Posts by dafe

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: One good sanction deserves another

Debts that can't be paid won't be paid, but it doesn't matter. It was never the plan that the Ukraine could pay for their weapons. The uncollectable collateral creates jobs and weapons, by the time the debt is due the weapons have already been used, the debt will be written off. But not before accepting all of the Ukraine's natural resources as a down payment.

The Western businesses losing business in Russia can't sue Russia for the sanctions that were imposed on Russia, but they can sue the governments that cost them the opportunity. Russia can seize their fallow assets in the meantime, and maybe put them to use, for not paying their due taxes.

If the war ever ends, whoever will have "won" will demand reparations. If the West wins, they can sue Russia for what they had to pay, and if Russia wins, they may demand the remaining outstanding debt.

Of course there won't be anything left to actually pay it with. But Haïti managed to pay off France after a few centuries, so who knows. Or it might set the stage for WW4. If there's one thing we learn from history, it's that we are doomed to repeat it.

Re: World record?

If I computed correctly, that would be approximately by March 2029.

I'll make a note and plan accordingly.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

Re: Ok... How I do stuff

There's already a term for what he described.

It's Waterfall.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

It's not human nature.

The problem is that Agile was intended as a way of minimising management meddling in the work of programmers, keeping them out of their hair and not interrupting them.

And then it was the managers who embraced it and acquired certificates to put on their CVs and gave seminars about it.

As usual in history, none of this was inevitable.

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

> users really don't know what they need.

That's right, they don't.

It is the job if the engineer to find out the requirements, before a single line of code is written. In Agile, it's the job of the project owner.

Re: Managers Sometimes DEMAND a Load of Whalesong

> there is so much buggy and/or undocumented libraries and other code that you will be using.

The mark of a bad programmer is that he thinks that dependencis are a good thing.

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

Engineering is applying scientific theorems to solve practical problems. Ideally that's what cobbling code together should be.

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

Civil engineering explicitly involves art history.

And there are mathematical metrics for software quality.

Programming is really a specific form of poetry, but it's a mistake to think that architecture isn't fine art first and foremost.

Intel, AMD take a back seat as Qualcomm takes center stage in Microsoft's AI PC push

At least you can still load custom.images on those devices. UEFI was originally meant to prevent that.

If they really want to lock them down, they could build them such that the boot image is in a part you cannot replace.

Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles

Most other car companies does not include Tesla. Or at least he seems to think it doesn't.

Re: Of course he doesn't

Climate fixing technologies should create employment, so that's really the same thing, isn't it?

Unless propping up obsolete business models and their rightsizing is more important than creating new jobs.

Have they ever shifted back?

Re: No Chinese cars presently for sale in the United States.

Would that be the industrial base that the USA have outsourced from Detroit to Mexico with a free trade agreement? Or the industrial base they have been outsourcing to China for forty years and are now trying to build back better?

Re: No Chinese cars presently for sale in the United States.

What does it matter? Last time I checked, Canada was not in the USA.

Raspberry Pi OS update beefs up security

Re: Linux and security

Unlike using Administrator as default account, sudo still requires a password for becoming root.

Of course if you use the default password, that doesn't matter.

Re: Linux and security

I've seen many Windows boxen where Administrator was the only user account, used for everything. And many applications that refused to install for any other user.

But that was a long time ago. I'm sure thingschave improved since then.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: Moaning Minnie

Have you heard of Rust?

Re: Interfacing to OS has to work at low level for maximum flexibility

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.

C is not low-level, it is not even the lowest common denominator, it is merely the de facto standard, and the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. There are many C standards, and they don't even agree about what should be undefined.

So passing data erases the type, because that is the convention. ASN.1 unambiguously defines structures, but C does not.

And Lisp machines became extinct when an HP Tru64 ran a Lisp VM faster than hardware. Of course the VM had less control over the metal. But with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 running Lisp with full control of the hardware, Lisp machines might just make a stealth comeback in the embedded space. Either way, Lisp is Turing-complefe, which means it can emulate any other machine.

The most widely used language today is a Lisp dialect called JavaScript.

Re: Confusing a language with an architecture

There are academic open source operating systems that use capability inheritance to restrict child processes.

But no, the architecture is not the point here. The point is that IPC, library calls, and system calls all inherit the insecurities of C, even where no actual C code is involved in either side, because the C conventions are the de facto standard that all programming languages adhere to for interoperability. This is how an Ada process reads an error text from another Ada process as an interger and Ariane 5 explodes, because C inhereted type unsafety from BCPL.

Re: Sorry, someone who found CORBA in any way praiseworthy?

Using C voids to pass data between processes isn't exactly clean. CORBA is a Lovecraftian horror, but that doesn't mean that something like ASN 1 can't be both structurally sound and efficient

Re: Not a convincing argument

The fact that you have to inline assembler in your C code is proof that C is not close to the metal.

I"ll give a simpler example: The overflow register. All CPUs have one. The PDP-11 had one. In C you have to write an if-condition that explicitly checks for overflow, and do so in such a way that the compiler recognises it as something it can replace with a check of the overflow bit.

Speculative execution is taking advantage of the superpipelining in every RISC machine (or in the case of AMD and Intel, the RISC core in the CISC machine), parallelism that is already there in the hardware, but not reflected in the software (except in MIPS assembly).

Parallelism is inherently safe in functional languages, and they don't even need the crutches that were invented for C. But it has been thirty years since bare-metal Lisp machines. Erlang is still in widespread use in the telecommunications industry, a functional language that is designed for network-transparent parallelism. But it uses a VM.

GOTO considered harmful

Dijkstra observed that people who use goto often make a mess of code. The kind of mess for which the term "spaghetti code" was invented, the kind that breaks flowcharts.

The title of Dijkstra's article was Wirth's idea, I'm told.

Anyway, Dijkstra formally proved that gotos aren't needed for code. Informally, Hoare and McCarthy had done the same. And experience confirms that code without gotos is cleaner.

C is the only reason why gotos are still in use. Even though tail recursion optimisation and function inlining can produce efficient code from small functions, C compilers shy away from refactoring the input just so that the debugger can step through the code line by line, because apparently that is better than proper debug output.

So gotos in C are more efficient only because C compilers are not.

Re: Other languages....

There are fundamentally two kinds of languages: Those that can be interpreted, and those that need to be compiled.

Of course those than can be interpreted can also be compiled.

Machine language is interpreted, and so are BASIC and FORTRAN and bash and python.

Virtual machines like the JVM or .NET or the Erlang VM interpret virtual machine code. Which can be text.

Higher level languages are compiled into languages that can be interpreted.

Text is a universal interface

Ken Thompson said that, and I think he knows a bit about inter-procrss communication.

Re: Programme in C, think in C -- sad but true (for any language, actually)

That wasn't Wirth, that was Stroustrup.

Ukraine's nuclear plants: Chernobyl off diesel power, explosions explained

Re: What is left unsaid

Their ghosts are doing the tasks now.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Russia tried that

By popular demand they kept daylight savings time for the whole year. I guess they thought it was a clever way to get rid of those cold Russian winters.

By the next year they had switched to permanent winter time.

Re: USA change its date format ...

It was France who gave them that loan to back their colonial scrip with something fungible.

It was France who sent them General Lafayette.

It was France who sold them what they now call the Midwest, Cajuns included.

It was France who gifted them their Statue of Liberty.

And it was France who gave them their Freedom Fries.

You might be on to something here.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

Anti-virus is malware.

It has root access, reads all your files, monitors your traffic, and has encrypted connections to a command-and-control server that updates it with new instructions.

This is true of all anti-virus.

Microsoft, OpenAI method could make training large neural networks cheaper

This seems very similar to AutoML.

Russia labels Meta an 'extremist' organization, bans Instagram

Re: Classic Putin

What is the alternative to diplomacy?

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

People being scammed is no reason to make scamming legal. Or easy.

Have you heard of cash money? It is anonymous, difficult to trace, widely accepted, easy to carry.

Crypto is inherently traceable, which wallets holds which coins, not just what amounts but the individual, unique, items, is public record, so every transaction is also visible to anyone who cares to look.

Driverless car first: Chinese biz recalls faulty AI

Re: Standards?

There are industry safety standards for self-driving vehicles, but they assume a workspace environment, not open road.

Re: The real problems are the ethical and legal ones

Human drivers cause a huge number of accidents, but that is considered normal and acceptable.

Robot cars can be much safer than human drivers and still not be accepted. Robots are expected to honour the First Law, while humans are not.

So by insisting that robots are 100% safe, we are continuing to keep the number of car accidents high.

"Enough eyeball make all bugs shallow."

The problems are the same, but there is a lot more testing, more code reviews, and more proposed patches than any company by itself could afford to do.

Sharing code helps. There are reasons why X was released for free. And XFree worked a lot better than the previous commercial release that RedHat had licensed and continued to use and patch for years.

But that goes against the medieval thinking of keeping the advantage of knowing something your competitors don't.

ICANN responds to Ukraine demand to delete all Russian domains

Re: firewall

Some countries do censor their internet. Saudi-Arabia for example routes its entire inbound traffic through a firewall that censors out all the porn (and who knows what else).

Sure, the problem with censorship is the loss of autonomy, but in international law the government has the right to do whatever they want to their own people as long as it's not torture or genocide.

All root servers are under US control. It used to be more diversified.

But yes, everyone can set up their own root servers. You only need to get the ISPs to refer to them, or otherwise convince users to configure their DNS settings to include them.

TikTok under investigation in US over harms to children

I don't know, but

I remember that showing ads to children was already a huge issue with YouTube. Is Biden demanding a law that already exists?

Does TikTok even show ads to children?

Or is "think of the children" just an excuse for something else? (If so, it is certainly not "personal responsibility".)

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

Re: Interesting.

I'm using a Pi4 with passive cooling. The heat sink is the entire chassis, but it works very well.

The Pi4 does need more Ampere than the Pi3. A USB2 hub would not suffice.

China makes using cryptocurrency a crime – again

Nothing about the digital Yuen? Or about anti-cartel measures? Or about how Kosovo and Kazakhstan oppose DeFi simply because of the high energy cost?

WeChat, AliExpress added to US Notorious Markets list

Notorious

The Trade Rep was careful to note that the list [does not] reflect legal violations, government analysis of intellectual property, or enforcement-related matters.

So being listed does not mean you violated trademarks (counterfeiting) or otherwise broke any laws.

Does it actually mean anything at all?

UK starts to ponder how Huawei ban would work

What makes you think they won't?

Re: Childish behaviour

It is not against the WTO rules because it benefits those who the WTO exists for.

Re: Why do you keep tip-toeing around the bush ?

If it can't be imported, it can't be used.

Except if it is already in use in much of the infrastructure, and someone wants it removed.

GNOME Project retires OpenGL rendering library Clutter

GLX is horrible. You need two drivers, one in the kernel and one in X, to get hardware acceleration, with doesn't work when the client is not on the same machine as the server.

But it is what everyone is using. (Almost everyone. In the embedded space they use hardware acceleration in the kernel framebuffer.)

XGL was a much better solution.

Things would be much simpler if the X server itself was written in OpenGL.

DirectFB3D used to be a thing as well. But the attempt to build X directly on the framebuffer has mutated into just a fallback driver.

Python2 is the fault of RedHat. Python 3000 was a rewrite that is much faster and much more efficient that was supposed to replace Python2 over ten years ago. But too much tooling was written and never ported, so there was pressure to keep Python2 around even after it had been discontinued, dropped, abandoned, support cut, and officially retired. And so there was no pressure for other projects to port either.

GTK2 is different. Originally written for the GIMP, GTK was adopted by GNOME as a free alternative to Qt, and extended. RedHat soon replaced it with GTK-MM and GTK3, pulling in more GNOME-specific (and circular) dependencies. Many projects chose GTK2 over GTK3 because it is faster, more lightweight, and doesn't pull in as much cruft. RedHat have since gutted GTK3 of features GNOME doesn't use, even though other projects do, forcing those projects to port to GTK2, Qt, or GNOME. (And GNOME is actively preventing ports to BSD or any other system that isn't Linux or Windows.)

alacritty

Linux Snap package tool fixes make-me-root bugs

Re: Snap is a bad idea

Snap, Flatpak, Docker – all work-arounds for problems you wouldn't have if you just compiled statically.

Re: Snap is a bad idea

Virtual machines are not what you think they are.

A sandbox is not (or not necessarily) a VM. A sandbox is a process that is forced to drop capabilities before it starts.

A process is already isolated: It is restricted by user privileges, and it has access to only its own virtual memory. (And so do all the libraries and plug-ins it loads.). It communicates through signals, files, sockets, and sometimes explicitly shared memory.

A sandbox restricts it further by preventing it from opening new files. Or only files contained in one directory subtree.

A virtual machine is a processor, an interpreter, that is not made of silicon wires, but exists only as software. An emulator that emulates a machine that exists only in emulation. Hence: virtual.

A container is run and managed by a shell process that sandboxes it, but it still uses the same machine code interpreted by the same non-virtual machine under the same scheduling by the same operating system. No VM involved.