Posts by Sparkus 230 posts • joined 20 May 2020
is it being kept alive by weight of numbers as well as sysadmins and management who are 'entrenched' with their skill sets?
There are plenty of bare metal alternatives from the new-fangled 'container' side of the tech world; many of them open source and well supported with well defined roadmaps.
had the additional benefit in that is was first to 'market' with USGov and Military accounts on a very easy buy it now deal tied to standard laptop and desktop procurement contracts. The business flow (profits, commissions) from that little piece of business let a friend of mine retire to Costa Rica at the age of 40 (in 1995).
He's still there running his tourist dive charter business..........
The deliberate decision was to incorporate the code into File Explorer.
I'll bet that code will remain, just waiting for msft to one day 'accidentally' enable it again.
One wonders how invasive that code really is? Does it monitor my computer and file system usage? if it sees me with a large amount of fresh raw photo images, will I be pummeled with ads for Adobe products? Does it notice that I cache local copies of monthly security and bug fix distributions? will it them 'accidentally' turn on the local sharing of msft updates?
Can of worms here........
......who somehow conned their way into the CIO-ship of an international agriculture company.
Quickly realizing they were in over their head, critical internal functions were single-source out-sourced to Accenture/ATOS (lift and shift, upgrade in place, it's easy, etc), who then proceeded to muck it up including a transition/consolidation of SAP.
The CIOs response; it was to run through two complete sets of direct reports, fired on the basis of 'not doing their job' or 'hard to get along with' or 'unable to work with external consultants'.
After 18 months of this, the executive board finally caught on, had a heart-heart talk with the CEO, and the CIO (and Accenture) was history.
Those of us who were caught up in the madness get together once in a while to laugh over beers.
perhaps their best path is smart/thin terminals and some kind of remote desktop arrangement against central servers/mainframes.
Seriously, take the responsibility and authority for end-user 'computing' away from local officials and civil servants and get back to a centralized model that fits the way the 'system' is known to work. People can still have their PowerPoint and Teams. Or linux-based. Or whatever.
Plus, all of those GS 9-15 local idiots that currently hide behind their desks are made redundant in favor of local techs or contractors who do nothing but swap broken thin terminal out.
Yup, this is an issue I have strong and unpopular opinions on.
//greybeard recollection warning//
IBM was looking at OS/2 not only as a standalone OS, but to be the user exec for their other systems; AIX, MVS, and AS/400. Those systems we all know were (and continue to be) dominated by the classic green-screen. Having passed on an opportunity to buy Apple, IBM was looking to push their three dominate systems down-scale into small business and home user environments. NT and OS/2 were to be the gateway drugs in that effort. The MSFT interface was for home consumers while a similar but more 'focused' Workplace Shell was for business. Either UI would have been able to run on the same hosting OS and on multiple hardware architectures.
Even then there was early work in flight to condense the multi-chip implementation of the RS/6000 chipset into what became the Moto 68x influenced Power architecture. The roadmaps that eventually pulled in the then independent MVS and AS/400 CPU implementations into Power were largely in place in the mid-1990s.
IBM stumbled twice at that point. It was the unfortunate delay in getting viable PPC/Power cpus into the market (PPC 601 was a disaster for everyone but Apple) which in turn was a key factor in losing the desktop UI and developer base to Wintel.
OS/2 (Workplace Shell really) running on PPC 604e was pretty damned fast but the economies of scale for systems production just wasn't there. AFAIK, Workplace Shell never made it onto Power.
IBM tried to pick up the pieces with OS/2 partnerships on both Sun and Xerox. The Xerox hookup in particular was interesting as it was bringing the Most Excellent Xerox XDE and ViewPoint/GlobalView environments to a user exec that could in theory run on the three classic IBM hardware platforms plus the evolving 16/32 bit Intel platforms. Alas, the best that partnership could deliver was a Xerox Mesa emulator card (ISA FTW!!) that would run under Solaris/Sparc or Intel-OS/2.
who owns the fabs, how redundant/dispersed they are, and how close to full capacity they are running. Running a high-speed supply chain that has no elasticity is, well, just stupid.
Multiply that by the discredited but not yet abandoned 'just in time' supply chain mess, and you have a recipe for "we aint' learned nothin this time either" repeat of recent events.......
The plain-paper encrypted G4 fax machine, most notably those economy models mass produced by Xerox in Ireland in the mid-late 1980s, were arguably the single most effective 'weapon' supporting the Solidarity trade union and the Catholic Church in Poland and Czechoslovakia. which in turn led directly to the collapse of East Germany and the Warsaw Pact.
The Velvet Revolution was enabled by information exchange, not MBTs and IRBMs.......
working a project right now whose sole reason for being is to clear a few years of accumulated tech debt (doc'd via Jira) including a massive backlog of security and reliability patches.
As you might understand, we are pushing this project as rapidly as possible to stop the REMFs from diverting us into things like GUI look-pretty cruft (ooh, Dark Mode!), double-byte language support for the lower-slobovian market and so on.
It's not an easy slog.
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