|
shame on an IGA posted:the lack of ribbon connectors is appalling this is some ancient electrical design I did some time working on electronics at a couple different defense contractors early in my career and I don't remember ever seeing a ribbon cable in any of the boxes we designed. Plenty of discrete white wires carefully hand tied into bundles just like that, though. (There's a standard for how to tie up the bundles.) Been a long time, don't remember any specifics about why no ribbons, probably not considered reliable enough or something. There were some flex cables though. As the more informed people on those twitter threads get into, those boxes were probably all designed by Thales a long time ago. The big chips are late-90s stuff. Good luck trying to prevent Russia from getting FPGAs and DSPs of that vintage.
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 21:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 16:46 |
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:Large part of what is considered western world and manufacturing industry is still running on DOS, CP/M and similarly ancient stuff. Almost all corporate data centers, and old systems, have that mythical "blinking box" which no-one knows what it does and why it exists, but you aren't allowed to even intensively stare at it because last time it stopped blinking people died and/or the stock dropped like a stone, or the production line was dead in the water for several hours until the box started to blink again. There is actually a niche market for people sufficiently skilled in programming with 50's, 60's and 70's stuff like Fortran or Pascal in the legacy maintenance cycles. I wish I was kidding but I am not. We had such a box in the server room. They're real. They fired the guy who knew how to operate it and then had to bring him back for big extra $
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 21:58
|
|
|
Slovakia, get in https://twitter.com/SophyRidgeSky/status/1636834231073603587?t=Q3I6Gfzz0jNhxeHJIAo1aw&s=19
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:02
|
|
|
Hasn't there been evidence that Russia has been using Loran-C in Ukraine? Windows XP seems like a hell of a step forward compared to that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:02
|
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:Large part of what is considered western world and manufacturing industry is still running on DOS, CP/M and similarly ancient stuff. Also OS/2. Never made it far as a desktop operating system, but for some reason it's had a second life in industry. There are even two licensed spinoffs that are being updated to this day, but lol there's still tons and tons of heavy machinery that run the last patch of IBM's original OS/2 from 2001.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:05
|
|
|
Tuna-Fish posted:Also OS/2. Never made it far as a desktop operating system, but for some reason it's had a second life in industry. There are even two licensed spinoffs that are being updated to this day, but lol there's still tons and tons of heavy machinery that run the last patch of IBM's original OS/2 from 2001. Because it was cheap
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:07
|
|
|
OS/2 was the operating system of choice for many ABM manufacturers for quite a while.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:10
|
|
|
pantslesswithwolves posted:There was a photo of Putin in a meeting recently and it appeared his desktop PC was running Windows XP.  would know due to it running XP
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:17
|
|
|
Jimmy Smuts posted:I wonder what's on his computer. Porn? Cat pics? His memoirs? I guess Pirated Hearts of Iron 2 without the later official expansion disk. It is also his chief advisor since Shoigu is that weird guy who collects petrified wood for his "projects" and Gerasimov was hired because he sort of looks like the "bad guy" commander Harris from the Police Academy movies Putin loves. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Mar 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:22
|
|
|
CainFortea posted:Because it was cheap It wasn't just about the price. IIRC it's because it was in the sweet spot where you could achieve very low and predictable interrupt latencies and still have a lot of the nice stuff of an actual operating system. If your computer is operating heavy machinery, you really don't want there to random hitches where your OS just decides to randomly spend 100us doing some housekeeping while you have a part moving and need to give the stop command. And for a long time proper RTOSes were really spartan and required you to roll your own everything. These days, there are multiple real-time operating systems that are fairly nice to work with, but the spiritual successor of running an OS/2 build from 2001 is probably running Linux with someone's custom RT patch set forked from the mainline before they moved off from the 2.6 version number scheme.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:29
|
|
|
