Posts by Bela Lubkin

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

Re: x86 Train Wreck

174 feature flags is a bit misleading, though:

- a large fraction of them are only of concern to an operating system kernel, are already handled by existing kernels, and that handling is encapsulated so that end users will never know a thing (except possibly some resultant performance or capability difference)

- many are for extremely obscure or forgotten features which never caught on and simply won't be of interest

- most of the rest are captured as large groups under the headings of 'x86_64 v1' through 'v4', as overarching compile-to targets available to OS distributors, software designers and builders

Somewhat orthogonally, other groups of such flag-related decisions are encapsulated into various libraries. If you need to do some sort of SIMD math, you can write your own x86 assembly using SSE, AVX, AVX-512, etc. -- or you can use one of many many libraries which encapsulates the conceptual operations. The library 'knows' about the various CPU instruction families (and in some cases, also, how to outsource this to a GPU, NPU, or whatever newfangled whatsit is available); knows how to spot-test for presence and then spot-benchmark for performance, and therefore, how to use whatever's available, to best effect.

So yes, all that throbbing complexity exists in the background; and you *can* engage with it if you really insist on it; but there's also a huge existing software ecosystem which hides most of the complexity, should you choose to go that route.

And as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, ARM is certainly not free of such things. There are lots of generations of the ARM Instruction Set Architecture, each of which has plenty of optional design-in extensions. If you told me that the overall level of complexity is lower -- using a headline figure like 'there are only 67 architectural flags to be aware of' (number pulled out of thin air) -- I would believe you. It's still a level of complexity which demands support in the OS kernel, compiler, libraries, etc. Overall it might be a little bit smoother, but this is really a minor quantitative difference, not qualitative.

BBS legend Ward Christensen logs off for last time at 78

Re: kudos to Ward, especially for ReSource

Source code which was (1) eventually seen by an engineer from Digital Research, who said that it was far more readable than the original source code; and (2) eventually lost during a house move when my entire cache of 8" floppies was taken to the dump by a helper mis-following instructions :(

kudos to Ward, especially for ReSource

Back in the day, I used Ward's ReSource interactive disassembler to create source code for the CP/M 2.2 BDOS. The concept of an iterative, interactive disassembler is amazingly awesome. (I didn't actually know if he originated the concept, but certainly brought it to me... and I was actually using someone else's Z80 mod of it...)

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

I infer from this article that the "unix" brand name (user land) has recently been merged with the "POSIX" brand name (API)

True, if by 'recently' you mean '20+ years ago'...

Years late and 36 cores short of AMD, who are Intel’s 4th-gen Xeons even for?

> AMD 8 core chiplets are in fact 2x 4 core chiplets

That was Zen 2. Zen 3 & 4 chiplets are unified 8-core CCX / CCDs.

Move over, graphene. There's a new super-material in town: Graphullerene

Re: Graphene is actually

That's quite a laundry list of properties! Sounds like someone read all the 'new battery tech coming' articles for a couple of decades and wrapped them all up into one huge overhyped promise...

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

PATA / IDE are still supported

This is the removal of a lot of ancient driver code specifically hard-coded for old PATA controller hardware. The same controllers are still supported with smaller, more modular drivers based on libata and presenting the drives as pseudo-SCSI devices.

So no, old 40-pin cables have not just been obsoleted. Just old device names in the /dev/hda style, which now become /dev/sda style.

l imagine there will be some exciting quirks to discover while moving to the new kernel on systems with the old hardware. You 'get to' discover all the places which have unwisely hard-coded hda-style names. (I also imagine that most of the affected systems will be VMs, here in the early 2020s...)

Firefox to adopt Chrome's new approach to extensions – sans the part that threatens ad blockers

why go along with Google?

It's a matter of self defense.

Since manifest v3 has a lot of API changes, extension developers who port to it will be under pressure to drop v2 support. New extensions developed after v3 is widespread and fully operational will of course target the gigantic Chrome market, ignoring or only addressing as a lagging afterthought the relatively tiny v2 market.

Browsers which do not support v3 will be left behind in a shrinking pool of sad remnant extensions. Look at the state of extensions for Firefox forks which haven't picked up WebExtensions (manifest v2) support.

