Posts by GrumpenKraut

Germany is helping the UK develop its COVID-19 contact-tracing app, says ambassador

Re: In the interim, the British government has been forced to adopt human-powered contact tracing

> Some people don't have smart phones.

As far as I can tell this is pretty rare (I myself do not own a smartphone). People who do not have one are most often very old people who are not likely out in the street. IIRC the owner rate if 95 percent in the "not a small child and not yet retired" bracket.

The problem is *much* more in the installation numbers. Still, even a non-perfect percentage will lead to alarms when the virus hits those with the app. 30 million (or even more installs) would be great to have.

Re: £11.8M

For a project of that size 20 m is not one bit excessive. Note, it was delivered on time, it actually worked from day one, and it supports many types of smartphones.

People form the CCC (Chaos Computer Club, very competent folks) looked at it and deem it good.

Not one penny wasted IMO.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Entirely legal

> AEG washing machine, 15 months and the pump broke, 5 years and the main bearing in the drum is buggered

AEG now is Electrolux (and other companies), avoid. Story is just as your last paragraph puts it.

Same is true for various (ex-)German brands that used to produce decent stuff; in fact most brands I could name from the top of my head, I am afraid.

If you want utter shite, buy anything from Whirlpool.

Another month, another way to smash Intel's SGX security. Let's take a closer look at these latest holes...

16 micro-operations pre-patch and about 7,565 micro-operations post-patch

So that is just a factor of 472, not rendering RDRAND pretty much useless. Not a problem at all. Nothing to see here. This is fine. ---->

intel "still a bit faster than rolling dice"-edition[TM].

Franco-German cloud framework floated to protect European's data from foreign tech firms slurpage

GAIA-X

That name makes me cringe and the image "Architectural concept ..." makes my head hurt, I have seen marketing material that made more sense. But there is that X-shape in the diagram, so everything ist wunderbar!

Travel-sick Windows needing a Systemwiederherstellung would be in Germany, right? Austria? Not necessarily

Re: Schoolchild giggle?

Thank you verrrry much.

Re: Schoolchild giggle?

"Vater" and "farter" are actually shockingly close. I didn't even realize until a British guy asked me how Germans pronounce "Vater" (of course he knew). After I spoke it loudly three times he said "Ah, I understand! Just like ..." and let one rip that stunk up the room beyond what should be humanly possible.

"Flasche" (pronunced like "flush-e") and "flasher"? Not convinced.

Anyway, Friday activity is calling ------->

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

Oh, just wait for systemd-shell-handling-deamon.

Re: IT Solves that People Problem following Greater Trails with Enlightening Tales to Tell

Dear amanfromMars 1, I do thing you are pulling a leg here. Please tick as appropriate.

[ ] This leg is mine!, MINE!, ***MINE***!!!eleventy!!!!

[ ] Oops, middle leg. I am very sorry. Very, very.

[ ] Leg: no such device.

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

> Bit harsh downvoting him for saying that nobody has explained it well.

Oh please. It is trivial to find pretty much all criticism online. Whether one agrees or not is of course another thing.

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

"-- get over it."

And this attitude is *exactly* why some people perceive the friends of systemd as a bunch of &^&^%^&.

Me included.

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Re: Timing?

Also benchmarking/profiling code. Also measurements including timestamp. Fscking up time info means trouble for a whole lot of things.

Linus is right, no surprise here.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: Fear the

Oh crap! For me "Something for the weekend" still is amongst the best to be found on El Reg.

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

"Testimonials" is also worth a peek. Totally not written by just one person, honest!

Read the one from "~Cathy" for gems like "Virtually as soon as I plugged it into my laptop I felt an overwhelming sense of an emanating higher consciousness. Tears ran down my face, not from sadness or distress, they just started to flow"

Great success! Finance app was able to inform user that their action was unsuccessful

Re: I have smelled something like this before

man 2 printf: m (Glibc extension; supported by uClibc and musl.) Print output of strerror(errno). No argument is required.

Yet another morsel of useful (YMMV) knowledge learned.

IBM's sacking spree reaches Australia – and as staff wait to exit, they're offered AU$4k to find new workers

Re: Does IBM still exist ?

> DXC global bloodbath

An article was shortly there, then it disappeared together with the comments. I don't quite dare to ask why that was. Legal something-something, I'd speculate.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Re: AMD's new marketing slogan: "Intel outside"

I had one of those stickers on my toilet lid for years.

Re: How much?

> I don't think I'll be able to save much with a 3970x...

Have you compared to some (roughly) equivalent intel offering?

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Re: Relocating office...

Work law trumps that. Fun detail: the cost-saving by buying CRTs where minimal, so effectively they paid twice.

Relocating office...

New monitors had to be bought anyway. Flat screens still a new thing and somewhat expensive. So management opted for (rather big) CRTs. New site near rail roads, so all CRTs where flickering like hell whenever a train passed, and that was all the time. And there is no practical way to stop the flickering (shielding with a thick iron box not being practical). CRTs were sold off for pennies, and flat screens bought.

Manglement ------>

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Funny that

> loose

You basterd!

Strangulation-over-IP activated in 3, 2, 1...

