Posts by -tim 783 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2009
In the war of vi vs emacs, one place were emacs win is the cat test.
Open a file in each editor, drop a cat on the keyboard.
Which editor does more damage and how long does it take to fix it and how much is unrecoverable?
Emacs wins the cat test. It also wins the Eliza test.
> As it's 8 years old I think Apple can be forgiven for no longer providing updates
Why? It would take Apple a team of 5 engineers to provide critical security updates for everything they made since their G4 Mac days. Some times those patches would end up turning off features but they could keep the older equipment functional enough to not end up as landfill.
Most countries have laws that say a product must be supported for a number of years based on its cost. Apple products tend to be in the category where those laws require a decade or two of support for critical problems.
There have been hacks to the timezone files used by Unix/Linux/OSx to adjust for moon time and solar noon time.
One odd advantage of the leap second is that now some programmers understand that the concept of time in computers isn't quite as easy as it first appears.
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.
I have 3 M570 trackballs on my work bench that are disassembled as I tried to find out why they don't work properly anymore. The mechanical switches still work yet they behave oddly. One won't trigger the edge detection on the mac. Another has an odd issue with the right button. My next guess is to reflash the processor to see if that helps.
They dropped the wired versions so now they all need batteries and a wireless dongle. It isn't like a cable on a trackball is a problem.
They could appeal based on the US flat out not telling the truth in a UK court. The US has stated the charges and swore those were the only charges. That leaves out the John Doe warrants against the author of the hacking tool "strobe." I know this because I've seen some of the witness statements and I know there will be additional charges once he is in the US.
While the DDD should be technically more correct, I'll take the AAD or ADD version most of the time. In my CD collection, the AAD is left of the ADD which is left of the DDD which is left of the "remastered" versions. The ones that get the most play are the ones on the left.
Our problem with Perl is lack of new programmers. Our business runs a bit of Perl and it is the most profitable per line of code by a huge margin but new coders haven't even looked at Perl.
As far as backward compatibility goes, recent version of Perl 5 have broken more things that any other version change I can remember and I have scripts that started out with version 3.
openssl 3 is removing some of the older broken encryption by default. That means talking to ancient un-updated equipment won't work out of the box if ever. We keep a version of ssh 6.6 compiled with open ssl 1.0.1 called ssh1 for those rare cases but web things are getting harder. We have used haproxy 1.8 configured to talk to old ssl backends also linked to older openssl which lets us use modern browsers with old hardware and old hardware with new web sites. We use the odd mixes for devices that can't phone home for firmware updates because they can't do modern ssl/tls but we have to configure per host and play dns and cert games to get that to work.
openssl skipped version 2 because of the protocol 1 vs protocol 2 version issue.
Does Cisco even make DIMMs as they seem like a part that should be outsourced. If that is the case, who make them and what else are they in?
Reliable systems with large memory need to have ECC. There is no excuse not to have it in. While rare, on our systems that properly record ECC corrections, it is interesting they happen on different systems at about the same time.
11.4 won't run on anything we owned so it was off to FreeBSD for us. 11.3 had finally fixed the security issues I didn't like from 10 and ZFS was a game changer. Oddly enough there were still patches to Solaris 9 hiding on the solaris 10 container stuff the last time I checked a bit over a year ago. That still runs on SPARCstation 20 from 1994. That means you could have a nearly 30 year old computer that meets security compliance regulations if you could keep your applications patched.
We deracked a V100 last week. The thing was older some of our staff. It was removed because one of its original disks was going bad and we were pulling out a bunch of far newer systems. We still have one X1 in our internal R&D DNS cluster and will remain there until it fails which might be a while since it has flash IDE disk emulator.
I've got a tadpole Sparckbook 2 from 1993 that still works except for some of the keys are a bit of a problem.
Why do people keep thinking the memory is soldered?
Because it is. It is soldered to the same substrate that the CPU is attached to and a few people have upgraded them, it just needs more specialized equipment than any low end repair shop happens to have as well as donor ram chips which can't be sourced new.
The real reason the M1 chip's memory is so fast is they use about 877 pins to transfer more data in parallel compared to the 288 pins of a DDR5 DIMM. That allows the chips to transfer the address and more data in parallel without wasting cycles.
The term is already being perverted in the industry. Places want to do Single Sign On and Zero Trust to be fully buzzword compliant.
Another meaningless term now is "Air Gapped." Apparently acceptable use somehow now means firewalled with all inbound connections disabled to the specific host rather than the "No network at all" like it used to mean. I've seen the term used to describe a host on a typical office LAN where other hosts have inbound traffic allowed.
