* Posts by Vometia has insomnia. Again.

483 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2021

Page:

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

There's a whole bunch of processes that are dedicated to doing stuff like that and other snooping. I have very noisy HDDs on my gaming PC (large and relatively inexpensive because of the amount of gaming mods and crap I download, and they're okay for RAID; but they are bloody noisy) and I can hear them unexpectedly rumbling away on a regular basis. It's nearly always the result of something that came hidden amongst the inevitable bloatware that all IT companies are now guilty of that's decided without asking permission that it's going to rummage through all my shit and phone home with its findings. Some of it is more persistent and difficult to get rid of than others. It's kinda scary/annoying (depending on mood) how much of this stuff goes on, and I'm probably only aware of the more blatant examples.

"Something must be done", though I'm not going to hold my breath. Big Tech™ still exists in a current-day Wild West and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Chrome used to do the same thing

Same, only with some added lack-of-paying-attention in my case.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Legacy is here to stay... Live with it...

Securility, surely.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

I cancelled not that long after the huge price hike for the bundled video service I didn't want. Not even because of that but because their once outstanding customer service nose-dived; that was before the tidal wave of dodgy Chinese tat. Amazon no longer has anything I want, but it now has plenty of stuff I don't, including the deluge of attempted spam from AWS that they evidently do very little to counter.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

They do learn an important lesson: that they can do what they like with total impunity because any attempt to hold them accountable will be bogged down in bureaucracy forever. The medical profession is especially bad for this, I'm sure managers are all issued with a "lessons will be learnt" rubber stamp that magically makes all the problems go away, regardless of misconduct and criminality; they've been doing it for decades.

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

I hope so. Crypto, NFTs and now AI feel like they're trying to recreate the dotcom bubble of the late '90s; I'm a bit disappointed that the Register seems much less sardonic about the matter this time round and if anything seems to be just another cheerleader. A lot of the problem in all cases is the name, which is (probably deliberately) confusing, vague or misleading; I guess at least some people routinely refer to "AI" as LLM which is a lot more accurate as it isn't what most people would actually think of as AI. I've had several conversations with non-tech people who think it really is intelligent and perhaps even sentient and they seem disappointed that, while ChatGPT may make it seem that way, there's no actual thought nor understanding going on at all and it's no more AI than decades-old ELIZA, it just has larger models to work from (okay, simplistic, but more true than calling it "intelligent").

Part of my cynicism is that it's now 40 years since I first heard of AI being within reach and recalling the endless stream of disappointment that teenage me first experienced when she read that Lisp was the language for AI (really!), and since then the likes of Prolog and intelligent systems (gf did those at college a few years later and seemed to feel likewise; not quite the same disappointment, but that they weren't what they were colloquially described as being) and so on.

Not that it doesn't have its uses, though it's no surprise that the techbros seem to be most interested in finding a way around copyright law. Of course any loopholes will be very quickly closed off as soon as the plebs look like they may be able to do the same.

Cruise being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the road

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: "The system, nicknamed Vista"

When I hear "Vista", I still think of Philips' internal email system of that name developed in the 1980s. Unlike its later Windows namesake, it was actually very good and provided a lot of features that modern email still can't do well.

Its main problem is that it ran on MVS so it wasn't very portable, but while 3270 (and emulation) was commonplace, it was well-liked and popular.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Months???

I suppose that's the difference between an actual accountant and a "bean-counter". The former knows what they're doing, understands the benefits of investment and planning and so on; the other just wants a pat on the head from bonus-seeking veeps for slashing costs wherever they can get away with it and damn the consequences, it'll look like someone else's fault. Though I suspect the VP and bean-counter are often one and the same given the sort of stratospheric ego who reckons they can do anything without relevant training or experience because they're awesome, they wouldn't be VP otherwise, etc.

I still shudder at the memory of DEC's sudden cancer of VPs: around 40 by the early '90s, already thought to be far too many, and IIRC 160+ and still growing by the time I left a few years later. Ironically, Greasy Bob was hiring all the senior managerial liabilities that IBM was firing at the time; this isn't IBM's first episode of nearly going down the toilet. DEC went down the toilet instead. I'm not sure IBM has the leadership to do the same this time, though, and "reassuringly expensive" won't keep them going forever.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: It's the IBM of the 21st century, what do you expect?

