Posts by lordminty

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

"European techies and lobbyists are pressing the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, to create a sovereign infrastructure."

Yeah, that'll fix it. Typical EU posturing. While the US developed a rocket stage that can return to earth and park itself on its launch pad, the best the EU could produce from all it's self-appointed 'experts' and lobbyists is a bottle top that remains attached to the plastic bottle.

By the time the EU create their own cloud, the US will have invented the cloud's replacement.

Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative

Rather have an UPTON ONE

As Argon 40 have just teased the UPTON ONE, a purpose-built, modular, and truly open-source laptop powered by a Raspberry Pi compute module, I'd rather have one of those.

At least it looks like Framework will have some competition.

Euro cloud biz trials 'server blades in a cold box' system

45 years late

It's like Back to the Future.

Like lots of things in IT this is not new.

They have reinvented IBM's Thermal Conduction Module (TCM) from the 1980 IBM 3081.

At the place I worked we used the waste heat from our 3081 to heat the office space in the 4 floors of the purpose built building, which was cleverly designed to recycle the heated water.

Which became a bit of an issue when we replaced the 3081 with an air cooled Amdahl 5890!

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

3 quid before you got answered

What a nice little earner.

I'd you pay for phone calls per minute in the UK, which I suspect most callers to HP do, it's around 20p per minute. 15 x 0.20 = £3.00

I can't believe it would be a freephone number.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Hang on a minute...

"8 bits is 1 byte."

You've just proved the point. "8 bits is 1 byte." is b*ll*cks

8 bits are not always a byte. Just because they are in some architectures or languages doesn't mean it's universal.

Bytes can be any size, and have been 4 bits 6 bits, 7 bits, 9 bits, 12 bits, 16 bits, 18 bits, 24 bits, 32 bits, 36 bits and 40 bits.

Some still are.

You'll be claiming you can't have 24-bit or 31-bit addressing next.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Re: Still can't figure this out

Why do Unix bigots always think the whole world revolves around C, and it's the only language that exists? Why?

Not all operationing systems are written on C!

Most of the world's financial services industry runs on operating systems written in IBM assembler or PL/S.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

BASIC+2 was the cool kid on the block

I learnt BASIC at school in the late 1970s on a DEC System/10 using coding sheets, punched cards and paper tape.

Then we got regular access to a swanky new DEC PDP-11 running RSTS/E that came with BASIC+2 which was a massive leap into the future. The arrival of a Research Machines 370/Z brought 8-bit BASIC, but compared to BASIC+2 it was quite poor.

Next stop was Uni and a bew fangled VAX-11/780, with Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, VAX Macro32 assembler (and Z80 on a Exidy machine).

In my first job at an engineering consultancy I wrote a fair but if Fortran, but I just couldn't get my head around code to calculate all the natural frequencies of the steel cylinder for a nuclear reactor pressure vessel.

So I wrote it in BASIC+2, all nicely structured, with subroutines.

I kicked the run off on a Friday afternoon thinking it would run before I went home.

It ran all weekend. And finally finished on Monday afternoon.

The engineers I worked with didn't believe the result and the thousands of natural frequencies of the cylinder.

Not long after I got made redundant, and a few years later on TV was a animation of a wobbly reactor pressure vessel and a load of political finger pointing over who hadn't spotted the problem!

By the time the micros were all the rate I'd graduated to working on IBM big iron mainframes, so micros were just toys to me.

IBM has it's own BASIC like language, ReXX, which is super-powerful, so much so that a colleague and I wrote an entire job scheduling system for VM/VSE in it.

Re: Hmmm... two different things..

I was introduced to structured programming AND subroutines while at school using BASIC+2 on a PDP 11/70.

The thing that didn't have "structured thinking" was the PICNIC, not BASIC the language.

White House’s new fix for cyber job gaps: Serve the nation in infosec

Well. IIts been a good week fir other countries copying ideas from the former UK government that just lost the UK General Election.

First the Germans copy the Rwanda Plan, now our American cousins have copied the idea of doing national service in Cyber Security!

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

Microsoft Linux?

I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft had their own...

Unix.

Xenix. We used to run it on Altos boxes.

Just like everything in IT, it goes around in circles.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

"And the trains and service were way better back then."

Clearly you never used them. They were awful. Worn out dirty trains, late, and the workers would go on strike for WEEKS on end.

Re: Related?

Wait until they have to eat GB Railways sandwiches!

Re: Inevitable

Yep that was a mega, sorry Meta issue...

You'd be giving your 5,000 users an introduction to Agile...!

Re: Getting sick of evermore intrusive endpoint security suites

I used to be a big fan of Avast and ZoneAlarm on our personal Windows PCs.

Over the last couple of years they have become so bloated and invasive and gobbling up all the CPU on older lower end machines. I've had to start removing them from our dual core and low end quad core Win 10 PCs as they are just unusable otherwise.

