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Comment Re: No trust (Score 1) 124

If you notice there are some similarities of inittab and a makefile.

What?

Look at the names and descriptions in the fields and the pre-tab makefile format for far more similarity.

But both of those things are actually used. So are the IDs, they actually have meaning. And the runlevels are part of dependency. You pass through runlevels on your way to other runlevels.

The ID's aren't used for dependency. The id in sun sysv is a hack based on things like telnetd and rlogin. Part of the plan was to have the action field reference the ids and a state which was not done. The idea was to have a make like dependency check based on the current state of what was running.
Had inittab been expanded slightly, the need for scripts for most things would have disappeared completely. Everything else would have ended up being like the traditional rc3.d/[SK]* scripts.

Comment Re: No trust (Score 1) 124

Remind me again what was wrong with sysinit scripts?
The sysv init was never finished. If you notice there are some similarities of inittab and a makefile.
The idea was the runlevel and action fields could be used for dependency and concurrency. The run levels A,B & C are hints of that as is the current total lack of use of the id field. There are hints in the 5ess software as well. Init's early features were limited because it could never be paged out and multi-cpus weren't an option on the newer 3b line that sysV was written on until Sun added the sun-4m line.

Comment Training exercises often use oddball threats (Score 3, Interesting) 80

It is common to use strange threats for training exercises. It means the training controller can play games to put normal plans out of play. The CDC has been using zombie attacks for this reason for years plus it helps keep teams entertained while being able to evaluate the leadership parts of the teams. The CDC training requires a whole bunch of volunteers so zombies work for that. The military uses similar techniques for asymmetric warfare.

Comment Not just jamming (Score 1) 31

There are some systems that are sending valid looking signals with apparently valid ephemeris and almanac data. The signals should have been digitally signed decades ago. I had two different GPS receivers revert to valentine's day over the black sea. The one started seeing sats that were 10db stronger than the real ones and it got the time but never could get a position fix.

Comment Re:In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score 2) 71

The old images were from radars that did 6 elevations with a sweep time of a minute per elevation. So rather than put the data in a continuous 6 minute buffer, they throw all the data away every 6 minutes and start over.

They could have bought a system from a number of groups for far less money. There are even TV stations that would have sold them a world class system for a few million dollars. That would be a turnkey system that can take feeds from all the existing radars plus any of the newer coastal radars that also collect weather data as well as the mobile research radars.

Comment 7 Day certs? (Score 3, Interesting) 38

There are proposals to have 7 day SSL/TLS certs. This is an example of why that could be a major problem. Many Islands are connected by one cable with an old satellite system as backup. Emergency satellite links often don't comply with the local law of the disconnected country or the downlink station.

Comment Re:what does AI do when... (Score 1) 70

I would expect the AI to say "fix the core routing network" based on the last problem I had. It turns out the ISP's config is broken for IPv6 BGP via two different backends on their system to the same router on my end. I kept getting the BGP packets on the wrong interface so one link would never come up. I have no idea how that would happen but it did. Oddly the v4 BGP works quite well.

Comment Re:Who gives a shit. (Score 1) 275

Base load coal power in China is about $25/MWh. Solar panels by the container ship load cost less than $0.20 a watt at the factory. Most of that cost is the energy to make them. A good guess for daily average solar production is 4 hrs a day at 100% power for total power produced over the 20 year expected life of the panel.

Comment Did anyone do the math? (Score 1) 79

When are advertisers going to learn that too many ads run people away from their product. That has been a great deal of technical market research that proves that. The bottom line after increases in ad spend also proves it. I guess the people buying ads haven't collectively figured out that the only people who are falling for the ad agency's BS is the ad buyers, not the end customers. There is plenty of data showing only 2 commercials in a typical sitcom work which is the 1st one past the end and the one before it starts. The rest of the commercials in a sitcom decrease brand value.

The Aussie ABC has a show called Gruen which is about ads and covers the technical and psychological details behind advertising while making fun of bad ads. The show was named after the well studied psychological technique of confusing customers with shop layout.

Comment Re:Welp (Score 1) 116

Sun tried that 25 years ago and even today it is hard to find correct examples of how to create the configuration to make it useful. There were a lot of good things in Trusted Solaris that never got used even in most places that decided they needed the "Trusted" version.

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