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Admin
I've got to like this :)
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And... cue the buffer overflow
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Awesome Comment Enabled!
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Wow! Third! I am so fucking awesome! This never happened to me before in my life. The gods are finally smiling on me. Everyone will have to read my comment.
Hmm.
Now if only I had something to say.
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Third? Your counter must be zero-based.
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We all know that if your app is going slow the obvious solution is to throw more hardware at it. We just never knew what to do if you can't do or exhaust that option. Now we know!
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A WTH (What The Huhh) framework app running off a 256-bit HyperTurbo CPU with AwesomeCache enabled, what possibly could have slowed it down.
On the other hand, the WTH frame does suffer from Relative syndrome. Now if only the CPU honoured the UNCLE flag.
Admin
This reminds me of one of my first hacking attempts. It was a multi-user mainframe, and as a student my user ID didn't have what I considered sufficient access rights. But I knew one of the admins, let's say "bill", did. So I wrote a fortran program to deliberately overflow its array boundaries and go tromping through "core" looking for the address where my user ID was stored. When I found it, I tried to overwrite that string with "bill", reasoning I would thereby become bill as far as the system knew. Sorta like a soft CPU upgrade, you see?
Unfortunately when I tried to write to that memory location I discovered a little feature called hardware enforced access control. It was a read-only address for my process. Drat!
My second attempt was much more successful. I went over to the DecWriter (a hardcopy terminal) Bill had recently used, tore off the last several pages, and flipped back to where he had logged in. There was a button you could push to turn off echoing while you entered your password, but nobody bothered, because as soon as you hit Return the system would print asterisks and hashes etc. over your password rendering it unreadable.
Or not.
It wasn't hard to see that his password was "Jeni", his wife's name.
Fast forward a couple decades and attacking the system is still a waste of time when it is so easy to hack the user. How little we've learned!
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The CPU was saying uncle!
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This ain't being good solution. If unemploymented, modole is ain't making sence to casual observer, yet is having fer reaching efects for entire system.
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So there's no buffer overflow here :)
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It's good practice. Every optimization should include a placebo.
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It's been a while since my C days, so...the real WTF is not using strncpy?
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What OS was this? You'd think the OS would segfault when you tried to write to memory outside of your process' allocated memory. Isn't that the usual thing to do?
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I gotta ask - was that really the CPU ID string used in the solution, or is it an anonymized string used to avoid vendor unhappiness with this site? I just find it a little hard to believe that the Chief Developer could identify an "inferior, off-brand" CPU, but let a completely fictitious CPU slide.
I think I would have been tempted to request documentary evidence of the performance increase from the Chief Developer, and then revealed the CPU ID switch with an aim to discredit him.
Admin
It is DECwriter...made by...wait for it...DEC [Digital Equipment Corp]. The vast majority of these were used for PDP-11 and VAX computers, both of which were considered Mini computers and not mainframes...
Given that nearly evry mainframe of that time period was EBCDIC based, and the DECwriter was ASCII, it would be extremely suprising to see that combination.
Since I am involved in historical computing (and a member of a number of Musuems and Rescue organizations), I would be very interested in getting more information about this extremely suprising configuration.
Admin
This sound like made up fake story to me.
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He didn't say the DECWriter was connected to the mainframe, only that Bill had just been using it. The likelihood of someone using the same password for both his VAX account and his mainframe account, back then, would have been close to 100%. Especially someone who didn't turn off echo when typing his password.
Admin
If you're going to have a fake story, it might as well be a made-up one.
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Kinda like the time I installed Firefox on a user's PC, put a shortcut on the desktop, renamed the shortcut "Internet Explorer," and give it IE's icon. Whatever gets the job done!
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TRWTF is using loff_t i; instead of int i;
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That's because we're getting new and better systems all the time, but we've been using the same model user for millenia
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We had large numbers of ascii terminals connected to our System 360 running MTS at University of Michigan, through a device called a Data Concentrator, which was a pdp-11 with a bunch of rs232 line cards. The ascii terminals included ASR33 teletypes, DECwriters, Tektronix 4014s, Silent 700s, etc. This was a common configuration at the time.
