Re: [9fans] Purism laptops

[James A. Robinson]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 1:12 PM Harri Haataja  wrote:
> https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/  Indeed, blobs seems to be one point.
>
> Another thing seems to be that they advertise that these laptops
> have no hidden features or remote control. How they could claim to
> guarantee this and how a customer could possibly believe them, I
> don't know.
>
> Having hardware kill switches is also nice, but guarantees that
> they truly stop any access to camera, mic, or whatnot might be hard
> to make.
>
> Trust or no trust, they might be offering some desirable hardware
> there.

Good points.  Something that might have been unclear from my
original use of the words "put together 'open' hardware" is that
they are simply gathering together hardware from various vendors,
not manufacturing the hardware themselves.  They are assembling
laptops and trying to work with vendors they find acceptable.

But I wasn't so drawn by the privacy issues as I was to the idea of
having a high end laptop that might be documented enough that
one could port another OS to it.

Jim

[9fans] Job interview questions

[Winston Kodogo]

Excellent suggestions by Kurt. I'm sorely tempted to submit them to the
recruiter, but I don't think he'd get the joke.

Re: [9fans] Purism laptops

[Harri Haataja]

On 12 November 2016 at 21:22, James A. Robinson  wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 8:19 AM,
> Andrés Domínguez  wrote:
>> Do they really make open hardware? In what aspect
>> is their hardware more open than any other laptop?
>
> A summary would bet hat typically the hardware
> drivers that are run on a computer come in two possible
> forms, either closed source or open source.

https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/  Indeed, blobs seems to be one point.

Another thing seems to be that they advertise that these laptops have
no hidden features or remote control. How they could claim to
guarantee this and how a customer could possibly believe them, I don't
know.

Having hardware kill switches is also nice, but guarantees that they
truly stop any access to camera, mic, or whatnot might be hard to
make.

Trust or no trust, they might be offering some desirable hardware there.

-- 
I appear to be temporarily using gmail's horrible interface. I
apologise for any failure in my part in trying to make it do the right
thing with post formatting.

Re: [9fans] Purism laptops

[James A. Robinson]

On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 8:19 AM,
Andrés Domínguez  wrote:
> D​​o they really make open hardware? In what aspect
> is their hardware more open than any other laptop?

Hi,

A summary would bet hat typically the hardware
drivers that are run on a computer come in two possible
forms, either closed source or open source.  A closed
source driver, a binary blob, would have an externally
documented API but nothing telling you what is going
on inside the API to drive the hardware, it's a black box
from our perspective, and of course it's an executable
targeted at a specific OS such as Windows, or on the
rare occasion Linux.

An alternative is open source.  Either the manufacturer
is releasing the source code for the driver or they are
documenting the details of the hardware internals
and making it openly available, so that someone with
motivation can write an open source driver.

So I think that leaves us with three possible states
for the components of a computer:

1. Undocumented hardware, and the manufacturer
releases a black-box binary blob to drive it for a
specific set of operating system.

2.  Fully documented hardware, and someone has
written an open source driver for the hardware. In
some cases this a "white room" situation where one
person signs an NDA in order to get the documents
but are then allowed to release a freely available driver
(I think this is the case with a few driver used in Linux
on the Raspberry Pi).

3. Fully documented hardware and paired with
an open source driver for the hardware from the
manufacturer.

I was having a discussion with someone about a
variant of this issue a month ago.  They planned to
write a driver for a piece of hardware, but the ideal
situation of the hardware specification being available
was not the case.   However, a Linux open source
driver was available, so he thought he'd be able to
examine that and reverse engineer it for Plan 9.

Jim

Re: [9fans] Job interview questions

[cigar562hfsp952fans]

Kurt H Maier  writes:

> On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 07:03:24PM +1300, Andrew Simmons wrote:
>> I’ve just been asked to respond to the following. Apart from number 8, where 
>> the answer is clearly “because they are clinically insane”, I am at a loss. 
>> Any hints from the group?
>> 
>
> Happy to help.

...

LMAO.  That's not just funny - it's smart-funny.  Perfect!

Come to think of it... if Andrew actually submitted those as answers to
the questions, it would certainly get the recruiter's attention.
Whether that would work for him, or against him, depends on the
particular circumstances.

Re: [9fans] Job interview questions

[cigar562hfsp952fans]

Charles Forsyth  writes:

> In the newer ASP.NET Core, they've ramped it up by extensive use of
> reflection, so your program ends up trapped in a hall of mirrors,
> and you've no idea who calls anything, with what, when, and why.

Perhaps they're taking their lead from Ruby.

Re: [9fans] Purism laptops

[Andrés Domínguez]

2016-11-11 19:51 GMT+01:00 James A. Robinson :
> Have folks seen https://puri.sm/ ?  Their description of how they are trying
> to put together "open" hardware (not 100% there yet)

Do they really make open hardware? In what aspect is their hardware
more open than any other laptop?

Andrés

 makes me wonder if
> it'd be open enough w/re to hardware specs to make it a target for Plan 9
> porting/support.
>
> Jim
>

[9fans] anyone using jenkins or hudson?

[Steve Simon]

hi

i put together a hudson/jenkins client which,
(because i had the framework to hand) i implemented
as a file system. currently it has been tested against
exactly one jenkins instance. 

anyone willing to test against their build servers, i am particularly
interested in a hudson test.

-Steve