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

> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
> > Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to
> >> record patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who
> >> apparently preferred then to hand-written notes.
> >
> > Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?
>
> Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:
>
> The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of

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

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

On 2023-12-10, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

> On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
>
>> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
>> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
>> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.
>
> "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)

It's time for a 21st-century re-write:

This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath
Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....

> Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
> song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
> individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
> is some kind of natural law.
>
> And then .....

Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

> "Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
> want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
> severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
> interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.

And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon.
The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are
loudly shouted down at every opportunity.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
> Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 56g.1173 wrote:
>>
>>> Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
>>> gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
>>> for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....
>>
>> We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.
>
> My two favourite thoughts about the future:
>
> "The future is here, just unevenly distributed"
>
> "The future was never like this"

The future isn't what it used to be.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 16:52:41 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
>>> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to
>>>> record patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who
>>>> apparently preferred then to hand-written notes.
>>>
>>> Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?
>>
>> Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:
>>
>> The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets of
>
> Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by
> those things when I was at school.

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

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

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 17:51:26 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 16:52:41 -0000 (UTC)
> Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 14:07:10 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>
>> > On Sat, 9 Dec 2023 13:46:04 -0000 (UTC)
>> > Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>> >
>> >> project in Wellington where the hospital's Heart Unit used them to
>> >> record patient notes: the page were designed by hospital staff, who
>> >> apparently preferred then to hand-written notes.
>> >
>> > Have you ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting ?
>>
>> Fair comment, but maybe I wasn't clear enough in my description:
>>
>> The Optical Mark Reader couldn't recognise script: input was on sheets
>> of
>
> Oh I know - we had a lot of multiple guess exam papers marked by
> those things when I was at school.

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

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

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2023-12-10, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:29:30 +0100
>> Deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 56g.1173 wrote:
>>>
>>>> Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
>>>> gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
>>>> for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....
>>>
>>> We all live in the movie IDIOCRACY - It is not the future, it is the now.
>>
>> My two favourite thoughts about the future:
>>
>> "The future is here, just unevenly distributed"
>>
>> "The future was never like this"
>
> The future isn't what it used to be.

Future ??? Buyer Beware ....

On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2023-12-10, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>
>> On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
>>
>>> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how they said
>>> that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another war "because we won't
>>> turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't "turn up", nor did those women.
>>
>> "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)
>
> It's time for a 21st-century re-write:
>
> This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath
> Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....

Heh, heh .... yea ... more true than you know ! :-)

Looking, I keep being reminded of the early 20th
century. Loons and anarchists and fanatics galore.
Everyone was eager to roll the dice in hopes of
coming out better. The TOLL however .......

>> Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
>> song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
>> individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
>> is some kind of natural law.
>>
>> And then .....
>
> Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:
>
> The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Glad somebody noticed that ....

>> "Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
>> want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
>> severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
>> interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.
>
> And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon.
> The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are
> loudly shouted down at every opportunity.

Yep. They RUIN it for so many others.

There is political/economic POWER in that Gordian
knot of "complexity". It can hide SO many things.

Ok, "The World" IS very very complex these days. Not just
a small handful of mega-powers. Political, military,
economic power and the web of INTERACTIONS/LINKS make
things VERY complicated. Maybe TOO complicated.

I don't think there's "A Solution" anymore.

So, like with "IT" issues, you HAVE to have several
layers of backup. If The Global System cracks/breaks
then you must have at least a functional alternative
on the more local level. Won't be everything the big
existing system offered - but it'll keep you alive
and kinda competitive.

Any who DON'T have that ... they're goin' DOWN ...
dark-ages down. Dung huts and plagues and tyrant
kings down .....

Not entirely sure what this has to do with rPI's though ...
however they may be the highest level of computing power
left after a Fall.

On 12/8/23 2:36 PM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 08/12/2023 19:16, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>    I worked at that service bureau on those days, while during
>> the rest of the week my disenchantment with Computer Science deepened,
>> and I discovered that theoretical math really wasn't my forte.
>> At the end of my third year (a disaster aside from the programming
>> part), I dropped out, went on full time with the service bureau,
>> and have been programming real-world applications ever since.
>
> Yes. Computer science is relatively speaking bollocks. Software
> engineering however is extremely valuable

Well, it's not entirely bullshit ... but it's RELEVANCE
to What's Going On is often rather tenuous these days.

It's a sci/stat/theory look at "computing". However it
rarely PRODUCES anything of relevance. At best it might
tell you what just CAN'T be done with conventional
computing (which may NOT be true for quantum computing).

Now some time back, esp what Turing was doing, that
WAS more relevant to The Future. Possibilities, and
Limits, were defined. Computing can't do EVERYTHING,
but it CAN do a LOT ........

