Posts by Roo

Re: relying on third-party services

In practice it appears that you don't really need to avoid the US authorities. Certainly doesn't seem to present much of a problem for the oligarchs that funnel huge amounts of money through the London property market, multiple UK shell companies and tax havens.

For extra cover you can insinuate yourself into the circles of the ruling classes, scratch a few backs, buy a newspaper, buy football clubs etc, you could probably buy the entire Tory party for less than the price of a second hand yacht. :)

Re: "political neutral factual tech reporting"

"say nice things about crap ideas to make people feel better, and others feel worse, then, yeah, we're not gonna do that, and have never done that TTBOMK."

That's is precisely why I read the Reg. Thank you for sticking to your guns all these years !

Re: El Reg becoming political now ?

Just because an article points out stuff that you don't like doesn't mean the substance is untrue or biased.

Murdoch has a lot to answer for - he can't pop his clogs soon enough.

Re: Spot on!

"And do bear in mind that specialisation and economies of scale make things cheaper to buy in than doing them in house, generally. No one suggests offices should contain paper factories, for example."

I agree with your point, but your strawman is a bit pants. Case in point it's generally cheaper to cook + eat at home than it is to go to a 3 star Michelin Restaurant. :)

Re: Spot on!

I think some negativity is inevitable with respect to renting hardware...

- avoidance of capex (and potential debt/difficulty to get loans)

- avoidance of maintenance cost

- avoidance of obsolescence

Not convinced the customer avoids any of that - as a money making business will pass those costs + margin onto the customer. Unless of course they sell at a loss (hint: vendors might do loss leaders - but they actually do need to make money at some point in order to survive).

- elasticity/flexibility up and down and in terms of contract terms

In principle yes, but it does require the vendor having a pile of idle kit hanging around burning money - they have a strong incentive not to do that. What actually seems to happen is that they have a ~3 month lead time on the kit getting put into their datacenters... Oh and good luck enforcing an SLA on that.

- immediacy of services (for cloud services at least) with no lead times

IME that can be true if you are lucky or you are a very small customer. ;)

- outsource of infrastructure expertise

Vendors have a tendency to skimp on expertise, choosing to keep costs to a minimum (as you'd expect) - their idea of adequate skill levels and acceptable SLA is somewhat different from the customer.

- outsource of hosting and connectivity

I think that point stands. :)

For the record I definitely see valid cases for renting kit - but I haven't seen it work out cheaper yet. :(

First to market is king in (most) software development, first to go bang is rarely considered by the folks throwing money at it.

Re: Emulation

"You are quite right. I'm talking about emulation, and the pain that would happen when what you're emulating is a virtual machine host."

Oddly enough that is exactly the problem that has been solved many times over from the 80s to the current day. Even today's common-or-garden VMs emulate (a surprising amount of) PC hardware sufficiently to host Windows 10.

While I it doesn't belong in the "trivial" bracket, emulating the CPU isn't as hard as you may think - as evidenced by the last 40 years or so, and Windows 10 and it's apps don't require cycle accurate emulation for everything either - as evidenced by the fact they run under VMs - even with PCI(e) passthrough quite happily.

"ranslating all of Windows's instructions from X86 and X86-64 to ARM will require a lot of emulation, and it will either take a lot of processing (meaning it runs slowly) or require a massive cache of pretranslated instructions as you have mentioned, "

I have to respectfully disagree with you on that point - based on what I saw over 20 years ago with NT x86 binaries running quicker on an Alpha box - and the current state of the art with respect to VMs and JVMs. :)

"Remember that Windows 10 weighs in at eight gigabytes, a lot of which is X86 binaries. "

Another way to look at this is modern CPUs have a certain amount of cache - and a very high penalty for accessible data in the DIMMs. Windows 10 like all other software executing on modern CPUs, has to be kind to those caches to get close to acceptable performance, this means that the code is tuned to make those caches effective, which in turn helps you if you're loading up caches with translated instructions.

Additionally - most, if not all AMD & Intel processors are actually RISC style machines under the covers - they have a front end that decodes (aka translates) x86 CISC instructions into micro-ops... The emulator would be doing something similar...

In summary I don't think it's a stretch for Apple to make on the hoof translation work - but I think (very pragmatically) they've taken the approach of generating fat binaries instead.

Re: Emulation

"The worst case scenario is ARM-compatibility layer virtualizes X86, VM host runs in X86, tries to run another OS in X86, and probably screeches to a halt before the application can even be started. It will depend a lot on the companies producing VM software."

Err, I think you're talking about emulation, and it's pretty old hat now... See SoftPC (late 80s), FX!32 (mid 90s), simh etc.

