• New-Gen "IT" People ... Think DISASTER

    From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to All on Thu Dec 7 03:12:19 2023
    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 ....

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to 56g.1173@ztq9.net on Thu Dec 7 08:53:52 2023
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including
    my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From yeti@3:770/3 to All on Thu Dec 7 14:43:55 2023
    Loosely(?) related:

    Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
    Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

    Smarter Every Day 293
    I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

    --
    1. Hitchhiker 0: (5) Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd
    all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.
    And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one
    should ever have left the oceans.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to yeti on Thu Dec 7 16:48:36 2023
    On 07/12/2023 14:43, yeti wrote:
    Loosely(?) related:

    Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
    Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

    Smarter Every Day 293
    I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU


    I have renamed IT to DIT. DisInformation technology.

    --
    If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
    eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
    time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
    and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
    important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
    the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the
    truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

    Joseph Goebbels

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Robert Riches@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 03:51:18 2023
    On 2023-12-07, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!

    I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another
    counterexample. There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was
    hired right out of college. I think it has been less than two
    years that he has been on the team. He was sharp to begin with,
    but at this point his skills have sharpened to the point that if
    the two of us were interviewing for the same job, I'd give him
    better than even odds.

    --
    Robert Riches
    spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
    (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 00:09:19 2023
    On 12/7/23 3:53 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!

    I know there are still many "real programmers". The ISSUE
    is that they're no longer in the biz/service ranks. This
    has been taken over by M$/Apple/Goog supplicants who don't
    know much beyond how to spend more $$$ with those corps
    for their wunnerful (now mostly cloud/pay-per-byte)
    offerings.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to Robert Riches on Fri Dec 8 00:41:52 2023
    On 12/7/23 10:51 PM, Robert Riches wrote:
    On 2023-12-07, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked including >> my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern afflicted programmers >> (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who write the most incomprehensible >> code I've ever seen - but it works!

    I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another
    counterexample. There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was
    hired right out of college. I think it has been less than two
    years that he has been on the team. He was sharp to begin with,
    but at this point his skills have sharpened to the point that if
    the two of us were interviewing for the same job, I'd give him
    better than even odds.

    But ... how COMMON is this ???

    Most biz/etc these days want 'cloud app' experts who
    are only good at finding/negotiating licenses with a
    few Big Tech entities.

    This is what I'VE seen.

    And they don't know DICK about computers, only about
    those rip-off 'services'.

    Oh well, won't be long before China/Russia/etc make
    that 'cloud' seriously unreliable. THEN what ? Backup
    plans ? NONE !

    Shit, three recent applicants didn't even know what
    DHCP was for/did ... and yet ALMOST made the cut ....

    'Dilbert' was prophecy.

    And I retired at JUST the right time .....

    There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH
    better than I am - the geeks who burn a gram+ of
    caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar doughnuts every day.
    In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started
    with PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out
    on your own. College-level was WAY too abstract for
    most practical uses beyond mainframes at NASA.
    HATED punch-cards.

    Some of the Linux mags of the past had articles
    by Linus's kernel guys - showed how DEEP it gets.
    Also showed how Linus would fight to keep things
    sane and consistent.

    HOW many today have EVER done assembler-level
    programming ? Know ANYTHING about how cpu's
    memory, peripherials, talk to each other ?
    Shit, how many know what an OS actually DOES ?
    They exist, fer sure, but they're mostly no
    longer where they're most NEEDED - out in
    the pubic ranks, innovating, keeping it sane.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Fri Dec 8 00:49:15 2023
    On 12/7/23 11:48 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 07/12/2023 14:43, yeti wrote:
    Loosely(?) related:

    Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
    Preventing the Collapse of Civilization /
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

    Smarter Every Day 293
    I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU


    I have renamed IT to DIT. DisInformation technology.

    Well, that's become a significant part of it :-)

    But not the whole thing.

    I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt
    shops where nobody seems to KNOW anything about
    computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
    anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
    or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server
    model from the 60s/70s.

    ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely
    now CAN - take that shit DOWN in an instant if
    the poop ever hits the proverbial propeller. Too
    many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans
    other than to blame M$ and friends.

    "Not MY fault !"

    Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy-
    haired bosses who hired you ...........

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@3:770/3 to Robert Riches on Fri Dec 8 08:29:58 2023
    Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> writes:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked
    including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern
    afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who
    write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!

    I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another counterexample.
    There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was hired right out of
    college. I think it has been less than two years that he has been on
    the team. He was sharp to begin with, but at this point his skills
    have sharpened to the point that if the two of us were interviewing
    for the same job, I'd give him better than even odds.

    Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the more
    senior roles than junior.

    Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
    oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
    own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
    it’s all hot air.

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to 56g.1173@ztq9.net on Fri Dec 8 09:09:14 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    And I retired at JUST the right time .....

    Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still fun.

