Posts by NickHolland

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

"Finest keyboard ...ever"

"the finest keyboard in the world, ever, is the IBM Model M."

well...no. "ever" is a very long time, even in IT.

Let's ignore that people vary, and people can legitimately love/hate different things. There were a lot of options out there before the PC and some were just plain better.

Let's not forget, when IBM came out with the PC, the keyboard was laughed at by many, loved by some. I recall one review (Byte Magazine?) which summed it up as, "how could the company that produced the IBM Selectric Typewriter produce ... THIS?"'. In addition to the weird feel, the weird key placements were just out of line.

The later 101key Model M fixed the placements (for the most part. CTRL moved stupidly). So now it was just the feel. Love it or hate it.

When the IBM clicky keyboards came out, I hated them.

Now, I think a Model M (or a clone -- Unicomp) it is the best I can find. Not so much (I believe) because I've changed my mind...it's just that better computer keyboards went away. There was a lot of good stuff in the Pre-PC world (and a lot of trash, too -- admittedly).

My favorite I've owned: Zenith Z100/Heathkit H100 (a PC class but not PC compatible computer). I used to have people come to my dorm room and say, "I have heard you have a computer with an amazing keyboard, can I try it?"...and I don't recall anyone walking away saying, "eh", except for the rabid IBM lovers (the ones that didn't even want to talk about compatibles -- 4.77MHz 8088 and 6MHz 80286 are enough for ANYONE! After that -- get an IBM Mainframe!). I've used an IBM 3279 terminal which also had a stunning keyboard, though I wasn't using it for "PC" style applications, were I could just type fast, hard and long -- so I'm not sure if my admiration would hold up. And yes, the purely mechanical IBM Selectric golfball typewriters had stunning keyboards. No switches, just rods and levers causing things to happen, and giving the user an amazing experience (except...that backspace key doesn't "work" like I need it to).

Before I ran out of supply, my favorite PC keyboard was the Zenith ZKB-2. Now, if I can avoid a PS2-USB converter, a real Model M is my favorite (I have a lifetime supply). Unicomp is good -- very good -- but feels a bit like a worn Model M. Really good, but not quite 100%. And I wish they'd improve the features, not just clone 40 year old keyboards (i.e., their trackball and button mouse keyboards are fatally crippled by lack of the seemingly required modern wheel and third button functions. Some programmability/macro functions would be nice, too). PS/2-USB converters have been hit-and-miss for me. Some work well, some are laggy. I'd gripe about breaking a Unicomp by spilling some water in it, but I managed to do the exact same thing with a real Model M a few weeks later (40+ years in the business, and the two keyboards I destroyed were just weeks apart!!), so I guess that's authentic.

One GREAT thing about the migration to commodity PC hardware: you can get a keyboard that works for you and put it on your computer that works for you with the monitor that works for you. One sad thing is people cheap out on the very things they interact with the most (monitor/mouse/keyboard), and go for fancy and expensive stuff in the computer's box they don't actually use 80% of. Go buy a good keyboard. $150USD is nothing for something that will make your life better and improve the experience. My only gripe is there few places you can walk in and try out the high end keyboards before purchasing (I'd like to try the Model F clones...but I'm not quite ready to drop $400 for an experiment. If it is good, I'm fine with the price).

Re: The keyboard of the gods

I've got a Model M with trackpoint.

Good, because it's a model M.

Trackpoint, I find useless because only two button mouse. I live off the roller and third button, it seems.

I picked up a Unicomp with trackball. The thing has eight buttons, two sets of four. Two buttons in each set aren't even hooked to anything, and the "right/left" click buttons I found useless due to lacking the roller/third button. I was incredibly disappointed by the lack of evolution in the Unicomp boards. Are they good basic keyboards? Absolutely. Worth the money. But having unusable buttons on the trackball was ... wow. ouch.

OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025

Re: I often wonder

Security is everyone's top priority ... second to only everything else (i.e., absolute last place). They won't adjust anything in their decision and selection process if it means moving away from the bells and whistles they want, or are used to, or learned ten years ago.

Governments are even worse than businesses in that regard. Not their data, not there benefit, not their money, no consequences. ZERO motivation to do things well.

As for moving Exchange to ... well, anything, be aware your users will protest. They also want Security only if it means no change to anything. And as mediocre of an e-mail and calendar system Outlook/Exchange is...it's what people are used to.

North Korea’s fake tech workers now targeting European employers

Nothing new here

Almost 20 years ago, my then-employer had problems interviewing one person and a different person showed up for "work". And of course, lying on resumes and Bull S---ing the way through interviews is just normal (as is demanding ten years experience with new technology, and expecting a job applicant to walk in knowing *all* the systems at the company. Ask for BS, get BS). No one wants to admit the new guy they just helped select is a loser, so the paychecks roll on for a non-trivial period of time. Oh, the guy appears to be an operative for hostile foreign state? Oh, we really don't want to talk about falling for that, as that's a failure at so many levels in the company. Maybe he'll leave on his own.

