Or, rather, the next-generation portable version of OS/2 on which Microsoft were working became, instead, a next-generation portable version of Windows, i.e. Windows NT. How much OS/2 code, other than perhaps the HPFS implementation, was in Windows NT is another matter.
which became Windows Server.
Or, rather, which was given various names that didn't have "NT" in them, such as "Windows XP", "Windows Vista", "Windows 7", and "Windows Server 20xx" (rather than "Windows NT Server").
A lot of Windows Server is in Windows 7.
Well, yeah, Windows 7 is "Windows NT 6.1", as is Windows Server 2008 R2; they're both releases of The Code Base That Is Windows NT, even though Microsoft aren't using "NT" in the name any more.
I'm pretty sure a substantial amount of OS/2 code is still in use today, or at least a derivation of it...
Are you pretty sure because you've seen the code, or are you pretty sure because you're making what seems a plausible guess to you? I suspect little code from the versions of OS/2 that were released is there, although there's probably a substantial amount of Microsoft's "OS/2 NT" code in there.
512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB.
Presumably meaning "the absolute partition limit is 2TB, and if you want the partitions to be compatible with other operating systems, the limit is 512GB"; I think at least one responder may have found it a bit confusing, given that 2TB > 512GB.
Expand its desktop/notebook presence, as that's what's being discussed here?
And isn't the latest "Mac" OS just a shell over BSD?
OS X is Darwin plus a very large amount of code atop it; Darwin is a Mach-and-BSD-derived OS, with a lot of Apple code in it in addition to the Mach and BSD code. If you're comparing it to "Linux", it's best compared with a desktop/notebook Linux distribution; one could call the code atop Darwin a "shell", but the "shell" is thicker than the Darwin "core" (more code), just as in, for example, Ubuntu, there is, as far as I know, more code in the desktop environment than in the "core OS" (Linux kernel, glibc, other non-GUI libraries, commands, and daemons).
This is a well debunked fallacy. The statistics you use only apply to daytime usage when work machines are thrown in. At night, it is closer to 10-20% Linux usage. Even Microsoft has admitted that.
Windows NT and OS/2 are more similar than Windows NT and VMS.
In some ways, yes, but, for example, the lowest-level I/O architecture for NT is rather VMS-like (or perhaps rather Mica-like, although the obvious Mica documents don't describe whether it had the same I/O Request Packet-based model as VMS).
There has never been a source compatibility or easy conversion capability with VMS and RMS.
Cutler wasn't working for DEC any more, so there was no need for that. Internal design concepts, however, were reused.
Yeah, but he says "at least 80% of all crashes and hangs on my Mac" and then talks about how "iOS lives quite happily without Flash" but yeah, I'm sure he was referring to his browser and not to the whole machine.
Good, I'm glad you agree with me, and realize that neither of the two statements you cite are in any way indications that he refers to the OS crashing or hanging as a whole (given that both OS X and iOS are UN*Xes that put each process's userland code in a separate address space and protect the kernel's address space from userland code):
the first statement says "on my Mac", but that's not "of my Mac" - it's quite believable that most of the cases where applications crash or hang on his Mac are cases where the application is Safari and the crash or hang is due to the Flash player;
the second statement mentions an operating system, iOS, but that just means that, as Apple controls the availability of third-party software, and does not allow Flash Player to be available (and does not support third-party plugins for Safari on iOS), Flash isn't available on iOS, and, for many users, that's not an issue.
"I found this great new site you may be unaware of. It's called Wikipedia. It is kinda of like an online encyclopedia that has brief summaries of almost anything", trout007
Is this the same Wikipedia that says Windows NT wasn't designed for the Internet?
Consumer versions of Windows were originally designed for ease-of-use on a single-user PC without a network connection, and did not have security features built in from the outset. However, Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, but were not initially designed with Internet security in mind as much, since, when it was first developed in the early 1990s, Internet use was less prevalent.
which is not the same as "Windows NT wasn't designed for the Internet".
I don't have exact numbers here, but Ulrich has had a massive role in producing what may very well be the most widely used C library ever. There's a very good chance that the very computer you're using right now is executing at least some of the code he's written hundreds of times each second!