    There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH
    better than I am - the geeks who burn a gram+ of
    caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar doughnuts every day.

    That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
    realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and *NO*
    meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely unmaintainable.

    In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started
    with PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out

    Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.

    on your own. College-level was WAY too abstract for
    most practical uses beyond mainframes at NASA.
    HATED punch-cards.

    The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
    stead ever since.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Jan van den Broek@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 10:38:08 2023
    2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> schrieb:
    On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
    Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
    oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
    own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
    it???s all hot air.

    There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
    of today from Roman times.

    Yes, but the Romans were probably right when complaining about the youth
    being bad programmers.

    --
    Jan v/d Broek
    balglaas@dds.nl
    Look out, here he comes again
    The kid with the replaceable head

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Richard Kettlewell on Fri Dec 8 10:13:30 2023
    On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
    Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
    oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
    own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
    it’s all hot air.

    There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
    of today from Roman times.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 13:02:43 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 09:09:14 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500 "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    And I retired at JUST the right time .....

    Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still fun.

    There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH better than I am -
    the geeks who burn a gram+ of caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar
    doughnuts every day.

    That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
    realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the
    Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and
    *NO* meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely
    unmaintainable.

    In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started with
    PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out

    Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.

    Same here. Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!), went straight into a one
    of ICL's computer bureaus (ICL 1902 mainframe where I was taught assembler
    and wrote that for 2-3 years before we switched to COBOL and using the
    George 3 OS in the late '60s. Mostly wrote that on 1900s and 2900s until I joined Logica in the mid 80s (so got into using fault-tolerant kit:
    Tandem, Stratus, as well as minicomputers NCR Unix and IBM AS/400s until
    Logica imploded in 2001.

    Learning Algol 60 followed by COBOL as my first programming languages
    almost certainly gave me a better grounding in designing, writing and implementing systems in well-structured code than learning BASIC as my
    first language would have. I'm certain that it also helped me get into
    database design and implementation to have done that in a 2900 with IDMSX.

    The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
    stead ever since.

    Snap.

    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to All on Fri Dec 8 13:19:17 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:

    But not the whole thing.

    I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
    to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
    anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
    or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
    60s/70s.

    ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
    shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
    propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
    than to blame M$ and friends.

    "Not MY fault !"

    Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
    hired you ...........

    Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
    design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
    detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
    detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your
    management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

    The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
    Post Office Horizon screw-up.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Fri Dec 8 13:56:35 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:02:43 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 09:09:14 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:41:52 -0500 "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    And I retired at JUST the right time .....

    Nah I'm sticking around for a few more years yet, it's still
    fun.

    There are programmers/system-people who are MUCH better than I am -
    the geeks who burn a gram+ of caffeine and 2000 cals of sugar
    doughnuts every day.

    That went out of fashion some time ago, when people finally
    realised that you don't get more done that way. The BASIC for the
    Camputers Lynx was written by someone like that 16K of Z80 Assembler and *NO* meaningful comments. It worked but it was completely
    unmaintainable.

    In my time IT was mostly self-taught. You started with
    PETSs/VICs/Atari's/C64s and found it all out

    Sounds like your time was a little after mine, but not much.


    and yours sounds a little earlier still.

    Same here. Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only

    Good start! I learned BASIC at school, then taught myself FORTRAN
    and IBM 1130 Assembler then learned COBOL in an A level course before going
    to college and getting taught Algol-W, BCPL and a heap of a lot of other languages. I really liked BCPL.

    student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!), went straight into a one
    of ICL's computer bureaus (ICL 1902 mainframe where I was taught

    I went straight into a startup producing a CP/M machine based on
    the Beebon and my own Z80 card (Acorn's would have been too late).

    Learning Algol 60 followed by COBOL as my first programming languages
    almost certainly gave me a better grounding in designing, writing and implementing systems in well-structured code than learning BASIC as my

    Very much so - I had a lot of unlearning to do. OTOH I really appreciated how much help proper structure was.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Richard Kettlewell on Fri Dec 8 14:08:38 2023
    On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
    Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> writes:
    Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 03:12:19 -0500
    "56g.1173" <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

    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.

    You have seen a corner - there are many real programmers still and
    some very good young ones, I've found them everywhere I've worked
    including my CPOE. There's also a large bunch of design pattern
    afflicted programmers (mostly in the "Enterprise Java" world) who
    write the most incomprehensible code I've ever seen - but it works!

    I work in a very small team, but I'll supply another counterexample.
    There's a new guy on the team I work in. He was hired right out of
    college. I think it has been less than two years that he has been on
    the team. He was sharp to begin with, but at this point his skills
    have sharpened to the point that if the two of us were interviewing
    for the same job, I'd give him better than even odds.

    Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the more senior roles than junior.

    Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
    oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
    own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
    it’s all hot air.

    Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
    exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
    fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
    beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few
    exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if they
    don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a fucking
    liability.

