Category Archives: News

Article note: Neat. I sort of distantly knew Unisys was still supporting the direct ancestors of Burroughs MCP from 1961 as ClearPath MCP - ported through a language change in the 70s and several architecture changes over they years - but you can literally run the direct descendant of MCP as a hosted environment on Windows on commodity x86_64 hardware _as a supported configuration_, and the latest release was just last year.

Article note: We really should be running manufacturing more-or-less on "Battlestar Galactica" protocols. There's no reason to plug that shit directly into an Internet-connected network. ... Or, to make another reference You hooked it up to the ~~phone~~ Network, didn't you? Dade! Turn the shower off! You screw up again and you ~~won't get into college~~ will break civilization!

Article note: The story seems very suspect, but hilarious if true.

Article note: Man, we're only like 10 years from "Never use your real name on the Internet" to threatening "The government mandates you supply your legal name to the ad-tech companies who have taken over the Internet"

Article note: Getting out of Sparc makes sense, no one gives a shit about commercial Unix anymore, Oracle has poisoned the waters around Sparc, and Fujitsu has seriously badass AArch64 designs that can take over in the remaining markets. The mainframes though? That's an ...odd... move. There doesn't seem to be a ton of overlap between the "Mainframe customers" (serous mainframes, the GS21 family are basically modernized Amdhal ESA/390 compatible designs) and "Customers who will migrate to a new, small cloud provider."

Article note: This is just weird. Yes, AMD has some compelling technologies in both the CPU and Graphics spaces, and recently acquired Xilinx, so they're well positioned. Yes, Intel appears to be making some poor decisions. But they have a long history of terrible decisions that they've managed to get away with. More importantly, unlike AMD, they own an (expanding) ton of leading-edge fab capacity, and significant market dominance in almost every laptop-and-larger CPU category.

Article note: Very cool. The various RT patch-sets to Linux have always been under-maintained for how useful they are; there is a lot of industrial equipment out there that is really a RTLinux box, and it's generally not a bad solution.

Article note: The modern design process, folks.

Article note: Aw, he's been one of my favorite serious tech writers for some time, sad to see him stepping away from his usual platform.