Posts by MarkMLl

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Good article, if a bit too wide ranging

I agree: so wide ranging it makes comment difficult and risks having somebody who has good reason to disagree with one point say things based on an imperfect understanding of others.

Having said that, I think the priesthoods that surrounded the major mainframe architectures were so intent on protecting their precincts by means of arcane incantations that their successors really hadn't got the faintest idea what they were talking about.

It took me years to find a coherent explanation of what a "parallel sysplex" is, and how it compares with an SMP system, or NUMA, or a cluster.

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...

"I'd heard his reason for leaving MS was his insistence on keeping the GUI out of the kernel vs. Gates' insistence it run in privileged mode for visual performance reasons"

I'd say that history has proven Gates wrong. MS was very much into "let's improve the user experience", but the amount of productivity sacrificed (and crime perpetrated) as a result of that vastly outweighs the benefits.

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...

There is no way the PC shipped with a sound chip: it had 1-bit output to a PC and you had to hardcode almost everything.

Re: Disagree on a few points

"Yes, a concept carried over by Commodore on the original PET and it's floppy disk unit. Maybe others did it to, but none I'm aware of."

In that case you've really not looked very hard. From the early 80s onwards anything using a SCSI bus had a significant amount of processing power in each host (i.e. peripheral), and the situation has continued to the present day. Haven't you ever stopped to wonder just what's inside that fancy printer on your USB bus, with a display that would put the original PC to shame?

Re: Correctness and Simplicity

I believe that the original definition was from John McCarthy (MIT and later Stanford), who compared a certain type of programmer with a "ski bum" intent on shaving a fraction of a second off his downhill run time.

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

Interestingly (at least IMO), Sun's enterprise-grade machines and the Cray CS64000 were all based on an "Artificial Intelligence Workstation" architecture developed at Xerox PARC, which was then reworked by a collaborative team of Sun and Xerox engineers to use SPARC processors (the seminal papers have a couple of dozen authors from the two companies).

If nothing else, this suggests that physical size and the number of simultaneous users are barely relevant when it comes to firming up the definition: it mostly boils down to "what does this company see itself as selling?".

Re: Disagree

The bigger problems with the dynamic languages is lack of internal protection: an ordinary user can make breaking changes to the underlying structure of the system.

I'm fully behind "It's my PC, and I'll pry if I want to". However I think it's indefensible for a user to (a) make some arbitrary change to a network-facing computer and then claim it's unmodified or (b) make a change to some component which he does not "own" (i.e. take full responsibility for) and then blame everybody else for the resultant problems.

Smalltalk (or for that matter Lisp) with some form of object/class-based ownership and protection mechanism would be very interesting indeed. But AFAIK, such a thing does not exist.

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Re: Oh flippin' great...

Got it thanks.

66-1 = 67.

MarkMLl

Oh flippin' great...

Spotted the upgrade on Sunday (10th) evening, installed it yesterday (Monday 11th) morning and it's left me with kernel 6.1.66-1 (2023-12-09) and no indication of any available replacement.

However /etc/debian_version tells me I'm on 12.4, which is presumably OK.

Still better than my memories of OS/2...

MarkMLl

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

Re: You /what/ Liam?

So in Smalltalk you have left-to-right, in APL you have right to-left, and Lisp does its own thing. Then you've got RPN as used by Forth, HP et al.

All of which has left me with the definite feeling that we owe an enormous amount to ALGOL as originally defined, which despite the fact that few people at the time knew how to write a compiler did its best to stick to normal algebraic evaluation.

Re: Downvote magnet ...

> But thats standard when writting any sort of code... comment the hell out of it.

No. Read the Blue Book and you will see that the language- not support software added later- contained what was basically project-management facilities.

Re: (Potentially-) Evil Programming Constructs

"Untagged variant records" in more recent Wirth-style parlance. A lot of machines were like that, and while I've not gone into that facet of history in detail my suspicion is that the original intention of types as conceived by Hoare/Wirth was to handle those, with extension to more complex data structures etc. following.

Re: Excellent Work !

Burroughs ALGOL-based mainframe emulation: https://retro-b5500.blogspot.com/

Re: Excellent Work !

George 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEORGE_(operating_system)#Emulation https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/running-george-3-on-a-raspberry-pi

plus many others.

Re: Downvote magnet ...

But one of the most significant things about Smalltalk as described in the "Blue Book" was that it went to significant lengths to encourage commenting etc. to make large-scale programming manageable.

