Posts by Jim 68

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

The AI Hindenburg is Joining the Itanic

A significant issue with AI systems today is that having run out of "training" materials they are starting to digest their own waste.

This seems to be the issue with GPT-5.

I recently had a "discussion" with a bot that completely misunderstood the nature of ENRON's broadband division.

AI is becoming like my health insurance company's Merlin phone system. If you want something off the main menu it will argue with you forever.

It's like when companies stopped hiring skilled sysadmins because MBAs thought they could replace them with BMC PATROL and similar products.

It won't be long before the current crop of AI goes to join the Itanic in its virtual watery grave.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

When DEC was running TOPS-10 they required regression testing for any patch.

Microsoft just throws it at the wall and sees if it sticks.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Re: DNS

DNS was intended to be a truly distributed system. Not one owned by Cloudflare.

Most people don't even operate a DNS server. They just link to a service provider.

So all it takes is one low wage "technician" to typo something and the whole Internet collapses.

Re: Not really.

I have worked with both Honeywell and IBM mainframe and terminal systems with Internet or similar distributed redundant resources.

If you cut to the chase and ignore the hype and jargon, cloud largely is the same thing, just more cleverly marketed.

Want to keep Windows 10 secure? This is how much Microsoft will charge you

What we need is a really catastrophic security exploit of Windows that affects thousands of employees in American government agencies in highly sensitive/classified positions.

That will force Microsoft to stop dancing and seriously upgrade.

Re: Go to market strategy

Harvard MBA 101.

Didn't Bill Gates attend Harvard?

The only UNIX system with a good applications universe I have ever owned was the AT&T UNIX-PC from 1985.

I actually had a licensed multiuser copy of real Microsoft Word on that system. On UNIX!

I think the MS Word license cost $450 in 1985.

AT&T UNIX System V release 2 with the 4.2 BSD virtual memory. And dynamically loadable device drivers.

This was a Motorola based workstation, not a PC clone.

You could even buy ORACLE for it. As well as INFORMIX. I think the ORACLE license was about a thousand dollars.

I ported Berkeley SPICE 3C1 to that system.

I ran Solaris on a dual Xeon Intel motherboard later for a few years and it was the same as Linux, poor quality applications for home PC use.

I ran Microsoft XP with the SFU Unix package on my IBM/Lenovo T60 laptop and that was good because it wasn't an emulator. Microsoft actually merged AT&T SVr4 UNIX into the guts of XP.

My favorite Linux is SUSE Enterprise Linux.

I have run ORACLE 10g Enterprise RAC on that.

It has a lot of the look and feel of AT&T UNIX.

But again the applications are disappointing in quality for home PC use.

So you're kind of forced to put up with Microsoft if you want a good home PC experience.

I have never liked Apple PCs except for the Mac IIfx. They are typically slow and the user interface is so frustrating that you feel like you want to just rip the top off so you can get to the guts of it.

The Mac IIfx was insanely fast but cost around $7,500 or so in 1992.

I'm sort of resigned to the fact that you have to put up with Microsoft Windows if you want a decent home PC experience.

Re: Be careful what you wish for....

I miss XP with SFU which I had on my ThinkPad T60. That was not an emulator but a true merger of XP and SVr4 UNIX on the same filesystem.

You could use microEmacs to edit Windows scripts, for instance.

I had a similar experience in the mid 90's developing software for an IBM mainframe running MVS, DB2, MVS/TSO, CICS and VM/CMS.

Documentation was on MS Office.

Official email was on VM/CMS.

We had a big AIX pSeries server.

I installed eXceed on my desktop and could access everything in different windows from the pSeries server on my X11/Windows desktop and seamlessly cut and paste anywhere. It had active icons which were a miniature of the session screen so you could see when a compile job finished or monitor performance without opening the window.

