pdw

You're probably thinking of Algol 60? Algol 68 definitely had heap operations, the sample code on Wikipedia even showcases them to build linked lists.

Amusingly similar to the much more recent slide decks about the x86 port, e.g. https://vmssoftware.com/docs/State_of_Port_20171006.pdf

Not a book, but a paper. I found two citations, but I can't find either version.

Slater, L.W. (1982). Everything you ever wanted to know about microcomputers (but didn’t know WHO to ask). Navy Regional Data Automation Center Publ., Norfolk, Virginia, 19 pp.

Leland W. Slater, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Microcomputers," Computopics, 3/82, pp. 38ff.

(Computopics appears to have been the magazine of the Washington DC chapter of the ACM.)

There are the NIST guidelines on "memorized secrets" (passwords): https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#5-authenticat...

> Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically).

It has much to say on all kinds of other password nonsense:

> Verifiers SHOULD permit subscriber-chosen memorized secrets at least 64 characters in length. All printing ASCII [RFC 20] characters as well as the space character SHOULD be acceptable in memorized secrets. Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters SHOULD be accepted as well.

> Truncation of the secret SHALL NOT be performed.

> Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret.

> In order to assist the claimant in successfully entering a memorized secret, the verifier SHOULD offer an option to display the secret — rather than a series of dots or asterisks — until it is entered.

> similar thing that can do OCR on scanned docs

It's only part of what you want, but ocrmypdf will add a OCRed text layer to PDF files, making the text selectable and indexable

Don't use die.net! The manpages there were last updated 10+ years ago. It's very unfortunate that that site does so well on Google.

I know this is a completely unimportant tangent. But I'm always amused that systemd skeptics insist on the "SystemD" spelling. Where does that come from? I never see anybody talk about NtpD, InetD or VsftpD. But somehow systemd needs to be SystemD. As I said, amusing.

Debian does not ship the AAC codec, due to legal quagmire surrounding the necessary code. The same probably goes for Ubuntu. That might be the cause of at least some of your problems. https://tookmund.com/2024/02/aac-and-debian

IXI was bought by SCO, and they shipped X.Desktop with their Unix releases. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer

That was very lucky then. USB parallel ports adapters are only intended to work with printers. They fail with any hardware that does custom signalling over the parallel port.

And especially their auditors

They might just be encrypted with a customer-specific key. That wouldn't surprise me.

It was decided last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361510

That's not really true. If you link a shared library that was compiled with -ffast-math, that will affect the entire program. https://moyix.blogspot.com/2022/09/someones-been-messing-wit...

Even the Windows 95 Minesweeper was only a 24 kilobyte program.

This chess piece likely predates the introduction of the bishop. The set would have had elephants instead, which would have been depicted with two tusks. See e.g. https://www.thehistoricgamesshop.co.uk/early-medieval-chess....

I think they must be referring something in an unstable-series kernel. I don't remember anything like that, but I only ever used the stable kernels. (Back then, there were separate stable (2.2.x, 2.4.x) and unstable (2.3.x, 2.5.x) branches. "Linus forced a swap rewrite" sounds like an unstable branch thing.)

I always heard that the "2x RAM" thing came from some primordial BSD release.

I've used nip2 when dealing with giant images. It's a weird tool, but it's designed for that kind of work. https://github.com/libvips/nip2

I was going by https://meow.social/@tryst/112547072349850935

But these things have a lot more of it

That makes sense when you realize that what C folks care about more than anything else is _ABI compatibility_. Changes to language or toolchain are acceptable as long as they don't change the ABI.

E.g. consider the hemming and hawing about a 64-bit time_t. That's a tiny change in comparison, and one that's obviously unavoidable and with a strict deadline. And yet...

MacPaint of course :)

Yeah, you don't even need to go that exotic. E.g. an IBM CGA card:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#/media/...

And it's a very poor rendering of a man page. man can generate HTML or PDF output if you want it:

    man -Thtml ls > ls.html
    man -Tpdf ls > ls.pdf

I don't have any personal knowledge, but see e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-September/018472.ht...

The cited RCS paper is actually somewhat contentious among Unix greybeards. They claim the paper compared RCS against an obsolete version of SCCS. Supposedly a contemporary SCCS would have easily outperformed RCS.

Of course, RCS was freely available, while SCCS needed to be licensed from Bell Labs, so RCS was much more widely used.

In any case Debian has its own archive of every xz-utils version they've used in the past.

I don't know the details, but from Wikipedia: "In May 1997, DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the original Pentium, Pentium Pro, and Pentium II chips. As part of a settlement, much of DEC's chip design and fabrication business was sold to Intel."

Lots of software links both liblzma and libcrypto. As I read Andres Freund's report, there is still a lot of uncertainty:

"There's lots of stuff I have not analyzed and most of what I observed is purely from observation rather than exhaustively analyzing the backdoor code."

"There are other checks I have not fully traced."

Flagged: How is this "via a project dev"? Which project? The guy doesn't seem to have anything to do with the discovery of this backdoor, and he just summarizes Andres Freund's announcement.