Many years ago, computer scientists at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, chief among them Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf, had a wacky idea. What if, instead of having computers talk to each other like people do on the phone–with dedicated long-term connections, hello and goodbye messages, and a centralized service responsible for connection reliability–we created a new kind of system, where the chopped-up pieces of information moved autonomously through a network of abstract nodes and edges, to be assembled by the recipient, where only the sender was responsible for correctness? This idea–championed throughout its lifecycle by, yes, Vice President Gore–undergirds what we now call the Internet. It is fault-tolerant, able to route messages around broken nodes, and it can scale so effortlessly that we have repeatedly run out of addresses for nodes. And it is proving itself right now as never before.
Few pieces of modern information technology have reached this level of longevity. Few pieces of historical information technology are so important to the world–the book; the data-transmission cable; the human-readable programming language. You may have seen one of the latter in the news–COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. People like to make fun of how it’s still in use today, but the fact is, you only hear about it when the world breaks–when, say, New Jersey’s COBOL-based comptroller system can’t handle the influx of unemployment claims caused by a pandemic unprecedented in modern history. Contrast that to a website such as this one, which probably doesn’t run correctly on half our computers, though the Internet happily routes its packets to us almost instantly. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, while awesome, was not actually heavily involved in COBOL’s development, but go ahead and watch her explaining a nanosecond anyway.)
Mr. Cerf recently recovered from the coronavirus. “I don’t recommend it,” he said. The Washington Post had a good article about him, and the Internet, and the test it is currently passing. So let’s hear it for the things keeping the world from completely shutting down, especially Kahn and Cerf and their team; truly, they have won the Internet. A series of interconnected, independent systems through which we can all communicate, even when some of them are bad actors–a model of collaboration we should all aspire to.
Open thread!
Baud
Universal access to animal videos would not be possible without TCP/IP.
geg6
Yes, three cheers for them! Without them, I would be one of those pissed off people trying to apply for unemployment. For which I am eternally grateful.
SFAW
Is Vint Cerf also fat like Al Gore? Does he wear brown suits? That information is FAR more important than claiming they “invented the Intertubez.”
BellyCat
Cerf’s understated response, “I don’t recommend it”, made my day.
MattF
For a li’l more understanding, note that TCP and IP are layers four and three of the OSI model. The idea that you can abstract away both the application layer above and the physical layer below is crucial.
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
I haven’t seen Vint in a while, but the last time I did he looked tall and skinny. ETA: I don’t remember what colour suit he was wearing, though.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: I was aiming more for ‘pop science’ than ‘answering a common job interview question,’ but yes for those curious and with a bit of time, do read up on it further!
Dorothy A. Winsor
Yay for these guys. Most of my book sales are ebooks. They’re cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and zip right onto your device with no waiting. That would not be possible otherwise.
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Not surprised. I’ve never seen him, but of course his name is well-known in the nerd/tech geek community. Were I smart enough to be considered a nerd, of course.
Elizabelle
Cuomo’s press conferences are always so interesting. He is now discussing how superficial his conversations with his daughters had become, because everyone was busy, busy, busy, and he is now having long talks with them.
He’s talking about what we can learn from this pandemic. For example, do we really have to have people commuting in to work in an office, constantly.
Now saying how he regrets not taking his mom up on “come for coffee” invites, because now she’s isolated and he cannot see her at all.
Can you even imagine der Trump saying something like this; discussing it at length? Unless someone gave him a script, to try to humanize him, and then watch out for how he goes off the rails.
These pressers with governors, and particularly with Cuomo, are fascinating. The man could have been a priest (if the Catholic faith got rid of its ridiculous celibacy requirement).
SFAW
@MattF:
Is that the one with vegetables and grains at the bottom and Reese’s cups (or equivalent) at the top?
Jeffro
For those who are interested, trumpov is busy tweeting that his supporters should
and
I have mused aloud about him calling for violence from his supporters. This is the start.
Baud
@Elizabelle: Wait. Did Cuomo say he didn’t become a priest because he likes fucking too much?
MattF
@SFAW: Cupcakes at the top.
Elizabelle
@Baud: I don’t know that he actually did, but we can sure suspect it!
MattF
@Jeffro: Kevin Drum agrees.
Jeffro
I mean, I know he is thoroughly shamed now that he understands even his big $$$ donor CEO buddies won’t re-open or be able to re-open jack/shit until there is widespread testings – something he has demonstrably ignored for months – but this is completely unacceptable
And a day after he told the governors, they have his ‘permission’ (UGH!!) to call the shots.
He needs to resign or be impeached again. Immediately. Step up, national Dems!
Elizabelle
@Jeffro: (1) Fuck Trump.
For those who aren’t Virginians: der Trump is mad cuz Governor Northam signed five or more gun safety laws this week, delivered up by our newly elected Democratic-majority state legislature, filled with a record number of women.
The gunhumpers showed up in force on Martin Luther King Holiday (!!!) to stamp around and protest. The legislature and governor ignored them, and went right ahead with the gun safety legislation. Maybe more fervently.
Trump and these rightwingers are bullies. And now they’re whining.
Jeffro
@MattF: Anything to hide the shame, anything to avoid the accountability.
Major Major Major Major
@Dorothy A. Winsor: eBooks are almost all based on XML or HTML, which are derived from SGML, a wonderful method of describing documents as a series of nested containers:
Book (consists of) Title, Frontispiece?, Author, Prologue? Chapter+, Epilogue?
Chapter (consists of) Paragraph+
Paragraph… etc.
I took an information modeling class in grad school from one of the XML standard authors, very cool stuff. Obviously the transmission of eBooks is what lets you sell them easily, but the standards matter too (not that you were saying otherwise).
SFAW
@MattF:
“Gut” ist was einem schmeckt
[Which can be translated as “there’s no accounting for taste,” or maybe “whatever floats your boat.”]
PS: Amir, I know you know the actual translation. Just let me have my little Spass.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
sounds like somebody got some bad news… polling? Michael Cohen being released? Roger Stone’s prison sentence getting closer?
Jeffro
@Elizabelle: Yes, and since he doesn’t care/can’t change/doesn’t listen, it’s imperative that the Dems beat on the media to beat on the GOP – “are you going to go along with this, Senator McSally? What does ‘liberate’ mean, Senator Grassley? Didn’t trumpov just *yesterday* say these decisions were up to the governors, Senator Collins? Why is he stirring up mobs and not saying anything about continuing to stay safe/sociallly distance, Senator Gardner?”
He wouldn’t dare tweet this kind of crap in a swing or red state.
It’s sheer intimidation, and that makes it abuse of power. Impeach him again, House!
Baud
@Elizabelle: Yep.
SFAW
@MattF:
Kevin Drum agrees.
Oh, quit whining, Drum! It’s not as if the Republicans could have done anything to rein Trump in.
Van Buren
I am sure that Trump is simply encouraging his minions to get and vote. It’s very uncivil to suggest he is calling for violence.
On a serious note, I am pretty interested in seeing if there will be a backlash to Northham’s aggresiveness this November.
azlib
I am a 2nd generation Internaut. I started using the old ARPANET in 1978 when in graduate school at the University of Texas. I implemented TCP/IP at the University where I worked in the Computation Center and the Computer Sciences Department. I also co-authored several books on Internet technology in the early 90s and Vint Cerf wrote a forward for one of them.
I am glad to see Vint is recovering from his illness. He along with Robert Kahn are in my estimation two of the greatest inventors of the 20th century. I did not know Vint well, but was always grateful for his support of us Internet pioneers who helped evanagelize the technology.
TCP/IP is a remarkable protocol suite which has continually adapted to the higher network speeds of today. I remember running it over a 19.2 kbit/sec connection in the early 90s and even though it was slow, it was extremely robust. I still have a copy of the DDN protocol handbook from 1985 and it still describes the protocol suite in use today to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: maybe he read that article in the WaPo about how Dems are energized and successfully rolling back the tea party, most especially in Virginia.
Tdjr
I started as a COBOL programmer in 1982. Also learned Java and other web development tools. Finally was retired (riffed) voluntarily in January. From the time I started to the day I left, the industry kept saying that COBOL was dead. They stopped teaching it in schools. Outsourced work to India and other places.
With billions of lines of active code still working hard, I’m not surprised we have a problem.
arrieve
@Elizabelle: Like so many of us, I’ve never been a big fan of Andrew Cuomo, and I may go back to mostly disliking him when this is all over, but when he talks like this you can really see that he’s Mario’s son after all.
Jeffro
@Van Buren: Northam’s “aggressiveness”?
