Posts by sw guy

Canon ships first nanoimprint chipmaking machine to R&D lab

Re: Coating

Of course, you know that buying a new printer is cheaper than buying a cartridge because the bundled cartridge is smaller than the refill one

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Re: worse

Disclaimer: English is not my native language

I can easily think of a person having alredy written s-t-r-a-w-b-e and then asking "Strawberry, one R or two ?"

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

But...

I was able to work at home while there was a mess in the office

(and yes, this is by luck)

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: I know for a fact ...

What I was told is: One person enters the pub and ask for lavatories, and the pub explodes

French issue alerte rouge after local governments knocked offline by cyber attack

Re: French fried networks

Submarine building at Saint Nazaire, really ? I would have assumed Cherbourg instead.

And BTW, there is an Airbus factory at Saint Nazaire, too, much smaller that what exists at Toulouse, I reckon.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: NSDE **

and letting a floppy inside the drive was a way to propagate virus

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Right

I use from a phone with Firefox. TheRegister is fine then.

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

grep ?

So you want to compare with grep, with all options ?

Including regular expression in legacy syntax or in egrep syntax or in perl syntax ?

I wonder how this works with indexing to save time...

Windows breaks under upgraded IceXLoader malware

Weakness

Maybe this a weakness of malware, but what I see looks to me a big issue for sandboxing itself

Tiny quantum computer plugs into top Euro supercomputer – because why not?

Re: Stating the obvious

What is obvious after reading the post is that your sense of logic is broken

Singapore to phase out checks for businesses by 2025

Re: Spell checker, not cashing a cheque

Here is what I found when looking for content of speech: https://sbr.com.sg/news/singapore-eliminate-all-corporate-cheques-2025

Again, USA not knowing how is the world outside USA ?

Meta met a programming language it likes better than Java

Re: Wow

Possible benefit: Less snafu count for application ? (see non-nullable types)

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Global, what global

How can people not having learn (whatever) english as a foreign language tell us (those who did) how this teaching is done ? What I learnt in school: First UK english (and BBC as reference), second, once first step OK, US english.

Beside, as other commentards wrote, if I want a global IT site, there are lot of choices.

What I appreciated with El Reg was its (unique) UK aspect.

My feeling is initial flavor/flavour is not totally gone, and I agree with claim that each of you should write in its own "dialect" (but for units, of course)

OVH opens less flammable datacenter at site of 2021 fire

Re: Not the job for me

Yes it is.

It depends on where in France actually, and. tbh, I do not know status of *this* location

AMD admits its Ryzen mobile naming scheme is a mess, promises to clean it up

But does Zen matter ?

Of course I am aware than for Y > X a ZenY core has a better IPC than a ZenX core

However, would I have to pick a CPU, what should matter is: Instruction set / RAM interface as well as IO (including chipset) / Power usage / Price

Then I expect all 5*00U providing same instruction set and be socket compatible.

Plus, a correlation between numerical order and performance level.

If this is not the case, then this is an AMD fail.

If this is the case, I do not mind Zen level (whatever my admiration for continuous IPC increase between generations)

Broadcom in talks to buy VMware: multiple reports

Oh no

My feeling when having work relationship with Broadcom ? First answer to a prospect: sending a NDA.

Another company send me e-mail address where I could ask question.

Guess which company I recommended.

As I never worked with VMware, I can say nothing for them.

(my previously VMware employees colleagues did not look to keep a bad memory of their experience, though)

Parallels: Purveyors of decent virtualization software... and occasionally iffy checksums

md5 !

Or they know that md5 hash is broken and should no longer be used for that purpose

'Now' would be the right time to patch Ubuntu container hosts and ditch 21.04 thanks to heap buffer overflow bug

Re: 21.04 LTS

BTW, I read that 20.04 is also affected…

Bad things come in threes: Apache reveals another Log4J bug

Just FYI

I deliver here an french expression used by ancient french president:

«Les emmerdes volent en escadrille»

(translation by google looks adequate to me)

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

Re: The language is not that important

Weird, maybe, but what about the following feature:

Pass label as parameter for a function who then can decide to return there instead of just after call ?

Qualcomm kinda spins out Snapdragon – as a brand, not a business

who buys ?

Quote: "easier for punters to understand what they are buying"

Me, I may buy phone(s), or tablet(s), or computer(s).

Does the name of CPU matter ?

Maybe (maybe) for a computer.

But for a phone or a tablet, I read reviews to know if performance is OK, that's enough.

And maybe I could follow same process for a computer.

Facebook building 'on-demand executable file format' that self-inflates using homebrew compression

Re: I have a better way to save space on phones

I came here to post same comment, but you beat me to it.

Have a (see icon), later in the day, though.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Re: Linux Subsystem - Android?

Oh no.

(letting apart the case of native code)

Java as a source language, yes (though you should have a look at Kotlin).

But Android does not run a standard JVM:

Java bytecode is transformed into something very specific to Android before your phone dares to execute application.

Toyota reveals its work on an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility

no need for perfection

What matters for me as a driver is to be aware there is something in this direction, as well as how does this something roughly looks like.

As long as there is a big enough surface of really transparent stuff (a.k.a. windscreen and windows), a blur, not invisible, pillar area may be enough

Indian government reverts to manual tax filings as new e-tax portal remains badly borked a week after launch

I did see really good SW, coming from India, though I also saw very bad one.

Mind you, the price was not the same.

Seven-year-old make-me-root bug in Linux service polkit patched

That's why you should always use sudo -k

Report: World's population of developers expands, JavaScript reigns, C# overtakes PHP

Thus JavaScript is twice award winning

Both most used and most hated language

(from a neutral observer, I never used it, I never learned it, …, I just summarize what I eard)

Trail of Bits security peeps emit tool to weaponize Python's insecure pickle files to hopefully now get everyone's attention

Re: pwned by default

So, pickles are kinda executable files.

One should trust / un-trust them on the same basis as any executable files.

VS Code acknowledges its elders: Makefile projects get an official extension – and VIM mode is on the backlog

Re: Key collisions - forced decisions

I remember reading that when Bill Joy developed vi he was often connected to computer by a 1200 baud modem. This convinced him to find a way to minimize bytes flows in the 2 directions, with curses library as a consequence.

Going underground with Scaleway's Apple M1-as-a-Service: Mac Minis descend into Paris nuclear bunker

Why, oh why ?

Why should I request my cloud provider survive a big nuclear bomb, while I am pretty sure this would not be the case for me and my customers ?

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Re: Not the 2nd 64 Windows

Thanks for the clarification, I assumed kernel code was compiled to "preferred" register size of CPU.

Well, I reckon this is ambiguous for MIPS, but in my remembering (which can be wrong) Alpha was kinda 64b only with support for 32b.

I totally agree regarding endianess. Actually, I almost noticed it, but I did not just to stay short.

Anyway, NT kernel was able to run of beast with very different ways of interfacing with peripherals, for instance, and my I never heard my colleagues writing drivers saying they had to take care of this.

Not the 2nd 64 Windows

From the ground-up, Windows NT was built as really really portable.

Proof are its 4 initial platforms:

- 32b x86 (nobody had ever though of a 64b x86 at that time

- 64b Alpha

- 64b MIPS (I got one at work!)

- PowerPC (I saw references inside doc., even possible one of my colleagues used one) I do not remember if it was 32b of 64b

Itanium came later.

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine (JET Blue) source code arrives on GitHub – sadly comments not included

Usage ?

To me "is for use in applications that require fast and/or light structured data storage, where raw file access or the registry does not support the application's indexing or data size requirements." is a good description of sqlite.

Any comment from people working with this kind of tool ?

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

Timing attack ?

I read the whole set of comment and I saw a single reference to timing attack

(of maybe 2 if you assume the sentence about probing generated assembly was, too)

Now, I have a question for people proposing others languages:

Is there a way to make sure a function can be guaranteed to execute in a constant time (that is: same time whatever input on same machine) ?

If one wants to be sure, same question could be asked to C users.

Oracle exhumes ‘Older, Still Useful Content’ penned by Solaris and SPARC veterans

Maybe still possible

Given the lengthy life-time of space projects, it is possible some LEON using projects are still alive.

I do not have such feeling for OpenSparc, though.