Payoff is big, risk is low, especially with an international border involved. No brainer, really. It is gonna happen. Oooo...bad states figured out what individuals have been doing. I'm not in the slightest bit surprised.

Chimera Linux ghosts RISC-V because there's no time for sluggish hardware

native build is The Way.

Compiling an OS and applications natively is a good test under non-trivial load that your OS and tools actually work. Cross compiling itself tests nothing other than the code builds. Booting it up on a target system kinda hints that there's some functionality, but doesn't indicate suitability for any particular task.

Emulation is a similar situation. Real hardware has bugs, real emulators have bugs; they probably aren't the same bugs (though of course, the emulator should emulate known real HW bugs). If your code works on the emulator, you don't know if it is stable on the real hw. A crash in the emulator may reflect a problem in the code, or it may be a flaw in the emulator.

Cross compiling and emulators are good for bringing up a new platform or for "token" or "vanity" platforms ("oh, look, I got Linux running on my Timex watch!"), but not really want you want to do for something you claim is production ready.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: What about...

"What about...... if programmers actually took responsibility for their work"

The problem is... good code takes time to write IN ANY LANGUAGE. If you do it right, you will be beaten to market by your competition. It really is a race to the bottom (or a race out the door). Why learn your tools in detail if you can grab a few pieces off the shelf and shove something out the door NOW, get the praise of your managers, a jump on the competition, and start raking in the money, grab a bonus, and then jump jobs before it all blows up?

And then there's the career problem. Employer/employee loyalty is a thing of the past, and employment cycles are shorter than major software revision cycles in some/most environments. I've seen too many cases where the main application was (poorly) developed by people no longer there, and new people trying to figure out how to bolt new features on old code and fix bugs.

I'm not going to pretend to know what the answer is.

Re: Talking at cross purposes?

Unfortunately, in IT, we hand "guns" to the untrained all the time.

You just have to SAY you have been trained, throw a few buzzwords around at the interview, and you are given the title "senior whatever" and thought to be an expert. Or get someone else to interview for you and then you show up at the job (best for "remote" or "overseas" work, of course).

Programming is hard. Now, I'll be quick to admit that C is dangerous as heck, and yeah, some simple memory constraints and checking embedded in the language would probably be a good thing. But look at what the "safe" Java language did -- lowered the bar to entering "programming" so low that almost anyone can become a programmer, and it shows. And that "Java sandbox" they used to talk about seems to constrain your program within its boundaries about as well as a real sandbox does for a real toddler (not at all).

I'm not a "memory safe denier" by any stretch, but let's be realistic -- there aren't enough GOOD programmers to go around, and there aren't enough managers willing to pay them to keep them or let them spend the time needed to write code, refine code, document code and cross-train their coworkers to make the next generation of good programmers. Memory Safe languages will not change any of that. I suspect "memory safe" languages will do for programming what automatic transmissions did for driving -- enable a lot more less competent people to do more damage in other ways.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: Conflict of Interest

Many/most US presidents (and I suspect leaders around the world and throughout history) have had unofficial advisors. Trump is being open and honest about it, relatively speaking.

Something tells me that Joe Biden was not the person controlling the content of his teleprompter and "his" policies. Just a hunch.

H. Clinton made a snootload of money BEFORE she ran for president by being a horrible public speaker. You think those people paying didn't have "interest" in the outcome of the election, or plan to remind her of their support after she got elected?

Your point is valid. It should be a concern about ALL leaders, not just the ones you voted against.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

I don't think Ada ever had favor, outside of some government contracts where it was specified. I got to wonder how many contracts were awarded to companies that bragged (lied) about their "Ada experience", with the expected results from inexperienced programmers.

I also don't think things "moved over to C/C++" -- my memory was that C was established in much of the world long before Ada, and things FAILED to move to Ada, unless they had to. By the time Ada was being talked about, much of the world had a computer that could run a good C compiler; few had access to anything that could run Ada. Things STAYED with C.

I have no hard numbers, but I can't think of anything in the consumer world which was written in Ada at any point in the last 45 years, and of course, a lot was and is written in C.

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

Was I supposed to be hearing that sang that in Justin Hayward's voice?

(for those not catching my probably obscure reference, I'm thinking of Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical version of War of the Worlds)

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Re: I wish everyone would get it

This was just individual words, or more accurately, names. Since "T" is often followed by "H", words with "TH" would often be in the output. That kinda thing. Since they fed it a bunch of UK names, "shire" was at the end of the output in many cases. Super simplistic, but ... also produced interesting results, which just feel a lot like the modern "AI".

