We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.
But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.
From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
Indeed, we still pay homage to the era with terms such as the stack, pushing and popping, and all kinds of things .. i remember we had fun inserting random infinite loops in other students cards on occasion until we all realized we could just have marked “finished” stacks with an X across the spine, and also to ease sorting, and so on .. i would mark certain sub-routines with different color markers on the spine too, just to see a budget for how much computing time i expected to be billed for, and so on and on .. lots of valuable hands on came from the card-based computing, its a lost art ..
I have been writing for some time now, on a very large variety of devices, and my current go-to is an iPad and keyboard .. at various times the smart thingy (from Apple) .. but also often now lately with a Bluetooth logi .. just to give the joints a bit of variety as they get older and crankier ..
I do miss the old typewriter. Not so much the selectric era, but more the well-balanced instrumentation of a manual.
Still, there is a lot to be said for the amber glow of full-screened vim session on such a portable device.
The one thing I truly wish for, is a solar-powered writerdeck, i.e. 100% off grid, forever. Just like the good ol’ typewriter ..
I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.
There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..
Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
In 2021, Russia was the source of 52% of Germany's gas. Following the expansion of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 imports from Russia quickly dropped. The biggest suppliers of gas to Germany last year were Norway, Netherlands and Belgium. LNG from the United States and other countries has increased to 10% which is not nearly enough to replace the Russian imports. The phaseout was accomplished by drastically reducing overall gas usage.
There is something better. The little sensor that maintains the distance between the spinning platter and the armature is sensitive enough to be a reasonable microphone. But it is inside a heavy metal box (the HDD) so you do need to shout at it.
>> They tapped into the feedback system that helps control the position of the read head above the magnetic disk. When the head is buffeted by sound waves, the vibrations are reflected in the voltage signal produced by the drive’s position sensors. By reading this signal, Fu and his colleagues were able to make high-quality recordings of people speaking near the drive.
The NSA could turn on your flip phones mic thirty years ago without you knowing, I don’t think they needed to do all that fancy stuff with hard drives. That’s just research that they funded to cover up the fact that they owned every computing device on the planet for a while.
“Hasn’t happened” is quite naive. It happens internally - putting unscrupulous code in a company’s distro before torching the place is a surprisingly regular occurrence in places which have long since adopted Debian as a platform host. IT departments around the globe will benefit from this immensely.
The one single fail point they prevent is infected build hosts.
That might be some reasonable benefit for the company if it is building it on public architecture, but for projects like Debian that insist build hosts are basically offline (package in, package out with no internet access during build process) it is very fringe benefit.
Why should it only be valuable if the effects were to be publicly known?
There are plenty of places in industrial computing where reproducible builds have prevented subterfuge within the organizations themselves. Injecting binaries to do inf-/exfiltration is a long-standing industrial espionage activity which is of immense value to all users of the operating system - not just the consumer users.
My magic beans have prevented thousands of tiger attacks in top secret underground moon bases, never you mind that there's no way for me to actually prove this.
There's a certain irony in pushing for verifiable builds with completely unverifiable claims.
I've worked at several of the biggest targets for espionage, industrial or otherwise, and to the best of my knowledge, the only thing that's ever been discovered by their reproducible build efforts has been failing hardware on build reproducers
You probably don’t have enough experience with professional enterprise IT departments. Rootfs audits are a thing made a lot easier, and more effective, with reproducible builds.
Reproducible builds are an essential method in industrial computing - Debian isn’t at the forefront of this, it is merely adopting industry wide techniques also applied to other operating systems in use in long-term and safety-related applications.
Certainly, a lot of the hard work of the Yocto and Debian developers is already in your hands.
What is interesting is that this is now being applied in a more forward-focused policy by the Debian developers, that it will now be the norm rather than an option…
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