JdeBP

I think that 7 decades's worth of telly and movie set designers will take issue with the claimed uselessness of blinkenlichten. Blinkenlichten make money. (-:

One does not even need to squint. The first page of RFC 882 explains outright that the DNS came about in the first place because the mechanisms for updating a HOSTS.TXT file and publishing it to loads of places did not scale.

That's still just as true for the intranets of the 2020s with thousands of machines all downloading a HOSTS file several times a day (or even hour/minute) as it was for the Internet of July 1983 with around 500 hosts that was merely downloaded by everyone a couple of times per week. The fact that a file can be copied faster now is counterbalanced by the fact that tying this to real-time failover means that it needs to be updated and distributed several orders of magnitude more quickly than it was in 1983 too. And that's ignoring the linear nature of a HOSTS file lookup contrasted with even the stupidest DNS implementation.

Those who think that HOSTS is a fallback for any sort of dynamic operation (into and out of service) of even hundreds of machines have not learned the history of why the DNS even exists.

Yes, and under the covers some parts of Windows NT, notably server processes, do something akin to this; although its interactive login on a windowstation system follows the Unix model of the TCB doing the login dialogue and then spawning a user process running as the logged-in user.

That sort of idea, yes.

I've just done some research and it looks like the Debin Hurd people did attempt to actually implement this. I just never heard about it. There was a 'login shell' and a 'nouser'. The latter had am empty set of IDs, and this case (optionally) switched to an extra set of rwx permission bits that existed specifically for determining 'nouser' access.

* https://groups.google.com/g/linux.debian.ports.hurd/c/2rCbPl...

No. The multiplexers are all turned off, and I have devd/udev rules that spawn my own userspace driver processes (as services, via service management) to attach to the individual USB devices. The driver services in turn use an autoconfiguration system to determine whether they should actually attach to the device whose name they are passed, and where they should pass input onwards to.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/user-virtual-terminal-...

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/user-vt-reali...

This is for a virtual terminal system. For X11 or Wayland, one would have to replicate the same idea in an appropriate form, and stop using the multiplexed devices.

We should start telling them again, then. (-:

In the current versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, Illumos, and Debian, it is still /usr/share/dict .

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/dict/

* https://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/share/dict/

* https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/?p=dragonfly.git;a=tree;f=sh...

* https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/dict

* https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04s11.htm...

* https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/wbritish/filelist

Amusingly for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/325776830 , the last place to use /usr/dict (Debian, which changed it in 1998; Berkeley having changed it in Net/2 in 1991) stopped doing so years before Wikipedia was invented.

Not enough reading of Hacker News, young grasshopper! (-:

Used several times within the last month alone.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691

I don't know. This was a very early description of how it would work that I read, a long time ago.

Thinking it through as a thought experiment, the way that I'd do it, a process with no credentials would not be able to open anything for write access and only a limited number of things for execute access, and be limited to a minimal amount of read access. One does not have to follow the POSIX model when one is introducing something so definitely outside of it as a process with no user/group IDs (perfectly fine as far as raw Hurd is concerned).

There was precedent for such ideas. On Novell Netware, MS/PC/DR-DOS clients could access only one server directory, containing the LOGIN program, until they had logged their machine on.

One interesting idea, never realized that I know of, was for Hurd. The idea was that 'login' would be a simple utility program. One started a session with no user credentials, and ran 'login' as a command to add credentials to already running processes.

This was not at all how Unices worked, of course, which is likely why it never happened. On Unices it would have needed some sort of shared process credentials structure that could be augmented in place by a privileged process. On the Hurd, it would have required an extra method implemented by the auth server.

On my machines, login is not run any more. It's just a PAM client that provides a very dumb paper-compatible cooked mode terminal user interface, after all. I thought for a long time about writing a PAM client that had a better full screen TUI interface that assumed (gasp!) video terminals. So eventually I did just that.

There is only one 'blue', colour number 4, in ECMA-45.

It's the decades-old problem of blue on black, which has led to interminable discussions of which exact tint of blue should be ECMA-45 blue on a terminal. Pick one, it has poor contrast with a black background. Pick another, it has poor contrast with a white background.

* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_...

It's an interesting fact. I have been surprised at how often The Guardian sneaks in to stuff that is otherwise overwhelmingly North American sources only. The Legal Eagle channel on YouTube has cited The Guardian a few times that I have seen, for example. And they even present it seemingly on the assumption that they don't have to explain to their viewership what The Guardian is. They just slap it on screen the same as they do the Washington Post or Politico or some such.

No, You're the one stretching things. If you want to provide an example from The Guardian that actually works, and it is as easy to do so as you say, go ahead. As I said, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a blind spot, given who is on the staff and the byline of this very piece. But you haven't here.

Rather, you've showed an article where the primary complaint of the headlined report, that the potential biases of a commentator or a source are not made apparent, does not apply because the bias of the person quoted, that xe is politically connected to the government whose actions are being scrutinized in the piece, is very much given as context.

Yes, and I was slightly disappointed, from a statistical point of view, that they didn't tell us how many people they excluded from the original sample for this reason. That could have told us things.

If (say) they threw out 967 to leave those 33, then one possible explanation that that leaves the door open for is that journalists are so used to there being no conflict of interest, it being the case the majority of the time, that they don't check in the minority of cases where there is.