None of this would apply if it were truly just a different manifest format; if a single extension could easily be packaged in either 'v2' or 'v3' format with a few simple build procedure changes. The name is misleading.

Chrome release cycle accelerated to four-weekly frenzy

The Race Is On

'tentatively starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021'

Interestingly, Firefox already releases on a 4-week cycle and currently has this schedule for mainline releases in 2021Q3:

2021-07-13 -- Firefox 91

2021-08-10 -- Firefox 92

2021-09-07 -- Firefox 93

According to the Chrome plan, Chrome will perpetually be 1, 2 or 3 releases higher than Firefox (depending when in Q3 they switch to the 4-week cycle).

Makes you go 'hmmmm'.

Intel screams Tiger Lake is 'world's best processor' (then quietly into its sleeve: for thin Windows, ChromeOS laptops)

Re: What's wrong with "times"?

> I’m pretty sure “SX” and “DX” don’t stand for anything meaningful at all

Oh no, it was amply demonstrated over time that 'SX' stood for 'sucks'. (Which meant that 'DX' stood for 'doesn't suck as much'.)

Sometimes 'SX' meant 'we removed half the I/O bus', sometimes 'we removed the integrated FPU'; whatever the tech details, it was clear what it meant to the user.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: Well it's kind of a good idea but...

> Errm, remind me where the cloud resides?

In *somebody else's* gigantic operational & maintenance hassle.

Chrome, Firefox pull very unstylish Stylish invasive browser plugin

-- and, of course, you can use the 30-line script to inject any CSS of your own. I would cut it down to about 10 lines since the bulk of the script relates to dealing with old pre-Greasemonkey userscript injection frameworks...

In addition to Stylus, it is worth noting that each(*) 'style' on userstyles.org has a link 'Install style as userscript' (just above 'Discussion'). Clicking on this is supposed to immediately invoke your Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey / Violentmonkey to suck it in as a userscript; this mechanism isn't currently working for me, but using `wget` on the URL pointed to by the link does work, and is preferable anyway since I can vet the result.

Said result is basically a 30-line userscript wrapped around the raw CSS(**) of the style. You could download it once, then subsequently download other styles from userstyle.org using the 'Show CSS Code' button and pasting the received CSS into the middle of the static userscript. But why bother, when the site will already do it for you.

(*)Of course I only checked a few so it is always possible that this feature isn't universally available...

(**)One of the ones I downloaded had a bit more complexity having to do with adapting the CSS to different sites; this may be an additional reason to actually use the userjs downloader rather than the 'Show CSS' downloader.

Meet TPU 3.0: Google teases world with latest math coprocessor for AI

serial liquid cooling

Is that picture in the article for real? They bring in cold liquid, heat it up on one TPU, pipe it to the next TPU, heat it some more, send it back to the cooling unit?

So presumably TPU #1 'mysteriously' always runs overly hot and has to throttle back, while TPU #0 gets to blithely crank along at full speed?

Intel's security light bulb moment: Chips to recruit GPUs to scan memory for software nasties

I think most currently shipping Intel CPUs have integrated GPUs, even if they are sold as a GPU-less model. The silicon is there, disabled for some combination of marketing & manufacture-time test failure reasons.

Even the GPUs which failed as full marketable GPUs probably work well enough to be used as background security lurkers.

... I wonder if they'll roll out a set of microcode updates which partially enable those GPUs to be used as security sidecars.

We put Huawei's P20 triple-lens snapper through its paces

Re: Please, I don't want your cool hack

Swipe-across to answer a phone call is a reaction to several common failure modes:

- phone answers while you're fumbling it out of your pocket and would have chosen (on seeing the caller) to reject

- phone answers in your pocket before you even start digging it out

- phone answers in your pocket without you having noticed at all; then the caller gets to listen to you & your surroundings for as long as they want

A simple on-screen pushbutton just isn't reliable enough.

Should the phone UI have an option to turn off slide-to-answer, if you'd like to experience all those failure modes? Maybe. Or at least a hardware alternative like up-or-down-volume.

