Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: Hmmmm...

outside ARPANET (and possibly early versions of JANET) it wasn't really used

I don't believe that's true. While other protocol families such as DecNET, SNA, and XNS were also still common at the time, even in the first half of the '80s TCP/IP had a significant share of local networks and small-i internets in academia and some businesses. The CMU/IBM Andrew Project was always TCP/IP-based, for example, and it started in 1982. The same was true of MIT/DEC/IBM's Project Athena, which started in 1983. I think BSD 4.1a with TCP/IP came out in '82.

For the big-I Internet, besides ARPANET there was CSNET (routing TCP/IP over X.25, starting in 1981), NSFNET (1986), and others.

Wikipedia says JANET (an X.25 network) didn't start routing IP traffic until the 1990s. BITNET, a prominent US academic network, and IBM's VNET (the largest internet in the world until it was surpassed by the TCP/IP Internet sometime in the '80s) ran on RSCS, a pre-SNA IBM protocol. RSCS was a store-and-forward protocol somewhat like UUCP.

Re: He's threatening Italy as well

Alas, for the US, Mike Pence is a drawback.

Re: Engineer ?

Frankly, I'm not so complacent about the medical industry's co-option of the term "doctor", either. Both etymologically and in other fields it means "scholar", and many medical doctors, while upstanding members of their profession, do no research and don't even have much time to follow current research in clinical practice. (That's why Cochrane metastudies exist: so that a team of experts can review research in an area and digest it down into clinical recommendations.)

And in the US, medical interns - who are not yet licensed medical doctors - are generally told to use the title "doctor" with the patients they see. They are scholars - they're still in school - but the medical profession wants to have it both ways: "doctor" meaning "student" and meaning "professional who has acquired some special credential".

Perhaps everyone read the article and understands the bug was in a third-party app?

I think Apple's security is overrated by many (most?) users, but they're in the clear on this one. Unless you think they should do more extensive vetting of everything in the app store,¹ which is a position one could argue, but doesn't seem economically feasible.

¹Say, by requiring apps be submitted as source, which Apple would run through static analysis and then build and deploy to the store. That's technically feasible but probably not a viable business model, since it would be resource-intensive for Apple and would meet resistance from app developers.

Re: Inventory

"I have no idea. I've never tured anything."

(The judges would also accept "Some sort of fancy car?".)

Re: No Outsource Clause

Was it not declared? The article says Co-Op claimed they were told the IG package was an "out-of-the-box solution". My impression is IBM told them pretty early on, possibly in the proposal, that they'd be using Insurer Suite. Since IBM does not have their own commercial package for this industry vertical, you'd think Co-Op would have wanted to know where the software was coming from at the start.

I'm not saying IBM didn't misrepresent Insurer Suite - they may well have; I don't know anything about the situation beyond what's in the article. But it doesn't sound to me like they represented it as something developed in-house.

Re: Shock

Yes, since it's impossible for a firm to obtain a second domain name, that will definitely do the trick.

Re: s/specific skills that are in limited supply/willing to work for peanuts/g

They could move elsewhere

Many of them have, or never located in high-rent areas in the first place. Any list of high-tech growth areas for IT in the US will show that there are plenty of other areas with high concentrations of IT and other high-tech firms.

the glamor isn't there

From surveys I've seen, this appears to be largely irrelevant to many firms and most of their employees.

Sure, Silicon Valley still has a cultural presence, and that draws some firms, the ones who hope to find success by basking in the glow of the FANG companies or want to be close to the venture capitalists so they can con them in person. But not everyone is so easily led.

Re: Why indeed...

you actually can't hear what people are saying if there's other loud stuff on the soundtrack, because the speakers are so bass and treble heavy and knacker the mid-tones

IME, this is at least as much due to stupid, ubiquitous Dolby 5.1, and sound engineers insisting on mixing the dialog on the center channel - which is largely lost if all you have is a pair of stereo speakers.

