A small vulnerability in a $50 consumer grade router that only results in a small number of users getting hit, most of which will never know they were pwned anyway, will not usually result in a massive effort to patch the flaws. Only after it is exploited on a wide scale and public attention and/or lawsuits brought will the beancounters think it's economically worth doing.
In the end I think most of these manufacturers should collaborate, fund and use a common community-driven firmware. Just slap a custom theme on an OpenWRT web GUI separate from the base firmware w/ some preinstalled packages and call it a day. With everyone throwing money and resources at OpenWRT, lighttpd, freecwmp, etc things could get a lot better.
This is just another lame attempt to allow people to squeeze "creation science" into courses at universities that receive public funds by saying that certain instructors can spout their personal "beliefs" as fact. To these people "evolution" and having your kids vaccinated are "controversial". I agree that people shouldn't be able to shut people like Milo down but this bill is utter bullshit.
OSX never existed in the 68k era. Apple's UNIX system in those days was called A/UX and it was actually quite cool but way overpriced due to AT&T licensing issues, etc. It was based on SVR2 and could run X and classic mac apps side by side. OSX was based on NeXTstep which had a better GUI layer than X-Windows since oh.... about 1988. Was originally based on Display Postscript which got morphed into Display PDF/Quartz. While that was a Steve Jobs venture, Woz had nothing to do with NeXT. NeXT was a pretty kickass platform though.
Decent UI layers are VERY VERY VERY hard. Which is why modern Linux GUI's suck worse than they did in 1999 and why NeXTstep was better since the late 80's. Apple's had 3D-accelerated compositing, etc since OSX 10.2 beating Linux and Windows to the punch by quite a bit.
MacOS X has existed since 1988, it just wasn't called MacOS X back then. So yes..... MacOS X was and is *VERY* innovative, especially if you set preferences to get rid of the tablet-esque features and bring a proper desktop back. Apple seems intent on killing OSX in spite of this.
When you build your own computing platform from the ground up without Google at your disposal.... you get to have an opinion. Once you have to fame, money and nerd street-cred.... who really gives a shit what you've done lately? He's probably forgotten more than you'll ever know about electronics engineering.
I don't know..... he created a line of reasonably ok 8-bit 6502 machines that lived from 1977 into the '90's FAR past their prime and kept the company afloat while the early Mac 128 and 512 were flopping like a fish? I can't think of a single school I attended as a kid that wasn't chock full of ugly Apple IIe's and the occasional IIgs.
Apple was far from unsuccessful in those days. You know, back when they were actually a computer company instead of peddling shiny consumer-grade content consumption devices to over-privileged hipster brats.
True, the early 8080 and 6502 curb stomp it when it comes to speed. Being a very early CMOS CPU, it had the edge when it came to radiation resistance and power consumption. It was also fairly easy to program but things like proper CALL/RETURN took some creativity but with 16x16-bit registers this was easy to get around. The built-in "load mode" made building a simple switches and lights front panel really easy as well. It also was pretty interesting when it came to I/O.... you weren't restricted to simply memory-mapping everything.
Not a top performer but interesting and fun as far as 70's-era CPU's go and it gave you a lot of flexibility when it came to hardware design. And you can clock it higher than an 8080 or early 6502 to make up for some of the lackluster performance. I don't think it ever got much of a fair shake. Aside from industrial and NASA applications, only a few hobbyist kits, a shitty game system and 1 or 2 home computers like the COMX-35 were built around it.
As far as a hobbyist computer build from the ground up though, the 1802 is hard to beat if you want simplicity. Nowadays you'd probably just pick a decent ARM SoC, slap it on a board with some connectors and call it a computer.
RCA 1802 w/ 16x16-bit registers, 16-bit address bus and 8-bit data bus 8 LED's and 8 toggle switches for bootstrapping and debugging Bit-banged serial I/O Low power consumption Can even run BASIC Might even survive the EMP of a nuclear blast if you choose the right components. Rad-hardened CPU's available fairly cheap.
Even the Atari 400/800/XL/XE series, which inspired the Amiga later and was designed by a lot of the team, outclassed PC's in graphics and sound for all practical purposes until EGA and the Adlib was a reality. Granted, it was at lower resolutions but ANTIC/GTIA beat CGA for gaming in almost every meaningful way and was far more programmable.
