OT Antivirus software

Dave Hinz wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>>Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>That was fun...
>
>
> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>
> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>
>
Humph. Late comer. How about Fortran I and FAP, later MAP and Fortran
II. Lots of people writing good stuff to augment the manufacturer's
offerings, including CARE (CDC 924 assembler), Boolfinder (JPL 7044 link
editor), and a memory management system for 360 75's running RTOS/JPLOS
(can't remember the name). The last three are unfair because I wrote
them (most of them anyway) in about 1963, 1968, and 1971.
creak,
jo4hn

Convinced me, bought it this morning. Thanks all for the suggestion
and support.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 18:50:03 -0400, "Ian Wheeler"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>AVG gets my vote as well. Been using the free version for about a year, it
>updates very smoothly every day, very easy to use (nothing to do) and
>integrates perfectly into Outlook.
>
>Ian

Duane Bozarth wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:45:33 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Robatoy <[email protected]> writes:
> > >
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > >> OS 9 and previous
> > >> Virus free since Jan. 1993.
> > >
> > > OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)
> >
> > Ahhhhh, another person who knows OS-9. Mine was on a 6809E. Yours?
> >
> > Dave "Feeling old..." Hinz
>
> Mostly 68K's VME-bus.

Small world. I may have done some hardware design work on those VMEbus
boards (mostly fixing the original designer's blunders). I still make
my living in the VME market.

Tom

Old Nick wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
> Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
> there.
>

That old argumetn remains false.

Remember the "Join the Crew" virus hoax? This was a chain letter
sent around the internet from naive users. Basicly it said that
if you got an email with "Join the Crew" in the subject line to
had to delete it unread because if you read it, your computer
would be infected with a terrible virus. Periodically system
administrators hd to remind their naive users that you could not
infect your computer by reading your email.

Then Microsoft discovered the internet and suddenly it became
possible for viruses to spread just by reading email. Not
satisfied with that, Microsoft went on to wirte email clients
that would automatically infect your computer with emailed viruses
even befor you read the email.

NO previous email client software had been written that would
automatically and by default execute any executable it received
in an email. Pretty much everyone else had realized THAT would
be incredibly stupid.

There are a host of other mistakes made by Microsoft that everyone
else had previously avoided right off the bat that Microsoft has
made and still has refused to correct. Another classic that no
decent programmer would make was the practice of updating the
registry BEFORE installing a new module and writing the OS so
it would not re-install software that was in the registry so that
if the installation failed the user could not simply fix the problem
by repeating the installation.

Then there is Microsoft's refusal to use CDS which assures the
viability
of buffer-overflow exploits.

And so on.

Yes, without Microsoftware there would be worms and viruses and
definately there would be spam, but not like we have now.

--

FF

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>> That was fun...
>
>AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>
>Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>
>

WATFIV

SPSS

BAL

SOC 4

PL/C


See, I know the *real* swear-words! <grin>


I actually enjoyed using FORTRAN. It was a lot more tolerable, after you
figured out "equivalents" for 'useful' features in other languages. I even
managed "array of pointer to function" that didn't give any even ANSI WARNING
messages.

I'm *not* going to repeat what the salesman for a high-end Fortran-to-C
conversion service said when he got some of that code for a demo of their
product. <evil grin>

Then there was the time the boss made me write more than 40 lines of comments
to document a _single_ line of Fortran code. A *very*simple* line of code.
all it did was a _single_ 'shift' operation. This was one of those things
where _what_ was happening was absolutely clear, but *WHY* it worked took
a _lot_ of explaining. an 'abuse the data representation' situation. :)

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:58:56 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Dave Hinz wrote:
>
>>> Nice. Does FreeBSD have the bug where after 497 days, the uptime
>>> display starts over at 0 days? First time that linux box did it, I
>>> spent some non-trivial time trying to figure out what the hell went
>>> wrong. Turned out I just was seeing the uptime reporting bug.
>>
>> Not at all, my uptime was showing 642 days when we lost the power. 497
>> seems like such a weird number to bug out on (only 9 bits in use, but
>> first 5 bits are 1s and the rest 0s with the last bit hitting a 1 = 497).
>
>Number of seconds crossing some bit boundary maybe? Dunno, netcraft
>has a "how long has this site been up" with a link that talks about the
>bug, maybe it'll explain it there.

Number of _milliseconds_ overflowing a 32-bit qty.

In article <[email protected]>,
Charles Spitzer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>"Odinn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>news:[email protected]...
>> Charles Spitzer wrote:
>>> "Odinn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>> news:[email protected]...
>>>
>>>>Charles Spitzer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>"Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>>>>news:[email protected]...
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>>>>>>wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>In article <[email protected]>,
>>>>>>>nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>>>>>>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>>>>>>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start
>>>>>>>>it
>>>>>>>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>>>>>>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>>>>>>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering
>>>>>>>>if
>>>>>>>>there are other options available.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>OS X
>>>>>>>Virus free since April 2001.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>In other words, for the entire history of OSX.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9
>>>>>years.
>>>>
>>>>That would be one out-of-date kernel with gawd only knows how many
>>>>security holes in it.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://stratus.com
>>>
>>> no security holes. out of date perhaps, but lots of our customers don't
>>> upgrade for years and years if it's working ok. lots of our customers
>>> can't have the computer stop working for normal upgrades because there is
>>> no scheduled downtime allowed.
>>>
>> I don't know of a single 9 year old kernel (linux, freebsd, openbsd, aix,
>> solaris, etc) that doesn't have security holes. These can be minimized by
>> ACLs, firewalls and other means, but they still have security holes.
>
>multics. i worked on it for many years. certified to b2. another os/hardware
>platform from the same company was certified at a2.
>
>there has never been a security hole used against stratus computers.
>
>just because you don't know of one doesn't mean there isn't one.
>
>
"The number of _discovered_ bugs in a system is always finite in number.
the number of UNDISCOVERED bugs, is, by definition, infinite in number."


I do know of *one* O/S without any bugs in it. TSEC 'orange book' certified
at the A1 level -- with the formal mathematical proof of correctness, and
the proof of implementation matching the design.

In article <[email protected]>,
Old Nick <nsnsafemail#iinet.net.au> wrote:
>On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>wrote:
>
>But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
>Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
>there.

Even if true, the 'risks/damages' are _guaranteed_ to a much lesser degree.

out-of-the-box, without any 'hardening' --
User mail readers don't run with "system" privileges.
The _windowing system_ doesn't run with 'system' privileges.
Users (or viruses they unknowningly execute) cannot over-write *system*
files

With only a -moderate- amount of hardening (2-3 hours of configuration
tweaking) and the right SCSI drives, and I have systems where I will
_give_ you the superuser password, _and_ access to the physical console,
and the _worst_ thing you can do is cause the system to re-boot.

It _doesn't_ require 'rocket science'. Just healthy paranoia, *and* the
right 'building block' tools.

Windows XP PRO is approaching where Unix was 15-20 years ago, in _that_
respect.

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Thu, 26 May 2005 17:02:13 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
>> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy
><[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>> > That was fun...
>>>
>>> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>>
>>> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>>>
>> I'll see you and raise you a FORTH.
>
>Actually, I rather liked FORTH. Built a 6500-based micro back in, er,
>'80 or '81 maybe, that used it. PicoFORTH maybe?
>
>> "Forth is a recursive language. You can't understand Forth till you
>> understand Forth."
>
>Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
>bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
>assembler much easier.
>
>> I wrote a Forth interpreter for a Modcomp mini once when I was between
>> projects and bored. The guy in the next office outdid me - he took the
>> Forth and used it to build a Lisp interpreter :-).
>
>Now that, is just _wrong_.

DEFINITELY!!

The proper use of FORTH is writing floating-point emulators.

So says the Bible.



"Go FORTH, and multiply"




<groan>

In article <[email protected]>,
lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>> Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
>> bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
>> assembler much easier.
>>
>It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that
>drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about
>Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what
>I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about
>the limit.

That descriptor was usually applied to APL. where the 'half-life' for
readability by the author was about half a day.

In article <[email protected]>,
Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
>Mark & Juanita wrote:
>...
>> When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C,
>> one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he
>> could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.
>>
>> Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to
>> be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.
>>
>...
>
>Then I'll wager his C code was no easier to read than his Fortran... :)

I can show you code that is _much_clearer_ with the use of the carefully
implemented goto than the equivalent mess in a "pure" structured form.

We won't even discuss setjmp()/longjmp() -- that's getting perilously close
to the COBOL "ALTER" verb.

And then there were the people that threatened to implement a 'COMEFROM'
statement.

In article <[email protected]>,
Doug Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>In article <[email protected]>, lgb
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>Back in the early days, I had at least one job that required writing
>>Cobol programs. I was told my Cobol looked like Fortran :-).
>>Apparently most people didn't even know Cobol had a COMPUTE statement.
>
>No, we just *wish* it didn't. Destroys readability. Except for Fortran
>programmers. :-)

Some COBOL code is _intrinsically_ virtually unreadable. without COMPUTE.

Try to imagine what data-decompression algorithms look like in COBOL.
(It _wasn't_ a matter of choice, that was the *only* language that that
shop used. CICS command-level COBOL, in fact.)

Variable width bitfield data is all *sorts* of fun.

line after line of
DIVIDE foo INTO bar GIVING baz, REMAINDER quux.

with various
MULTIPLY something BY power_of_two,
ADD this TO that GIVING result.
thrown in, 'as needed'.

It's _all_ scratch-pad temporary variables, there's *NO* way to assign
'meaningful' names.

Plus, 'bit twiddling' is an utterly foreign concept to COBOL programmers
in the first place.

There is simply _nothing_ you can do to make that code 'readable' by anyone
other than a systems "guru". And _they_ have to puzzle over it for quite
a while, because it would *never* occur to them to try to do that kind of
thing in _that_ language.

The _internal_ documentation for _what_ that module was doing was six or
seven times the size of the of the functional parts of the PROCEDURE and
DATA divisions combined. And management _still_ put a declaration on the
front of that module forbidding *anyone* but the author to modify it.

In article <[email protected]>,
Doug Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>In article <[email protected]>,
>[email protected] (Robert Bonomi) wrote:
>>In article <[email protected]>,
>>Doug Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>In article <[email protected]>, lgb
>>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Back in the early days, I had at least one job that required writing
>>>>Cobol programs. I was told my Cobol looked like Fortran :-).
>>>>Apparently most people didn't even know Cobol had a COMPUTE statement.
>>>
>>>No, we just *wish* it didn't. Destroys readability. Except for Fortran
>>>programmers. :-)
>>
>>Some COBOL code is _intrinsically_ virtually unreadable. without COMPUTE.
>
>Yeah, and a lot of it was written by Fortran or assembler programmers. :-)
>
>>Try to imagine what data-decompression algorithms look like in COBOL.
>
>Thank you, I'd rather not.
>
>>(It _wasn't_ a matter of choice, that was the *only* language that that
>> shop used. CICS command-level COBOL, in fact.)
>
>I've always preferred environments where the programmers could use the
>appropriate tools for the job.

No choice in this situation. Smallish shop, IBM 4381, 3 'applications'
programers, *zero* 'systems' programmers. COBOL was the only language
product they had licensed.

I was a contractor, that they brought in to 'do the impossible'. Because
I could do d*mn near anything with whatever 'less than appropriate' tools
were available.

>>Variable width bitfield data is all *sorts* of fun.
>
>To win a bet a number of years ago with a co-worker who claimed it couldn't be
>done, I wrote a Cobol-85 program to manipulate individual bits in a
>doubleword. It was an interesting intellectual exercise, but one with no
>reasonable practical application other than winning a bet.

*GRIN* I had a reputation of "If you want something done, hunt up Bonomi,
tell him it's 'impossible', and stay out of his hair for a couple of weeks."

>>
>>line after line of
>> DIVIDE foo INTO bar GIVING baz, REMAINDER quux.
>>
>>with various
>> MULTIPLY something BY power_of_two,
>> ADD this TO that GIVING result.
>>thrown in, 'as needed'.
>
>Looks familiar.
>>
>>It's _all_ scratch-pad temporary variables, there's *NO* way to assign
>>'meaningful' names.
>>
>>Plus, 'bit twiddling' is an utterly foreign concept to COBOL programmers
>>in the first place.
>
>Probably why my colleague said it couldn't be done. OTOH, I began my career in
>DP with four years in an assembler shop. Wrote two Cobol programs the entire
>time; everything else was ALC. So I was intimately familiar with the concept,
>and practice, of bit twiddling.

Yuppers. The primary reason it's foreign to COBOL programmers is that the
relevant verbs ('shift', 'mask', 'bitwise and', 'bitwise or', etc.) simply
do not exist in the COBOL vocabulary. If you don't have the concepts, you
can't think in those terms. You have to have been exposed to the concepts
elsewhere, internalized them, and then find 'equivalent functionality'
work-arounds. Knowing about 'modulo' (another verb that doesn't exist in
COBOL) helps greatly in getting down to the 'equivalent functionality'.

>>There is simply _nothing_ you can do to make that code 'readable' by anyone
>>other than a systems "guru". And _they_ have to puzzle over it for quite
>>a while, because it would *never* occur to them to try to do that kind of
>>thing in _that_ language.
>
>Comments help... if the programmer knows how to write them. :-)

"sometimes". I once had to write an entire page of documentation for
one line of program code. That line of program code reduced to *one*
machine instruction. a 'shift' operation.