We've had to get (cheap) "soundbar" speaker sets for the TVs in our houses (just one each, fortunately) in order to reliably make out dialog without having background music and SFX too loud. My wife is deaf on one side, so audio separation is meaningless to her, and I don't care about it a whit; but we need at least three channels just to hear the programs.

TV sets used to come with an option to force sound to mono, which would be just fine with me, but I haven't seen that feature in years.

A pox on all their houses.

Ooh, pigment war! Death to VANTAblack! Black 3.0 forever! (Or, I guess, until Black 4.0?)

Though the last I looked they're both proprietary. When will we have a true open-source really-very-black paint?

Re: Sedation for tooth extraction?

Extracting impacted molars is better done by a proper dental surgeon, not a run-of-the-mill DDS. All credit to my dentist, whom I quite like; but that's a specialty procedure. Which is why she referred me to a dental surgeon to have my impacted supernumaries¹ removed.

And a good thing, too; one of them was bent in a full 180-degree arc. Took some work getting it out. The surgeon said it was one for the trophy case, but alas it turned out he was just kidding, and didn't have a trophy case.

¹Extra molars behind the "wisdom" (third) set. I still have my third molars, but the fourths had to come out.

Re: Perspective

This is not a loss for Free Software fundamentalism, it's a testament to the influence it's had on the world of software, transforming the landscape into a world that's now orders of magnitude more open.

I'm dubious about this narrative. Shipping source was the rule, not the exception, in first couple decades of commercial digital computing. The move to closed-source software was arguably driven by a couple of factors: the rise of commercial pure-software companies, and the IBM consent agreement which led to "unbundling" and the forced conversion of its mainframe software into a profit center.

Even prior to the rise of the free/open software movements, source code was still exchanged widely, at both small scale (the txtfile community, for example) and large (AT&T UNIX). When Stallman founded the FSF, I don't recall it being greeted as a surprising concept; the controversy was around the ideology, not the notion of open source, or even open-source commercial software.

Personally, I suspect we'd have a significant open-source presence even if the FSF and the free-software movement (and its variants) had never happened. Certainly the FSF and GPL had a tremendous effect on the evolution of FOSS and its current state, and almost certainly on the volume of FOSS and the success of FOSS-based commercial firms such as Red Had. But I think it would have been significant even without them.

the distinction between acronym and initialism originated in the US

And wherever it originated, it's false pedantry. There's no good justification for avoiding the term "acronym" for so-called "initialisms".

Re: All the more reason...

Ah, that's some good kook-rant.

Re: I don’t see how USB-C solves the charger-zoo problem......

Indeed. I'm sure mileage varies, but for all my USB-charging devices¹ I've always just had a couple of those kits that have a cable and a set of adapters for various USB sizes, and the assortment of USB chargers I've accumulated over the years. Phones, tablet, Kindle, that old MP3 player I sometimes dig out for when I'm working on the house - they all charge just fine with whatever cable and charger I use.

I keep a couple of chargers in my computer bag and have various ones scattered around the houses. (The latter stay plugged in; they dissipate negligible heat, which means they're using negligible power.) I've never had any reason to look to see what they're rated for.

¹Refusing to use Apple products has solved the Lightning problem nicely.

Re: The Future of the Deal

I suppose some of his most gullible followers might believe that's a quote manufactured by the deep-state LIEberal elite MSM news, but not enough of them to get him re-elected.

As far as I can tell, for the vast majority of his supporters, it doesn't matter what he may have said. Positions don't matter; policies don't matter; performance doesn't matter.

I've read numerous interviews with Trump supporters over the past few months. These are middle-class and upper-middle-class people, likely voters, likely financial supporters. They're educated, articulate, not perceptibly stupid or ill-informed or insane. And what they say, consistently, is that they'll vote to re-elect the man. Sometimes they'll mention specific achievements (the tax-code changes he signed into law, the stock market, etc); Trump doesn't really deserve much credit for those, but they don't dwell on them anyway. They're excuses. Then they'll use descriptions like "the best president since Reagan" or in some cases "the best president ever".

