Posts by AGK

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Denard Scaling

Bob Denard never got the credit he deserved. Moore's Law rides on the back of Denard Scaling. Oh, and Denard also invented modern DRAM. This guy deserves the credit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Yes, this story gets back around to the backup thread.

I was just listening to a video podcast about Steely Dan and the making of the Gaucho album. It seems they were perfectionists. As such, they created a master (cassette) tape of each track, including one called "Second Arrangement". After days of recording and production, an engineer accidentally stuck the cassette - THE cassette - into a recorder and recorded some test tones in order to tweak the recorder into final alignment. Over the one and only master recording of "Second Arrangement". As the podcast host commented, the good news was that they had 14 seconds of "Second Arrangement" and the bad news was that they had only 14 seconds. Although it was one of their favorite tracks and it was planned to be featured as a single, they decided that track would be dropped form the Gaucho album and it has never appeared.

There was NO backup of the cassette because an analog copy of any recording would introduce artifacts, perhaps inaudible in the final track, but artifacts of imprefection (sic - intended).

A cautionary tale from the analog world that has echoes throughout the digital world. Make backups and test them, dear readers, for anything you care to keep.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

GCC will not be complete until it supports MUMPS.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

The Enshi--ification of Red Hat, taken from the Book of Twitter and Facebook

Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick have been writing recently abou the ensh-ttification lifecycle of products. The details differ, but I suggest that the path of Red Hat is following closely the steps of Twitter, Facebook, and others. Here is Jason Kottke's summary of the lifecycle from the writings of Cory and Mike.

https://kottke.org/23/07/seven-rules-for-internet-ceos-to-avoid-enshittification

Excerpt -- This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Apple pushes first-ever 'rapid' patch – and rapidly screws up

Apple achieves Microsoft service levels

I discovered this morning that my MacBook Pro rebooted overnight. I assume this means I Got The Patch. At first, Mac would not accept my password. Several tries later, I restarted the machine and that convinced it to accept my password. Then I discovered that an external, thunderbolt-connected disk drive would not mount - it has a fatal error.

"Problem -69842 occurred while restoring the original mount state."

I ran a Disk Uitility check on it, several times, and no joy.

I unplugged the disk, and no joy.

I am to the point that I must reformat the drive and recover from Time Machine.

This feels exactly the way that Windows used to feel. Congrats, Apple!

Cloud Engines Pogoplug Pro DIY cloud box

Send photos on Grandma's printer

I can imagine installing one of these at Grandma's house with a little photo printer. Then I can send photos of little Grandson and Granddaughter at any time. Grandma likes prints because she can show them to her buddies. The nice thing about the pogoplug is that I don't have to be a technical wizard and consultant should something go wrong. A photo site is nice, but then I have to teach G'ma about photo sites and how to navigate and how to print and....