The comments were *utterly* lucid, including 'pictures' of exactly what
was going on, and why.

But people couldn't cope with the fact that this shift operation was being
done on a character string and *not* in a multiple of the bits-per-character.

Take a character string, shift it 'x and one-half' characters, and use the
result in an arithmetic comparison was just "too strange" to be believable.

>>The _internal_ documentation for _what_ that module was doing was six or
>>seven times the size of the of the functional parts of the PROCEDURE and
>>DATA divisions combined. And management _still_ put a declaration on the
>>front of that module forbidding *anyone* but the author to modify it.
>
>I wrote a couple of modules like that myself... including one, in Cobol-85,
>that performed closest-match searches of a thousand-element internal table.
>The actual search code is only some two dozen lines IIRC, but with comments it
>runs around four pages.

My record is that full page, documenting a single line, a single machine
instruction.

And then there's the fun when you get into 'fuzzy' math -- where the precise
value used simply *doesn't* matter.

Example: you have the Julian day-number of the first of this month, you
want the day-number of the first of next month. How do you get it?
The 'obvious' way is to convert to Gregorian, bump the month number
(remembering to handle overflow), and convert the result back to Julian.

Twice as fast, however, is to add 50 to day number, convert that to
Gregorian, and subtract the indicated 'day' of the month less one from the
unconverted day-number. Note: the number '50' is meaningless. _any_ value
between 31 and 59 works. every time.

Now, given the 1st of the month day-number, and you want the 1st of the
month 3 months out. you can do *exactly* the same thing. just using
100 as the number added, instead of 50. Again, '100' is meaningless. any
value between 90 and 120 works.

Lastly, if you have a parameter that is '1' if you want '1 month' out,
and '2' if you want '1 calendar quarter' out. you can simply use
'50*period' as what you add to the day-number. Even scarier, if you define
the values for that parameter as binary flags, then the next value
'4', gets you '6 months', and the successor ('8') gets you 'one year')

This is _amazingly_ useful in all sorts of bookkeeping applications.

But trying to explain _how_ that trivial little "50*period" incantation
accomplishes that magic is *very* involved.

In article <F%[email protected]>,
Doug Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
>In article <[email protected]>,
>[email protected] (Robert Bonomi) wrote:
>[long snip of interesting idea]
>>But trying to explain _how_ that trivial little "50*period" incantation
>>accomplishes that magic is *very* involved.
>
>In similar situations, I have been known once or twice to write comments along
>the lines of "Trust me: this works. If you can't figure out why, you probably
>shouldn't modify it."
>
>Those comments occasionally produced some chuckles... but never any
>complaints.

I did that once. The boss spent the *entire* week-end trying to figure out
_how_ it did what it did. Including setting up a test-bed program to verify
that it really did do what I claimed.

Monday morning, I get called into his office. Whereupon he makes the request
to 'explain this thing to me', and then would I _please_ not do things like
that 'late in the week' -- that it was hard on management when they discovered
it after I was gone for the week-end.

After that, he made me write up complete comments on *how* it worked.
That was the full-page of comments for the one-line (one machine-instruction)
code.

The particular functionality was heavily used in that set of applications,
and my approach was 'merely' 3-1/2 orders of magnitude (decimal) faster than
what they had been using. That -single- change made a difference of 15-20%
in the run-times of some of the applications that were converted to use it.

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Mon, 30 May 2005 14:23:17 -0000, Robert Bonomi
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> *GRIN* I had a reputation of "If you want something done, hunt up Bonomi,
>> tell him it's 'impossible', and stay out of his hair for a couple of weeks."
>
>Yeah, I used to do that too, until I twigged to the fact that people
>were doing it intentionally to me. In college, (mumble) years ago, for
>one of the fabrication classes the assignment was to make a 2-sided PCB
>for a logic analyzer. "Can't be done single-sided, so don't even try".
>Well, it wasn't _that_ tough to do (he forgot that components are also
>jumpers), so I did it single-sided. He threatened me with an
>incomplete, because he had specified double-sided...

That's when you hand over the layout for the other side, showing the
etched-away surrounds for all the holes *except* one, which is plated-through
from ground on the other side. And explain it's a start towards TEMPEST
protection. <grin>

> so I handed him the
>other version done the way he wanted it.
>
>Point is, the "It's impossible, you can't do it" is a tactic that people
>to use to get people like you and me to work on something. Just so you
>know. Not saying it's a problem, because those are usually the fun
>projects anyway, but just something to be aware of.

*snort* I'd tumbled to _that_ by about fifth grade. Never got sucked into
anything unless I *wanted* to.

It's like you say, though -- for those who enjoy "problem solving" those are
the 'fun' projects. beats the h*ll out of doing routine support work
any day.

Then there was the day I made the 'mistake' of suggesting to the boss that
I might be able to improve the performance of our 'critical path' project
scheduling software (which was believed to be the fastest package then
in existence at that work). The boss was doubtful -- *very* doubtful in
fact -- giving me permission to try, but saying "I'm 'Thomas'". I found
out *later* that that program was his pride-and-joy, that he had sweated
blood optimizing it. Well, 4 days later, I'm back to see him. Requesting
an appointment with "Mr. Thomas". Puzzlement, he can't place any client
named "Thomas". then he remembers "Oh??" "Yup!" (with a *BIG* grin.)
And show him a quick-and-dirty that is more than *one*hundred*times* faster
than the production software. Disbelief was rampant, to put it mildly.
It took numerous runs, with radical changes to the data, before he'd believe
that it was calculating the entire solution each time.

Boss had a *real* problem with that piece of work. Terribly conflicted.
*SERIOUS* "pride of authorship" in the work he had done on the one side, and
cupidity on the other. On same-size networks, on roughly equivalent CPUs,
competing software would have run-times measured in hours. Our production
product gave you enough time to go have a somewhat leisurely cup of coffee
(i.e. the 10-15 minute range). My 'improved' version reduced the calculation
time to under 10 *seconds*. Not even enough time to stand up. :) The
'economic advantage' of _that_ was obvious to him.

It did get a little funny though -- the performance of the whole package when
I got through 'playing with it' was so high that there was a degree of
disbelief that it could "really" be doing what it claimed. One example;
IBM was building a new chip-fabrication plant on the East Coast. They had
a project-scheduling package that ran on their mid-range systems. the
complexity of the fab plant construction was exceeding the limits of
that software, _and_ taking almost an entire shift (8 hours) to calculate
a set of solutions. The general contractor was _insisting_ that they
user our service; so, eventually, an entire troop of IBM big-wigs came
out to our offices for the 'dog and pony show'. We had already input
the data for their project into the system, to for the demonstration.
*I* am the "lucky" guy who gets to do the demo. I'm showing the date-entry
capabilities, review and editing stuff, etc. to establish that it's the
real project data, and then I do the 'generate solution' command.
( About this point, the top dog of the visiting crew gets distracted by
what's going on outside the window of our offices -- mid-level of a
high-rise, with a _new_ building going up on the adjacent property;
construction up to about our floor-level.)
12 seconds later, our computer says the solution is ready; so I'm showing
those who are paying attention that we do have a solution. "now, lets
change some data and re-solve", Doing this for several iterations, I push
the 'critical path' all around the project, leaving no doubt that actual
solutions are being generated. One final set of data edits, to remove
all the changes, and another solution generation, About this point, the
'top dog' pulls his awareness back to the demo -- 'how long till we see
some answers?' he asks. His disbelief, when *his* people insist to him
that it's =already= been done, and not just once, but _half_a_dozen_times_,
was a sight to see. He came "thisclose" to calling the first guy a liar
right to his face, only when the rest of the crew was all jumping in and
insisting it 'really was true', did he calm down. I re-ran a couple
of change cycles, _while_ he was paying attention, and he got *very* quiet.

Needless to say, we got that project. And a fair number more from IBM.


Note: the more the boss looked at what I had done to that software, the
*more* pissed-off he got. He *knew*, for example, that the fastest way
to search is a 'binary search'. And had carefully organized the data in
sorted order so that his finely tuned and optimized binary search would
operate at maximum efficiency. Whereas _I_, the freshly-out-of-college
'young twerp', wasn't bothering to maintain any kind of ordering in the
data, and was using brute-force _linear_ searches. The fact that he was
doing a binary search of a _disk_file_, and I was doing a linear search
of an array _in_memory_ had a *great* deal to do with my approach being
faster. I _could_ have don binary searches, too, but this was a *very*
restricted memory environment (total address-space of 32k 16-bit words)
and the additional _space_ consumed by the binary-search code - and the
requisite sorting of the data - wasn't worth the space penalty,

The boss understood _programming_. I understood *systems*. He had done
his best optimizing the software -- and the algorithm _was_ very highly
optimized. I looked at the _system_, and engineered away the _systemic_
bottlenecks. I/O is *slow*, so you minimize it. 'Record-based' I/O also
lots of overhead, so you do large block I/O instead. Organize the data
in the way the _machine_ uses it, rather than 'people-rational' style,
etc.,etc.

By the time I got _done_ playing, performance was just over 3-orders of
magnitude better then the prior version -- on a 'maximum-size' network,
*and* the maximum-size of the project it could handle was _60%_ larger.
(this is a textbook "order n-squared" problem, so the total performance
differential was about 3.5 orders of magnitude. Not too shabby! :)

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Sat, 28 May 2005 01:46:45 -0000, Robert Bonomi
><[email protected]> wrote:
>> In article <[email protected]>,
>> lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>>>> Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
>>>> bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
>>>> assembler much easier.
>>>>
>>>It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that
>>>drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about
>>>Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what
>>>I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about
>>>the limit.
>>
>> That descriptor was usually applied to APL. where the 'half-life' for
>> readability by the author was about half a day.
>
>I used to work with a guy whose Perl is like that. (Sean, I'm gonna
>kill you.)

"sufficiently advanced PERL is indistinguishable from line-noise".o

<grin>

In article <[email protected]>,
Norman D. Crow <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>"Tim Douglass" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>news:[email protected]...
>> On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:09:59 -0000, [email protected]
>> (Robert Bonomi) wrote:
>>
>> When I moved to managing programmers I came to loathe those who wrote
>> "clever" algorithms. My ability to read and understand code was well
>> above average and anything I couldn't figure out in a reasonable
>> length of time with the included comments was rejected. Those who
>> persisted in producing those things found employment elsewhere. My
>> experience has been that the more clever the algorithm the more likely
>> it is to cause problems a couple years down the road. A good example
>> is undocumented truth-table algorithms - which were a favorite with
>> *my* boss when he wrote code (which I inherited). It wasn't hard at
>> all to lose a week or more just trying to add one option. As hardware
>> speeds increased I dumped the elegant in favor of brute force that
>> could be easily understood and maintained.
>>
>
>I wasn't in the software end of the business, but 27yr. with NCR Corp. as
>large scale system tech. produced a lot of funnies. First one was an
>insurance company, program running solid for about 3yr. suddenly starts
>blowing up, always at the same address. Turned out it was a situation which
>original programmer knew could occur, but had never debugged!

I released a program with a 'known bug' in it. Once. The boss made me
do it. I'd spent two solid weeks trying to chase it down, _without_ any
luck. A memory corruption problem. Brute-force tracking. scatter a
bunch of output statements through the program and see where the thing
gets clobbered. then scatter more output between where the last point it
wasn't clobbered, and where the first place it _was_ clobbered. Only to
find that *now* that the crime is happening "somewhere else". This was
a 'bug' with *legs* -- it MOVED!

In desperation, played with the order in which the modules were linked,
found a sequence where (presumably *still* happening) memory corruption
did not affect the answers coming out, and released it that way. Put a
*LOUD* note in the source, documenting the existence of the problem; that
if the existing code was linked in _this_ order, the problem was 'harmless',
and that _any_ modification of any component was "highly risky".

This was documentation that *literally* started off:
"Warning, Will Robinson. WARNING!!"

and ended with "All hope abandon, ye who press 'enter' here."

It seemed appropriate.

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Tue, 31 May 2005 18:31:26 -0000, Robert Bonomi
><[email protected]> wrote:
>> In article <[email protected]>,
>> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>On Mon, 30 May 2005 14:23:17 -0000, Robert Bonomi
>>
>> That's when you hand over the layout for the other side, showing the
>> etched-away surrounds for all the holes *except* one, which is plated-through
>> from ground on the other side. And explain it's a start towards TEMPEST
>> protection. <grin>
>
>Once again, I bow to the superiour deviousness. Deviousity.
>Deveveiance. Whatever. Well played, Sir, is what I'm saying here.

<grin>

I've had *LOTS* of practice.

It also runs in the family. My brother had a college course in Mech. Eng.,
where on one exam, they had to design a mechanism for keeping a particular
pressure differential between two tanks. And there was a list of components
that you had to use -- anything else in addition was OK, but you had to use
_those_ pieces. My brother looks at the problem, realizes that there is an
'absurdly simple' solution, involving nothing more than a couple of
appropriately-sized pieces of pipe, a free cylinder, and a couple of pin-holes
in the pipes. *But* he has to use the required hardware. so he adds a
pulley, with a wire over it, hangs all the electronics on the end of the
wire -- as dead-weight *ballast*, to provide for some hysteresis in the
movement of the free cylinder. He told us, later, that there was a *LOT*
of discussion on how to grade that answer.