Too many eggs in too few baskets

This is a great example of why you shouldn't automagically take every update, and why your critical business systems should be air-gapped from the Wild West that is the Internet.

Watching the share price of Crowdstrike today should be entertaining, and a few CIOs should have their b*ll*cks in a vice.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: things that are running

2038 won't break mainframes running proprietary mainframe OSes like z/OS.

Euro-cloud consortium CISPE calls for investigation of Broadcom

Not many cores for a 'cloud operator'

<blockquote>few VMware-powered cloud operators operate 3,500 cores</blockquote>

That really isn't a lot of cores for anyone that tries to call themselves a 'cloud operator' is it?

Maybe I've just worked in big shops, but 3,500 cores is only around ~90 ESXi servers with ~40 cores each. My last place had that sort of number of ESXi hosts for one solution comprising of a just 6 applications.

A path out of bloat: A Linux built for VMs

Re: The really clever thing about IBM mainframe VM/CMS was...

Thanks for taking the time to respond Liam.

The diskless boot looks very interesting. I wonder if it would work on a Raspberry Pi Proxmox hypervisor? When I get time I might have a play.

Now if we can move the master image into ram disk Linux can match IBM VM from 1967!

The really clever thing about IBM mainframe VM/CMS was...

It's 'Shared Segement'.

Instead of IPLing (booting) CMS for each user from DASD (disk), it was already in CPs (the mainframe OS, aka VM) memory. When you logged into your CMS VM (actual virtual machine) it was there instantaneously as a read-only copy.

When you IPL VM (the OS, aka CP), CP loaded all the shared segments into upper RAM, where they lived all the time the machine was up.

The beauty of it was that when you upgraded VM, you upgraded CMS. So every CMS VM got upgraded. None of this lark of having multiple old OSes on different VMs clogging up your estate that all need to be upgraded individually.

Are there any x64 or Unix/Linux hypervisors that load a shared read-only copy of a guest OS image in memory?

And Shared Segments weren't just for CMS. They were used by 4GLs like FOCUS and RAMIS. Again when you upgraded it, everything using it got upgraded. No having gazillions of SQL or Oracke versions around.

I also worked on MVS and one thing I wanted to try before I moved on was a single shared read-only SYRES volume, to IPL our 14 MVS systems from. It was technically possible.

Do any x86/*nix virtualisation solutions use shared read-only boot disks?

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

Re: @Alan Bourke - STRAW MAN ALERT

I'm running 32-bit x86 Raspberry OS (basically Debian) on a Pentium M 1.7Ghz with 2GB RAM and an SSD via a SATA-IDE adapter where the CD drive once was, on a Acer Extensa laptop from 2005. It's far, far quicker than it ever was with Windows XP!

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Re: Improvement?

Your ideal employee should have all the modern professionalism we would expect (remember: it wasn't common in the 1990s, we were still making stuff up as we went)

Wot? Are you serious? In the 1990s I was a senior MVS and VM Sysprog responsible for 14 IBM mainframe images, most running in around 128MB of memory. We had no choice not to be professional. If we cocked up we took thousands of online users and the entire business offline and I'd get a personal visit from the IT Director (who was being given constant ear ache from higher up).

Modern professionalism seems to consists of pushing out massively bloated, untested code and upgrades and then shrugging shoulders when it goes tits up.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: No Love for MVS?

Sadly never had need for TCP/IP on my VM/SP and VM/HPO systems. RSCS and Passthru were cool though when compared to RJE etc. on MVS, especially when you could hop halfway round the world.

No Love for MVS?

I'm old enough to remember installing 5735-HAL IBM TCP/IP FOR MVS Version 2.2 waaay back in 1992.

Otherwise known in IBM speak as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol Programme Offering, or in plain English an unsupported experimental product. I still have the scars and nightmares about SMP/E.

And all that pain so the MVS image could have a single IP address! It was the first time I used 'ping.

Then within 3 years, along came the fully POSIX compliant OS/390.

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Is Carole Cadwalldr on the case?

How has this not been fixed yet?

I mean The Guardian has the finest investigative IT journalist to unleash on the incident, Carole "Russian bots" Cadwalldr, winner of journalistic awards on the subject of hacking, with loads of "sources" to bail them out.

I expect she's frantically hitting her Macbook's keyboard right now, Googling "IP addresses in Russia"

Linux gods at last turn their gaze to Pi 400: Computer-in-a-keyboard receives mainline kernel support with v5.14

If you've got an 8GB Pi 4B then you can load up the ESX ARM Fling and run your own Pi VMs...

Just sayin'

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Re: Highly sophisticated

"on an unsecured Tiscali database"

It was worse than that wasn't it? Application and DB all on a single Internet-facing server.