Kay, unlike many who attempt to design a language, was intimately familiar with the state of the art: warts and all.

Re: You /what/ Liam?

I'm disappointed that your editorial staff aren't sufficiently on the ball to have picked up the lisp/list inconsistency.

The more time I spend with software projects' excuse for documentation, the more I respect the rigour that the Ada community attempted.

I've dug around the history a bit, and in actual fact the Strawman requirements did mention LISP's indeterminate-length lists as something useful to have. Other than that it was ignored, and in the end they explicitly based the language on Pascal (i.e. as distinct from ALGOL-60 etc.).

And then it appears that the DoD's HOLWG actually hired Dijkstra, Hoare and Wirth as consultants: they being the prime movers behind the "Minority Report" which pointed out flaws in ALGOL-68 as first defined.

All of which could be very easily interpreted as an aggressive dismissal of a whole bunch of ivory tower academics including John McCarthy and van Wijngaarden's coterie.

But the bottom line is that neither Ada nor ALGOL-68 had an easy/cheap implementation which allowed an engineer or project specifier to take a copy home or run it standalone on his office workstation. And that's probably why C (and, in its day, Turbo Pascal etc.) outsold it something like 5,000-to-1. Hell, I've seen more copies of LISP sold than Ada...

You /what/ Liam?

Interlisp or Interlist? Parehelion... who the heck were they?

And if LISP really was so great, how come it was almost totally ignored when the DoD was looking for a foundation for Ada?

MarkMLl

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

How the Hell did he manage that???

The TC500 decoders were sealed units with the electromagnetic clutches and brakes running in an oil bath.

If a rag got into it... well, all I can say is that https://xkcd.com/463/ applies.

System76 teases features coming in homegrown Rust-based desktop COSMIC

Yes, yes, yes... but when are we going to get a half-decent Rust-based RAD with IDE, form builder, integrated debugging etc. to rival NeXTSTEP, Delphi or FPC/Lazarus?

openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared

Re: I don't see an explicit "version2" or "architecture version number" there...

Hmm. So /very/ approximately:

v2 sse4_2

v3 avx2

v4 avx512

...with a lot of scope for chip variants to have some enhancement of (in particular) AVX512 to suit "jeu de jour".

So since we are- obviously- talking Linux here, what does this translate to in terms of what the kernel reports via /proc/cpuinfo ?

I don't see an explicit "version2" or "architecture version number" there...

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Re: Sometimes you have to pay

"software to run your factory"... customised for you by a specialist, built on an Oracle database after they bypassed the technical departments and made a pitch to the directors. The price goes up exponentially every year, and eventually you're told that you have to move to "the cloud" because they're no longer going to support on-site servers. And since you've not been investing in your own people to handle the maintenance, you don't have the slightest idea how to disentangle things and move to an alternative.

Once you're ensconced in the cloud, somebody cuts a cable at the other end of the country and a chunk of the national telecoms infrastructure goes down. So your factory stops.

Re: One of those "Yes!" articles

USA spelling... I believe Liam still writes with a British-made Parker pen. What El Reg's editorial desk does with it is outside his control.

Re: Public Domain

No. "public domain" in general implies res nullius, i.e. nobody owns it and there are no strings attached. FOSS is owned, and that ownership is enforced to a sufficient extent to allow one of the FOSS licenses to govern its distribution.

What do you really own?

Well done Liam, very good indeed.

The one thing I'd add is that generally speaking ownership of a particular piece of free software /has/ been retained by the developers, or delegated to somebody who is expected to act in the project's interest. That is why non-compliance with the selected license can be policed.

However, the end user can fairly claim to own the binaries that he is running, have a non-revokable right to continue running them, potentially move them between computers, and to turn to whoever he chooses for support and maintenance.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Yes, /but/...

This is something that Liam and I have been sparring over for the last ten years or so.

The first thing I'd say is that on Linux- in fact I'd hazard any modern unix- everything /isn't/ a file: network interfaces aren't files, sockets aren't files, USB devices aren't files... and even in the case where some device or OS interface /does/ exist as a name in the filespace it very often needs a specialist API which controls it via IOCTLs.

Second, if we do magically decide that we can do without secondary storage and have everything inside the application program(s) like a 1980s home computer or like a PDA how do we organise it and ensure that it will scale?