I never managed one _quite_ like that, although I did manage to sabotage
a final in a course I wasn't even taking. Freshman year, and I'm struggling
through the regular 2nd-quarter integral calculus course. an acquaintance
is in the "honors" advanced calculus course. They had a 'take home' final
in that course, with all of 5 questions on it. And an entire _week_ to
do it in. Explicit rules were "Anything goes" for references, etc. except
for consulting other students in the class. He brings it with him to lunch
in the cafeteria. I look it over, don't even _understand_ the first 4
problems; look at #5 and say "Oh! that one's easy!" Not quite an "AHA!"
solution, but close. *IF* you approached the problem the way it was laid
out it was a real doozy. If you took "two steps back", and squinted at it
sideways, there was a far, far, simpler method of getting at the answer.
elementary integral calculus. I didn't "know enough" to tackle it the
hard way, but, in my ignorance, immediately saw the simple approach.
It turned out that the professor had overlooked the existence of the simple
approach when designing the problem. that was the problem that "nobody"
was expected to get entirely right. OOPS!

For some reason, I was _not_ terribly popular with TAs, and even some
professors, in college.

OTOH, many of the profs and I got along fabulously. Intro assembler-language
course, and about the 3rd assignment is to write a sort routine -- trivial
one -- given an array of numbers in memory, sort into order. Everybody else
is struggling with a simple bubble sort -- I turn in an insertion sort that
doesn't use _any_ additional storage; everything is in registers. Comes
back from grading with a single comment across the top:
"And now, for something COMPLETELY different..."
I _liked_ that professor!


On the other hand, there was the 'algorithms' class. where, at one point,
we had to write, and *time*, various sorting algorithms. In the language
of our choice. So we could 'see for ourselves' the relative performance
of the various algorithms. I chose to write in assembler, and the prof
got upset. Two reasons: 1) he didn't understand assembler, 2) my results
didn't show what they were supposed to show -- he was convinced I'd done
something wrong. We had to turn in the programs, so he could critique the
style, and verify the performance. My "inconsistent" performance numbers
*did* verify, somewhat to his consternation. He had to go consult some
of the gurus over at the computer center about the code. They looked at
it, and verified that they were all 'good quality' implementations of the
algorithms.

So, *why* was 'bubble sort' _faster_ than all the other algorithms, for
anything that would fit in memory on that machine? Things *AINT* supposed
to work that way! _Hardware_ quirk. that machine had a very small
instruction cache. Just barely big enough to hold a carefully coded
bubble sort. Any 'smarter' algorithm didn't fit in the cache. and you
had constant reloading from main memory. Plus, physical memory was
small enough that _within the constraints of available memory, you
didn't get enough advantage from the lower 'order' to make up for the
much larger constant.

That Prof was seriously miffed at having the 'real world' trample all over
his nice theories.

>>>Point is, the "It's impossible, you can't do it" is a tactic that people
>>>to use to get people like you and me to work on something. Just so you
>>>know. Not saying it's a problem, because those are usually the fun
>>>projects anyway, but just something to be aware of.
>
>> *snort* I'd tumbled to _that_ by about fifth grade. Never got sucked into
>> anything unless I *wanted* to.
>
>Just checking. Because I used to work with a really dumb smart guy who
>still hadn't figured it out by age 30, and the sight of it dawning on
>him as I explained what was going on, was _priceless_.

I daresay.

>> It's like you say, though -- for those who enjoy "problem solving" those are
>> the 'fun' projects. beats the h*ll out of doing routine support work
>> any day.
>
>I don't mind the end-users so much now that I don't have to deal with
>them, unless there's a "Sherlock Holmes" thing going on.

I was talking about 'maintenance coding', not user hand-holding. I generally
enjoyed that, too. Except for the guy who got it into his head that I was
a Lotus 1-2-3 guru. A program I knew *NOTHING* about. He'd ask me to come
out to his desk, and say "I've got this problem. I'm trying to do to thus-
and-such, and it won't work." My invariable response was "Give me the 1-2-3
manual. Lessee, the index says 'thus-and-such' is on page xxx. Page xxx
says..." and I would read verbatim from the manual. "Gee. THANKS!!! That
does it!" *sigh* I'm glad _he_ understood it. Frequently _I_ didn't!
But, that's how a consultant gets a reputation as an expert. <wry grin>


>> Then there was the day I made the 'mistake' of suggesting to the boss that
>> I might be able to improve the performance of our 'critical path' project
>> scheduling software (which was believed to be the fastest package then
>> in existence at that work). The boss was doubtful -- *very* doubtful in
>> fact -- giving me permission to try, but saying "I'm 'Thomas'". I found
>> out *later* that that program was his pride-and-joy, that he had sweated
>> blood optimizing it. Well, 4 days later, I'm back to see him. Requesting
>> an appointment with "Mr. Thomas". Puzzlement, he can't place any client
>> named "Thomas". then he remembers "Oh??" "Yup!" (with a *BIG* grin.)
>> And show him a quick-and-dirty that is more than *one*hundred*times* faster
>> than the production software. Disbelief was rampant, to put it mildly.
>> It took numerous runs, with radical changes to the data, before he'd believe
>> that it was calculating the entire solution each time.
>
>Easy to step on someone's toes by making a radical change to something
>they've been improving incrementally. Not that that stops me, but it's
>understandable. I'm told that at times like that, there's this thing
>called "tact" that I should try to use (shrug?) whatever that is.

This wasn't a tact issue -- it was just that he'd been tuning that program
for a number of years. and it was known to the fastest thing going, vs.
what _any_ of the competition had. The new version simply _couldn't_ be
*that*much* faster. He _had_ sort of lit-up (friendly!) when he figured
out the "Mr. Thomas" reference -- I think figuring I might have found a
way to squeeze out maybe 10-20% faster runs. 100x, on the other hand wasn't
credible. 'Incredible' it was, in the *literal* meaning of the word :)

>> Boss had a *real* problem with that piece of work. Terribly conflicted.
>> *SERIOUS* "pride of authorship" in the work he had done on the one side, and
>> cupidity on the other. On same-size networks, on roughly equivalent CPUs,
>> competing software would have run-times measured in hours. Our production
>> product gave you enough time to go have a somewhat leisurely cup of coffee
>> (i.e. the 10-15 minute range). My 'improved' version reduced the calculation
>> time to under 10 *seconds*. Not even enough time to stand up. :) The
>> 'economic advantage' of _that_ was obvious to him.
>
>Lovely, that!

Yeah. Unfortunately *he* didn't realize/recognize the depth of the conflict,
While cupidity governed his primary decisions, there _was_ still the other
stuff going on.

>> It did get a little funny though -- the performance of the whole package when
>> I got through 'playing with it' was so high that there was a degree of
>> disbelief that it could "really" be doing what it claimed. One example;
>> IBM was building a new chip-fabrication plant on the East Coast. They had
>> a project-scheduling package that ran on their mid-range systems. the
>> complexity of the fab plant construction was exceeding the limits of
>> that software, _and_ taking almost an entire shift (8 hours) to calculate
>> a set of solutions. The general contractor was _insisting_ that they
>> user our service; so, eventually, an entire troop of IBM big-wigs came
>> out to our offices for the 'dog and pony show'.
>
>That's normally a clear setup for a catastrophic setup during a demo.
>As I'm sure you know.

>> We had already input
>> the data for their project into the system, to for the demonstration.
>> *I* am the "lucky" guy who gets to do the demo. I'm showing the date-entry
>> capabilities, review and editing stuff, etc. to establish that it's the
>> real project data, and then I do the 'generate solution' command.
>
>...and here it comes...
>
>> 12 seconds later, our computer says the solution is ready; so I'm showing
>> those who are paying attention that we do have a solution. "now, lets
>> change some data and re-solve", Doing this for several iterations, I push
>> the 'critical path' all around the project, leaving no doubt that actual
>> solutions are being generated. One final set of data edits, to remove
>> all the changes, and another solution generation, About this point, the
>> 'top dog' pulls his awareness back to the demo -- 'how long till we see
>> some answers?' he asks. His disbelief, when *his* people insist to him
>> that it's =already= been done, and not just once, but _half_a_dozen_times_,
>> was a sight to see.
>
>I _love_ that look.

My boss, back in the corner, was thoroughly enjoying it.
I *really* didn't know enough to appreciate it. 2nd job, fresh out of college.

The IBM bigwig _really_ thought the guy was pulling his leg, at first.

He knew what kind of 'toy' equipment we were running on (Data General mini),
and had been using the IBM in-house product for years -- where the turn-
around time on _much_smaller_ projects was 10s of minutes, if not
hours. This *exact* dataset -- on their (much bigger) platform -- had a
run-time that was just over eight _hours_.

I _think_ that crew came out with the intention of a quick once-over, and
then dismiss it as 'unworkable' for any reason they could think up. You
realize that this was IBM corporate, coming to a _non-IBM-equipment_ shop
for data-processing services. What kind of odds would you offer _against_
that =actually= happening?

They went away sold. They hired us.

>> The fact that he was
>> doing a binary search of a _disk_file_, and I was doing a linear search
>> of an array _in_memory_ had a *great* deal to do with my approach being
>> faster.
>
>Still applies today. Index that database & keep the index in RAM.
>Seems blisteringly obvious, but at the time, the field was still full of
>surprises. What am I saying - it's still full of surprises...

Part of it was 'database organization', too. Split the database into
multiple parallel tables (although this violates 'standard' database design),
so that you can pull in *only* the critical fields for any particular
operation. Then pull the entire table into memory in -one- operation,
rather than a row-by-row read. (not forgetting the 'incidentals', like
declaring that disk allocation for that file was to be contiguous, and
creating it at maximum size.

Even the report generator worked the same way. compose an entire block
of pages _in_memory_ (I had room for 5 print pages), and then issue _one_
system call to output the whole mess. Made the report writer more than
100x faster, just due to the I/O reductions.


When somebody was using that package, it was *immediately* obvious on
the system status monitoring tools. Bam, the system I/O rate goes through
the roof (like 8x the normal load rate); BANG! CPU utilization hits 100%,
and stays there, while I/O plummets back to normal; Then the CPU load
drops to normal, with another big spike in I/O. Nothing else on the system
came close to touching _either_ the CPU utilization or the I/O rates.
It _was_ fun to watch.

>> The boss understood _programming_. I understood *systems*.
>
>Right. The best possible improvement to the wrong solution still gives
>you the wrong solution, in the end. In his case the fundamental design
>flaw was masked by the improvements he was making to it.

Even deadlier. He's started out developing something to solve _small_
networks (that did fit into memory). As he got the software "good",
he needed to be able to deal with more network elements than there was
memory available. "Paging" the data to disk was an 'obvious' solution.
(no hardware VM, no O/S support, memory management _was_ the domain of
the application program.)

I had a significant advantage -- looking at initially as a 'big' problem.
And, if you didn't have room for all the data, and all the code, you
keep only the 'critical' part for any given step in memory (but keep _all_
of that), and do the same thing with the code. modularize it, with only
a single module in memory at at time. Not even 'overlays', a whole
flock of stand-alone programs, and an entirely separate 'user interface'
program that did nothing in and of itself, just the function menu display
and invoked the other tools, as needed -- some menu options invoked only
one tool, others invoked multiple tools in succession.

Running with a _total_ address-space of 32 k words, most of the tools had
declared data areas in excess of 27K words this left d*mn little room
for code. :)

>
>> By the time I got _done_ playing, performance was just over 3-orders of
>> magnitude better then the prior version -- on a 'maximum-size' network,
>> *and* the maximum-size of the project it could handle was _60%_ larger.
>> (this is a textbook "order n-squared" problem, so the total performance
>> differential was about 3.5 orders of magnitude. Not too shabby! :)
>
>Fun stuff...

In article <[email protected]>,
Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Tue, 31 May 2005 22:35:31 -0000, Robert Bonomi
><[email protected]> wrote:
>> Only to
>> find that *now* that the crime is happening "somewhere else". This was
>> a 'bug' with *legs* -- it MOVED!
>
>Sounds like a timing problem (race condition)?

highly doubtful. *Absolutely* reliable for occuring and at what location in
any particular build.

It was just that inserting/changing the diagnostic instrumentation caused
the location to migrate.

Also, hard to get a timing problem, with a single, self-contained, module
that is merely doing a sh*tload of computations.
>
>> In desperation, played with the order in which the modules were linked,
>> found a sequence where (presumably *still* happening) memory corruption
>> did not affect the answers coming out, and released it that way. Put a
>> *LOUD* note in the source, documenting the existence of the problem; that
>> if the existing code was linked in _this_ order, the problem was 'harmless',
>> and that _any_ modification of any component was "highly risky".
>
>I love finding those.

I figured that the next guy along deserved the information.
Heck, he makes some trivial one-line change, and the "Heisen-bug"
re-appears, and there he goes, trying to figure out how *THAT* change
causes the error "somewhere *totally* unrelated" to what he did.
Possibly even happens _before_ the program gets to the point where he
made the change.

