* Posts by William K Kelley

15 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2007

CrowdStrike apologizes to Congress for 'perfect storm' that caused global IT outage

William K Kelley

Why is CrowdStrike even necessary?

Properly architected hardware and operating system software would not require something like CS! Basic problem is that x86 / Windows, PDP-11 / UNIX, and Linux began life as single-user systems with no thought being given to proper isolation and security. They have been grafted on over time, but it's been piecemeal and the gaps continue to be exploited. Systems designed as multi-user systems from the beginning have had fewer of these issues.

Ancient US air traffic control systems won't get a tech refresh before 2030

William K Kelley

Re: Shocking

If the FAA is still using 5081's, these are specialized versions of the 3081 mainframe (370-XA architecture) from the very late 1970's / early 1980's. They were 2-way multiprocessors (2 cores in today's parlance). The technology was bipolar transistors (not CMOS) running inside of Thermal Conduction Modules (TCM) which conducted their heat to a circulating cold water system. From what I understood at the time was that IBM warehoused some number of TCMs for replacements and it is likely that they are now running out. The technology to build new TCMs is long gone. The 5081's were surrounded by specialized gear to interface them to the various ATC inputs. If these systems are still running today, it is a testament to how well they were designed, built and programmed.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

William K Kelley

RIP CardCard and TiVo

The FCC has apparently ruled that US cable providers no longer have to support CardCards, which among other things, are required to interface TiVo DVRs to digital cable systems. So as of sometime in October, my cable provider- Optimum - will cease to support their CableCards and my two TiVo's become bricks. The wife is not happy! Not clear what the alternatives are, but undoubtedly it'll cost me more money.

US warns aging air-traffic control code won't be fixed until 2030

William K Kelley

Re: It'll Be Soooo Cooool ... When We Add A.I.!

Getting rid of the irrelevant NOTAMs is helpful -- making the remaining NOTAMs more easily understandable would be far more useful. Most NOTAMs use four times as many words as necessary; they need to be far more succinct! If you go to the NOTAM website you'll see what I mean... It's hard to avoid you're eyes from glazing over after reading the first few.

Any iPad is foldable if you try hard enough but Apple guru says a hinged one is coming

William K Kelley

OLED iPad?

I have NO use for a foldable iPad, but an OLED iPad (Mini) would be GREAT! As a pilot, the single biggest problem with an iPad has always been the interaction between the iPad LCD screen (and other avionics with LCD screens) and polarized sunglasses. The choice has been to give up the polarized sunglasses so you can read the iPad and put up with the glare or cut the glare and not be able to read the iPad. Now if only Garmin would change to use to OLEDs...

Hardware boffin starts work on simulation of an entire IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe

William K Kelley

S/360-50 microcode held in capacitors

Curious how he got ahold of the S/360-50 microcode. On several of the S/360 models (40,50,65,67), the microcode was held in arrays of capacitors formed by large plastic sheets with conductors etched on one side of them held between large steel plates. These capacitors were quite sensitive to the pressure applied to them by the steel plates (which were sensitive to the temperature inside the machine's cabinet) and the IBM customer engineer (CE) would occasionally have to re-torque the screws which applied pressure to the plates. A microcode update required demounting the plates, replacing the plastic sheet with the new one, replacing the plates and then re-torquing them until they read properly. Model 30 used plastic 80-column punch cards inserted in slots in the machine for its microcode. Models 44, 75 and 91 were "hard-wired" for best performance and didn't have microcode, which made fixing engineering mistakes more costly. S/370 microcode was held in semiconductor memory and loaded during machine power-up initialization from 8-inch floppy disks which IBM invented for that purpose.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

William K Kelley

Blame Jack Welsh

Almost all of the executives that drove McDonald-Douglas and subsequently Boeing into the ground were alumni of General Electric and former CEO Jack Welsh. His alumni have wrecked several other US companies as well, most notably GE itself. When "financial engineering" replaces real engineering, bad things (eventually) happen, like at IBM.

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

William K Kelley

Re: Pilots

Right! I use an iPad Mini 4 running Foreflight all of the time when flying a Cessna 172. The Cessna has a Garmin 650 GPS built-in but the display is tiny -- the iPad is just right mounted on the yoke. The one thing I wish Apple would do is come out with an iPad Mini 4-sized iPad with an OLED display - then I wouldn't have problems with polarized sunglasses.

