Posts by John Savard

Everything you need to get up and running with MCP – Anthropic's USB-C for AI

Image

I hadn't heard of Claude by Anthropic before. So when I saw the image on your main page leading to this article, I thought it was the picture of a Chick tract, and I tried to search for that.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Re: "the RSRE flavour on a 1904 running George 3"

RPG was a tool for migrating off of assembler? I thought it was a tool for migrating off of plugboards for tab equipment, because it was designed very much along the same lines - as opposed to being procedural, which COBOL and assembler have in common.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Not a Remedy

I don't think this will fly. The bad thing about "illegally trained" LLMs is that they were trained on copyrighted material. If they were trained illegally on stuff like E-mails and USENET posts, it would make sense. But otherwise giving the model away in the public domain would just compound the harm to the copyright owners.

AMD sharpens silicon swords to take on chip and AI rivals

Nvidia isn't Intel

If AMD is gunning for the top spot in AI accelerators, then indeed it could overtake Nvidia in gaming GPUs as well, since what AMD lacks isn't raw shader power, but the fancy AI related features that Nvidia pioneered in GPUs.

But I think I'll wait for some evidence that they're achieving results before getting my hopes up.

And Intel can either correct its missteps, or go fabless - I don't expect it to be behind AMD forever, either.

But as long as AMD remains a formidable competitor, it can always become #1 again even if it can't permanently claim the top spot.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Not a valid complaint

Neither Crowdstrike, Microsoft, nor the EU is to blame for the fact that Crowdstrike is an antivirus product, and, as such, needs to run at a low level in the operating system. The alternative would be for Microsoft to make the only antivirus software that can run on Windows.

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

Safe Mode

If it's hard to boot an Azure VM into Safe Mode, and this is what's needed to easily recover from this issue... then surelky Microsoft should be rushing to add that feature to Azure?

Re: Ya know?

I wasn't aware that anyone else but us humans was able to understand English and post on these forums. We humans are concerned about the survival of the human race because it's the one we belong to, and thus its survival is required for our own personal survival.

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

Re: The issue is not if there IS a backdoor now

Precisely, and the fact that this is an issue is not "pure politics". I mean, it's like Britain using antivirus software from a German firm in the 1939-1945 period.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Re: A Simple Matter

iThere were threats to commit rape. That should be enough for a life sentence in itself.

Devs claim Apple is banning VPNs in Russia 'more effectively' than Putin

Re: Doing Business

Actually, I read the book "IBM and the Holocaust" from cover to cover. It seemed to me that the book was well-researched, and the facts which it presented were accurate. But maybe there is something wrong with me, because as I read the book, it seemed to me that despite the way the authors reacted to those facts, they were telling the story of...

a company that had been doing business in Germany before Hitler came to power, and when Hitler came to power, they did just about everything that a private corporation could reasonably do to cease all operations in Germany, without placing their employees there in danger. Rather than IBM's behavior in Germany being egregious, what they recounted was behavior that was exemplary.

All right, it is true that it is shocking that IBM covered up the fact that the Nazis (illegally) used (pirated) IBM punched card equipment in running their concentration camps, so as to avoid a potential image problem. But except for that, I was struggling to figure out what it was about IBM's behavior they considered objectionable and why.

Re: Not the Apple I loved

I hate to break it to you, but Dow Chemical is an American company.

Doing Business

Companies have to obey the laws of countries in which they do business. So, obviously, Apple has to pull things from its App Store in China when its government demands it.

But why on Earth is Apple doing business in Russia when Russia is dropping bombs on people in a democratic country allied with the United States? That's like doing business in Germany in the 1939-1945 period.

Where there's a will, there's Huawei to develop one's own chipmaking kit

Re: Middle finger

Well, those engineers are being very silly. Now they will have to live the rest of their lives in the totalitarian People's Republic of China. No amount of money is worth that.

How to improve Chinese TV? Better censorship, says top tellie-maker

They Seem to Have Been Trying

I saw an interesting video with some music in it on YouTube, and it made me curious enough to find out where it came from.

It turned out that it was from a Chinese movie, made in the PRC, that showed young people successfully rebelling against their teachers at a music school. However, the rebellion was of a patriotic nationalist nature: the teachers were focusing on Western music and instruments, and downgraded and dismissed traditional Chinese music and musical instruments.

