Posts by prandeamus

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

For those of us with an interest in the topic but no specialisation, how does 400 CVE reports compare to, well, let's call it "pre-LLM activity levels". Obviously quantity and quality are both important but pulling a value of 432 out of the air gives nothing to compare to. Or did I miss something?

1 in 5 Brits think AI layoffs could trigger civil unrest

1 in 5?

I find it just as plausible that 1 in 5 people have not given "civil unrest due to AI" a second thought, or even a first one, until they encountered a leading question in a survey. What was their methodology? Ah it's just clickbait isn't it? Fooled myself again.

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Be fair, if you're storing dates for historical artifacts that can require a lot of functionality that isn't work including in generic functionality, like the Julian/Gregorian switch (Old Style vs New Style dating) which happened over the course of several centuries at different times in different countries. Or pre-Julian dates in Ancient Rome, or different conventions about the start of the new year. To say nothing of non-Western calendars. So yes, I dare say you had problems with MSSQL 6.5 but it seems an odd hill to die on.

It's great to have a turing-complete programming system on your RDBMS sometimes. PL/SQL or T-SQL or that limited .NET runtime thing. Having said that, if you rely on it too deeply for business logic other than simple triggers it can be a right royal PITA to manage.

YMMV

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

MEMORY UNLOCKED

I've just remembered faffing around with my BBC Micro in ... 82/83? ... and connecting the cassette tape relay via a primitive current loop to an ASR33 teletype at 110 baud. I kinda got it printing a few characters, but a fellow computer club member told me I wasn't doing the circuitry (at either side) any favours. Nice callback

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

"The author said he was doing it to try to push Claude Code to its limits to see where it would fail."

That is a genuinely useful and honourable thing to research. It's too easy to say "woo, it wrote a compiler".

Re: Not to mention

This is so important. People have been working on C compilers for, what, 50+ years now? There's wide range of discussions and source code for the most recent ones, plenty of academic discourse about the "right" ways to build compilers, tons of open discussions about strategies for various CPUs. And there are the various formal C standards. I'd be impressed if the agentic LLM approach came up with something *better* but there seems no evidence of that happening.

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

Re: The "3D printed chicken"

"Also worth pondering what happens to all the less popular bits of animal like rectums, spleens, eyeballs, gizards, udders, etc."

That reminds me, Ant and Dec are on tonight.

Re: Ratners

The wikipedia link which I supplied does in fact address that point. I "did the research" and it was literally a click away.

Yes, it was a joke he'd used before without repercussions and it blew up this one time. The UK gutter and not-so-gutter press can be ruthless if the fancy takes them, or if someone makes it worth their while to hound some guy.

And also it was a damn stupid thing to say about your product and your customers. Regardless of the circumstances, saying in a public space that your products are overpriced crap and your customers are knuckle-draggers is never a winning strategy.

Both statements can be true at the same time.

Ratners

No one has mentioned Gerald Ratner and the prawn sandwich gag. Either you folks are too young or too non-UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Re: Surely the bigger question...

I have taken apart a number of these, even a recent rechargable vape left lying in the street. I've never found anything of this complexity. Until recently a lot of disposable vapes used lithium cells without recharge circuits (waste!). The only active components were the detection of pressure changes and timer to heat the coils for a few seconds. One recent vape I found has a dedicated package to do that AND incorporate USBC charge circuitry, all bonded to a pressure sensor about 5mm across. Very very surprised to find a microcontroller doing the job, and I'd guess this is an outlier.

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

OOTB threshold

In my experience (not BCC!) upgrading any in-house-system to any shrink-wrapped SaaS

- Aspiration for project is to use only "Out of the box" functionality

- Everyone signs up for this, except at the last minute someone says "we to add this little thing"

- "And this little thing"

- "And this tiny amendment"

- And vendor says "That's not OOTB."

- "But it's just a tiny little thing, surely you can add that"

Six months later the tiny things block the rollout because in the meantime they have grown.

