Posts by jake

Re: There is NO future for advertising.. NONE!

"adverting provides a pointer to likely quality."

I think I see a serious problem with your thesis.

"“clean rooms” provide a concept space where you AI avatar can inspect information to help you decide what to spend money on"

More like provide more fodder for my filters. A corporate shill working out of the 27th floor on Madison Avenue and living in a 300sq foot, $3500/month "apartment" in Manhattan (San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo ... ) has absolutely no idea whatsoever about the needs of Middle America, much less what I need out here in the wilds of the West Coast. Why should I pay any attention to them, much less allow my network to waste the bandwidth downloading their useless drivel?

Re: Better than a PM

I'm not just an operator, I'm a systems administrator. I'm here to do work, not to fuck around and daydream.

Re: ping

Yes. "ping" is not an acronym, and never was.

It was released as public domain software first (1984ish), later changed to the BSD license (1985ish). It was included in 1986's 4.3BSD. Obviously we used it in 4.2BSD as we were building 4.3.

Note that some variations of ping include an audible option. Handy occasionally. Usually annoying.

Also, see: https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/ping.html

Re: Better than a PM

Depending on the machine and your access rights, tell it to echo ^G to its console once or twice per second. Even if you can't personally hear it, the person sitting nearest to it will call and bitch about it.

Re: TV has been formulaic for at least a couple of generations

TV has been a vast wasteland since the 1950s. Hollywood officially went TITSUP[0] with the release of TriStar's Godzilla in 1998. It's all been downhill from there, IMO. Fire the lot of 'em, no great loss.

[0] Total Idiocy To Sucker Underbred Public

Re: Pandora’s Box is Split Asunder, Mars is into Minerva, and the Devil is in the Detail

"AI is not going away"

You're right. But it's time for it to start hibernating again. Winter is upon us.

"is only going to grow in stature"

It'll grow in stature, sure. It's already getting fat, and moving on to extremely ponderous and obese.

"and reputation"

It's sure got a growing reputation. That it doesn't work as advertised, can't work as advertised, and is nothing but pure marketing dross as advertised.

"and increase its intelligence hold"

Let's get this straight: There is absolutely no intelligence involved. Machines cannot now, and never will be able to think. All they do is repeat the garbage they are told to regurgitate. No machine has ever created anything new, nor had an original thought. Nor will they, at the current state of technology ... and most actual experts on the subject are pretty certain that it won't ever happen. Anybody who says otherwise is suckering you, in search of the almighty buck. Or trying to start a new religion, which comes to the same thing when you think about it.

Re: unique skills command high wages

Hardly unique. There are probably a dozenish ElReg commentards who wrote, and possibly still maintain ML code at least partially using COBOL.

And of course ELIZA (one of the, if not the first modern chatbot) was written in an extension to Fortran called SLIP (Symmetric LIst Processor).

Every CPU has it's quirks, some are more quirky than others. They all suck, but we use 'em anyway.

Re: Languages

"CPAN was, to my knowledge, the first modern software package repository, though; certainly it was the first one I saw a lot of chatter about."

The DECUS Software Library launched in roughly 1962 and arguably had none of the issues you discuss ("bloat, software supply-chain security, and learned helplessness among developers") through its long life. Yes, I know, it was largely a paper catalog and not generally available electronically[0] until around 1980, but still.

Later came the whole BSD thing. You can see some of the archives at tuhs.org. Lots has (probably) been lost to history, alas ... but people keep digging up old tapes and getting them cleared for inclusion.

perl, while ancient to today's kids, came about quite a while later.

[0] Although Stanford (for one) had electronically searchable, yet somewhat clandestine, bits of the DECUS archive by ~1970, and all of the current archive by 1977. Berkeley had a similar thing. I assume other universities also archived the code they received through the normal channels. Caching saves bandwidth, especially when it's USPS delivered tapes or card decks.

Re: One programmer is happy with PHP

"and show of hands, who wants to build large-scale webprojects in Perl?"

Pace your definition of "large scale", me, for one.

And last time I checked, much of ElReg was written in perl.

_{It would seem that most people parse hy perl ink incorrectly ...}

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

It's not simply disagreeing with an opinion. It is decades of past experience demonstrating that a one-word answer to a multi-level problem likely indicates a lack of familiarity on the part of the party uttering that one word.

Re: First web server outside CERN

"The first web server outside CERN came up on an IBM mainframe and was written in REXX (according to B-L's book)."

Tim's wrong. We had experimental WWW servers at Unis all over the West Coast before IBM's was running. The first one was running at Berkeley a couple evenings after the CERN release, the next was at Stanford the following morning, followed very closely by UCLA et al.

Perhaps he meant "the first non-CERN based WWW server"?

_{Not that there was much for them to do ... but it invented a lot of temporary busy work as undergrads were hired to make much of Gopher-space available on the WWW ... until they realized it would be easier to add the gopher protocol to the browser. Hindsight's 20/20 ...}

Re: *EVERY* form of communication

"most of actors were idealistic dreamers making the Web for free."

You are looking at the past through rose tinted specs[0] ... May I introduce you to James Clark (and Marc Andreessen)?

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I was using Gopher on a Sun Workstation along side the early WWW software (early '90s) ... Gopher was far easier to use, client-side and server-side, and had a huge[0] head start. I honestly think that if the University of Minnesota had gone with the GPL, instead of a fee-based license, for the server right from the git-go, Gopher would have the place that the Web has today ... Or be operating alongside it as a peer, at least.

