Perhaps I was insufficiently succinct. Let me clarify. I will assume that you are genuinely curious about the Mach kernel, and not merely a trolling closeted Windows Fan Boy
You made an entirely bogus claim about Mach performance above the 2-4 CPU count which you did not support. Your follow-up makes it clear that you have read the Wikipedia page, but perhaps don't fully grok the IPC microkernel performance issue which is the stuff of Monday Night Hacker armchair kernel designer legend.
In contrast, I provided as a counter argument:
ample historical context which suggests that your claim is wrong, and
pointers to authoritative soruces, and
some hints that perhaps I might know a little more about the narrow subject of how many CPUs the Mach kernel has been running on for a very long time (more than 2 to 4, I assure you) than one might hope to glean from buying scrap iron.
(Please check yourself into to the
Argument Clinic for further treatment regarding the mechanics of argument.)
One-off hot rods are not required. Apple could buy or rent large systems from companies that have them off the shelf, like Unisys, Fujitsu and otheres (Intel), Sun (SPARC), HP (PA-RISC) or IBM (Power) . At various times since at least 1992 the NeXT/Apple version of the kernel compiled on some or all of those hardware architectures. It probably still does in the labs, even if Darwin, the fork of the source that builds production releases of Mac OS X, may not. Steve Jobs has demonstrated that he values the portability of Mach, and is willing to devote resources to make sure that it remains portable. If market conditions changed, Steve Jobs could wake up one day and decide he wants to ship Mac OS X for SPARC and have it running on his desk by the end of the week if not the end of the day. In a few months, Mac OS X Server for SPARC could be a shipping product. People doubted this for years when NeXT Fanboys said this, but history has proven that this can happen. It can be running and ready to hand out a CD to thousands of developers before IBM even knows you're going to switch processors to one that has a roadmap that extends beyond 2003. You doubt such a scenario? What if Google one day decided they want to convert their data centers to SPARC because they can squeeze 64 cores into the power envelope used by 4 cores in their current data centers, and that they wanted to use development tools for Mac OS X to build a new service. Do you think Apple would be in position to take advantage when a member of the board calls Steve and says something like, "Hey Steve, I have an idea I want to talk with you about..." You bet your stock options, Apple could have a demo in front of Google ASAP.
This issue regarding Mach IPC that has your undies in a bunch is pretty clearly not a problem in the production kernel, judging by the SPECint and SPECfp and other benchmarks that Apple is getting on multiple CPU architectures. Don't take my word for it. Get a box yourself and put Linux , FreeBSD, and Windows on it and see if you come up with similar numbers. Undoubtedly you would. If the IPC inside the Mach kernel was such a performance problem with multiple CPU, this problem would undoubtedly be measurable in a dual or quad core system. The fact that the internet isn't abuzz with people posting bona fide exposes about this issue probably means it's not an issue. (Be sure to use benchmarks which are designed to measure performance on multi-processor machines like the Spec Int Rate benchmark).
Better yet, get a friend at a university or at some place that makes such iron, a
NeXT multiprocessed the guts of OS X on 2-4 processors. The result is that the mach kernel doesn't scale the processors linearly. There isn't the straightline performance boost of adding another processor beyond 4 cores with Mac OS X's mach kernel.
Let's assume for the moment that none of us in this forum actually know anything factual about how many years Apple (or even NeXT before them) have been running Mach on machines with more than 4 processors on the corporate campus behind locked doors.
However, we can probably reason this out if we try. We're all bright geek types, right? There are several clues. NeXT bought Apple for a negative $400 million or so in what, December of 1996?
The heritage of NeXT that you mention is a pretty big clue. I don't recall off the top of my head how many processors were supported by the production shipping Mach build for SPARC and PA-RISC back in the NeXT days, but let's assume it was 2, just for the sake of argument. Both of those platforms offered ready availability of systems with many processors even way back then. Perhaps there were systems like that in the lab.
Mach was originally a research project with an interesting goal: clean support of certain abstractions in a platform-independent way. One of those abstractions was support for multiple processors, beyond the typical SMP architectures we see today, which means that the author's concept of platform-independent went quite some distance beyond a different instruction set in a different risk architecture. Dig this:
Mach kernel
Unlike UNIX, which was developed without regard for multiprocessing, Mach incorporates multiprocessing support throughout. Its multiprocessing support is also exceedingly flexible, ranging from shared memory systems to systems with no memory shared between processors. Mach is designed to run on computer systems ranging from one to thousands of processors. In addition, Mach is easily ported to many varied computer architectures. A key goal of Mach is to be a distributed system capable of functioning on heterogeneous hardware.
