Posts by Javapapa

Windows 10 Spring Creators Update team explains the hold-up: You little BSOD!

Re: If anyone knows of any other solutions, please reply.

Windows 7

Mac OS

Linux

Chromebook

Android

Wait – we can explain, says Moby, er, Docker amid rebrand meltdown

DRe: Name Change, what for?

Future System, System H, System/380, (no scratch that, too incompatible with the 370), System/38, AS/400, iSeries, IBM i for business...

If the marketing idiots who killed a great IT brand ever bought Coca Cola, they would have renamed it iPop.

Old, not obsolete: IBM takes Linux mainframes back to the future

Ahh'll not be baack.

"A bit like a wrinkly grey-haired T-800, you find yourself rooting for it."

I am wrinkly, and definitely grey-haired, but after the IBM mainframe execs dragged the glorious AS/400 brand through the dirt (let's call it e-server iSeries; no, just iSeries; no call it "i for business", no, just call it "i"), I feel no desire to root for IBM anymore.

I do miss the stone cold consistent TLA commands compared to the childish Unix/Linux nonsense, but the RPG language not at all. A good ride, and thank you Dr Frank Soltis for all the fish.

Biz that OK'd Edward Snowden for security clearance is fined $30m for obvious reasons

No one works in Washington except contractors

The bureaucrats simply approve invoices. Outsourcing went into high gear under Reagan and the feds started buying COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) hardware. You would be amazed by the amount of whitebox computers purchased, some even assembled in the suburbs.

Toshiba CEO and execs quit over $1.2bn six-year accounting scandal

Don't they have accountants in Japan?

Or is it the old "the nail that sticks up is soon hammered down" culture regarding reluctance to warn the boss of bad news?

Microsoft to Windows 10 consumers: You'll get updates LIKE IT or NOT

You are not the customer...

...unless you bought a box of software (or download equivalent).

The OEMs are the customer.

That fact explains Microsoft's behavior.

Android Wear 5.1: A more enduring wristjob for your pleasure

Waiting for bendable wrist cuff

Like the military use. I usually know exactly where I am, but it would be so cool to tap the map to confirm airstrike targeting. Or summon Uber.

A brief introduction to converged infrastructure

Oh, like an AS/400?

Beautifully integrated, if you didn't mind extreme vendor lock-in and IBM's goal of 40% profit margin before taxes.

Or the loss of IT empire because one admin could support hundreds of users.

MIT's robo-cheetah leaps walls in a cyborg hunt for Sarah Connor

Re: wankers.

Take away our Chinese Express credit card and much of this kind of excess will end.

Is hyper-convergence a good thing? Ask a mini computer veteran

In my day sonny,

We bought IBM AS/400's with integrated everything, and we LOVED it!

Too bad we didn't know then we were hyperconverged.

Panda antivirus labels itself as malware, then borks EVERYTHING

Fawlty Software

Manuel, you nitwit, I said "test the patch", not "mess the batch"!

?Que?

Assemblers were once people: My aunt did it for NASA

NASA history

Told quite well in a book titled "Digiral Apollo". Chapter on rope wranglers was fascinating - they literally hard coded the small program segments with wire bundles.

Welcome to Spartan, Microsoft's persuasive argument for... Chrome

Re: "having to build for not one but two Microsoft browsers"

Didn't Nicholas Zakas make the point that browser content should follow progressive enhancement, from plain vanilla HTML, adding CSS and Javascript as desired for a richer UX, but still working if the browser isn't "modern"?

And I want to drag the corners of my browser screen and adjust the size on my screen, or hit Ctrl + late in the day to accommodate tired eyes, isn't it more important that the content refresh instantly according to concepts of liquid flow that to have every pixel exactly where it looked good on your browser with your settings preference? Say goodbye to the days of consistent 1280x1024 and say hello to the era of NxM.

I don't care if a things look different due to interpretation of standards. I am not going to shim anything to make it look exactly the same on all browsers, or use a bloated framework for that purpose.

Fool's errand, like User-Agent detection.

Re: But it's Google...

I just sign in to NSA and bypass the middleman.

Dark Fibre: Reg man plunges into London's sewers to see how pipe is laid

Re: Security?

