System 6 and earlier did a few tricks to help with memory. Until the Mac//x, they didn't have a PMMU, so normal VM paging didn't work (the Mac// got an upgrade for it eventually.) Pages of the application's code was stored in segments, and each segment was loaded and unloaded, similar to.OVL files in MS-DOS. The QuickDraw routines and the Toolbox did pretty much everything
Of course, with System 6 came INITs and control panel devices, the closest equivalent these days would be.kext files or Linux kernel modules that would only be loadable during startup. Those provided additional functionality, and some were architecturally ahead of their time.
I am glad someone is able to emulate QuickDraw and the ToolBox, especially the Desk Accessory functionality. This definitely is a start for a platform that is definitely hard to emulate.
This also has echos of East Germany and the fear of winding up on the wrong side of the Stasi. Guilt by association, and know too many "guilty" parties, and there would be a knock on the door.
My question is... will the site red-flag websites that are leaning in their political direction, but are making up white lies, or will they let someone who is trying to step over the line with vague stuff get their way.
I hope that they are able to call out anyone, regardless of side, trying to actively lie, or passively misrepresent stuff. However, I have doubts... I have lost respect for journalism as a whole, as formerly top notch news agencies have devolved into propaganda presses... and this is both sides of the spectrum. I've wound up looking at other countries' news sites, hoping to find some that don't "have a dog in the hunt", so can actually state what is happening without impressing their political leanings.
With how trivial it is to hide an attack in another country and blame it on another group, I hope France at least gets some surety of whom they are hacking back, because it seems like this can harm innocent parties, or parties which already have been breached.
Also, what is the end goal of "hacking back"? "rm -rf --no-preserve-root/" on the bad guys' machines may sound cool, but the bad guys likely have better backups than 95% of the companies out there and would be back in business in no time. Finding out whom the attacker is? At best, you may net a zombie "client", and maybe find a C&C IP address range.
State on state warfare as in going after another nation's power grid. Oftentimes hacking are asymmetric attacks. There may not be a power grid to speak of in some countries. Others would take that as an act of war, and respond with nukes or other weaponry.
Instead, maybe France needs to take a page from China and other countries, and that would be to see about better firewalling at their physical border routers, so attacks from foreign sources are stopped there, rather than at the hosts themselves. It might be wise to just block entire countries' IP space completely, if it is confirmed without a reasonable doubt that that country has state actors trying to do stuff.
Or, create an organization like UL and have component makers pass basic security testing before it is allowed to be sold, especially IoT stuff. It may not even hurt to make top brass of companies (you know, the guys who say "security has no ROI", then short the company stock before a security breach announcement is made) personally and criminally liable for breaches.
There is a lot countries can do to make themselves less of a target. "Hack them back" just doesn't sound feasible. Way too easy to launch attacks from someone else's territory. One thing countries can do is just not play ball. If Lower Elbonia is always a source of attacks via their state government, block their IP ranges at the routers, and call it done. If a corporation in another country is causing issues due to lack of security, block their range, or put the range in a blackhole list and let the ISPs do the blocking.
Definitely feasible. Other currencies have been hit by 51% attacks and compromised with bogus double-spending transactions. Since China has 51% control of Bitcoin anyway, this could easily allow them to manipulate it by adding more currency or double-spending existing coins. And with 300 gigs of blockchain, few people are going to validate all the way to check for hanky-panky.
I do worry about that. A revolution where power changes hands completely may wind up making things worse. For example, Iran went from a Shah who was trying to get the country modernized into a theocracy.
The problem with violent revolutions is that the most brutal, bloodthirsty tyrants rise to the top. We saw that in the Iraqi power vacuum earlier this decade when the US pulled out. If the existing Chinese government completely collapses, there is a good chance we may get another Mao... who would not hesitate to nuke the West to give his people Lebensraum. Best thing we can hope for is more transparancy and democracy to actually happen, so Chinese laws don't "mysteriously" come into being from nowhere, but there is some public oversight before things happen.
Hopefully China can reform from within. They can do a lot of good in the world, and in some ways, have been bestowed the mantle of being the world's moral leadership.
One idea of smartphone which would be nice would be one that you used a paper clip to push a release button, similar to the SIM card tray in iPhones, but would allow you to pop the phone open, replace the battery, add/replace one of two SIM cards, add/replace one of two MicroSD cards. This way, you have the same zero-hole look... but you still have full repairability.