An excellent book entirely about Mach is: Programming under Mach, which also mentions the design intent.
The original project was funded by DARPA, with the specific goal of developing operating systems technologies which would support super computers with hundreds or thousands of processors.
The Mach project developed new techniques which have migrated directly (via actual Mach code to OSF, NeXT, Mac OS X, et. al.) or indirectly into pretty much every modern operating system.
Mach research spanned a very long period of time, and two Universities. Curious, bright, and arguably insane people (or they would have been making money instead of slaving away making Mach on grad-student salary) with access to multiple processor machines with DARPA funded directives to make it scale to hundreds of processors. Hmm... that seems like a clue.
NeXT was, and Apple is a hardware engineering company. Apple has been building multiple processor boxes since before the reverse acquisition. I know, I had the, uh, perverse and shameful pleasure of running BeOS on one of them for sport.
If any joker with a web site can get ahold of pre-
Civilizations routinely destroy their home planet by creating miniature black holes thereupon whilst trying to figure out what makes them tick. Technology advances faster than democracy, and it has never yet in the long history of the universe been put to a vote.
Apple made the right decision updating the iMac to a 64-bit processor and using the low power version of the same 64-bit dual core chip family in the product. How many tons of coal will be saved over the lifetime of the first million of those iMacs sold, compared to the same system were it to use the desktop chip, whose primary technology advantage from the home user's perspective would have been that it runs hotter and slurps more electrons.
and if it makes my computer easier to use and I'm willing to pay for it who the fuck are you to stand in the way of progress?
I guess that depends if they happen to be an executive at a telco. I've noticed that far fewer Macintosh owners use bluetooth to sync their address book to their phone than one might think. The reason? For certain phone companies including at least Verizon and Quest, the vendors offer almost no bluetooth enabled phones to start with, special models of the same perfectly good phone with the bluetooth hobbled to worthlessness by custom firmware.
The executives at the telcos are holding up progress because they want to be the only company to sell $1.99 ring tones to their customers and they all have fantasies about setting up their own iTunes style online stores, too. The telcos are standing in the way of progress for, literally, hundreds of millions of people (2 Billion served).
I could tell you why I think Time Machine will be easy to use. But then I'd have to arrange for you to be sequstered in a lonely place until after Leopard ships.;-)
This article tells absolutely nothing useful about the Core 2 platform, but it may have useful bits in it for those who are buzzword hungry. As our sister site reports, the first chip is better than the other chip. Let's have a look at a list comparing features of Chip A and Chip 2.
first chip - better than some other chips, unless you wait until spring
chip II - chip C is better than this in all respects, except that a certain chip which may or may not be the second chip or chip 3 is more modern and consumes less heat and is faster
third chip - designed in a foreign country and better than chip 2 but slower than the second chip
another chip - better than a chip which is to say not really better, but overwhelmingly not quite as power hungry as chip 1
a different chip - this is the be-all and end-all of chips off the ol' block, the mother load of chipdom, but not very impressive otherwise as that other chip
Having trouble following me? Oh, gosh! I'm so sorry! As you can see, I'm having some difficulty stringing nouns and verbs together in order which conveys useful meaning. This article is a wedgie bunchy terdhammer pukebucket of crap. This article is a hopeless string of buzz words in a mash-up, probably ripped from an ars technica article or two and cranked back and forth through the Google translator to obscure the source . Don't waste your time reading it.
I hope and desire that reading this really-not-fine-in-any-way article has not permanently affected my linguistic processing ability, although it may be so effected... doh! affected.
There are now a sizeable chunk of Firefox users on windows. Some of them are government agencies or corporations, who won't upgrade to Vista until Firefox is running. Firefox is now a big customer, important to Microsoft.
I find this fascinating. The personal and identity information of every PC user on the planet has been under serious and sustained attack for nearly a decade now from "unsigned" malware, but that really didn't elicit meaningful changes in the design of the operating system that most PC users employ. However, when the entertainment industry realizes that these techniques for privilege escalation can be used to hijack their content, serious design changes are created to support the policy these customers seek to enforce.
