Posts by Dvon of Edzore 111 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2018
Datapoint (maker of ARCnet) had an accessory optical link to get around needing to pay telco to run a wire across a street or paperwork for government-licensed radio links. It was plain optical with big lenses to avoid cost of compliance with laser safety regs at the time. Ended up looking like cartoonish huge binoculars but it worked well enough outside monsoon season.
Computerworld: Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532590/forgotten-pc-history--the-true-origins-of-the-personal-computer.html
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200
Expanded summary:
* 8008/8080 came from the Datapoint 2200 design, not the calculator-based 4004.
* As reported in other accounts, the 2200 design was offered to both Intel and Texas Instruments in order to pay an overdue bill for memory chips. Intel accepted, TI refused.
* The improved instruction set of the upgraded 2200 became the Zilog Z-80 when Intel decided the original was good enough. Some Intel engineers thought otherwise, left and formed Zilog. The two instruction sets were essentially identical, even at the bit level.
* The 2200 was an early all-in-one computer, having keyboard, screen, processor and storage (a pair of digital tape drives) in one desktop box.
* The display on the 2200 was a pioneer of human factors engineering. The screen refresh was synchronized to the power line so office fluorescent lights reflecting off the screen no longer caused flicker-induced headaches for the operators.
* Datapoint also pioneered heterogenous networking in Arcnet, where multiple computers could share a single hard drive. (Was this the first SAN?) The interface also supported hardware encryption via a plug-in scrambler PROM chip, which allowed different users to have private repositories on a shared drive. I saw all this in operation with a software development team. Each programmer had their own chip to encode their work.
* Arcnet also had a wireless link over non-laser, non-radio infrared optics, so it didn't require FCC or AT&T permission to cross a public street within a campus, as wired or radio network links would at the time.
* The Datapoint OS also allowed rudimentary multi-tasking. For example, one could play a game on the screen while copying one removable hard disk to another.
Not bad for the early 1970's!
At my university, the building mainly housing the Computer Science department had a lobby with a parquet floor which the IT students installed. (The floor may have been their gift to the school - those neurons were recycled decades ago.) After inserting the final piece of the puzzle, the tired crew went back to their dorms, only to return the next morning to a veritable explosion of small wood squares. It seemed the kiln-dried lumber had made merry with the rise in humidity overnight and expanded a bit in size, but the walls were not so forgiving. Reportedly, the student crew had to hand-sand each of the thousands of squares to make them fit once again. (I suppose the grain of the wood made them no longer square so the pattern wouldn't work if used as-is.)
No. According to the New Microsoft they are supposed to run the Hypervisor on the bare metal and the OS & Applications on Virtual Machines in Clusters so you pay for the infrastructure three times.
Exotic use cases like actually getting shit done will be left to supercomputers running Linux (or devices running Apple iOS) with no Redmondware in sight.
Twins and triplets come to mind. As does the term click-bait. But perhaps the queue was excessive and $worker was only trying to help speed things along.
If referring to fingerprints and the like, please note where tasks are heavily mechanized, the double amputee is not without precedent. Seemingly identical information is not always the result of malice.
The fine article reported, "The Google Cloud solution is built on top of Sabre's existing data warehouses, but in the long term, the plan is to consolidate data onto one system".
I'm sure the current Atlassian and OneDrive stories reinforce the benefits of single-supplier relationships, and having all this sensitive traveler data in the hands of the biggest ad network on the planet has zero chance of being misused. It says so right above the door where "Don't be Evil" was chiseled away years ago.
Hey FTC! Use that string of one success to investigate a certain company named after a river. The commingled comments for different products and vendors are a rich source of intentional customer confusion, let alone the fake reviews and tolerance of counterfeit goods. Be sure the settlement is at least 10% of annual sales corporate-wide, so you can staff a field office at each of their warehouses for continuous supervision.
Of course this ignores the biggest player in the launch game, with a Real Soon Now ability to launch multiple 100+ ton payloads to anywhere per day, but then Belgium wouldn't get their piece of the action. Maybe the EU could donate some old monuments for impact mass, like the Atomium or that rusty tower in Paris?
Of course it does! This is the same company that happily extended email to be executable code instead of a simple messaging platform so spammers could pwn your computer, added "features" to the web browser so anonymous adverts on "trusted" websites could pwn your computer, and made it much easier to run everything as administrator (root) rather than encouraging least-privilege software to limit the damage their new standards caused.
The real question is, "Do you trust the authors of Visual Studio?"
"I usually joke that if I'm doing my job well enough then I've just done myself out of a job because everything important is now covered and there is nothing really for me to add."
What you add is your current experience. You better understand the relationship of the components to the business, and can modify the monitoring and reporting to be more useful for your specific business case.
