vaxman

I did too, but the lessons have nothing to do with the incredible platform. There is this fictitious scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where young Billy boasts that it doesn't matter if DOS is NOT better than Mac. That's the lesson I learned IRL as some kid who grew up in the shadow of the USSR carrying around Andy Tanenbaum's "Dinosaur" book (featuring MINIX) and downloading free "layered applications" and utilities for it from some socialist ahole (with tenure at MIT) over the Internet, filled a vacuum created by all the cash being sucked out of Technology by the dot-com crash..just about the exact same time that a now exposed group of losers in Santa Clara allegedly stole the plans to DEC's Alpha chip, enabling them to breath incredible life into the then very dead architecture that is only now being eclipsed by ARM. (Ironically, the settlement with DEC involved the Santa Clara losers having to buy DEC's Hudson FAB that included StrongARM --bit the Santa Clara losers were such big idiots they first spun that off into a subsidiary and then sold the subsidiary, only to have it all come back and kick their arse here in 2025). No, you can't make this stuff up and I'm sorry if they don't teach it in the circular referencing blogger sphere.

https://youtu.be/bJHPfpOnDzg

As far as devolving into useless one liners --there is an emerging tech called the at-proto (not related to modems hahaa) that is poised to disrupt billions of dollars worth of sites like this one. Enjoy this era while it lasts..

He should have convinced Ken Olsen to let him port VMS to commodity hardware and gone back to DECWRL to try again later if Ken refused, but instead he built it for Billy and Balmy who were guaranteed to (and, in fact, did) use it to destroy the lives of every DEC employee and every industry worker that had specialized in DEC's proprietary (but incredible) systems, also setting back the progress of mankind a couple of decades because NT turned out really terrible compared to VMS, giving rise to Linus' science project born out of the pages of a book on operating system theory written by an academic with no real world experience compared to the Chief Architect of VMS, RSX11, RT11, etc. (If there is no Hell, he's home free. If we make hell on Earth, then for him, it must be knowing that WSL exists.)

Brightline is currently constructing a 200mph bullet train to connect Boring Company's "Vegas Loop" to the commuter train service in Los Angeles over a complex route through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, expecting to be done before the 2028 Olympics by running mostly down the center of the existing I-15. A MAG-LEV from Phoenix, stopping only in Bullhead City and Boulder City, then heading along the undeveloped side of the McCullough Mountains to the planned Ivanpah Valley Airport site and the new Brightline/Vegas Loop station would be much easier and faster to construct. BLM clearance, finance and getting the Japanese MAG-LEV "trains" (and maintenance facility) would be another matter. Brightline is using German bullet trains made in New York, btw. Their maintenance facility will be in Sloan, between the Ivanpah Valley Airport site and the Brightline/Vegas Loop station.

https://youtu.be/mpWe5C58y40

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...

Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366851/doge-nlrb-whist...

The choice of a trusted HMD is a little more complex, but very solvable ;)

Be sure to fill out the customer information/registration and download the latest firmware :/

I hope he doesn't think Trump is his boy and will keep DOJ off his back. The problem is that the institutional funds and market makers will not support this level of Watergate/Enron/WorldCom-like risk and Trump isn't going to become entangled in that (since it means the corporate death penalty as far as public equity and access to bank capital is concerned).

BUT the Report is from a super controversial NGO that has long been targeted by Republicans and may soon be DOGEd, so it could be filled with speculation, half-truths, innuendo and lies.

Still...They didn't use StarLink?! I mean, is that not the greatest evidence you could ever hope for of an obvious NSA backdoor in StarLink? They were willing to risk obscure premises-based (bandwidth) monitoring over holding a mini-dish out the window for a few seconds..Too much! I feel like I owe someone $20 for a ticket.

The problem Steve had with that nice ObjectiveC system was that the fools who ran Corporate America were from the generation that was still "shell shocked" from all of the vendor lock-in that went on during the wars between DEC, IBM, HP, Spurrows (Unisys) and smaller players like Nixdorf, none of which were software (or hardware) compatible with each other, meaning their customers were held hostage, often with incredibly expensive long term contracts on less than state-of-the-art machines. In the new Desktop era (that had just begun), for a short while at least, they wanted "cross-platform apps" that ran on universal hardware (think PC and Mac "clones") and that meant using object oriented frameworks and the only OOP systems that were mature enough to have platform-specific GUI libraries for DOS, Windows and Mac were some interesting Smalltalk packages and some exotic C-macro based systems like Neuron Data's Open Interface Toolkit and eventually Microsoft MFC (which was available for Classic Mac and all the versions of Microsoft Windows). Of course, as Windows took over the game, the need for cross-platform apps ended --just as Visual Studio, Microsoft FoxPro/Access and Visual BASIC were cleaning up and really locking everyone in for the decade. There was no more need for object oriented systems like NeXTStep or Smalltalk.