>> This was documentation that *literally* started off:
>> "Warning, Will Robinson. WARNING!!"
>> and ended with "All hope abandon, ye who press 'enter' here."
>
>My personal favorite is writing error messages like "There is no way
>that you should ever see this error message." But, you don't want an
>unhandled exception, even if it's "impossible".
>
I did enough of those, I had a standard format for it:
"Impossible error {{number}}
Internal program logic error.
Notify programming immediately!"

In article <[email protected]>,
Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:

> I don't think I am in rec.woodworking anymore, Toto.

Use the Filter, Luke!

--
~ Stay Calm... Be Brave... Wait for the Signs ~
------------------------------------------------------
One site: <http://www.balderstone.ca>
The other site, with ww links<http://www.woodenwabbits.com>

I thought AVG was free for personal use. Been using it on a PC for
some years. It updates automatically, scans email. If you are using
it for business, you need to buy the license.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 08:53:44 -0700, nospambob <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Convinced me, bought it this morning. Thanks all for the suggestion
>and support.
>
>On Wed, 25 May 2005 18:50:03 -0400, "Ian Wheeler"
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>AVG gets my vote as well. Been using the free version for about a year, it
>>updates very smoothly every day, very easy to use (nothing to do) and
>>integrates perfectly into Outlook.
>>
>>Ian

On Wed, 25 May 2005 07:41:52 -0700, nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

AVG antivirus, free, from www.grisoft.com is excellent. Same updates as
Norton and McAfee, on the same days, good cleaning abilities, and
automatic scans and updates are standard.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>> there are other options available.
>
> OS X
> Virus free since April 2001.

In other words, for the entire history of OSX.

> UNIX rules!!!

I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.

> and prior to installing OS X:
>
> OS 9 and previous
> Virus free since Jan. 1993.

There ya go.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:45:33 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> Robatoy <[email protected]> writes:
>
>
> [...]
>
>> OS 9 and previous
>> Virus free since Jan. 1993.
>
> OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)

Ahhhhh, another person who knows OS-9. Mine was on a 6809E. Yours?

Dave "Feeling old..." Hinz

On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:03:37 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Robatoy <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> > OS 9 and previous
>> > Virus free since Jan. 1993.
>>
>> OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)
>
> Cute.
> OS 6 (SIX) wasn't even old by 1993.

I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982.

> I knew some parts of 'Old Europe' were a bit behind on some things, doc,
> but system 7.6 wasn't released till Jan 24 1997.
> This time, it seems, you were ahead by at least 7 years with the release
> of OS 9.0 which was released just prior to OS X to prepare mac users for
> the upgrade to OS X. I'd put that release around 1999 or 2000.

> Have somebody check your homework. <G>

Have somebody check your history. <G>

On Wed, 25 May 2005 14:12:33 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982.
>
> macintosh OS 9? Or are we talking Apple II stuff here?

Nope. Here:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~pruyne/os9faq.html

> If we are.. I'll beg off, as I know (in my best Schultz voice) NOTHING
> about any Apples prior to 1984.

OS9 as you may know by now, was fairly unix-ish. So it is more similar
to OS X than it was to the other, more recent OS 9.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:34:36 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:45:33 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)

>> Ahhhhh, another person who knows OS-9. Mine was on a 6809E. Yours?

> Mostly 68K's VME-bus.

Ah. Never got to run it on anything that new. Fun times, as you
said...mostly.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 15:55:40 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:

>> I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>
> Longest I have up is 419 days, FreeBSD, and only because of a major
> power outtage (UPS couldn't last 13 hrs). Prior to that, it had a 642
> day uptime.

Nice. Does FreeBSD have the bug where after 497 days, the uptime
display starts over at 0 days? First time that linux box did it, I
spent some non-trivial time trying to figure out what the hell went
wrong. Turned out I just was seeing the uptime reporting bug.

Been around that twice on the system described above. It was a sunday
morning in 2002 when it was last bounced...and that was a planned
reboot. It. Just. Works.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:27:22 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 14:12:33 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > In article <[email protected]>,
>> > Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982.
>> >
>> > macintosh OS 9? Or are we talking Apple II stuff here?
>>
>> Nope. Here:
>> http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~pruyne/os9faq.html
>>
>> > If we are.. I'll beg off, as I know (in my best Schultz voice) NOTHING
>> > about any Apples prior to 1984.
>>
>> OS9 as you may know by now, was fairly unix-ish. So it is more similar
>> to OS X than it was to the other, more recent OS 9.

> Whelllll..egg on MY face.
> Here I thought I knew what I was talking about.

Well, you _do_ know what you're talking about! You just didn't know
what _we_ were talking about. A subtle but important distinction.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:58:56 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:

>> Nice. Does FreeBSD have the bug where after 497 days, the uptime
>> display starts over at 0 days? First time that linux box did it, I
>> spent some non-trivial time trying to figure out what the hell went
>> wrong. Turned out I just was seeing the uptime reporting bug.
>
> Not at all, my uptime was showing 642 days when we lost the power. 497
> seems like such a weird number to bug out on (only 9 bits in use, but
> first 5 bits are 1s and the rest 0s with the last bit hitting a 1 = 497).

Number of seconds crossing some bit boundary maybe? Dunno, netcraft
has a "how long has this site been up" with a link that talks about the
bug, maybe it'll explain it there.
>
>> Been around that twice on the system described above. It was a sunday
>> morning in 2002 when it was last bounced...and that was a planned
>> reboot. It. Just. Works.

> My home desktop is FreeBSD, my desktop at work is FreeBSD, my laptop is
> windows, I also have a Solaris and 7 AIX boxes at home and a couple of
> windows machines for the wife and daughter. At work, I manage AIX,
> Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Windows servers (over 200 in this office
> alone). Thank goodness I don't do desktop support (over 1500 desktops
> and laptops at our company).

Sounds like we're in similar worlds. My home systems include
Sparcs from Sparc10 through Ultra60s, an SGI Indy, an SGI O2, a Dec
Alpha (running FreeBSD this month), couple of linux boxes, the 2 macs,
and a laptop that can boot into Windows if it has to. Work is mostly
Solaris and Linux, and the box I'm on right now is Ubuntu Linux which is
a nice debian-ish distro with better packages.

Beats working, y'know?

On Wed, 25 May 2005 14:37:08 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>> I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982
>>
>
> You beat me to it, Dave. IIRC, it was written OS/9, but I'm not sure.
> I do remember being impressed with it at the time. I think it required
> a 6809 and wouldn't run on a 6800,

Yes from my memory as well, hence the /9 I think?

> but again it's been a long time so I
> could be mistaken. Didn't it have some sort of dynamic function loading
> that was new, at least for micros?

Yes, the device and library structures, along with of course the syntax,
was very unix-ish. Pretty good for early 80's on an 8-bit micro.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:42:22 -0700, Charles Spitzer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...

>> I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.

> i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9 years.

Not surprising. I should mention that the Linux box in question is
running 3 websites with thousands of hits a day, and a monitoring
application that watches our ecommerce sites, sends notifications, and
so on - so it's a busy little box, not just off in a corner building
uptime. (Not implying your clients' box is like that, not my point).

On Wed, 25 May 2005 18:26:30 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Charles Spitzer wrote:
>> "Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>> news:[email protected]...

>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>
>> i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9 years.

> That would be one out-of-date kernel with gawd only knows how many
> security holes in it.

Yup, it sure would. But, if it's located in the right place,
network-wise, the risk is minimized.

On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:

> Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
> That was fun...

AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!

Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!

On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:30:35 -0700, Tim Douglass <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>Before everybody takes their shirts off, I only toot the Mac horn when
>>the topic has presented itself. I NEVER start threads extolling the
>>virtues of the vastly superior, crash-worthiness, viral immunity,
>>functionality and blazing speed of this obviously better platform.
>
> The whole Mac/Unix/Linux thing really torques me because those who
> tout it so heavily never seem to consider that it is darn hard to come
> up with commercial applications to accomplish real work on them.

Like what? I have yet to find something I can't do.

> I
> have 40 some apps on my Windows XP box, of which only 3-4 are
> utilities. I use them all on a regular basis. They are all commercial
> applications with support available.

*nix and Mac have this, of course. Some of 'em are even free, with paid
support if you feel the need.

> They all installed the first time
> w/o problems and most have been upgraded w/o problems.

I'm not seeing a difference yet.

> I have been
> running MS operating systems since 1986 on my personal computers at
> home and have never had a virus. I buy cheap hardware from God only
> knows where and plug it in and it works - every time.

If I choose to use Linux on commodity hardware, it works every time as
well.

> I despise Windows for many reasons - security included - but it works
> when you need to get work done - something I never found to be true
> with Linux apps. And there is software out there for just about
> anything you want to do - unlike either Linux/Unix or Mac.

What specific need have you been unable to find an app for? The "There
aren't any apps" argument was sort-of valid 5 years ago, but today? Not
hardly.

> If the Linux community would go after commercial software developers
> so that there were some real applications available it might make some
> inroads, but Open Office just doesn't cut it. Likewise if Apple were
> to blow the box open so that I can slap in cheap off-shore upgrades

Every Apple tower system made in recent memory (last to generations at
least) has been standard hardware for user-replacable stuff. Memory,
cards, disk, and so on. Maybe you haven't looked real close?

> when I want to then open up their software licensing rules and re-work
> that horrid user interface they would be worth a look.

I have never heard anyone else complain that Apple's UI is difficult to
use.

> But for now, in
> the real world of people who need to do lots of different tasks,
> Windows XP is the clear winner in terms of usability and
> functionality.

Well, if you say so. Glad you're happy; you just don't know what you're
missing.

> It's about time for my semi-annual Linux trial, so this opinion is
> subject to change if the conditions have changed.

Are you open to suggestions?

> "We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"

"Bad news & good news, Kid. Bad news is that you're going to be
sacrificed at dawn. Good news is that I know how to get you out of
it..."

On Thu, 26 May 2005 13:41:08 +0800, Old Nick <nsnsafemail#iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
> Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
> there.

You're confusing "popularity" with "vulnerability".

On Thu, 26 May 2005 20:07:18 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 16:58:56 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
>>>> Nice. Does FreeBSD have the bug where after 497 days, the uptime
>>>> display starts over at 0 days? First time that linux box did it, I
>>>> spent some non-trivial time trying to figure out what the hell went
>>>> wrong. Turned out I just was seeing the uptime reporting bug.
>>>
>>> Not at all, my uptime was showing 642 days when we lost the power. 497
>>> seems like such a weird number to bug out on (only 9 bits in use, but
>>> first 5 bits are 1s and the rest 0s with the last bit hitting a 1 = 497).
>>
>> Number of seconds crossing some bit boundary maybe? Dunno, netcraft
>
> Uptime is calculated from "jiffies", time slices of the kernel.
> Usually you have 100 jiffies in a second (the HZ constant in the
> kernel include files). 24*60*60*100*497=4294080000, which is
> bigger than 2^32=4294967295, so the rollover occurs after 496 days, 2
> hours, 27 minutes, 52 seconds and 95 extra jiffies...

Ah. Thanks for the concise explaination. Seemed like some "magic
number" kind of a rollover, glad to know it makes sense.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 12:16:53 -0700, Charles Spitzer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> another one was a rail road who had brick walled off one of our computers
> into a room that had no other door. it was 3 years before they even found it
> by tracing cables.

Yup, I had a Sparc 2 get walled into a non-room in a similar manner.
It just continued to do it's job, and I put a sign on the wall with a
reference to Edgar Allen Poe, a cask of amantillado, and the server in
question, so whoever took my place would have a hint where it was. I
should touch base with the current crew & see if they're still using
it...

On Thu, 26 May 2005 23:07:02 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy
>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>> That was fun...
>>
>>AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>
>>Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>
> WATFIV
> SPSS
> BAL
> SOC 4

Nothing. Not a twinge of recognition even.

> PL/C

OUCH!

> See, I know the *real* swear-words! <grin>

I see now that I am in the presence of a true master.

> I actually enjoyed using FORTRAN. It was a lot more tolerable, after you
> figured out "equivalents" for 'useful' features in other languages. I even
> managed "array of pointer to function" that didn't give any even ANSI WARNING
> messages.

I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
it's set to. OK, now, use it.

> I'm *not* going to repeat what the salesman for a high-end Fortran-to-C
> conversion service said when he got some of that code for a demo of their
> product. <evil grin>

No conversion software has ever been worth a damn, that I've seen.

> Then there was the time the boss made me write more than 40 lines of comments
> to document a _single_ line of Fortran code. A *very*simple* line of code.
> all it did was a _single_ 'shift' operation. This was one of those things
> where _what_ was happening was absolutely clear, but *WHY* it worked took
> a _lot_ of explaining. an 'abuse the data representation' situation. :)

There's a "guide to writing obfuscated code" somewhere which is great
reading for amusement purposes. Unfortunately, some of the code-monkeys
I've worked with have mistaken it for a style guide, I think.
Ah, here one is, but it's not the one I was thinking:
http://mindprod.com/unmainobfuscation.html

The one I was thinking talked about using variable names that looked
like commands and so on, but my google-fu is deficient today.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 17:02:13 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>> > That was fun...
>>
>> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>
>> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>>
> I'll see you and raise you a FORTH.

Actually, I rather liked FORTH. Built a 6500-based micro back in, er,
'80 or '81 maybe, that used it. PicoFORTH maybe?

> "Forth is a recursive language. You can't understand Forth till you
> understand Forth."

Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
assembler much easier.

