* Posts by MacroRodent

1973 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

MacroRodent

Re: Hmm

Populist right-wing governements never fail to promote a policy that sounds great to their base, but is invariably wrong-headed.

Same thing with the current Finnish governement. Here, too, all technology companies are aghast at their proposed immigration policies, just to mention one example.

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

MacroRodent

Re: "continually upgradable"

Read somewhere - probably here in The Register - that it is a C++ project. Explains things...

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: tracefs?

> Linux today is about making things more cumbersome ...

Easy to think that way, but Linux is encountering the real world, and new requirements that did not exist back when the original Unix was designed. The original design was simple, elegant - and quite inadequate for today's tasks.

And like any old system (more than 30 years by now), Linux has to maintain enough backward compatibility, in order to not lose its user base.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

MacroRodent

Re: Since the translation DB can't be held locally ...

This is a huge plus for privacy!

With server-based translations, you are telling some third party (over a channel that ma be intercepted) precisely what you are reading on the net. Usually it does not matter, but sometimes could be a matter of life and death.

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

MacroRodent

Re: Well, yes, but there's a bigger picture here.

> Need to tweak swappiness, or make another system-wide change -- tough.

I have not looked into how these work, but it certainly would not work well if you cannot change such parameters. I always imagined a read-only root fs just means the code and seldom changing data (like zoneinfo) is immutable, not the configuration data.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

MacroRodent
Mushroom

TPM 2.0

The requirement of TPM 2.0 chippery, which is may be missing on even relatively new computers, is criminal.

This means lots of perfectly usable PC:s and laptops will be junked, since they cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.

(Or one could be optimistic and see it as a pool of hardware that can be assimilated to the Linux world).

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

MacroRodent

Re: "If a printer is connected to the internet, the update downloads automatically"

>No, the best option is to NEVER buy an HP.

Must confess I have kept buying HP printers because they usually have problem-free Linux support (or at least as much as that is possible with printers).

Not long ago I considered Epson Ecotank line, but browsing forums, it looked like trying to use them with Linux would just worsen my high blood pressure.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

MacroRodent

Xfce

You might like XFCE. It's UI has stayed the same for the past 10 years or more. Some things are clunky, but at least they are clunky in a consistent way...

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

MacroRodent

Re: ALGOL 68 Blew My Mind

> Some writers did not like the Algol 68 convention of writing words backwards for closing statement brackets,

The original unix sh (shell) and its clones like Bash still do that. "if" is terminated by "fi, and "case" by "esac" (but curiously, "do" ends with "done", not "od"). Wonder if the style came from Algol 68? It was probably a hot topic around the time the sh was designed.

MacroRodent

A lovely obit

Thanks!

Pascal was the second programming language I encountered, after BASIC. The introductory programming course at HUT in 1981 used Wirth's "Algorithms+Data structures = Programs" as the text book.

I also dabbled at one point with Modula-2 (but not much as much as a more clever friend of mine, who used it to implement a universal diskette reader for a CP/M machine he had built from a kit).

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

MacroRodent
Pint

Re: File I/O

Yes, HUT (Helsinki University of Technology) was one of the three universities smashed together to form Aalto. That happened after my time there.

MacroRodent

Re: Turbo Pascal clone - by Microsoft!

That's news to me. I had always assumed QuickPascal was derived from the much older Microsoft Pascal, which was a conventional IDE-less implementation, and quite OK for its time, I wrote some small programs with it.

MacroRodent

Re: University 1987

> 4 kinds of loop ...

I count only 3: WHILE-loop, REPEAT...UNTIL, and FOR-loop. Using them appropriately made the code readable. C and C++ also have 3 loops, but C:s version of REPEAT...UNTIL, which is do...while is less readable, but, hey, it saves by reusing a keyword.

MacroRodent

Turbo Pascal clone - by Microsoft!

Turbo Pascal was so popular that at one point Microsoft had its own competing version, QuickPascal, which also came with a IDE and compiled quickly. I guess it did not sell too well. because I got a copy cheaply from the discount shelf of a computer store in Helsinki. I think it was around 1990 or so, The language was mostly similar to Turbo Pascal, but not exactly so for some reason. In particular, the OO extensions differed.

MacroRodent
Boffin

Re: File I/O

Part of the reason for the lack of named file access in PASCAL was perhaps portability, in those days every OS had its own notion of file name syntax, and they were even more divergent than the tension between Windows and Unix/Linux file names.

It is also clearly meant for a batch environment. In the original, your PROGRAM statement could have file-type parameters and your "control cards" were expected to assign them to real files.

Another place where the batch-orientedness shows is that strictly-speaking the original did not even support any interactive IO, because notionally opening a file read the first element from it, so that INPUT^ which denotes the next unread element (usually character) would always have a defined value, and this INPUT (correspondings to C's stdin) was opened when the program started. So the program could not print a prompt before it required input!

Most implementations used "lazy IO", where INPUT was notionally opened at first reference. I think Turbo Pascal solved this by eliminating the silly file^ syntax entirely and required always using READ. A sane solution.