Magic Leap ships headsets at last, but you'll need a safe

Thank you for this item of actual thoughtful introspection and analysis

THIS is what I expect from The Register. I don't even care if it's totally wrong (and I'm not saying or even trying to imply that it is). It is interesting analysis, the polar opposite of the barely-chewed press releases which constitute an unfortunately large portion of recent output.

Do it again. Keep doing it.

Qualcomm, Broadcom sitting in a tree, you'll have to cough up more if you wanna buy me

the important question

Will the resulting company be known as QualBroad, BroadQual, or -- for Maximum Brand Loyalty Preservation -- CommCom or ComComm?

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Re: Ker-ching!

Those would work, as long as they're well documented to be printed on flammable materials...

China-owned Opera touts big comeback

FB and WTF aren't actually particularly 'integrated', they just provide a place where their respective chat things *can* lurk if you so choose. I don't.

The entire spectrum of Chrome extensions are usable on current releases of Opera.

I switched to it from Firefox about 2 years ago, have been reasonably satisfied since then. I have up-to-date FF and Chrome available as well, poke around with each from time to time, return to Opera without regret.

Coming Xeon 'scalable' family will run SAP HANA '1.6 times faster'

Re: And the software licenses will cost how much?

Terabytes, not gigabytes.

E7 systems with 3TB physical RAM do not exist.

1.6x performance gain in a system with 3x the RAM, everything else approximately unchanged, is quite plausible.

Mastercard launches card that replaces PIN with fingerprint sensor

Re: Not quite thought through

Indeed, I would be happy to use chip-and-pin-and-fingerprint. But the banks would never go for it (maybe some day in the midst of a fraud epidemic?)

Pulsating white dwarf described as a 'dynamo' found, no, not in the back pages, 380 LY away

Re: Another pendant contributes

I want to specifically congratulate _Sorry that handle is already taken_ for the magnificent pun. I was halfway to scolding about the mistaken use of "pendant" for "pedant", when it swung around and hit me.

Re: "Should that not be in fact 10124009 Brontosaurus?"

Recheck again. Archaeoboffins have most recently decided that not only were Brontosaurs real and separate from Apatosaurs, but they in fact rate their own genus comprising three species!

Ubuntu Linux daddy Mark Shuttleworth: Carrots for Unity 8?

Re: Ubuntu meh!

Um. There are approximately 50 window managers in the Ubuntu repositories.

This returns 57 matches:

$ ### sudo apt install aptitude ### if necessary

$ aptitude search '?and(!~ri386,~Pwindow-manager)'

-- of which half a dozen are essentially duplicates.

$ aptitude search '?and(!~ri386,~Psession-manager)'

returns 7 non-duplicates.

Neither of those are a good comprehensive list of "desktop environments" available in Ubuntu. That would be some sort of matrix of window manager x session x who knows what else, numbering in the thousands of possibilities.

The problem isn't that you're stuck on Unity, but that there's an overwhelming sea of possibilities with nary a map in sight.

Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10

Sign Error, Re: Eventually...

-4 years from now: raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7552

Not call, Intel – not call: Chipzilla modems in iPhone 7s fall short

sorry, had to do this

s/one's/ones/

Samsung to fab 10nm FinFET SoCs for next year's exploding phones

The author's Notably short fuse makes me wonder whether the chaebol once blew up his dog...

Adobe reverses decision to kill NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux

My guess: some crucial security fix which is just too difficult to backport to the ancient 11.2 code base. For this reason to make sense, there also has to be at least one gigantic paying customer or strategic partner who firmly insist on continued Linux support. This was already a necessary condition for the previous ongoing 11.2 patching, but now we know that the insisting customer is even bigger or more strategic than we might previously have imagined...

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

The testing burden is real

Operating system initialization is extremely CPU- and chipset-specific. Showing that your OS tests successfully in 32-bit mode on a modern 64-bit x86 CPU is not at all the same as showing that it actually works on real 32-bit hardware. I'm talking about differences in page table setup, various control registers, workarounds for ancient bugs like "f00f" and the FP divide bug, etc.