We had something like that here, called CurrenC, but it flopped. Mainly because it used ACH debits rather than credit card transactions, so if fraud did happen, the customer was stung with it, with no way to get anything back, as opposed to reversing charges with a credit card.
Even here in Texas, Apple Pay is common. I did have reservations about its use, but because gas pumps accept it, I use it, just because it ensures that my card can't get grabbed by a skimmer. Wave phone by reader, pump gas, go on.
Just the fact that it removes so many common avenues for fraud make it worth having, be it the "tried and true" method of copying down a card number, to skimmers, etc. Since the US is still not on Chip and PIN, one can do a lot of fraud with just the numbers.
Hangouts had a nice niche. For personal use, Discord comes to mind. However, for a company, perhaps Slack might be the answer. Or perhaps moving from G-Suite to O365 and using Teams.
Why no Linux? Even the most paranoid people out there use some form of Linux distro. I can't think of any general purpose OS that would be any better. QNX? You would pay for that, and it isn't cheap. Solaris? Meh. AIX, perhaps... Windows? Just ignore all the encrypted telemetry data zooming to Bog knows where.
The only OS that would even come close is a BSD, and the hardware support would be something to have to work out.
Flat sales are definitely not good. Especially with China's economy growing as it is. This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.
Apple's worst enemy is Apple now. They need to start doing some serious innovation. Something more than adding "5G", another camera, or yanking some feature out of "courage". The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending money than the GDP of a lot of countries, they better start doubling down, otherwise they may end up like Sony... strong brand, but more of a relic of the past than something bringing stuff new and cool.
Apple needs revolution in design, not "lets just tack on a 'filler' feature in the 'S' year", if they are to keep going, especially when the economy is starting to tilt down, and convincing people to buy $1500 phones becomes harder.
This doesn't seem hard to do. Create throwaway accounts, make some inane comments, click 5 stars, repeat.
It would be nice if Glassdoor would do some vetting... even if it just asking for a SMS number and making sure it belongs to a cellular network (so Google Voice or burnerapp.com could be factored out.) Combine that with some active bannification of offenders.
Unfortunately, the MagSafe connector has about 8 years on its patent life left, and with Apple not bothering to use it, pretty much nobody is using that anymore.
I have been looking for a laptop to replace my 2015 MBP when the time comes... and because Linux can't run on the internal SSD (it can boot, but the T2 chip blocks access to the SSD), I'm probably going to just buy a Dell Latitude or XPS 13, which has all the cool things the MBP has... but still has regular USB ports and doesn't lock out Linux as a usable OS.
I would pay the price premium for an Apple product, but because the only usable OS with security patches, once macOS stops being supported on those models, is W10, I might as well go elsewhere.
In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.
Apple has backed themselves into a corner. IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price. However, this is only going to get into a negative feedback loop as other device makers come out with $1500 models with folding screens, 3+ cameras, ability to run x86 programs and operating systems, so the phone can run as a desktop PC, and other stuff.
As for Macs, same thing. Apple needs to look at splitting the Mac line into "toys", stuff that looks great, but has issues, versus "workhorse" machines which may not be as thin... but are well built and can be upgraded if need be. Apple can easily do this... the 2008 MacBooks are a testament to that. Barring that, maybe Apple should spin off the Mac line, a la Claris or Filemaker, and have it designed with something other than Steven King's "Thinner" in mind.
I'd be careful on that. I have had some carriers lock unlocked phones, or re-lock phones that were unlocked. How does this rev of Android know the difference between a phone that was locked from the factory versus a carrier trying to seize control of a factory unlocked device and lock it to their network?
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of carriers would love to lock out that second SIM as a matter of principle.
Technically, UNIX people have been using dump and tar for backups. rdiff-backup is an exception, and there are other utilities like Borg Backup which, when combined with a basic server setup, can ensure that the client can only append. rdiff-backup's downside is that one can erase everything in/Backups/remote.
We are talking ransomware. In the past, dumping to a NFS volume, zfs send, or chucking data to a server via SSH was good enough. Now, we have to have a barrier in place to prevent clients from overwriting existing backups in case they are compromised. As a stopgap, one can always have a NFS volume that does snapshots, so a backup overwritten can be recovered, but on the long haul, that isn't feasible, especially if ransomware slowly corrupts files over time on the backup server, so the point where things started would be impossible to find.