So much to unpack in just those two words and especially the second one…
SFAW
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I read that shit, and I still have a tough time accepting that this whining, insane motherfucker occupies the Oval Office.
Elizabelle
@Jeffro:
Also incredibly tone-deaf: yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. 32 dead. Tim Kaine was governor at the time. Virginia Tech remains the deadliest school shooting, with 33 dead (including the gunman). Sandy Hook, Newtown CT is second at 28 total dead.
And Donald Fucking Trump sends out that tweet, this week. Fuck Trump, and fuck his supporters. They are terrible, terrible people.
SFAW
@arrieve:
FWIW, Mario was kind of a dick in a lot of ways, but he gave good speech.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m almost curious as to the rationale behind the no popcorn rule
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That fucker has a lot of nerve accusing others of an “ENDLESS VACATION.”
Have I said “Fuck Trump” enough in this thread yet?
The Moar You Know
TCP/IP is great for open networks. It is terrible, by design, for closed networks. Banking. HIPPA. Email. Anything you want to keep confidential. But by God someone back in the day decided we’d use TCP/IP for all these functions anyhow.
So we’ve kludged our way into at least being able to feel a sense of safety using the internet.
That sense of safety is wholly and completely unjustified. One of my pet peeves. Can you tell?
trnc
OK, boomer.
:-)
Jeffro
@Elizabelle: unless he’s busy spending it all behind the scenes, now would be a great time for Bloomberg to sponsor a “Golf Master Donnie” ad.
‘Endless vacation’ indeed.
mrmoshpotato
We know what we’d do. Who wants some sliced ham?
Elizabelle
Here are the five laws Northam signed into legislation this week. None of them are over-reaching, not one. https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2020/april/headline-856016-en.html
cmorenc
Thankfully, Trump was not in charge of government technological policy when Kahn, Cerf, and ARPA were creating the foundations for the internet. Unless Trump could understand the implications well enough to figure out how he could extract major grift from it (doubtful in the extreme), support for it would have been heavily cut or eliminated entirely.
trnc
He started calling from violence from his supporters as a candidate.
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know: This was a problem for a long time but easy public-key encryption has made it much less of an issue (for now). They tried to incorporate packet encryption in the 80s but gave it up because encryption was a lot harder. (I’m sure you know all this.)
laura
@Elizabelle: No. No you have not said Fuck Trump enough. Get cracking! ?? it bears repeating.
Amir Khalid
@SFAW:
Okay.
Mandalay
No. That would be Fortran, which (like COBOL) is still chugging along.
Elizabelle
Trying again; earlier comment went into moderation.
Here are the five laws Northam signed into legislation this week. None of them are over-reaching, not one. From the governor’s website.
Governor Northam signed these bills: I took out the links and bill numbers. More info at Northam’s link.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I imagine Bill Kristol has, or could very easily get, the personal phone numbers of a lot of the Republicans who are letting this happen, people like Thom Tillis and Susan Collins and Rob Portman. He ought to violate some journalistic, and social. rules, and make and record those phone calls (IANAL and am speaking in terms of what should be allowed and should happen)
MattF
@Elizabelle: I imagine that some gunhumpers will see that as a checklist.
laura
@Amir Khalid: Amir, I have a question about Ramadan – I understand that children and those who are ill should not observe the rigors of the daily fast. In this terrible year, how do you think the CV19 will impact the holy month?
Baud
@Elizabelle: So radical. Are we sure Northam isn’t a godless communist?
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes, and yesterday, Max Boot wrote a WaPo column that listed a dozen Republican elder statespersons who could and should speak up. But… I don’t expect that to happen.
WereBear
Someone in the press read some insulting Trump tweets to Governor Cuomo just now.
His reply is that maybe the President, who has time to tweet, should get back to work.
Just One More Canuck
I’ll play NotMax for a moment – A Hard Day’s Night is starting on TCM
The Moar You Know
@Major Major Major Major: I do, but disagree with the assertion that public key encryption has made it much less of an issue. That’s a result of my job. The weaknesses are not with encrypted data itself but the entry and exit points. These systems are not secure and cannot be made secure. That’s all I’m trying to say here.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
So like a series of tubes?
Spanky
Mrs. Spanky and I were both born in 1954 but grew up far apart in so many ways. She was COBOL, I was FORTRAN, but we made it work anyways. Especially since we’ve moved on to other technologies.
Vint survived COVID-19! More evidence that he is a god. And I will heed his non-recommendation.
Elizabelle
Forgive me, it was GOP governor Bob McDonnell (R-Pat Robertson’s Law School) who overturned the previous one-gun a month ban. Which Virginia enacted years before when it became obvious the state was a source of trafficking to other states (like NY). [And hey, didn’t a few too many 9/11 highjackers get their driver’s licenses in the Old Dominion?]
I associated it with George Allen, in error, although I kind of think he was associated with the idea of a repeal. Macaca!
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Jeffro :
This is far from the start. Trump has ALWAYS encouraged violence, starting when he was candidate Trump
Trump incites violence against protesters
“At a press conference in Florida earlier on Friday, Trump was asked about his rhetoric in the wake of an incident in which a supporter at a rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, sucker-punched a black man in the face.
While he wasn’t asked about that specific altercation, Trump said of violent behavior in general at his events: “The audience hit back and that’s what we need a little bit more of.”
He also praised people using physical force at his rallies as “appropriate.”
“On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump said he would have his team look into paying the legal fees of 78-year-old John McGraw, who was charged with assault and disorderly conduct after attacking the protester.”
He LOVES seeing people beat up anyone who disagrees with him.
“As protesters were being escorted out of the rally in Fayetteville on Wednesday, Trump told the crowd that the protesters were not being treated poorly enough.
They used to treat them very, very rough, and when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily,” he said, before lamenting “we’ve become weak.” “
He is a bully and has ALWAYS been one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@MattF: AB Stoddard wrote a piece calling on Obama and GWB to issue a joint statement calling on trump to do all the things trump should. She was almost crying talking it up on the Nichole Wallace show a week or five years ago. It got a lot of play because Stoddard is exactly the kind of quietly partisan conservative the Beltway loves. No one, on the show or on the internet that I saw pushed back on the idea that the Barack Obama, Democrat and the first African-American president, has an equal obligation to push back against the racist game show host who’s political career is protected and propelled by racism and Republican partisanship.
That incident aside, I was struck last night that I haven’t heard a peep out of the Shrub, no words of encouragement for the nation, no calls to encourage social distancing and reminding people that this is our fight, etc etc. Not that I follow him on twitter, but I think I would’ve seen retweets among my new never-trump virtual friends.
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know: Gotcha–that is true.
WereBear
@WereBear: Jiminy Haploid Diety on a rocket powered pogo stick. You have got to track down Governor Cuomo’s response at the end of the press conference, when a reporter reads some DT tweets that came out during the press briefing!
He is on fire with one BURN after another, all delivered in a measured, sensible tone, with no drama, just facts.
Bravo, Governor. Bra-vo.
Major Major Major Major
@Mandalay: Good catch, updated.
Amir Khalid
@laura:
Generally, temporary or chronic poor health or pregnancy is considered a reason not to fast. If you have tested coronavirus-positive you definitely shouldn’t fast, IMO, even if you’re asymptomatic.
Any Ramadhan observance that involves a gathering, including congregating for tarawikh prayers, is now out of the question — which is quite a big deal. ETA: Because Ramadan is a season for prayer and good works. (As I mentioned in an earlier thread, the tradition of buying seasonal delicacies for breaking fast is also out, although strictly speaking this is not a religious observance.)
trollhattan
@Just One More Canuck:
A superlative movie still, and boldly innovative in its day.
Major Major Major Major
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: It drove me absolutely bonkers when that was circulating, because “a big truck” vs. “a series of tubes” is actually not a bad metaphor for the history of the Internet.
dm
@The Moar You Know: That’s a little like blaming copper for wiretapping.
I kind-of think that the RSA and related patents on public-key cryptography is more responsible — that, and the fact that security is harder than it looks.
The patents made development of the use of public keys for things like email and authentication pretty difficult in the 80s and early 90s, when security protocols were being developed — IPsec was an internet standard by 1995, and ISAKMP followed not long after.
Meanwhile, the commercial world was spinning out internet commerce. TLS (the S in HTTPS) also dates back to 1995, and, also has a heavy reliance on public key crypto (but there was money to be made so patent fees could be paid, plus the patents were nearing their expiration).
ETA: yes, the endpoints are weaknesses, but isn’t most of the weakness between the chair and the keyboard?
WereBear
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Shrub is under radio silence because he is an embarassment best forgotten. Republicans don’t want to be reminded of his greatest failures.
