Posts by Caspian Prince

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

That's a really nice...

[digital library of private things | application you've used for years | community you've built up over 2 decades] (delete as applicable) you got there... it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Re: We don't have a package manager

The problem is you can never trust them - because they can be poisoned /after/ you've checked them for trustworthiness.

Die, package managers, die.

Re: I sort of expected something like this.

It already does this.

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

The real reason nobody wants to use it

... is that it's easy to remember and read out a dotted quad but essentially impossible to remember or speak ff:12:34:56:78:89:0a:ff ... and it probably really is that simple.

If only they'd just added a couple more bytes to the address and left it with room to add more as needed.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Won't be a problem...

Rather like ... phones are right now?

Re: Anybody remember the linker?

That's how they still work - if you want to do it that way. These days the favoured way is to dynamically link a shared object library, the reason being that hundreds of applications will all be using the same code so you might as well have the OS only load it into RAM once. In other words after not-very-much linking it becomes hugely more efficient, not less efficient, to load the entire library instead of just bringing in bits and pieces.

Re: Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

Only about 1 in 10 people I've ever worked with over the last 35 years or so have really been software engineers... the rest do it for various reasons but not because *it's their thing*, they just kind of accidentally fell into it like accountancy or sysadmin or estate agents, and trudge along in a mediocre fashion, never really caring much for what they do.

Re: Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

That's not quite the case though: because RAM is not reserved by a single application it's easy to conflate RAM usage with the simple requirement of disk space. The reality is that RAM usage is amortised over the usage of multiple applications simultaneously, and not all applications are loaded at once. So while you are totally correct to say that it is way cheaper to bung 4GB of RAM into a server rather than shave 4GB off of the memory usage of the service running on it, it's also still true of an application that runs on a million installations: because 4GB of RAM installed on a million computers is amortised over the varying usage of a thousand applications. Your application isn't the only application to benefit from the 4GB of RAM: the other 1000 different applications also benefit from it, and that makes all 1000 applications quicker and easier to build and maintain, and that makes all 1000 applications cheaper to make, and that means that those million users pay correspondingly less for their software, and it *still* works out cheaper for them to just buy a 4GB stick than it is to pay for the extra cost of the engineering time to make 1000 applications a bit more efficient.

Not all optimisation in software engineering has been about resource efficiency

There are other concerns that the commissioners of software have long been concerned about need to be considered yet it's fashionable amongst us older devs to pretend that back in my day, we had to lick t' road clean before fatha would even let us go to school and we made every byte count, etc. etc.

The problem is if you cast your mind back to software development in the 70s and 80s and even 90s ... it was fucking awful. The tools were primitive. There wasn't a lot in the way of useful abstraction, which means stuff took ages to develop, was usually fragile and tied to specific bits of hardware, and riddled with the sorts of potential security bugs that would have you hung by the foreskin until sorry for in modern day computing (but fortunately back then everything was air-gapped).

Not only did stuff take ages to develop, it didn't actually do anything much that everyone takes for granted these days. Software almost certainly wouldn't have worked with any other character set than US ASCII. It wouldn't have handled RTL script. It very likely didn't have any undo feature, or any cut and paste or global clipboard. Your fonts would have been shitty bitmaps on a low-res monochrome screen instead of beautifully rendered glyphs in 32 bit colour rendered slightly larger on your 4K monitor for your tired miserable old eyes. It might not, if you go far enough back, even have had a GUI. It won't have been able to even access more than 2GB of RAM until it got a 64 bit OS. It would likely have just crashed when it ran out of physical memory. All of these things have been added and demonstrably made using software vastly better than it used to be... and it's all cost space. Everything's come at a cost in space, and CPU power.

And while it was taking ages to develop, very few people had much of the required patience and autistic attention to detail to actually do it properly, and so they commanded a very high price, which they charged for a very long time, and this vexes people who pay for these things to get developed, so they're very keen to make it a) easier and therefore less of an exclusive and hence expensive club and b) quicker so it costs even less to make and gets to market faster. And these two last drivers of market forces are the full force of what's driven software development for the last ... 3 decades or so? Make it quicker. Make it cheaper.

It's still vastly cheaper to buy RAM than it is to optimise software. Vastly, vastly, cheaper. Even at todays slightly higher prices. And ... I'm fine with that, because I can concentrate on the first, and most difficult bit of software development - make it work - for longer before I have to worry about the next bit - making it fast.

India’s IT minister moves to Zoho’s spreadsheet and word processor, urges 1.4 billion people to do likewise

Re: Ulaa = chromium fork

Today my crappy £200 phone has about 10 times the processing power of, and unfeasibly more memory than, the Windows PC I first used Microsoft Office on. I think it's a fairly low bar to reach to get a word processor running on something "low-powered", or perhaps everyone has become so inured to the incredible bloat of Windows products that it has become some sort of fantastical dream.

Terminators: AI-driven robot war machines on the march

Asimov

...once again showed the deep philosophical thinking and prescience of science-fiction authors when he developed the Laws of Robotics, which specifically exist because of this exact problem.

