Posts by that one in the corner

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

> I really can't see what's so terrible about paying a company to pay a programmer to write specialist software I need

But have you ever actually done that? You name-check MATLAB and I'm willing to bet you never paid anyone for thst *before* it was written. You just saw that there was this program out there and bought a copy in whatever state it happened to be at the time. Nice serendipity if it happened to fulfill all your needs.

You day that Octave isn't a valid alternative, but why? Is it simply incapable of running the calculations you need or is it just less convenient (or just less familiar). Or is it that you ate now simply tied into MATLAB? It needn't be a long explanation, but given the breadth of the points in the article it would make it possible to understand your claim.

Hmm, some people argue that FOSS is in a bad way way because it is written by amateurs, some say because it is being written by professionals (paid for by all the Usual Suspects).

This is all very confusing.

Re: Nothing wrong with services

And just like the trains, your SaaS can be shut off without warning, leaving you stranded.

Although, in practice, we usually are forewarned about rail strikes, closures are accompanied by the dreaded rail replacement bus (because, unlike software suppliers, they have a duty to get you from A to B) and there will be stern words spoken on Panorama.

So the comparing trains and SaaS, trains come out on top. And isn't that a scary thought.

But the point of the article wasn't ownership of software but of being (more) in control of your situation. What level of service are you being promised and how is that backed up?

Re: Documentation and code quality

and the Linux in their TV, DVR, probably the washing machine by now (and no, it doesn't *have* to be "connected" to be making use of Linux).

But not the toaster, never make the toaster smart.

Re: Public Domain

One point: Public Domain is a legal construct that only exists in some countries: the US has it, but Germany does not, for example.

So anyone arguing about PD must state where they are talking about or the discussion will be null.

Re: DOS Editor

edlin fred.txt

or

copy con: fred.txt

Which one was worse?

Foldable smartphones crawl to one percent of global market share

Multiple parallel folds

in an A4 screen, so that it can collapse into a 30cm "stick" (with the screen completely inside) would be great. Should be strong enough to push into and pulled out of a bag without worrying about protecting a large flat panel, could even be popped into a water bottle pouch on the side of the bag. Need not pull it out completely flat to use, just unfold one or two slices.

Basically, an electronic newspaper/magazine/briefing paper that is actually as mechanically convenient as paper with the benefits of the 'tronics. That is something I'd love to have - in today's real life, the large Boox e-reader is good to use but isn't usable in the way a paper magazine is (ignoring the use of e-paper in the Boox).

We are nowhere near a foldable screen that size, but smaller phone screens are a step on that path. So I'm happy to see these phones appearing, even if I can't see these models being something I'd ever buy.

This rumor needs to Die Hard: Bruce Willis denies selling face to deepfake biz

Deepfaking Deepcake

So the new story is that the original news story was someone faking a fake company (as in a company that makes fakes, not a company that is a fake) but are we really sure the retraction isn't a fake from the fake fake company (as in a non-fake company that makes fakes faking another non-fake company that makes fakes) which would imply that the original fake company was faking Bruce after all?

Re: Not the only one.

Never have continents been so insulting.

FYI: TikTok tracking pixels can be found all over the web – just like Meta, Google

TikTok still need co-operation

to get their trackers onto the webpage, as do Google, FB and anyone else in this game.

So how about pointing some of the ire at the webbies who invite these people onto their pages and try to get them to stop doing that in the first place? I'm sure we can come up with some epithet that can be used to help shame them (better than my attempt, which so far stands at Visitor's Information Collection, Help Yourself).

From today, America and UK follow new rules on how they can demand your data from each other

CLOUD act

Well, it has a super-duper-special acronym so we can all trust it, can't we.

Seriously, they seem to spend more time on making up names of acts which they can use to bamboozle people than the actual content of the acts.