So they do seem to have been trying to reconcile ideological purity with genuine entertainment for some time now.

The movie of which I speak is "Our Shining Days" from 2017.

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Nitrogen Emissions?

ASML is being required to limit nitrogen emissions from its factories?

This sounded very weird to me; emitting N2 into the atmosphere, like emitting, say, Argon, hardly counts as a form of pollution, as that's just a natural part of the atmosphere.

But then I realized there could be other ways to emit nitrogen that are harmful. For example, if they released ammonia, or other nitrogen compounds, in their wastewater, that would act as a fertilizer, upsettilng the balance of life in nearby rivers.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

One Objection

If Microsoft keeps changing the Windows Update page, or they use non-standard functions on it that reach intimately into the operating system, so that it needs Bing to work properly, I'm not going to object to strenuously for Bing to be used for Windows Update even when Firefox is the default browser for everythilng else. Of course, though, the way Microsoft is doing this at present is still anticompetitive, as it covers other things for which Firefox or other browsers are not unsuitable - but if Microsoft were prepared to respect the principle of fair competition, having a way to carve out certain vital system-related web functions for Microsoft's own browser is something that could be done in a legitimate manner.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

The One Flaw

The Sinclair QL was an amazing computer for the price.

However, I live in North America. I did pick up a brochure for one at a computer store, but I don't know if they actually brought any in. I do know that I never saw any Microdrive cassettes on sale anywhere, but then perhaps they just had to be ordered direct from Sinclair.

And, instead of a hard disk, it was to offer a module based on wafer-scale technology - which did not materialize.

Had it offered a floppy disk drive, it would have been more expensive, but it would have still been cheaper than the competition, and it would have had a real chance to succeed.

However, there's no need to turn the Sinclair QL into an Atari ST, since we already had - several years later - the Atari ST. And that, despite having a successful run, failed too. More ignominiously than the QL, given that the QL, like the Amiga, still lives on today among retrocomputing enthusiasts. (No doubt the Atari ST does too, but to a lesser extent.)

Apple was one of the partners in developing the PowerPC, and the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the Sinclair QL together weren't successful in creating a market that would lead to 68020-compatible processors, with improvements and advancements, being available right up to the present day in the same way that 8086-compatible and 80386-compatible processors, with improvements and advancements, such as x86-64, AVX-512, and so on, continue to be available to this very day.

That's "failure". It may not be a very fair standard, but in practical terms, it's the one that counts. Offices everywhere aren't, at least a sizable fraction of them, browsing the Internet, drafting letters on word processors, or calculating with spreadsheets on descendants of the Sinclair QL, they're all using descendants of the IBM PC or maybe the Macintosh. Even those who are using those descendants of the IBM PC to run Linux instead of Windows.

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

A Disaster

I don't use Notepad. I found that Programmers' File Editor was better, and when I need a fancier text editor with things like Column Mode, there's Notepad++.

But I do use WordPad, and have not seen the need for any replacement for it. Although I wish the Windows 3.1 application it replaced was still around: Microsoft Write.

Not that a few extra features wouldn't be appreciated, like the ability to use modern font features provided by OpenType.

I'll see if there is a good replacement around, since the last time I looked, I wasn't happy with what was available.

Amazon's practices are 'the essence of competition,' it tells judge

One Thing Right

That online sellers going through Amazon need to use its fulfillment service to qualify for free shipping is indeed not anti-competitive behavior. Amazon can only provide its own services for free, anyone else's shipping is something somebody has to pay for - whether the seller or Amazon itself to make it "free". As far as the rest of the complaint goes, though, I would have been inclined to view it as valid.

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

More Could Be Done

Obviously, since the Space Shuttle was built, despite allowing some of the technology to be lost, a similar vehicle could be developed again, to allow the HST to be repaired.

A second HST mirror, one without the incorrect corrections from spherical that required the Hubble to use a less efficient optical design, is in the Smithsonian Institution. It could be used to make a second HST.

And the HST has a smaller aperture than originally planned, because the original design required the gyros to be placed at on end of the scope, rather than around its middle, which was a more problematic design. They could have shipped a space telescope up in three pieces; one trip for the telescope proper, and one trip for two snap together pieces to go around its middle with the gyros. If we have a Space Shuttle-like vehicle again, that would be a reasonable thing to try launching.

Of course, though, it might be argued that both the HST and a minor improvement to it are obsolete, as a successor to the JWST, with a similar design, but larger, and operating in the visual and ultraviolet range like the HST, is in the works. If, indeed, this telescope does work well, instead of just getting one telescope for all that design work, they should build maybe twenty of them after the first one is shown to work, so as to allow more astronomy to get done.

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Slap On The Wrist

The penalties, in my mind, are not sufficient to achieve the goal of ensuring that this is the last time that anyone ever will try something like this, after seeing what happened to him for doing it.

Therefore, innocent people will continue to be forced to go to effort and expense to lock out fired employees from their computer systems.

And I note that he was charged with causing damage to a "protected" computer system. Instead, the law should give equally severe penalties to people who tamper with any computer system, such as your home computer and mine.

Of course, legal penalties for hacking that inspire terror only work against miscreants not working from within unfriendly nations not subject to regime change, such as Russia and China with their nuclear weapons. So we also need operating systems like Windows and OS X to be made secure.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Hacktivists?

A laboratory working with radiation can create mutations, but only random ones.

If they really wanted cat-girls, they'd ask somebody who was working with CRISPR.

So I think they should be described simply as pranksters. Although that's also not quite appropriate, given the amount of damage hacking does.

Open source license challenges part 461: Element plots move to AGPLv3

Still Like GPL

I hadn't heard of the AGPL before, so I had to look up information about it.

It turns out that the AGPL is like the GPL, but with one additional restricion: if, instead of distributing modified copies of the software, you merely provide people access to modified copies of the software running on your servers, you still have to release the source of those modifications under the AGPL. So it avoids a loophole where providing services instead of software gives you, in effect, a BSD license.

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

They Wrote It

At least most of it. More, because they hadn't accepted many outside contributions.

So if their duty to stockholders means the best they can do is distribute their code under a quasi-open-source license - and one with a fairly narrow exclusion, to boot, just service bureaus directly competing with them - it's hard for me to find this to be wrong.

It's okay to be disappointed, but furious?

Google Chrome to shield encryption keys from promised quantum computers

Re: Teaser......Diffie/Helman might be more secure than described......

In this case, it's the discrete logarithm problem that is the question, not factoring, but your correction stands otherwise.

Say hello to Downfall, another data-leaking security hole in several years of Intel chips

Re: Downfall

"Everyone with an AMD processor, leave the room."

Re: Planned Obsolescence

It's definitely just a happy little accident.

How do I know? These vulnerabilities are the result of a standard technique to improve computer performance that has been around for ages, out-of-order executiion. This was introduced with the IBM System/360 Model 91, which only handled floating-point instructions with OoO. That computer was succeeded with the Model 195, which added cache memory, another very successful performance-increasing innovation from the System/360 Model 85.

So fast-forward decades later, after Moore's Law finally let that level of complexity be put on a microchip - and out came the Pentium Pro and the Pentium II, which, just like the 360/195, had cache on the chip, and OoO execution for the floating-point section. (And an advanced division algorithm, although not quite as fast as the one the 360/195 used.)

So they were trying to make the best chip they could, using a proven way to increase performance... but which, sadly, had a weakness that could finally be uncovered in today's more hostile computing environment.

Fujitsu pulls the plug on European client PC sales

North America

This makes me wonder about the North American market. Is Fujitsu still selling client systems there, or has it left that market even earlier than Europe?

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Possible

Since the MacOS is (legally) available only with Macintosh hardware - and now that it's moving to Apple Silicon from Intel, the qualifier will soon be droppable - even if only Microsoft went to the cloud, a lot of people would indeed have Linux as their only choice.

In packages of DOS, though, Microsoft used to include a registration card that bore the text "Do you want the phone number of the most important person at Microsoft?", the joke being "So do we" - you can't have a company without paying customers. Sure, Microsoft may get greedy, but they won't be stupid enough to go where customers will refuse to follow. So this kind of development is not certain - and, if it does happen, it may take quite a while before it does.

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

Surprising

I am amazed that a Twitter employee would deny access to the premises to a building inspector.

But the solution to that is obvious. The next time, the building inspector should be escorted by an armed police officer. I mean, presumably this is against the law.

And surely the municipality has other recourse. You denied access to one of our building inspectors? Right, you've got 48 hours to tear down your whole building.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

What is Chrome OS anyways?

Google's Chrome OS certainly is based on Linux.

Back when Chromebooks first came out, though, comparing the possible major alternatives available - a Macintosh, a Windows PC, and a Chromebook - the Chromebook couldn't keep resident applications on a local disk, it could only run software it got off the Internet. That got me to reject it as not a computer, but a useless toy.

They've now fixed that limitation of the Chrome OS. But even so, I am strongly sympathetic to those who reject it out of hand. Maybe not being truly Linux isn't really what its problem is, but it's less flexible than Windows, while Linux is more flexible than Windows.

Since Chromebooks can't normally run typical Linux software (no package manager) then they don't increase the size of the market for typical Linux software. That is the most fundamental sense in which Chromebooks fail to enlarge the market share of "Linux", and I think this is a sufficiently real concern that taking notice of it isn't hair-splitting religious warfare.

It isn't what Chrome OS took from Linux that counts; it's what it gives back to Linux that matters.

AlmaLinux project climbs down from being a one-to-one RHEL clone

Open and Shut

I'm surprised to hear that "it would be hard to prove in a court of law"; the license under which Linux is distributed is clear and unequivocal: you can freely make and distribute copies of Linux, either identical copies or copies you have made changes to; there is no restriction on what you can charge for them (after all, blank CD-ROMs cost money); but you may not place any restriction on the ability of those who recieve those copies to copy them themselves.

Red Hat's license for RHEL is now no longer compliant with that last condition of the GPL. Not all of IBM's lawyers should be able to obfuscate the fact that the GPL means what it says, and says what it means.

Of course, though, it is understandable that those responsible for Linux are loath to take drastic steps, like withdrawing IBM's license to use and distribute Linux for this violation.

China chokes exports of semiconductor secret sauces gallium and germanium

Re: Middle Kingdom

If a state condones harmful individual actions, if it allows its citizens to violate the rights of others, surely it is responsible for doing so?

However, there are no countries that could carry out regime change in the United States of America. And its peers are genuine dictatorships, while the United States is an imperfect democracy, which, over the years, has made progress towards a greater measure of justice for its black citizens.

The American federal system, by allowing excessive latitude to individual states, permits individual states to have laws which besmirch the reputation of the whole country abroad. Because it requires the consent of 3/4 of the several states to amend the Constitution, it is difficult to correct this.

Free Enterprise

As a privately owned company, why would I even consider invesing a large amount of money developing either a mine for gallium or germanium, or processing facilities for them, when China can do it cheaper, and there's no way to tell when China will drop its export restrictions? Especially since China would be likely to do that as soon as outside sources reduced the impact of this measure.

So since the real benefit of having these outside sources is hard to monetize, it's governments that should be building these mines and factories for everyone's benefit - which they will yield even if they don't manage to sell much product.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: GPL violation

When the wording of the GPL is clear, plain, and obvious, and the violation of the contract is clear and direct, even the very limited amount of legal counsel the FSF can afford from donations should suffice.

Re: GPL violation

Precisely. This point was missing from the article. Red Hat will indeed not be in compliance with the GPL when they implement this policy.

If they want a free UNIX-like operating system that they can turn into a proprietary product, they will have to do what Apple did to make OS X. So long Red Hat Linux, hello Red Hat BSD.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Not just Apple

Hardly any smartphones have removable batteries these days. Even LG, one of the last holdouts, stopped with the V30. So users of Samsung phones, for example, will gain by this too.

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Done before?

I think this kind of tiny membrane fan is new and unique.

But when I saw the headline, I thought it was something that certainly has been done before: thermoelectric cooling.

Court gives FTC 30 days to swing again in privacy bout with location data slinger

Home Address

That an individual's location at night is likely the individual's home address, from which that individual's identity can be deduced seems to me to be rather obvious, and not something highly speculative. Thus, I am dismayed by the judgement. But what is clearly needed is an amendment to the Federal wiretap statute which would make collecting or selling that kind of data utterly illegal from the get-go.

Ex-Uber CSO gets probation for covering up theft of data on millions of people

The Real Excess Leniency

It's those who are truly culpable, who freely chose to break the law, that need to be punished. But the CEO of the company at the time hasn't even been charged. So I'm not upset at the leniency granted to someone who no doubt was acting under threat.

Taiwan asks US if it could chill out on the anti-China rhetoric

Supposedly?

Of course the United States is attempting to prevent the People's Republic of China from being able to make its own state-of-the-art semiconductors because of how useful they are in all sorts of military equipment. Why should there be any doubts about its motives there?

Of course, as a nuclear-armed state, if the PRC does invade Taiwan, the options of the U.S. may be limited, therefore it is high time to get, say, 95% of the world's advanced semiconductor capability located in safe countries - not Taiwan, where China might attack, and not South Korea, where North Korea might attack. This doesn't have to mean just the United States. There's Europe. There's Canada. And, even closer at hand, there's Australia.

Of course, Australia is short of water, which chip production uses, but desalination is possible, and it could even be powered by the abundant solar energy in the dry parts of Australia.

Google destroyed evidence for antitrust battle, Feds complain

It Should be Simple

If the government can prove that Google did indeed insttruct its employees to talk about matters related to how the company reacts to competition by voice, which is not recorded, rather than E-mail, which is retained for evidentiary use in antitrust proceedings, from that point on it should be a slam dunk to find Google guilty of whatever antitrust offence the government might claim it has engaged in.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Rational Reason

Well, people who live inside Russia might be forced to include malicious code in their contributions to open-source projects.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Shocking?

Shocking that Ken Thompson is using a form of Linux?

I mean, it might have been shocking that instead of something UNIX-related, he was using a Macintosh.

I was expecting the "shocking" revelation that he used the operating system that actually lets people get work done, for which a large number of applications are available. Microsoft Windows. I could see people being shocked about that.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

An Error of Analysis

I could accept that people need an environment that supports their choice to eat a healthy diet. And so if more people brought in lettuce or whatever to snack on instead of cake, those people might be helped.

However, many people don't feel that way.

But the thing in the article that made me think that the people saying this had lost their senses was right at the end.

People don't prefer chocolate cake over cauliflower because there are more advertisements on TV for chocolate cake. This isn't food industry brainwashing at work. These are the innate food preferences that are natural for people; some people have struggled against those preferences after learning that some foods are healthier than others. Of course, ever since agriculture started, it's been too easy to make what we like, so that our preferences are out of sync with what's healthy.

When meat and calories were hard to get, and there were no refined sugars, our preference for fats made us eat enough protein to survive, and our preference for sweetness got us to eat healthy fruit.

If you think the source of the problem is TV commercials, you're not going to make any real headway in solving it.

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Re: "This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment..."

As noted in the article, they're in violation of the terms of their liquor license.

Because people need to have a job to live, place of employment should be a protected characteristic; if this sort of thing is legal, then that just means there is an urgent need to amend the laws so that it is strictly illegal.

A suitable penalty would be to allow her to collect punitive damages of the sum total of the firm's assets. That would ensure no other company would think about behaving this way in future.

China files complaint with WTO against US chip export controls

And it totally is

Are you insinuating that the United States is insincere about its export controls being about preventing China from having the most advanced military equipment?

IBM to create 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle database license

Re: For now...

But if that's the case, why didn't they change them long ago? You can get Oracle for x86 hardware as well, and Intel and AMD both make chips with more than 24 cores.

Competition

It's not as if IBM is setting out to scam Oracle here.

After all, you can also run Oracle on x86 hardware, and there are x86 processors from both Intel and AMD that have a lot more than 24 cores per chip. So IBM is simply doing what it must to remain competitive.

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Blame

It's good to know that a correctly installed 4090, with the connector plugged in carefully, is unlikely to have this issue.

However, does this sort of thing routinely happen on other video cards? Like the Nvidia 3000 series, or AMD's cards? If not, then clearly plugging in the connector just right has suddenly become a lot more critical than it used to be.

So Nvidia ought to be pulling the 4090 with the 12-pin connector, and replacing it with one with a different arrangement, better able to handle its demand for power. It might look to IBM for examples of how a serious company handles an "Oops" moment.