IBM has a mainframe program named IEFBR14. Officially, it does absolutely nothing. It's a dummy program used for things like anchoring JCL file allocations.
There have been at least 5 releases of it, although one was an upgrade to 64-bit integers. The others all count as bugfixes. Because when it comes to computers, even doing nothing does something.
The first of them was, allegedly, the S/3x0 assembler-language and OS/360 equivalent of replacing
int main(void) { }
with
int main(void) {
return 0; }
as per this RISKS Digest message (the OS/360 and C calling sequences both treat a return from the main program as an "exit", with the exit status being the numerical return value of the main program).
Actually, I think it was more like:
"return x-x";"
And in rare cases, where "x" (actually the contents of General Register 15) had the right value in it, this would ABEND the program due to an arithmetic overflow error. Which lead to the second fix, which also had a bug...
This will fly right until the first exploit, after which all belief will be broken. I'm in an optimistic mood: I'll give it a year.
IBM has a mainframe program named IEFBR14. Officially, it does absolutely nothing. It's a dummy program used for things like anchoring JCL file allocations.
There have been at least 5 releases of it, although one was an upgrade to 64-bit integers. The others all count as bugfixes. Because when it comes to computers, even doing nothing does something.
Yeah, I think there's a sort of analogue to Godel's incompleteness theorems here, in that any computer powerful enough to be interesting is powerful enough to do things that some stakeholder didn't want and will consider an "exploit." Of course "exploit" is fundamentally a subjective label, so of course it can't be "solved," outside some more formal definition of "exploit" that will inevitably fall short of people's wishes.
Most have some brain disorders like dyslexia. There's something about the type of brain wiring involved in certain disorders that frees up the problem solving areas of the brain. I think part of the hard work involves overcoming the disorders. Most geniuses are unconventional thinkers. I remember a quote that genius was being about to connect A to C without going through B. It's that out of box thinking that defines true genius. Being able to take an equation with 12 steps and reduce it to 3 or 4.
Genius is being able to jump from A to C, then go back in and fill in B.
Insanity is being able to jump from A to C when B doesn't connect to both of them. A lot of political thought falls into this category.
Please, the term is "vision-impaired". I can't believe Slashdot can be so insensitive.
I am vision-impaired. Most people in my line of work are. I make Mr. Magoo look like 20/20. You do not want me on the highway without corrective lenses.
I am "legally" blind in both eyes, but I can still see well enough to operate a cellphone. But I am not "blind" in the white-cane and guide dog sense, which is what people commonly think of as blind. It's a whole different can of worms when even with the best aid available all you can see is a smeary blur or nothing at all.
It isn't effective because it isn't done in public. Back in the good old days you'd strap a crook to a rack and pull out his innards in the middle of a town square. Then you'd use a couple of horses and pull of his limbs, which you would display all around town. That scared the shit out of people. Nowadays all that you do is give a lad a couple of injections in front of maybe a dozen people. People can get "deterred" by reading the news of the event if they want. Waste of time if you ask me. If you want to deter crime, then the criminals-to-be need to hear the screaming.
One of the signature characteristics of criminals is that they're "special". Only Other People get caught. I'm too smart. So seeing Other People get executed in gross and painful ways does little to deter criminals, although it may make them think about using more extreme measures to avoid getting caught.
On the other hand, we're well aware of the desensitizing effects of repeated spectacles. When a Drawing and Quartering replaces Monster Truck Pulls as a place to take the kiddies, don't be surprised if the kiddies end up with rather brutish ideas of how to interact with other people.
While I would definitely enjoy seeing a few telemarketers being given an up close and personal exploration of their entrails, this kind of stuff isn't really about punishment, it's about revenge. Consider the quality of life in countries where revenge is the accepted means of dealing with injury. Even the so-called civilized ones. Where simply riding the bus can turn out to be an unexpected adventure.
They'll end up liking the taste of crow. Idiots. Without search engines, the online content will never be found, shrivel up, and die. It's a symbiotic relationship and punishing one side is just going to hurt the other.
I think the main rationale for Germany's censorship laws is that there are still Nazis alive today, though their numbers are fast dwindling.
Imagine, if you will, that some charismatic former member of the 3d Reich named Schwarzenegger got up and started freely inciting the German populace. Reminding them of the humiliation of losing the previous war and the offences of Foreigners, Jews and outside Nations. How Germany deserves its rightful place at the forefront of the world. People like that are always with us, but they carry an extra bit of magic when they are the embers of the old Reich, attempting to revive the fire, instead of just knee-biting wannabes.