It's 2058. A quantum computer is just another decade away. Still, you curse Cloudflare

China and others are stealing data now to decrypt later

"and others" being absolutely everyone who can get of the traffic. But make sure to deflect notice from the "Good" (?) guys by only naming the Big Bad du jour.

Samsung’s Smart Monitor tries too hard to be clever

Re: TL;DR - isn't this a "terminal" ?

There was no mention of an RS232 port, telnet or ssh so, no, it doesn't sound as useful as having a VT100 or any more modern terminal.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

Most of the list is the same each week - milk, bread, quicklime

Just get that lot tattooed on your wrist and cross the items off with felt-tip.

Tell anyone noticing that you're counting The Silence.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

Re: Cold Fusion

> The problem with hot fusion reactors is that they've been 20-40 years away

I think you'll find that they have always been only 10 years away.

Re: Great

Nuclear bombs; pick your favourite type:

Fission = A-bomb

Fusion = H-bomb

Fake vibrating teeth could make great hearing aids

No doubt fitted with Bluetooth - Munch on that.

Visions of the car stereo offering to pair with your teeth or the horror of being bluejacked or rickrolled, knowing you can't even keep it out with hands over the ears!

Know we understand the true meaning behind Munch's The Scream, begging the viewer to help with the aid of some pliers.

NASA, SpaceX weigh invoking Dragon to take Hubble higher

Re: why stop there?

> the movie Gravity is not an accurate representation of how things work

Very true; never have understood why Clooney's character, supposedly the most experienced astronaut on that flight, decided to commit suicide.

Hmm, if physics really did run on drama like that, would we have more countdowns safely ending at 1 or more explosions for no apparent reason? Probably need to watch a few more historical documents and keep count.

Re: 32-year old hardware

Can even iFixit sell you a space-rated spudger?

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

Is your agenda showing through?

> in the fact that no woman, anywhere in the US will be persecuted for having an abortion

Yes, women will be persecuted in the US, shunned and worse.

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

Given the heating effects of bovine gaseous by-products

have they remembered to account for all the damage caused by the hot air and noxious fumes emitted from the pro-crypto speakers' arguments?

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

5"? Mine were all 5 1/4" - when your floppy is that small, the extra 1/4 inch is important!

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

Remembering a demo of a pre-production BBC Micro official Acorn floppy disc drive and accompanying DFS ROM.

Chap told us that they'd had to put in both *DISC and *DISK commands - oh, the waste of bytes in a 16K[1] ROM!

[1] if someone wants to correct me on the ROM size (it may have just benn an 8K job), which would make it worse!

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Re: One thing that make me wary of rust

Well, the justification they give for the existence of crates.io explicitly references npm so don't be surprised by such similarities!

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/faq.html

Funky new ecosystems == bleeping annoying to use in an existing environment

Just because you have a fancy new programming paradigm that doesn't mean that it makes sense to go your own way on all the bits and pieces that surround the source code.

So, we've been at this game for a while and have an existing build system ready to go; does all the obvious, keeping generated files well away from sources, pulling in sub-dependencis, generating sufficient OSS compliance docs etc. Multiple languages and targets, the usual. Loads of relevant support libraries neatly curated, all version controlled, waiting to give their all to our next project.

Rust does sound interesting, let's start reading about how to get it added into our setup so we can asess how well it'll work for real; there are books on Rust and rustc online, looks good.

Section 1.1 Installation: "If you prefer not to use rustup for some reason, please see the Other Rust Installation Methods page for more options." White hair equals suspicious mind, what could "some reason" mean? Follow the link: "Offline installation. rustup downloads components from the internet on demand. If you need to install Rust without access to the internet, rustup is not suitable." OR, access to the Internet aside, you're in a Serious Business and want some modicum of control over what is being used.

Section 1.3: "Cargo is Rust’s build system and package manager". Um, they've created yet another build sytem of their own, catering specifically to Rust?

Section 7: We are now using new terminology for compilation units? Including calling any old sub-module without a main() a library? "Most of the time when Rustaceans say “crate”, they mean library crate, and they use “crate” interchangeably with the general programming concept of a “library"."