I can sympathise with Liam's uneasiness at the idea of having data which isn't immediately accessible to the CPU. However, what is the alternative? There really does have to be some sort of organisation even for something which has a single-level addressspace, and if we assume that the leading contenders are environments like Lisp or Smalltalk we have to ask: how is internal data organised, and in particular how is any form of security implemented?

The original Smalltalk books (Goldberg et al.) casually remarked on cases where system owners were free to change low-level details. However the early non-PARC implementors were quick to point out that such things made systems virtually unmanageable since there was absolutely no way that a program (some species of object bundle) could make any assumptions about what already existed on the system.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no persistent single-level environment where every object has an owner and well-defined access rights. Hence there is no way of saying "this stuff belongs to the user and can be read by nobody else", "this stuff belongs to the underlying environment system and can only be updated by its maintainers", and "this stuff is the intellectual property of some middleware bundle released as open-source, and if modified it can no longer be passed off as The Real Thing".

As such, I have reluctantly decided that the idea of file-less flat systems is a non-starter.

CHERI-based computer runs KDE for the first time

Re: A way to go!

> I agree with Tony Hoare.

"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off [bounds] checks in the interest of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to—they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

The bottom line is that by ignoring most of the available hardware protection capabilities in an attempt to make software appear to run slightly faster, Microsoft et al. have left their systems vulnerable to any amount of bugs and malware. Even ignoring the cost of theft and extortion, the time wasted scanning for potential problems and fixing any that get through is vastly greater than the time they were able to save.

Re: Capabilities you say?

> You mean like the Manchester MU5 of the late sixties?

...which shipped in '74, some fifteen years after Burroughs started working on their descriptor-based architecture which was released commercially in I think '63.

I admit to being slightly dubious about the ultimate provenance of that architecture. The tag that indicated whether a word in memory was data or a descriptor might have been a side-effect of designing hardware to run ALGOL, which later turned out to have broader applicability.

Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux

OK, but just what /is/ this?

Well, I remember people running WordPerfect multiuser on CCP/M-86.

But just what are we looking at here? Is this a fairly straighforward compilation of available sources, or is there some sort of shim involved in the same way that Linux used to offer shims to support the APIs of some of the established unix flavours? And how's the UI handled: curses/termcap or something more esoteric?

Confirmation that a modern Linux distro remains compatible with legacy software is at least as big news as the availability of Lotus or Wp for a current OS.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

If that were the case, then somewhere embedded in the digits of pi are the digits of pi... a statement which is either trivial (if we allow the perfect overlap) or paradoxical.

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Who cares?

The bottom line is that you don't need a supercomputer to read propaganda.

And it doesn't matter whether that propaganda comes from Vlad the Insane or Elon the Erratic.

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Jenny List, writing at https://hackaday.com/2021/01/29/why-blobs-are-important-and-why-you-should-care/ , suggests that many controller ASIC contain bought-in IP which might include firmware provided under NDA, the source of which quite simply can't be made public.

As others have said, this is hardly a new problem. In addition, Debian does have various binary firmware collections in the "non-free" area of its main repository.

The real problem is when installation requires non-free firmware... and the target system has no supported removable medium from which it may be loaded (not to mention the virtually-undocumented naming conventions etc.). Or even (and I've seen this on SPARC systems... anybody remember SPARC?) when the installation CD contained a blob for the SCSI controller which it didn't actually install.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: REALTIME, baby.

Yes, and the first computer implementation of APL was by Breed with Wirth as academic supervisor.

Re: Jupiter ACE

Related code was used in boot ROMS from IBM and Apple at various times. It went on to be used on the One Laptop Per Child machines and never lived it down.

Re: Modula 2

I agree. Basically, Pascal was a rush job designed in between April when Wirth threw his toys out of the pram and resigned from the ALGOL-68 committee and the intake of new graduates in the Autumn.

But it made too much of a splash, and Wirth was never able to really popularise the "done right" version that was Modula-2.

What is not generally known is that Borland had an 8-bit Modula-2 that they decided not to sell themselves but licensed to IIRC Echelon (Ciarcia's company). However they didn't license the documentation, which meant that it was essentially unsellable.

The 16-bit implementation became TopSpeed, published by JPI and later Clarion.

Re: Modula 2

Yes, but if you look at Post-Wirth Pascal you'll find that just about everything that's been added is basically Modula-2 syntax, e.g. the try-finally-END and try-except-END blocks.