> I wrote a Forth interpreter for a Modcomp mini once when I was between
> projects and bored. The guy in the next office outdid me - he took the
> Forth and used it to build a Lisp interpreter :-).

Now that, is just _wrong_.

On Fri, 27 May 2005 02:52:43 GMT, jo4hn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>>That was fun...
>>
>>
>> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>
>> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>>
>>
> Humph. Late comer. How about Fortran I and FAP, later MAP and Fortran
> II.

'79 or '80 is as early as I get, having been 12 years old at the time.

> Lots of people writing good stuff to augment the manufacturer's
> offerings, including CARE (CDC 924 assembler), Boolfinder (JPL 7044 link
> editor), and a memory management system for 360 75's running RTOS/JPLOS
> (can't remember the name). The last three are unfair because I wrote
> them (most of them anyway) in about 1963, 1968, and 1971.

/tip of the hat

On Thu, 26 May 2005 23:08:17 -0400, Mike Marlow <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>> On Thu, 26 May 2005 13:41:08 +0800, Old Nick <nsnsafemail#iinet.net.au>
> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
>> > Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
>> > there.
>>
>> You're confusing "popularity" with "vulnerability".
>
> But it is vulnerable Dave. Open source code makes it more vulnerable than
> proprietary code.

That's straight out of the Microsoft propaganda mill, and is laughable.
The whole point of open-source software is the peer-review process. If
you tried to check in something that was insecure due to intent, or due
to just bad coding, (a) it gets caught, and (b) you lose credibility.
I'd rather trust thousands of geeks who are trying to do it right,
compared to one entity (Microsoft) whose motivation is profit. It's not
just a theoretical difference; compare vulnerabilities of, say, OpenBSD
vs. Windows XP. You might have trouble finding some for the former...

> It is a matter of poplularity at this point that makes
> *nix less attractive to the average adolescent with too much time on his
> hands. CERT advisories make it clear that *nix is certainly vulnerable.

And yet, those vunlerabilities are usually a case of someone changing
something in an unwise way, to expose the possibility of a hypothetical
bug. Compare this to the trojan-of-the-week advisories that you're no
doubt also seeing for Windows.

As another person here has posted, even if you exploit user or
process-level security holes, you don't get system level access. This
is in sharp contrast to Windows where the user and window manager run
with system-changing authority. That fundamental difference is the
critical difference. No matter how a Unix user screws up, or what they
run, they can't hurt the system.

On Fri, 27 May 2005 05:57:53 -0500, Prometheus <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 15:55:40 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>>
>>>
>>> I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>>
>>
>>Longest I have up is 419 days, FreeBSD, and only because of a major
>>power outtage (UPS couldn't last 13 hrs). Prior to that, it had a 642
>>day uptime.
>
> All right, I know you Linux guys are going to blink a couple of times
> and scratch your heads, wondering how I could even think to ask such a
> thing, but why one Earth would you care how long the computer has been
> running continously?

Well, as I mentioned, one of mine is monitoring several dozen financial
service provider websites that our company has on the Internet. My
boss's boss's boss would get touchy if we didn't know something went
down because the monitoring boxes failed, because people wouldn't be
able to do things like buy houses and other kinda important stuff.

> I know mine has been on for a couple of months
> (Win2000 professional) but I can't imagine keeping track of the number
> of days,

We're not keeping track of it, just run 'uptime' and it tells ya. Well,
on the one, I know it rolled over the 497 days thing twice, so I guess
I'm keeping track of it somewhat...


> or even really caring if it got shut off for a while (it just
> stays on because I'm sort of lazy, and I figure the cancer-research
> screensaver can use it when I'm otherwise occupied). What are you
> doing, trying to find the zillionth decimal place of PI with a 486 or
> something equally odd?

No, it's running a critical business function that can't just crash at
random times because it feels like it. Someone else mentioned a control
system at a steel mill, which would require literally tons of metal to
be reprocessed should it fail.

But, raw uptime isn't the primary reason, or even _a_ primary reason, to
switch to an OS. Just Not Breaking is damn nice once you get used to
it.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 19:54:31 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think I am in rec.woodworking anymore, Toto.

Subject lines. Use them. Love them.

On Fri, 27 May 2005 08:11:33 -0700, nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
> I understood from the couple of days use of the free version that
> E-mail was excluded and there was no support.

Nope, the free one works for email far as I know, and in the dozens of
systems I've installed it on, I've never _needed_ support, so...

> After McAfee I've had
> all of the no support I need! It is labeled Professional but that's
> merely Madison Ave chatter as far as I'm concerned.

AVG Personal (or Home Edition...whichever) probably has the license
terms you're after. Far as I know, that's the _only_ difference between
the free one and the commercial version of AVG. But, hey, if you're
really using it on a business system, don't be a schmuck - pay the
guys. Their whole purpose of making the personal version free, is so
that the people using it at home will have their bosses buy it at work,
I'd think.

On 27 May 2005 15:12:53 GMT, Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2005 17:02:13 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
>> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>>> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>> > That was fun...
>>>
>>> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>>
>>> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>>>
>> I'll see you and raise you a FORTH.
>
> Actually, I rather liked FORTH. Built a 6500-based micro back in, er,
> '80 or '81 maybe, that used it. PicoFORTH maybe?

Followup to myself - it may have been an '1802' CPU.

On Fri, 27 May 2005 12:55:20 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
> ...
>
>> I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
>> Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
>> it's set to. OK, now, use it.
> ...
>
> I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
> but fail to recognize the above complaint???

Well, to be fair, it's been ...24 years since I took that class, so my
memory may be "a bit rusty". I do remember not liking it at all.

On Sat, 28 May 2005 09:19:45 -0400, Mike Marlow <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>>
>> AVG Personal (or Home Edition...whichever) probably has the license
>> terms you're after. Far as I know, that's the _only_ difference between
>> the free one and the commercial version of AVG. But, hey, if you're
>> really using it on a business system, don't be a schmuck - pay the
>> guys.
>
> Cheers and slaps on the back. Thank you Mr. Hinz.

Don't thank me, thank AVG. Hey, that rhymes and everything.

> In an internet world
> where people increasingly think it's the norm to expect everything for free
> and to pirate everything they like, there are not enough voices suggesting
> paying the guys who actually wrote a product that works. What a shame too,
> since the cost is so much less than if one went to McAffee, or (forbid...)
> Symantec.

Well, I've been making money in the software industry since 1981, so I'm
kind of sensitive to the issue. And, having had my work blatantly
stolen made me fed up enough with the shareware world to give that up,
so ...

On Fri, 27 May 2005 19:03:55 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 27 May 2005 12:55:20 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Dave Hinz wrote:
>> >>
>> > ...
>> >
>> >> I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
>> >> Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
>> >> it's set to. OK, now, use it.
>> > ...
>> >
>> > I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
>> > but fail to recognize the above complaint???
>>
>> Well, to be fair, it's been ...24 years since I took that class, so my
>> memory may be "a bit rusty". I do remember not liking it at all.
>
> Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)

I'd rather remove my own spleen with a spoon, thank you very much.

On Sat, 28 May 2005 01:46:45 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
>>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>>> Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
>>> bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
>>> assembler much easier.
>>>
>>It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that
>>drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about
>>Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what
>>I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about
>>the limit.
>
> That descriptor was usually applied to APL. where the 'half-life' for
> readability by the author was about half a day.

I used to work with a guy whose Perl is like that. (Sean, I'm gonna
kill you.)

On Mon, 30 May 2005 14:23:17 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:

> *GRIN* I had a reputation of "If you want something done, hunt up Bonomi,
> tell him it's 'impossible', and stay out of his hair for a couple of weeks."

Yeah, I used to do that too, until I twigged to the fact that people
were doing it intentionally to me. In college, (mumble) years ago, for
one of the fabrication classes the assignment was to make a 2-sided PCB
for a logic analyzer. "Can't be done single-sided, so don't even try".
Well, it wasn't _that_ tough to do (he forgot that components are also
jumpers), so I did it single-sided. He threatened me with an
incomplete, because he had specified double-sided...so I handed him the
other version done the way he wanted it.

Point is, the "It's impossible, you can't do it" is a tactic that people
to use to get people like you and me to work on something. Just so you
know. Not saying it's a problem, because those are usually the fun
projects anyway, but just something to be aware of.


Dave Hinz

On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:10:48 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 27 May 2005 19:03:55 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:

>> > Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)
>>
>> I'd rather remove my own spleen with a spoon, thank you very much.
>
> Nothing ventured, nothing gained... :)

Eactly. I'll stay over here, fully spleened and programming in the
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, thanks.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 13:11:01 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:10:48 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Dave Hinz wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Fri, 27 May 2005 19:03:55 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> >> > Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)
>> >>
>> >> I'd rather remove my own spleen with a spoon, thank you very much.
>> >
>> > Nothing ventured, nothing gained... :)
>>
>> Eactly. I'll stay over here, fully spleened and programming in the
>> Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, thanks.
>
> Would seem to be for differing class of problem than where I would use
> Fortran...

Yes; in this case "something I'll work with" vs. "something I'd rather
not".

> I've done quite a lot of Tcl, not much Perl

I can tweak and/or copy Tcl, but not write from scratch in it.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 18:31:26 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>>On Mon, 30 May 2005 14:23:17 -0000, Robert Bonomi
>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> *GRIN* I had a reputation of "If you want something done, hunt up Bonomi,
>>> tell him it's 'impossible', and stay out of his hair for a couple of weeks."
>>
>>Yeah, I used to do that too, until I twigged to the fact that people
>>were doing it intentionally to me. In college, (mumble) years ago, for
>>one of the fabrication classes the assignment was to make a 2-sided PCB
>>for a logic analyzer. "Can't be done single-sided, so don't even try".
>>Well, it wasn't _that_ tough to do (he forgot that components are also
>>jumpers), so I did it single-sided. He threatened me with an
>>incomplete, because he had specified double-sided...
>
> That's when you hand over the layout for the other side, showing the
> etched-away surrounds for all the holes *except* one, which is plated-through
> from ground on the other side. And explain it's a start towards TEMPEST
> protection. <grin>

Once again, I bow to the superiour deviousness. Deviousity.
Deveveiance. Whatever. Well played, Sir, is what I'm saying here.

>>Point is, the "It's impossible, you can't do it" is a tactic that people
>>to use to get people like you and me to work on something. Just so you
>>know. Not saying it's a problem, because those are usually the fun
>>projects anyway, but just something to be aware of.

> *snort* I'd tumbled to _that_ by about fifth grade. Never got sucked into
> anything unless I *wanted* to.

Just checking. Because I used to work with a really dumb smart guy who
still hadn't figured it out by age 30, and the sight of it dawning on
him as I explained what was going on, was _priceless_.

> It's like you say, though -- for those who enjoy "problem solving" those are
> the 'fun' projects. beats the h*ll out of doing routine support work
> any day.

I don't mind the end-users so much now that I don't have to deal with
them, unless there's a "Sherlock Holmes" thing going on.

> Then there was the day I made the 'mistake' of suggesting to the boss that
> I might be able to improve the performance of our 'critical path' project
> scheduling software (which was believed to be the fastest package then
> in existence at that work). The boss was doubtful -- *very* doubtful in
> fact -- giving me permission to try, but saying "I'm 'Thomas'". I found
> out *later* that that program was his pride-and-joy, that he had sweated
> blood optimizing it. Well, 4 days later, I'm back to see him. Requesting
> an appointment with "Mr. Thomas". Puzzlement, he can't place any client
> named "Thomas". then he remembers "Oh??" "Yup!" (with a *BIG* grin.)
> And show him a quick-and-dirty that is more than *one*hundred*times* faster
> than the production software. Disbelief was rampant, to put it mildly.
> It took numerous runs, with radical changes to the data, before he'd believe
> that it was calculating the entire solution each time.

Easy to step on someone's toes by making a radical change to something
they've been improving incrementally. Not that that stops me, but it's
understandable. I'm told that at times like that, there's this thing
called "tact" that I should try to use (shrug?) whatever that is.

> Boss had a *real* problem with that piece of work. Terribly conflicted.
> *SERIOUS* "pride of authorship" in the work he had done on the one side, and
> cupidity on the other. On same-size networks, on roughly equivalent CPUs,
> competing software would have run-times measured in hours. Our production
> product gave you enough time to go have a somewhat leisurely cup of coffee
> (i.e. the 10-15 minute range). My 'improved' version reduced the calculation
> time to under 10 *seconds*. Not even enough time to stand up. :) The
> 'economic advantage' of _that_ was obvious to him.

Lovely, that!

> It did get a little funny though -- the performance of the whole package when
> I got through 'playing with it' was so high that there was a degree of
> disbelief that it could "really" be doing what it claimed. One example;
> IBM was building a new chip-fabrication plant on the East Coast. They had
> a project-scheduling package that ran on their mid-range systems. the
> complexity of the fab plant construction was exceeding the limits of
> that software, _and_ taking almost an entire shift (8 hours) to calculate
> a set of solutions. The general contractor was _insisting_ that they
> user our service; so, eventually, an entire troop of IBM big-wigs came
> out to our offices for the 'dog and pony show'.

That's normally a clear setup for a catastrophic setup during a demo.
As I'm sure you know.

