Maintaining multiple kernels would confuse and potentially invalidate entire suites of compatibility tests. Picking and choosing which kernel to install at update is a risk, as would be testing other software for security, performance, and bugs with distinct runtime kernels running on distinct hardware. The list of issues grows the more you examine software validation for such a critical component as a kernel.
I'm afraid that society, and the human mind, cannot operate correctly without some elements of self interest, which discriminates against everyone else. Discrimination against "the majority" is thus inherent.
Replacing the CPU on on one host often puts every system in the rack at risk. Most household systems can stand a loss of a few % of performance with a patched kernel. Server rooms filled with racks and blades, such as a major data center hosts, can mean unscrambling rats' nests of cabling to extract a host, opening it up, edging blocking components out of the way, releasing the heat sinks, replacing the CPU, _replacing the thermal paste_, and re-attaching the heat sink, closing the system up, and testing it. Much like taking your car in for an oil change, this creates a real risk of making mistakes and requiring additional effort or replacement parts. It also creates a risk of failures in the weeks after the CPU replacement, especially if the installer mishandles the thermal paste.
Completely halting and then cold booting servers is not a zero risk operation. Hosts, or arrays, that have been stable for years will fail to reboot and may even be unrecoverable in an environment where systems are not rebooted regularly and discovered earlier. Mechanical parts, such as fans, and spinning hard drives, are most likely to fail during such a restart. Old clock batteries can expire and fail to set time properly on reboot, old power supplies can fall out of spec and fail to handle start-up voltage requirements, the list of potential problems is extensive.
Replacing CPU's in a production environment can be as great a risk as the security issues of these Intel bugs.
If I may, I'd have to call this an anecdote rather than a quote. The description is from years after the Intel meeting, and doesn't have direct quotes of speech or writing of the personnel involved in the policy change.
With that understood about the anecdote's provenance, it is _completely_ believable. It is precisely the sort of mandate that can save a company in the short term, preserving the jobs and careers and technological development the company is doing, at the risk of a deadly failure down the road. It's the sort of business risk assessment that occurs on an annual basis when testing standards and guidelines are set. It also occurs on a daily basis when security practices are created: do we accept the risk of a breach today, while this is unpatched, versus the risk of service failure or loss of business during system updates?
I well remember testing out operating systems on 486 based hardware. I actually did tests with Windows, with early Linux releases, and with HURD on the same host. HURD was unusable. Linux became a critical part of the environment very quickly, since genuine UNIX systems were much more expensive than our limited development budget could support.
For medication, and for software, the old version is no longer produced. The "tuning" is heralded as a new feature, if necessary, and sold on that basis, to replace the old version for new users. The relevant new patent is invalid at its core. But proving a patent invalid in court is a difficult and expensive proposition. The new, fundamentally fraudulent patent is used as an anti-competitive measure.
I'm not suggesting that this is the major software patent portfolio of, for example, Intel. But I am suggesting that it's a common practice to review older in-house technologies for patentable features and manipulate the patent system to get new patents for existing or new product lines.
Sadly, thee is a trick to work around the 20 year patent limit. Patent a subtle feature of the old design, and if necessary tune the new patent to be more applicable to modern tools. This is an old practice with software patents, still in use by companies that create defensive and competition stifling suites of patents. A review of existing tools for patentable material is standard practice for a skilled patent attorney.
While the joke may sound funny at first, it is most definitely not true. Quoting Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundaton, about the licensing of Linspire:
> No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom
If Linspire's "pay for play" model included access to the relevant source code, under a "free" development license with access to source code, it could be considered compatible with most Linux software and business models. It does not: its support for prprietary projects and vendor lock-in is precisely what the GNU project and the FSF reject.
Thank you for the more thoughtful analysis. This wasn't a subtlety that would be apparent to an analyst focused on a particular task: it took a broader view of the flow of data, one that would not show up for a developer or tester focused on one specific task or feature. It's part of a class of flaws that can occur when developers and designers focus on one very particular task without being encouraged, or permitted, to examine related behavior.