A new take on programming trends: You know what's not a bunch of JS? Devs learning Python and Java ahead of JavaScript

OK, programming. But what is the target ?

I wonder which kind of domain is the one with the most program lines created per year ?

Sure, the web is the most visible (tautology?), but how about all those embedded programs we do not even see , or do not even know they exist ?

(I read one day there are 4K of code within an electric shaver)

Note this is a true question, I do not have any clue.

But what I know, is that JS did nothing for me when writing firmware for various devices. Neither python, nor java, BTW.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Sorry, but no

Veteran Unix admin are used to the old adage: if it ain't broke, don't fix.

And BTW, Debian did a good job of increasing boot performance by replacing /bin/sh years ago: You can run a search of dash cs. bash

And BTW*2, boot frameworks including parallelism though using shell scripts exist

Barbs exchanged over Linux for M1 Silicon ... lest Apple's lawyers lie in wait

Re: Look forward to this coming to fruition

Oh, and there are some not cheap chips involved in running Linux and cited in the TOPxxx of high-performance computers

Linux developers get ready to wield the secateurs against elderly microprocessors

Bad metric ?

As long as platform does not get any new specific hardware gadget, is there is need for a change when all CPU/board specific stuff already is there ?

Using already cited example: Does something prevent last kernel version working on powerpc/amigaone ? (assuming of course that involved devices are still operational)

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Re: And if you are past a certain age ....

I think you wanted the «sad reality» icon and you did not find it…

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Re: Prelalal dnceodig

Interesting, your sentence was difficult for me, as english is not my native language (nor is chinese: my native language uses latin alphabet)

Microsoft is designing its own Arm-based data-center server, PC chips – report

Re: How many companies have to fail at server-side ARM64 ...

Please, avoid "ad hominem" argument.

What I said is what I can say after several years of working pieces of OS on several CPU architectures.

If you want performance, ISA matters, but at soon as the expected features are present, what matters is implementation and memory access (and I/O, if your data set needs it). Oh, and regarding SIMD, you should have a look at what last ARM ISA offers, you would discover why Fujitsu uses it for HPC beasts.

Re: How many companies have to fail at server-side ARM64 ...

You may as well apply your last sentence to yourself, as it looks like you forgot some lesson from history.

That is:

x86 is born as a desktop CPU rather than a server one.

Regarding difference between desktop and server CPU, I already eared that: This is what company sending servers with their own CPUs said to the world when they started to feel the hot from (comparatively) cheap x86 server lines.

BTW, yes, there is a difference between desktop and server CPUs, but the instruction set is moot for that purpose.

Overpriced, underpowered, and over here: Microsoft to bring the Surface Duo to British shores in early 2021

No NFC

Some people put that on the negative side, but others put on the positive one

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

Re: "And does that matter to anyone?"

I am not quite sure one can say this is not the job of TSMC at all.

TMSC has hard-cells for CPU available (at cost) for their customer, hasn't it ?

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

You remembered me physics problems in high school where wed could have "please assume pi^2 = 10", or "pi^2 = g (gravity acceleration)"

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Re: Those were the days

Exactly

You could have:

ASSIGN 1000 to LABEL

GOTO LABEL => will GOTO 1000

But then something worst was added:

A way to pass labels as parameter for a subroutine

(that is: a function w/o return value),

with a specific syntax inside subroutine to select a label from parameter list:

Caller jumps there right after the return !

RT were a new process in Unix V.4

RT as Real Time, a new class of scheduling

You said new ? Hence I had to test that.

This allowed the whole team to discover that looping on decrementing an unsigned 32b integer from its maximum value to zero can take time (more then than now).

And of course, no way to kill process, as there was only one (single-core) CPU…

Re: Those were the days

This makes me remember when I had to write a FORTRAN program for which natural data set was a small bag of stacks, but there was no way to create big array to contain biggest possible data (I know, because I tried and I got a "virtual memory full" error message).

Had to put stacks into files, and use windowing, to operate on stacks and just flushing/reloading when needed,

Apple's privacy pledges: We sent dev checks over plain HTTP, logged IP addresses. We bypass firewall apps

Rasberry Pie ?

Thus, beside your Mac you know need a small device running the actual network control, tailored to *your* need.

TBH, this kind of box could please Windows 10 users, too.