-
Reminds me of a blog post I made years ago about the ancient and obscure “dsw” Unix command: https://web.archive.org/web/20111104141518/http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/18/a-bit-of-history
-
Very interesting post. But:
The legendary Seymour Cray was famed for being able to switch in a bootloader from memory.
Back in those days, all ops could do that. Admittedly, doing it on a CDC6600 like Seymour was using was a bit more involved, but I certainly could do it on a PDP-11 30 years ago (no…I don’t remember now). I have many acquaintances that still do it regularly on a PDP-8, PDP-11, IBM or DG today.
Now the folks who could front-panel the test routines from memory…that was impressive.
-
-
I have to agree with this. My personal Mac is a 2013 model Macbook, and between how well it still runs and the high price and design compromises in newer Macbooks, I don’t feel much interest in updating it. I am starting to consider replacing it with a Pixelbook, since the price came down to well below $1,000. I already have a cheaper chromebook, but oh those HiDPI screens are so nice.
-
I have the same model. It’s a really nice machine, but I agree I just don’t see the reason to update. There’s so much more to offer in other ecosystems (especially considering price), and the idea that the answer to long-form document creation in the Apple ecosystem seems to be “iPad Pro with a 3rd party wireless keyboard/mouse” is just…weird. But maybe I’m excessively old-school.
-
-
I can’t follow this at all the way it’s presented.
-
No worries, you are not the only one who is having trouble following it.
This is not an editorialized piece of writing trying to guide you towards a particular point of view. It just shows unredacted facts. The intent is to allow anyone to be a bystander in the discussion that actually occurred and make up their own minds about related questions if they have an interest in doing so. And it is only happening in public because interpretations of what happened contradicting the facts were circulated in public (most recently at BSDcan).
There are no easy answers to the questions raised by the full- vs coordinated-disclosure debate in general. If you are involved in the disclosure process of a security problem and fix, whatever you do, one way or another someone else might potentially be put at risk as a consequence of your actions. And not every risk assessment will lead to the same conclusions.
-
Near as I can figure, there was a bunch of back-channel communications about the issue in the OpenBSD community until the guy who found the issue contacted CERT because he figured out the issue went way beyond OBSD. The OpenBSD folks apparently don’t trust CERT and decided to push a fix to protect OBSD users possibly at the expense of, well, everyone else because…I don’t know…screw them, I guess.
You put us in a conundrum. We knew there was a problem and how to fix it. And when you got CERT involved, we had to assume that information about the problem was now leaking beyond your control into government agencies and private companies, and that some of those “in the know” would have had 2 months of extended embargo time to use an exploit against OpenBSD users. I don’t see any reason to trust every single person in those parts of the security community and in these institutions to act responsibly.
-
-
wouldn’t you have to agree to an embargo in order to break it?
also: How about blaming the people who created the flaw instead of the people trying to fix it?
-
Oh believe me, I would like to blame Damien Bergamini for lots of things :) But that wouldn’t do the overall great results of his work justice.
KRACK was a common flaw across many independent WPA implementations. Which was quite surprising. It has been argued that it’s an 802.11 standard flaw because the standard authors didn’t alert anyone that the state machines described in the documents were incomplete and didn’t account for this issue. But of course the standard authors didn’t notice the problem either at the time.
-
“because the standard authors didn’t alert anyone that the state machines described in the documents were incomplete and didn’t account for this issue.”
Another example where formal specification of a standard might have caught a problem. Especially if it involved state machines.
-
-
wouldn’t you have to agree to an embargo in order to break it?
Yes, but if you don’t agree to it, don’t complain if you aren’t given disclosure.
How about blaming the people who created the flaw instead of the people trying to fix it?
Because that’s not a mutually exclusive position, and a transparent attempt to create a moral high ground where none exists. You can blame both the people who created the flaw and the people who trying to fix it if they act in bad faith.
-
-
Since the OBSD folks are talking about the embargo and their participation (or not) in it in all of the emails cited, I assume you’re speaking of the general case and not this specific one. I agree that, in the general case, if you aren’t notified it’s hard to agree to an embargo. That’s not the case here, of course.
-
The OBSD people were talking about how they heard rumors of an embargo, and could not get a response from anyone relevant. They were absolutely clear that if they had been able to agree to the embargo, they would have. They were not offered the option.
The best they got was “You didn’t get a response because you asked the wrong people”. When asked who the right people were – crickets.
-
-
-
-
-
The title is a little misleading. The author is not against adblocking in the abstract, but is against Adblock Plus, a specific adblocker.
-
-
The title capitalizes Adblock, which makes it pretty clear that it’s talking about a specific product.
-
-
-
Very interesting, but name collision with one of the bigger products in the data classification space. Ah well.
-
On one hand, I’m semi-amused by the creativity. On the other hand, christ what an asshole.
Since it’s an explicit attempt to use a ‘letter of the law’ argument to circumvent an ‘intent of the law’, I’m not sure a judge would think it’s nearly as clever as the author thinks. Pure speculation. IANAL.
