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User: Richard+W.M.+Jones

Richard+W.M.+Jones's activity in the archive.

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  1. Not that anyone has talked about in public, and I've been following RISC-V for a long while.

  2. I haven't looked but probably all you get is the layouts

    Pro-tip: Look at what you're posting about before posting such nonsense.

  3. I've been working for a couple of years on Fedora and Linux on RISC-V and the "Seeking alpha" article is the strangest thing. The RISC-V Foundation offers BSD-licensed specs and multiple CPU designs (and a lot more besides). WD, Google, and many more are members. But they are not in any real sense "joining forces to develop a new open-source chip design". The design and chips are already out there, you can make your own FPGA or (if you're very rich) ASIC and have been able to for years. WD are going to switch all their hard drives to RISC-V soon. Google are likely interested because it could be used for their TPUs of their own design. "Joining forces" just means the companies subscribed to the Foundation for a very nominal fee, back-of-the-sofa loose change for these companies.

  4. Re:Sooo... on Qualcomm Eyes Intel With Centriq 2400 Arm Server Chip (eweek.com) · · Score: 2

    These run KVM and Xen out of the box. I've been using this chip and its predecessor (Hawker) for a while and they are very nice indeed. It is far from being a "re-purposed" mobile chip (although of course Qualcomm do make buckets of those). They've been developing this as a server-specific chip for several years (4 years I believe from reading another press release).

  5. Re:KVM on Interviews: Ask Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst A Question (redhat.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat on virtualization)

    Red Hat and Fedora have a strict "upstream first" policy. We also have a large team working on KVM and qemu. A natural consequence of this is that we implement many features and fix many bugs in KVM/qemu, and these go upstream, and every other distribution benefits. This is great for open source. But I think your question is How is it good for Red Hat? since your implication is you can free ride on Red Hat's efforts.

    There are three cases where you might benefit buying RHEL: Firstly if you call support with a serious bug, then eventually it'll get escalated likely to the person who actually wrote the original code. Secondly RHEL subscribers influence the future development direction (of course, the larger ones have a bit more influence). We really care about how our customers are using the tools. Third, you're probably not just using a single KVM host, you might want to try out OpenStack or oVirt, and we have systems architects who help customers with these larger deployments - the same architects who previously worked with large telco subscribers using OpenStack or huge bank deployments of oVirt, so they have loads of real world experience.

    However if you're happy to free-ride, then us developers are happy too, because at the end of the day we really care about Free software.

  6. Re:Volunteers? on Russian Troops Traced To Ukrainian Battlefields Through Social Media · · Score: 1

    Work makes me take my laptop when I go on vacation.

  7. A lot of screwed up stuff in this story ... on Robbery Suspect Tracked By GPS and Killed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People are becoming addicted to prescription painkillers. They cannot just buy these products. Therefore they (or others) have to rob them. Men worry about "erectile disfunction" because of advertising. Robbers steal the same products that are advertised for this. Guns are widely available in the US. Guns are used to commit these robberies. Police shoot the suspect because he's carrying a gun.

    The decoy pill bottle is just a symptom in all this.

  8. Re:sensationalism? on Google Wants Patent On Splitting Restaurant Bills · · Score: 1

    The system described is identical to the one we used to use in our shared house to settle bills. We even did it on a computer, so they don't get to use the "but it's on a computer so it's complete different!" defence.

  9. Re:careful what you wish for on Google Threatens French Media Ban · · Score: 1

    This just means that booksellers are getting a hidden subsidy from French readers. Sure, you can make anything a success if you have the government enforcing your rent-seeking behaviour. But I wonder if the customers would be happy if it was laid out to them that this policy directly costs them a hidden X euros a year.

    Rich.

  10. Re:Who pays for the tile servers? on Wikipedia Mobile Apps Switch To OpenStreetMap · · Score: 1

    Eventually I'll just replicate the entire database on my N terabyte USB key. Really, this one isn't a problem.

  11. Fedora can do this already on Windows 8 To Natively Support ISO and VHD Mounting · · Score: 2

    This is going to be a feature in Fedora 16 (it already works in earlier versions of Fedora, we're just polishing it). More screenshots.

    You can also mount and modify virtual machines securely (including Windows VMs and VHDs), using libguestfs and guestmount.

    Rich.

  12. Re:Pulse Audio on Lennart Poettering: BSD Isn't Relevant Anymore · · Score: 2, Informative

    PulseAudio sucks, but systemd is reasonable stuff. It's like upstart (but done right) combined with inetd.

    Unlike what another reply says, systemd does not require changes to daemons.

