Posts by Herby

Value??

Yes, sleepless nights in Sillycon Valley, and surely that is VERY non fungible. Have it for (enter value here) in bitcoin.

Remember, it only has value if you can get someone to pay for it, or someone thinks it is worth something in exchange.

And then there is paper money......

I've got to go to bed. ZzZzZ...

Two monitors...

Back many moon ago (1987) my nephew showed me a two monitor setup on a then new Mac II. I was suitably impressed. My experience before was possibly two monitors on a PC, one monochrome, and another color. Not much integratoin between the two at all.

The moving between two monitors with the mouse pointer truly amazed me.

Of course now it is second nature, but 35 (more or less) years ago. it kinda blew my mind.

Time marches on.

I'll believe they are SERIOUS when...

I see Microsoft Office running on Linux and supported there.

Until then, I'll watch the movie, and eat my popcorn.

Real men....

Use something wonderful: OS/360.

Given today's expanse of disk and main memory, it would easily be done now.

Yes, the '60s have called and they like their OS.

Me: I used an os on a different group of machines. They used EBCDIC and had nice "big endian" attributes, and bits numbered from left to right!

Wasn't Fedora supposed to be that?

As I understand it, Fedora was the upstream of RHEL and then to CentOS. Why change this? Who is in charge for these things? It seems that somebody is using mind altering chemicals to come to this silly conclusion.

Me? My work uses CentOS (Usually 7.x), but at home I'm a Fedora guy. Both have worked for me, and I really like yum/dnf as a package orchestrator. I don't know the next step.

Can you keep a secret?

So can I!

As the saying goes, "what do you have to hide?". The answer is that everyone has something to hide, plain and simple!

Red Staplers?

This talk of funtiture reminds me of the Red Stapler fiasco. How it will turn out is anybody's guess.

RFP writers?

Looks like those vendors haven't taken lessons in RFP writing! The really good ones specify the vendor without specifying the vendor outright. "Must own ajor newspaper", will get you Amazon, etc...

Some vendors of items actually have the "RFP language" right in the sales brochure. Seems like school got dismissed early!

Reminds me of....

...Back to the Future. Change the time-space continuum, and bad (biff) things happen. Got to go back and correct them before things change the wrong way.

Of course, meanwhile in Redmond......

One for every grain of sand...

The planning for IPv6 didn't include a very good transition phase, and it isn't that good. All of those nice home routers/nat boxes might have been good to accommodate IPv6 at that point, and then it might have worked out better.

Alas, my DSL provider wants to do PPPoE with IPv4 addresses, and that is what routers support. I haven't seen any IPv6 home routers, but they may exist.

IE 10 (or whatever it is today or tomorrow)

Yes, at work we still run IE because even though it is "obsolete" some of the stuff needs to use it to work. If someone discovers a security thing with IE that is in the "won't fix" (but it isn't a problem in (insert browser here), it might change things.

Yes, I exist in a "administrated by central" environment which is pretty locked down, and I wish I could get a proper persuasion device activated on the proper people, but I dream...

I am reminded of the quote (title of a paper)...

"Why Pascal is not my favorite language" which can be had here. Of course the opinion may be biased, but is probably relevant.

Magic names...

To me they are the "Redmond Robbers!"

Hours???

So, if you have a program that is running for hours at a time MIGHT transmit something. Makes me wonder, what program will last that long to execute something. If you believe that it will run on a Windows box, I'll let you believe your fantasy!

"Black Power"

Was really a thing in the 60's and the place where I worked (PPFY days) one of the grad students got inventive and labeled the power cord as "black power". Subtle humor, but VERY good.

I suspect you had to be there.

Just remember...

Micro-Focus Cobol is written in (are you ready for this?) Micro-Focus Cobol.

Maybe that is a clue...

Of course, we all know that S/360 Fortran 66 (H level) was written in Fortran-H. But that actually worked (most of the time, save for some instances of OPT level 2).

How to write directions...

I am presently writing a set of instructions on how to do a task for my company. It is a LONG and tedious task, as I have to make SURE that the 1D10Ts who will be attempting to do the instructions will be able to do it. The whole thing includes MANY screen shots and paragraphs of explanations. Then after I write the thing, I force myself to "follow" the directions like a normal idiot user would. We live in such trying times, that it seems that I need to go over about 3 iterations of this to get it right. The sad part: God will invent further 1D10Ts that I haven't accounted for.

Life goes on.

A key between Shift and 'Z'??

What are they thinking? They tried it with the VT220, and it was a massive fail. Come on guys, you don't put a key there!

FAIL!

First rule about "rockstars"...

If you say you are a "rockstar" you probably aren't.

Of course the second rule is "never admit you are that good". Just show what you can do. No more, no less.

Oh, and programmers aren't "fungible". Skill sets vary, and without absorbing more knowledge, the half life is very short!

Sounds like...

A "professionally offended" person. They seem to multiply at times, and have NO relation to the actual offended people.

I've been doing computer stuff for over 50 years, so yes, I am a geek of sorts.

In the words of those across the pond: SOD OFF!

Maybe the solution is...

Put the sum of the fines in a year-end bonus pool for the agency that does the most to get rid of these. Financial incentives work quite well. No cost to the government. Everybody (except the spammers) wins.

Just move to "some other computer"

That's what the cloud really is. Something that you have NO ultimate control over, and are at the mercy of the provider.

Now what was that uptime guarantee??

With every new language that comes out...

It seems that more and more I go back to my first: FORTRAN (66 mind you). You actually needed to wrote comments to understand what YOU were doing. These new fancy ones encourage you to skip this step much to the chagrin of the "next guy" who inevitably will be your own next assignment in 6 months.

Oh, and yes it had one time do loops!

On ony guy's VBlog...

He mentioned that Bose items "Were built to a price". Then there is the advertising budget.

Enough said.

This just in.....IETF announces IPv7

Oh, it will be compatible with IPv4 as a subset. It adds a byte in the middle, so 127.3.2.1 becomes 127.0.3.2.1 if routed. Lots more addresses only TWO more bytes in the header. Easy for things to translate as needed. Oh, 256 times more addresses. Sorry not enough for every grain of sand on earth, but it should last a few years.

Well, we can always hope. Wishful thinking.

For some reason this reminds me of...

Making the first line of my C code say:

//C.SYSIN DD *

And that DOES go back a ways!

Of course there are other options....

Perhaps another sillycon valley company (which has a bunch of $$$ floating around) that has IP addresses that start with 17 (one more than HP's) might be in the market, you never know....

The other option might be for HP to acquire Xerox. It has happened before.....

And we wonder why people want to exit the EU

Bureaucracy is one of those things that just grows like a virus. Unfortunately there is no cure.

Then again, planting a BOFH in the right place might have some results. We can only hope.

Idea for ages...

1) Invent an ISA socket that works via USB.

1a) Or as an alternative, one that interfaces with the Raspberry PI.

2) Design..

3) Sell, profit...

Your popularity...

...is measured by how many protesters come to your event.

Of course, the more you try to keep things "private" the more people want to not make it happen. Sometimes you want to be left alone.

I just wonder the reaction to Elizabeth Warren would be in Midland, Texas.

Why didn't they...

Make a simple transition tool. Takes in "python 2(.7)" and emits "python 3". The parser for python2.x already exists, just change what it outputs. Sure it might not be "optimal", but it ought to work. If it doesn't (something that doesn't translate) emit a nice message and a couple of suggestions, and let it go.

Sounds like the way to go for me.

Of course, I prefer nice ANSI C89, which doesn't have such fluff as '//' comments and the like (and MISRA seems to agree!). Of course YMMV!