The real warrant to their arguments, readily apparent, is that they support Trump because he's their team and they want to win the game. US politicians have successfully pushed most of the electorate into treating politics as a sport, and most voters will put up with pretty much anything to support their team. People mocked (and continue to mock) Trump and his supporters since he first entered the 2016 race; and those supporters will be damned before they back down.

And so will the rest of us.

Under a number of models, the European countries and Japan are both part of the continent of Eurasia. Regarding Europe is a continent unto itself has a long history but is by no means uncontroversial. Certainly, those who consider the Americas to be a single continent - a convention widely observed in a number of countries - don't have much justification for calling Europe a separate continent.

Re: "Most-accurate algorithms showed 'little to no bias', so nothing to fear, eh?"

Yes, privacy is a major concern, as are attacks on group behavior. An argument can be made that crowd anonymity is a fundamental human right. I'm reminded of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd".¹

¹I've always wondered if this story is the origin of the term "gumshoe" for a detective. A quick search didn't turn up an earlier use. I'd check the OED but I'm feeling lazy.

Re: The two biggest problems in IT security today ...

90% of the userbase is incapable of wrapping their tiny collective hive mind around the concept of security

Of course. For any topic X of at least moderate complexity, it's likely true that for a sufficiently large population, at least 90% don't understand X - regardless of its relevance to their lives or jobs.

Security researchers have made the point, over and over, that blaming users is unproductive; and that training users, while it can have some benefit, is limited and rarely or never a satisfactory solution in itself.

None of that contradicts what you wrote, of course. It's just to point out that while we have mechanisms for encouraging greater investment (regulation in various forms, possibly with some contribution from market forces, e.g. by coupling security measures to insurance premiums), the human element remains an intractable problem. It can likely only be successfully addressed with a complex of human and technical measures that's customized for different use cases.

Re: and giving users an inferior experience when compared to a native desktop application

Browser-based apps can only be astonishing if you're easily astonished. FTFY.

I've never seen a browser-based application that I'd consider anywhere close to "astonishing". I might allow "mildly impressive". And, yes, I've used Google Docs.

Re: And I quote...

Since there's no absolute frame of reference, and information cannot be transmitted faster than C, for most purposes it makes just as much sense to talk about it in the present tense.

Re: This is an application!

IBM Data Explorer/6000, which began life as IBM Scientific Visualization System, is another example, from circa 1991. It provided a dataflow programming system for data visualization where the user added processing modules to a directed graph. Users could also write their own modules (in the language of their choice), but drag & drop was the main paradigm.

It's an approach that works well in specific domains. I'm much happier seeing scientific visualization done that way than in Excel, for example.

But, yes, for general business application development, this approach is often oversold, and the market seems to already be well-served. Tableau seems to be reasonably successful, for example.

Re: Just another example?

The almighty buck has for a long time dominated decision-making

So what's your solution? Running a university is expensive. US universities rely heavily on non-tenured faculty (fixed-term and part-time) and high-tuition students (foreign and legacy) because they have to pay the bills and state support has plummeted over the past couple of decades. Students who aren't wealthy rely on loans they already can't afford, so they oppose tuition increases.

Nobody really wants to learn - they only want the diploma; nobody really teaches - they just cram folks for exams; exams are increasingly multiple choice, which just tests parrot memory, not understanding.

Sigh. It's easy to lob generalizations. I've been an academic (including a number of stints teaching) and many of my friends and family members are in academia, and I'm calling bullshit on this. Most of the professors and instructors I've known take teaching very seriously indeed, and a majority of the students - undergraduate and graduate - are sincere about learning, for the most part.

Multiple-choice exams may be common in some areas, particularly for recitation classes; it's not feasible to grade several hundred essays in a couple of days. But I can only remember seeing a couple of them while studying for my three degrees (or the fourth that I never finished).

Re: Accountability

The purpose of the USAF is to support Boeing shareholders

It's symbiotic - there's money and power on both sides. That was Eisenhower's point about the military-industrial complex.