Comment Re:It's sad... (Score 1) 440
My XP Pro 64-bit is still running and the file is still there, with no infection hits reported in recent days.
Comment Re:That's the end of D-Link. (Score 1) 428
Yeah, but I haven't bought from them and my website still has a Belkin with the international negation symbol over it and a link to an explanation of their faux pas.
Journal Journal: Slashdot once again displays incredible stupidity
Slashdot once again displays incredible stupidity
23 Jul 08 2143 hours
This is not a submission; it is a comment on the utter cluelessness and stupidity displayed by Slashdot in rejecting my submission about the Getronics Wang VS End of Support announcement release Monday morning.
Submission + - Slashdot once again displays incredible stupidity (marketwatch.com)
vacuum_tuber writes: "This is not a submission; it is a comment on the utter cluelessness and stupidity displayed by Slashdot in rejecting my submission about the Getronics Wang VS End of Support announcement release Monday morning.
My second submission (the first was incomplete due to hitting "Submit" instead of "Preview" due to the positioning of the buttons after the first preview) was perfect, links verified, well-written, and I am the leading authority on the subject on the whole planet.
A key point of interest is that the New VS that continues on after end of life for the legacy systems takes the Wang VS mainframe into LINUX, repeat LINUX. We who work closely with the virtual New VS are both VS and Linux people. All the customers who move to the New VS end up running Linux in commercial production, often as the enterprise system running the whole business.
Another point of interest, possibly going over your heads due to your young ages, is that Wang brought the world affordable calculators, word processing, affordable business data processing, the first optical document imaging, the first PBX/DP integration, and for 31 years offered the most efficient, easiest to program, easiest to operate and easiest to use mainframe-class systems. Throughout the 31 years and something like 16 generations of VS processor, Wang maintained binary compatibility, something IBM never did. Wang manufactured about 65,000 of its 1970s 2200 small business systems and about 65,000 of its VS mainframes. The high water mark of the VS installed base was probably around 30,000 systems. Literally millions of people over the age of 25 have had their hands on Wang keyboards. Just ask around.
Wang was one of the last great U.S. R&D shops, one of the last to design and build CPUs and the OSs to go with them.
The passing of the VS from support after 31 years is a momentous event, and one with Linux implications as the New VS that replaces it runs exclusively on Linux platforms. There are perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 live, living, production legacy VS systems still in operation in the world. Most are in multi-technology sites running a variety of systems often covered in news on Slasdot. Many people currently working in IT are affected by this.
In the time since I submitted this you have published a number of interesting and also a number of thoroughly trivial articles. I don't know why you sat on this until it became stale, nor why you rejected it, but I have to conclude that the many evidences of sloppiness and cluelessness visible daily on Slashdot are hereby confirmed.
In the past I have been a slashdot subscriber but I doubt I will ever send you morons another dime."
My second submission (the first was incomplete due to hitting "Submit" instead of "Preview" due to the positioning of the buttons after the first preview) was perfect, links verified, well-written, and I am the leading authority on the subject on the whole planet.
A key point of interest is that the New VS that continues on after end of life for the legacy systems takes the Wang VS mainframe into LINUX, repeat LINUX. We who work closely with the virtual New VS are both VS and Linux people. All the customers who move to the New VS end up running Linux in commercial production, often as the enterprise system running the whole business.
Another point of interest, possibly going over your heads due to your young ages, is that Wang brought the world affordable calculators, word processing, affordable business data processing, the first optical document imaging, the first PBX/DP integration, and for 31 years offered the most efficient, easiest to program, easiest to operate and easiest to use mainframe-class systems. Throughout the 31 years and something like 16 generations of VS processor, Wang maintained binary compatibility, something IBM never did. Wang manufactured about 65,000 of its 1970s 2200 small business systems and about 65,000 of its VS mainframes. The high water mark of the VS installed base was probably around 30,000 systems. Literally millions of people over the age of 25 have had their hands on Wang keyboards. Just ask around.
Wang was one of the last great U.S. R&D shops, one of the last to design and build CPUs and the OSs to go with them.
The passing of the VS from support after 31 years is a momentous event, and one with Linux implications as the New VS that replaces it runs exclusively on Linux platforms. There are perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 live, living, production legacy VS systems still in operation in the world. Most are in multi-technology sites running a variety of systems often covered in news on Slasdot. Many people currently working in IT are affected by this.
