StillBored

How accurate is it that the DoD has a handful of class A networks? And WTF do they need them for these days, they aren't actually advertising internal networks on the public internet are they?

Part of this is simply fixed by a tweak to copyright that if the IP isn't available for sale at a reasonable price the copyright no longer applies. Games, books, movies, music, etc.

I'm surprised that these articles never method Orthokeratology (Ortho-K), which are basically retainers for your eyes and reshape the cornea at night and wear off if not worn regularly.

I've considered it just based on that basis for the last 10 years but still haven't done it because I don't know a single person who has.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

POE and existing wiring, and terminating copper on the lower end is dead simple for the kinds of people who wire houses, being able to run on cat3 phone cable would be even more of a bonus. There is a market for attaching APs, security cameras, and a load of other stuff on copper.

As an American who recently moved and can now get 1/2/5Gbit XGS-PON, in a location which is borderline rural/suburban and was originally platted out 50 years ago, at the same price I was paying for shitty 400/20... I don't think our failures to invest a single cent in infrastructure or regulation over the past few decades should define the Ethernet working group's priorities.

I think the larger point is that dumping baseband and going with OFDM/etc over wider spectrum allows those cat5e runs that are rolling off at 600Mhz (or whatever) and the super clean cat8/whatever to coexist with bad cables, bad termination, etc. The spec could easily be built for say 50Gbit, and fall back to 2.5Gbit/etc on 200M chicken wire runs.

Then the argument about "but we have to pull more cable to guarantee those speeds" or "It consumes to much power" all go away, and instead the analog side gets a bit more complex, but given the $100+ phy's in 10GbaseT the argument that it drives cost is bogus when triband Wifi7 USB nic's are $30.

Does the mac still lack a SMB/CIFS browser?

I was shocked years ago that the mac, famous for its early network peer discovery and zeroconf and all, couldn't present a list of SMB servers and shares despite that kind of function being around forever on every other platform in existence.

8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.

But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.

Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.

1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.

Its more than that, its that x86 vendors know how to maintain hardware backwards compatibility, they don't throw out the entire USB subsystem every time a new phy/whatever shows up because there is a standardized mailbox interface sitting in front of the actual HW. Same with the core platform, which works out of the box using 25+ year old firmware standards that are flexible enough to support simple sensors and behaviors, like lid close notification on a laptop for example across multiple OS's. Even something as simple as the firmware interface for handing off a frame buffer to the OS isn't universally support on arm platforms because a significant fraction don't support uefi. Apple was an early uefi adopter, but whatever internal politics they have, means they tossed even that on the latest mac's.

I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.

I just wish they would make another pass at cleaning up the stack. It should be easy to `git clone --recurse-submodules rocm` followed by a configure/make that both prints out missing dependencies and configures without them, along with choices for 'build the world' vs just build some lower level opencl/HIP/SPIRV tooling without all the libraries/etc on top in a clear way.

Right now the entire source base is literally throw a bunch of crap into the rocm brand and hope it builds together vs some overarching architecture. Presumably the entire spend it also tied to "whatever big Co's evaluation needs this week" when it comes to developing with it.

I recently dumped opnsense because they took a stand against a few things I was trying to do (ex, webUI on wan port IIRC) which make sense at a high level. But I _HATE_ devices that think they know better than me. I was trying to configure it on a _LAN_ such that the identified WAN side was actually my local lan, and I spent an hour hacking it to work and was like "you know if they can't get this shit right i'm out". There are a lot of places in the technology world where someone who thinks they understand my use case makes a decision based on some narrow world view because they can't understand that not everyone trying to use their product is some idiot home user using it for their home network.

I've got one of those N100+10Gbit router devices with a handful of ports. It seems a pretty reasonable device with one of the router distros running on it, but it doesn't seem nearly as efficient as my ucg-fiber/route10 devices, and that wouldn't bother me except that I suspect the packet latency is significantly higher too. Those devices AFAIK have hardware programmable router chips, which means the forwarding is done 100% without the interaction of the main CPU, so there isn't any interrupt/polling/etc delays when a packet arrives, the header gets rewritten, the checksum verified and off it goes.

Anyone actually measured this? I see a lot of bandwidth/etc style tests but few that can show the actual impact of enabling disabling deep packet inspection and a few of the other metrics that I actually care about. Serve the home seems to have gotten some fancy test HW but they don't seem to be running these kinds of tests yet.

RIP, truly one of the greats.

His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.

PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.

Its not against the law in any US state (a quick search seems to back this up) to pass on the right. With one huge gotcha, it must be "safe" defined in various ways.

OTOH, most states have a stay right except to pass, slower traffic keep right laws.

Which means, that unless the person to your right is weaving through traffic, driving on the shoulder, or a few other bits of unsafe behavior, if someone passes you on the right your likely the one violating the law by not moving right when your not actively overtaking/passing someone.

