Re: Sounds just like DEC
Yeah. I worked for them when Greasy Bob took over. What joy. :|
393 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2021
The very idea of charging per install is lunacy.
It's Riccitiello, so it's just business as usual really. Not sure anyone really believed his "how do you do, fellow gamers" shtick when he was trying to bolster EA's coffers by blatantly ripping off its customers.
Why is The Register complicit in this sort of misdirection ?
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm becoming weary of hearing "legacy systems bad, cloudy devops good" when the reverse is frequently the case. I've worked on one of those legacy systems and the culture was very different to the inevitable failures of the big outsourcers: the government department, developer and independent consultants worked very closely together for the duration and produced something that actually exceeded their expectations. Nowadays it would be farmed out to some secondary or tertiary bottom-rung dev sweatshop without any proper decision-making, communication or other useful process.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of the culture sucked, especially the inclination of certain individuals within HMG to start pointing fingers in lieu of anything actually going wrong, but at least said individuals were identified and "managed".
That all sounds very familiar. I've had cause to complain several times over the years and they always use the same procedures to try to derail the complaint. If you still insist they just refuse to communicate any further beyond "go cry to the ombudsman if it's so important to you" knowing perfectly well the ombudsman does the same thing.
The only way to have any hope of getting anywhere is through the courts.
Yeah. My partner died recently due to said incompetent or malicious staff killing people; it's taken them two months just to get the investigation going, and the coroner's so resigned to dealing with the sauntering unimportance they give even the most serious cases that they've had to add a six month delay to the inquest date in the hope that they actually produce something by then. There's been essentially no contact from the hospital managers at all, their only action was to hide the worst culprit elsewhere before the investigation started (even though it won't be apportioning blame).
On the rare occasions the press does pick up on it e.g. with Lucy Letby they're all "how could this possibly happen?!" Well this is how, and it happens far more often than people realise.
We were all set to have decent infrastructure over 30 years ago that they'd been developing since the '70s; but as with so much other stuff, Thatcher intervened because it would upset the free markets or some such crap so we're still largely stuck with shitty infrastructure to this day.
And yeah, I know the sad Tory gits will downvote me for criticising their precious neoliberalism like they always do. Never known such a bunch of perpetually butthurt snowflakes.
It was the case with IBM's VM, at least sometimes. One example is MUSIC which could run directly on the hardware, but it required VM if you wanted any networking; and I think IBM's Unix-for-S/370 needed it for various other "VM assists" too. Plus various other mainframe OSs just ran better under VM than they did on native hardware because it did the paging and stuff that they didn't bother with themselves.
Back in the ICL days, VME called what is nowadays usually referred to as a process as a VM, and its idea of a process is what's now termed a thread; not sure if the latter was widely used (or used at all) back then, though. But AFAIK that's just a terminology difference rather than any equivalence of functionality regarding a "microVM".
Yeah, I take it* on prescription; it makes me a bit less dysfunctional, though admittedly that latter thing was for the most part burn-out from trying to cure my social awkwardness by choosing to work in the City of London for a few years. Turns out my approach to exposure therapy wasn't very sensible. Er anyway, ADHD seems to be more of an altered state of attention rather than a lack of it, and that hyperfocus could make me pretty good at what I did, albeit at the cost of sometimes being somewhat brittle to be around if someone kept interrupting my concentration...
* "it" being lisdexamphetamine for the curious, which I find somewhat easier going as it doesn't make me crash every 2-3 hours.
I've heard that some of the PDP-10 cabs could get rather warm; supposedly warm enough to cause quite serious discomfort, according to the possibly apocryphal story of an idiot boss who was told to not lean on them and did so anyway, as was his habit. I have no experience of them in person other than as a user, my college still running a pair of 10s during my time there in the late '80s, but I only saw the actual beasties themselves in photos (which also revealed the 109x to live in a curious arrangement of DECSYSTEM-20-style cabinets, albeit a fairly long row of them).
The contraptions in the photos have lots of tubes and... things. I dunno what they're for, though. I tried reading his notes and they just made my head hurt; something to do with making spicy rocks faster, I think. I'm going to have to steal that phrase too.
I dunno, I have photos of my father-in-law in a similar environment with nice big single-glazed windows where he's doing things with nuclear stuff and not even with the lab-coat. This was in the '70s, mind you.
tbh I got the same thing when I lived in the Home Counties. A lot of people were at best vague about the differences between northern England (where I'm from) and Scotland and got annoyed if you pointed it out.
Me: "Hello."
Them: "Why can't you talk properly?! Where are you from?!"
Me: "Newcastle."
Them: "Och aye the noo!" (said in a sort of Welsh/Indian accent)
Sigh.