And yes, there are archives out there...but that also requires time to sit and dig through them. And I'll probably scour the years I'm suspecting, and then in ten years, figure out it was really Dr. Dobbs or worse, some one-off Commodore magazine I picked up and I translated a program into my system's BASIC interpreter.

Re: I wish everyone would get it

Somewhere around 1983-1985, BYTE magazine ran an article with a BASIC program where you could enter a list of words, and it would make NEW words out of that, by linking sequences of letters that appeared together. The example I'm remembering was a list of U.K. town/county/region names, from which, this program produced some total gibberish, some REAL town names that were not in the original set, and some names that SOUNDED like they could be real U.K. names...but weren't. (I'm believing I remember this because, though I live in the US, at the time, I lived on a street named after a British county).

I haven't managed to re-find this program, but after playing with it in the 1980s, I just see all the AI stuff doing basically the same thing, but with 40 years of improved technology, storage and data input.

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

Re: People are just as falible

well, resources are an issue...as is the cooperation of the victim and neighbors of the victim (and perps).

But another big factor is also score keeping. Police like to talk about "arrest rates" for crimes -- an arrest (and later found "not guilty", or even "insufficient evidence for prosecution") is better than no arrest. Prosecutors like to talk about convictions -- a wrongful conviction is better than no conviction. A hung jury beats not going to trial. A plea bargain beats going to trial ("Admission of guilt! Sure, lesser charge, but we all know what he did"). It's easier to prosecute a crime victim that fights back than it is the criminal -- as the criminal generally had a plan going in, the victim made it up as it went along. The victim who shoots or stabs their attacker is an easy win on the score card for all parties (arrest, prosecution, conviction!).

I do believe there were even scandals in a few big US cities where crime rates were deliberately INFLATED to get more money to "fight crime".

And unfortunately, many of the people who claim "the system is stacked us!" don't even bother to show up to vote in local elections, where the prosecutors and people who manage the police departments are chosen.

I don't know what the answer is. But it is all related to people...

Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users

Re: "an ever-lengthening list of known issues, many of which remain unmitigated or unresolved"

And that's why I, a Unix person, dislike Linux. The Bar is set to "better than Windows" -- and that's it. No desire to be a good OS, just "better than Windows". And Linux often stumbles over that bar. File system of the month, firewall solution of the year. Always more fun to reinvent something from scratch rather than improve (or fix) the existing things, and then leave support for both the new and several old solutions in place. Lots of re-inventing of very round wheels, with zero apparent benefit to the users.

We used to say, "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.". Now we have Linux trying to reinvent Windows, poorly. Linux has been taken over by people who hate Windows, not those that understand and love the Unix philosophy. And yes, systemd...but that's just one example.

And yes, Windows is getting easier to hate, but I'm not finding Linux "easier to love" as anything other than a bad re-invention of windows.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: Looking to the Future -- The Limits of "Move Fast and Break Things"

Noah's family were the only surviving witnesses.

He left out his test and failures from the official reports.

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

are humans on Mars even a good idea?

Let's pretend it is practical to set up a self-sufficient Mars colony, and it is basically free to do so. Let's also pretend it is reasonably safe.

Is it a good idea? I'm thinking ... environmental impact and scientific impact.

As I understand it, we are still looking to rule out the possibility of both extinct AND current life on Mars. If Mars is confirmed "dead", both now and in the past, fine. Go ahead, no harm, no foul. But I don't think we've done that yet. If we put humans on Mars, we are going to be making ecological changes, and nothing we discover afterwards will become simple (as if the search for life has been "simple" on Mars so far). I'd assume any microbial life we introduce might well mutate/evolve fairly quickly to a point that we might not be sure if it is recent transplants from earth-to-Mars, or long-time inhabitants.

I'm suspicious I might be missing something, as I'm just not seeing this discussed much in the "colonize Mars" stories, so please tell me what I'm missing.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: DOS memory limit

Heathkit H100, actually (a.k.a., Zenith Z100)

Pure graphic machine -- no "text mode"/"graphics mode". I used to have fun with friends by writing a quick-and-dirty random line drawing program in BASIC, hit CTRL-C to stop it, and the text output would pop out in the middle of the graphics. They'd jump with shock. Then I'd do a LIST to put some text on the screen, and the graphics would scroll. Then I'd hit CONTINUE, and watch them freak out as the thing drew lines THROUGH the text on the screen. That was pretty amazing stuff in the early 1980s consumer market.

Also...640x225x8 colors graphics resolution, 192k RAM devoted to just video (64k reserved for ROM, and 768k main memory...so entire 1MB address space accounted for!). A whole lot of showing what the IBM PC COULD have been.

