Allowing owners to choose when to install updates would address many issues. Most updates are uneventful, but I’d prefer to install them when I’m at home in my driveway rather than while road-tripping in a rural area, 90 miles from the nearest dealer, or rushing to meet a nonrefundable hotel reservation.
Some NCR cash registers used this trick: they shipped with all the hardware included, but jumper blocks determined what percentage of the hardware the customer had paid for. As the customer’s business grew, they could purchase additional capacity, and an NCR service technician would visit to adjust the jumpers, instantly unlocking 25% more capacity. The actual limits were software-based; the jumper block was only read at startup or when a special code was entered on one of the terminals, and the software limits would adjust accordingly.
The motion picture industry’s problem isn’t piracy, it’s just that they keep targeting movies at 0.02% of the population. If they want to sell more movies they ought to target a bigger demographic.
I recently bought a SIG P320, and a week later, I started reading articles about it self discharging. =P It’s not like it happens all the time, but it seems that if the safety lever spring’s thickness is off by a thousandth of an inch, and the height of the post it fits on is also off by a thousandth of an inch, and you drop the pistol at just the right angle with enough force, the FBI reportedly got it to discharge once during testing—though officially, the results are inconclusive. Now, some law enforcement agencies are quietly replacing the P320 with the Glock 19. Personally, I’m keeping mine because it’s a great gun, and I love that 21-round magazine. However, I sent in my warranty card in case there’s a recall or something similar.
Odds are, you'll never experience the self-discharging issue. Having said that, I don't find a mostly-reliable firearm acceptable from a safety perspective. If I don't pull the trigger, it cannot go bang, ever, for any reason.
I'm still very curious why the P320 beat out the venerable Glock 17 & 19 combo in the Army's recent selection. It would seem being able to change from duty to compact is more of a gimmick than practical. I'd wager most P320's will spend their service life in exactly one configuration.
Sig does have a way of making every pistol feel like it was custom molded to your hand - but Glocks "Just Work".
"I just want them to make one with a damn thumb safety and if this competition won't make them do it, nothing will." - some US Army ordinance guy about Glock, probably.
"Cocked & Locked" is usually how people refer to this - and it is easy to screw up. Under stress, people's fine motor skills vanish, sometimes resulting in the safety not being disengaged as you draw from the holster. Additionally, it can be accidentally flipped off during handling.
Modern firearms have multiple internal safeties to prevent accidental discharges (unless you're Sig apparently).
If for some reason you're open carrying in a holster (like perhaps a police officer or soldier would be), and someone tries to get your weapon off of you and succeeds, a manual safety could save your life. They probably won't realize that the safety is on, and when they point the weapon at you and pull the trigger, nothing will happen, giving you a chance to escape or fight back.
Without that manual safety, the weapon just goes off and you now have an aftermarket hole installed in your body.
There's less of an argument manual safties in concealed carry, though. The opponent shouldn't know you have the weapon until it's drawn, so there's less chance of them getting it out of a holster.
Unfortunately the 2A community is filled with fud and hollywood-esque beliefs. Those who have little training or practical experience often fall victim to believing these fantastical "what-if" scenarios.
The amount of times a firearm has been taken out of someone's duty holster and used against them is a statistical rounding error. Most LEO departments require Level 3 Retention holsters, making this scenario nearly an impossibility. Additionally, a safety isn't going to save someone's life if the "bad guy" has wrestled control of the firearm away from the owner.
This entire scenario is fiction. Manual safeties often do more harm than good - which is why just about all modern handguns have no manual safety (outside of the few States which, out of ignorance, require them by law).
I'd take this with a grain of salt. I generally like James' content, but he has always been a huge Sig supporter and throughout the p320 debacle, he's been more supportive of Sig than I think he should be.
Their report outlined here and the police officer’s account of the unintentional discharge occurred without dropping and while securely in the holster without any items intruding in the holster (i say that because it was a prior excuse Sig made for the unintentional discharge reports)
A thousandth of an inch would do it? They couldn't give more margin-of-safety to a critical part like that?