(Aside: a good rule of thumb about OS testing is: if you haven't tested it, IT DOESN'T WORK. This isn't an actual identity, but it's close. Changes *here* have unanticipated effects *there*, so it's really necessary to test every supported scenario against every release.)

So, don't make any changes to 32-bit init code? But huge swaths of the x86 code is shared between 32- and 64-bit paths. An attempt to freeze the 32-bit init code would involve changes all over the shared x86 arch part of the kernel. This would be potentially disruptive of the 64-bit path, thus nearly impossible to get merged into the mainline kernel. So now you're asking distros to maintain a forked kernel for arbitrarily long.

Init code isn't the only pain point. Even if you get the OS to boot, you'll eventually find other subtle issues leading to data corruption, panics, etc., unless you are rigorously testing on real 32-bit hardware.

Meanwhile, old hardware can continue to run the same old software that it already runs. Nothing a distro does is going to reach out and retroactively destroy existing x86_32-supporting OS releases.

Embedded users shouldn't be too bothered since they rarely use "full fat" desktop versions of any distro. Many embedded systems build their entire userland themselves and don't really rely on a "distro" at all. It is irrelevant that they can't acquire things like modern browsers able to handle the latest web site tricks. (For most embedded applications, it would be a serious security problem if it was even *possible* to install a full browser...)

BlackBerry Priv: Enterprise Android in a snazzy but functional package

Re: There once was a way for a single page

Actually http://theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/blackberry_priv_review becomes http://theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/blackberry_priv_review/print.html which redirects to http://theregister.co.uk/Print/2015/11/06/blackberry_priv_review and works; but including both /Print/ and /print.html redirects a second time, to (404) http://theregister.co.uk/Print/Print/2015/11/06/blackberry_priv_review

(Sloppy Crapmonster lives up to the moniker :)

POLAR DINOSAURS prowled ARCTIC NIGHT, cast doubt on COLD BLOOD theory

(icon: the only available dinosaur)

@jake, thank Roger for Kentucky Fried Lizard Partes -- not Harry.

But indeed, RIP to both.

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

keyboard hell

The article fails to mention the single worst feature of the PCjr -- at least the early version which was inflicted upon me.

Real IBM PCs had 15 characters worth of typeahead: if it was busy while you were typing, what you had typed was stored in a little buffer and played back later, when the next prompt arrived. If you typed too much (the 16th and subsequent chars), it would BEEP! to let you know that the extra chars were being ignored.

PCjr? Oh my.

There was still typehead on the PCjr. There was also still a beep. The semantic interaction between these, however, had been diabolically redesigned.

For some reason, the PCjr wasn't always able to receive a typed character while it was busy. Someone once claimed this was because of its lack of DMA; I never learned why. In any case, it *did* apparently have some inkling that it had lost a character.

The PCjr's somewhat more modest "bip!" therefore meant "I lost the one character you just typed".

At least that was the theory. Unfortunately, even the signal telling it that it had lost a character was flaky. What the sound actually meant was "I MIGHT have just lost a character".

Which meant that as soon as you'd typed 1-2, maybe even 3 chars, you got an audible signal meaning "give up, you have no idea what's in the input buffer now".

Arrggghhhh!!!!!

OHM MY GOD! Move over graphene, here comes '100% PERFECT' stanene

This stuff should be ideal for tinfoil hats (tip o'mine to JustaKOS who already obliqued this joke)

Ex-Nokia team unveil Jolla smartphone with added Sailfish OS

good sign

It has to be a good sign that this venture already has its own special dedicated RegTrollTard(tm).

I survived Spiceworld 2013, heat and all: Here's how I did it

Rather bummed that this was not a harrowing tale of survival at a Texas rootin' tootin' chiles-and-others-spices show...

Curiosity photographs mysterious metal object on Martian rock

Re: I was wondering where that went ...

Now a Valero (with an Arco [BP] across the street in the southwest corner)...

Leap second bug cripples Linux servers at airlines, Reddit, LinkedIn

timetard(is)

This is obviously an outrageous attack on OSS by Microsoft! They deliberately slowed the rotation of the Earth in order to insert a leap second, thus sabotaging dozens of services relying on Linux.