Major Major Major Major
@dm: It also wasn’t helped by the government’s (ongoing) war on encryption, sadly led by Joe Biden, alongside other Dems like Feinstein (and of course a lot of Republicans).
Renie
@WereBear: Cuomo’s remarks were epic going after trump. So glad to see someone finally stand up to this bully. Blamed trump admin reports for the failings trump blamed on Cuomo. He is putting up slides showing what WH reported so trump can see. LOL Expect another tweetstorm from trump who is sitting around doing nothing
Oklahomo
@Tdjr: I still have COBOL running at work. Sometimes if I am bored I will write a program in COBOL.
Elizabelle
@Renie: And he is still doing it, going after Trump. As in, “maybe we should not have believed you” WRT projections of beds, etc. needed. (The CDC’s work; Trump has just been waving the whole thing away.)
Will have to put up the video, once the press conference concludes, with cliff’s notes on where Trump comes up.
dm
@Major Major Major Major: Nahh. I had to deal with the damned export controls when they were really crazy (I had to advise the lawyers filling out paperwork to re-export some open-source software I’d “imported” from, I think, New Zealand). While it weakened the exportable implementations (40-bit keys in exported software instead of more secure key-lengths), it didn’t have that much effect on development of the algorithms and corresponding infrastructure.
One of the problems that The Moar You Know alludes to is the fact that you can attach your device to the internet anonymously. That’s both a bug (hello, distributed denial-of-service attacks) and a feature (did you know that the KGB had control of all the copiers in the Soviet Union?).
But it’s not the network’s job to enforce your security. It really is your job, because you may not be happy with the security that the network provides.
I’m now too deep in the weeds. At least I didn’t suggest you should have mentioned Larry Roberts along with Bob Kahn (but you should have).
Elizabelle
Cuomo just now: “Can you put up the Novarro memo, just for kicks?”
Notes the prez says he never read it.
Now he’s joking that Trump should “fire them all” for the projections. The CDC, Novarro, the coronavirus task force.
Something like: “If he wants to revive his television career.” Riffing off the You’re Fired schtick. P
===
Press conference just ended.
Mandalay
@Elizabelle: A very illuminating post. Nobody here was yelling louder than me for Northam to step down after the blackface brouhaha. Pretty dumb of me with hindsight.
That was back in my “when they go low we go high” days. Now I’m more “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good“, but I’m drifting towards “by any means necessary” as November approaches.
SFAW
@Elizabelle:
Sorry, but until there’s more “Fuck Trump!” in your comments, no forgiveness for you.
mrmoshpotato
@Elizabelle: Dump and “discussing at length” does not compute.
Major Major Major Major
@dm: hmm, ok, good to know on that first paragraph, thanks!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro: How long before we see “No, you can’t shoot the virus, you stupid, stupid dumbshits.” PSAs?
SFAW
@Elizabelle:
” … or perhaps he couldn’t read it?” would have been a nice touch. Well, maybe coming from Ted Lieu, since Cuomo needs to tread a fine line while the Murderer-in-Chief still (maybe) has the power to give NY-intended PPE to Wyoming and Montana.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF: Don’t forget the delicious gooey center!
dm
@Major Major Major Major: Like I said, too deep in the weeds.
But you really should have mentioned Larry Roberts, too.
Bob7094
I’ve never understood the panic about no COBOL programmers left alive, both in 1999 and now today. I started as a Fortran and assembly language programmer. My first boss thought I should also know COBOL so he assigned me to write a program in COBOL to run on the RCA Spectra 70 downstairs. It took a few weeks, but I learned enough on own to get it done. Any programmer who knows more than one language (isn’t that all of them?) can easily learn a another procedural language like COBOL.
Elizabelle
The Guardian has a liveblog on Cuomo’s press conference, with his responses to Trump’s latest inanities. Cuomo had a really good crack about Trump’s past as a reality TV show host, which I don’t see here.
A sample:
Major Major Major Major
@dm: I decided to start post-packet-switching, but yes, he was very important too.
Major Major Major Major
@Bob7094: No, no, we have to celebrate youth and poorly-built languages (*cough* javascript) over sensible industry standards.
Jeffro
@mrmoshpotato: hey whatever it takes to reach even a few of them…
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Fuck the fucking Yankees, but I’m all for every Yankee fan being allowed to kick Hannity in the dick.
mrmoshpotato
@Elizabelle:
State got a stay-at-home order? Why not try to achieve the impossible?
different-church-lady
I keep thinking about plagues a thousand years ago. Imagine yourself in that: “Well, lots of people are dying. Who knows why? Maybe I’ll die, maybe my family will die. Oh well, might as well try to find some food somewhere…” That’s your whole damn life for years.
different-church-lady
@The Moar You Know: I’m cashing my last freelance paychecks through a mobile banking app on a tablet, which of course only connects to the internet via WiFi. What could go wrong?
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: Could, or will? The biggest danger to you in this scenario is the fact that you’re freelancing.
whomever
@SFAW: I know are joking but Vint Cerf is one of the best dressed people out there. He always wears three piece suits (you can google to see him). He is also legendarily one of the nicest people in the universe, the low level people at Google (Where he currently works) are pretty much universal about that.
Tdjr
@Bob7094: Problem is they’re not teaching procedural languages. Object oriented languages are a bit different.
SFBayAreaGal
Remember Netscape? When the biotech firm I was working at started using this browser (1995) a whole new world opened up. At the time, we were on Apple computers.
dm
@Bob7094: On top of that, there’s been an Object Oriented COBOL standard since, like 2000.
A friend tells me that one can run COBOL on an IBM 360 emulator running on a PC these days.
Also, I hear https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course is the new hotness on github.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: There have been many many times over the past five years where I have rued my career decisions…
Origuy
I was on the COBOL ANSI standards committee for a while in the early 2000s. I was on a COBOL compiler project at the time, but the only time I wrote in the language was for test programs. When I was on the committee, one of the new features we worked on was reading and writing XML.
different-church-lady
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yes, but they also go obsolete in ways paper books don’t.
E-delivery of entertainment was always more about rights management than environmentalism.
Major Major Major Major
@dm: Some jackass even made a COBOL web framework (there’s a Fortran one too).
@different-church-lady: ACTUALLY
*adjusts digital librarian hat*
it was about access. Publishers are the people to blame for DRM, not information scientists. Most of the proprietary standards are derived from open-source ones, which are great.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
As a cynical guess, I would say that perhaps 50% of the jobs we have do not actually need to get done at all, but we need to have them anyway so that a majority of our population is not impoverished.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
I’m so old I can remember when we were going to leave this guy on an ice flow because he did something really stupid in college and never apologized for it correctly.
Fair Economist
@Tdjr: I’m surprised there’s so much trouble getting COBOL programmers. It’s a pretty straightforward language and it should be easy to learn. I suppose it might be hard to manage with pre-structured code programs.
WhatsMyNym
@Tdjr: Just give them a copy of COBOL for dummies . I think they will figure it out if they’re any good at programming.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: In the early days of digital photography there was a flyer that said, “Why trust your precious memories to 100 year old technology?”
And I’m like, “Because it’s tried and true for 100 years?”
Poe Larity
I’m glad to hear about Cerf. Not too far back an engineer I know who worked on a certain Unix netwok stack said “When we got to 10gb, we had to change some stuff and we were all very worried when it looked like we were changing stuff that was as old as Vincent.”
Gravenstone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Um, Donnie? Weren’t you just threatening to dismiss Congress unless they immediately got back to work at approving your crooked judges? And now you’re pretending that you need them to pass legislation to help Joe C. Public? Here is where I once again suggest that you kindly fuck off and die!
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: I was and am a defender of Governor Northam. The blackface was wholly out of character, and the twitter and online mob should have taken a look at his accomplishments and platform before that photo ever came out. But that is … work.
It was useless to say anything about that here, at the time. Hive mind. I am glad Northam stuck it out.
Origuy
This may be today’s best thing on the Internet. It’s surely why Kahn and Cerf invented it.
Quarantined Woman Creates a Fine Art Museum For Her Guinea Pig
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle: I only wish he had been a hell of a lot better at owning it.
On the other hand, considering the zeitgeist of the time it might have been volunteering for the scaffold.
different-church-lady
@Origuy: The internet is like Homer Simpson’s view of alcohol: it’s the cause of, and the solution to, all our problems.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: Books are still the gold standard for text storage.