Probably not going to get quite the same PR, so I guess it's 18 carat Ratner rather than the proper 9 carat Full Ratner.

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Time to insource

Incidentally government IT has had quite a few successful projects. The DVLC is still running a forty year old system with no need for replacement.

This is precisely the sort of stuff they want to replace. "Legacy systems" is such a give-away, it's the scary catch-phrase for anything that's just been quietly doing its job and minding its own business for decades without ever making the headlines, and it makes the usual suspects unhappy because it's a wasted opportunity to bilk someone for expensive crapware that never works.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Yeah. IIRC that was the whole point of the shake-up with IBM back in the '70s when they started charging for their operating systems, because IBM's prior insistence on being the sole provider of the entire package was problematic and anticompetitive. I still think a major part of the problem is the outsourcing of development: government used to do their own and would take on various contractors (whether from the hardware and/or software providers or independents) to help out with their own development rather than to farm out the entire project. Though not without its problems (hard to say if government was actually more bureaucratic than DEC or just a different sort of bureaucracy) it worked pretty well, and certainly worked a lot better than the innumerable failures of the past 20-odd years courtesy of the usual culprits. You'd think by now someone would be doing something about it instead of "well maybe that sucks but we're still just going to keep on doing the same thing indefinitely".

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Origins of Horizon

No. In fact my experiences with the then Inland Revenue were quite the opposite: all staff who had access to the test systems (which had a small subset of live data) required positive vetting, which AIUI was an ongoing process which could see staff permanently turfed out at any moment if something was flagged up. Physical security was significant (keycard-controlled entry booths right in front of the permanently manned security offices, patrols, video surveillance, all areas were behind locked doors with keycards and/or combination locks, underground walkways so staff, documents and data didn't have to leave the premises to get to other buildings and so on) and there was definitely no remote access. They used me to physically move some data to another site as they didn't trust any couriers with it, even though I was all "but I have a hangover" (though more seriously, it went straight there and didn't leave my possession until it was at its destination; compared to, say, giving it to an MP who'd probably have printed it off and left it on the train). Live systems were even more stringently guarded, by actual security personnel who constantly hovered around the one time I was briefly allowed near it. I don't know the exact details about logging but there's no way it wasn't a thing, and it would've been pretty comprehensive because their internal security people were actively all over that stuff.

It's quite astonishing to hear of a system where general staff were allowed unrestricted access to probably similarly sensitive information without even logging stuff. Well, "astonishing" implies surprise and at this point I'm not, I'm just depressed about the state of things.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Was it really that far back? Blimey. I suppose my observation is that I knew some people who worked for ICL around the time Fujitsu took over way back and their morale absolutely plummeted; and while I'm not going to claim ICL was without its flaws, it seemed to rapidly get very much worse, at least from a bystander's perspective.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

I was seconded to the Revenue's internal IT team way back to help develop something. Same story, the project was delivered on time and under-budget, and also turned out to have spare capacity to do various other interesting things. Some of the internal politics and gnashing of teeth weren't always fun but most were a good bunch and stuff just worked. They did have a bit of a love-affair with ICL (and hence Fujitsu's entrance, sadly) but AIUI the computers and software that were supplied in the ICL years worked well; about the only thing I heard anyone complaining about was a mainframe-based text editor that was apparently a bit shit.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Corruption

Internal IT departments have done it since forever and on a pretty tiny budget too. The development (and thus support) team for a complex piece of software rolled out to thousands is often a couple of people and a coffee machine. I spent much of my career writing bits of software to do stuff that was apparently complicated and/or difficult, it's just what programmers do. Backed up by a competent ops team to do first-line support, that sort of development was unremarkable. If the software had problems that evaded testing, it was fed back to the team immediately and fixed, as was stuff that wasn't technically a problem but which annoyed users, hence the Problem Report/Change Request forms.

Okay, a lot of this is going back to the days of mainframes, minis and clusters but I honestly don't see what's changed (I mean other than the omni-menace that is ISO-9000, but even stuff like that is hardly a deal-breaker).