And, often, it's those little 13-year-old nerds in
the basement who are most relevant as to what CAN
be done. Lots of sugar/caffeine and "Dammit, how to
get around this problem ?" attitude ..........

On 2023-12-11, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:

> On 12/10/23 2:18 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2023-12-10, 56g.1173 <56g.1173@ztq9.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/9/23 5:14 AM, TimS wrote:
>>>
>>>> See, it's like the naive ones of the 60s. Remember them? And how
>>>> they said that peace would prevail and there wouldn't be another
>>>> war "because we won't turn up". The jews of the 1930s didn't
>>>> "turn up", nor did those women.
>>>
>>> "This is the dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" :-)
>>
>> It's time for a 21st-century re-write:
>>
>> This is the dawning of the age of the psychopath
>> Age of the psychopaaaaaaath....
>
> Heh, heh .... yea ... more true than you know ! :-)
>
> Looking, I keep being reminded of the early 20th
> century. Loons and anarchists and fanatics galore.
> Everyone was eager to roll the dice in hopes of
> coming out better. The TOLL however .......

I think this one is different. We're not dealing with loons
or anarchists. The people to watch for are very smart (in
a frightening way), and have a well-thought-out game plan.
I believe it all started with the hard swing to the right
in the '80s, and the "Me Generation" that developed around
it. Greed became redefined as a virtue, and money the only
moral yardstick. Yes, these things have been around since
the dawn of time, but never have they been so mainstream.

>>> Anyway, 'normal' soon comes to DELUDE. As the old Zappa
>>> song went, 'It can't happen here ...". This is when both
>>> individuals and institutions get CARELESS - think "normal"
>>> is some kind of natural law.
>>>
>>> And then .....
>>
>> Speaking of songs, there's that one by Bruce Cockburn:
>>
>> The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
>
> Glad somebody noticed that ....

Thanks.

>>> "Civilization" and its fruits are far more fragile than people
>>> want to believe. The more complex a 'system' the more rapid and
>>> severe its fall. 1st-world is 1st-world because everything is so
>>> interconnected and smooth ... but that can CHANGE.
>>
>> And people just love complexity. Remember, complexity is a weapon.
>> The KISS principle is a countermeasure, but KISS advocates are
>> loudly shouted down at every opportunity.
>
> Yep. They RUIN it for so many others.
>
> There is political/economic POWER in that Gordian
> knot of "complexity". It can hide SO many things.

Sing it, brother!

> Ok, "The World" IS very very complex these days. Not just
> a small handful of mega-powers. Political, military,
> economic power and the web of INTERACTIONS/LINKS make
> things VERY complicated. Maybe TOO complicated.

Definitely too complicated. That's why, wherever possible,
I eschew shiny solutions in favour of simple ones that work -
and will keep working.

Stuff that works
Stuff that holds up
The kind of stuff you don't hang on the wall
Stuff that's real
Stuff you feel
The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall
-- Guy Clark

> Any who DON'T have that ... they're goin' DOWN ...
> dark-ages down. Dung huts and plagues and tyrant
> kings down .....

Yup. It's frighteningly close already - especially in
our shining (and increasingly unaffordable) metropolises.
Suggested reading:

Patrick Saint-Paul
The Rat People: A Journey through
Beijing's Forbidden Underground
ISBN 9781551528038

Or just about anything by Cory Doctorow.

> Not entirely sure what this has to do with rPI's though ...
> however they may be the highest level of computing power
> left after a Fall.

See another thread in this group about spammers rendering
many more appropriate groups nearly unusable.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | The Internet is like a big city:
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | it has plenty of bright lights and
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | excitement, but also dark alleys
/ \ if you read it the right way. | down which the unwary get mugged.

