StillBored

That seems an odd interpretation of how they extended the 286 protected mode on the 386. The 286 converted the fixed address+64k sized segment registers to 'selectors' in the LDT/GDT which added permissions/etc to a segment descriptor structure which were transparently cached along with the 'base' of the segment in generally invisible portions of the register. The problem with this approach was the same as CHERI/etc that it requires a fat pointer comprising the segment+offset which to this day remains problematic with standard C where certain classes of programmers expect that sizeof (void*) == sizeof (int or long).

Along comes the 386 with adds a further size field (limit) to the segment descriptor which can be either bytes or pages.

And of course it added the ability to back linear addresses with paging, if enabled.

Its entirely possible to run the 386 in an object=segment only mode where each data structure exists in its own segment descriptor and the hardware enforces range checking, and heap compression/etc can happen automatically by simply copying the segment to another linear address and adjusting the base address. By today standards the number of outstanding segment descriptors is limiting, but remember 1985 when a megabyte of RAM was a pretty reasonable amount...

The idea that someone would create a couple descriptors with base=0:limit=4G and set all the segment register to them, in order to assure that int=void * is sorta a known possible misuse of the core architecture. Of course this basically requires paging as the processor then needs to deal with the fact that it likely doesn't actually have 4G of ram, and the permissions model then is enforced at a 4K granularity. Leaving open all the issues C has with buffer overflows, and code + data permissions mixing/etc. Its not a better model, just one easier to reason about initially, but then for actual robust software starts to fall apart for long running processes due to address space fragmentation and a lot of other related problems.

AKA, it wasn't necessarily the best choice, and we have been dealing with the repercussion of lazy OS/systems programmers for the 40 years since.

PS: intel got(gets) a lot of hate from people wanting to rewrite history, by ignoring the release date of many of these architectural advancements. Ex the entire segment register 'fiasco' is a far better solution than the banked memory systems available in most other 8/16 bit machines. The 68000 is fully a year later in time, and makes no real attempt at being backwards compatible with the 6800 unlike the 8086 which is clearly intended to be a replacement for the 8080.

And its not like actual flaws people found couldn't be fixed.

There is a word for this.

Is the security extension from 1996, which has a section on keyboard security

and its crazy to me that this anyone can claim X11 can't be off loaded, which its been doing for decades. From all the crazy blt/pattern HW acceleration to GL/vulcan implementations to the fact that the entire server can be on the other side of a network pipe, meaning it could be anywhere, including entirely encapsulated on a graphics card/smart nic/etc.

And if your talking about the xlib serialization, that was largely fixed with XCB.

Notice the date.. 1996

(for those that didn't click the link, that is the X11 security extension which address all that, and it was published ~30 years ago).

One head strictly stuck in the ground and ignoring the cases that make many of those statements flatly false. Like for example, the nvidia support. Nvidia support in Linux is in the 'good luck' catalog, especially on any optimus laptop, where one is lucky if the power management works, much less multiple screen docking/undocking, and a heap of other issues. Then please clarify which actual driver stack one is running (nouveau vs provide by nvidia binaries, vs nvidia open source) To claim its great with wayland ignores core failures that still exist.

Its the same with X11 forwarding, which like copy paste, has been steady degrading to the point where all the dbus/etc services being depended on makes double digit percentages of applications not work with 'ssh -X' and oh wow, waypipe. It seems all of windows/osx and KDE/Gnome are steadily shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm sorta happy I pulled my financial support not long ago, there are a couple 'toxic' people in the distro DE community who are pushing their own agendas, everyone else be damned. And weirdly enough it seems those people aren't doing it for some corporate/whatever reason, but just to wave a flag about their accomplishments. The entire reason most people claim wayland is 'better' is largely FUD, but that doesn't stop the true believers.

Which is a load of FUD, the X11 security extensions from (checks google) 1996, restrict this.

If you flip a bit in memory, on the way to the disk, then its corrupt at rest, and future reads will likely propagate the error.