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Semitic Plane

Or perhaps Mr Noseybonk for us traumatised UK Generation X types.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

What irritates me is all the fanbois who keep insisting it's "the successor to VMS". VMS was notable for its verbose error messages, intuitive and consistent CLI and its extensive online help, as well as the (in)famous wall of manuals. Windows just goes "hurrdurr, I done an oopsie lol" and even if you look stuff up in Event Logger and can find anything relevant buried in the reams of crap, it's all obfuscation and hex codes and stuff. Trying to look them up usually ends up on the Micros~1 support site full of helpful remarks from Hello My Name's Dave asking if you've gone back to the last known good version or perhaps tried reinstalling Windows. argh. Though of course Poetterware has tried so hard to drag Linux in the same direction.

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

"academia trees"?

I guess well-read cattle are tastier.

Angus, a breed of black or red cow, is referred to as Aberdeen Angus because it originates from north-east Scotland.

So do many of my ancestors but I don't look all that cow-like. I suspect my forebears were probably wild haggis because nothing else can explain why I remain the shape of a Space Hopper no matter what.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: I hope they also covered

Seems I paid even less attention to the history of the place than I thought! The poly did have a probably completely unrelated (to the plane, I mean; well, and the hotel too) wind tunnel. I remember every day at the end of lectures I'd be sitting in the car waiting for my friend to turn up and looking at its warning sign, wondering if I might one day hear the sudden noise in question. I never did.

The whole time I was there we searched for Hatfield's actual shopping centre, not believing that the rather run-down '50s precinct was it. Then they built the Gonorrhoea which didn't really improve things, but the resulting tunnel did give unruly students something to race through. Obvs. back in the days before speed cameras.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: I hope they also covered

Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about that; you'd think I'd remember as I was commuting into London around that time (though not on that line). I'd mentioned the Comet but IIRC its issues were with metal fatigue not being terribly well understood at the time rather than not bothering to tighten stuff properly...

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: I hope they also covered

I presume the Comet. I vaguely remember "The Comet Building" being pointed out often when I went to Scumbag College Hatfield Poly but seemed to be paying more attention to working on the most efficient means of developing a hangover.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Hot air

Police won't even bother with murder now, as I discovered last year. Weeks after the event it turned out they weren't investigating, though they didn't actually bother to tell me that. Scene was photographed, forensics did their stuff, CID came round, I handed them evidence and gave them a very long and detailed statement; and then, bugger all. I had to really pester them to find out what was happening and found out they'd decided it wasn't a crime. On the basis that I have a different opinion and think that murder is actually quite serious I complained to them, as directed by my MP, eventually got an acknowledgement and "we'll get back to you". That was a couple of months ago and nothing since.

I'm not sure what it is they actually do nowadays, but it does seem very apparent that the UK doesn't "do" justice any more. I suppose I shouldn't expect any better since our gropey MPs have been clearly breaking all public standards, engaging in "conflicts of interest" which look a lot like fraud and repeatedly committing perjury, evidently with zero risk to themselves.

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Won't be a problem

That was pretty much Stock, Aitken & Waterman's approach. Very formulaic music with assorted different singers and as soon as an "artiste" got too big for their boots they were sacked and someone new brought in. I guess sort of prehistoric Pop Factor, and AI-generated dross will just be another chapter from the same book.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Borislav is awesome. I honestly thought Kirill would be impossible to replace, and fortunately Borislav doesn't try to be him (though some of the music really does take me there) but he has the same talent for creating incredibly evocative and emotional pieces, sometimes so poignant that they can be hard to listen to at times, but that's praise, not criticism.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

If you go back to Divinity 2, Larian went through absolute hell with their publisher at the time, which resulted in e.g. the final chapter having to be released as a post-release expansion. They decided they were done with publishers at that point so they went their own way. It was a huge amount of effort and disruption but it paid off: they're releasing the stuff they actually want to do and are getting accolades because of it. So other games studios can do it, and hopefully they will, though I suspect the ones that are already owned by big publishers are lost to us forever.

tbf, Divinity 2 remains one of my favourite games but that's in spite of their publisher rather than because of them.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...really?