I remember reading an article a while back about a company (some major company, this was just a fun project) who’d come up with a microetched-quartz information storage system. It was pretty cool, able to last for a very long time in underground storage. The article ended with something like, “[company] did not respond to a question about whether the electronics necessary to read it would exist in ten thousand years.”
MattF
@Bob7094: I suspect the problem is not so much learning COBOL syntax as understanding what’s going on in an existing mountain of COBOL code that dates from Only-Deity-Knows-When.
Gravenstone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Probably because you tend to share popcorn.
Can’t believe I’m trying to ascribe logic to fucking Hannity!!!
bemused senior
@MattF: tcp/ip predated the osi model and in fact doesn’t follow it.
Elizabelle
The FTF NY Times sends out a breaking news alert about Trump’s “liberate” tweets this morning. Their article, to save you a click:
Trump encouraged resistance against three Democratic governors’ lockdowns, echoing right-wing protesters’ calls to “liberate” their states.
“Remarkable” and “most fervent supporters” are definitely euphemisms there.
And you will notice he does not include Ohio — also on lockdown — in his ALL CAPS messages. Maybe Fox News didn’t say anything about that one, since … Republican governor.
MoxieM
Oh, Yay. Bring back memories when, among other things, I was SysOp on a Dec20 (great machine!). We were a college in the MIT orbit, and hence a node on ARPANET (was node the name then? can’t remember.) I don’t think we were on DARPA. I had a Bitnet address and everything. One of those bearded brains from XeroxParc in holy Palo Alto used to come around quite a bit. Can’t remember his name either, but I imagine it would ring bells for the savants among you. I was lowly–managing student workers, teaching the Profs how to “program:” (yes in those days it was programming) SPSS. Pace Dorothy Windsor, it eventually led me to getting a PhD in Sociology, where I was one of the few bi-lingual, or ecumenical students around: I could do both quant and qual and saw great value in each. I wrote an ethnographic dissertation eventually, about women who chose to have children without partners. It was news then, and I was interested in how they constructed kinship. (Pretty anthropological, but very sociological roots.)
But those were fun days, and a great big fun toy of a machine. Winchester disks! Octal switches! Floor suckers–hell, having a machine room so you could keep the lot of it cool.
Gimme a holler if you remember all that fun. It was just on the midnight eve of PCs, for me. (Quoth Ken Olesen, “who is going to want a computer in their house?”). Heh. Bad bet, Kennster.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: And it’s really weird to blame COBOL for that. Like, legacy enterprise code is… not unique to COBOL.
MoxieM
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, blame SNOBOL.
smedley the uncertain
@Elizabelle: Is there a site that rebroadcasts Cuomos press conferences. I want to share it with others (unbelievers). NYS site doesn’t seem to offer it.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: I was glad to see Northam stick it out, after the knee jerk demands from Democrats for his resignation, because I am sick of knee jerk demands. You have to look at a situation in full, and they did not.
I was ashamed for the cowards, which included my own congresscritter. Second strike for her, but she’s marvelous otherwise.
hw3
There’s a great book talking covering the story of the pioneers who created the roots of the Internet: Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/281818.Where_Wizards_Stay_Up_Late
Elizabelle
@smedley the uncertain: C-Span is great. And they will eventually have a transcript up, within 24 hours for sure.
This was one 1 hour 22 minutes. Here’s the link to today’s Cuomo press conference.
sdhays
@Bob7094: I’ve always found this somewhat perplexing as well. My guess is that because the systems that require COBOL are so mission-critical, they don’t want to trust updates to it to people that are learning the language just for that project.
bemused
@Jeffro:
Damn him to hell.
Baud
Ok, COBOL.
MattFnO
@Elizabelle: Trump is trying all the doorknobs to see if one is unlocked. This one happens to be labeled ‘Mob Violence’. And he’s not going to stop trying.
Jeffro
@bemused: almost too good for him at this point
I know there’s no way to measure how many more people will be exposed, get sick, and die due to his stupid exhortations but any blocked ambulances stuck in traffic and certainly any acts of violence – both easily measurable – are all on his and the GOP’s heads.
MattF
[deleted]
Elizabelle
Cuomo begins: “Good morning. Happy Friday. Weekend’s almost here. Whatever that means …”
then a quip about whether one is an optimist or pessimist as one reviews the curve.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
Trump is not just failing to lead the fight against Covid-19, he’s actively sabotaging it.
different-church-lady
@MattFnO: Someone should tell him the doorknobs are activated by tongue.
LongHairedWeirdo
An interesting tidbit: although we’ve run out of IP addresses for TCP/IP V4 – 4 sets of one byte = 4 billion addresses – TCP/IP V6 uses 4 sets of 32 bits each = 128 billion billion billion billion addresses… and yet, very little has actually changed. Address allocations have certainly changed; but the basics of network identification (“when is this address on my local network (segment)?”) and routing have remained essentially the same.
I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense: don’t reinvent the wheel. On the other, it demonstrates just how well thought out TCP/IP was. A competitor, Novell Netware, used the unique ID of each network device to identify and route messages between nodes, but those are essentially random numbers – TCP/IP ensures that if two nodes are “close” (on the same segment), their addresses *must* be close to each other. That means there’s a route to each block of addresses, rather than to each and every node in the network – that’s far more efficient.
Amir Khalid
@smedley the uncertain:
Don’t they post videos of the press conferences on YouTube? That’s what the key agancies in Malaysia have been doing.
sdhays
@Elizabelle: He’s my governor, and I think this time my reaction was good. Before I made up my mind, I waited to see what people who had the right to be offended thought – African American Virginians. When it turned out they didn’t think he should resign, that was my answer.
I understood where people were coming from, and the double standard argument is cutting (he gets by because he’s a white man, while any minor blemish can end others’ careers), but the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good. What worried me the most was how it would affect the legislative elections. A few months later: it didn’t matter at all and we swept the legislature into Democratic control.
Major Major Major Major
@LongHairedWeirdo: it’s really an amazing system (I allude to addresses in my post…)
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid: Yes. He is actively sabotaging. He should go to prison for this. And I hope we can make that happen.
Laurie Garrett in Foreign Policy magazine. And this was published January 31! Way before all the tap-dancing and incomprehensible inactivity and lying/misdirection since.
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.
bemused
@Jeffro:
There aren’t words strong enough to describe what this sick, sadistic, monstrous creature is.
D Gardner
@MattF: Of the many things I was taught in my Comp Sci degrees, for some reason the OSI layers have stuck with me (ok, top two usually elude me because I wrote a lot of socket-based code).
I love the idea of the layered responsibility that takes place all the way down to Data Link and Physical layers.
D Gardner
@SFAW: I’m sorry, but this involves Maslow’s Hierarchy of Frame Retransmission.
J R in WV
@Mandalay:
When I started in my BSCS program, they taught using a language called P/L1 — which stood for Programming Language One,
They started by writing a compiler ( perhaps the first such tool ) in assembler, with which they were able to bootstrap by writing a second generation compiler in PL/1.
This was in 1980, and it ran on an Amdahl plug-compatible IBM mainframe up in Morgantown. There was also a Star-configuration DEC VAX Cluster, and I believe PL/1 also ran on that platform… but it was a very long time ago and I am not now positive…
Mr V Cerf must be older than old trees today. Wrong, only 76, so 7 years older than I. He’s still a spring chicken. “I don’t recommend it [Covid infection!].”
Major^4, thanks for this post, I’m sure most of the comments will be more interesting than this one.
Elizabelle
@sdhays: Yeah. When you read the “most liked” reader comments at the Washington Post: they were not part of the race to judgement crowd. I was heartened to see that. The newspaper was doing its part to light the torches. A lot of readers were not having it.
cynthia ackerman
Holy shit. I do not tear up, this
teared me up.
japa21
Just watched some of the more damning parts of Cuomo’s presser. I loved his line, “And if we listened to you (about how many beds would be necessary) then we should be ashamed.”
D Gardner
@The Moar You Know: I write a lot of networking software, but it is mostly data acquisition from sensors, so there is no need to be concerned about security in any meaningful sense. However, I like to know things, so can you elaborate briefly on what you mean by “entry/exit points” for PKE? Are you talking about key distribution and security?
dnfree
@SFAW: love that mention! I was in graduate school in the mid-70s when I learned that model, and it was astonishing to me. To think of it as still part of the underpinnings is even more so.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@MoxieM: AH, WInchester disks, I worked with some of those in the Navy, I hated backup nights because I had to keep switching them I think my hearing suffered from being around them, and those things weighed a ton! and the old tapes drives and patch panels. And 80 column cards, had to program some of the card sorting machines with patch panels too. Dropping an entire tray of cars was always fun. Good times.
Why yes I am old!
