nickdothutton

This sounds like the next iteration of "nobody understands their runtime environment these days", which I've been saying for many years.

At least Dekker is referenced.

I've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissatisfaction/annoyance with all the dark patterns, mode of participation, and ensh*ttification in social networks. I began using UNIX in the early 90s when finger was still quite useful, and yes we did connect it to a named pipe for all sorts of fun (like a finger to SMS gateway).

Once had a lengthy battle with a marketing person. They attempted to change "uninterruptible" (as in Uninterruptible Power Supply) into non-interruptible, and then finally into interruptible. Took the best part of a week to get it fixed.

I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).

Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.

I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.

As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.

While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in the process[1][2]. Of course this was during a time when Microsoft saw no point in including an IP stack with their OS, or indeed much point in connecting to the Internet at all! Some of the younger readers may find these things hard to believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetManage

At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.

In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to reposition a power cable slightly for the rack I was working in. What I saw stayed with me.

Stuffed under the floor of the adjacent rack were perhaps a dozen-or-so small servers, switches, the odd modem or 2, and perhaps a kvm box. The tenant had obviously exceeded his physical space but not his power allocation. He had simply "gone underground". Like a little farm of blinking LED mushrooms in the dark.

We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (mostly VAX VMS 6000 and 8000 series, already pretty long in tooth). I later learned that the faculty decided to permit the MUDs consumption of scarce resource because they considered the development work a valuable lesson in itself on maintenance of a large code base and division of labour.

Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an information problem in-disguise as something else. However I do not think the UK housing crisis is an information problem, either plainly or in-disguise.

I started out on Z80 when HLL compilers were expensive for me and the shareware alternatives weren’t so accessible as open source is today. Everyone should do at least a little assembler to gain an appreciation of what they are asking the machine to do, and the Z80 was simple enough to reason about.

The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), which would have provided orders for virgin steel from such furnaces. It's hard to see how this has a happy and sustainable ending.

I really wish LinkedIn would collapse and close so that something useful could take its place. At the moment I feel like it's squatting the "business networking" square on the board, but I don't know what it would take to dislodge it. I wrote a little about this on my blog about a decade ago and I don't feel we are any closer to it being dislodged.

Seek out his various interviews on YouTube.

Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

The "real banned books" are (in my opinion) generally those which have not been translated.

Reminder: In the UK we do not know where the trains are. We know what section of track they are on, but not where within the section. A section could be miles long. To know more precisely, we telephone the (manned) signal boxes to ask if they can see the train or how recently it passed them, and occasionally phone the driver on his mobile to ask them directly.

I don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.

They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.

"I want to do the thing that gets me the most votes and carries the least political risk". Note this is not necessarily the wisest thing, or even the thing that objectively solves or mitigates the problem the most. Many such cases...

This sort of shenanigan is why it’s important to have a competitive market for CPUs.

We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.

AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched was bad. A real pity.

If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.

The UK student loan book regularly changes hands on the secondaries market at half of face value. Make of that what you will. Draw whatever conclusions you might about the market value of some of the education provided.

I support anyone's wish to gain an education, including the study of esoteric subjects if that is what interests them. However many young people have been mis-sold an education in the belief that it would result in a well paying job. Of course the young are the easiest people of all upon which to perpetrate such a scam. There are very few with a film studies degree, who manage to secure a job as film director. About 500 people every year study golf course management. We have about 2500 golf courses.

Supercalc2, Maxam2, dBASE II. You could do a lot with CP/M software, especially if you had access to a hard drive which would eliminate the "insert floppy disk X into drive Y" tedium.

I'm the downvoted poster above, and I used to run a BBS. Mostly hosting info files and CP/M software (Thanks U.S. Robotics, couldn't have done it without HST). I am genuinely interested in know where (and if) such a network of people could ever exist again. For those who may be too young to get the joke... Reddit is certainly not it.