But then the WWW became a thing and NeXT made a bold move with WebObjects, which allowed their ObjectiveC visual tools (Project Builder) to output HTML in realtime. About the same time, Sun Microsystems launched Java with a really terrible UX library, but the promise of the portable Java interpreter (which was similar to the promise of UCSD p-code back in Steve's earlier Apple days) and that meant Java could "run (ugly looking but portable) code" in web browsers on any hardware. Oh happy days, a way to get back into Corporate America without the word Microsoft on your business cards. While the FIRST end of ObjectiveC is described in the article (before NeXT picked it up), Steve saw the potential to replace that ugly Java UX library with their WebObjects masterpiece and pivoted to rewrite WebObjects to output Java --and that was the SECOND end of ObjectiveC.

Somehow my Dad's old colleague working with Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on behalf of CalPERS was able to bail the shareholders of NeXT and Apple out. But NeXT was all about WebObjects by then and you couldn't run Macs with WebObjects (that would be a "thin client" which was a much maligned concept and offered no value-add for Apple), so that meant Avie Tevanian's team had to hold their nose and fuse the stinking classic Mac operating system into NeXTStep, breathing new life into ObjectiveC.

As that post-NeXT Mac operating system was "forked" to make battery powered phones, the idea of allowing developers to write apps in ObjectiveC became a liability. Suddenly they had a class of "fart apps" that were draining batteries, closing unexpectedly, heating up devices in people's hands, etc. --and to a casual user with limited computer experience, that looked like an iPhone problem. Apple had the incredible app-review process going on, but it's not the correct prescription for curing stupid programming. They needed a solution like Java (being used by their competitor and embroiled in litigation involving Sun/Oracle/Microsoft/Google) or even their old UCSD p-Code interpreter that ran Pascal, a language that had long been obsoleted by Ada, which everyone with half a brain hates. So..

> The end came for Objective-C in June of 2014, when Apple announced the debut of Swift

I wouldn't say that the THIRD death of Objective-C happened in 2014 nor is it upon us in 2025. Aside from a lot of existing code and performance reasons to use Objective-C, there is also the fact that the popular AI coder models were all trained on GitHub 2023 and the Swift code that's out there is from six different versions of the language, mostly written by people who were just learning it (so it's not leveraging Swift's value prop much). Cross-platform Linux/Mac code, like Moonlight for iOS, is also written in Objective-C (that had superior C++ integration than Swift until very recently). It's possible to remove ObjectiveC from Apple's product line, but it can't be a priority given the industry move to agentic-apps.

The arguments against "open source" back then are no longer valid. That ship sailed (or should I say sunk?) They commoditized the art-science while driving engineering wages down, killing the country's competitive edge that every male and several females in my family for generations literally fought to create and now, train AI models that write and deploy apps based on single commands issued by get-rich-quick-schemers or even other AI models. https://youtu.be/mpWe5C58y40

PS: Published my first "public domain software" in mid-1980s on the DECUS mass magnetic-tape duplication service that ran at every convention (bet you thought I was going to say "Fred Fish Floppies" lol.)

It's very sad. She reported to Congress that she faces a $50K per disparagement penalty. Let's say there are 25 disparagements in the book and it sells 100K copies into the Billion+ FB user community. As she pointed out to Congress, a disparagement is a truth. $5B for telling truths from seven or eight years ago.

Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)

I hope Mark issues a public statement that he is dropping his emergency arbitration against her and will allow her book to Publish. I get why he did it, but it didn't work and now it is hurting more than helping. There is no such thing as Bad PR --but an open wound is a different story. (I am on his side in that I don't neurotically hold people accountable for being dbags back in their 20s and early 30s when they aren't that person anymore...google for "brain development at 30" to see why.)

PS: Was at a startup that was wiped out by Instagram 4.3. This was after Mr. SnapEgo reportedly turned down a cool $1B and McAfee's lost son snapped up the technically troubled Vine (that Mr. FootInHisMouth should probably retool and rebrand as "X Prime").

I had gone to a meeting at Disneyland Hotel in 1989-1990 and heard Mehdi Ali (CEO du jour) talk, then went home and forced myself to do a "hard stop" on Amiga after YEARS of around-the-clock (when not "working" to pay for it all haha) single-handedly implementing X.PC (Tymnet VAN's multichannel, dial-up, asynchronous, X.25 protocol) as the base for my grand plan that was going to be a fully distributed network system that used network directories and RPC to implement consumer apps like 10-20 years before Lotus Notes (and Meta Facebook).

Still, when I see projects like this one, I hear the boxes-o-Amigas calling me..someday maybe I will have the courage to put them into a proper trash dumpster (wearing gloves, of course). RIP Jay Miner https://youtu.be/guJOyJyTn5w

VMS' key feature over Unix is consistency and beyond that it is being interrupt driven at all levels (no wasted cycled polling except for code ported over using POSIX interfaces). VMS was killed by a confluence of business issues, not because it was obsolete or inefficient.