Gritting teeth, carry on reading 'cos that is the job. Get to the FAQ:

Q: "Will Cargo work with C code (or other languages)?" A: "Yes!" "Our solution: Cargo allows a package to specify a script (written in Rust) to run before invoking rustc". Go that route and before you start into your Rust journey you need to know enough Rust to duplicate at least enough of the existing build system to cope with "Building a bundled C library" and "Finding a C library on the host system" - taking into account their methods of avoiding unnecessary rebuilds...

Maybe the next FAQ will ease our woes:

Q: "Can Cargo be used inside of make (or ninja, or ...)" A: "Indeed." ... "We still have some work to do on those fronts, but using Cargo in the context of conventional scripts is something we designed for from the beginning and will continue to prioritize." That is it. No link to any helpful hints.

Look, this is just a load of rants from a crusty, but if Rust wanted to be taken seriously as a language that we should migrate to, it should really help with migration. It is easier - a LOT easier - to drop a COBOL compiler into our build.

And I've not even touched on crates.io

Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s

Creative euphemism

They can't call it "work to rule" because that might give workers the idea that they have any kind of power to influence management and make them reconsider the pay and conditions.

Call it "quiet quitting" instead and make it sound like the workers are just too lazy to even help themselves, there is just nothing that management could do.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

Re: Plenty of horizontal space?

Too true. I have a 1920x1200 monitor - i.e. portrait - that is great for reading PDFs and (most) long docs on websites. You'd think that 1200 wide would easily be good enough for any website, especially ones that are long, long, pages and pages of scrollable content.

Nope.

Sigh.

Re: Directories please

Ah, they are called "directories" because they literally *are* directories! Things that reference and provide metadata for other things. Nothing to do with picking an arbitrary name which then sort of stuck.

And you may want to expand your knowledge about how paper directories exist and are (have been) used. One level deep? Can only be arranged in one way, alphabetically? There are a multitude of librarians, archivists and stock controllers, to name a few, who could help you there.

Re: Directories please

But, but using the "folders" model makes it so much easier for the Users to understand! Ideas like nesting folders become so intuitive. "Directory" is too cumbersome an idea.

I mean, how could you explain complicated things like multiple links to a file without using folders?

You'd have to come up with some outlandish examples, like having one directory (in a big fat book) that gave you some kind of reference that lets you find, say, a person or a business - probably just use a number for that. Then have *another* directory that, say, only listed a subset of those, maybe just businesses, printed on, ooooh, yellow paper to tell the two books apart. Totally unworkable model for how files work on a computer, people would only push the metaphor too far, like jokingly suggesting you could a third directory that used the same numbers, but now gave them different names like "Mum", "Big Sis", " Old bloke down pub". The whole thing would be stretched too far.

No, no, no-one would be able to understand what a "directory" means. Book on yellow pages, don't make laugh.

Now, using the proper "folders" metaphor, you can explain symbolic links with the simple physical model of - um, well, if I cut here, glue this, now you hold that end and pull

Re: And this is so relevant to browser development.

> I prefer my IT and my IT news coverage to be about IT.

Agreed.

Well, except for Bootnotes, of course. Although those are losing their splendour as well; remember when they were so off-to-side that commentards used to have to be reminded they were reading a Bootnote after they'd flung an "IT Angle?" ?

SQL Server admins warned about Fargo ransomware

"it used the file extension .mallox"

So now I find myself cheering on it the Bad Guys, who can be bothered to learn that it has been a long time since file name extensions were restricted to three or less characters.

Looking at the current darling of the programming world who decided to use .rs instead of .rust, just as the latest example.

And the Bad Guys even know you can append extra extensions, like myfile.txt.fargo3, which could open so many avenues if more people knew about it (see more in the file rants.markdown.txt)

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

Re: You can either have Free Speech

> a really lazy patch

And as this audience is well-placed to know, once a lazy patch gets released to the public it will stay around for far too long.