Re: Funny that

> would off gotten kicked

> I could of said

Nope, nope, nopedy-nope!

Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works

Re: On speed

> long division algorithm

Long division is O(n^2), Newton iteration with FFT-multiplication is roughly O(n*log(n)). Contrary to folklore the overhead for the latter is not anymore big. With 10k-digit numbers just forget about any O(n^2) algorithms!

Re: Meh

Nice. Reminds me of that thing I give to people knowing Java and thinking "C is not that different".

Q: What does printf("hello" + 3) print?

A: "lo" for C and "hello3" for Java (where printf may have to be println or some such).

Re: On speed

Hard to measure, could be (very roughly) several thousand CPU cycles. So in the order of a microsecond.

Re: What does Rust actually do?

Nicely put, thank you.

Re: On speed

> Still, having threading built into the lingo is interesting. Perhaps in the next evolution of C++ it'll be there, too.

That already happened with C++11, right?

[Edit: Kozicki already said it, and better.]

Re: On speed

Both problems have the same complexity and run-time in practice.

Indeed I computed sqrt(Pi) as well, same run-time (after pre-computation of Pi).

Re: Meh

Did you know that an equivalent expression for (array access) a[3] is 3[a]? Try it!

Re: On speed

> 50 minutes should be more than enough for billions of digits.

OK, tested it. Computing a square root to 10^9 digits takes 50 seconds (for comparison, computing Pi takes 32 minutes). Needs quite some RAM, of course.

Re: On speed

Richard P. Brent, Paul Zimmermann: Modern Computer Arithmetic, Cambridge University Press, 2010. See either here or here.

Some write-up by myself is in Part 4, "Fast Arithmetic", of the book, Matters Computational (Springer, 2010). For final version see bottom of that page.

I can give more references if you are interested.

Re: On speed

WIkipedia list of arbitrary-precision arithmetic software. For the indicated problem (real numbers), I'd suggest to look at MPFR.

For the speed claims I made, computing Pi to 10^6 decimal digits using Pari/gp takes 400 millisecs on my (pretty decent) system.

Re: On speed

> your computations done in parallel

No, rather implement FFT multiplication and use Newton inversion for sqrt.

... but only if you have a year of your lifetime to spare, otherwise grab gmp and be done with it.

Re: On speed

What, 50 minutes? That is spectacularly slow. Just tried with Pari/gp, which takes less than one millisec:

default(realprecision,17000); sqrt(7);

*** last result computed in 0 ms.

50 minutes should be more than enough for billions of digits.

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Re: Globalization: Who's fault is that?

> made-in-France cellphones

Now that's too harsh!

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Re: Micros~1

> how does one pronounce this?

"The company that brought edlin to you."

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'll give it a go...

After reading all comments so far (yes, I am bored), Micros~1 should be it.

> 'EaaS' (Everything as a Service).

More specific, 'DaaS' (Desperation as a Service).

Re: Bob

What about "bombastic bob's gods"? Cue some all capitals head explosion around here.

Intel is offering more 14nm Skylake desktop processors, we repeat: More 14nm Skylake desktop processors

intel "Must do something!" edition

also known as "Where complacency gets you" edition.

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

"maintain the integrity of our printing systems"

...and I was thinking I'd own a printer after paying for it. Silly me!

Looking for a new tech gig? Engineers, developers, and Atlassian admin sought – more details inside

Just an appreciation pint for running this.

GCC 10 gets security bug trap. And look what just fell into it: OpenSSL and a prod-of-death flaw in servers and apps

Re: Look at valgrind

% type -a val

val is an alias for valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes --error-exitcode=1

Repeat after me: valgrind is awe ... wait for it ... some!

Re: El Reg (or the readership) really has changed

Now I am scratching my head over whether TDH is something you just made up or... Too Damned Healthy.

Whatever, icon for the cure.

News sure to ex-Zeit: Next.js company reborn as Vercel

Vercel!

Gesundheit.

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

to LOL or not to LOL

I do feel bad for the customers. Still, this so bizarre, it is amusing. Maybe El Reg should have a section "Curiously shitty companies".

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

Re: Again?

> ... by habit (or lack of constraints (within their belief-system)))

Are you having a lisp? Please report at the mini-lisp!

Reg readers have not one, but TWO teams in Folding@home top 1,000 as virus-bothering network hits 2.4 exa-FLOPS

disable CPU boost

Mostly a re-post of my earlier comment under the former article:

For CPU jobs, disallow the CPU frequency boost partially or (better) completely.

That top end of the clock range is very energy-inefficient compared to the base clock. For my machine (i7-8700K, 6 cores), base freq. 3.7 GHz, boost 4.7 GHz, the difference at full load is "almost silent" versus a rather obnoxious "WOOOOSH!".

I suspect one can do similar for the GPU, could somebody enlighten us?

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

Re: Farewell, Professor

GOL was why I learned machine code on the 6502 from the book "Programming the 6502" by Rodnay Zaks. On a Apple ][ clone that I had to assemble myself. The machine code was almost a thousand times faster than the BASIC code I had written before. I still have the hand-written listings. Happy memories.

Re: On Surreal Numbers

> written by Stephen Wolfram

Rather Eric Weisstein?