* Posts by carlsonjma

14 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2015

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

carlsonjma

Re: Understatement

The Star Office version was *way* worse than what's there now. I'm glad they've pared it down this much, because the alternate-universe approach was just bonkers.

Petition asking Microsoft to open-source Windows 7 sails past 7,777-signature goal

carlsonjma

much harder than it looks

I love the idea, but this is far harder than the FSF seems to think. I was one of the many, many people at Sun who were involved in the work required to turn Solaris into OpenSolaris. It was a monumental amount of work involving an army of engineers and lawyers. We had to establish the lineage of every source file and every contribution to it. Many things were purchased from third parties (e.g., the Mentat TCP/IP STREAMS code) long, long ago. Some were patched with contributions by other vendors. The documentation of these agreements was buried in offices all over the world, and known to people who'd either left the company or had died. And then there were patents to contend with, both Sun's and others.

We had to establish rights akin to ownership for everything such that we could then re-license (or sub-license) it for use by others. It was extraordinarily hard work.

If you don't care about being sued or enticing others into being sued, I suppose you can just dump it all on github and walk away as they seem to be suggesting. But in the world as it is today, that's just not going to fly. It's bonkers.

Based on what I saw, I think it'd be hard to estimate the effort required, but 30 man-years and USD$6m or so wouldn't be out of line. It may even be an order of magnitude or more than that, depending on just how much swill they've accumulated over the years and how well they've kept the records of it all.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

carlsonjma

Re: 767

They don't get to determine whether the gauge is an issue on their own -- except, perhaps, in a career-limiting, "sorry, I won't fly this thing."

Instead, it's determined in advance by the manufacturer's MMEL and the operator and local agency who figures out the MEL. If something's on that list, then you're good to go as long as you follow whatever rules the list specifies.

Just about all of these incidents and accidents reveal interesting things about the inter-related parts of the system, rather than just a simple "this guy blew it." It's often described in the US as getting all the holes in the Swiss cheese to line up just right so that an accident can occur. (I know that folks elsewhere have different cheese names. :->)

Hey, those warrantless smartphone searches at the US border? Unconstitutional, yeah? Civil-rights warriors ask court to settle this

carlsonjma

Re: The US had a huge revelation in 2001

I have no doubt we'll get there by January 2021. I believe in us.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

carlsonjma

happens everywhere

When I worked at Sun Microsystems, there were four "James Carlsons." Surprisingly, only one of them was me. I regularly received messages, sometimes highly privileged, that were misdirected to me.

One of the other "James Carlsons" was apparently a Director of Sales. A lot of his direct reports would send me their requests for vacation time. For a while, I put up with sending back a message letting them know that they should correct their request, because I couldn't do what they wanted. Eventually, I gave up and started rejecting them. One of them actually went to the trouble of calling me in a state of profound rage, demanding to know why I'd denied the vacation request. My answer was simple: I'm not your boss.

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

carlsonjma

Treating the promotion of an RFC to "Standard" status as a starting point is a bit of a misunderstanding of the process. (See RFC 2026 for details.) (I sort of hope it was intended as an inside joke, but if not ...)

Standards-track RFCs start off life as Internet Drafts. As drafts are written and published, most vendors are in the process of producing interoperable implementations. Actual products are sold based on the drafts. Once rough consensus exists, it goes to Proposed Standard and is published for the first time as an RFC. If you don't already have an implementation in the field by this point, you're really a bit late to the game.

For many protocols, the story peters out there. Proposed Standard is awfully good. You don't have to have multiple interoperable implementations and active deployment underway to get there, but very often you do, and it's often used as an argument in favor of approval when the IESG is evaluating the request to publish. Most of the developers start drifting away to newer and better things at this point. If there are enough die-hards left to do the work of cataloging the implementation status, you might get promoted to Draft Standard.

After a very long time, a few protocols end up being promoted one last time as full Internet Standard status. But many of the things we rely on every day don't make it that far, because it's mostly an effort of paperwork by then, and not a protocol development exercise. It's a lot like getting a "lifetime achievement award."

So, yes, the July 2017 change is important for the protocol, but it really means nothing for the mature and robust implementations that have been in the field for 20+ years now.

IPv4 is OVER. Really. So quit relying on it in new protocols, sheesh

carlsonjma

IPv15

I sure hope we get it right by IPv15. It's a shame to run out of bits.

(For what it's worth, I was there for IPng and the arguments over variable length addresses to appease the OSI weirdos. This has been a much longer slog than anyone ever imagined.)

Google: There are three certainties in life – death, taxes and IPv6

carlsonjma

yeah, right

"faster and more reliable than TCP" ... yeah, right. Pull the other one.

WhatsApp, Apple and a hidden source code F-bomb: THE TRUTH

carlsonjma

the part that confused me

Why did you need to quote "fuck" in your xargs/grep invocation?

Does it have special characters in it?

Samsung: Don't install Windows 10. REALLY

carlsonjma

Re: opaque system administration

I see systemd and svchost, and raise [Solaris] smf, [AIX] odm, and [SVr4] sac.

So, what's happening with LOHAN? Sweet FAA, that's what

carlsonjma

No clearance required

Regarding the aircraft designed to fly above 60,000 feet, no clearance is needed to fly there. 18,000 through 60,000 is Class A (IFR clearance required), but above 60,000, if you can get there, is Class E. No clearance or even radio communication is required to fly there.

Fugitive UK hacker turned ISIS recruiter killed in Syria

carlsonjma

keyboard malfunction

I'd just like to know what's wrong with the keyboards these idiots use. TriCk? TeaMp0isoN? Is your shift key return spring broken or are you really that precious?

GRENADE! Project Zero pops pin on ANOTHER WINDOWS 0-DAY

carlsonjma

Re: Let battle begin

You're familiar with the scroogled ad campaign, right?

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

carlsonjma

ahead of you

I'm already against the next methodology fad.