Posts by MacroRodent

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

Loongson is really a modified MIPS clone, and MIPS is a clean RISC architecture. Linux and other free OS'es have supported it for a while, so arguable it is rather open, and likely to have less vulnerabilities like the complex Intel architecture, with its decades long trail of backward-compatibility. The interesting question for security is does Loongson have a separate closed system processor with "superpowers", like most Intel and AMD ones do. That is where one would hide backdoors, if there are any.

Porting

About that ">I spent much of 1999-2004 porting software to it, which was a prime waste of time and money. "

I wonder how much of it really was due to Itanium quirks, and how much the general hassle of porting code that has too long assumed "longs" and pointers have the same 32 bit size?

If the latter, then AMD64 would case the same pain, and work on making code 64-bit clean for Itanium is not wasted.

Re: Those Chinese Linux distributions are still Linux, right?

> Instead of GNU, Linus could easily have used the open source 4.4BSD-Lite userland.

IIRC that did not include a usable C compiler targeting 386. The PC BSD versions have always used GNU C, except for shifting towards LLVM in recent years.

The development tools used for 386BSD (which was the first free BSD on the PC) is described here: https://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/porting-unix-to-the-386-language-tools-c/184408529

Re: Fire Upon the Deep

I haven't read the book (definitely will fix that), but if it describes a galactic network, the Usenet style of networking could still make sense, if the bandwidth is limited and/or there are long latencies.

(But I assume the network uses some sort of "ansible" technology to avoid making the latencies centuries long).

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.

Re: "continually upgradable"

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Asimov

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

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.

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. ....

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Great...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.