Posts by jake 26689 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
I was wrong. I did hear about it again. But it took a newbie commentard replying to a three year old comment here on ElReg ... Seriously, as a guy who has lived & worked in SillyConValley & environs these last 60ish years, this is quite literally only the second time I remember hearing about Medium. In any medium.
A pint o'beer to Wisteriacats, for the handle if nothing else. Welcome.
Alternative to a sword, for places where such things are outlawed in public, would be a stick. My walking stick is made from white oak, and is 0.0994 Brontosauruses by 0.3356 Linguini.
Optional: forge iron caps on each end so it doesn't wear out prematurely.
Two bats and a ball are somewhat alien to many of our commentards, who traditionally live in Mummy's basement where the only Sun they see is a rack full of pizza boxen. For these people, I recommend using that long-time unit of IT measurement, the Nanosecond.
Two bats & a BS 5993:1994 standard cricket ball is approximately six and two thirds nanoseconds.
Where'd you get 27 feet? 9 meters is about 29 feet 6 inches, or just over sixty four and a quarter Linguini. (This conversion brought to you by the cross-pond commentard translation service).
On the other hand, perhaps Covid-19 is an hepticosapede?
OIn the gripping hand, beer. It's 5 o'clock somewhere.
"Anyone know the length of two average family hounds?"
Retrievers aren't hounds ... but I just happen to have some actual hounds here. So in the interests of Science, and cross-pond relations, I picked up a tape measure and set to work. The Greyhound curled up into a tighter ball and told me in no uncertain terms that he's sleeping, and go away. The Velcro Whippet decided that my movement at this hour (01:45 left-coast time) meant we were going on our late-night inspection tour of the barn, and he's already downstairs, waiting by the door.
The only logical conclusion is that while you can see a hound, they aren't measurable. One wonders if one can measure them when you can't see them ... but the whippet is waiting, so I'll have to revisit this anon.
Shirley you mean Montréal? Isn't that one of those benighted places that thinks the French should still be in charge? Its a nice place to visit[0], but there is no way I'd want to live there. For one, you only have two seasons, winter and mosquito ... I need at least four. (Here in Northern California we have four: summer, fire, mudslide and earthquake. Sometimes all on the same day.)
Ah, well. Vive la différence? This round's on me.
[0] Especially if the Sharks are playing the Canadiens and I have tickets ... In my experience the locals are very tolerant of out-of-town sports fans, even us left-coasties, once they discover some of us actually know something about hockey.
"a bit like buying Alaskan air conditioners"
Almost mandatory, then?
My brother made quite a decent living selling and maintaining refrigeration and HVAC systems in Fairbanks. When weather is as extreme as they get there, maintaining nicely conditioned indoor air isn't quite as easy as it is in a more Mediterranean climate.
Don't be daft. Linux is the kernel, and the systemd cancer is not now, and never will be, a part of the kernel. So no, the systemd cancer is not Linux no matter how hard you squint at it.
I have never employed the systemd cancer in any enterprise, nor do I intend to start any time soon. Why would I? BSD is a better server OS than Linux (not by much, but it doesn't take much). For the desktops I use an easy to customize, non kitchensinkware variation of Linux called Slackware. You may have heard of it.
It's not a matter of ignoring the systemd cancer, it's a matter of understanding it, and being able to explain to my clients why, exactly, it's not a very good variation on the init theme. To date they have all agreed with me after a thorough explanation.
Obviously YMMV ... but feel free to rejoin the light side. It's very liberating.
"Do state sponsored hackers break down or more simply open novel doors onto platforms and into applications"
The latter. Brute force leaves broken bits and bytes behind. Opening and then closing doors behind after entry leaves no traces (idealy ...). You know this, so why ask?
Monett, your screed is fundamentally flawed for one simple reason: Linux attracted hackers right from the year dot. That's what happens when a new OS built by hackers for hacking appears on the horizon. (Perhaps you don't know what the term "hack" means? If not, you are incapable of intelligently commenting on the subject, by definition.)
As for Linux on the desktop, it works for MeDearOldMum and my Great Aunt. The only major change after switching them from Windows to a subset of Slackware (as built by me, for them specifically) is that support calls from them have dropped to near zero per year, down from several times per month each.