The tantalizing part was how much "future" was designed into the machine. 16 bit expansion bus (IEEE-696 -- updated and standardized S-100) with 24 bit addressing space, so basically the IBM AT ISA bus several years earlier. I've heard stories of a prototype 286 version of the H100 at the factory, no idea if this was true, but as good as the H100 was, it was also clearly intended to be a stepping stone into the 16 bit future.

Re: DOS memory limit

One of my favorite bad examples of "640k wasn't an MSDOS limit" was the 3Com 3+Share network software. As their software got too big to fit in the PC 640k limit, rather than rewrite their code for the then very available 80286 processor...they built NEW HARDWARE that didn't have video or floppies, but was otherwise PC-ish (80186 proc, though). Console and boot media was through a bizarre network application (because the then universal serial port was too simple, I guess. I did this once. I succeeded. But bootstrapping a network server over a network was definitely an interesting event in the mid 1980s). Gave them almost 900kB for their applicaiton...most of which was used. Caching data? nope. Their big sales pitch against Netware: "We are easier to manage if you have ten servers!" Novell basically ignored them, but their response could have been: "If your application and hardware didn't suck so bad, you wouldn't NEED ten servers!". 3+Share ended up being the basis of MS Lan Manager and then NT networking, hopefully just the protocols, not the 8088 code.

Other than the interrupt table in 8086 page zero, I can't think of any reason the entire 1024k RAM space of an 8086 couldn't be used by MSDOS. Sure, there's the boot code, but CP/M people figured that out long before -- disable the boot ROM once the OS is up and running. Display could be serial terminals (granted, that was very much out of favor by the time the PC came along).

Re: DOS memory limit

I think you are confusing "MSDOS" and the IBM PC BIOS. Granted, I stopped looking at MSDOS function calls around MSDOS v3, but up to that point, there was ZERO support for graphics in MSDOS itself. Text output. Even moving the cursor around the screen was a BIOS call, not a MSDOS call. (in the CP/M days, the BIOS was how the OS interacted with the HW. In the PC world, the BIOS became an extension to the OS itself -- beyond what the OS supported).

Yes, because of the ubiquity of the IBM PC and its BIOS, it's a fuzzy line, but as a one-time user and lover of a non-IBM PC MSDOS machine, it's an important line to me. Yes, the (IBM PC) BIOS graphics calls gave you a degree of device independence (but then, so did the ubiquity of PC compatible HW), but only on PC hardware with a PC BIOS. There were some attempts to emulate this in non-PC systems, but...as you indicated, they were doomed to failure because doing it yourself directly to the hw worked so much better. One of the things that impressed me early on with the IBM PC is just how bad the performance of going through the OS+BIOS was compared to writing to HW directly. My non-PC compatible MSDOS system needed to manipulate 27 bytes to put one character on the screen (8x9 matrix, three bits per dot for the three colors), compared to two bytes for the IBM PC. Writing directly to the HW, the IBM PC kicked my machine's butt (as expected), but going through the OS, my machine ran circles around the PC.

Re: 2GB

according to the article, "We gave the VM a 2GB virtual drive, and it automatically partitioned and formatted it as one big FAT32 volume."

so..sounds like "yes"

FAT16 did 2G volumes, but the block size was huge (64k, iirc). Back in the day of 1GB drives, which were actually a hair over 1GB in size, I would partition them to be a hair less than 1GB, tossing away maybe 8MB or disk space or so, which got a HUGE savings in wasted space due to the smaller block size at below 1GB as opposed to over 1GB. I started doing this after upgrading a client's almost full 200MB drive to a (hair over) 1GB drive, and after copying over all her tens of thousands of tiny files, ended up with less than 400MB free. Reducing the drive size below that 1GB boundary got us the almost 800MB free that she was expecting after the upgrade. FAT32 was a nice improvement.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Giving BASIC a bad reputation

I never programmed in C64 BASIC. Based on the statements in this article, I'll just grant it was bad. But I don't think I believe that was really the "killer" for BASIC's reputation. No one bought a C64 thinking it was the ultimate computer to write business applications in, and no one was going to be writing cool games in BASIC in home computers. It was colorful, it had good sound, it was a game machine you could justify because it was also tried to be "practical". I'm not glad Commodore skimped on the BASIC for it, but...it was a budget machine, we all knew that. This is why I never had any interest in the C64 at the time.

If you wanted to do serious programming in an 8 bit machine, it was generally assumed you would have to do either a compiled language or assembly. The computers were just too small for interpreters. Not unique to Commodore at all here. I believe most "serous" programs were developed using cross-compiling from "big iron" systems, so they were probably too small for compilers, too.

