Larry Wall & Cults

[Alan Balmer]

Not out of the question, be obviously untrue.

"We must invade Iraq to remove the threat of a madman with WMD"
--> Inspectors were inside Iraq looking already.
--> N. Korea was boasting about its nuclear program and firing
test missles all over the place.
--> Not a stick of said WMD has been found since invading.

"We must save the Iraqi people from a ruthless dictator"
--> since Hussein is just one of scores of such monsters and Iraq
was the country chosen, this can not be the reason.

"We must fight terrorism"
--> The hunt for Osama, known to be NOT IN Iraq was practically dropped
to invade Iraq.
--> Everyone outside of the Fox news network knows there was never any
link from Iraq to Osama.
--> Terrorism is now a big problem in Iraq where it was not before.

My, you are behind the times. Sorry, I'm not going to rehash all this
stuff now. It's been done too many times. Check the archives.

 

[Harry Penner]

We're a little more concerned with making sure terrorists are all
killed or detained before they murder more innocents, than with making
sure their accommodations get a 5-star rating. And -- although two
wrongs don't make a right -- doesn't the Geneva Convention also
prohibit targeting civilians? The scum and villainy we're fighting
doesn't exactly come into equity with clean hands; you make it sound
Kafkaesque, as if they were randomly picked up off the street and
jailed. These are people who would still be actively trying to kill
Americans if we let them out. As for international agreements and
keeping to the Geneva Convention in general, let's just say it would
be a whole lot cheaper and easier not to use the precision "smart"
weapons that have spared so many Afghan and Iraqi civilian lives so
far.

But I think we're getting a *little* OT here, unless this discussion
results in some pythonic irc-bots to argue by proxy. I'd be happy
to continue a debate off-list...

-Harry

 

[Morten Reistad]

And, of course, entertaining the possibility that his agenda is just
what he says it is, is completely out of the question.

I just cannot understand what he wanted to do with Iraq, so fast and
with such a limited expedition corps.

If we for a moment give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that
Iraq WAS a hotbed of terrorists buiding WMD's. There may after all be
some information they cannot tell us. This would explain the
hurry and the go-it-alone tactic. In that case , why wasn't the place
hit a lot harder; int the Nixon/Pinochet style? Why a PHB like Bremer?
Why not a real tough army goy the first couple of months? I just cannot
make sense of this scenario.

On the other hand, it may be a wish to liberate Iraq from the ravages
of Saddam, and a final round of being pissed at Saddam repeatedly
flouting the ceasefire agreement. This is a perfectly legitimate
reason to escalate the war again (it is the same war, there was never
a peace agreement, only a cease-fire). In that case a few rounds of
UN song and dance could be done while a new coalition was built; with
the US taking around a fourth of the cost and manpower, like last time.
This could be convincingly sold to the Iraqi populace as a liberation.

So, I don't get it if the agenda is just what is spoken. If the agenda
is to make way for Israel scenario #2 would still be a better one.

Contrast this with Afghanistan, where there was a pretty high urgency
to get the al-Quaeda and the Taliban before they moved with another
terrorist monstrosity. Yet, a large alliance was built, NATO was used
as far as it could be stretched. the UN was in on it; and the US ended
taking around half the cost and supplying a fifth of the manpower.
With a similar strategy in Iraq the US could have resources left over
to handle North Korea, Sudan, Sierra Leone with less expenditure than
what you ended up with.

I just don't get it. The stated agenda is either misstated, or grossly
misimplemented.


-- mrr

 

[Morten Reistad]

the first disks i played with at the univ. were 2311s on 360/30; they
were individual, top-loading, with mountable disk packs; 2311 disk
pack was a little over 7mbytes. didn't find picture of 2311 ... but
this picture of 1311 were similar ... the lid of the unit was released
and raised (something like auto engine hood)
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_1311.html

the next were 2314s that came with 360/67. it was long single unit
with drive drawers that slid out. top & bottom row with 9 drives.
drives had addressing plugs .... eight plus a spare. a 2314 pack could
be mounted on the spare drive, spun up .... and then the addressing
plug pop'ed from an active unit and put in the spare drive. it reduced
the elapsed time that the system saw unavailable drive (time to power
off a drive, open the drawer, remove a pack, place in new pack, close
drawer, power up the drive). 2314 pack was about 29 mbytes. picture
of 2314 cabinet
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2314.html


the next were the 3330s ... long cabinet unit looked similar to 2314
... but with only 8 drawers (instead of 9). 3330-i pack had 100mbytes
... later 3330-ii pack had 200mbytes. picutre of 3330 unit ... the three
cloaded plastic units on top of the unit were used to remove disk pack
and hold it.
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH3330.html

These are the IBM gear that most resemble SMB equipment. SMD's were
the BUNCH answer to DEC's RP04/5/6 and IBM's 3330. Originally made
by CDC; others also produced them. NCR and Fujitsu come to mind.