Most Germans would ignore him, some would denounce him. But they did that once before. We know the result. The censorship laws were passed back when there were a lot more former Nazis around, but until each one is well and truly lost in history, there's a certain advantage to muting their voices.
I've been making the case that you can't really "own" anything that can be confiscated for taxes either, but let's not run off a clockwork-driven ideological recording.
If you "own" the property, you can apply the taxes on it against other tax liabilities. You can often apply depreciation. Stuff you can't do when someone else "owns" it.
Eminent domain is another matter, but my observations have been that it's the government that's more often taken to the cleaners when they buy up property, not the owners. The real stink of Eminent Domain is more often that "My Grandad and I built this house" or "We're a community. We've all lived here for 30 years". Those thing are intangible and have no absolute monetary value, even when they're more important to the inhabitants than simple cash compensation. And actually, some or even all of the inhabitants may be renters, not "owners", especially in old historical impoverished districts.
It's a little sad when you have to write police raids into your disaster recovery policy. Especially when it's one of the more likely disasters.
Sad, but true. It has already been amply demonstrated that you can end up offline because someone else in the farm got raided and the police simply confiscated things wholesale.
I've seen two instances where a drive failed. Each time there were no handy replacement drives. Within a week a second drive died the same way as the first! back to backup tapes! Better to have replacement drives in boxes waiting.
Same with me. Except that the drives would invariably fail when I was on vacation. One drive would blow. OK, no problem - it's RAID. Second drive blows 2 days later. Uh-oh.
Come back to work and that size drive is no longer manufactured and no other people in a campus of approximately 1200 people had a spare.
I hope there is one of those Pinko-Liberal-Commie-Democrat-Basterds teachers on the faculty making the kids read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
And who says English Lit is worthless.
When I was young, I thought Fahrenheit 451 was about suppressing books because government was authoritarian.
I read it more recently and realized it was because the people had democratically decided that books were unhealthy and interfered with watching Dancing with the Stars.
What I don't understand is what wireless brings to the table. The way it read to me, it was more a matter of having local "sewing circles" that were networked.
I liked the "sewing circle" concept, but why wireless? These are short distances. If you don't like short network cables, why not just use LED transceivers, instead? No wires to plug in when you jack compute modules in and out, (in theory) simpler circuitry, and as long as the cabinets are light-tight, no leakage issues. You could even put a big light up on top of the cabinet to be the transceiver for cabinet-to-cabinet networking.
The problem is - these religious nuts are closed minded individuals that believe their way is the only right one. They put all their beliefs in a single text book that says anyone who thinks different is evil. These people don't think for themselves, they use no logic. Instead they have become too lazy and complacent to question what they believe.
It's worse than that. When a copy of a holy text becomes an object of worship, it becomes, in effect, an idol. And the Qur'an explicitly forbids idolatry. If there's a First Commandment of Islam, it's that Thou Shalt Not Add Gods to God, and that includes images, prophets, books - whatever.
Not that the USA can smirk in its own virtue on that one. An alarmingly large number of people idolize the American Flag, and it's an ongoing struggle in Congress to get that idolatry enshrined into law via things like anti flag-burning amendments. Fortunately, that hasn't happened. Yet.
This. At some point there was a shift from providing good business to profiting by any means.
Nah. Profiting by any means is as old as business itself, up to and including literally ambushing and robbing customers. It isn't good business, however, if your idea of good business involves repeat customers and you don't hold a monopoly. Remember: give a man a fish, and he'll sponge off you for a day. Teach a man to fish and you can bleed him for the rest of his life, because you own the lake that you rent him access to, you bloody conniving bastard!
What did turn for the worse is the ascendence of the "bean counters" coupled with the ideal that it's better to pillage and run quickly over making a slow, sustainable fortune. Mergers and Acquisitions that have zero (or negative) benefits for the customers and employees, but pay the executives when they buy and again when they sell off the gutted remains. "Cherry picking", "lemon dropping", and sawing the corners off everything because it saves 5 cents per thousand units sold. Hyper-efficiency, where you're so "efficient" that a bump in the road wrecks everything because there's not enough slack in the system to absorb it. "Bean blindness", where anything that doesn't look like a "bean" doesn't get counted.
Amazon lost me as a (formerly very active) customer 2 years ago because of certain things they were doing and have done since then, largely because they are a semi-monopoly and were throwing their weight around. There are other, far worse companies out there, however.
they'll likely add algorithms to compare similarity. Too high of a percentage will trigger a hit. or they will have a specific part of the design require an exact match. More likely though, they will use a combination of these two approaches - a nearly exact match (99.5%) on any of a number of small structures, OR a 95% overall match, trips it.
Before things like "software patents" came to the fore, a lot of little knobs and gears and stuff sported patent numbers or "patent pending" on them. They were basically customized general items, and probably no more original that a lot of software patents. And it would be a real bugger to figure out which one a 3D plan violated unless the infringement algorithm did a detail-by-detail comparison.
I think we need to drill our asses off locally, build more refineries to keep us going while we explore all other forms of energy.
Problem is, while we've no shortage of people pushing to drill our asses off locally, they're usually also vehemently opposed to exploring all other forms of energy. If we ran off something besides oil, they'd have no traction.
If the Arabs want to build any sort of credibility, though, they need to stop treating the Prophet like some sort of God. You know darned good and well they wouldn't riot like that if a film was made mocking you or me. Or for that matter, even Jesus, who is (according to some) just one step lower on the Islamic order of prophets.
What worries me about 2-a-day releases is that not everything that can go wrong with a new release can be automatically tested. A software release isn't truly trustworthy until actual users test it. Users have this bad habit of doing things in ways that no sane programmer can anticipate, much test think to test for.
Unlike computers, however, human testers cannot receive, test, and approve in milliseconds. Nor are they always on-line and available to test. In fact, simply getting a tester for my current work is a major accomplishment.
The other downside to such a volatile environment is that it becomes much harder to determine and isolate problems because the problematic software is almost literally changing from hour to hour and the bugs and side-effects that the user encountered at 6 am might not be the same as what they'd run into at 3 pm.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has a mainframe program named IEFBR14. Officially, it does absolutely nothing. It's a dummy program used for things like anchoring JCL file allocations.
There have been at least 5 releases of it, although one was an upgrade to 64-bit integers. The others all count as bugfixes. Because when it comes to computers, even doing nothing does something.
The first of them was, allegedly, the S/3x0 assembler-language and OS/360 equivalent of replacing
with
as per this RISKS Digest message (the OS/360 and C calling sequences both treat a return from the main program as an "exit", with the exit status being the numerical return value of the main program).
Actually, I think it was more like:
And in rare cases, where "x" (actually the contents of General Register 15) had the right value in it, this would ABEND the program due to an arithmetic overflow error. Which lead to the second fix, which also had a bug...
Perhaps closer, genius is the ability to quickly see a B shaped void between A and C, then find B.
touché!
This will fly right until the first exploit, after which all belief will be broken. I'm in an optimistic mood: I'll give it a year.
IBM has a mainframe program named IEFBR14. Officially, it does absolutely nothing. It's a dummy program used for things like anchoring JCL file allocations.
There have been at least 5 releases of it, although one was an upgrade to 64-bit integers. The others all count as bugfixes. Because when it comes to computers, even doing nothing does something.
Yeah, I think there's a sort of analogue to Godel's incompleteness theorems here, in that any computer powerful enough to be interesting is powerful enough to do things that some stakeholder didn't want and will consider an "exploit." Of course "exploit" is fundamentally a subjective label, so of course it can't be "solved," outside some more formal definition of "exploit" that will inevitably fall short of people's wishes.
Translation: That's not a bug, it's a feature!
It's on my 4-function desktop calculator. You didn't specify what the OS had to be able to -do-...
[/obligatory]
Wasn't there at least one book that dealt with how to do tricks by exploiting quirks in the designs of various calculators?
Your 4-function desktop calculator has no operating system, by any accepted definition of the term operating system.
Some of us are more accepting in our definitions. Or does your definition require that an OS must be something that presents a "C:" prompt?
Most have some brain disorders like dyslexia. There's something about the type of brain wiring involved in certain disorders that frees up the problem solving areas of the brain. I think part of the hard work involves overcoming the disorders. Most geniuses are unconventional thinkers. I remember a quote that genius was being about to connect A to C without going through B. It's that out of box thinking that defines true genius. Being able to take an equation with 12 steps and reduce it to 3 or 4.
Genius is being able to jump from A to C, then go back in and fill in B.
Insanity is being able to jump from A to C when B doesn't connect to both of them. A lot of political thought falls into this category.
Please, the term is "vision-impaired". I can't believe Slashdot can be so insensitive.
I am vision-impaired. Most people in my line of work are. I make Mr. Magoo look like 20/20. You do not want me on the highway without corrective lenses.