Have a friend who was a Forward Air Controller during Gulf War I. His mission was to navigate the Baghdad sewer system, push open a manhole cover (at night), aim a laser at a government building for the smartbomb to home in on.

Watch the movie "The Third Man" for a tour of the Vienna sewer system.

‘Whatever happened to Vladimir Putin?’ and other crap New Year prophesies

Re: Y2k

I told a manager we should use 4 digit dates on an IBM System#38 ERP project in 1987. He said no, save the bytes, besides he would be retired by then. I was a contractor, wanted to ask him if the pension programmers cared about accurate date calculations.

Vendors like IBM got the last laugh using 10, count 'em, 10 bytes for the ISO date format.

Go Canada: Now ILLEGAL to auto-update software without 'consent'

Easy fix

Relabel buttons "Download, eh?"

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

Corporate rollouts to 20,000? Meh.

IIRC, Amazon rolled out a major order entry, inventory search, payment & shipment tracking system to over 200 million desktop users last year.

I believe their end user operating system platform used a bunch of capital lettered components glued together with a poorly named language, what was that, oh yes, now I remember, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

No need to call the bouncer over, I'm getting my coat. Please leave my Chrome running on Win 7 when I get back from paying the Hypocrite Tax.

Tesla S P85+: Smiling all the way to the next charging point

Real world experience with a Leaf

Automotive journalists get to drive lots of cars, but don't get to live with them for long.

Into my fifth month driving a base model Nissan Leaf in Houston. Currently using the "trickle charger" at home, plan to install a 220 volt 30 amp circuit soon for a L2 6.6 kW/hr charger. My daily commute is less than 40 miles on a combination of level urban streets and Interstates with overpasses. I arrive home with 50% or more of remaining charge; plug-in overnight, ready to go next morning.

Wife's Tiguan is our intercity vehicle. Tesla installs charging stations between cities, very few Level 3 CHAdeMO equivalents for Leaf or Volt drivers. Nissan dealer is three blocks from office building, with three other L3 chargers within a 3 mile radius, one near restaurants.

Love the torque, love the silence, love the wide variety of fuels used to power the grid. Leasing to mitigate risk of premature battery decline or range obsolescence. Unknown maintenance costs for the electronics, expect the motor itself to be long lived.

The best design compromise single car drivers is probably a plug in hybrid with small engine optimized for charging the battery when needed, simplifying the drivetrain. Chevy Volt is a good example, BMW i3 is another. Not impressed with complexity of the Prius.

For the naysayers, consider the serendipity of cross over technical advancement. Laptops created a mass market for lithium ion batteries, which made the Tesla roadster possible.

I have probably purchased my last ICE powered vehicle.

FBI boss: Sony hack was DEFINITELY North Korea, haters gonna hate

Who needs proof?

Having a flimsy excuse (or being unwilling to show technical details of the evidence chain) is better than no excuse to take them off-line. Heck, we should mess with their minds just for them tolerating a supreme leader with a bad haircut.

IBM Research wants laptop batteries to retire and slum it

Flashback memory

We used tired batteries from our tactical radio in Vietnam to read at night in our basecamp after the noisy diesel generators shutdown.

Crack open more champagne, Satya, XP's snowballing to HELL

Expect a spike up in December

When all the students come home and surf the net on their parents' XP desktops.

Yes, you heard me – the storage infrastructure WARS are over

Re: Compass points

Trevor, as an old AS/400 application developer, this kind of story helps tremendously understand aspects of computing I never see up close and personal.

Please clarify one point that is confusing me. When you describe arrays vs SAN, are you referring to NAS arrays? Link below uses term array for both NAS and three subtypes of SAN. And of course there are still legacy Direct Attached Storage (DAS) grinding away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_array

CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker

CoreOS Blog graphics styling?

Terrible choice of thin line font and very light gray text color, IMHO. Does anyone know if a Chrome or Firefox extension exists to force text to be rendered full black? I remember the early days when IE or NN would allow overriding the designer's intent.

Hard to determine righteousness or unrighteousness when you can't read the reasoning without performing SelectAll to invert the colors. Or is it just me?

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re: Secret mode?

No need to update anything.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." - Gen 1:1 (KJV)

Includes P67.

It's Big, it's Blue... it's simply FABLESS! IBM's chip-free future

Let's just call them IB

Pretty soon there won't be any Machines to sell. Serves them right for treating the AS/400 brand with benign neglect.