I primarily developed software in Emacs on the pSeries for COBOL, CICS and DB2 on the mainframe. The mainframe COBOL had special hardware acceleration tied into DB2 within MVS. I learned that from K.R. Hammond, one of the principal developers of DB2 on MVS.

My coworkers hated me.

They used dumb terminal emulators that took over the whole desktop, so they had to log out of CICS or TSO just to check their email.

I could do everything all at once from the Windows desktop and stay logged in to everything.

It's a matter of when, not if, customers move to the cloud, SAP tells investors

Didn't the Hindenburg lift us into the cloud?

Wow, we just bought this VAX 780 and now we can free ourselves from leasing time on that IBM mainframe and control our own culture.

Shift forward a few decades and we're floating toward the Cloud, inhaling its mephistic vapors from the hookah.

Does any of this sound familiar?

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

Culinary experience

I recall the woman describing her experience with White Castle: It tasted a lot better last weekend when I was drunk.

Rate of disruptive tech and science discoveries has slowed over the decades, claims study

Disruptive MBAs

To be serious for a moment, I think the post about the rise in the noise level is relevant. It took Max Perutz 30 years to elucidate the structure of h(a)emoglobin.

Most scientists would be fired by MBAs if they took more than 5 years even to discover the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

I was going to categorize this up there with the electric fork until some boffins brought up the porn aspect.

Now you can be working remotely and typing an angry message to your boss while fondling your Internet girlfriend's body.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Re: Itanic industrial mistake

"Although VMS is therefore relevant to the lingering on of Itanium, another significant factor is perhaps the fact that no port of HP-UX to x86 or x86-64 has ever been released."

I suspect the reason for no x86 port of HP-UX goes back to AT&T SVr4. Sun Solaris 2 was developed from scratch and dual endian.

HP decided to incorporate SVr4 into HP-UX without a full rework, so it stayed big endian only.

If you look at the source code there is so much low level bit twiddling that it would be impractical to try to "port" HP-UX to a little endian CPU with anything short of a complete ground up rewrite.

There were a couple perfunctory stabs at it that were cancelled early on.

Since most customers are primarily interested in application environments above the OS, porting HP-UX to x86-64 was less attractive than migrating them to Linux.

IBM researcher suing for age discrimination blames CEO Arvind Krishna for his ousting

This is typical of a corporate environment that places stock buybacks above creativity and innovation. IBM has been engaged for over a decade in deliberate age discrimination mainly to cut the payroll.

And the company's customers have suffered from it.

At this point as a customer I would never do business with IBM, largely because they have nothing to offer.

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

Re: Optimised in compiler

As I recall, the impetus for EPIC was a soon discredited research paper implying that there was a huge amount of unexploited parallelism in existing source code that was missed by compiler peephole optimization and RISC runtime reordering.

I tested this with a DEC Alpha in 1993 running OSF/1. The compilers had the option to do deep/wide optimization across the entire set of source files for an application.

I compiled some large biomedical imaging and genomic applications and found the difference in runtime performance was about 3% or less - not worth the effort.

Given the lack of runtime optimization and the nondeterministic nature of cache misses and memory access, the only way to get Itanium to work was to put the entire working set in cache.

It would have been interesting to see what the highly regarded PA-RISC design team could have done has they not been displaced.

Of course the same goes for Alpha.

IBM still spending its way to cloud relevance with BoxBoat buy

IBM is so far behind Amazon and Microsoft they might as well just punt and put what little is left behind Watson. As if there's much more promise there.

They took one of the best computer companies in the world and turned it into a disaster while destroying the careers of their employees.

We've heard of too big to fail, and IBM used to fall in that category.

Now IBM seems to be exploring "too dumb to fail " as a business model.

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Maybe we dodged a bullet?

I think NSA told me to avoid side-channels back in the 1980s.

