* Posts by stephanh

472 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Sep 2014

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Screw everything! French swingers campsite up for sale, owners 'tired'

stephanh

What have the Romans ever done for us?

The Romans are to blame for the name Palestine; they so renamed what was called Iudea after crushing Yet Another Jewish Revolt (TM). By that time the original Philistines were long gone. A classical example of digging up an old name from the history books to make a political statement.

The Arabs just took the name from the Romans when they conquered the area.

Essentially Palestine/Philistine comes from two different traditions of transliterating the same name into Greek. Palestine (with a π) is a secular Greek tradition whereas Philistine (with a φ) is the rendition by Greek-speaking Jews, which made it into the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible); the Septuagint was in turn highly influential in other Bible translation including the King James. Hence "philistines" in English.

Note that what the Romans called Palestine was much larger than the original area of the Philistines, which was essentially just the Gaza strip.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli to miss 2024 Paris Olympics

stephanh

Re: A contrary view

Shkreli did what everybody in pharma does, just with worse PR.

Cue the recent news about Hepatitis C treatment Sovaldi.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/New-Hepatitis-C-drug-99-cheaper-in-India/articleshow/39719323.cms

I suppose Shrekli's real "crime" was to draw unwanted attention to this state of affairs.

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

stephanh

post-its are for amateurs

Apple employees, get this stuff:

https://www.amazon.com/Armour-Etch-15-0200-Cream-10-Ounce/dp/B001BE3UM4

Then walk to your nearest window and start thinking different.

With IoT you too can turn your home into a giant flashing 'HORSE BIRTH NOW' klaxon

stephanh

Re: Surely it can be adapted...

Are you aware that there are nowadays people who upload the whole baby eruption process to Youtube for the, ahem, entertainment of the whole world?

God, I know you promised never to do the flooding thing again, but really, we would be quite OK with another go, please deliver us from ourselves.

My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background

stephanh

Re: Broken monitor

"I remember the good old days when you could re-program the 'Enter' key on the terminal to be 'Line Erase'."

Good old days?

stty kill ^M

works in 2018 on Linux and macOS (and I think other *nix-like operating systems too).

We need baby Googles, say search specialists… and one surprising VC

stephanh

Re: Makes little sense to me

"How and why would Google Maps compete with YouTube or Android compete with Google Search?"

They would compete for the advertisement budget of their customers.

The DNS was designed for diversity, but site admins aren't buying

stephanh

beam me up, Scotty?

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This is not in Sun Tzu's "Art of War". The book is far too practical to contain that kind of fortune cookie "wisdom". Here's an actual quote, to get the idea of the content.

"When there is dust rising in a high column, it is the sign of chariots advancing; when the dust is low, but spread over a wide area, it betokens the approach of infantry. "

Does my boom look big in this? New universe measurements bewilder boffins

stephanh
Headmaster

km per second per megaparsec ?

This unit was perchance invented by the same people who measure battery charge in milliAmpere-hour?

This is just a frequency: 73 km per second per megaparsec = 2.4e-18 Hz. That is the rate at which the universe expands with a factor e. In other words, if you sample the distance between two galaxies with a frequency of 2.4e-18 Hz, it increases with a factor e between a sample point and the next.

They could at least have eliminated the redundant SI prefixes and call it 73 mm per second per parsec.

stephanh

Re: Something's not right here.

"How can it be accelerating? That implies a force pushing on it. "

1. Stuff is accelerating.

2. That means something is pushing it.

3. We have no clue what it is.

4. Let's call it "dark energy", because that sounds more sciency than "Fluffy the Terrible".

What "dark energy" actually is is unknown, except that it is by definition the stuff which is pushing away the galaxies from us.

We all hate Word docs and PDFs, but have they ever led you to being hit with 32 indictments?

stephanh

how to lie with PDF

Using a vector drawing program (e.g. Inkscape):

1. Put some text "Alice promises to pay Bob $1000". Convert to image.

2. Overlay some text "Bob promises to pay Alice $1000". Set stroke width to zero, fill to transparent.

3. Save as PDF.

Presto! A PDF document which appears to read "Alice promises to pay Bob $1000", but, when converted to text, reads: "Bob promises to pay Alice $1000".

I am sure all you BOFHs will have creative applications for this.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

stephanh

Re: Hmmm

"50% of the population are of below average intelligence"

Are those the ones who confuse "average" with "median"?

Contain yourself – literally. You can't avoid Docker, K8s for long

stephanh

"Docker didn't invent containers on Linux, they just made them easier to use and also did a good job with the publicity."

