Posts by Richard 12

You aren't perfect

Sooner or later, you'll forget to check through absolutely every path in a tarball containing tens of thousands of files, and lose something important.

And you probably won't even realise it happened until weeks later.

Microsoft will allow all software to run exactly once on each machine, so malware had better do all the damage the first time.

In all seriousness, I've found that Endpoint Protection will fairly consistently allow a "potentially dangerous" application to run the first time, then block subsequent executions.

Which is both utterly pointless and incredibly frustrating.

I hope you soldered on a standard coin cell holder so they could swap it themselves five years later.

Re: Odd choice

A lot of kernel-mode drivers are already written in C++.

As I understand it, Tlthis work is basically to allow Rust to be used for kernel-mode drivers too.

Which is a good thing, drivers are hard. If the toolchain can help (be that memory safety guarantees, RAII etc) this is good.

However, it's still going to be a subset of those languages that can be used.

Re: Toast

They aren't direct competitors (yet) though.

ARM sell actual core designs and guarantee their performance, while RISC-V is just an ISA - it's not a core.

You need a lot of specialist expertise to turn that ISA into an actual working RISC-V chip, and you don't know up-front what you're going to get because it's not a tried-and-tested design.

The real competitors are the likes of Si-Five who will sell you a tested core design.

Re: Doesn't make sense

There's a very small number of short hop routes where it might make sense, I guess.

But it's still only going to be able to make two to three flights a day, at most. I guess that works for some inter-island routes that local laws require they fly, but not for commercially viable routes.

Re: Consitutaional right to block content and legal precedent?

It is clearly unconstitutional for the Government to force you to say something you do not wish to say.

The social media platform therefore has a clear constitutional right to choose which drivel they wish to publish.

This is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt by the Texas Government to force them to publish things they don't want to say.

If you accept this, then logically, the Texas Government can force you to say anything.

Re: Io-uring is not new news

True, and true.

It's only really interesting at the very top end of I/O - file servers, databases, HPC etc.

That said, because of that it also means that certain things that would otherwise need to be kernel drivers for performance, can be done in userspace instead.

Which is nice.

Re: "a process that Lieberman said takes about four seconds"

Outlook takes 10-20 seconds to start normally. Excel et al can take far longer if the document is large.

Do they genuinely think anyone believes that?

Re: If it's anything like where I work...

Nothing to do with WFH.

There have always been people who don't bother doing their jobs and rely on their colleagues and/or underlings to do the work.

In some ways WFH actually gives the slackers less chance to hide, as they can't rely on pointless presenteeism or buttering up the boss quite as much.

Re: Ehrm, What is the Problem

The pile of abuse above shows where part of the problem lies:

There's a lot of men in IT who think that any woman is not there on their own merit.

This (and outright misogyny) then leads to abuse, both direct and indirect - also proven repeatedly in multiple studies.

Which of course means women leave the profession, because WTF would you stay in a career where a significant number of your coworkers and managers continually undermine you?

There is also an important difference between equality and equity.

Re: The choice isn't really about reliability

Missed the point.

Reliability matters, but not for the data (it's a boot drive, the data is a clone of a million others). It matters for the downtime.

Losing the boot drive takes out the server for a few hours, and consumes the valuable in-person time of a technician to go and physically swap it out.

Re: Robotics

Can't do that on Mars.

The entire point of sending people back to the Moon is to practice manned exploration in a location where it's possible to scrub the mission and come home in a few hours to a day (survivable with only emergency O2 bottles), as opposed to several months.

The other reason is of course because it's feasible within a political cycle, while Mars is not.

As to why people?

Partly because humans explore. It's what we do and why we're the most successful large animal on the planet.

And partly because a human can slap a bit of gaffer tape on a broken bit and continue, instead of scrubbing the mission.

Re: Excluding them makes it worthless

By the normal "acts of war" definition (state declared), the only cyber attacks that have ever been acts of war are the ones perpetrated by Russia upon Ukraine.

Excluding state actors would also mean things like refusing to cover a police car crashing into your building, leaving it to you to recover the costs from the police without any assistance.

On the other hand, perhaps killing off the entire ransomware insurance industry will take out the ransomware industry too.

Re: Too many or too few desktop UIs

You can update iconography without throwing away usability.

Since Win95, many would say the only significant improvements to the Windows shell have been:

- Type-ahead find.

- Better typography/font rendering

- Pinning items to the taskbar (not quicklaunch)

- Taskbar "badges" and "progress" indicators

Possibly also the "show desktop" button, system tray indicators and a few other smaller additions that some will like.

The only removal that was an improvement was Quicklaunch, and that was only because pinning serves the same purpose while being harder for developers to abuse.

Most of the other changes have been cosmetic, which is fine, or actively harm usability, which is not.

Re: Please don't take this the wrong way, but

Pensioners are one of the major Tory heartlands.

It's very odd that they seem hellbent on killing off about 1/4 of their voters.

Re: Can any American gun enthusiasts please explain

Produce sufficient evidence to have a trial.

This is called "rule of law", and is something MAGA Republicans are utterly terrified of.

Otherwise, stop spreading unfounded rumours - accusations like that are not protected speech, there are civil and (in some cases) criminal penalties for that kind of thing.

Anyone hear the rumour that Ghostman lied on their form 4473? It's got just as much to back it up.

Re: the point here is how Twitter reacted

There have been larger trials and meta-studies since.

Ivermectin has no detectable effect on covid.

This is a very good example of journalists (term used loosely) causing panic by not understanding how science works.

They didn't understand what they were reporting, and never bothered to follow up the story later when it was shown that it didn't work.

Really, any place that reports "compound X cures Y" should be forced to report all followup studies with equal prominence.

Here's the list of safe apps:

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