Of course Linux is vulnerable. All complex code has vulnerabilities. It's just not as vulnerable as other alternatives. And those vulnerabilities get fixed, usually within hours of being found ... unlike alternatives I could mention.
Also note that TOA didn't make specific references to any actual vulnerabilities. Nor does the freely available info from BlackBerry. It wants you to provide personal details to them before you can see whatever those details might be. In other words, it seems to be nothing more than marketing bait, and is thus probably worth somewhat less than the paper it's printed on.
" day or so's Azure DevOps outage"
But it's not a day or so, is it? Not a week goes by without ElReg reporting the various clouds going down, being broken into, slowing down, and what have you.
I guess in your scenario of fly-by-night industries & jumping about like a frog in a frying pan corporate "visions", where profits are often calculated on an hourly basis, clouds might make some sense (unless it all goes TITSUP, of course) ... but I don't have time for that kind of headache & ulcer inducing bullshit. Sane people calculate their profits quarterly or yearly.
And yes, I consult for people who have great capacity management, who are prepared to fund significant spare capacity ahead of known demand, and suppliers who don't let me down. So can you. Try it, you might like it. It even pays better.
Those of us eschewing the concept of allowing someone else to run our vital computing needs, instead opting to keep it all in-house, have had no problems. That's none. Zero. Zilch. Everything works as designed and implemented.
What good is a computing infrastructure that grinds to a halt at the first sign of traffic? Especially traffic that your corporation is utterly helpless to help direct?
Have fun watching your clouds evaporate this fine Spring day :-)
Dandelions have a PH of 22.7? No wonder my lawn refuses to grow ... And here I thought it was California's perpetual drought, and me refusing to water it ...
I hope you publicly ripped the idiot a new one so nobody in your family listens to her about anything even vaguely scientific ever again. Dumbasses like that kill people.
(Just as a side-note, spring dandelions are a mostly forgotten delightful salad green. Try 'em, you might like 'em. They get bitter after they flower, so act fast!)
It gets worse! There are detectable levels of Di-Hydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) in all alcoholic beverages produced in the UK. DHMO is a well-known industrial solvent and coolant, and is used in virtually every commercial food growing operation in the UK. This chemical is adsorbed into all foods during production, and even after a thorough cleaning it is still present. It exists in all UK produced foods, even if they are gluten free, dairy free, non-GMO, unfiltered and organically grown with no tree or ground nuts.
Ban all food and alcohol produced in the UK before it's too late! Write to your MP demanding the banning of DHMO before it becomes so common you drown in it!
Hopefully I don't have to point out to all y'all that petrol-filled SuperSoakers are not a good idea?
A kid in my hometown decided to try it back in the early 1990s. The tip of the barrel caught fire. So he shook it to put it out. Spreading fire in every direction, including all over his clothing. He managed 1st degree burns over about half his body. But that wasn't what killed him. He inhaled the flames and torched about a third of his lungs. It took the resulting pneumonia almost ten days to drown him.
Don't become a statistic. Please.
My Father's early 1950s Model 500 Western Electric rotary dial telephone is at my elbow, and still works just fine. It is my primary office telephone. Yes, my local telco still supports pulse dialing :-)
Before you knee-jerk a "luddite"[1] comment, where will all the money you have spent on telephones be in 70 years? Down the toilet, that's where. Think about it.
My grand daughter discovered the thing when she was about 5 years old. I gave her one of her own for her 6th birthday ... complete with a switch & circuitry to convert from pulse to DTMF as insurance for when her local CO drops pulse capability. She thinks it's wonderful ... and her friends think she's weird, which she also thinks is wonderful. Mission accomplished.
[1] I do cop to being a neo-luddite ... I use tools because they work, not because they are flashy or because the marketers or my peers insist that I should.
"You got a 24-oh-whatever to connect to a "Pee-Cee"?!?"
It's not all that hard. Most of the 1970[0] and later pre-PEE CEE computer peripherals had an HP-IB/GPIB/IEE-488 option (this can easily be retrofitted if needs be ... usually). Slackware drives most of it quite nicely with a little bit of tweaking, and the various BSDs make life even easier. (This last is subjective ... BSD and I grew up together.) You're on your own if you run Redmond[1] or Cupertino[2] consumerware ...
The fun hack was convincing Slackware that yes, a 1963 IBM 1402 is indeed a valid printer, and gibberish is NOT what I intended to print.
