Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Semicolons and curly braces, forever.

Hmm. Learning how dd works by trial and error sounds interesting.

Assuming the government wants to check your numbers, they have to generate your tax return anyway. Why not do it before the due date and share the answer with you?

If there is a use-case for 3 people to have Excel then why wouldn't you treat that the same way as 3 people who use some other obscure app that only exists in Windows flavour?

Re: Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities?

At the clock speeds we're talking about, I doubt you could manage 2020 levels of performance without speculative execution.

Re: Totally OT question

I think "vanilla" might be a fair translation. I've never heard it used to mean "actively bad" but your basic, entry-level thingy is never very good, so there is scope for confusion on that point.

Re: Rolling rolling rolling ... rawhide

Probably all true, but it doesn't help you. The central problem for ia64, known at the time and still unsolved, is that real-world code is gnarly. It has data depencies every half dozen instructions and branches every couple of dozen.

You could have an infinite number of execution units and feed the entire program to the CPU in one truly epic instruction, and you still wouldn't have any more parallelism than a modern out-of-order CPU.

It's worse. CreateProcess actually lets you feed two strings, one for the launched app and one for the arguments, but for various reasons I (and possibly others) have long considered that one should leave the first string empty and put the executable as the first "argument".

This is far from obvious, but certainly plays more nicely if the program being launched expects argv[0] to be the program name, which many command-line programs do.

Re: 3.5 KB / sec

At roughly 10MB/hour, 2GB/week, and some heuristics about memory layout, a few months would perhaps be enough to let you examine your cloud provider's host's kernel memory. Rich pickings there and an embarrasingly parallel attack strategy so I assume it has already been done.

Re: "They Said"

1375 is, in fact, within the date range usually described as "Middle English", known to squillions of school-children through being force-fed Chaucer as part of their "English" curriculum. Singular 'they' is, therefore, arguably older than English. Not quite as old as 'it', however, since that appears to have been invented in the 1100s as a way of avoiding being gender-specific for inanimate objects. Using 'it' to avoid mis-genering nouns is, of course, medieval woke shit and therefore OK.

Re: The pot calling the kettle black

There is radio, for now, but the price of a broadcasting licence presumes that the audience are humans, who might go on to buy a copy so that they can choose when to listen. If the audience now includes AIs that will only ever listen once to derive the full effect, I expect the cost of a broadcasting licence to (massively) increase to reflect that.

Re: It's déjà vu all over again

This move appears to be timed to coincide with MS actually withdrawing from the market (of operating systems that run on the computer you already own) so it is hard to imagine a repeat of those events in this case.

Re: just give common knowledge (without any real data)

But isn't Android based on Linux which is written in C? Comparisons of this nature are complicated but C is a *very* different beast from C++ in just about every respect other than its lexical structure.

"Making predictions half a millennium into the future is a good idea. Nobody's going to call you on it if you're wrong."

Not true. Nostradamus was making predictions just under 500 years ago and people are always dissing the guy!

Re: A real loss.

Surely one man's locked boot loader is another man's secure device, at least in the embedded space where it isn't reasonable to ask the (absent) user to type in a cryptokey (on an absent keyboard) during the boot process.

Re: gog/linux

If you are considering games, I think there is quite a difference between a VM and bare metal.

If the lower chiplets are memory, they will be basically idle most of the time and could be designed to trade some capacity in exchange for a ridiculously low leakage current. The power per unit area might not be much higher than today.

Re: AI Feng Shui Expert

For those who don't want to risk it, a "I’m a psychic medium on Medium. •BA in Psychology •Substitute teacher •Lover of pink" is trying to sell small lumps of rock to people who have larger lumps of inanimate matter between their ears. Fairly harmless, as these things go.

Re: Is that the end of it all?

I don't think they can be held liable for the actions of another adult. Their background does, however, completely nail any idea that their son couldn't be expected to understand the consequences of his actions. He appears to have taken several billion dollars of other people's money and just spent it on himself and his friends with no realistic prospect of ever being able to pay it back. The rest of us need to be protected from people like that.

Re: Do they work?

I'm asking about the fair number of articles I've read on this site in recent years about how various ad-blockers have changed policy to allow "good ads" and how Google's changes to how their plug-ins work have led some ad-blocker authors to claim that it stops them from effectively filtering content. I assumed that this was common knowledge among the readership here, but based on the downvote pile-on perhaps that isn't the case.

I think you are assuming I have exactly one phone.

Re: "Just carry on with the weekly mass murders"

Almost certainly, but why is it only the US that has this problem? Do other countries not have criminals, or do they not have illegal guns, or it is something else they don't have?

Re: The only way to make it work is a jump start (jump over the ocean)

"It's an open secret that US Aircraft Carriers are no longer safe operating in those waters due to advances in drone and missile swarms."

Oh sure. Try taking out a US carrier sometime. No need to tell us how you got on. We'll probably be able to hear Uncle Sam's reply from just about anywhere on the globe.

Why the hell would that embedded system be running an OS that you even /could/ install Office on?

Re: "They have that kind of money"

For the price of a Ferrari, would it grey?

Re: One for the how not to text books

Surely incompetence is exactly what leads to a pattern of behaviour? Or did you believe them when they said "Lessons will be learned."?

Nah. If they wanted to play that game they'd just buy Montserrat. (Population under 5000. GDP around $60m. Country code .ms.)

Re: Confused

Thunderbird can talk to exchange using a paid-for add-in. I used to use it but then my Exchange stopped serving anything except trusted clients and that didn't include "thunderbird on a linux box outside the usual domain". A fair admin policy decision, but not a technical limitation. A friendly Exchange admin might even enable the IMAP support, in which case no add-in is required. Again, a policy decision rather than a technical limitation.

Perhaps if MS really screw up Outlook, Exchange admins might be irritated in their own daily usage and be open to the idea of facilitating broader access.

Re: Papering over the cracks

Yeah, but they'll be papering over those cracks at machine speed now.

Re: 30 years later...

I think you are confusing two things. Win3 could run in "real mode" where it did indeed do all that shuffling. It was a fantastic overlay manager and ran quite happily on an actual 8088. Sane users ran in "386-enhanced" mode where the windows kernel was a protected mode OS moving segments by fiddling with descriptors.

Then of course there wasthe third thing, where DOS device drivers were "supported" by running them in the first VM and redirecting all device I/O from other VMs into the first one so the poor little DOS driver never had to worry about being "instanced".

Impressive, in a depressing way, that it ever worked.

Re: simple.

I don't know how you are defining "national infrastructure", but I'm fairly sure that setting fire to telecomms kit is "criminal damage" and already punishable on those grounds. All you have to do is catch the criminals.