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Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

> 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

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

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

7 years, 7 months

RIP John Mauchly

by Dave Horsfall

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/… [View More]

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> 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 … [View More]

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Norman Wilson

Random832 (a good year for randomness, that): Who says right is positive? ===== Good question. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Left-handed

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

by Norman Wilson

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

7 years, 7 months

OT: critical Intel design flaw

by Andy Kosela

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

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Doug McIlroy

> 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 … [View More]

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Clem Cole

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 … [View More]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 ᐧ [View Less]

7 years, 7 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: Grace Hopper, Unix epoch, ARPAnet converted to TCP/IP

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall > What timezone did you say you were in again? Ah; didn't realize you wanted the exact time, not just a date! :-) Well, according to this: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/museum/ddn-news/ddn-news.n19.1 it was _planned_ to happen at "00:01 (EST) 1 Jan 1983". Whether it did happen at that moment, or if in reality there was some variance, I don't know (IIRC, I was off sailing in the Caribbean when it actually happened :-). Noel

7 years, 7 months

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