Where can I buy a large analogue meter?

Incompatibilities is a very big reason why I would never touch an Apple with a bargepole. Even their stupidity of dropping serial ports when adding USB instead of having a crossover time was absurd.

You can turn them off.

You could always take a "different" job in another company but end up giving them some secrets to a neighbouring department!

You don't have trains? They're annoying things with shitty brakes that would cause a car to be taken off the road. They expect everything else to get out of their way. And they never go where you want to when you want to. About time we got rid of those useless things which actually use more fuel per person than a car.

Yes, but never mind the details, Apple did get it to work very well, and maintained it for about ten years, then ceased to support it. By then, most of those critical apps wee no longer critical, or had been killed off by something else.

Joe Gwinn

Nobody does anything critical with a Mac anyway. They're just for arty folk.

Not an uncommon view, but inaccurate. Excel, for example, started life as macintosh-only code; the Windows version was an afterthought, ported over.

Gotta start somewhere. Things tend to improve.

Leading to the Meltdown, Zombieload and Spectre exploits... Some of those may have been other side-channel effects.

Side note: The only project I have worked on that used Apple equipment used the original Mac toasters for some purposes. It was the only machine that met the TEMPEST requirements of the day. I doubt that was Apple's intention.

That was c. 1985 and the Russkies were out in the bushes trying to steal technology. Fast forward to 2022 and the Russkies are much more sophisticated when the pwning government data.

Not a clue. Have I mentioned I hate VMs? Sometimes they're good for a laugh. Some sites with high availability systems respond to Linux like a vampire to garlic. What they don't know is under all those Server 20xx VMs, Redhat and kvm is holding the whole mess together.

Excellent movie but relevant how?

I use them to be able to run Linux shit on my grown up Windows systems.

That feature may go away; they'll have to get more creative. Currently some bodycam systems vendors turn the camera on when the officer gets within a specified distance from the incident. That, of course, also implies the body camera is a radio collar for the cop.

There have been times when I've thought giving the source code to a competitor could set them back a few years.

That's the purpose of trade shows. You skulk around seeing what everyone is doing and if it looks good you steal it. You need to be careful though. A few years back cloud based solutions were all the rage. Then AWS very visibly went t*ts up at inopportune moments. Twitter taking a dump is one thing but the emergency services people are a little less enthused by their system going down.

When I first started working I was involved in the machine tool sector. The Asians were cute. Of course they all had cameras and they would subtly position one of their guys in the photos so they could go home and scale everything.

Then the Japanese ate the US machine tool business and I moved on.

Oh, we have trains but they're hauling coal to BC to ship to China.

No passengers, no tables. We have two passenger terminals but they've been recycled to other uses.

That was the Milwaukee Road terminal but they went under in the '70s. You can't see it but in the foreground the rails have been ripped up and turned into a bike/pedestrian trail. The other terminal is next to an active rail line but the coal trains don't stop.

The closest passenger terminal is 133 miles north. You might want to think twice about setting up a computer on the Empire Builder:

Except for the east coast routes favored by government drones like Biden US passenger rail is pretty dismal. Freight isn't much better:

The second one is the money shot. A major fertilizer manufacturer can't ship its product to the Midwest where the farmers are getting ready to plant. If the farmers skimp on fertilizer the yields will be down. Just what we need with Ukraine off the table at least for this season.

Well I've never been accused of being arty, but OK.

But for really critical stuff, nobody uses Windows for sure. It's Linux all the way, often controlling bespoke FPGA hardware.

Why no Windows? Well, the US Navy tried, in the SmartShip IT-21 program, for which the USS Yorktown was the testbed.

.

Long story short, someone in the engine room entered a bad value of an input form for pump performance recording, and crashed the Windows computer system and all associated shipwide networks. The ship was dead in the water, without propulsion, steering, or weapons. What could go wrong?

Fortunately they were far from land, and not in a battle, so they didn't get sunk or blunder into anything. They had to reboot the entire ship. This all took about three hours.

That was the end of SmartShip - only the name survived, used only for administrative activities, isolated from all tactical networks.

UNIX was the follow-on answer, but the various big platform vendors became too expensive and too inflexible, and over time everything migrated to Linux, mostly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which IBM subsequently acquired. Wonder if IBM has learned anything since DoD abandoned AIX.

Joe Gwinn

Isn't Excel just a Windows steal of Viscalc? Lotus 1-2-3 came next, so Excel is more a Chinese copy of that that exploited the Widows graphical user interface - and of course the MacIntosh had the first commercial graphical user interface, copied from the Xerox PARC Alto machines (of which there were a couple of thousand, although it was never marketed).

Visicalc was the killer application for the original Apple 2 computer. Dan Flystra made a lot of money out of it - I had an acquaintance at MIT at the time, who had run into Flystra who was also active in starting up Byte (which was how I got to be foundation subscriber to the magazine).

I can't charge my car as fast as the car charges, now. I can't get 200 kW service at my home.