With all these ransomware products coming out, I've wondered why backup utilities have not evolved much. The ideal backup utility would be one that is "pull" based, where the client machine has zero access to the backup data. The closest would be something like CrashPlan or Mozy that doesn't allow access to the client, and the next closest would be something like Borg Backup backing up to a server in append only mode.
Unlike most IT disasters where backing up to a file share or a S3 bucket is good enough, ransomware means that you have to ensure the client can only append data.
The big concern is that if some company grabs one's open source software and turns it into a service, then any and all financial contributions will be focused on just that service, and not ported to the upstream source. It would be nice if a cloud provider donated to the software project that made the service they are offering. Even a relatively tiny amount from the profits would mean a lot for the open source project's continued existence.
I would probably assert that moving to a NVMe SSD might more important than going to a new CPU barring specific tasks like Photoshop or other rendering. For almost all interactive use, disk I/O is what causes slowdowns.
In my experience, it is usually disk I/O -> RAM -> GPU -> CPU, in that order for performance items, for most things.
I prefer more cores as well, just because more tasks can run unimpeded. Especially with desktop virtualization, so the web browser VM can run without affecting anything else on the system.
AMD is looking quite attractive these days for the desktop. More cores, less cash.
This type of CPU seems like something that is more sizzle than steak. If it is so expensive and exclusive, what makes it better than say, a Xeon Platinum or even a Xeon D?
There is so much overlap that one might as well jump to a Xeon if an i7 just isn't up to the task anyway, unless this is a laptop or mobile machine.
There may be a crash. When Joe Sixpack gets hit so hard and no safety net is available other than creating a GoFundMe, he will start paring down "luxury" items to the bone. Netflix will be replaced by BitTorrent, a music subscription gets replaced by a hard drive full of music files of unknown origin, and so on. The problem is that so many companies live by those monthly subscriptions, and when people go into survival mode, most of those will wind up being cancelled. For the most part, if people are looking to see where their next meal is going to be, they are not going to be buying the latest $1500 iPhone 11 with four cameras and four fold-out screens.
A cyber security breach would just mean they short a bunch of stock before the announcement, making them even wealthier. I have yet to see any real negative consequences for neglecting security, other than maybe paying a year's worth of Locklife in bulk as a PR measure.
Slashdot Mirror
System 6 and earlier did a few tricks to help with memory. Until the Mac //x, they didn't have a PMMU, so normal VM paging didn't work (the Mac // got an upgrade for it eventually.) Pages of the application's code was stored in segments, and each segment was loaded and unloaded, similar to .OVL files in MS-DOS. The QuickDraw routines and the Toolbox did pretty much everything
Of course, with System 6 came INITs and control panel devices, the closest equivalent these days would be .kext files or Linux kernel modules that would only be loadable during startup. Those provided additional functionality, and some were architecturally ahead of their time.
I am glad someone is able to emulate QuickDraw and the ToolBox, especially the Desk Accessory functionality. This definitely is a start for a platform that is definitely hard to emulate.
This also has echos of East Germany and the fear of winding up on the wrong side of the Stasi. Guilt by association, and know too many "guilty" parties, and there would be a knock on the door.
My question is... will the site red-flag websites that are leaning in their political direction, but are making up white lies, or will they let someone who is trying to step over the line with vague stuff get their way.
I hope that they are able to call out anyone, regardless of side, trying to actively lie, or passively misrepresent stuff. However, I have doubts... I have lost respect for journalism as a whole, as formerly top notch news agencies have devolved into propaganda presses... and this is both sides of the spectrum. I've wound up looking at other countries' news sites, hoping to find some that don't "have a dog in the hunt", so can actually state what is happening without impressing their political leanings.
With how trivial it is to hide an attack in another country and blame it on another group, I hope France at least gets some surety of whom they are hacking back, because it seems like this can harm innocent parties, or parties which already have been breached.
Also, what is the end goal of "hacking back"? "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" on the bad guys' machines may sound cool, but the bad guys likely have better backups than 95% of the companies out there and would be back in business in no time. Finding out whom the attacker is? At best, you may net a zombie "client", and maybe find a C&C IP address range.
State on state warfare as in going after another nation's power grid. Oftentimes hacking are asymmetric attacks. There may not be a power grid to speak of in some countries. Others would take that as an act of war, and respond with nukes or other weaponry.
Instead, maybe France needs to take a page from China and other countries, and that would be to see about better firewalling at their physical border routers, so attacks from foreign sources are stopped there, rather than at the hosts themselves. It might be wise to just block entire countries' IP space completely, if it is confirmed without a reasonable doubt that that country has state actors trying to do stuff.