PC's of the early to mid-80's were pure shit except as a replacement for CP/M boxes running business software like spreadsheets and WordStar.
Even uttering that within earshot of anyone under 35 now can get you fired. I tend to use "Bad Beer Rots Out Your Guts But Vodka Goes Well - Get Some Now" instead so I don't get accused of supporting "rape culture" and "slut-shaming" by virtue signalling militant morons.
If you consider blasphemy laws and media silence on religiously-motivated crime "democracy" then yes.... they have a better democracy. I'd rather keep the 1st amendment intact.... the one that lets me speak no matter who I offend or how much of an asshole the majority thinks that I am.
I'll take a constitutional republic over a democracy any day of the week. Too bad the republicans have become the Christian Nationalist party instead of real republicans.
Dude I had no idea about flightgear! I play an old version of MS Flight Sim. I'll definitely check that out,
Flightgear has been around a long time. It's a great sim. I just get bored quickly without being able to blow shit up so I start playing IL2 1946 or CoD instead which gives me a realistic sim and a the fun of strafing Russians.
Again, if they had the resources of Microsoft, the openBSD team would be perfect.
And if I had the resources of Microsoft, I'd be tapdancing on f**king Mars not giving a sh!t about ransomware. What's your point? And no, they wouldn't be perfect. Guaranf**kingteed they'd have a few showstoppers once the scrutiny of the planet was upon them and the entire blackhat community wanted a piece of their a$$. You can worship Theo De Raadt and crew all you want. OpenBSD.... is.... not.... perfect.
Do they have an interesting and valuable approach? Yeah. Is their model the end-all-be-all of development models and utterly flawless? No.
As much as their proactive approach to security helps with an out-of-the-box, you're still screwed if you rely on things like Apache httpd, MySQL, Samba, Xorg, etc. And wasn't it their OpenSSH project that was full of interesting holes pretty recently?
And I'm saying this as someone who's been running various forms of BSD since around 1994. Nothing is perfect. BSD just sucks less. And if you're really trying to imply OpenBSD is "bug-free" that's just wishful thinking.
The "ZOMG MS iz teh SuX0rz.... if only everyone ran Linux and OpenBSD the world world be SAVED" tripe got old 20 years ago. Does Windows suck more? Yep. But they all suck.
And your bug-free 100% secure multi-user OS w/ flawless network stack is where, exactly? All large software projects have bugs and vulnerabilities. It's a fact of life.
If the NSA had actually cared about securing US systems from attack, they would have had MS fix the vulnerabilities instead of exploiting them for fun and profit we wouldn't have this problem.
If the general public realized the importance of keeping software vulnerabilities patched, they might have been able to avoid such widespread infection.
*NIX systems get pwned every damn day, too. I hate to defend MS but there's no such thing as a large software project that is bug-free and impossible to exploit.
I agree but if the $40 helps keep the project producing the open source textbooks going and keeps the infrastructure providing the online assignments up and running I'm not nearly as pissed about it. The online assignments are far less obnoxious than paper and give instantaneous feedback and I at least get the book for free if I don't mind staring at a screen to read it.
Ideally I think the school should cover it but it probably isn't going to happen yet. I'm much happier spending $40 than $400. It's not uncommon for books to cost $700+ per semester and the publishers change 2 paragraphs and rearrange a couple things every few months and call it a new edition. Public school districts don't tolerate that BS, I've never understood why colleges/universities do.
We use open source physics textbooks where I attend and it actually works out pretty well. The books are pretty well-written. The PDF versions are free, the dead-tree edition is like $100. The one-time key for the online assignments is like $40. At the end of the day, other than tuition I only had to spend $40. Pretty awesome idea if you ask me.... the rest of my classes require books ranging from $120 to $400.
The college book publishing racket has to end.
The additional amusement watching retarded millennial kids who never learned to use a real computer and are too cheap to buy a tablet trying to use the eBook version as well as complete assignments on their phones is priceless as well. I've seen people trying to write papers on phones recently. They'd rather fumble with a $600 phone than spend $100 on a used laptop. Boggles the mind.