It's also a firm reminder of various principles. One is that security costs. In this case, it costs performance: the checks or flushes to avoid sharing the results of pre-execution themselves cost cycles and resources. Another is that parallel execution also adds costs, because now this "pre-execution" is shown to require "post-execution" steps to protect data that was in the pre-execution, and that the typical programmer has no reason to suspect was ever stored elsewhere. It's invisible to their code.
> The internet was going along quite well WAY over six years before network neutrality regulation passed.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (From John Philpot Curran, often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson,)
The difficulty with the loss of network neutrality is not an immediate collapse of infrastructure. It's the economic and social bars to new speech and new endeavors. We can expect throttling of content on a massive scale, and preferential treatment of "preferred partners" to favor their content. _By itself_, I would not see that as so dangerous. But the infrastructure used to improve quality-of-service for that protected content is precisely the same infrastructure that can _filter_ and _monitor_ traffic. The relevant routers to violate network neutrality with are ideal locations for illicit monitoring. ISP's can, and have, violated civil rights with law enforcement installed monitoring. Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) existed.
I suggest you wait 6 years. It's going to take a few years for the current backbone infrastructure to adjust to the new regulatory status. Then expect to see far more siloed services., and far more pernicious monitoring built into the systems that are doing throttling, as part of the package. I'd estimate 3 years as the half life oof the most powerful backbone routers to really see traffic alter.
I agree with you that they are a problem, and a dangerous one. Exposing them can be a public service. The idea that moral or ethical behavior is "unprofessional" is a confusing one. There is a great deal of behavior in the workplace that is very "professional" in the sense of lowering expenses or improving profit, benefiting that "profit" root word in "professional", but are nonetheless unethical or illegal. This includes refusal to hire the disabled, refusal to hire young women who many become pregnant, hiring hundreds of 36-hour workweek part-time employees to avoid providing full-time benefits, firing employees just before retirement to avoid pensions, etc.
If I may, I'd like to encourage separation of the idea of "ethical" from "professional". I'm afraid it's been a common theory among my younger, libertarian leaning acquaintances that the "silent hand" of market forces will correct moral or ethical issues automatically. I've had some difficulty walking them through examples of market forces _encouraging_ abuse. The idea that abuse is built into the fabric of certain markets has been difficult to convey.
I would be very reluctant to publicly defame a former employer. This is especially because I have various non-disclosure agreements signed with current employers and former partners. But such comments have been invaluable when reviewing a new business partner or writing a contract, to understand how a partner's management and work ethic might affect our work with them. Being overworked, poorly organized, or being a wonderful place to work can affect whether we need to hand them an early release and collaborate to get the full deployment together, or whether we know they're very reliant on H1B personnel who don't actually know the material. In such a case, we need to allocate resources for training and more reference documentation.
No. His dangerous foreign politics, his abuse of the Department of Justice, his behavior towards women, and the same fiscal planning that have bankrupted him 4 times applied to the US budget are sources of profound loathing.
Simply because companies develop defensive patent portfolios does not mean that they have _no_ legitimate, valuable patents. I think you'll find that it's not that the companies see little or no value in patents per se. Rather, it's rather that _most_ of the patents, especially software patents, have little individual value. It's a small percentage of software patents that are significant, enforceable, and worth spending resources to bring to court for enforcement. They also have value to the owner of the patent portfolio by having a chilling effect against potent competitors entering the market, but who may not have the resources to do "due diligence" against the full list of patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Sadly, the list of patents has become outrageously large and many of them invalid, because the current practice of the USPTO is to issue the patent and let thorough review be done by the court.
The current system has many flaws. Please be aware that there are people and companies who _do_ benefit from the current system, such as the lawyers themselves who are involved in patent law, and the bureaucrats at companies that manage the patent portfolio. Reform of the system to reduce the overflow of patents will meet a great deal of legislative pushback from those who benefit from the current arrangement.
I'd hate to see some of the classics of my youth lost forever due to legal issues with unlocking DRM. Personally, I would appreciate seeing the game authors prepared to unlock the content with a final patch as a responsible sign-off to their customers when they abandon publishing that particular content, or running the servers. There are a few particular favorites, such as the old "Marathon" games, that I'd welcome seeing in Steam or preserved for posterity for some of our children.
Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space are lost in my memory. The lunar landing, and my excitement at earlier Apollo launches, are still clear. I'd like to see us go back to the moon and gather inspiration that has been lost in the intervening time, and knowledge that could not have been gathered with the relatively crude instruments and extremely limited payload of the Saturn based lunar missions. The effective loss of our space program to the profoundly flawed Shuttle program cost us dreams, and cost us knowledge that only a more effective space program could provide.
Ebon Musk, when you finally pass away, I hope that your heirs can plant your remains on the moon, with your tombstone an air tank with tag scrolled with the poem "Requiem" as described by Robert A Heinlein in this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... You've earned it.
One installs "MRemoteNG", a very useful tab-based GUI for putty. I recommend it to all my Windows using colleagues who need SSH management. It's available at https://mremoteng.org/
Cygwin provides an SSH server, with current OpenSSH releases and a more powerf bash based local working environment. It does require additional non-Microsoft published binaries, and it has had issues operating with various anti-virus software packages. I admit that I'm very, very curious what shell and what capability for chroot sftp access may be available with the new Microsoft published server.
Activating that future could be very helpful for people who wish to safely upload, or download, more safely from what is already a publicly exposed Windows server.
There are some such laws. Tennesse, for example, has laws specifically targeting pregnant women for illegal drug use while pregnant. The purpose seems to be to provide grounds for getting the mother off the streets and into treatment or a controlled environment where the illegal drugs are not available. The damage to a fetus can be very real, and the state is claiming a strong interest in preventing a child being ill and requiring extensive social and medical support from birth.
> And yet a fetus is a baby, just still in the womb.
This is not reflected by the legal or medical definitions. Merriam's Dictionary publishes this:
* Definition of fetus * an unborn or unhatched vertebrate especially after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind; specifically * a developing human from usually two months after conception to birth — compare embryo 1b
Note, in particular, that "fetus" may not mean a human baby. This has medical and legal distinctions.
Slashdot Mirror
Maintaining multiple kernels would confuse and potentially invalidate entire suites of compatibility tests. Picking and choosing which kernel to install at update is a risk, as would be testing other software for security, performance, and bugs with distinct runtime kernels running on distinct hardware. The list of issues grows the more you examine software validation for such a critical component as a kernel.
I'm afraid that society, and the human mind, cannot operate correctly without some elements of self interest, which discriminates against everyone else. Discrimination against "the majority" is thus inherent.
Replacing the CPU on on one host often puts every system in the rack at risk. Most household systems can stand a loss of a few % of performance with a patched kernel. Server rooms filled with racks and blades, such as a major data center hosts, can mean unscrambling rats' nests of cabling to extract a host, opening it up, edging blocking components out of the way, releasing the heat sinks, replacing the CPU, _replacing the thermal paste_, and re-attaching the heat sink, closing the system up, and testing it. Much like taking your car in for an oil change, this creates a real risk of making mistakes and requiring additional effort or replacement parts. It also creates a risk of failures in the weeks after the CPU replacement, especially if the installer mishandles the thermal paste.
The risk is compounded in environments with poorly configured cabling, such as those shone here: https://www.cepro.com/photo/th...
Completely halting and then cold booting servers is not a zero risk operation. Hosts, or arrays, that have been stable for years will fail to reboot and may even be unrecoverable in an environment where systems are not rebooted regularly and discovered earlier. Mechanical parts, such as fans, and spinning hard drives, are most likely to fail during such a restart. Old clock batteries can expire and fail to set time properly on reboot, old power supplies can fall out of spec and fail to handle start-up voltage requirements, the list of potential problems is extensive.
Replacing CPU's in a production environment can be as great a risk as the security issues of these Intel bugs.
If I may, I'd have to call this an anecdote rather than a quote. The description is from years after the Intel meeting, and doesn't have direct quotes of speech or writing of the personnel involved in the policy change.
With that understood about the anecdote's provenance, it is _completely_ believable. It is precisely the sort of mandate that can save a company in the short term, preserving the jobs and careers and technological development the company is doing, at the risk of a deadly failure down the road. It's the sort of business risk assessment that occurs on an annual basis when testing standards and guidelines are set. It also occurs on a daily basis when security practices are created: do we accept the risk of a breach today, while this is unpatched, versus the risk of service failure or loss of business during system updates?
