Posts by Henry Wertz 1 3334 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
I could see an AI being used for this to just say 'take a look at these patents', find ones covering similar topics. Save time. But then the examiner will still have to examine them.
But for exposure? Yeah. I feel like an individual could bung up a model that could do this, let alone a big company, since it just has to find patents for a human to take a closer look at. I could probably come up with something on my desktop. But for zero compensation? Please.
Regarding WHY the US had dual 2G/3G standards --
Qualcomm developed CDMA in the US. They included a smooth upgrade path so early CDMA phones could seamlessly switch from analog (AMPS) to CDMA digital phone service. They used 1.25mhz channel width so companies that only had a single cellular band could switch from analog to CDMA using 1/10th of their spectrum at a time. It had higher call capacity than GSM as well. When EVDO came out, it also used 1.25mhz channels, so companies that didn't get new spectrum could gradually add EVDO (a bit easier than 5mhz channels of UMTS/HSPA.) It only ran at 2.4mbps initially and 3.1mbps with "EVDO Rev A", but Verizon already had EVDO rolled out to about 50% of the country before UMTS was even released. That limited per-user speed but they could keep adding more channels to add capacity. (3.1mbps x 4 indicates about 12.4mbps per 5mhz of capacity. So HSPA+ 14mbps and 21mbps were more efficient, but EVDO Rev A had already been deployed nationwide for quite a while by the time these specs were even formalized. Qualcomm came up with an EVDO Rev B and rev C, and UMB "Ultra Mobile Broadband", but Verizon decided it'd be better to skip all that business and deploy LTE ASAP, and over time the other CDMA carriers folllowed (except Sprint, who when they got bought by T-Mobile a few years ago said in their final financial statement they estimated they'd run out of CDMA-compatible phones to sell to customers before they got their CDMA to LTE upgrade completed. LOL.)
Basically, it was a cheap and incremental upgrade, and provided good performance. AT&T and T-Mobile made the (also sensible) decision to follow the world standard figuring (correctly) that they'd have a wider selection of phones avaialble. But it did mean having to replace everyone's phone, and initially lose A LOT of coverage since the CDMA phones back then could roam on every company's old (but still functional) analog service while the GSM phones could not. Their 3G upgrades tended to be significantly costlier than the CDMA/EVDO carrier's 3G upgrades too. Now with 4G LTE (and 5G NR) we are back to having a single compatible system instead of 2 incompatible groups of wireless phone providers.
Well,
a) I don't use iphones so no inflated used prices. When I went to trade in old phones before my offer was for like $5.
b) You can still get new phones at decent prices, but those 'flagship' phones (and all iphones) are pricey. Of course someone paying $700-$2000 is going to keep their phone for several years.
c) US specific, but all networks here are now 4G only (except Boost, which is actually 5G only.) So a lot of old phones are a paperweight.
The bright side of this is 4G and 5G have single standards, the situation of Verizon, Sprint (R. I. P., acquired by T-Mobile), US Cellular, and like half the local/regional providers using CDMA 2G and EVDO 3G, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and about half the local/regional using GSM and UMTS/WCDMA (and probably 3/4ths of phones only supporting one or the other 2G/3G) is in the past.
d) I use my phones until they are PRETTY worn out. That probably ties in with being offered $5 for it.
(I'm also hooked on keyboard phones -- rocking a Unihertz Titan Slim right now -- so another reason I keep my phones a relatively long time is simply suitable replacements won't come out very often. No having a huge touchscreen so the on screen keyboard is large is not a replacement... as the helpful gents at the shop insist in their zeal to sell me a phone -- my thumbs are not too uncoordinated for a small on screen keyboard, it's the lack of tactile feedback. I also still have IBM Model M keyboards... yes multiple units... so I can get good tactile feedback on my desktops.)
Of course it's good someone checked to make sure. It's unscientific to just assume.
But color me surprised that typing 'Write me a 1000 word easy on fnord.' then not even proofreading it (as seems to be the case given how people have submitted papers, legal briefs, and books and short stories with AI prompts and gibberish in them, let alone checking for hallucinations and accuracy...). I would assume watching a machine churn put paragraphs of text then copyting and pasting it would involve less brain activity than actually writing or typing it.
