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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Looks like I’ve replied to you a few times, and sorry for the accusatory tone! Didn’t mean it! You did get me worried since I’m going to be used “bare metal” in my embedded class later this semester, and felt like I had gone insane not being able to find it anywhere. I was mostly just trying to convince myself this morning I wasn’t insane. I had thought it was the standard terminology. I do also need to caveat this that I am not familiar with whatever law OOP was referencing. I’m assuming it was one of the either baked-in surveillance or age verification things. Yeah, I’m with you and don’t really see a way out, unless we just step way back in time when we had less standardization and do bespoke everything. Cheers, and sorry for the tone!



  • That’s a good point about what the OS provides. I come from an embedded context, so often RTOS are not much more than a kernel that’s handling some basic threads and processor access. There was a really interesting talk at USENIX a few years ago (Usenix 21 keynote with Timothy Roscoe, I just looked it up) that was basically saying that a modern OS like linux, isn’t even accessing hardware and is just an OS in a system of OSs on a computer.

    So you are not wrong about what you are calling bare metal, but that usage is more popular at the moment, but the older meaning of bare metal actually just means “no OS.” It’s still very common in embedded world. They are the same words, but do have different meanings.

    I cannot find it at the moment, but about 10 years ago I had found a guy at Tufts (I think) who was publishing about actual bare metal (no os) single process machines that would run a server with nothing else. It was supposed to be helpful for security reasons. It was definitely whacky. I cannot find it because the server-farm usage of bare metal has taken over :(

    [Bare-Metal (redirect on wiki)[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal ]

    I do now see that “bare metal server” is not going to be the right search term. Perhaps bare metal computing? I’m not sure. But what I am talking about pre-dates virtualization.

    Edit: For servers, it seems the papers are calling it “Bare PC” Example: https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCC.2009.34


  • What you’re talking about would be called running a browser on “bare metal.” The OS is typically on charge of resource management between the various tasks. Access to the processor, storage, screen, input devices, sound, network. The os is a layer that mediates these devices. On bare metal you have to do ALL of that.

    I’ve seen some interest in bare metal web servers in the past which some believe to be more secure. But I don’t think I’ve seen browsers on bare metal. There’s so much browsers need to do anymore. But anyways, bare metal would be the search terms you want to start using.

    Edit: “bare metal” seems to have a newer usage for servers, so the papers I found were calling it “Bare PC.” Example: https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCC.2009.34



  • I have to use acrobat for some work stuff (it is the only pdf reader I can find that lets you do highlights, add notes, and use custom stamps. I’ve tried a ton of open source options and they are all surprisingly missing some subset of those features). I use playonlinux and there is an older acrobat version from there that works. I can look to see what my desktop shortcut is later.

    … time passes …

    Yep, mine works as you are wanting. It’s acrobat dc and it’s from a 2016 version. It’s fairly stable to run, but will freeze out if the blue every now and then. So save often.

    The exec piece is:

    <path>/playonlinux —run “Adobe Acrobat Reader DC” %F

    Maybe this can lead you down a path that works. There is a web version of some adobe tools but I found them to be pretty bad when I tried them.








  • I’ve read the paper and it is indeed garbage. However, I’ve also read the rubric, and per the rubric it should not have been a zero. The student write mostly coherently and had somewhat of an argument, and was clearly responding to a prompt about a personal response to the article. I think the grader is overstepping here. But, we don’t know any further context on if this has been something ongoing and student has been warned before, or something else.

    What does strike me as very odd is that there are ZERO citations in the paper.

    This was being discussed elsewhere but it seems to warrant a low grade (or very low grade) and a conversation instead of a zero.

    Would that have avoided the entire controversy? Who knows. The culture wars are everywhere any more and neoliberalization of education turns it into a commodity of certification instead of places of learning.





  • If you enjoy science fiction, I think Ursula le guins Dispossessed is a great tool to help imagine what something like this could be like on a larger societal scale.

    In many ways anarchism is the default way of living for humans. Unless you are religiously conservative, that’s how husbands and wives operate, and in many ways the global order is also anarchistic (that’s debatable of course and there is definitely asymmetric power strictures but at the core there is no ruling country and instead joint resolutions are reached).

    The devil is always in the details and that’s why leftist infighting exists. The ultimate shared vision and the morality though are there.

    The flip side is that capitalism is inherent with inconsistencies and cannot function on paper. (How can basing a society on infinite growth operate?) But we live in this system and it does work. (For some at least. Perhaps it’s better to say that even though on paper the system does not make sense in practice it is able to function.)

    Would idealized anarchism work? I don’t know. However, is it a dream with aspiring towards? I’d say yes.