On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2023-12-10, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>
>> On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
>>
>>> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
>>> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
>>> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.
>>
>> "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)
>
> It's time for a 21st-century re-write:
>
> This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath
> Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....

Heh, heh .... yea ... more true than you know ! :-)

Looking, I keep being reminded of the early 20th
century. Loons and anarchists and fanatics galore.
Everyone was eager to roll the dice in hopes of
coming out better. The TOLL however .......

>> Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
>> song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
>> individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
>> is some kind of natural law.
>>
>> And then .....
>
> Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:
>
> The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Glad somebody noticed that ....

>> "Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
>> want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
>> severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
>> interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.
>
> And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon.
> The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are
> loudly shouted down at every opportunity.

Yep. They RUIN it for so many others.

There is political/economic POWER in that Gordian
knot of "complexity". It can hide SO many things.

Ok, "The World" IS very very complex these days. Not just
a small handful of mega-powers. Political, military,
economic power and the web of INTERACTIONS/LINKS make
things VERY complicated. Maybe TOO complicated.

I don't think there's "A Solution" anymore.

So, like with "IT" issues, you HAVE to have several
layers of backup. If The Global System cracks/breaks
then you must have at least a functional alternative
on the more local level. Won't be everything the big
existing system offered - but it'll keep you alive
and kinda competitive.

Any who DON'T have that ... they're goin' DOWN ...
dark-ages down. Dung huts and plagues and tyrant
kings down .....

Not entirely sure what this has to do with rPI's though ...
however they may be the highest level of computing power
left after a Fall.

On 12/8/23 2:36 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 08/12/2023 19:16, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>    I worked at that service bureau on those days, while during
>> the rest of the week my disenchantment with Computer Science deepened,
>> and I discovered that theoretical math really wasn't my forte.
>> At the end of my third year (a disaster aside from the programming
>> part), I dropped out, went on full time with the service bureau,
>> and have been programming real-world applications ever since.
>
> Yes. Computer science is relatively speaking bollocks. Software
> engineering however is extremely valuable

Well, it's not entirely bullshit ... but it's RELEVANCE
to What's Going On is often rather tenuous these days.

It's a sci/stat/theory look at "computing". However it
rarely PRODUCES anything of relevance. At best it might
tell you what just CAN'T be done with conventional
computing (which may NOT be true for quantum computing).

Now some time back, esp what Turing was doing, that
WAS more relevant to The Future. Possibilities, and
Limits, were defined. Computing can't do EVERYTHING,
but it CAN do a LOT ........

And, often, it's those little 13-year-old nerds in
the basement who are most relevant as to what CAN
be done. Lots of sugar/caffeine and "Dammit, how to
get around this problem ?" attitude ..........

On 2023-12-11, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

> On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2023-12-10, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
>>>
>>>> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how
>>>> they said that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another
>>>> war "because we won't turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't
>>>> "turn up", nor did those women.
>>>
>>> "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)
>>
>> It's time for a 21st-century re-write:
>>
>> This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath
>> Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....
>
> Heh, heh .... yea ... more true than you know ! :-)
>
> Looking, I keep being reminded of the early 20th
> century. Loons and anarchists and fanatics galore.
> Everyone was eager to roll the dice in hopes of
> coming out better. The TOLL however .......

I think this one is different. We're not dealing with loons
or anarchists. The people to watch for are very smart (in
a frightening way), and have a well-thought-out game plan.
I believe it all started with the hard swing to the right
in the '80s, and the "Me Generation" that developed around
it. Greed became redefined as a virtue, and money the only
moral yardstick. Yes, these things have been around since
the dawn of time, but never have they been so mainstream.

>>> Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
>>> song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
>>> individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
>>> is some kind of natural law.
>>>
>>> And then .....
>>
>> Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:
>>
>> The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
>
> Glad somebody noticed that ....

Thanks.

>>> "Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
>>> want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
>>> severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
>>> interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.
>>
>> And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon.
>> The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are
>> loudly shouted down at every opportunity.
>
> Yep. They RUIN it for so many others.
>
> There is political/economic POWER in that Gordian
> knot of "complexity". It can hide SO many things.

Sing it, brother!

> Ok, "The World" IS very very complex these days. Not just
> a small handful of mega-powers. Political, military,
> economic power and the web of INTERACTIONS/LINKS make
> things VERY complicated. Maybe TOO complicated.

