Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"gnarly old Unix admins who still maintain the last boxes in their organisation running VMS, AIX, and OS/390."
This gnarly old - and long retired - Unix admin-and-everything-else looked on VMS as something that was already from the past but still had to be lived with
OS/390 was something with which I never had to deal although the same VMS-using business I mentioned in my story from c 30 years ago did also have some species of IBM mainframe.
IBM mainframes, of course, are still current. I've no idea what lies at the bottom of their OS stack but I do know that not only is there a Linux port for them but they're capable of/very good at running multiple Linux instances.
"Did the users make a note of it before dismissing it?"
Pause the program for about a minute before clearing the text "to give them time to make a note". Helping you fix the problem means they won't get delayed like that in the future.
To be really sneaky, write a file which will tell the program to pause longer next time. Have some key combination that clears it that you tell them about when they report the error message properly.
"Stupid design choice."
What's likely to have happened is that a lot of manglement have a say in designing the camel. One of them has been upset by finding his laptop has a flat battery and insisted that Something Must Be Done. Good design choices rely on there being one person who has the final decision no matter how senior the person who wants to smuggle some feature in. They also rely on that person having good judgement of what works for the user.
I believe, however, that it's a good principle to delay making a design choice as late as possible, if possible delay it to run time so it becomes a matter of user choice.
"On the rare occasion when I've caught it, it seems to be the collision avoidance alert"
My wife's car also has this horrible misfeature (yes, I know I've just changed lanes into a short slot, now the next thing is to ease up and get a bit more space to the car in front). It also flashes lane warnings. Locally there's a stretch of road with hatchings down the middle. Presumably some highway engineer had a surplus of white paint to get rid of and not even the local knowledge of local parking habits that a glance at the OS map would have provided. So if one pulls out to pass the parked cars outside the fish restaurant in order to avoid triggering the collision warning let alone an actual collision the lane warning triggers.
Then thee was a test drive some years ago in a car which had adjacent lane traffic warnings. That could have become annoying very quickly unless it could be turned off. I didn't buy it.
It's a bit like those signs that say "New Road Layout Ahead" which are always left there for at least 10 years after the road was changed.
And if you're a regular user of the road you'll almost certainly have been held up by seen the roadworks that changed it. If you're not then it will be meaningless as you'll have no knowledge of what it was like before the change
Until we have a universally accepted definition of what is "consciousness" / "sentience" and when can be something considered "conscious" / "sentient", this discussion is purely academic
We can make a start by recognising that our individual views of sentience or consciousness are subjective. We look at them from the inside. We have an awareness of our places in the world. We are aware of whether we feel comfortable with it, whether it threatens us, whether it pleases us. We can set goals and work out how to achieve them.
We can look at others and recognise them doing the same thing. Where the others are fellow humans we can empathise with them fairly closely.
We can look at other animals exhibiting some of these things - devising strategies to cope with a novel problem, even using tools which was once considered a human characteristic. We can recognise these as indicating that such behaviour requires something akin to what we consider sentience in ourselves. It might be a different kind of sentience. We may well come to the conclusion that, when we see a dog or a crow exhibiting some sentient behaviour, we still can't really understand what it is to be a dog or a crow. We see the kinship and we see the differences.
One of the factors which enables us to see the kinship is the realisation that the behaviour is being achieved by a mechanism similar to our own. An artificiall system displaying something superficially similar doesn't usually raise that kinship. If it does then the situation isn't going to be academic any longer - your ethics committee is going to start taking an interest.
"whilst getting the filters, systems or whatever sorted they put up a warning"
So it's a scheduling problem. Does this look loke a better schedule:
1. Get "filters, systems or whatever sorted"
2. Open app store for uploads
3. Publish filtered apps checked by whatever was put in place in 1.
If it's a commonly used library there are probably enough projects doing "let's download anyway because it's aa convenient a way as any to check" and if it's an application there are probably enough people who download because it's not in their OS's app store/repo.
If you look on SourceForge there can be a surprising number of downloads listed for something you might have thought was niche or dead. And even if there aren't it's still there.
PyPi and NPM, also mentioned in the article, are not, on the face of it, collections of random uploads. They present themselves as resources for developers in their respective languages. A user might reasonably expect them to be sources of high quality S/W. AFAICS the reality is that both collections simply accept contributions on trust with mechanisms to remove malware once the damage has been done.
Should you have the misfortune to fall victim to one of these, possibly as a result of a library downloaded by someone else acting in good faith, you might have occasion to reflect that there are worse problems than spelling variations although these are, in fact, at the very heart of typosquatting. You might even come to the conclusion that uploads should be vetted before being publicly posted. You might even use the term "curated".
PyPi's "terms of use" make no mention of not uploading malware: they're entirely concerned with an uploader having the rights to distribute the material. They make no mention of the terms on which material is provided to the downloader. Neither is there any mention in the code of conduct.
NPM is slightly better. The acceptable content, in its 3rd paragraph forbids malicious content. Perhaps reasonably this positions it after licencing considerations but both are placed after "harassing, inappropriate, or abusive".
But as commentards have pointed out below, there isn't enough of it. Not nearly enough. Not enough by several planets' worth. Fossil fuels have built up over geological time and they're being burnt in a few years. When it's gone it's gone. We need much smarter solutions than this.
Back in the day I was using something called - IIRC - SDOS, or maybe SD/OS which was either a rebadged CP/M or a knock-off. It came with a system built on S100 boards from a company called SD. There seemed to be no difference at all from CP/M except for the name. We accumulated all sorts of freeware, even Algol (probably as a compiler) although the main language used was Microsoft FORTRAN.
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