Article note: Oh, good to see they aren't being dicks about it.
One-Way enable mechanisms like that seem like a good balance between "pissing off enthusiasts who then find and publish exploits so they can do what they want" and "discouraging non-technical users from doing dumb things that will hurt them."
On January 10th Bambu Lab published a blog post in which they address the issue of installing custom firmware on your Bambu Lab X1 3D printer. This comes hot on the heels of a number of YouTube channels for the first time showing off the X1Plus firmware that a number of X1 users have been working on as an open source alternative to the closed, proprietary firmware. Per the Bambu Lab blog post, there is good and bad news for those wanting to use X1Plus and similar projects that may pop up in the future.
After Bambu Lab consulted with the people behind X1Plus it was decided that X1 users would be provided with the opportunity to install such firmware without complaints from Bambu Lab. They would however have to sign a waiver that declares that they agree to relinquish their rights to warranty and support with the printer. Although some details are left somewhat vague in the blog post, it appears that after signing this waiver, and with the target X1 printer known to Bambu Lab, it will have a special firmware update (‘Firmware R’) made available for it.
This special firmware then allows for third-party firmware to be installed, with the ability to revert to OEM firmware later on. The original exploit in pre-v1.7.1 firmware will also no longer be used by X1Plus. Hopefully Bambu Lab will soon clarify the remaining questions, as reading the Reddit discussion on the blog post makes it clear that many statements can be interpreted in a variety of ways, including whether or not this ‘Firmware R’ is a one-time offer only, or will remain available forever.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a 3D printer manufacturer give users this sort of firmware ultimatum. Back in 2019 Prusa added a physical “appendix” to their new 32-bit control board that the user would have to snap off before they could install an unsigned firmware, which the company said signified the user was willing to waive their warranty for the privilege.
VMware's new owner is ending the virtualization and cloud computing company's partner programs. It's unclear who or how many current partners will be able to sell VMware-related offerings after April 2024, leaving the potential for tens of thousands of businesses to be disrupted.
Broadcom, which closed its VMware acquisition in November, told The Register in late December that “effective February 5, 2024, Broadcom will be transitioning VMware’s partner programs to the invitation-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program.” This signaled the end of VMware's partnerships with solution providers, resellers, and distributors. But today’s news reportedly reveals a final closure date for the cloud services provider partner program, which debuted in 2019.
Today, The Register reported that Broadcom recently shared an end-of-partnership date specifically for VMware cloud service provider partners that work with VMware through the VMware Partner Connect Program that launched in 2020.
Article note: It's a bit surprising it is still active. The clearinghouses for other similarly dead platforms of that era (like peanuts for Next) have mostly long since disappeared to only being historical archives.
I'm sure the archives will be thorough.
Fans of the tech dinosaur have a few months to fill their drives with software
Bad news for OS/2 fans: the Hobbes OS/2 software archive is to be shuttered once and for all in April.…
Article note: Very cool, OpenWRT is pretty essential infrastructure for small decent networking gear, and has been for decades.
It seems unlikely having some hardware partners will be corrosive to the overall project.
Article note: Every time I read about the Node ecosystem I remember that I thought it was a joke about bad software design for for the first several _years_ I was hearing about it.
I'm still not entirely convinced it isn't, but there sure are a lot of people who didn't realize.
Happy 2024, folks! Just when we thought we’d seen it all, an npm user named PatrickJS, aka gdi2290, threw us a curveball. He (along with a group of contributors) kicked off the year with a bang, launching a troll campaign that uploaded an npm package aptly named everything. This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies.
The everything package and its 3,000+ sub-packages have caused a Denial of Service (DOS) for anyone who installs it. We’re talking about storage space running out and system resource exhaustion.
But that’s not all. The creator took their prank to the next level by setting up http://everything.npm.lol, showcasing the chaos they unleashed. They even included a meme from Skyrim, adding some humor (or mockery, depending on your perspective) to the situation.
I know this is a bad thing, you shouldn’t do this, it harms a lot of people, etc., etc., but let’s be honest here – this is a hilarious prank that showcased a weakness in a rather playful way. Sure, there were real consequences, but it doesn’t seem like any of them caused any permanent damage, data loss, or compromised systems. What’s worse, it seems this isn’t even the first time stuff like this happened, so I find it baffling people can still do this. What are they doing over there?