Originally existed as 80-megabyte, pretty light units (30 kg);
later expanded to 160-megabyte. Then the real washing machines
turned up; 300 mb (315 unformatted megabytes). Originally 4 on a chain,
15 mbit analogue readout (MFM ISTR; they never tried RLL).

These were a mainstay among the smaller mini vendors from approx 1974
to the advent of winchesters around a decade later. The earliest
winchesters made exact hardware replicas of the SMD. Then the
spec was expanded and became ESMD, but ESMD was never as robustly
standardized. Sacrifices of goats, PHBs and undergraduates was needed
to stabelize long ESMD chains.

close up of 3330 disk pack in its storage case ... also has picture
of 3850 tape cartridges
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_PH3850B.html

misc. other storage pictures:
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_photo.html

next big change was 3380 drives with totally enclosed, non-mountable
cabinet.

old posting on various speeds and feeds
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#8 3330 disk drives

and some more old performance data
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#10 virtual memory

i had written a report that relative disk system performance had
declined by a factor of ten times over a period of 10-15 years. the
disk division assigned their performance group to refute the
claim. they looked at it for a couple of months and concluded that i
had somewhat understated the relative system performance decline
... that it was actually more. the issue was that other system
components had increased in performance by 40-50 times ... while disks
had only increased in performance by 4-5 times ... making relative
disk system performance 1/10th what it had been. misc. past posts
about the gpd performance group looking at the relative system
performance issue:

And we are still on that line.

Nowadays most heavy production database data really stays in memory;
with the disk as a backup medium.

-- mrr

 

[Chuck Dillon]

What makes you think that the current US government gives a
shit about international agreements? Bush thinks he's entitled
to declare anybody and everybody an "enemy combatant" and lock
them up in secret forever. Add a moustache and he'd make a
pretty good Stalin.

Such statements only underscore the incredible ignorance of the author
or his/her assumption of ignorance in the reader. President !=
Dictator. The U.S. President is limited to two four year terms so if
someone is locked up "forever" the power to do so must extend far
beyond any President. Fully one third of Americans are Democrats and
our press is still free (not necessarily without bias but free). You
must think W a genius to think he could pull something like that off.

So, lets say you are an elected official on 9/12/01, the day after we
lost *only* 3K out of the potentially 20-30K folks that could have been
killed (that's how many folks spent their day in those towers). You no
longer have any frame of reference for the magnitude or imminence of
risk of an attack elsewhere in country. How much time do you spend
studying up international treaties before you decide how to act?

Say Bush did study the treaties and we failed to stop an attack and
some other 3k folks got fried a few months later. Would you be
supporting his re-election today or be slamming him for being indecisive?

-- ced

 

[Grant Edwards]

Such statements only underscore the incredible ignorance of
the author or his/her assumption of ignorance in the reader.
President != Dictator.

Such statements only underscore the incredible inability of the
author to recognize hyperbole.

 

[Jack Peacock]

Can you point to the international agreement which allows Canadian
citizens to be thrown into US jails for the stated offense?

Canada does extradite to the US on a case by case basis, if there is no
death penalty (though there has been at least one exception to that
condition too). However, I can't see a Liberal government ever extraditing
based on information obtained by farmed out medical records. More likely
the RCMP would come round for a polite conversation.

Unless they were french speaking immigrants living in Quebec. I believe the
law grants them a presumption of innocence *in spite of* evidence to the
contrary.
Jack Peacock

 

[Jack Peacock]

The U.S. President is limited to two four year terms so if someone is
locked up "forever" the power to do so must extend far beyond any
President.

That's why we have 4+ term incumbents in Congress. Though I believe they
are encouraged to accept retirement when they reach the age of 100.
Jack Peacock

 

[Jack Peacock]

Do you really think the Bush administration cares
about international agreements?

Governments all over the world tremble in fear of a strongly worded UN
resolution. No one would dare risk the consequences of a second, or third,
or fourth, or 37th follow on resolution...
Jack peacock

 

[Chuck Dillon]

Not out of the question, be obviously untrue.

Again, I'll point out that it is naive to put this entirely on the
administration. We're in Iraq because we effectively declared war.
The dance with the U.N. went on for some 3 months. It was clear where
we were headed. Our congress, including Kerry and all of the others on
the Democrat side, stood their ground. They didn't revoke the
declaration. They didn't even have debates on the subject.

If you condemn Bush on going into Iraq you condemn Kerry who stills
says it was the right thing to do. His issue is with the details and
like most political rhetoric is mostly spin to underscore the negative
and downplay the positive.

