[CentOS] Y2K not - Re: Cemtos 7 : Systemd alternatives ?

Tue Jul 8 18:01:58 UTC 2014
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

On 07/08/2014 01:45 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Gilbert Sebenste
> <sebenste at weather.admin.niu.edu> wrote:
>> On Tue, 8 Jul 2014, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>>
>>> and did the conversion for display to save another byte.  Efficiency?
>>> We were desperate for every byte we could squeeze out.  the US Post
>>> Office created a standard so that all US cities (and supposedly streets)
>>> could be entered in 14 characters or less.

thinking back, I think it was 14 characters for cities and 25 for 
streets.  But this IS going back 40 years.  I still have some of the 9" 
tapes, but no tape drive...

>>> We changed the abbreviation
>>> of Nebraska from NB to NE (I remember writing that conversion program)
>>> so we could more easily mix US and Canada addresses (those they would
>>> not change their 6 character code to our 5 digit one).  We burned CPU to
>>> save storage. then rewrote key routines in assembler and hacked the
>>> COBOL calls to make it all work.
>>>
>>> Things change.  Design  goals change.  Systems have to change.
>> Of course they do. And those were changes in efficiency that were the
>> result of needed productivity improvements. Change for the sake of
>> major improvement(s). Wonderful, well-designed, efficient AND necessary.
>> And it obviously made things more productive for everyone!
>>
>> I argue that systemd neither improves efficiency, productivity or
>> satisfaction...nor is it necessary.
> More to the point, those 'old' efficiency hacks were from a time when
> programmer time was cheaper than the computer resources.   Now, the
> computers should be doing the work for us instead of the other way
> around.  Can anyone really make the argument that we can't afford the
> computer resources for transparent backwards compatibility now?
>