Tesla's Elon Musk shows the world his D ... and it's a monster

Re: I dont get it.

Some real world stats from 5 weeks of driving an all electric Nissan Leaf in Houston during September:

Battery can hold 24 kilowatt/hours of potential energy. Motor peak output is 80 kW/hr (107 hp). Overall curb (kerb?) weight is 3,200 pounds.

Houston Texas is mostly flat, most "hills" are the Interstate overpasses. Averaging 4.5 miles per kW./hr, at rate of $0.104 equates to about $0.024 per mile, gasoline would be between 5 to 7 times higher. Leasing for 3 years to mitigate risk of battery problems. My shortest round trip commute is 30 miles, I trickle charge overnight. Max range for me is around 95 miles, but I never intend to go below 20% on battery. Limited to Houston area, cannot drive the 180 miles to Austin, so wife's VW Tiguan is my range extender.

I'm not a tree hugging environmentalist, I work with engineers who design systems to extract oil & gas from Gulf of Mexico. But I am very, very tired of multi hundred dollar repairs for failing O2 sensors, timing chains, fuel injector fouling, etc.

Downside of electric cars is the low energy density of the battery. A US gallon of gasoline equates to 37 kW/hr and weighs 8 lbs. My battery weighs about 600 lbs. Do the math, lithium ion batteries have very low energy density. Everything will get better over time, but limit is an atom can give off only 1 or 2 electrons, whereas a molecule of fuel, combined with ambient O2 releases far more energy.

Optimal where daily usage is less than half of max range. Not for everyone, and pretty expensive. But quiet, vibration free, and good low end torque. Every Leaf driver would love to be a Tesla driver.

Apologies for my use of non-Imperial, non-metric units of measures, cousins.

So long Lotus 1-2-3: IBM ceases support after over 30 years of code

I remember Multiplan

It was available when Datapoint was desperately trying to stay alive and "office automation" was all the rage. The paperless office and all that jazz.

Heck, I even remember spread "sheets" - pads of wide, columnar oriented accounting paper forms. I sold Monroe electronic calculators to minions who cross footed sums of rows with sums of columns as a error detection technique.

Ellison: Oracle's now a Cloud biz. Ignore everything I said before

Watching the keynotes

Pretty obvious to me that no one presenting keynotes at OpenWorld or JavaOne has ever studied Steve Jobs and his style and grace when presenting, let alone his dedication to weeks of rehearsal. Battery failure of a hand held slide controller? Hundreds of words on a slide? Pitiful repeat of a claim as a desperate plea for applause?

New market opportunity: SJaaS

Troll hunter Rackspace turns Rotatable's bizarro patent to stone

Proud to be a Rackspace customer

Texas history has a defining moment when Colonel Travis drew a line in the sand with his sword, allowing each volunteer to decide if they would stay and fight, or leave. The Alamo defenders, out numbered over 10 to 1, held off Santa Anna's army for 13 days, giving Sam Houston vital time to assemble his militia.

Rackspace is a Texas company.

Trolls, you are on notice.

Gee, everyone who wants a tablet has a tablet. Waiddaminute....

Seniors have their moments

I say balderdash to big buttons and simplified screens.

I'm 66. I want to say, "Computer, <command in native language>" and not have to touch anything, hold anything in my hand, wear funny glasses, or attach a Bluetooth dongle to my ear. I want this unseen, ever ready servant to be in my car, in my office, and in my home, with the nearest display, speaker, lock, machine, applicance or vehicle automatically activated. Siri, Galaxy, Cortana: you ladies are getting close, but more interfaces and AI services are yet to be created.

There is your roadmap kids. Get cracking.

China building SUPERSONIC SUBMARINE that travels in a BUBBLE

Chinese takeout

100 minutes is a little long to wait for Shanghai cuisine to be delivered to San Francisco.

Unless "takeout" means delivering something hotter than Gen Tso's chicken.

Hacker crew nicks '1.2 billion passwords' – but WHERE did they all come from?

Re: Cut of Russia from the Internet

Don't stop there, add Eastern & Western Europe, China, the Middle East, the rest of Asia, Central & South America to the drop list. That leaves the AngloSphere (Five Eyes) inside the firewall. That way, if anything goes wrong, we know who to blame (NSA, GCHQ).

