Everyone should be allowed to talk about Rust. There is no authority that deserves to have the power to decide which people can or cannot talk about Rust.

That said, it’s also fine to say that the author’s opinion about Rust is untrustworthy because it bears the hallmarks of someone who has read about Rust but not actually used it themselves in any meaningful way. I myself agree that it’s possible to write lots of useful rust code without running into situations where the borrow checker trips you up, and that some of Rust’s best innovations are the “small” things like the algebraic types, macros, Cargo, etc. that are now available in a non-GC systems language.

Prgmr.com is on the pre-disclosure list for Xen. When a vulnerability is discovered, and the discoverer uses the responsible disclosure process, and the process works, we’re given time to patch our hosts before the vulnerability is disclosed to the public. On balance I believe participating in the responsible disclosure process is better for my customers.

Pre-disclosure gives us time to build new packages, run through our testing process, and let our users know we’ll be performing maintenance. Last year we found a showstopping bug during a pre-disclosure period: it takes time and effort to verify a patch can go to production. With full disclosure, we would have the do so reactively, with significantly more time pressure. That would lead to more mistakes and lower quality fixes.

Well, it’s complicated. (Disclosure: we were under the embargo.)

When a microprocessor has a vulnerability of this nature, those who write operating systems (or worse, provide them to others!) need time to implement and test a fix. I think Intel was actually doing an admirable job, honestly – and we were fighting for them to broaden their disclosure to other operating systems that didn’t have clear corporate or foundation backing (e.g., OpenBSD, Dragonfly, NetBSD, etc). That discussion was ongoing when OpenBSD caught wind of this – presumably because someone who was embargoed felt that OpenBSD deserved to know – and then fixed it in the worst possible way. (Namely, by snarkily indicating that it was to address a CPU vulnerability.) This was then compounded by Theo’s caustic presentation at BSDCan, which was honestly irresponsible: he clearly didn’t pull eager FPU out of thin air (“post-Spectre rumors”), and should have considered himself part of the embargo in spirit if not in letter.

For myself, I will continue to advocate that Intel broaden their disclosure to include more operating systems – but if those endeavoring to write those systems refuse to honor the necessary secrecy that responsible disclosure demands (and yes, this means “embargoed and NDA’d vulnerabilities”), they will make such inclusion impossible.

I’ll agree it’s possible to read the Amazon LPs the way you do, but I think that’s unnecessarily incharitable in service of your (otherwise great and thought provoking) presentation.

At Amazon, ‘Earns Trust’ means what it literally says on its face; to earn the trust of your customers, your peers, your management, and your reports, without equivocation. And it’s drilled in, correctly, that trust is fragile; it is far easier to break it than to ever fix it once it’s broken. In order to keep and maintain trust, you have to work with integrity, compassion, an adult viewpoint, introspection, deliberation, openness, thoughtfulness, and a bunch of other non-mentioned (but critically important) motivations, and you have to keep those front and center all the time.

I think it’d be a pretty great idea if we exposed some of the internal training materials about the principles to the public. I think it’d help in discussions like this. I’ll bring that up.

100% agreed. My understanding was that Joyent had done the former.

To add another wrench to the mix: if your value system is that breaking the rules is ok to achieve goals, you can still have integrity (in the technical sense of the word) as long as you are clear that your values allow this. To use Uber as an example as well: the results of the Uber scandals, I find, ethically problematic. However they are completely in line with my understanding of the Uber culture and I’m not surprised or feel scandals demonstrate any dualism in Uber. Their communications have always been to do whatever it takes to succeed.

Note that this definition of ‘integrity’ is that someone/group is the same internally and externally. Unified. Which is, perhaps, a different definition that many people have or how it’s used day-to-day. This definition comes from Ray Dalio’s Principles book.

So, to play devil’s advocate, what competitive edge does integrity give in a modern business? What is the dollars-and-cents value of scruples?

