One of the biggest computing inventions of all time, courtesy of Xerox PARC. //

Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines? //

A token network's complexity makes it vulnerable to a number of failure modes, but such networks do have the advantage that performance is deterministic; it can be calculated precisely in advance, which is important in certain applications.

But in the end it was Ethernet that won the battle for LAN standardization through a combination of standards body politics and a clever, minimalist—and thus cheap to implement—design. It went on to obliterate the competition by seeking out and assimilating higher bitrate protocols and adding their technological distinctiveness to its own. Decades later, it had become ubiquitous.

If you've ever looked at the network cable protruding from your computer and wondered how Ethernet got started, how it has lasted so long, and how it works, wonder no more: here's the story. //

Other LAN technologies use extensive mechanisms to arbitrate access to the shared communication medium. Not Ethernet. I'm tempted to use the expression "the lunatics run the asylum," but that would be unfair to the clever distributed control mechanism developed at PARC. I'm sure that the mainframe and minicomputer makers of the era thought the asylum analogy wasn't far off, though. //

in their paper from 1976 describing the experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs showed that for packets of 500 bytes and larger, more than 95 percent of the network's capacity is used for successful transmissions, even if 256 computers all continuously have data to transmit. Pretty clever. //

It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, 10Mbps Ethernet was very fast. Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers? 300 baud modems? 500 ns memory? Daisy wheel printers? But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed, and it's still part of the 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet interfaces in our computers. //

It's truly mindboggling that Ethernet managed to survive 30 years in production, increasing its speed by no less than four orders of magnitude. This means that a 100GE system sends an entire packet (well, if it's 1212 bytes long) in the time that the original 10Mbps Ethernet sends a single bit. In those 30 years, all aspects of Ethernet were changed: its MAC procedure, the bit encoding, the wiring... only the packet format has remained the same—which ironically is the part of the IEEE standard that's widely ignored in favor of the slightly different DIX 2.0 standard.

DCRoss
Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
960
Yesterday at 11:36 AM
#24

MTSkibum said:
Somewhere a web developer chose an arbitrary nvarchar length for the password and is storing it unencrypted in a sql database.

That is how you ended up with the maximum password length.

There's more to the story, but the relevant part is that way back in 1976 UNIX systems hashed passwords with a DES based algorithm which was limited to two characters of salt and eight characters of password. It wasn't until 1994 that Paul Henning-Kemp replaced this with a more advanced hash based on MD5 for FreeBSD, and this was adopted by just about everybody. However, not only did applications keep using the old crypt(3) implementation long after that, they also stuck with the idea that having an eight character limit on your password was reasonable, and even that if you used a more secure algorithm that sixteen was fair.

With this in mind, setting fixed length fields for passwords or password hashes was considered acceptable for far longer than it should have been.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/usenix99/full_papers/provos/provos_html/node9.html

http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/ieee.software.pdf

The New York Times
@nytimes
·
Follow
Breaking News: The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.
https://nyti.ms/4347Xrx
10:21 AM · Jun 29, 2023

The claim, of course, was made without evidence because there is none.

There is, however, fresh and real-time evidence that the unapologetically woke New York Times newsroom is packed full of the very types of disreputable people they claim to abhor, as lawyer/YouTuber Viva Frei explained:

The @nytimes explicitly stating they believe blacks & latinos are intellectually inferior to whites & asians such that they cannot succeed on their own merit.

This is the face of true racism. The not-so-soft bigotry of low expectations.

Congrats, NYTimes. You are the racists you warn others about.

"Clever, yet defeated" came rushing back to me as I marched through The Password Game, a web-based text box of tears from Neal Agarwal. The game has been trending its way through social media since its official release yesterday, and understandably so. We only get so many of these "Pure enjoyment on the web" moments each year, so I recommend you avail yourself of it as soon as you can.

You'll grasp the theme and genre immediately, as you've been playing it for years. You'll see "Please choose a password," a text box, and then rules. Your password must be at least five characters. It must include a number, an uppercase letter, and a special character. But the digits in the password must add up to 25. And now you have to include a month of the year. And then way more.

https://neal.fun/password-game/

Steve Milloy @JunkScience
·
14,000 panel, 5.2 MW community solar array in Nebraska destroyed by hail storm last night.

This doesn't happen to baseload power plants.

https://notrickszone.com/2023/06/28/huge-nebraska-solar-park-completely-smashed-to-pieces-by-one-single-hail-storm/
9:42 PM · Jun 28, 2023

Shanghai @thinking_panda
·
In China, in the Shanxi province, there is a huge solar energy farm right on the mountain. Solar panels stretch for 80 kilometers. It looks as if the mountain was covered with a blanket.
(Shanxi is on the Loess Plateau which has nothing but silt and dust. Nothing grows there.)
4:23 AM · May 31, 2023 //

A professor of Geochemistry explained that solar isn’t all that “green.” Solar releases nitrogen trifluoride. What’s NF3’s impact on the environment? It is 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

https://www.chemservice.com/news/learn-which-chemicals-make-solar-power-possible/

American Deplorable ™
7 hours ago
Working in Texas I saw a solar array that covered hundreds of acres that was located on the edge of the desert.

The dust storms there are legendary and have been for millennia.

I was told that the dust reduces the panels ability to create power by as much as 70% at times so the utility decided to hire a full time cleaning crew to keep the panels working.

A dozen two man crews equipped with a side by side vehicle, squeegees and spray bottles spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week cleaning the panels.

Absolutely insane. //

bintexas
6 hours ago

1. Climate change hail takes out a field of solar power panels

2. Double the number of fields to combat climate change

3. Climate change hail (aka springtime in the midwest) busts up two fields of panels.

I am detecting the makings of a perfect grift