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Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a

Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then. > just tell me how to do what I want to do I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.

bombcar 4y ago
Both points are spot on - people nowadays forget just how amazing things like Rosetta are; around the time WINE began emulation was synonymous with "slow as hell". The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound. We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure". The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.
- blueflow 4y ago
  If i was a surgeon and "held it wrong" I'd probably get sued or fired. If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination. If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    If you were a pilot and "held it wrong" you'd probably be dead, and Boeing would get away scott-free ... the first time. Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.
    - blueflow 4y ago
      Not reading the available documentation for your tools is neglience either way.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        I'm willing to bet a pretty good sum of money that no professional programmer has read all of the available documentation for all of their tools.
        blueflow 4y ago
        Yeah, that does not happen either, but it would be nice if professional programmers would at least try to read it instead of relying on reddit, stackoverflow and random peoples blogposts.
      - afiori 4y ago
        That is why it is allowed to buy morphine by the pound at Wallmart, you are trusted to understand the consequences and use it right. More seriously, the actual objective is not blaming the guilty but rather avoiding the problems. If system A interacting with system B is likely to causes an incident then either A, B, or the interaction need to change. For surgeons all three have happened, the same for airline pilots. The surgeon had to swear very convincingly to have "read the documentation" before being even allowed to think about "holding it wrong". In the case of people using GPG wrong the only solutions you have is to make is easier to "hold right" or make is so heavy and painful that anyone without true determination gives up trying to "hold it" at all.

bombcar 4y ago

Both points are spot on - people nowadays forget just how amazing things like Rosetta are; around the time WINE began emulation was synonymous with "slow as hell". The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound. We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure". The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.

blueflow 4y ago
If i was a surgeon and "held it wrong" I'd probably get sued or fired. If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination. If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?
- bombcar 4y ago
  If you were a pilot and "held it wrong" you'd probably be dead, and Boeing would get away scott-free ... the first time. Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Not reading the available documentation for your tools is neglience either way.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      I'm willing to bet a pretty good sum of money that no professional programmer has read all of the available documentation for all of their tools.
      - blueflow 4y ago
        Yeah, that does not happen either, but it would be nice if professional programmers would at least try to read it instead of relying on reddit, stackoverflow and random peoples blogposts.
    - afiori 4y ago
      That is why it is allowed to buy morphine by the pound at Wallmart, you are trusted to understand the consequences and use it right. More seriously, the actual objective is not blaming the guilty but rather avoiding the problems. If system A interacting with system B is likely to causes an incident then either A, B, or the interaction need to change. For surgeons all three have happened, the same for airline pilots. The surgeon had to swear very convincingly to have "read the documentation" before being even allowed to think about "holding it wrong". In the case of people using GPG wrong the only solutions you have is to make is easier to "hold right" or make is so heavy and painful that anyone without true determination gives up trying to "hold it" at all.