Posts by jake

Re: "US Government"

True enough. Perhaps ElReg should have chosen another link, or none at all.

But it doesn't alter the fact that the US Government does, in fact, still use COBOL (and Fortran) running on decades old Mainframes. And why shouldn't they? If it ain't broke ...

Re: Timeline

I don't usually recommend Wikianything, but a good place to start is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Energy_source

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management

Re: Quantum vs COBOL

I think that because most research (outside Universities) is being done in publicly traded companies, any and all breakthroughs will be announced immediately to drive up the price of their stock. As seems to be happening, if you follow the news.

Re: Even if an iPhone . . .

Aren't all iFads ised, by definition, making "ised iPhones" redundant?

Here in California you can't purchase alcohol at the self checkout. I solved that problem by making my own ... its hardly rocket surgery.

On the bright side, it's not New Jersey where you have to go to a separate store to get alcohol. (Worse, they won't even let you pump your own gas/petrol in NJ. It's a good state to avoid.)

Tip: Most "grocery stores" here in California have a Customer Service desk with a till. If you say PleaseAndThankYou and smile nicely, most stores will allow you to purchase up to 8-10 items from there, which means no queue to purchase a couple bottles of plonk ... One caveat, the CS till has no scales, so you can't buy anything not pre-labeled by weight there (meat, usually OK ... produce, not so much).

Re: what is problem with COBOL ?

Mine is dogeared, coffee & Guinness stained and signed by both Brian and Dennis. It's sitting next to my autographed first generation Xerox of Lions' Commentary. (The first was from when I was a student at Berkeley, the second was sent to me by John himself after he read a Usenet post of mine bitching about copyright restrictions for students that didn't exist when I was the student ... )

Re: what is problem with COBOL ?

"I have always distrusted any programmer who cannot express themselves with diagrams on paper."

One of the best programmers I have ever known was born blind. She doesn't do much drawing on paper.

Re: what is problem with COBOL ?

"Wanting someone to define a complex idea in a single sentence is a sign that you really do not understand how definitions work."

Thinking that the interviewer is expecting a one sentence answer to that complex question is a sign that you don't understand what the interviewer is actually looking for.

It's not the answer, rather it's how it is answered.

Re: When

And flying cars

And AI.

'tis been true since I was first aware of what was happening at SAIL, lo these many decades ago.

AI

'nuff said.

Re: Over 30 years ago I was teaching

I've been recommending people buck the trend and learn COBOL and Fortran since they started dropping the two in favo(u)r of C back in the early '80s. Not a month goes by without a former student dropping me an email thanking me for the advice.

Re: The SCSI implementation on the Amiga was badly broken.

My Sun 3/470 "Pegasus" has 5 CDC WREN IV SCSI drives that have been running flawlessly pretty much non-stop since 1988. Seems pretty reliable to me.

Re: 600MB?

By 1992, when the 4000 was released, 1Gig drives were readily available and selling in the $2,000 range.

Re: I'm far from an expert, but I declare this unsolvable

I wouldn't go so far as to say there is no possibility of replicating it. Folks around here admit to having metric butt-loads of working obsolete hardware stashed about the place ... I'm pretty certain with a little effort a similar box could be cobbled together, which in turn might exhibit the same behavior. Follow that with a little old-school hacking, and we'd have an answer.

If I had any of the relevant Amiga kit I'd volunteer it just out of curiosity.

So unlikely to be solved, yes. But hardly impossible,

Which reminds me of an AI koan ...

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Re: My favourite timing bug

A 10MHz CPU in the '70s? That would have been a rare beast indeed!

Re: Witchcraft

We were doing it with DEC boxen before SGI existed.

Re: Am I surprised?

I'm sure the Sons of Owen fully understand your concern. No doubt they are furiously inventing a time machine so they can go back and rename their family before William is born.

Or not, as the case probably is.

Re: An alternative measure for social distancing

Alternative to a sword, for places where such things are outlawed in public, would be a stick. My walking stick is made from white oak, and is 0.0994 Brontosauruses by 0.3356 Linguini.

Optional: forge iron caps on each end so it doesn't wear out prematurely.

Re: The alligator is not a unit of measurement

1) What did that poor alligator ever do to you?

2) Alligators are a protected species. The society of something or other probably wants to have a word.

(Question: Is this Osman character not a common thicky and doing very well?)

Re: The alligator is not a unit of measurement

You don't actually need a large, wild carnivore. I have found that brood mares are a perfectly adequate substitute.

Re: Of course! Cricket!

Two bats and a ball are somewhat alien to many of our commentards, who traditionally live in Mummy's basement where the only Sun they see is a rack full of pizza boxen. For these people, I recommend using that long-time unit of IT measurement, the Nanosecond.

Two bats & a BS 5993:1994 standard cricket ball is approximately six and two thirds nanoseconds.

Re: Nothing is secure

Uh, no.

That word "always" doesn't mean what you think it means.

There is a large difference between consumer-grade tat and more important hardware.

Most reputable manufacturers have figured out that security by obscurity is a bad idea.

Re: hmmm..

To be fair, why anyone would intentionally live anywhere East of the Rockies is beyond me. There are even parts of Canada that are worth living in on the left side of the Rockies ... The Okanagan comes to mind.

Re: quel surprise

"a bit like buying Alaskan air conditioners"

Almost mandatory, then?

My brother made quite a decent living selling and maintaining refrigeration and HVAC systems in Fairbanks. When weather is as extreme as they get there, maintaining nicely conditioned indoor air isn't quite as easy as it is in a more Mediterranean climate.

Re: So, one Linux myth bites the dust

Except the systemd cancer is not Linux and Linux does not need the systemd cancer to operate. Make it your mantra and the world of admining Linux suddenly gets much, much easier.

Re: In Free AI Spaces of Quiet Contemplation ....

"Do state sponsored hackers break down or more simply open novel doors onto platforms and into applications"

The latter. Brute force leaves broken bits and bytes behind. Opening and then closing doors behind after entry leaves no traces (idealy ...). You know this, so why ask?

"Interesting, and worrying, that they were able to avoid being noticed by going for Linux."

Proof? Show me the code. Merely telling me it exists doesn't work, I'm a sysadmin not a religious fundie.

Re: So, one Linux myth bites the dust

Monett, your screed is fundamentally flawed for one simple reason: Linux attracted hackers right from the year dot. That's what happens when a new OS built by hackers for hacking appears on the horizon. (Perhaps you don't know what the term "hack" means? If not, you are incapable of intelligently commenting on the subject, by definition.)

As for Linux on the desktop, it works for MeDearOldMum and my Great Aunt. The only major change after switching them from Windows to a subset of Slackware (as built by me, for them specifically) is that support calls from them have dropped to near zero per year, down from several times per month each.

Of course Linux is vulnerable. All complex code has vulnerabilities. It's just not as vulnerable as other alternatives. And those vulnerabilities get fixed, usually within hours of being found ... unlike alternatives I could mention.

Also note that TOA didn't make specific references to any actual vulnerabilities. Nor does the freely available info from BlackBerry. It wants you to provide personal details to them before you can see whatever those details might be. In other words, it seems to be nothing more than marketing bait, and is thus probably worth somewhat less than the paper it's printed on.

Re: Indictment of education system

Dandelions have a PH of 22.7? No wonder my lawn refuses to grow ... And here I thought it was California's perpetual drought, and me refusing to water it ...

I hope you publicly ripped the idiot a new one so nobody in your family listens to her about anything even vaguely scientific ever again. Dumbasses like that kill people.

(Just as a side-note, spring dandelions are a mostly forgotten delightful salad green. Try 'em, you might like 'em. They get bitter after they flower, so act fast!)

Re: More worrying than 5G...

It gets worse! There are detectable levels of Di-Hydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) in all alcoholic beverages produced in the UK. DHMO is a well-known industrial solvent and coolant, and is used in virtually every commercial food growing operation in the UK. This chemical is adsorbed into all foods during production, and even after a thorough cleaning it is still present. It exists in all UK produced foods, even if they are gluten free, dairy free, non-GMO, unfiltered and organically grown with no tree or ground nuts.

Ban all food and alcohol produced in the UK before it's too late! Write to your MP demanding the banning of DHMO before it becomes so common you drown in it!

Re: Anyone with any sense

50 times? That'd be pushing it a trifle. Experienced COBOL coders are already making several times the rate of an average "web programmer" (whatever that is).

I've been recommending people buck the trend and learn COBOL and Fortran since they started dropping the two in favo(u)r of C back in the '80s. Not a month goes by without a former student dropping me an email thanking me for the advice ...

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

"Ahhh the language where we spent more time arguing over the aesthetics of a piece of code than whether or not it actually worked......"

Nonsense. First we made it work. Then we made it pretty.