* Posts by gnasher729

2110 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Oct 2014

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: some of those being asked back were apparently laid off by mistake

If I had any passwords I’d destroy them to make sure I can’t be accused of doing or planning anything naughty.

(Actually, I handed over computers and backups with all passwords changed to 1234. And for one account that hadn’t been used and nobody knew a password, there was 2FA connected to my private phone, so when they recovered that account, they had to call me and I read the 2FA code over the phone to them).

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: re: buying it out to shut it down

He needs to get these billions back. Any suggestions how?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: It’s toxic and it got nasty during the pandemic

In the UK, as long as numbers were published, there were the same number of Covid deaths amongst the 10 percent unvaccinated and the 90% vaccinated.

In other words, your risk of death was nine times higher with vaccine.

Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

gnasher729 Silver badge

You are right to post anonymously.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Bye bye ARM

You realise that you are hating on ARM because of some totally unsubstantiated claims by a company who is in court with ARM right now? Didn't it occur to you that just because Qualcomm makes some outrageous claims it doesn't matter that these claims are true? And maybe you should learn the meaning of the word anti-competitive?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Apple has a perpetual, fully paid, architectural license. They can do anything they want with their ARM chips without paying ARM another penny. They have no reason to switch to risc-v until someone builds risc-v that beats silicone. And that’s far far off.

Open source's totally non-secret weapon big tech dares not use: Staying relevant

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Seems like a spurious argument

You didn’t really read what I wrote. You say “you can stick a fork in it”. No, 99.99% of people can’t. I had a look at a few packages. OpenSSL I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. zsh or cmake need moving into this decade. I _could_ develop open source stuff, but I’m not going to. It doesn’t pay the bills. Not an arbitrary package that loses support.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Seems like a spurious argument

I make a living writing software. If a FOSS project stops, I’m not going to rescue it because I won’t make money. My wife loves me making money, because she can buy things. Simple as that. Maybe when I retire.

So “you can fix open source, you can’t fix closed source” is not very much of an argument.

For its big comeback, Intel needs to spend money – and it's making less and less of it

gnasher729 Silver badge

Lucky with Apple

Apple is right now building chips that kill Intel. Macs were probably 8 percent of intel’s chips, and they didn’t buy any celerons, switching to arm will have hurt Intel. Where Intel is lucky is that Apple wants to keep all these chips to themselves. I don’t know how easy it is to switch from Intel windows to arm windows, but if apple sold to pc makers that would be disaster for Intel.

Party like it's 2014, if you can – that's the last time smartphone sales were this low

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: "bad economic indicator"?

The manufacturer could reduce the clock speed when the battery is getting weak to keep the phone working for longer. Don’t you think that would be an excellent idea?

Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because 'we have no choice'

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: iNnovation™

Not sure what you are talking about, but my two year old iPhone charges at about 19 Watt with an Anker USB A charger and USB-A to lightning cable. And at 30 Watt with USB-C to lightning cable. All this rubbish does is make sure that when either my wife or I gets their next iPhone we need two cables to charge at maximum speed. And I have a 4xUSB-A plus 1xUSB-C charger.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

gnasher729 Silver badge

Supporting 80486 takes developer time. And what if a change in the kernel would require a 486 change - is there anyone who will test it? Or even just try it out? So what is 486 support worth if it hasn't even been tried to work? I think Google is following Apple with a long delay dropping support for 32 bit ARM. (And Apple has even removed any ability to. run 32 bit ARM code from all its processors).

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I don't mind PDFs

PDF invoices: easily created, and hard to modify. PDF cvs: the same

Bias toward office staff will cost you: Your WFH crew could walk, say execs

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Astounded......Yup......Really astounded!!!

Who says bus drivers can’t work from home? At least one poster on some site claimed their dad was a bus driver who parked his bus besides their home.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Bad design

Mine has two engine states: "Engine running" and "engine officially running". The engine stops at traffic lights and comes on again when you drive. When stopped, the engine isn't running but it is "officially running". When you park the car, the engine will stop but it's still officially running, so you have to press to Start/Stop button to stop it officially, or it might turn itself on again.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Press the button

In ancient times, I came to a place that had two Apple computers (before Mac), with monitors stood on them. Since the cables were quite long, some idiot had put the monitor connected to the left computer onto the right computer and the other way round. I turned out the computer on the left and the monitor on the left - no picture. Took me a while to figure out, because that wasn't the stupidity I expected.

