Cheques don't bounce.
I'd like to cash this cheque for 10Trillion Zimbabwe dollars, please. Yes, I'd like that in USD. Nickles will do, thanks.
1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
Precisely my thought. Perhaps we should call this latest incarnation "dis-integrated circuits".
Also a time to remember that, at least as I was told back in the day, Seymour Cray had more patents for packaging, cooling, and power distribution than for the more "CS-ish" stuff.
I could probably sell you my 2-floppy set of Micro Focus COBOL for the PDP-11. That's two 8-inch Single-Sided Single Density, FWIW. At the time I bought that particular PDP-11, I checked (on a whim) that the software would transfer with the machine, but that was a while ago, so YMMV.
Finding a PDP-11 to run it on could be as simple as getting SIMH, but then Micro Focus probably has some objection to running in a VM.
So, pretty much anybody working in the police, courts, legislature, or executive branch has a better than 50% chance of being due for a long-term extensive study of the inside of a detention facility Too bad those would be closed, or more likely the inmates would be running the asylum, as usual.
Not to minimize the problem of impersonating an officer. Many police are competent and as honest as the next person, and they are put at risk by this crime. But, just as with banks with online systems that seem designed to train us to be phishing victims, a bit of professionalism on the part of all police would not be amiss.
I am really tired of hearing the usual "A few bad apples.." without the rest of the sentence "..spoil the barrel".
When the instructions for applying a security update to your deep-space probe start with:
1) Hold down the RESET button while turning power to the Main board off for 5 seconds, then on.
2) Confirm that blue LED is blinking.
...
You know you are going to have to deal with that guy in corporate travel, and that never goes well.
One of my (thankfully _former_) employers used
CompanyName/CompanyNameMMDDYYYY (Date of most recent password change)
to finesse the "must change password frequently. And they rolled out the password change promptly on the first working day of each month.
But I'm sure all of the 5K or so employees (from floor sweeper to CEO) knew not to share that knowledge.
(Note: these were not router admin passwords, but the one that gave you access to virtually every computer's network shares)
As it happens, one of my sister's grade-school friends was named Merrily (or, maybe MaryLee, but I was not a top-notch speller at 6). While I imagine there are not so many humans named Merrily, I can imagine a somewhat under-achieving canine, with a show coming up, causing Bob to utter: "Alice, exercise Merrily" .
Of course, Alice may choose to demonstrate her contempt for the patriarchy by ignoring him.
Are there also Snake, Weasel, and Barnacle filters? I have avoided such things so far (at least on my own phone, who knows what the Paparazzi use?), and those three came to mind, but the politician-appropriate list should probably also include Sloth, Vulture, ...
(Yeah, I'm not so sure how to map a barnacle onto a mammalian leech, but that's why we have developers, right?
Thank you. I (barely) restrained myself from replying to the comment above about bottom feeders to note that pretty much _every_ "buyer" of Atari have been such. I lost track around a half-dozen such, in 2000.
As a former employee of Atari (after it had only been bought once, by Warner, not total asshats, but maybe sub-total), it pains me to see a place with so many wonderful, talented, nice (yes, really) people blamed for what has happened to The Brand once it was taken over completely by bean-counters and con-men.
(OK, Williams were OK for a while, but suffered their own dismemberment at the hands of "media moguls" along the way, and there was no room in the lifeboats for the coin-op brands they had collected along the way)
I recall the days around the adoption of SubLogic's Flight Simulator by MSFT, and more importantly by IT (then often called MIS, if not DP) departments.
IBM's failure to prevent "clones" originally promised "A thousand flowers" of PC innovation, but it soon became clear that much PC software bypassed the OS to bang directly on the hardware. The funkiness of early drivers may have had something to do with this. Purchasing departments started evaluating the "quality" of prospective vendors by running, you guessed it, Flight Simulator. Although companies claimed that they were buying PCs for word-processing and spreadsheets, ability to run Flight Simulator became the Gold Standard for "IBM PC Compatibility".