The worst of what Billy ever did was cause some people to lose their will to live by destroying their life's work (like pulling wings off a fly) with bullshit marketing, investment and employment strategies; he's been doing a Carnegie ever since to make up for it all.

How ironic is it that Musk is helping to destroy what Carnegie helped build? What could Musk possibly do to make amends for being the public face of an effort likely to kill millions of America's elderly before it gets sorted? (Because people over a certain age don't do well when they don't get their daily Meals on Wheels, or the social interaction that goes with it, or when their housing subsidy forces them to move from familiar surroundings beyond an age when they can adjust or if they're stuck in a for-profit nursing home that suddenly loses its regulators. Changes like these have to be made so they only impact future generations unless there is an instant emergency and even then, every precaution has to be taken or manslaughter will occur as Andrew "people die" Cuomo found out in NY during the Pandemic.)

Elon Musk is a more complex case. There is a reason that large parts of the US government are running on IBM 360 emulation. There used to be an expression in the 1980s "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Well, there also used to be a lesser known expression "There are certain things you just don't do and selling faster computers to the government is one of them." DEC, for example, was run by a famous Mormon named Ken Olsen. Mormons have incorporated the US Constitution into their religion. Their loyalty to the US is unquestionable. Of course DEC had cost-effective VAXclusters and client/server relational database software (Larry Ellison's Oracle and Sybase which sold to Microsoft and SAP) way back in the 1980s, so it wasn't a question of having to buy the latest expensive IBM mainframe (or even an IBM 370) when affordable mini-computers and later PC servers were available. It was that the computer companies were not willing to vend at market rates to certain parts of the US government because, as US President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” Now comes Elon Musk, all these decades later and he's portrayed as uniquely qualified to go in and do what IBM, DEC, ORACLE, SAP and the army of Windows Server vendors would never do. Elon's team is reportedly also volunteering their time to do it! Is it because his xAI may train a model on all of the data of the entire federal government and offer it up via satellite to organizations that he's reduced to being totally dependent upon his operation? It only takes about one second to transmit a mag-tape worth of EBCDIC or 7-bit ASCII data through Low Earth Orbit to a remote location anywhere on Earth for storage, indexing and training. Why would Trump let him? Because Elon's efforts promise to lower interest rates by reducing the National Deficit and we're running low on other ways of accomplishing that feat. Elon's endless controversies (many obviously a result of his claimed "Asberger's Syndrome") are also keeping the Opposition preoccupied while Trump quietly pushes an even more controversial agenda. Trump's team is ignorant to the danger here that was well known to Ken Olsen, Lou Gerstner and many others like Michael Capellas, Mark Hurd, etc. who were in a position to improve government efficiency many decades ago. Maybe Elon Musk will start out building a special "gov cloud" like version of xAI to absorb the data, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to maintain that thing (and its football fields worth of NVIDIA chips) and who better to do it than the company that created it?

--- [1]-grew up with a lot of geniuses because Soviet threat to families of Defense workers caused us to have to live in close proximity

BTW, Unix on DEC hardware was never really popular outside of academia so DEC's machines were primarily programmed in FORTRAN, BASIC or Macro assembler, but there were still several third-party C compilers (for RT11, RSX11, RSTS/E, TOPS and VMS). My shop had spun off of Bell Labs so we had just a few Unix weirdos running things, but the bazillion dollar VAXcluster only ran VMS, so they made us all use Whitesmith's C (which they would incorrectly pronounce with three syllables) which was horrible - so was constantly getting in trouble for continuing to work the evil FORTRAN77 ways 'til one day a Lead (pear-shaped Unix grandmaster smellable from 20 feet away) dropped this on my desk with a thud http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/lang/c/AA-L370A-TE_Prog... Soon, I was spending my hard earned dollars on Lattice and Aztec C licenses for my own home-brew systems too. I resisted Unix to the very End tho #rofl

A solution is for ID.me to begin issuing developer certificates (for free to those offering themselves up as developers) and for the old system of public repositories and mirrors to be replaced by a single source of truth operated by a new entity jointly sponsored by the $15.4 Trillion worth of companies: Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, nVidia, Tesla and Microsoft in such a way that everything in every repository can be traced back to the actual biometric signature of a developer and their related IRL context. These entity, its sponsors and ID.me also need to observe a regulation that they will NOT "track" or share information between each other (or others) about developers indexed off their developer certificates beyond what's necessary to host the repositories and to manage access to developer-only programs (such as Xcode signing, etc.) Ideally the JV will be located in Switzerland (perhaps with the hardware located in a Svalbard-like facility) using some UN supervised process (overseen by Nato, Russia, China and the Plebeians) to vet all workers.