Article note: Everyone whose old publications are run through a modern checker is going to get got, because academics have been min-maxing their publication throughput the greatest degree they can get away with for decades, and the standards have changed. Plus, some concepts like self plagiarism in the form of reusing your own background material in multiple places being wrong are new and kind of bullshit.
Neri Oxman, a former M.I.T. professor, is accused of copying from Wikipedia. Her husband, William Ackman, vowed to check the work of the entire M.I.T. faculty.
Article note: Maybe a decade ago I was musing with some colleagues about how computing was interesting as a field because there was basically only one or two generation of the computing field who had passed away, so there is almost nothing not in living memory (and yet we still ignore our own history for the most part). That is rapidly and tragically becoming less true.
(Clarifying: There were the precursor folks like Pascal, Boole, and Babbage scatted way back, and people like Vannevar Bush and John von Neumann who raised the people who made computers realizable, then the first generation with reliable computers like Mauchly, Eckert, Aiken, Shanon, Turning, and Zuse who mostly passed away in 1995+/-10. Everyone else was kind of still around at the time).
Although perhaps not as much of a household name as other pioneers of last century’s rapid evolution of computer hardware and the software running on them, Niklaus Wirth’s contributions puts him right along with other giants. Being a very familiar familiar face both in his native Switzerland at the ETH Zurich university – as well as at Stanford and other locations around the world where computer history was written – Niklaus not only gave us Pascal and Modula-2, but also inspired countless other languages as well as their developers.
Sadly, Niklaus Wirth passed away on January 1st, 2024, at the age of 89. Until his death, he continued to work on the Oberon programming language, as well as its associated operating system: Oberon System and the multi-process, SMP-capable A2 (Bluebottle) operating system that runs natively on x86, X86_64 and ARM hardware. Leaving behind a legacy that stretches from the 1960s to today, it’s hard to think of any aspect of modern computing that wasn’t in some way influenced or directly improved by Niklaus.
A New ALGOL
Niklaus Wirth in 1969 (Credit: Robert M. McClure)
Niklaus Wirth was born in 1938, got his Bachelor of Science degrees at the ETH Zurich in 1959, his Master of Science at the Université Laval in Quebec in 1960, followed in 1963 by his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. After this he worked from 1963 to 1967 as assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University.
During this time he would develop the Euler programming language together with Helmut Weber, as a generalization and extension of the then popular ALGOL 60 programming language. He’d also design PL360, a system programming language for the IBM System/360, which was the new computer system for Stanford University. His description of PL360 and the reasoning behind its design were published in volume 15, issue 1 of the Journal of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). In it he expresses the hope that PL360 will find use as a tutorial language and to be of interest to the designers of future computers, illustrating how his focus was less on this one IBM platform and more on the development of programming languages in general.
With ALGOL 60 becoming somewhat long in the tooth, there was a call for suggestions for the next ALGOL version, called ‘ALGOL X’ as a placeholder. In 1965 Niklaus submitted a proposal for a set of additions to ALGOL 60, which was rejected due to ‘not being ambitious enough’ for a new ALGOL version. Even so, he was invited to submit his suggestions to the ACM magazine, where it was featured in the June 1966 issue. Niklaus would develop his proposal into an extension to ALGOL 60, called ALGOL W, while his colleague Adriaan van Wijngaarden’s proposal for ALGOL X would go on to become ALGOL 68.
Despite the somewhat competitive nature, there was no bad blood between the parties involved, with the very jovial Niklaus Wirth inspiring for example Van Wijngaarden to quip at the 1965 IFIP Congress that “Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way (‘Nick-louse Veert’), Americans invariably mangle it into ‘Nickel’s Worth.’ This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.”
Pascal And Beyond
Following very much his own course, Niklaus used ALGOL W as the foundation for what ultimately would become Pascal, as named after the famous French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal. First released in 1970, this programming language would go on to fulfill many of Niklaus’ wishes with PL360, in that it became an important teaching tool at schools and universities, as well as being used for programming minicomputers that were making computers ever more accessible outside of big universities and companies.