More than 5% of the macs that hit my web sites are versions that are old enough that they will never be patched and they cluster around the last supported versions for hardware that appears to be fully functional except for their stock browser is full of holes. A team of 5 people in apple could keep these older machines running securely. Apple hardware seems to keep getting handed down to others when new machines are bought. We still see PPC based macs. Most countries have laws that require major appliances to be supported for at least a decade and it is time those laws were enforced with the vastly more expensive computers particularly with the total lack of hardship it would cause Apple.
I have two extra buttons on my trackball and I would love to have them move the cursor to a specific place. Then I wouldn't care where the cursor had been.
Now if Logitech would just allow space for a USB cable out their next model, I won't have to keep buying batteries since my trackball seems to stay where it should be.
Can we get some real numbers of how many digital radios are actually sold to consumers who know what they are buying? Stop counting the ones that come with the TV that no one ever uses. Stop counting the new cars and resold cars because those numbers are about as useful as the number of consumers who bought car jacks last year. Find out how many consumers went out to buy a digital radio to listen to digital radio. Then tell me how many are bought. Better data would include how many knew the new radio they bought was digital and wasn't mistaken for an AM/FM one.
I know of an HP multi-function that is warning about a "scanner error" but the scanner isn't the flat bed scanner on the top of the device, it is the laser scanner that paints the image on the drum when it should print that isn't spinning fast enough that causes the error. At least that device has reasonable errors vs the guess the light dot pattern problems of my older HP printer.
You can also cut 3 of the 4 pairs of an ethernet cable for the same effect. You will have to tell the driver that it is in a odd state with no sync but that is usually an parameter to ifconfig or its replacement. You can extend the technique to make Y cables that listen to one host and talk to two or more devices the same way as twisted pair ethernet is still technically a shared bus with typically just two ends.
What are the odds that the show and tell app that should be running was written in flash? Moving on might be a whole lot more challenging than it would appear.
As far as unsupported, doesn't MS still have that pay for support thing going if you are willing to pay big? If I remember right, the cost per workstation today for that support would still be smaller than some Oracle seat licenses.
As far as the confusing and obtuse parts of git, I wonder if that is related to how git has some verbs where the subjects don't quite follow normal UK/USA speech patterns. It is like a Finn or a Swede who asks "I'm a bit low on cash, can you borrow me $20?" It is hard to parse because the direction of the word "borrow" seems backwards to most people. I've heard that enough times I should figure out the proper way to ask for my money back.
QNX appear to use the same calloc as many GNU projects and the same bug has been in MS products since they learned to love C. calloc has always been odd when called with out small sizes that are nice powers of two since the function might just try to guess how things are aligned. A calloc(10,5) might assume that 10 items need to be 8 byte aligned (like large floating point numbers on a number of older architectures) and allocate 80 bytes compared to the 50 that many programmers would expect. It is another C function that was useful in its day and now shouldn't be used. Does calloc(3689348815, 5000000000) return a null on your system (assuming you can malloc 1.3g)?
The payment security standard PCI-DSS still seems remarkable quiet on the IPv6 front to the point where 5 of the top 5 PCI external security scanners can't even scan an IPv6 server at all. The rules say to scan all protocols that are enabled and ping ::1 works on almost all modern hardware so IPv6 needs to be scanned.
I worked for a place with a Sun E10K and it of course came with redundant power supplies. The problem is no one ever plugged in one side. The one that was hooked up had a nice short curved lead near the corner of the server that went to a rather large plug. Someone managed to get their foot in that loop while walking too close to the very expensive computer and the power went out.
I've use a website that can't be linked to on facebook because of something about "community standards" yet there has never been anything offensive on the domain and it has been around for more than 25 years. I'm sure facebook is using some third party service but I can't find out who it is or how to have them re-review their data.
The US Dept of Ed has a program where a student can ask for a cancellation for student loans from Universities that don't deliver what they claimed. As this incident has made degrees issued by that department nearly useless, could all their current and many of their past student now ask for their student loans to be canceled?
Sunview would allow any logged in user to manipulate window positions. The 'w' command would helpfully point out the window id on the workstation user was using to edit code. We had a program that would move the window one pixel a second. On a 1024 pixel wide screen, it didn't take long for that to be annoying particularly when it was moved mostly to the right and slightly down.
Any earlier examples would have been turned into something else after they were no longer repairable. Anything broken thing made of metal would have found its way into the hands of a recycler if there was anyway to get it there. I think a survey of jewelry possibly made of gears would be an interesting thing to look at since there are mentions of other complex devices and turning a broken gear into a relatively shiny bit of ornamentation would have been an easy task.
The study of Ancient Egypt mentions devices made of wood including devices used to lift large stones yet no examples have been found but in a place where firewood was hard to get, any broken wooden device would be building material or firewood very quickly.
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