You can also work on cross-department relationships so changes can be anticipated and the infrastructure ready to meet future company goals as they arrive. For example, adding a first-ever third-party sales representative in a different country can bring a nightmare of compliance issues that did not exist before. You'll really appreciate time to get understanding and documentation of requirements and costs when you're blindsided in a meeting and have to either commit to doing something you have no idea how to accomplish or be seen as obstructionist to company progress.
Alert communications also need to help the recipient understand the impact on the business of what's being alerted. Simplifying the alert to say "Firewall A3 is down" tells a typical C-level person nothing useful. Including "The following key systems are affected: Payment card processing halted, electronic funds transfer halted, electronic deposit processing halted" will encourage approval of better equipment or secondary services to avoid a repeat incident.
Whereupon you zip-tied the two connectors to prevent their becoming unmated because the screws which normally accomplish that purpose had mysteriously gone missing, right?
Restoring the connection to a known-defective state would merely reset the time bomb for the next sod charged with "make it go, now" - a crime for which the afterlife offers ample opportunity for pain and regret.
Worse, the systems were almost secure, leading to a bit of complacency. If you read the neighboring story about Identity and Access Management, you'd know how difficult it is maintaining a list of every VPN and other hole in Hadrian's Wall that let those annoying Pictsies in. Oopsie!
It's a pretty standard response to go on lockdown when a breach is suspected, so I don't blame Colonial for their first actions. I do blame them for having a network design that was easy to move about once inside. The days one can trust local systems to be clean ended with the "I Love You" email virus, and Management will just have to pay to do things a bit differently.
To other admins: I'm in the midst of a similar security upgrade, so I share your headache.
Microsoft is spinning a fairy tale. Windows of any version is exactly as vulnerable to viruses the day or year after support ends as it was the day or year before. Software does not "wear out" with use like a pair of cheap shoes. Internet packets do not get more powerful to break through closed connections like K.I.T.T. crashing through a wall. Defects in design or production that allow malware exploits were inherent in this "professional" software from the moment it left the factory, and should be treated by regulators the same as safety defects in appliances and automobiles - by mandatory repair or refund regardless of warranty terms.
An End-Of-Support date is just an attempt to turn liability for defects into sales of new products with new defects adding to the legacy defects carried forward for compatibility. Microsoft's shifting "end-of" dates testifies to how arbitrary these paper lifetimes really are.
The cycle of "sell crap, pretend to care for a bit but disclaim all remedies in the license, sell new crap" will continue until lawmakers assign strict liability to software vendors that claim to offer support as a justification for the price. If the license limit on number or type of installation applies in perpetuity, then so must the full support period. Flaws present from Day One should be treated as if they were discovered on Day One and not allow the get-out-of-hell-free card of calling a product "too old to fix."
Firmware for such devices is often shared among multiple related products, including those from other vendors, because chipset makers generally provide reference designs and code libraries for the purchasers to brand with their product logos and other user interface customizations. This was seen last year when a broad swath of Netgear home routers were found vulnerable to a common set of vulnerabilities, as cited in the story.
Searching the CVE database for the similar JGS524PE, one finds four 2020 vulnerabilities shared by the JGS516PE, JGS524PE, JGS524Ev2, and GS116Ev2. Someone having any of these four sibling devices should press Netgear for answers.
All the sprinkler heads going off at the same time only happens in bad movies. Each sprinkler head has a heat activated trigger that keeps the water valve in each head closed unless the air temperature at that specific head rises above the trigger value. This system was designed a long time ago when elec-trickery was understood to be unreliable in a crisis, so no common signals for false alarm disasters.
Still a dumb idea to use water, when CO2 is cheap and plentiful. Too bad the horns that announce its release are so loud the vibration can damage the equipment (hard drives mostly) it is there to protect.
The official talking point was that the added circuitry for ECC memory (including the extra bits of storage) would actually reduce the reliability of most systems because there would be more parts to fail. This while simultaneously claiming ECC was needed for servers with their massive memory capacities of up to 4 GB! (Windows NT for servers) Considering a typical consumer build of the last decade had as much memory as a server of the Y2K era, that argument sounds a little weak, doesn't it?
Those who click on everything might already have noticed the tag page for 12BoC (as linked at the top of this story) only shows six of the current eight episodes, including this one. How apropos.
"Be not deceived, Bork is not mocked; for whatsoever a man maketh, that shall he also fucketh up." --Murphy 6⅞
Each nation regulates radio communication (including satellite up/down-links) as they see fit. That an American company would start with the same American regulator (FCC or Federal Communications Commission) they must regularly beg for temporary permission to communicate with their rockets during launch should not be surprising. Australia and other mostly-English-speaking countries with a heritage of British Common Law have a leg up on getting in next, followed by nations who ask nicely and offer reliable local partners (as opposed to The Leader's worthless nephew.)
