An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

[hirez]

You know, perhaps trying to build complicated things with inadequate documentation, the day after an evening in the pub to commemorate a friend/colleague who'd killed themselves wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had

Comments

[autopope]

* Waves stick at young whipper-snapper *

As a former techpubs person at a then-major UNIX OEM in the early 90s I want you to know that ... well, UNIX was different back then and SYSV init was built that way for at least a vestigial reason; there were different classes of machine to run on but the default assumption was (a) minicomputer (single user mode for maintenance, multi-user for terminal logins) or (b) workstation (single user or X11 with xlogin or similar and multi-user shit happening in the background). The spare runlevels probably got bundled in with the five needsome ones (a shutdown level and run level 0) just in case someone thought of a future use.

But. But. minicomputer! Not a fricking PC, whatever the SCO XENIX/286 ads in Byte in the late 80s insisted

[hirez]

I wish I still had the HP-UX11 training manuals which explained all this stuff in gruesome detail. Training bloke spent about a morning bitching about depot files (There was going to a An Standard Package Format that everyone would use. Currant-Bun et al bunked off to the back of the metaphor bus to smoke tabs and look at pictures of NeXT workstations. HP the swot implemented the complete and unwieldy thing) and why inetd still existed and did telnet (Local government. And Oracle.)

Oh god. You know, there's a case to be made that there's not much useful doc any more because 'Well, because the code is open source you can easily check the .c sourcfiles to see how that's implemented.'

Yes. I could do that. Or I could piss off and go market gardening.

(Still smirking about 'whippersnapper'. I think there's about 18 months in it..)

[hirez]

IKR.

I have this whole other piece (likely inspired by correspondent above) about a whole swathe of missing technical advance because those little SV shites don't have to deal with their own or others impairments. There's regular talk about 'outboard brain', but for the people who actually need that sort of thing (Let me tell you about my mother, etc..) there is nothing worth a light.

Will an outboard brain work as an advertising platform? No. They're not interested.

(We totally need to get to the left coast before the heat death of the universe or before intercontinental travel becomes a thing only for the 1%)