    It boils down to how to you take a bunch of people who are intelligent,
    but not exceptional, and get productive work out of them. And the answer
    is things like WordPress, or Visual Basic, Python or whatever the
    latests 'framework' is that allows them to build stuff *without really understanding what they are doing*. And create an industrial *system* of quality control that tests everything they do until their 'random
    monkey' approach - I think you called it 'cargo culting' - produces
    something that actually works.



    --
    There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
    that sound good.

    Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Fri Dec 8 14:21:21 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:19:17 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests,

    I recall getting a lot of push back on that from an internal
    customer - right up until a misunderstanding of the requirements resulted
    in a production disaster - *then* they got the point and got all
    enthusiastic about acceptance testing.

    That was a very well run project - we designed APIs first as a
    group and then one engineer went off to write tests and another to write
    the implementation (the competitive aspect of this was really helpful,
    you really pay attention when you know someone good is trying to break
    your code). When test met code we found the places where the design was insufficiently clear.

    I've advocated this approach ever since but there's a modern mantra that the developer should write the tests - IMHO this is wrong because then tester and writer share blind spots.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Fri Dec 8 15:20:05 2023
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
    On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
    Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple
    of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the
    more senior roles than junior. Every generation has some people
    whinging about the younger ones, oblivious to the fact that analogous
    complaints were made about their own generation a few decades
    earlier. At a certain point you realize it’s all hot air.

    Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
    exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
    fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
    beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if
    they don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a
    fucking liability.

    Right, I don’t think the balance between the exceptional and the
    adequate has substantially changed, certainly not since the 1990s and
    probably not since the 1590s.

    Look at the annual intake of, I dunno, a Tudor-era shipyard and I’d
    expect to find a handful people who take to the work like they were born
    to it, and a much larger number of people who could knock together some
    planks with a bit of supervision and inspection.

    The thing that’s hot air is the claim that there’s some kind of generational difference involved.

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 16:04:31 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 14:21:21 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 13:19:17 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have
    the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests,

    I recall getting a lot of push back on that from an internal
    customer - right up until a misunderstanding of the requirements
    resulted in a production disaster - *then* they got the point and got
    all enthusiastic about acceptance testing.

    That was a very well run project - we designed APIs first as a
    group and then one engineer went off to write tests and another to write
    the implementation (the competitive aspect of this was really helpful,
    you really pay attention when you know someone good is trying to break
    your code). When test met code we found the places where the design was insufficiently clear.

    Sounds like good practise.

    The approach that Logica used, at least in its finance divison, and for
    large financial networks, such as CHAPS, was that, once the requirements
    and detailed specifications had been agreed and signed off by both the development team and the client, the development team got on with writing
    the detailed specs, development, and the system tests prior to delivery. Meanwhile, the client specified and then implemented their acceptance test suite without reference to the developers - unless of course, their work discovered cases not covered in the system specs.

    The system was delivered to the client after we'd got clean runs through
    our system tests. At this point the client ran it their acceptance test
    suite: it wasn't signed off as complete and ready for live operation until
    it had passed all their acceptance tests.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Fri Dec 8 16:51:10 2023
    On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
    student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

    The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Richard Kettlewell on Fri Dec 8 16:33:15 2023
    On 08/12/2023 15:20, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> writes:
    On 08/12/2023 08:29, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
    Agreed, we’ve had some excellent graduate hires over the last couple
    of years. If anything it’s been harder to hire good people into the
    more senior roles than junior. Every generation has some people
    whinging about the younger ones, oblivious to the fact that analogous
    complaints were made about their own generation a few decades
    earlier. At a certain point you realize it’s all hot air.

    Not all hot air. I remember hiring you and you were absolutely
    exceptional. Far too many other people simply were 'Ok-ish' and could
    fiddle with Windows and eventually make it work, but had no real clue
    beyond that. The problem is that in any generation there are a few
    exceptionals and a thousand 'ok, with the right training' . But if
    they don't get the right training, they are to put it bluntly, a
    fucking liability.

    Right, I don’t think the balance between the exceptional and the
    adequate has substantially changed, certainly not since the 1990s and probably not since the 1590s.

    Look at the annual intake of, I dunno, a Tudor-era shipyard and I’d
    expect to find a handful people who take to the work like they were born
    to it, and a much larger number of people who could knock together some planks with a bit of supervision and inspection.

    The thing that’s hot air is the claim that there’s some kind of generational difference involved.

    Agreed. But I think that there is a difference, though I am not sure
    that I would call it generational. Its more just an 'autre temps, autre moeurs'

    Viz I grew up in the shadow of WWII. Barnes Wallis lived down the road,
    and the Vickers aircraft company was a big employer. Overhead V bombers
    were a daily occurrence and the village boasted a house that used to
    belong to Tommy Sopwith, of Camel fame and was in fact later bought by
    Harry Hawker, of Hawker aircraft, Down the road was where Willian of
    Occam was born (as well as Eric Clapton) and the Tyrell formula one
    racing team.

    Britain was the second nation in the world to have developed the atomic
    bomb, and the jet engine the first to have developed the magnetron
    radar, cracked the Enigma code etc etc etc.

    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.

    In short, Boffins had won the bloody war and were held in some kind of
    awe, and they in turn felt a deep sense of responsibility to make sure
    that the promised better lives that people had been promised, happened.
    The BBC was staffed with many people who had been through hell and
    emerged the other side humbler older and wiser.

    All that has now gone. My Ex BIL and I had a conversation a few months
    ago. He is a German. 'In Germany we have two professors of nuclear
    physics and 102 professors of gender studies'.

    I am constantly informed that all my science and engineering knowledge
    is 'just my opinion' and that what is true is 'what 98% of people
    believe to be true', and my critique of *renewable energy* makes me a
    'climate denier' and an 'oil company shill'

    Meanwhile the police won't listen to me unless I am a 'victim' . Or an 'oppressed minority' of some sort.

    In short all the respect for traditional things that helped bind and
    construct the post war society have ben shredded by - well its easy to
    say 'socialists' - but its close enough.

    We are feeding the laziness, the stupidity, the egotism, the banality,
    and cancelling anyone who tries to make a serious point. And that has
    lead to a generation that are not innately any more stupid than they
    always were, but where the best way to get ahead is to behave like an
    utter dickhead. To not learn mathematics and science, but to become a fuckwitted Celebrity, and marry a Prince.

    To go to Uni and get a Degree, based neither on native genius, nor on
    hard work absorbing some useful skill, but rather on the regurgitation
    of what some chippy left wing self styled intellectual has decreed to be
    'how things ought to be' and the rewriting of the historical narrative
    to justify it.

    And then because you haven't a qualification worth a shit, to complain
    that you are being 'discriminated' against in favour of someone who
    actually shows some competence and skill.

    If that's what people want, all well and good, but they should not then complain when nothing works anymore.

    When they get sold lipstick for pigs, cant afford a house, and are
    seeing their standard of living eroding in real terms back to the sort
    of standards it was in the 1950s.

    This crappy software is simply another symptom of that. Born and brought
    up to not have to work that hard for the basics of life, they take it
    all for granted and urinate on anyone 'boring' enough to think it
    important enough to make a career in.

    In short todays world IS different from the 1950s, in that people do not
    settle for nice houses, a steady productive job and a family, because
    they didn't spend the last decade having the crap bombed out of them.
    They do nor respect boffins and scientists as the people who stopped the
    crap being bombed out of them, but call them geeks and borderline
    autistics and laugh at them despise them and socially cancel them for
    'not being where it's at'.

    And because people have been successful at that ploy, the inevitable
    result is that the world that we built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is
    falling apart at the seams, and everyone is rushing around blaming
    everyone else and no one is rolling up their sleeves to fix it.

    Its probably simply part of a sociological cycle. The success of the
    feudal system and mass employment in agriculture and the rising tide of globalism lead to the Black Death, the death of huge numbers of people,
    a widespread deepening of distrust, if not in God, at least in priests,
    and the [partial] emancipation of the peasant.

    The onset of the industrial revolution and its comcomitant rise in per
    capita energy use, led to the rise of enormous population levels and
    unheard of standards of living, and well as more silliness than the
    world had ever seen. The rise of globalism is now accompanied by the
    rapid spread of pandemics, just as in the 14th century, and in mass
    migration of the unskilled and uncivilised, , which creates an
    unsustainable strain on the living standards of the indigenous populations.

    *shrug*. That's the modern morality, as delivered by the Precious
    Priests of Progressivity.
    I cant stop it, and I am almost too old to give a fuck these days. The
    reality of dynamic systems like societies, is that no one has any real
    power to modify them. Only to chart their downfall.

    The past was Empire, common wealth, democracy and trade, the Future is
    the EU, Putin, Oppression and Slavery.

    Because people have simply forgotten how shit life can be, when someone
    comes along with a gun and cant stand the sound of yiur whining about
    'Yuman Rites' and 'fairness' and decides the pragmatic solution is to
    put a .22 round between your eyes.


    --
    Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.
    Mark Twain

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to TimS on Fri Dec 8 17:04:08 2023
    On 08/12/2023 16:51, TimS wrote:
    On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
    student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

    The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

    I think Cambridge had one.

    Oh. Apparntly not...

    "The first computer at the University of Cambridge was EDSAC 1, a
    computer designed and built by the University's Mathematical Laboratory.
    It ran its first program in May 1949, and was one of the first computers
    in the world to store its program in memory, rather than with hard
    wiring. It was also unusual in being designed to be used by scientists. Scientists from many disciplines used it, but for this history
    particular record should be made of calculations on the band structure
    of aluminium contained in Prof Volker Heine's PhD thesis (submitted June
    1956) for which he used EDSAC 1.