Definitely too complicated. That's why, wherever possible,
I eschew shiny solutions in favour of simple ones that work -
and will keep working.

Stuff that works
Stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall
Stuff that's real
Stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall
-- Guy Clark

> Any who DON'T have that ... they're goin' DOWN ...
> dark-ages down. Dung huts and plagues and tyrant
> kings down .....

Yup. It's frighteningly close already - especially in
our shining (and increasingly unaffordable) metropolises.
Suggested reading:

Patrick Saint-Paul
The Rat People: A Journey through
Beijing's Forbidden Underground
ISBN 9781551528038

Or just about anything by Cory Doctorow.

> Not entirely sure what this has to do with rPI's though ...
> however they may be the highest level of computing power
> left after a Fall.

See another thread in this group about spammers rendering
many more appropriate groups nearly unusable.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

-=> On Thu Dec 7 03:12:00 2023, 56g.1173 wrote to All <=-

> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
> program or tweak existing programs. They've
> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>
> They are "expert" at using M$/Apple/Goog commercial
> apps. That's about it. WHEN it all goes to hell they
> will NOT have a backup plan - just to blame M$ or
> whatever to keep their jobs.
>
> M$/Apple/Good commercial apps actually DO a lot.
> They are also Huge Targets for enemy hacks because
> of that. A layered security/backup scheme is the
> only way to survive. "Cloud" - not nearly as
> secure/robust as they think. They WILL put
> EVERYTHING there - and LOSE it.
>
> We who deal with programming, systems-level stuff,
> we KNOW. The new gen, and the pointy-haired bosses
> who believe in whatever "Modern Management Mag"
> says, are SO seriously deluded. "Appearances" are
> all that counts. Alas, by deflecting blame, they'll
> likely survive - apparently that's the Alpha/Omega.
>
> I spent over 40 years finding out How Things
> Really Work and putting that to best advantage
> for "The Cause". From Assembler/DOS/Win/Linux
> to the latest stuff, I just *had* to know what
> made it tick. What was great, what was crap, what
> was Armageddon.
>
> Do I sound bitter ? Well, that's not really the
> right mindset ... it's more "despondent", seeing
> how far standards have fallen and where it leads.
>
> Oh well, I'll get my pension and SS checks - might
> even make more money than before - but now whatever
> happens isn't MY fault anymore. I can do the
> blame-displacement game too - and with solid creds.
>
> Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
> gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
> for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....
>

Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like you
act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do things. If
you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not a *real* IT
person!

Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in engineering and
computing careers, especially among white men for some reason. Anyone doing
things differently, or learning in a faster way, or progressing faster than
they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then
so should you!" implying that their skills are somehow weaker or less valuable
because they were obtained differently.

I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding job. Maybe
if you actually looked around and took your blinders off, you'd be able to see
that.

> --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
> * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway
> (3:770/3)
>
--
Aurelius
Home BBS: aBSiNTHe

=== TitanMail/linux v1.2.4

On 12/12/2023 11:08, A.M. Rowsell wrote:
> Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like you
> act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do things. If
> you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not a*real* IT
> person!
>
LOL!
> Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in engineering and
> computing careers, especially among white men for some reason. Anyone doing
> things differently, or learning in a faster way, or progressing faster than
> they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then
> so should you!" implying that their skills are somehow weaker or less valuable
> because they were obtained differently.
>
I think you are over egging the pudding
> I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding job. Maybe
> if you actually looked around and took your blinders off, you'd be able to see
> that.
I know a lot of completely trashy crap software., especially in the
[b]anking sector that is truly execrable.

It wasn't written by senile old white men.

--
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house
for the voice of the kingdom.

Jonathan Swift

On Wed, 13 Dec 2023 13:24:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 12/12/2023 11:08, A.M. Rowsell wrote:
>> Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers
>> like you act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do
>> things. If you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not
>> a*real* IT person!
>>
> LOL!
>> Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in
>> engineering and computing careers, especially among white men for some
>> reason. Anyone doing things differently, or learning in a faster way,
>> or progressing faster than they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had
>> to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then so should you!" implying that their
>> skills are somehow weaker or less valuable because they were obtained
>> differently.
>>
> I think you are over egging the pudding
>> I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding
>> job. Maybe if you actually looked around and took your blinders off,
>> you'd be able to see that.
> I know a lot of completely trashy crap software., especially in the
> [b]anking sector that is truly execrable.
>
> It wasn't written by senile old white men.

but, IME anyway, said senile white men were generally rather good coders
as well as rat-hot bug finders and fixers, while and at least one young,
knowitall New Yorker was so bad and uncontrollable that he got slung off
sight when he, apparently just because he could and without permission,
'fixed' but actually wrecked the COBOL copy library the project depended
on.