AFAIK the only Tandy computers to make much headway in the UK were the TRS80s, mostly model 1s, and not many of them either due to the "optimistic" pricing; and though I saw the Color Computer in shops once or twice, again they didn't sell many as the Dragon was practically identical, much cheaper with twice the RAM as standard (I think) and had a much better keyboard: as much as the computer magazines of the times maligned it endlessly, it had the same switches as at least one revision of the endlessly-praised BBC Micro and nice heavy double-shot keys (I didn't care for the stepped profile compared to sculpted, but that's a matter of taste); the 51(?)-key layout was restrictive but few if any commented about that, and was the same as the CoCo's. Which was a "chicklet" keyboard. Not as bad as the Spectrum's, but not great. Don't think I ever saw a Tandy PC; IIRC even their catalogues seemed less than enthusiastic about it.

Amstrad's version is classic Amstrad: buy a job lot of something that costs next to nothing because nobody else wants it and make it work, somehow. Same thinking that brought 3" floppies to their CPC66x computers: nobody really cared that 3½" would be The Standard™ (eventually; took quite a few years for 5¼" to stop being the most commonplace let alone die out), they were more interested in no longer having to bugger about with cassettes for what was at the time a weirdly small price premium. Their hifi systems may have always been a bit hmm but the CPC series was incredibly good; even the software (in terms of BASIC and OS) was surprisingly good and IIRC Locomotive BASIC was one of the best dialects of its day, both in terms of features and speed.

But I digress. Again. D:

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Disagree on a few points

I remember a few PCs with IRMA cards; but at our site, most desks were inhabited by VT220-compatibles, so one of my first jobs was a crash course in figuring out what on earth SNA was so I could automate logins for managers who were much too important to type, ending up with some half-scripted, half interactive 3270 gubbins connecting our Unix systems via SDLC to the mainframes' FEP. This was back in the day when our mainframers were suspicious and unconvinced that ethernet was relevant so to send emails we had a cobbled together system where Unix mail was sent to the mainframe-based VISTA and PROFS systems by JCL (which turned out to be expensive and I got told off for using it too often) over the same SDLC, and they replied by sending a telex which one of our Unix boxes reformatted into email and squirted into uucp. Ugh.

Er anyway, yeah, I get your point about the target market, and in fact remember one of those computer mags saying the same thing: they said as much as they weren't impressed at the complexity and price for something whose performance was so underwhelming, it didn't really matter as those three magic letters guaranteed it would succeed and would probably steamroller everything else in the process. While the latter took a bit longer to happen than anticipated (especially once the Amiga and ST appeared on the scene) they were right about it making massive headway just because IBM said to existing customers, "you want this. You need this. Buy lots of them."

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...

I completely agree. As much as I may think that people give DC way more credit than is due (something I was also corrected about long ago) I'm certainly not going to the other extreme of saying he didn't know what he was talking about: Gates (or whoever was responsible) was absolutely wrong about this and it's indicative of the sort of decision-making that's always prevailed at MS. As long as it's shiny enough to guarantee sales, other people can deal with the problems it causes. Horrible way to write software and do business, sad that it keeps on working out for them.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...really?..again?

My starting point is that I remember thinking the list price of the TRS-80 was "optimistic" and the asking price for an Apple 2 was outrageous: at the time Acorn were resisting dropping the price of the BBC Model B from £400 by bundling more and more stuff with it, an absolutely bare-bones Apple 2 (16K? Don't remember offhand) without even decent graphics had a price tag of £650. That was the only time I ever saw one in a shop, and nobody I knew owned one. The PC was already available to buy by that time but apart from businesses there were no takers that I knew of because even the basic version was 2-3 times the price of the already exorbitant Apple 2. Even the computer mags at the time were distinctly unimpressed, describing how it used so many more components than any other micro to do much less, and all for a price tag that only IBM could get away with. They did like the keyboard, though, albeit in retrospectively unconvincing terms like "as good as the BBC Micro's" (though that's another debate).