Also, what do you you think caused this shift, if indeed it was a shift?

I didn’t say I wanted to work at such a place. I countered the idea that integrity was most important by noting that most successful businesses sacrifice it in some way regularly to gain market share, profit, etc. All the market leaders do as well for all far as I can tell. So do almost all politicians and companies that write the laws that people with integrity are forced to operate under.

Given all that, I think businesses should be willing to sacrifice integrity when it helps them achieve goals, esp long-term. I prefer them to operate with integrity but their environment means most won’t. Many will even go under when competitors use low integrity marketing or cost-cutting strategies. Example: try competing in hardware market by having well-paid, first-world people assemble the components with 40 hour work week, breaks, vacations, and so on. You’ll go bankrupt if it ain’t defense or some high-margin industry.

the actions that these arguments would imply are not necessarily aligned and perhaps not even reconcilable.

So an action that’s carried out to achieve a capitalist end is simply external to any moral universe? The “values & morals” just don’t apply once an economic motivation comes into play?

Cites anecdote. Fails to disprove the rule.

Right. Yeah, as a co-chair of the European Data Forum 2013 and countless user groups I think I have a bit of an idea what it means. Suggest you have a look at the super successful Devoxx franchise here in Europe as well, as a reference. I’d immediately know two locations in Europe (incl. partner and logistics): CodeNode in London (with SkillsMatter) and Software Circus in Amsterdam (with Container Solutions) + I can certainly ask our friends at MSFT if they wanna support this as well.

This is such an awesome format and it would be a really great thing to make this accessible in person for Europe. Happy to do whatever it takes to make it happen!

The whole conference reminds me a lot of !!Con, which I spoke at in 2014. I plan to submit a talk for this, though haven’t quite stumbled upon a good idea yet.

Thanks for putting this together!

Nice write-up on i432. Glad you took some time to read on it. I’ll add that Intel learned from their mistake quite a bit in the design of i960. It’s worth checking out. It’s basically a RISC + object descriptors + error handling + fault tolerance + parallel processing. It overdid it with more mistakes due to requirements of ridiculous BiiN project. They canceled that then started selling it as an embedded CPU. It performed well. Moreover, I see a subset of it that would’ve made a fine alternative to Intel 286, etc with way better security, reliability, and multicore later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

What did you think of it?

Congrats! Must be exciting times over there.

if you need an office in brisbane australia, ive got one ready to go ;)

itd be nice to have alex back too.

Thanks for the kind words and I’m glad you enjoyed it – and if my only service is to explain that implementing the console was a giant pain in the butt, I think I’ve done right by Dan, if no one else. ;)

I had found the docs, but not the mail thread – especially given its recency, that pretty much says it all! I’m still a bit flabbergasted that this still isn’t done 15+ years after the original work; jails are woefully incomplete with respect to databases as long as this remains unimplemented!

Ya, that’s what I thought. For somebody to notice that there’s a pause each time a new file is opened, that’s a lot of tables.

FWIW thanks! I quite enjoyed reading though it this morning.

Thanks also for listing some recent talks in your opening. I admit to having been a bit baffled by the popularity of docker (seemed like a convoluted/glorified chroot), and am going to watch your talk on it and see if anything resonates.

edit clarification: popularity of docker vs something “better” like jails/zones, or even using lxc directly

Out of curiosity, since it doesn’t seem super likely that io.js and node are getting together anytime soon (and that’s beside the point anyways)…would Joyent be interested in moving off of v8 as a JS runtime if a better platform, like an open-sourced engine from Microsoft or duktape or something, became available?

Thanks for doing that @bcantrill! I know there are all sorts of interesting folks doing open source stuff, but I found it refreshing to see your name out there. Cheers!

Don’t forget usr/src/common/brand/lx!

FreeBSD has 32-bit support but not 64-bit support. Last I have heard is it’s a work in progress but I’m not aware of anything, even in 11-CURRENT, that supports 64-bit binaries.