'elle', and making a mish mash of gendered nouns. That's not so bad when it's just an 'e' at the end (so etudiant-e) but it looks a lot worse when the masculine and feminie versions differ more. For instance "Conducteur·rice de train" (train driver, copied and pasted from this ad https://metiers.siep.be/metier/conducteur-conductrice-train)
Who writes Linux and open source software?
Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page
The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs
Eclipse boss claims Visual Studio Code is an open-source poseur – though he would say that, wouldn't he?
Oracle creates new form of free Solaris
Re: OpenIndiana
OpenIndiana - not really. Due to lack of available hardware (and maybe people able/willing to do the work) OpenIndiana Hipster no longer supports SPARC.
https://www.openindiana.org/es/documentation/faq/#does-openindiana-provide-a-sparc-release
There seem to be a few (more) obscure spins that still support SPARC.
Intel energizes decades-old real-time Linux kernel project
These couldn't wait for Patch Tuesday: Adobe issues bonus fixes for 92 security holes in 14 products
Spot the dog? No, we couldn't either because Spot is a robot employed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
Waterloo! Windows defeated, your sign is screwed. Waterloo! Promise to bork you forevermore
Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g
Re: The numbers are not tautological.
It's a coil. An inductor. One of the 3 types of passive circuit element that exhibit electrical impedance.
Quicky refresher, for ideal components and steady state. A resistance lets current flow through it, proportional to the voltage. A capacitor will have current flow until it is charged and then it will have a voltage across it but 0 current. In inductor will have a voltage across it until the magnetic field builds up when it will have current but 0 voltage across it.
These numbers for coil voltage and resistance are pretty close to zero are pretty close, which is why there is such a high current and magnetic field.
As Tesla hits speed bump after speed bump, Elon Musk loses his mind in anti-media rant
Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine
Re: I call bull
For the electronics, it's not just a question of the field strength. It's more a question of the rate of change of the field.
For the hard disk, the write head is **very** close to the magnetic material. The magnetic filed falls off with the cube of the distance. So I guess it would have to be a fairly enormous MRI-style superconductor magnet that would be required.
Labour says it will vote against DUP's proposed TV Licence reforms
Dark times for OmniOS – an Oracle-free open-source Solaris project
Re: It was designed to fail
You are seriously misinformed. If you wind your clock back to 2005 then the picture is very much different. Back then, Linux was pretty much only 32bit, and the 64bit version was not yet fit for purpose. Sun, by that time had a lot of experience of 64bit Solaris on SPARCV9. So when Solaris 10 came out, the 64bit amd64 version was probably the best OS for the platform. Remember, Intel was still sailing towards the iceberg on the Itanic, and AMD was trying to steal a march with Opteron. AMD stumbled with Barcelona and Bulldozer, Intel struck back with em64t, Sun failed to get much traction for Solaris amd64 even on its own hardware, OpenSolaris was too little, too late and the rest is history
Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10
Anyone using M-DISC to archive snaps?
Data for the fourth millenium
Whilst I've not worked in the field for a long time, my PhD was on pit-forming mechanisms in dye-polymer optical storage.
I'm not too impressed by the FAQ. "the M-DISC™’s data layer is composed of rock-like materials known to last for centuries". The Wikipedia M-DISC article is a bit better.
Normally optical media uses a polycarbonate substrate. This has pretty good optical and physical properties (and is dirt cheap). However it is somewhat hygroscopic, and when under stress, the optical properties are less nice. On top of this, CD/DVD/BD-LTH have an organic dye-polymer layer (100nm or so thick), a layer of aluminium (50nm) and a layer of laquer (10um) on the label side. 10 microns of laquer doesn't offer much physical protection. Back on the polycarbonate substrate side, small scratches tend not to be too much of a problem because the disk is fairly thick (1.2mm) and the incident laser has a fairly high numerical aperture (i.e., it's still a fairly wide spot when incident on the disk, but converges at a high angle to the dye/reflective layers [as high an NA that you can get with a lens that probably only costs 20p]). Also the Reed-Soloman ECC does a pretty good job. I don't know if this has improved with DVD or BD.
I doubt that the M-DISC deviates that much from the CD/DVD structure. The main difference seems to be in the recording layer, which is more like BD. I'm not sure about the thousand year claim, but if you take care not to scratch the disks, write on the label with a felt pen that won't dissolve the laquer and keep them somewhere fairly dry, then I reckon they'll last well compared to alternative data storage media.
Silicon daddy: Moore's Law about to be repealed, but don't blame physics
Many issues
There are many issues involved in continued die shrinkage. Just to list a few. There's the problem of making masks. Currently there are large sets of design rules in order to be able to create masks with dimensions using light that is of a much larger wavelength. People have talked about moving to shorter wavelengths, but again there is a big economic barrier. Next there is the issue of what exactly scales. Back in the old days, you had 5V and you could just shrink the dimensions and nothing else. But then the electric field (voltage/distance) started getting too high, so the voltage had to start dropping. Second but, it couldn't drop as fast as dimensions shrank. This has a speed/power tradeoff, but basically silicon transistors don't work below about 0.6 to 0.7 volts (the threshold voltage where a transistor switches between off and on). High-k dielectrics were introduced to help with the electric field breakdown issues. Next there is the problem of variability. One of the important aspects of IC design is that while it isn't easy to exactly control the parameters of the transistors (e.g., to have precise resistances and gains), it used to be the case that transistors physically close on the die would be very closely matched in characteristics. When you scale down to small numbers of atoms, then each transistor has much more statistical variation. This makes design much harder.
Boffins, Tunnel Tigers and Scotland's world-first power mountain
eBayer mails UK lad £44k
Is Solaris really a bright choice for developers?
Some Corrections
I don't think Mike Wright has much experience with Solaris, to be honest. For free you can get the OS and critical and securty patches, and any such patches that are dependencies. You have to pay for the rest. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Enterprise Linux you pay for the OS and annual support. If you want compare it to an all-free Linux like Fedora Core, then you should compare it to Solaris Express. That's free and has updates roughly every month (though no patches of any kind).
sh as the only shell? Of course not. Personally I use ksh, but all of the shells are there. sh may be limited, but it's not as buggy as bash. Since Sun puts a lot of emphasis on compatibilty, there is no way that they will ever replace the Bourne shell with a symlink to bash.
From what I've seen, it's not just on high end hardware that Solaris gives Linux a run for its, err, money.