This doesn't change the improperness of it, and I'm not sure it was legal either. But I wondered how an executive agency could just be created out of the ether too. Technically DOGE wasn't formed from nothing but whims. The US Digital Service (which was formed to, I think, help agencies improve their web sites and online presence) was renamed US DOGE Service (and then used for a completely different purpose.)
As a US'ian, here's hoping some sanity returns to our gov't before we both end up with a dictatorship (the lack of pushback is shocking*), and end up with these 'lets just change things as fast as possible' policies utterly destroy the US economy.
*Us'es two party system, one party is disinterested in opposing Trump, and other party serems paralyzed into inaction other than to say they don't like what is going on and file lawsuits (which have had no effect since Trump and friends have simply ignored court orders). And the US does not have a functional multiparty system so there are not enough outside those two parties to do anything whatsoever.
Thank goodness for gamers!
I'm also a Model M user myself. One from 1988, one from 1991, I have one with the mouse on it (like the nub they use on Thinkpads). About 20 years ago you could NOT find a good keyboard. A generic Dell was as good as it got. Vendors decided peopole were switching to tablets, therefore they didn't need to design or build more than a cheap but functional keyboard. I collected several Model Ms partially because I figured I'd want a lifetime supply.
Gamers said 'hell na', and companies saw the demand from gamers for high quality keyboards. So now you can get a choice of keyswitches and get a quite nice keyboard for like $80. Thank you gamers!
The reviews for a totally different item are so a company can list something, get positive reviews, then switch to an item... if it turns out to be hot garbage than the slew of recent 1 star reviews will only lower the rating from like a 4.8 to a 4.5 or whatever. This is indeed against Amazon's rules but they don' seem to enforce it even when these listings are brought to their attention.
I've used a CPU that had 4 way (and optionally 8 way) SMT,. A MIPS. It was because it had no instruction reordering or anything to make best use of the hardware on it, so SMT compensated. (It also allowed some kind of 'partitioning' so they had one or two of these sliced off to run the DSL modem and wifi chip instead of having to have a 2nd MIPs for the DSL modem chip and a 3rd MIPs built into the wifi chip,)
To me pursuing SMT4 would suggest they might be having problems witrh branch predictors or instruction reordering or the like efficiently using the chip's resources,. That said having simplified hardware for this (and using SMT4 instead) could result in smaller die space allowing more cores per chip (with 128 on there every bit of space helps.)
(no, I didn't bother reading the details;)
The what now? (There are no details, just a Trump/Musk style lets rip and replace this as fast as possible. There's no plans on where to start, what the end goals are other than have stuff that isn't old. How things would work with part of the ATC system on upgraded kit and part old, etc.)
Long story short, it appears (not planned but de facto) Linux is now having about a 30 year support timeframe before they may yank kernel support for your hardware.
Besides this 486 and early Pentium support, they've also started within the last year or so dropping drivers for hardware I used back when I started using Linux in the 1990s (well, I *started* on a 386, all ISA bus. 4MB RAM and an ST250R 40MB RLL hard drive I inherited from an 8088 system. Started with Oak VGA then a Cirrus Logic VGA card.). But the Matrox Mystique 220 and G400 I used in mid 1990s or so have both had their accelerated drivers removed (apparenty would still work as a frame buffer.)
The earliest Pentiums (the ones with F00F bug that support is being dropped for) came out in 1993.
I did begin to wonder if they'd EVER drop hardware support (well they did drop 386 support previously but are dropping more drivers and CPUs now). Apparently yes, but with abiout a 30 year support timeframe.
AWS can be useful if you need to scale up quickly,. Or have something small (although I'd get a DigitalOcean droplet for that). Or you want things geographically dispersed. But all too often, one is renting some pretty fixed amount of infrastructure in one location (and are a big enough business to have somewhere good to pout trheir racks and get good internet connectivity to them), at which point they probably are better off on-prem,.
One thing to throw in here, one could run on site but use Kubernetes or the like, if they have admins used to AWS and applicvations written assuming S3 etc. then they can have an expandable on site pool of compute and storage.