Act now before it's too late and get these into law.

Linux Mint 22.2 polishes the desktop, but kernel updates are the real deal

No intrinsic rendering issues here but dragging Chrome tabs around on my Mint XFCE install runs as if in treacle. Clearly a problem but not one to worry too much about.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

At the end of the day it's at the dealers' discretion

...as to whether they do the right thing and swallow the £49 costs themselves.

Just as it will be my discretion as to whether I ever buy another Hyundai ever again*

* Spoiler: I won't

Wikimedia Foundation loses first court battle to swerve Online Safety Act regulation

Re: Why no....

UGC exists in the form of the comments section on the BBC site, and it's such a cesspit of right-wing f*cktards, NIMBYs, armchair lawyers, Karens, Nazis, and Fail readers that I am *almost* tempted to agree that perhaps it needs some sort of protection put in front of it.

Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often

Would you like me to sit in a corner and rust

...or just fall apart where I'm standing?

Legendary OpenPrinting architect looking for new role

"This is one of the perils of trying to automate the assessment of an employee's value."

Are you kidding me ... honestly, this is one of the key symptoms of internal rot in a company when it starts to try and automate things like this. On the one hand - lol, Canonical have just shot themselves in the foot with facepalmingly accurate corporate stupidity. And on the other hand - would you want to remain at a company that actually set any merit behind this sort of treatment.

So long and thanks for all the work, Till.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Java to .net

Having had the pleasure of many languages over the years, including .net, I'd rather stick with Java than almost any other flavour-of-the-month.

Currently doing C code. I forget sometimes how wonderfully simple it is. And just how long it takes to get anything at all of any significance working.

Canonical adds extra shots to Ubuntu Java

Re: You don't tend to see it around much anymore

It is generally everywhere, thought not in very many exciting places. Particularly disgruntled that it hasn't gained enough traction for front-end, or videogames.

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

Teachers need to be paid appropriately ...

... by which I mean, the same as if they were in the industry using their skills to do the job. Only then will you have a chance to attract people good enough to teach it well.

I would have loved to teach computer science... but not for less than one third of my current income.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Not ready at all.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-2-the-audio-stack-is-a-crime-scene/

Seems germane to the conversation.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Having grown up with the Vic20/C64 keyboard...

... I need something I can literally batter with a hammer and won't break to suit my typing style, which could charitably be described as "irritatingly loud" by my colleagues.

Ducky keyboards ftw by the way.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: I'e already said this

Linux for gaming *as well*. Works great (thanks Valve).

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

Re: Fantasy Linux

I have absolutely no idea. I just install every update that comes my way from the Software Update centre. And then one day it just refused to boot after one of those updates - I forget the exact failure but it was obscure enough that I couldn't actually find a solution on the interwebs.

I have had a lot of trouble with hanging as well - some kernels are not so well tested as they should be perhaps. And don't get me started on Nvidia driver failures.

Re: Fantasy Linux

Even Mint, the go-to replacement for WIndows, has been something of a huge pain in the arse for me, at one point breaking so thoroughly I had to reinstall it completely after a year in use. We have to be honest about it or it won't get fixed: it's difficult, still extremely fragile, and prone to total breakage. When you have to use a mobile phone to trawl Mint forums for obscure issues (on *very* mainstream hardware) because it can no longer boot, you know it's not quite all there yet for everyone.

AI datacenters want to go nuclear. Too bad they needed it yesterday

Re: Thorium?

Not to labour a point but I suspect that in a few thousand years' time that a field full of solar panels uncovered by archaeologists is unlikely to kill anyone unpleasantly.

If only there was some sort of safe solution

... to all that incredibly dangerous nuclear waste. Ah well I suppose the AI can figure out where to hide it.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Still slightly awful to use

I've not managed to get it to run under Bottles yet. Plus, exactly how hard can it be to port it to Linux, as they're already maintaining a Mac version?

Still slightly awful to use

At the risk of enraging everyone who stands for the GIMP - and good on you, it's worth fighting for - I was rather hoping V3 would have addressed its chronically grim user interface finally. With at least two extraordinarily good competitors from which to crib from - Adobe, for all its sins, and Affinity Designer, a truly excellent piece of software - I had thought the people behind it might have taken a bit of reflection to heart, a bit of deep soul searching, perhaps asked some users of these (very much paid for) tools, why are you paying money to use these things when you could have the GIMP for free? And the reason is, because they are so infinitely nicer to use, that we'd rather give people money to keep making them better.

Well, in the case of Affinity anyway. Adobe can go fuNO CARRIER

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Built-in Javascript engine?

It's a bit of a shame that Javascript has found itself in a desktop widget environment in a place where it literally doesn't need to be. Javascript has few redeeming features - in fact the only redeeming feature it has it that by a quirk of history it wound up being the defacto environment for remotely delivered code despite being demonstrably awful at anything nontrivial. Kill it with fire.

Oracle JDK 24 appears in rare alignment of version and feature count

Re: Memory safety

What are those consequences though? In the real world that is?

