Posts by C R Mudgeon

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: Not the only game in town

I can't resist putting in a plug for Robert Calvert's satirical 1974 concept album about that whole fiasco, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters. Brilliant.

Re: should be beaten into UX developers with a heavy object

While I upvoted your post, it's more complicated than that.

"You want stuff that works? Let the trained engineers design it."

You want an interface that sings? Engineers are likely not to be the best people for the job -- two different skill sets. Case in point: git. It's an incredibly useful piece of software, and I've ended up using it for my personal revision-control needs, but its UI was designed by kernel developers, and it shows, and not in a good way.

As I understand it, what was good about Apple stuff's user experience came about because Jobs wouldn't settle for less than excellence. He could be a right asshole, or so the stories go, but what he brought to the table was a relentless insistence on quality.

Same with Disney, or so I was told once. It seems that somebody got curious about why their animation quality had gone so downhill since the glory days of Pinocchio etc. He went to the Disney studios and interviewed a bunch of people, and found that the answer boiled down to this: the old man died. Walt Disney himself wouldn't settle for less than excellence, but the new bosses would.

So I do definitely take your larger point: that the way to get excellence is: (1) insist on it, (2) pay for it, (3) hire excellent people, and (4) get the hell out of the way and let those excellent people do what they excel at -- including keeping other departments (e.g. marketing) off their backs.

Re: System 7 - the horror, the horror...total BS

Re. the claim of MacOS Classic's crashiness, and the counterclaim about the quality of its system code:

Was there memory protection?

I'm not in a position to comment on the relative quality of the MacOS Classic vs. Windows pre-NT system code, as I never developed for either one. So I'll provisionally take you at your word that Apple's software was far superior (mostly because that accords with my anti-M$ biases, but that's another issue).

That said, in my experience, if a system doesn't have memory protection, it's crashy as hell, because a botched pointer dereference (for example) in application code can bring down the whole system -- and even if the system appears to have survived, it should be deemed corrupted and rebooted anyway. RSX-11M, Amiga, MS-DOS, even UNIX-like OSes that ran on 8086-based PCs. Is there a reason that memory-protection-less MacOS would be any different?

Unless there is, even if Apple's code were truly flawless, that wouldn't invalidate the OP's empirical observations about the stability of the running system.

In short, it might well be that you're both right.

Re: System 7 - the horror, the horror.

"Moral of the story - simple UI good, stable OS better."

This is a false choice. Why should it be impossible for there to be a stable OS with a simple UI?

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Green screens were great!

Nooow you tell me!

"The cloud" is just a euphemism ...

... for "somebody else's computer". It can be very useful, as long as that core truth is kept constantly in mind

Re: Green screens were great!

In 1990 or 91, a coworker who was doing Windows development had the same idea: the program he was working on on the main display, and the debugger off on a much smaller black and white (well, actually amber and white) screen.

I was so envious! The Amiga I was developing for was superior in many ways, but monitor count wasn't one of them.

MX Linux 21.2: Middleweight Debian-based distro is well worth a look

Re: @Pirate Dave

"*Effectively* systemd-free", then -- as in, the thing is present but you don't have to deal with it. And, as the story makes clear, it's only there so you don't have to deal with its absence. Best of both worlds, it seems to me. (That such a kludge is necessary(ish) is deplorable, but that's the world we live in.)

I suppose one could say that MX Linux contains systemd the way Salk vaccine contains poliovirus :-)

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

Or the old fox, goose and grain puzzle, in which a farmer has to get all three across a river, using a boat that can carry only one at a time, without any unapproved eating going on in his absence. (It's a bit of a mystery why a farmer would be transporting a fox, but that's the problem as stated.)

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Honeywell mainframes (66/60 and relatives) had something similar. I think it was the "BCD" instruction, intended for binary-to-BCD conversion, but obviously it was more general than that.

I never had cause to use it for £sd, but used it to convert (fractional?) seconds to HH:MM:SS in one go -- mixed 10s and 6es.. I can't recall whether it stuck in the colons too.

