Change keeps coming, even when the wire format of a protocol has ossified. I've spent years in security and router performance at Cisco, wrote a respectable fraction of the flagship's L3 and L2-L3 (tun) firewall. I merged a patch on this tried-and-true firewall just this year; it's now deployed.
As vendors are eager to remind us, custom silicon to accelerate everything between L1 to L7 exists. That said, it is still the case in 2025 that the "fast path" data-plane will end up passing either nothing or everything in a flow to the "slow path" control-plane, where the most significant silicon is less 'ASIC' and more 'aarch64'.
This is all to say that the GP's comments are broadly correct.
In the mid-2000s, I attended evangelical 'kids night'. Held each Friday at the dead-center of an unincorporated community in rural Colorado.
The "cool" youth pastor who was responsible for these events told us "the Gospel's authors are anonymous, their names are totally traditional". I never had the sense that this view was in any way heretical or contentious, even in a strain of Christianity that strongly emphasized the historicity of the Bible.
The pandemic killed a fantastic meetup called "Papers We Love" here in San Diego. I miss the many great people (and papers) I met through PWL, and would be thrilled to see something like it again.
If not, we're just going to have to jump-start it ourselves.
I traveled through a town in California known for it's apple orchards. There, I ate a 'Hawkeye' apple, which was said to be an ancestor of the 'Red Delicious'.
The 'Hawkeye' isn't my new favorite, but was good enough to appreciate how much it's shameful descendent had dishonored the name of this otherwise respectable apple family.
The Red Delicious was made not for taste, but for durability: it has exceptionally long shelf life, so it's excellent for shipping to far-away places, including overseas, and it doesn't require refrigeration.
Most likely, the ancestor doesn't keep or ship that well.
There's a reason no one who actually likes apples buys Red Delicious these days; they buy one of the better varieties like Gala or Fuji or Honeycrisp or many others. Red Delicious still sell in huge quantities in the US, though, mainly to institutions like schools and hospitals. When the person selecting your meal cares more about cost than taste, you get Red Delicious.
Also, Americans throughout much of the 20th century had very poor culinary tastes. That only started changing in the 1980s, and got much better by the 2000s. So for a long time, Americans were perfectly happy to eat the nasty Red Delicious apples.
And you can still get Hawkeye. In fact, you can probably look up and find hundreds of heirloom apple types, pick any three at random, and go get them within a few days if they're in season.
Feistel ciphers are a good technique for doing just this but it's also worth noting that if all you are looking for is "produce a pseudorandom permutation of 1..N without actually shuffling a list of numbers" you can also use an LFSR as well.
of course, but an LFSR is going to be faster (provided you have a reasonable number of rounds in your Feistel cipher), have some situationally desirable statistical properties and is easier to adapt than a format-preserving encryption technique like a Feistel network.
Sorry, but faster for the computing capabilities we have in every electronic device is no significant in the application. I have not seen a customer inquiring about the speed of this process. They were looking to a method that is more secure than others.
For example, in the case of Philip Morris was about winning prizes and imagine if they tried other methods before where some smart people reversed the method.
In general, not really, but the most common string comparison instruction in x86_64 leaves the last character of one of the strings being compared with the other one just being a pointer into the C-style string.
This isn't to refute your overarching point, but even the oldest of stories, the 'Epic of Gilgamesh', begins with the titular character accused of not "leaving maidens to their warriors", leading the gods (and people) of Ur to try to end his reign. I think the story makes it clear - this behavior was totally unacceptable for a king, even in what the Sumerians considered "those ancient days, when bread had been tasted for the first time".
Do you see this is an expression of secular "neo-Persian" nationalism, or as part of a reaction to Iran's religious conservatives who'd read literal truth in the Quran's story of a heroic Zuul al Qarayn (whom I've heard is identified with Alexander)?
i enjoyed the shitstorm i unintentionally created but i don't think most people (even religious ones) make the connection with dhu-l-qarnayn. it's probably, like someone else said, something that has to do with softer or harder persian nationalism. after all, even religious iranians are still iranians.
Very neat. Do you implement option parsing in "magic getopt" or can you (somehow?) handle setting up the option string arguments used by the more familiar variants in getopt(3)?
All the option parsing is done in functions called by the macros. The "getopt string" isn't needed since the GETOPT_OPT() and GETOPT_OPTARG() "case statements" convey the same information (the set of valid options).
As vendors are eager to remind us, custom silicon to accelerate everything between L1 to L7 exists. That said, it is still the case in 2025 that the "fast path" data-plane will end up passing either nothing or everything in a flow to the "slow path" control-plane, where the most significant silicon is less 'ASIC' and more 'aarch64'.
This is all to say that the GP's comments are broadly correct.