I'm starting to get flashbacks to reading the NME 30+ years ago. Too many gig and record reviews were used as platforms by its contributors to show off how supposedly erudite they were but little useful information was conveyed. One guy in particular (I forget his name now) made a thesaurus a requirement just to observe that he had nothing to say. At the other end of the scale you had the likes of Julie Burchill who reckoned she could manage the same feat by just using the word "smorgasbord" as often as possible: "i's exo'ick!" etc.
One of my all time favourites has to be the huge and very heavy keyboard attached to an IBM 5250(? I think; the older twinax thing, anyway). Just in case there was any risk of you not hearing it going clunkity-clunk from the beam-springs, which were already loud enough, it had a floor-shaking solenoid too. Daft layout but other than that it was lovely to use. And back in the day, one of those fugly terminals would probably cost more than your car...
I guess it depends; I always preferred concave keyboards, so from more modern offerings I like IBM/Unicomp Model Ms or Cherry MX switches with SA keycaps on them, and one of the things I disliked about my Dragon's keyboard is that it wasn't concave (though it was still stepped); which incidentally felt exactly the same as the BBC's keyboard (at least the ones with the Futaba switches) in spite of what the snobs used to claim. Some people hate concave stuff, though, which is why the e.g. DCS family for Cherry remains so popular, as much as I may not understand it.
Even ~40 years later I'm still astonished by the cost, tho'. I'd never seen an Apple in the flesh until 1983/84 when I spied one in a computer store with a price tag of £650 for the most basic Apple II, minimum memory and no extras. At the time the price of everything else was either tumbling, or in the case of Acorn they were bundling in more and more stuff on top of a spec that was way ahead of that enormously expensive Apple in every respect. I guess I'm reminded of the (almost) contemporary Stella Artois "reassuringly expensive" ads.
Autism doesn't mean someone is unable to make decisions about their life; on the contrary, those decisions are likely to be more thoroughly considered. I'm a bit tired of being told that, as an autistic person, I'm basically too stupid to make my own life choices. The main problem autistic people face isn't autism, it's other people.
As for the rest, AGP & social contagion don't exist outside the imaginations of some very disturbing people, tomboys aren't dying out, and while I dare say some "transtrenders" exist I doubt many people are willingly choosing to put themselves in the firing line given the amount of unpleasantness nowadays.
This was in the UK, though it was DEC and their horrid SAMS timesheet system was a company-wide thing I think. Even where it is necessary, my opinion is that it's really a managerial task to keep track of what their staff are doing...
I always questioned why I needed to do timesheets, especially in such detail, considering I always had some manager breathing down my neck. If they had no idea what I was doing, what use were they? And if they had no idea what I was doing when we were both in the office, how would it make a difference if I was working from home? The answer is it didn't, except for the benefits of not being interrupted and micromanaged. Another advantage of not being seen was no requirement to wear such uncomfortable clothes and shoes that the workplace stipulated back then, though once my WFH days ended and I was back in the office I just started wearing whatever I felt like anyway.
I'm reminded of some of the lads I was at school with many years ago who turned up one day with a bag containing their collection they were so proud to show the teacher: it was full of flush pedals they'd collected from numerous trains.
Girls never did that sort of thing of course. Well, not flush pedals, anyway.
That's BS. In fact, there is tons of evidence that WFH has, in fact, increased productivity.
That was my experience of WFH in the '90s; and I was told it wasn't exactly a recent discovery then either, it was well known that tech employees like me were typically a lot more productive and the problem was the risk of over-work. But every company I've worked for since, even those who promised they'd give it "serious consideration" in the interview, would immediately renege on the offer using the same tired old arguments we're still seeing today. And that resistance always comes from the same old middle-manager types, the ones I've tried to figure out exactly what it is they do other than micromanaging and making everyone's life harder, and decades later I still have no idea.
I did, but it irritated me for some reason. Weird, considering I'm fine with them in Cygwin, my normal Windows environment; maybe it's just that standard Micros~1 thing where "working as intended" means broken. Fortunately I only use Windows for games and modding.
Is there any chance they've fixed the decades old "Windows Explorer is not responding" bug? Still have vaguely irritated memories from the '90s of half the PCs still being powered on come Monday morning with the usual dialogue box asking if you want to shutdown anyway. They finally kludged Windows' shutdown to do so regardless but it does make me wonder how much ancient code still lurks in "brand new" versions of it. It's also be nice if it would differentiate between jpeg, png etc files without having to turn file extension visibility for all files: dunno whose bright idea it was to group them all by preferred application with no further hint.
I'd forgotten they existed: IIRC my debit card also did the job of a cheque guarantee card since probably the late '80s. I vaguely remember them making a big deal about it being "three-in-one"; not sure of the other, at a guess probably cash machines (with all the cheque/check carry on part of me wanted to write "cache machine"... sigh).