Origuy
Grace Hopper invented the first English-like programming language. It was the basis for COBOL. I don’t know how much she was involved in the later iterations of the language. I never met her, but I knew several people who did. PL/I was based on Algol, another language that started around 1958.
Major Major Major Major
@D Gardner: I think TMYK was referring to network entry and exit points in general?
Oklahomo
@MattF:
This. I call it forensic programming. 800 people have added and commented out code and each one has to put his unique spin on any new code.
J R in WV
@Oklahomo:
I worked in COBOL from 1985-95, or so. Was offered big money to go back into COBOL later on in the 90s as big business worked to avoid the Y2K disaster… no amount of money was enough to pull me to Pittsburgh (just to pick one city where I was recruited from) and COBOL banking systems!!
When I first worked on a large COBOL financial system in the mid 80s, we used a two digit year, and if the yy year field was larger than 50 we assumed a CC of ’19’, else ’20’ to the system was good for 70 years — until 2049. We couldn’t imagine that any system would be in production for that long… now I wonder about that.
The more senior designers started back when storage was really expensive and hard to come by, so saving 2 bytes from every date amounted to a real difference. The last 15 years I spent mostly analyzing data and designing relational DB tables and keys.
Many-to-Many relationships galore!!! in Oracle DB. We broke down and bought a data architect tool for DB design, it was way too hard to white-board data bases with 200+ tables…
NotMax
Way back when there was INTERCAL, which resulted in huffy mode* if one didn’t include a “Please” keyword statement from time to time in the program.
*As in the equivalent of “I’m not gonna compile and you can’t make me. Nyah-nyah-nyah.”
Elizabelle
Listening to the Cuomo press conference. The comments about his daughters and personal relationships were around 23 minute mark, give or take. About realizing the relationship had become superficial, and the importance of deeper connections, as a suggestion to all of us.
Trump could never, ever, ever say something like that, at length.
Now discussing how the COVID money was distributed politically, to the GOP senators up for re-election. 30 minutes.
RobertB
@J R in WV: I learned PL/1 at Marshall (Go Herd!) a couple years after you did, and it was compiled on a VAX. We did assembly language and JCL on an IBM 370.
God, that PL/1 compiler was insanely slow. Either that or student privileges were the lowest of the low (most likely). You’d submit your code as a compilation batch job, then kill about a half hour until you got either your executable or an error log. Fun times.
SteverinoCT
@Major Major Major Major:
One of my personal projects during a quiet time a few years ago was converting my old documents, saved in some unknown format on a PCjr, into ASCII. Luckily I wasn’t that prolific way back when. Also converted my Word docs into Open Office docs.
Oklahomo
@J R in WV: I had to do a Y2K upgrade medical billing package on the AS/400 that was written in both RPG/400 and COBOL/400. Code that had been modified from a S/38 package. Some of the coding techniques were inspired, some of them insane.
J R in WV
@Poe Larity:
I too thought his first name was Vincent, but when I looked him up I saw that it is actually Vinton Cerf. Who knew?
Elizabelle
36 minutes. Comments about people being sick of being home, but they still need to do it, because “death is bad.” Understands they need a paycheck. But ….
RobertB
I think the “Cobol in the Days of Covid” isn’t getting a PC to emulate a 50-year-old 370 or to teach Cobol to a Java developer, it’s to hook that emulated 370 to all the old hardware, and to teach the developer all the ancillary stuff around it.
My wife started out in her career as a mainframe developer. I used to watch over my wife’s shoulder while she’d just do JCL off the top of her head, and I’d tell her NFW could I/would I do that. I was doing PC development in C at the time (still do it, sort of), and she’d watch over my shoulder say the same thing.
Major Major Major Major
@SteverinoCT: One of the biggest advantages of XML document formats is that, even if everything goes to shit, as long as you can load Unicode, you can sorta read them manually.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: In general, as a person who really enjoys the physical world and tangible things, I find our current state of affairs (everything virtual by necessity!) amplifies my psychological strain. It feels like fate is trying to tell my my affection is misplaced.
MattF
Politico article on Trump-as-Houdini.
John Revolta
I studied COBOL and FORTRAN in high school in 1970. Thought there might be a future in this computer stuff. Still have some punchcards stashed away somewhere. Well, it looked like the guys that were in bands were having a lot more fun and adventures so I went that way instead, figured I’d be rich and famous by the time I was 25 maybe. I got the fun and adventures part right anyway…………….
Elizabelle
45 minutes: discussing how much stuff is made in China. The supply chain, for a lot of states.
davecb
@SFAW: The ARPAnet actually has it’s own model, that was twisted slightly to fit the ISO one. It sat on top of physical and was network, host-to-host and application. TCP and IP were part of host-host. (Padlipski, MA, The Elements of Networking Style)
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: one of my digital libraries profs thinks that paper books won’t be around in 2050 except as oddities and legacy items. (He is not advocating this, just observing)
J R in WV
@RobertB:
When I enrolled in 1980, there were 400 incoming freshmen in the CS program, and 4 terminals in the “lab” !!
Fortunately I was becoming friends with a guy who had worked for IBM as a field tech, repairing and maintaining card punch machines, of which were were a dozen or more abandoned in teh back of the lab. We keyed all our programs that first year onto 80 column cards, he could make those machines do anything, read a card with a typo in and correct the 2 columns that were hosed.
We’re still good friends. He has recently rebuilt an original Z-car that gleams like a new car. Worked on networking computers for Nortel back when they were about the biggest networking vendor.
When he was still an employee of IBM he spent a year in Brazil where he helped build a computer that sat between other computers emulating a long-distance network for testing networks without needing inter-continental distances. Over my head!! Cross between system programming and Electrical Engineering, which was his first degree. He’s retired and in Montana now.
@Origuy:
Algol, huh? I can believe that. Rings a bell actually.
Villago Delenda Est
Grace Hopper handed me a nanosecond when I was attending the Signal Officer Basic Course.
pluky
@Elizabelle: Just a priest, I doubt Andrew would be happy at anything less than Archbishop.
laura
@Amir Khalid: Thank you Amir Khalid. I’m so sorry that this year’s observance will be solemn and solitary as have the earlier holidays have been. Our local farmer’s market sells the most beautiful and tender dates and this is the time of year that they really move their product.
mrmoshpotato
Some fine kicking of Dump’s orange manchild ass here.
Elizabelle
55 minutes — reporter brings up the Trump tweets scolding Cuomo.
here come the fireworks.
“First of all, if he’s sitting home watching TV, maybe he should get up and go to work.”
Patricia Kayden
Elizabelle
@pluky: Cardinal.
But he’s got a pastoral manner. Speaking of comforting, not predation …
(I say that as a lapsed Catholic, with years of parochial schooling…)
57 minutes: were we foolish for relying on your projections, Mr. President?
Patricia Kayden
Yep
Oklahomo
@Patricia Kayden: There seems to be a perverse sort of pride at work. Most people laugh it off and take no precautions; and those of us masked and gloved folk are looked at like we’re naked freaks.
Elizabelle
59 minutes. The President doesn’t want to help on testing. Says It’s too complicated and too hard.
And then: the 10th amendment. Do not need the president to tell the governors what to do.
I have read the Constititution. Maybe he should have read the Constitution before he said …. and he did a graceful 180, and many people allowed him to do a 180
By the way, I need a stockpile. Where was your stockpile?
[You all will really enjoy watching the video. Cuomo brings it.]
Another Scott
@Elizabelle: I must admit that I was one of those Virginians loudly yelling for him to resign when he had that disaster of a press conference denying it was him (the day or so after he apologized for it being him). And yelling for the Lt. Gov. to resign as well. As were many, many elected democrats.
But not yelling for AG Herring to resign when his story came out shortly thereafter…
I should have held my fire, especially after agreeing with Cole about freaking out when the story of Hillary’s e-mail server first came out, and (I thought) learning my lesson there…
People are flawed. People do stupid things. We need to hold our representatives to high standards, but conduct in office right now is more important than their conduct decades ago. And while corner cases make bad law, blind adherence-to- standards without consideration of repercussions makes things worse.
Maybe I’ll learn not to fly off the handle, but it’s hard!!
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who still thinks that Justin Fairfax is a cautionary tale…”)
Fair Economist
@MoxieM: That sounds like a really cool dissertation.
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
No one can say Fuck trump enough. Even when you say it often, Fuck trump, it’s never enough. I mean Fuck trump rolls off the tongue or Fuck trump rolls off the the finger tips and Fuck trump sounds just about right no matter what. So if you don’t think you’ve said Fuck trump enough, I encourage you to say Fuck trump as often as possible….
