nightmare

On Thursday, 5 September 2019 06:40:27 UTC+1, bitrex wrote:

On 9/5/19 1:30 AM, bitrex wrote:
NT:

But you can still do a huge lot better than MS Windows

You can do a lot better than McDonalds too, even in the regime of fast
food but at some point someone realized that brand recognition and
market penetration/availability were more important concepts than the
intrinsic quality of the product.

"quantity has a quality all its own" or that is to say 40,000
restaurants nationwide and billions and billions served can't be "wrong.."

depends how you define wrong. Plenty of people go to McDs when they could have a better burger a few doors away

Microsoft and McDonalds are either thought of as failures of late-stage
capitalism or rousing success stories, depending on how one looks at
things. They sell a mediocre product at a price a bit too high for
what's on offer and they'll always be there for you. What's not to like?

quality, price, ethics, the usual restaurant things

It seems that over the years and decades investors at least have sure
liked it a lot..

If both companies were really that terrible at what they do nobody would
use them, people would find a way, any way, to do something different en
masse.

People have found other ways to do the same thing en masse, thus the existence of linux, ios, android etc. Sadly android also stinks. Ios works but is more limited.

And if they put way more effort into making their product exceptional
they'd have no choice but to charge more. More than most Americans could
afford on the regular. Someone would move in immediately to undercut them..

I'm not so sure. If Windows were debugged as it went, there's be far less other OS users around, they'd sell more product.

These companies are cutting edge, in the field of walking the razors
edge of good-enough engineering.

Windows really isn't good enough, it causes a mass of problems that cause end users more cost than debugging it in the first place. That's precisely why so many aren't using windows today. Had MS taken bugs seriously all along, Win would have not have fallen in market share the way it has and continues to.


NT

 

On Thursday, 5 September 2019 02:37:43 UTC+1, Rick C wrote:

On Wednesday, September 4, 2019 at 8:24:25 PM UTC-4, tabb wrote:
On Wednesday, 4 September 2019 16:11:26 UTC+1, bitrex wrote:

Sometimes older guys wax nostalgic about the big iron they used in their
teens and 20s in the fashion that you know they thought it was really
something else at the time.

You won't find me waxing nostalgic much about any "In my day" computers
because in the same time period for me what the kids had available was
early Pentiums and some Mac Quadras and stuff. These machines were
unpleasant to use the operating systems stunk they were under-powered,
overpriced, and generally sucked balls.

Yes - computers are different to other stuff. A computer that old is pretty much useless, a hifi amp from 1959 can (occasionally) be excellent.

The only reason why old computers are "useless" is because there is something else that is better and cheaper. It's simply not worth continuing to use the old machine. But there is nothing inherently worse about an old computer. It's not like they go bad in any way other than how everything goes bad, by wearing out.

On the other hand, an old amplifier does have inherent shortcomings in the same way as old PCs. Newer gear is smaller, lower power and can be made with features older gear can only dream of. So no one other than collectors have any reason to use old amps. Better stuff is available.

The difference is the rate of improvement. Excellent amps existed in 59, among much mediocre & horrible stuff, and the best hasn't got a lot better since (the average sure has!). Computers OTOH are the main area of fast technological progress.


NT

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 9/4/19 2:53 PM, John Larkin wrote:
<snip>

Address space layout randomization is hilarious, the moral equivalent
of hiding under the bed.

I don't see why. It takes a whole class of potentially-reliable
exploits and renders them essentially impossible. Your immune system
has a similar type of defense-in-depth.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com

 

tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote in
news:6d6259b2-1624-4eb3-a906-fd84f85a77e9@googlegroups.com:

depends how you define wrong. Plenty of people go to McDs when
they could have a better burger a few doors away

I find it lame that those going to McD's or the others failed to
notice them creep up the burger price to now $3.99 and even $4.99!

It is so lame, and their app 'offers' turned lame too.

Right now... the best fast food burger in this region of the
country anyway... is the Checker's (Rally's) Texas Garlic Bread
Toast Double Burger at $2.99.