Bitcoin energy consumption a feature, not a bug, says crypto-miner

gnasher729 Silver badge

Public flogging

That and displaying him in the stocks would be appropriate punishment for him.

Uber, Lyft stock decimated as US aims to classify gig workers as staff

gnasher729 Silver badge

Downvotes from Liz Truss and her mate, I assume?

gnasher729 Silver badge

An important part of working as a contractor is that you make more money in exchange for your added risk, no holiday pay, no benefits etc. If that is not there, then the company isn’t hiring contractors, they are just exploiting people.

Linus Torvalds's faulty memory (RAM, not wetware) slows kernel development

gnasher729 Silver badge

So in this case an unremovable alert “memory chip broken” would have been all he needed.

Haven’t had this problem in 30 years. Before that, as a software developer: App crashed if the largest source file was compiled on one particular machine in the afternoon. After that: 4 out of 7 machines with third party RAM crashed quite reliably if you went for a coffee and stayed away for more than 15 minutes.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Other way round

A three and a half inch disk isn’t three and a half inch. For starters, it’s not square. It is just the correct size to fit into a three and a half inch disk drive.

gnasher729 Silver badge

I’m told new Macs have a feature where they calll the fire department if they detect a soldering iron turned on within ten meters :-)

Intel accidentally leaked its 34-core Raptor Lake chip. What do the dies tell us?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Just saying: 34 cores is perfect if you want to ship 32 cores and want to accept chips with one or two broken cores. Apple seems to have enough yield so they get away with putting chips with fewer cores into cheaper models.

Those screws on the Apple Watch Ultra are a red herring

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Muppets

This watch is supposed to be _used_ at 40m depth. Like telling you the depth, dive time etc.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Muppets

It's not just 100m rated (which is a rather meaningless number). It is actually supposed to work at 40m depth; that's a totally different calibre.

Charter won't pay out $7b after cable installer murdered woman. Just $1b instead

gnasher729 Silver badge

27 million for getting murdered by a sadistic cop looks cheap suddenly.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

gnasher729 Silver badge

Tax deductible

I suppose if a small business buys software from the App Store, it’s easily tax deductible. With a donation it might be a lot more difficult.

And there is the “if it doesn’t cost then it’s no good” brigade. You should have a “reassuringly expensive” £119.99 version for them.

What happens when cancel culture meets Adolf Hitler pareidolia? Amazon decides it needs a new app icon

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: I guess sometimes you just can't win.

The problem is that once you’re told it looks like Hitler, suddenly it does.

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: time to sell my floppy disk stock?

Russians and typewriters - easily hacked if any microphone is nearby. (At least I wouldn’t be surprised).

gnasher729 Silver badge

I just had to check on Amazon. 3.5” disk drive = £26, 20 disks = £22. I can remember vaguely paying less for floppy disks. I thought they would be more expensive.

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

gnasher729 Silver badge

Does that mean Americans in Texas can freely post about their government and its sexual relations with cows, underage girls and boys, drug habits and so on?

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: She was a good one

Taking Germany as an example, which has a President: The President should be someone who is highly regarded by all the parties, with a huge amount of personal integrity.

Johnson is highly regarded by maybe 40% of one party, and his personal integrity is about 0. He would have absolutely zero chance.

He is also supposed to represent the country. Any country that wants to be represented by a bumbling incompetent, to put it into the politest terms possible? Again, zero chance.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: PO also said they have been told not to pulp or otherwise "waste" the existing stick of stamps

In some countries it is totally unacceptable to plan for the death of the head of state. I bought a book about localisation, and one company shipping to Japan made the public holiday for “birthday of the emperor” editable for a case like this one. Not acceptable. The only acceptable solution is to release a software upgrade when needed.

Elon Musk claims SpaceX was in talks with Apple on iPhone 14 satellite services

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Isn't it obvious?

What I read it’s not “one cruise ship company partnered with star link” but star link offering the complete hardware so a cruise ship can offer satellite internet to its passengers, for about $30,000 per ship. That’s one base station plus the hardware to distribute it across a 300 meter ship, 60 meters high, with lots and lots and lots of very thick steel.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Colin Wilson 2 - Apple have got this right!