Re: Modula 2

However there's little reason to assume that an OS written in Prolog would actually /reason/ about what needed to be done to e.g. service an interrupt, rather than using an imperative extension to the language intended for systems programming.

Re: What about Assembly Language?

No, but Kildall had APL experience from his time at Washington https://www.cs.washington.edu/tr/1970/09/UW-CSE-70-09-04.PDF

He also had Burroughs mainframe experience, so he was well aware of the feasibility of writing an OS in a high-level language.

Re: Apollo OS

I believe that Cray also used Pascal-based OSes. However I'd caution that it's likely that the implementation language was a long way from (standard) ISO Pascal or (de-facto standard) Turbo Pascal, in the same way that Burroughs' implementation language for the MCP (ESPOL) was distinct from the ALGOLs that they used for application programming.

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

"relatively modern programming language"

Noting Torvalds' public fulminations regarding C++ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus I'm not sure it's prudent to describe Haiku as being written in a relatively modern programming language.

I would certainly agree that using a language which offers decent type checking and modularisation is better than using assembler or K&R C. But let's face it, just about /everything/ has learnt those lessons from Wirth over the last 50 years, and adopting a toolset that offers too much in the way of prepackaged objects can contribute to code which is both enormously bloated and incredibly difficult to maintain when something goes wrong in a layer which the developers normally take for granted.

And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho

Re: Vastly wide of the mark

Yes, that's a good point and one I was thinking about. But I still think that the gushing way in which Aho and Ullman are described by various people quoted in the article, which omits the crucial words "contributed by documenting" etc. isn't really appropriate.

Re: Vastly wide of the mark

Oh I agree: they definitely deserve recognition for collating and documenting the field. But they definitely didn't originate it.

Vastly wide of the mark

I don't know who advises the ACM grandees on this sort of thing, but the charitable assumption is that he was working from home and the wrong side of the paywall that protects the ACM archives from plebs like us.

Everybody agrees that Aho (, Sethi) and Ullman wrote and maintained a comprehensive book describing compiler writing. But crediting them with major contributions to the field?

What about Irons (recursive ascent), Grau and Waychoff (recursive descent), Knuth (who famously wrote a mainframe ALGOL compiler over his Summer vacation), and Wirth (an undeniable "doer" and influential on just about every major language)? What about Schorre (compiler-compilers) and Richards in the UK (BCPL?) What about Hoare and Dijkstra, who laid much groundwork even if not significant compiler authors in their own right? Hell, what about Alan Kay (Smalltalk)?

Crediting Aho and Ullman as substantial contributors of original work is vastly wide of the mark, and smacks of the current tendency to lionise "media personalities" and to listen to those who make the most noise.

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Re: FAKE NOOS!!! (recanted and concluded)

I think this wraps it up conclusively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3AASKr_iHc

The USA will probably put more resources into investigating the collapse than they did into preventing it.

Re: FAKE NOOS!!! (recanted and concluded)

Thanks for the more recent photos which I think just about wrap this up. I'd comment that Google Maps shows a cluster of (maintenance?) buildings in the area from which that the original Twitter photo was almost certainly taken, so presumably somebody got out quickly to take a photo or there might have been a camera set up taking timelapse shots.

Finally, I think we could all do with remembering the island and people of Puerto Rico, which is much more than just a convenient foundation for the USA's astronomical facilities.

Re: FAKE NOOS!!!

I'm no longer confident in my conclusion. The tops of the pylons might show signs of fracture, and there might be debris trails in plausible locations.

FAKE NOOS!!!

That's been "photoshopped". If you look carefully the cables have completely vanished, and the towers in the "after" shot have fewer tiers than in the "before" one.

Genuine photo at https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/q/38585/7982

Which just goes to show that one shouldn't take stuff on Twitter at face value.

Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts

Old news

This has been knocking around for a year, see https://hackaday.com/2019/10/17/worn-out-emmc-chips-are-crippling-older-teslas/

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Re: Algol 68 is not ALGOL 60

The problem with ALGOL-68 was that when Wirth's ALGOL-W was rejected he threw his toys out of the pram and resigned from the committee. If he'd stayed but voted against the proposed standard than it's likely that a majority of the committee would have followed his lead... it was basically Wirth+Hoare vs van Wijngaarden and a number of his students whom he'd coopted.

And what exactly McCarthy was doing there is unclear, since he'd already abandoned ALGOL for Lisp.

MarkMLl