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 Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions.
Here's one. If Bell Labs holds some kind of symposium on
the lines of the dmr memorial, how about a plenary
session with TV participation from remote venues (think
Berkeley/Silicon Valley and Wollongong/Sydney--a nine-hour
span of time zones).
Any thoughts about this or other possibilities?
Doug
I don't think I'm violating anyone's confidentiality by revealing that
Marcus Weldon, current president of the Labs, at the suggestion of
Martin Carroll, expects the Labs to embark soon on plans to mark
the occasion. I, and no doubt Martin, will keep you posted. Meanwhile
I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions.
Doug
We lost a co-inventor of ENIAC, John Mauchly, on this day (that's 8th
January like my headers say) 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 Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> From: Andy Kosela
> it appears this is a fundamental Intel bug that exists in all x86_64
> CPUs.
I'm highly amused by the irony. Intel throws bazillions of transistors at
these hyper-complex CPUs in an attempt to make them as fast as possible - and
(probably because of the complexity) missed a bug, the fix for which
involves... slowing things way down!
I wonder how many other bugs are lurking in these hyper-complex designs?
Didn't anyone at Intel stop to think that complexity is bad, in and of itself?
But I guess the market demands for faster and faster machines outweighed that
- until it bit them in the posterior. The real question is 'how many more times
will it have to happen before they get a clue'?
There's an interesting parallel between this, and uSloth's struggle with
security and bugs. For a long time, it seemed it was more important to the
market to add features (i.e. complexity), and security be damned - until poor
security really started to become an issue.
So now they're trying to catch up - but seemingly still haven't got there, in
terms of the fundamental architecture of the OS, as the never-ending stream of
bug patches attests.
The sad thing is that how to provide good security (not perfect, but much,
much better than what we have) was worked out a long time ago, and Intel hired
Roger Schell to add the necessary hardware underpinnings when they did the
386:
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/133439/1/oh405rrs.pdf
Mutatis mutandis.
Noel
Clem Cole:
IIRC this is part of the argument Dykstra made with the THE paper years
ago, Parnas in his information hiding paper -- i.e. why microkernels and
proper layering are a good idea. Keep is simple and do one thing
well/protect yourself against other subsystems not being 100%.
=====
Indeed. Complexity creates needless RISC, er, risk.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
Including here as it concerns Unix kernel and leaking memory from kernel
space to userland.
This is big -- it appears this is a fundamental Intel bug that exists in
all x86_64 CPUs.
It will be interesting to watch the ramifications and impact of this on the
industry as a whole.
--Andy
> A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to
> when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes
> in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time
> offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that
> Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an
> entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).
But east postive is an artifact of north up. I remember Australian
souvenir shops selling maps on "MacQuarrie's corrective projection",
in which south is up. In fact this orientation was not uncommon in
Europe between medieval maps that really were oriented, with east up,
and later convention that put north up and shoved Australia down under.
Surely an Aussie would prefer south up and west positive!
Doug
On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 7:15 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> A lingering gripe that explains my latent anti-Americanism goes back to
> when I had to support Uniplus 2.2/2.4 (sorta SysIII-ish) on the WICAT boxes
> in here in Australia. At installation time, we had to express the time
> offset as hours *west* of GMT; this left me with a lingering belief that
> Americans didn't want to be perceived as being backwards (yeah. it saved an
> entire keystroke out of the dozens that were otherwise required).
Dave I'm not so sure it's about being perceived as forward or backwards -
its just shallow, provincial and often lazy because the program did not
really knowing any better. The problem is too many American',
(particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational
system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places,
cultures or social norms.
I admit this is extreme example, but about 8 years ago, my daughter had a
friend, who was approx 16 at the time, that we took to the big city
(Boston) to play in a orchestra concert at Symphony Hall when they both
were named 'All State' for the instruments. I don't remember why said
friends family did not/could not come - but it made sense and we said we
would take her with us. On the drive in-town, we were talking with her and
I discovered that she had never gone to Boston before ... ever -- she was
excited to see it (we live less than 1hr North mind you. Note quite the
boon-docks). She had not gone to a 'Bo Sox' game or anything. Never went
to the Science Museum, etc. She grew up in her town (mind you happy) and
using TV as her window to world.
Which brings me to >>my complaint<<. We, as American's, project so much
about 'us' via TV. The said truth is most Americans are not like what they
see on TV [e.g. Rice-A-Roni is made up!!, Benihana's is an American
invention, and "the big yellow school bus" is dirty/noisy and usually
without seat belts]. Sadly, many Americans do not know any better - queue
the famous quote about never under-estimating the taste of the American
public. But think about what folks outside the US see and think? Many of
my European friends in particular all want to visit NYC. [I tell them all,
visit Boston or Philadelphia first if you can. Those cities are much more
representative of America then LA, NYC or Dallas; if for no other reason
they are more 'European' in feel].
When I run into things like what you just described (and I seem to run into
then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must
have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to
make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-)
Clem
FWIW: Not only did we take my kids all over the world as children, we
brought the world to them by sponsoring kids from all sorts of countries.
But I fear, my wife and I are less the norm then I would wish.
ᐧ
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