-
Please read and consider this. I have a reasonably mild essential tremor (many have much, much worse), and there are any number of touch interfaces that a are terribly hard to use. Even basic things on my iPhone decide I’ve actually double (or triple) tapped or tapped and dragged with only very minor tremors. UX folks really need to consider that not everyone has dexterous, slim, precise fingers with tiny pads.
-
I got quality time with Power7 and Power8 infrastructure when I was at IBM, and I can’t say enough good things about performance, stability, etc. But I don’t think they’ve got the economics right. There really needs to be a true entry level machine, something on par with an HP DL360 or Dell R400 type, something in the sub-$2k price range, that would induce a substantial number of users say “I can afford to pick one or two up just to check it out”. They’re simply way outside the kick-the-tires price point to make adoption easy.
-
A small and cheaper machine might be good for i users as well - a large chunk of them of them are still hanging onto their old AS/400 Model 150/170s running a hopelessly old version of the OS, and “gone off the grid.” IBM shows little interest in trying to get them back on the wagon again; “entry level” POWER9 is still very, very expensive and very large compared to a tower-sized Model 150. A small POWER9 wouldn’t get just new customers, but it’d turn long-time shops back into paying customers again.
(It has to be an IBM design too; they’re the only ones with tagged memory extensions that i needs.)
-
-
Probably because they were an all-in-one solution marketed to replace a pile of servers, enterprise DB integrated last I checked, and not needing much administration. That’s the kind of thing one can avoid making a commodity for a while. We know it would be a smart move to chase that market with cheap offerings due to Net Integrators’ Nitix boxes that did similar things with UNIX tech. Really neat development back then. What happened to them? IBM acquired them, shelved the regular solution, and re-released it as something in Lotus portfolio. Typical IBM… (sighs)
-
You keep using past tense there. AS/400 nee i-Series is now almost 30 years old (40 years old if you consider the System/3x ancestors) and is still a profitable line of business for IBM. Apparently, they’ve managed to not make it a commodity for a long time. They’ve got an awfully long track record of success for us to second guess them and say they need a dirt cheap/hobbyist/tire kicker AS/400; that smacks of hubris.
-
The AS/400 doesnt have same feature set as an IBM i. The System/38 similarly had differences to AS/400. I said were because AS/400 is an older product in ths family. Far as will never, people said that about mainframes, too, long ago. IBM has entry-level ones now that let people experiment for a fraction of a real mainframe.
I dont think they want to do IBM i that way but might in future.
“They’ve got an awfully long track record of success for us to second guess them”
You could use same logic to say COBOL is still a huge, profitable language because it’s superior to modern ones. Instead, IBM tech and legacy systems have a high switching cost that keeps customers upgrading their boxes instead of porting to Linux or something. Vendor lockin. IBM also cleverly let the newer ones run Linux in VM’s to reduce some motivation for porting. That the machines are also incredibly reliable compared to risks of a switch look even higher.
If there was no cost for a port, you bet a lot of businesses would consider moving their AS/400 apps onto a highly-available, mostly-self-managing set of x86 machines running enterprise Linux. Esp when they look at $2-5k that Nitix-like solutions did/could cost vs whatever IBM i’s go for now. That many were already doing new developments on Linux or attempting ports via migration companies likely contributed to IBM supporting it in IBM i systems.
-
The i-Series is upward compatible with AS/400, and if it “doesn’t have the same feature set”, it doesn’t in the same way that Solaris 2.1 had a different feature set that Solaris 2.8. Yes, in 30 years, new features hopefully creep in. And yes, IBM has entry-level z-Series…but they aren’t sub-$2k items. Other than that, I don’t really see what you said that contradicts what I did.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Maybe “iverson” in honour of their common roots?
-
-
kjs3
5 months ago
|
link
| on:
Stack Computers: The New Wave: A Survey of Computers with Hardware Stack Support [1989]
Koopman is great if you want to understand stack architectures (tho as I recall he doesn’t really dig deep on multi-stack, esp 3 and 4 stack possibilities, this far back). But this is from ‘89, and there’s probably a reason that stack machines aren’t the dominant architecture, no matter how much hyperbole he heaps on them. I’ve got a soft spot, first because the Burroughs Large Systems mainframes are really cool and second because it’s pretty easy to look like a rock star in undergrad computer architecture implementing a simple stack machine and a crappy Forth.
-
I don’t know if it’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I feel like just since @hwayne started posting about J here, I’m seeing more and more APL and J stuff everywhere (including other tech link aggregators and Reddit).
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. So, +1
-
I just saw that mentioned on HN. I thought it was too simplistic because (a) I can easily tell with searches that some stuff picks up over time in waves and (b) some of those waves start by people posting things on well-read forums. Gotta eliminate that first.
