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User: TWX

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  1. Re:About time on HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port · · Score: 1

    I think that the controller in my air conditioner is powerful enough for FORTRAN programs...

  2. Re:If there have been signs..... on HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port · · Score: 1

    I want to know how many legacy VMS users there really are left out there. It's been SO long that companies have been forced to start researching migrating off of VMS, and I expect that a lot have made the jump.

    I'm wondering if this is more an attempt to bolster staggering Itanium sales than it is to really make VMS strong again.

  3. Re:All the happy on HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port · · Score: 1

    I remember when there was discussion about getting rid of their printers division. Someone should have been smacked upside the head for that one, as HPs are really the only printers worth having. We've got ancient Laserjet 4s running still, and just about everything in their commercial/workgroup size since then has been good. They've had some stinkers in the color printing department (the 4500/4550 that spun the cartridges and tended to fling toner through the entire inside comes to mind, as does the 4600/4650 with the fuzz problem) but they've been a hell of a lot better than Lexmark or Dell.

  4. Re:All the happy on HP Gives OpenVMS New Life and Path To X86 Port · · Score: 2

    Because you're trying to establish a niche. Everyone's running on x86 or amd64, you need to set yourself apart. Since the Itanium-based boxes, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, tend to sell in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range, then perhaps this is an attempt to bring the OS back into the supercomputing market where it might actually find interest. From HP's perspective, since they're the main seller of Itanium-based systems, it's also a way for them to use something that they have significant money invested in and may not be selling as well as it should.

    Thing is, it's going to come down to applications. At my work they're convinced that the i-Series/AS/400 is the devil's work, and they're wanting to replace it with Microsoft-based servers, and that's even with good recordkeeping and financial software that's reasonably up-to-date. If VMS is really as dead as it sounds, then there's going to be a dearth of applications for it, and with competition from other large "big iron" machines, large POSIX systems, and even from Microsoft virtual-cluster systems, it's going to be hard to justify getting in on VMS again. If there are any existing VMS users with applications that they haven't been able to replace then those would be the first customers, but there are only so many Rand Corporations and National Weather Services out there.

  5. Re:Change management fail on Passport Database Outage Leaves Thousands Stranded · · Score: 1

    More like same as trying a test server, then after that appears to work, pushing out to only a portion of your production cluster, if the backend can handle having two different versions running concurrently, then seeing if those portion that are changed continue to work at least as well as the original ones for a functional duration, if not better. Then push out to the rest.

    Even better, if the circumstances require significant DB changes, you back up the DB (you are backing up the DB, right?), start bringing up new nodes, add those nodes to the load balancer, then start bringing down old nodes. You also date-stamp the changelog so that if you have to rollback to a previous database for previous-generation servers, you can propagate the necessary changes that were committed to the new database post-roll to the old one, if you have to bring the old one back online.

  6. Re:Doesn't surprise me on Nevada Construction Project Could Be Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory · · Score: 1

    And when it was rumored that Chrysler was introducing another brand in the early 2010s, we "knew" that Plymouth was coming back. It didn't. RAM was split from Dodge instead.

    I wait until either the formal announcement or the signs go up. Until it's official it ain't official.

    I watched some of that movie that Scorcese made about Howard Hughes last night. I couldn't help but draw parallels to Elon Musk, both in the secretiveness and the balls-to-the-wall approach when committing to a decision. We'll have to see how this plays out.

  7. Re:From Finland on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 1

    "Ping" never got me, but I knew the word first from the film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October and its scottish pronounciation (even though he was playing a Soviet Lithuanian), and after that I new it from the ICMP utility. For me, if it had a language association it was scottish/English and technical, not Asian or Chinese in particular.

  8. Re:From Finland on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 1

    Probably. The "No" is pronounced strongly and staccato, and the "kia" part has most emphasis on the "ee" pronounciation of the letter i.

  9. Re:From Finland on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 1

    How about I rephrase... Europe wasn't known for their consumer electronics in the United States. Of that list, the only one that I was aware of in the eighties through mid-nineties was Philips, and I knew them mostly through their ownership of American firm Magnavox. I'm now acquainted with Siemens, Ericcson, and Loewe, and I've heard of a couple of the others, but they weren't the names of that time like Samsung (for low end), Sony (for medium-grade) and Pioneer (for higher-end) were.

  10. Re:From Finland on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 1

    Correct. Don't have to shovel sunshine...

  11. Re:From Finland on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 1

    Pretty much. And honestly, Europe wasn't exactly known for their consumer electronics during my formative years either, excepting extremely high-end brands like Bang and Olufsen.

  12. Re:Good riddance on Crytek USA Collapses, Sells Game IP To Other Developers · · Score: 1

    Yup. In my opinion this is a bit of an, "Emperor has no clothes," moment, as the game engine itself has always seemed to need more computing power than one has, and the developers were the only ones to actually make anything of it.

    There was a joke a few years ago, "Could God create a video game so demanding that his computer can't play it?" "Yes, it's called 'Crysis'."

  13. Didn't realise they weren't Japanese on Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic · · Score: 0, Troll

    I thought that Nokia was a Japanese company. Maybe with the Japanese electronics boom of the eighties they were happy to let that misconception persist.

  14. Re:Burglary... on Nuclear Missile Command Drops Grades From Tests To Discourage Cheating · · Score: 1

    They're physically proprietary. They're smaller than 3.5" floppies.

  15. Re:Burglary... on Nuclear Missile Command Drops Grades From Tests To Discourage Cheating · · Score: 1

    Or a burglary of any computer geek's residence that's been in this since the days of DOS 5.0...

