prosaic-hacker

The article talks about long forgotten reasons why things are as they are.

I have heard of a, probably now apocryphal story, of field on a Multinational's paper report that was always supposed to be 0. When the IT team that did the automation of the report, discovered field was the number of bombs that fell that week on a property owned by the company during the London Blitz. Not a big consequence to the company but the story had been lost.

I am from a earlier generation. Owned a TI SR-51A last year of High school, Then a HP-29c first year of University. I vaguely remember the SR-51A had an limited equation programming : multiply by a constant and add a constant. I remember writing sort routines for the 29c using its indirect register access to treat a block of registers as an array. Bench-marked various sorts. I think minutes to sort 20 items.

About 1/4 of a Security Now podcast or 1/2 of the Amp Hour or Embedded.

I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.

At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.

I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )

>There are an amazing number of "business critical" applications that are running ancient libraries, protocols, etc.

Do you know of any examples of these "walking wounded" applications? Can we bring some attention to reduce their foot print.

I teach in a tech/trade vocational program where 1/2 the students are your generation. All kinds of reasons they are there. (Didn't do well in High School, College, University, Grad School, Gaming in their parents basement since they were 10)

When one of the skills click (some try 2 or 3 of the ones we teach) and they start working the says that life is happening for them. The failures, in retrospect, become steps the had to take to get where they are. Perseverance is probably good personality trait to develop.

I chose my handle to have the word prosaic in it because I did many thing in tech (and other fields), none at extraordinary levels, but all done by learning by trying things out. You don't have to be wildly successful in life, prosaic can be good enough.

Early 80's VMS had a Keep/Purge system for history of files. Everytime you edited a file a version number was bumped up by 1. There was a command, "purge", I think that set the Keep count which was default to 3.

This would have been within the contemporary Dos and disk capabilities and size of 160-360kBytes, although slow (5-15 seconds).

When Dave Cutler moved from DEC to MS I expected the Dos console under windows to get that same feature. Disappointed. A gajillion lost hours could have be saved.

There was this link on the page https://hackaday.io/project/202541-replica-of-the-pdp-1-pidp...

TL;DR Don't sweat the future, it will mess up eventually. Just Do something now that is productive for a while and don't be afraid to change you mind or your job.

Doing the same thing I have been doing since I was your age. Learning some that interest me now that could be useful.

Started out as a math and science geek: Organic Chemistry was the target. Two chance encounters: one with two real working chemists that warned me to get a PHD to get a real job. I was to impatient to do that much school so the second chance encounter was with a obsolete computer that was plotting graphs and space games on paper. Three years os CS later I was working on Flight Simulation. The 1st PC era happened and 5 years later I switched to install 1st gen PC networks. Then Unix got big and I did Sysdmin on that for a while. Then Perl programing which morph into webdev for handful of years.

Then I was "old" at least to the HR 15 guy, years my junior, who would not hire me, so I became a manager. Then there were to many managers I went back to school and got an accounting degree. Did that for a bunch of years and started teaching System Administration. Now looking for my next obsession.

I have seen the effect of tools building in several contexts. The most successful were teams that respected the process in that they each, could and would build tools themselves and would adopt other's tools.

Without the symmetry then the creators has to make sure to keep up the pace on the global progress or be label as distracted by the tool creation.

Worst case the tool creators get separated from the main production and have to maintain the core groups utilities (which will become any code they don't want to maintain).

Tools have to be short to build, widely useful, and placed in a repository that is collectively maintained.

Remember the context that created the need for the tool may move on and the existing tools will have to be upgraded. The group should have a plan how to handle that.

I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.

I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.

As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".

I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.

Ageism is not death. Just a bump in the road.

I am well past 60. For the first 30 odd years I was an individual contributor in both programming and system administration and manager of the same.

When one of the financial crises and ageism ended my management career, I went back to school and switched fields. After a few years I got the chance to teach new computer support professionals in vocational program. I have been doing that for 15 years.

As a side note for ageism "victims" our school is growing and is struggling to find enough competent teachers (Window/Linux Admin, Database, Scripting, Networking, VMs, Cloud, Mobile devices...).

Check out your local vocational programs. You can find permanent or bridge work teaching at this level. Usually industry experience is more important for these jobs than a teaching degree.

I have been following ReactOS development for years. I have loaded and run it for various hobby projects.

I am glad that the skills developed in working on ROS are transferable to another area.

This is not a topic that can be explained while standing on one foot. It is a multi layer cake of hand-offs of information similar to the ISO OSI model of networking (which of course is I/O through the network.

At the top end is a program asking built in function or library to print some text. Many layers down is the final hardware receiving the text and displaying it. These two video will cover the lower layers

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFWff2QjXCW...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXN...

Breadboard implementation using the MC14500b

Usagi Electric 1-Bit Breadboard Computer P.01 – The MC14500 and 555 Clock Circuit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPA8dHtf_6M&list=PLnw98JPyOb...

Your desire that everyone learns to swim is laudable but as with all useful skills it takes work. Our completely distracted society is loosing skills like map reading, making change, driving manual, tying knots(still learning) ... (Sounds like a reason for Scouting and 4H) I will even posit shoelace tying given all the Velcro shoes.