There's an excellent chance that the computers that a number of people posting to Slashdot are running are executing code either in a C library from Microsoft or in one that's a combination of FreeBSD and Apple code; are you asserting that most Slashdot posters are running Linux on the machine on which they're posting (which might be correct - the Slashdot audience is different from the "owns a desktop or notebook computer" audience) or that Drepper's code is in one or both of those C libraries? The rest of your post may be valid, but be careful with that assumption - it's not a Linux-only party here.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic, but if your OS is crashing or hanging due to Adobe Flash or any other user space application, then your OS is broken. Memory protection is not new.
You may, indeed, be inappropriately pedantic; he referred to "crashes or hangs", he did not explicitly say that the entire machine hung or crashed. Perhaps they were Safari (or Firefox or $OTHER_BROWSER_THAT_HAS_A_FLASH_PLUGIN) hangs or crashes.
Alternative history of Apple: Apple engineer speeds up memcpy implementation. Does some serious application testing for compatibility. Talks to Steve Jobs. "So what have you been working on?" "I made the C library a few percent faster, which benefits all users. It makes Adobe Flash crash". Steve Jobs: Dies laughing.
That's sound software development advice, I don't disagree with it. I'm not defending reverse memcpy, I'm merely saying that "flash doesn't work when we implement memcpy like this" isn't a good enough reason to change the implementation if the bug is on the flash side.
How about "Flash and some other programs in Fedora don't work correctly when we implement memcpy() like this, and some of them might "not work correctly" in ways that are security holes, and we currently have no tools to reliably analyze C code to catch incorrect use of memcpy(), and the failure modes are not always obvious, so it might be quite a long time before all the code out there is fixed?
No, people shouldn't use memcpy() in calls where the source and destination regions overlap, but if it's going to be a long time before those are all fixed, and if the failure modes can be insufficiently obvious that the bugs might not even be discovered before they do damage, this might be like {warning, car analogy ahead!} going through a traffic intersection with a 2-way stop, on the street without the stop signs, without slowing down and checking for oncoming traffic on the other street, because people shouldn't go through stop signs.
Here lies the body of Jonathan Day, who died defending his right of way. He was right, dead right, as he sped along, but he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong.
I think the key here is that the punishment for violating the C standard isn't that your program fails in an obvious fashion, it fails in a somewhat random fashion. If memcpy() would check for an overlap and abort the process if it discovered it, fine, but, at that point, it could, instead, check for an overlap and punt to memmove() with no loss of performance from the version that aborts in the case where there is no overlap and with a gain of "programs don't just barf mysteriously to the end user" in the case where there is.
So the question is whether the reasons for doing the backwards copy, as mentioned in the cited bug report and items to which it links, are sufficient to justify exposing the bugs in buggy programs such as the Flash player. If the performance benefits aren't large, perhaps they aren't.
...especially if the bugs in question are security bugs. If it turns out that it's too easy for people to use memcpy() when they should be using memmove(), perhaps there are technically good reasons not to have separated them, as long as "technically" includes "psychologically" as well as "computer hardware and software-wise", given that much of the computer software that would use memcpy() and/or memmove() is, for better or worse, written by human beings.
When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player.
Presumably you meant memcpy(), not malloc(). Somebody at Adobe needs a gentle reminder ("gentle" because I can't say for certain that I always remember that memcpy() is explicitly allowed not to properly copy between overlapping memory regions - "properly" meaning "as if the source region were copied to a temporary buffer and then the temporary buffer were copied to the destination region" - but memmove() is explicitly required to do so) that this is a job for memmove() Man.
So the question is whether the reasons for doing the backwards copy, as mentioned in the cited bug report and items to which it links, are sufficient to justify exposing the bugs in buggy programs such as the Flash player. If the performance benefits aren't large, perhaps they aren't.
What is this extant "North American Union" to which you're referring (if it doesn't exist at this point in time, it has nothing to do with this case), and when did Cuba become part of it?
Well, it may be April 1st where you are, but it's still March 31st where I am, and, more importantly, the date on the article is March 26th, so this does not appear to be an April Fool's joke.
If we were prone to fucking off, you'd be speaking German or Russian right now.
If we were prone to fucking off, Iran might have a reasonable secular democracy now. Just because certain US actions might have achieved good goals, that does not mean that all US actions are quite so beneficial. And, in this particular case (just as in the cases of, say, the coups against Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and Allende in Chile), in this particular case, the world (and, for this case, the US) would be better off if we truly did fuck off.
... and here's how. "Oh, you won't comply? Guess you don't want your airline to have landing rights in the US, then."
That only works for airlines that want/need to land on US airports.
So, why, then, is Canadian Affair complying (if the claim in the article that they are is true), as I see no evidence on their Web site that they land in the US? Perhaps some of their flights cross US airspace, and the US might deny them the right to do so if they don't impose those restrictions on all travelers even for flights that don't cross US airspace. Or perhaps they're being beaten into complying by their government or the UK government under pressure from the US government.
(Idiot mouthbreather who doesn't have a calendar in his mom's basement, thinks the US is terrible and Iran is a world leader)
(Idiot in his mom's basement, who can't write clear sentences to save his life (of course dskoll has no calendar in his mom's basement, why would he keep his calendars there rather than in his own home?), who didn't bother Reading The Fine Article to see that it's dated March 26th, not April 1st, and who thinks anybody who criticizes the US about anything not only thinks everything about it is terrible but also thinks Iran is a world leader)
So, are we absolutely sure this guy isn't some good scientist gone mad?
Actually, I suspect he is asking questions to provoke thought about ethical questions, whether the thoughts are "that's crazy" or "you have a point" or....
Kind of like how when Mini came back into existence it contracted BMW to make the cars, with BMW staying arms length until it was a huge success and they were purchased by BMW later?
More like "BMW purchased the Rover Group, descendants of Austin/Morris/Leyland/etc., and makers of the original Mini, and, under BMW's ownership, they introduced the new MINI."
That might be like Intel buying up AMD and then using the AMD brand name, and perhaps designs, for a new line of Intel x86 processors for markets not served (or not well served) by existing Intel x86's.
(At this point, the car analogy now sits by the side of the road with its radiator spewing out steam and oil dripping from the engine....)
Slashdot Mirror
OS/2 became Windows NT
Or, rather, the next-generation portable version of OS/2 on which Microsoft were working became, instead, a next-generation portable version of Windows, i.e. Windows NT. How much OS/2 code, other than perhaps the HPFS implementation, was in Windows NT is another matter.
which became Windows Server.
Or, rather, which was given various names that didn't have "NT" in them, such as "Windows XP", "Windows Vista", "Windows 7", and "Windows Server 20xx" (rather than "Windows NT Server").
A lot of Windows Server is in Windows 7.
Well, yeah, Windows 7 is "Windows NT 6.1", as is Windows Server 2008 R2; they're both releases of The Code Base That Is Windows NT, even though Microsoft aren't using "NT" in the name any more.
I'm pretty sure a substantial amount of OS/2 code is still in use today, or at least a derivation of it...
Are you pretty sure because you've seen the code, or are you pretty sure because you're making what seems a plausible guess to you? I suspect little code from the versions of OS/2 that were released is there, although there's probably a substantial amount of Microsoft's "OS/2 NT" code in there.
No, it was not. OS/2 has nothing to do about OS/400 (I guess you are refering to that one).
Nor was it a port of MVS, if that's what he meant.
512 GB partitions if you want them compatible with other operating systems, otherwise the ancient architecture is limited to 2 TB.
Presumably meaning "the absolute partition limit is 2TB, and if you want the partitions to be compatible with other operating systems, the limit is 512GB"; I think at least one responder may have found it a bit confusing, given that 2TB > 512GB.
Macintosh has shrunk considerably in the past few years.
Not for the past year, at least according to NetMarketShare's statistics.
while Linux has continued to expand.
Expand its desktop/notebook presence, as that's what's being discussed here?
And isn't the latest "Mac" OS just a shell over BSD?
OS X is Darwin plus a very large amount of code atop it; Darwin is a Mach-and-BSD-derived OS, with a lot of Apple code in it in addition to the Mach and BSD code. If you're comparing it to "Linux", it's best compared with a desktop/notebook Linux distribution; one could call the code atop Darwin a "shell", but the "shell" is thicker than the Darwin "core" (more code), just as in, for example, Ubuntu, there is, as far as I know, more code in the desktop environment than in the "core OS" (Linux kernel, glibc, other non-GUI libraries, commands, and daemons).
This is a well debunked fallacy. The statistics you use only apply to daytime usage when work machines are thrown in. At night, it is closer to 10-20% Linux usage. Even Microsoft has admitted that.
Where can the numbers to support that be found?
Windows NT and OS/2 are more similar than Windows NT and VMS.
In some ways, yes, but, for example, the lowest-level I/O architecture for NT is rather VMS-like (or perhaps rather Mica-like, although the obvious Mica documents don't describe whether it had the same I/O Request Packet-based model as VMS).