Once you cross the threshold of accepting new functionality and not being OOTB, the threshold is crossed and you can't go back. The Genie will not go back in the bottle. The vendor will drag their heels in implementing any such thing (understandable) the internal customers push for the original schedule... someone stands up a local team to create some sort of shim layer that turns into a bodge...

It's human nature, and understandable, but if the internal customers and analysts don't understand the implications of sticking to vendor's standard product, it's really hard.

(Yes, yes, there are exceptions and caveats)

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Well now.

The XX00 and Y solution is very neat. I wish I had thought of that one.

Re: "Microsoft later, ahem, drew inspiration from CP/M"

If I recall correctly, in Windows 95 each DOS box was pre-emptively multi tasked, using the 386 VM features although I suspect that quite a lot of the underlying code derived from MS-DOS wasn't reentrant and was protected by some locking mechanism, But yes, the DOS apps could run without modification and pre-empted.

By the same token, the 16-bit & 32-bit windows apps were scheduled co-operatively? There were some subtle distinctions between the previous Windows/386 product which used a few 386 features to run DOS boxes and supported the 16-bit Windows API. There was a Win32S bodge to run limited 32-bit Windows apps, there was Windows 95 itself which supported native Win32 apps... I'm fairly sure , forgive an old man.

Re: claiming Bill Gates didn't write 'his' BASIC but stole it.

Have a look around for CONV86 and XLT86, which claim to be source translators.

I didn't have occasion to use tools like this but Intel definitely sold one. Entirely possible it ran under ISIS-II, ISIS-III, or ISIS-IV, or even RMX86 on custom Intel hardware, as it pre-dates the IBM PC inspired commodity hardware. I spent a little time working for Intel in the mid-80s. From my addled memory, I don't think that using a third-party system like an IBM XT or AT to run Intel development tool software caught on until a few years later. YMMV. Anyway, if at that time when were shipping their dev tools to run against the UDI API interface on their own operating systems, changes of survival to the present day are lower. I wonder if they shipped early tools to run on CP/M? I don't remember that.

Re: Well now.

After some 50 years of this design, I want to put it on record that the (ZP),Y addressing mode was much more useful than (ZP,X). Also, so many design patterns require you to use the first mode for addressing data with fully dynamic pointers, and you tend to spend eternities setting Y to zero or 1 when moving 16-bit data around. Also the original instruction set could increment or decrement X, Y or a specified memory location +/- 1 but NOT THE ACCUMULATOR. Other things that we'd see as omissions today, like the lack of multiply instruction, are honest reflections of what could be done at low cost in that area of tech at the time.

Various later iterations fixed this by adding (ZP) addressing modes without Y, or adding INC A/DEC A opcodes. It's a clever device for the mid-70s, and it will be forever part of my career in IT, but those are reasons why the code density can't match 8080 or Z80 in the general case.

The 6809, a few years later, was so much nicer but for Motorola it was too little, too late and too costly, which was one reason they decided to leapfrog the 16-bit market and with the 68000 get a toe-hold on 32-bit computing.

Re: Hmmm

MS Basic was influenced by the DEC Basic variants, for sure, in terms of the way string processing was done. But that's very different from saying the internals of both interpreters were the same.

Re: Well now.

There are a number of compilers outside of GCC.

- SDCC (Small Device C Compiler) is adding 6502 support,

- the cc65 project has a pretty mature compiler, assembler and linker.

- Most intriguing is the LLVM-MOS, is a fork of LLVM that includes support for a number of 6502 variants.

On the face of it, 6502 is not well suited for C code generation. The lack of registers and the difficulty of implementing a recursive stack for auto variables means that code density is low compared to more modern machines. This is generally true of 8-bit microprocessors. Z80 had more registers on chip and was a little more C-friendly. The 6809 was the first 8bit machine with decent addressing modes and stack awareness to make idiomatic C code possible. And of course, the 64K address space limits what can be done easily.

