219 karma · joined March 29, 2016
You cannot get rid of the enviroment, and the best thing you can do is be explicit in what you rely on. For example, formally verified operating systems often rely on hardware correctness, even though the errata sheets for modern CPUs are hundreds of pages long.
Presumably it is much harder to sell now. If you didn’t want it, why buy it in the first place?
For additional fun: Swiss German doesn't use ß at all, so there is no difference between "in Maßen genießen" (to enjoy in moderation) and "in Massen genießen" (to enjoy in large amounts).
Take the Halting program for example: For a program p which halts, you can determine whether it will halt in finite time (because by definition it halts). However, there is no semidecidable algorithm for "this program runs infinitely long".
Thanks!
I understand both sides of the argument here - on one hand you have fast and unreadable code and on the other hand slower and more readable code. The problem here is 1. the leaky abstraction of characters and code points and 2. loss of type safety due to C's weak typing rules, which is a bit lost in the "hurr durr messy code."
I'm not arguing for or against undecidability in type systems, the page aims to be present the information neutrally.
Have you observed one/both behaviours?
But the thing about certbot and TLS is that these things are security-relevant, and IMO security one of the only (if not the only) reason to break compatibility these days. TLS ciphers break, heck even the TLS protocol itself may reveal flaws later (see POODLE, BEAST, FREAK, etc.). That's why SSLv2, SSLv3 and TLS1.0 are deprecated: Not because there is a better protocol out there, but because the protocols are inherently insecure. (There is no huge flaw in TLS1.1 I am aware of, it uses MD5 and SHA1 under the hood for master secret derivation, but that's about the only thing).
I'm with you that maintenance is a big chunk of work, but that's IMO a price you pay for being in control. I've got a few services running myself, and honestly I forget about the boxes after setup and enabling auto-upgrades, so it isn't too breaking, at least for me.
And that said integrity protection is what is important in today's world: advertising is being injected into HTTP content by third parties which is a very bad thing IMO.
If updating your servers once-in-a-while is too much for you, maybe running a webserver isn't for you at all - there are certainly enough hosting providers which handle that for you.
Although it sure would be nice to have explanations for amateurs such as me.