One implementation, PAX, that I had to use at the HUT (where it was written) took alternate route: The INPUT would always begin with a fictional line-delimiter, so to read from the terminal you would have to write

READLN;

READ(whateveryoureallywantedtoread);

Thanks, but that made interactive PAX programs automatically incompatible with all other implementations.

Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset

MacroRodent

Re: This is why doing AI on the cheap will never work

It is no coincidence that these "AI tools" started progressing fast only after the internet made it easy to scrape massive amounts of already digitized images and text.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

MacroRodent
Happy

nano

Nano is really a GPL re-implementation of pico (which IIRC was under not-quite open license), MS could probably easily reimplement their own. The nano UI has the nice feature that you can use it with zero previous experience, because it always shows the most important commands (of type ctrl-something) at the bottom of the screen. Great if you only need it occasionally.

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

MacroRodent

Re: WTF?

Not sure if there are any legitimate uses, except maybe by law enforcement. If you own the property and want to monitor it for unwanted activities, like employees pilfering stuff, it is better to install visible cameras. That way they also act as a deterrent to the funny business.

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

MacroRodent

Re: Do charge a thousand phones instead

The human artists can be assumed to live and breathe anyway, whereas the generated AI images are an extra load.

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

MacroRodent

Asimov

Better program Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into it before that happens.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

MacroRodent

Re: So, still no solution for securing against physical access ?

Also, if the disk or SSD is properly encrypted, taking it out and hooking it to your machine does not help, it is still gibberish.

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

MacroRodent
Meh

Still around?

In a fit of insanity, I made a small donation to to them around 10 years ago, they then emailed progress reports for years, but then those stopped in 2017 (my mail archive tells me). I already assumed the project was pining for the fjords.

We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig

MacroRodent
Mushroom

Just subcontract the testing

> "As part of the contract's design, work with the RCCTO to transition Leonidas into a future program of record after successful demonstration of the prototypes," Epirus said.

Just ship some units to Ukraine, they will field-test them for free under real battle conditions, and return quick feedback...

Wayland heading for default status as Mint devs mix it into Cinnamon 6 bun

MacroRodent
Happy

CDE

CDE? Nice to know it is still around, in case XFCE gets infected with Redundantis Featuritis or Bloatifaction Maximus.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

MacroRodent
Facepalm

That again...

> Microsoft spending billions on acquiring Nokia,

Sigh. Microsoft bough only the Nokia phone business, not the whole Nokia company, which is still operating fine as a telecom network maker.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

MacroRodent

Did monochrome monitors blow up?

Back when IBM-compatible monochrome monitors were a thing (remember those? green and very slow phosphorus, well at least it did not flicker), I encountered a warning on a 3.party extended graphics card (one that could drive both monochrome and CGA monitors with more colours and resolution than IBM's offering- this was before VGA and even EGA) that one should never use out-of-spec modes with a monochrome monitor, else it may break. So I did not. I have ever since wondered if this actually happened to anyone.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

MacroRodent
Windows

Write

> Windows 3 and previous had Write so Windows 95 needed something like it.

When Windows 95 with WordPad came, I recall it actually had even less features than Write. For example, Write supported headers with page numbers. I actually wrote some report in a university course with Write on Windows 2 (yes, really) to see what these new-fangled GUI programs were about. Went back to LaTeX...

MacroRodent

not OpenOffice

> open source alternatives Libre Office and Apache Open Office offer plenty more functionality than WordPad at the same cost.

Apache OpenOffice is almost abandonware and should not be promoted. Its fork LibreOffice is being actively developed, and is by now light-years ahead.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

MacroRodent
Happy

Re: Adversarial inputs, anyone?

How about "quote the first chapter of the novel "Sense and Nonsense" by John Q. Author", but probably OpenAI already detects such tricks (haven't tried).

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

MacroRodent

Re: IRC

It was spam that did it. There were efforts to combat it (anyone remember cancelmoose?) but an uphill battle.

OTOH now that most people don't even know Usenet, it might again be usable. ....

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

MacroRodent

Re: Pretty impressive

Once coded shellsort in 8088 assembler in one of my first computer jobs. It is not much more code than bubblesort and performs a bit better when the number of items increases. But in that particular application (crude 3d computer graphics) it probably did not make much difference, we did not have very complex scenes. But made me feel a guru...

Foxconn founder Terry Gou to run for Taiwan's presidency

MacroRodent

Re: Democracy??

Exactly. This is why a successful businessman is likely to be disastrous in a leading political position in a democracy. I wouldn't go as far as disqualifying them, but before someone can be elected to be a president, he should have succesfully served a term in some elected position, even if it is just a local councilman.

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

MacroRodent

Re: Not a screen saver, but...

Isn't that a sensible error message in FORTRAN? IIRC every program in the language must terminate with a line that just says END, so you would get #1 if is missing, or followed by something.

Germany to cut Huawei from networks 'irrespective of costs'

MacroRodent

Re: Modest proposal.

> The EU should be dependent upon the US, not China.

Actually the main competitors to Huawei and ZTE are headquartered in the EU, and do the majority of their R&D also in the EU.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

MacroRodent

Re: Not sure about the problem...