Most people had to connect whatever computer they had to their TV; few had monitors, though that number increased once Amstrad released the CPC464 with apparently decent monitors for probably less than the usual asking price of a dedicated computer monitor. IBM eventually cottoned on but kinda seriously fumbled by creating the rather duff PCjr, which was more like the home computers that'd been so popular only a bit more crap, a lot more expensive, and late; and IIRC not entirely compatible with the actual PC. And a rubbish keyboard whose novelty feature was unreliable wireless.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Disagree on a few points

I had much the same experience of the IBM PC: I encountered my first several years after becoming familiar with the BBC Micro and then the college minis and mainframes, and I was underwhelmed to put it mildly. At the same time, Acorn's Sophie Wilson was struggling to find a suitable CPU to run the successor to the BBC's OS and when she couldn't find one she created her own: the ARM was born. Yeah I know, everyone here knows that story, it's just hard to reconcile stuff like that happening at the same time as my first encounter with the PC: it already felt like it actually pre-dated yesterday's technology, yet people were saying "this is the future!" :|

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...

None of that really surprises me. I'd heard his reason for leaving MS was his insistence on keeping the GUI out of the kernel vs. Gates' insistence it run in privileged mode for visual performance reasons but "I'd heard" was more hearsay than anything. MS were probably at their peak of double-crossing people at the time having just done the same with IBM (again) and DEC too, as well as countless others. A lot of stuff they got from DEC they failed to implement, I remain astonished that they never used the clustering technology.

My first impression of NT was similarly underwhelming. By that time I'd heard endless hype about how it was VMS for the modern generation and it just totally wasn't. At all. I only once had to develop something on it and the experience was one of the very lowest points of my career.

I've also heard stuff about DC moving on from NT to work on one of the popular games consoles at the time which a gamer friend describes in pretty much the words you describe above. It was apparently a bit of a disaster.

He's probably good at being a talking head giving his opinions about stuff, which he was always enthusiastic about, but apparently not so much to work with.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

I worked for DEC at the time and we'd often end up doing the same thing because they wouldn't allocate Alphas of any sort (not even for internal IT to use for the "superclusers" that they bragged to customers about being Alpha-based: they were all ageing Vax 6000s with pre-NVAX processors, i.e. slow, and hugely overloaded) and management said if we needed them we'd have to lease them from a third-party. Yeah, DEC under Greasy Bob's rule was always destined for greatness. :| Anyway, we didn't have the budget for that either, so some of us got newer PCs instead. I remember the joy of finding a discarded 486 that I could play Doom on only to have it seized by someone who needed it for actual work.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Disagree on a few points

I was (unsuccessfully!) stealing someone else's joke about the 8080 being the main CPU! The 8080, PDP-11 and whatever it was the big Vaxes used (LSI-11 I think, at least the earlier ones) replaced all the switches and flashing lights. Bah.

I'm still sad that my only direct experience of PDP-10s was at college, Hatfield's imaginatively-named BLUE and ORANGE (a 109X and 2020 respectively) but I still remember even at the time a lot of people had a great deal of fondness for them. I've long had a rather belated fascination with them and appreciate the elegance of their instruction set now I've read more about them. It's nice that at least emulators exist and distributions of the main operating systems are readily available to run on them.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Sorry Liam, Not Even Wrong...

DC in particular seems to get way too much credit. It's also interesting to see how much of a contrarian he was: he hated Unix, he hated DEC's large systems, he even hated DEC's medium systems that weren't his baby and ISTR trod on a lot of people's toes with RSX (probably still giving him too much credit; I mainly remember its naming, the letters "sounded cool", revisited in the '90s by the woefully inept marketing for EVAX, or VAXng, Alpha, or AXP, or whatever the fuck they ended up calling it). He was happy to be credited for VMS when it was more a case of the big boys taking over something that DEC wanted to straddle its mainframe and mini lines. Seems that since then he's been a bit of a prima donna whose approach has always been his way or no way.

That's probably a bit scathing, but the way some people would have it, so many that I'm worried it's just become accepted "fact", is that DC was DEC's lone tech genius and DEC died because he left and went on to create VMS's "natural successor", Windows NT. None of that is true.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Disagree on a few points

Mine has a 6502 co-processor, which brings extra MHz and RAM to the computer; the first 6502 effectively becomes an IO processor and GPU I think. Obvs. software is expected to use OS calls rather than trying to twiddle with hardware itself, though as there's no protected mode there's not much that can be done to ensure software authors play nice. But of those who did, IIRC the software could use the external CPU without modification.

