wsh · HackerTrans

6 months agodiscuss

If you’re wondering, as I was, who Amateur Radio Digital Communications is and how they have money to make grants, it’s the foundation that sold a quarter of the 44.0.0.0/8 IPv4 address block, allocated in 1981 for use in amateur radio, to Amazon in 2019 for $109 million.

wsh

6 months agodiscuss

FS.COM Limited (深圳市飞速创新技术股份有限公司, https://cn.fs.com/) was founded in Shenzhen in 2009. They’ve applied to be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; here’s the draft prospectus from a month ago:

https://www1.hkexnews.hk/app/sehk/2025/107950/documents/sehk...

wsh

7 months agodiscuss

I liked An Answer for Linda (1961), which shows the work of outward toll operators using mark-sensing call tickets at traditional (3CL) cord switchboards. “Watch Billie closely, as she handles a group of typical calls.”

(I won’t spoil the Answer; you’ll have to watch for yourself.)

https://archive.org/details/GjEpnTcLgq1eTUR90yMhdcJMvFmMuw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq1zu4fJaO0

wsh

12 months agodiscuss

You forgot SMPTE 170M, which is probably the definitive standard at this point:

https://pub.smpte.org/doc/st170/20041130-pub/st0170-2004_sta...

wsh

12 months agodiscuss

RJ45S and RJ45M are ordering codes for so-called “registered jack” configurations for terminal connections to the U.S. telephone network. These codes were defined until 2000 in the FCC Rules (47 CFR § 68.502(e)) and later in the TIA/EIA-IS-968 standard, and they refer to single and multiple arrangements of two wires and a programming resistor on a miniature eight-position keyed jack.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2000-title47-vol3/pd...

Unfortunately, the “RJ45” part of these codes has become a metonym for the unkeyed version of the miniature eight-position jack and plug, now widely used for Ethernet and other purposes, but strictly speaking, RJ45 refers to a different connector with totally incompatible wiring.

wsh

last yeardiscuss

Interesting. The left side of the slide at 15:43 in the video is definitely from page 27 of Symbol Sourcebook, but the detail of the ⌘ symbol doesn’t seem to be: not only could I not find the symbol, but also its caption (“FEATURE”) is set in Helvetica rather than Univers as used in the book.

wsh

last yeardiscuss

Symbol Sourcebook would’ve been my first guess, too, but I just glanced through my copy (7th printing, 1977) and didn’t see the ⌘ symbol. The closest thing in the Graphic Form Section is a symbol for “Atomic d orbital,” but it’s clearly not the same one that inspired Susan Kare.

wsh

last yeardiscuss

The treaty returning sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, disestablishing the British Indian Ocean Territory, seems to be on track for ratification:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

The consequences for the .IO ccTLD are still unclear and ultimately will depend on how the United Nations, the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, and ICANN respond. I’m not aware of anything more definitive than ICANN’s blog posting from November 2024, which emphasizes that “much of the discussion about .io is simply speculation” but also acknowledges the possibility that “a five-year time window will commence during which time usage of the domain will need to be phased out.”

https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-chagos-archipelag...

I wouldn’t use a .IO domain name for anything important.

wsh

last yeardiscuss

I’ve always thought of Kerberos as a centralized authentication system, to establish users’ identities.

Authorization, in the sense of deciding to allow or deny a requested action by a known user on a specific object, remains distributed, even with Kerberos. For example, a Windows file server, having received a Kerberos ticket showing a user’s identity and security group memberships, consults its own access control lists to determine what operations to allow on files and directories.

The article here argues that those authorization decisions should also be centralized, presumably using the sponsor’s “cloud-native authorization platform,” instead of being made within each service or application.

wsh

last yeardiscuss

Both links worked earlier, but they don’t work for me now, either.

Anyway, the data sheet explains how the manufacturer tested the tape’s effectiveness with rats. The Wayback Machine has a copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201017204509/https://www.terao...

wsh

last yeardiscuss

The manufacturer’s product page, with a link to the MSDS:

https://www.teraokatape.co.jp/english/products/class/class00...

Data sheet describing the “rat prevention effect”:

https://www.teraokatape.co.jp/english/products/Rat_Preventio...

wsh

2 years agodiscuss

DFSMS: Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem

DFSMSdfp: Data Facility Product

DFSMSdss: Data Set Services

DFSMSrmm: Removable Media Manager

DFSMShsm: Hierarchical Storage Manager

DFSMStvs: Transactional VSAM Services

DFSMSopt: Optimizer

See ABCs of z/OS System Programming Volume 3 (SG24-6983), https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246983.pdf.

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