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#46
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Wolf K wrote:
On 2018-01-18 18:53, Brian Gregory wrote: On 17/01/2018 15:10, Wolf K wrote: On 2018-01-17 08:24, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote: On Wed, 17 Jan 2018 06:28:20 -0500, Paul wrote: PeterC wrote: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm with a warning not to d/l from other sites. That page says it's "written in assembler" ??? LOL. Maybe he inserted a couple of #pragma and 20 lines of assembler or something. I doubt the entire program is assembler. Only a kook would do that (we had such a kook at work). Steve is exactly that sort of kook, but mostly harmless. He's been boasting of writing assembly language Windows apps for 25 years or so, and I've not seen anyone do a disassembly and deny that it's handcrafted. He is a loon. Cheers - Jaimie OK, but is he a clever loon? Definitely. He uses a large library of macros with assembler so his code does look rather like a weird high level language of his own design. :-) All high level languages are really more-or-less-systematically created and organised macros. The GRC utility is not re-sizable and needs to be scrolled to read the output. Why exactly ? Why doesn't it just drop a text file for us to read, using applications we can control (Notepad can be resized). This made it hard for me to take a screenshot, so I could show people all the output, in one picture. It's possible if the application had used a standard HLL library, the dialog could have had standard behaviors, such as a resize corner. This is why you don't do your own G.D. GUI. I'm a hardware guy, but I've also written software. I spent a month once writing software. I decided it would be a good call to use low-complexity graphics widgets for my screen. The result looked terrible, and was one of the worst features of the program. If I'd used the regular library all the other designers used, it would at least have looked no worse than what they were making. But this is how we learn, apparently. Paul |
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#47
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
"Paul" wrote | The GRC utility is not re-sizable and needs to be | scrolled to read the output. Why exactly ? Why doesn't | it just drop a text file for us to read, using | applications we can control (Notepad can be resized). | | This made it hard for me to take a screenshot, so I could | show people all the output, in one picture. CTRL+A, CTRL+C Of course if he'd written it in "HLL" he could have also had an edit context menu for that, requiring about 30 seconds to code rather than 9 hours. I think we're all getting too old. This is turning into one of those long threads where all the geezers jump in: My first computer was an abacus.... That's nothin'. We had an abacus made with stones, and they slid uphill both ways.... Oh yeah, I remember that. My boss made me chip and polish the stones myself.... You had an abacus?... Whether it's feminists or programmers, there are always the oldtimers who think the new people have it too easy and that they just haven't been issued enough medals and certificates. |
#48
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Paul writes:
A GUI doesn't need to be built from assembler. That's why they put all those APIs and libraries there, so you need less than a page of code to put it on the screen. If you need to emit a privileged CPUID instruction in your code, I'd buy the need to do a little inline code or the like, to do it. A lot of what you may need is available as compiler intrinsics anyway (for instance MSVC has a ocuple for cpuid). But indeed, not everything. Rotates and use of the carry flag are the the ones I usually miss. -- https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/ |
#49
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Diesel wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:22:19 GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote: In message , pjp writes: [] I'm surprised people find assembler something they don't expect to be used anymore. I would suspect that an assembler level programmer would build up a toolbox of canned routines used over and over again no different than people constantly using any language. Even in C/C++/Pascal & Delphi (geez even dBase in it's day) I had a library of "utility" routines I constantly used. I was somewhat startled in discussion with a youngish computing graduate - I think in the last ten years, but probably not much more recent than that - to discover he'd never done any assembler. But IT is so big these days that there will indeed be room for people at all levels. And, sad though it may be for some of us oldies, modern processing power (and storage, both RAM and disc) are such that it really isn't necessary to write compact code (unless you're writing for microcontrollers - and even those have huge amounts compared to what I grew up with). Those are not valid reasons to cease writing tight/compact code. Those are excuses to make your program bloated and resource wasteful and we continue to see ample evidence of just that. Is assembler consistent with doing modular, collaborative projects which require unit testing and continuous integration? I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices. |
#50
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote: [snip] I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices. Why don't you find out whether your first sentence is true before stating the second? I do not code in assembler these days, but I would not be surprised to find similar tools for system development as those used for HLLs. Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko |
#51
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
In message , Gene Wirchenko
writes: On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: [snip] I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices. Why don't you find out whether your first sentence is true before stating the second? I do not code in assembler these days, but I would not be surprised to find similar tools for system development as those used for HLLs. Sincerely, Gene Wirchenko You can write project procedures that define the inputs and outputs that modules generate and expect, whether those modules are written in assembler or a high-level language (or coded for hardware, for that matter, such as VHDL or Handel-C). The compilers (for high-level languages - equivalents for assembler or hardware code) _can_ provide a baseline set of such. A _good_ optimiser can remove unnecessary interfaces (such as where module X has code to generate standard output, where it only interfaces to module Y, which immediately converts standard input back to the same internal form as module X was using); this would usually happen at an integration level. (An excellent project manager will assign/subdivide the project to minimise such interfaces anyway, but modern optimisers are often good enough to avoid the need for excellent project managers of this type. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Where [other presenters] tackle the world with a box of watercolours, he takes a spanner. - David Butcher (on Guy Martin), RT 2015/1/31-2/6 |