Also, the DEC-10 was often considered a mainframe, although it was tiny compared to the 360.
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"Ain't?"
Nagesh is from South Carolina now? Mississippi, perhaps?
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I think you'll find the replacement id was annoymized for comic effect. The original was probably AMD (which must of had a 40% market share at some point in the past).
Admin
I used to use a DECWriter attached to a Harris 400 on campus, which is evidently classified as a "supermini." My guess is the OP was referring to a large, installed, non-portable computer with a beefy OS as the "mainframe" even if it was technically a mini or supermini. It didn't take long for these small (read: refrigerator-sized) computers to surpass the mainframes of yesteryear in computing power. The operating systems they used worked pretty much like mainframe OSes anyway.
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Granted, some of us have been at it for longer than others.
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Nope, it's that it didn't follow the GNU style guidelines.
acsi: I'm no' gonna acsi agun...pick up your room!
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Nagesh learned English at the Baptist run Gen Lee Missionary School in Hyderabad.
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Call me crazy, but shouldn't you have just bought 1 HyperTurbo CPU and installed it in a test machine, then ran your load tests to prove that performance still sucked with the new CPU?
That would be a lot easier and more ethical than lying to your boss, and would carry the added benefit of maybe actually getting the problem fixed.
Admin
PDP-10s, PDP-11s, and VAXen were all considered mainframes by the late eighties, when the term no longer meant "the CPU cabinet is the size of a refrigerator" and meant instead "that big box that everyone dials into." This was especially prominent once the microcomputer era began.
Also, there were still lots of big non-IBM mainframes around when the DECwriter was introduced in the early seventies. :)
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KL-10 was a variety of PDP-10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10#KI10_and_KL10
Admin
So, lemme get this straight.
WTF #1: Writing a fictional hardware type to the operating system (provides no performance impact, but prevents insidious ID-10T Runtime errors.) I can buy that.
WTF #2: The 'improvement' in performance. Was it entirely vapor, or did some refactoring take place behind the scenes?
CAPTCHA: Transverbero - A word that becomes movement...
Admin
It is not vapour. Placebo effect is quite real.
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Nagesh almost becomes funny again if you read every comment in a hick Southern accent.
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Terminals made by IBM used other weird character sets. The 2741 came in two varieties which needed different translation tables. However, the 2741 was good for security. I removed the typeball before typing my password and then put the typeball back on afterwards.
I don't remember what I did on ASR33 teletypes. Maybe I ripped out the part of the paper where my password had been partly covered up.
Admin
Old enough to retire yet? Please?
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The reversal of bits was a requirement of RS-232, which transmits bits in LSB-first order, by standard. So a "C" character, normally considered 0100 0011 in ASCII was sent with a start bit of 0 and a stop bit of 1, as 0 1100 0010 1. (An idle line was normally mark or 1 and so if you could consider the idle line as a series of ones, a single C would be sent as ...1111101100001011111111...)
For ASCII, the parity bit was normally in the MSB position of the 8 bits, because the ASCII code assignments in that era actually used only the lower 7 bits (of 8). Parity would not typically be visible on the terminal (though it might indicate an error if the parity was wrong). But, yes, one would be able to TR ASCII-with-parity into normal EBCDIC characters or vice-versa, since both were 8 bits.
Rumor had it that the exact translation table from ASCII to EBCDIC was an IBM trade secret that was actually kept on paper in a vault for safekeeping. And one would guess it still is since I have seen (and been frustrated) by multiple, but slightly different, translation tables.
Admin
It smells suspiciously like Honeywell GCOS, which allowed such tomfoolery. Back in the day, you could do some very (nasty|cool) things, like deliberately cause a system program to fail, and specify the file that the coredump went to. Ok, it involved rumaging through the object code, but you could patch it, and send it on it's way, altered to your specification.
Admin
It smells suspiciously like Honeywell GCOS, which allowed such tomfoolery. Back in the day, you could do some very (nasty|cool) things, like deliberately cause a system program to fail, and specify the file that the coredump went to. Ok, it involved rumaging through the object code, but you could patch it, and send it on it's way, altered to your specification.