Alert: 15-year-old Python tarfile flaw lurks in 'over 350,000' code projects

Put in a lot of ../../.. and you'll eventually ascend to root.

So, having a ridiculously deep directory tree is actually a security feature! Well, until the bad guys put in a ludicrously large number of ../

Microsoft debuts Windows 11 2022 Update – now with features added monthly

Re: Bug free?

No more bells and whistles please, RESTORE the basics!

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: Bummer

You never learnt to nip out the holes with your canines?

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Data retention for 100 years is all well and good, but is there a requirement that the information still be readable and interpretable in 100 years time? Readable by the glowing, yet ironically blind, subterranean mutants living below the magic warm dome, that is.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Excel is like any other tool

Whosoever can wield this spreadsheet shall be granted forever ownership and a right bollocking when it goes wrong, no matter it is only your second week on the job.

SETI seeks amateur astronomers to find hot Jupiter-like exoplanets

Stirring it up a bit

This would be the same Unistellar whose Kickstarter product was reviewed by that nice Mr Thunderf00t

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tyG9kbJo2sg

Crypto biz Wintermute loses $160m in cyber-heist, tells us not to stress out

Re: Yay !!!

Why would you ever have unplugged your copy of "Neuromancer" from its socket in your neck?

Now, "Mozart in Mirrorshades" I'd understand unplugging (and stamping on, with extreme prejudice).

Linux luminaries discuss efforts to bring Rust to the kernel

Re: Why make things slightly more complex ?

Thanks for the link to Redox.

The best thing about El Reg comments is when someone posts a link to something I've not yet come across.

Re: Why make things slightly more complex ?

And at the risk of seeming petty, with regards to your convincing paragraph that Rust could never be 10x faster than C (as it was a rather excessive reaction to what was not only an obvious parenthetical hyperbole but also indicated that I don't expect such a speed up to occur):

Unless one language is vastly different in its manner of execution (e.g. purely interpretive BASIC versus Pascal compiled to machine code), which is clearly not the case when comparing C and Rust, as you know the only time you'd ever see an order of magnitude improvement would be with a change in algorithm and/or data structure in use. One thing that switching to a different language, especially one with any "oddball" behaviour compared to the previous choice, can do is to prompt a re-examination of the algorithms and data structures.

Of course, any such changes are likely to be portable back into the C variant and built for all the architectures, in which case clearly the whole experiment was a failure as there wouldn't be any Rust running in the kernel. Hmm.

Please note, BTW, that I've not said one way or the other whether I personally want there to be any Rust in the Linux kernel, but if they want to try then have it. I'll trust Linus to reject the results if they aren't useful after all (and that includes because the compiler support isn't up to scratch), otherwise, yay, we all win.

Re: Why make things slightly more complex ?

Ok, we can move onto this second topic

> just that it currently does not have the support in place today

The key word here being "currently".

Remember, at the moment this is all in the "let us find out if is it going to be worth doing?" stage; none of the existing C code is actually being replaced yet, in any production kernels.

When (if!) the Rust work demonstrates it actually has worth to the kernel there will be more delay as the new code is thrashed and made stable and production-ready even for the architectures already supported by Rust.

In the time to get to that stage, the Rust compilers have the chance to improve architectur support: as well as the GCC version, there is now some *reason* for other backends to be built, as they would now be used in a non-trivial project.

Re: Why make things slightly more complex ?

Going back and reading the article, when the text you quoted is put back into its context, there is nothing in it that implies there will be lots of time wasted on re-implementing from C to Rust.

Especially if you bother to go and look at the referenced LWN article, which talks about the two currently extant drivers, starting with "The idea of being able to write kernel code in the Rust language has a certain appeal, but it is hard to judge how well that would actually work in the absence of examples to look at."