In the time since I submitted this you have published a number of interesting and also a number of thoroughly trivial articles. I don't know why you sat on this until it became stale, nor why you rejected it, but I have to conclude that the many evidences of sloppiness and cluelessness visible daily on Slashdot are hereby confirmed.
In the past I have been a slashdot subscriber but I doubt I will ever send you morons another dime."
Submission + - End of Life for 30-yr-old Wang VS line (marketwatch.com)
vacuum_tuber writes: "End of Life for the venerable Wang VS line of mainframes was announced today by Getronics, successor to Wang Global and Wang Laboratories. Fortunately for VS customers there is a new kid on the block to take over. TransVirtual Systems, originator and owner of the virtualization technology that has already replaced 60 of the legacy VS systems in 10 countries, is named in the announcement as the exclusive source for Wang VS software and systems going forward.
The Wang VS was first released in 1977 as the VS80, an interactive system with an IBM 360 instruction set and memory architecture, supporting up to 32 users and numerous I/O devices in a maximum of 512 KB of main memory. Many generations and models followed, culminating in the VS18950, released in 1999, and the smaller VS6700 models release in 2000. The top-of-the-line legacy VS18950 is able to support up to 500 users, usually in less than 1 GB of main memory.
The principal language employed on the VS is COBOL, either COBOL 74 or COBOL 85, although major systems have been written in C, Wang BASIC, RPG II, PL/I and others. The VS IDE supports about a dozen languages. The VS also offers PACE, a 4GL and rdbms, with ironclad referential integrity that is rule-based rather than trigger-based.
The Wang VS has seen service in virtually every industry and most countries, including the third world. At one time, every U.S. State Department facility worldwide had a Wang VS, all of them networked using Wang System Networking, variant on the multilayer OSI protocol model. The largest WSN network was Wang's own, with over 900 systems supporting email, scheduling, package distribution, remote logon and file transfer. There were even VS systems on U.S. Navy ships.
TransVirtual's post-legacy New VS, which forms the VS22000 family of official VS models, runs on modern Dell PowerEdge server hardware and brings to the VS world levels of performance, reliability and fault tolerance unknown in the legacy VS world. High end performance is presently 220% of the legacy high-end VS18950. The principal precept underlying the New VS is 100% seamless compatibility. The New VS passes the same VS platform certification tests used for legacy VS models and runs all VS software from the VS Operating System all the way through to customer applications. It can even IPL from a legacy Wang VS system disk. There is no conversion whatsoever, not of programs and not of data. The New VS is truly a VS, just in modern platform clothing and with modern performance.
Transvirtual Systems is a Texas company formed in 2004 specifically to bring a new generation of Wang VS computer to market. TVS has principal offices in Cypress, Texas, a few minutes from the former Compaq campus. The company already employs several key former Wang people but its engineering core studied the Wang VS hardware for ten years before the virtualization was attempted. The company and its products are an outgrowth of The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center, a VS-centric website in operation since 1995."
The Wang VS was first released in 1977 as the VS80, an interactive system with an IBM 360 instruction set and memory architecture, supporting up to 32 users and numerous I/O devices in a maximum of 512 KB of main memory. Many generations and models followed, culminating in the VS18950, released in 1999, and the smaller VS6700 models release in 2000. The top-of-the-line legacy VS18950 is able to support up to 500 users, usually in less than 1 GB of main memory.
The principal language employed on the VS is COBOL, either COBOL 74 or COBOL 85, although major systems have been written in C, Wang BASIC, RPG II, PL/I and others. The VS IDE supports about a dozen languages. The VS also offers PACE, a 4GL and rdbms, with ironclad referential integrity that is rule-based rather than trigger-based.
The Wang VS has seen service in virtually every industry and most countries, including the third world. At one time, every U.S. State Department facility worldwide had a Wang VS, all of them networked using Wang System Networking, variant on the multilayer OSI protocol model. The largest WSN network was Wang's own, with over 900 systems supporting email, scheduling, package distribution, remote logon and file transfer. There were even VS systems on U.S. Navy ships.
TransVirtual's post-legacy New VS, which forms the VS22000 family of official VS models, runs on modern Dell PowerEdge server hardware and brings to the VS world levels of performance, reliability and fault tolerance unknown in the legacy VS world. High end performance is presently 220% of the legacy high-end VS18950. The principal precept underlying the New VS is 100% seamless compatibility. The New VS passes the same VS platform certification tests used for legacy VS models and runs all VS software from the VS Operating System all the way through to customer applications. It can even IPL from a legacy Wang VS system disk. There is no conversion whatsoever, not of programs and not of data. The New VS is truly a VS, just in modern platform clothing and with modern performance.