A $3 burger is closer to the right price point. Far closer than
the others. If I want to pay that much for a burger, I'll go down to
the popular sports bar and get their $7 burger and actually get a
real, cooked when you ordered it on a grill by a cook and dressed
amazingly. And that usually comes with a side salad too... for that
$7. And some of them have POOL TABLES! And juke boxes and sports
playing on the TVs all over the place. Far more worth the extra two
bucks when standing in line on a sticky slop-mopped floor to buy
economized process max profit fast 'food' is your alternative. Or
the "drive through" method. The roller skate server and stalls were
a far better way. Frisch's Big Boy should be very successful, but
jackasses want food fast so they can continue driving down the road
with their faces planted in a cell phone, except now they can fuss
with a bag of food at the same time. How quaint... NOT!

The sourdough garlic bread toast is an excellent change of pace for
fast food. Their Philly Cheese Steak Burgers they put out for a
short time were pretty darn good too.

 

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:28:51 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 17:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 17:14:45 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


Although there is some excellent software about and best practice is
improving gradually (though IMHO too slowly) there is far too much of a
ship it and be damned macho business culture in shrink wrap software.

Win10 updates that bricked certain brands of portable for example.

running some spice sims, breadboarding something to try an idea, swapping parts to see what happens.

I find it very odd that he trusts Spice simulation predictions when at
the same time he rails incessantly against climate change simulations.

I mostly - certainly not always - am guided by simulations of stable
linear systems where I can trust the component models and the sim
software. I don't trust future-state simulations of unstable or
chaotic systems, especially if I don't understand the component
behavior, the forcings, or the initial states.

Apart from the initial bias most of the interesting behaviour in Spice
comes from its solution of non-linear component models.

Simulation mostly helps me to think.

And of course, being in business to sell stuff, my simulations are
rapidly, often concurrently, verified by experiment, which also guides
future expectations of simulations.

Is that unreasonable?

No, but it is unreasonable to decry one sort of simulation because what
it predicts is inconvenient when you also rely on another simulation.

Dorian is now headed about 140 degrees away from the path that most
models predicted a week ago.

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 9:41:06 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote in
news:6d6259b2-1624-4eb3-a906-fd84f85a77e9@googlegroups.com:


depends how you define wrong. Plenty of people go to McDs when
they could have a better burger a few doors away


I find it lame that those going to McD's or the others failed to
notice them creep up the burger price to now $3.99 and even $4.99!

It is so lame, and their app 'offers' turned lame too.

Right now... the best fast food burger in this region of the
country anyway... is the Checker's (Rally's) Texas Garlic Bread
Toast Double Burger at $2.99.

A $3 burger is closer to the right price point. Far closer than
the others. If I want to pay that much for a burger, I'll go down to
the popular sports bar and get their $7 burger and actually get a
real, cooked when you ordered it on a grill by a cook and dressed
amazingly. And that usually comes with a side salad too... for that
$7. And some of them have POOL TABLES! And juke boxes and sports
playing on the TVs all over the place. Far more worth the extra two
bucks when standing in line on a sticky slop-mopped floor to buy
economized process max profit fast 'food' is your alternative. Or
the "drive through" method. The roller skate server and stalls were
a far better way. Frisch's Big Boy should be very successful, but
jackasses want food fast so they can continue driving down the road
with their faces planted in a cell phone, except now they can fuss
with a bag of food at the same time. How quaint... NOT!

The sourdough garlic bread toast is an excellent change of pace for
fast food. Their Philly Cheese Steak Burgers they put out for a
short time were pretty darn good too.

I find it amusing that people are talking about dollar store burgers as if there was any way they could be "good" food. Virtually all the meat comes from other than contented cows, processed at the same smelly abattoirs and shipped frozen through the same channels only to be thawed out and cooked by someone barely old enough to drive.

I worked in food service when I was a kid and I saw the quality of the people doing that work first hand. No thanks, I'll get my nutrition by other means than fast food of any sort.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote in
news:qkp6q2$13rd$1@gioia.aioe.org:

The ultimate secure computer system will have absolute hardware
protections. Programmers can't be trusted here.

Even with an entirely separate code and data address space strict
Harvard architecture so that data can never get executed there are
still ways to subvert an operating system. It is just a bit harder
to do.