65 patches later and Java STILL breaks stuff

Java Language Specification

8.8.7. Constructor Body

"The first statement of a constructor body may be an explicit invocation of another constructor of the same class or of the direct superclass."

From http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-8.html#jls-8.8.7

Sounds like the patch changed the enforced behavior from "may" to "must". An "explicit" invocation of a constructor probably means arguments are used since a no arg constructor will be inserted by the compiler *if not provided by the programmer), and that inserted constructor will have an invocation to the no arg constructor of the superclass.

Cause the devil is in the details.

Free 2004-spec AS/400 pops up in the cloud

Re: PTSD

The most underrated feature of the AS/400 and its predecessor. The System/38, was the large, boxy 5250 terminal. What it took away from desk space it returned with a flat top without vents. Several feet of wide line printer listings could be stacked on top. Good times.

Microsoft's MCSE and MCSD will become HARDER to win

Certs vs Experience

BS degree in Finance (quit laughing, I have).

Forty years of IT experience, over half as a direct contractor.

Self taught in RPG, SQL, Databus, Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS, NoSQL.

Exactly one certification - Sun Java Programmer.

Exactly one paid formal training for a product (Obsysdian) which was eclipsed by Java.

Attended a few conferences when I could justify the opportunity cost, never paid to go.

Many viewings of conference keynotes and tech talks on Youtube, Vimeo, or conference sites.

Many viewings of tech talk slideshows on Slideshare.

Hundreds of books (my expense) on software development and database design.

Subscriptions (my expense) to ComputerWorld, BusinessWeek, Fortune, JavaWorld, Database, Programming Languages back when print was king.

Many, many monthly user group meetings (my expense or free). Still go.

Purchased compiler licenses (my expense) of VisualBasic, Databus, Smalltalk.

Hundreds of downloads of open source software.

Made friends with other professionals; was an instructor/mentor to others.

Get the picture? Invest in yourself. No one else cares more about your career than you.

Regrets? Some, mainly not seeking masters degree and not going to more conferences.

Google shows off new Chrome OS look

Re: hmmm

"Fantastic choice for senior citizens who might not be too computer savvy."

This 66 year old senior IT professional is savvy enough to use Windows 7 Pro, Windows 8.1, LinuxMint, Android, and Chromebook, and has coded for AS/400, System/38, Datapoint ARCNET, DEC System/20, and Tektronix 4012.

I agree, youngster. Chromebook is a fantastic choice. If it had SMB to access documents on Windows servers, it would be my primary work machine. (Yeah, I know, they are "working on it".)

And by the by, if you use ANY browser on ANY platform that supports predictive completion, you are sending what you type to the server, character by character. BaaK Browser as a Keylogger.

So be careful out there. For example, don't type: how do I murd ^H^H^H ake my wife happy?

Listen: WORST EVER customer service call – Comcast is 'very embarrassed'

Switching providers

In the Colonies, when switching providers, we often have to talk with a rep from a third party company which provides legal protection against charges of "slamming" on part of new provider. Been a while, so don't know if still in effect.

Btw, all governments are or quickly become oligarchies. In fact, the leader of our Revolution was one of the richest men in the American colonies, so knock it off, ok? At least we get to choose from the fortunate few with the stamina to run for election and endure a form of Question Time which we laughingly call debates. Representative republics with divided power and terms of office do tend to reflect the will of the people. Can't help it if the people are insane.

God save the Queen, y'all!

French Senate passes anti-Amazon amendment

Price regulation

King Louis XIV, in an attempt to please the masses, and protect them from the evil bakers, sets the price of bread below production costs + profit, but leaves expensive luxury goods (ie, cake) alone.

Reports soon come in that the masses are even more PO'ed, as there is now no more more bread.

Marie Antoinette responds, "Then let them eat cake."

No wonder they cut their heads off. One way to eliminate faulty thinking.

Blame WWI, not Bin Laden, for NSA's post-9/11 intel suck

Cycles

The politicians enable the spies, the spies monitor the politicians (explaining why Hoover remained in power for 48, count 'em, 48 years).

Took a clean living Mormon from Idaho to make reforms in 1975. Don't be surprised that no one else is stepping forward.