Multics resurrected: Proto-Unix now runs on Raspberry Pi or x86

William K Kelley

Re: Anything we should steal ? - Definitely

The much under appreciated IBM TSS/360 operating system also had memory-mapped files, decades before the FS-inspired System/38 (iSeries these days). Basic problem with TSS was that it was well before its time, and the S/360 model 67 hardware was never adequate to run it. While it was possible to get a 32-bit addressing version of the model 67, no S/370 models offered it, so customers such as General Motors who had built their early automobile CAD system on TSS were unable to migrate TSS to S/370 and had to rewrite/restructure their CAD software to run on the 24-bit virtual of S/370, and also lost the ability to have memory-mapped files.

Crafty Fokker: Norfolk surgeon builds Red Baron triplane replica

William K Kelley

Not so easy to fly...

Some years ago, a US Navy "Top Gun" pilot convinced Cole Palin to let him fly one of Palin's DR-1 replicas. Which he crashed shortly after take-off. He survived without injury, but the plane was a total loss. You can still see the pile of wreckage, preserved in one of the museum buildings at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome.

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

William K Kelley

In certain niches, they're still revolutionary

For pilots, tablets -- and in particular iPads -- have been nothing less than revolutionary. Airline pilots have been able to dispense with tens of pounds of charts and manuals that they used have to carry with them, and private pilots (at least in the US) now have situational awareness that they couldn't have dreamed of (or afforded) ten years ago. For less than a thousand dollars, I can fasten an iPad mini to the yoke of the Cessna I fly, wi-fi attach it to a Stratus GPS and ADS-B in source, and running the Foreflight app have a moving map display of my position, with near real-time weather, and other nearby traffic. The combination really puts to shame the Cessna's built-in Garmin GPS (yes, I know the Garmin is TSO'd and the Stratus/iPad isn't). Rather than focus on what tablets don't do as well as laptops or workstations, maybe the point is that there are things they are capable of doing where laptops and others need not apply.

NASA swerves serious cash cuts – but Earth climate probes, asteroid snatcher face axe

William K Kelley

Aeronautics?

Somehow everybody forgets that NASA is also about aeronautics, so it'll be interesting to see whether any of their proposed X-plane projects survive.

Intel fabs to churn out 10nm ARM chips for LG smartphones next year

William K Kelley

Its all about fab utilization

Intel is being forced to fab non-x86 stuff for the same reason that IBM had to fab game processor chips for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo -- if your fab utilization falls below that required to cover your fixed costs you start losing money big time. In the case of IBM, it bought them a few years, but once Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo went elsewhere IBM getting out of the business (by selling to Global Foundries) was inevitable since they did not have enough volume of their own to cover the escalating expense. Intel is facing the same prospect. You've got to make a lot of chips to justify a $10B investment in a new fab. This was a pragmatic decision, nothing more.

Remembering the Cray-1

William K Kelley

Another Seymore Cray story

Apparently the French atomic energy agency had a brand new CDC 6600 that refused to operate correctly and the service guys from CDC had been unable to locate the problem. The French government was threatening to throw the machine out, so CDC sent Seymore over to rescue the machine. After looking at all of the tests that had been performed by the techs, he closed himself in a room (not with the computer, and with no schematics), emerging a few hours later to tell them that the problem was a particular transistor on a particular board in a particular part of the machine -- and he was right. When asked how he had arrived at the solution, he said it was the only possible answer given the test results and the structure of the machine. His understanding of the machines he created was legendary...

Sony renounces rear-projection TVs

William K Kelley

Bummer

From what little information has been posted, its not clear what Sony is killing. Are they killing just the LCD rear-projection units or the SXRD rear-projection units too? Very different tech and the SXRD tech is also used in their front projectors. Are they gonna kill the front projectors too? And where are the large (60-70") LCD panels to replace the 60-70" rear-projection units? The whole point of the rear-projection stuff was to provide affordable large screens. The largest LCD I've seen at Crutchfield's is just 57" and is double the price of a 60" rear-projection unit. And then there is the question of picture quality -- the SXRD tech results in no discernable gaps between pixels whereas LCD (and plasma too) have a decided "screen door" appearance. But I guess too many people are buying their LCD panels because they are panels and look "cool" rather than for their picture quality. OLED looks great, but its going to be awhile before we see 60-70" panels. Hope my SXRD rear-projection system holds up until then...