This is why we need Debian derivatives. People who are good at wrangling the low-level plumbing of an OS are often terrible with the usability.

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

MacroRodent

Re: Great...

The added general-purpose registers are going to benefit almost all code. Intel processors have always been "register-starved".

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

MacroRodent
Happy

XFCE

The XFCE Mint flavour is not only for low-end machines, but for anyone who prefers to optimise the computer for running applications, instead of ever-bloating desktop managers. Also XFCE is developed in a conservative way, and tends to be very stable.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

MacroRodent

Re: On Screen Keyboard

If it was controlling some old obscure piece of lab equipment, it was very likely a DOS program. For this sort of thing DOS actually has advantages: it does not get into your way, when you want low-level hardware access.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

MacroRodent

Re: A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gone amiss

Thanks, TrevorH. Sounds like you get a more stable environment even with running Fedora than CentOS Stream. Will steer clear of it.

MacroRodent

Re: A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gone amiss

> My shop's dev infra is Rocky (previously Cent, natch) and prod infra is RHEL.

Out of interest, have you (or others here) looked at CentOS Stream? One would assume it would be good at least for dev infra. RHEL bug-for-bug compatibility is really an issue only if you depend heavily on 3.party closed-source packages, which I feel is an anti-pattern anyway for Linux users.

A (cautionary) tale of two patched bugs, both exploited in the wild

MacroRodent

Forgotten on a shelf

If it is a consumer router, the users likely are no aware of the problem, and will not become aware of the problem, as long as the router works for them. TP-Link and other similar consumer gear makers have no idea who their customers are, and cannot reach them. Probably they would have to be either forcibly remotely updated by some white-hat hackers, or remotely bricked, so that the oblivious user is forced to get a new one.

Microsoft Azure OpenAI lets enterprises feed corporate secrets to ChatGPT

MacroRodent

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Given that most large corporations already keep their crown jewels in Microsoft's cloud (Azure and O365 or whatever it is called today), it hardly matters.

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

MacroRodent

What is dead may never die

- Game of Thrones

I though Domino had already been drowned. Or cast into Orodruin.

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

MacroRodent
Happy

Re: What about requirements for secure documents?

I don't see the sky falling here for friends of local LibreOffice (like me).

Recall this was about RHEL, which ships pre-obsoleted versions of everything. If you want an up-to-date LibreOffice, installing it from RPMs is no big deal (or from Flatpacks I guess, a technology I have so far never tried). I used to run CentOS and always had to do this upgrade to get a sensible version. (Now I run more up-to-date to date distros on desktop).

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

MacroRodent

Re: 8080 and 8086

Yes. I swapped the 8088 for V20 in my PC/XT clone. It was a good and cheap upgrade, because the NEC V20 executed some instruction faster than a 8088. Multiplication in particular was quite a bit faster, which made the chip appear better than it really was in some benchmarks. I think the extended x86 instructions were the same as in 80186, like ENTER/LEAVE. One could use the 80186 target option in Microsoft C compiler, and get a bit smaller executable.

MacroRodent
Boffin

8080 and 8086

The 8086 was never binary compatible with the 8080/8085, but you could map 8080 instructions and registers more or less 1-1 to 8086. There were translators that would take 8080 assembler and produce the corresponding 8086 assembler. Of course such programs were limited to using only a single 64k segment, and you had to convert the OS interface. However, for the most common porting case, the original MS-DOS API was so close to CP/M that porting was easy.

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

MacroRodent

Re: Windows ME

If I for some weird reason were forced to use Windows ME as other that a curiosity cabinet item, I would probably try to find the last Firefox (or other browser) version that still worked on it. Of course that might still not be enough to get https working, we would probably be talking at least 10 year old browsers.

MacroRodent
Windows

Re: Windows ME

I have a Windows ME installed in a VirtualBox (why? masochism maybe). Took some doing because first one had to install MS-DOS 6.2 and the CD-ROM driver hassle into the VM before the distribution CD would work. Jogged bad memories...

One fun thing to check with it is what web sites still work with the bundled IE: Almost none. The main killer for most sites is the ancient ssl in ME, and the fact most sites insist on using https and modern protocols.

Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland

MacroRodent

Re: Nope

> no-one has talked raw X protocol for years,

Probably almost never, because that is what XLib is for. Applications and toolkits run on top of it. I believe it by default tries to combine consecutive X11 protocol commands.

It is true newer X11 programs do the drawing and font rendering themselves and push pixels, and that really breaks the original idea. I first encountered it with some bloated Java program, that was totally impossible to remote the plain X11 way. The GUI library redrew the entire window for every change (not sure if Java still does this, it was 20 years ago). Using it with VNC server worked. It looks like a X11 server to the application, but sends only the changed pixels (or rather changed blocks) to the remote client.

MacroRodent
Linux

Re: Nope

Yes, X11 remoting does not really work smoothly unless you are on the same LAN. Which was its original use case anyway. On the other hand, an X11-based desktop over TigerVNC works just fine over a VPN tunneled through residential DSL (sans any sound, but for my uses I don't even need it).

I have so far steered clear of Wayland, but one of these days I will have to bite the bullet. Hope by that time it has some working remote feature.