That may be regional. Seamus Heaney says, "in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak [...] 'so' operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention."

Which sounds pretty weaponized, to be sure.

On the other hand, my (Canadian) experience of it, when used to introduce a topic shift, is that it serves as a warning, to make the transition less jarring, not more so.

I don't like "timesing" either, and upvoted on that basis. To me, it sounds like the word you'd use with a child who was just learning how to do it.

But I find sentence-starting "so" completely unobjectionable, when used in an informal register. In fact, I suspect that one of its uses might be to indicate informality.

Canada no longer has even whole pennies; they were discontinued in 2012. Since then, our smallest coin has been the nickel (5 cents).

Even after being debased from copper to mostly steel, they still cost more than their face value to manufacture.

They're still legal tender, but I haven't received one in change since surprisingly few months since the Mint stopped issuing them.

Re: Software with western components

I didn't realize that the name has wider usage. I was thinking specifically of the Jordanian Dinar.

Re: £sd

Well, the whole Guinea has a story behind it. It was originally a gold £1 coin, so called because much of the gold came from that part of West Africa.

Then gold increased in value relative to silver, so the gold coins became worth more than £1 -- at times up to 30s. Later the coin's value was fixed at 21s. Later still, the Guinea coins stopped being used, but the Guinea stuck around as an abstract unit.

Re: £sd

"Dinar", as used in some Middle Eastern countries, is also from "denarius".

AMD boasts of record sales, says 5nm Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 coming this quarter

Re: On the flip side...

Sorry for the late replly.

"Is that what your experiences with AMD boards are or am I misunderstanding their architecture cycles?"

I can't answer from experience. This build will be my first dip in the AMD pool. That said, my understanding from reading is that they make (some?) sockets last longer than Intel tend to do. AM4 launched in 2016, and the last new CPU for it was (or is due to be?) released this summer. Similarly, they've announced a planned 5-tear lifespan for AM5.

That's one of my main reasons for deciding to go AMD this time.

The other is (unofficial) support for ECC RAM, as in, that's not in the specs but it's been supported [*] even so. No guarantee that will continue of course, which is another reason not to buy right out of the gate. (In Intel world, from what I've read, non-Xeons don't do ECC, not even off-spec. And Xeon == $$$.)

[*] And they actually use the ECC functionality, as opposed to simply ignoring it as some "ECC-capable" CPUs/chipsets do.

But again, all this is based on web browsing, not experience. Please don't take my word for it.

On the flip side...

I need a new computer, and have decided I want it to be Ryzen of some vintage. (The current one is a 10-yo laptop, so doesn't owe me anything.)

If it weren't that socket AM4 is at the very tail end of its lifespan, with no further upgrades forthcoming, that would be the obvious choice -- I'm not exactly one who always needs the new shiny.

But as it is, I have three options, all distasteful:

* go with Ryzen 7000 and risk the usual .0-release bugs

* wait a year for a second-generation Zen4 CPU and AM5 mobo (but I'm really tired of how memory-constrained the current laptop is, and not sure its screen or keyboard will live another year)

* buy into AM4 even though it's run out of road, and AM5 is projected to have 5 years ahead of it.

Clearly it's the wrong year for an upgrade.

(At this point, I suppose I'll wait until Ryzen 7000 has been out for 2-3 months, read the reviews, and then decide whether to risk that.)

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: My girlfriend did it

The time an unopened can of Coke spontaneously exploded, and the resulting splatter took out our only copy of the installation floppies for some mission-critical software.

Several fails, obviously: only copy; food on the same shelf; all of it by a window (don't know, but I'm guessing that the can was in the sun).

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

"You could also use RJ45 for RS232C serial communications"

Or even RJ-11s, if all you needed was TxD, RxD, and ground (i.e. software flow control). Where I worked in the 90s, the serial-terminal building wiring was done that way. Each terminal (Wyse'es, model number long forgotten) had one of these little adapters plugged into its DB25. An off-the-shelf phone cord went from that to the wall-mounted RJ-11.