Or, create an organization like UL and have component makers pass basic security testing before it is allowed to be sold, especially IoT stuff. It may not even hurt to make top brass of companies (you know, the guys who say "security has no ROI", then short the company stock before a security breach announcement is made) personally and criminally liable for breaches.
There is a lot countries can do to make themselves less of a target. "Hack them back" just doesn't sound feasible. Way too easy to launch attacks from someone else's territory. One thing countries can do is just not play ball. If Lower Elbonia is always a source of attacks via their state government, block their IP ranges at the routers, and call it done. If a corporation in another country is causing issues due to lack of security, block their range, or put the range in a blackhole list and let the ISPs do the blocking.
Definitely feasible. Other currencies have been hit by 51% attacks and compromised with bogus double-spending transactions. Since China has 51% control of Bitcoin anyway, this could easily allow them to manipulate it by adding more currency or double-spending existing coins. And with 300 gigs of blockchain, few people are going to validate all the way to check for hanky-panky.
I do worry about that. A revolution where power changes hands completely may wind up making things worse. For example, Iran went from a Shah who was trying to get the country modernized into a theocracy.
The problem with violent revolutions is that the most brutal, bloodthirsty tyrants rise to the top. We saw that in the Iraqi power vacuum earlier this decade when the US pulled out. If the existing Chinese government completely collapses, there is a good chance we may get another Mao... who would not hesitate to nuke the West to give his people Lebensraum. Best thing we can hope for is more transparancy and democracy to actually happen, so Chinese laws don't "mysteriously" come into being from nowhere, but there is some public oversight before things happen.
Hopefully China can reform from within. They can do a lot of good in the world, and in some ways, have been bestowed the mantle of being the world's moral leadership.
It does have a reset hole.
One idea of smartphone which would be nice would be one that you used a paper clip to push a release button, similar to the SIM card tray in iPhones, but would allow you to pop the phone open, replace the battery, add/replace one of two SIM cards, add/replace one of two MicroSD cards. This way, you have the same zero-hole look... but you still have full repairability.
We had something like that here, called CurrenC, but it flopped. Mainly because it used ACH debits rather than credit card transactions, so if fraud did happen, the customer was stung with it, with no way to get anything back, as opposed to reversing charges with a credit card.
Even here in Texas, Apple Pay is common. I did have reservations about its use, but because gas pumps accept it, I use it, just because it ensures that my card can't get grabbed by a skimmer. Wave phone by reader, pump gas, go on.
Just the fact that it removes so many common avenues for fraud make it worth having, be it the "tried and true" method of copying down a card number, to skimmers, etc. Since the US is still not on Chip and PIN, one can do a lot of fraud with just the numbers.
Hangouts had a nice niche. For personal use, Discord comes to mind. However, for a company, perhaps Slack might be the answer. Or perhaps moving from G-Suite to O365 and using Teams.
Wish Discord had an enterprise tier.
Why no Linux? Even the most paranoid people out there use some form of Linux distro. I can't think of any general purpose OS that would be any better. QNX? You would pay for that, and it isn't cheap. Solaris? Meh. AIX, perhaps... Windows? Just ignore all the encrypted telemetry data zooming to Bog knows where.
The only OS that would even come close is a BSD, and the hardware support would be something to have to work out.
Flat sales are definitely not good. Especially with China's economy growing as it is. This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.
Apple's worst enemy is Apple now. They need to start doing some serious innovation. Something more than adding "5G", another camera, or yanking some feature out of "courage". The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending money than the GDP of a lot of countries, they better start doubling down, otherwise they may end up like Sony... strong brand, but more of a relic of the past than something bringing stuff new and cool.
Apple needs revolution in design, not "lets just tack on a 'filler' feature in the 'S' year", if they are to keep going, especially when the economy is starting to tilt down, and convincing people to buy $1500 phones becomes harder.
This doesn't seem hard to do. Create throwaway accounts, make some inane comments, click 5 stars, repeat.
It would be nice if Glassdoor would do some vetting... even if it just asking for a SMS number and making sure it belongs to a cellular network (so Google Voice or burnerapp.com could be factored out.) Combine that with some active bannification of offenders.
Unfortunately, the MagSafe connector has about 8 years on its patent life left, and with Apple not bothering to use it, pretty much nobody is using that anymore.
