Vertigo #$FF @vertigo@hackers.town

As folks know, I've been on something of a journey of re-discovery with respect to mainframes, thanks in large part to the public availability of MVS 3.8 and Hercules.

I'm detecting MVS's influences on Unix, which I've touched upon earlier, but also other environments as well, like Commodore's 8-bit environment. The "screen editor" has strong 3270 vibes, and the Commodore DOS shares much with the mainframe's management of data sets, while advancing on the state of the art at the same time.

In light of the fact that I've already received one "good riddance" toot, though, I can't help but notice that the NIH of the Unix community has infused itself into the greater Linux community. To be expected, I suppose, seeing that Linux is a POSIX OS.

Look, no system is perfect; and as much as I'm finding MVS actually preferable to use over Linux for some things, it goes without saying that MVS isn't perfect either. How can it be? It's literally the first OS of its kind in human history.

My advocacy/excitement for MVS should never be construed to also mean that I don't appreciate contemporary operating systems.

But, one thing I am seeing, though, is that the age-old truism by Henry Spencer can apply just as well to systems which came before Unix. The recent recommendation of using timeout to enforce a time limit on a process on a case-by-case basis (versus uniformly across the whole system, where trusted binaries are the exception, not the norm) is a case in point here.

And anyone who dares to tell me that I should just wrap everything in a shell script to establish the environment prior to launching the binary has just walked right into justifying the existence of JCL.

Remember, you only get to be smug because you won the mind-share, not because you won technologically. That's a subtle, but important, difference.

Filters in place. Let's see if they work going forward.

You would think I'd've learned this by now, but I guess next time the topic of amateur radio comes up, even here in the Fediverse, I'll just keep my mouth shut.

It seems clear to me now that I'm pretty toxic.

Sigh.

That moment when you realize that the design you come up with to solve a problem, which you've already started implementing and documenting, is not optimal, and you realize there's a better way.

I'm tempted to redesign from scratch. It'll delay the project. But, will it be worth the effort? It seems like it would be, as the new design is a better fit to the 65816's architecture and capabilities.

Damn it brain, you could've thought this through back in January, when I was first coming up with the damn design!!!!

"LOL this means he shopped whatever his "initiate & execute lawsuits" idea is to a bajillion firms that would normally do anything for money but they all said no"

(included image is of a Musk thread on Twitter, where he is seeking unscrupulous lawyers to build a litigation team for Tesla.)

https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/status/1527768838430916608

Gotta love YouTube on Android.

When Google can't even get their own shit working on their own operating systems...

And despite a number of bug reports, several update cycles indicate that they have no intention of fixing this.

This would be unbelievable, were it not seen with my own eyes.