I am "legally" blind in both eyes, but I can still see well enough to operate a cellphone. But I am not "blind" in the white-cane and guide dog sense, which is what people commonly think of as blind. It's a whole different can of worms when even with the best aid available all you can see is a smeary blur or nothing at all.
It isn't effective because it isn't done in public. Back in the good old days you'd strap a crook to a rack and pull out his innards in the middle of a town square. Then you'd use a couple of horses and pull of his limbs, which you would display all around town. That scared the shit out of people. Nowadays all that you do is give a lad a couple of injections in front of maybe a dozen people. People can get "deterred" by reading the news of the event if they want. Waste of time if you ask me. If you want to deter crime, then the criminals-to-be need to hear the screaming.
One of the signature characteristics of criminals is that they're "special". Only Other People get caught. I'm too smart. So seeing Other People get executed in gross and painful ways does little to deter criminals, although it may make them think about using more extreme measures to avoid getting caught.
On the other hand, we're well aware of the desensitizing effects of repeated spectacles. When a Drawing and Quartering replaces Monster Truck Pulls as a place to take the kiddies, don't be surprised if the kiddies end up with rather brutish ideas of how to interact with other people.
While I would definitely enjoy seeing a few telemarketers being given an up close and personal exploration of their entrails, this kind of stuff isn't really about punishment, it's about revenge. Consider the quality of life in countries where revenge is the accepted means of dealing with injury. Even the so-called civilized ones. Where simply riding the bus can turn out to be an unexpected adventure.
They'll end up liking the taste of crow. Idiots. Without search engines, the online content will never be found, shrivel up, and die. It's a symbiotic relationship and punishing one side is just going to hurt the other.
A child can understand that concept.
Don't tell Rupert Murdoch that.
I think the main rationale for Germany's censorship laws is that there are still Nazis alive today, though their numbers are fast dwindling.
Imagine, if you will, that some charismatic former member of the 3d Reich named Schwarzenegger got up and started freely inciting the German populace. Reminding them of the humiliation of losing the previous war and the offences of Foreigners, Jews and outside Nations. How Germany deserves its rightful place at the forefront of the world. People like that are always with us, but they carry an extra bit of magic when they are the embers of the old Reich, attempting to revive the fire, instead of just knee-biting wannabes.
Most Germans would ignore him, some would denounce him. But they did that once before. We know the result. The censorship laws were passed back when there were a lot more former Nazis around, but until each one is well and truly lost in history, there's a certain advantage to muting their voices.
I've been making the case that you can't really "own" anything that can be confiscated for taxes either, but let's not run off a clockwork-driven ideological recording.
If you "own" the property, you can apply the taxes on it against other tax liabilities. You can often apply depreciation. Stuff you can't do when someone else "owns" it.
Eminent domain is another matter, but my observations have been that it's the government that's more often taken to the cleaners when they buy up property, not the owners. The real stink of Eminent Domain is more often that "My Grandad and I built this house" or "We're a community. We've all lived here for 30 years". Those thing are intangible and have no absolute monetary value, even when they're more important to the inhabitants than simple cash compensation. And actually, some or even all of the inhabitants may be renters, not "owners", especially in old historical impoverished districts.
This has been done for year, it isn't a new concept.
For example, on Ötzi the Iceman.
Going in the opposite direction, I know EXACTLY where the cat has been. How can one small animal shed so much?
I drink exclusively Perrier, so the cops think I was in Vergèze in the Gard département of France the whole time.
Perrier has a plant in ZephryHills Florida. You could be drinking Tampa tapwater, since they're both using the Hillsborough River.
It's a little sad when you have to write police raids into your disaster recovery policy. Especially when it's one of the more likely disasters.
Sad, but true. It has already been amply demonstrated that you can end up offline because someone else in the farm got raided and the police simply confiscated things wholesale.
New teacher litmus test: are you now or have you ever been a liberal?
Being a liberal is practically a hanging offense in some places I know of.
I've seen two instances where a drive failed. Each time there were no handy replacement drives. Within a week a second drive died the same way as the first! back to backup tapes! Better to have replacement drives in boxes waiting.
Same with me. Except that the drives would invariably fail when I was on vacation. One drive would blow. OK, no problem - it's RAID. Second drive blows 2 days later. Uh-oh.
Come back to work and that size drive is no longer manufactured and no other people in a campus of approximately 1200 people had a spare.
I hope there is one of those Pinko-Liberal-Commie-Democrat-Basterds teachers on the faculty making the kids read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
And who says English Lit is worthless.
When I was young, I thought Fahrenheit 451 was about suppressing books because government was authoritarian.