I made hardware IP encryption modems for the military. Devices
required on both ends.

NOBODY without authorization gets in, and NOBODY gets to read the
data packets to any fruition.

That isn't to say that stuff could not be done better. OS/2 was
very much technically superior to Windows when it was launched but
IBM made such an awful hash of marketing it with PS/2 MCA hardware
lock-in that apart from in a handful of niche applications it sank
without trace.

OS/2 died because MicroSoft screwed them when they reneged on their
agreement to provide the full WIN32 API to them. The same demise
befell Quarterdeck's DesqViewX.

OS/2 was far superior and by now would have easily supplanted all
Linux and UNIX based OSes and definitely would have killed off
Windows poor operating model and subsequent OS. IBM is the best
after all.

However the PS/2 thing was their biggest mistake at the hardware
level as well as for OS/2.

They were probably trying to cut down on via count or such with MCA.
Hardware did not get the same growth path that chips enjoyed,
minitiarization-wise. Now, it has caught up quality wise as folks no
longer worry about things like via count. Look how long thin gold
plated wires play well with the ethernet spec. Billions of
connections around the world no longer worrying about silly
oxidations and such. I can remember when 'fixing' a 'broken down'
Pac-Man Upright video game many times merely involved taking the edge
card connector off and on a few times to put a fresh burnish on the
fingers. Back up and runnin'. Now we have chips with over 2000
"faces" on the chip that all get reliably connected to. Amazing!

 

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:42:51 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 19:53, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 14:37:24 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

It's been proved that there's no such thing as an "ultimate secure
computer" there's no way to ensure that your compiler isn't compromised
in some way, too. Or that your compiler's compiler wasn't compromised,
or that the compiler that you use to compile the tool you use to check
to see if your compiler is compromised, wasn't compromised.

Or that the hardware that you use to compile the software that you use
to design the hardware for the ultimate secure computer didn't itself
inject a vulnerability into the design software that then compromises
your new hardware.

And so forth...

I believe that absolute hardware protection is possible. But people

It is if you don't mind having computers that can only do one job.

Your problem is always that at some point you have to load the program
code in from external storage as data and then flip a bit to allow it to
execute. Controlling that executable transition is the key.

Proper hardware protection would allow *any* loaded image to run
safely.

Sadly the likes of Windows have far too much code executing with the
highest level of privileges for very minor speed gain and insanely high
vulnerability risk of buffer overrun attacks.

With proper memory management, buffer overflow exploits should be
impossible.

don't even use the protection mechanisms that are provided. The
structure of c sure doesn't help.

C is unfortunate, but we are kind of stuck with it now. Attempts to
improve it have made the syntax more complicated but left in the
tendency for cryptic obfuscated code that can easily go wrong.

The problem isn't syntax, it's the way c compilers manage code, data,
stacks, buffers, pointers, libraries. They generally dump all of them
into one priviliged space, where anything can be executed.

The PDP-11 and the 68K had proper hardware protections. Intel did not.

RISC-V seems to have sensible memory management. A multiprocessor
version could be absolutely safe, if anyone cared to implement it.

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:a1f219d1-073b-4df2-8683-0e258fb790d8@googlegroups.com:

I find it amusing that people are talking about dollar store
burgers as if there was any way they could be "good" food.
Virtually all the meat comes from other than contented cows,
processed at the same smelly abattoirs and shipped frozen through
the same channels only to be thawed out and cooked by someone
barely old enough to drive.

This is Michigan. TONS of meat get processed here. RBS does it and
just like Alkaline batteries, you do not know what name brands get
put on the bags (chubs).

I find it strange that if a cow is dead, why can't they pass it
through a decontamination shower to clean the outside, and then
actuall use folks that know how to do the primary butchering where
all the bad entrails get PROPERLY removed from EVERY cow.

How can they screw up that part, and also how can they allow the
facility to slowly get contaminated?

I have seen Costco butchering rooms that get washed down with
steaming hot high pressure sprays every fucking day. It does not get
any cleaner than those guys right behind a plexiglass wall for us to
see.

It is when the numbers go up... the raw volume that causes the
dopes doing the work to cut corners to get their numbers up. BAd
move when bloodborne pathogens could become involved.