Power Khan posted:We had such a box in the server room. They're real. They fired the guy who knew how to operate it and then had to bring him back for big extra $ If you are capable FORTRAN/COBOL/Pascal/original-C programmer you probably will make more money than any other coder monkey in the planet in the next 20 or so years. Especially if you have any idea on pre-Internet network protocols. You basically set your rate for re-engineering stuff or fixing problems, and if they say "no" they will come back down the line with at least matching rate and bonus for delivering early and the government/finance/MIC will have a fight concerning your services. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Mar 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:42
|
|
|
I work in OT security and the worst I've seen so far is NT 4.0, but I've also come across FDDI and token ring so I'm sure there's even older poo poo out there. Sometimes it's like working in a living museum of technology. Also degreed engineers are silly people who use terminology from the 1980s in the year 2023. It's a loving switch, not a tap, guys. I don't care that you went to school for mechanical engineering in the 90s, get with the times.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 22:45
|
|
|
I work in IT Security consulting and do a lot of audits and pen testing, run into everything from NT boxes to extremely old token ring connected mainframes. All sort of goodies.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 23:01
|
|
|
BobHoward posted:I did some time working on electronics at a couple different defense contractors early in my career and I don't remember ever seeing a ribbon cable in any of the boxes we designed. Plenty of discrete white wires carefully hand tied into bundles just like that, though. (There's a standard for how to tie up the bundles.) I don’t recall any specific prohibition on ribbon cables specifically. I expect that the cables can get embrittlement over time and as they bounce around flexing and moving could break themselves apart if made of the wrong materials. Connectors that can work themselves loose when under vibe are a no no but there isn’t any reason you couldn’t make a locking connector or epoxy it in place. I assume you can and would stake them down but lol at extra process steps. Also, hi reliability and rugged cables tend to have a woven nickel or other metal sleeve over the assembly with another rubber or plastic sleeve over that to avoid them severing due to chafing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 23:03
|
|
|
Decades ago i was chatting with a technology teacher who was ex RAF and he said that when they were working on circuit boards back in the day you had to make sure to bend the actual wires on the discrete capacitors/resistors etc in a certain way or they would all start arcing when the plane got to high altitude and fry the board.... curved wires good, nice looking 90° wire and everything fried. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 23:42
|
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:If you are capable FORTRAN/COBOL/Pascal/original-C programmer you probably will make more money than any other coder monkey in the planet in the next 20 or so years. Especially if you have any idea on pre-Internet network protocols. People want to believe this, but it orgs pay these skillsets entry level wages, expect modern development pace, expect the legacy program to have an end date, and you’re the first to be cut. Since the 90s every enterprise it org has been trying to pay 10x replacing half the functionality of the legacy system (where legacy is one or more of mainframe, as400, unix, minicomputer, SQL, 4GL, C, Pascal, SQL, Oracle, Windows, Perl/Ruby, ASP, SAP, dotnet, Java). It’s a losing bet to concentrate on the ‘legacy’, especially since its not portable knowledge; a year learning BoAs mainframe payments system isn’t going to get you a year of proficiency on Citis mainframe payments system. No CIO is going to get paid for the accomplishment ‘kept legacy system running’; why would you expect them to reward that? Your ceiling is a grudging acknowledgment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 23:44
|
|
|
Saukkis posted:Politico: ‘Hunting rifles’ — really? China ships assault weapons and body armor to Russia Before I worked there, the gun shop I used to work at here in Canada was involved in the design of the CQ-A, we even had a couple of prototypes still kicking around the shop. Later on my boss worked on getting the Type 95 turned into a civilian (semi-automatic) version called the Type 97 while I did work there. The CQ-A is semi-auto only - at least as designed. It's dirt simple to manufacture it as select fire and I don't doubt that it has been for non-civilian markets. The best part about the CQ-A is some of the copy in the manual: "CQ-A1 5.56mm automatic rifle is an automatic or semi-automatic weapon for infantry to kill individuals or group active objects. The rifle is characterized with light weight, high accuracy, high cyclic firing rate, easy operation, more cartridge-carrying and makes the operator enjoy a better annihilating firepower within 460m."
|
|
#
?