But usually the mainframe peripherals are connected to their respective mainframes as Gawd/ess intended. Some people meditate. I collect and restore big iron.
[0] That's not a hard cut-off. In fact, the line is about as blurry as they get.
[1] How in the hell can Microsoft release an operating system THAT obese, and yet not find room for a couple K worth of print drivers for a line of printers that'll probably happily take a direct hit during Armageddon and come out unscathed?
[2] I rather suspect that Apple's underlying BSDness can be beat into compliance by a properly cognizant hacker. It's on my listie o'things t'do in my !copiousfreetime.
50 times? That'd be pushing it a trifle. Experienced COBOL coders are already making several times the rate of an average "web programmer" (whatever that is).
I've been recommending people buck the trend and learn COBOL and Fortran since they started dropping the two in favo(u)r of C back in the '80s. Not a month goes by without a former student dropping me an email thanking me for the advice ...
Yes, this box runs the old COBOL code quite nicely. Unfortunately, it's a PEE CEE and doesn't have anywhere near the I/O capability of a mainframe. Which is the problem in the case in point.
I still use my 9track tape and cards to support various clients.
They'll probably re-code it in JavaScript ("so it'll run in a browser", of course). And no doubt require blockchain ... ::sighs::
"And not a single one of these people looking for a job had any experience as a COBOL programmer!"
That's because COBOL programmers are only out of work when they want to be. I wrote this post back in January of 2009. It has remained true for the last 11 years. I rather suspect it'll still be true when my Granddaughter retires. She'll be 10 in September.
COBOL is dead! Long Live COBOL!
Most of us who worked on COBOL for Y2K weren't retired quite yet. Some of us still aren't officially retired.
There is nothing really wrong with the COBOL code we are talking about here. It's been cranking away for years, happily putting in work. All it needs is shifting over to faster hardware with better I/O. Which is available off-the-shelf, for a price. And no, it's not "cloud" crap. For example, I know for a fact that some of IBM's current gear will run COBOL that I wrote in the early 1970s unaltered.
TPTB in New Jersey know this. They just want to avoid spending money. Especially money that'll be going to keeping the legacy code around for another 50 years ... because let's face it, that's exactly what'll happen if it can be made to handle the current crisis.
So now they want us to work for free? What kind of suckers do they think we are?
If it was an accident, I'd do it for free ... but let's face it, long-term gross incompetence on the part of elected officials is hardly an accident. There is more than enough money in the state coffers to provide a better retirement for a couple dozen retired COBOL programmers who missed out on the dot com boom due to age.
"Dead people / Total flown people"
No. But then that number by itself is useless. You need miles and/or hours in that figure to take any real meaning from it. I don't have those numbers handy, either.
However, the MAX flew around half a million flights and only had two fatal crashes. Both of those crashes were avoidable (see my comments elsewhere). In my mind, the MAX could still be flown today, with properly trained pilots at the controls. It's not an inherently unsafe aircraft.
The court of public opinion says otherwise. ::shrugs::
Of course I include myself! Furrfu.
Concur on preferring to be at the controls ... but I can sleep in the Peterbilt when my Wife or Daughter are taking their turn driving cross-country. Not cat-napping, real sleep. It's a trust thing. I also don't mind somebody else taking the controls of the aircraft when we're flying straight & level. Gives me a break. (I admit that I doubt I'd be quite as blasé about this if they weren't dual yoke ... )
It was the 737MAX, there is no 787MAX. Am I supposed to listen to, or reply, to someone who made such a basic error?
I did not say there was no issue with the plane. I said that properly trained pilots knew of the issue, and the work around. Am I supposed to listen to, or reply to, a coward who makes such egregious logic errors?
Consider that the day before the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, the exact same plane was kept from crashing by a third, off-duty pilot who happened to be in the cockpit when the exact same problem that brought the plane down the following day occurred. That's right, he stopped the plane from crashing. As could the pilots who were onboard the next day, if they had had the proper training, which clearly existed.
The fact that this information and training wasn't available to the pilots of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 over five months later is criminal, and IMO that airline should be at least partially, if not wholly, responsible. Blaming it all on Boeing is akin to blaming the loss of a team sporting event on a single play by a single player. It says more about the lobbying power of the airlines than it does Boeing's issues (which do exist, and I'm not saying otherwise).
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