Ok, not to break up a (somewhat) popular hate fest, but you HAVE to realize, for any given sitcom on commercial TV, there's inevitably going to be FCC complaints, many of which are going to be... strange. Consider, in any group of people 300M large, a significant fraction of which watch TV, a significant fraction of *that* having no other damn thing going in their lives, what the heck do you THINK is going to happen? We used to call these people Fred and Ethyl, after Lucy's hapless elderly neighbors. Fred and Ethyl eat dinner off tin fold-up TV trays and watch TV in real time, including commercials. Fred and Ethyl can't tell the difference between rubber brains and the head meat of small animals. They think objects thrown from offstage must be from monkeys in a cage because that's what the dialog alludes to. They think the sounds of a cat squalling are being made by someone torturing a cat just behind that fake window there. Combine this with the current fashion of being offended at the tiniest opportunity, and what do you THINK is going to happen?
This article speaks more about the reporters than the reportees. It's non-news, but it bashes a show that some geeks don't like. So let's go with it. (In Kevin Kline's voice) DisapPOINTed.
And finally, it's not a laugh track -- it's a multicamera studio production in front of a live audience. Geeze.
I thought this was news for nerds. Not news for clueless nerds.
I put the company I worked for on Usenet in 1982. (My "hello world" message is still available via google groups.) That was the point where I switched from engineering to systems administration.
Unfriending someone doesn't even come close to what I went through.
I agree. Same here. But people with a sense of entitlement are jumping on the bandwagon, because, hey, media coverage, instant fame, power over other individuals. And the real issues get that much more polluted.
I have been involved in several mainframe migrations. It is hard, requires a lot of planning and testing but it is quite doable. Having said that if HP bid a price to do it and failed their is no "in all fairness", they signed up to do, got paid to do it, they are responsible to do it, their is no excuse of it was too hard! If it is too hard for them then they didn't do due diligence or executed poorly.
I agree that from a technical standpoint, getting off the mainframe is (or should be) quite doable. The issues I've seen were mostly not technical.
I'm conflicted, because, --let's face it-- I want to see HP burn in hell. Just pointing out that in my own experience the chances of success in this kind of endeavor are very small.
Wow, the LAST thing I want to do is take HP's side in ANY argument. But (reluctantly...) in all fairness, getting off the mainframe is very VERY difficult, for a large number of reasons, not the least of which IBM's commitment to preventing that from happening.
In the decades I've been in IT, I've seen three fairly large companies make a concerted effort to get off the mainframe. All failed. One ended up upgrading the mainframe. One ended up renting mainframe time from ISSC. One is still trying, years later.
I don't know what happened in this particular case; maybe HP saw this as a cash cow they could milk for several years, due to the fact that the industry expectation of success is so low. But there is a possibility that HP saw this as a genuine business opportunity, and didn't realize until later that it just wasn't possible.
At 50 million bucks, why didn't they emulate the old machinery or port the code to an interpreter running on a modern system? Off the top of my head, that sounds like the most reliable ways to duplicate exactly an old system.
That's a great question, and the answer is, IBM Z-series business unit has, bar none, the most aggressive, talented and ruthless customer retention team in the world. You're right, there's no sane reason why a mainframe application can't be emulated at least for a stopgap measure. But you'll find that there are a score of legal, political and business reasons why you won't be allowed to do that.
Moreover, you'll find that it's just impractical to port the application to any other reasonable platform. Even though your smartphone probably has more guts than the '60's era mainframe you're trying to get off of, actually making the cutover is very VERY difficult, for a variety of reasons, few of them technical.
> 'Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,' one scientist wrote in an internal document."
And we know that global temperatures rocketed up several degrees in the 1980's and we're all dead now.
There's always going to be a debate on Photoshop, but what I really need is Lightroom. Specifically on Android. The only thing keeping me from buying an Android tablet is that I'm a content producer, not a content consumer, and the apps aren't there yet. (Adobe Carousel is a joke. Don't even mention it.)
Enh, as someone who had to struggle late into the night trying to resolve driver issues, PnP issues, master browser storms, and other idiotic issues, I'd say Windows 95 sucked its entire life, and Windows 98 did too. 98 SE was when they finally got it right. Or, at least, usable.
From a conceptual standpoint, Microsoft really had something with 95. But under the covers, it could get really ugly.
