velox_io

All the gear and no idea...

I've redacted this post as I don't want to publicise a gaping hole which renders these measures pointless. You wonder if the security serves a real purpose, or is there just to make people feel safe.

I am quite surprised that they're launching a consumer CPU with 70MB of cache! When most CPUs have ~8MB, I don't think there's ever been such a huge CPU cache jump in history.

Those duel CCXs means the 16 core Ryzen could be ready for release (that's what I have my eye on!). It's funny, going from 12 to 16 cores is basically the i7 6700k in my desktop.

Plus, it's great that Intel is being aggressive by releasing the 9900KS (which is a pretty good GPU for gamers). It's been a while since we've seen any real competition between AMD & Intel.

Of course you would, this is the same reason ASICs have come onto the market.

I'd say the inefficiency is one of the smartest moves in the design of Bitcoin. Not only does it counter Moores law, it also provides a scarcity; the more bitcoins that are mined (so there must be a demand for them), the harder mining becomes (limiting supply) - Adding inflation into the mix.

Had they just dumped 21 million Bitcoins into the market, it would have never taken off, and it would have probably been written off as a Ponzi scheme.

While you may not like the social or environmental impact of Bitcoin, it is hard to deny there is some brilliance in its design (like how the coins become the product of their own transaction logs).

You could say this about mining any other commodity. Modern mining is literally converting fuel into some metal or mineral.

For instance: There's only a finite amount of gold, and until recently (electronics), it had no real applications aside from looking nice. Yet gold has been mined for millennia, historically with slaves (sadly this is still the case in parts of the world) and now with machines. The economic use stems from this, and as gold has always been sort-after, it's desire (value) probably won't change anytime soon. While you can't wear bitcoin, I don't see it disappearing either.

I've had my eye on this. It settled around £3000 for some time. Then lately it became far more active, fluctuating between 3 to £4K and on an upward trend...

I do think media coverage (hype) fueled bitCoin exploding (then imploding). It's not a good thing when EVERYONE starts raving about investments.

I've been in London for five years and don't think I've ever used the printed timetables, the live ones at some bus stops work surprisingly well (and saves me having to whip out my phone to check City Mapper, which started in London).

Something that the article missed is that late buses are compounded. As the delay causes more people to wait, those people getting on delay the bus even further, that's where the adage "wait ages for a bus, then two come at once" stems from. Even if the bus behind it is also delayed, it makes up time as the previous bus has scoped up all passengers. Occationally buses will divert/ terminate to rebalance the timetable.

I was recently in hospital, where the wifi wasn't great so I spent a lot of time looking out the window, and onto a busy junction. During the later part of rush hour buses often arrived together, even saw three of the same bus arrived together (only a couple vehicles separating the last bus) at one point! (like I said, bad wifi) It was staggering seeing so many ambulances arrive during the weekend, they often arrive together as the first ambulance clears a path (like in Die Hard 3).

You also see that on the tube, when people are fighting to get on a train (delaying it further) then the one following a couple of minutes behind is largely empty, it's even a little more pronounced as trains can't leapfrog each other to spread the load.

Such incredibly sad news that he has passed away, I met Robert Virding a few years ago (small group of us went out for a meal). I had hardly heard of Erlang before, followed much more since, plus many of their talks. It's fascinating how physicists design a programming language/ system, especially the treading/ distribution model. I think it was WhatsApp the catapulted Erlang to the limelight (outside of telecoms), it's doubtful that they would have scaled so quickly had WhatsApp been written in anything else.

Rest in Peace Joe, and my condolences to his friends and family.

Sorry, I meant to write crucial (similar word, quite a different meaning..)

I believe the reason for MCAS was because the had to lower and move the engines forward. So at lower power, the forward engines make the plane nose-heavy. When the engines are near full power, the lower engines push the nose up. Compounding the difference in handling compared to the older models.

Here's the safety bulletin Boeing issued after the first crash. Even when you know what you're looking for it's hard to spot: "runaway stabilizer". It does seem they downplayed how serious the failure is, but they couldn't know how common it could be. That raises another question: Other pilots must have experienced the runaway event, but managed to gain control. What happened to those reports?

There will be lessons learnt from these crashes, in a number of fields.

[https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/boeing-nearing-737...]

That's what I was getting at. If the nose is at an extreme angle (or reported to be) and the plane isn't climbing/ or descending - there's something wrong!

Just after takeoff while the plane is still climbing. I'm not sure that helps matters much, as the plane is off the ground and lore's the pilots into a false sense of security as plane's working ok..

Here's the bulletin Boeing issued after the first crash. It's hidden away in the bottom left and not highlighted, so it's easy to miss: "runaway stabilizer". Unfortunately, the brief is more focussed on assuring how safe the planes are, and what counter-measures to take in the event. Rather than what a runaway event looks like. https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/boeing-nearing-737...

I'm just amazed by how poorly this was implemented. Software engineers expect hardware to fail. This wasn't just the work of a newb (or I hope it wasn't). This was planned; both the requirements and the failure modes. Then implemented by another team, and the quality verified by another team, even a 3rd party. There wasn't even a cutoff if it started operating outside it's expected range, surely one of those people would have noticed the shortfalls. This software should have the same level of engineering as other systems/ parts of the plane.