James Watt didn't invent the steam engine, he just improved upon the machine invented by Newcomen and also did a good job with the publicity.

The D in R&D is just as important and difficult as the R.

A print button? Mmkay. Let's explore WHY you need me to add that

stephanh

Re: ArrZarr: Use python

"Use Python, the library is built-in."

Somehow that doesn't stop them from reinventing this wheel anyway.

Another fun fact: if you try to import a .csv (which presumably stands for COMMA separated values) into Excel, you can select an arbitrary delimiter, and the default delimiter is not even comma (it's tab).

Facebook's big solution to combating election ad fraud: Snail mail

stephanh

security theatre

Obviously Facebook has deemed it politically expedient to be seen doing something. Or to be seen to be considering doing something. Whatever, as long as it doesn't upset the flow of $$$.

I assume they will eventually settle on putting a check box "hereby I declare that I am a U.S. citizen" on the webform. That will thwart those eeevil Ruskies!

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

stephanh

Bloaty McBloatFace

The post is required, and must contain letters.

You're the IT worker in charge of securing the cloud for your company. Welcome to Hell

stephanh

Re: Now let's play this through for a UNIX(oid) shop

"...email software which I reckon is probably not going to be elm or pine in most businesses around the world."

I certainly hope not. Mutt for the win!

Besides the XPoint: Persistent memory tech is cool, but the price tag... OUCH

stephanh

Re: Bandwidth != Latency

Amen. Tape has bandwidth aplenty, just drive a truck full of the stuff somewhere. It's latency which costs $$$.

Firefox to emit ‘occasional sponsored story’ in ads test

stephanh

Re: If you still use FF, this won't stop you.

Well, being a Firefox user is a bit like riding a bull in a rodeo. From time to time the beast is making an unexpected move to throw you off, you just need to hang in there.

Everyday now I expect to see the message "Congratulations, you are the last user left!"

stephanh

history repeats itself

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-officially-kicks-off-ads-in-firefox/

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

stephanh

Re: Arm A53

The Raspberry Pi is more expensive than a core i7 - when measured in performance per £.

Also the Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis was a nice hack, but impractical for almost anything since the networking on a RPi is so slow (it goes over the USB interface).

Of course, you could put a bunch of ARM A53 on a die in an advanced technology node, with fast interconnect, and get something which would be like a modern-day transputer. Then you merely need to rewrite your software to be efficiently multi-threadable.

Julian Assange to UK court: Put an end to my unwarranted Ecuadorean couch-surf

stephanh

Another solution

Ecuadorian embassy personnel throw Assange out of the window, and in return, British diplomats will only *occasionally* remind them of the whole embarrassing affair.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

stephanh

Re: Absolute tosh!

@ King Jack

"Please name these 'scientists' and give examples of the many times this has happened."

"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. "

-- Albert A. Michelson, Nobel Prize in Physics laureate

See: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_A._Michelson

So at least 1.

stephanh

Re: it's not that bad

@Charles 9

"Problem being, how do you restore the cache state when you're already using the cache as it is?"

I imagine a scheme where you keep a bunch of "scratch" cache lines outside the normal cache. Once the instruction which triggered main memory fetch retires, you write the "scratch" cache line to the real cache. Again, fundamentally not different to how you treat a register. Just think of your cache as a register file, each cache line being an individual register.

You would only need a very limited number of such "scratch" cache lines. Just enough to support the amount of speculative execution you do. If you happen to run out of scratch cache lines, you just stall the pipeline. Number of scratch cache lines should be dimensioned so that this is rare.

It might actually end up increasing performance since mispredicted instructions aren't going to pollute the cache.

stephanh

it's not that bad

Fixing Spectre is conceptually pretty simple: once you detect that you mis-predicted a branch, you need to restore *all* your CPU state, including cache content and branch predictor state. Not fundamentally different from restoring your register state.

Now admittedly, making this change in a highly complex existing CPU design is a different matter. But if existing CPU vendors cannot fix it, they will be replaced by new companies which can.

29 MEEELLION iPhone Xs flogged... only to be end-of-life'd by summer?

stephanh

Re: I know

@DeeCee

"sounds like something that happened in empire of evil(aka soviet union) to people with wrong haircuts in 70ies"

No no, it would only be done to people with haircuts *I* don't like.

So quite different, really.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

stephanh

Re: Your Network is broken!

"He couldn't understand that he created shortcuts to the files on his computer and that it wouldn't work on our computer..."

I am somewhat sympathetic to this. The whole shortcut thing is quite an advanced concept, and most people who are supposed to work with it are expected to just "pick it up" and have never received training about it.