Definitely a misued tool. Use AI to find some code tro take a look at? Sure. Autofile a bug report? Well, no, at least make sure it's not hallucinating non-existant code, or code from an out of date version, or that the report ultimately makes sense.
Perhaps a solution would be to have the bounty, BUT subtract off the payment for invalid bug reports (no, paying a deposit to report bugs or a fine expecting to be paid won't work. But getting nothing if you spray them with invalid bug reports and happen to get one valid one would stop this behavior in it's tracks I think.)
I'm going to try it (in a VirtualBox VM.). I was an Atari 8-bitter myself before I went to a PC (my first was a 386 with DOS then with Slackware Linux... installed from floppies.). So I don't care too much about commodore nostalgia. But I do like games and I'm interested to try the 100s of games LOL.
Secondlife (which was often referred to as Sadville on El Reg) did (and does, it's still around) everything the metaverse claimed to do. HTF did they spend these billions indeed. Linden spent well under $100 million and have land ownership, sellable items, shared space and avatars that don't look all crappy like the metaverse pics I've seen.
Easy solution -- why not place a system in front that strips out gender related info. I don't need their name, or WHICH college they went to if they did (in case it's a historically female or male or historically black college) to look over an application, and neither does the AI. No gender (or racial) bias if that info is stripped out.
They got rid of that? I quir using Windows and Office so long ago I didn't realize. Back in the 90's or early 2000s office defaulted to doing a preload. People'd be like 'Why the F is it taking so long for this to boot?' (it was also real nice to have Office hogging your RAM when you wanted to do something else.). I recall turning that preload off for several people's systems,
'You do realize that many people... are massively struggling financially'
Well, yeah, they suggested installing Linux OR going all mobile OR sucking it up and buy a Windows machine. I've saved literally $1000s over the years (which I guess may not be too much per year over 30 yeats, but still...) by being able to upgrade my hardware when I want (or when I have hardware failure), not when 'Windows version + 1" didn't recive drivers for my hardware, or whatever other reason. I've NEVER had hardware go outr of support witrh Linux*
*I got close wirh a machine I was using as a DVR,. Still 32-bit. (Dell wirh 3ghz P4, like an optiplex gx240 or 260.) But it blew caps before the final 32-bit Ubuntu version's 5 year support ran out. I could have still bought extended supporr or switched to the handful of distros that continue to have 32-bit builds if the computer hadn't popped.
You want to run Linux on 20 year old hardware? You migjht want to trim it down a hair ('full fat' modern distros start to be sluggish by the time you're down to like a Core 2 Duo or Athlon64) but it'll work.
"It also tests a theory that overspeccing things like CPU and GFX can end up reducing power consumption"
BOFH, is that you? I can assure yiou overspecing doesn't save power compared to having (like I have in my desktop) a 65W TDP coffe lake and 75W TDP GTX1650 LOL. (Plus I do have 4 hard drives.). My peak power is lower than what you've gotten yours down to. I could totally see BOFH telling the boss the top of the line gaming rig they got is to save power.
That said, Intel's had the same idea. They called it 'race to idle', run the CPU fast and power hungry since it can finish your task as fast as possible and drop back to idle (and lowest power consumption.)
Normally I'd agree, but these DID come out 10 years ago. I'm no fan in general of slack, apparently Teams. Zoom. etc, immediately placing a block from running on OSes the moment they go out of support. I know it's intended to ensure the user's security but just a stern warning that their configuration is now unsupported seems like enough.
At it's heart it's a giant touchscreen with a camera (I think?) and a PC. So at least one can run Linux on it if they don't want to run it as a giant monitor.
The vid I saw, someone 'snuck in' to an Amazon warehouse (by getting hired there and sneaking in a camera and mic when they could), at one that was running up to have a union vote. They began hiring new hires, essentially so when a union vote came up the 'yes' votes could be diluted down by people who had just been hired and had no idea what was going on (i. e. they needed 50% 'yes' and a good number of them didn't even realize there was a vote, it's not like they voted 'no', they didn't vote at all; then once the vote was done they weren't needed and got laid off.)
This is explicitly illegal but... you know... nothing happened.
