Re: Weasel words...again
You beat me to it.
3011 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2010
Utilization evaluation features could be built-in to CPUs and GPUs, and the results made available to software reading a port.
Chip manufacturers see a negative benefit to that.
IBM's OS/360 had an API for user-supplied utilization-accounting software, but that API changed frequently and capriciously.
I can't imagine why. /sarcasm
If they want to decentralise it, why not go blockchain-based?
Because we don't want to use that much of our electricity doing this. Blockchain computations are very energy-consumptive. Using blockchain computations for a thing that will be at least current-DNS-request frequency would be madness.
I once worked for a large org - mainframe, minis, 13K+ PCs, 2K+ printers - which had the favorable circumstances of low tech-job turnover. ALL the techies knew ALL the other techies - field service, networks, telecom, help desk, machine operators, DBAs, and computer security people - by name, face, and voice.
Yet when you called the help desk to have them reset your password(s), they always (cheerfully) asked for your verifying info.
OK, so what? Offline the DECwriter, set it up with a new box of paper, turn it back online, and you can once again type system comnands to rhe computer.
I never had a DECwriter, but I had a surplus ("Just haul it away and you can have it.") Data General Dasher TP-1 dot-matrix printer+keyboard, and a Nova 4 minicomputer to hook it to.
For a while I had a surplus Model 15 (I think) KSR. This was the version which used 5-bit character encodings, had three rows of keys (plus a spacebar), and [Letters Shift] and [Figures Shift] keys.
It had been left out in the rain for months, and some of the parts had obviously corroded.
After pulling out the plant detritus, I brought it inside and let it dry out, wired it for loopback operation, and turned it on. Unsurprisingly, it did not work properly.
I unplugged it, sprayed the hell out of it with WD-40, let it sit a day, then, each afternoon when I came home from school, I'd spend 5-10 minutes typing on it, then unplugged it, and lightly re-sprayed it with WD-40.
After a week or so, began working properly.
@ nobody who matters:
They are called "fighter jets" because the phrase, "jet fighters" is misleading. These jet-powered, fixed-wing*, military aircraft do not fight only other jet-powered, fixed-wing* military aircraft.
* the phrase "fixed-wing aircraft" is not literal ("swing-wing" military aircraft have existed), but generally-descriptive, and used as contrast to "rotary-winged" aircraft (helicopters).
"Guilty!! Guilty as charged!! We find for the plaintiff."
(Lawyers get their cut ...)
"If you are a member of this class, please provide your full legal name, physical address, telephone number, email address, a photocopy of your driver's license (both sides), and the ORIGINAL sales receipt from a decade or more ago when you bought the covered MICROSOFT product(s), and you will be sent a cheque for €1.77.
Please allow 12 to 16 weeks for processing.
Yours truly,
Dewey, Cheatham and Howe, administrative designee for MICROSOFT CONSUMER COMPENSATORY FUND "
I've gotten some good keyboards from thrift shops for < €10 each. One is a Das Keyboard (Hotblack Desiato model) with mechanical, non-clicky switches. The other is a no-info-available, clicky mechanical switches with annoying-RGB-LED backlighting which I finally figured out how to "freeze" into a non-moving pattern.
1. ... should be required for every device with modifiable firmware or microcode: BIOSES, CPUs, hard drives, video interfaces, network interfaces, IMEs/PSPs, USB controllers, USB devices (notably thumb drives), and so forth.
2. Re: making the switches "obscure": No. Security through obscurity has been shown to be pointless. If you don't have physical security, you don't have security.
3. The tech bros don't want to lose profit by including these switches.
4. Home users don't want to be "bothered" by such things.
5. Big business users don't want to pay tech staff to physically visit machines to update them.
6. Manufacturers probably were leaned upon by spy agencies decades ago to design in these security holes.
7. Despite intensely-wishful thinking otherwise, modern PCs are not things which can informationally-safely be operated by ignorant, arrogant, lazy, or stupid people. They are not toasters. (And even toasters are potentially-deadly. There is a greater-than-zero number of deaths each year due to people trying to fish pieces of toast out of plugged-in toasters, using electrically-conductive items.)