I well remember testing out operating systems on 486 based hardware. I actually did tests with Windows, with early Linux releases, and with HURD on the same host. HURD was unusable. Linux became a critical part of the environment very quickly, since genuine UNIX systems were much more expensive than our limited development budget could support.
For medication, and for software, the old version is no longer produced. The "tuning" is heralded as a new feature, if necessary, and sold on that basis, to replace the old version for new users. The relevant new patent is invalid at its core. But proving a patent invalid in court is a difficult and expensive proposition. The new, fundamentally fraudulent patent is used as an anti-competitive measure.
I'm not suggesting that this is the major software patent portfolio of, for example, Intel. But I am suggesting that it's a common practice to review older in-house technologies for patentable features and manipulate the patent system to get new patents for existing or new product lines.
Sadly, thee is a trick to work around the 20 year patent limit. Patent a subtle feature of the old design, and if necessary tune the new patent to be more applicable to modern tools. This is an old practice with software patents, still in use by companies that create defensive and competition stifling suites of patents. A review of existing tools for patentable material is standard practice for a skilled patent attorney.
I've not delved into Linspire or Freespire Are they still using glibc?
While the joke may sound funny at first, it is most definitely not true. Quoting Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundaton, about the licensing of Linspire:
> No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom
If Linspire's "pay for play" model included access to the relevant source code, under a "free" development license with access to source code, it could be considered compatible with most Linux software and business models. It does not: its support for prprietary projects and vendor lock-in is precisely what the GNU project and the FSF reject.
Thank you for the more thoughtful analysis. This wasn't a subtlety that would be apparent to an analyst focused on a particular task: it took a broader view of the flow of data, one that would not show up for a developer or tester focused on one specific task or feature. It's part of a class of flaws that can occur when developers and designers focus on one very particular task without being encouraged, or permitted, to examine related behavior.
It's also a firm reminder of various principles. One is that security costs. In this case, it costs performance: the checks or flushes to avoid sharing the results of pre-execution themselves cost cycles and resources. Another is that parallel execution also adds costs, because now this "pre-execution" is shown to require "post-execution" steps to protect data that was in the pre-execution, and that the typical programmer has no reason to suspect was ever stored elsewhere. It's invisible to their code.
I see the tweet quoted, and links to similar material of Donald J. Trump's, at:
http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/02/...
> The internet was going along quite well WAY over six years before network neutrality regulation passed.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." (From John Philpot Curran, often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson,)
The difficulty with the loss of network neutrality is not an immediate collapse of infrastructure. It's the economic and social bars to new speech and new endeavors. We can expect throttling of content on a massive scale, and preferential treatment of "preferred partners" to favor their content. _By itself_, I would not see that as so dangerous. But the infrastructure used to improve quality-of-service for that protected content is precisely the same infrastructure that can _filter_ and _monitor_ traffic. The relevant routers to violate network neutrality with are ideal locations for illicit monitoring. ISP's can, and have, violated civil rights with law enforcement installed monitoring. Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) existed.
I suggest you wait 6 years. It's going to take a few years for the current backbone infrastructure to adjust to the new regulatory status. Then expect to see far more siloed services., and far more pernicious monitoring built into the systems that are doing throttling, as part of the package. I'd estimate 3 years as the half life oof the most powerful backbone routers to really see traffic alter.
"_the_most_revolutionary_method_of_communication_used_by_humans,"
I'd present that label to the written word. But yes, the spread of the Internet would be a close second.
> Abusive employers are the unprofessional ones.
I agree with you that they are a problem, and a dangerous one. Exposing them can be a public service. The idea that moral or ethical behavior is "unprofessional" is a confusing one. There is a great deal of behavior in the workplace that is very "professional" in the sense of lowering expenses or improving profit, benefiting that "profit" root word in "professional", but are nonetheless unethical or illegal. This includes refusal to hire the disabled, refusal to hire young women who many become pregnant, hiring hundreds of 36-hour workweek part-time employees to avoid providing full-time benefits, firing employees just before retirement to avoid pensions, etc.
If I may, I'd like to encourage separation of the idea of "ethical" from "professional". I'm afraid it's been a common theory among my younger, libertarian leaning acquaintances that the "silent hand" of market forces will correct moral or ethical issues automatically. I've had some difficulty walking them through examples of market forces _encouraging_ abuse. The idea that abuse is built into the fabric of certain markets has been difficult to convey.