"We have no plans to reimplement the JVM in other languages or platforms" ... well, except that GraalVM has reimplemented the JVM in Java itself, of course.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

I currently make my living rewriting ancient C code into Java code. Some of this C code is in control of things that can and would actually kill people in an extraordinarily messy way. It is possibly the worst codebase I have encountered in 40 years, and by happy chance, I don't think it's actually killed anyone yet.

The new code runs at approximately the same speed, not that anyone can tell because the difference between "insanely fast" and "slightly less insanely fast" is hard to perceive of course. What is most interesting though is that for every 1000 lines of C code or so, I can replace it with about 100 lines of Java code, and I now have the added benefits of being able to reason about what it's doing, write easy-to-run-and-maintain unit tests for it, and most importantly I don't have to worry about the enormous number of completely unchecked memory issues that existed in the old C code.

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

I actually wrote those programs that everyone copied out that were in those magazines :|

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

if only AManFromMars could wade in with their salient points on the discussion....

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

It bothers me that there is continued emphasis on its effects on "the poor"

...and to some extent, "the elderly/infirm/young/other helpless minority" because this leads the main perpetrators of the issue at large - ie. mostly everbody - thinks it's going to hurt someone else and so maybe, just maybe, they'll be all right Jack, and just carry on as they are, forgetting that they might one day also be old, or infirm, or have kids, or - shock horror - poor one day, because there's not an awful lot of need for software engineers when there's no civilisation left to need an internet for because all the poor people who used to work in the fields are now dead and, in fact, so are the fields.

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

Not fooling anyone

And that one guy in 10 always looked suspiciously like Larry, wearing a false nose & moustache and glasses, intoning, "I'd like to stay with Oracle!" in various different comedy accents.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Age verification

Either you have never had kids, or you are so remarkably naive as to think your kids are angels who would never do such a thing.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

See Pico-8 for how to do it properly

Without line numbers. Also, Lua is the new BASIC, amirite?

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Never mind Linux!

...get Pico-8 on it, and rejoice in the joy you once had when you flicked the on-switch on your C64. Yes, really, it's that same hit.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

Re: In mother Russia...

"In Soviet Russia, you didn't take advantage of TPM, etc"

Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies

What sort of CIO exactly has sat on this for a all this time and done sweet FA about it? The move to OpenJDK should have been done a decade ago. There are *no* excuses. *No* reasons not to have done it. Don't come bullshitting about compliance or compatibility - because it is just that, bullshit. Do your goddammed jobs. Or perhaps, GTFO and let somebody who has a clue run the show instead.

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

Re: Doesn't help

These are not actually memory leaks, they are object leaks. The difference is a memory leak just soaks away into nothing and becomes untraceable and leads to all sorts of bullshit like use-after-free etc., whereas an object leak is entirely traceable, and the only side effect is an OOME rather than undefined or hackable behaviour of use-after-free.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: The issue with rust

That would be Java or C# then.

Re: Why?

I don't know if it's Reg readers being deliberately ironic for shits and giggles but as if to hammer home the point, the post asking the question has received 10 downvotes and only 2 up as of the time of writing...

Epic Games starts Battle Royale with Samsung, Google over app store practices

Re: ‘Bout time someone bit back

While you're having fun poking at Tim Sweeney it should be made clear to you that Epic does *not* mandate that purchases are made through EGS - it is purely a convenience. And Epic have actively supported entirely novel mechanisms to manage purchases - eg. digital blockchain stuff (for better or worse - the point is it's not like Apple or Steam or Google where such things are *explicitly banned*)

Re: I said it before and I say it again...

Rather than just downvote this comment it's probably worth explaining why it's nonsense, and this from someone who has supported native Linux gaming for 25 years (as a creator) and exclusively runs a Linux rig now:

Epic have no real need to expand their market share by about 1%, which is the realistic maximum size of the Linux gaming market, at a cost to them that will most likely actually exceed any profits they might have made on that 1%.

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

And it is extraordinarily *hard* to write pathologically nasty code in Java. The VM conveniently provides a sandbox to stop RAM overcommitment snafus, although unfortunately thread creation is still unbounded.

To toss petrol on the fire ... 90% of all the C++ code out there could be rewritten in a third of the time in Java or C# and be just as effective as it was before, but without the memory safety issues.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: FALSE

You might want to actually look at the rates first before posting. Consistently 2/3rds of the rates for exactly the same skills used making ordinary boring application software. (Which is why I've stayed away from it ... I'd *like* to do it but I can't *afford* to)

That might have been the case 20 years ago but it is definitely not the case now and it still evolves into an ever more performance, ever more efficient, ever more expressive, and ever more concise platform. Where it succeeded is that it made more people happy more of the time than any other language before it, which is why it's now ubiquitous. Unfortunately this means it has also attracted the lion's share of mediocre programming talent as well, but hey, at least they can't write code containing use-after-free...

Re: Embedded? Don't think so

Unfortunately not, for reasons unknown, embedded programmers seem to be paid bugger all. The rates are abysmal.