The IT version of leaving going out and leaving all your house doors and windows open with a big sign saying 'Criminals Welcome' hanging outside.

Did they use Stevie Wonder for their PCI-DSS audit?

Sheesh, here we go again, another big name scrimping on IT security and using Stevie Wonder for their PCI-DSS audits.

Sod the ICO/GDPR fines, the banks should just take away their ability to take card payments, its not like this stuff is actually difficult.

If it's SQL injection again they really need to rethink their application and DB tiering, but I'll hazard a guess that everything is running on a single Internet-facing tier.

I'd call them cowboys, but at least cowboys wear boots.

FYI: When Virgin Media said it leaked 'limited contact info', it meant p0rno filter requests, IP addresses, IMEIs as well as names, addresses and more

Internet facing database?

What sort of amateur Muppets are VM employing to build and secure their infrastrucure?

This stuff is just so basic they deserve the full wrath of GDPR. Bring. It On.

If you're writing code in Python, JavaScript, Java and PHP, relax. The hot trendy languages are still miles behind, this survey says

Re: COBOL

"I think that's because their computers lack internet access... IPv4... graphical displays..."

Pah, I was installing the quaintly named Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol on IBM MVS mainframes back in 1991 before it was even an official IBM product for MVS.

Oh, and we used IBM-compatible PCs (remember them?) running Attachmate 3270 emulator, so arguably we had a graphical display too.

Re: COBOL

"They missed FORTRASH also."

Yeah, FORTRAN is one of the few languages I've coded where I can claim my work has got a mention in a history book about the company that sold the software to big customers and created an industry from it.

Actual rocket science.

Re: COBOL

"I was using C on a Z80 based embedded system and it was a lot easier than assembler we had been using."

Z80 assembler isn't difficult! You need to try IBM mainframe assembler.

Re: raw hex

"Once upon a time you could boot an IMSAI or a PDP by loading the bootstrap in binary from the front panel."

Yeah, and a TI-990. In fact I used to have to do that, from multiple sheets of A4 to load the bootstrap loader that could then read a deck of cards, which loaded a program to do a bit level disk clone backup.

It was a right PITA when you got a few pages in and then messed up the switches. No choice you just had to start all over again.

Kids today eh?

COBOL

Wot no COBOL?

Surely in terms of lines of code in active service, COBOL is still leader of the pack?

Are these languages actually popular, or is this survey of forums a measure of just how unskilled younger code monkeys are, or how user hostile and illogical the 'top' languages are?

Anyway, you're not really a programmer until you've had to hand code IBM mainframe assembler just to get the system to IPL. Somehow I dont see any Javascript/Java coders going near that.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook and Twitter profiles silently slurped by shady code

Theft? Freely given away shurely?

"This latest incident brings back memories of the largest of those data thefts: the 2016 collection of Facebook information by political marketing strategists at Cambridge Analytica."

When people give data away freely it's not theft. When people use dodgy Facebook apps to impress their so-called friends and boast abou having a particular type of personality, it's not theft.

Just saying.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Suspicious activity?

If you watch the petition site it jumps up in numbers in bursts of around 350 every 20 seconds or so.

Having watched other similar petitions its not the normal behaviour seen on the site.

Pain spotting: Russia's Aeroflot Docker server lands internal source code, config files on public internet

So much for Russian hackers

Who needs Russian hackers when you have Russian IT professionals...

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

Irony

So Kaspersky are under fire because they are Russian AV that a few punters use which uploads dodgy files to their cloud for analysis, meanwhile the NSA slurps all of everyone's data via hardware backdoors.

"Only in America..."

Presto crypto: IBM releases gruntier, faster Z14 mainframe

I've not worked on mainframes for over 20 years now (I was a VSE, VM and OS/390(MVS) sysprog manager, and I've worked with x86, Sparc and HP-UX based solutions for over 10 years now.

I suspect many of the negative comments come from people who have never experience mainframes, or seen a server estate that consists of tens of thousand of the things. 10s of thousands of physicals are not easy to manage and when you need a small army to run them, it makes mainframes look cheap. Mainframes just get a bad rep due to the upfront capital costs not the long term operational costs.

Quite simply I've seen nothing in the x86 etc. space that comes anywhere close to IBM's mainframe offerings, and I cease to be amazed by the so-called industry 'developments' in the x86 etc. space that mainframes were doing 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Yes some of the tech out there is interesting (think Sparc-based Exadatas, but they ain't cheap!)

Virtualisation is another one. VMWare ESX and NSX etc. are all interesting but they are still miles behind what VM on mainframes could do over 20 years ago.

Just look at the number of Linux VMs you can host on z/VM compared to a VCE Vblock, and even hidden in that press release, 2million Docker containers. You get big figures on big iron.