Its fair to say that I;ve seen badly written, and poorly maintained,
software in both banks and the Civil Service (think bugfixes that were not
documented in either by comments in the code or in the system
documentation. I worked on several sites and saw software staff writing
bad, undocumented code and then trying to debug it, but a reasonable
amount of this bad code was written by young 'uns, many with strange
misunderstandings and never been taught to comment their code either.

On one large project, written in COBOL, we had several on these:
- one young contractor had idea that an ICL 1900 mainframe wouldn't stop
and and require engineering attention if a program divided anything by
zero. Fortunately he was slung out in under a week.

- another didn't know that if there's no 'EXIT' statement at the end of
a paragraph, it falls through to the next one, so where several
paragraphs were expected to fall through to the next one, he'd write

PARA-1.
MOVE A TO TOT-VAL.
ADD B TO TOT-VAL.
GO TO PARA-2.
PARA-2,
ADD C TO TOT-VAL.
MOVE D TO TOT-VAL.
GO TO ALL-DONE.
ALL-DONE.
DISPLAY TOT-VAL
...

Several other contractors knew him from other projects and said he'd
written code like that as long as they'd known him.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 09 Dec 2023 at 09:59:37 GMT, "The Natural Philosopher"
<tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>>
>> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>>
> It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.
>
> When every single part of your life is affected by it.
>
> Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
> should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.

Or those Israeli women near the Gaza border on 7th Oct whom Hamas "fighters"
raped, murdered and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps they
should have paid less attention to culture war nonsense.

See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

--
Tim

On 09/12/2023 10:14, TimS wrote:
> On 09 Dec 2023 at 09:59:37 GMT, "The Natural Philosopher"
> <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 09/12/2023 08:56, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
>>>> These were not despised as the product of 'white male science', nor
>>>> yet were they dismissed as irrelevant or socially dangerous. They were
>>>> seen as triumphs of traditional education and bloody hard work.
>>>
>>> You should spend less time paying attention to culture war nonsense.
>>>
>> It is very hard not to be overwhelmed by it Richard.
>>
>> When every single part of your life is affected by it.
>>
>> Frankly I feel your comment feels like saying to a 1930s German Jew 'you
>> should pay less attention to that national socialist nonsense'.
>
> Or those Israeli women near the Gaza border on 7th Oct whom Hamas "fighters"
> raped, murdered and mutilated (not necessarily in that order). Perhaps they
> should have paid less attention to culture war nonsense.
>
> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.
>
I met a Vietnam Vet in the 1970s. He and his college chums didnt 'turn
up' either. They were told to go down holes in the ground and shoot Viet
Cong. They refused. The Viet Cong repaid him by blowing his legs off
with a land mine.

> You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
>
Sadly yes. I wasn't too interested in working on war electronics. And
yet a missile I had a teeny little part in developing shot down cruise
missiles in the Falklands and saved UK lives.

My problem is that very early on I got sucked into the culture wars. A
sort of friend at College saw me as ideal material for the communist
party. He told me their 50 year plan.
"It will be the long march through the institutions: we will join every
union, every public sector organisation, every school, university and
media company, and we will teach communism, though we will call it
socialism, and we will destroy the state from within so we can replace
it with a Marxist one".

And they have succeeded.

--
Any fool can believe in principles - and most of them do!

On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:

> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and
> so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had
> autocode - no Algol.
>
The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never seen
one running.

The 503 was physically huge, being four cabinets, each about the same size
as a two-door wardrobe, an engineers monitoring panel which was about 4
feet by 3 feet, a lineprinter, two paper tape readers, two paper tape
punches and a control console. The latter was a small desk with keyboard
and teletype-style printer inset flush with the desktop. IIRC had two