Microsoft's early BASICs were based around 8080, and they struggled with code density even when hand coding assembly. In terms of speed, there's not a ton of difference in the end products (all things being comparable), but You can squeeze more code into 8K using an 8080 compared to 6502.

Do check out the CC65 and LLVM-MOS projects if you are curious about compilers.

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Emails look like spam

I received one of these yesterday.

Congratulations, Microsoft, it's written to look very much like a spam email. If it were not for the Register I'd have ignored it. Since I don't think anyone in the house uses the Xbox these days it may be a moot point anyway.

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

If anyone has an novel, safe, fast solution to solving problems of this magnitude, they should publish it and earn our everlasting gratitude.

NARRATOR'S VOICE: They did not have such a solution, They went ahead with their half-arsed plan. People suffered.

Re: Currying Favour

OR words from someone tactically passing the unsolvable problem to DOGE

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

BASIC Damage

I definitely remember attending interviews (1980?) for Comp Sci course at Queen Mary College, London. Reading the interviewer's form upside down on his desk, he had a checkbox marked "BASIC Damage" such was the bad reputation that BASIC had in academia. Seemed a bit harsh at the time, though I understand the point.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

I have transcended mere programming these days (I've promoted to places where I do less harm), but I was once heavily involved with C, and I'm currently taking an interest in Rust. What strikes me is that although memory-safety is certainly the Big Thing promoted by rustaceans, Rust has strong opinions about other things, too. There's a powerful macro system, a different approach to object-oriented development compared to C++, enums and exception handling may not match your experience elsewhere. If you are ahead of me you could probably add a half a dozen other aspects.

If you are a C developer trying to learn Rust thinking you only have to learn about memory management stuff, you're in for a world of pain. You've got to keep your mind open to lots of "different ways of doing things".

For the benefit of reflex commenters, I'm not passing judgement on whether Rust has made the "right" decisions compared to Your Preferred Language. I'm just saying it's not *just* about memory management.

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Heavy Metal Detector

I now imagine the Heavy Metal app users shouting.

OK GOOGLE! I SAID OK ... GOOGLE ...

You see, it's very loud ...

I'll get me coat.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Re: AI is mostly bullshit

Good point about AI not being exactly the same as generative AI. Alas, it was ChatGPT and its friends who grabbed the headlines, so the two are basically as one in the public consciousness, I fear.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Can someone who understands these better explain why "Texas" is the right place for this work to take place? I don't have the context to understand that remark. I'd assume that in general Texas is more generally a conservative/Republican state, thus more generally MAGA-facing, but don't want to jump to conclusions. How dull of me to ask for facts :)

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Interviewee: "Here's my undergrad thesis project"

Interviewer: "Great! How do you fancy being head of marketing?"

Bias in LLMs is absolutely an important topic, and I say this as a white male with a traditional white male name.

But I also recall my undergraduate project work as being of sufficient to pass the degree rather than something I'd ever want to quote in public. Maybe reporting is misleading here: do undergraduates write theses in Sweden? I'd associate a thesis with a masters or PhD. Or maybe there's a company who has appointed a raw undergraduate to head of marketing; that would merit a raised eyebrow at least.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

For those of you who like such things, that Star Trek episode isn't only about computeringation. It's about the man who created the computer and the society he is a part of

Fascinating analysis here: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/die-maschinenmensch-the-ultimate-computer

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Re: A nice idea but seems impractical

Moreover, as I understand it, the various huts at Bletchley Park were often deliberately kept in the dark with regard to what their colleagues were doing - Loose Lips Sink Ships and that bally gubbins, what?

Part number

What's the Lego part number for the infinite paper tape?

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

Re: Why a new language?