There has never been a source compatibility or easy conversion capability with VMS and RMS.
Cutler wasn't working for DEC any more, so there was no need for that. Internal design concepts, however, were reused.
A browser shouldn't crash either even if a plugin does. Run them in a separate process,
Which Safari now does (I forget whether that was introduced in Safari 5 or earlier), and I suspect at least some other browsers do.
and better yet, run every tab in a separate process.
Which Safari doesn't do, although it does run the UI and the rendering/JavaScript stuff in a separate process (that was introduced in Safari 5.1).
Yeah, but he says "at least 80% of all crashes and hangs on my Mac" and then talks about how "iOS lives quite happily without Flash" but yeah, I'm sure he was referring to his browser and not to the whole machine.
Good, I'm glad you agree with me, and realize that neither of the two statements you cite are in any way indications that he refers to the OS crashing or hanging as a whole (given that both OS X and iOS are UN*Xes that put each process's userland code in a separate address space and protect the kernel's address space from userland code):
That's Hedley!
...who uses his tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore.
(And, since it's 1874, he'll be able to sue her.)
"I found this great new site you may be unaware of. It's called Wikipedia. It is kinda of like an online encyclopedia that has brief summaries of almost anything", trout007 Is this the same Wikipedia that says Windows NT wasn't designed for the Internet?
No, it's the same Wikipedia that says
which is not the same as "Windows NT wasn't designed for the Internet".
I don't have exact numbers here, but Ulrich has had a massive role in producing what may very well be the most widely used C library ever. There's a very good chance that the very computer you're using right now is executing at least some of the code he's written hundreds of times each second!
There's an excellent chance that the computers that a number of people posting to Slashdot are running are executing code either in a C library from Microsoft or in one that's a combination of FreeBSD and Apple code; are you asserting that most Slashdot posters are running Linux on the machine on which they're posting (which might be correct - the Slashdot audience is different from the "owns a desktop or notebook computer" audience) or that Drepper's code is in one or both of those C libraries? The rest of your post may be valid, but be careful with that assumption - it's not a Linux-only party here.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic, but if your OS is crashing or hanging due to Adobe Flash or any other user space application, then your OS is broken. Memory protection is not new.
You may, indeed, be inappropriately pedantic; he referred to "crashes or hangs", he did not explicitly say that the entire machine hung or crashed. Perhaps they were Safari (or Firefox or $OTHER_BROWSER_THAT_HAS_A_FLASH_PLUGIN) hangs or crashes.
Alternative history of Apple: Apple engineer speeds up memcpy implementation. Does some serious application testing for compatibility. Talks to Steve Jobs. "So what have you been working on?" "I made the C library a few percent faster, which benefits all users. It makes Adobe Flash crash". Steve Jobs: Dies laughing.
Definitely an alternative history. (And, yes, memcpy() and memmove() use the same code for each of the other versions of that code - "scalar" 32-bit x86, SSE2 32-bit x86, SSE3 32-bit x86, SSE 4.2 32-bit x86, and PowerPC. The source to the ARM versions isn't available, so it's possible that for iOS it matters which one you use.)
But use memcpy() only where you don't have overlap, even if you're working on OS X (or, I think, most if not all of the *BSDs), anyway.
That's sound software development advice, I don't disagree with it. I'm not defending reverse memcpy, I'm merely saying that "flash doesn't work when we implement memcpy like this" isn't a good enough reason to change the implementation if the bug is on the flash side.
How about "Flash and some other programs in Fedora don't work correctly when we implement memcpy() like this, and some of them might "not work correctly" in ways that are security holes, and we currently have no tools to reliably analyze C code to catch incorrect use of memcpy(), and the failure modes are not always obvious, so it might be quite a long time before all the code out there is fixed?
No, people shouldn't use memcpy() in calls where the source and destination regions overlap, but if it's going to be a long time before those are all fixed, and if the failure modes can be insufficiently obvious that the bugs might not even be discovered before they do damage, this might be like {warning, car analogy ahead!} going through a traffic intersection with a 2-way stop, on the street without the stop signs, without slowing down and checking for oncoming traffic on the other street, because people shouldn't go through stop signs.