I would be very reluctant to publicly defame a former employer. This is especially because I have various non-disclosure agreements signed with current employers and former partners. But such comments have been invaluable when reviewing a new business partner or writing a contract, to understand how a partner's management and work ethic might affect our work with them. Being overworked, poorly organized, or being a wonderful place to work can affect whether we need to hand them an early release and collaborate to get the full deployment together, or whether we know they're very reliant on H1B personnel who don't actually know the material. In such a case, we need to allocate resources for training and more reference documentation.
No. His dangerous foreign politics, his abuse of the Department of Justice, his behavior towards women, and the same fiscal planning that have bankrupted him 4 times applied to the US budget are sources of profound loathing.
Simply because companies develop defensive patent portfolios does not mean that they have _no_ legitimate, valuable patents. I think you'll find that it's not that the companies see little or no value in patents per se. Rather, it's rather that _most_ of the patents, especially software patents, have little individual value. It's a small percentage of software patents that are significant, enforceable, and worth spending resources to bring to court for enforcement. They also have value to the owner of the patent portfolio by having a chilling effect against potent competitors entering the market, but who may not have the resources to do "due diligence" against the full list of patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Sadly, the list of patents has become outrageously large and many of them invalid, because the current practice of the USPTO is to issue the patent and let thorough review be done by the court.
The current system has many flaws. Please be aware that there are people and companies who _do_ benefit from the current system, such as the lawyers themselves who are involved in patent law, and the bureaucrats at companies that manage the patent portfolio. Reform of the system to reduce the overflow of patents will meet a great deal of legislative pushback from those who benefit from the current arrangement.
I'd hate to see some of the classics of my youth lost forever due to legal issues with unlocking DRM. Personally, I would appreciate seeing the game authors prepared to unlock the content with a final patch as a responsible sign-off to their customers when they abandon publishing that particular content, or running the servers. There are a few particular favorites, such as the old "Marathon" games, that I'd welcome seeing in Steam or preserved for posterity for some of our children.
Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space are lost in my memory. The lunar landing, and my excitement at earlier Apollo launches, are still clear. I'd like to see us go back to the moon and gather inspiration that has been lost in the intervening time, and knowledge that could not have been gathered with the relatively crude instruments and extremely limited payload of the Saturn based lunar missions. The effective loss of our space program to the profoundly flawed Shuttle program cost us dreams, and cost us knowledge that only a more effective space program could provide.
Ebon Musk, when you finally pass away, I hope that your heirs can plant your remains on the moon, with your tombstone an air tank with tag scrolled with the poem "Requiem" as described by Robert A Heinlein in this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... You've earned it.
One installs "MRemoteNG", a very useful tab-based GUI for putty. I recommend it to all my Windows using colleagues who need SSH management. It's available at https://mremoteng.org/
Cygwin provides an SSH server, with current OpenSSH releases and a more powerf bash based local working environment. It does require additional non-Microsoft published binaries, and it has had issues operating with various anti-virus software packages. I admit that I'm very, very curious what shell and what capability for chroot sftp access may be available with the new Microsoft published server.
Activating that future could be very helpful for people who wish to safely upload, or download, more safely from what is already a publicly exposed Windows server.
There are some such laws. Tennesse, for example, has laws specifically targeting pregnant women for illegal drug use while pregnant. The purpose seems to be to provide grounds for getting the mother off the streets and into treatment or a controlled environment where the illegal drugs are not available. The damage to a fetus can be very real, and the state is claiming a strong interest in preventing a child being ill and requiring extensive social and medical support from birth.
> And yet a fetus is a baby, just still in the womb.
This is not reflected by the legal or medical definitions. Merriam's Dictionary publishes this:
* Definition of fetus
* an unborn or unhatched vertebrate especially after attaining the basic structural plan of its kind; specifically
* a developing human from usually two months after conception to birth — compare embryo 1b
Note, in particular, that "fetus" may not mean a human baby. This has medical and legal distinctions.
How would the word "fetus" be part of "buzz word bingo"? It has a clear medical definition, and compelling legal definitions.