#52
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
On 18/01/2018 22:40, Chronos wrote:
Of course, now we have Meltdown and Spectre, you'll all be buying new CPUs anyway - which*will* help both Intel and Microsoft. If I weren't an ardent wielder of Hanlon's razor... Why would I not buy an AMD? For most of my use a top end ARM would probably work too. Andy |
#53
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
"Chronos" wrote
| Of course, now we have Meltdown and Spectre, you'll all be buying new | CPUs anyway - which *will* help both Intel and Microsoft. Who's you all? See the next topic up. Someone trying to find a system with the newer type CPU on which they can install Win7. So a new CPU might not be a great solution. It's probably not a rational solution for anyone. But I wouldn't be surprised if you read that somewhere. The lapdog tech media is always happy to run press releases that tell people they need to buy new stuff. And what's the problem? A rather limited risk that anyone who doesn't bother with online security, and buys stuff online with credit cards, might possibly leave data exposed to hackers. You're running more risk just by enabling script online. Not to mention that the worse bug, meltdown, is not an AMD problem. If people haven't stopped paying through the nose for Intel by now, wouldn't this be a good time to stop? |
#54
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Brian Gregory wrote:
Just because it's not the right tool for you doesn't mean it's not the right tool for someone who does it all the time and has a massive library of macros to help him. I once saw the source code of a web browser written in assembler. I still have nightmares. It worked, it was fast, but it could not be maintained and was never updated to later web standards. Sooner or later you reach the limit of human ability... Theo |
#55
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote:
I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. Your impression is way off base. Believe it or not, operating systems used to be written in assembler. And typically they needed teams of people. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://BrownMath.com/ http://OakRoadSystems.com/ Shikata ga nai... |
#56
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
On 2018-01-19, Chris wrote:
I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices. Nonsense. Plenty of operating systems have been written in assembler. Do you think they were single-person projects? For that matter on early computers applications were written in assembler (if not directly in machine language) and they were not single-person projects either. I've beein involved in such projects myself. You must be very young and stoopid. (Don't worry, you'll probably outgrow it.) -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.) NSA sedition and treason -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com Don't talk to cops! -- http://www.DontTalkToCops.com Badges don't grant extra rights -- http://www.CopBlock.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
#57
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
In message , Theo
writes: Brian Gregory wrote: Just because it's not the right tool for you doesn't mean it's not the right tool for someone who does it all the time and has a massive library of macros to help him. I once saw the source code of a web browser written in assembler. I still have nightmares. It worked, it was fast, but it could not be maintained and was never updated to later web standards. Sooner or later you reach the limit of human ability... Theo Could not be maintained by - and the limit of ability of - a _single_ human, perhaps. A team, working on modules each, would have no problem maintaining it. Of course the splitting into modules, with properly-defined interfaces, could be seen as an element of high-level language (-:. (A browser might indeed be another category - along with video and perhaps audio processing - where assembler coding could well yield benefits. Though probably only parts of it [in the overall cost/returns analysis].) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Gravity is a myth; the Earth sucks. |
#58
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Stan Brown wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote: I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with single-person projects. Your impression is way off base. Believe it or not, operating systems used to be written in assembler. And typically they needed teams of people. Understood. Thanks for the clarification. |
#59
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
"Chris" wrote
| I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with | single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices. | I guess that will teach you not to engage in mild speculation, after being roughly rebuked by no less than 3 local porcupines. (At least one of them has blacklisted me for disagreeing with him once, a number of years ago. Maybe we're all just getting too old and cranky on usenet.) I've only heard of single individuals using assembly in recent times. It seems to be kind of a hobby craft, like grinding one's own flour. I once bought The Art of Assembly Language by Randall Hyde, but then just couldn't see the point in mastering something that simply wasn't necessary. Though I'm very grateful to one clever person who mixes short lines of assembly with VB6 to produce very useful results, like the ability to call CDECL functions that VB6 can't otherwise handle. But I really don't understand the code myself. If I had to go down to such a tedious level to program, I never would have started. (I also wouldn't bake bread if I needed a wheat field and a windmill to do it.) On the other hand, I'm self taught and could probably never cooperate with a group myself. I always understand "willing to be a team player" as code for "expect to be an abused lackey if you work at our company". So I guess I'm not very modern myself. |
#60
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Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester
Mayayana wrote:
On the other hand, I'm self taught and could probably never cooperate with a group myself. I always understand "willing to be a team player" as code for "expect to be an abused lackey if you work at our company". So I guess I'm not very modern myself. Don't knock a work dynamic, until you've tried it. Paul |
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