* Posts by gnasher729

2110 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

gnasher729 Silver badge

I once looked at a garden shed that was self assembly. According to the manager it’s easy to do. Unless you hire the professionals to do it, because they don’t read instructions. Worst case was a guy who couldn’t fit the roof. He was asked to send in a photo and was told “you built it upside down”..

Indian PM calls on the world to save youth from Bitcoin

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "Modi lauded India's technology sector for helping to address the Y2K problem"

Y2K problem is solved. I'll be retired in 2038. I really hope they get their act together and all APIs that are limited to the year 2038 get removed in 2030 or so. Probably enough to rename them with a "deprecated" prefix. Apple's NSDate / Date should be able to run forever (but with resolution going down to a microsecond in about 200 years). Curious if they tested this at all.

Just tried: I can't set the date on my iPhone beyond 2038 in "Settings". Apple, I'm disappointed. Something like 2199 would have been much more acceptable.

Apple is beginning to undo decades of Intel, x86 dominance in PC market

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Denial...

I think Apple might be at the point where they produce more total CPU power than Intel. They are building more chips (used to be 220 mil vs 200 mil but now 20 million Macs switched to ARM), and the average iPhone has a more powerful processor than a cheap Intel laptop).

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Why is the speed of switch in anyway surprising?

Apple has been working on its ARM processors since about the time of the iPhone 4s. Performance improvements year after year. Around the time of iPhone 7/8 I’ve seen articles saying “you could actually use these chips for a real computer”. A few years ago there was the story that the fastest chip in an iPad was faster than 90% of all laptop processors sold. The first prototype for an ARM Mac had the processor from an iPad. And now it’s the other way round, the top-of-the-range iPad uses a M1.

So this has all been in the works for a very, very long time. Apple did strike when their low-end M1 beat all the quad core Intel processors easily. The current mid-range chips are up with a 14 core Intel processor. Next year they’ll combine two or four of these mid-range chips on one carrier, and that’s game over for intels high end.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Opening up the M1

No, Apples processors are not “copyable”. Apple and a few other companies have unlimited licenses to use the ARM instruction set. But the chip design is 100% Apples property.

Samsung for example is free to create their own design, and sell it to PC makers if it is good, or build their own PCs. But they cannot copy Apple’s design.

PS. Apple seems to have made some changes so that sharing between processors with stricter Intel rules, so low-level code for locks etc. works correctly when translated from Intel to arm code.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: So no one around for the PPC transtion in 1994 then?..

I remember some Atari fans making the complete 68,000 Atari software run under emulation on a PowerPC Mac. A 150 MHz PowerPC was the fasted Atari computer ever.

Remember SoftRAM 95? Compression app claimed to double memory in Windows but actually did nothing at all

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Apple Store

Probably marked as “mostly harmless”. There may be companies that will purchase only hardware with antivirus software. So if Apple can sell 1,000 iPhones because there is a fake but harmless antivirus software available, why not?

gnasher729 Silver badge

VM before around MacOS 7.5 was totally inefficient because they had a bug where writing out consecutive pages marked all but the last page as dirty again. It usually tried to write dirty pages in blocks of 8, so 7/8ths of the pages came back dirty and were swapped out again.

At the time I was working on a quite memory hungry application that had very bad launch times, so I had to read data at program launch in a strange pattern that minimised the effect of this bug.

And now the general opinion is that very, very fast memory compression is what allows macs with 8 GB of RAM to work like older Macs with 16GB. That and having a very fast SSD.

Linus Torvalds admits to 'self-inflicted damage' with -Werror as Linux 5.15 rc1 debuts

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: -Werror

I did that on one major project, together with one other developer. Well, we didn't turn werror on, we just turned warnings on one after the other, and then removed whatever what easy. Started out with about 4,000 warnings. Most of them could be removed trivially, like int status = somefunction(); "warning: unused"; (void) status; or incorrect formats that worked. Many printf formats, many || vs && precedence and so on.

We then were left with about 3 or 4 genuine bugs, and some cases where we had to change code to make warnings go away. The most annoying was that you can't write if (x >= lowerLimit && x < upperLimit) if x is unsigned and lowerLimit is a constant zero.