I think the key here is that the punishment for violating the C standard isn't that your program fails in an obvious fashion, it fails in a somewhat random fashion. If memcpy() would check for an overlap and abort the process if it discovered it, fine, but, at that point, it could, instead, check for an overlap and punt to memmove() with no loss of performance from the version that aborts in the case where there is no overlap and with a gain of "programs don't just barf mysteriously to the end user" in the case where there is.
So the question is whether the reasons for doing the backwards copy, as mentioned in the cited bug report and items to which it links, are sufficient to justify exposing the bugs in buggy programs such as the Flash player. If the performance benefits aren't large, perhaps they aren't.
...especially if the bugs in question are security bugs. If it turns out that it's too easy for people to use memcpy() when they should be using memmove(), perhaps there are technically good reasons not to have separated them, as long as "technically" includes "psychologically" as well as "computer hardware and software-wise", given that much of the computer software that would use memcpy() and/or memmove() is, for better or worse, written by human beings.
When I wrote about pragmatism I was thinking of this problem where a modification to glibc's malloc() implementation broke the Adobe flash player.
Presumably you meant memcpy(), not malloc(). Somebody at Adobe needs a gentle reminder ("gentle" because I can't say for certain that I always remember that memcpy() is explicitly allowed not to properly copy between overlapping memory regions - "properly" meaning "as if the source region were copied to a temporary buffer and then the temporary buffer were copied to the destination region" - but memmove() is explicitly required to do so) that this is a job for memmove() Man.
So the question is whether the reasons for doing the backwards copy, as mentioned in the cited bug report and items to which it links, are sufficient to justify exposing the bugs in buggy programs such as the Flash player. If the performance benefits aren't large, perhaps they aren't.
Nope, North American Union, fools...
What is this extant "North American Union" to which you're referring (if it doesn't exist at this point in time, it has nothing to do with this case), and when did Cuba become part of it?
(preface: yes, I know this is April Fools).
Well, it may be April 1st where you are, but it's still March 31st where I am, and, more importantly, the date on the article is March 26th, so this does not appear to be an April Fool's joke.
If we were prone to fucking off, you'd be speaking German or Russian right now.
If we were prone to fucking off, Iran might have a reasonable secular democracy now. Just because certain US actions might have achieved good goals, that does not mean that all US actions are quite so beneficial. And, in this particular case (just as in the cases of, say, the coups against Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and Allende in Chile), in this particular case, the world (and, for this case, the US) would be better off if we truly did fuck off.
... and here's how. "Oh, you won't comply? Guess you don't want your airline to have landing rights in the US, then."
That only works for airlines that want/need to land on US airports.
So, why, then, is Canadian Affair complying (if the claim in the article that they are is true), as I see no evidence on their Web site that they land in the US? Perhaps some of their flights cross US airspace, and the US might deny them the right to do so if they don't impose those restrictions on all travelers even for flights that don't cross US airspace. Or perhaps they're being beaten into complying by their government or the UK government under pressure from the US government.
(Idiot mouthbreather who doesn't have a calendar in his mom's basement, thinks the US is terrible and Iran is a world leader)
(Idiot in his mom's basement, who can't write clear sentences to save his life (of course dskoll has no calendar in his mom's basement, why would he keep his calendars there rather than in his own home?), who didn't bother Reading The Fine Article to see that it's dated March 26th, not April 1st, and who thinks anybody who criticizes the US about anything not only thinks everything about it is terrible but also thinks Iran is a world leader)
So, are we absolutely sure this guy isn't some good scientist gone mad?
Actually, I suspect he is asking questions to provoke thought about ethical questions, whether the thoughts are "that's crazy" or "you have a point" or....
using gene therapy to create smaller, less resource-intensive children
...bought the album that had the song on it.
The next hurdle: printing with bio-material so we can start making our own body parts/organs.
Seriously? SERIOUSLY? ... Herp a derp, dude.
For what it's worth, at least one dude at which this should be directed is the one who wrote TFA; that's where that line originally comes from.
Kind of like how when Mini came back into existence it contracted BMW to make the cars, with BMW staying arms length until it was a huge success and they were purchased by BMW later?
More like "BMW purchased the Rover Group, descendants of Austin/Morris/Leyland/etc., and makers of the original Mini, and, under BMW's ownership, they introduced the new MINI."
That might be like Intel buying up AMD and then using the AMD brand name, and perhaps designs, for a new line of Intel x86 processors for markets not served (or not well served) by existing Intel x86's.
(At this point, the car analogy now sits by the side of the road with its radiator spewing out steam and oil dripping from the engine....)