In Austin too, and probably just caused a driver to think the same thing. They were in the left lane on a frontage road which was suddenly turning left even though there was an entire lane opposite the intersection blocked off by those plastic things that seem popular to randomly place in the road these days. I saw them hesitate and figured they wanted to merge right, so i decelerated a bit to add another car length or or so, at maybe 10-15mph. They had plenty of space, flipped on their blinker, and instead of just merging started slowing down, to which I decided I wasn't going to brake more to allow them to block myself and everyone else from rolling through the intersection. They basically stopped in their lane, and beeped as I rolled by, to which someone behind them beeped at them for blocking the lane.

In Austin if you want to merge, decide if you can, blink and then merge.

Don't expect people to stomp on their brakes and stop to let you in, especially if your already traveling slower than the lane you are trying to get into and decide to further slow yourself.

And if you can't merge, deal with it, exit, or miss your exit and go around. Next time you will be more prepared or you will learn how to properly merge.

Why? If everyone followed the rules the lanes would segment into slowest on the right, with gradually increasing speed to the left and people moving between the lanes as needed to overtake. It would be far far far better than the chaos of having to move across all the lanes of traffic all the time because there are random campers driving below the speed limit in every single lane.

At first glance that seems to be true, but when you look at the arguments at the time, who made them and how much of it was walked back, it just looks like the usual legislative panic, same as 911. It doesn't make the original intentions wrong, anymore than what happens when you release open source software and it takes on a life of its own under new maintainers. The failure to understand the long term reprocusion of basically ignoring the actual language of the original document puts one in a place where literally nothing matters except what you can ram through congress and get supreme court approval over during a time of panic or before the other side takes over again.

Thats not a constitutional democracy, thats just anarchy and rule by whoever can buy the most seats.

The constitution doesn't provide a "common sense" loophole. Much of it is written in absolutist language because that was the actual intention. The amendment process is provided to open "common sense" loopholes if everyone agrees they are common sense, not for the courts to gradually erode the language until the federal goverment is doing things the founders explicitly fought the revolutionary war over.

Put another way, Writs of Assistance, were perfectly legal common sense way for the British government to assure their customs laws were being enforced, and it was one of the more significant drivers of the revolution.

There are whole catagories of people without "ID" as such, like say underage children or people unable to drive. ID's in the USA have traditionally been either drivers licenses or passports. Many states have added non-drivers license IDs for handicapped, elderly, etc, but AFAIK they aren't particularly popular since those catagories of people don't tend to need them until they suddenly find themselves in a situation needing one.

But the airlines don't really give a crap, southwest started basically as an air bus, show up buy a ticket get on. No reservation, no id, nothing.

The airlines don't even check ID most of the time with these electronic boarding passes if your not checking luggage.

Frankly, the entire agency is unconstitutional. From the fact that they basically exist under a general warrant issued by the supreme court (although they invented a new catagory, "administrative search", which doesn't fundamentally change what it is) to the restrictions on the right to assembly requires free travel as well, although the current legal underpinnings are "creative", the 10th admendment which grants all non enumerated powers to the states, to the restrictions on bearing arms on the plane and a half dozen other parts. About the only part they might be able to stand on is commerce again, but then so much travel in the larger states remains in the state (ex dallas/houston, san fran/LA) requiring seperate security zones.

Bush should have _NEVER_ nationalized them, at least as a private entity they existed in a sorta gray area. Now they are clearly violating the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 10th amendments.

And the solution isn't another bullshit supreme court amendment of the absolutist language in the bill of rights/etc but to actually have a national discussion about how much safety the are providing vs their cost, intrusiveness, etc and actually find enough common ground to amend the constitution. Until then they are unconstitutional and the court makes a mockery of itself and delgitimizes then entire apparatus in any ruling that doesn't tear it down as such.

And before anyone says "oh thats hard", i'm going to argue no its not, pretty much 100% of the country could agree to amend the 2nd to ban the private ownership of nuclear weapons, there isn't any reason that it shouldn't be possible to get 70% support behind some simple restrictions "aka no guns, detected via a metal detector on public airplanes" passed. But then the agency wouldn't be given free run to do whatever the political appointee of the week feels like. But there are "powers" that are more interested in tracking you, selling worthless scanners, and creating jobs programs for people who enjoy feeling people up and picking through their dirty underwear.

I wouldn't really call 100Gbit overkill, if you compare it to modern disk drives is about where we should be relative to shared storage/NAS/etc infrastructure people used to run. So yes, being able to share my /home directory across a few dozen machines at my house without a huge perf impact vs using a local drive seems a pretty reasonable use case. Sure its faster than my WAN access, but who cares?

Frankly, 10Gbit is fully 25 years old with, 10GbaseT being 20 years old this year.

Thats ridiculously ancient technology. There is/was a 25/40GbaseT spec too (now 10 years old), which basically no one implemented because like ECC ram (and tape drives, and seem to be trying to do it with harddrives and GPUs) the MBA's have taken over parts of the computer industry and decided that they can milk huge profit margins from technologies which are incrementally more difficult because smaller users just don't matter to their bottom lines. The only reason those MBAs are allowing us to have it now, is because a pretty decent percentage of us can now get 5Gbit+ internet access and our wifi routers can do 1Gbit+ wireless, and the weak link is being able to attach the two.