But the real benefit wasn't the three or four bugs fixed. The benefit was that we _always_ had no bugs introduced that would have been found with the right warning, but the warning was never seen because we had too many. So now there is over a million lines of code with no warnings, and werror turned on. Unless the Indian guys who took over removed it.

gnasher729 Silver badge

"gcc Is right to warn you about unsigned >= 0."

No, it's not. It's right in a context where I perform a loop until i < 0, because it will not ever become less than 0, and that's a big trap. It's nonsense in code that is obviously a range check. The range check (I >= 0 && I < limit) will produce the correct result, even if I started with I = 0 and subtracted 1 from i.

It's not right, it's programmed to do it, including in a situation when there is obviously no problem with the code. It is stupid to think that I should write a range check for 1 <= I <= 10 in a different way to a check 0 <= I <= 10.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: The warnings aren't always bad code

In my current project, there are exactly two warnings turned off: One where the compiler tries to tell me that using a semaphore is inefficient (when the efficiency is totally of no concern, and the workaround would be an awful lot of work and very hard to get right), and one where I intentionally crash the program, like * (int *) NULL = 0; and the compiler won't let me do that without a warning.

gnasher729 Silver badge

No, I wrote some perfectly fine code. I wanted to check that 0 ≤ i < n, so I wrote the obvious code. If I don't write "i >= 0"then some reader will assume that I forgot to check the lower bound.

The second code was not worse, it was an obvious workaround against the compiler's stupidity. And ran into another stupid rule of the compiler, where it assumes you don't know the relative priority of || and &&.

Hope that explains it. As for criticising, well, I assume that I know better than you any day.

gnasher729 Silver badge

That's the bloody spelling checker which changes a lower case i to an upper case i. On the other hand, do you want the compiler to produce a warning for that?

gnasher729 Silver badge

I remember getting warnings for “if (I >= 0 && I < limit)” for a range check if I was an unsigned integer. Because I >= 0 is always true. And I wanted to write a check for the lower bound even if it was 0. So I changed to “if (I == 0 || I > 0 && I < limit)”. Another warning. Mixing || and && without parentheses. “If (I == 0 || (I > 0 and I < limit))”.

Apart from that being free of warnings is good because then every warning means something and doesn’t get ignored. I couldn’t use -Werror for ages because we used FIPS, and the FIPS source that you are not allowed to touch or lose your certification produced warnings. I could have changed compiler flags for that source file but considered that cheating.

Assange psychiatrist misled judge over parentage of his kids, US tells High Court

gnasher729 Silver badge

Charges were dropped because the time limit for pressing charges ran out. The way he acted to prevent going to court, it is common sense that he was guilty as hell.

And jumping bail is a criminal offence, whether you are guilty of the original crime or not. So it was always obvious that as soon as he left the embassy, he would be arrested and later convicted in the UK.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Somehow I can't find this to be a reliable source. Swedish court would be much more reliable, and according to the Swedish court there was at least sexual harassment. And you are "innocent until proven guilty" in court. Avoiding going to court by absconding from the country and then holing up in some embassy for years doesn't make you innocent.

Software Freedom Conservancy sues TV maker Vizio for 'GPL infringement'

gnasher729 Silver badge

SFC explicitely said that they do NOT have any copyrights here, they just are "customers" who think they have rights that they don't have.

So what I said was based on SFC's words. Everyone can read it. "In the past, the SFC said, "the plaintiffs have always been copyright holders of the specific GPL code." ". That's why I posted. They are not copyright holders. They say they are not copyright holders. What you said, emfiliane, was just made up. Dunning-Kruger at its finest.

They are also the ones who sued VMWare in Germany in 2015 with the case finally dismissed in 2019.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I smell a fight coming on

Linux based doesn’t mean open sourced. The OS doesn’t determine what license you need to use.

gnasher729 Silver badge

I don’t know why nobody mentioned how this “SFC” isn’t actually a copyright holder, so they have no right to sue for anything.

GPL tells companies “if you want to distribute this software then it would be very wise to distribute the source code as well, otherwise you have no right to distribute and the copyright holder can sue you”. Nobody else can. SFC can complain to copyright holders and ask them a lawsuit, that’s all.

And the obvious case that you can use GPL licensed software without distributing it, _if you received a different license from the copyright holder, usually for money.

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "I'm actually honest, self-deprecating, and funny"

"Then, by definition, they aren't men. Come on; It really isn't difficult."

Where did you learn that? Biology 101? In that case you should have taken a more advanced course.