I'm actually working on building an 1802 based machine for giggles. Will have blinkenlights for address and data lines instead of hex displays along with LED's for various other things. 64K battery-backed static RAM (of which 32K may eventually get swapped with an EEPROM). It will have the standard Q/EF3 bit-bang serial port initially but will also have 2 16550 UARTs. Not sure if I'll go with CF or SD for mass storage.... bit-banging SPI for SD probably wouldn't be much fun.
Will also have a variable clock rate and single step functionality.
Parents bought an Atari 400 w/ 8K and 410 "program recorder" then quickly upgraded to an 800 w/ 48K and an 810 floppy drive. They bought me an early-model Atari 130XE w/ 128K RAM of my own when they upgraded to ST's. I started with the 1010 cassette drive and got me a 1050 5.25" "Happy Drive" pretty quickly after it ate tapes on me a couple times. Started with a black&white TV for a display.... then a green-phosphor Apple composite monitor.... then a nice NEC monitor. Also had a 1020 color plotter for it which was a lot of fun. Had a Koala pad for a while too. Was a neat machine. ANTIC>IA made for a pretty cool programmable video chipset.... could do 256 colors on screen at low rez with some dirty tricks. The 1.79MHz CPU was pretty zippy for a 6502-based machine.
This got replaced with an old Mac Plus around 1991ish which was replaced with an LC III a bit later.
Except that it isn't. It's an ARM-based emulator. Has nothing to do with the original hardware. If it was an NES implemented in a little FPGA or something it'd be kinda neat but it's just software emulation.
They still make the 6502 and the 65816... that plus a cheap CPLD or two and you could probably have something closer to the real deal.
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A small vulnerability in a $50 consumer grade router that only results in a small number of users getting hit, most of which will never know they were pwned anyway, will not usually result in a massive effort to patch the flaws. Only after it is exploited on a wide scale and public attention and/or lawsuits brought will the beancounters think it's economically worth doing.
In the end I think most of these manufacturers should collaborate, fund and use a common community-driven firmware. Just slap a custom theme on an OpenWRT web GUI separate from the base firmware w/ some preinstalled packages and call it a day. With everyone throwing money and resources at OpenWRT, lighttpd, freecwmp, etc things could get a lot better.
This is just another lame attempt to allow people to squeeze "creation science" into courses at universities that receive public funds by saying that certain instructors can spout their personal "beliefs" as fact. To these people "evolution" and having your kids vaccinated are "controversial". I agree that people shouldn't be able to shut people like Milo down but this bill is utter bullshit.
Original Core Duo was 32-bit. Many of the Intel Atom tablets were 32-bit as well.
"Challenge accepted" ....said the 12 year old Lithuanian kid in his mom's basement. Expect ReallyWannaCry S Edition in weeks.
OSX never existed in the 68k era. Apple's UNIX system in those days was called A/UX and it was actually quite cool but way overpriced due to AT&T licensing issues, etc. It was based on SVR2 and could run X and classic mac apps side by side. OSX was based on NeXTstep which had a better GUI layer than X-Windows since oh.... about 1988. Was originally based on Display Postscript which got morphed into Display PDF/Quartz. While that was a Steve Jobs venture, Woz had nothing to do with NeXT. NeXT was a pretty kickass platform though.
Decent UI layers are VERY VERY VERY hard. Which is why modern Linux GUI's suck worse than they did in 1999 and why NeXTstep was better since the late 80's. Apple's had 3D-accelerated compositing, etc since OSX 10.2 beating Linux and Windows to the punch by quite a bit.
MacOS X has existed since 1988, it just wasn't called MacOS X back then. So yes..... MacOS X was and is *VERY* innovative, especially if you set preferences to get rid of the tablet-esque features and bring a proper desktop back. Apple seems intent on killing OSX in spite of this.
When you build your own computing platform from the ground up without Google at your disposal.... you get to have an opinion. Once you have to fame, money and nerd street-cred.... who really gives a shit what you've done lately? He's probably forgotten more than you'll ever know about electronics engineering.
Maybe in the Intel era but certainly not in the 68k or early PowerPC era.