Unfortunately, we had two offices, whose in-wall cabling patterns were different (one was straight-through, I think; can't recall what the other was) -- which meant that the adapters we wired up for office A wouldn't work in office B and vice versa. There came a point that I got so frustrated that I remade a bunch of connectors at the server end to compensate, so that all the user-end wall-mount RJ-11s ended up with the same pinout.

Then we expanded again, and the new space had to be renovated, including data cabling for yet more serial terminals. The price difference between phone quad, which is what was called for, and CAT-5 was small enough that I convinced management to spring for the extra. Drastic overkill for the purpose, but "we'll need networking one day". (Can't recall for sure, but I presume we made up cables with an RJ-45 at one end and an RJ-11 at the other, wired so that the RJ-11 presented our standard pinout.)

Sure enough, within a year or two, the Wyse'es were gone, replaced by networked Win95 boxen. One of those all-too-rare instances where YAGNI (you aren't gonna need it) proved false, and foresight paid off.

(Now that expansion space is a pet store, and all our old cabling has presumably been ripped out.)

Re: Heisen-net

Ah, one or more of those might well have been our problem. I had no idea BNCs were so inherently incompatible. Glad to know it might(!) not have been my cabling skills at fault.

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

You also knew when the packet would arrive. For some applications, e.g. real-time process control, that matters.

How much better than token ring was the Ethernet of the day, i.e. 80s-vintage coax? (I've worked with thin-wire Ethernet, but not with thick-wire or with token ring, so this question is serious, not rhetorical.)

Sure, UTP's star topology is more robust than a daisy-chain of whatever flavour, but back when TR and Ethernet were duking it out -- and, I presume, when that Computer Chronicles episode aired -- 10BASE-T was still in the future, wasn't it? So can't have figured into their wondering.

Back in the 80s, the choice between TR and Ethernet was between two similar topologies (one a ring, one a bus, but both daisy chains, with all the problems those entail), and each had technical strengths and weaknesses. As I understand it, in theory there were legitimate technical reasons to choose either one, depending on your requirements -- Ethernet for better network utilization, but TR for guaranteed transmission times at the cost of fewer packets per second overall).

But that's theory. In practice, maybe TR really was so awful, even compared to 1980s Ethernet, that there should have been no comparison. What's the experience of people who have worked with both?

None of this is to discount the marketing BS. Sure, IBM would try to sell you their solution even if it wasn't the best fit for your use case -- and, being IBM, might well succeed. But that doesn't mean it was never the best fit, right?

BTW, if you're streaming one of those Computer Chronicles episodes and it stalls, well, you've just discovered why people building systems to control heavy machinery might care more about guaranteed arrival times than bandwidth...

Re: Ah yes locked meeting rooms affected us

"the Polycom based Cisco 7937 conference phone"

I never encountered the Cisco version, but Polycom's analogue version was (is?) a great phone -- far better audio quality than just putting a regular phone on speaker (at the local end anyway; I can't vouch for the remote end). Its styling is way cooler, too (the above links are to images).

Polycom's video-conferencing codecs, on the other hand, not so much (at least, as of 2009). No idea how good or bad they were at their core function, but if you wanted to automate a fleet of them, they were a major pain -- endless small variations in their command sets that the code had to account for. Unlike the Tandberg units, for which you could write write the code once and it would work on all of them.

Re: colour me sceptical

He keeps his printer

in a pretty cabinet.

Cabling's a bitch, he says.

Tends to bring down the net.

.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re: Terminators and T-Pieces

"With the best little whorehouse too..."

Nope, that's in La Grange. Besides the movie, that brothel has a song about it, "La Grange" by ZZ Top.

As it happens, Paris, Texas also has a movie named after it[*], with a wonderfully evocative soundtrack by Ry Cooder.

[*] which I haven't seen, so no review is implied, but FWIW, it won a bunch of awards

Heisen-net

"They were the bane of our life in the mid-late 80's and the 90's."

Oh yeah!

In our case it wasn't the terminators that tended to cause us pain, but the cables' BNC connectors -- not malice, but sheer flakiness. We had what I believe was the right crimper, but I never figured out how to install a BNC robustly. And in those (effectively) pre-internet days, there was no obvious way to learn. Or maybe the parts we had were simply crap.