In my mind, it was Microsoft's MSDOS BASIC (IBM PC BASIC, BASICA, GWBASIC, whatever) is the "BASIC that killed BASIC being taken seriously", because it just wasn't what it could/should have been. For small systems users, MSDOS systems had huge (for the time) memory capabilities but the BASIC interpreter was a machine rework of the 8 bit CP/M BASIC, with a lousy 8 bit 64k program space (one 8086 RAM segment for the interpreter's code, one segment for your BASIC code and data) . So...this was the Commodore "BASIC that doesn't support the hardware" all over again, but without the "shoestring budget" justification. For MSDOS systems where BASIC wasn't included, it was a non-trivial cost product, and an utter disappointment. Just that CP/M product with graphics. I get their need to "get it out the door quickly" in 1981, but ... it got very little development after that. (There was a much-later "QBASIC", but that was a decade late, and the world had given up on BASIC by that point, and I don't know if it fixed the memory limitations).

So..I'm gonna blame MS BASIC on the PC for giving BASIC a bad reputation.

Australia moves to drop some cryptography by 2030 – before quantum carves it up

encryption is nice, but ...

... the real risks to data loss were, are, and will continue to be bad software and bad management. If I'm talking to someone about computer security, and "encryption" is the first thing they start talking about, as far as I'm concerned, discussion is over. We aren't using words the same way. Encryption is cool, and it is a good thing, but bad software and bad administration is how real world data is lost.

Why worry about sniffing data and running it through a hypothetical quantum computer when you can sit in a basement half a world away and see how many accounts you can get into using the password, "Welcome123", on a system where the only implementation criteria is "get it working" and the OS hasn't been upgraded in ten years, because the person who cobbled that crapplication together was laid off shortly after it was "completed"?

Broadcom says VMware is a better money-making machine than it hoped

IF they get their return on investment plus "cost of money" in those three years, he did the job he was paid to do.

IF IT managers learn to not hang their company's infrastructure around one product/brand, he did a job that needed to be done.

I'm not praising Broadcom (and I've had a dislike for VMware long before Broadcom), I'm just marveling about how companies -- in business to make money and maximize profit -- don't comprehend that their vendors are in business for the EXACT SAME PURPOSE. Just as a change in management at your employer can change a workplace from great to unpleasant (or unpleasant to great, presumably, though I'm lacking hard data here), a change in management at a vendor can have the same effect. Some people show more blind devotion to their vendors than they do to their spouses.

Broadcom makes U-turn on plan to serve top 2,000 VMware customers itself

Re: Downpour

Oh, I'm sure Broadcom will ride it out.

If they get more in revenue (with time value of money stuff calculated in, of course) than they paid for VMware, it will even be a win.

There are too many companies out there who are too committed to VMware (first mistake) to make a quick change. Or even a slow change. So VMWare will be a money maker for a number of years to come. As customers scale back, chop VMware R&D staff, then support staff, customer relations staff. A small billing department can take in a lot of money. Couple people to deal with security patches (who am I kidding? Whaddya gonna do, shut down your VMware servers? move to another product? Chop the security people, too! Oh wait, that looks bad. Outsource that to Elbonia, and show your "commitment to security"). It becomes almost pure revenue, minimal cost to produce that revenue.

Broadcom is going to ride it out just fine. VMware will probably vanish as a "product" in a decade or so, but the money will be made. Return on investment had. Success.

If this gets companies to realize bedding down with one vendor is a Really Bad Idea, that's all fine with me. If this gets companies to realize their vendors are in business for the same reason they are (to make money), again, all the better.

NASA finds Orion heatshield cracks won't cook Artemis II crew

Re: I have a bad feeling about this ....

SpaceX: "That worked, but let's see if we can make it better!"

... vs ...

NASA: "that didn't work as intended. We'll change the mission profile so it is 'acceptable'."

If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.

Re: It’s not a race!

Safety is most important! behind ...well, um... everything else.

(much like computer security)

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: "Progress, eh?"

Back in The Day, I'd tell my clients, "buy a CDROM drive". If they wanted to pay me to insert floppy after floppy, I'd do it, but I'd point out that a CDROM drive cost about the same as one hour of my time, and it would save more than one hour of my time. It was far cheaper to pay for a CDROM and then have me do the install off CD, and then they had a CDROM drive on their computer (and by Windows 95 days, CDROM drives were getting pretty useful). I'm pretty sure I NEVER installed Windows 95 from floppy.

For Novell Netware 3 installs, I'd put my own CD drive in the server, install off that, then remove the drive, because other than the initial install, the CD on the server was of very minimal use. I'd have the customer buy on floppy, but install off my Netware CD, and serialize with their floppy. (by Netware 4 days, CDs were common enough I just told 'em to get one in the server).

