gnufx

I've looked without success for external audit reports of either Tailscale and Netbird, like Mullvad gets. While I don't approve of the sort of auditor box-ticking we get at work, it would be reassuring to see a report from a proper security consultancy.

I'm just reading what was written, especially "the specific components we needed", and assuming they're not as incompetent as is being suggested, given they've served me well. Perhaps you haven't been tendering for server hardware recently, even bog-standard stuff, and seen the responses that even say they can't quote a fixed price currently. At least, that's in my part of the world, in an operation buying a good deal of hardware. We also have systems over ten years old running.

> commodity hardware

Apart from the "someone's basement", as objected to in this thread, it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.

Fedora, for instance, is built with LTO, except for some packages which it breaks. I've forgotten the details of where I had to turn it off.

Fortran calling...

In most of the cases I've seen where people felt the need for intrinsics, GCC will vectorize it -- at least if it's allowed to use the same potentially-incorrect semantics as the intrinsics version -- and potentially for multiple micro-architectures with GCC's target_clones attribute. GCC's -fopt-... flags can give you a lot of information on vectorization and other optimizations, if maybe couched in somewhat compiler-internal jargon, and other compiler probably do something similar. Vectorizing compilers have existed for 50-ish years, so it's well-established stuff.

No, see (even the new) Fowler's Modern English Usage. British usage is -yse, but right-and-proper Oxford spelling uses -ize, not -ise, for words with a Greek root.

1970s-ish capability systems with support in hardware/firmware include CAP, Flex, System/38, Plessey System 250 (which a former colleague worked on) -- the last two commercial; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security.

I'd like to think their time has come, given vulnerabilities I see.

Not relevant to GCC, but one use for an old A68 compiler was apparently to be adapted for the old NA Software Fortran 90 compiler, I was told by a former colleague. I'd have expected Ada to be a closer fit, and I don't know how well the decision worked out.

At least it's been fine for four years of research software on a POWER9 cluster I support (with nodes like the Summit system's).

It's worth noting that Stallman had earlier proposed a design for Emacs "to handle all the world's alphabets and word signs" with similar requirements to UTF-8. That was the etc/CHARACTERS file in Emacs 18.59 (1990). The eventual international support implemented in Emacs 20's MULE was based on ISO-2022, which was a reasonable choice at the time, based on earlier Japanese work. (There was actually enough space in the MULE encoding to add UTF-8, but the implementation was always going to be inefficient with the number of bytes at the top of the code space.)

Edit: see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tsutsui/emacs-18.59-netbsd...

> Active Directory (invented at MIT)

AD was invented by Microsoft, gluing together Kerberos (from MIT) and LDAP (from UMich). If it was from MIT, we wouldn't have had Windows 2000's infamous proprietary PAC.

This hasn't been posted for two years and still deserves reading 60-ish years later.

Block structure as indentation was introduced in Landin's ISWIM. I think the first actual implementation was in Turner's SASL (part of the ancestry of Haskell). Note that Haskell doesn't have Python's ":" and it also has an alternative braces and semicolons block syntax.

Then, after successful debugging your job isn't finished. The outline of "Three Questions About Each Bug You Find" <http://www.multicians.org/thvv/threeq.html> is:

1. Is this mistake somewhere else also?

2. What next bug is hidden behind this one?

3. What should I do to prevent bugs like this?

Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET

I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.

Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.

The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)

Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.

The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)

Jim Austin has one: https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html

> a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

> Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks

It certainly was from 2011 to 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer

> obviously you need to write your own software

Kerberos ran fine for me on cast-off SPARCstation 10(?) which was well obsolete at the time.

The last Sun systems I operated -- x2200s not up to Sun standards -- ran GNU/Linux on Opteron in an HPC cluster.

> an emulation of a VGA PC setup

IPMI does rather more than than giving you console access, though it's serial, not VGA. Typical server BMCs which embed IPMI do more again. Not to defend the quality of various BMC firmware and support I've encountered...

Well, it should always be on a physically isolated network, and avoid BMCs which share their NIC with the system.

See the references I just posted, crossing with that, for CHERI-RISC-V if others are interested.

I wonder why emulators aren't interesting for a hobbyist. However, there are FPGA implementations [1], and micro-controller-type systems on FPGA available commercially [2].

[3] has a list of publications for the rigorous engineering agenda.

1. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...

2. https://cheriot.org/

3. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...

One such paper is https://jianyuhuang.com/papers/sc16.pdf; I don't know if there's anything more recent/relevant.

https://github.com/flame/blis#citations is the current set of references for various aspects of the approach.

The article, or something similar, was posted recently with discussion.