This meant that trying to compete on features like CPU speed, power-supply reliability, or graphics was pointless. The only real criteria were "bit for bit and bug for bug" behavior, and of course price. This drove "white box" clone prices through the floor, while simultaneously reducing the need for shrink-wrap software developers to produce various versions of the products. One (later two) floppy disk format, a handful of glitch-compatible video cards, and we're done. Truly a Golden Age.
Yes, I remember Turbo Buttons, and how infrequently they were used (or, presumably, tested).
But imagine a world where PCs could compete on something other than price, and software developers could code to a published standard with confidence that a rising tide of PC performance would lift at least a few boats.
Yeah/no nevermind
Seeing this is MacOS, it is probably controlled by a bunch of XML stashed in one of the Registry wannabes in folders you will soon be unable to see. And don't think that Search will save you, as you will expire long before it finishes displaying all the uses of "mode", and "line" (with various misspellings) and every string with the digraph 'vi', in every file on your computer and in various clouds.
Jello Biafra correctly (although probably inadvertently) predicted modern computing:
"The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory."
-- That's like two decades? --
Sounds about right. I recall a post on UseNet about abusing the modeline to create a "viral email". This was back when The Cognoscenti were telling all and sundry that such a thing as an "Email Virus: was technically impossible. So, before ILoveYou, early 2000.
I am sorry to report that the one from the Computer History Museum is, well, _from_ the Computer History Museum. Its owner has reclaimed it and moved it a ways north.
Some nit-picks:
The difference Engines are not computers. More like a Systolic Array (or a stack of adding machines) feeding a "typesetter" (which is not quite that either).
There are more than 2 Difference Engines in the world, unless you consider the two from the Science Museum to be the only ones that count. For example:
http://www.meccano.us/difference_engines/index.html
Which lists several, some made from Lego, some Mecanno, and at least one made (in 1859) of the sort of materials one would expect from a proper Victorian Computer.
I have, over the years, reduced my dependency on MSFT to near zero, but my familiarity with a certain fruity company, telecom providers, and various smaller outfits has led me to conclude that the entire _purpose_ of updates is to break existing functionality. Thus is the user "encouraged" to purchase (or more likely rent) a poor substitute for what is lost.
Won't somebody think of the oligarchs?
... wasn't there a problem quite a long time back with at least one registrar whereby if someone checked for the existence of a domain, they'd go ahead and register it - so the person searching could then not do so anywhere else? ...
Yes, I do recall that, although I don't recall whether it was GoDaddy or NetSol.
Definitely a thing, though.
Just FYI, my wife is a Pisces, and an Artist (in the sense of "Sells her stuff in a few galleries, albeit some orders of magnitude less expensive than a Damien Hirst slowly-rotting shark". OTOH, Hirst is an Aries, so maybe the Rams get the Big Bucks)
As for "code that beats it for efficiency": Not gonna happen as long as managers approve the purchase orders for snazzy software tools and hold mere code-jockeys in lower regard than phone sanitizers. Remember that Time to Market is the _only_ metric.
Never tried iWeb, but iPhoto used to do an OK job of exporting an album as a website (that worked across at least Firefox, IE, Safari, and iCab).
Photos doesn't allow it at all. Like all the newish Mac stuff, the apps are siloed roach-motels: data checks in, never checks out.
Hmm, I guess the Eagles were right about Hotel California. Maybe I should try stabbing MacOS with my steely knife? Nope, still can't kill the beast.
Was I hallucinating a time when one could partition the space on an iPod and just copy stuff to it?
Having a spinning-rust original iPod got you music _and_ a handy backup drive.
Pretty sure I was not hallucinating being able to re-arrange the apps on my Touch or phone with a decent drag-and-drop bit in iTunes, rather than the multi-window 15-puzzle hell that is modern iOS.
