Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | rkagerer's commentslogin

I'd like to snag that latest previous version which still has compatibility with older OS's, anyone have a reliable link handy?

(I couldn't quickly find a "Previous Versions" list on their website)


It looks like all the old files are still hosted on the server. You can just replace the version number in the download links with one of the tags from https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-windows.

But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place?

Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?

Or even go out and proactively build your library for you. Then let you download the missing ones (or if that flouts distribution laws, roundtrip mail them to you).

Since you're unlikely to need to view all of your titles at once, maybe they could do a loaner program where customers pool their entitlements and "check out" movies to watch.

Wait, have I just reinvented OG Netflix?

Move the storage to the cloud and now you have something like contemporary Netflix.

The difference being instead of going out and negotiating bulk streaming contracts, there's a physical DVD backing every single ownership title.

(For my next trick we'll tokenize them to a cryptocurrency...)


> But who wants boxes of DVD's cluttering up the place?

I buy Blu-Rays at charity shops, strip them from the case and once ripped slide them in to a CD wallet with the inner leaflet. A horror show if you were collecting with cases but works for if you desire to own movie to NAS legally.

> Could someone turn this into a business where they store all those DVD's you bought, on your behalf?

Someone did, got sued and the business took the shock and closed down. They used to let you buy old stocked DVD's they owned. When you cancelled your subcription they sent you back the DVD's.


This is so much more useful than the abhorrent practice Google employs of rewriting all its search result links simply to track what you clicked.

Halfway through this great video and I have two questions:

1) Can we take this library and turn it into a a generic driver or something that applies the technique to all software (kernel and userspace) running on the system? i.e. If I want to halve my effective memory in order to completely eliminate the tail latency problem, without having to rewrite legacy software to implement this invention.

2) What model miniature smoke machine is that? I instruct volunteer firefighters and occasionally do scale model demos to teach ventilation concepts. Some research years back led me to the "Tiny FX" fogger which works great, but it's expensive and this thing looks even more convenient.


1. not that I can think of, due to the core split. It really has to be independent cores racing independent loads. anything clever you could do with kernel modules, page-table-land, or dynamically reacting via PMU counters would likely cost microseconds...far larger than the 10s-100s of nanoseconds you gain.

what I wished I had during this project is a hypothetical hedged_load ISA instruction. Issue two requests to two memory controllers and drop the loser. That would let the strategy work on a single thread! Or, even better, integrating the behavior into the memory controller itself, which would be transparent to all software without recompilation. But, you’d have to convince Intel/AMD/someone else :)

2. It’s called a “smokeninja”. Fairly popular in product photography circles, it’s quite fun!


Or, even better, integrating the behavior into the memory controller itself, which would be transparent to all software without recompilation.

Yeah it would be neat to just flip a BIOS switch and put your memory into "hedge" mode. Maybe one day we'll have an open source hardware stack where tinkerers can directly fiddle with ideas like this. In the meantime, thanks for your extensive work proving out the concept and sharing it with the world!


If you're able to do it at the memory controller level, would it be as simple as making two controllers always operate in lock-step, so their refresh cycles are guaranteed to be offset 50% from one another?

Given that the controller can already defer refresh cycles, and the logic to determine when that happens sounds fairly complex, I suspect that might already be in CPU microcode.

...which raises the tantalizing possibility that this lockstep-mirrored behavior might also be doable in microcode.


Is there a reason you can think of why AMD, Intel etc. would not want to do this?

Really enjoyed the video and feel that I (not being in the IT industry) better understand CPUs und and RAM now.


I can not think of any reason they would not want to do it.

However, I do seem at least 2 downsides to this method.

Number one it is at least 2x the memory. That has for a decently long time been a large cost of a computer. But I could see some people saying 'whatever buy 8x'.

The second is data coherency. In a read only env this would work very nicely. In a write env this would be 2x the writes and you are going to have to wait for them to all work or somehow mark them as not ready on the next read group. Now it would be OK if the read of that page was some period of time after the write. But a different place where things could stall out.

Really liked her vid. She explained it very nicely. She exudes that sense of joy I used to have about this field.


> halve my effective memory in order to completely eliminate the tail latency problem,

Wouldn't you have a tail latency problem on the write side though if you just blindly apply it every where? As in unless all the replicas are done writing you can't proceed.


Brio 33884. It has a tiny ultrasonic humidifier in there.

Another tip: Blowing air onto a component, instead of sucking it away, is much more effective for cooling. Basically if you put your hand where the cooled component is you should be able to feel the airflow.

In practice this meant flipping the "exhaust" fans in one of my systems. It resulted in temperatures that were consistently a few degrees lower. Note in this instance there wasn't any ducting involved.


Yes, positive pressure is also essential for keeping dust off components, which becomes insulating if left unchecked. Make sure intake fans have filters and you're golden.

I wish Dropbox would make some kind of “classic edition” that removed annoyances from their desktop client.

They absolute do!

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/simplified-desktop-applica...

Here's a screenshot:

https://i.imgur.com/7g2xRJP.png

It's just a non-intrusive little menu that lives on your system tray. No ads, nags, bloat or unwanted new "features" pushed onto you. It resembles their original software much more than it does the latest garbage to come out of that company.

The context menu shortcuts in File Explorer for Copy Link, Share, and View on Dropbox still work. Sync works. Most of the other crap is gone. It's great. It was so refreshing when it got installed. I would have left Dropbox by now without it.


Wow! It looks maybe a little hard to trust given that it’s clearly designed for older OSes but maybe I’ll play with it since my account is free tier anyway.

(I guess for Linux I could run the headless daemon, I think only the standard desktop experience is available)


I wish Microsoft expanded and built on that model, instead of moves like firing swarthes of their QA staff.

It could have grown into a massive, self-service testing playground where any developer could submit their product and put it through an arsenal of basic, automated evaluations (e. does uninstall leave tidbits behind?), with paid upgrades to more tailored services. They could even publish scores to help consumers coarsely compare workmanship across different vendors, and encourage an emphasis on quality across the whole ecosystem.

Instead they decided to just become overpaid bouncers who take your money, check your ID, and don't even bother about what you bring through the door.


Thank you for that. Although it may be unlikely, I'd love to see a mass exodus away from their failed attempt to emulate all the worst aspects of appstores popularized in other platforms.

I grew up being able to download software and install it, and actually prefer that model (relying on reputational trust of the party publishing it, my own verification from other signals researched, or sandboxing techniques where appropriate).

Most users may not be aware, but a rare gem of a version of Windows that refreshingly doesn't even come with the store (or a bunch of the other unwanted bloat) is IoT Enterprise LTSC.

As a lifelong Windows user, the premise of Microsoft controlling what goes on my PC is revolting. I'm buying a tool from them, not a set of handcuffs. If it was some non-profit, open-source group running the store I might be more inclined to trust it. But ultimately the only gatekeeper on a product I own should be me. Otherwise I don't really own it, which leads to problems like this one.


The main complaint I have against IPv6 is the addresses are so unwieldy. When I look at them I have the same reaction as when I look at some kind of complex scientific formula comprised of operators and symbols that are unfamiliar. It also takes extra mental effort to expand the compressed zeros and interpret what I'm viewing.

Even after reading about them many times and using them in (an albeit limited) fashion, they still just don't feel human friendly. Not like the more straightforward IPv4 addresses do. (Or even like a hypothetical "IPv5" that simply prefixes one extra octet).

Whenever I bring this up I'm told something like "Don't bother memorizing IPv6 addresses. Use DNS instead."[1]

That take completely overlooks the fact that if the numbers exist, you will inevitably wind up needing to deal with them at various points along the way. Eg. Debugging logs, sniffing network traffic, ruling out if DNS is down, etc. I'm a big fan of ergonomics to make things intuitive and reduce unnccessary cognitive overhead, and the new scheme is a regression in that regard.

If anyone has tips on how they became more fluent with IPv6 I'd love to hear.

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/934784/mission-impossib...


Just use it. This reaction is coming from a lack of familiarity, not from it actually being hard.

Here's some roughly equivalent IP addresses:

    203.0.113.45+192.168.1.1 ↔ 2001:db8:2d4f:1::1
    203.0.113.45+192.168.1.2 ↔ 2001:db8:2d4f:1::2
    203.0.113.45+192.168.1.3 ↔ 2001:db8:2d4f:1::3
    203.0.113.45+192.168.2.1 ↔ 2001:db8:2d4f:2::1
The v6 addresses are made up of the network prefix (2001:db8:2d4f, basically an opaque string like 203.0.113.45+192.168), then the subnet ID (1, 2) and then the host ID on the network (1-3 and 1).

When you look at 2001:db8:2d4f:X::Y, it should be pretty easy to see that it's host Y on subnet X, under your prefix which is the same for your whole network. Even if it's 2001:db8:2d4f:X:YYYY:YYYY:YYYY:YYYY it's still the same thing, just with more characters.


Thanks, that's a helpful comparison. You've shown a fixed prefix 3 hextets (48 bits) in length - is that the most common convention these days?

And has the practice of generating portions of the address from your MAC address been universally (or at least mostly) abandoned?


The most common is more like /56, which is unfortunate because it means you have to deal with "2001:db8:2d4f:61XX::". It's still easy enough to read the subnet out of :6101:, :6102:, :6103: etc, but it does mean every address is longer :(

> And has the practice of generating portions of the address from your MAC address been universally (or at least mostly) abandoned?

Somewhere around mostly. Windows, OSX, and network-manager/dhcpcd/systemd-networkd on Linux all enable RFC7217 (uses a hash of your MAC and a secret value), temporary addresses (random addresses used for outbound connections) or both by default. Either of these will prevent people from seeing your MAC when you connect to them.

I'm not sure about mobile devices. I'd expect temporary addresses there, but also MAC randomization is a thing these days which would do the job too.

Notably absent from that list is Linux's in-kernel SLAAC client. Client-oriented distros often enable tempaddrs by default (or they install one of the network daemons that does it), but server-oriented distros tend not to.


This is without even getting into learning the new (old?) paradigm of "exposing" all addresses to the whole internet. I realize "NAT" is not equivalent to "firewall", but placing them at the same boundary made things simple to understand conceptually. I for one never had trouble opening/forwarding ports (and liked the control it provided over what goes in and out, especially in the days before it all just became HTTP) but I sympathize with the major headaches the NAT "workaround" caused.

NAT also solves the dynamic address issue. With GUA I need to deal with both dynamic prefix and randomised suffix that can be changed by seemingly unrelated things when opening ports to the internet.

That's why server use a static suffix and do slaac to get their prefix. It's really as simple as that.

Regarding firewall policies:

just because most network OS are plain dumb, does not implies that's the fault of IPv6.

A zone based firewall solves that already. And for instance OpenWrt fw4 can make rules for suffixes in a zone too.


Does your ISP not offer static prefixes?

For 5€/mo additional I get a static /32 v4 (for NAT64) and a /60 v6 prefix.


SimCity, Starcraft, etc. taught me the value of saving up. But after some decades in the real world, I think computer games should simulate inflation so youth can get some practice at this!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: