I look forward to someone spending a few million to hunt for bugs in seL4.

I am kinda expecting the second coming of unikernels. The reduction in both attack surface and depth seems likely to be useful.

Why would unikernels fix this? They don't even attempt privilege separation at all.

Because 50m lines of code with whatever defect density is a lot more defects than a dedicated app+kernel with just the code that you need. So much of the Linux kernel is unused by any given application: why have that code loaded and runnable?

Exactly. Anybody deploying Linux today in scenarios where you might replace it with a unikernel is already not affected by LPE. They have a kernel running in a VM with one user and one application, in essence using Linux as a sort of bloated unikernel.

VMS people, am I right in remembering that there’s a standard “library” which does globbing, so while it’s done in every tool, they at least do it consistently?

Unix used to have a glob command, rather than building it into the shells (and the C library). I think it was 7th edition that added it directly to Bourne shell.

Things "with no connection to creating market value" or that "no businessperson would consider engaging" are perfectly valid subjects for education.

If you want job training, get certifications.

If like to point out that word processors existed well before DOS, and that DOS itself didn’t exist until many years into the personal computer revolution.

To this day there are people who still use Wordstar, for instance.

I am well mistaken -- TIL!

(forgive me -- i probably should have used 'command line' instead of 'ms-dos'. it's just that ms-dos was my introduction to computers, and so felt like the 'beginning of all time' of systems to me.)

Tariff European products. Cut off access to payment networks. Stop sharing satellite imagery.

There’s a lot of things the rest of the world has no or bad backups for.

The only thing that would achieve is that the rest of the world would decouple even faster from the USA. Incidentally, there are also a lot of things that the USA does not have backups for and this whole isolationism mindset always ends up with the rude awakening that no single party is larger than the rest of the world.

Yes.

The US is choosing to leverage its position without much concern for those consequences right now. The rest of the world is busy routing around that, and the leverage is slowly reducing.

It will take time: the US was a key member of the world economy. But there’s frequent new reminders of why it’s necessary.

Yup. I cannot stress how much the conversation has changed from a decade ago: the mere prospect of a European army was feared enough to be one of the reasons why we left the EU, but now it's something being seriously considered thanks to Russia's deranged land grab and the US's worsening instability. There's even been some panic over how reliant we are on the US for our nuclear deterrent and what that could mean should relations break down. This became a particular concern when the US started openly threatening to annex Greenland.

The prospect of the US going rogue has forced us to wake up and realise that every dependence we have on the US is potential leverage. For example, the US has levied sanctions against ICC judges, meaning that they can no longer use their VISA/MASTERCARD cards. This means that the French Judge Guillou for example cannot go to a shop in France, pay for French goods in Euros with a card from his French bank, because a US company is intervening to prevent it. As such they can only pay for things in cash... and Europe is becoming increasingly cashless.

Freedom Fries redux

An IDE, form designer, language, runtime, and database engine.

People used it to write business applications. Like Microsoft Access, or Visual Basic.

It started as a competitor to dBase II/III called FoxBase, and then Microsoft bought it.

UML was phase two of OMG. It originally developed CORBA.

"The horror, the horror."

Forgive the ignorant question, what made CORBA terribile?

I only used it during university and it seemed overengineered but it mostly worked, and I vaguely recall IDL to be nice.

I'm guessing interop was actually atrocious?

Synchronisation based on spooky action at a distance of mutable objects.

CORBA had the concept of distributed objects which is a terrible idea in practice.

For a long time, std::endl demonstrated that you were a proper C++ programmer, not some neckbeard C apologist. It wasn’t until C++ had „won“ that it became acceptable to use \n again.