A more elegant phrasing is found in the BCPL (strong influence on C) reference documentation

"The philosophy of BCPL is not one of the tyrant who thinks he knows best and lays down the law on what is and what is not allowed; rather, BCPL acts more as a servant offering his services to the best of his ability without complaint, even when confronted with apparent nonsense. The programmer is always assumed to know what he is doing and is not hemmed in by petty restrictions"

https://archive.org/details/richards1979bcpl/page/n11/mode/2up page 5.

Re: Why a new language?

"Now had the issue of memory safety, etc, in C (or the lack thereof) been addressed by creating a sub-set of C and/or a few features to mitigate some issues like use-after-free then it would have been fairly trivial to do this..."

If wishes were horses...

I hear ya. But consider that the memory-safety aspects of C have been known since day 1 and no doubt there's chapter-and-verse somewhere out there in K&R or some Bell labs memo. Subsets of C have been created but C is so deeply dependent on certain things being done via pointers I don't think anyone can have something which is both a subset of C and capable enough to build kernel or drivers. Or maybe there is, but for some reason it didn't have traction.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Correction..?

The snark was a boojum, you see.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Reputation, Reputation, Reputation

Having worked for an anti-malware provider in a previous life, though not on the frontline, I can tell you that reputation is gold dust. It's true for any commercial organization of course, but particularly true in the antivirus world. I only hope that when the internal investigations happen, it won't be a witch-hunt in which one or two drones are fired. Mistakes happen but that's why we have quality control, right? And that's why you fund your test environments thoroughly, right? That's why there's someone on the board who will own this, right? We shall see.

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

Hallucinations again

Off-topic as its not about breaking the LLM or security I guess, but vaguely amusing and it's Friday.

I asked Gemini to suggest proverbs in languages other than English to express the thought "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It dutifully listed a variety of similar terms in modern major languages, always close in structure to the original. Not being an expert, I couldn't judge if they were accurate.

Then it suggested an equivalent in Yoruba claiming it translated into "The diviner with just the single kola nut cannot perform a major divination."

ok... sounds fascinating

Neither the translation or the claimed Yoruba text show up in google search anywhere. Which is unlikely, if it really was a common proverb (making allowance that the corpus on online Yoruba text would be significantly smaller than major languages like English)

Google translate declares the Yoruba text into "A valley is a threat not to sow great things"

If any Yoruba-phones see this, they can confirm, but that looks like classic hallucination delivered with utter confidence. Excuse me, I'm to buy more than one kola nut as I have major divinations to do this weekend.

Bake an LLM with custom prompts into your app? Sure! Here's how to get started

Re: Another tip for integrating LLMs into your project

The cynic in me says that pressurised support staff will not actually edit or check the content, or do it sloppily. Meanwhile anyone conscientious and half-decent in the team will have perceived low throughput, and will get the boot. Because the performance metrics don't allow for errors in LLM output.

One year later, Octopus energy writes 20% of their responses as haikus advising customers to lick their fingers and shove them into power sockets.

I'm not saying the LLM generation is worthless, but if the beancounters and shareholders don't understand the risk ...

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Monitor?

Was this Reuters "Monitor" product? I spend many vaguely happy hours working for a third party building value added applications onto those monochrome screens. Widely understood to be running on some cluster of aging PDP-11s in the late 80s.

Why RISC-V must get its messaging right on open standard vs open source

Re: We've been down this road before

"Ironically, one of the foundational strengths of the US itself is the notion that its Constitution is based on an idea rather than evolving from 'the divine right of kings'"

This is true. But to add irony of their own, too many citizens have elevated The Constitution to a position of majesty in its own right. For document with origins in the 18th century it is a remarkable achievement that merits a great deal of praise. But it should not be used as a gpld standard for evaluation of every new idea in politics and governance. It may be that XYZ is judged to be incompatible with the constitution, but that doesn't make XYZ morally wrong per se.