While we're at it, you might also consider a more strategic view of why
we went to Iraq. Publicly, all you are going to hear is glowing words
about the long term benefits of bringing democracy to the middle east.
But that's only part of it and the governments, as well as religious
leaders, in the middle east know it.

If what you write below is what you really believe you aren't thinking
you are just regurgitating what you hear from those you listen to the most.

-- ced

 

[Brian Raiter]

Holy cow. Can you folks possibly stop cross-posting this
multi-tentacled leviathan of a thread to five different newsgroups?

b

 

[Jon Boone]

I just don't get it. The stated agenda is either misstated, or grossly
misimplemented.

Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained through
incompetence.

--jon

 

[Antony Sequeira]

So, lets say you are an elected official on 9/12/01, the day after we
lost *only* 3K out of the potentially 20-30K folks that could have been
killed (that's how many folks spent their day in those towers). You no
longer have any frame of reference for the magnitude or imminence of
risk of an attack elsewhere in country. How much time do you spend
studying up international treaties before you decide how to act?

How is that related to Saqqddam Hussqqqqqain being a jackass and us
spending 100 or whatever billions on removing him and having 1000+ of
Americans + unknown number of Iraqqqqqis getting killed. How does that
help avoid
9 qqqq 11 or are you confused between Iraqqqqqis and Saudqqqqis ?
Why don't we destroy everything but the U.S., that way we can guarantee
that we'll never have any posibility of a terrqqqqorist attack from
anywhere but from within U.S. I'll leave it to your imagination on how
to extrapolate that to counter terrqqqqorism within U.S.

-Antony

 

[Rupert Pigott]

Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained through
incompetence.

--jon

That doesn't adequately cover incompetantance and malice combined.

-- Rupert

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

These are the IBM gear that most resemble SMB equipment. SMD's were
the BUNCH answer to DEC's RP04/5/6 and IBM's 3330. Originally made
by CDC; others also produced them. NCR and Fujitsu come to mind.

Originally existed as 80-megabyte, pretty light units (30 kg); later
expanded to 160-megabyte. Then the real washing machines turned up;
300 mb (315 unformatted megabytes). Originally 4 on a chain, 15 mbit
analogue readout (MFM ISTR; they never tried RLL).

These were a mainstay among the smaller mini vendors from approx
1974 to the advent of winchesters around a decade later. The
earliest winchesters made exact hardware replicas of the SMD. Then
the spec was expanded and became ESMD, but ESMD was never as
robustly standardized. Sacrifices of goats, PHBs and undergraduates
was needed to stabelize long ESMD chains.

some number of the senior disk engineers left in the late '60s and
early '70s .... fueling the shugart, seagate, memorex, cdc, etc disk
efforts. in fact, the excuse given (later half 70s) for dragging me
into bldg. 14 disk engineering conference calls with the pok
cpu&channel engineers was that so many of the senior disk engineers
(that were familiar with the channel interface) had left.

random disk history URLs from around the web:
http://www.old-computers.com/history/detail.asp?n=51&t=2
http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/shugart_09052002/shugart/
http://www.logicsmith.com/hdhistory.html
http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/revolution/shugart/i_a.html
http://www.disktrend.com/disk3.htm

search engine even turns up one of my posts that somebody appears
to be shadowing at some other site:
http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/lynn/2002.html#17
of course the original
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002.html#17

in the previous posting
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004l.html#12
this reference
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#8
also gave the speeds and feeds for 3350 (including 317mbyte capacity).

the 1970s washing machines were the 3340s & 3350s ... but the 3350s
enclosed and not removable/mountable; 3340s .... which had
removable/mountable packs .... included the head assemble & platters
completely enclosed.

3340 (winchester) reference, picture includes removable assembly on
top of drives ("3348 data module"):
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3340.html
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3340b.html

picture of row of 3350 drives is similar to that of 3340s ... except
the 3350 packs weren't removable and had much larger capacity
http://www-1.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3350.html

postings reference product code names:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001l.html#53 mainframe question
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003b.html#7 Disk drives as commodities. Was Re: Yamhill

3340-35 was code named Winchester and as per the IBM 3340 ULR began shipping
to customers november, 1973.

we had a joke when the 3380s were introduced about filling them
completely full. if you converted an installation with say 32 3350
drives .... to 16 3380s (sufficient to hold 32-3350 drives worth of
data, 10gbytes) ... you could have worse performance ... while 3380s
were faster than 3350s, there weren't twice as fast. the proposal was
to have a special microcode load for the 3880 controller .... which
would only support half of a 3380 disk drive. There were a number of
customer people (mostly technies) at share which thought it would be a
good idea ... and furthermore that ibm should price these half-sized
3380s higher than full-sized 3380s (to make the customer exectives
feel like they were getting something special). They would be called
"fast" 3380s (because avg. seek only involved half as many cylindes)
and it was important that the limitation be built into the hardware
and be priced higher. It was recognized that installations could
create their own "fast" 3380s ... just by judicious allocation of data
and no special microcode. However, it was pretty readily acknowledged
that w/o the hardware enforced restrictions, that there were all sorts
of people that populate datacenters that would be unable to control
themselves and fully allocated each 3380.