Perhaps the real joke is on "us" (i.e., the IT industry). Why do we like to complicate things so much?

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

stephanh

Sir Humphrey on Ubuntu

HACKER: I have heard we could save millions by using this program called "Ubuntu".

SIR HUMPHREY: Ah, the Open Source operating system.

HACKER: You know about it?

SIR HUMPHREY: I have indeed heard about it. I understand "Ubuntu" is a philosophical term in various African languages.

BERNARD: It means: I don't know how to install Debian.

HACKER: I don't care what it means. Shouldn't we have an Open Source policy?

SIR HUMPHREY: We already have a policy on Open Source. In fact, we have an Initiative.

HACKER: An Initiative. Is that similar to Under Active Consideration?

SIR HUMPHREY: Not at all, Minister. The purpose of an Initiative, is, of course, to avoid any form of consideration in primo loco.

HACKER: But why? Why don't we take action? We could save millions.

SIR HUMPHREY: The point, is, of course, that taking action might lead to failure. Which would be inconvenient. However, not taking action might lead to accusations of wastefulness. Therefore, as you can see, the best course of action is to take no action, but rather to have an Initiative.

HACKER: But then nothing will ever change!

SIR HUMPHREY: Change is overrated, Minister.

stephanh

it is all as clear as mud

Code4Health is an "initiative" "supported" by the NHS.

Code4Health seems to have somehow supported/ordered/endorsed/considered the NHoS system.

Pro tip: if your project is endorsed by an initiative supported by the actual decision maker, it is doomed.

Private submarine builder charged with murder of journalist

stephanh

Re: jury...

"Juries are not really used in Swedish courts of law." But the Danish police has the tendency to bring cases in a Danish court of law. And they do have juries.

"Jury cases are cases in which the prosecution claims punishment by imprisonment of four years or more or in which the accused may be committed to custody or other detention."

http://www.domstol.dk/om/publikationer/HtmlPublikationer/Profil/Profilbrochure%20-%20UK/kap08.html

Airbus warns it could quit A380 production

stephanh

speaking as an airline customer

I was never a fan of the "hub and spokes" strategy since it means more stop-overs.

I'd rather have a smaller plane which goes where I actually want to go.

Heart of darkness: Inside the Osówka underground city

stephanh

Re: "An entirely Scottish project..."

"with steelwork sourced from the Scottish towns of Gdansk, Seville and Shanghai."

Make Scotland Great Again?

Europe to spend €1bn on supercomputers and big data infrastructure

stephanh

The Brexit angle would be the question if ARM is still politically possible as CPU architecture.

From a technical point I would say an ARM-based supercomputer would be interesting.

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

stephanh

powershell VS bash

We are just having a nice powershell vs bash flamefest in another topic's comment section. Vi vs emacs it ain't, but there is still hope.

Woo-yay, Meltdown CPU fixes are here. Now, Spectre flaws will haunt tech industry for years

stephanh

lovely story from 1976

http://www.multicians.org/timing-chn.html

It's about a covert timing channel based on the memory hierarchy.

A different level of hierarchy, to be sure (main memory/disk cache), and between two co-operating processes, but otherwise eerily similar to Meltdown.

"When I thought about this I realized that any dynamically shared resource is a channel."

Proposed solution in the paper is to only ever run programs certified by desk-checking.

stephanh

just a routine diversification of his portfolio

http://dilbert.com/strip/2000-02-15

stephanh
Happy

here's a vendor which is not vulnerable to either attack

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

Raspberry C uses an ARM Cortex-A53, which is not vulnerable.

Be sure to beat the rush.

Here come the lawyers! Intel slapped with three Meltdown bug lawsuits

stephanh

Re: timing attacks

> Cant you just reduce timer accuracy for untrusted code and get all your performance back?

Note that this is currently being implemented as a software mitigation for Javascript in browsers.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/

Interestingly, they also needed to disable SharedArrayBuffer (shared memory between two threads). Because a second thread which is simply incrementing a counter in shared memory can be used to synthesize a high-resolution timer.

For native code this would effectively require forbidding (shared-memory) multi-threading.

Qualcomm joins Intel, Apple, Arm, AMD in confirming its CPUs suffer hack bugs, too

stephanh

Re: The same bug.

...and they are mostly the same people, who have been to the same universities, have been thaught by the same profs, and from the same textbooks. They job-hop among the same set of companies.

And they mostly don't interact with security experts who are more software people.

