Pascal is relatively straightforward; at least until you hit something it wasn't designed to do. C, C++, Perl and (heaven help me) APL programmers have been known to take it as point of pride their code is "so clever nobody but me and the interpreter/compiler understand it"). Which one would you rather grade?

There is indeed a reason to change the port number for ssh: NOISE REDUCTION!

On one machine I see, say, a thousand ssh break in attempts a day. If I change the ssh port from 22 to 578 (for instance) I just cut that 1000 down to maybe 20 + legitimate users...and those 20 are the ones to be most worried about out of the 1000! That's a win.

A wise wise network engineer at UW once showed me the following diagram several years ago:

INTERNET -> PORT80, PORT443

His point being more and more is routed through ports 80 and 443 in an effort to avoid firewall restrictions. I often think he was right. Consequences for firewalls left up to reader.

Typically Credit Unions are less jerky about this stuff. Mine was very fast and, as a policy, treats identity theft of credit card AND debit cards the same.

That's not to say any given Bank might not be better than any given Credit Union but, on the whole, I have WAY more trust in my local credit union than my now non-existing bank.

Some programs (e.g. TouchTerm on the iPhone) have an interesting twist on screen real estate:

Translucent Keyboard

I don't like it as much as my old Droid and Palm physical keyboards but it does let me see more of the screen when using an on-screen keyboard by letting me see THROUGH the keyboard.

I don't really understand this. I do assume "for all time" is hyperbole.

Important, popular, projects where most of the work is by one or two developers are common.

Example: UW-IMAP (At least until recent UW budget cuts). Most used imap implementation on the planet?

Example: troff, the original little-commented PDP-11 assembly language version. It was tense for those who depended troff to write manuals, dissertations or books when the developer died.

Example: TeX

Example: Macintosh Window Clipping

Example: Trumpet Winsock (DOS/Early Windows TCP/IP)

Example: 4K Micro-soft [sic] BASIC

Yes and No (mostly "No"). Although a tape cartridge can be a physically reliable device; tape drives (except perhaps at the extreme high end) are typically not. Further, they often evolve in not-backwards-compatible ways.

A disk drive contains both the media and the mechanism. It typically costs 2x as much as tape EVEN IF YOU CONSIDER THE WHOLE DRIVE THE MEDIA.

Tape drives, on the other hand, are expensive and touchy beasts where the moving parts are exposed to air and dust.

Further while the mechanism to read the tape involves some kind of fairly standard interface that doesn't change all that fast (e.g. SCSI, IDE) the tape itself tends to evolve. Reading a first generation 8mm Exabyte tape isn't even possible on recent tape drives (is that format even still in use?).

A disk more typically needs to have some kind of format that's still around, power and a standard interface (SCSI, IDE) and that's it.

This means the total system: tape+drive is less likely (in my opinion) to be available/documented/repairable than a disk drive.

I've read 20 year old tapes and 20 year old disks and neither was a pleasant experience....but I'll take the disks. Especially if I have a lot of the same kind of disks (for parts). Also, I suspect less magnetic leakage since in a tape the magnetic regions are close to each other in 3 rather than 2 dimensions.

Reliably reading 50 year old tapes for any reasonable amount of money is, again in my opinion, something of a fantasy. Same for magnetic disks at that age although I have hopes for DVD-type media....but I am not an expert in archive media, just someone that actually has to read the stuff.

Weirdly enough many enjoyed Start Trek: The Motion Picture much more on it's first network TV showing than in a theater. I'd pay for a DVD of that cut. Seriously.

Someone had taken those 5 minute exhibition shots and trimmed them way way down. Enough was still there to make sense but the picture moved along better. Also much of the more painful acting was left behind.

I always got the feeling the movies editing was rushed. Getting a movie down to "enough but no more" seems a perversely time consuming and tricky task.

As funny as that is (and it is) I find it interesting that when young I often did foolish things to impress women.....without asking them what they thought about it first. That was non-optimal. Now I'm older and it's one woman. With her help I do WAAAY less foolish things BUT since the foolish is being pointed out more often; it feels like I'm doing more foolish things.

It should be obvious she isn't here right now as post this.

Get the budget balanced and as rational as you can: every year.

An example: It is not uncommon to see one part of an operation (e.g. phone lines) subsidize another (e.g. networking). There can be great reasons to do that kind of thing but it tends to bite eventually.

People may abandon the expensive service (especially in a tough economy) and come to expect the cheap subsidized service as a right (understandably). In this particular example the cheap networking can replace the expensive phone lines and suddenly you are laying off dozens of people and seeing sarcastic plays written about IT management in the local University bookstore.

Not that this has ever happened.

While I agree FORTRAN (especially the older dialects) is relatively easy to optimize for parallel operations and clusters and the like and the libraries are platinum, I do think they need rewrites from time to time; those libraries can be hard to understand and I want every generation to have lots of people who understand, not just use, the things.

Also, every 10-20 years assumptions change. The early libraries did floating point entirely in software and memory was tight, in 2009 we can almost assume any desktop (and most laptops) have floating point to IEEE standards available in single and double precision plus virtual memory.

Now we are seeing GPU's being used in non-graphics computation so algorithms that are stable in single precision and can actually use 64 pipelines are being written and memory is tighter.

SpinRite:

It's not so useful from USB (not useless, but not at its best. It does its best work talking to the disk at a low level USB hides).

It works much better on an IDE/EIDE/SATA/SCSI connection.

There are several things going on:

1) It used to be almost my only tool and worked maybe 4/5th of the time on disks that could still spin but had enough hardware problems to be un-mountable. In those days disks were very expensive.

I am less inclined to use it first because I want to depend on a flaky drive as little as possible. ddrescue does a pretty good job there: get the good data off fast, try to get the flaky data off next, no writes to the flaky hardware and with luck you have the data you need and SpinRite is still available.

2) Using SpinRite as a repair tool: SpinRite tries to fix things which means depending on copying and writing on flaky hardware. It does an AWESOME job working around that flakiness and it is persistent. It feels like magic when it works and it usually does. I usually run it on the failing disk even if I have a ddrescue copy.

When SpinRite is done I usually have all the data, when ddrescue is done I often have most of the data.

3) SpinRite is also good at seeing trouble coming, which is no small thing but you actually have to run it regularly and few people do that.

Assuming the disk works at all: Work on a clone, not the original.

If you are working on a 2nd generation clone you can afford to take risks in restoring the filesystem. "Oh it that didn't work, fire up another clone and try something else".

ddrescue (and other damaged disk oriented cloners) lets you work on a copy (or in my preference: a copy of a copy). This preserves the original disk if it has to go to a specialist lab later.

SpinRite has also saved my bacon more than once but that's something run on the original drive: not done lightly.

(Warning: dd_rescue is not Gnu ddrescue and Debian Linuxes rename dd_rescue to ddrescue. dd_rescue is a similar but not identical).

Finally: I need to add Windows NTFS rescue (built in) impressed me last time I needed it. It trundled for many hours but at the end, I had a mostly intact copy of a filesystem on my 2nd generation cloned drive. The original disk had been a mess.