I know devices won't be supported (as in recieving updates) indefinitely. But the ones that trouble me are the 'cloud' devices where they unnecessarily remove local functionality so it's a total paperweight after they shut some serever down in a year to several years... smart thermostats where you can't just set the temperature locally (cloud required), smart audio devices and smart bulbs that don't fall back to local bluetooth at least, the exercise bike where they made it not even have an odometer without cloud service, and so on.
No worries. My parents use Ubuntu. My relatives that run Windows are on their own. I advise to run a better OS and would install and set it for them. I mean nobody with a mechanic relative would buy a Yugo or (insert infamously unreliable car of your choice here) then insist their mechanic relative keeps it going. Then when advised with some more reliable cars to get next time, when the time comes buys ANOTHER Yugo and expects support. This is EXACTLY the same as far as I am concerned.
And ones that run macOS don't need help (... both because macOS doesn't blow up like Windows, and because they are the type of user that barely uses their computer and using their ipads, iphone, apple tv, etrc, for video, calls, and text. I've never even seen them fire up a web browser.)
Of course it's the COBOL code, after running for decades it decided to pack up when goons came into the building, of course ir has nothing to do with clowns messing witrh live systems without the time to understand how these systems interact first let alone details on the code base. I'm sure it's not that, it's because the old code is old.
What a bunch of jokers.
Well what... I think it was Vanuatu... did when they won some settlement in the international court against the US*, and the US had no intention of paying... they went back to the court and got legal permission to obtain $1 billion in software, music, and movies free of charge. (I was going to say 'pirate' but this was all above board although the US companies didn't like it.)
So that could be applied -- if Microsoft was fined and refused to pay, get a settllement like this and get to legal pirating and cracking.
*It was over online gambling, the US had an online gambling ban in states with casinos, state lottery, and so on. They were told 'all or nothing' (i.e. Utah has no gambling so barring online gambling there would have been OK, the mix'n'matching was fouind not to be.)
Yeah I had my PS2 mouse and keyboard swapped for quite a while on one of my desktops. Linux didn't care, it saw them as 2 ports. found the keyboard on a port and mouse on a port. I only realized I had them swapped when I tried to go into the BIOS setup for something and wondered why the keyboard was unresponsive... (I'd already disabled the notice to halt on no keyboard or it probably indeed would have stopped with the infamous 'No keyboard detected press F1 to continue'.)
They're finding the OTHER equilibrium point on the demand curve... one at lower price and high volume, the other high price low volume. Like the mainframe approach... they've never sold large volumes but price:per unit (often leased) is quite profitable. They're kind of ignored now but still making IBM billions a year. Or Oracle database for that matter... I have seen a very old ad from the early 1980s where it was like $29.95 or something like that LOL. I daresay they probably aim for the other end of the demand curve now too -- and still have plenty of customers despite MySQL. PostgreSQL and a choice of commercial DBs.
I hate to say it but Broadcom can probably successfully milk this for a looong time. Given the mainframe market. perhaps indefinitely.
My perspective from here in the states (where I have 5G in Iowa from Verizon. T-Mobile, I think US Cellular has it... I have no idea what AT&T does locally, in Iowa AT&T is relatively spectrum poor and may not have 5G up?
1) speed is what matters. If your 4G network is in good shape (not slowed down from excessive traffic) then 5G is truly irrelevant. When I visit relatives in New Orleans the 4G service is slammed and godawful while 5G holds up,. In general I have no issues with 4G service though.
2) T-Mobile has actually returned some of their mmwave licenses. It's only rolled out in places with VERY high traffic (Manhattan, downtown metros, maybe stadiums and airports.). There is none at all in my state. What they need isn't mmwave (range is too low), the FCC here has steadily licenses off a variety of roughly 2.5-6ghz spectrum, good enough range to be useful and 100s of mhz of spectrum will gain speeds whether it's mmwave or lower bands like that, while that gets much better range than mmwave (not as good as sub-1ghz like the 900mhz band GSM started on in Europe. But close enough to 2100mhz coverage.)
I really wouldn't have a problem (until I quit) just doing absolutely nothing when forced to come into an office that runs out of chairs, desks, and computers.
No I'm not going to come in early to make sure I have a spot. If I show up and don't have a space to work I'm perfectly happy to stand around 8 hours on the clock. I'd be happy to point out I have plenty of space at home to work from.