Pakistan's tech lobby warns that slow internet is strangling IT industry

how's that WFH working out?

Everyone loves "Work From Home"...until they realize that "home" can be anywhere...or anyone.

I sympathize. I love working from home, especially when that "home" can be a sick friend or family member's house as easily as mine. But if that's all I'm willing to do, the people I'm competing with for jobs are literally all over the world.

Supermicro hot-swaps auditor in hope of dodging Nasdaq delisting

Sad...

this is sad to me, as I have learned to detest HP and Dell server hardware, and respect Supermicro HW for not doing the things I dislike about Dell and HP. I've enjoyed that I've seen IBM and Dell products that were just SuperMicro HW under the badge. I'd like to hope their "accounting problems" are just a paperwork snafu, but based on the experience of working in one company that also had "accounting problmes", this really doesn't look good.

Of course, the reasons I love supermicro boil down to, "get a SuperMicro box, it works, it does its job, it's easily expanded with third party parts". The reason I detest HP and Dell is stupid little money-grubbing tricks like having drive bay blanks that can not be used to hold a drive, and the only way to get an HP or Dell drive carrier from the manufacturer is by buying an overpriced drive, too. Apparently, the money grubbing works.

To kill memory safety bugs in C code, try the TrapC fork

Re: Code analysis

you aren't wrong...but

1) the demand for programmers greatly outstrips the supply of GOOD programmers.

2) the demand from bosses to produce results NOW and worry about mess later is, if not universal, very common.

3) more and more programming work is going to barely-skilled low-cost "other country" development houses, where quality of work is irrelevant.

So...safer languages are needed.

Except...that lowers the bar for people to think they are "good" programmers, which ends up reminding people there are more ways to lose data than just memory errors in C. I saw something once a number of years ago, where some prestigious school washed out 75% of their computer science students when they were teaching C. Once they switched to Java, they graduated 75% of their entering CS students. So most of the graduates still sucked, but they could pass and get a sheet of paper and go writing banking software.

I have no idea what the answer is...

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Enterprise Grade --> Voyager Grade

I never could figure out the IT world's use of "Enterprise Grade"...did these people ever watch Star Trek? That dang ship broke every week, and in the same way twice a year!

Let's call it "Voyager Grade" -- even when it breaks, you can get it back up and running.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

my version of the CD story --

Customer called, "DISK READ ERROR"

me: "is there a floppy in the drive by any chance?"

Customer: <pause> "No. No floppy in the drive."

me: "ok. I'll have to come out and take a look, sounds like you have a bad hard disk."

me...hop in car, drive down-town, find a parking place. Walk to building where customer was. Walk into office, walk up to computer, push the button on the 3.5" floppy, out it pops. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, machine boots right up.

Customer: "Oh. THAT floppy. I thought you meant this one [points at 5.25" drive, which...to be fair, did not have a disk in it]".

Primary contact at customer (not the person who called me): "oops". IIRC, she was somewhat annoyed at the person who called me, so she figured she'd just let the other person deal with the problem.

I did point out that between driving, parking, and walking, I was out about $10 and two hours, so I was going to have to bill 'em an hour, "is there anything else you need done?" So I ended up doing general handyman stuff for the next 45 minutes or so (I believe I ended up fixing a desk fan, few other things around the office) before I left. IIRC, I left the invoice somewhat vague about the exact nature of the problem. If they asked, I'd have told, but we had a very good relationship, so no problem.

so...diagnosis: from "seeing the machine" to "fixed" -- I'd say it was less than 8.5seconds. But a lot longer than that to get to make that diagnosis.

I did have a walk-in-and-obvious power problems in building call. Fast to diagnose, but took shockingly long to convince the people there that the computers were using power and thus, if the power was bad, the computers weren't going to be working. Finally, "I guess we probably should cancel the copier repairperson, too, huh?" yep...

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

old word processors were about stringing words together in the right order.

Modern word processors are about making documents pretty.

I was in school when the Macs were first coming out. A lot of us (without Macs) were quite convinced that "fancy formatting" was often getting confused for "good writing". I'm sure that's the case now.

Same with presentations. Back when I was in school, the rule was "talk to/with your audience, don't read from a script", and your visual aides were AIDES, not the presentation. Now: "Read your PowerPoint ... because that's what is important". A few years ago, I was sitting in on a local school board meeting, and they had a set of presentations showing what they did with the latest infusion of money. The Language department representatives gave this carefully scripted, highly animated PowerPoint presentation, which by the standards I was taught for public speaking SUCKED. Totally non-interactive, zero benefit to being in-person vs. a recorded presentation. And the animations totally distracted from the content (which was meaningless fluff anyway).

I'm glad I'm not trying to teach kids to write and present today.