FX!32 made a big impression - it was a emulator layer for Windows NT on the DEC Alpha that ran x86 binaries as quick on a (very low end bargain basement) 166MHz Alpha as they ran on a very expensive maxed out 200MHz Pentium Pro box. IIRC it translated code on the fly & cached the translations - so you didn't pay the translation penalty over and over again - like Sun's HotSpot JVM.

The mini/mainframe vendors also shipped emulators for their legacy lines - some implemented in hardware, some software and some a mix of the two.

Re: Move on

He did get paid 132K for the work...

Sadly true. My interest in what goes on in the US is because UK government foreign policy has pretty much been dictated by the US government. Although that does seem to have evolved a little - the UK cabinet now takes it's orders from a bunch of shady think tanks that are set up & funded by US & Russian billionaires instead - I guess they cut out the middle man which makes sense if they already own the US government from top to bottom.

Re: Move on

"If you have actual proof of such wide-spread fraud, please alert the authorities ... and the Press. Posting about it here does absolutely zero good."

Fair point, but I suspect the poster may well have been thinking about such as "Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr" - he has been indicted recently. Funnily enough it's actually quite difficult to get search results for this stuff because of all the mud stirred up by the Republicans - the majority of hits reflect their narrative rather than the fraud investigations and their outcomes.

Re: Real Fix

Kinda sad seeing a key Intel customer, AWS, flounder around trying to fix Intel's bugs instead of leaning on Intel to actually fix them. AWS are between a rock and a hard place - they either replace the hardware - with the unavoidable chance that the new hardware will also be broken, or they implement performance killing hacks on their heavily utilized shared boxes... Gee, maybe putting all your eggs in one basket was a dumb idea after all...

Re: "XML"

Over the years I've found that validation against a schema doesn't really help that much in practice, it's another complex pile of stuff to parse with more bugs waiting to bite your ass. Using as simple-to-parse format as possible (to minimize the valid permutations of input), writing unit tests and integration tests to go with it has proven to be more effective the long haul than adding yet more attack surface to the input handling code.

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

The "small disadvantages" of DDT that you glossed over include it killing ff a lot more than mosquitoes and persisting in the environment (and accumulating in larger organisms) over a long period of time. IIRC it takes 30-40 years to breakdown... Quite a few people see those as huge disadvantages - not least the folks who want their crops pollinated...

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

"According to the article he wanted to strong-arm his employer into taking "climate action"."

I think that's a legit call when you take into account that Amazon is heavily into the Data Center business in the form of AWS - in addition to box shifting lots of shiny luxury items to the masses.

AWS runs on a huge amount of plant that is continually refreshed and burns a lot of juice. Furthermore AWS tends to run I/O intensive applications on Virtual Machines - which tend to impose a heavy penalty for I/O - thus increasing the amount of energy to run those I/O intensive apps.

Re: Who are the downvoters, in this comment thread

Companies impact all aspects of our individual lives and the environment we live in - but very few of them actually take responsibility for that. Furthermore there are plenty of disincentives to price the downsides in - as the 2009 crash illustrated so vividly. Hell, it took over 40 years of activists to kicking up a fuss to get DDT usage under some kind of control (note: it still isn't actually banned outright), and there's a some evidence that we're facing a similar problem again with Neonicotinoids.

I'm all for people having a roof over their heads and a comfortable life - and making money to facilitate that - but I'm also for folks taking responsibility, honestly considering the downsides to society and the planet as a whole, and moderating their activities accordingly...

TL;DR version: Narrowly focussing on the money is simply not sufficient to run a society or a planet.

Not really sure why you're so anti-Koala preservation - did one bite you in the nuts on a nudist beach ?

Re: "XML"

Agreed... To put it another way the worst aspect of XML (and to a much lesser extent JSON) is the expense of parsing the bloody stuff and the myriad vulnerabilities that result from folks getting it wrong, all to make it "readable" by meatbags..

The WHO are a coordinating entity (at best), they don't have a bunch of jackboots on the ground to bust asses - or the ability to apply sanctions at the drop of a hat. All they can do is to The buck stops with the power brokers. It's hardly a surprise those power brokers that dropped the ball are blaming the WHO, they haven't got anyone else to blame having shit-canned the advice and experts who advised them to prepare for pandemics before Covid blew up in the first place.

Re: @Snake - Microsoft shooting itself in the foot?

"And that's why you people are not only DEAD WRONG but proven so with a 2.7% desktop adoption rate ."

Not even sure why you care so much about it, desktops are going the way of the dodo.