The problem is NOT that Gary Grunt or Pauleen Peone were fooled by cybercrims.
The root-cause problem is that the real Big Boss(es) can, and do, call up Gary and Pauleen, and demand that Gary/Pauleen take all sorts of security-compromising, company-policy-violating, GAAP-busting actions, such as, "Wire £10M from the employee retirement account to my personal checking account, and put it down as a loan," and, "Make my nephew, Freddy Fumblefingers administrator on host smytheco-gb-dc0."
Should Gary/Pauleen ask for identity verification, a second signature on the order, or point out the Big Boss(es) is/are demanding Gary/Pauleen to commit a security policy violation and/or a crime, the Big Boss(es) thunder, "Don't you know who I am?! Carry out my orders imnediately, or I will have you fired! You'll never work again in this industry! You'll never work again in this city!!"
Gary/Pauleen know the Big Boss(es) can, will, and have made this happen, and that Gary/Pauleen have effectively zero protection against this.
So Gary/Pauleen carry out these orders immediately without question or pause for verification.
In Mission Control ...
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M [Enter]
(time passes)
PFY: "Hey, Charlie ... why is the system so slow today?"
BOFH: (looks up from his onion bhajis and sees write activity lights flashing madly on the SAN controllers) "WHAT. DID. YOU. DO?!"
This sort of thing can happen at cloud providers as easily as it can on-prem.
If you don't know how big your data is going to get, or how long it will take to get big, then yes, cloud storage makes sense for startups.
Just ensure as best you can, that you have a reasonably-fast and inexpensive way of getting your data back off of the cloud when you do go on-prem.
There are many techies who see a really stupid idea and accept the intellectual challenge of making it work.
Sadly, many of them succeed.
I question how well an Apple Airtag-like device would work inside a grounded, metal computer chassis, which is filled with radio-frequency interference.
Not a PET, but it had a "Cue:Cat" peripheral. These were free barcode scanners given out. They had a PS/2 keyboard connector intercept jack and plug.
The company hoped you'd install their driver on tour PC, which in turn "phoned home" to query a database, which would return the text info on what item you'd just scanned.
In turn, when the device phones home, it sent the serial number of your Cue:Cat, and logged the item to the profile the company built up on you, which it intended to sell.
The company went bankrupt.
The Cue:Cats themselves worked just fine without the driver, without phoning home, on any OS. You got the string of numbers represented by the bar code, "typed" into your PC via the keyboard port.
This level of paranoid reaction to anything vaguely Pakistani would be like the US government fearing revolutionary plots every time someone sang or played, (I Wish I Was in) Dixie's Land.
Lyrics link:
https://genius.com/Daniel-decatur-emmett-i-wish-i-was-in-dixies-land-lyrics
When I was young, I thought I would like to be an ATC as the work appeared interesting. I found this DOS-based, character-mode game which simulated being an ATC, and found I could not get past even the first level. I learned my brain is not wired to process that sort of information/do those sorts of calculations sufficiently-quickly.
I de-selected "air traffic controller" as a potential career, and have the highest respect for the people who can do that sort of work.
Even if it were in tip-top shape, "AI" searching would continue to be useless to me.
This is because I search for uncommon items, and the tree-pruning / node-weighting processes inside the "AI" engines remove the things I'm looking for from the "AI"'s results.
I don't want a peanut butter cookie recipie.
I don't want instructions on how to assemble an IKEA Hëavybōttom chair from a kit which is missing three of its eight fasteners.
I want the name of the book which documents Gear's Assembly Language (and even better, the source code of the assembler itself), without being drowned in a sea of unrelated, so-called-related results about industrial this and machining-supply that.
I want a conventional search engine which respects double-quotes, capitalization, Boolean operators, parentheses, a near() function which takes as a parameter the maximum number of words between groups, regexes would be nice but not required, AND which does not show me anything I did not explicitly ask for.
I might as well ask for a unicorn, too, because the enshittification bros will never give me what I want.