Thanks for nothing, OpenSSL, grumbles stonewalled De Raadt

Open source vs closed source

With Five Eyes, all bugs are exploited.

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

Anyone know what this is?

23.671402, 58.117301

Located southwest of GHQC compound.

Adobe blames 'maintenance failure' for 27-hour outage

Re: Do not touch the switch ...

I almost hit the power switch on an IBM System/38 during an interview in 1982. Back then the O/S would have taken 8 hours to prove all objects were present and accounted for before letting users login. My career almost ended before it began.

WTF is Net Neutrality, anyway? And how can we make everything better?

A lot depends on the location

In southwest Houston, I have Comcast for Internet (averaging 20-25 Mbps download), DirectTV for satellite TV, and T-Mobile 4G averaging 3-5 Mbps, AT&T was a bit of slug upgrading U-Verse in my neighborhood, which is populated mostly by retired folks. I briefly tried Clear (now being absorbed by Sprint), and businesses in tall buildings with good lines of sight can use MetroPCS. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon compete against T-Mobile for cell phone service.

My guess is the set of options in the hinterlands is not as good.

Good article, by the way.

50+ crowd are wolfing down tablets: Silver foxes are even migrating to the Twitters

In my day, sonny...

We entered our Facebook posts using IBM 029 keypunch machines, mailed them in, and eagerly waited for the monthly greenbar report to come back, and WE LOVED IT!

Loudspeaker because you whippersnappers need to speak UP.

Java, because that's the language I use, and Papa, because I turned 66 last week.

Cold War spy aircraft CRASHED Los Angeles' air traffic control

Re: If you only knew how old that gear is

What's wrong with relocatable aluminum strips with paper inserts? Glitch proof, needs no batteries (except flashlight to see them at night).

New Reg mobile site - feedback here!

Tested April 22 on Samsung Galaxy S3 Chrome Browser

Big improvement over previous version where the articles did not auto size, forcing a pinch zoom.

Agree that using a style to show links followed would help with navigation, like desktop version does.

Also if selecting the "Most Read" option, it would be great if that choice persisted after reading an article. Currently it resets to the "Top stories" tab.

Also works with Android browser on S3, same comments apply.

Go sign to keep improving.

Bored with trading oil and gold? Why not flog some CLOUD servers?

Re: Economic WIN

Glad someone posted how Amazon AWS is alerady offering different pricing models. If a company has to process Super Bowl ad driven web responses, they can manage the risk of not being able to scale out on demand by paying more. A university number crunching batch run might be willing to release CPU cycles and finish a few hours later than planned to stretch the budget. Within a cloud vendor such decisions could be made quickly. Reminds me of how setting batch vs interactive priority allowed the AS/400 to achieve near 100% capacity utilization with sub second interactive response time for online users.

The CME contract would be targeting longer range time spans; however I wonder if there is enough natural variation (catastrophic storms, terrorist attacks on infrastructure, memory prices, rare earth pricing, megawatts, etc) to justify a contract market. The idea is intriguing. The success of the idea would depend in part on how quickly an application or a chunk of scale out could be provisioned to run in another vendor's data center. I didn't see a description of provisioning time granularity in the article.

To the person remembering Enron - their concept was to create a market for network bandwidth after having successfully creating a market for electrical power. Markets for power contracts exist today, I believe the bandwidth on demand market is dead due to vast over supply of the early 2000's.

There was an essay in "The Atlantic" written in 1979 during the second Arab oil embargo against the US for support of Israel, where the question was raised how to break OPEC's power. Apparently setting up oil contracts market through the New York Mercantile Exchange was part of the answer. The Arabs kept taking dollars, they stopped their embargo strategy.

'I was like, yea!' 5-year-old found his Xbox so easy to use, he hacked it

GoTinder hackers

Apply here http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html for your $100,000 Turing Test prize.

How Brit computer maker beat IBM's S/360 - and Soviet spies

Re: English Electric Lightning

Vivid memory, 1980, walking from Steineke Hall to ARAMCO admin building, heard a thunderous roar, looked up, saw two EE Lightnings with full missile kit enroute for a Persian Gulf Combat Air Patrol. Loved the clipped delta wing and tail, and the over and under engines on afterburner. You chaps can create great kit when you want to.