It used 39 bit ferrite core memory and needed those big cabinets because
the logic was built from discrete transistors, so the 503 must have been
one of the first transistorised computers.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 09/12/2023 12:39, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2023 08:53:19 GMT, TimS wrote:
>
>> Luxury. We had perhaps 8k of store and the only I/O device was a paper
>> tape read/punch. The machine was in fact an 803 (I misread your OP) and
>> so slow that it couldn't drive the reader at full speed. And it only had
>> autocode - no Algol.
>>
> The Elliott 503 preceeded the 803: I've seen 803s in NMOC but never seen
> one running.
>
> The 503 was physically huge, being four cabinets, each about the same size
> as a two-door wardrobe, an engineers monitoring panel which was about 4
> feet by 3 feet, a lineprinter, two paper tape readers, two paper tape
> punches and a control console. The latter was a small desk with keyboard
> and teletype-style printer inset flush with the desktop. IIRC had two
>
> It used 39 bit ferrite core memory and needed those big cabinets because
> the logic was built from discrete transistors, so the 503 must have been
> one of the first transistorised computers.
>
>
Transistors had been around at least 10 years prior to its introduction.

The late 60s had them cheap enough for 'transistor radios' to be the
i-pods of their time.

"Following the invention of the transistor in 1947—which revolutionized
the field of consumer electronics by introducing small but powerful,
convenient hand-held devices—the Regency TR-1 was released in 1954
becoming the first commercial transistor radio. The mass-market success
of the smaller and cheaper Sony TR-63, released in 1957, led to the
transistor radio becoming the most popular electronic communication
device of the 1960s and 1970s.¨
So building a 'puter out of DTL or RTL using discrete semiconductors was
utterly feasible in the the late 1950s. Slow, extremely bulky and pretty
power hungry, but feasible.

"In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs
built the first computer without vacuum tubes. Known as TRADIC (for
TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer), the machine was a mere three cubic
feet, a mind-boggling size when compared with the 1000 square feet ENIAC
hogged. It contained almost 800 point-contact transistors and 10,000
germanium crystal rectifiers. It could perform a million logical
operations every second, still not quite as fast as the vacuum tube
computers of the day, but pretty close. And best of all, it operated on
less than 100 watts of power. ¨

--
Karl Marx said religion is the opium of the people.
But Marxism is the crack cocaine.

On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:16:38 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

>
> I've always said that this will be the epitaph of our society (spoken in
> a nasal whine, of course).
>
>> The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
>> Post Office Horizon screw-up.
>
> Is that anything like the Canadian Phoenix federal payroll screw-up?
>
I don't know about that one, but for sheer venality, bad management,
incompetence, (seeming lack of) and purely incompetent system design and
development and swindling the users this easily takes the biscuit.

Private Eye published a good description of the scandal:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post

and BBC's Radio 4 also has an excellent series on it, but the scandal
(which would seem to involve management and staff at all levels in the UK
Post Offoce and Fujitsu isn't done and dusted yet.

> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
> when there is nothing left to take away.
> -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
>
Indeed: another interesting example of cockup by carelessness turns out to
be the recent delivery of samples from the Bennu:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasas-asteroid-mission-struck-its-
target-but-then-dodged-a-bullet/2/

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 12:56:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> So building a 'puter out of DTL or RTL using discrete semiconductors was
> utterly feasible in the the late 1950s. Slow, extremely bulky and pretty
> power hungry, but feasible.
>
> "In January of 1954, supported by the military, engineers from Bell Labs
> built the first computer without vacuum tubes. Known as TRADIC (for
> TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer), the machine was a mere three cubic
> feet, a mind-boggling size when compared with the 1000 square feet ENIAC
> hogged. It contained almost 800 point-contact transistors and 10,000
> germanium crystal rectifiers. It could perform a million logical
> operations every second, still not quite as fast as the vacuum tube
> computers of the day, but pretty close. And best of all, it operated on
> less than 100 watts of power. ¨

The first computer anything I remember seeing were the 7 transistor radios
owned by the (relatively) rich kids in 1956/7 and the single transistor-
boosted crystal sets that the rest of us built around then.

I never saw the inside of the Eliott 503's cabinets, so have no idea of
hoew its transistors were packaged, only that it was described as not
using ICs. The first machines I saw th interior of were the ICL 1902 and
1903 mainframes, and those big cabinets seemed to have more wire than
anything else in them and certainly guped power: IIRC a 1903 with two 60MB
disks, 10 tape decks, two card readers, a paper tape reader and an Optical
Mark Reader chewed through 20Kw when up and running.

Side comment: I thought the Optical Mark Reader was a great idea: it read
A4 paper sheets which were marked up with a pencil. I was involved in a
project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to record
patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who apparently
preferred then to hand-written notes. We just wrote a fairly simple system
that red the OMR forms and stored the data on tape as well as translating
the marks into printed pages.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org