My 107 years young Great Aunt is not quite done publishing her life story in Gopher. When I started teaching her, it seemed like the easiest option for what she was trying to do. That was about 30 years ago, when Auntie was a sprightly 77ish. I run the server. I'd have moved her over to the Web years ago, but she's resistant to change and quite happy with gopher. I almost hope she never finishes it ... I kind of suspect that the project is one of the things that keeps the old girl going.

[0] "Huge" in the world of software development in the late 80s and early 90s time was on the order of weeks or months, not years.

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"Gopher? EWWWWWWWWW!"

How to tell me that you never used Gopher without having to say "I never used Gopher"

"Once Netscape blew Mosaic out of the water"

Probably because the major developers of Mosaic at NCSA (Andreessen and a few others) moved to California and started Netscape Communications (originally "Mosaic Communications").

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

"Gopher was barely more than a way of indexing documents served by FTP."

It is/was far, far more than that. Don't be disingenuous, it doesn't behoove you.

Wow.

Have you any other xenophobic thoughts to share with us?

"I think you're the only one complaining about the web becoming popular"

Nobody said anything about "becoming popular".

"WWW != Internet ... that's a whole different invention"

No, the WWW is just an add-on to the foundation provided by Internet. The Internet would carry on without notice if the WWW were to disappear overnight. The WWW would collapse instantly if the Internet went away overnight.

"How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW?"

All the fucking time. It's a daily demonstration of the ignorance of the great unwashed.

I often check Internet resources that are not on the WWW, and likely never will be ... but then I'm a computer user, not a shiny interface fondler.

Re: it changed software development

"In the 1970's, there was an expectation of the "end of programming" -- that all the (green-screen) applications needed by business would be completed, and all the world would need would be a small coterie of operations and maintainence programmers."

Only a few folks suggested this was possible, mostly management being hopeful that they could get rid of costly staff, and their sycophants and hangers-on.

"Then PC's were introduced, and we got to do everything all over again."

Not all over again. Rather, finding new ways of doing certain things. The old things carried on, and STILL carry on, to this day. I'll bet your bank runs code written in the 1950s.

"Then the Internet came, and we got to do everything all over again."

Again, no. Finding new ways to use computing tools as they became more sophisticated and networking became ubiquitous. The old ways stayed put, and were still used as needed.

"Then smartphones came, and we got to do everything all over again."

The biggest change here was dumbing down and shrinking computing so any old idiot could play angry birds on the bus to work. Note that Mattel sold Auto Race, a hand-held portable digital game, in 1976. (Motorola's DynaTAC came out in 1983, Nintendo's Gameboy in 1989.)

"Then web services and the cloud came, and we got to do everything over again."

To all intents and purposes, those had existed since the 1930s. See: "service bureau". Later, as computers and networking became faster and more powerful, the so-called "timeshare" grew popular.

"Nobody I knew was predicting this in 1975!"

It was all predicted long before the 1970s. Dick Tracy had his 2-way wrist radio in 1946 (2-way wrist TV by the early 1960s). By the mid-1950s, it had percolated from popular culture into upper management. Here's a link to a clip of an AP article, published in many mainstream newspapers on April 10th, 1953. Have you not read the science fiction from the Golden Age?

"since I don't buy their overpriced crap."

How much extra per day does Intel cost for similar performance?

_{My machines typically last 10 years or more before replacement ... This laptop is nearing 20. YMMV.}

Re: Ultra Max Super

My Wife, glancing over my shoulder just now, saw "Ultra Max Super" and wondered why the denizens of ElReg were talking about tampons/pads or makeup.

Re: Fiddling while...

Horses for courses has long been a mantra around these parts.

Re: Marketing: why do we need it again

I've seen benefits with renaming and rebranding. They've all been negative, though.

Marketards are only legends in their own tiny, little minds. They are truly one of the lowest forms of life, ruining almost everything they touch. The rest of us would get along just fine if the lot of them were to jump off the edge of the world, never to be seen again.

Yes, even the original orange Sun logo was readable about all four rotations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1#/media/File:Sun-1_Badge.jpg

Re: True story

Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why, not even IBM's field circus dudes.

Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.

Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.

Once I figured it out, and could reproduce the problem at will, a little shielding (spec'd, provided and installed by IBM, gratis!) made it go away permanently.

Re: Multi I/O Boards

We built them for the S-100 bus, Unibus, Q-bus, STD bus and etc, long before the IBM PC was invented. In fact, in the early days most such peripheral cards for the IBM were modified S-100 bus designs.

Re: Pooh-Poohing Anti-Static Cautions

The instructions beginning "Run tub with cool water. Remove clothing. Stand in tub."?

I know people who actually did that when populating RAM ... Memory was very expensive, and quit delicate at the time. There was a lot of superstition surrounding it.

How expensive? I have a hand-written receipt[0] dated early December of 1977 for "8ea 16 Kbit Mostek MK4116 DRAM, new, in factory tube, with seals" ... for the low, low price of $336, plus tax. So I guess one question to the "42" answer is "What was the price in US dollars for 1 (one) 16K bit DRAM in late 1977?" ...

By way of reference, $42 in 1977 money is just about 325 bucks today.

[0] From the late, very much lamented Haltec, no less ...