"The network's down" was an all-too-common cry throughout the office, the cue for me or my colleague to spring into action. The obvious approach was bisection -- break the network at a T and drop in a terminator; see if that brings back the upstream section of the network; iterate. But that risked fubarring that BNC connector too, and so multiplying the failures.

I was a bit dubious about the newfangled 10base-T stuff (star topology seemed wasteful), but quickly learned what a huge improvement it was over thin-wire Heisen-net.

Re: ISDN to the rescue

Nineteen years ago. D'oh.

ISDN to the rescue

My place of employment in the early 2000s was a small IT contractor in Toronto -- and by small, I mean fewer than a dozen employees. Our internet uplink was an ISDN line (BRI, i.e. 2B+D). This was presented as a little box screwed to the wall of the telecom closet, which had, as I recall, two pairs of screw terminals, one (or both?) of which was wired into whatever bit of our networking hardware, and an RJ-11 jack which went unused but was part of the telco's standard ISDN termination unit.

Well, twenty years ago tomorrow -- Thu, Aug. 14, 2003 -- at a little after 4 PM, the power went out in our office -- and, as we didn't yet realize, across much of north-eastern North America.

Once the outage had proved itself not to be transient, people started wanting to contact their spouses etc. Problem: no power = no phones; the PBX was out. (Someone will surely comment about battery backup. I don't remember the details, just the unhappy end result.) Cell phones also weren't happening. (I don't recall those details either. Maybe the cell towers were out too, but more likely they were simply massively overloaded as everyone in range tried to place calls.)

Fortunately, I remembered having seen a POTS phone sitting in a box in a closet -- not one of the fancy units that worked with the dead PBX, but just a standard, residential-grade single-line telephone. I plugged it into the empty RJ-11 jack on our internet uplink and woohoo! Dial tone! So people could take turns going into the wiring closet / makeshift phone booth, to reach whoever they had to reach. Or try to, depending on circumstances at the other end.

(The rest of this has nothing to do with ISDN; it's just about the blackout in general.)

By the time all the calls had been made, I guess we knew it was a major blackout and that no more work would be done that day, for we all decamped to a nearby restaurant. The only food they could serve was prepackaged stuff like potato chips -- no way to cook -- but this basement pub's claim to fame was their extensive beer menu, and that was all we were after. We spent an hour or so drinking by candlelight, then headed off in our various directions.

I had taken the subway (RightPondian: tube) to work, but both that and the (electrically powered) streetcar system were down, and the replacement buses threatened to be madness. So I set off on the looong walk home. (Google Maps tells me it was 10 km.)

I passed through the Bay Street business district (think Wall Street or the City). The traffic lights were all dead, but there were stockbroker/lawyer types at all the major intersections directing traffic. The above-linked Wikipedia article says the police issued some of them with high-vis vests, but I don't recall that; it must have happened after I passed through. I just remember Bay-Street guys in shirts and ties, playing amateur traffic cop.

Later, by which time night had fallen, my route took me along College Street through Little Italy, an area of restaurants and bars, many of which have patios. They were all candle-lit and all packed. None of them serving food either, I presume, but doing a roaring business in drinks.

Then, bonus! A pizza place was actually in full operation. Gas-fired pizza oven, I guess. I bought a slice or two, and that was dinner.

It seems most places got power back later that night, but in (my part of) Toronto, it was out for a couple of days. I don't remember much about the rest of the blackout. The one thing I do remember is the novelty of seeing So Many Stars at night in my urban neighbourhood.

Side note: my parents never lost power. They lived in a suburban neighbourhood in a small city an hour and a half from Toronto. They were in the middle of the blackout area, but near a couple of small local power plants, which I guess managed to isolate themselves the way every power plant should have done, and so avoided the general cascade failure. My folks only learned that there was a blackout when my uncle called from California to ask how they were faring.