In this case literally yes. I assume the phone knows where satellites are at any time and can give you on screen instructions how to point in the right direction.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Only marginally useful

People just have no imagination. This is the perfect tool for stupid tourists who try to climb mountains with zero experience and zero clue and get themselves into trouble. Useless for people falling off the top of Mount Everest.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Only marginally useful

I think the majority of people getting into trouble on mountains are clueless people encountering a bit of fog or rain/snow without protective clothing. Which can be lethal without help.

Apple Silicon takes a back seat at iPhone-heavy launch event

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Missing

Same as some Amazon ebook readers that I remember. 1Hz refresh means you can see the screen, but there is very little energy used to upgrade it. Reading eBooks at 120Hz refresh seems a bit pointless,

Here's how 5 mobile banking apps put 300,000 users' digital fingerprints at risk

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Where did these fingerprints come from?

This is close enough. In reality, the application stores some encrypted data in the keychain and uses fingerprint or Face ID to decrypt it - of course you can just encrypt “yes” or “no”.

And possible responses are: “Error, phone doesn’t support finger print”, “Error, phone is not currently set up for finger print”, “Error, user denied finger print”, or the decoded data.

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: biometric HASHES

I thought on iOS it was actually impossible for an app to get any information about your fingerprint - it can just store some code in the keychain and retrieve it if the user uses their fingerprint. No way to get the actual fingerprint.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Still work in progress

It depends on whether you want to operate on code points and assume different code points are different, or if you want to operate on characters, where the same character can and will be represented in different ways. For example "café" can be four or five code points, but it is four characters, and they should be considered the same.

Software developer cracks Hyundai car security with Google search

gnasher729 Silver badge

There was a case where the RSA private keys in routers had one of their two primes in common. In that case the common factor is calculated as a gcd, and we get the other factor of each key with one division.

And then someone wrote an algorithm that given a billion private keys with primes reused occasionally can find them all in reasonable time.

gnasher729 Silver badge

One company probably 30 years ago managed to use an RSA private key that I cracked with pen and paper. The key was of the form 2^123 - a * 2^60 - b with rather small a and b.

It turned out both primes had been taken from a table from “The Art of Computer Programming”.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

gnasher729 Silver badge

Intel is just lucky that Apple isn't going to sell its ARM chips to anyone else. That gives them a year or two breathing space until AMD squeezes them at the server end and Qualcomm or whoever can do it squeezes them from the other side with ARM processors. Note that on a high level, ARM and x86 are very, very compatible.

Apple might actually sell more CPUs (inside Macs, iPhones and iPads) and probably more cores than Intel.

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: re: call into question its commitment to free speech

They said "The government told us not to host your speech, and we defer to the wisdom of our government." So where did they pretend it was illegal to host the code? Plus, any sane business would not host code that _might_ be illegal to host. They are not going to take risks to host someones code.

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Trailing spaces

MacOS x allows any valid unicode code point in utf-8 format, except nul and slash (on its own drives, network

drives have different rules).

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

gnasher729 Silver badge

Back in the day, I had non-technical relatives (still have) who would never think of stealing, or of not paying someone who creates something for them.

The problem is that since I was the person with the CD recorder and the empty disks they saw _me_ as the creator of music, not the musicians or the record company.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

gnasher729 Silver badge

Re: Examples?

"In Portugal, there's a phrase that's repeated verbatim in about half the job advertisements I see:

Integration into a young and dynamic team

I think it simply means "must be biddable", but it sounds dreadful. And that, no doubt, is the point."

I was told that Portugal has a really bad problem finding anyone who can do a decent IT job. Maybe that's related? Seriously, I have 40 years+ of accumulated bullshit filter. No problem with a "young and dynamic team" if half of them have half my talent.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

gnasher729 Silver badge

So my understanding is that you want to treat it as RAM. Probably your normal RAM becomes L4 cache and you could run your software unchanged. Except you throw your database out and keep your data in RAM. And Word doesn’t save documents anywhere but keeps them in RAM.

Until your app crashes. Then you have to restart it and it needs to be restarted so that it’s fine with all documents and the database in the same place. Not really that difficult. Could be made to work.

But then… what price?

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

gnasher729 Silver badge

Five years ago I put a SanDisk SD card, 256GB, into my MacBook for TimeMachine backups (on the road, no cables, just a tiny bit of card sticking out). It’s backed up my MacBook ever since, five years with no problems ever.

So I suppose the problem is not with the cards but with the OS.