I can still remember Ringo Star wearing a white lab coat, using a
bullhorn to intice rich, suit wearing dopes into a vat of
slaughterhouse refuse to get a few ten pound notes out of the slop.

"Free money! Get your free money here!" -Youngman Grand, "The
Magic Christian"

 

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:a1f219d1-073b-4df2-8683-0e258fb790d8@googlegroups.com:

I worked in food service when I was a kid and I saw the quality of
the people doing that work first hand. No thanks, I'll get my
nutrition by other means than fast food of any sort.

Funny, when I go out I make a point of noticing how clean the
bathroom(s) is(are). I found a bar that uses the same soap that
surgeons use. I shoot pool and wash up after touching a table that
an unknown number of other assholes have touched. I feel better
after that joint than anywhere and would trust their food prep too.

Stuff like that matters. The local transit center ran by the city
has a nasty bathroom that has gotten so bad that it needs a good
steam cleaning done on it plus a bit of plumbing fixes.

The folks running the cities etc. are nothing more than greedy
punks sucking a paycheck. These idiots do not even know how to
program a traffic light controller and that tech has been around
since the '70s!

I think the nation needs a full bore street light LED upgrade and
traffic controllers and traffic lights need to switch over to LED and
DC with battery backup so that even a power outage does not stop a
traffic light or street light for that matter.

I see street lights still on all the time because even the new
units are fitted with 6 decade old day-night sensor technology. They
should have a fucking RTC in them or even one per 8 lights.

A traffic light could have redundancy right on the lamp face.
Sensors in the roads need upgrading. We could save 50k barrels of
fuel a day with better traffic light control gear. Oh and look at
the JOBS that would create!

Infrastructure people. That is what our next president needs to
focus on, not some lame wall.

What a pathetic ass we have at the top in this nation right now.

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 10:32:42 AM UTC-4, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:28:51 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 17:51, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 17:14:45 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:


Although there is some excellent software about and best practice is
improving gradually (though IMHO too slowly) there is far too much of a
ship it and be damned macho business culture in shrink wrap software.

Win10 updates that bricked certain brands of portable for example.

running some spice sims, breadboarding something to try an idea, swapping parts to see what happens.

I find it very odd that he trusts Spice simulation predictions when at
the same time he rails incessantly against climate change simulations.

I mostly - certainly not always - am guided by simulations of stable
linear systems where I can trust the component models and the sim
software. I don't trust future-state simulations of unstable or
chaotic systems, especially if I don't understand the component
behavior, the forcings, or the initial states.

Apart from the initial bias most of the interesting behaviour in Spice
comes from its solution of non-linear component models.

Simulation mostly helps me to think.

And of course, being in business to sell stuff, my simulations are
rapidly, often concurrently, verified by experiment, which also guides
future expectations of simulations.

Is that unreasonable?

No, but it is unreasonable to decry one sort of simulation because what
it predicts is inconvenient when you also rely on another simulation.

Dorian is now headed about 140 degrees away from the path that most
models predicted a week ago.

My understanding is it has to do with an unexpected blast of hot air from the west coast.

--

Rick C.

++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Rick C]

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 10:36:30 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Rick C <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote in
news:a1f219d1-073b-4df2-8683-0e258fb790d8@googlegroups.com:

I worked in food service when I was a kid and I saw the quality of
the people doing that work first hand. No thanks, I'll get my
nutrition by other means than fast food of any sort.

Funny, when I go out I make a point of noticing how clean the
bathroom(s) is(are). I found a bar that uses the same soap that
surgeons use. I shoot pool and wash up after touching a table that
an unknown number of other assholes have touched. I feel better
after that joint than anywhere and would trust their food prep too.

Lol, so it doesn't actually matter if anyone uses the soap, just that it's the same as the soap used by surgeons, eh?

I actually have a bit of a phobia I got at a job when I noticed someone walking in to use the urinal while I was washing my hand, then leaving without washing. I won't touch bathroom door handles any more. lol

At least I know surgeons aren't touching the door handles, but pretty much everyone working at your bar is touching the same door handles as the patrons who wiped their rears and left without washing.