I think *most* people use a spreadsheet as a column-oriented word processor or a data organizer (tempted to call it "database", but not really. Just keep a line of data together, and separate the fields, and "sorting based on a field" is about as fancy as they get).

The problem MSWorks always had is it was carefully crafted to NOT compete with the Big Money MS products, so it was 90% of what 90% of most people needed, but most people missed that missing 10%. The problem many programs have, and definitely a huge problem with Open Source programs, is adding features is fun...so they do.

CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag

Re: $25,000 for an annual subscription?!

I wonder what the savings on auditing would be for many big companies. I know I've seen a fair amount of people-hours going into figuring out what licensing we need and if we are in compliance with what we have...and projects paused while we try to decide if it is worth extending a license or not. I'm not seeing a ten system company going for this, but I can see a 100+ system company drooling all over it. Even if the cost is a little more up-front, it's paid and done.

Heck, the *ONLY* useful thing my employers ever get out of RH "support" was when their damn licensing code broke our systems. So yes, we were paying (a lot more than $25k/yr) for them to take free code, add run-time restrictions, then fix it when their run-time restrictions caused us downtime or other pain. (to be fair -- I've heard companies with thousands or tens of thousands of RH licenses getting useful support out of RH. That's not my world).

CIQ, you got my attention in a good way. I wish you well.

Geico tells El Reg, no, it's not canceling all Cybertruck insurance

Re: Geico thinks that some CT Owners are Renting the Vehicle Out Under the Table

when I was young, our family of four had eight cars.

Why did we have eight cars? Because we sold one.

Currently, I own three cars, all licensed and insured, and four motorcycles, and I live alone.

My GF (who lives alone) has two cars. yes, I inspired that.

We love our cars. Just money holes, not renting or running a business from them.

(and to bring this back to the topic of computers and IT)

I call my collection the Redundant Array of Individual Cars.

Long time ago when I was self-employed, I was trying to impress on a CFO the importance of good backups. Finally, he decided to get personal and say, "Well, how many cars do you have?" I told him, "not only do I have three cars, but I'm driving the backup van today, the primary van is in the shop". We did get our backup system.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: Not a problem

considering how this particular salesperson's family seemed to grow nine months after a landing each big contract, yes, I think he did.

Side story: I recently came across this salesperson after not seeing him since the early 1990s. He actually remembered my MOTHER (his prenatal instructor) more than me (the person who made him quite well-off by supporting and sometimes landing all those big-contract customers). Ah, well...

Start your downvotes!

It is up to the company to decide the work rules based on what they think is best OVERALL for the company, and up to employees to decide if they wish to earn money by working under those rules.

I like working from home. I also value the time I spent at my current job in the office when I first hired in -- it helped me come up to speed rapidly AND I now know (and work well with) several of my coworkers in other teams much better than people who have barely stepped foot in the office in five years. I want to continue to be mostly WFH, but I also recognize many of my skills are best (or only) done "in person".

I've worked with someone who was GREAT at working from home before the world went crazy in 2020. He was easier to reach than most of his in-office teammates, always available, and clearly put in his hours. He treated WFH as a privilege he was granted and needed to continue to earn, not an expected entitlement. I've also worked with people who screamed, "I WORK BETTER FROM HOME! I GET MORE DONE! I'M MORE PRODUCTIVE", and yet, no one is quite sure what they accomplished, why it took so long, and why they were so hard to get ahold of when needed.

Unfortunately, it's really worker-by-worker, and that's shaky legal ground. "You let Mary work from home, why can't I?" isn't going to work well.

So much more to say, except I'm on the clock!

Re: Not a problem

yep... The scene: a past job, salesperson is packing up.

"I'm heading <big customer>, I'll head home from there when done"

coworker: "Jim, it's after 5:00pm. You can just say, 'I'm going home'. Besides, <big customer> went home a couple hours ago"

That was over 35 years ago

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

Re: Its not about the licenses being used....

when I first saw VMware, I thought it was pretty cool tech.

Then...I started realizing their pricing model was based on "Look how much we save you on hardware! Now pay us 80% of that. See? you come out ahead!"

Now Broadcom's pricing model is based on, "Look how much it would cost to change platforms. Now, pay us 80% of that. See? you come out ahead!"

Lesson: if you are running commodity HW and OSs, make sure all parts of your system are replaceable with alternative products. And make sure you can do that.

Quick Payback and strong IRR

yeah, that was in-freaking-credible for them to put that in the public record.

I used to work at a Big Company, which had all kinds of training about what kind of things you should invoke the legal department over, The general process was, "if in doubt, run it past legal".

Sounds like Broadcom needs their legal department to run stuff past Marketing and PR. Just...Wow.