Transvirtual Systems is a Texas company formed in 2004 specifically to bring a new generation of Wang VS computer to market. TVS has principal offices in Cypress, Texas, a few minutes from the former Compaq campus. The company already employs several key former Wang people but its engineering core studied the Wang VS hardware for ten years before the virtualization was attempted. The company and its products are an outgrowth of The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center, a VS-centric website in operation since 1995."
Submission + - End of Life for 30-yr-old Wang VS line (marketwatch.com)
vacuum_tuber writes: End of Life for the venerable Wang VS line of mainframes was announced today by Getronics, successor to Wang Global and Wang Laboratories. Fortunately for VS customers there is a new kid on the block to take over. TransVirtual Systems, originator and owner of the virtualilzation technology that has already replaced 60 of the legacy VS systems, is named in the announcement as the exclusive for Wang VS software and systems going forward.
Yahoo Seeking Partnership With News Corp. 91
rattlesoft tips us to a Washington Post report that Yahoo is now seeking a partnership with News Corp. A related Reuters article notes that analysts are skeptical of such a deal. From the Post:
"Yahoo is talking with a number of potential partners, possibly as a way to either stave off future Microsoft offers or in an effort to drive up the software giant's offer. The talks between News Corp. and Yahoo ... may signal a resumption of discussions that took place last summer between the two media giants that quieted during the fall. Such a combination would make News Corp. the largest single shareholder in a Yahoo/Fox Interactive unit. That would marry the world's most popular social-networking site, MySpace, with Yahoo's 4 billion page views per month to make a formidable opponent for Google."
All GeForce 8 Graphics Cards to Gain PhysX Support 114
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed exactly what it plans to do with the company's PhysX physics processing engine. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Nvidia is working to add PhysX support to its GeForce 8 series graphics processors using its CUDA general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) application programming interface. PhysX support will be available to all GeForce 8 owners via a simple software download, allowing those users to accelerate games that use the PhysX API without the need for any extra hardware. (Older cards aren't CUDA-compatible and therefore won't gain PhysX support.) With Havok FX shelved, the move may finally popularize hardware-accelerated physics processing in games."
Comcast's FCC Filing Called Unfair, Not Good Enough 157
Shoemaker brings us a follow-up to Comcast's recent defense of its traffic management procedures. The companies involved in the original FCC investigation are not satisfied with Comcast's response. From Ars Technica:
"Comcast made an aggressive defense of its policies, claiming that it only resets P2P uploads made during peak times and when no download is also in progress. Free Press, BitTorrent, and Vuze all say that's not good enough. In a conference call, Vuze's general counsel Jay Monahan drew the starkest analogy. What Comcast is really doing, he said, wasn't at all comparable to limiting the number of cars that enter a highway. Instead, it was more like a horse race where the cable company owns one of the horses and the racetrack itself. By slowing down the horse of a competitor like Vuze, even for a few seconds, Comcast makes it harder for that horse to compete. 'Which horse would you bet on in a race like that?' asked Monahan."
Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats 214
The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War:
"Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."
Microsoft Battles Vista Perception With Prizes 342
LambAndMint writes "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed 'facts' will make you feel like you're reading a document from an alternate reality. Get ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz."
Journal Journal: Timekeeping for billing
For time accounting I use a simple text file on a mainframe (uh, a Wang VS mainframe). Entries have a simple format enforced by nothing but guided by tab stops:
F 0930 0630-0645 SD1: This is a time log entry. It can
. run to multiple lines.
F = Friday, just because I keep a better picture of things
in my head when the day of the week is associated.
0930 = mmdd of the log entry.
0630 = hhmm of the item start.
Journal Journal: Thanks for mod up
Many thanks to the unidentified moderators who modded up several of my comments today.
Journal Journal: Mod points carelessly assigned to lowlifes
Some asshole with moderation points hit two of my posts today. Judge for yourself:
Re:Tax systems was 1, now 0
This was "Overrated" at its default of 1? Obviously the person who modded this down is a fuckwitted socialist asswipe who loves high taxes.
Re:I'd rather have a sales tax than an income tax was 1, now -1.