100 million individuals can be easily ignored because they produce white noise when speaking, but a dozen individuals with hundreds of millions of dollars can speak with a very clear voice and wind up with veto power over Microsoft. They have decided that everyone must upgrade their computers to watch HD content. (It's time to purchase shares in Intel, the top PC component suppliers, and the top 10 PC makers -- they'll all be selling more stuff as a result of this.)
The security needs of the individual consumer will continue to be largely ignored, except where they happen to overlap with the needs of really big clients like the entertainment industry. It's not clear how to aggregate those little voices to speak with one, loud and clear, voice, particularly as they don't know, on an individual basis, what to say or even that they need to say anything at all. I suppose if enough people start switching to Mac OS X or Linux, and cite security concerns as a primary reason, that might get attention in Redmond.
I'm not picking on you, I've just seen this same error (confusion of "moot" with "mute") several times in the past week or so. The error seems to be reproducing. It's time for a brief vocabulary lesson.
A point of argument may be moot if it's debatable or of academic interest only.
Heh. Yes, you correctly identified my grammar error. Naturally I meant either, "backups could not be" or "no backups could be". Sunrise over turquoise mountains, Disk kaput. Backups kaput. Llama taboot taboot. : )
Lotus Notes doesn't really do this on purpose, but an artifact of the system architecture and user behavior (they want local copies of everything) seems to combine to provide a rudimentary capability of data recovery from widely distributed stores such as you describe. I observed a client once restore all the data on a Lotus Notes server following a catastrophic data loss (short chain of events meant no backups could not be recovered following the loss of a RAID filesystem, many GB of data gone). They put a call out their user community for the replicated copies of the various "database" thingies which existed on user laptops and desktop systems. They were able to recover all of the data that anyone cared about, anyway, if not actually all of it.
"Let's see what happens to "security" if the market share ever heads north of the 80% mark. All the system needs is a couple million coders bent on stealing or propagating a virus, and they will be fucked."
You forgot to mention one bit vital to your recipe:
A defect which can be exploited.
*ba-dmp-chnk*
Just kidding. Sure, various defects exist on Mac OS X. It's interesting that they don't get exploited with a frequency that represents their market share. People always say Mac are more expensive, so Mac users much be richer, so we might think that they would be "juicy" targets for identity theft.
"I think that would be a cool feature. I would like the ability to tag content with a review for others to read later on, add to or disagree with as they please."
Great. All we need is yet another way for induhviduals to cause you grief by spoofing your email address (or whatever). Suppose one day you accidentally slight the 15 year old summer intern by humming along to Eleanor Rigby when it comes over the Muzak(TM). Unbeknownst to you, starting the next day your "review" is attached to all the pr0n mpegs floating around on the net. A thousand years after you die, the only trace of you left on the planet will be pr0n files with your "review" attached:
"John Q. Public says: MUST SEE!!! h0t b3atch3s p7mp3d 1n 411 h0l3s!!!"
Since The Kid used the latest version of Jonny-Rev13wZ-it.EXE, each of your "reviews" will be unique of course. The time stamps of the reviews will be spoofed so that they are spread out over the last few years, starting with late night reviews, then adding in early morning reviews, then lunch hour reviews, then, finally, within the past few weeks, work-day reviews. Some of your reviews might even contain samples of phrases gleaned from your blog and other emails of yours floating around the internet, to add to the apparent authenticity. Then he anonymously reports you to the FBI, because undoubtedly some of those reviews are attached to material which would qualify you for special treatment in the Federal penitentiary where you will, most likely, live out your days. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to be acquitted by a jury with a high tolerance for techno-babble.
Meanwhile, you won't be able to get a date with any girl savvy enough to Google you.
Unless you must first submit a notarized copy of your "review" along with your X.509 certificate and two forms of valid government issued photo identification at the county courthouse, No, thanks.
This is not mere grandstanding it is also an interesting twist on the ever-raging debate on full disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Eschewed were the two classic positions usually assumed by professionals in the field:
disclose in public sufficient detail to demonstrate and reproduce (and sometimes fix) the vulnerability, which might or might not include sample exploit code, and
disclose those details in secret to the vendor).
Rather than adopt a classic position, these two, ahem, security researchers...
ahem, ahem... I have something stuck in my throat, ahem...
have staked out territory previously reserved for crackers (aka black-hat hackers), that being: "we know about a vulnerability and will not disclose its details to the community at large, but also will not share with the product vendor details sufficient to allow them to find, reproduce, and fix the problem". Traditionally the cracker also reserves the right to exploit the vulnerability if desired, or sell it to other crackers.