    EDSAC 1 was replaced by EDSAC 2 in 1958, which was in turn replaced by
    TITAN in 1964/1965. TITAN was the first computer in Cambridge to support high-level languages, such as Fortran. In 1970 the Mathematical
    Laboratory divided to become the Computer Laboratory and the Computing
    Service, the latter now being called the UIS. In 1971 an IBM 370/165 ("Phoenix") was installed. This was upgraded twice, to an IBM 3081D in
    1982, and then finally to a 3084Q in 1989, before being decomissioned in
    1995.

    The Titan was a modified ferranti ATLAS 2

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

    --
    Truth welcomes investigation because truth knows investigation will lead
    to converts. It is deception that uses all the other techniques.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Fri Dec 8 19:16:37 2023
    On 2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    The computer science I learned at college has stood me in good
    stead ever since.

    For me, the nice thing about the university courses was the access
    it gave me to computers, although through a family connection I had
    gotten my hands on a couple of small office machines before that.
    The first machine I actually played with (at the tender age of 15)
    was a Univac 1004, a hopped-up electronic version of the IBM 407,
    so I even got a taste of plugboard wiring.

    Alongside university course assignments, I wrote a lot of fun programs
    for myself, and learned as much from that as from the actual courses.
    However, disenchantment set in when I realized how far Computer Science
    was from the Real World [TM] (at the time, the CS department was still
    under the department of mathematics). Pretty soon it turned into a
    lot of airy-fairy theoretical stuff (one course hit you with a new
    programming language every two weeks), with a lot of time spent
    contemplating the whichness of what with no practical applications.
    Meanwhile, I found I enjoyed getting down to the metal with assembly
    language, which didn't go over well with the faculty.

    Fortunately, between my second and third years, I managed to land
    a part-time job programming at a small service bureau. That's when
    the real learning began. When it came time to go back for a third
    year of university, I arranged my schedule so that I had Thursdays
    off. 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.

    --
    /~\ 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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Jan van den Broek on Fri Dec 8 19:16:39 2023
    On 2023-12-08, Jan van den Broek <balglaas@dds.nl> wrote:

    2023-12-08, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> schrieb:

    On Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:29:58 +0000
    Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    Every generation has some people whinging about the younger ones,
    oblivious to the fact that analogous complaints were made about their
    own generation a few decades earlier. At a certain point you realize
    it???s all hot air.

    There are surviving complaints about the deficiencies of the youth
    of today from Roman times.

    Yes, but the Romans were probably right when complaining about the youth being bad programmers.

    Give them a break, programming in Roman numerals was a bitch.

    --
    /~\ 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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Fri Dec 8 19:16:38 2023
    On 2023-12-08, Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:

    But not the whole thing.

    I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
    to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
    anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
    or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
    60s/70s.

    ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
    shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
    propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
    than to blame M$ and friends.

    "Not MY fault !"

    I've always said that this will be the epitaph of our society
    (spoken in a nasal whine, of course).

    Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
    hired you ...........

    Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
    design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
    detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
    detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have
    the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

    Two words: shit happens. Those who refuse to believe this should
    get what's coming to them - but unfortunately too often don't.

    It matters not if you win or lose, but how you lay the blame.

    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've always said that payrolls should never have been computerized,
    because computers are logical and payrolls aren't. But people have
    become so enamoured with complexity - confusing it with sophistication -
    that things become messy very quickly.

    Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more
    to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
    -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

    --
    /~\ 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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Fri Dec 8 19:36:13 2023
    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

    --
    Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
    guns, why should we let them have ideas?

    Josef Stalin

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Fri Dec 8 22:02:51 2023
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 17:04:08 +0000
    The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    On 08/12/2023 16:51, TimS wrote:
    On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only
    student computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

    The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

    I think Cambridge had one.

    Nope. In my day there was a 370 and a Sigma 6 (engineering
    department), I missed Titan by a few years.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to TimS on Fri Dec 8 23:12:30 2023
    On 8 Dec 2023 16:51:10 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid>
    wrote:

    Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student
    computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

    The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

    Victoria University of Wellington (NZ).

    From memory ours had 32 KB main memory and another 32Kb, in a separate
    cabinet, that operated as fast disk store: After it was booted, all
    standard executables and, IIRC the Algol standard library, were loaded
    into it. Any unoccupied space in it could also be used as a sort of paged memory for holding and operating on large arrays.

    It had a line printer as well as paper tape readers and punches. By the
    last time I saw it, it had acquired four 1/2" inch mag tape drives,
    mainly, I think, because it booted faster off mag tape and anyway, I'd
    imagine that would be more resistant to wear & tear than paper tape,

    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Richard Kettlewell@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Dec 9 08:56:38 2023
    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.