Zilog to end standalone sales of the legendary Z80 CPU

Re: 8-Bit Wars Redux

Although I believe the Z80s internal ALU was 4-bit, which just goes to show the tradeoffs that were made in those early days. That doesn't invalidate your point, to be clear. As a long-time 6502 developer there were times I would have killed for 16-bit registers and a stack that wasn't limited to 256 bytes. Or more than three on-chip registers. Or an increment instruction for A that didn't require you to clear the carry flag first (and so on).

It all prefigures the CISC/RISC architecture wars. Z80 was closer to the CISC camp, and some aspects of 6502 were quite RISC-y. (And before the purists peck my eyes out, I'm not saying that 6502=RISC in a strict sense).

The processor I really enjoyed writing code for was the 6809, but I didn't have many opportunities to do so. Oh, nice addressing modes and a consistent design!

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

I'm not looking for a flame war, but it's not really "assumption on which your argument pivots", just pointing out an ambiguity that threw me when reading your (interesting) article. I dare say Oberon was a reaction against bloated sorta-Pascal. As was Modula-2 in some ways: Wirth had a genuine skill for reducing things to their simplest form, although sometimes his work resulted in programming environments that were a teeny bit too simple. The world definitely owes a debt to Wirth for Pascal and so on. However, that wasn't the way your line of thought was constructed: you didn't mention Delphi or Turbo Pascal or Object Pascal in that context. You said "Pascal".

To be positive, I found the article worth a read and you make some good points, like making the effort to understand LISP, or something like it, in order to think differently about software. We should periodically jolt ourselves out of complacency.

"Oberon is a smaller, simpler, faster Pascal. Like Pascal, it's strongly-typed and garbage-collected [...]"

I think you lost me there. The original Pascal was stripped down in so many ways from its Algol predecessors, and one could argue it's stripped to the bone in ways which make it an excelled teaching language. Subsequent commercial implementations added back stuff that was needed for large scale development and that's a story in its own right. But is Oberon objectively net simpler than Pascal when it adds new features like dynamic dispatch? Was Wirth's Pascal ever garbage-collected, because I don't recall that? In what sense is Oberon faster - it was certainly possible write fast compilers for Pascal generating pretty decent code.

I don't have a downer on either language but it's thing like this that make it harder to appreciate your wider debating point. I love me a good polemic, but a polemic still has to have a core of hard logic.

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Re: USCD

Is BCPL's O-code similar enough to count?

Close but no cigar. Ocode successfully separated the front ends of the compiler (lexical, syntax analysis, and all that) from the code generator. The front ends outputted Ocode, and up to that point pretty much all BCPL compiler were the same. Some variations existed e.g. the Acorn BCPL compiler was structured as a set of overlays or whatever because of the extreme RAM limit on a BBC model B. The OCode was fed to the code generator stage which could vary wildly between implementations. So it was not originally conceived as a run-time environment.

Moving on a little, M. Richards did produce INTCODE, that was a simple virtual machine designed for interpretation, to help with bootstrapping. You could cross-compile BCPL to OCODE and code generator would output INTCODE, and then write a simple but slow INTCODE interpreter on the target machine. I think the idea there was to be "just good enough" to bring up a compiler on the target machine for which you could write a native code generator. INTCODE was a bootstrap aid, not an execution environment.

The next iteration was something like CINTCODE which was designed for interpretation. CINTCODE was designed for microprocessors where address space was at a premium (C=Compact). So in the Acorn implementation of BCPL for BBC Micro, the code generator takes OCODE as input and CINTCODE as output, and the CINTCODE was interpreted by code in the *BCPL language ROM. CINTCODE implementations did permit escapes to native compiled code for those time-critical bits. The BBC Micro BCPL was created at Richards Computer Product, run by John Richards, lovely fellow. M. Richards continued to develop this stuff further in academia so there's probably a divergence between the two over time.

That said, I think CINTCODE is roughly contemporary with UCSD p System.

I'm an old man now, forgive my slips of memory.

Damn, even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in

Re: Stick to what you know

Niche... but appreciated.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

VB

What VB did very well is to show that certain kinds of small and medium sized apps could be built without recourse to C and complex SDKs. Was it the first? No - there was SQL/Windows, there was Actor, and probably others. Was it the world's cleanest or neatest programming language? Lord, no. After a year or so, Turbo Pascal for Windows knocked it out of the park in so many ways. Was it particularly fast? Nah. Was it the kind of tool that amateurs could write terrible code? Yes. I don't wear rose-tinted glasses when I think about it. "Option Explicit" came too late to stop people making awful errors. People often didn't understand how Variant worked. There was the bizarre DOS-only mutant. Team programming was hard. It never really got to grips with O-O programming until VB.NET forced a complete overhaul. Having two different versions for VB4 (16 and 32 bit) was a pain. "On Error Resume Next" was the dumbest idea ever. I don't think VB6 had a true compiler (feel free to correct me). By all means, list the unfixed quirks and bugs. I never got to grips with data binding. No, I don't want purple and yellow buttons, oh my eyes!

But it opened the market very convincingly. It was just-good-enough, and sometimes that is what counts. You could paint a screen, write the event handlers, and get things done. It had enough extension capability (calling C DLLs, and the VBX/OCX development model) to support a decent third-party tool market. In the city of extreme visual impairment, the monocular one reigns.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Re: Too pessimistic

I knew I should have written "Antenna"

Re: Too pessimistic

My house is a typical 30s built suburban semi, with all internal walls being brick. In some cases, definitely some sort of Friday afternoon brick with neutron star density. It has an extension beyond what were originally the outside walls. As you would expect it's a pain to get coverage from the main router. I've tinkered with additional access points with mains power backhaul, and though they work quite well for devices that don't move around like the Amazon firestick, phones and tablets and laptops don't handle the transitions well as you move around the house. Are true meshes - with reliable switchover as you move around - even possible? Should I try a single access point with a honking big ariel (or whatever)?

Unity talks of price cap and fees for only largest games developers

"Confusion" was a bit of a weasel word in Unity's statement. The changes were crystal clear and completely understood. That's why people were angry, because they could see exactly what impact they would have. As "Angst" , let it pass.

The correct response would have been "we screwed up, and we're rethinking this". As it stands it feels like one of those classic passive-aggressive fake apologies.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

I know a number of people who volunteer in parish councils, town councils and so on as their contribution to a functioning democracy. They genuinely do it out of a willingness to serve. I count as friends in this category both Tory and Labour councillors. But it's hard to get elected without a party ticket of some kind. There are a few independents in local government, but most have affiliated themselves with a party rosette of one kind or another.

Those genuine people who just want to get the paths weeded and timely dustbin collections, through their party allegiances, can also be the levers through others get into higher office.

In all walks of life, the Dunning-Kruger effects (or if you prefer, the Peter Principle) gets us all in the end.

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

Nah, that's Metal Mickey, my little fruitbat.

Boogie Boogie.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Mandate

"If Microsoft and Sun had compiled C# and Java native code instead of a virtual machine I believe there would be little demand for a language like Rust. "

I take your point, but feel obliged to point out that C# does have an ahead of time compiler, NGEN. And I believe it's been available since day 1. That said, I don't think you can claim that native code has quite the significance you think it has. Deferring the code generation with JIT has overheads, yes, but it's not intrinsically more or less memory-safe.

Bodhi Linux 7 brings Enlightenment to Ubuntu

I have found lubuntu to be effective as a fairly good unbuntu remix. If that's your starting point and you don't want to deviate far from the true Upath. https://lubuntu.me/

As mentioned elsewhere the Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC's is pretty good. That's a strong debian flavour. https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/

I did try things like puppy linux a long time ago, but my opinion counts for much less there. I could see that puppy was more efficient, by doing less, but it was a learning curve that I wasn't personally prepared to get into.

Dear reader, your mileage may vary.