Never fear! The security researchers are here. Ahem.
OK, that's entirely too much like something I would say. To Win the Game, WWBS, enter something succinct and pity.
The whole idea that Apple could 'kill' Microsoft or Dell is too far-fetched to even consider. The only way either company could die is by suicide.
With something like $80 bazillion dollars in *cash*, Microsoft could put a grenade in its mouth, tie the pin with a string to a sword, commit seppuku with aforementioned sword, causing the pin to be pulled simultaneously, and it would still survive as a headless, bloodless, gutless, 800 pound monopolistic monster -- for a few more decades.
Suicide is not an option. It would only result in a corporate zombie.
Slashdot Mirror
Hop to it.
shooting by
passing through
nearly or entirely without mass?
ephemeral without interception
like a neutron
through a mind
unnoticed
The poem "a point" is Copyright © 2006 Gary W. Longsine, All Rights Reserved.
Perhaps I was insufficiently succinct. Let me clarify. I will assume that you are genuinely curious about the Mach kernel, and not merely a trolling closeted Windows Fan Boy
You made an entirely bogus claim about Mach performance above the 2-4 CPU count which you did not support. Your follow-up makes it clear that you have read the Wikipedia page, but perhaps don't fully grok the IPC microkernel performance issue which is the stuff of Monday Night Hacker armchair kernel designer legend.
In contrast, I provided as a counter argument:
(Please check yourself into to the Argument Clinic for further treatment regarding the mechanics of argument.)
One-off hot rods are not required. Apple could buy or rent large systems from companies that have them off the shelf, like Unisys, Fujitsu and otheres (Intel), Sun (SPARC), HP (PA-RISC) or IBM (Power) . At various times since at least 1992 the NeXT/Apple version of the kernel compiled on some or all of those hardware architectures. It probably still does in the labs, even if Darwin, the fork of the source that builds production releases of Mac OS X, may not. Steve Jobs has demonstrated that he values the portability of Mach, and is willing to devote resources to make sure that it remains portable. If market conditions changed, Steve Jobs could wake up one day and decide he wants to ship Mac OS X for SPARC and have it running on his desk by the end of the week if not the end of the day. In a few months, Mac OS X Server for SPARC could be a shipping product. People doubted this for years when NeXT Fanboys said this, but history has proven that this can happen. It can be running and ready to hand out a CD to thousands of developers before IBM even knows you're going to switch processors to one that has a roadmap that extends beyond 2003. You doubt such a scenario? What if Google one day decided they want to convert their data centers to SPARC because they can squeeze 64 cores into the power envelope used by 4 cores in their current data centers, and that they wanted to use development tools for Mac OS X to build a new service. Do you think Apple would be in position to take advantage when a member of the board calls Steve and says something like, "Hey Steve, I have an idea I want to talk with you about..." You bet your stock options, Apple could have a demo in front of Google ASAP.
This issue regarding Mach IPC that has your undies in a bunch is pretty clearly not a problem in the production kernel, judging by the SPECint and SPECfp and other benchmarks that Apple is getting on multiple CPU architectures. Don't take my word for it. Get a box yourself and put Linux , FreeBSD, and Windows on it and see if you come up with similar numbers. Undoubtedly you would. If the IPC inside the Mach kernel was such a performance problem with multiple CPU, this problem would undoubtedly be measurable in a dual or quad core system. The fact that the internet isn't abuzz with people posting bona fide exposes about this issue probably means it's not an issue. (Be sure to use benchmarks which are designed to measure performance on multi-processor machines like the Spec Int Rate benchmark).
Better yet, get a friend at a university or at some place that makes such iron, a
Let's assume for the moment that none of us in this forum actually know anything factual about how many years Apple (or even NeXT before them) have been running Mach on machines with more than 4 processors on the corporate campus behind locked doors.
However, we can probably reason this out if we try. We're all bright geek types, right? There are several clues. NeXT bought Apple for a negative $400 million or so in what, December of 1996?
The heritage of NeXT that you mention is a pretty big clue. I don't recall off the top of my head how many processors were supported by the production shipping Mach build for SPARC and PA-RISC back in the NeXT days, but let's assume it was 2, just for the sake of argument. Both of those platforms offered ready availability of systems with many processors even way back then. Perhaps there were systems like that in the lab.