    I still have a couple of 5.25" floppy drives. I'm not proud of this, but I just can't quite bring myself to throw them away, just in case I need them. I still have a 3.5" floppy drive in a computer that I use regularly, and I still have my SCSI internal Zip Drive and my SCSI internal Jaz2 drive, though those aren't actually installed in anything running at the moment.

    And my wife is still annoyed that her old Smith-Corona word processor's floppies are proprietary, and she has no way of reading some of the research papers she did in high school and college. We still have the media, but no word processor.

  16. Re:And it'll keep happening, again and again... on Hackers Plundered Israeli Defense Firms That Built 'Iron Dome' Missile Defense · · Score: 1

    And if e-mail on the corporate internal LAN/WAN never touches the public Internet then even if someone brings in a USB FOB with an infection, it won't readily spread automatically.

    Hence two separate networks.

    If it's that important, then the employees should be able to handle having two separate systems, one for internal use only, one for external use only.

  17. Paying their clients on Ford, GM Sued Over Vehicles' Ability To Rip CD Music To Hard Drive · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is totally a trolling lawsuit. I mean, just look at their website.

    It's fucking stock wordpress.

    Maybe they're just being frugal. Maybe they're trying to pass on as much money to the artists they represent as possible.

  18. Re:Not sure how well this will stop cheating on Nuclear Missile Command Drops Grades From Tests To Discourage Cheating · · Score: 2

    If the average score was 95%, then wouldn't that mean that the general field of scores was falling somewhere in the 100%-90% range, possibly with disproportionately more above 95% to offset those falling below 90%?

    Frankly, the danger is that we can't really know what the actual scores, without the pervasive cheating, would have been. There might well be 30% that passed that would have failed without cheating.

    If over 50% of the participants were able to cheat, then it sounds like they need to work on their testing procedures in addition to their scoring metric. In this day and age it's not all that difficult to random-generate tests and source questions from sets so that one set may have 30 questions that apply to the same topic and three are randomly chosen; it means that for a 100 question tests there'd need to be probably a thousand questions grouped into sets, but if it's that important then it's not unrealistic to do the major work once and to maintain it properly from then on out.

  19. Re:And it'll keep happening, again and again... on Hackers Plundered Israeli Defense Firms That Built 'Iron Dome' Missile Defense · · Score: 1

    I'm well-aware that keeping employees busy with enough work and having enough oversight to help keep them on-task is important, but reducing distraction is also important. There's more than one contributing factor to inefficiency. I can suggest remedies for this one.

  20. And it'll keep happening, again and again... on Hackers Plundered Israeli Defense Firms That Built 'Iron Dome' Missile Defense · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...until software and systems security is finally taken seriously. That may mean corporate LANs interconnected between sites by leased private fiber, where ther entire computer system for the company is not able to even reach the public Internet. That may mean that users have separate systems, one for internal communication within the company, and one for external communication to outsiders. That may also mean that companies stop allowing anything sensitive on public-reachable computers, and it might even mean that corporate IT departments have to look at hardware that doesn't allow for secure computers to even plug into regular, public networks, and for those 'regular' networks to be highly monitored and partially locked-down as to what IP ranges (and countries) can even be communicated with.

    I can tell you one thing, if such a system were implemented there'd probably be an uptick in efficiency as now it'd be a lot harder to screw around at work. Sure, a lot of people would be really pissed that they can't do non-work tasks at work without using a system seeing such monitoring too, but given that salaries in the defense sector are generally pretty good, that's a tradeoff that one could probably stomach.

  21. Re:Alright! Go Senate bill on Senate Bill Would Ban Most Bulk Surveillance · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The constitution is the law you dumbass. No other law is needed or is superior. The fourth amendment and other [un/en]umerated rights prohibits search and seizure upon your life without reasonable suspicion and backed by warrant.

    It's a real shame that the Supreme Court doesn't really agree with you.

  22. Re:What makes this a gigafactory? on Tesla and Panasonic Have Reached an Agreement On the Gigafactory · · Score: 1

    Given how many residents of Boston are already scared of the places in contention for the new factory, I don't see a problem with this...

  23. Re:Alright! Go Senate bill on Senate Bill Would Ban Most Bulk Surveillance · · Score: 2

    Of course not! Would you voluntarily give up a tool that was handed to you when you started your job, without a replacement provided?

    That's the entire point of having separate branches of government.

  24. Re:Great... on Satellite Images Show Russians Shelling Ukraine · · Score: 1

    I believe it's possible to have more than 100% blame for a situation.

    Those that shot-down a civiian airliner deserve 100% of the blame for shooting it down. That's a given.

    Those that provided weapons without providing proper training deserve some blame.

    Those that gave orders in the heirarchy to the crew that fired the missile deserve blame, even if they weren't actively involved in the choice to engage the target.

    Those that chose to fly through that region also deserve some blame. Not as much blame, but some.

    And honestly, I don't have a problem with the concept of blaming, at least to a small extent, the victim. That doesn't mean that one should shame the victim, but from situations as insignificant as not maintaining situational awareness when walking through a rough neighborhood and being mugged to as large as flying through a warzone all have a kernel of blame attributable to the victim, in that the victim's choices assisted in being victimized. The world is a harsh place, and while the perpetrators of violence are 100% responsible, there's still more blame to assign to some of those that fail to take basic steps to protect themselves or those in their charge.

  25. Re:Alright! Go Senate bill on Senate Bill Would Ban Most Bulk Surveillance · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, since the party whose member is placing the hold has to at least make that known, if there's bipartisan support in the House and the Executive Branch is on board, I don't expect such a hold to go over very well. This might be one of the few things that both parties agree on and that neither party could really use as leverage against the other in an election year, as the public is starting to get upset across the board about it too.