Mirrors my experiences with z/OS. One thing I distinctly remember was when I tried to write JCL to move some datasets. Took me 2 days reading documentation and trying out things. Finally I just gave up. It is not fun when you have noone to help and Google isn't very helpful. If you think Unix tools have no consistency, try JCL and z/OS. Considering how alien JCL is and magic incantations I invoked with it, I'm convinced that there is Cthulhu in the mainframe machine.
Still, I'm quite proud I manage to write some JCL which saved us potentially days of manual work.
Other things I remember from that time was that passwords were only 8 characters long and case insensitive. My guess is z/OS is secure only by its obscurity. Though maybe this was just our installation. No idea until today.
> Other things I remember from that time was that passwords were only 8 characters long and case insensitive. My guess is z/OS is secure only by its obscurity. Though maybe this was just our installation. No idea until today.
Everybody nowadays uses a security add-on product with z/OS - most commonly IBM’s RACF, although some people use Broadcom (formerly CA)’s ACF2 or TopSecret instead. RACF allows a user to have either a “password” or a “pass phrase” or both or neither. For legacy reasons, a “password” indeed can be max 8 characters case-insensitive, but a “pass phrase” can be up to 100 characters and case-sensitive. And it also supports non-password based authentication mechanisms, including client certificates, smart cards, multi-factor auth, passtickets… some of that stuff is relatively new, but it isn’t all new. The bigger problem is you can offer all these more modern security features, but you can’t force customers to adopt them, especially when that adoption isn’t free (putting aside additional licensing costs for some of these features, there is also the person-time to configure it, test it, roll it out, etc)
I was using the Mainframe as an intern. Working in a Mainframe company it still took me three months to be able to write JCL from scratch with out needing help. It was a constant struggle until one day a switch flipped and I just understood the basics. I've never had another programming experience where I've gone from struggling to comfortable so quickly.
The US doesn't seem to particularly stand out. I feel this article is manipulative and just tries to antagonize people. Manipulative because it says some marriages were for children aged 10, while the minimum age is usually 15/16. So how is this even possible? Those 10 year child cases should definitely be investigated, but I'm sceptical that's anything more of a small fraction of underage marriages and they are probably illegal to begin with. The antagonizing part is simple: It's all Republicans. Don't mention that California has technically no official age defined. This would break the narrative.
>area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh-smallest since recovery began in 1992
Yet later in the article:
>In previous years, NOAA and NASA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time period dating back to 1979 (...) . Using that longer record (...) this year's hole ranked 20th-smallest in area across 45 years of observations.
20th-smallest or 25th-biggest. So looks like perfectly average size to me.
If we look at year earlier:
>the hole ranked as the 12th largest single-day ozone hole since 1979.
Oh yeah the reports about Russian army from beginning of war in Ukraine read like someone copying his book Inside the Soviet Army. Which in turn reads like stories you heard about the Soviets in WW2.
It did. Suvorov has said some cringy and contradictory things, but it seems to me that if you simply take what he has written at face value you'll be closer to right than wrong nearly every time.
Still, I'm quite proud I manage to write some JCL which saved us potentially days of manual work.
Other things I remember from that time was that passwords were only 8 characters long and case insensitive. My guess is z/OS is secure only by its obscurity. Though maybe this was just our installation. No idea until today.