The only thing that could beat saying Fuck trump, often, loud and proud, would be never having to say Fuck trump ever again. Also it’s difficult to say Fuck trump and spit while wearing a mask.
Nicole
@Elizabelle: Today’s briefing from Cuomo was so good I wanted a cigarette after, and I don’t smoke.
(For those who feel like watching them live and don’t already know, you can go to governor.ny.gov to see them live. And they have the most soothing pre-brief music to listen to ahead of time.)
Jeffro
Amazing new 3-minute anti-trumpov ad up…WOW…pulling no punches on trumpov’s attempts to re-write history about covid-19 and China
Elizabelle
1:03 re the Comfort: which by the way is just doing your job as president. It’s not really “thank you” like you wrote a check yourself.
…. we need help on testing and we need funding … speaks about SBA funding, but testing is really important, first …
By the way, I know that airlines need a bailout, but not the states. Why don’t you show as much consideration to states as you did to your big businesses, and to your airlines?
MattF
@Jeffro: Link?
Another Scott
@J R in WV: Just for you, and the other dB heads -something I found on another site I haunt:
Hehe.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: good god.
D Gardner
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks – makes sense. I was trying to be too clever (an accusation I rarely hear about myself).
D Gardner
@Oklahomo: Remember, only the living can have the last laugh. No one (one hopes) dies from being too cautious here, so we will never know what the alternative timelines look like if we were cavalier about this.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: In 2050 we may not be around except as a decimated species hunting and gathering on a desert planet.
Elizabelle
And what really set off a Cuomo tirade: reporter asks if he and Trump have spoken since (no) and then about how Trump announced the May 1 reopening of the states …
1:04:40 in
No, he didn’t announce anything. He said it’s up to the states. … some governors will be able to open right away; some states never even closed down … He’s doing NOTHING. He said it’s up the to states. It’s up to the governors. Which is what it always was, because it’s always been the governors’ power.
And then he says, there’s a 50 piece puzzle. Oh no no no. That’s called the map of the United States. It’s not a puzzle. And those lines are called STATES and those states have constitutional power.
[And then how the colonies created the federal government and not the other way around. ]
So, “Introduction to Constitutional Theory and Policy.” …
Isn’t it fucking ridiculous that a governor has to school the “president” on very basic concepts of the Constitution? This is — what — fifth grade? Seventh grade?? But it’s where we are.
Elizabelle
@Nicole: I know. It’s a tethering line from a sane planet. And Cuomo enjoys updating people and attempting to school Trump, in the process. It is the best reality TV out there.
Real issues. Discussion of opening the marinas (and other facilities). What do you do when Connecticut’s got theirs open (and sounds like they might) and New Yorkers want to flood in over there…?
LongHairedWeirdo
@Major Major Major Major: You’re right about XML, etc., but it’s TCP/IP that provides the magic of the quick, effortless transfer of the book’s contents (in any format) to the user.
Of course, if TCP/IP didn’t work that magic, we’d have invented something else. But how amazing that we never had to!
@Elizabelle: On the plus side, that sort of tweet would fire up his base in *ordinary* times… but if there’s still some sanity in this country, it will backfire now.
A normal election has the right wing going on about gun grabbing, bible burning, baby killers (i.e.: their friends and neighbors who are Democrats).
This election is going to include tens of thousands of Americans dead due to the President’s idiotic insistence that Covid-19 was under control (and now, possibly more dead due to his direct push to have more people get sick and die to try to own the libs).
Unless the Republicans have the outright stupidity to continue to insist that their puffed up peacock of a President “kept us safe, just like George W”, his actions now will hurt him in November.
That said, if the Republicans do try to polish this turd, we should be pretty damn scared. It’s one thing to wave off the deaths of foreigners who committed the terrible crime of living in Iraq; they’re far away, and only have a small number of friends and relatives in the US.
Ignoring the deaths of anyone is morally bankrupt; but ignoring visible deaths of people who live near you takes a level of evil that borders on sociopathy.
@The Moar You Know: It doesn’t have to be that insecure. TCP/IP was built in a trusting world, but most security issues are not because of TCP/IP, they’re because people don’t think of security from the moment they start to design things.
And why should they? In America, at least, a major data breach will mean a few weeks of bad headlines, and a desperate push to make sure final penalties are decided during a Republican administration, who will offer a sweetheart deal in exchange for campaign contributions.
I’ll grant you this: the easy, and economically expected, way is *extremely* insecure. But if security was an absolute demand, if there isn’t a way to lock them down tighter than tight, there *would* be. When you hear about data breaches, remember how the GOP loves them some deregulation – better data breaches than punishing companies by making them develop secure systems!
@Elizabelle: I’m surprised no enterprising gun dealer has come up with a “gun of the month club” now :-)
@Bob7094: Agreed. Fortran didn’t seem like anything different from BASIC (yes, it’s supposed to be in caps: Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instructional Code, or something like that – Cobol is “COmmon Business Oriented Language”, Fortran = “FORmula TRANslation” – isn’t it cute how common restrictions in computers of the day actually guided the language used to discuss them? You didn’t have room for long names, so you used abbr constantly :-).)
@Tdjr: You’re right, procedural is very different from OOP; but I’d bet any competent OOP programmer could pick up COBOL in a weekend, if they had an old-school programmer around to explain that, yes, that *is* how we did it, in the old days. “No, we didn’t have properties; we used bit flags, and had to document which bits, in which positions, determined what you’d now call ‘properties’.”
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
GWB was in the running to be one of the 5 worst presidents.
trump has taken up all five of the bottom slots all by/for himself.
There are two reasons he’s going to stay in hiding. First, he belongs in the bottom 5 and doesn’t want to return. Second, how do you know he doesn’t agree with trump? I’m not saying he does, while he is evil, he is an evil human. trump will have to move up the food chain a few dozen steps till he hits evil human, right now he’s lower than whale shit in the Marianas trench.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Major Major Major Major: Oh, yeah, but I’m having a good day (fatiguewise) and I do love to hear myself talk :-).
Elizabelle
I listen to Cuomo’s conferences, and think that we should not have a president who’s not been a governor or a big city mayor, or a Senator (or Nancy Pelosi) or run a huge agency. Because it’s so complicated, so many considerations, that impact all sorts of others — your neighboring states, etc.
And we have an imbecile in there who cannot even run his own private business without running aground. It is a tragedy.
Trump is so unqualified it’s mind-bending, when you listen to Cuomo speaking. This can never happen again.
mrmoshpotato
@Patricia Kayden: What’s the word? Hoocouldaknowed?
Elizabelle
1:06: speaking about how the governors are coordinating with their own regional governors. And Trump?
“All he’s doing is walking in front of the parade. But he has nothing to do with the timing of the parade. The governors are going to open when they think they should open … they need 2 things from the federal government — help on testing, because the states can’t do that, and I don’t want to redo the mayhem of the PPE debacle — second point: we need funding to do it.”
“And the way you love talking about how you funded everything … big businesses are all getting bailed out. Airlines are getting bailed out. Bail out, bail out, bail out. All with taxpayers’ money. State governments, which are the only ones doing the reopening — they’re going to need funding. And will show gratitude. How many times do you want me to say thank you?
“And I’m saying thank you for doing your job. Because this was your job. As president.”
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
You left out the, while wearing steel toed work boots.
BrianM
I don’t get it: what’s the political downside of the Trump administration pushing hard to increase the number of tests? It’s pretty clear that we desperately need them.
More tests would show a lot more positives, but it seems that could be spun as: we suspected the Democratic governors were falling down on the job – both in preventing the spread and even in knowing what the spread was – so we had to take over for them. Give the parts of the country that *aren’t* liberal big cities more of a fighting chance, now that the big city failures were taking up all the supplies. Etc.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus:
Sorry Ruckus, but we will preserve our right to say “Fuck Trump!” long after all of these fascist shitstains are long dead.
Fuck Trump, and fuck the Confederacy!
Martin
So, a million years ago, when I was emerging from the hobbyist self-learned programmer into the trained professional programmer scene, I worked on a project for a guy who wasn’t a programmer but was pushing computers into the humanities, where there wasn’t yet a recognition that computers were useful to the humanities. A lot of their early stuff was designed by folks in the humanities, with assists from programmers, so it’s fair to say that it didn’t hold up well on the technical side – but it made sense to the humanities folks who didn’t want to learn a more technical approach, so it was useful for what it did. Anwyay, he hired me on to modernize a number of their tools and systems. He told me the biggest mistake he made in the project, which was then 20 years old and really struggling under the load of decisions made 20 years prior, was not depreciating their technical infrastructure. He said he should have invested in such a way that his codebase and equipment should have been able to be completely rewritten every 10 years. And that’s not a requirement to rewrite it, rather a commitment to review it in the context of modern languages, hardware, design approaches, and so on and decide what parts are fine for another 10 years, and what should be retooled in a new language because nobody is being trained in the old one, and what should be completely redone because the basic approach from 10 years back was wrong and it can’t scale, etc.