I read it more recently and realized it was because the people had democratically decided that books were unhealthy and interfered with watching Dancing with the Stars.
What I don't understand is what wireless brings to the table. The way it read to me, it was more a matter of having local "sewing circles" that were networked.
I liked the "sewing circle" concept, but why wireless? These are short distances. If you don't like short network cables, why not just use LED transceivers, instead? No wires to plug in when you jack compute modules in and out, (in theory) simpler circuitry, and as long as the cabinets are light-tight, no leakage issues. You could even put a big light up on top of the cabinet to be the transceiver for cabinet-to-cabinet networking.
The problem is - these religious nuts are closed minded individuals that believe their way is the only right one. They put all their beliefs in a single text book that says anyone who thinks different is evil. These people don't think for themselves, they use no logic. Instead they have become too lazy and complacent to question what they believe.
It's worse than that. When a copy of a holy text becomes an object of worship, it becomes, in effect, an idol. And the Qur'an explicitly forbids idolatry. If there's a First Commandment of Islam, it's that Thou Shalt Not Add Gods to God, and that includes images, prophets, books - whatever.
Not that the USA can smirk in its own virtue on that one. An alarmingly large number of people idolize the American Flag, and it's an ongoing struggle in Congress to get that idolatry enshrined into law via things like anti flag-burning amendments. Fortunately, that hasn't happened. Yet.
This. At some point there was a shift from providing good business to profiting by any means.
Nah. Profiting by any means is as old as business itself, up to and including literally ambushing and robbing customers. It isn't good business, however, if your idea of good business involves repeat customers and you don't hold a monopoly. Remember: give a man a fish, and he'll sponge off you for a day. Teach a man to fish and you can bleed him for the rest of his life, because you own the lake that you rent him access to, you bloody conniving bastard!
What did turn for the worse is the ascendence of the "bean counters" coupled with the ideal that it's better to pillage and run quickly over making a slow, sustainable fortune. Mergers and Acquisitions that have zero (or negative) benefits for the customers and employees, but pay the executives when they buy and again when they sell off the gutted remains. "Cherry picking", "lemon dropping", and sawing the corners off everything because it saves 5 cents per thousand units sold. Hyper-efficiency, where you're so "efficient" that a bump in the road wrecks everything because there's not enough slack in the system to absorb it. "Bean blindness", where anything that doesn't look like a "bean" doesn't get counted.
Amazon lost me as a (formerly very active) customer 2 years ago because of certain things they were doing and have done since then, largely because they are a semi-monopoly and were throwing their weight around. There are other, far worse companies out there, however.
they'll likely add algorithms to compare similarity. Too high of a percentage will trigger a hit. or they will have a specific part of the design require an exact match. More likely though, they will use a combination of these two approaches - a nearly exact match (99.5%) on any of a number of small structures, OR a 95% overall match, trips it.
Before things like "software patents" came to the fore, a lot of little knobs and gears and stuff sported patent numbers or "patent pending" on them. They were basically customized general items, and probably no more original that a lot of software patents. And it would be a real bugger to figure out which one a 3D plan violated unless the infringement algorithm did a detail-by-detail comparison.
If you actually think of yourself as having a 'personal brand', I'd say that existing is all the punishment you could ever require...
Oh, everyone has a "personal brand". Just in a lot of cases, it's Brand X.
I think we need to drill our asses off locally, build more refineries to keep us going while we explore all other forms of energy.
Problem is, while we've no shortage of people pushing to drill our asses off locally, they're usually also vehemently opposed to exploring all other forms of energy. If we ran off something besides oil, they'd have no traction.
If the Arabs want to build any sort of credibility, though, they need to stop treating the Prophet like some sort of God. You know darned good and well they wouldn't riot like that if a film was made mocking you or me. Or for that matter, even Jesus, who is (according to some) just one step lower on the Islamic order of prophets.
What worries me about 2-a-day releases is that not everything that can go wrong with a new release can be automatically tested. A software release isn't truly trustworthy until actual users test it. Users have this bad habit of doing things in ways that no sane programmer can anticipate, much test think to test for.
Unlike computers, however, human testers cannot receive, test, and approve in milliseconds. Nor are they always on-line and available to test. In fact, simply getting a tester for my current work is a major accomplishment.
The other downside to such a volatile environment is that it becomes much harder to determine and isolate problems because the problematic software is almost literally changing from hour to hour and the bugs and side-effects that the user encountered at 6 am might not be the same as what they'd run into at 3 pm.