Stuff like that matters. The local transit center ran by the city
has a nasty bathroom that has gotten so bad that it needs a good
steam cleaning done on it plus a bit of plumbing fixes.

The folks running the cities etc. are nothing more than greedy
punks sucking a paycheck. These idiots do not even know how to
program a traffic light controller and that tech has been around
since the '70s!

You are such an idiot. People do the jobs they are asked to do and the way they are asked to do it. Don't blame the workers as the "easy" target. Maybe it's them, maybe it's the job.

I talked to one of the traffic light maintainers once. The main drag through town was timed to let you continue to catch green lights if you drove under the speed limit. A couple were a little early or late. I asked the guy if they could adjust them. He went off a bit complaining that those lights were paid for by the state although the city did the work. The state refused to upgrade them to modern devices that would work properly. In other words, it's not his fault, he was trying to make it all work as best he could.

I think the nation needs a full bore street light LED upgrade and
traffic controllers and traffic lights need to switch over to LED and
DC with battery backup so that even a power outage does not stop a
traffic light or street light for that matter.

Ok, cough up the bucks! BTW, most traffic lights are already LED because of the money saved by much lower maintenance.

Battery backed up street lighting??? Why, it really isn't that important. I guess they could use them for arbitrage of electricity paying for the installation after a couple of decades. But then they wouldn't be available to light the streets if the power failed early in the evening. How many days of hold up would you recommend?

I see street lights still on all the time because even the new
units are fitted with 6 decade old day-night sensor technology. They
should have a fucking RTC in them or even one per 8 lights.

Or maybe something is simply broken? Why do you rile about such little things?

A traffic light could have redundancy right on the lamp face.
Sensors in the roads need upgrading. We could save 50k barrels of
fuel a day with better traffic light control gear. Oh and look at
the JOBS that would create!

There are many things we can save money on by investing. But the return is often marginal and people aren't interested.

Infrastructure people. That is what our next president needs to
focus on, not some lame wall.

The President should focus on traffic lights?


> What a pathetic ass we have at the top in this nation right now.

I can't argue with you when you are right.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christense]

torsdag den 5. september 2019 kl. 16.00.34 UTC+2 skrev Rick C:

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 9:41:06 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote in
news:6d6259b2-1624-4eb3-a906-fd84f85a77e9@googlegroups.com:


depends how you define wrong. Plenty of people go to McDs when
they could have a better burger a few doors away


I find it lame that those going to McD's or the others failed to
notice them creep up the burger price to now $3.99 and even $4.99!

It is so lame, and their app 'offers' turned lame too.

Right now... the best fast food burger in this region of the
country anyway... is the Checker's (Rally's) Texas Garlic Bread
Toast Double Burger at $2.99.

A $3 burger is closer to the right price point. Far closer than
the others. If I want to pay that much for a burger, I'll go down to
the popular sports bar and get their $7 burger and actually get a
real, cooked when you ordered it on a grill by a cook and dressed
amazingly. And that usually comes with a side salad too... for that
$7. And some of them have POOL TABLES! And juke boxes and sports
playing on the TVs all over the place. Far more worth the extra two
bucks when standing in line on a sticky slop-mopped floor to buy
economized process max profit fast 'food' is your alternative. Or
the "drive through" method. The roller skate server and stalls were
a far better way. Frisch's Big Boy should be very successful, but
jackasses want food fast so they can continue driving down the road
with their faces planted in a cell phone, except now they can fuss
with a bag of food at the same time. How quaint... NOT!

The sourdough garlic bread toast is an excellent change of pace for
fast food. Their Philly Cheese Steak Burgers they put out for a
short time were pretty darn good too.

I find it amusing that people are talking about dollar store burgers as if there was any way they could be "good" food. Virtually all the meat comes from other than contented cows, processed at the same smelly abattoirs and shipped frozen through the same channels only to be thawed out and cooked by someone barely old enough to drive.

the cheap meat might be from old dairy cows, which if fine for a burger,
but I don't know what third world country you have to be in for abattoirs
and such not be strictly controlled by vets and food safety authorities

 

[bitrex]

On 9/5/19 1:03 PM, bitrex wrote:

With proper memory management, buffer overflow exploits should be
impossible.


don't even use the protection mechanisms that are provided. The
structure of c sure doesn't help.