Every phone I've had in the last decade has come with GPS (which includes altitude), giros and even magnetic compasses. So they can work out the angle of attack without the need for additional sensors, or at the very least a backup!

Is this a wider issue with software development in general? My guess is that many businesses are moving away from the waterful model, which can often go overboard with planning (not really a problem in aerospace..). To 'Agile', which I don't think many people truly understand (especially some managers), often sidestepping the planning and documentation to software that appears to work fine, and senior management are overjoyed with the progress and become complacent.

This software wasn't even a crucial feature. It was only needed when high power is applied to the engines (like during takeoff) to stop the nose feeling too light by existing 737 pilots. This wasn't a jet-fighter, which would become unstable without the aid of computers. It's a shame 338 died because of what is effectively a 'schoolboy error'.

I wouldn't say it's the bandwidth limit per se. A bigger problem is latency, cache misses have a bigger impact the faster clock speeds go.

Grace Hopper and her nanoseconds (30cm) of wire, doesn't sound so eccentric these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#Anecdotes

Sadly, the extra bandwidth will come in handy as software developers become evermore slack.

I do agree about parsing text (like json!). It seems crazy to stick to text formats/ protocols when binary would be much faster (it's easy to convert binary to text for debugging purposes, as that's what happens anyway!), we're still not fully utilising http2. (Don't quote me) but I remember hearing somewhere that -10% of computer resources are spent converting between base10 and base2. Have a read of DotNet's Span (reference structs), by not copying values everywhere (and the relieving subsequent GC pressure) it's improved tasks like parsing text by an order of magnitude (often more) - That's something the compiler will be able to do without the developer's effort.

ASCII is underappreciated.

Given the Inverse-square law, your phone and wifi network will probably give you more radiation..

I had some bones scans (plus a couple of CTs the same day, just a bit more ionising radiation) last year. They inject you with Technician 99m and YOU become the gamma/ x-ray source. It's a little concerning when you see the detail and spread of the radiation. If it wasn't a pure Gamma source (and 6hour half-life) it would be lethal!

I forget if it was 70,000 milli or microsieverts (think it was milli? 0.5% increased risk of cancer in my lifetime). Oh, and my bladder looked like a lightbulb.

The new Ryzens are meant to launch with PCIe 4.0 (this summer, I'm due an upgrade!), so effectively...

I'm surprised they don't come with more, especially many of the current ones come with 2-3 x16 slots, AND 2-3 M2s.. Both Intel and AMD have been adding more cores recently. Plus, if you're doing any GPU-based rendering, they're going to simultaneously move data back and forth from NVMe to the GPU's memory. But it grabs a headline and most synthetic benchmarks will only test RAM, graphics and storage in isolation - sneaky!

Hi Patrick,

Before we had M2/U2 NVMe drives, there were quite a few manufacturers making drives that plug straight into the PCIe bus where they could easily access the full 16 lanes, and they still can...

Intel seems to be the only ones making PCIe drives (Octane's are funny; they don't look fast only 2000 MB/s, although they do win on latency and random access). Anyway, there doesn't seem to be much demand for that speed, I guess it's a case that x4 U2/M2 are good enough.

Speaking of which.. I'm am surprised there isn't a similar network interface utilising PCIe with a low overhead protocol the same as NVMe does. Getting towards the point where a small number of machines could share memory and CPU's between machines. I know we have Infiniband but that has always come at quite a cost, mainly in supercomputers.

Yeah, that's why most PCIe M2 top out at around 3500 MB/s, I doubt it will take long to saturate 7 GB/s (or double that in RAID0). Either way, it's a heck of a lot of bandwidth!

I should have been more specific. Yes, the --strictNullChecks switch almost gets you there.. I forget there's also the 'never' type, and '{}', which are very similar to null (I've seen someone use the string null in production). The reason I bring this up is that if you remove null, it removes the need for both of '==' & '===' (could possibly be removed with something like strictEqualityChecks).

Exception handling and null checks are both conditional, so there is the potential to replace checking for null with exceptions. Plus, removing the null checks (is an object still an object when most of its properties are null?) could be fixed with better use of inheritance. And the '?' suffix.

This is not the first language Anders has been involved in developing, I'm sure remember him talking about his dislike for null somewhere (I could be wrong). Typescript is both an abstraction and adds features to Javascript. So TypeScript has the opportunity to remove such idioms. Scala and Java are very different languages despite running the same underneath.

The question at the end of the post was more hypothetical. Could this be done or is the concept of null is so ingrained that it can't be removed? (When Functional programming manages null.) I'm just interested, especially when null is known as the "Billion Dollar Mistake" - that's ignoring inflation.

I was kind of hoping that they would get rid of null or undefined (or both). While I understand that null and undefined are not the same, are both truly needed? Seems like a missed opportunity to make the language cleaner. They seem redundant when you have exception handling, which I think makes the flow of the code easier see.