I did a bit of back of the napkin math/simulation about a possible variable rate Ethernet (ex like NBbaseT, where it has multiple speeds and selects faster one based on line conditions), and concluded that 80+Gbit using modern PHY/DSP's and high symbol rate, multiple bands, techology which is dirt cheap thanks to wifi/bt/etc on fairly short cable distances (ex 30-50M) on CAT8 is entirely possible. And this isn't even fantasy, short cat7 runs are an entire diffrent ballpark from a phone pair, and these days mg.fast/etc have shown 10Gbit+ over that junk.

I think my point revolves more around what the HW designers were enabling. If they thought that the flat model was the right one, they would have just kept doing what the 286 did, and fixed the segment sizes at 4G.

<i>So with the 80386, Intel finally abandoned their failed approach of segmented address spaces and joined the linear rest of the world. (Of course the 386 is technically still segmented, but let's ignore that).</i>

That seems an odd interpretation of how they extended the 286 protected mode on the 386. The 286 converted the fixed address+64k sized segment registers to 'selectors' in the LDT/GDT which added permissions/etc to a segment descriptor structure which were transparently cached along with the 'base' of the segment in generally invisible portions of the register. The problem with this approach was the same as CHERI/etc that it requires a fat pointer comprising the segment+offset which to this day remains problematic with standard C where certain classes of programmers expect that sizeof (void*) == sizeof (int or long).

Along comes the 386 with adds a further size field (limit) to the segment descriptor which can be either bytes or pages.

And of course it added the ability to back linear addresses with paging, if enabled.

Its entirely possible to run the 386 in an object=segment only mode where each data structure exists in its own segment descriptor and the hardware enforces range checking, and heap compression/etc can happen automatically by simply copying the segment to another linear address and adjusting the base address. By today standards the number of outstanding segment descriptors is limiting, but remember 1985 when a megabyte of RAM was a pretty reasonable amount...

The idea that someone would create a couple descriptors with base=0:limit=4G and set all the segment register to them, in order to assure that int=void * is sorta a known possible misuse of the core architecture. Of course this basically requires paging as the processor then needs to deal with the fact that it likely doesn't actually have 4G of ram, and the permissions model then is enforced at a 4K granularity. Leaving open all the issues C has with buffer overflows, and code + data permissions mixing/etc. Its not a better model, just one easier to reason about initially, but then for actual robust software starts to fall apart for long running processes due to address space fragmentation and a lot of other related problems.

AKA, it wasn't necessarily the best choice, and we have been dealing with the repercussion of lazy OS/systems programmers for the 40 years since.

PS: intel got(gets) a lot of hate from people wanting to rewrite history, by ignoring the release date of many of these architectural advancements. Ex the entire segment register 'fiasco' is a far better solution than the banked memory systems available in most other 8/16 bit machines. The 68000 is fully a year later in time, and makes no real attempt at being backwards compatible with the 6800 unlike the 8086 which is clearly intended to be a replacement for the 8080.

Ok, so instead of a couple UAC style prompts for screen readers, macro recording, desktop sharing, etc, and some tweaks to GDK, we got what? An entire new backend GDK windowing system, and a pile of broken applications? And its been decades?

And its not like actual flaws people found couldn't be fixed.

There is a word for this.

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Is the security extension from 1996, which has a section on keyboard security

and its crazy to me that this anyone can claim X11 can't be off loaded, which its been doing for decades. From all the crazy blt/pattern HW acceleration to GL/vulcan implementations to the fact that the entire server can be on the other side of a network pipe, meaning it could be anywhere, including entirely encapsulated on a graphics card/smart nic/etc.

And if your talking about the xlib serialization, that was largely fixed with XCB.

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xextproto/security.ht...

Notice the date.. 1996

(for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).

The KDE blog entry reads like a modern political platform denying climate change, or claiming renewable energy can replace traditional energy sources on the grid.

One head strictly stuck in the ground and ignoring the cases that make many of those statements flatly false. Like for example, the nvidia support. Nvidia support in Linux is in the 'good luck' catalog, especially on any optimus laptop, where one is lucky if the power management works, much less multiple screen docking/undocking, and a heap of other issues. Then please clarify which actual driver stack one is running (nouveau vs provide by nvidia binaries, vs nvidia open source) To claim its great with wayland ignores core failures that still exist.

Its the same with X11 forwarding, which like copy paste, has been steady degrading to the point where all the dbus/etc services being depended on makes double digit percentages of applications not work with 'ssh -X' and oh wow, waypipe. It seems all of windows/osx and KDE/Gnome are steadily shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm sorta happy I pulled my financial support not long ago, there are a couple 'toxic' people in the distro DE community who are pushing their own agendas, everyone else be damned. And weirdly enough it seems those people aren't doing it for some corporate/whatever reason, but just to wave a flag about their accomplishments. The entire reason most people claim wayland is 'better' is largely FUD, but that doesn't stop the true believers.