But now we also know AT&T runs obsolete and unsupportable applications. The company that basically invented much of computing...isn't even keeping stuff up to date. Sigh.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

I'm curious how you would have had the US be "first" in WW1 or WW2. Or Ukraine.

While I do not agree, a case could be -- and has been -- made that the US should not have been involved in any of those wars. They were not at US boarders. All three were clearly "European problems" (and "Asian problems", until Japan thought an attack on the US would be a great idea).

If the US gets involved, they are the world's bully. If they try to stay out, they are "yellow and lets everyone else do the fighting". Often in the exact same conflicts. Often described those ways by the same people.

Mainframes aren't dead, they're just learning AI tricks

cynical answer...

I suspect, being it is Kyndryl's survey, I suspect they meant "IBM Z systems".

What the respondents meant, no idea...

However, reading the statements with a cynical interpretation, it looks like a lot of people doing what everyone should do... "how do we get the best return from our investment". But often the answer is "not this way". (or politely telling Kyndryl, "yeah, we'll keep you in mind. Don't call us, we'll call you")

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Decisions, decisions...

Unfortunately, I disagree with the "Linux is getting better" part.

Linux has been taken over by people who hate Windows, but are intent on re-inventing poorly.

The question, "Should this be done?" is not asked -- just feature parity, which appears to be the definition of "better" for a lot of people. I'm sure it won't be long until someone adds AI to Linux, (probably systemd... "look! Smarter starup!"), but says, "This time, it is done right" (and they'll say it over and over).

I love Unix, and a Unix variant is my daily driver, but ... not Linux.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: Reputation

being this group is mostly IT people, I don't feel qualified to throw that stone, our collective glass house is REALLY REALLY thin glass.

Re: NASA has learned..

"It seems that NASA has finally learned how to properly assess risk."

I don't completely agree. Yes, better -- FAR better -- than continuing to fly the shuttle after numerous "we got away with it this time, let's assume we always will" decisions, but... they sent people up in a capsule that had yet to have an uneventful demo and attach it to the space station in a way that it would prove difficult to remove. Looks like a whole lot of "what do we do if it fails" thinking didn't take place, and a some "we'll hope that doesn't happen again" logic took place. Not as much learning as I would have hoped.

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Re: Works for me...

Oh yeah.

Same job they sent the fake termination notices out, they used an "secure e-mail" system that basically sent you a link to click on to get your e-mail off a website.

So not at all infrequently, we'd get unexpected e-mails from people we'd never heard of about things we we didn't know about with a link to click on. And the same management that enforced "security and compliance training" expected us to violate exactly the guidelines they "trained" us on. I refused. I ain't clicking on that thing. (security team hated that service for that reason. Well, that, and a certain jackass (me) kept hitting "report phish". Don't know what bothered them more -- me hitting "Report Phish" or the fact that so few other people did.

Re: Works for me...

The problem is...you mentioned REAL WORLD scams that actually take place.

Which would you prefer: "your son's been killed" and turn out to be a phishing training drill, or "your son's been killed" AND they just used your emotions to penetrate your company's security systems, or your bank account, or... ?

People need to learn, think first, emotions later. They ARE out to get you. The bad guys don't give a rat's ass about your "feelings".

Works for me...

A few years ago, my employer sent out a fake termination e-mail. "please click on this link, download the forms, fill them out, sign them and take them to HR", something along those lines. I thought it was a brilliant test.

However, I had a new coworker -- very Inexperienced, but smart and trainable and hard-working. i.e., the dream young employee. However, while her experience was measured in months, the rest of us in the team measured our experience in decades. So...not too surprisingly, she had confidence problems. She got the fake termination phish test, and she told us she freaked out. And I fully sympathize.

BUT...you can't take tools off the table. If we say, "We won't train with 'shocking' content", there's how you get get your phish through. Shock them, horrify them, get them to drop their guard...and a-clicking they will go.

Security training needs to be brutal. Two-up bosses telling underlings to do things (and obviously, managers have to learn to accept people questioning their questionable demands). Disease alerts. Termination notifications. Meet the new coworker. Department after-work party. And drop the stupid "misspellings and bad grammar should be your tip-off" b***s***, because if the target is worth the effort, they'll find someone who can write good $LOCALLANGUAGE.

Re: Priorities?

That's exactly what should be happening..

EMAIL CAN NOT BE TRUSTED. Period.

All the attempts to bolt "security" on a fundamentally insecure protocol just don't work. The ones that are technically sound are too complicated for normal users, who can't figure out the difference between a lock indicator on the URL bar and a lock graphic in the web page.

People have to learn that you can't trust e-mail. If a "genuine health warning" is sent out via e-mail and that's the only way it is sent, then the senders need to learn how to do their job properly.