Sure, who cares, a glitch here/there in your kids first birthday video. Better hope the glitch is there, rather than in say the bit of code computing the sector offsets/whatever.

Stories like this hit the media every couple years, so if it can happen on the big fancy EMC/whatever then it can happen on your little NAS in the closet.

So, just pay the little extra for the CPU+MB+RAM that protects your data from the NIC all the way to the HD.

Why is any of this needed when the kernel is full of platforms that are forward compatible with the Linux kernel and boot and generally operate on day one, without a huge pile of changes?

What does it benefit the user to have a huge pile of proprietary implementations of devices they frankly don't care about? Ex: just about anything related to power management? Why can't QC adhere to industry standards when they implement standard devices, ex: USB? Why can't these platforms adhere to industry standard firmware interfaces rather than custom mailbox interfaces?

And go read the 4th amendment, with the understand that no one who signed it thought anything in the constitution authorizes any part of the federal government to ignore the absolutist language the bill of rights is written in. The assumption was that if there arose a need to justify the federal government searching people like this it needed a super majority to pass an amendment to fix it.

The federal government passed it along with the authoritarian wishlists various agencies had been salivating over for 40+ years and unable to get passed, until under the guise of saving us from the 'terrorists', who now 25 years later, turned out the actual terrorists were probably just domestic authoritarians. The guys living in caves weren't really a threat and could be dealt with, without passing a bunch of stuff to affect every single citizen of the country.

For the rest of us, what matters is whether we can open digikey/newegg/whatever and buy a few machines and whether they are open enough for us to achieve our goals and their relative costs. So that list of vendors is more appropriate because they _CAN_ sell the resulting products to us. The problem is how much of their mostly off the shelf IP they refuse to document, resulting in extra difficulties getting basic things working.

One of my 'bad' machines is more like 10-100W and i'm lucky to get two hours.

Smaller efficient CPU + low power sleep + not a lot of background activity + big battery = very long run times.

The comment about ACPI being the problem is slightly off base, since its a huge part of the solution to good power management on modern hardware. There isn't another specification that allows the kind of background fine grained power tuning of random busses/devices/etc by tiny management cores who's entire purpose is monitoring activity and making adjustments required of modern machines. If one goes the DT route as QC has done here, each machine needs a huge pile of custom mailbox interface drivers upstreamed into the kernel customized for every device and hardware update/change. They get away with this in the android space because each device is literally a customized OS and they don't have the upstream turnaround problem because they don't upstream any of it, but that won't scale for general purpose compute as the parent article talks about.

That isn't to say that modern standby/s2-idle isn't super useful, because it is, but more for actual use cases where the machine can basically go to sleep with the screen on displaying something the user is interacting with.

RAM usage for a lot of workloads scales with core/thread count, and my general rule of thumb is that 1G/thread is not enough, and 2G/thread will mostly work, and 4G/thread is probably too much, but your disk cache will be happy. Also, the same applies to VMs, so if your hosting a VM and give it 16 threads, you probably want at least 16G for the VM. The 4G/thread then starts to look pretty reasonable.

Just building a lot of opensource projects with `make -j32` your going to be swapping if you only have 1G/thread. This rule then becomes super noticeable when your on a machine with 512G of ram, and 300+ threads, because your builds will OOM.

Got powerlines? Well then you can get gbit+ to a few outlets in your house.

Got old CATV cables? Then you can use them at multiple gbit with MoCA.

Got old phone lines? Then its possible to run ethernet over them with SPE and maybe get a gbit.

And frankly just calling someone who wires houses and getting a quote will tell you if its true. The vast majority of houses arent that hard, even old ones. Attic drops through the walls, cables below in the crawlspace, behind the baseboards. Hell just about every house in the USA had cable/dish at one point, and all they did was nail it to the soffit and punch it right through the walls.

Most people don't need a drop every 6 feet, one near the TV, one in a study, maybe a couple in a closet/ceiling/etc. Then those drops get used to put a little POE 8 port switch in place and drive an AP, TV, whatever.