Itanic was sunk before launch - by Alpha compiler

Itanic was sunk before launch - by Alpha compiler

I had an early DEC 3000 Alpha 400/400S AXP workstation. It had a C compiler that did extremely deep/wide source parallelism analysis across an entire application, what EPIC later promised. I experimented and found that the degree of "hidden" parallelism discovered in no way compensated for the inconvenience and time required to recompile the entire application from source just to edit one module. Yes, I conducted detailed, controlled studies at (then) DCRT at the NIH. Around late 1992 or early 1993. Oh, yes, you could do EPIC on an Alpha in 1992! Just pick the right compiler options and compile the whole source at once.

This whole disaster could have easily been avoided had someone at HP or Intel simply repeated what I did a decade earlier with that Alpha.

Yet IBM decided I didn't deserve to have a job selling HP Itanics to Mickey Mouse (he evidently likes HP-UX better than IBM POWER with the COBOL like AIX OS) so I was RA'd.

Go figure...

Republicans' net neutrality attack written by… you guessed it, the cable lobby

It's Comcastic!

And the winner is...

Fire fighters get grinding on London man’s trapped genitalia

Sounds like another job for...

Angle Grinder Man!

Best be Nimble, best be quick. You're out of a job at HPE – and that's sh*t

Re: I am not a resource!

Hewlett and Packard wanted to make the best quality engineering kit possible. It was costly but generally worth it if you could afford it.

When I visited a large HP facility around 1999 or so I asked about their quality assurance testing. Once the laughter subsided I was told: "If it powers on, it ships!"

I think I also vaguely recall a time when employers saw critical minded, skilled employees as a valuable resource. By the 1990s they were a disposable asset. Now they're just a cost to be cut.

Industrial plant robots frequently connected to the 'net without authentication

I suspect...

...there are a lot of people who simply can't envision anything that's not connected to the Internet.

Come celebrate World Hypocrisy Day

Startup Entrepreneurship

Silicon Valley essentially invented IP theft. The whole idea of startup "entrepreneurship" was essentially joining a firm, learning their kit and then going into competition with them.

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

Fair Use, We Don't Need No Steenkin' Fair Use!

Why can't people ever get over this "copy protection" nonsense? All DRM does is to hobble reasonable use by legal licensees.

Fix crap Internet of Things security, booms Internet daddy Cerf

Re: I hope "the answer" isn't EVEN MORE gummint...

A significant issue is the prevailing social problem of complete lack of ethics that has overtaken nearly everything. When the people in control of doing things have no interest in quality or potential risks, it really doesn't matter. Private sector or public, big or small, if there's no intent to do good to begin with, neither regulations nor market selection pressure will matter.

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

I Just Assumed...

The Internet being what it is these days, I assumed the periodic hiccups in MS cloud svcs were due to a DDoS attack on their authentication servers. Fortunately in my case reloading the page a few times got through and everything I did Tuesday seems to be there today.

Will AI lead to the rise of the love machines?

Big Bang Theory

There was that episode with Wolowitz' robotic hand...

Scott McNealy: Your data is safer with marketers than governments

"...Wait until we see puck."

Most Sun engineers in the '80s and '90s regarded Scooter primarily as a source of entertainment.

Hyper-V guest escape, drive-by PDF pwnage, Office holes, SMB flaws – and more now patched

'...Secure programming is hard, kids'

From reading the descriptions of most Windows related vulnerabilities, the developers would only have needed to type, size, bounds and sanity check inbound data. All incoming data, every time. This is hardly news, and is certainly less difficult than the time some suits at a former unnamed employer decided it would be a nifty idea to mix big and little endian app servers in a n-tier SAP environment. "Well, the marketing rep SAID it would work..."

IBM: Voluntary redundo offer? Ticked. Min stat terms? Ticked

Re: But don't we need to import IT skills...

This was always the old selling point when Cisco produced that white paper nearly two decades ago about "at will" employees being able to pick and choose the best compensation. Unfortunately when everyone is going down the H-1B route there aren't many "opportunities" to choose.