Yeah, iTunes sucks, but it (and iPhoto, and iDVD) sucked _less_ than their modern replacements.
Now get off my lawn!
The remote-control Food Bots reminded me of a conference some time ago, at which several folks, including some AI gurus, were asked too predict the world in ten years (this was over 20 years ago, so...)
One of the AI gurus had a double prediction: that "ten years hence" (i.e.ago) domestic androids controlled by operators in third-world countries would be replaced by fully autonomous ones.
Check out the Texas company still (as of 2013 at least) running the business on pre-computer punched card gear:
TL;DR version for Da Youf:
https://blog.adafruit.com/2013/04/24/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today-1948/
A bit more info, but still "webish":
https://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html
Traditional version for those of us with flowchart templates (that have been used):
http://ibm-1401.info/402.html
This reminds me of two "ideas" I had back in the day (scare quotes because ideas are cheap, execution is the real issue).
1) A digital camera that would encrypt any images, with a generated key, and then dole out <n> partial keys, such that all subjects (participants?) would need to consent to later viewing. Or using Shamir's "Secret Sharing", some quorum of the subjects.
2) A way to record (on analog tape) a conversation with potential risk of prosecution for both sides, including some preamble and postamble around an agreed course of action. Neither party would want the recording to be seen, but the threat of "blackmail", in pursuit of a "less formal court system" could be used to strengthen the "contract". The basic idea was to shoot the video in a room with a television playing local news and a window onto a busy street, plus whatever other "continuity canaries" are agreed.
As with previous ideas about ways to route (landline) telephone calls to make it harder to associate number with physical location, it was not the work involved (although I am lazy), but the risks of dealing with the most likely customers. Groups like Camorra don't have great retirement plans.
Anyway, also seconding the mentions that the tech from the article will almost certainly find its main use to establish "plausible deniability". Who you gonna believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?
I recall getting a phone call in 2000 when IBM finally stopped supporting 1401 emulation. Guy was still depending on it, although the last 1401 rolled off the line in 72-74 (IIRC).
Impressive in these days when your phone will stop being usable in under 10 years, and be irritating to use within 3, due to "upgrades".
@Old Used Programmer
We must know each other. The CPU was not shipped, but loaded on that truck along with the rest of the gear. I was the one that rented that truck, although I do recall being a bit startled to see the result of asking for the "largest I could legally drive with a class 3 license" And I was 20 years old. A couple of comments at the risk of boring other readers...
The club already had one SS-90, gift of the I. Magnin department store. IIRC, there was another, in much worse shape, stored in Richmond at the former Ford Motors assembly plant. Dunno what happened to it. The two that were actually running in the basement of Cory Hall were bought for a small, token payment (again IIRC) by two members when the EE department threw us out of the basement.
I actually ended up buying it (them) from the service bureau (run by those members), when they shut down (about 1974 or 75). One had been scavenged for parts to keep the other running. So then there was one. I moved it to a corner of a printing plant whose owner was keen on the idea of having a computer, but despite his beliefs, the 480V power he had for his presses was the wrong flavor (Delta vs Wye, IIRC) and the power company wanted something like my annual salary to bring in the right flavor. He got tired of waiting for me to somehow manage it, and called the scrappers without telling me. Thus endeth the saga of the first computer I ever owned, although I never ran it while I owned it nor owned it while I ran it.
Despite the "SS" name, there were valves/tubes, many in the drum read/write stuff, but also six 4CX250 (forced air cooled tetrodes with max plate dissipation of 250 watts each) in the "clock", which was really the main power supply to the diode-core logic.
There were, (again IIRC) 65 Thyratrons in the printer (which had been adapted from an earlier Univac printer), because the drum was "checkerboarded" to reduce ghosting, so only 1/2 the hammers could fire at once
More than you probably want to know at
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-u3.html#UNIVAC-SOLID-STATE-80/90
and some manuals at
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/univac/uss/
The drum is in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA. I had pulled it out for the trip, and was not intending to re-install it until we had power. So it escaped the scrapping.