Among my bigger criticisms of software engineering is not having the discipline to institutionalize these kinds of practices with the assumption that software is as much critical infrastructure as highways and sewage systems. institutions fail all the time to actually make the investments to upgrade or even maintain these traditional systems, but the engineering disciplines do not fail to insist that it happen – which is why we know it’s a failure – because ASCE puts out a regular infrastructure report card telling anyone who would listen what should be happening and should have happened. That happens nationally as well as at the state and often county level.
Spanky
Fyi, Jennifer Rubin has already fired off a column on Cuomo’s presser. “Reminder: Don’t get on Andrew Cuomo’s bad side.”
CindyH
@BrianM: No testing means not knowing and that ignorance is what incites all his deplorable followers. And he’s probably only helping his big donors get the testing gigs so they can drive up the price and make more money.
Elizabelle
1:10 or so:
Cuomo: “Thank you for participating in a modicum of federal responsibility in a national crisis. Which you know is a national crisis, because he declared a federal emergency. So thank you for having the federal government participate in a federal emergency.”
And thank you for helping build Javits. With 2,500 beds. PURSUANT TO YOUR PROJECTION. Your projection. And if you don’t agree with your projection, fire the head of the CDC. Fire the White House Coronavirus Task Force people because they did the projections. In case he forgot or didn’t read his CDC report, just to be precise — March 13th — CDC says … 160 to 214 million Americans infected. That’s over half the population. …. other statistics follow … 21 million Americans hospitalized. The C. D. C. OK? …
[more discussion on the beds projected and present capacity …]
[sternly:] “That’s why we built 2,500 beds at Javits. Because we listened to you, Mr. President. And if we were foolish for listening to you, then shame on us. But read your own report next time before criticizing.”
Mandalay
A Joe Biden tweet from 2:02 pm today:
Trump might want to change the conversation to liberating Michigan, but politicians and reporters are finally wising up, and playing Trump at his own game.
Elizabelle
@Spanky: I know ! Trump does everything to message to his base, but in flaming at Cuomo, he definitely brought a spitball to the fight.
I think Cuomo enjoys taking on Trump at his press conferences, and he is also schooling other governors and officials — and probably the press — on how to do it.
Gravenstone
@BrianM:
Numbers. Trump is likely still fixated on reducing the numbers of people who are known to have gotten sick with covid, as well as those who actually died from it. If you can’t adequately test, you can’t definitively say that this individual has covid (or died from it). It’s all a shell game to him. If they don’t know the real numbers, then he can bullshit his way through. Or so he thinks, since that’s been his approach to blustering and bullying his way through life.
Elizabelle
@Gravenstone: What I don’t understand — and maybe I am being innumerate — doesn’t Germany have such a low number of deaths to infections to tests ratio because they are doing so many tests and thus improve the ratio?
Has anyone explained that to Mr. got my degree at Wharton?
ETA: Plus, Germany is/was really serious about the lockdown. 500 euro fines and up. And they’re ticketing folks for being out when they should not.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus: Silly me! Here I am forgetting to protect feet from Hannity’s pelvis!
Central Planning
@trnc:
That’s solid.
MattF
@Spanky: Yes, and Jen is not above casting shade:
Gravenstone
@Elizabelle: Germany started early and built out. We started late, in part because some bright spark refused the initial WHO test kits offered, and in part because Trump absolutely wanted to suppress the bad numbers. Someone reminded in a previous thread about how he initially refused to allow one of the early cruise ships with active corona patients on board to dock here, because it would more than double the number of cases in the US! Yeah, that ship (and oh so many more) sailed long ago. We’re now orders of magnitude beyond those early numbers of ill and dead. Yet he’s probably still trying to keep the numbers down. Stupid and pointless and counterproductive as that actually is.
mrmoshpotato
@MattF: Speaks loudly and carries a tiny stick and is Russia’s and China’s and North Korea’s and Saudi Arabia’s bitch.
Elizabelle
1:13: Cuomo asks for “Gareth” to do him a favor — “put up the White House coronavirus projections so the president can READ what he said.”
It’s gorgeous and sunny here in Virginia. Want to go out for a walk. Wondering if we should tune in for today’s Trumpshow, because it might be epic ….
Dorothy A. Winsor
Reports are Governor Pritzker is going to close Illinois schools for the rest of the school year. I’m not surprised. My kindergarten teacher DIL will be sorry though.
Martin
@LongHairedWeirdo: The problem with COBOL isn’t that the language is hard – it’s fucking weird but as with languages of the day, it’s very compact so pretty easy to learn the syntax of. The problem with COBOL is that it’s fucking weird, at least in terms of how modern data system work. So it’s not like you can take a pile of COBOL code, abstract it, and reimplement it in C or python or whatever because the way it deals with data has no modern counterpart – because it’s wrong, for lack of a better word. The way it does things is wrong.
Another system that we can’t seem to move forward from is EPIC because it’s similarly wrong – the way it builds out and stores these ad-hoc data structures is just wrong. The only way to be EPIC-compatible is basically to reimplement EPIC, at least conceptually. COBOL suffers from a similar problem.
So COBOL systems aren’t migrated so much as they are completely re-architected and re-imagined. And that’s well worth the effort given how old these systems are, but it’s also a major investment and difficult to get the commitment from leadership to do it. They insist on ‘let’s just migrate it forward so we can maintain it’, when concepts like smartphones were too futuristic even for Star Trek to present to audiences years later, and the system was designed around concepts like trained clerks performing data entry rather than consumers/voters/citizens directly interacting with the system. And those ‘lets just migrate it forward’ efforts ultimately fail because the basic assumptions behind the tools are wrong for today.
Sab
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My grand-daughter didn’t go to college this year because of fimances and family reasons. This fixes a gap in her resume while she was just living life.
My six- year old autistic grand-daughter wasn’t quite ready for regular school. A few months in lockdown with a new five-year old roommate (new concept: sharing) and two moms should do a lot to help her develop in new ways and also fill the gap in her resume.
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve recently contemplated how W remains in hiding. And it is hiding. Dump shit all over him and his father, but like Ted Cruz and Little Marco, he just rolled over and played dead. If he cared about this country, he would have tried to torpedo Dump in 2016. Maybe he already had so little juice that it wouldn’t have mattered, but I think having the previous Republican President disavow Dump would have taken him out.
But W just stayed at home, painting in his bathtub, and didn’t have to lose any rich friends. He’s a quintessential pathetic, “good” Republican. He’s now so small, it’s hard to imagine how dominating he was for a time in American politics.
Another Scott
@Martin: On the other hand, there are graveyards filled with projects that were working well that were suddenly “re-architected” and killed the company. Sometimes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” really does apply.
Remember the mania, back in the day, to “write once, run anywhere”?
The trouble is, knowing when to kill a project and start over, or to kill a product to give birth to a new product, is really, really hard.
Cheers,
Scott.
leeleeFL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Did he miss the part where millions of people have already been laid off or furloughed since March and early April?
And what happened to State Governors handling the return to Normalcy(gratuitous Calvin Coolidge reference) for their States?
I am really worried that we are in for an ugly surprise and the virus will smash us hard if we open up too soon. These protesting buffoons will likely exacerbate the chance of that happening, and it will be violent soon with that Shithead fanning the flames.
I hate him more with every nanosecond that passes. Did not see that coming! I thought I was at Peak Hate
J R in WV
@Martin:
It certainly is at least as critical as highways and water and sewer systems. But have you noticed that every so often a major city Interstate highway bridge falls down, with traffic on board?
And many sewer systems have so many leaks. I once toured a fairly major landfill site (for WV anyway) with a bunch of inspectors learning how to inspect such a site. Those landfill cells have leachate collection systems under each cell, collecting into a central tank, from there through a dedicated sewer line to the municipal sewer system.
When they first installed all that newly invented cleaner methodology for that landfull [they even built new cells to empty old cells without that collection system into] they ran Fluorescent Dye Tracer Tests and Hydrogeology — running day-glo orange or green dye through the system to see where there might be leaks between the landfill and the treatment plant. There were 17 major leaks just in the neighborhood!