I don't know..... he created a line of reasonably ok 8-bit 6502 machines that lived from 1977 into the '90's FAR past their prime and kept the company afloat while the early Mac 128 and 512 were flopping like a fish? I can't think of a single school I attended as a kid that wasn't chock full of ugly Apple IIe's and the occasional IIgs.
Apple was far from unsuccessful in those days. You know, back when they were actually a computer company instead of peddling shiny consumer-grade content consumption devices to over-privileged hipster brats.
True, the early 8080 and 6502 curb stomp it when it comes to speed. Being a very early CMOS CPU, it had the edge when it came to radiation resistance and power consumption. It was also fairly easy to program but things like proper CALL/RETURN took some creativity but with 16x16-bit registers this was easy to get around. The built-in "load mode" made building a simple switches and lights front panel really easy as well. It also was pretty interesting when it came to I/O.... you weren't restricted to simply memory-mapping everything.
Not a top performer but interesting and fun as far as 70's-era CPU's go and it gave you a lot of flexibility when it came to hardware design. And you can clock it higher than an 8080 or early 6502 to make up for some of the lackluster performance. I don't think it ever got much of a fair shake. Aside from industrial and NASA applications, only a few hobbyist kits, a shitty game system and 1 or 2 home computers like the COMX-35 were built around it.
As far as a hobbyist computer build from the ground up though, the 1802 is hard to beat if you want simplicity. Nowadays you'd probably just pick a decent ARM SoC, slap it on a board with some connectors and call it a computer.
Yeah, but...does it run FORTH?
Yup. I never bothered learning FORTH though. I think there's even a LISP for the 1802 somewhere. That could be entertaining.
You should go with the 1802 membership card....
RCA 1802 w/ 16x16-bit registers, 16-bit address bus and 8-bit data bus
8 LED's and 8 toggle switches for bootstrapping and debugging
Bit-banged serial I/O
Low power consumption
Can even run BASIC
Might even survive the EMP of a nuclear blast if you choose the right components.
Rad-hardened CPU's available fairly cheap.
First microprocessor in space!
Even the Atari 400/800/XL/XE series, which inspired the Amiga later and was designed by a lot of the team, outclassed PC's in graphics and sound for all practical purposes until EGA and the Adlib was a reality. Granted, it was at lower resolutions but ANTIC/GTIA beat CGA for gaming in almost every meaningful way and was far more programmable.
PC's of the early to mid-80's were pure shit except as a replacement for CP/M boxes running business software like spreadsheets and WordStar.
You forgot "Computer City".... aka "Computer Shitty" which was Tandy's attempt at a CompUSA clone.
Even uttering that within earshot of anyone under 35 now can get you fired. I tend to use "Bad Beer Rots Out Your Guts But Vodka Goes Well - Get Some Now" instead so I don't get accused of supporting "rape culture" and "slut-shaming" by virtue signalling militant morons.
If you consider blasphemy laws and media silence on religiously-motivated crime "democracy" then yes.... they have a better democracy. I'd rather keep the 1st amendment intact.... the one that lets me speak no matter who I offend or how much of an asshole the majority thinks that I am.
I'll take a constitutional republic over a democracy any day of the week. Too bad the republicans have become the Christian Nationalist party instead of real republicans.
Dude I had no idea about flightgear! I play an old version of MS Flight Sim. I'll definitely check that out,
Flightgear has been around a long time. It's a great sim. I just get bored quickly without being able to blow shit up so I start playing IL2 1946 or CoD instead which gives me a realistic sim and a the fun of strafing Russians.
Again, if they had the resources of Microsoft, the openBSD team would be perfect.
And if I had the resources of Microsoft, I'd be tapdancing on f**king Mars not giving a sh!t about ransomware. What's your point? And no, they wouldn't be perfect. Guaranf**kingteed they'd have a few showstoppers once the scrutiny of the planet was upon them and the entire blackhat community wanted a piece of their a$$. You can worship Theo De Raadt and crew all you want. OpenBSD.... is.... not.... perfect.
Do they have an interesting and valuable approach? Yeah. Is their model the end-all-be-all of development models and utterly flawless? No.