I suspect that they didn't throw out anywhere near as many as that, though. But, still, I would have liked to have been told the figure.

Not quoted as saying that there should be some sort of budget or spending increase, which is the sort of evidence being presented in this report, but merely some historical context statement about how the armed forces had been 'right-sized for the era'; and with his political ties also mentioned.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if AOAV had a blind spot with respect to The Guardian. However, that doesn't show one; and they did do lists of news media for several of the 19 (e.g. Richards) indicating that they aren't just picking 1 example publication for each person. Which is why I'm still inclined towards this telling us that there is a certain subset of U.K. publications in which this occurs.

If they hadn't mentioned Nation Cymru I'd be inclined towards this telling us that the report is highly London-centric and not reflective of 'U.K. media'. But they did.

A correct analogue would be 'The expert stating that more should be spent on treatment X was employed in the NHS five years ago and currently runs/directs/consults for a business selling supplies for treatment X.'

It is interesting to look at the details and see who the (news) 'media' are in this case. Going through the details, I find 1 instance (under Kemp) of the BBC, and everyone else is the 'usual suspects', the Telegraph, the Mail, GB News, the Sun, the Times, and so forth.

The Guardian is only mentioned in context of exposing these conflicts of interests; and whilst I am surprised to find LBC and Nation Cymru as not being transparent about their experts and commentariat, I don't see The National mentioned at all, nor The Herald, The Scotsman, the Metro, the Financial Times, and The i.

This may tell us that these experts only appear in the 'usual suspect' news media. Or it may tell us that this report didn't look at a wide range of U.K. news media. The latter seems unlikely given the inclusion of some niche publications (I've never even heard of London Loves Business until today.) and things like Nation Cymru, so I am more inclined to suppose the former.

In 17 of the 19 detailed instances, it is stated that they are promoting increases in budgets and spending. The two others are reported as speaking with different conflicts of interest.

We should tell the Unix people that they've been giving /usr/share/dict the wrong name for over three decades. (-:

My computers ignore USB HIDs other than the ones that I have explicitly permitted. Unfortunately, this is a major architectural revamp for many operating systems. The idea that every HID is automatically added to a keyboard/mouse 'multiplexer', that provides a single combined input stream, is a pervasive one.

There are a few lettered extensions to the base RV32I instruction set. e.g.:

* https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/unpriv/m-st-ext.html

Indeed. This is one of the differences between the Unix and the MS/PC/DR-DOS command-line world. In the latter, recognizing empty final pathname components actually did become a way of differentiating such situations. I wrote a set of DOS and OS/2 tools in the 1990s, including COPY and MOVE commands, that had this very behaviour. I wasn't alone.

It's called a post, the same as you used for Hacker News.

And yes, I debugged one of the issues. I made the second comment in one of them. Markus Mayer did some debugging, too.

Then I had to deal with something completely unrelated to computers for the rest of that day and several days thereafter, and came back to this.

The problem with compiling code that used new kernel features was a bit poorly done. Anyone with any experience knows that a simple #if defined(__linux__) , which is a platform test, does not cut it for feature testing. M. Mayer went with an autotools test, which is what I'd have done too.

The problem with the on-the-wire protocol is a tricky one, and caused by suddenly being conservative in what rsync accepts apparently without much testing of what out-of-range stuff in-the-wild rsync sends.

Pre-World Wide Web, strictly, as the Internet pre-dated Fidonet by some years. The Internet almost, but not quite, preceded Teletext.

But yes, people did all of that many years before it was done on the World Wide Web.

(There's some complexity as to whether Usenet was an Internet thing early on, as it did the whole dial-up-over-PSTN thing, that Fidonet did, quite a lot before settling on mainly NNTP.)

More so that you think. Piracy was not actually most of it. There was a whole thriving shareware system, which in Fidonet was done via FREQs. Tens of thousands of nodes pushing archived shareware softwares, many long since forgotten, around the globe.

Given that someone wrote this up directly as a recipe for agents to follow, and put it on the WWW where it has been scraped many times since 2025 no doubt, it's not that amazing.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350964

Aviation aside, it is worthwhile remembering that IBM traditionally had a whole other jargon vocabulary for computing. A 'crash' was an ABEND, an abnormal end.

No. After the 'Login incorrect' (or equivalent on non-Solaris systems) message, login(1) loops around back to prompting for the user name afresh. Try it.

What's unusual here is rather the missing password prompt after 'login root', which is presumably what the fictional -n option (non-existent in BSD or Solaris login) is suppressing.

* https://illumos.org/man/1/login

* https://man.netbsd.org/login.1

Almost. The explanation there is that effectively jtnimoy did the terminal user equivalent of motion capture. Xe ran some shell sessions, which were recorded, and the animators took them and reconstructed them in Adobe and Cinema 4D.

Interesting.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-topaz.t...

Although Unscii populates Unicode from a number of sources and leaves the source fonts at their original repertoires.

I have that forked, as well as a fork of funscii. Both have fixes in the main branch. I've added a fair amount of stuff beyond that in a branch of unscii.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/tree/2.1.1f

* https://github.com/jdebp/funscii