A Lilith workstation, on display at the Enter Museum, Solothurn.
Pascal saw itself developed by Borland and Apple into Object Pascal, of which the Delphi dialect is probably one of the more well-known. Meanwhile Niklaus had commenced developing a new language called Modula, but after a 1976 sabbatical – during which he spent time at the Xerox PARC labs and got inspired by their Xerox Alto system and accompanying Mesa language – he abandoned Modula and created Modula-2 instead, which saw itself paired with the ETH Zurich-developed Lilith workstation, released in 1980.
This was an AMD 2900-based system, running the, fully written in Modula-2, Medos-2 operating system. From here the 1987 Ceres workstation with its ill-fated NS32000 processor followed, which saw the first use of the Oberon System. Although a Modula-3 was also released, this was not developed by Niklaus Wirth, but rather by Maurice Wilkes who got permission from Niklaus to continue with Modula since Niklaus himself was busy with the Oberon programming language, along with the operating system written in it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Example of a Zooming User Interface.
It’s hard to really look at Niklaus Wirth’s career and get anything other than the feeling that he truly enjoyed every aspect of it, whether the challenge of creating a new, better programming language, exchanging ideas with like- and less likeminded colleagues, or increasingly the development of an operating system, experimenting with both Text-Based UIs (TUI) and Zooming UIs (ZUI). Although he noted that software in general by the late 1980s had begun to outstrip the capabilities of the hardware it ran on (referred to as Wirth’s Law), this didn’t deter him from continuing with what he felt was right.
His efforts in progressing the state of computer programming languages had been acknowledged by the ACM in 1984 when he received the Turing Award, along with a range of books such as Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs that were used extensively both in education as well as outside it. Despite languages like Pascal having only a small presence in today’s world of computer science, it’s hard to underestimate the impact that it, as well as Modula-2 and other Niklaus Wirth-designed languages have on the landscape of computer science today.
Much of what we accept as the norm today with imperative and object-oriented programming languages, whether it’s C++, Ada, Java, or any of the hundreds of other large and small languages in existence today, can trace their roots to ALGOL 60. Roots shaped and nourished by Niklaus’ efforts over the decades in making programming languages as simple and effective as they can be. Even today, universities like Oxford continue to use Oberon in their computer science classes, with Oxford even maintaining its own Oberon-2 compiler (OBC).
Where many modern programming languages have a mostly vertical learning curve, Oberon and its predecessors have the property that they are first and foremost simple and elegant, making them excellent teaching tools alongside Niklaus’ books. Although it may seem quaint to teach students to program in a language that they’re unlikely to encounter in a job, Niklaus Wirth has demonstrated throughout the years that it is not the language that matters, but rather the structures and definitions that underlie them.
Rather than developing ALGOL well into the 2000s, he instead chose to design, use and then discard one programming language after the other, dissatisfied with some aspects that he felt certain he could improve upon with the next iteration.
Preserving The Legacy
What is perhaps the biggest risk to Niklaus Wirth’s legacy is digital oblivion, especially considering the fruits of his career. Even while doing literature research on his academic past and the software projects like Oberon (the language and OS) and the A2 (Bluebottle) OS, it’s heartbreaking to see the amount of broken hyperlinks, and the defunct code repository at ETH Zurich for the latter OS. I was able to find an old mirror copy on GitHub by Bernhard Treutwein, in which a number of alternate URL are provided, including an active GitLab instance that appears to be the main repository.
Although much of the information and data does appear to be still out there, there is no good way for newcomers to learn about or get started with these last projects of Niklaus, with generally more information available on Russian-language websites, presumably due to the use of Modula-2 and kin in the Soviet Union and successor states. This fragmented state raises the risk that more and more of this extensive legacy will slowly decay, with few aware of it, and even fewer trying to preserve everything.
Here’s to Niklaus Wirth’s legacy to be preserved forever in its ever-changing, bit-perfect glory, lest it all becomes just a barely remembered Midsummer Night’s Dream.
(Top image: Niklaus Wirth with the Lilith system that he developed in the 1970s. (Photo: ETH Zurich) )
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