> We had already input
> the data for their project into the system, to for the demonstration.
> *I* am the "lucky" guy who gets to do the demo. I'm showing the date-entry
> capabilities, review and editing stuff, etc. to establish that it's the
> real project data, and then I do the 'generate solution' command.

...and here it comes...

> 12 seconds later, our computer says the solution is ready; so I'm showing
> those who are paying attention that we do have a solution. "now, lets
> change some data and re-solve", Doing this for several iterations, I push
> the 'critical path' all around the project, leaving no doubt that actual
> solutions are being generated. One final set of data edits, to remove
> all the changes, and another solution generation, About this point, the
> 'top dog' pulls his awareness back to the demo -- 'how long till we see
> some answers?' he asks. His disbelief, when *his* people insist to him
> that it's =already= been done, and not just once, but _half_a_dozen_times_,
> was a sight to see.

I _love_ that look.

> The fact that he was
> doing a binary search of a _disk_file_, and I was doing a linear search
> of an array _in_memory_ had a *great* deal to do with my approach being
> faster.

Still applies today. Index that database & keep the index in RAM.
Seems blisteringly obvious, but at the time, the field was still full of
surprises. What am I saying - it's still full of surprises...

> The boss understood _programming_. I understood *systems*.

Right. The best possible improvement to the wrong solution still gives
you the wrong solution, in the end. In his case the fundamental design
flaw was masked by the improvements he was making to it.

> By the time I got _done_ playing, performance was just over 3-orders of
> magnitude better then the prior version -- on a 'maximum-size' network,
> *and* the maximum-size of the project it could handle was _60%_ larger.
> (this is a textbook "order n-squared" problem, so the total performance
> differential was about 3.5 orders of magnitude. Not too shabby! :)

Fun stuff...

On Tue, 31 May 2005 13:34:33 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> ...
>> Yes; in this case "something I'll work with" vs. "something I'd rather
>> not".
>
> I meant more in the sense that Fortran (or C/C++/...) are not what I
> would think of for solution language(s) for what I would consider
> suitable for Perl/Tcl/..., not that any one of them as being a personal
> choice within the general class...
>
>>
>> > I've done quite a lot of Tcl, not much Perl
>>
>> I can tweak and/or copy Tcl, but not write from scratch in it.
>
> About my state wrt Perl although if tweaking were to get at all involved
> "I'd rather not". :)
>
> Out of curiousity have you ever looked at current Fortran or are your
> past experiences the extent of knowledge?

It's been over 20 years, and I really don't want to go back there.
I'm doing sysadmin-project stuff now, so between shell scripting and
perl, I can do 95% of what I want to do.

> Many complaints cross-posted
> in comp.lang.fortran arise apparently from such long held perceptions.
> But, C++, it isn't even though there are forms of OOP making it into
> current proposals for the next Standard. (Of course, it isn't intended
> to be.)

Right, C++ is an entirely different set of problems.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 18:38:30 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:

>>I used to work with a guy whose Perl is like that. (Sean, I'm gonna
>>kill you.)

> "sufficiently advanced PERL is indistinguishable from line-noise".o

I wouldn't exactly call the PERL in question "advanced", but the guy who
wrote it would probably loudly disagree.

><grin>

It's not funny, trust me on this one ;)

On Tue, 31 May 2005 16:27:19 -0400, Norman D. Crow <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I wasn't in the software end of the business, but 27yr. with NCR Corp. as
> large scale system tech. produced a lot of funnies. First one was an
> insurance company, program running solid for about 3yr. suddenly starts
> blowing up, always at the same address. Turned out it was a situation which
> original programmer knew could occur, but had never debugged!

You mean like the 9/9/99 date bug that I personally wrote into more than
a few applications? I mean, come on, who in their right mind would
still be using this POS in 15 years...

...and oddly enough, in September '99, I got a phone call and found out.
It was OK though, the guy wasn't _in_ his right mind. "Hey, your
program broke!" "Um, OK, can you be less vague please?" "Yeah, this is
(name that rhymes with, oh, let's say, 'Dennis'). That program you
wrote for me just died."
"Let's see - that was....1983? 84? I think the warranty period
is over. My consulting rate these days is..."

The conversation was over, just like the previous time he called me for
immediate help. On Easter Sunday. He doesn't call me any more.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 16:09:19 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
> ...
>> It's been over 20 years, and I really don't want to go back there.
>> I'm doing sysadmin-project stuff now, so between shell scripting and
>> perl, I can do 95% of what I want to do.

> No, wasn't implying that at all...just that what started this sub-thread
> was a comment based on 20+ year old perceptions of a language that has
> changed dramatically...

Oh, I'm sure it has, and it definatly has a place. GE's MRI scanners
are still using Fortran in some of the heavy-duty math processing, or at
least were a few years ago. No reason to change it - it's great for
what it's great for.

On Tue, 31 May 2005 22:35:31 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Only to
> find that *now* that the crime is happening "somewhere else". This was
> a 'bug' with *legs* -- it MOVED!

Sounds like a timing problem (race condition)?

> In desperation, played with the order in which the modules were linked,
> found a sequence where (presumably *still* happening) memory corruption
> did not affect the answers coming out, and released it that way. Put a
> *LOUD* note in the source, documenting the existence of the problem; that
> if the existing code was linked in _this_ order, the problem was 'harmless',
> and that _any_ modification of any component was "highly risky".

I love finding those.

> This was documentation that *literally* started off:
> "Warning, Will Robinson. WARNING!!"
> and ended with "All hope abandon, ye who press 'enter' here."

My personal favorite is writing error messages like "There is no way
that you should ever see this error message." But, you don't want an
unhandled exception, even if it's "impossible".

On Tue, 31 May 2005 20:09:41 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
>> Eactly. I'll stay over here, fully spleened and programming in the
>> Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, thanks.
>>
> And we all know you have a well vented spleen, Dave :-).

Gotta keep the pipes cleaned out regularly, Larry...

On Tue, 31 May 2005 20:28:19 -0700, Mark & Juanita <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 31 May 2005 20:54:07 GMT, Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 31 May 2005 16:27:19 -0400, Norman D. Crow <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I wasn't in the software end of the business, but 27yr. with NCR Corp. as
>>> large scale system tech. produced a lot of funnies. First one was an
>>> insurance company, program running solid for about 3yr. suddenly starts
>>> blowing up, always at the same address. Turned out it was a situation which
>>> original programmer knew could occur, but had never debugged!
>>
>>You mean like the 9/9/99 date bug that I personally wrote into more than
>>a few applications? I mean, come on, who in their right mind would
>>still be using this POS in 15 years...
>>
>
> You mean you broke one of the first rules of programming? i.e, don't use
> conditions that are possible, even if highly improbable, to terminate
> loops. Or at least it was one of the first ones in our intro to
> programming course when I was in college 20+ years ago.

I specifically remember being taught _to_ use 9999 as a terminator, to
say "We're done processing data now". I'm sure that that particular
terminator was responsible for more than that Y2K bug.

> My first assignment out of college was designing and building automated
> test equipment. I was assigned to a "senior" engineer, I think he had
> around 8 years of experience :-) My assignment was writing the code to
> control an eprom programmer, he was designing, building, and designing the
> code for a much more sophisticated interface panel, designed to serve as an
> interface between the system being tested and a controlling computer. He
> had someone writing the assembler code for this panel to his design. When
> I finished my assignment I wound up helping him debug the code and hardware
> for the interface panel. While I had taken a modular, test a step at a
> time approach to my design, this more senior guy took a more wholistic
> approach, he had the first interface panel hardware assembled, did a
> cursory visual power signal check, blew all 30k bytes of assembler code
> into eprom, then turned on the panel expecting to get some sort of readout
> on the front panel -- he didn't.

Ouch. I tend to over-test and iterate as I'm writing something, myself.
Makes the problem more immediate with less "Now WTF did I do wrong and
when" head-scratching.

> It took several months of time to work
> through the hardware errors before we even got to the point of having the
> software start functioning.

Ow. Sounds like the run of multi-layer boards they had made, before
debugging the design. Turns out the component library had the wrong
info for a dual j/k flipflop - so all the resets were tied to the wrong
place through their resistors. I spent a non-trivial amount of time
making transparencies of the layers, tracing traces, and finding out
where I could drill which trace to get the right layer and not the wrong
layers, so I could avoid fly-wiring the whole damn thing. Engineer
never _looked at_ the design or he would have said "Hey, waitaminute,
you can't tie that there, it'll stay in reset all the time".

> One of the funniest parts of the assembler code, he had a module of code
> that had the comment, "should not have gotten here, set a flag so we don't
> get here again".

I must remember that one, thank you. I've found old code of mine which
includes comments like:

# Now we're going to do (thing). I'm not quite sure just yet how I'm
# going to pull this off, so let's read on and find out together, shall
# we?

(And I just learned that this version of vi automatically continues
comment blocks by adding the # after a cr/lf. That's kinda cool...)

> After he left the company, I inherited this monstrosity -- I convinced my
> supervisor that it would be cheaper and better for all involved if I just
> started over and redesigned the whole thing, hardware, code and all from
> the ground up. My supervisor agreed. The resulting system did *not* have
> any places where I set a flag to make sure I didn't get somewhere I should
> not have gotten in the first place.

A total rewrite is hard to agree to, but when it's needed, it's needed.
We're re-writing something right now (ref: earlier death threats to
Sean), which unfortunately has to be done without breaking prod - but,
to the guy's credit, at least it's somewhat modular so we can fix one
chunk at a time, just keep the gazintas and gazottas the same.

On Thu, 02 Jun 2005 11:42:05 -0000, Robert Bonomi <[email protected]> wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>,
> Dave Hinz <[email protected]> wrote:
>>On Tue, 31 May 2005 22:35:31 -0000, Robert Bonomi
>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Only to
>>> find that *now* that the crime is happening "somewhere else". This was
>>> a 'bug' with *legs* -- it MOVED!
>>
>>Sounds like a timing problem (race condition)?
>
> highly doubtful. *Absolutely* reliable for occuring and at what location in
> any particular build.
> It was just that inserting/changing the diagnostic instrumentation caused
> the location to migrate.

That's what we call 'Heisenberging the system' here. Change it's
behavior by trying to figure out WTF is going on.

> Also, hard to get a timing problem, with a single, self-contained, module
> that is merely doing a sh*tload of computations.

True, that.

>>I love finding those.
>
> I figured that the next guy along deserved the information.
> Heck, he makes some trivial one-line change, and the "Heisen-bug"

Ah, OK, so that's not a unique term. Figured it couldn't be.

> re-appears, and there he goes, trying to figure out how *THAT* change
> causes the error "somewhere *totally* unrelated" to what he did.
> Possibly even happens _before_ the program gets to the point where he
> made the change.

And people wonder why IT folks drink.

>>My personal favorite is writing error messages like "There is no way
>>that you should ever see this error message." But, you don't want an
>>unhandled exception, even if it's "impossible".

> I did enough of those, I had a standard format for it:
> "Impossible error {{number}}
> Internal program logic error.
> Notify programming immediately!"

Very nice. I should expand my error message vocabulary accordingly.

I understood from the couple of days use of the free version that
E-mail was excluded and there was no support. After McAfee I've had
all of the no support I need! It is labeled Professional but that's
merely Madison Ave chatter as far as I'm concerned.

On Thu, 26 May 2005 19:50:23 GMT, Phisherman <[email protected]> wrote:

>I thought AVG was free for personal use. Been using it on a PC for
>some years. It updates automatically, scans email. If you are using
>it for business, you need to buy the license.
>
>On Thu, 26 May 2005 08:53:44 -0700, nospambob <[email protected]>
>wrote:
>
>>Convinced me, bought it this morning. Thanks all for the suggestion
>>and support.
>>
>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 18:50:03 -0400, "Ian Wheeler"
>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>>AVG gets my vote as well. Been using the free version for about a year, it
>>>updates very smoothly every day, very easy to use (nothing to do) and
>>>integrates perfectly into Outlook.
>>>
>>>Ian

"nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

AVG Antivirus. They even have a 100% free version which works great and the
virus definitions are updated very regularly. Been using it here for last 6
months and still virus-free.
www.grisoft.com

--
Regards,

Dean Bielanowski
Editor,
Online Tool Reviews
http://www.onlinetoolreviews.com
Complete our tool survey, Win $200!
------------------------------------------------------------
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------------------------------------------------------------

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:03:37 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
> > In article <[email protected]>,
> > Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> Robatoy <[email protected]> writes:
> >>
> >>
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> > OS 9 and previous
> >> > Virus free since Jan. 1993.
> >>
> >> OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)
> >
> > Cute.
> > OS 6 (SIX) wasn't even old by 1993.
>
> I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982.
>
...

I (think) Robotoy is referring to Mac OS 9, not Microware (Radisys) OS9.

Google found a thread from a year or so ago where a respondent posted
the following brief history...

"Assuming you [mean] OS-9 the Real-Time OS and Not OS9 the Mac OS, OS9
first
started about 1978 on the 6809 processor. It was ported to the 68K
family
about 1982. In 1987 the OS was ported to other Processors, I believe
the
x86 was the first. This was know as OS9000 at the time. Since then
OS9
has been ported to the PPC,MIPS,Hitachi H series, Sparc, ARM, and other
processors.
For a detailed timeline you might want to contact Radisys(Microware)
directly."

Brings back many old memories...some good, some not so much. :)

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:45:33 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Robatoy <[email protected]> writes:
> >
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >> OS 9 and previous
> >> Virus free since Jan. 1993.
> >
> > OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)
>
> Ahhhhh, another person who knows OS-9. Mine was on a 6809E. Yours?
>
> Dave "Feeling old..." Hinz

Mostly 68K's VME-bus.

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 13:34:36 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, 25 May 2005 17:45:33 +0200, Juergen Hannappel <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > OS9 was pretty old by 1993... dou you run it on a 6809 or a 68000? ;-)
>
> >> Ahhhhh, another person who knows OS-9. Mine was on a 6809E. Yours?
>
> > Mostly 68K's VME-bus.
>
> Ah. Never got to run it on anything that new. Fun times, as you
> said...mostly.

Yes, indeedy, indeed! Most fun (truly) was the 3-CPU mobile
"man-replacement" robotic system for application as observer and minor
work in a power plant...great fun, that! (Wonder what the S. Koreans
ever did w/ it. When it shipped they were supposed to get us over for
training, but it never happened. Probably one of those good ideas that
never came to anything.)

Dave Hinz wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>In article <[email protected]>,
>> nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>>>there are other options available.
>>
>>OS X
>>Virus free since April 2001.
>
>
> In other words, for the entire history of OSX.
>
>
>>UNIX rules!!!
>
>
> I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>

Longest I have up is 419 days, FreeBSD, and only because of a major
power outtage (UPS couldn't last 13 hrs). Prior to that, it had a 642
day uptime.

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

Dave Hinz wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 15:55:40 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>Dave Hinz wrote:
>
>
>
>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>
>>Longest I have up is 419 days, FreeBSD, and only because of a major
>>power outtage (UPS couldn't last 13 hrs). Prior to that, it had a 642
>>day uptime.
>
>
> Nice. Does FreeBSD have the bug where after 497 days, the uptime
> display starts over at 0 days? First time that linux box did it, I
> spent some non-trivial time trying to figure out what the hell went
> wrong. Turned out I just was seeing the uptime reporting bug.

Not at all, my uptime was showing 642 days when we lost the power. 497
seems like such a weird number to bug out on (only 9 bits in use, but
first 5 bits are 1s and the rest 0s with the last bit hitting a 1 = 497).
>
> Been around that twice on the system described above. It was a sunday
> morning in 2002 when it was last bounced...and that was a planned
> reboot. It. Just. Works.

My home desktop is FreeBSD, my desktop at work is FreeBSD, my laptop is
windows, I also have a Solaris and 7 AIX boxes at home and a couple of
windows machines for the wife and daughter. At work, I manage AIX,
Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Windows servers (over 200 in this office
alone). Thank goodness I don't do desktop support (over 1500 desktops
and laptops at our company).

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

Charles Spitzer wrote:
> "Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>
>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>In article <[email protected]>,
>>> nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>>>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>>>>there are other options available.
>>>
>>>OS X
>>>Virus free since April 2001.
>>
>>In other words, for the entire history of OSX.
>>
>>
>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>
>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>
>
> i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9 years.
>
>
That would be one out-of-date kernel with gawd only knows how many
security holes in it.

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

Patrick Conroy wrote:
>
> Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote in
> news:[email protected]:
>
> > Mostly 68K's VME-bus.
>
> Ahhh - I was on the *other* side - Intel x86 and Multibus.
> Ran iRMX as the RTOS. rq$sendmessage()...

Ah, the dark side... :)

I remember the first time I had to deal w/ non-memory-mapped i/o and
segmented addresses...I'm still not over it some 20+ years later. :)

Charles Spitzer wrote:
> "Odinn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>
>>Charles Spitzer wrote:
>>
>>>"Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>>news:[email protected]...
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>>>>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>In article <[email protected]>,
>>>>>nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>>>>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>>>>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>>>>>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>>>>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>>>>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>>>>>>there are other options available.
>>>>>
>>>>>OS X
>>>>>Virus free since April 2001.
>>>>
>>>>In other words, for the entire history of OSX.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>>>
>>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>>
>>>
>>>i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9
>>>years.
>>
>>That would be one out-of-date kernel with gawd only knows how many
>>security holes in it.
>
>
> http://stratus.com
>
> no security holes. out of date perhaps, but lots of our customers don't
> upgrade for years and years if it's working ok. lots of our customers can't
> have the computer stop working for normal upgrades because there is no
> scheduled downtime allowed.
>
I don't know of a single 9 year old kernel (linux, freebsd, openbsd,
aix, solaris, etc) that doesn't have security holes. These can be
minimized by ACLs, firewalls and other means, but they still have
security holes.

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

Charles Spitzer wrote:
> "Odinn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>
>>Charles Spitzer wrote:
>>
>>>"Odinn" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>>news:[email protected]...
>>>
>>>
>>>>Charles Spitzer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>"Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
>>>>>news:[email protected]...
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
>>>>>>wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>In article <[email protected]>,
>>>>>>>nospambob <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>>>>>>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>>>>>>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start
>>>>>>>>it
>>>>>>>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>>>>>>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>>>>>>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering
>>>>>>>>if
>>>>>>>>there are other options available.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>OS X
>>>>>>>Virus free since April 2001.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>In other words, for the entire history of OSX.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>i think the current record for one of our customers is upwards of 9
>>>>>years.
>>>>
>>>>That would be one out-of-date kernel with gawd only knows how many
>>>>security holes in it.
>>>
>>>
>>>http://stratus.com
>>>
>>>no security holes. out of date perhaps, but lots of our customers don't
>>>upgrade for years and years if it's working ok. lots of our customers
>>>can't have the computer stop working for normal upgrades because there is
>>>no scheduled downtime allowed.
>>>
>>
>>I don't know of a single 9 year old kernel (linux, freebsd, openbsd, aix,
>>solaris, etc) that doesn't have security holes. These can be minimized by
>>ACLs, firewalls and other means, but they still have security holes.
>
>
> multics. i worked on it for many years. certified to b2. another os/hardware
> platform from the same company was certified at a2.
>
> there has never been a security hole used against stratus computers.
>
> just because you don't know of one doesn't mean there isn't one.
>

Just because there has never been a security hole used against a
computer doesn't mean one doesn't exist :)

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
...

> I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
> Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
> it's set to. OK, now, use it.
...

I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
but fail to recognize the above complaint???

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Thu, 26 May 2005 17:02:13 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:
> > In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> >> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
> >> > That was fun...
> >>
> >> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
> >>
> >> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
> >>
> > I'll see you and raise you a FORTH.
>
> Actually, I rather liked FORTH. Built a 6500-based micro back in, er,
> '80 or '81 maybe, that used it. PicoFORTH maybe?
>
> > "Forth is a recursive language. You can't understand Forth till you
> > understand Forth."
>
> Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
> bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
> assembler much easier.
>
> > I wrote a Forth interpreter for a Modcomp mini once when I was between
> > projects and bored. The guy in the next office outdid me - he took the
> > Forth and used it to build a Lisp interpreter :-).
>
> Now that, is just _wrong_.

I also enjoyed Forth <a lot>...did many systems in robotics and other
embedded or real time monitoring control from early 80s through
mid-90s. Had opportunity to meed Chuck several times at ORNL--a <most>
interesting and impressive fella...

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Fri, 27 May 2005 02:52:43 GMT, jo4hn <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
> >>>That was fun...
> >>
> >>
> >> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
> >>
> >> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
> >>
> >>
> > Humph. Late comer. How about Fortran I and FAP, later MAP and Fortran
> > II.
>
> '79 or '80 is as early as I get, having been 12 years old at the time.
>
> > Lots of people writing good stuff to augment the manufacturer's
> > offerings, including CARE (CDC 924 assembler), Boolfinder (JPL 7044 link
> > editor), and a memory management system for 360 75's running RTOS/JPLOS
> > (can't remember the name). The last three are unfair because I wrote
> > them (most of them anyway) in about 1963, 1968, and 1971.
>
> /tip of the hat

Ahead of me, also...I was just getting out of HS in '63 and didn't get
to touch the IBM 1620 as freshman back then...had a full semester of
hand-coding starting w/ binary, then machine language to prepare us for
FORTRAN coding forms... :)

lgb wrote:
>
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
> says...
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> > >
> > ...
> >
> > > I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
> > > Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
> > > it's set to. OK, now, use it.
> > ...
> >
> > I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
> > but fail to recognize the above complaint???
> >
>
> Same reaction here. Of course you had to use DIMENSION and EQUIVALENCE
> statements, but simple variables could be used without decaratives.

There was no requirement for EQUIVALENCE. I'd think only a small
fraction of all FORTRAN programs actually used it at all (although, of
course, there were/are reasons for needing it).

> Some versions even set all data to zero when the program started, so you
> wouldn't get the undefined values problem.

Non-standard and therefore, not wise if one ever moved platforms...but
I've seen a lot of code that relied on the behavior and a lot of errors
in comp.lang.fortran because of it... :(

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Fri, 27 May 2005 12:55:20 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >>
> > ...
> >
> >> I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
> >> Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
> >> it's set to. OK, now, use it.
> > ...
> >
> > I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
> > but fail to recognize the above complaint???
>
> Well, to be fair, it's been ...24 years since I took that class, so my
> memory may be "a bit rusty". I do remember not liking it at all.

Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)

lgb wrote:
>
> In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> > Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
> > bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
> > assembler much easier.
> >
> It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that
> drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about
> Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what
> I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about
> the limit.

One can write "write-only" code in any language...Forth has it's
practitioners of the art as does every other language.

Some of the most legible code I've ever seen was Forth--of course, it
was written by some true experts. I recall an automated loom weaving
control program presented at the Rochester Forth Conference some years
ago. I was actually like reading a piece of literature for clarity--all
one need was a dictionary to understand the English definitions of
technical terms for weaving and the whole code was transparent.

Some of Chuck Moore's code was that way as well while other was well,
dense might be a good description!

jo4hn wrote:
>
> Duane Bozarth wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >
> >>On Fri, 27 May 2005 02:52:43 GMT, jo4hn <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >>>Dave Hinz wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>>Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
> >>>>>That was fun...
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
> >>>>
> >>>>Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>Humph. Late comer. How about Fortran I and FAP, later MAP and Fortran
> >>>II.
> >>
> >>'79 or '80 is as early as I get, having been 12 years old at the time.
> >>
> >>
> >>>Lots of people writing good stuff to augment the manufacturer's
> >>>offerings, including CARE (CDC 924 assembler), Boolfinder (JPL 7044 link
> >>>editor), and a memory management system for 360 75's running RTOS/JPLOS
> >>>(can't remember the name). The last three are unfair because I wrote
> >>>them (most of them anyway) in about 1963, 1968, and 1971.
> >>
> >>/tip of the hat
> >
> >
> > Ahead of me, also...I was just getting out of HS in '63 and didn't get
> > to touch the IBM 1620 as freshman back then...had a full semester of
> > hand-coding starting w/ binary, then machine language to prepare us for
> > FORTRAN coding forms... :)
>
> My first computer was the Burroughs E101, an externally programmed clank
> which was about the size of a desk and did about as much. At UCLA in
> the early 60's, the Math dept. had the SWAC with a 1401 (?) front end
> and the Fortran club used the WDPC IBM7090 which was state of the art.
> Jeez, some of the hardware of the time was nearly psychotic.
> glork,
> j4

Yes...the first machine after school where I worked (starting in '68)
was a Philco TransEra 2000. I most fondly recall the 27 7-track tapes
for all external storage! :)

Mark & Juanita wrote:
...
> When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C,
> one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he
> could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.
>
> Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to
> be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.
>
...

Then I'll wager his C code was no easier to read than his Fortran... :)

Mark & Juanita wrote:
...
> As I indicated, this person wasn't a programmer, he was an algorithm
> developer. Completely different talent and skillset altogether. While
> some good algorithm developers are good programmers, there are fewer good
> programmers who are good algorithm designers. Typical development cycle
> consists of the algorithm developer developing the concept and testing it
> (hence the need for them to be able to do some level of coding),
> implementation then follows. Typical implementation is on a different
> platform and environment altogether than the proof of concept code.
>

Atypical environment in my experience...sounds like a <good>
environment, but certainly not the prevelant one... :(

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Fri, 27 May 2005 19:03:55 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, 27 May 2005 12:55:20 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >> >>
> >> > ...
> >> >
> >> >> I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
> >> >> Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
> >> >> it's set to. OK, now, use it.
> >> > ...
> >> >
> >> > I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
> >> > but fail to recognize the above complaint???
> >>
> >> Well, to be fair, it's been ...24 years since I took that class, so my
> >> memory may be "a bit rusty". I do remember not liking it at all.
> >
> > Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)
>
> I'd rather remove my own spleen with a spoon, thank you very much.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained... :)

Dave Hinz wrote:
>
> On Tue, 31 May 2005 11:10:48 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Dave Hinz wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, 27 May 2005 19:03:55 -0500, Duane Bozarth <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >> > Might be time to look at F90/95 then? :)
> >>
> >> I'd rather remove my own spleen with a spoon, thank you very much.
> >
> > Nothing ventured, nothing gained... :)
>
> Eactly. I'll stay over here, fully spleened and programming in the
> Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, thanks.

Would seem to be for differing class of problem than where I would use
Fortran...

