Posts by Doctor Syntax 42496 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Running at that scale is a non-trivial problem. They're running from multiple centres but still have to keep the data in sync.
Then there's risk aversion. Because of that production distros such as Centos tend to be trailing edge in terms of release versions of different components but with security updates back-ported. They're going to have to build and, also because of risk-aversion, thoroughly test all their custom stuff onto what may also be a distro similarly customised for extremely long term support but with a more recent base.
"If you want to improve your company product make your company actually use it in real world conditions"
This makes me wonder about their patch teams. Do they really put up with their own product? Or maybe they do and have no experience of how much better it could be. Perhaps they should be made to run something like Debian as their daily drivers for a couple of calendar months and then switch back to be faced with the accumulated junk they'll have to catch up on.
"In June of last year, the CAC instituted even tougher rules that required regulatory intervention when sending data abroad. Companies that move data describing over 100,000 individuals or handling information of over one million people were required to conduct risk assessments and file declarations."
Tougher? That sounds remarkably lax.
"So they select content about asphyxiation, and users actually read it and/or try what is suggested. Who'd have thought it?"
Anyone who had experience of dealing with sudden deaths. Distinguishing between what's generally termed sexual asphyxia and suicide was a problem well before social media, the web or even the internet existed.
"I think I only ever saw real TRS-80s of any kind in Tandy shops."
My boss had one. I built a joystick interface for it based on one of Steve Ciarcia's articles in Byte. If memory serves that involved making a PCB with a Dalo (resist) pen and etching with ferric chloride.
Years later I saw a TRS80 on a market stall and bought it simply because it was a piece of history. It's in the garage somewhere - I don't even know if it was working when i bought it. By now it would probably need re-capping if I wanted to try it.
My local Tandy shop in NI had a range of non-Tandy IBM compatibles. They had a case design I've never seen elsewhere in that the lid hinged up from the back, no faffing about with screws or whatever. They were ideal for playing with using for insrumentation in the lab.
"The blame should probably be shared between IBM and the clone manufacturers."
This is much later than the period of he article.
The point that everyone seems to be missing here is that when the first 8-bitters emerged there was no existing S/W except what was in the ROM. Somebody had to write it. The "vast software code base" was built up over time once there was something to write on and write for.
Hardware manufacturers made hardware. Software was an after-market product. And if the choice is between a new, more powerful video chip that's not compatible with the older one and he older one that's compatible with the older software what hardware manufacturer is going to put up with the pointing and laughing that would come with stagnating specs? They'd expect the after-market to catch up.
Apart from what was built in on the ROM there was no S/W and that might be no more than a BIOS. Microsoft BASIC was developed on PDP. The first time they say any part of it execute on an 8080 was when they took the paper-tape of the first completed version to Altair on paper tape.
The key to understanding the early 8-bit computers is that there was no established market for computers at that sort of price. None of the manufacturers would have had a clear idea of who would have wanted to buy them and it's a mistake to imagine that they were all aimed at solely at games although that might have been many vultures' and commentards' first experience of them. Once one realises that what one might have regarded as a gaming machine was conceived as having a much wider market the availability of CP?M is less surprising.
Essentially the arrival of the 8-bit processor had enabled the creation of machines whose possibilities were open-ended, vastly so from the perspective of the day. OTOH, not having any established market the makers had to put them out there and hope that they got the mixture of facilities right for some people to find uses for them.
They may well have envisaged businesses developing S/W for their own use with some of them then selling the S/W to others which, of course, enabled H/W sales. That certainly happened. I remember one event in the series the Beeb made at the time. A little old (so she appeared to me at the time) lady running a sweet shop had bought herself some machine - I can't remember what - and was writing her own programs. She was talking to the interviewer whilst doing something at the keyboard when there was a sudden, angry snap of her fingers as she'd obviously discovered something wrong; a sudden non-verbal communication, instantly understood and remembered over the decades.
Others, like myself, in mid-career in science or academia had had experience on mainframes, and subsequently looked enviously at the likes of PDP-8s, well above our budgets. We latched onto them. I had been looking at the possibility of some dedicated gadget to interface a microspectrophotometer to a tape punch with the hope of getting the QUB 1904 to process the tapes for me when a fire destroyed our wing of the lab and by the time we'd got up and running ot became feasible to set the whole thing up with S-800 kit. I know the Met forensic lab was looking at the same thing with a PET (it should be remembered that Commodore had an expansion bus that was based on the HP-IB). I heard, via an archaeologist friend in the Ulster Museum, that someone in the QUB Psychology Dept. had a machine (?Sol) which was a console format with the basic computer on a motherboard but with a few S-100 slots for expansion. From today's perspective it's probably impossible to imagine just how exciting it was for someone used to low budgets to suddenly have these possibilities open up.
"luxuries that would have been prohibitively expensive in the 1970s, like color and sound."
Of course it had colour: green! I can't remember whether it had a beep but it probably did.
I once saw a number of the later models on sale at Henry's in Edgeware Road. Maybe I should have bought one but getting it home might have been a bit of a problem.
The real mistake of the early PET was the keyboard. Why - just why?
As a member of a local history group we have the other side of this problem. We are occasionally given collections of documents but have no premises in which to store them. What to do? I'm gradually moving them towards a hosted NextCloud instance to make them accessible to members but that only lasts as long as there are funds to pay for hosting and it still doesn't help house the originals. Archives are not necessarily interested in them.
"unfortunately they didn't have any clear loan agreements with conditions for returning the items."
This is critical. Loaning an item is safer than donating it in the event that the museum may close - and even publicly-owned museums, or those set up as trusts can run into hard times and be closed. But it needs firm documentation.
The better response would be along the lines of "He has reported $Cases. We originally stated that he had committed these offences. That statement was a mistake on our part and is hereby retracted."
The harm lies in the original statement. Setting that right is important. Issuing a correct version on its own does no do that, neither does ducking the subject entirely.
Given that it seems likely to have been a generic error fixing it one case at a time isn't going to help.
I think it's now digested the story that it was telling porkies. According to one version I heard of it was reporting him as being the victim of incorrect reporting. That doesn't, of course, signify that it in any way understands what reporting means, let alone incorrect. Understanding is not a function of the system.
The Unix shell was conceived as a means of separating the low-level OS user interface from the kernel. As the only option at the time was a character-based interface using teletypes it was implemented as commands issued as lines of text, hence a command line.
Because os the layered nature of Unix it was possible to replace one shell with another so although you might be thinking of the Bourne shell or, possibly more likely, bash there were many others, ksh and csh being a couple I've used. Although, as you say, they have become programmable (and also implement some commands as built-ins) the essence has always been invoking other programs and providing parameters to them. If one wanted to be unkind (which I wouldn't) it would even be possible to describe that programmability as bloat.
With the arrival of GUIs we new have GUI-based shells. But if it's a text based shell interpreting lines of text as commands, then it's a command-line shell. What else could it be?
For the average Windows user who wants to stick with Windows the bast thing that could happen would be for Linux market share to start increasing exponentially with a doubling period of about a year.* At some point it might scare Microsoft into listening to its customer.
* Yes, I know it would really be sigmoidal growth but the marketroids who react to such things don't grok that.
A very long thread illustrating, largely, the harm a monopoly does. Microsoft doesn't care. It doesn't have to It has the lot of you by the short and curlies.
The best thing that could happen for Windows users would be for Microsoft to see Linux uptake increasing at a rate that would imply doubling market share every year. It's about the only thing that would scare the shit out of them and start making them listen to you.
