Always wished I could find a meteorite, but the Sahara is too hot and Antarctica is too cold. Maybe there are some in the Atacama, I'll have to look the next time we go to Peru.

Tweedledum and Tweedledumber also proposed to purchase the Nordstream pipelines. This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, Putin is far too much of a nationalist to let some of the most valuable assets the country has be taken over by the nation most intent on Russia's destruction. He's smart enough to string the idiot twins along for years though, dangling that carrot just out of reach.

NT 4.0 would be a good choice as long as it's air-gapped. Before the update-mania really took hold one of my NT 4.0 servers had longer uninterrupted uptime than any of our Unix, AIX, OS2 or Novell servers. The ex-DEC crew that wrote it, headed by Dave Cutler, did a fine job with it.

He got elected in part with ads and astroturf NGO action from the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA/State Dept. cutout. Most of the money is probably in Miami and NY banks.

House arrest, most likely, probably unsupervised.

Sure they know, they're those boring statistics that you ignore while looting whatever country you've managed to bribe the politicians into taking out your loans.

"News for nerds, stuff that matters." Not every nerd is a programmer, and I've enjoyed many of the off-the-wall articles that have made it to the front page, such as the town that powered its cold-weather shelter from a locomotive during a blackout, or (my favorite) the theft of a million pounds of maple syrup from the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. YMMV

My boss used to say, "DEC? Best hardware in the business, worst salescritters in the world."

There's a lot of that stuff around, if a company buys a million dollar automated CNC machine they're not going to toss it just because the OS is no longer supported.

I was surplussing a bunch of old computers and equipment from a local electric utility and saw a knee-high pile of ancient Compaq laptops collecting dust. I offered to take them away, and the guys almost had heart attacks. They had bought a cutting edge radio tower for their fleet, then the manufacturer was purchased, the new owner discontinued the product, and they were left with control software that absolutely could NOT be upgraded above DOS3 on a 386. (No, compatibility mode and VMs did not work.)

Older CAT scans and MRI machines required drivers that directly accessed the hardware (a no-no since WinXP), they'll never be upgraded until they die. Factory floors around the world have ancient creaking desktop machines running DOS that control critical hardware, power dams and megawatt generators often require versions of UNIX 20+ years out of date, ten years ago there was a sawmill in Oregon that still ran on PUNCH CARDS. There is a Bio-Hazard Level 4 lab in the Puget Sound area which relies on a Radionix input/output board from the early 1990s (that one worries me).

The hardware running water/sewer systems, electrical grids, irrigation dams and the like are generally SCADA systems on their own air-gapped network. Generally they're required to be air-gapped by law if they're considered critical infrastructure. **HOWEVER** the organization that runs them is more frequently targeted through its back office systems, which can still be pretty disastrous . Imagine if your electrical utility's phone and/or email system is taken down and they have no way to dispatch service trucks or buy/sell power.

Because retail stores are cheap. They don't want to pay to hire someone competent to do it, much less pay them enough to maintain them in the position.

Service, maintenance and monitoring.

And how many people out there "have a clue" these days? Do you know anyone under 30 who has ever replaced parts in their computers, or repaired their own cars? We're becoming a society of hardware illiterates. If it doesn't have a GUI the majority of the people have no clue that it even **CAN** be accessed.

Service on the device. If a company charges $150/hr for a service tech would you rather they make changes remotely or charge you an additional two hours minimum for travel (for each site)?

You've never worked in retail, I take it. Stuff gets moved around all the time, what's in the cabinet next week may be bags of ice or frozen salmon.

Service is the big need, I've covered it a bit in https://it.slashdot.org/commen...