hapless

The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.

I think aix still ships CDE, too

which would be unremarkable except none of the UNIX vendors has produced a new build in like 30 years

so if they are still shipping CDE it is probably 32 bit binaries from AIX 4 or AIX 5L

"deprecated" is not "removed"

it can take literally decades for a deprecated package to actually get removed, because customers get mad

It's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible

now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS

The ten dollar word for this is “revealed preferences”

If you have $50k in retirement savings at age 60, you are already broke

Turning it into $40k or $70k is unlikely to impact your life outcomes

Amazon charges you for the “privilege”

Roughly half the gold produced each year vanishes into gold hoards. Half.

This has been going on for forty years. There's literally decades of gold production sitting in hoards all around the world.

Gold prices could get very strange very fast.

Tl;DR computer nerd reads marx, rejects marginal revolution, writes about classical economics in turgid prose

Complete and utter horseshit

The first x86 project I saw doing line speed route+filter on 10gpbs used 4x top-end Nehalem chips, an output of the RouteBrick project

Although, their original paper says they used a 2-socket prototype and got some very impressive numbers: https://www.sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2009/papers/dobres...

So maybe you could skate by with a slightly cheaper machine ;)

The user interface is literally 1000x better. That's all

Linux is enormously higher performance but it is a huge pain in the ass to squeeze the performance out AND retain any level of readability

which is why there are like a dozen vendors selling various solutions that quietly compile their proprietary filter definitions to bpf for use natively in the kernel netfilter code...

I just today deployed an $800 mikrotik in my house that can route 10 gbps at wire speed. on the CPU. with firewall and nat rules applied. no joke. 4 million packets per second is, like, a lot, post-filtering and with any substantial packet size.

This was doable back in 2008 with about $15k of x86 gear and a Linux kernel and a little trickery with pf_ring. The minute AMD K10 and Intel Nehalem dropped, high routing performance was mostly a software problem... Which is cool as hell, compared to the era when it required elaborate dedicated hardware, but it does not make it cheap or easy. Just, commodity. Expensive commodity.

Now you can buy a device off the shelf for $800 that will do it on the CPU, to avoid the cost of Cisco or Juniper, and it has a super simple configuration interface for all the software-based features. Everything you could do in L3/L4 on a Linux platform in 2008, for like, 1/16th the price, with vastly less engineering effort. It is just like, a thing you buy, and it all kinda works outta the box.

No pf_ring trickery, no deep in-house experience, just a box you buy on a web site and it moves 10 gbps with filtering for $800

There's no real magic here: they use absolutely shockingly enormous ARM chips from Amazon/Annapurna. You can build an $800 commodity platform that rivals a $15k commodity platform in 2008, and both of them replace what used to cost $500k.

Is it as good as Cisco or Juniper? oh, certainly not. Will it route and filter traffic at much greater rates, for $800, than anything they have ever been bothered to offer? ABSOLUTELY

OpenBSD's pre-journaling FFS is ancient and creaky but also extremely robust

I am not sure there is a more robust, or simple, filesystem in use today. Most networking devices, including, yes, your UPS, use something like FFS to handle writeable media.

I am not accustomed to defending OpenBSD in any context. It is, in every way, a museum, an exhibition of clever works and past curiosities for the modern visitor.

But this is a deeply weird hill to die on. The "Fast File System," fifty years old and audited to no end, is your greatest fear? It ain't fast, and it's barely a "file system," but its robustness? indubitable. It is very reliably boring and slow. It is the cutting edge circa 2BSD

edit: I am mistaken, the FFS actually dates to 4.1BSD. It is only 44 years old, not 50. Pardon me for my error.

This post sounded faintly crazy to me, so I went into a little wiki-hole consisting primarily of mailing lists and dev docs

Turns out, the main reason `pf` is non-portable is that half of it runs inside Berkeley-type network stacks, often in kernel space, but the remainder is in user space.

So the miserable single-threaded `pf` on OpenBSD is still, in some part, single-threaded on FreeBSD, but for certain rule-sets, you will get the benefits of FreeBSD's intensively re-entrant and multithreaded TCP/IP, because those parts of `pf` are embedded in the network stack.

So depending on workload, a given `pf` configuration on OpenBSD might be perfectly equal to its FreeBSD counterpart, or hundreds of times slower. I feel like this gives a lot of context to the OP's grousing around "10 gbps"

P.S. To confess my own biases: a port of a `pf` configuration to a platform where some rulesets are high performance and others are not, that would not be very attractive to me. An improvement, but not a solution. I would be looking to move to a Linux stack. Baby steps, I guess. I have done worse things to better people!