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: The guiding principle

"Generally I'd even give credit for work after the deadline"

The rule used by many of my CS profs was: submit it N days late, lose 2^N percent of your mark. So, a day late? Yeah, whatever. A week late? Don't even bother.

Re: The guiding principle

"Surely this is a Qbit."

Almost surely it's not. I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of people who write code have never encountered a qubit, while most of us have encountered yes/no/don't-know situations.

Please don't conflate the general idea of yes/no/don't-know variables with one (currently rather esoteric) implementation of said idea. That way lies madness.

Re: The guiding principle

Hardware people already have an excellent word: "tristate".

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Hmmm, rather like Broadcom & VMware?

Not-quite-infinite loop

"... teh boxes keep going round and round."

That image reminds me of an early computer crime I read about back in the 70s or 80s. I forget some of the details, but the gist of it went like this.

The thief opened an account at a New York bank (call it Bank #1) -- I don't remember this part, but presume he used fake ID. He then had counterfeit versions printed of the cheques that Bank #1 had issued him. The human-readable address on these was of Bank #1, but the MICR coding was for a California branch of the same bank (Bank #2).

He then wrote an NSF cheque, and deposited it into an account created for the purpose (Bank #3).

The clearing house's sorting machine sent the cheque to bank #2 based on its MICR coding, where somebody looked at it, went "this doesn't belong here!" and sent it to New York -- where it went through the sorter again and got ping-ponged back to California. And so on.

Meanwhile, Bank #3 had placed its usual N-day hold on the deposit, but that expired and so, even though the cheque hadn't cleared yet, the funds were released. The miscreant withdrew them and vanished.

The crime was only discovered when the cheque became too badly worn to go through the sorting machine yet again, causing someone to finally take a closer look at it.

Re: ambiguous

Yes. The IBM 2741 terminal was essentially a Selectric built into a desk. A room full of them, all going full speed (134.5 bps, IIRC), produced quite the din.

VMware’s subscriptions start at 16 cores, prices won't be made public

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

The operative word is "easily". The article's author isn't claiming it's impossible, merely pointing out that the newsletter's author has found an unusual way to make it gratuitously harder than it needs to be.

Seems to me that in an article about what boils down to corporate arrogance, an offhand remark about corporate arrogance is justified.

James Webb Space Telescope looks closer to home with Jupiter snaps

Imperial. In Europe they're on the metric system.

Re: photographing a turtle

Not him, then, but his cousin, sin A'Tuin.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: Lotus 1-2-crash

If I'm not mistaken, some prototyping software creates GUIs that look hand-drawn -- a script font, lines and widgets that look as though they were drawn freehand, etc. The theory is that, even if the buttons are clickable and the fields fill-in-able, if it looks like a sketch, people won't mistake it for the real thing.

Canadian ISP Rogers falls over for hours, takes out broadband, cable, cellphones

Re: Interac

"redundant backbones, much like telcos"

Some telcos. Rogers, apparently, not so much.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Here's another. Toronto used to have a system called Timeline: every bus stop had a phone number, which you could call to get the next 3 scheduled bus arrival times. It disappeared at the turn of the millennium. Not Y2K compliant, and they deemed it too expensive to repair, so instead they discontinued the service. Here's the story, as told by one of the people involved.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and every bus stop again has a number. But not a phone number; the current system is SMS-based. And (in theory anyway; I have my doubts about how well it works), it doesn't report scheduled times, as Timeline did, but estimated actual times, based on the buses' locations -- they're all fitted with GPS.

Carbon paper still has at least one speciallized use

Or at least, a close relative.

My dentist calls it "bite paper". After some procedures, he'll have me bite down on a small piece and grind my teeth around. It leaves a mark on any high place that needs to be ground down a bit to let my teeth meet properly.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

You mean one of these?

Not a GNOME fan, and like the look of Windows? Try KDE Plasma or Cinnamon

Re: Feature Request

That would need i18n treatment: in my part of the world, a one-finger gesture would be more fitting. Of course, then there's the technical problem of recognizing which finger...