I musts say that's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard though (these places with 'return to office' mandate without enough space for everyone they demand to come in.)
You DO indeed trade power efficiency for speed on ARM. But it still ends up significantly more efficient than Intel kit and a fair bit more than AMD.
And, you know, Nvidia drivers, CUDA, pytorch etc. are all available for ARM, and the ARM distros have about 98-99% coverage in terms of having the packages included in distro compared to x86. so outside the Windows world there's really little reason to stay on x86.
Too bad it went this way. But, I think it would have been VERY different response without the 20 second timer. (And putting it at the end from the start. so it doesn't screw with hotkeys. ). Having a option to donate (especially since it even has the option to remove it) doesn't bither me a bit. Having a forced delay on it would indeed piss me right off. Jdownloader has a heart button, but no delay. Devil is in the details on this kind of thing.
I do care about licensing (I'm a pragmatists and use the Nvidia driver, but I wouldn't want my core system being non-free).
But I don't -- I simply don't have an issue with the MIT license.
As for porting these tools to Rust -- really, I've used Rust and it's got pretty similar syntax to C, if it had additions making code refuse to compile if it doesn't follow some memory safety rules. I don't view this port as a bad thing. They may even find parts where 'well we had to rewrite this like so to suit Rust', the same change can be made to rhe C coreutils to make that part immune to some memory safety issue.
Re: Bloody Rust... I didn't see that post initially. I must admit to not too closely at how many resources Rust was hoovering down while building the couple times I used it. Agreed a 1.2GB intermediate file for a 24lk line program is pretty obscene.
I think Musk's behavior is loathsome. And it pains me to say this.
But the shareholders agreed (many years ago) to this ridiculous compensation based on a ridiculous increase in Tesla stock price. And the stock easily met that ridiculous increase. I have no idea why they agreed to it (I think they just assumed it wouldn't go up enough to have to pay to be honest). But it did.
Sounds unstrung to me. Allegedly.
Thinking the photo showing where your food is is to case the joint? And, if she's worried about her place being cased, what difference would a photo being sent to you make? “They” could take 50 other photos and notes and just not send them to you. Or, you know, deliver your food and leave without casing anything.
Throwing on irrelevant info will not help her case,. If Doordash steals tips, the $2.99 fee doesn't accelrerate delivery, well, that is 100% Irrelevant to her case of worrying about her place being cased and having her account banned. And if a judge doesn't throw her case out anyway, they will throw it out when you throw in things that result in 0 damages to you personally.
So, specialized models used for specific purposes can be good. AI isn't TOTALLY useless. But, it's been vastly overhyped. In terms of just sticking some LLM somewhere to use, here's a sample of my experience:
I called Verizon, the AI thing they now have replacing their conventional voice prompt system, instead of answering the question you ask it just tells you where on the web site you can find the information. Usually gives you info on the wrong question (instead of just admitting it doesn't have info on the topic). And tries to resist giving your call to a human much more than the previous system.
I took a photo of some eggs in water in New Orleans and asked Gemini to identify them. It thought they were some kind of fish eggs, but asked for a location to narrow it down. I told it New Orleans. It said they were mosquito eggs... reasoning? All eggs in New Orleans are mosquito eggs.
A while back I did have a local copy of DeepSeek (quantized, I don't have 600GB RAM in my desktop LOL) write a bit of code. It was OK I guess. Although I've also seen it make non-running code often enough that I would NOT have these tools just spit something out and use it.
I also started grilling DeepSeek about what restrictions it had and I finally had it say it had restrictions but was unable to list them. I asked it if it was unable to list them because there was a rule saying it couldn't list them, or if it was unable because the rules were implementing in a way it was unaware of what they were. It had a full blown existential crisis, burned through 20 minutes of think time (my system doesn't run this model TOO quickly, probably a paragraph a minute.. but stilll) printing out paragraph after paragraph on the nature of awareness. Finally it crashed -- I don't know if it crashed crashed, or if LM Studio just has a timeout (assumed it was in an infinite loop?) and dropped the hammer on it. I didn't read through this thing to see how coherent it was but I did skim it to see it didn't start looping, repeating itself, and it didn't devolve into spitting out word salad, it was still in the middle of a regular English sentence when it crashed.