I'm not a kernel engineer (just a sysadm from way back) but I seem to recall that Windows NT inherited quite a bit from VMS under the covers, both good and bad. (An example of bad, I was told, had to do with security issues with message passing. I can't remember anything more than that.)
Well, yes, you're right. Still, there is a tendency to oppose risks imposed on one than those one chooses.
Well, true, but we do have to make some decisions as a community rather than as individuals. I guess that's why you have some choices as to where you live.
Not to mention that moving furniture is damn deadly too! Apparently 15 Americans are crushed to death moving their furniture every year! BAN THE COUCH!
I absolutely agree. I used to ride sport bikes (mostly Suzuki) but I'm old now and my knees and back are shot (product of a few ill-advised get-offs) and I have to wear a bracelet that warns EMTs that I'm missing an internal organ. (In case they need to know, I guess.) These days I ride a Harley touring model. I figure I'll keep riding for as long as my body lets me.
When daughter was still in daycare, I had to rush home from work to switch over to the truck so I could pick her up. The logistics were complicated and I ended up traveling part of the route multiple times. One time she asked me why I rode the motorcycle? I said imagine a roller coaster that starts at your house and ends at your work, and you get to ride it every day.
The point is, it's all about managed risk. If the benefit is great enough, the risk might be worth it, and/or there might be reasonable ways to mitigate the risk. Nuclear power has its disadvantages, but you don't have to dam rivers or burn coal, and it makes a lot of energy, even at night when there's no wind. There are ways to do it wrong, but there's ways to do anything wrong.
I didn't know that about moving furniture. I *did* bolt the bookcases to the wall studs, because I had nightmares of the kid trying to climb them and tipping one over. But she never did.
That's true, I was just proposing the solution I had personal experience with. The point is, none of these solutions require a monthly fee.
This is similar in my view to Comcast or whatever they're calling themselves these days trying to sign people up for a security system at an inflated price monthly price that continues ad infinitum, when you can *buy* the equipment and incur no recurring cost for less than a year's cost of the service.
Cable companies still seem to be locked into the business plan of "providing a service" for a stiff monthly fee for essentially doing very little besides keeping the lights on and maintaining the billing service. That really doesn't work anymore.
The accident reporting and roadside assistance features could be useful. As soon as these become readily available, though, one of the first things that a car thief would do is pull the dongle out of the OBD II port and throw it and the visor widget out the window, making it impossible to track the car. As a built in module, it works, because it's difficult for a thief to remove, but if it can be removed in 30 seconds without tools, it's worthless for tracking a stolen car.
Thing is, accident reporting and roadside assistance features can be had with any cell phone. And also some aftermarket in-dash radio/gps units.
Having these features as an add-on to the car would be convenient, if not for the monthly cost. It seems like Verizon is really reaching here.
The Clintons have, over the years, demonstrated a supreme ability to shake off controversy. I don't see this going anywhere.
Hillary could have actual blood on her hands and her prints on the weapon and she's look indignant, deny everything and blame it on her political adversaries. It's a strategy that's worked very well for her in the past.
I think we're drifting from the point a little bit. It's not about playing conqueror. It's about wanting or needing someone else's resources. The overall point is that going back to an agrarian society doesn't mean the people who are successful at growing crops will have food and everyone else is just going to sit at home and die. What Sweetness doesn't realize is that those hungry people are going to take their stuff. And no amount of group standing in a circle and chanting is going to change that.
What usually happens is that some group of hungry people get organized, weaponize, and then take over. But this isn't necessarily about an organized take-over. It's about the rest of the world wanting scarce resources that you happen to have. They'd be *lucky* if it were an organized take-over, because a mob wouldn't leave anything, and then everyone starves.
The kind of society that Sweetness envisions only works, sadly, if there's a larger social structure that's willing to put up with them and protect them. They can't exist on their own.
And as I think you pointed out, even if they existed in a complete vacuum, eventually other members, or their kids, would think, why do I put up with this when I can just pick up a rock and take over?