What counts to make someone "man" or "woman" is what goes on in their mind. Their body parts are not of any importance for that.

Come on, it really isn't difficult. And anyway, what's your problem? Why would it offend you personally if a man has a child? I just don't care. It's their life, not mine.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "I'm actually honest, self-deprecating, and funny"

"Black lives matter" was intended to mean "Black lives matter". As a white man, I'm not complaining. I feel just lucky that I don't have to say "White lives matter" all the time because they usually do matter to police officers etc. But then I was told about a much better reason: All people should be equal, and treated equally, and they are not. If you say "All lives matter" which is factually correct, many many people will automatically turn that into "All white lives matter, and others don't".

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Inclusive must mean that we only include things that we like...

I wouldn't assume he was fired because someone complained, but because his behaviour just wasn't acceptable. Of course unacceptable behaviour would leave to complaints, but it's the behaviour, not the complaints, that get you fired.

Apple arms high-end MacBook Pro notebooks with M1 Pro, M1 Max processors

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It has a notch!

No, they didn't "add a notch" to the menubar. My older Mac has a 10mm border at the top of the screen. They removed 6mm of that border, so the menubar could move up by six mm, and goes right over the bit with the camera. The screen sizes are all 16 x 10, plus 74 pixels additional height. They didn't move a notch into the menubar, they moved the menubar away from its old position outside the area where the screen used to end.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

gnasher729 Silver badge

"The Left Hand of Darkness", Ursula K Le Guin. Where everyone is currently undecided, until a couple decides they want a child, and one of them turns spontaneously into a man, and the other one into a woman.

Missouri governor demands prosecution of reporter for 'decoding HTML source code' and reporting a data breach

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Dare I admit to the govenor ...

The guys from the newspaper pressed “show page source”. On a hacking scale from 0 to 10 that’s a big round zero. curl and wget is at least a one.

Apple beat Epic Games 9-1 in court. Now it's appealed the one point it lost

gnasher729 Silver badge

They were kicked out because they were in breach of their contract.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Is it going to matter ?

Apple never charged for any payments that were not made from within the app. I worked for a subscription based company that sold on the App Store, but also through their own website. With money coming in from both sides. App Store revenue was a bit less work, website produced more cash.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Is it going to matter ?

No, Epic is not compelled to go through the AppStore. The rules are: If the transaction is made from within the game, then it must go through the AppStore, and you can't send the user elsewhere. But outside the game, you can sell the same things any way you like, and Apple doesn't see a penny of it.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Dear Apple...

Tomato, you should be ashamed of yourself. I mean it, ashamed.

The average retail worker in the USA is more likely to be murdered doing their job than a Foxconn employee's chances of dying by suicide. US suicide rates were three times higher than Foxconn, at Foxconn's worst times. And since then they have reduced the rates.

How? They looked at _how_ people commit suicide. Most in the USA take guns. Owning a gun in China is illegal. Lots of things are not possible when you live with lots of other people. So they jump off tall buildings. Americans and Brits don't do that, so this sounds horrible to their ears.

And what do suicide nets do? As Jerry Pournelle explained years ago, they stop people from killing themselves. Making suicide just a little bit harder reduces numbers hugely. Someone climbs on a roof, wants to jump, sees a net, what do they do? Climb down from the roof and continue with their lives.

An unwanted side effect is that this kind of action gives ammunition to sad idiots. That's why such sad idiots, should be kicked as hard as possible. It seems that Foxconn decided "if 1,000 people make fun of us, but it saves one life, then we should do it". I say to Foxconn "if 1,000 people make fun of you, but it saves one life, then you should do it and I'll kick anyone making fun of you".

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

gnasher729 Silver badge

There was a story about a power company where that happened. Being a power company, they didn't pay electricity bills, so their computers were permanently turned on. Then they moved offices. If I remember right, hundreds of hard drives turned off for the first time in years. And the lubricating oil turns solid when that happens.

And yes, the solution for a few hundred machines was dropping them on the table which made the lubrication oil fluid again for a fraction of a second, then turning the computer on at the exactly right moment. Once the drives where spinning they were absolutely fine.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: And their plugs are crap

Which is safest? The UK _plugs_ are safest. On the other hand, in Germany you will have a microsecond fuse. So you have an 11KWatt water heater in your shower without fear. It wouldn't have enough time (one microsecond) to hurt you.

gnasher729 Silver badge

At one place we had a rather large office space, with air conditioning / heating being split with two controllers. There were two tiny problems: 1. The controllers were marked wrong.The one supposed to control the left half controlled the right and vice versa. 2. One controller was upside down. Instead of turning everything up it turned things down.

