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stmw

2,725 karma · joined October 2, 2017

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stmw··on Is PHP Running on Your ColdFusion Server? How to Check, and Remove It
ColdFusion did a lot of things right for its time, but it can only be appreciated if one understands the engineering challenges of the time period (e.g. perl cgi-bin). Using HTML templating and good support from a small and agile company had a lot to recommend it, and many people built a living out of it, both inside and outside Allaire.
stmw··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
Oh, wow, that's a great page with a lot more technical detail than what I originally posted ^^ highly recommended.
stmw··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
OP here, yes, good write up, although I wish someone would code up a simulation that showed it and allowed us to hear what this telephone sounded like to FDR and Churchill.
stmw··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
I don't, but by that point it was a solve problem - speed-of-light is certainly fast enough, especially with optional pre-bias correction term based on distance. 300,000 km/s, say 6000 km, approx 20ms.. It's also oddly similar to the 50 Hz sample rate.
stmw··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
OP here - I'm so glad this got picked up and people are enjoying it. So many excellent additional details, like the list of firsts and other history.
stmw··on Passkeys are not a trap
Great examples, exactly what I'm saying. And every one of these (browsers, OSes, phones, etc) has strong incentives to only offer its own password manager.
stmw··on Passkeys are not a trap
It's notable that several of the claims on that page conflict with the other info in both the OP article and the follow-on.

As for choice as the user, it's a choice "for now"... and only for users who understand all of these details (which seems unlikely).

Personally, my observation is that if one tries to properly configure 2FA with any major website lately (no, I don't mean AWS console), the level of "your choice" and properly implemented security has actually gotten worse...

stmw··on Passkeys are not a trap
Well, they can (and likely will be) used in both modes. Either these things are just a different way of generating a password for a password manager (itself a big target of attacks), or they are a way "to move beyond password with TPM-level security". If it's the former, the security benefits are limited. If it's the latter, the "it's a trap" logic applies at least in part.
stmw··on Passkeys are not a trap
Look, at best, Passkeys shift your logins from your head to OS-supplied keychain management. Whether they do attestation today or not, they big, industry-wide effort to move away from "what you know" (i.e. username/password) + "what you have" (2FA) towards "platform-authenticates-you-to-website automatically" has both security benefits and lock-in risks.

Maybe it was too strong to say the were a "trap", but it is also too strong to say there is no worries here.

stmw··on Sorry we made you grind LeetCode
It should be said that there were others - like https://interviewing.io/ https://karat.com/ et al - that figured out the importance of moving beyond "grind LeetCode" years hackerrank did, but it's good to see them acknoweldge this, too.
stmw··on C74-6502 Overview
"The C74-6502 is a homemade implementation of the venerable MOS 6502 microprocessor. The 6502 was revolutionary in its time, and widely adopted in early home computers and gaming consoles. This design is a microprogrammed, discrete-component 6502, an architecture that was prevalent in 1970s-era mainframe computers which pre-dated modern microprocessor technology.

The C74-6502 is plug-in compatible with a wide variety of 6502 systems, including classic computers from Commodore and Apple, as well as modern systems based around the 65C02 microprocessor still in production today. This CPU runs at speeds of up to 20MHz (vs. 1 MHz for the original MOS 6502)."

stmw··on Salesforce Global Outage
The customers are quite isolated, but it doesn't mean that some services or errors do not propagate. In public cloud terms, think back on some AWS or Azure or even Gmail outages - you probably wouldn't even hear about them if it didn't affect millions of users at once, across security and availability boundaries.
stmw··on Salesforce Global Outage
Despite all of the snark here, in my experience Salesforce SRE team is quite competent. The engineering challenges of running a large PaaS - not just with own apps, but with millions of customer-written apps running on it - are quite interesting, and sadly things happen. The status page makes sense to actual customers, it's the particular "pods" where a given service runs.
stmw··on 'Offensively cheap': solar power is looking up
One of the important questions to always ask about solar is the energy inputs required to make a solar panel, and the time required to "earn it back" with solar electricity. This is different than "cheap price" because the energy consumed in manufacturing usually happens on a different continent, in a different currency, different regulatory regime and is thus easily obscured.
stmw··on The Thinking Machine (1961) – AI debates 65 years ago [video]
Indeed, he and Turing and a handful of approximate contemporaries had a very clear view that was wrong only in its timing.
stmw··on The Thinking Machine (1961) – AI debates 65 years ago [video]
"This rare episode of CBS’s Tomorrow series, produced to commemorate MIT’s 100th anniversary (1861–1961), explores the early days of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the potential of “thinking machines.” Hosted by actor David Wayne, this documentary-style special features interviews with pioneering computer scientists, including MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner and AI visionary Oliver G. Selfridge of MIT Lincoln Laboratory."
stmw··on An interactive tour of the spanning tree protocol
Also a good opportunity to read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman in general (she is mentioned in the blog of course).
stmw··on The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac
It's interesting because we learned this lesson with JVM applets, Flash and X controls in the browser, yet somehow insist on revisiting it...
stmw··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
JIC! That's funny. It may sound like inefficiency, but really it is an option on future flexibility. Just like the big box of cables.
stmw··on Bill Biggart, 9/11 photographer
also - https://www.freedomforum.org/remembering-bill-biggart-911-an...
stmw··on Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
It's what JIT (just-in-time) inventory and offshore manufacturing took away from us. Hold onto your spare parts.
stmw··on Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
Thanks for answering, not surprising. I think the transition from all-hardware to Windows-driven digital hard on Tektronix and many other storied engineering teams.
stmw··on Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
For a brief second, I thought this was about an original 7104.

Are there specific TDS models that you have found to be better, btw, reliability-wise?

stmw··on 507 Mechanical Movements
Ineed, it's a very good book. Someone should make an animated website version, though.
stmw··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Which MacOS version are you on, out of curiosity? Do others see the same software issues?
stmw··on The Official History of Arm
"Arm was officially founded as a company in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, which was a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and VLSI Technology (now NXP Semiconductors N.V). "
stmw··on JDK 27 G1/Parallel/Serial GC Changes
When I say "unavoidable" I mean exactly things like your "a high allocation rate of long-lived objects (as one example), where the work that has to be done requires a significant number of CPU and memory cycles spent on memory management (manual or automatic).

When I say tradeoffs", I mean exactly things like "inherent increased footprint", or my earlier "wasting RAM" point.

At this point, I'm not sure that we're disagreeing about these details, but rather what we make of them... I view them as just years of continued tuning of tradeoffs (heap size vs CPU cycles vs memory cycles), while you them as major breakthrough that makes garbage collection much more desirable. Is that fair?

stmw··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
Someone runnning Kubernetes on an old unpatched on-prem Windows box, conducting a "failover test" by pulling one of its power supplies, spilling coffee on the other one, catching their house on fire, and waiting to call the fire department due to being embarrassed.

One shouldn't make jokes about a situation where people died. Just to sum up Chernobyl 1. no containment building 2. flawed reactor design 3. operators turned off safety systems and improperly operated the reactor 4. delayed / improper emergency response

stmw··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
This is the equivalent of a Kubernetes pod restarting.
stmw··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
To rephrase it: nothing happened, and reactor is back online generating clean electricity.

This is the equivalent of a Kubernetes pod restarting.

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