-=> On Thu Dec 7 03:12:00 2023, 56g.1173 wrote to All <=-

> I've seen the New Gen. Most barely know how to
> program or tweak existing programs. They've
> never writ a client/server app or ANY app. They
> think Linux is a disease. They think Python is
> an animal and 'C' is a letter of the alphabet.
>
> They are "expert" at using M$/Apple/Goog commercial
> apps. That's about it. WHEN it all goes to hell they
> will NOT have a backup plan - just to blame M$ or
> whatever to keep their jobs.
>
> M$/Apple/Good commercial apps actually DO a lot.
> They are also Huge Targets for enemy hacks because
> of that. A layered security/backup scheme is the
> only way to survive. "Cloud" - not nearly as
> secure/robust as they think. They WILL put
> EVERYTHING there - and LOSE it.
>
> We who deal with programming, systems-level stuff,
> we KNOW. The new gen, and the pointy-haired bosses
> who believe in whatever "Modern Management Mag"
> says, are SO seriously deluded. "Appearances" are
> all that counts. Alas, by deflecting blame, they'll
> likely survive - apparently that's the Alpha/Omega.
>
> I spent over 40 years finding out How Things
> Really Work and putting that to best advantage
> for "The Cause". From Assembler/DOS/Win/Linux
> to the latest stuff, I just *had* to know what
> made it tick. What was great, what was crap, what
> was Armageddon.
>
> Do I sound bitter ? Well, that's not really the
> right mindset ... it's more "despondent", seeing
> how far standards have fallen and where it leads.
>
> Oh well, I'll get my pension and SS checks - might
> even make more money than before - but now whatever
> happens isn't MY fault anymore. I can do the
> blame-displacement game too - and with solid creds.
>
> Until it penetrates my pension/SS stuff. THEN it's
> gonna be bad. Oh well, that's what LAWYERS are
> for ... sue the fuckers for ten times the damages ....
>

Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like you
act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do things. If
you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not a *real* IT
person!

Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in engineering and
computing careers, especially among white men for some reason. Anyone doing
things differently, or learning in a faster way, or progressing faster than
they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then
so should you!" implying that their skills are somehow weaker or less valuable
because they were obtained differently.

I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding job. Maybe
if you actually looked around and took your blinders off, you'd be able to see
that.

> --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
> * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway
> (3:770/3)
>
--
Aurelius
Home BBS: aBSiNTHe

=== TitanMail/linux v1.2.4

On 12/12/2023 11:08, A.M. Rowsell wrote:
> Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers like you
> act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do things. If
> you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not a*real* IT
> person!
>
LOL!
> Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in engineering and
> computing careers, especially among white men for some reason. Anyone doing
> things differently, or learning in a faster way, or progressing faster than
> they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then
> so should you!" implying that their skills are somehow weaker or less valuable
> because they were obtained differently.
>
I think you are over egging the pudding
> I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding job. Maybe
> if you actually looked around and took your blinders off, you'd be able to see
> that.
I know a lot of completely trashy crap software., especially in the
[b]anking sector that is truly execrable.

It wasn't written by senile old white men.

--
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house
for the voice of the kingdom.

Jonathan Swift

On Wed, 13 Dec 2023 13:24:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 12/12/2023 11:08, A.M. Rowsell wrote:
>> Jeez, and you wonder WHY people are reluctant to join IT? Old-timers
>> like you act like gatekeepers, saying there's only "one true way" to do
>> things. If you're not writing your own firewall in assembly, you're not
>> a*real* IT person!
>>
> LOL!
>> Gatekeeping behaviour is something that tends to run deep in
>> engineering and computing careers, especially among white men for some
>> reason. Anyone doing things differently, or learning in a faster way,
>> or progressing faster than they did is somehow an impostor. "If I had
>> to suffer through X, Y, and Z, then so should you!" implying that their
>> skills are somehow weaker or less valuable because they were obtained
>> differently.
>>
> I think you are over egging the pudding
>> I know a LOT of young people in IT and they do a fucking outstanding
>> job. Maybe if you actually looked around and took your blinders off,
>> you'd be able to see that.
> I know a lot of completely trashy crap software., especially in the
> [b]anking sector that is truly execrable.
>
> It wasn't written by senile old white men.

but, IME anyway, said senile white men were generally rather good coders
as well as rat-hot bug finders and fixers, while and at least one young,
knowitall New Yorker was so bad and uncontrollable that he got slung off
sight when he, apparently just because he could and without permission,
'fixed' but actually wrecked the COBOL copy library the project depended
on.

Its fair to say that I;ve seen badly written, and poorly maintained,
software in both banks and the Civil Service (think bugfixes that were not
documented in either by comments in the code or in the system
documentation. I worked on several sites and saw software staff writing
bad, undocumented code and then trying to debug it, but a reasonable
amount of this bad code was written by young 'uns, many with strange
misunderstandings and never been taught to comment their code either.

On one large project, written in COBOL, we had several on these:
- one young contractor had idea that an ICL 1900 mainframe wouldn't stop
and and require engineering attention if a program divided anything by
zero. Fortunately he was slung out in under a week.

- another didn't know that if there's no 'EXIT' statement at the end of
a paragraph, it falls through to the next one, so where several
paragraphs were expected to fall through to the next one, he'd write

PARA-1.
MOVE A TO TOT-VAL.
ADD B TO TOT-VAL.
GO TO PARA-2.
PARA-2,
ADD C TO TOT-VAL.
MOVE D TO TOT-VAL.
GO TO ALL-DONE.
ALL-DONE.
DISPLAY TOT-VAL
...

Several other contractors knew him from other projects and said he'd
written code like that as long as they'd known him.

--

Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org