P.P.S. I suspect this coupling between a re-entrant TCP/IP stack and a single-threaded firewall process is also why FreeBSD `pf` is never even close to feature parity with its OpenBSD counterpart -- it is just easier to do new stuff with a simpler model

Well, that is just the problem, isn't it?

A lot of the bad behavior in corporate America comes from signalling (for above) and posturing (for below), not from finding ways to make money

(Communes often have the same signalling and posturing problems, but they don't have to additionally worry about shareholders and bonus payments)

The American army, the origin of the term "fragging." (to wit, making sure your commanding officer has a close, and final, encounter with a piece of ordnance, such as a frag grenade)

if we are to learn anything from the US military, it is twofold

1. You can absolutely create a self-reproducing tradition of absolute conformity while retaining ample capacity for local decisionmaking, if you have enough money and time. (In the case of the US army, approximately 150 years, and more money than any other organization in the history of man)

2. Segregating the staff into "officers" and "enlisted" is still gonna get a lot of "officers" killed dead, and even more "objectives" un-taken, because it spreads their incentives too far apart.

fads come and go but idiocy is forever

this guy didn't write a blog post, he wrote the preface material for a training module to be sold to the least-competent HR execs he can find

it is generally a bad sign when you set out to taxonomize all possible productive behaviors. in this case, possibly a worse sign is that this guy has two "clusters" making up eight "foundational skills." for perspective, when Immanuel Kant set out to taxonomize all possible human experiences, he came back with four "clusters" of four "skills"

apparently engineering management encompasses the same complexity as half of all possible human experiences, from tabula rasa. good to know, i guess

(perhaps obviously, i did not read the essay any further than the introduction of "eight foundational skills" in "two clusters." at that point clearly I am being sold nonsense, and I feel free to stop reading and just poke fun at the author instead.)

Gonna file this away under the "I am very old" category

Revised opinion: Maybe it should be EXTREMELY ALARMING to see a neighborhood kid make a one-time purchase of condoms or lube

edit: i have worked retail but it was 30 years ago

It remains legal to provide drugs off-label because physicians sometimes know better than federal regulators

It's horrible that A-Z would illegally market drugs for off-label uses -- I would not disagree for a minute with your reasoning! -- but we retain this "escape hatch" because it is important to patient health

without the off-label "escape hatch," we would not have, for example, the glp-1 class of anti-obesity drugs, or, buproprion for smoking cessation, the most effective drug ever found in its area.

We needed doctors working firsthand with patients, and building "anecdotal" (i.e. case-based) evidence to learn things that really matter on a population level

You've never seen a kid buy condoms because mom and dad are lazy?

I aspire to your lifestyle ;)

kids buy condoms for the same reasons kids used to buy cigarettes or beer. It would be super weird to see the same neighborhood kid buy condoms every week, but it's not particularly alarming on a one-time basis.

Maybe I am just very old, and I should be alarmed by a one-time purchase. I am relating the basic guidelines from my own youth.

It is plainly a bad idea by any standard to provide an application for teenagers to keep diaries of their sexual abuse.

Pen and paper are not restricted by Apple's "App Store."

So, what is your own company's approach to restricting underage use?

because your blog post is, ahem rather less than persuasive

It is a tracker of sexual activity.

It has no other purpose.

It ain't livejournal, my man

I am pretty sure that raping children is a problem worldwide

Also, there is an entirely separate set of Apple content guidelines around firearms.

I would have thought this app was targeted at people with unconventional lifestyles

Maybe people need a dedicated, mobile-ready spreadsheet to track sexual partners!

but this particular blog post makes me think they need a mobile spreadsheet to track their juvenile victims

It is, quite literally, a diary for your sexual activity

Condoms, lubes, and intimate apparel are not threats to children. If you found children buying condoms, lubes, or intimate apparel at unusually high rates, that would be very alarming. But, normally, they are purchasing these products for very lazy adults.

There is 0 use case for a person under the age of majority to use this application. It is only usable by a person being abused.

Precisely 0 adults have charged children with the mission of f... blogging sexual activity.

It is an explicit sex tracker that does not restrict usage by children

You can imagine why Apple takes a dim view

Well, no, because Apple categorizes all of these things separately. The world is not subject to MPAA notions about "Sex" or "Violence" -- rather, Apple splits those up into "does this app have any sex" or "does this app have any violence"

The author has a problem because what he is selling is an app to track sexual activity in explicit detail, which is a huge privacy invasion, and Apple's normal screens are rather good at noticing that

The author of this post is trying to sell an app that is not explicitly prohibited by Apple guidelines, but it is offensive to pretty much anyone who looks at it

it is light on details because the author wishes to invade your privacy in exchange for catering to your perversions

he didn't have any power or ability to fix anything that didn't involve trafficking young girls

he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"