Somehow this didn't work. Before the problems were identified, they found a state that was close to reasonable, and warnings of instant death sentence if you touched the controllers.

Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Hmm

On the positive side, the amount of fuel most people could hoard is one tank full, while the amount of toilet paper one can hoard is usually one loft full.

Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps'

gnasher729 Silver badge

Traffic has two sides. Consumers pay for the bandwidth to deliver from the ISP to their home. Does that pay for delivering from say Netflix to the ISP as well? Not sure here.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

gnasher729 Silver badge

They use usb-c chargers on all newer iPhones. Some people just don’t know the difference between charger and cable.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: The new iPhone doesn’t come with a charger

That’s the idea. Most people have an old iPhone charger (usb a) that they can just use, or some Samsung or other usb-c charger. Exactly what the eu want. I have a five port charger with usb-a and usb-c ports.

Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Slash happy

There’s a rule that in the scheme, two slashes may have a specific different meaning than one slash, but three or more slashed should be treated as one.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Not case sensitive

MacOS file names are _not_ case sensitive.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Probably “test driven design”. You write a test and check that it is fixed. file:// was handled incorrectly, a test was written, and the change fixed the test. 15 more tests were not written.

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

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: my eyes

“Apple-centric bollocks” - Swift 5.0 is nice. Swift 5.5 seems will be a little bit nicer. I use it on a Mac, for iOS development, but there’s nothing apple specific in the language.

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: M1 hARM

Should be released around the year 2045.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: shoddy

All Macs are easily upgraded. It involves eBay though...

Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov on CLU and why programming is still cool

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: mumbo jumbo

Does anyone use multiple inheritance? I know about classes implementing multiple interfaces, and I’ve seen multiple inheritance used 20 years ago, but today?

If it were possible to evade facial-recognition systems using just subtle makeup, it might look something like this

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apples faceid

FaceID works by measuring the distance between the camera and your face, with about 300,000 pixels total. Seems to be totally unaffected by makeup unless you apply filler :-) Should also be fine with different skin colours.

Just haven’t heard of any commercial source for that camera. And it can’t be trained with photos.

Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Data economy?

Well, it can solve the problem of backlogs with court cases. But so would giving the judges some dice and five minute training. At much lower cost.

The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Are they being paid?

You would obviously try to find another job while the mess is sorted out, sou you live instead of starving if you fail in court, and you can put a huge compensation into a savings account instead of using it to pay back your debt if you lose.

Epic Games asks for Apple's help to put South Korea's alternative app payments law to work

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: We allow alternative stores...

Apple always allowed alternative payments. I worked for two companies that did exactly that very nicely. What apple doesn’t allow is using alternative payments _from within the app_. Just do it on your website. I have Netflix and prime video on my phone, no problem to pay for them.

VMware announces tech preview of Arm hypervisor – Fusion on Apple's M1 silicon

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Interesting

Apple is fine with running virtualised software - but check the MacOS license terms if you are allowed to run more than one copy of MacOS. Last time I looked you were allowed to use one copy of MacOS, on an Apple computer. Another copy in a virtual machine would be two. Running Linux or Windows is none of their business.

Apple stalls CSAM auto-scan on devices after 'feedback' from everyone on Earth

gnasher729 Silver badge

Two things that would be totally acceptable: 1. Apple has the right to keep illegal materials off its servers. 2. Most people don’t want to look at some illegal materials at all, and would be happy if illegal materials can’t get on their phone.

That’s what they should have done. 1. When the phone uploads images to Apples servers, the phone just refuses. (And you have the choice to send the photo to a manual review).

2. When my browser downloads illegal images, it refuses and returns a status 403 instead, if I opt-in. Nobody learns about it, Apples lawyers make sure that I haven’t legally downloaded such an image, and opting in shows that I’m legally not attempting to download anything. So I have strong legal protection, and again nobody learns what’s been filtered out.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Rather moronic

Would you blame them? The woman deserves all she gets. If they were clever and restoring everything cost less than $10,000, she is lucky. If there were no backups, I'd keep her paying to the end of her life.