I've done quite a lot of Tcl, not much Perl

Dave Hinz wrote:

...
> Yes; in this case "something I'll work with" vs. "something I'd rather
> not".

I meant more in the sense that Fortran (or C/C++/...) are not what I
would think of for solution language(s) for what I would consider
suitable for Perl/Tcl/..., not that any one of them as being a personal
choice within the general class...

>
> > I've done quite a lot of Tcl, not much Perl
>
> I can tweak and/or copy Tcl, but not write from scratch in it.

About my state wrt Perl although if tweaking were to get at all involved
"I'd rather not". :)

Out of curiousity have you ever looked at current Fortran or are your
past experiences the extent of knowledge? Many complaints cross-posted
in comp.lang.fortran arise apparently from such long held perceptions.
But, C++, it isn't even though there are forms of OOP making it into
current proposals for the next Standard. (Of course, it isn't intended
to be.)

Robert Bonomi wrote:
>
...
> "sufficiently advanced PERL is indistinguishable from line-noise".o
>
> <grin>

The old ploy of typing in your name or other phrase into TECO comes to
mind? :)

Dave Hinz wrote:
...
> It's been over 20 years, and I really don't want to go back there.
> I'm doing sysadmin-project stuff now, so between shell scripting and
> perl, I can do 95% of what I want to do.
>
...

No, wasn't implying that at all...just that what started this sub-thread
was a comment based on 20+ year old perceptions of a language that has
changed dramatically...

Prometheus wrote:
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 15:55:40 -0400, Odinn <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>
>>>>UNIX rules!!!
>>>
>>>
>>>I've got one Linux box that has an uptime of (checks) 1004 days.
>>>
>>
>>Longest I have up is 419 days, FreeBSD, and only because of a major
>>power outtage (UPS couldn't last 13 hrs). Prior to that, it had a 642
>>day uptime.
>
>
> All right, I know you Linux guys are going to blink a couple of times
> and scratch your heads, wondering how I could even think to ask such a
> thing, but why one Earth would you care how long the computer has been
> running continously? I know mine has been on for a couple of months
> (Win2000 professional) but I can't imagine keeping track of the number
> of days, or even really caring if it got shut off for a while (it just
> stays on because I'm sort of lazy, and I figure the cancer-research
> screensaver can use it when I'm otherwise occupied). What are you
> doing, trying to find the zillionth decimal place of PI with a 486 or
> something equally odd?
>
>
Since the company I work for writes (and hosts) online banking. Uptime
is critical. Banks want 5-9s of uptime (that's 99.999% uptime for those
who don't know what 5-9s is), which is about 300 seconds of downtime per
year. Having a system that requires a reboot every month is
detrimental. Our applications and web servers are redundant, so we can
shut down one to upgrade it while the others take the load, but it's
much more difficult with database servers. You need something that is
stable and not very vulnerable, plus tons of security controls
(firewalls, ACLs, PKI, IPSec, etc) to limit access to any possible
vulnerabilities.

--
Odinn
RCOS #7

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself." -- Sir Richard Francis Burton

Reeky's unofficial homepage ... http://www.reeky.org
'03 FLHTI ........... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/ElectraGlide
'97 VN1500D ......... http://www.sloanclan.org/gallery/VulcanClassic
Atlanta Biker Net ... http://www.atlantabiker.net
Vulcan Riders Assoc . http://www.vulcanriders.org

rot13 [email protected] to reply

"Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
> AVG Personal (or Home Edition...whichever) probably has the license
> terms you're after. Far as I know, that's the _only_ difference between
> the free one and the commercial version of AVG. But, hey, if you're
> really using it on a business system, don't be a schmuck - pay the
> guys.

Cheers and slaps on the back. Thank you Mr. Hinz. In an internet world
where people increasingly think it's the norm to expect everything for free
and to pirate everything they like, there are not enough voices suggesting
paying the guys who actually wrote a product that works. What a shame too,
since the cost is so much less than if one went to McAffee, or (forbid...)
Symantec.

--

-Mike-
[email protected]

"Dave Hinz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> On Thu, 26 May 2005 13:41:08 +0800, Old Nick <nsnsafemail#iinet.net.au>
wrote:
> > On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> >
> > But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
> > Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
> > there.
>
> You're confusing "popularity" with "vulnerability".
>

But it is vulnerable Dave. Open source code makes it more vulnerable than
proprietary code. It is a matter of poplularity at this point that makes
*nix less attractive to the average adolescent with too much time on his
hands. CERT advisories make it clear that *nix is certainly vulnerable.

--

-Mike-
[email protected]

Duane Bozarth wrote:
> Dave Hinz wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 27 May 2005 02:52:43 GMT, jo4hn <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>>Dave Hinz wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
>>>>>That was fun...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>>>>
>>>>Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>Humph. Late comer. How about Fortran I and FAP, later MAP and Fortran
>>>II.
>>
>>'79 or '80 is as early as I get, having been 12 years old at the time.
>>
>>
>>>Lots of people writing good stuff to augment the manufacturer's
>>>offerings, including CARE (CDC 924 assembler), Boolfinder (JPL 7044 link
>>>editor), and a memory management system for 360 75's running RTOS/JPLOS
>>>(can't remember the name). The last three are unfair because I wrote
>>>them (most of them anyway) in about 1963, 1968, and 1971.
>>
>>/tip of the hat
>
>
> Ahead of me, also...I was just getting out of HS in '63 and didn't get
> to touch the IBM 1620 as freshman back then...had a full semester of
> hand-coding starting w/ binary, then machine language to prepare us for
> FORTRAN coding forms... :)

My first computer was the Burroughs E101, an externally programmed clank
which was about the size of a desk and did about as much. At UCLA in
the early 60's, the Math dept. had the SWAC with a 1401 (?) front end
and the Fortran club used the WDPC IBM7090 which was state of the art.
Jeez, some of the hardware of the time was nearly psychotic.
glork,
j4

On Fri, 27 May 2005 13:29:16 -0700, lgb <[email protected]> wrote:

>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected]
>says...
>> Dave Hinz wrote:
>> >
>> ...
>>
>> > I just couldn't stand the whole "doing things 4 times" aspect of it.
>> > Hey, I'm gonna use a variable. Here is what it's called. Here is what
>> > it's set to. OK, now, use it.
>> ...
>>
>> I've used Fortran since before there was a Standard in many incarnations
>> but fail to recognize the above complaint???
>>
>
>Same reaction here. Of course you had to use DIMENSION and EQUIVALENCE
>statements, but simple variables could be used without decaratives.
>Some versions even set all data to zero when the program started, so you
>wouldn't get the undefined values problem.
>
>The best thing that ever happened to Fortran was Ratfor.
>
>BTW, I really like C's use of functions and absence of subroutines. The
>Modcomp realtime minis I used to use a lot had Fortran interfaces to
>system functions that looked like:
>
>CALL XYZ( A,B,C,D,.TRUE.,.TRUE.,.FALSE., ... .TRUE.,0)
>
>I contemplated homicide every time I had to figure out what one of those
>was actually doing.

When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C,
one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he
could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.

Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to
be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.






+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

On Fri, 27 May 2005 22:11:12 -0700, Mark & Juanita
<[email protected]> wrote:

> When we transitioned from doing algorithm development in Fortran to C,
>one of our more senior alg developers finally acquiesced and decided he
>could live with using C when he found the GOTO statement.
>
> Absolutely brilliant algorithm developer, you just didn't want to have to
>be the one who had to figure out what his code was doing.

When I was managing programmers I used to get rid of those sorts. No
amount of brilliance was worth the pain down the road. I think C tends
to bring out those kinds more than other languages, but they show up
everywhere. It is that mentality that explains a lot of the garbage
running on our systems now.

--
"We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"

Tim Douglass

http://www.DouglassClan.com

On Wed, 25 May 2005 11:18:29 -0400, Robatoy <[email protected]>
wrote:

But up comes the old argument. If there were a billion people using
Unix, Linux etc, the viruses and spams would simply start up over
there.

>OS X
>Virus free since April 2001.
>On line 24/7/365 'cept one line power failure
>caused by some privatization deal south from here..*G*
>UNIX rules!!!
>
>and prior to installing OS X:

nospambob wrote:

> I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

So far, you have used two that most people seem to have problems with.
Here are some others...

Free
AVG
avast! (my personal choice)

Paid
Kasperky (many feel it is the best)
e-Trust (computer Associates...used to use it but dumped them
because they would not honor their agreed upon renewal fee)

--
dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
...a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

"nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

I have been using the free version of AVG.

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1/lng/us/tpl/v5

They have pay versions as well. I have tried several other virus filters.
But AVG has done the job for me. The strongest point in its favor is that it
doesn't load my machine down and slow the computing. Which is important for
my applications.

The only downside is that it does take a bit longer when using my new spam
filter. But even then, it doesn't load the machine down and everything gets
done like it is supposed to.

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Robert Bonomi) wrote:
[long snip of interesting idea]
>But trying to explain _how_ that trivial little "50*period" incantation
>accomplishes that magic is *very* involved.

In similar situations, I have been known once or twice to write comments along
the lines of "Trust me: this works. If you can't figure out why, you probably
shouldn't modify it."

Those comments occasionally produced some chuckles... but never any
complaints.


--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt.
And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?

Woodcrafter wrote:
> "nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>
>>Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>>again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>>load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>>show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>>with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>>3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>>there are other options available.
>
>
> AVG Antivirus. They even have a 100% free version which works great and the
> virus definitions are updated very regularly. Been using it here for last 6
> months and still virus-free.
> www.grisoft.com

I second that recommendation. Great program, simple to install,
configure, use and, most importantly, it works!

Free for home use and VERY reasonable for networks. I bought a ten
license network pack for $250 which includes updates and viruse
definitions for TWO years. Figures out to $12.50/yr per machine.
Compare that to even the best rebate offer Symantec offers.

Try the free version - fully functional - and see what you think.

AVG gets my vote as well. Been using the free version for about a year, it
updates very smoothly every day, very easy to use (nothing to do) and
integrates perfectly into Outlook.

Ian

"Woodcrafter" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
> "nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
>> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
>> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
>> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
>> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
>> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
>> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
>> there are other options available.
>
> AVG Antivirus. They even have a 100% free version which works great and
> the
> virus definitions are updated very regularly. Been using it here for last
> 6
> months and still virus-free.
> www.grisoft.com
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dean Bielanowski
> Editor,
> Online Tool Reviews
> http://www.onlinetoolreviews.com
> Complete our tool survey, Win $200!
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Latest 6 Reviews:
> - Betterley Tru-Cut Insert System
> - Digital Calipers & Height Gauge
> - Delta SS250 Scroll Saw (Review Updated)
> - Porter Cable FR350A Framing Nailer
> - WoodHaven Biscuit Master
> - EZ Smart Guide System
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

"nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

I used McAfee for a while, but I never really liked the way it worked or
didn't work. Once it is broken, it seems nothing can restore it to good
healtn.
I have been using Norton, and it works for me.

By the way, you also should use SpyBot Search&Destroy, Zone Alarm, and
Ad-Aware to supplement whatever anti-virus program becase no program catches
everything. These three programs are free.
Jim

"nospambob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Repeated requests to McAfee for help getting their software running
> again have gone unanswered! Program got into trouble and wouldn't
> load to it was uninstalled and reloaded twice and attempts to start it
> show the same error message. One message from McAfee was received
> with sounds of wanting to help was received and it has been sent back
> 3 times. I used Norton before switching to McAfee and am wondering if
> there are other options available.

I've installed AVG, Ad-Aware, Spybot and MS Beta Spyware Blocker on many
systems with no further problems or slowdown. All can be set to run
automatically and to update automatically.

Best of all - they are all free.

I do not like either Norton or McAfee for various reasons - suffice to say
the combo I mention above is superior for various reasons, IMHO.

Vic

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> I don't know OS 6, but OS9 was released at least by 1982
>

You beat me to it, Dave. IIRC, it was written OS/9, but I'm not sure.
I do remember being impressed with it at the time. I think it required
a 6809 and wouldn't run on a 6800, but again it's been a long time so I
could be mistaken. Didn't it have some sort of dynamic function loading
that was new, at least for micros?

--
BNSF = Build Now, Seep Forever

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> On Wed, 25 May 2005 22:26:01 GMT, Patrick Conroy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Second "PC" was a //e that I upped to 128K to run Apple (UCSD) Pascal.
> > That was fun...
>
> AAAAAAAAAARGH! Someone mentioned UCSD Pascal!
>
> Please, please don't do that. Just for that - FORTAN 77!!!!
>
I'll see you and raise you a FORTH.

"Forth is a recursive language. You can't understand Forth till you
understand Forth."

I wrote a Forth interpreter for a Modcomp mini once when I was between
projects and bored. The guy in the next office outdid me - he took the
Forth and used it to build a Lisp interpreter :-).

--
BNSF = Build Now, Seep Forever

In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> Well, if you understand registers and CPU-speak in general, it's not
> bad. (thinks) actually, I learned Forth first, which made learning
> assembler much easier.
>
It's not the registers, it's keeping track of what's on the stack that
drove most folks crazy. One of the other well-known comments about
Forth was "Forth is a write-only language." I could usually read what
I'd written if I went back to it within a few months, but that was about
the limit.

--
BNSF = Build Now, Seep Forever