I'd expect a number of "research organizations" will spring up to study surveillance tech. They'll need a lot of test data so will contract with local businesses (and public libraries, etc.) to share the data collected from devices "on loan". The Authorities will see an uptick in useful "anonymous tips", and the whole thing will be funded either by skimming a bit off the "Widows and Orphans Fund", or under some obscure title in the 500 page "Unicorn Preservation, Rainbow Appreciation, and Omnibus Funding Bill", passed at 4AM in an extraordinary session, after being introduced at 2AM.
Shortly thereafter, a number of people who look a bit too much like stock photos of terrorists may mysteriously disappear.
See also Frederik Pohl's "Heechee" stories with "prayer fans" classified as religious artifacts (and tourist items). I suppose one _could_ make a claim for that being a bit true, if one wants to stretch things a bit., but that would be a spoiler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee
-- being nasty is the only way any one takes anything seriously --
Or you could try the approach of the IT manager at one place I worked. He was generally quite polite, but did have a concealed carry license and the .45 automatic pistol it applied to. And we all knew it. (also drove a Dodge Viper and wore cowboy boots, non-ironically). I later heard he went to work for MSFT.
IIRC, the first paper about the (negative) effects of frequent mandatory password changes came out in the 80s or 90s. Did the 2010 folks do their research in a library? Probably not, because who the heck looks at paper anymore...
Meanwhile, upon being borged by a major networking company I attended a mandatory security training session, moderated by the head of corporate security. After the session I chatted with him for a while and mentioned the password expiry issues, and how long they had been known. His answer shocked me: "I know, but it's not my call". In case you missed that, the head of corporate security could apparently be over-ruled on security policy. By whom? Marketing? HR? Catering?
Of course the whole company was a pack (gang? confusion?) of weasels (apologies to mustelidae everywhere) and I left as soon as my retention bonus vested.
Having retired over a decade ago, I'm pretty sure all of the libraries included in my software projects were Haskell Free. Unless Eddie Haskell took up Computer Science after High School, for its ample opportunities for strategic truthiness, or to Curry favor with Ward and June Cleaver.
AFAICT, the entire purpose of Slack is to destroy productivity, with the equivalent of of a PHB hovering over your shoulder at all times, while klaxons sound at random intervals carefully tuned to maximize anxiety. MSFT has decades of experience at this sort of demotivation, from LookOut! to Clippy, so should have an Edge.
Not seen the online version, but various mimeographed equivalents I (may or may not) have seen contained enough wildly inaccurate information to make me wonder if they were essentially attempts by The Powers That Be to troll wannabe revolutionaries into blowing themselves up, or being arrested for intent while planting totally ineffectual WMD.
But stay away from the (1950s/60s) Encyclopaedia Britannica articles on pyrotechnics if you value your freedom.
And... now I'm pretty curious why I just got asked to re-authenticate my Register username and password, after posting another comment only a few minutes ago.
That works well, until the district decrees that the _only_ way to get homework assignments, required reading, and scheduled exams (not to mention the only way to turn in homework) is "The Portal", managed, as with corporate equivalents, to provide maximum annoyance and ridicule for the masses, and endless fun (and kickbacks) for the administration.
Soon, not having your child's every thought sent to a privately run (but government mandated) data center for pre-crime analysis and ad targeting will be deemed child abuse.
If they are using exponential backup (doubling the "cool off" time for each failure) and keeping the time in seconds, that would be about 31 times. Of course, if their code was using a 32-bit variable, it might be an interesting question whether the next "fail" would wrap to a low number, while a signed/unsigned confusion could lead to requiring one to wait -48 years.
"Set the WayBack machine for 1971",
"and the place?"
" Funky Town!"
(OK, off by a decade, but that's not the worst thing the MacOS calculator has done to me)