12K is a lot for ROV (other comments suggest the could be cheaper ones) but the good news is the operator has had 10,000 hours practice on a Xbox. The Engineer/PM/Accountant in me hopes the ROV is reusable and will be used over many years spreading the cost out over time saving many people.

Hopefully the saved will come to Jesus (pronounced "heysous"), I mean the local teen working at the swimming pool who has a knack for teaching adults to swim.

TLDR: 30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it.

I bought it 15 years ago and have run it on about 200 drives. My anecdotal results are in thirds with about equal results for drives(both spinning and ssd) that have measurable slowdown from new. 1. No visible improvement of the situation. 2. Moderate improvement in speed or identification of "bad sections of the drive". 3. Significant improvement in speed or readability.

For the third group especially backup times were horrible or failed so the idea of doing the backup not the rescue first were not successful so we had no option but try the recuse.

In this case after the rescue the backup worked. I then backup up the backup because one copy is not enough (min 3 on different media and at least one offsite). Then restore/image the disk and boot up the system with a new disk and put the old one on a shelf until you have appropriate back ups of the new one. Then destroy the old one so no one can use it.

30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it.

What will the world look like after the "Great HW speedup Plateau". Will we have top level optimizers rewriting code to get software only speed ups.

I have be hesitating to buy a PROM programmer.

Now I dusted off a couple of old Arduino Unos and a ZIF socket and I will get one of these.

What could I build....?

Their could be a pre-Dinosaur version of this going back to HTML only websites with submit buttons (1995) because java-script came out only in 1997.

Being nerd sniped into thinking I could learn how to do the same thing for X64.

Backing away from the assembler.

I have a storage room under the stairs which would be a vintage computer museum of its own. I am keeping it there until I downsize the house in the next 5 years. I have been delusionally waiting for that 10,000 year preservation origanization to come into existence but I am not holding my breath.

If a billionaire funded museum could run into trouble (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831880) what hope is there for anything else.

PS. I have a cache of ~10,000 1980s and 90s DIP ICs (8032 Micro controllers and support chips) that I want to find a use for. You could contact me at my account name without the punctuation at gmail.

So all those people with FZs I met at Bsides were car thieves.

Just how many thefts are linked to its use.

Criminals will be add FZs to their gun and drug shipments to Canada

There is a twist in Canadian law regarding mortgages. Quoting from the page linked below. --- Canada’s Interest Act states the following about amortizing mortgages: “... the principal money and the rate of interest chargeable on that money, calculated yearly or half-yearly, not in advance.” --- This page does go into the detail a little more. https://wowa.ca/how-is-mortgage-interest-calculated

It may not be authoritative but you can start with https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-15/page-1.html which should be.

The whole article has a straw-man feel to it. It is not the senior developers responsibility to create a proper QA policy for the project. It is good that the lead should know how to implement good QA processes.

HOWEVER, the real culprit are the MANAGERS.

After 50+ years of skanky software development policy aimed at low balling cost its time to blame the right people. No amount of cajoling, "business/budget" speak manipulation is going to fix a fundamental flaw in how managers at that level are trained and behave.

We have stop being apologists for mistakes not of our making. If using QA techniques would increase the managers bonus then we will see it being used. If all it does is make better software then this post will be rewritten in 50 years and would still be relevant.

I was out this morning. You can, at times, taste the ash rather that just smelling. This afternoon it still smells and you can see a reduction in visibility at the distance of one yard to the next. It has different quality to it than the same reduced visibility as fog. At no times did my eyes sting but I was outside for minutes at a time. In the house, the car, and a big public building the smell is almost at 0.

Exiting the build you feel the change in the typical double door entry to public building. Its an "airlock" entry in that one person cannot hold open both inside and outside doors at the same time. Most likely to preserve heat inside in the winter.

My HP-29C could use something like that. I have it on the shelf beside me I use AA batteries and the seem to have both a good shelf life but I do now about life span because I don't use it much but when I do it still works.

I teach at a Vocational college the teaches entry level system administration. I am one of those boomers (1959) but I have no degrees above a Bachelors. I could not get out of the teaching because of ageism and assumed if-you-cant-do-teachism.

I took this job 15 years ago because prospective employers looked at my then 30 year career and repeatedly said you cannot adapt to new tech and are too expensive. So I took my sysadmin, programming, and management skills and taught them to younger people who did get the jobs I was rejected for. Hopefully some of my work ethic will have rubbed off on them and when they hire they will do it with less "ism".

Now I get to play with the newest tech and teach it.

I believe not now but Perl 5.004 was installed on Window NT (3.5 or 4) by default. That made the case for its use on project that could not afford the IBM AIX or Silicon Graphics systems we were using at the time.

We used Netscape Fasttrack as the server.

Perl does not die easily because of the way many of us learned it. We started to used it for sysadmin automation (prehistoric DevOps) and then the early Web showed up and we used it for that too.

After 15 years (much more the 10,000 hours of use) it was hard to forget. And that over 15 years ago. Once you have it in your brain it does not go away easily.

I teach Python but I still think in Perl.