Re: Unintended consequences...

c) how to avoid doing it again, repeatedly and infuriatingly, when I'm just trying to get stuff done and don't really want to be distracted by a wild goose chase looking for a (quite possibly nonexistent) way to turn off a gesture I frequently do by accident but will never, ever do on purpose (e.g. summon up Android's voice-assist spyware).

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

With a typewriter, it's obvious what SHIFT means -- it literally and quite visibly shifts the whole guts of the machine, with an audible "clunk". It's obvious that pressing SHIFT puts the machine into a different state and releasing returns it to its original state -- and so, if you want a capital letter, it's clear what the order of key presses and releases has to be.

If you're too young to remember typewriters, I presume that the essential "shift"ness of the operation isn't nearly as viscerally obvious -- to the point that the key's name has become detached from any obvious referent.

In other words, a typewriter provides feedback, but a computer doesn't. Haptic too, in the case of a mechanical typewriter -- without a power assist, you have to press that SHIFT key *hard*.

And what's CTRL, anyway? It's another shift, but to a different chunk of the ASCII (or Latin-n or Unicode) character set than SHIFT shifts to. But non-geek users don't -- and shouldn't be expected to -- know that. To them, CTRL (like ALT) means: "do something magic[1], with rarely any direct mapping to what the other key has on its keycap, so you just have to memorize it".

[1] in the Clarkeian sense

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

There was a route my dad was explaining to me a long time ago, one segment of which was a twisty country road. [1] The instruction for the turn off of that road: "take the first left after the second wiggle-waggle -- or is it the second left after the first wiggle-waggle?" Fortunately, as it turned out, both versions worked out to them same left turn.

[1] It being hilly terrain, there were many twisty country roads -- all different.

But back (sort of) to computers, I was once handed a tape and a list of instructions, and told to install the software, while the author of same watched over my shoulder. The point was to beta-test the instruction list itself.

Commonly given advice is to get someone else to read over your resume.

Both of these are examples of a commonplace in the publishing business: "never proofread your own work", because you're prone to see what you expect to see, which might not be what's actually their. (See what I did they're? :-) )

Of course, the exact phrasing of that commonplace is an example of another commonplace, which is the source of the "CTRL and C" muddle: "know your audience". Because of course you go over your own work, looking for mistakes; you just get someone else to proof it *too*. But people in the biz get that, so don't bother to spell it out.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

What could go wrong?

"1. The required level of paranoia. (Extreme)"

Indeed.

My home backups take place ad hoc, since the backup server doesn't run 24/7. I power up the latter and run the script when I think of it.

One time I set out to transplant my laptop's drive into a new laptop. Take the several hours to back it up first? "It's a simple thing I'm doing. What could go wrong?" But, being the impatient but paranoid sort I am, "OK, _fine_," I sulked at myself. "I'll do the right thing: run a backup overnight, and move the drive in the morning."

What could go wrong? Post-move, the drive failed to spin up. Nor when reinstalled in the old laptop. Dead, kaput, pining for the fjords, yada yada.

No new lesson was learned, but suffice to say, one that had previously been learned the hard way was powerfully reinforced.

Side note: introductions to computers often talk about the CPU being a computer's brain. Whatever. The HDD (or latterly, SSD) is its soul.

Re: Backups

On a somewhat related note, I read a paper about a decade ago that advocated _against_ orderly shutdowns. The author's position was that systems should be architected in such a way that an uncontrolled shutdown not do any damage, and that to test that robustness guarantee, one should always shut it down hard -- and to ensure _that_, one shouldn't even create a clean-shutdown facility in the first place.

E.g. for a desktop O/S, that would mean no "shut down" menu option, command, or whatever; a hard power-off would be the correct, documented way to bring the system down.

(I've tried searching for that paper again, but without success. Can anyone point me at it, by any chance? I'm pretty sure it was an academic paper, not a blog post or the like.)

There's a wonderful feeling of freedom when you've done a test O/S install onto a new box, and so can type such commands at will.

Also:

echo "Scratch; can be repurposed" >/dev/sdc

(after triple-checking, of course, that sdc is in fact the USB stick I have in mind.)