The other take though, was that it was just a $ grab by rebranding and charging more for drives that were functionally the same. Which for logical people made sense because otherwise, why not say why their drives were better. But sometimes the lawyers get involved and saying "our rebranded drives are the only ones on the market that work right when we do X, Y, Z" is frowned on.

Hard to really know without some engineer actually clarifying.

Ex, SMART attributes, mode sense/caching behaviors, etc. Which can all be used in conjunction with RAID to determine when a disk should be replaced, or the user warned about possible impending doom, to simple things like how one sets cache WT/WB and flushes the caches (range based flushing is a thing, doesn't always work, etc) for persistence.

OTOH, much of this is just 'product maturity' because it is possible to have a blessed set of SMART/etc attributes that are understood a certain way and test to see if they exist/behave as expected and warn the user with something like "this drive doesn't appear to report corrected read errors in a way that our predictive failure algorithm can use". Or "This drive appears to be a model that doesn't persist data with FUA when the caches are set to write back, putting your data at risk during a power failure, would you still like to enable writeback?"

And these days with the HD vendors obfuscating shingled drives or even mixing/matching the behavior in differing zones its probably even worse.

Ex, netflix, which has decided to pop up a 'we noticed there are people who don't live with you using your account, click here to pay us another $9/month' every time it starts on my TV, presumably because my underage child, who legally lives with me, uses it on her phone when she is away at school for 5 months a year.

And then when someone clicked the default pay us button, I was unable to figure out how to remove the charge without actually calling and telling them I was canceling after 20+ years. (the whole extra member thing wasn't showing up in the web ui, no idea why, maybe its because of the TV clicking process).

And my point in providing a concrete example, where a decision was made to prioritize unsafe behavior in a known problematic area, when they could just as well have made a half dozen other decisions which would have solved a long standing problem rather than just perpetuating it with some new syntactic sugar.

Why go through all the trouble to make a better array, and require the user to call a special .at() function to get range checking rather than the other way around? I promptly went into my standard library and reversed that decision because if i'm going to the trouble to use a C++ array class, it better damn well give me a tiny bit of additional protection. The .at() call should have been the version that reverted to C array behavior without the bounds checking.

And its these kinds of decisions repeated over and over. I get its a committee. Some of the decisions won't be the best, but by 2011 everyone had already been complaining about memory safety issues for 15+ years and there wasn't enough politics on the comittee to recognize that a big reason for using C++ over C was the ability of the language to protect some of the sharper edges of C?

On those grounds, the lack of pre-tokenization in html/css/js ranks at this point as a planet killing level of poor choices.

In this case some subset of apple provided apps weren't following the theme and they fixed it by adding a private css property.

Vs some other OS vendor that likely removed most of the theme controls so they didn't have to keep fixing a huge pile of 1/2 baked abandoned toolkits scattered across their product portfolio.

Is there government waste? Sure, but that requires micro tweaks, aka instead of hiring more TSA agents maybe decide they shouldn't be randomly selecting every 3rd precheck user for additional screening/etc, or maybe decide that investing in even slower scanners isn't the right choice. Plus, in TX having seen some of these contracts the city/state gives out, the idea that private industry is more efficient is laughable. In some cases they are basically contracting out for millions of dollars a year a job that could be handled by one or two actual government employees paid less than $100k a year.

They are pretty niche, so much so that it took me maybe a year of half-hearted searching before I found a smart thermostat that wasn't dependent on an internet connection. And of course there is a home assist integration/etc https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/venstar/

Read some reviews before you buy them, or you might be surprised by the resistive touch on some models (which works fine with the UI), audible click when the relays go on/off (this is actually a big advantage in failure modes), and other features some people might not like.

All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.

Nevermind. that pretty much all services treat the second factor as more secure than my 20 character random password saved in a local password safe. And those second factors are, lets see, plain text over SMS, plain text over the internet to an email address, etc, etc, etc.