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sat Dec 9 08:53:19 2023
    On 08 Dec 2023 at 23:12:30 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On 8 Dec 2023 16:51:10 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 08 Dec 2023 at 13:02:43 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid>
    wrote:

    Learnt Algol 60 at uni where I was using the University's only student
    computer (Elliott 503 - look THAT up!)

    The one I used was at Imperial. Where was yours?

    Victoria University of Wellington (NZ).

    From memory ours had 32 KB main memory and another 32Kb, in a separate cabinet, that operated as fast disk store: After it was booted, all
    standard executables and, IIRC the Algol standard library, were loaded
    into it. Any unoccupied space in it could also be used as a sort of paged memory for holding and operating on large arrays.

    It had a line printer as well as paper tape readers and punches. By the
    last time I saw it, it had acquired four 1/2" inch mag tape drives,
    mainly, I think, because it booted faster off mag tape and anyway, I'd imagine that would be more resistant to wear & tear than paper tape,

    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.

    It supposedly was intended for use by the optics group in the Physics dept,
    for ray tracing, but we undergrads who had some slight interest in Astronomy wanted to use it for orbit calculations, but we didnt really know how.

    --
    Tim

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  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Richard Kettlewell on Sat Dec 9 09:59:37 2023
    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'.


    --
    Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
    guns, why should we let them have ideas?

    Josef Stalin

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to tnp@invalid.invalid on Sat Dec 9 10:14:40 2023
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to TimS on Sat Dec 9 10:58:51 2023
    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!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to TimS on Sat Dec 9 12:39:16 2023
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Dec 9 12:56:06 2023
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Sat Dec 9 13:15:42 2023
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Sat Dec 9 13:46:04 2023
    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

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Elvidge@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Dec 9 14:19:55 2023
    On 09/12/2023 13:15, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    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/




    There's supposed to be a TV special (docudrama?) about it on soon.
    Buggered if I can find it though.
    OK! "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office" to be aired on ITV, starting 9pm New
    Year's Day
    https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-packs/mr-bates-vs-post-office https://virginradio.co.uk/entertainment/128839/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-release-date-cast-plot-details


    --
    Chris Elvidge, England
    CURSIVE WRITING DOES NOT MEAN WHAT I THINK IT DOES

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Dec 9 14:07:10 2023
    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sat Dec 9 14:20:14 2023
    On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid> 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.

    Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963. The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503 was much faster.

    [1] That's 500Hz.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sat Dec 9 17:24:12 2023
    On 2023-12-09, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    It's amazing how much better systems work when the designers
    allow the users to comment on what they'll be using.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/256071928782484982/

    --
    /~\ 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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sat Dec 9 22:38:41 2023
    On 12/8/23 8:19 AM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
    On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 00:49:15 -0500, 56g.1173 wrote:

    But not the whole thing.

    I'm more worried about the private/corp/govt shops where nobody seems
    to KNOW anything about computers or programming or much of ANYTHING
    anymore beyond how to spend big $$$ with M$
    or Goog or Apple for some neo metered client/server model from the
    60s/70s.

    ENEMIES, real enemies, are keen to - and likely now CAN - take that
    shit DOWN in an instant if the poop ever hits the proverbial
    propeller. Too many of the New Guys have NO contingency plans other
    than to blame M$ and friends.

    "Not MY fault !"

    Yes, it IS your fault ... and that of the pointy- haired bosses who
    hired you ...........

    Agreed. If you fail to adequately deal with any aspect of application
    design and documentation, system architecture, performance, error
    detection and recovery, software design, including adequate error
    detection and recovery and, for non-trivial applications fail to have the client build and USE adequate acceptance tests, then you and your
    management have failed and deserve all the grief that comes your way.

    The prime example of how not to do all of the above correctly is the UK
    Post Office Horizon screw-up.

    You NEED to have local backups - pref several layers - of
    all your important stuff. You do NOT rely on 'cloud' storage.

    You NEED to have at least locally-usable versions of your
    day-2-day important software. Can users run Office apps
    on their individual boxes if the net goes down ? Probably
    not. Ergo something like LibreOffice should be installed
    on every relevant box.

    All e-mail thru M$ or Goog or its friends ? Nope - need to
    have a local mail server that CAN be activated. May not work
    if the Net is badly damaged, but at least you TRIED.

    Accounting/payroll ? Can you do it THERE, at least half-ass ?
    Spreadsheets usually work quite well - in a disaster you will
    get a break on govt/tax nuances. Oh, can you pay people with
    CASH MONEY in-hand ?

    Users should be able to at least get snail-mail, type up
    letters/responses and print them. Not as 'efficient' as
    online stuff, but the world worked on that paradigm
    thru the 70s and early 80s so it DOES work.

    "Cloud" always SOUNDS so great - but the younger set do
    NOT seem to realize how FRAGILE that model can be even
    on a good day. Gotta put fair effort into being self-reliant,
    self-sustaining. It's the 'professional' thing to do, rather
    than "Blame M$" excuses. Assume everything can be screwed for
    at least a month and some of your data will NEVER re-appear.

    Hey, got any good old LAND-LINE phones ? :-)

    Complex systems soon become so "normal" that people just
    cannot imagine them NOT working. Then they start to make
    bad mistakes. I was in a serious hurricane area some
    years back. NO infrastructure remained - all the wires
    were a tangled mess, water-lines were torn up, even the
    roads were blocked for about a week. People had to WALK
    places. No phones. No PCs. Nothing worked - even the
    banks were down for awhile. The kiddies were in a daze
    because they couldn't text anyone. Pay in CASH. That was
    a NATURAL disaster, not 'cyber-war' or giant solar-flare.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to TimS on Sat Dec 9 22:52:11 2023
    On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, 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.


    "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)

    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 .....


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

    It can reach anybody anywhere. Big wars, small wars, insurrections
    and revolutions and even local disorder/riots. This is the history.
    You are NOT 100% safe, not even in Kansas.

    You don't have to go overboard and live in an old missile silo
    with a ton of salted beef, but you DO need some contingency
    plans - means and methods. Even a 48-hour plan vastly increases
    your chances of a fair outcome. Do you have enough to eat/drink
    for a few days ? Can you deter physical attacks ? Got some basic
    med supplies ? Got enough cash to cope until banks start working ?
    "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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Deloptes on Sun Dec 10 08:35:16 2023
    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
    Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:

    56g.1173 wrote:

    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 ....

    We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.

    My two favourite thoughts about the future:

    "The future is here, just unevenly distributed"

    "The future was never like this"

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Dec 10 16:04:59 2023
    On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid> 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.

    Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
    The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503
    was much faster.

    [1] That's 500Hz.

    Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
    around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
    NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott timeline
    and as I haven't seen one run.

    I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is this true?


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Dec 10 16:52:41 2023
    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

    The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of
    A4, fed through the document path sort edge first. It could reading up to
    24 marks equally spaced along in rows parallel to the leading short edge
    and returned a list of words (the 1900 series used 24 bit words) with bits
    set in then corresponding to marks on the input document. The printed
    form, filled in by the user had a pair of short black lines on one of the
    long edges of the path that enabled the 24 read heads when thet were
    between the two markers and the users were expected to place marks within preprinted boxes on the page. Any artwork on the page was in dull red ink
    and was invisible to the reader, so was typically boxes round places where
    a pencil or black pen mark would cause a corresponding bit to be set in
    the word mapped corresponding to that row of marks.

    As a result, the design of the input document could be fairly free-
    form:I've seen them used:

    - by delivery drivers where marks on the OMR document were printed using a standard lineprinter to encode the delivery note with details in both
    readable text and hyphens as OMR marks and with boxes for the van driver
    to mark the number of items of each type delivered. The delivery note was
    then brought back and scanned by the OMR to generate invoices.

    - used by staff in the Wellington hospital heart unit to record case
    notes. Staff in theatre found this easier to do with OMR forms than with
    pen and paper when wearing their surgical kit in theatre. Their OMR
    forms were then read and added to the hospital's surgical notes database

    - I've also seen examples used for car repairs: the OMR document was a
    copy of an exploded view of a carb, gearbox, etc with an OMR box
    associated with every item in the exploded view: this was for
    replacement parts control: the mechanic just added a mark into a box for
    every item he'd replaced before the form when through the OMR to
    update the spare parts database.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From TimS@3:770/3 to All on Sun Dec 10 16:20:21 2023
    On 10 Dec 2023 at 16:04:59 GMT, "Martin Gregorie" <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid> 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.

    Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
    The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The 503
    was much faster.

    [1] That's 500Hz.

    Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
    around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
    NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott timeline and as I haven't seen one run.

    I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is this true?

    According to Wikipedia, that is the case.

    --
    Tim

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Chris Elvidge on Sun Dec 10 16:57:17 2023
    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:19:55 +0000, Chris Elvidge wrote:

    There's supposed to be a TV special (docudrama?) about it on soon.
    Buggered if I can find it though.

    See BBC Radio 'Sounds' for a pretty good audio version

    OK! "Mr Bates vs. The Post Office" to be aired on ITV, starting 9pm New Year's Day https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-packs/mr-bates-vs-post-office https://virginradio.co.uk/entertainment/128839/mr-bates-vs-the-post-
    office-release-date-cast-plot-details





    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to TimS on Sun Dec 10 17:08:47 2023
    On 10 Dec 2023 16:20:21 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 10 Dec 2023 at 16:04:59 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid>
    wrote:

    On 9 Dec 2023 14:20:14 GMT, TimS wrote:

    On 09 Dec 2023 at 12:39:16 GMT, "Martin Gregorie"
    <martin@mydomain.invalid> 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.

    Back to front; the 803 came first (1960 or so), then the 503 in 1963.
    The 803 was bit-serial, so the cycle time was around 2msec [1]. The
    503 was much faster.

    [1] That's 500Hz.

    Fair enough: I hadn't seen an 803 until I first visited the NMOC , so
    around 35 years after I last saw VUW's 503. The last time I was at the
    NMOC there wasn't lot of technical info on the 803 or an Elliott
    timeline and as I haven't seen one run.

    I have heard that the 803 instruction set is identical to the 503: is
    this true?

    According to Wikipedia, that is the case.

    Cool.




    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Sun Dec 10 17:51:26 2023
    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 16:52:41 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

    The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of

    Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by
    those things when I was at school.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith
    Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
    Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
    Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to 56g.1173@ztq9.net on Sun Dec 10 19:18:35 2023
    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....

    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.

    "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.

    --
    /~\ 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.

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Dec 10 19:18:36 2023
    On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
    Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:

    56g.1173 wrote:

    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 ....

    We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.

    My two favourite thoughts about the future:

    "The future is here, just unevenly distributed"

    "The future was never like this"

    The future isn't what it used to be.

    --
    /~\ 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.

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Dec 10 19:18:37 2023
    On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 16:52:41 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

    The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of

    Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by
    those things when I was at school.

    The all-card shop I started out in would buy cards wherever they could
    get them the most cheaply. This meant we got a lot of overruns and
    surplus, which enabled me to build an interesting collection of printed
    cards, which I still have somewhere.

    We got a few million OMR cards from the phone company, apparently used
    by telephone operators to record details of the calls they handled.

    --
    /~\ 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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Ahem A Rivet's Shot on Sun Dec 10 20:53:26 2023
    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 17:51:26 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 16:52:41 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

    On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
    Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:

    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.

    Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?

    Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:

    The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets
    of

    Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by
    those things when I was at school.

    Interesting. I was only aware of two implementations in NZ.

    Its biggest drawback was that ICL never provided any explicit interface packages for languages such as COBOL. Fortunately the PLAN Macro
    Generator, which we'd already used to build a fairly comprehensive salary analysis application and so were familiar with the Macro Generator. As a
    result our our first step to implementing a set of COBOL Mark Reader
    interfaces for the Surgical Notes database system, which was written in
    COBOL, was to write a set of Macro Genersator macros to interface the
    Mark Reader to 1900 COBOL's suproutine calling structure.


    --

    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Mon Dec 11 00:47:43 2023
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Mon Dec 11 00:27:34 2023
    On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
    On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
    On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
    Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:

    56g.1173 wrote:

    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 ....

    We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now. >>
    My two favourite thoughts about the future:

    "The future is here, just unevenly distributed"

    "The future was never like this"

    The future isn't what it used to be.


    Future ??? Buyer Beware ....

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  • From 56g.1173@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Mon Dec 11 01:40:34 2023
    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 ..........

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to 56g.1173@ztq9.net on Mon Dec 11 19:07:55 2023
    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.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From A.M. Rowsell@1:2320/105 to 56g.1173 on Wed Dec 13 00:08:00 2023
    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
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    --
    Aurelius
    Home BBS: aBSiNTHe

    === TitanMail/linux v1.2.4
    --- SBBSecho 3.14-Linux
    * Origin: capitolcityonline.net * Telnet/SSH:2022/HTTP (1:2320/105)
  • From Richard Falken@1:135/115 to A.M. Rowsell on Wed Dec 13 04:16:46 2023
    Re: New-Gen "IT" People ... T
    By: A.M. Rowsell to 56g.1173 on Wed Dec 13 2023 12:08 am

    Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like yo

    If anything, people is eager to join IT because they hear of the high wages. Then you end with offices full of people doing IT who actually hate doing IT.

    --
    gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken
    --- SBBSecho 3.20-Linux
    * Origin: Palantir * palantirbbs.ddns.net * Pensacola, FL * (1:135/115)
  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to A.M. Rowsell on Wed Dec 13 13:24:37 2023
    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

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Wed Dec 13 16:56:17 2023
    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

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to nospam.Richard.Falken@f1.n770.z1390 on Wed Dec 13 17:25:19 2023
    On 2023-12-12, Richard Falken <nospam.Richard.Falken@f1.n770.z13903.fidonet.org> wrote:

    Re: New-Gen "IT" People ... T
    By: A.M. Rowsell to 56g.1173 on Wed Dec 13 2023 12:08 am

    Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like yo

    If anything, people is eager to join IT because they hear of the high wages. Then you end with offices full of people doing IT who actually hate doing IT.

    That's OK, they're only using IT as a stepping-stone to management. :-p

    Call them "PHBs in training".

    --
    /~\ 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.

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