Ive not seen people say Baader-Meinhof virtually ever despite being kind of person that likes learning or spoting such things. It got mentioned recently on HN which is said to have millions or tens of millions of views a month. At least one high karma person said it. After that, many other people are repeating it on HN, Reddit (which may have had it before HN), and now Lobsters.
We normally call these trends, fads, or bandwagons which are themselves even more common by my estimation than Baader-Meinhof obsessions. What I dont know is if you personally saw it on HN or Lobsters recently before saying it now. You might be independent of recent trend I saw on social media. Im guessing you read others, though, with you seeing on one. If so, it’s a just a fad.
-
I only use lobste.rs - certainly never Reddit nor HN - but, the post here on kdb+ I found interesting because I had just recently mentioned it in a private discussion about some language and tools which used used in very specific industries (we were talking about ‘big finance’, VLFIs [Very Large Financial Insutitions], and high frequency trading), so it was certainly a great example of synchronicity to see it mentioned here.
I always enjoy playing with APL because it causes you to excercise a different way of thinking, and would encourage all programmers to explore some recreational APL.
Doesn’t mean it might not be a fad, however, but I’d like to see such a tag, if only because I find APL and APL-derived languages and environments fascinating and enjoy reading about them.
Edit: I absolutely boycott all social media and do not use nor even access Facebook or Twitter or what not - but that doesn’t completely isolate me from influences from the people who do.
-
I was talking specifically about “Baader-Meinhof” in that comment. APL has had a lot of interesting posts here on Lobsters. That by itself is a little trend that could justify a tag with the upswing in interest. That might explain you seeing it here around same time you mentioned it but it’s still a little uncommon. Still might be an interesting coincidence.
“ I absolutely boycott all social media and do not use nor even access Facebook or Twitter or what not”
Good for you! It will save you a lot of time and headaches better spent on your life or hobbies. :)
-
I strongly suspect the people using the term (aside from the eye-roll worthy, pseudo-intellectual aspect) don’t know who the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction or the German Autumn were, nor do they know how tenuous the connection between the group and the phenomenon is (go on…you know who you are…scramble to Wikipeadia to catch up). Maybe we use ‘frequency illusion’ or some equivalent term instead. RAF are horrible people that don’t need any more attention.
That said, I think an APL tag would be apropos.
-
-
-
-
-
The problem is, that we have to treat work as an environment where we do not feel like we are surrounded by predators. Sure, you can steal somebodies purse and car keys or even lunch to prove a point, but honestly, I do not see where that leads to. Yes there are bad guys and all that, but things have to stay in balance. Are we all supposed to have firearms on ourselves just in case? That is what this seems to lead to. Be afraid of everybody and trust nobody. What kind of a world is that?
Also, laptop locks are funny these days where everybody has a Mac and no way to lock them…
Capitalism?
“An armed society is a polite society.” -Robert Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon
The point of the talk is that security starts at the physical world, and that everyone is afraid of “evil hackers” or Russia/China, when they should be concerned about who’s in their facilities.
An unrecognized face should definitely be questioned, which is why at high security facilities (i.e. an airport), keys and cards are required to get into say, the data room, with an escort. Obviously, visitor badges should be required, and an escort is a good option, also, in order to keep out the bad guys at the physical layer (obviously, this doesn’t include security at every other layer, such as a legacy telephone system voicemail running on NT 4.0 that can be NetMeetinged into and compromised very simply, or someone having a 0-day for a service ran on-site and exposed to the public).
By that definition the US is the politest place in the world. It clearly is not.
It may not be, but then again, not everybody in the U.S. owns a firearm.
The US does own many more firearms than other notoriously more-polite societies (Japan, say) though.
The obvious conclusion here is that there’s no real reason to think that the fun Sci-Fi Writer had any real insight into or facts to support his take on the topics of armed civilians, trust, and what makes for a livable society – at the end of the day it’s just a pithy turn of phrase.
Im a pro-gun person from a former, murder capital in the South: Memphis, TN. Most of us would laugh at the quote given the number of assholes and thugs we’ve run into in our lives.
We do think a high amount of firearms, esp concealed, reduces number or success of physical attacks since many attackers are basically wimps or arent in top shape mentally. Many of us think of it as check against government worst-case scenarios. For many others, it’s a tradition, recreational activity, family bonding, protecting cattle/crops, and/or self reliance for food sources. A few deer can feed a poor family quite a while for the price of some bullets. Grocery stores nowhere near that cheap.
It doesn’t make the area more polite, though. Some situations are even scarier when they might have concealed weapons. Hell, some calm people become assholes when they have power of life and death at their fingertip.
An armed society is a society that thinks problems should be solved with arms.
An armed society is one that thinks a corrupt government might be a problem that takes guns to solve. That problem and solution is how America itself was created.
Then, they created a Constitution. It said most problems are to be solved by individual citizens within the country’s laws, legislative bodies, executive branch/agencies, and court system. And in pro-gun America, that most problems are resolved using those instead of the guns totally disproves your point in general case. Cops and gun owners rarely shoot people out here. Mostly gangsters doing that.