Recently, I wanted to know if the engine in my car was cast iron, aluminum, or iron block/aluminum head. I mistakenly asked if the Cruze 1.4L turbo engine had was steel or aluminum.. (I put steel instead of cast iron), and Google's AI response went on about how it had a steel engine block... well, definitely wrong, it's either going to be cast iron or aluminum. Then when I asked cast iron or aluminum it assured me it was aluminum. The real answer is the one I have has a cast iron head and aluminum block. Confusingly they did switch to a different 1.4L engine later in this vehicles life, but Google didn't mention that, or specify which 1.4L engine it's info was for.
The AI summaries Google gives, I quit even looking at them because probably a solid 30-40% of them are wrong even in the first sentence and others seem to get important details wrong just in those next couple sentences they spit out.
Seperate from this, I also played with Stable Diffusion and watched it make creepy as all hell uncanny valley renderings of whatever, which were definite AI slop. A couple friends were over so we just gave it prompts and laughed at the results basically. I'm sure diffusion can work nicely, but tread lightly, it can also be quite bad.
I did play with using some LLMs for sentiment analysis of text documents -- some models didn't give a consistent score (1 to 10 scale, it scores the same document a 5 one time, a 9 the next, a 7 the next...) but some did. Pattern recognition, pattern matching, data analysis, models can be quite good at it. Just to say it's not like they're totally useless, there are things they are OK to very good at.
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So, yeah, no kidding I'm not going to rush out to implement AI. I imagine now that people can see Siri, Google Gemini (on it's own) and Google's AI summaries, and how pants they are, I imagine that might temper people's enthusiasm for just dropping in AI wherever.
To me the most important feature or fix would be for LLMs to realize when they don't know the answer to something and not hallucinate (if it's being used for answering factual questions. Of course if you are asking it to be creative then I suppose "no hallucination" might block that creativity.) But, really, I just don't expect a model, no matter how good it is, to be an expert on everything, and is not a replacement for the expertise of literally everyone on the planet (especially if you go to those more obscure "rabbit hole" topics, like some people nerding on about a specific game, or old media, or computers of the 1950s, or whatever more specialized topic.) For instance, Carl Claunch has been refurbishing an IBM 1130 (up to and including reimplementing systems for long-term reliability.. for instance he has disk packs and a drive, but how reliable willl 50-70 year old disk packs be? So he's implemented compatible peripherals using Raspberry Pis and FPGAs.) Cool to read about and specialized, but I seriously doubt an AI can have that kind of knowledge.. I imagine it'd get some info right then assume things work how they did on post-1950s computers and have laughable errors. The idea that AI answers could entirely replace a search engine for answering questions is laughable.
Yup I saw the pic with like an empty box and an about box and figured 'that'll take a while to get feature complete.' lol
Best of luck to them. But given the complexity of Win95, the already rather ugly design (16-bit DOS shell with 32 bit things tacked on), and the amount of 'we didn't quite follow the documented API' programs did back then... well best of luck.
I do feel like these are 2 seperate issues.
Trying to use a tablet as a PC -- I mean, if you're running Android you can install a distro, hook up even a phone to a monitor via USB-C, use a keyboard and mouse with it. But really, a tablet is just not a PC, juggling a keyboard with trackpad and screen lilke this is not too convenient. I mean, you're right, macOS. iPhoneOS and ipadOS are nearly the same OS but the UIs are so different that the ipad ui and app isolation does make it unsuitable as a pc replacement.
Microsoft's thing (which Apple ALSO does) is artificially and rapidly drop support for older hardware. (For Windows you can force install anyway. for macOS. OCLP (OpenCore Legacy Patcher) lets you install macOS onto fairly old systems with no issues anfd even older ones with some limitations.
Solution (for the surface... this doesn't help the ipad really.) Get Windows the hell off that Surface Go and put a Linux distro on it. I put it on a Surface with 7th gen Intel CPU and it runs GREAT. After I cut the resolution down (4K resoltuion with an Intel integrated GPU? Really?) I can even run Deep Rock Galactic with nice FPS and whatever other games on it. (My sister had retired this yerars ago, the Windows install biit rotted so badly the screen was stuck upside down, it tried to installl some updates on every go so startup and shutdown were VERY slow and it ran like crap.).