C is unfortunate, but we are kind of stuck with it now. Attempts to
improve it have made the syntax more complicated but left in the
tendency for cryptic obfuscated code that can easily go wrong.

The problem isn't syntax, it's the way c compilers manage code, data,
stacks, buffers, pointers, libraries. They generally dump all of them
into one priviliged space, where anything can be executed.

The PDP-11 and the 68K had proper hardware protections. Intel did not.

RISC-V seems to have sensible memory management. A multiprocessor
version could be absolutely safe, if anyone cared to implement it.


von neumann architecture was a compromise to make computation cheaper
with the vacuum tubes and relays available at the time that has
persisted to the present day

Like if you don't want to write self-modifying code (one of the biggest
security threats there is) why in the world should executable code and
runtime data share the same memory space

 

[bitrex]

On 9/5/19 10:27 AM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:42:51 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 19:53, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 14:37:24 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

It's been proved that there's no such thing as an "ultimate secure
computer" there's no way to ensure that your compiler isn't compromised
in some way, too. Or that your compiler's compiler wasn't compromised,
or that the compiler that you use to compile the tool you use to check
to see if your compiler is compromised, wasn't compromised.

Or that the hardware that you use to compile the software that you use
to design the hardware for the ultimate secure computer didn't itself
inject a vulnerability into the design software that then compromises
your new hardware.

And so forth...

I believe that absolute hardware protection is possible. But people

It is if you don't mind having computers that can only do one job.

Your problem is always that at some point you have to load the program
code in from external storage as data and then flip a bit to allow it to
execute. Controlling that executable transition is the key.

Proper hardware protection would allow *any* loaded image to run
safely.


Sadly the likes of Windows have far too much code executing with the
highest level of privileges for very minor speed gain and insanely high
vulnerability risk of buffer overrun attacks.

With proper memory management, buffer overflow exploits should be
impossible.


don't even use the protection mechanisms that are provided. The
structure of c sure doesn't help.

C is unfortunate, but we are kind of stuck with it now. Attempts to
improve it have made the syntax more complicated but left in the
tendency for cryptic obfuscated code that can easily go wrong.

The problem isn't syntax, it's the way c compilers manage code, data,
stacks, buffers, pointers, libraries. They generally dump all of them
into one priviliged space, where anything can be executed.

The PDP-11 and the 68K had proper hardware protections. Intel did not.

RISC-V seems to have sensible memory management. A multiprocessor
version could be absolutely safe, if anyone cared to implement it.

von neumann architecture was a compromise to make computation cheaper
with the vacuum tubes and relays available at the time that has
persisted to the present day

 

[bitrex]

On 9/5/19 12:55 PM, bitrex wrote:
I find it amusing that people are talking about dollar store burgers

as if there was any way they could be "good" food.  Virtually all the
meat comes from other than contented cows, processed at the same
smelly abattoirs and shipped frozen through the same channels only to
be thawed out and cooked by someone barely old enough to drive.

I worked in food service when I was a kid and I saw the quality of the
people doing that work first hand.  No thanks, I'll get my nutrition
by other means than fast food of any sort.


I've never gotten sick from eating in a chain fast food restaurant as
far as I can tell.

I've definitely gotten sick from eating in "upscale" restaurants from
time to time. Pretty sure I've had food poisoning from a four star
Zagat-rated $48 dinner place before. Those little food-truck vendors set
up at street fairs and in office parks etc. no, I don't really trust
them much either.

Granted sometimes food poisoning can take a while to take effect so it's
hard to tell what it was that caused it precisely, you can only have
suspicions. and sometimes it hits really, really quick...

That is to say if dinner at the four star is the only meal I've had that
day and I'm sitting on the can for three hours later that night with a
knife twisting in my gut and exploding diarrhea repeatedly I've
definitely got my suspicions.

To be crass about it.

