Tuesday, September 03

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Daily News Stuff 3 September 2024

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Disclaimer: I'm holding out for five-and-a-half gig/

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:56 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I've watched Rust off and on with some degree of foreboding. I could tell just from the rhetoric of the language designers that it was going to be the programming equivalent of a Maoist humiliation ritual. One of the most stable and secure operating systems in the world was apparently bashed together by "cowboy coders", whose every keyboard stroke was "unsafe". Tantrums?! It sounds a lot like Boeing's remarks about their "highly talented assholes" that they needed to put in their place.
Why do we let these human toothaches insult productive men, their craft, their skills, and their way of working? What do you think an industrial electrician would tell you if you took away his wire-strippers, and demanded that he do his job on his knees, with tweezers, and that he wire the site with yarn? Is he not being a team player when he gives you the finger and no amount of money could induce him to put up with it? Make no mistake, the things that have been done to programmers, the micromanagement, the agile Taylorism, and these byzantine straightjackets are an *insult*. In more civilized times, we dealt with insults with pistols and swords.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 09:47 PM (hRoyQ)

2 Made the usual stupid mistake: read the comments. The ones that sound like they come from people with souls are all aggressively downvoted. One of *those* places. The entire internet has become one of *those* places. The 90s, the cathedral and the bazaar, etc lead me to expect a different kind of person in the "tech" industry.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:14 PM (hRoyQ)

3 @madrocketsci the safetyism nannies always want to wrap you up in bubble-wrap so tightly you can't move, to make you "safe".  It's like they think "With Folded Hands" was a how-to guide, not a warning.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:42 PM (MItL9)

4 5Gb Ethernet....and 27 power stages?  Why not put some gold plating on there as well.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:44 PM (MItL9)

5 Panther Lake has a 16-core + 12 Xe core chip at 25W and a 16-core + no Xe core (?) chip at 45W.  Wow, I bet those will be record-setting performance machines.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:46 PM (MItL9)

6 "Bug" feels like a weird way to describe "a feature someone had to spend time to add into the system, that we didn't actually want there."
It's kind of like how Google Search occasionally "accidentally" gets code added to it that blocks search results they don't like, like any inconvenient-to-Democrats news about Trump.  "Someone getting caught adding a feature users despise" isn't a _bug_; it's closer to a Kinsley gaffe.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 03 2024 10:49 PM (MItL9)

7 I checked articles last night on register to audit the quality there. 

One, I think the big government push for 'convert everything to memory safe languages' is ill advised.  It is part of the wider effort by totalitarian academics and government bureaucrats to pretend they aren't making security worse. 

Second, Linux kernel is probably the last place to demonstrate that sort of project, so of course there were people eager to push it early. 

Thirdly, where the cult of Rust, Microsoft, and the US and EU central governments are concerned, they can take 'convert it to Rust because of vague government statemetns', and go frustrate themselves with it.  If they want more code in memory safe languages, they can make a better language.  Okay, Rust's problem is probably mostly the cult, and having the cult develop a new 'improved' language is going to get more cult. 

Now, learning C/C++ is probably a real issue, given that it does not seem that the demand for those languages will go away.  There are add ons that test/reject compilation for more stringent cases for those, but not obvious/intuitive for learners.  (I _may_ just be too early in my own reading on that stuff, and if I were a little deeper, everything would be clear.)

I think the government suggestions on cyber security are mostly a way to make things worse. 

I thought "Rust fans should write a kernel entirely in it" was good advice.

I feel pretty strongly that Microsoft can go frustrate itself, as well, on the recall/11/other points I am salty about.

Register also had an article on the 11/10 market share situation.  For a linux focused place I would forgive the oversight, but some companies need specific packages, that are not supported for 11 yet. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 01:03 AM (rcPLc)

8 Let's look at the last time a language was mandated: 
Ada was mandated for all government computer requirements in 1991 by bean-counters in the US DOD. The compilers at that time were clunky at best. Despite the language having been designed to run on embedded systems and for real-time applications, it would only do so if you turned off most of the protection features. At that point, you might as well be coding in FORTRAN or JOVIAL. Many exemptions were given, and by 1997, the DOD moved on to the "next big thing," COTS software, which came with its own set of problems.
Here we go again. One thing you can count on is that bean-counters never learn. (No, I'm not bitter. Why do you ask?)

Posted by: John Donigan at Wednesday, September 04 2024 03:16 AM (VAiJm)

9 In fairness, 1991 is 33 years ago. I think that maybe the intersection of people who know anything about the Ada requirement then, and are involved in the current government decisions now, might be zero. Knowing anything about technical policy previously might be the opposite of what the decision makers are selected for.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 04 2024 04:52 AM (rcPLc)

10 Re: what's inside an SSD. I unscrewed the case of my dead 1 Tb laptop drive (barely 2 years old! Feh!) and it was mostly empty. The actual circuit board, including connectors, was 1.5" x 2" with only two major chips on it.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, September 05 2024 08:48 AM (nk1Z+)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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