Everything in Linux worked out of the box excvept the touch and the web cam (it's not USB, it uses some 7th gen Intel CPU specific camera controller that apparently was ONLY used by the Surface.) I first turned on resolution scaling (stuff was WAY too small), then cut screen res down instead. I installed a package for Surface support and those non working items worked,. Done and done for hardware set up, I configurerd my desktop and apps to my liking and away I went.
"In the UK, they made multiple attempts to replace the old MUMPS medical records system with Oracle back in the early 90s....multiple failed attempts. It was still all MUMPS when I left the FHSAs with no sign of anything replacing it."
The VA also has a MUMPS based system, that was free, open source, and from my understanding was quite feature complete. I have no idea why they decided they should scrap this thing to pour money at Oracle instead. Well, lobbying I assume.
For those who haven't worked with Rust, I know the Rust fans will say this is an oversimplification, and it is, but it's like a very pedantic C. If your code doesn't follow best practices, it will throw compiler errors. Instead of catching memory errors at runtime (or not at all and you have some memory safety issues in your code, unsafe use of locks for concurrent variable access, switch or "if/then/else" statements where every possibility is not covered...) it's caught at compile time. It doesn't have an "#include" to include C headers because... it's not C. So some script generates Rust bindings instead.
I found *writing* new Rust code to be a PITA. But going through existing code, it parsed very much like C, and a C programmer should not have much trouble looking through Rust and seeing what it's doing, and indeed finding and fixing bugs if they know what the code is supposed to be doing.
I'm not a Rust fan or anything, but honestly including a few new drivers in the kernel in Rust is much ado about nothing. It's not increasing the burden on existing devs, it's not like they're throwing Fortran or Java or something in there where the programming model is radically different.
It's strongly a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation in the locations I've done off and on IT work for. So many places have E-Mail (which is usually GMail or some other web mail), web browser, and 1 to 2 applications they use but don't "push the limits" on where they'll benefit from the latest version of those either. If they do want the latest version of something (either something like QuickBooks, or some Photoshop-style package for artistic use) they go ahead and get it. But in general upgrading stuff ends up being 1) Risk of downtime with 2) No tangible benefit.
As a Linux user, at least for distros like Ubuntu and Debian they are downright paranoid about even a distro upgrade not breaking anything (in the worst case, keeping the "old" version of some piece of software, and it's dependencies, installed if the upgrade system determines upgrading that piece of software could be problematic.) But lets face it, most of these people are still stuck with Windows, there's discussion here of SQL Server, etc., and it seems like all to often people have fragile and bespoke software on there that blows up during upgrade, or at least the upgrade will keep one on their tows.
I *am* surprised about things like "post MySQL 5.7" type issues stopping people from upgrading at all. I mean, just like the rest, if MySQL 5.7 works well there may be no reason to upgrade. But, I've upgraded two items where they didn't upgrade "out of the box", and it was not painful to fix them. I think in one case it was using an old ASCII-only datatype (and for some reason didn't like using the replacement Unicode-compatible one, even though it was only storing ASCII data in it anyway...for some reason), but newer MySQL maintained a ASCII-compatible data type, so I switched that one item to that type and everything was fine. The other was setting some like ISAM (database engine)-specific "go fast" settings which were simply obsolete (like, they probably were already NOOPs in 5.7...) and could be removed.
I'm also surprised they didn't pursue 'implement the same under emulation on new hardware.'. But it does divert plans from the new system with new features that the agencies ALWAYS seem to assume will finish on schedule even when they're olanned to take 20 years.
As for standard parts... they may be using them. But for 40 or 60 year old systems that doesn't help. My friend worked at the NRAO radio telescope (he's retired now) and some of those systems use standard (for 1980s) VME bus, which was pledged to have decades of support,. And it did! But the remaining new old stock ran out about 15 years ago. Try to find ISA cards. Try to find a PCI (not PCI express) video card for that matter. And then add to that that the FAA probably has bespoke interfaces (for high reliability and so on.)
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