 

[SM Ryan]

# I just don't get it. The stated agenda is either misstated, or grossly
# misimplemented.

You haven't been listenning carefully enough. The agenda is to destroy the UN.
Neo-conservatives recognise that if the UN becomes powerful enough to deal with
people like Saddam Hussein, then it can deal with Bush as well. People
like Kissinger are still running around as big shots in America while other
countries consider him a war criminal.

There are actually idiots that believe the US will remain the most powerful
military forever (or until God ends the world a few years from now). The
rest who know that power is fleeting have two options: construct a world of
comprehensive cooperative political structures, or batter any possible opponents
so they cannot attack the eventually weakenned US.

The first choice was the one (more or less) followed by the US since about 1945
through 2000. It has a long history of success behind: while not yet of that scale,
the notion of uniting disparate political units to a larger whole for mutual
security and mutual trade has worked time and time again: modern England out of the
old feudal lords, or the US out of thirteen colonies. Up side: long term peace and
stability for your grandchildren. Down side: your own power is eclipsed by the
centralised power.

The second choice has been followed by the US since 2001. Again there is a long
history behind, always ending in failure: Persian empires, Roman Empires, Chinese
empires, etc. You can never inflict enough damage on your opponents so that once
you do weaken they cannot strike back and eviscerate your corpse. Up side: you
continue to live in wealth and luxury as long as you die before the bill comes due.
Down side: your grandchildren will curse your name if they survive.

So why follow a course known to end in disaster? Pride? Greed? Delusion that
the end of the world is nigh and God will forgive warmaking and genocide?


There is a second agenda which is also being implemented successfully. Conservatives
want to dismantle government because it interferes with their private pursuit
of profit and power (see also Miliken and Quatrone). Actually repealing the legal
framework has been unsuccessful: no matter how appealing their claims about taxes
and regulation, when push comes to shove, most people want a government that's
powerful enough to provide for the sick and old, stop quacks from killing patients,
stop manufacturers from killing customers, and to have water and air that are not
fatal to touch.

So since 1980 the conservatives still whine about big government, but they are quite
happy to increase the government size and expenditure. While cutting taxes. The net
effect is a government that is increasingly in debt. The long term goal is to get
the government so heavily indebted that it can no longer borrow money. Then it will
collapse of its own dead weight.

 

[SM Ryan]

# Unless they were french speaking immigrants living in Quebec. I believe the
# law grants them a presumption of innocence *in spite of* evidence to the
# contrary.

I hope you understand that when US takes over Canada, we are not accepting Quebec.
That province will be floated and barged out somewhere into the north Atlantic. I
can't imagine France wanting them back. Maybe leave them in the middle with a big
bulls eye for the next comet. Atlantis II.

 

[SM Ryan]

# the 1970s washing machines were the 3340s & 3350s ... but the 3350s
# enclosed and not removable/mountable; 3340s .... which had
# removable/mountable packs .... included the head assemble & platters
# completely enclosed.
#
# 3340 (winchester) reference, picture includes removable assembly on
# top of drives ("3348 data module"):

How's it feel to be a like an old war veteran sitting against the wall,
blinking in the morning sunlight? I used to lug around disk packs before
the first winchesters. Now I have a laptop with one disk drive, higher
capacity and faster access than a Cyber 170 disk farm. I remember when
we first saw the portapotty winchesters.

Before that they had a problem with (?)844 (I think that was the model
number). They transferred fast enough that on older machine, by the
time periphial processors read a sector, checked it, packaged it, moved
it central memory, the next sector was already under the head, requiring
a full revolution to read each sector. So they used half tracking
to make logical contiguous sectors physically discontiguous.

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

somewhat thread drift between ssa disk storage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 SSA

ha/cmp
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp

and electronic commerce
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3

 

[Lew Pitcher]

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Charlie Gibbs wrote:
[snip]

Wasn't "ditto" the name of one of those console-driven mainframe
utilities that would copy anything to anything?

IBM 360/370/390... DOS (later DOS/VS, then DOS/VSE, then VSE/SP, then VSE/ESA)
has a batch utility called DITTO, which copies files from device to device.
The closest analog in the pre-Unix and Unix world would be PIP

- --
Lew Pitcher

Master Codewright & JOAT-in-training | GPG public key available on request
Registered Linux User #112576 (http://counter.li.org/)
Slackware - Because I know what I'm doing.
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