[Info-vax] New VSI Roadmap (yipee!)

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <mdagsu$fqt$1 at pechter.eternal-september.org>,
	pechter at S20.pechter.dyndns.org (William Pechter) writes:
> In article <clbbmtF4cigU2 at mid.individual.net>,
> Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
>>In article <mcp3ek$u6i$1 at dont-email.me>,
>>	David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
>>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>> In article <346eb384-6ca2-4691-b96b-fe75da303549 at googlegroups.com>,
>>>> 	John Reagan <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> On Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 4:21:38 PM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:
>>>>>> John Reagan wrote:
>>>>>>> Thanks for the input.  Just out of curiosity, how many lines?
>>>>>> Not sure what you're asking.  New lines, or total.  Last I heard, we had 
>>>>>> well over a million lines of code in the Codis application.
>>>>>>
>>>>> That's what I want to see.  People keep wanting to tell me that
>>BASIC and Pascal are fringe languages.  I keep saying there are lots of
>>real (and large) applications, but I want real data points.  Another
>>customer contacted me via email today with a Pascal application just shy
>>of 1 million lines.
>>>> 
>>>> There are hundreds of millions if not billions of lines of COBOL code
>>>> out in the world.  And places are doing new development in it everyday.
>>>> And yet it is still considered "fringe" and schools refuse to continue
>>>> to teach it even going so far as to tell students that even learning
>>>> COBOL will be dettrimental to their career opportunities.
>>>> 
>>>> Would you expect Pascal and especially BASIC (which has had a bad rep
>>>> since its earliest days!!) to fare any better?
>>>> 
>>>> bill
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I have no idea who would be giving it a bad rap.  
>>
>>Seriously??  You reall do need to get out more.
>>
>>    "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
>>     that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
>>     they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." -- Edsger
>>     W. Dijkstra, 1975
>>
>>
>>>                                                  At least people from 
>>> DEC environments.
>>
>>I was talking about BASIC in general.  DEC Basic has always been one of
>>the rare exceptions.  ANSI BASIC may have tried to fix the original bad
>>rep, but it was too MS ingrained to accomplish that.
>>
>>> 
>>> Basic was the #1 language on your beloved RSTS/E.  I doubt many coming 
>>> from that environment would bad mouth Basic.
>>
>>I certainly don't.  But I was talking about the overall image in the IT world,
>>98% of whom have never heard of, much less used, any version of DEC BASIC.
>>
>>> 
>>> But if there is a bunch of idiots out there that want to talk about 
>>> something they most likely don't know anything about, what do I care, as 
>>> long as John takes care of Basic?
>>
>>Well, I believe the earlier comments were about making languages (BASIC and
>>Pascal included) compliant with more current standards.  While that might
>>help some languages it wold be a very large step backwards in the case of
>>DEC BASIC.
>>
>>> 
>>> As for your beloved schools, I seem to remember a bit of wisdom.  "Those 
>>> who can, do, and those who can't (attempt to) teach."
>>
>>Don't tar me with that brush.  I am a firm believer that one should not
>>be allowed to become a college professor until they have real world
>>experience.  And that applies to every field.  But especially to the
>>Computing Sciences where it is way to common to goi:
>>                  BS->MS->PHD->Professorship.
>>
>>I didn't enter academia until I was almost 40.
>>
>>bill
>>
>>-- 
>>Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
>>billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
>>University of Scranton   |
>>Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>   
> 
> 
> I hear you on that experience thing.  I did corporate IT training on Unix
> Sysadmin.  Most trainers I've known were either trained teachers or support
> guys who moved into training.  Very few were professional sysadmins with
> current experience doing it.
> 
> I found that there's a vast difference in the skill sets when you have
> a professional with over 5 years experience doing the job training
> staffers versus a "training expert" with no practical job skills in
> what he/she is training.

You mean like college professors?

> 
> I did training on Field Service/Maintenance, Operations (Unix Operator),
> Systems Administration and the things I brought to the table came from 
> outside the standard courseware.

As a Warrant Officer in the Army training was one of my responsibilities.
One had to have experience in order to become a Warrant Officer.  Not like
otehr officers who go to ROTC and "graduate" as officers.

> 
> Some of them -- how to reconfig a million dollar 10 cpu multi disk 
> controller  box to resume limited operations after a failure. 
> Original courseware told how to log support call.

During my hiatus from the University, I worked for a whole month at
Tobyhanna Army Depot.  My first day at work they had a major failure
of one of the HP-UX machines.  Worst of all, it was the machine that
did payroll.  :-)  The machine had a disk failure (actually, a disk
on a SAN) and was spewing error messages accross the console faster
than you could even read them.  Not having had my security clearance
re-validated there I could not touch any machine.  So, I stood next
to one of their other admins and talked him thru fixing the problem
blindly.  Yeah, I told him everything he had to type with no feedback
on the screen because it was lost in the spewing error messages.
Needless to say, th epeople around me were rather amazed that I,
not only had all this in my head, but could do it without seeing
what came back from each command that was typed.  Yes, I got them
to the point where the messages stopped and they could fix the problem.

Nothing replaces experience.  And my current boss actually wants me to
document all this knowledge that is stuck in my head.  :-)

bill

> 
> Running on 9 cpu box might be better than dead 10 cpu box if you're
> the customer 8-)
> 
> Now it's pretty much a different world.  There's no training.  Sysadmins
> are expected to know hardware of x86 stuff and to be remote hands
> on this stuff for vendor remote support. 
> 
> I've seen hardware destroyed by non-tech's trying to reseat a board.
> 

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>