Could they be removed?

I don't think there's been such powerful organisations since the East India Company.

Mainly to read articles/ ebooks (I take more in that way), but also to proofread what I've written as things still slip through spell check.

I'm not that bothered about speech to text, as products I've tried in the past often end up more cumbersome than the problem they solve. I might try again as the has been an explosion in machine learning recently, so maybe technology has advanced to be more natural & accurate.

Wow, for me it looks like the tops of many of the characters has been rubbed off. These 'fat-bottomed' fonts seem to be a common theme.

I do find it strange that a font designed for readability (such as Consolas -my fav for any text editor), isn't mentioned as a readable font for dyslexics (or why it isn't). Monospacing improves the readability of certain characters (i,l,t) words with this combination of characters (ill, lit, readability) often end up getting very compressed.

As a dyslexic person, this actually makes things worse. I have a hard time reading caps, I believe it's because the characters have the same vertical positioning so there are less visual cues to go on. A similar thing with serif fonts, I understand that the tails are meant to aid readers, but I just find it as additional noise.

Switching that font to lowercase doesn't help much (didn't see the link at the top of the page initially, not until I went back to the page in fact). That font feels like my monitor is badly in need of calibration. I get that they're adding a horizontal rule to aid readers to follow each line, but it just looks weird! Maybe things would be different if I grew up with it. Plus I've put in tonnes of time and effort reading 'normal' fonts.

Pro tips:

-Line spacing greatly helps things (things get cryptic when it's removed).

-Small fonts make things harder to read (right now my browser is at 150%, have a 43" monitor so why not). I generally increase the font 20% (even when I have no eyesight problems).

-Contrast! Bright coloured/ contrasted backgrounds (such as black on red) make make things much harder to reader to read (I left that typo in, brain was still thinking about harder and read (er... did it again here) at the same time)). Feels as though there's too much info coming in simultaneously. Similar with black on white, but not as bad. That could just be an ADD/ ASD thing (there's a surprising amount of crossover) as I literally hate the white from some LED bulbs (10k+) - it's piercing.

-Avoid overly long paragraphs (tend to get a little lost in the wall of text).

Dyslexia is a funny thing, it affects people in different ways to different degrees (a friend of mine is a bank manager, yet he can barely write a text message). It's taken me a while to develop strategies, such as: I read any any [duplicate word] text I write at least three times, yet I still have errors. Often sound words in my head as I write, and some words I constantly get wrong. Such as 'field', have to remember it as 'fI-elD' (hard i at the start) - Kind of ironic as the secondary school I went to had field in its name (luckily it was embossed on my jumper:D) and now I constantly work with databases. At school my literacy was appalling, at college it was embarrassing (with tutor corrections on every line), wasn't on uni/ after that I started to get a handle on things. In my thirties I still feel I'm improving, people often judge intelligence in people's ability to write. I'm sure some of my teachers would bet good money that I'd never be able to touch-type (although I'd be lost without spellcheck).

If anyone knows a text reader that isn't a pain in the a (able to read a paragraph or article, and not follow my cursor as I change applications). I'm all ears! ;)

Thought my TV was playing up (Youtube)

I use it for muscle spasms, when CRPS is bad.

It's quite amazing how much has come to light with THC et al. recently. I vape CBD daily (never smoked, or vaped nicotine). I can't help but feel that the last 100 years has been lost (in the west at least), feels as though it's now being rediscovered.

Doesn't really say if it was brute force or they're using unsalted encryption.

The article didn't really go into detail about how this works within each city.

I am surprised they're scanning each city linearly, even a crude index (such as boxing), or a binary search would greatly improve the lookup time. I guess if the data fits into the cpu cache the order these are scanned doesn't matter so much?

Where's the edit gone? I meant drugs, not drunks (long day).

It's much more likely that those taking such drunks, are at a much higher disposition of developing such complications.

I started taking such a drug again after developing stomach issues. I had a scare a couple of years ago, and it was only by chance that I changed to another GP who was much more attentive, turned out that I was only months away of having a haemorrhage that would have likely been fatal. All from a few years taking a 'safe' anti-inflammatory. Now I won't touch any NSAIDs (which is a shame as I'm in more pain), but it isn't worth the risk of further damage, which was left me as a coeliac (body went after the wrong target).

How often do you read about NSAIDs? No, it's how Fentanyl is killing so many heroin addicts, yet the patches are safely used by millions.

How is this news? I'd be surprised if they didn't.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu

You may find this a fascinating read. It's regarding how SQL Server has it's own threading scheduler to bypass the Windows scheduler. When ran on a machine with HyperThreading enabled it will only use 50% of the CPU, I guess they're going after CPU Cache utilisation.

It's really hard to find a decent article on the subject, here's two of the best I've found. https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4403/understanding-sq... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/th...

It's a shame you can't get a cable to link computers via PCIe (supports cables over 3m[0]). Multiple x16 connections that would lead to some decent bandwidth while being low-latency, without the network overhead or shelling out for high-end switches.

You can skip halfway. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5xvwPa3r7M