Local government or foundations offering beta-test incentives to equip underserved communities would appear to be welcome, so encourage your Civil Masters appropriately.
To paraphrase The Elon, "The most secure processor is no processor." Though it still won't protect against ransomware and "This is the Finance Director. Have our bank wire 21.7 million to this account for our new branch."
Thanks, it's the one with "Mechanical Interlockings for Dummies" in the pocket.
When the new team consists mainly of the old team with fresh managers:
"I have learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure that I could repeat them exactly."
(from the "Frog and Peach" sketch, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, as recorded on "Good Evening".)
The Fine Article mentions: <<Open-source bod Watkins sighed: "All of these systems were developed with the idea everyone wanted everyone else to have accurate data, for safety, and there are few checks and balances in place to validate the authenticity of the data.">>
Watkins may have been addressing GPS Spoofing, but the story here seems the opposite. The flight data was authentic, i.e. coming from the aircraft in question, but not accurate, as some of the aircraft systems did not know where they were to a shockingly large degree. (And the first Redmond-trained minion who says "They were in an aeroplane" gets to repeat the feather-versus-anvil speed of gravity test from 20 kilometres AGL. Their choice of which to hold on the way down in lieu of parachute.)
Buried in your comment is the key takeaway: Debian enables a toxic community. As Leader Carter said "Currently too many people take on too much responsibility because they feel there is no one else who can do so.” That's it exactly. Individuals who do not play nicely with others are allowed to seize control of maintenance by denigrating the contributions of others. Those who prefer to work in a cooperative environment quickly leave, and only the clique remains. The clique then self-destructs because someone has to be the weakest link each round. Eventually the survivor rage-quits for lack of adoring followers, and the WNPP list gains another orphaned package.
Gandi.net reported on the issue that they had dropped their BGP routes through CenturyLink/Level3 but CenturyLink was still advertising the dead Level3 routes. This meant that the mitigation built into the Internet for such dead routes wasn't working, so otherwise functional sites couldn't recover using alternate transport. The BGP storm CL unleashed may have caused enough congestion that the good updates simply couldn't get through.
In my case much of the Web traffic was still working, but email from my three main providers had stopped. Yahoo was feeling poorly, a fact that might bring some glee but it was affecting viewing several rocket launch attempts, dammit! At least the morning (USA time) launches were scrubbed, so no lasting damage beyond stress taking a few more sanity and health points.
Tests are not run in isolation, but compare the new output to the expected output, which comes from many years of tests from previous versions. Test code is reliable because it produces the same result over many versions and many implementations. And yes, different ways of doing the same thing are also required to match. This isn't Microsoft or Adobe where the customer is the unpaid test pilot.
It comes from movies where rapidly jiggling the switch hook and shouting is supposed to fix the broken connection. Sometimes worked as an attention signal to a human operator, but did nothing useful once state machines took over the job.
Might help with cranky fluorescent lights where breaking & making the circuit at the correct point in the AC power cycle would give an extra voltage kick to the transformer, exactly the opposite of what is needed in a computer.
Interesting that there are no photos of the warped beam-steering mechanism or receiver dome where the more important damage occurred, nor good identification of exactly what the failed cable was used for. Perhaps they fear if the extent of the damage were made public there would be more calls to abandon this relic and direct the funds into more up-to-date instruments since the 2017 hurricane damage has not been fully repaired either.
Yes, and it's still one of the few reasonably-priced vendors I can install in USA businesses, because Netgear is one of the very few who perform Dept. of Labor mandated safety tests, getting the UL, ETL, TuV, or other government-approved 'Listed' marking. I'd love to use any number of other vendors but they just aren't compliant with the law. If D-Link can certify a $15 dumb switch, why can't $Highly-Reviewed-Vendor do the same for a $500 smart switch?
Ubiquiti leaves promised and advertised features as "beta" for years. Apparently "beta" on their planet means both "broken" and "working as designed". If it filled a checkbox in a pseudo-review and got you to buy the product, it's working as designed, and by calling it "beta" they don't have to actually deliver a working component.
They also string customers along with "next update" promises until they declare the item End-of-Life and drop even pretend support. They're permanently on my Never Again list after spending resources to redo the website instead of actual feature development.
Behrens: "If you use this as an enterprise, you will not get any updates after half a year, so there is no way any large enterprise should use the free version."
No updates after six months? That differs from the plain language on the LibreOffice site and the rules of most distros that include LibreOffice. In any case I don't recall LibreOffice for Windows ever automatically installing an update, just opening the download web page for a manual install, so whatever is Behrens talking about?
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