 

[bitrex]

On 9/5/19 10:00 AM, Rick C wrote:

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 9:41:06 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
tabbypurr@gmail.com wrote in
news:6d6259b2-1624-4eb3-a906-fd84f85a77e9@googlegroups.com:


depends how you define wrong. Plenty of people go to McDs when
they could have a better burger a few doors away


I find it lame that those going to McD's or the others failed to
notice them creep up the burger price to now $3.99 and even $4.99!

It is so lame, and their app 'offers' turned lame too.

Right now... the best fast food burger in this region of the
country anyway... is the Checker's (Rally's) Texas Garlic Bread
Toast Double Burger at $2.99.

A $3 burger is closer to the right price point. Far closer than
the others. If I want to pay that much for a burger, I'll go down to
the popular sports bar and get their $7 burger and actually get a
real, cooked when you ordered it on a grill by a cook and dressed
amazingly. And that usually comes with a side salad too... for that
$7. And some of them have POOL TABLES! And juke boxes and sports
playing on the TVs all over the place. Far more worth the extra two
bucks when standing in line on a sticky slop-mopped floor to buy
economized process max profit fast 'food' is your alternative. Or
the "drive through" method. The roller skate server and stalls were
a far better way. Frisch's Big Boy should be very successful, but
jackasses want food fast so they can continue driving down the road
with their faces planted in a cell phone, except now they can fuss
with a bag of food at the same time. How quaint... NOT!

The sourdough garlic bread toast is an excellent change of pace for
fast food. Their Philly Cheese Steak Burgers they put out for a
short time were pretty darn good too.

I find it amusing that people are talking about dollar store burgers as if there was any way they could be "good" food. Virtually all the meat comes from other than contented cows, processed at the same smelly abattoirs and shipped frozen through the same channels only to be thawed out and cooked by someone barely old enough to drive.

I worked in food service when I was a kid and I saw the quality of the people doing that work first hand. No thanks, I'll get my nutrition by other means than fast food of any sort.

I've never gotten sick from eating in a chain fast food restaurant as
far as I can tell.

I've definitely gotten sick from eating in "upscale" restaurants from
time to time. Pretty sure I've had food poisoning from a four star
Zagat-rated $48 dinner place before. Those little food-truck vendors set
up at street fairs and in office parks etc. no, I don't really trust
them much either.

Granted sometimes food poisoning can take a while to take effect so it's
hard to tell what it was that caused it precisely, you can only have
suspicions. and sometimes it hits really, really quick...

 

[Martin Brown]

On 05/09/2019 15:27, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:42:51 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 19:53, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 14:37:24 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

It's been proved that there's no such thing as an "ultimate secure
computer" there's no way to ensure that your compiler isn't compromised
in some way, too. Or that your compiler's compiler wasn't compromised,
or that the compiler that you use to compile the tool you use to check
to see if your compiler is compromised, wasn't compromised.

Or that the hardware that you use to compile the software that you use
to design the hardware for the ultimate secure computer didn't itself
inject a vulnerability into the design software that then compromises
your new hardware.

And so forth...

I believe that absolute hardware protection is possible. But people

It is if you don't mind having computers that can only do one job.

Your problem is always that at some point you have to load the program
code in from external storage as data and then flip a bit to allow it to
execute. Controlling that executable transition is the key.

Proper hardware protection would allow *any* loaded image to run
safely.

That is tautology. Even the caching hardware on some modern CPUs can be
subverted to allow an aggressor to infer the values of data.

Sadly the likes of Windows have far too much code executing with the
highest level of privileges for very minor speed gain and insanely high
vulnerability risk of buffer overrun attacks.

With proper memory management, buffer overflow exploits should be
impossible.

They were virtually impossible in the segmented model of OS/2.

Your data segment came with a length and you could trash it but step
over the permitted bounds and your process would be unceremoniously
terminated.

don't even use the protection mechanisms that are provided. The
structure of c sure doesn't help.

C is unfortunate, but we are kind of stuck with it now. Attempts to
improve it have made the syntax more complicated but left in the
tendency for cryptic obfuscated code that can easily go wrong.

The problem isn't syntax, it's the way c compilers manage code, data,
stacks, buffers, pointers, libraries. They generally dump all of them
into one priviliged space, where anything can be executed.