So that project suddenly included miles of replacement sewer line to implement a properly designed landfill system up that hollow. And I’ll bet those tests haven’t been run again since the original permits were written — probably 20 years ago now.
Makes me shudder to think of the fluids being discarded into that landfill. Right here in Chemical Valley !!
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
Being able to say it and needing to say it are two entirely different points.
Right now we need to say it, Fuck trump. Have to say it, Fuck trump. Because not saying it while he’s squatting in the WH bathroom tweeting, would be an affront against humanity. Fuck trump.
When he’s gone we will still say it, Fuck trump, as a reminder of how shitty the republican party has become over the last 100 + yrs and how hard we will have to work just to avoid another thousand year fuck up, like electing him was. But we won’t need to say it, just to get through the day.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
From the NY Post on March 25th:
The article is of course trying to lower expectations: “Nobody could have predicted and we did the best we could. Oh well!”
And I found this article from last year interviewing Auerbach and he seems to sing a different tune:
Somebody’s lying here.
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
It’s also like, if you are going to hit someone in the head with a hammer, don’t use the 2 oz hammer, use the 2 lb hammer. Don’t kick someone in the crotch with a sneaker, when a steel toed work boot is much more effective.
?BillinGlendaleCA
This picture is made for this post, room where the first message was sent on the internet.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I worked for a company for a decade that had IBM PCs on every desk when I got there, using them mostly as terminals for their database in COBOL, running of course on an IBM mid level mainframe. This was in 95 and they had to scour to find people who had any understanding (and would work for crappy pay) to maintain and operate the system. None of the data base was complicated, but the person in charge of purchasing had zero concept of any part of it whatsoever. It was spit and baling wire all the way down. When I left in 05, the mainframe had been replaced twice the database was still the same. Wanna bet nothing has changed since?
J R in WV
@Gravenstone:
We need to have an Inspector general discover who made that “not invented here” decision whether a single moron or a committee being led by the nose by a moron, and indict them for however many deaths extra can be allocated to the delay in being able to test.
This is one of several insane decisions that have got us where we are today. Along with the airport scene with
hundredsthousands of people milling in terminals — could no one have forced the airlines to deliver people to the airport in a volume that would have allowed at least proper separation, temp taking, ID tracking, etc, etc? They could have been issuing masks to everyone as the disembarked their aircraft, gloves even.But No! No one could have done anything like that! Not in our current circumstances of governing at the federal level. Or is the CDC and the FAA being run by governors now?
Nora Lenderbee
@SFAW: Same here.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Aw, the teletype punch press in the back of the room. Had one of those in 73, to create tape for our first numerical control machine. The concept of pain in the ass was cemented as an operating concept with that teletype machine.
CindyH
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Love it! That room is so tidy! I’m a network engineer and have a very messy desk.
MoxieM
@Fair Economist: Thank you! It was. I would have happily done a book, but I was threatened with a lawsuit (no really) by one of my former advisors. I took her threat seriously, since she got tenure by suing the college. Ah, the joys of grad school, eh? I went on to do public health research on needle injection drug use and HIV/AIDS harm reduction, so, I put all 10 years ;) to good use, I guess.
MoxieM
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Lots of old Jackals. Get off my porch! But enjoy what’s left of the day.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Martin: To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting that *migration* was easy – I was suggesting that a programmer could probably learn enough COBOL in a weekend to implement a bug fix :-).
Of course, saying that does kind of lead away from the main point: these systems *do* need a rebuild, from the ground up. I wasn’t thinking too deeply, but, of course they’re not finding new bugs; they’re finding architectural limits.
(Heh. I remember watching Iron Man for the first time, and the one thing that *absolutely* crushed my suspension of disbelief was how Stark had written enough code that it took time to load and boot up the OS, while performing a massive amount of mechanical/electrical engineering, “in a cave! With a box of scraps!” I doubt a human being can either speak, or type (or, for that matter, *think*) fast enough, to generate that much code, bug free, that quickly. That did set me up for Infinity War, where he turned his suit into nanobots. That was a *cool* movie, I hope they make a sequel some day. And why didn’t they sue that pretender who put out “Endgame”? (Sorry, fan gripe. Don’t say you’re paying attention to Marvel Canon, and make Mjolnir unliftable except by those who are worthy, and then have anyone or any entity able to punch out the Hulk, *conclusively*. What’s that? How many movies have *I* made that earned a billion dollars? Well, the movies *I* didn’t make were more accurate, so there!) )
Martin
@Another Scott: Oh, no question.
But increasingly for businesses, your code is your culture and if you can’t figure out when to kill a product then you’re kind of fucked either way. If you can’t figure that out, then you don’t know where the market is going and you don’t know how to get there.
I see these cases all the time where there’s this sudden fall from grace, and they point to some execution failure like a failed project as the cause, but really the problem was much deeper than that.
How did Boeing suddenly find themselves in with the 737 Max problem and the Starliner problems and the KC-46 problems, and now not even being in consideration by NASA for certain future missions, and we’re looking at something MUCH deeper than an execution failure. Boeing is only surviving here because they are too big to fail for the US. Their management is lost at sea. Their culture is busted. And I bet you find evidence of that everywhere in the company – including places like HR and internal systems projects.
IOW, if you have good management, these things go well. If they don’t go well, it’s probably really because your management is busted.
Martin
@LongHairedWeirdo: But this isn’t bugfix level problems. This is how do you spin up new instances of your unemployment website (easy to the point of trivial) and not break the single process COBOL back-end that is doing your business logic (impossible).
I mean, we learned this shit the hard way with healthcare.gov and we learned the correct lesson at that time as well.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Boeing lost their way. They grew bigger and they matured and got stuck where they were. They looked at what they had and didn’t see where to take that. Companies of all sizes do the same. People do the same. As you age you can be highly successful or a total loser and the effect is the same, you lose your way (or never had one in the first place.) I’m listening to an interview with guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and he’s basically saying the same thing, a person or a corporation, has to have drive, a direction to drive and the ability to recognize what is going on and change course when needed. Boeing lost that way and lost that concept of doing well, above all else and allowed the concept of making money rather than what they did – building airplanes. Yesterday I commented that we as a nation elected a moron and his real problem (OK one among many, many problems) is that he thinks he’s done, everything is OK because he’s this special person, he can do anything. And of course most people are far better than he’s ever been or will ever will be. Because they look at least sideways if not inside themselves about being human rather than a false better than everyone, false because he really knows what and who he is.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: This is setup like it would have looked in 1969.
@CindyH: I think they tidied it up for the public to look at. The door is the type of door they had in 1969 as is the paint color.
JaySinWA
I’m guessing the IBM PCs are mostly gone.
JaySinWA
@Ruckus: Sorry, Boeing did lose their way, but not by being stuck in the past. They tried to change in ways that streamlined out the old stuff that slowed them down and jettisoned processes and people that kept things relatively safe along the way. Effectively they adopted the move fast and break things model. Union busting, tax relief grifting, moving manufacturing to cheaper labor, eliminating review processes, etc.
Ruckus
@JaySinWA:
You just described them exactly losing their way. And in exactly the way that I stated.
Yeah I’m related to someone who used to work there not long ago in design.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: Boeing lost touch with their roots when they moved from Seattle.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major:
Yes! Ted Stevens got a lot of flack for that description, but it’s a solid one.
@Martin:
What an excellent idea. I’ve been explaining to friends why some archaic systems persist today by asking them to imagine their teenaged kids asking for a new mobile phone: “What’s wrong with the phone you have now? It works to make calls, doesn’t it? It’s not broken, is it?” But that attitude leads us to air traffic control systems written for Windows 3.1.
J R in WV
@JaySinWA:
Boeing abandoned all the old ways that led to great air-frames. In exchange for more money.
As said, union busting, moving to South Carolina, finding scrap and rags left in fuel tanks — who does that while building aircraft? Non union scabs? Yeah, red neck asshole scabs!
When flying is possible again, I’ll be trying to book seats on Airbus aircraft, not Boeing, never again if I can avoid them.
I flew next to a French Aircraft Engineering professor once, transatlantic flight on Air France. His students designed and built the Airbus-380 two story giant aircraft. He was invited to fly on the early test flights, and was so proud of his students and their work.
He was flying to Tucson to consult on something secret… We talked all night, and drank champagne — Air France is the best way to fly trans-Atlantic.
Elizabelle
@J R in WV: I love Airbus.
But got to say that Norwegian’s 787s are comfortable, too.
Barney
Let’s also hear it for Paul Baran of the RAND Coorporation, and Donald Davies of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, who gave the idea of packet switching to Cerf and Kahn.