Definitely not SMP, but still MP. And then there's the DECSYSTEM-2020 which was an 8080-based minicomputer with a 36-bit KS10 co-processor. So kinda a microcomputer in a minicomputer cabinet with a mainframe co-processor. Poor thing must've had an identity crisis.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

IMHO a "workstation" is the sort of thing currently cluttering up my hallway: I brought a pair of VaxStations in from the garage so I can check their CMOS batteries haven't started leaking. A small PC-sized thing with a large CPU in it; in their case, small Vax processors (a KA43 and KA46 I think), 32 bit processing with lots of memory high-speed 3D graphics from an age when PCs were 286 and 386 with VGA and not much RAM. They ran VMS, not sure if Ultrix was ever supported, though they can probably run NetBSD now; I hope, because finding a VMS licence for Vax processors is next to impossible these days.

I always thought it was interesting comparing the standard of manufacture with PCs then and now and everything in between. PCs were and still are awkward fiddly affairs made of flimsy metal with razor-sharp edges everywhere; in contrast these are made of big, hefty sheets of stainless steel with all the edges milled away and large, knurled captive screws that won't roll off the desk/workbench/etc and be lost forever.

Obvs DEC weren't the only manufacturer, I just have these examples as they were bequeathed to me when I left. I should've asked for "my" Vax 4000 too but although comparatively small they're still actually quite big and would've just been cluttering the house for decades.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Yeah, I was referring to the early examples like the Cray 1; my mind seems to be largely fixated on "large computers of the 1970s and '80s" and I sometimes forget the same doesn't necessarily apply to everyone else!

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

AFAIK this was just standard, at least at the time; I would assume that hybrid heating & cooling systems are more common nowadays, but I've assumed lots of things that turn out not to be the case. ISTR some of the newer ICL stuff I saw 30 years back used what IBM calls a radiator in that they were water-cooled but instead of being plumbed in to under-floor piping, they dissipated the heat straight into the air, much the same as a modern water-cooled PC (except much bigger obvs.) and then the air was chilled to uncomfortably low levels by a battery of (very squeaky) air-con units situated around the computer room's periphery. I presume this was viable as they likely generated much less unwanted heat than their ancestors; part of me thinks it's a slightly inelegant solution, but another part of me also unwittingly found the outlet pipe of a CPU on one occasion and it was very ouchie. Nobody had thought to warn me beforehand "oh btw there are some very hot pipes down there lol" and I hadn't realised 1st gen AS/400s were water-cooled.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

They were connected by under-floor piping to the plant room where the compressors and fans lived. Kind of interesting in itself but it looked much more like traditional machinery and not at all computery!

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Sadly the Crays of the era used a constant amount of electricity regardless of workload and were described as looking like a "big resistor" as far as the building's electrical schematics were concerned. Probably why they required somewhat exotic coolant; IBM and ICL mainframes just used distilled water. Talking of which, I forget how much heat e.g. an IBM TCM (thermal coupling module) was expected to deal with, I think about 300W each for a 3090, each CPU having around 15 TCMs (that number may be completely wrong but it was quite a few).

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Why?

"Trust me bro."

And having seen that very weird and aggressive Palantir freak being interviewed on the telly, I'm not sure why anyone would trust them. Giving that everyone's most private and sensitive data has to be one of the worst things HMG has ever done.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: The platform will use only existing data legally collected

Only if they referred to them by the correct euphemism, which I forget offhand. Some hapless secretary also forgot and mentioned "gas chambers" in a telegram; they guillotined her.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Still Waiting for Derry Girls DVD

Thanks for the warning! My video pool consists of a pair of 11TB HDDs which is still only half full after ripping nearly everything we have, so it would seem I'm probably better off not mucking about with Handbrake... I'm guessing from what you say it's a lossy encoder which I prefer to avoid, which is why e.g. all my audio stuff is FLAC and only then gets converted to Ogg for portable devices.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Still Waiting for Derry Girls DVD

I've never bothered with that second part, though I admit I'm a bit clueless about ripping stuff. I seem to spend most of my time fighting with Kodi which I always instantly forget how to configure, rescan and so on.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

One of the reasons I hate systemd is its race conditions, e.g. attempting to mount network drives at the start of network configuration rather than after its completion, so it always fails. That was a previous release of Mint, I think they subsequently fixed it, but reading the documentation was of no help at all as it was variously inconsistent, gibberish, wrong or missing, and all of it seemed to be an excessively complicated means of configuring something simple. My late gf's PC still uses it and I'm still not ready to change it to something like MX Linux so I've had to set up a job that retries NFS mounting after systemd has finished booting, though its habit of periodically reconfiguring the network for no reason at all can still screw it up.

