* Posts by kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

148 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2016

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Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Can't do an OS in anything but C

There is no way to do an OS in Rust. The hardware forces the use of things like jump tables that Rust does not allow. You can't rely on safety code to catch things when you are the OS.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

C++ can't so an OS

If you write the OS in C++, then how does the OS do a 'new' dynamic allocation to itself? You can do a malloc(), but not a 'new'. In fact, there is no virtual function table or anything close to what C++ entails.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Operating systems always "unsafe"

If you can turn off the safety, then why bother ever having it on? You have to develop your own safety for an operating system, so you are better off never bothering with some poor imitation by the compiler, that you will have to turn off sometimes anyway. C is perfectly safe as long as you know what you are doing. There are some tricks to learn about how to use it safely, but there is no way to do all the things that have to be done and still have a compiler run the safety. Safety has to be hardware dependent.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Rust is bad

There is no way to make any operating system safe by imposing strict compile time limitations. And I think it is impossible for Rust to do what any operating system needs to be able to do.

There are times you need to do things like execute hardware jump tables. Anyone who thinks you can make things like that safe, has never written an operating system.

As far as the risks C presents, it is easily fixed by setting all pointers to null ahead of time, checking for null pointers before de-referencing, and tracking all dynamic allocations.

It is trivial to make C the perfect operating system language. And there is no way to make it better.

Nor it is trivial to mix languages. It is bad enough ensuring you get the right compiler version for 1 language, much less more than one.

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: Still peanuts.

Nah, no one can require you to update your OS. Most companies I work for stick with older versions they know they can trust.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

It costs nothing to stay with the older operating system, and you don't need or want "updates" that will cause system failure since your old device did not have something they want. The hackers will be targeting the latest, not the older systems.

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: LD A, annual_profit / XOR A,A

Zilog had no superior chip fab skills or techniques. Intel does. Intel can make chips for video cards, networking, cellphones, etc., and not be involved with competing CPUs.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Spin off the fab

The people who would be alternative fab customers would not be competitors but instead would be GPU, cellphone cpu, and others that have totally different requirements.

So spinning off the fab is a great idea. Lithography is the one thing Intel is really good at. CPU design, not so much. In fact, if Intel had kept up on their CPU design, GPUs would not ever have existed.

They would be redundant.

US military grounds entire Osprey tiltrotor fleet over safety concerns

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

The crash was not caused by a software glitch, but broken teeth in a gearbox.

On a normal helicopter that would not cause a crash and you would just freewheel until you auto gyro to the ground. But when you have 2 engines and one is thrusting while the other is freewheeling, then a crash is inevitable.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: An interesting concept

Ospreys are totally unreliable. Two engines ensures they will all crash eventually since all engines eventually will fail, and a mismatch of one running while one is not running will cause an Osprey to immediately spin and crash. The only way to prevent that is by synching the 2 propellers on the same engine with drive shafts and bevel gears. But then you have a whole different vehicle.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: An interesting concept

There is nothing wrong with a tilting rotor design, but you have to run them from the same engine, with drive shafts and right-angle bevel gears. If each rotor has its own engine, you not only double the source of failure, but cause a failure to immediately be so asymmetric as to not be survivable. An Osprey will immediately crash if one engine does out.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: An interesting concept

It is not so much the fuel or controls on the swing engines that failed as much as the pressurized fluid for the hydraulics.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: An interesting concept

Helicopters with tandem rotors still only use one engine.

If the one engine goes out, you just auto gyro and land.

With two engines, if one goes out, you immediately tip and crash.

It is not salvageable design.

Needs to be scrapped.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Example?

I can't image how AI could be used to detect bugs much less how they could be wrong? Anyone have an example?

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

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: Which language do you think is used to implement all those memory-safe languages?

.NET can't be written in C# since .NET requires hooks into the OS. C# is interpreted at run time, so can't have anything to do with the OS.

Delphi cannot be written in Delphi and Go cannot be written in Go.

You cannot make memory safe language with a memory safe compiler.

It's not possible. A compiler has to have the lowest level, direct address access.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

C and C++ can be memory safe

The idea Rust is more memory safe than C or C++ is foolish. Rust itself has to be written in C. In fact, all drivers and operating systems have to be written in C.

All you have to do is store information about the memory allocations, check for null pointers and length of allocated space, and there is no problem.

But there is no way Rust could be used to do things like access hardware registers. Only C can do that, and it will always be that way.

Floppy discs still run a U.S. metro? Japan steps in with 'project kill floppy'

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Actually the 5.25" floppy disk was obsolete by 1985 or so, when the 3.5" floppy took over.

But loading floppies onto hard drives is trivial.

Should not have cost much at all.

A rail signaling system should not be hard or expensive.

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: History should be remembered...

Czechoslovakia and Poland should never have existed. They were part of the German Federation, and illegally stolen from Germany by the evil attack on Germany in WWI.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Economic Sanctions are War Crimes

Economic sanctions violate the 1906 Geneva Conventions and are totally illegal. Being Finnish, Linus should know that Kyiv used to be the capital of Russia, and that Kyiv was illegally invaded by the evil Polish empire around 1700. The fact Kyiv is now mostly ethnic Polish does not mean the Ukraine is. Does anyone expect Russia to allow NATO nukes to be installed along its border?

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Odd how people forget how inefficient electricity is, since electric motors and generators each are only 50% efficient. And people seem to forget electricity comes almost entirely from fossil fuels.

Or how adding a half ton of battery weight doubles energy consumption.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: not a solution for all

Wrong. Switching ICE vehicles over to bio fuel will reduce emissions, while converting to EVs will increase emissions since electricity is so inefficient.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: not a solution for all

Wrong. Battery EVs produce far more emissions than most ICE vehicles. That is because coal is still the main source of electricity, and EVs waste huge amounts of electricity by carting around a ton of batteries.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

No, battery EVs are not a solution because it makes no sense to carry around an extra ton of batteries. Hydrogen or bio fuels make much more sense.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Wrong. Fuel cells are expensive, but less than lithium batteries, and much lighter as well. And also much quicker to refill.

EV efficiency is only about 12% because you failed to include the fact generating electricity is only 50% efficient, power grids lose at least 10%, charging batteries and discharging batteries each drop 10%, and carrying a ton of batteries loses 50%, and converting electricity back to kinetic energy is only about 50% efficient.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

People have easily been successful in storing hydrogen or over 30 years in vehicles in Iceland. Leakage exists, but it is very slow.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

So according to you, people have not been using compressed hydrogen vehicles for the last 30 years in Iceland?

It is easy to store hydrogen, and you do not have to transport it, since you generate it right at the fueling station.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

There are catalysts that make hydrogen production much more efficient than generating electricity.

And storage of compressed hydrogen is far more efficient than lugging around a ton of heavy batteries.

Retrieving electricity from batteries and converting it to kinetic energy is less than 50% efficient, while burning hydrogen is more than 50% efficient.

Burning hydrogen only produces water and it far better for the environment that burning fossil fuels to create electricity.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Totally wrong. Fuel cells do not need charging at all. And charging lithium batteries is less than 90% efficient. Discharging lithium batteries is less than 90% efficient. Carrying around a ton of batteries is less the 50% efficient. Converting electricity to kinetic energy is only about 50% efficient.

Storage in compressed hydrogen tanks is almost 100% efficient.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

It takes less energy to generate hydrogen, gasoline, ethanol, or diesel oil than it takes to transport and charge a ton of batteries.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Wrong. Iceland has been using highly compressed hydrogen for over 30 years without a single problem from the hydrogen in an accident.

That is because hydrogen disperses so quickly that it does not explode or even burn.

While in contrast, many people have been killed by lithium battery fires.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

That makes no sense at all. Hydrogen is the cleanest to produce and is least wasteful. With EVs you have the inefficiencies of carrying, charging, and discharging batteries, which waste more than half the energy. Not to mention battery fires. Burning hydrogen uses almost half the electricity of batteries.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Totally wrong. EVs are the most inherently inefficient. Generating electricity is only 50% efficient. Transmitting electricity loses 10%. Charging batteries loses 10%. Discharging batteries loses 10%. And carrying half a ton of batteries loses another 30%. Converting electricity back to kinetic energy loses another 50%.

And you clearly are totally wrong to claim ethanol or hydrogen will never be used successfully because they have been for decades.

Brazil has been running ethanol for over 50 years, and Iceland has been running hydrogen for 30 years.

They are far more efficient than electricity.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Ethanon or methanol is burned not used on fuel cells. Since it is a biofuel, it absorbs more carbon while growing, than later released when burned. So there is zero emissions from burning biofuels like ethanol or methanol.

And no, EV sales are not just "leveling off". They are decreasing after all the fires, dead batteries, slow charges, long recharge waits, etc.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Hydrogen

Fuel cells are not at all "picky", and while they run only on hydrogen, that is easily installed since hydrogen stations are self contained and only require electricity. In contrast, the existing electric grid is totally insufficient for any amount of EVs. You have to spend $20k on solar in order to make batteries work. It is much easier to run heavy wires to a few hydrogen stations than it is to run heavy wires to every home that has an EV.

Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Hillary likely did create ISIS

ISIS did not exist until Obama let go the Sunni Iraqi that Bush had illegally imprisoned. But these angry young Iraqis had no money, weapons, or jobs anymore. Suddenly they had new Toyota trucks, and lots of new weapons. So where did they get all this stuff from? When we look at what Ambassador Stevens was doing in Benghazi, apparently it was to have a CIA annex full of cash and weapons, for absolutely no reason. The coincidence is very suspicious.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: You own the car, and it retaining your information is no different...

The "remove phone" or "remove user/profile" function is too late.

The car constantly uploads your profile for sale to advertisers.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: I can see two cases here

It is different than just what you normally store on your phone, because what the car takes from your phone, gets uploaded to 3rd party advertisers to use however they want.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

More than 2 cases, Re: I can see two cases here

What you are ignoring is that it is not just the storage of your messages that is harmful, but downloading them to 3rd party advertisers who will use to to send you ads and do other things that could be harmful.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: "Dammit, why it is so hard for those corporations to stop grasping every single byte of data

Np its not "legit". The car maker never warned anyone that their message and phone info would be copied and sold.

The judge was wrong.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: This isn't as bad as it sounds

Wrong. The local dealers are who provide the profits to the parent company, so then the state can easily force the car makers to change.

But all the car makers have to do is admit they are logging private messages with a disclaimer sticker warning sticker.

There would no longer be any harm to sue over if the users had been appropriately warned.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

No warning

It is fine for phones, cars, networks, sites, etc., to save copies of things you enter, but they should warn you if they are going to be controlled by someone else.

The expectation people have is privacy of communications to another individual, so keeping and using those messages to others is a violation of the privacy the owner assumed.

The fact they assumed incorrectly is not their fault.

The perception is phone calls and messages expected to be private.

So the problem is the car companies did not provide the appropriate warnings that privacy is not maintained.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

reactors reduce radiation, not increase it

The idea reactors create or increase dangerous radiation is false.

They do slightly accelerate the release of the previously created and stored nuclear energy in the isotopes, but they do not create any nuclear energy and only help to speed up the decay back to safe material.

The ores used for reactor fuel are even more deadly than the waste taken out of the reactors.

All the reactors do is slightly speed up the decay process.

They do not create more radioactive energy than it put into them in the first place, from the radioactive fuel.

The net result of all reactors is the fuel isotope are less deadly after having decay accelerated in the reactor.

You do want to not have them around humans while the decay process if accelerated, but reactors do not create any deadly radiation energy.

It is all already there and always somewhat deadly.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

No such thing as "nuclear wastes"

The argument about nuclear power generating wastes is incorrect.

All the nuclear energy is created in some old star that died long ago.

The nuclear material got all of its dangerous energy eons ago.

All the nuclear reactors do is slightly accelerate the natural decay process of releasing that stored energy.

If you do not put the nuclear isotopes in to a reactor, they will just retain their deadly nuclear energy longer.

The reactor does not create deadly nuclear energy, but just releases it, allows it to decay faster, and reduces it.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Nuclear is best

The only reason why nuclear is not used for everything is because it is not as profitable.

But we do not want energy production to be profitable to greedy companies, and we would prefer it to be public and free.

Those claiming it is too risky have a point in that anything nuclear that can produce electricity can also be used for weapons.

But the idea of nuclear wastes being a problem is foolish, since nuclear reactors decrease nuclear material, not increase it.

The fuel used in reactors is much more radioactive before it is used in the reactor than afterward.

All a reactor does is speed up nuclear decay.

They do not cause or create it.

It is already in the fissile material, created in the core of a extinct star.

It will remain radioactive until it has totally decayed.

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: WAN congestion is not DC congestion

The solution is to establish permanent virtual circuits ahead of time, like ATM does. Then both sides agree how many uniform frames will be sent ahead of time, and the overhead and delays essentially disappear.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: Ah, ATM

True the 48 bytes is a compromise, but frame size does not at all matter when you only handshake to establish a permanent virtual circuit once before the first frame. Since there is no overhead for the following frames, then frame size is fairly irrelevant. You just send more frames instead of making frames larger. The only time it matters is with long distance satellite communications, where there is such huge transmission latencies.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: Ah, ATM

ATM is still used for anything where speed matters because TCP is almost 10 times slower. The military, aviation, cellphones, cars, financial institutions, etc., all do not use TCP.

The only people who do use TCP are the ones who don't really care about how bad TCP is, and simply want plug and play compatibility.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

Re: Ah, ATM

ATM only needed a small but consistent frame size because you did not do all the handshaking for each frame, so then could quickly and easily send as many frames as you wanted to. So then frame size is irrelevant. And while some may like the variable packet size of TCP, in reality all virtual packets are always actually transferred by a consistent physical frame. So all the TCP variable packets do is add lots of run time overhead.

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

TCP - terrible control protocol

TCP is awful and all other transfer protocols are a lot better. But TCP was the military and educational standard for so long that nothing else ever had any chance as a standard. But anyone with an option, like financial institutions, the modern military, cellphones, aviation, automotive, etc., would never use TCP. Frame Relay came from X.25, and later morphed into ATM. It is vastly superior to TCP, about 5 times faster, and much less difficult to implement. To support TCP/IP, you have to implement ancient libraries like Veronica, Archie, FTP, Gopher, etc. It is a kitchen sink approach instead of an optimized approach.

The main functional difference is that with ATM, all the frames are the same size and you do the overhead of handshaking a connection only once.

While with TCP, there is no packet size standard, and you have to do all the handshaking back and forth each and every time you send any packet at all.

TCP is immensely more complex, slow, and prone to crashes.

Probably about a whole order of magnitude slower and less reliable.

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

kirk_augustin@yahoo.com

There is no possible fix

While Musk was attempted to claim that autonomous driving vehicles are possible, any programmer knows it is not,

So Musk has never claimed the Tesla is autonomous and can handle cross traffic.

It is only intended or marketed as an adaptive cruise control.

That is all.

Again, NO CROSS TRAFFIC FIX WILL EVER BE POSSIBLE.

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