    Rich.

  13. Re:...opaque language is the norm. on If You're Working For Stock, Read the Fine Print · · Score: 1

    The two times I've bought houses, you bet I read every single word of every document, even the ones I didn't have to sign. Not doing so is just laziness and stupidity when you're making such an enormous purchase.

    Rich.

  14. Re:Things we've lost on Computer De-Evolution: Awesome Features We've Lost · · Score: 1

    Safe fast languages:

    SML, OCaml and some of the other functional languages. Usually within a few % of the speed of C, and far safer.

    However you're absolutely right in your list, and it's very unfortunate that programmers have forgotten or never even knew about these things.

    Rich.

  15. On TV ... on Britain's Oldest Working Television For Sale · · Score: 2

    If you track down The Secret Life of Machines Series 1, The Television Set you can see this sort of set (perhaps even this very set) being demonstrated.

    AIUI you wouldn't want to turn this on for very long, or at least not without a fire extinguisher handy. Some of the electronics (capacitors I think?) are made of paper and after all this time have dried out and are prone to catching fire.

    Rich.

  16. Re:talking about data how safe are the data center on Ask Slashdot: How Prepared Are You For a Major Emergency? · · Score: 1

    My experience is in data centres that I've seen and visited, not in power supplies. Show us a significant data centre that promises to run the whole thing from diesel generators.

    Rich.

  17. Re:talking about data how safe are the data center on Ask Slashdot: How Prepared Are You For a Major Emergency? · · Score: 1

    From my experience, I've seen data centres that have two supposedly redundant power supplies (usually this just means two paths into the data centre from the same supplier).

    It seems unlikely/improbable to me that a data centre could be supplied from local diesel generators. The power consumption is just far too great. So your answer is "not safe at all".

    Rich.

  18. Re:Wouldn't play on The Saturn Fly-By · · Score: 1

    Has anyone got this in an actual open format? I don't use flash.

  19. Re:/dev/disk/by-id/ on Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme · · Score: 1

    You can change the underlying disks - we do this for virt-v2v.

    Fixing /dev/disk stuff is just one of the things that makes conversions harder than they should be.

    RAID/md is not used much by virtual machines (it's done on the host instead) so I can't comment on what problem you had.

    Rich.

  20. Re:/dev/disk/by-id/ on Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme · · Score: 1

    Please don't use /dev/disk/by-id. SUSE uses this and it breaks virtualization.

    You cannot change the underlying disks (eg. to do migration or V2V) without the guest becoming unbootable.

    Use filesystem UUIDs instead. These survive all sorts of migrations and conversions intact, and are even useful in the non-virtual case -- eg. if you swap SATA disks around.

    Rich.

  21. Re:Space-shifting "service" is the issue on Japanese Supreme Court Rules TV Forwarding Illegal · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually had a friend who worked in sales selling one of these services.

    The way it works is this:

    The company hires a room in Tokyo and fills it top to bottom with (legally purchased) decoder boxes. The output from these is sent over the internet to paying customers in foreign countries -- in the UK in the case of my friend. They get access to these "proxied" services, the idea being that they can watch Japanese TV programs from the UK without needing all the special satellite equipment.

    The (stupid) copyright issue is down to regional licensing of TV programs and films, which is why the established broadcasters hate these services and try to portray them as criminal / pirates when of course they are no such thing.

    Anyway, hope this explains a bit more what's going on here. I see it's business as usual for openness and transparency in Japanese politics/law ...

    Rich.

  22. Re:A Bit Left Off on NASA Pitches Heavy Lift Vehicle To Congress · · Score: 1

    Possibly a stupid idea, but why don't they make the SRB casing by wrapping layers of some rolled metal instead? You can roll out some metals basically indefinitely, and then you roll these up around the fuel to the thickness required.

    Rich.

  23. Re:Quite right on The Clock Is Ticking On Encryption · · Score: 1

    I knew it, yet I didn't know it.

  24. Re:Hague Convention? on US Army Unveils 'Revolutionary' $35,000 Rifle · · Score: 1

    Sorry, my mistake, I meant the St Petersburg Declaration.

    "The Great Powers agreed to renounce, in case of war among themselves, the use of any explosive projectile of less weight than 400 grams (14 ounces avoirdupois) or one charged with fulminating or inflammable substances."

    It's possible that these projectiles are over 400g in weight though.

    Rich.

  25. Hague Convention? on US Army Unveils 'Revolutionary' $35,000 Rifle · · Score: 1

    I know the US doesn't care about such things any more, but don't these violate the Hague Convention on "exploding bullets"?