I have been looking for a laptop to replace my 2015 MBP when the time comes... and because Linux can't run on the internal SSD (it can boot, but the T2 chip blocks access to the SSD), I'm probably going to just buy a Dell Latitude or XPS 13, which has all the cool things the MBP has... but still has regular USB ports and doesn't lock out Linux as a usable OS.
I would pay the price premium for an Apple product, but because the only usable OS with security patches, once macOS stops being supported on those models, is W10, I might as well go elsewhere.
In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.
Apple has backed themselves into a corner. IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price. However, this is only going to get into a negative feedback loop as other device makers come out with $1500 models with folding screens, 3+ cameras, ability to run x86 programs and operating systems, so the phone can run as a desktop PC, and other stuff.
As for Macs, same thing. Apple needs to look at splitting the Mac line into "toys", stuff that looks great, but has issues, versus "workhorse" machines which may not be as thin... but are well built and can be upgraded if need be. Apple can easily do this... the 2008 MacBooks are a testament to that. Barring that, maybe Apple should spin off the Mac line, a la Claris or Filemaker, and have it designed with something other than Steven King's "Thinner" in mind.
I'd be careful on that. I have had some carriers lock unlocked phones, or re-lock phones that were unlocked. How does this rev of Android know the difference between a phone that was locked from the factory versus a carrier trying to seize control of a factory unlocked device and lock it to their network?
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of carriers would love to lock out that second SIM as a matter of principle.
Technically, UNIX people have been using dump and tar for backups. rdiff-backup is an exception, and there are other utilities like Borg Backup which, when combined with a basic server setup, can ensure that the client can only append. rdiff-backup's downside is that one can erase everything in /Backups/remote.
We are talking ransomware. In the past, dumping to a NFS volume, zfs send, or chucking data to a server via SSH was good enough. Now, we have to have a barrier in place to prevent clients from overwriting existing backups in case they are compromised. As a stopgap, one can always have a NFS volume that does snapshots, so a backup overwritten can be recovered, but on the long haul, that isn't feasible, especially if ransomware slowly corrupts files over time on the backup server, so the point where things started would be impossible to find.
With all these ransomware products coming out, I've wondered why backup utilities have not evolved much. The ideal backup utility would be one that is "pull" based, where the client machine has zero access to the backup data. The closest would be something like CrashPlan or Mozy that doesn't allow access to the client, and the next closest would be something like Borg Backup backing up to a server in append only mode.
Unlike most IT disasters where backing up to a file share or a S3 bucket is good enough, ransomware means that you have to ensure the client can only append data.
The big concern is that if some company grabs one's open source software and turns it into a service, then any and all financial contributions will be focused on just that service, and not ported to the upstream source. It would be nice if a cloud provider donated to the software project that made the service they are offering. Even a relatively tiny amount from the profits would mean a lot for the open source project's continued existence.
I would probably assert that moving to a NVMe SSD might more important than going to a new CPU barring specific tasks like Photoshop or other rendering. For almost all interactive use, disk I/O is what causes slowdowns.
In my experience, it is usually disk I/O -> RAM -> GPU -> CPU, in that order for performance items, for most things.
I prefer more cores as well, just because more tasks can run unimpeded. Especially with desktop virtualization, so the web browser VM can run without affecting anything else on the system.
AMD is looking quite attractive these days for the desktop. More cores, less cash.
This type of CPU seems like something that is more sizzle than steak. If it is so expensive and exclusive, what makes it better than say, a Xeon Platinum or even a Xeon D?
There is so much overlap that one might as well jump to a Xeon if an i7 just isn't up to the task anyway, unless this is a laptop or mobile machine.
There may be a crash. When Joe Sixpack gets hit so hard and no safety net is available other than creating a GoFundMe, he will start paring down "luxury" items to the bone. Netflix will be replaced by BitTorrent, a music subscription gets replaced by a hard drive full of music files of unknown origin, and so on. The problem is that so many companies live by those monthly subscriptions, and when people go into survival mode, most of those will wind up being cancelled. For the most part, if people are looking to see where their next meal is going to be, they are not going to be buying the latest $1500 iPhone 11 with four cameras and four fold-out screens.
This easily will have a domino effect.
Agreed. Insider trading to a lot of C-levels is like smoking pot. Yes, it is technically illegal, but getting caught seems to be relatively rare.
A cyber security breach would just mean they short a bunch of stock before the announcement, making them even wealthier. I have yet to see any real negative consequences for neglecting security, other than maybe paying a year's worth of Locklife in bulk as a PR measure.