castillar76

قبل شهرينdiscuss

The former happens a lot when people try to block specific commands for sudo, instead of taking a "permit these only" approach. If your sudoers file says you can access "all these commands but not cat", the site points out that you can still use base64 to accomplish the same ends. The effective solution is to start from "you can run exactly these commands and no others", which at least allows you to reason about what the user can and can't do.

castillar76

قبل 3 أشهرdiscuss

I doubt we'll see it, but one thing I'd really like is for them to release cleaner drivers or specs for the hardware in Intel Macs. Now that they're committed to removing Intel support from the OS, it would be really nice not to consign all of that functional, high-performing hardware to the bin.

At the moment, I have a 2018 Mac Mini with a 12-core i7 and 64GB of RAM that is more limited in OS choice and hardware support than the 2012 Mac Mini sitting next to it, because the inner workings of the T2 chipset in particular and various other components have to be reverse-engineered bit by bit.

castillar76

قبل 3 أشهرdiscuss

Yep, I concur: this explains a bizarre behavior I’ve noted in my Mac laptops for ages now. I have a tendency to just suspend them without rebooting for ages, especially the work one that doesn’t leave my office as frequently. Periodically, I’d come in to find the system bizarrely frozen just as they describe: TCP stack blocked up, but everything else on it behaving normally. (Well, mostly: some apps would block starting and bounce eternally, but I suspect that’s because they’re trying to make a network call while starting up and it’s blocking.) The only fix was a reboot.

It’s not a disaster, but very annoying. At least now I can just schedule a reboot every 30 days at minimum to keep things running.

castillar76

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

That’s fair! There were a couple comments that used similar language; I didn’t mean to call you out. Yours was the first I saw with it, so I hit reply. Thanks for clarifying.

castillar76

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

> The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding...

I tried to let this pass in the discussion, I really did, but since it came up in various other replies I felt like I just couldn't. We need to get the hell over ourselves as a profession: the fact that someone is an "engineer" says nothing about their communications styles, needs, or preferences as a person.

There is absolutely nothing intrinsically different about two engineers discussing a software codebase and two doctors discussing a surgical plan. Or two artists discussing a mural design. Or two musicians discussing a score. Or two stone masons discussing an arch design. Two professionals are discussing a professional issue as peers, and they are both people, which means they will have preferences about their communication styles and needs and none of that is dictated or predictable based on their choice of profession. I have worked with engineers who valued social interaction buffering comments about their code; I have met musicians who valued just being told what to do better in the next run-through.

If you[0], as a person, value directness, bully for you. Express that need to your peers, ask them to respect it, be prepared to be annoyed when they don't. But don't assume or expect them to assume that that's your communication style — or that it should be your communication style — because you are an engineer.

[0] The reader of this comment, not directed specifically at the person who posted this.

castillar76

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

Many companies miss how important this is, too: they get caught up in "but if they buy it second-hand, they're not buying our new stuff!". When people buy the stuff second-hand, though, they become Bose fans — that means when the second-hand Bose stuff dies, they're more likely to replace it with new Bose stuff. That's particularly true with audio equipment, where people become attached not only to how something works but how it sounds. If they like Bose's rather particular audio signature, they'll keep buying more.

Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...

castillar76

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Genuinely saddened by this. I had Dr. Newby for a Linux admin class in college in the late 90s and it was one of the courses that got me interested in systems administration. I remember him as patient, kind, and enthusiastic about open-source and the possibilities Linux represented for changing the Internet.

castillar76

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Agreed, and it’s not just the hardware keyboard (on which I could comfortably have written an entire novel) that I miss. It had just enough access to email that I could reply to things when necessary, even if it required a bit of typing (something very uncomfortable on a screen keyboard), and later on it had access to maps and enough web browsing to be able to look something up quickly. But the lack of an enormous app ecosystem and limited Internet access meant it didn’t become a doom-scrolling device to nearly the extent my current smartphone has, so I was more inclined to either pick up a laptop and do something deliberate or put it down and go do something useful like reading.

castillar76

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Side note that not remembering it has nothing to do with memory deterioration. Neurons that fire together wire together: if you haven’t used that particular piece of information in a while, your brain gradually clears out links to it to make room for stuff you are currently referencing. So not remembering it is really more a demonstration of how much ICQ use has deteriorated. :)

castillar76

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

> (That's usually used to justify 'And that's why I don't need to spend time looking into the actual details and just give up')

Just FWIW, giving up wasn't my point at all. I'm just not particularly optimistic that putting anything in front of the current SCOTUS bench will result in a lot of welcome rulings. That doesn't mean we don't seek legal remedies; it just means we need to plan for them to not work out and act accordingly. I'm heartened by the amount of work people are putting in at the state level and getting appropriately creative with bending the rules — for instance, the recent effort to redefine corporate powers at the state level in order to obviate _Citizens United_.

castillar76

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

Yeah, call me overly cynical but I'm waiting for this cycle to play out:

- CA bans face-masks for law-enforcement

- White House issues executive order requiring face-mask use for all federal law enforcement

- Both are placed on hold pending litigation, allowing the status quo (face-masks) to continue

- Litigation eventually winds up at the Supreme Court

- Supreme Court once again confirms White House can do whatever the hell it wants, Constitution be damned.

I really hate this timeline. Like, a lot.

castillar76

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

Interestingly, it has held up quite well, too: outside of the occasional bit of old tech sticking out here and there, the whole thing could be set in 2025 with a minimum of updating. The problem the MacGuffin solves, the methods for conducting their various heists, even the inclusion of the post-Soviet Russians as a player are all still valid today.

castillar76

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

sigh Is it that time of the year again that we start publishing these? Boy, how time flies...

Too frequently, what people (and clearly the author of this piece) mean when they say "tougher grading" is just a return to forcible bell-curve application and faculty who take out their personal insecurities and annoyance over being required to teach classes on their students. That's not making academics more challenging, it's just torturing statistics and arbitrarily modifying the race-course in order to satisfy other agendas. If you have a good teacher and a good course and more than half the class does well, you should consider making the next iteration more challenging, but you should not feel obliged to fail 10% of them because "there's always a bell-curve", nor should you be using grading as a means to "humble" your students.

I emphasized the word "consider" up there because not every course needs to be a slog up Everest, either — an "intro to X" course might well be a class in which many people do well. Some percentage of them will be people looking to make that their major, so they'll already know enough to be ahead of the curve in an "intro" course. Others will be bright people who learn well and adapt to the material. As someone who teaches classes regularly at the college/grad-school level, I try to make the content interesting and challenging, but if most of my students turn in work that exceeds standards and are coming out with a good understanding of the content, I feel like I've accomplished my goals — academia is supposed to be about learning after all, and they're displaying that they've correctly learned the content I wanted to communicate to them. I do spend time trying to re-work the course regularly (something I'm forced to do much more since the explosion of sites like Chegg...), but past a certain point if something is clearly working, why am I obliged to break it?

castillar76

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

In addition to the bug issue, OpenSSL has been around a long time and has accumulated a great deal of extra bits and bobs due to it being the Swiss-Army Knife of encryption on a lot of systems. If you’re writing a webserver, you’re unlikely to need support for, say, S/MIME for email encryption, but it’s in there. Smaller libraries like Bear or Boring that were designed specifically to do TLS and little else don’t have the extra pieces, which reduces attack surface, simplifies the code, and makes it easier to remove old encryption ciphers and add new ones.