Posts by TripodBrandy

AMD reveals an Epyc 50 flaws – 23 of them rated high severity. Intel has 25 bugs, too

They don't, since they are just busy implementing features and fixing bugs like all other software developers, security is only a concern when a vulnerability is found and exploited, otherwise it's "out of sight, out of mind".

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Tabs

512MB used to be enough for a large number of tabs in Firefox. I used an Athlon XP machine with that amount of RAM until 2008 and I regularly had a large number of tabs open, as well as the memory-hungry Azureus (written in Java) in the background. I did eventually upgrade that machine to the maximum it could handle (1.5GB) as the swapping was getting bad. Modern websites are probably a lot more memory-hungry these days though...

Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released

Waylanding

Wayland is mostly usable now in KDE Plasma, at least when using Intel GPUs, apart from some occasional strange behaviour like dialog windows appearing in the top-left corner. On my other machine with AMD graphics I still have to use X as Wayland is pretty unstable with daily crashes and hangs.

Is that a meteor crashing to Earth? No, it's Chromebook makers coming back to reality

Re: A plan to boost sales

We should bring back the letter Thorn in to modern English, wouldn't þat be ace?

Swift 5.5 unleashed with async keyword to fix 'pyramid of doom', plus other changes in 'massive release'

Re: A sink

Every 'await' is essentially a manual yield back to the event loop, where the function stops running and other asynchronous code can be scheduled. It's basically co-operative threading and you are subject to the same kinds of concurrency bugs you would get in a regular multithreaded program with syncronous I/O. It would be better if the language simply provided green threads and made async I/O look like sync I/O, or just use threads.

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Re: Debian Bullseye 32 bit

On 64-bit architectures your pointers take 8 bytes of memory instead of 4, so a lot of in-memory data structures double in size. This can also increase code size when 64-bit pointers are embedded in the code.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Re: ISAs?

Also if you want to implement an ARM-compatible processor, you have to pay for a very expensive architecture licence. I would agree, and ISA is the same kind-of thing as an API.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

False dichotomy

So not being totally OK with Bill Gates altering your DNA earns you the label "anti-vaxxer"... how much did the Foundation pay you for this article, El Reg?

Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last

Re: X86 ain't dead yet

You could make cores that can run both x86 and ARM code, depending on the mode the OS switched it in to. That would come at the cost of some overhead of having 2 front-end decoders. You would probably only support one architecture for system level code, which it would automatically switch back to when running interrupt handlers.

Re: How many years have Microsoft had to get this right?

Not forgetting 6502... but that was pre-Macintosh

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Backwards compatiblity

> He has advocated starting with the “simple and elegant features” and not worrying about parts of the language which may be there only for backward compatibility

Why not define which features in the language spec are there for backwards compatibility only, so you can use only the subset of "good" features. Then you could have a compiler switch to disable them, e.g. -std=c++20only which would fail to compile programs that use the old/"bad" features.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Microsoft Loves (Controlling) Linux

Microsoft has already captured many free software and open-source projects (including major parts of GNU) that are now developed on Microsoft GitHub (which has embraced Git and extended it with non-exportable, proprietary metadata). It seems quite clear they would love to effectively control the development of the Linux kernel proper, by bringing it under GitHub, and then using their usage policies to pressurize and deplatform developers that won't comply to their demands.

What's the Arm? First Apple laptop to ditch Intel will be 13.3" MacBook Pro, proclaims reliable soothsayer

Strategy

I don't think Apple would make this move unless they were fully committed to replace their whole lineup top to bottom, including the most high end Mac Pro workstations. Half-measures like only doing the low end of laptops first is not their style. They could have made that move years ago, the older A-series chips were more than capable. Apple will not want to split their Mac lineup between 2 different architectures.