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Ok, not to break up a (somewhat) popular hate fest, but you HAVE to realize, for any given sitcom on commercial TV, there's inevitably going to be FCC complaints, many of which are going to be ... strange. Consider, in any group of people 300M large, a significant fraction of which watch TV, a significant fraction of *that* having no other damn thing going in their lives, what the heck do you THINK is going to happen? We used to call these people Fred and Ethyl, after Lucy's hapless elderly neighbors. Fred and Ethyl eat dinner off tin fold-up TV trays and watch TV in real time, including commercials. Fred and Ethyl can't tell the difference between rubber brains and the head meat of small animals. They think objects thrown from offstage must be from monkeys in a cage because that's what the dialog alludes to. They think the sounds of a cat squalling are being made by someone torturing a cat just behind that fake window there. Combine this with the current fashion of being offended at the tiniest opportunity, and what do you THINK is going to happen?
This article speaks more about the reporters than the reportees. It's non-news, but it bashes a show that some geeks don't like. So let's go with it. (In Kevin Kline's voice) DisapPOINTed.
And finally, it's not a laugh track -- it's a multicamera studio production in front of a live audience. Geeze.
I thought this was news for nerds. Not news for clueless nerds.
I put the company I worked for on Usenet in 1982. (My "hello world" message is still available via google groups.) That was the point where I switched from engineering to systems administration.
Unfriending someone doesn't even come close to what I went through.
I agree. Same here. But people with a sense of entitlement are jumping on the bandwagon, because, hey, media coverage, instant fame, power over other individuals. And the real issues get that much more polluted.
I have been involved in several mainframe migrations. It is hard, requires a lot of planning and testing but it is quite doable. Having said that if HP bid a price to do it and failed their is no "in all fairness", they signed up to do, got paid to do it, they are responsible to do it, their is no excuse of it was too hard! If it is too hard for them then they didn't do due diligence or executed poorly.
I agree that from a technical standpoint, getting off the mainframe is (or should be) quite doable. The issues I've seen were mostly not technical.
I'm conflicted, because, --let's face it-- I want to see HP burn in hell. Just pointing out that in my own experience the chances of success in this kind of endeavor are very small.
Wow, the LAST thing I want to do is take HP's side in ANY argument. But (reluctantly...) in all fairness, getting off the mainframe is very VERY difficult, for a large number of reasons, not the least of which IBM's commitment to preventing that from happening.
In the decades I've been in IT, I've seen three fairly large companies make a concerted effort to get off the mainframe. All failed. One ended up upgrading the mainframe. One ended up renting mainframe time from ISSC. One is still trying, years later.
I don't know what happened in this particular case; maybe HP saw this as a cash cow they could milk for several years, due to the fact that the industry expectation of success is so low. But there is a possibility that HP saw this as a genuine business opportunity, and didn't realize until later that it just wasn't possible.
At 50 million bucks, why didn't they emulate the old machinery or port the code to an interpreter running on a modern system? Off the top of my head, that sounds like the most reliable ways to duplicate exactly an old system.
That's a great question, and the answer is, IBM Z-series business unit has, bar none, the most aggressive, talented and ruthless customer retention team in the world. You're right, there's no sane reason why a mainframe application can't be emulated at least for a stopgap measure. But you'll find that there are a score of legal, political and business reasons why you won't be allowed to do that.
Moreover, you'll find that it's just impractical to port the application to any other reasonable platform. Even though your smartphone probably has more guts than the '60's era mainframe you're trying to get off of, actually making the cutover is very VERY difficult, for a variety of reasons, few of them technical.
My first thought as well. I guess malware is in the eye of the beholder.
> 'Present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical,' one scientist wrote in an internal document."
And we know that global temperatures rocketed up several degrees in the 1980's and we're all dead now.
There's always going to be a debate on Photoshop, but what I really need is Lightroom. Specifically on Android. The only thing keeping me from buying an Android tablet is that I'm a content producer, not a content consumer, and the apps aren't there yet. (Adobe Carousel is a joke. Don't even mention it.)
Blue Iris video security software. I'd much rather run it natively on Linux rather than run it on Windows in a virtual box or try to get Wine working.
There's a lot of things to like about OSX, but their menu system isn't one of them. Just sayin'.
Enh, as someone who had to struggle late into the night trying to resolve driver issues, PnP issues, master browser storms, and other idiotic issues, I'd say Windows 95 sucked its entire life, and Windows 98 did too. 98 SE was when they finally got it right. Or, at least, usable.
From a conceptual standpoint, Microsoft really had something with 95. But under the covers, it could get really ugly.