Mar 17, 2023 23:53
|
|
|
Just Another Lurker posted:Decades ago i was chatting with a technology teacher who was ex RAF and he said that when they were working on circuit boards back in the day you had to make sure to bend the actual wires on the discrete capacitors/resistors etc in a certain way or they would all start arcing when the plane got to high altitude and fry the board.... curved wires good, nice looking 90° wire and everything fried. I haven’t heard about angles of the leads being an issue (other than the normal EM issues and physical stresses with sharp bends in wires) but there is a phenomenon where as pressure decreases at altitude it becomes easier for an arc to occur so you need to pay attention to what’s next to what and how far apart they are. The way it was explained to me is that at sea level there’s lots of molecules bouncing around picking up small quanta of charge and depositing it elsewhere. At you get nearer and nearer to vacuum there are fewer and fewer molecules so the components will build more charge and the molecules will build more charge and then ZAP, you get an arc. This isn’t at normal aircraft altitudes or in a compete vacuum though, it’s only pertinent for operating at very high altitudes where there is still some atmosphere.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 02:48
|
|
|
Murgos posted:I don’t recall any specific prohibition on ribbon cables specifically. I'm guessing if there's anything, it's corrosion on the insulation displacement connectors used to terminate ribbon cables. Dunno how airtight they can make those.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 03:40
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:https://tamiyablog.com/2023/03/boxart-of-tamiya-25207-1-35-leopard-2a6-tank-ukraine/ ICM is releasing a new boxing of their MiG-29 with HARMs and the adaptors they used to fit them together irl
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 03:50
|
|
|
Tuna-Fish posted:Also OS/2. Never made it far as a desktop operating system, but for some reason it's had a second life in industry. There are even two licensed spinoffs that are being updated to this day, but lol there's still tons and tons of heavy machinery that run the last patch of IBM's original OS/2 from 2001. There's a district in michigan that's running 19 schools' HVAC and boilers on an Amiga stack one of their students built from scratch in the 80s. https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 04:00
|
|
|
Der Kyhe posted:Large part of what is considered western world and manufacturing industry is still running on DOS, CP/M and similarly ancient stuff. Almost all corporate data centers, and old systems, have that mythical "blinking box" which no-one knows what it does and why it exists, but you aren't allowed to even intensively stare at it because last time it stopped blinking people died and/or the stock dropped like a stone, or the production line was dead in the water for several hours until the box started to blink again. There is actually a niche market for people sufficiently skilled in programming with 50's, 60's and 70's stuff like Fortran or Pascal in the legacy maintenance cycles. I wish I was kidding but I am not. If I told you exactly how much of the infrastructure that controls assignment of Social Security Numbers, pays your granny's checks, and worst of all, controls who this nation considers to be dead, runs on decaying COBOL architecture that is kept going by an increasingly diminishing population of geriatric programmers, and not diminishing because they've retired- they reached that point 15 years ago, it is now that the retirees they've bribed into coming back are literally dying, then you'd panic
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 05:05
|
|
|
I'm a computer toucher at an F100 with a focus on manufacturing (like the computers that run lines). My team was formed to try to drag the manufacturing sector of our business into the 21st century because a ton of mission critical poo poo is running on Windows 98 and unactivated copies of Windows XP (and a nice assortment of dos, nt4, etc). Nobody really notices because the machines have just been humming along for decades but when something breaks all hell breaks loose because no one has any idea how any of it works and getting replacement hardware or software support for any of it is impossible. A lot of hypercritical grid type infrastructure that allows us to live our daily lives is running on extremely old poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 06:06
|
|
|
The 50+ year old COBOL code running on mainframes has a huge advantage over something written last week: it is debugged. Or you could just learn COBOL? Is it too hard or something? Edit: oooh, I made a COBOL. IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. "HELLOWORLD" PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY "HELLO WORLD". STOP RUN. Rust Martialis fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Mar 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 08:24
|
|
|
COBOL sucks but it's not impossible to learn or anything.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 08:25
|
|
|
call it Pascal's wager and hope for the best
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 08:30
|
|
|
The Norwegian social security system was an early adopter - they wrote their own system for managing pensions and benefits and the like all the way back in 1967. Given the age there wasn't a huge selection of languages, so it was mostly PL/I with some COBOL. This system was known as DSF, "The central social security system" (Norwegian is compact). Over time, they merged this into the wider benefits system in 1978 (which is mostly COBOL), and then even later moved the benefits part to a newer system. The pensions stayed in DSF, though. The replacement system for that, Pesys ("Pension system") came online in 2011, a decent 44 years later. This still used DSF as a data store for anything entered before Pesys came online, though. The final final replacement happened in 2018, 51 years after it was first introduced, when they wrote a Java + database replacement for it known as Presys. They also open sourced the whole thing and put it on github, if you want to browse some decades old PL/I with Norwegian comments. There's an article about it here [in Norwegian], with pictures of some of the hardware involved. e: wait this is a Ukraine thread? In GiP? Oh well I assume you're all intimately familiar with ancient and clunky benefits systems. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Mar 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 12:19
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:
Keep your hands off my Champus!