Hands on with the Intel-powered Orange San Diego

not much ARM code should need to be emulated

Android apps are mostly Dalvik (cough*Java*cough) bytecode; they should run just as "fast" on x86 as on ARM.

Presumably where there's ARM code, the phone uses some sort of JIT ARM-to-x86 compiler. This stuff used to be terribly slow (10-100x penalty). These days there is no technological reason it should cost more than about 2:1. That is, *if* they cared to develop or buy the very best, the penalty shouldn't be too bad. If they just slapped something naive together then it's probably back to 10:1 or worse... Benchmarks will eventually tell the real story.

And presumably popular apps which use native ARM code will eventually be recompiled as fat binaries or separate x86 packages.

My guess is that the current generation of Atom SoCs will prove to be perfectly adequate also-rans in the cell phone CPU arena. They will not compare successfully against the latest multicore ARMs like Tegra 3, QualComm S4, etc. Atom is only barely touching the compute-per-watt range of the newer ARMs.

screen sizes

When writing an app for a tightly controlled platform that has only one screen size, you can be forgiven for designing to the size.

On a platform with two screen sizes, you would be sort of stupid to do so, but many developers could be expected to be on that side of the line.

Android cell phones collectively have at least a dozen different screen dimensions. Add tablets and you're up to at least 20. Coding Android apps to care greatly about screen size is just plain stupid.

Desktop apps have a resize control in the corner of the window. Web apps get fed into browsers on all size screens, which live in windows with resize controls. Any strong sensitivity to window size is idiotic.

BTW there are a lot of idiotic pages on the web. This does not excuse them...

Sega squirts urinal game console onto shop shelves

Kudos to Chris Watson -- and giant kudos to (ahem) dog pizzle if you set that up on purpose!

Thai floods derail Hadron-colliding antimatter boffinry

How do you think "50 million petabytes a year" gets reduced to "15PB" (a factor of about 3 million:1)? They're already compressing it incredibly.

HP previews ProLiant Gen8 servers

Gen8-alias-G8 -- yep, that all works out...

An NT-powered Windows Phone? Not so fast...

Thanks, now I get it

They don't want confusion around WP8, so they don't announce their intentions, they just release a swirl of contradictory rumors.

The Register Comments Guidelines

Ah, I have now *earned* the "commentard" moniker. My Mysteriously Missing Missives were there all along -- waaay up higher in the discussion, threaded under what I was replying to. Duhhh.

I think I'll go do something useful now, like load the dishwasher...

Perhaps... "accepted" but being held by the moderator while he comments on them? That's cheating, you know :)

All three of my recent set of blather read "Accepted by moderator at [time stamp]" on my posts page. Plus my three from yesterday. It seems like the 6th, at least, should have qualified easily under the "5 happy posts in 3 months" rule.

Therefore, apparently it prints "Accepted by moderator" whether it's referring to a human or an automated system.

I'd prefer if it said "Accepted by automoderation" or something like that. Perhaps with a nice link to the guidelines anchored on "automoderation".

Now thoroughly confused. My last two posts suddenly both appeared at the same time in "my posts" page; but neither have yet shown up here?!?

@Drew

[I thought I posted this but can't find it in either the forum or "my posts"... going senile...]

I wasn't asking about how moderators handle anon posts, but whether the <i>system</i> retains knowledge about who posted each anon post and whether the resulting scores accrue to the real poster. Then I decided you probably had to retain authorship information for various legal reasons; and it really would make sense to charge people for their anonymous misbehavior. So I probably answered my own question, but still seek confirmation.

Plus I get to check myself for HTML Super Powers...

@Drew

I wasn't asking how the moderators handle anon posts, but how the scoring system does.

When an anon post is accepted, rejected, or removed after acceptance, that's a scoring action that *could* accrue to the actual commentard account that created the post. If the database keeps track of that, etc.

Or anon posts could be truly anon (at least in that regard), i.e. their ownership could be completely whitewashed as soon as they were injected into the review queue, leaving no way for the system to accrue the score.

I guess for liability reasons, if nothing else, you probably need to hold onto who posted what, even anonymously. So I'll venture a guess that anon posts do accrue to your score...?