As much as their proactive approach to security helps with an out-of-the-box, you're still screwed if you rely on things like Apache httpd, MySQL, Samba, Xorg, etc. And wasn't it their OpenSSH project that was full of interesting holes pretty recently?
And I'm saying this as someone who's been running various forms of BSD since around 1994. Nothing is perfect. BSD just sucks less. And if you're really trying to imply OpenBSD is "bug-free" that's just wishful thinking.
The "ZOMG MS iz teh SuX0rz.... if only everyone ran Linux and OpenBSD the world world be SAVED" tripe got old 20 years ago. Does Windows suck more? Yep. But they all suck.
And your bug-free 100% secure multi-user OS w/ flawless network stack is where, exactly? All large software projects have bugs and vulnerabilities. It's a fact of life.
If the NSA had actually cared about securing US systems from attack, they would have had MS fix the vulnerabilities instead of exploiting them for fun and profit we wouldn't have this problem.
If the general public realized the importance of keeping software vulnerabilities patched, they might have been able to avoid such widespread infection.
*NIX systems get pwned every damn day, too. I hate to defend MS but there's no such thing as a large software project that is bug-free and impossible to exploit.
I agree but if the $40 helps keep the project producing the open source textbooks going and keeps the infrastructure providing the online assignments up and running I'm not nearly as pissed about it. The online assignments are far less obnoxious than paper and give instantaneous feedback and I at least get the book for free if I don't mind staring at a screen to read it.
Ideally I think the school should cover it but it probably isn't going to happen yet. I'm much happier spending $40 than $400. It's not uncommon for books to cost $700+ per semester and the publishers change 2 paragraphs and rearrange a couple things every few months and call it a new edition. Public school districts don't tolerate that BS, I've never understood why colleges/universities do.
We use open source physics textbooks where I attend and it actually works out pretty well. The books are pretty well-written. The PDF versions are free, the dead-tree edition is like $100. The one-time key for the online assignments is like $40. At the end of the day, other than tuition I only had to spend $40. Pretty awesome idea if you ask me.... the rest of my classes require books ranging from $120 to $400.
The college book publishing racket has to end.
The additional amusement watching retarded millennial kids who never learned to use a real computer and are too cheap to buy a tablet trying to use the eBook version as well as complete assignments on their phones is priceless as well. I've seen people trying to write papers on phones recently. They'd rather fumble with a $600 phone than spend $100 on a used laptop. Boggles the mind.
I'm actually working on building an 1802 based machine for giggles. Will have blinkenlights for address and data lines instead of hex displays along with LED's for various other things. 64K battery-backed static RAM (of which 32K may eventually get swapped with an EEPROM). It will have the standard Q/EF3 bit-bang serial port initially but will also have 2 16550 UARTs. Not sure if I'll go with CF or SD for mass storage.... bit-banging SPI for SD probably wouldn't be much fun.
Will also have a variable clock rate and single step functionality.
Parents bought an Atari 400 w/ 8K and 410 "program recorder" then quickly upgraded to an 800 w/ 48K and an 810 floppy drive. They bought me an early-model Atari 130XE w/ 128K RAM of my own when they upgraded to ST's. I started with the 1010 cassette drive and got me a 1050 5.25" "Happy Drive" pretty quickly after it ate tapes on me a couple times. Started with a black&white TV for a display.... then a green-phosphor Apple composite monitor.... then a nice NEC monitor. Also had a 1020 color plotter for it which was a lot of fun. Had a Koala pad for a while too. Was a neat machine. ANTIC>IA made for a pretty cool programmable video chipset.... could do 256 colors on screen at low rez with some dirty tricks. The 1.79MHz CPU was pretty zippy for a 6502-based machine.
This got replaced with an old Mac Plus around 1991ish which was replaced with an LC III a bit later.
Except that it isn't. It's an ARM-based emulator. Has nothing to do with the original hardware. If it was an NES implemented in a little FPGA or something it'd be kinda neat but it's just software emulation.
They still make the 6502 and the 65816... that plus a cheap CPLD or two and you could probably have something closer to the real deal.
Or they'll blow the dust off their old NES, get a less shitty power supply and play the games on the original hardware. Maybe even buy a multicart.