So there is now *one* commonly used driver being rewritten in Rust plus one new driver for a network protocol. Now anyone else who is interested in coding Rust drivers can use the NVMe driver as an example, comparing the two versions to see what the different approaches entail. And everyone else can have a go at running the new driver to see for themselves how the whole idea is panning out: for which NVMe is a pretty good choice, as it is commonly available and commonly used hardware, so it will be pretty clear if it is working or not.

If you are of the opinion that providing examples and experimenting to see if Rust can do what some hope is a waste of time then...

Of course, if the experiment shows that rewriting the NVMe driver results in clearly obvious advantages over the C version (probably won't run 10x faster, but if it did...) then, yes, there would probably follow a frenzy of recoding.

Creatives up in arms over claim that AI is killing human art

Autonomous taxi service to "light up many more markets"

The local Farmer's Market that takes over the high street on Thursdays?

Do these people ever listen to the words they are using and think about the images they conjure up?

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Ambulance chasing as a service

Rough idea: car knows you have subscribed to the app and gets your ID from the beacon, verified by comparing GPS and accelerometer data. Send data to Cloud, which dials an "approved" (read: kickback friendly) local lawyer/ambulance/undertaker as appropriate. Use "Injury Lawyers 4 U" style advertising to incentivise (sorry) users to run the app.

Have to sort out the details, so that Ford doesn't get sued for the accident, but they can figure that one out.

Risks:

- becomes too profitable for Ford, so shareholders best served by deliberately aiming cars at the app. Lawyers become rich.

- becomes too profitable to jump in front of a Ford. Lawyers become rich.

- other vehicle manufacturers join in scheme; traffic data is analysed in real-time to provide a spot market for maximised jaywalking profit. Lawyers become rich.

Think of it as Economics In Action.

Brought to you by the Assasin's Guild

"'Ere, you can't run me over, I've got the App on my phone"

"Sorry Guv, you didn't take out the full monthly subscription, so I'm not allowed to miss you. 'Ere, I'm generous, how about just a bounce off the wing mirror and you'll promise to upgrade this evening - or I'll be seeing you soon."

US bans some foreign investments in chips, AI, quantum computing

make sure they don't threaten national security

> advanced clean energy

America's security could be threatened by people outside the US getting clean energy? The clean energy that is intended to help against Global Warming?

The US do realise that they are actually part of The Globe and that everyone on the planet will benefit from everyone else getting clean energy?

Ah, I've just realised why that was a stupid question to ask. As you were.

UK govt refuses to give up on scoring Arm dual-listing for London

Re: Move along....nothing to see here...

As ARM is IP only, and Intel have said they'll fab ARM-based designs now (TSMC always would), money they spend on fabs will end up as more capacity to build designs licensed from ARM. Whether that leads to licence money coming into (or at least through) the UK - well, that is what all the discussion about retaining Cambridge HQ is about.

Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps

Re: Sink

Are there any stats on how many of those 400,000 bought their ETH at anything close to the current price?

If they bought in around 2015 at a dollar a pop at just hung onto them, not buying increasingly expensive mining rigs, then their cost to put up a stake has been $32 (and a lot of getting on with the rest of life) and now they have a chance at playing as a Validator.

Obviously, plenty of people will have paid more than $32 to buy their stake, but once you get a flow of people being seen to put up a stake, more and more will follow.

$48,000 buy-in

So does anyone have any figures on how many of those $48,000 buy-ins are needed to have a good chance of subverting the Ethereum chain by providing a consensus agreeing to a fraudulent block? And has this gone up/down/stayed the same since the switch over?

I can't help feeling that, if the buy-in is now literally a buy-in, as opposed to amassing all the mining kit plus everything needed to run it, the barrier for trying to take over the consensus has been lowered. At least perceptually (easier for Joe Family Man to get his head around). Then again, if that means that more attempts at gaming the system are made, it just pumps the price up again. So even (especially) just the perception of a lower bar would just make the existing ETH holders wealthier (on paper) - plans within plans.