Most of the time I'm not that bothered whether booting takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes, it's restoring my session that's the time-consuming and fiddly part and nothing seems to get it even slightly correct; actually, of individual applications, Firefrog actually gets that one right: even if it can't remember its screen position, at least it remembers my tabs and other shit.

I suppose tolerance of boot times partly depends what you're used to; back in the olden days my boot times were about 1 second (Dragon 32, albeit to crappy MS Basic with a cassette deck for storage) to around 10 minutes or so for a M68K or MIPS Unix box with lots of services or a VaxStation with VMS. Some of the old beards talked darkly of "most of the day" to get a mainframe from a cold start to a point where it could do useful work but I never knew whether or not they were exaggerating. We were using IBM 3090s at the time which weren't slouches either in CPU power or I/O so I'm not sure about that, unless some of the services were just particularly egregious to coax back into life. Also uncomfortable memories of trying to persuade a Vax mainframe to boot after a scheduled power outage (it was early and its army of butlers hadn't turned up yet) and realising whatever witchcraft its FEP needed wasn't even vaguely the same as the little desktop version.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

I eventually migrated to vi from ed, which I'd been using for years as I couldn't figure out how to do global search & replace in emacs. I dare say it can certainly be done, but finding out how was daunting when I was still grappling the oddities of Unix and C at the time, whereas ed's documentation was concise and simple enough for me to figure it out instantly. I eventually migrated to ex and then vi as ed can be just a bit too minimalist, sometimes; but vi initially caused that wtf moment where the only way out was CTRL/Z and kill. Actually now I use vim, which is considerate enough to write INSERT on the status line so at least I know what mode I'm in...

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

My internal thermostat is completely broken. I had the heating turned up to 23°C the other day and was still all "bloody hell, it's brass monkeys in here"; I seem to have warmed up a bit since, but I'm also reminded of days working in London where what passed for summer could still be unbearable and I'd go and lurk in the computer room to cool off. By "lurk" I mean lie on the floor and not care if anyone is looking.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: /usr

It was the "let's move everything into /usr" instead of "let's use the opportunity to clear out all the crap that shouldn't even ended up there in the first place and only ever did because there was nowhere else to put it", forcing actual users to go to /mnt, /home or various others depending on the era, the alignment of the planets and the sticky buns in the cafeteria and so on. My reaction to it has always been "yeah, I appreciate maybe it is a good time to tidy things up" but this was basically the opposite of what I'd hoped for and seems an ugly kludge. I have / and /usr on the same dataset anyway and /local (actually mounted on /usr/local) for all the 3rd-party stuff, though others prefer /opt for stuff like that. And apart from /work, everything else goes under /rec(reation) which I couldn't think of a better name for: music, videos, games modding, photos etc. Actually video gets its own pool because it's so lardy-arsed.

And swap gets its own GPT partitions. Well actually a pair of mirrors, similarly EFI is mirrored across all the drives. I've always felt a bit "hmm" about using different partitions like that and just kinda hoped the GPart suite can figure it out having heard various probably long-fixed problems with having swap on a ZFS file or dataset, but it seems to work pretty well.

Anyway, I've digressed because I'm outrageously tired; the idea of putting everything from e.g. /bin into /usr/bin and then symbolically linking them just seems so arse about tit to me. I can only assume Poettering's hand in that too as most of his decisions seem to be based on annoying as many people as possible.

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Re: "shody"

Showaddywaddy? Maybe once in a blue moon.

YouTuber who crashed plane for sponsorship dollars earns 6 months behind bars

Vometia has insomnia. Again. Silver badge

Page: