No details left, so not sure it was this particular virus, but a
customer running SCO UNIX on a DEC box left a DOS diskette in the
floppy drive and after the CRON scheduled nightly reboot (to clean up
application logs) the server found the diskette and started booting
from it. Staff arriving in the morning were wondering why their PCs
couldn't connect to the server.
Seems someone had forgotten to disable in the BIOS the booting from floppy.
Server was re-installed, booting from floppy disabled, about 200
servers spread over the country checked 'on site'!
Fast forward to the 'here and now' we still see regular warnings
posted about "don't stick a unknown USB memory stick in your PC or
notebook"
Nothing changes?
Commemorating Michelangelo's birthday in 1457, this was the scourge of
DOS-box users everywhere in 1992 (I was still using CP/M at the time
before upgrading to Unix).
-- Dave
Dick Hustvedt was born on this day in 1946; an architect of RSX-11 and VMS, he
also had a weird sense of humour which he demonstrated by enshrining the
"microfortnight" into VMS in order to make admins RTFM.
Sadly, we lost him in a car accident in 2008.
-- Dave
Almost forgot...
Born on this day in 1934, he pretty much invented ALGOL (and algorithmic
languages in general; the running joke was that you could call him by
name or by value)... From Clem Cole: "The actual joke was Europeans
called him by name ("ni-klaus vurt") and Americans by value ("nickel-less
worth").
-- Dave
On Thu, 14 Feb 2019, Thomas Kellar wrote:
> I am learning from the discussion. I disagree with the binary
> argument. Women and men both have personalities and brains that range
> over a huge spectrum of differences. It is society that tries to force
> them into particular molds.
Hi Thomas.
FWIW, the mainstream on both sides of this argument agree that men and
women overlap in characteristics. The question is what causes the
differences.
Many human characteristics are bimodal with most people clustering around
one of two points, and those points correlating with biological gender.
Opponents of inate gender differences argue that the observed differences
are socialised. They point out that neuroplasticity means that even
differences in brain structure between genders *could* be socialised.
This is why I find studies on infants so interesting. There are plenty of
examples but I've linked a study below that monitored the behaviour of
infants that are around 24 hours old. Statistically significant
differences in behaviour were observed between boys and girls. This is
far too early for any socialisation to have occured.
https://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/5b1501/F/sex.pdf
When I was a young man I believed that gender differences (beyond obvious
morphological differences) were socialised. But the evidence grew, and
has continued to grow, that to a large degree this isn't so.
A really fascinating area is "greater male variability" (GMV) which really
explains a lot about the world. I wrote an article on that for a well
known blog a few years ago. While researching the article I discovered
that men vary more than women in personality. That is to say that on
average women are more similar to each other in personality than men are.
I admit that one really surprised me.
Some people claim GMV has been discredited. It hasn't. People claiming
GMV has been discredited usually cite a handful of counter examples as
evidence of this. GMV was never claimed to be univerally true, only true
for most characteristics.. I suspect there is at least one case where
females, not males, exhibit greater variability but this still doesn't
discredit GMV.
Getting back to employment, there have been many studies on employment
patterns and gender by researchers and governments. They consistently
show that men and women make a myriad of different choices in employment.
In particular they show that men will tend to prioritise earning potential
over many other characteristics of employment while women tend to do the
reverse. The largest study on this topic anywhere is probably the
CONSAD Report, commissioned by the US Dept of Labor. The CONSAD Report is
actually on the gender earnings gap but it's still relevant to a
discussion on different choices men and women make in employment.
Here's a tiny URL to the CONSAD Report:
https://tinyurl.com/y6vvzm4v
Cheers,
Rob
<SNIP>
Is this thread really a good place for TUHS discussion? Maybe COFF would
be better suited for it.
And maybe the explanation why there are more men in IT is simpler than some
folks who forcefully try to create elaborate sociological theories think.
In nature males are just wired differently from females. And that is why
they ARE different, like 1 and 0. Otherwise they would be just one sex.
And as we know nothing can come from just one number...
--Andy
Seeing as how this is diverging from TUHS, I'd encourage replies to the
COFF copy that I'm CCing.
On 02/06/2019 01:47 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> There were protocols that fit better in the era like DeltaT with a
> simpler state machine and connection handling. Then there was a mad
> dash of protocol development in the mid to late ‘80s that were measured
> by various metrics to outperform TCP in practical and theoretical
> space. Some of these seemed quite nice like XTP and are still in use in
> niche defense applications.
$ReadingList++
> Positive, rather than negative acknowledgement has aged well as
> computers got more powerful (the sender can pretty well predict loss
> when it hasn't gotten an ACK back and opportunistically retransmit).
> But RF people do weird things that violate end to end principle on cable
> modems and radios to try and minimize transmissions.
Would you care to elaborate?
> One thing I think that is missing in my contemporary modern software
> developers is a willingness to dig down and solve problems at the right
> level. People do clownish things like write overlay filesystems in
> garbage collected languages. Google's QUIC is a fine example of
> foolishness. I am mortified that is genuinely being considered for the
> HTTP 3 standard. But I guess we've entered the era where enough people
> have retired that the lower layers are approached with mysticism and
> deemed unable and unsuitable to change. So the layering will continue
> until eventually things topple over like the garbage pile in the movie
> Idiocracy.
I thought one of the reasons that QUIC was UDP based instead of it's own
transport protocol was because history has shown that the possibility
and openness of networking is not sufficient to encourage the adoption
of newer technologies. Specifically the long tail of history / legacy
has hindered the introduction of a new transport protocol. I thought I
remembered hearing that Google wanted to do a new transport protocol,
but they thought that too many things would block it thus slowing down
it's deployment. Conversely putting QUIC on top of UDP was a minor
compromise that allowed the benefits to be adopted sooner.
Perhaps I'm misremembering. I did a quick 45 second search and couldn't
find any supporting evidence.
The only thing that comes to mind is IPsec's ESP(50) and AH(51) which—as
I understand it—are filtered too frequently because they aren't ICMP(1),
TCP(6), or UDP(17). Too many firewalls interfere to the point that they
are unreliable.
> Since the discussion meandered to the distinction of path
> selection/routing.. for provider level networks, label switching to this
> day makes a lot more sense IMO.. figure out a path virtual circuit that
> can cut through each hop with a small flow table instead of trying to
> coagulate, propagate routes from a massive address space that has to fit
> in an expensive CAM and buffer and forward packets at each hop.
I think label switching has it's advantages. I think it also has some
complications.
I feel like ATM, Frame Relay, and MPLS are all forms of label switching.
Conceptually they all operate based on a per-programed path.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
We lost computer pioneer John von Neumann on this day in 1957; the "von
Neumann" architecture (stored program etc) is the basis of all modern
computers, and he almost certainly borrowed it from Charles Babbage.
-- Dave
It looks like Kevin's response didn't make the COFF mailing list. So
I'm including it and my email that it's in response to below.
Kevin, are you subscribed to the COFF mailing list?
On 2/7/19 5:16 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 11:08 AM Grant Taylor via TUHS
> <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
>> Seeing as how this is diverging from TUHS, I'd encourage replies to the
>> COFF copy that I'm CCing.
>
> My thesis was that the specific vector of TCP becoming dominant is "UH"
>
>> $ReadingList++
>
> Pick up ISBN-13: 978-0201563511 if you work on transport protos.
>
>> Would you care to elaborate?
>
> Only briefly for this list -- certain common devices will intercept
> TCP streams and cause what are called stretch ACKs from a host because
> transmission is expensive in some vector -- shared collision domain
> like the air or a coaxial bus, battery power to key up the radio etc.
> This means the sender has to accommodate that behavior and know how to
> react if it is modeling the connection.
Intriguing.
It seems that the more answers that I get end up resulting in even more
questions and things I want to learn about.
Thank you Kevin.
>> I thought one of the reasons that QUIC was UDP based instead of it's own
>> transport protocol was because history has shown that the possibility
>> and openness of networking is not sufficient to encourage the adoption
>> of newer technologies. Specifically the long tail of history / legacy
>> has hindered the introduction of a new transport protocol. I thought I
>> remembered hearing that Google wanted to do a new transport protocol,
>> but they thought that too many things would block it thus slowing down
>> it's deployment. Conversely putting QUIC on top of UDP was a minor
>> compromise that allowed the benefits to be adopted sooner.
>>
>> Perhaps I'm misremembering. I did a quick 45 second search and couldn't
>> find any supporting evidence.
>
> G and Facebook also admit it uses 200% more CPU to do the same
> throughput. All for basically avoiding HOL-blocking, which can be
> worked around in most common scenarios, especially when you control
> the most popular browser :facepalm:. Both companies together could
> pull networking in any direction they want. I see QUIC as yet another
> unfortunate direction.
Okay.
>> The only thing that comes to mind is IPsec's ESP(50) and AH(51) which—as
>> I understand it—are filtered too frequently because they aren't ICMP(1),
>> TCP(6), or UDP(17). Too many firewalls interfere to the point that they
>> are unreliable.
>>
>>
>> I think label switching has it's advantages. I think it also has some
>> complications.
>>
>> I feel like ATM, Frame Relay, and MPLS are all forms of label switching.
>> Conceptually they all operate based on a per-programed path.
>
> By provider networks I mean tier 1 and 2 and core infrastructure like
> CDNs. MPLS is good. ATM got a couple things right and a lot of
> things less right.
I think one thing that MPLS, ATM, FR do / did is to transparently carry
other protocols without modification to their operation. I think such
transparency allows them to do things that would be considerably more
difficult if the switching / routing logic of the transport network was
trying to interpret network addressing and / or protocol information of
the payloads they were carrying.
I don't know how flexible MPLS, et al, are without the support of other
associated protocols. How well can a MPLS cloud with redundant
connections find an alternate path if a link goes down. That's arguably
something that IP is exceedingly capable of doing, even if it's not the
most efficient at it.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
> On Jan 6, 2019, at 11:36 PM, on TUHS Andy Kosela
> <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 9:01 PM A. P. Garcia
>> <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 9:39 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:06 PM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, 6 Jan 2019, A. P. Garcia wrote:
>>>>
>>>> If not for GNU, Unix would still have been cloned. Net/2 happened in
>>>> parallel, did it not?
>>>
>>>
>>> Berkeley actively rewrote most of unix yes. Net/1 was released about
>>> the same time GNU was getting started. Net/2 and later 4.4 BSD
>>> continued this trend, where 4.4 was finally a complete system.
>>> BSD386 only lagged Linux by about a year and had much stronger
>>> networking support, but supported fewer obscure devices than linux...
>>>
>>> Warner
>>>
>>> Ps I know this glosses over a lot, and isn't intended to be pedantic
>>> as to who got where first. Only they were about the same time... and
>>> I'm especially glossing over the AT&T suits, etc.
>>
>>
>> It's really hard to say. How would you compile it? Clang didn't come
>> along until 2007. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit, perhaps?
>
> I find it ironic that BSD people are so quick to bash RMS, yet they
> have been using his tools (gcc and various utils) for years... By
> reading this thread it appears there are more people that have
> personal issues with RMS than technical ones. I find usually there
> are two sides to each story though.
>
> One side is eloquently presented in 2001 movie "Revolution OS"[1]
> starring RMS amongst others.
>
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vW62KqKJ5A
>
> --Andy
>
> --Andy
I know a lot of folks seek adulation and acclaim. They can’t seem to
help themselves. Often, they deserve more recognition than they deserve,
other times not. As I have sought information regarding the history of
UNIX, it has as often as not involved personal narrative of those who
were involved in that history. Thankfully, a lot of those folks are
alive and reasonably cogent. This is a treasure that deserves
appreciation. However, to say that so and so invented/discovered such
and such is to make little the environment, resources, patronage,
gestalt, and even the zeitgeist.
Who discovered Oxygen? Lavosier? Did Pascal save the world? Read Bruno
Latour’s work for a different perspective on science and discovery.
Particularly, Science in Action or Laboratory Life. Discovery is rarely,
if ever, a solo activity, contrary to a lot of hype and romanticization
in the literature and media.
With regard to who wrote what code... I’ve written a lot of it, that I
personally designed. That code still lives in binary form that runs on
devices that folks use to this day. However, while my code is probably
still, as originally written, in the heart of many running systems, it
is certain that many of these system have been enhanced beyond
recognition. I guarantee you I didn’t do the extensions (I get bored way
to easily). So, if you look at the system today and ask who wrote it,
who wrote it? I would contend that while I wrote the key abstractions
that allowed these systems to come into existence, others also wrote
code to make the systems what they are today and without those
contributions, they would be lesser systems.
I love ancient UNIX, thank you Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, DEC, Bell
Labs management, those Multics folks, IBM, etc :). But I work, everyday,
on a mid-2012 15” Aluminum Unibody Macbook Pro with an Intel processor
and Hynix ram, some Chinese SSD, and who knows what else... Thank you
Steve Jobs and hosts of thousands for making this miracle possible. Oh,
and yes, I daily use gcc/gdb (although, I’d prefer clang/lldb because it
comes with no associated community whining), so thank you RMS.
Later,
Will
Myself it was v6 (most likely the typesetter version).
What I’d like to see discussed is how people today learn to write, enhance, design, and otherwise get involved with an OS.
When I was teaching at UCSD my class on Unix Internals used writing a device driver as the class project and covered an overview of the Unix OS using the Bach book. Even then (the late 80’s) it was hard to do a deep dive into the whole of the Unix system.
Today Linux is far too complex for someone to be able to sit down and make useful contributions to in a few weeks possibly even months, unlike v6, v7 or even 32v. By the time of BSD 4.1[a,b,c] and 4.2 those had progressed to the point that someone just picking up the OS source and trying to understand the whole thing (VM, scheduling, buffer cache, etc) would take weeks to months.
So what is happening today in the academic world to teach new people about OS internals?
David
Computer pioneer Donald Knuth was born on this day in 1938; amongst other
things he gave us the TeX typesetting language, and he's still working on "The
Art Of Computer Programming" fascicles (I only got as far as the first two
volumes).
I really must have a look at his new MMIX, too; I love learning new programming
languages (I've used about 50 the last time I looked, and I'm happy to post a
list for my coterie of disbelievers).
-- Dave
Another weird question from my warped mind...
Would anyone happen to have a copy of the (in)famous Mark V. Shaney
software (written by Bruce Ellis, I believe) that they coud share with me?
I did get it under an NDA from Chris Maltby (who was at Softway at the
time, I think) but it got lost during my dreaded house move (itself a long
story which I don't feel like sharing for a while).
Are you here, Chris? Yes, I used it on Amateur ("ham") packet radio to
annoy someone, and it sucked in not a few people who were wondering just
what the hell he was imbibing/smoking at the time... I think the Statute
of Limitations is now over :-)
Thanks.
-- Dave
Since y'all started it...
1. Close to 100% of gah-noo projects violate the Unix philosophy, the
Worse is better philosophy, the KISS principle, minimalist philosophies
etc. Take just about any of the ``core'' projects, like glibc, as an
example, starting with getopt_long, which lets a developer create
PowerShell-like-named arguments, that are ``human readable''; and
ending with its static linking abilities, which needs no further
ranting. It is in addition to the lead developer's attitude.
2. Close to 100% of GNU projects that simulate classic Unix utilities
introduce GNU'isms, one of them being already presented in the previous
point. Sometimes it goes very far, so we cannot call the Linux kernel
as being written in C, but rather the ``GCC C'' dialect.
The musl and Clang projects demonstrate how much it takes to being able
to replace the respective components while maintaining compatibility.
3. GNU has never been about quality. In fact, the aforementioned GCC
and glibc let developers write more and more bad code.
4. GNU and FSF have never been technical movements, they are political
movements that serve the interests of rms, and should be called as
such.
There are other projects that you all know and they don't need
additional ranting: GRUB, info, Autohell, GTK+, GNOME, and on top of
this, GPL. (HURD is a joke, so not included).
--
caóc
We lost a co-inventor of ENIAC, John Mauchly, on this day in 1980. ENIAC
is claimed to be the "first general purpose electronic digital computer",
but I guess it comes down to a matter of definition[*], as every culture
likes to be the "first" (just ask the Penguins, for example); for
"computer" you could go all the way back to the Mk-I Antikythera (Hellenic
variation, from about the 100BC production run)...
[*]
Analogue/digital/hybrid
Mechanical/electrical/electronic/hybrid
General/special
Wired/programmable/Turing
Prototype/production
Harvard/Neumann/quantum
Etc...
-- Dave
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, was lost to us in 1852 from
uterine cancer. Regarded as the first computer programmer and a
mathematical prodigy (when such things were unseemly for a mere woman),
she was the daughter of Lord Byron, and a friend of Charles Babbage.
-- Dave
A replica of EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was
switched on at Bletchley Park on this day in 2014; EDSAC was the first
practical general purpose stored program electronic computer (and how's
that for hair-splitting?).
-- Dave
(I decided it was more suitable for COFF instead of TUHS (but sadly the
membership does not overlap much.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Kleinrock#ARPANET
``The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969,
between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute.''
And thus from little acorns...
-- Dave
> From: Grant Taylor
> Thank you for the reply
Sure; I love to yap about stuff like this.
> I occasionally bump into some Multicians and am always pleasantly
> surprised at how different their world is.
Yes, it's very unlike most of what's been done since. Some of it (e.g. a
strictly ordered set of rings for protection) was wrong, but there's a lot of
good stuff there yet to be mined.
