Recent Comments

There's a list of IP ranges here at the bottom of the page. I'll be adding them to my hosts file.

Please remove the part before www.gatesnotes.com, thanks

I'm having a blast programming Arduino in C. That's 8-bit programming, and you have to be careful with cycles and resource usage. Arduino code ports quite easily to larger platforms too. It's cool to be able to load small programs on an AtTiny chip and have it be completely functional with no support circuitry.

CICS can serve web pages. Many mainframes with web front ends have COBOL programs at the back end served via CICS.

You can also expose any of your CICS transactions as web services very easily.What is old becomes new again.

Mainframes are amazing pieces of computing machinery these days. Nothing like seeing someone hot-swap a processor while the daily workload continues to process away.

That is "selling you more junk", as it's selling you a loan, on top of the junk you're buying that requires you to take the loan.

They DON'T get technology. At all. But apparently a majority (okay all) of the supremes have taken a liking for their own smartphones and realized that their bathroom "selfies" might be embarrassing at border crossings.

If they understood technology and the law then Aereo would still be in business.

And RAID-Z is just as dead easy to set up as a mirror. I set up a number of 6-drive RAID-Z2's, which gives the same double redundancy as a three-way mirror, but is much more space-efficient (4 times the storage space as a 3-drive 3-way mirror with only twice the total number of drives). What blew me away was that setting up the array was essentially instantaneous.

The next delight I had was when it dawned on me that I could extemporaneously "zfs create" separate "sub" file systems within each of those storage pools; again, essentially an instantaneous operation, and the disk space apportioning is automatic and dynamic. You don't have to set size limits for those "sub" file systems.

After that I just kept discovering new wonders. The use of snapshots for live archiving without consuming much storage space is a warm glow.

TV show tonight had the US border security woman reading a guy's emails from his laptop while accusing him of lying.All in all a serious wtf

Agreed 100%, and I couldn't put it better.

What I really, really like is that this decision cuts through the liberal/conservative, left/right divide decisively. It is a false divide, anyway. It is not what matters. The divide that matters is the totalitarian/libertarian one. I am pleased and surprised that the court decision is so decisively on the right^W, er, correct side.

I thought mainframes hosted databases with high reliability. And that at least one of the distinguishing characteristics was their redundancy and failover abilities.

First, let's be clear that I think it is dandy to address this shortcoming.

Having said that, and the tiny sprinkling of FreeBSD workstations aside, who uses the local text-mode console in a FreeBSD server for anything aside from dealing with hardware failure and dealing with a boot process which has gone awry?

All my text mode interaction with FreeBSD servers is through ssh, whether from a text mode terminal (very occasionally) or using an X terminal (most of the time). Does this change have any effect on that at all? Because it appears to work fine as is.

[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]# locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
[2][root@fnjomega ~]# mkdir unitest
[2][root@fnjomega ~]# cd unitest
[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]# touch ͲͻΉΏπξηθ
[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]# cat > ЉЏГЯШ
now is the time
[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]# ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Jun 26 09:07 ??ΉΏπξηθ
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 16 Jun 26 09:08 ЉЏГЯШ
[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]# cat ЉЏГЯШ
now is the time
[2][root@fnjomega ~]# rm ͲͻΉΏπξηθ
[2][root@fnjomega ~/unitest]#

I'm guessing the "??" in the Greek string above is a font shortcoming rather than a basic problem using unicode in bash on FreeBSD.

Especially good parts of this story are
- It was unanimous
- Roberts specifically addressed the fact that this ruling will make police work more difficult, and concluded that 'privacy has a cost'
- They clearly state that modern 'cell phones' are worthy of such protection not because of the type of data on them, but the amount of data on them; that is, while police are able to search wallets, and cell phones contain similar data, the fact that cell phones contain so much more data, and data of such varied types, makes them worthy of protection

A common complaint of the courts is that they don't 'get' technology; this shows to me that the Supereme Court does 'get' the privacy implications of modern data-holding technology.

HIPPA blocks access by people who should have it, and it allows access by those who shouldn't.

I don't want my insurer to have any details, and I certainly don't want their "contractors" and "authorized agents" to have any info at all.

Pretty much any doctor will have you waive your rights anyway. No waiver means no service. This shouldn't be possible.

On the other hand, some things need to be made known. Medical bills need to be made available to anybody you have financial entanglements with. This includes all people with whom you might share a budget in the recent past or future. Contageos (WTF spelling...) diseases should require notification of any and all who might have received or supplied the disease. People living in the same house, or intending to do so (marriage license) ought to get everything, without exception.

Duh, people who run out of room for addresses in their Filofax.

I use a lot of rolodexes. A LOT. Specifically, all of them.

cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.

I remember when we had those things. How nostalgic!

I was especially surprised to see that rolodexes are still being sold. I wonder who is buying them all?

I don't ask much from a console, but my Linux virtual consoles generally look pretty good including - up until recent kernel changes I think - some faint bitmapped graphics in the back. The font is usually chosen to render cleanly at whatever resolution my monitor is running at. On FreeBSD my 1440x900 screen console usually renders as though the terminal were expecting 800x600 and vidcontrol provides some but not enough control over that to make it pleasing to the eye. Sounds like this is an improvement. To me, at least.

The price/performance of mainframes is not very competitive unless RAS is a non-negotiable requirement, rather than as a tacked-on or 3.0 feature as it is for MS and Linux-based vendors. The rest of the computing industry is still catching up to the RAS stuff that IBM (and presumably its erstwhile mainframe competitors) had in place decades ago, not so much because it is rocket science, but because they're always too busy chasing the new new thing.

Good point. Same problem in windows with chinese fonts. Programs will not use the files and file management is a pain. Yes, I know, fixable ... but still a pain.

There is a similar site called Ohloh that has been active for a few years now: https://www.ohloh.net/

Ohloh is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it. Ohloh Code is a publicly available, free code search site that indexes most of the projects in Ohloh.

Ohloh is editable by everyone, like a wiki. All are welcome to join and add new projects, and to make corrections to existing project pages. This public review helps to make Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date FOSS software directories available. We encourage contributors to join Ohloh and claim their commits on existing projects and add projects not yet on Ohloh, to assemble a complete profile of all their FOSS code contributions.

Ohloh is not a forge - it does not host projects and code. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and analytics and search services. By connecting to project source code repositories, analyzing both the code's history and ongoing updates, and attributing those updates to specific contributors, Ohloh can provide reports about the composition and activity of project code bases, and aggregate this data to track the changing demographics of the FOSS world.

Still not convinced with Raidz myself, but I don't have large disk arrays. With FreeBSD 10 I went with a 3 way mirror on a server and it was cake to set up (compared to the pain the ass it was to set up before). The layout isn't exactly what I wanted, but it's more than enough for what I need.

I'm supposing you never downloaded a file with foreign characters then. I have this problem in Gentoo a lot. I download two files with distinct names, but all I see in a file listing is "??????". I wouldn't say the console is horrid in FreeBSD, but it's outdated and small problems like that have been piling up over time.

I've never had a problem with the FreeBSD console, and vidcontrol works well enough to change the text size etc. REALLY looking forward to being able to switch away from X11 to a terminal on my laptop though.

Maybe I'm old.

I don't get it. VT100 support. Check. Good to go, right? What else do you want from your console?

Not good enough? Fire up emacs and console from there.

What more is there?

There seems to be more to it that that - notice there is some incident also involving posting of information relating to her boyfriend or something. This is probably a case of poorly-educated individuals doing menial-labor clerk jobs at a hospital, who are given more access than they deserve, and abusing that privilege to engage in cheap retribution and personal attacks. I say fire the lot of them, hire and train more responsible staff, and move on before the scandal ruins the reputation of your hospital. As for syphlilis, she must have gotten it from someone, so she's not guilty alone, at any rate.

Awesome read, and I love the ending:

B.D.: Nice chatting with you. Oh, and one more thing?
AE: What's that?
B.D.:There's one thing Big Data can'tdo.
AE: Really? What's that?
B.D.: Big Data can't compensate for a shitty, ill-conceived product or a really dumb idea.

Hope those youngsters over at Hacker News are listening - they seem to think data and algorithms are all it takes.

CICS can serve web pages. Many mainframes with web front ends have COBOL programs at the back end served via CICS. Didn't take the time to google? http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247206.html?Open

Mainframes can run java. No googling first? Try http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware2/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=38317 for a start.

It is like everything else in Life and IT. Everything has a place and purpose. If your need is to process millions of transactions per day the mainframe option starts looking very good. Need a web server and an app built in a hurry then Intel server bubbles to the top of the list.

Your reference to 'terminals' is quaint. You will find that few programmers have a 'terminal'. Mainframe is accessed via a 3270 emulator which is generally a program running on a PC, or more likely an app in a web browser.
Programming? These days an IDE running on the user's PC can interface with the mainframe, pull the code up locally, compile locally, and push the code to the mainframe for compile and promote. Code promotion? Package and promote code from your IDE.

The mainframe has a TCP/IP stack. What can't be built? If you have one, then you may as well use it as much as you can.

http://www.autoextremist.com/current/2014/5/27/big-data-talks.html
Amusing editorial -- starts out straight, then turns into fiction.

Since I was sworn to secrecy, the only thing I can say about the location is that Big Data resides in a bunker-like facility sheltered in a deep forest in one of the states surrounding the Great Lakes. You'd never know that it exists, because there's a popular bar in front of it that's a favorite of the locals. Little do they know that the guy they know as "B.D." is in fact, the man himself: Big Data.
After the comely PR woman (complete with plaid shirt, tight jeans and a pair of kick-ass boots) plied me with Leinenkugels and a couple of brats, I was ushered out back and then guided down steps to a well-lit tunnel that I'm guessing was about 100 feet in length.

Do these people not know what a server is? Mainframes serve terminals, not web pages (though occasional these terminals run web-like interfaces a la intranet). The article seems to argue for main frames by saying that they are presently in use and therefor should be used... Yes, they are in use, but with personal computer prices so low now, why do we need terminals? Why not just use a server, which, so far as I can tell from the description of uses for mainframes in the articles, would serve the same purpose. IBMs is still trying to push their mainframes in the name of RAS but frankly given the state of IT, is that really an issue?

I see owning a mainframe as a Catch 22 to not stop owning a mainframe. Once you're in (especially if you've been in long enough that you would have at one point needed to have bought a mainframe), the price of switching your business to modern architecture goes up up and away.

But hell, I could be off base on all of this is the price is right. I don't have to time to look up numbers right now, so if someone wants to slam me into the ground with prices, that'd be cool.

Why isn't she under arrest for having vivesected that clerk?

For the same reason that people run phpadmin (or whatever it's called) on a public network. The number of probes to my webserver tell me that a lot of people (or at least a lot of scripted clients) expect there to be administrative tools publicly accessible.

However, it should have been obvious that there would be problems - the fact that it's called the "Intelligent" Platform Management Interface implies that there'll be something totally braindead about it or its implementation.

Probably extremely difficult. In that example, there is likely no film anymore.

How would you even verify that the records were fully expunged? Surely they have backups, as well as shared copies with your GP and maybe insurance as well.

Is it ever be possible to take ownership and control of your own records? 25 years ago I was able to take my X-ray films away from an independent X-ray clinic (to transport the film to my GP), and then I kept them. Probably not so easy to do that today.

Joy, I have an anonymous stalker who contributes less than zero to every thread I post to.

HumbleBundle is your friend

Yay for gopher!

As of a few weeks ago, I now run a minimal gopher server. All it serves is some limited information on the state of a customised IdleRPG
gopher://fatphil.org:7071/
I notice that there are very few compliant gopher clients. I'm writing some patches for w3m presently to fix the bugs in its implementation (it directly disobeys some "the client must" and "must not"s).

While sniffing around that machine, I notice that my fucking apache server has been rooted, so I'll be decomissioning it, and rebuilding as soon as I can. However, I plan to have the gopher service running again ASAP afterwards.

Australian government is forcing tax payers who use the ATO to lodge online to register with the DHS MyGov system. MyGov will include Child Support, Centrelink, Medicare and other major government departments. This means that if an Australian MyGov account is hacked they get everything. Tax file number. Child support information. Bank account information. Medical records. Lots of data.Recently MyGov was shown to have serious security flaws. Exposure of gigabytes of user data. Many people refuse to have their medical information stored in the PEHCR linked to MyGov.The takeup has not been as much as the government expected.

Not fines, damages paid to those affected.

Any breach yields immediate loss of medical licenses and mandatory fines, no trial or arbitration.

Clean and simple. Anything less, such as the current tremendously vague HIPAA regulations and corresponding lack of enforcement, means nothing but business as usual as "privacy" becomes a distant memory.

Witcher2 is supposed to be ported via a wrapper (like wine, but something else), and is supposed to have performance issues on a lot of systems. It may not on your system, but it may, so don't get your hopes too high. Hopefully Witcher3 will be native on release..

Your dimwitted and nearsighted interpretation of "a short time ago" is disturbing and sad. Yet again you contribute nothing of interest or substance to a Pipedot thread. :(

Micropayment systems, things like hashcash, and some anti-spam proposals, always depended on these kinds of computations being done. They weren't new 20+ years ago when I first heard of them, so they definitely aren't new now.

And the concept of subversively getting large numbers of unknowing volunteers to contribute to the efforts is even older - it was originally called the "chinese television" (the idea being that there are hundreds of millions of them, so great for embarassingly parallel tasks).

So git orf moi larn!

I miss the games from the '90s; 16-bit consoles and PC games. Simtower, Myst, Pilotwings, pretty much all the SNES Star Wars games. I am tired of Internet-connection-required, DLC, premium-service-required multiplayer. I just want simple games for my simple mind.

... when actual language professionals designed the computer languages we used.
... when the use of dynamic binding for any computer language was discouraged.
... when languages were available with restartable exceptions.
... when one only needed to know four languages to write a program (the command line language, the editor's command language, the language that one was programming in and (optionally) a bit of assembler for performance-critical code.
... when UI considerations did not outweigh the algorithmic.
... when an application without a "social" aspect could be released.

As a lover of computation, information, and their manipulation, I could go on, but I'll just fade away by saying "Get the fuck off my lawn!".

I miss the days when anyone into tech was a rarity. Once you found someone else who was, it was a really special thing.

NeXTSTEP

I suppose it's fair to say there are different types of nostalgia: there's a variant where you yearn for old days you truly believe were better somehow, and another where you simply have fond memories of a period that's now past.

I have a strange fascination with dial-up, but if you offered to take away my broadband and hook me up with a modem, I'd refuse. But I do have fond memories of that dial-up sound, and the amazement of being on line from a personal computer. Was just thinking of buying this poster, actually: http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html

Because honestly, either those options are still readily available or I'm glad to see their backside. I mean, MacOS Classic? Sure, I can't stand the OS X dock, but do you remember how often it crashed, INITs, the awful multitasking? Or 8-bit/16-bit computing? Okay, there were some nice apps, but would I really want to go back to an era when memory was counted in kilobytes (or even single bytes)? And dial-up networking shouldn't even get the slightest of considerations. I've embraced the changes of the ever-improving technology world because they have been, for the most part, actually improvements. I got more computing power in my cellphone (which do everything a PDA did, and more) these days than a Cray had when I was growing up. If I really want to re-live the glory days of past computing, there are always emulators to remind me of how far we've come, and how limited those old machines really were.

Nostalgia for old tech? I don't think so.

I kind of miss the original Yahoo, with its curated treeview guide to all things.

Maybe that doesn't even count as technology since it was labor intensive. Same with daily newspapers with the staff sizes that were common 20-40 years ago.

Wow, great comment. Yeah, I remember drooling over the catalogs of those companies that produced component audio systems. You'd spend $400 just for a turntable alone, then listen to it with over-the-ear headphones with an emphasis on high quality audio reproduction, not the number of MP3s you can fit on the device. I don't undervalue portability and love my ipod, but yeah, those were fun times.

Thumbs up for Gopher, too, and Usenet. No flash ads, etc. Try taking an article from huffingtonpost.com and extracting just the article text (ie, removing all the scripts, ads, etc.). The ratio is like 8% information.