Mach was originally a research project with an interesting goal: clean support of certain abstractions in a platform-independent way. One of those abstractions was support for multiple processors, beyond the typical SMP architectures we see today, which means that the author's concept of platform-independent went quite some distance beyond a different instruction set in a different risk architecture. Dig this:
That text is unattributed at the Wikipedia page, but comes from this document: Appendix B from the book: Operating System Concepts
An excellent book entirely about Mach is: Programming under Mach, which also mentions the design intent.
The original project was funded by DARPA, with the specific goal of developing operating systems technologies which would support super computers with hundreds or thousands of processors.
The Mach project developed new techniques which have migrated directly (via actual Mach code to OSF, NeXT, Mac OS X, et. al.) or indirectly into pretty much every modern operating system.
Mach research spanned a very long period of time, and two Universities. Curious, bright, and arguably insane people (or they would have been making money instead of slaving away making Mach on grad-student salary) with access to multiple processor machines with DARPA funded directives to make it scale to hundreds of processors. Hmm... that seems like a clue.
NeXT was, and Apple is a hardware engineering company. Apple has been building multiple processor boxes since before the reverse acquisition. I know, I had the, uh, perverse and shameful pleasure of running BeOS on one of them for sport.
If any joker with a web site can get ahold of pre-
Where are they? Gone.
Civilizations routinely destroy their home planet by creating miniature black holes thereupon whilst trying to figure out what makes them tick. Technology advances faster than democracy, and it has never yet in the long history of the universe been put to a vote.
Apple made the right decision updating the iMac to a 64-bit processor and using the low power version of the same 64-bit dual core chip family in the product. How many tons of coal will be saved over the lifetime of the first million of those iMacs sold, compared to the same system were it to use the desktop chip, whose primary technology advantage from the home user's perspective would have been that it runs hotter and slurps more electrons.
The executives at the telcos are holding up progress because they want to be the only company to sell $1.99 ring tones to their customers and they all have fantasies about setting up their own iTunes style online stores, too. The telcos are standing in the way of progress for, literally, hundreds of millions of people (2 Billion served).
under the cone of silence... give me a break.
Mods, get a clue. This was *funny*.
I could tell you why I think Time Machine will be easy to use. But then I'd have to arrange for you to be sequstered in a lonely place until after Leopard ships. ;-)
Dang it! I was going to run it through the Google translator and back before I posted. :-)
Thank you so much for taking care of this for me.
- first chip - better than some other chips, unless you wait until spring
- chip II - chip C is better than this in all respects, except that a certain chip which may or may not be the second chip or chip 3 is more modern and consumes less heat and is faster
- third chip - designed in a foreign country and better than chip 2 but slower than the second chip
- another chip - better than a chip which is to say not really better, but overwhelmingly not quite as power hungry as chip 1
- a different chip - this is the be-all and end-all of chips off the ol' block, the mother load of chipdom, but not very impressive otherwise as that other chip
Having trouble following me? Oh, gosh! I'm so sorry! As you can see, I'm having some difficulty stringing nouns and verbs together in order which conveys useful meaning. This article is a wedgie bunchy terdhammer pukebucket of crap. This article is a hopeless string of buzz words in a mash-up, probably ripped from an ars technica article or two and cranked back and forth through the Google translator to obscure the source . Don't waste your time reading it.I hope and desire that reading this really-not-fine-in-any-way article has not permanently affected my linguistic processing ability, although it may be so effected... doh! affected.
Doesn't anybody *screen* these submissions?
- transparent aluminum [Add to Cart]
- broad spectrum LEDs [Add to Cart]
- efficient peltier effect alloys [Add to Cart]
- 3D holographic memory array crystals [Add to Cart]
NOW How Much Would You Pay? (TM)There are now a sizeable chunk of Firefox users on windows. Some of them are government agencies or corporations, who won't upgrade to Vista until Firefox is running. Firefox is now a big customer, important to Microsoft.
I find this fascinating. The personal and identity information of every PC user on the planet has been under serious and sustained attack for nearly a decade now from "unsigned" malware, but that really didn't elicit meaningful changes in the design of the operating system that most PC users employ. However, when the entertainment industry realizes that these techniques for privilege escalation can be used to hijack their content, serious design changes are created to support the policy these customers seek to enforce.