>> Which is a pity, because when done correctly (which it was - Intel
>> hired Paul Karger to architect it)
Ooops, it was Roger Schell, I get them mixed up all the time. His oral
history, here:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/133439
is a Must Read.
>> it's just what you > need for a truly secure system (which Multics also
>> had) - but that's another long message.
> If you're ever feeling bored and would like to share that story.
OK, soon.
> From: Bakul Shah
> All of this would be easily possible on the Mill arch. if ever it gets
> built. Mill has segments and protected function calls.
What I found about that mostly talked about the belt stuff. Do you happen to
have a pointer to the segment/call stuff?
> set-uid has its own issues. Plan9 doesn't have it.
Ah, what were the issues (if you happen to know)?
Noel
> From: Grant Taylor
>> as an operating system person, I was, and remain, a big fan of Multics
>> ... which I still think was a better long-term path for OSes (long
>> discussion of why elided to keep this short).
> Can I ask for the longer discussion?
Sure. (Note that I'm not on COFF, so if anyone replies, please make sure I'm
CC'd directly.)
Basically, it boils down to 'monolithic OS's are bad' - for all the reasons
laid out in the usual ukernel places (I first saw them in the BSTJ MERT
paper, IIRC).
{What follows is not the crispest way to explain it; sorry. I didn't feel like
deleting it all and re-writing to get straight to the point, which is 'Multics
had many of the advantages of a ukernel - and a long time before the ukernel
idea arrived - but without the IPC overhead, which seems to be the biggest
argument against ukernels'.}
Now, early UNIX may have done pretty well in a _tiny_ amount of memory (I
think our -11/40 V6 had about 64KB of main memory _total_, or some such
ridiculous number), and to do that, maybe you have to go monolithic, but
monolithic is pretty Procrustean.
This was brought home to me in doing early TCP/IP work on PDP-11 Unix. The
system was just not well suited to networking work - if what you wanted to do
didn't fit into the UNIX model, you were screwed. Some people (e.g. BBN) did
TCP as a process (after adding IPC; no IPC in UNIX, back then), but then
you're talking a couple of process switches to do anything.
I looked at how Dave Clark was doing it on Multics, and I was green with envy.
He added, debugged and improved his code _on the running main campus system_,
sharing the machine with dozens of real users! Try doing that on UNIX
(although nowadays it's getting there, with loadable kernel stuff - but this
was in the 70's)!
To explain how this was even possible, you need to know a tiny bit about
Multics. It was a 'single level store' system; process memory and files were
not disjoint (as in UNIX), there were only segments (most of which were
long-lived, and survived reboots); processes had huge address spaces (up to
2^18 segments), and if you needed to use one, you just mapped it into your
address space, and off you went.
So he wrote his code, and if I in my command process executed the 'TELNET'
command, when it needed to open a TCP connection, it just mapped in his TCP
code, and called TCP$open() (or whatever he named it). It fiddled around in
the networking state (which was in a data segment that Dave had set up in his
'networking' process when it started up), and set things up. So it was kind of
doing a subroutine call to code in another process.
The security wasn't good, because Multics didn't have set-uid (so that only
Dave's code would have had access to that state database) - when they later
productized the code, they used Multics rings to make it secure.
But still, that was pretty amazing. The key thing here is that nobody had to
modify the Multics 'kernel' to support adding networking - the basic
mechanisms (the single-level store, etc) were so powerful and general you
could write entirely new basic things (like networking) and add them 'on the
fly'.
What Multics had was quite different from ukernels, but it amounted to the
same thing; the system wasn't this monolithic blob, it was
layered/modularized, and you could see (and gain access to, and in some cases
replace - either just for yourself, or for everyone) the layers/modules.
The nice thing was that to call up some subsystem to perform some service for
you, you didn't have to do IPC and then a process switch - it was a
_subroutine call_, in the CPU's hardware.
I don't think anyone else ever tried to go down that path as a way to
structure an operating system (in part because you need hardware support), and
it's a pity. (UNIX, which would run on anything, killed just about _everything
else_ off.)
The 386-Pentium actually had support for many segments, but I gather they are
in the process of deleting it in the latest machines because nobody's using
it. Which is a pity, because when done correctly (which it was - Intel hired
Paul Karger to architect it) it's just what you need for a truly secure system
(which Multics also had) - but that's another long message.
Noel
On this day in 1970 computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was awarded the
patent for the computer mouse. It was a fugly thing: just a squarish box
with two wheels underneath it mounted at right-angles and a button.
Ergonomic it wasn't...
-- Dave