I'm not a kernel engineer (just a sysadm from way back) but I seem to recall that Windows NT inherited quite a bit from VMS under the covers, both good and bad. (An example of bad, I was told, had to do with security issues with message passing. I can't remember anything more than that.)
Just sayin'....
Keep it a secret.
Well, yes, you're right. Still, there is a tendency to oppose risks imposed on one than those one chooses.
Well, true, but we do have to make some decisions as a community rather than as individuals. I guess that's why you have some choices as to where you live.
But so so so worth it! What do you ride?
Not to mention that moving furniture is damn deadly too! Apparently 15 Americans are crushed to death moving their furniture every year! BAN THE COUCH!
I absolutely agree. I used to ride sport bikes (mostly Suzuki) but I'm old now and my knees and back are shot (product of a few ill-advised get-offs) and I have to wear a bracelet that warns EMTs that I'm missing an internal organ. (In case they need to know, I guess.) These days I ride a Harley touring model. I figure I'll keep riding for as long as my body lets me.
When daughter was still in daycare, I had to rush home from work to switch over to the truck so I could pick her up. The logistics were complicated and I ended up traveling part of the route multiple times. One time she asked me why I rode the motorcycle? I said imagine a roller coaster that starts at your house and ends at your work, and you get to ride it every day.
The point is, it's all about managed risk. If the benefit is great enough, the risk might be worth it, and/or there might be reasonable ways to mitigate the risk. Nuclear power has its disadvantages, but you don't have to dam rivers or burn coal, and it makes a lot of energy, even at night when there's no wind. There are ways to do it wrong, but there's ways to do anything wrong.
I didn't know that about moving furniture. I *did* bolt the bookcases to the wall studs, because I had nightmares of the kid trying to climb them and tipping one over. But she never did.
What do you ride?
> Sure, but the people on the inland side of the road will be able to look forward to owning beachfront property!
True, but probably in several hundred years.
Motorcycle for me. Even riskier. Perspective is a good thing.
That's true, I was just proposing the solution I had personal experience with. The point is, none of these solutions require a monthly fee.
This is similar in my view to Comcast or whatever they're calling themselves these days trying to sign people up for a security system at an inflated price monthly price that continues ad infinitum, when you can *buy* the equipment and incur no recurring cost for less than a year's cost of the service.
Cable companies still seem to be locked into the business plan of "providing a service" for a stiff monthly fee for essentially doing very little besides keeping the lights on and maintaining the billing service. That really doesn't work anymore.
The accident reporting and roadside assistance features could be useful. As soon as these become readily available, though, one of the first things that a car thief would do is pull the dongle out of the OBD II port and throw it and the visor widget out the window, making it impossible to track the car. As a built in module, it works, because it's difficult for a thief to remove, but if it can be removed in 30 seconds without tools, it's worthless for tracking a stolen car.
Thing is, accident reporting and roadside assistance features can be had with any cell phone. And also some aftermarket in-dash radio/gps units.
Having these features as an add-on to the car would be convenient, if not for the monthly cost. It seems like Verizon is really reaching here.
> Previous Clinton controversies were greatly exaggerated by their political enemies [...]
See? It works.
The Clintons have, over the years, demonstrated a supreme ability to shake off controversy. I don't see this going anywhere.
Hillary could have actual blood on her hands and her prints on the weapon and she's look indignant, deny everything and blame it on her political adversaries. It's a strategy that's worked very well for her in the past.
I think we're drifting from the point a little bit. It's not about playing conqueror. It's about wanting or needing someone else's resources. The overall point is that going back to an agrarian society doesn't mean the people who are successful at growing crops will have food and everyone else is just going to sit at home and die. What Sweetness doesn't realize is that those hungry people are going to take their stuff. And no amount of group standing in a circle and chanting is going to change that.
What usually happens is that some group of hungry people get organized, weaponize, and then take over. But this isn't necessarily about an organized take-over. It's about the rest of the world wanting scarce resources that you happen to have. They'd be *lucky* if it were an organized take-over, because a mob wouldn't leave anything, and then everyone starves.
The kind of society that Sweetness envisions only works, sadly, if there's a larger social structure that's willing to put up with them and protect them. They can't exist on their own.
And as I think you pointed out, even if they existed in a complete vacuum, eventually other members, or their kids, would think, why do I put up with this when I can just pick up a rock and take over?