Security hole in AMD CPUs' hidden secure processor code revealed ahead of patches

stephanh

Re: So for Intel is always bad but the sweet AMD is fine? PLEASE!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ALighterShadeOfBlack

"Perhaps they're simply a smaller threat to the world."

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

stephanh

Re: How does knowing where imply knowing what?

Meltdown works like this:

Instruction 1 accesses a byte on a protected page and attempts to load it into a register.

Instruction 2 uses the value loaded into the register to access some memory on one out of 256 pages (depending on the value of the register filled by instruction 1).

Now, instruction 1 does an illegal access, so it causes a segfault. However, by that time instruction 2 has already been speculatively executed. Now, all the "normal" processor state (register values, etc.) are rolled back to before instruction 2, but, crucially, on Intel CPUs, NOT the fact that a particular one of these 256 pages was brought into cache.

The attacker can now determine which of these pages was brought into cache by carefully timing how long it takes to access each of them. The fast one is the one brought into cache. Presto, one byte read from kernel space.

Note that the 256 pages are NOT in kernel memory, they are just plain accessible memory in the attacker's process.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

stephanh

Re: Counting chickens?

Amen. A 5%-30% performance impact, with major changes to fundamental kernel operation? And no epic Linus rant on even the merest suggestion to merge this, but rather fast-tracked and back-ported to a stable kernel version?

Let's face it: hell has indeed just frozen over.

Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

stephanh

Unfortunately...

Nouveau doesn't support CUDA.

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

stephanh

Re: That farmer...

"what does the recipient of the 1.4 Mb (respect, 720K in the good old days) floppy do with it?"

Punch holes in it and put it in a binder. Of course.

Microsoft Surface Book 2: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, better

stephanh

Re: Great Handware, but!

It is nowadays perhaps not completely unthinkable anymore that Microsoft would provide some level of support for running Linux on its hardware. However, no sane vendor would claim to support Arch, which is a rolling release so a moving target. Linux- focused hardware vendors such as System76 usually support some stable target such as Ubuntu LTS.

stephanh

it's a Microsoft product...

...I think I'll wait for version 3. No, make that 3.1. Or 3.11.

(Honestly, I will also not be buying the 3, given the amount of money involved.)

Missed opportunity bingo: IBM's wasted years and the $92bn cash splurge

stephanh

Re: Failure to attract new business

This. AS/400, oops, I mean, IBM i [1], is fascinating technology. Basically, it is an operating system with a relational database integrated at the filesystem level. A "file" on IBM i is really a database table, and in fact can be a "virtual file", i.e. the (dynamic!) result of an SQL query.

As far as can see, IBM is sitting on this technology and only selling it to its existing user base, rather than showcasing this to the world.

[1] Stupid rebranding IMHO. AS/400 was a fairly well-known name and had a good rep. Nobody knows what IBM i is.

To Puerto Ricans: A Register apology

stephanh
Alien

If I understand correctly, the theory which is hinted at goes a bit like this.

Register reports story about Puerto Rico cellphone rebuilding effort. Pai, who had so far been unaware that Puerto Rico was also kinda part of the USA, reads it.

Then, being the illegitimate lovechild of Cruella Deville and Sauron, he decides to act decisively. So he cuts back reporting, because there is no surer way to tell your underlings to cut back their effort. Certainly much easier than just picking up the phone and saying: "Hey, it's the big boss here. You have been busy lately, but I don't want you to overwork. You certainly don't have to finish this before Christmas. Perhaps not even before Eastern. Please *do* take your time."

O wait, there wasn't any cellphone coverage. That's probably why.

Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs

stephanh

People who understand crowdfunding do not "invest" in crowdfunding.

But yeah, selling a few kidneys of the directors might still allow most "investors" to be refunded.

Intel beefs up low-end line with Gemini Lake CPUs

stephanh

True, but fortunately for Intel there is a lot of legacy x86-only software out there.

OK, AMD E; not sure how that compares to these offerings.

So you're 'agile', huh? I do not think it means what you think it means

stephanh

How to write non-buggy software

* Do lots of testing.

* Do code reviews.

That's mostly it. In addition, automatic checking tools (linters, static type systems, more advanced tools like Coverity) help but not nearly as much as testing and code reviews. (See also https://sixty-north.com/blog/top-four-javazone-2013-talk-the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-dynamic-typing.html for discussion of static type systems vs. testing).

I have a strong suspicion that a lot of "Agile" methods are a bit like the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet consists of a lot of complicated "rules" which end up making you eat less sugar. You could also cut the crap and just eat less sugar. Similarly, you can do "Agile" or you can just do more testing and code reviews.

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