100 million individuals can be easily ignored because they produce white noise when speaking, but a dozen individuals with hundreds of millions of dollars can speak with a very clear voice and wind up with veto power over Microsoft. They have decided that everyone must upgrade their computers to watch HD content. (It's time to purchase shares in Intel, the top PC component suppliers, and the top 10 PC makers -- they'll all be selling more stuff as a result of this.)
The security needs of the individual consumer will continue to be largely ignored, except where they happen to overlap with the needs of really big clients like the entertainment industry. It's not clear how to aggregate those little voices to speak with one, loud and clear, voice, particularly as they don't know, on an individual basis, what to say or even that they need to say anything at all. I suppose if enough people start switching to Mac OS X or Linux, and cite security concerns as a primary reason, that might get attention in Redmond.
I'm not picking on you, I've just seen this same error (confusion of "moot" with "mute") several times in the past week or so. The error seems to be reproducing. It's time for a brief vocabulary lesson.
A point of argument may be moot if it's debatable or of academic interest only.
People may be mute if they cannot speak.
Heh. Yes, you correctly identified my grammar error. Naturally I meant either, "backups could not be" or "no backups could be". Sunrise over turquoise mountains, Disk kaput. Backups kaput. Llama taboot taboot. : )
Interesting. Why 11?
"It's one louder."
Lotus Notes doesn't really do this on purpose, but an artifact of the system architecture and user behavior (they want local copies of everything) seems to combine to provide a rudimentary capability of data recovery from widely distributed stores such as you describe. I observed a client once restore all the data on a Lotus Notes server following a catastrophic data loss (short chain of events meant no backups could not be recovered following the loss of a RAID filesystem, many GB of data gone). They put a call out their user community for the replicated copies of the various "database" thingies which existed on user laptops and desktop systems. They were able to recover all of the data that anyone cared about, anyway, if not actually all of it.
You should win a prize! I was, as it happens, totally inspired by the headline the other day: Korea's Online Aggression a Taste of the Future?
A defect which can be exploited.
*ba-dmp-chnk*
Just kidding. Sure, various defects exist on Mac OS X. It's interesting that they don't get exploited with a frequency that represents their market share. People always say Mac are more expensive, so Mac users much be richer, so we might think that they would be "juicy" targets for identity theft.
"John Q. Public says: MUST SEE!!! h0t b3atch3s p7mp3d 1n 411 h0l3s!!!"
Since The Kid used the latest version of Jonny-Rev13wZ-it.EXE, each of your "reviews" will be unique of course. The time stamps of the reviews will be spoofed so that they are spread out over the last few years, starting with late night reviews, then adding in early morning reviews, then lunch hour reviews, then, finally, within the past few weeks, work-day reviews. Some of your reviews might even contain samples of phrases gleaned from your blog and other emails of yours floating around the internet, to add to the apparent authenticity. Then he anonymously reports you to the FBI, because undoubtedly some of those reviews are attached to material which would qualify you for special treatment in the Federal penitentiary where you will, most likely, live out your days. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to be acquitted by a jury with a high tolerance for techno-babble.
Meanwhile, you won't be able to get a date with any girl savvy enough to Google you.
Unless you must first submit a notarized copy of your "review" along with your X.509 certificate and two forms of valid government issued photo identification at the county courthouse, No, thanks.
This is not mere grandstanding it is also an interesting twist on the ever-raging debate on full disclosure of security vulnerabilities. Eschewed were the two classic positions usually assumed by professionals in the field:
- disclose in public sufficient detail to demonstrate and reproduce (and sometimes fix) the vulnerability, which might or might not include sample exploit code, and
- disclose those details in secret to the vendor).
Rather than adopt a classic position, these two, ahem, security researchers...ahem, ahem... I have something stuck in my throat, ahem...
have staked out territory previously reserved for crackers (aka black-hat hackers), that being: "we know about a vulnerability and will not disclose its details to the community at large, but also will not share with the product vendor details sufficient to allow them to find, reproduce, and fix the problem". Traditionally the cracker also reserves the right to exploit the vulnerability if desired, or sell it to other crackers.
Never fear! The security researchers are here. Ahem.
OK, that's entirely too much like something I would say. To Win the Game, WWBS, enter something succinct and pity.
Smug? No, you should Cower in Fear(TM) like The Rest of Them (TM).
Suicide is not an option. It would only result in a corporate zombie.