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 13:01
|
|
|
JOVIAL is still in use, which is apparently the same age as COBOL.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 13:19
|
|
|
gently caress myPay, amirite guys? ~~ an SOF marine
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 14:06
|
|
|
cr0y posted:I'm a computer toucher at an F100 with a focus on manufacturing (like the computers that run lines). My team was formed to try to drag the manufacturing sector of our business into the 21st century because a ton of mission critical poo poo is running on Windows 98 and unactivated copies of Windows XP (and a nice assortment of dos, nt4, etc). Like William Gibson said- the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 14:12
|
|
|
shame on an IGA posted:gently caress myPay, amirite guys? I'm unfamiliar with the term... <Halo jumps out of thread>
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 14:48
|
|
|
Is it really going that well? https://mobile.twitter.com/dansabbagh/status/1636758023937966082
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 14:51
|
|
|
I personally know two COBOL programmers who work for Salesforce in Argentina. They just had a huge round of layoffs but assured me that they are safe from basically anything.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
spankmeister posted:COBOL sucks but it's not impossible to learn or anything. I figure if there was a need for programs to be written in Esperanto haikus and the paychecks were big enough, no shortage of volunteers. Borscht posted:I personally know two COBOL programmers who work for Salesforce in Argentina. They just had a huge round of layoffs but assured me that they are safe from basically anything. That’s good, at my MegaCorp I’m not a programmer but am the only one who has the patience to deal with a clunky system and communicate politely with other depts who need the system to do something. The only other person doing so recently left, and will be lucky if we get a replacement and they aren’t bored immediately.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 16:57
|
|
|
COBOL seems like something you could reasonably transpile into a more modern language, or vice-versa, and even produce human-readable code employing a few olds at outsize salaries to maintain the existing poo poo is probably still cheaper (in some ways) than employing the team of postdoc programming language experts to do that well though
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 18:13
|
|
|
Hyrax Attack! posted:
Getting a strong "Office Space" vibe from you.
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 18:21
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:The Norwegian social security system was an early adopter - they wrote their own system for managing pensions and benefits and the like all the way back in 1967. Given the age there wasn't a huge selection of languages, so it was mostly PL/I with some COBOL. This system was known as DSF, "The central social security system" (Norwegian is compact). Regardless of what thread this is, this is extremely my poo poo and despite not being able to read the comments I am definitely going to be reading this after I finish waking up 
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 18:24
|
|
|
Blistex posted:Getting a strong "Office Space" vibe from you. They didn’t have to share cubicles, their management had degrees in their field, & the consultants worked quickly and got results 
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 18:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 16:46 |
|
|
Thought the back and forth carousel here is interesting. https://twitter.com/Seveerity/status/1637031056678191106
|
|
#
?
Mar 18, 2023 18:45
|
|