No they are all in user space but because an integer can be coerced to
be a pointer to any damn thing you like and flat memory models have
become the modern default there is scope for tremendous abuse.

I have used an OS/2 C compiler in the 1990's that did put user data
memory in separate data segments with lengths that you got to decide at
link time. The one advantage of putting stack at one end of a big chunk
of memory and heap at the other is that you can make best use of both.
The compiler itself had other problems and never went mainstream.

The problem with C is mostly down to copying nul terminated strings that
have been maliciously constructed to trample over something important.

Having distinct code segments that are permitted to execute and never
permitting data segment execution goes a long way to stopping exploits,
but you cannot prevent someone from tweaking a return address on the
stack if they have sufficient knowledge of where and how to do it.

We are where we are and fixes to the Windoze OS now have a bad tendency
to break anti-virus products and other bank security add-ons.

The PDP-11 and the 68K had proper hardware protections. Intel did not.

The Intel 386 CPU onwards had quite respectable hardware segmentation
but Microsoft's operating system developers chose not to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_mode#386

IBM's people got it about right with OS/2 but that proved to be a dead
end like Betamax - technically superior but lousy marketing.

RISC-V seems to have sensible memory management. A multiprocessor
version could be absolutely safe, if anyone cared to implement it.

You can certainly make it much harder for people and code to misbehave
with dedicated hardware assistance. But there is usually always a chink
somewhere that allows people to do things that they ought not to.

The aggressor always has the option of code inspection of the OS and a
great deal of trial and error to perfect their attack.


--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2019 13:03:21 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

On 9/5/19 10:27 AM, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 21:42:51 +0100, Martin Brown
'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 04/09/2019 19:53, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 4 Sep 2019 14:37:24 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

It's been proved that there's no such thing as an "ultimate secure
computer" there's no way to ensure that your compiler isn't compromised
in some way, too. Or that your compiler's compiler wasn't compromised,
or that the compiler that you use to compile the tool you use to check
to see if your compiler is compromised, wasn't compromised.

Or that the hardware that you use to compile the software that you use
to design the hardware for the ultimate secure computer didn't itself
inject a vulnerability into the design software that then compromises
your new hardware.

And so forth...

I believe that absolute hardware protection is possible. But people

It is if you don't mind having computers that can only do one job.

Your problem is always that at some point you have to load the program
code in from external storage as data and then flip a bit to allow it to
execute. Controlling that executable transition is the key.

Proper hardware protection would allow *any* loaded image to run
safely.


Sadly the likes of Windows have far too much code executing with the
highest level of privileges for very minor speed gain and insanely high
vulnerability risk of buffer overrun attacks.

With proper memory management, buffer overflow exploits should be
impossible.


don't even use the protection mechanisms that are provided. The
structure of c sure doesn't help.

C is unfortunate, but we are kind of stuck with it now. Attempts to
improve it have made the syntax more complicated but left in the
tendency for cryptic obfuscated code that can easily go wrong.

The problem isn't syntax, it's the way c compilers manage code, data,
stacks, buffers, pointers, libraries. They generally dump all of them
into one priviliged space, where anything can be executed.

The PDP-11 and the 68K had proper hardware protections. Intel did not.

RISC-V seems to have sensible memory management. A multiprocessor
version could be absolutely safe, if anyone cared to implement it.


von neumann architecture was a compromise to make computation cheaper
with the vacuum tubes and relays available at the time that has
persisted to the present day

You don't need a Harvard architecture to prevent executing data, just
proper memory management hardware. Of course, you have to use it.

 

[whit3rd]

On Thursday, September 5, 2019 at 7:32:42 AM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

Dorian is now headed about 140 degrees away from the path that most
models predicted a week ago.

Why is that meaningful? The storm is over a hundred miles wide, takes over
a day to move its diameter, and the 'heading' is just an imaginary center point doing
a moment-by-moment movement.

If you wish to imagine that center doing a 100 yard circular orbit inside
the storm, you can easily contrive the 'heading' to change 180 degrees in
a few hours, but that doesn't say which folk are getting wet. It's an irrelevance.

The storm's position today is not notably different from the estimate two days ago.