A thousand of an inch isn't such a theoretical number. It's about 25 microns, and I've shimmed one of my back-focusing photography lenses for less than that much (about 10 microns, to be specific). This is something that they ought to be able to machine for, but depending on the context, it might not leave much room for error.
Its likely a misunderstanding and/or mischaracterization of "tolerance stacking."
A safe example is bike chain. If each one is 1 inch +- 0.01", if every single one is +0.01" then ten links will be long by a tenth of an inch. And might pass QC on the bike when pedaled by hand- but it'll fall off when somebodies full bodyweight and 100hrs of wear is out into it.
That's not how errors add up, it's nonlinear. You have to take the sum of squares. So in your case, it wouldn't be 10 * 0.01 = 0.1, but sqrt(10 * 0.01^2) = 0.032, which is less than one third of a tenth.
Jamie Dimon's "office" is a 2,500 sq. ft. apartment on Park Avenue in New York. It's paid for by the company, and he lives there with his wife during the week. It's so hypocritical that the guy pushing hardest for a return to work is himself working from home every day.
It sounds to me like the university is using the threat of expulsion to steal or coerce you into giving over your site. I think you just got the best IRL education ever.
This is one of those games that would be great to have the source code for. I’ve seen dozens of people try to do rewrites or reverse engineer the code, but this one got further than most. The author of the original Allycat died a couple decades ago, so that little DOS binary is all we’ll ever have.
That is too bad, Teleport is how I learned a lot of the crypto APIs in Golang. It also provided me with a glimpse into part of openssh which was never very well thought out - signed keys.
Since I was working in an environment where development teams tended to obtain root credentials from CI-CD pipelines and use them to change all the permissions on production servers or fill the storage with database dumps, I ditched teleport, ssh, and logins altogether! We followed the serverless model and there are no logins to any compute resource. The only way to bring data in is via unprivileged ci/cd pipelines or the application's API, the only way to get data out is via stderr or writing to a resource like S3. Nothing runs with privileges, there is no ssh, there are no admin-only access methods. Overnight that eliminated almost everything mysterious or unreproducible. No more permissions issues.
When I did low latency everyone was offloading TCP to dedicated hardware.
They would shut down every single process on the server and bind the trading trading app to the CPUs during trading hours to ensure nothing interrupted.
Electrons travel slower than light so they would rent server space at the exchange so they had direct access to the exchange network and didn't have to transverse miles of cables to send their orders.
They would multicast their traffic and there were separate systems to receive the multicast, log packets, and write orders to to databases. There were redundant trading servers that would monitor the multicast traffic so that if they had to take over they would know all of the open positions and orders.
They did all of their testing against simulators - never against live data or even the exchange test systems. They had a petabyte of exchange data they could play back to verify their code worked and to see if tweaks to the algorithm yielding better or worse trading decisions over time.
A solid understanding of the underlying hardware was required, you would make sure network interfaces were arranged in a way they wouldn't cause contention on the PCI bus. You usually had separate interfaces for market data and orders.
All changes were done after exchange hours once trades had been submitted to the back office. The IT department was responsible for reimbursing traders for any losses caused by IT activity - there were shady traders who would look for IT problems and bank them up so they could blame a bad trade on them at some future time.
You don't need to shut down processes on the server. All you have to do is isolate CPU cores and move your workloads onto those cores. That's been a common practice in low latency networking for decades.
I'm not in HFT, but I wouldn't expect that to be enough.
Not only do you want to isolate cores, you want to isolate any shared cache between cores. You do not want your critical data ejected from the cache because a different core sharing the cache has decided it needs that cache. Which of course starts with knowing exactly what CPU you are using since different ones have different cache layouts.
You also don't want those other cores using up precious main memory or IO bandwidth at the moment you need it.
Just to add to your good points: since there's always a faster cache for your working set to not fit in, you can use memory streaming instructions to reduce cache pollution. Depending on the algorithm, increasing cache hit rates can give ridiculous speed-ups.
Some years ago I wrote a gist about HFT/HPC systems patterns (versus OPs C++ patterns) applied to dockerized Redis. Might be dated, but touches on core isolation/pinning, numa/cgroups, kernel bypass, with some links to go deeper. Nowadays I do it with Kubernetes and Nomad facilities, but same basic ideas:
