WServerNews: Governing our IT profession

In this issue:

Ask Our Readers (new question): Best RMM solution for a small MSP? Challenges to governing our profession. So much for digital currency! Windows news. Tips: virtualization, PowerShell, Azure. IT Bookshelf: Fraud Investigation and Forensic Accounting in the Real World. Factoid: Lunch, anyone? COBOL stories. Fun videos about DOOM. Do aliens work at the Pentagon? Plus lots more — read it all, read it here on WServerNews!

We might need a governing body over our IT profession to ensure it’s truly professional. Maybe something like the above? Photo by Marco Oriolesi on Unsplash

Mailbag

In the Cloud News section of our newsletter from two weeks ago we said the following:

A great way to avoid getting taken to the cleaners when utilizing Amazon Web Services is to subscribe to Last Week in AWS a newsletter by Corey Quinn. 

Daniel Paynter a Sr. DevOps Cloud Engineer for a health care company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA wrote to us to recommend another helpful resource for keeping up with AWS developments:

Not sure if its comparable to Last Week in AWS, but I’ve found Azure Weekly to be helpful. In keeping up with the updates to services and new services becoming available: https://azureweekly.info

This is great but we are still wondering if there are any similar *unofficial* resources (e.g. newsletter, blog, podcast etc) for keeping up with what’s new in Microsoft Azure and to help those using Azure from having their wallets emptied when they use it. Microsoft’s own *official* Azure firehose is just too much for us to handle. Any suggestions from our readers?

Got comments about anything in this issue?

Email us! We love hearing from our readers!

Ask Our Readers (new question): Best RMM solution for a small MSP?

A reader who runs a small Managed Services Provider (MSP) and who prefers to remain anonymous sent us the following request concerning Remote Monitoring & Management (RMM) solutions:

My little MSP is a Connectwise house. We use Manage for our ticketing, CRM and invoicing. Whilst I’m sure we’re only using a small percentage of its features, we’re happy with the job it does.

Our RMM tool is Automate, also from Connectwise. This, we aren’t so happy with with, especially in the last few months. The most critical problem is reporting – for all our managed backup customers we send them a report at the beginning of each month for the success/failures of their offsite backups for the previous month.

In November an update to Automate somehow broke the link between Automate’s reporting engine and the Shadow Protect reporting tool that keeps track of the data. End result is these reports come out with titles, explanations but no data. As you can imagine most customers interpret this as the backups not working – something I have to constantly assure them isn’t true because it’s part of our morning routine to check the backup success list.

Multiple calls to CW support, raising it with the sales people, tech managers, even the CEO has resulted in absolutely nothing. Nobody has been able to get the reports to run as they used to. It’s now been more than six months and I’m over chasing CW. I consider these reports mission critical – some of our government clients REQUIRE them for their auditors.

So now I’m on the lookout for another RMM. The CW changes to the licensing of Automate “add ins” are confusing and nobody has been able to explain what’s included and what isn’t. I think it’s time it was ditched.

I’d be interested to hear what RMMs your other MSP readers use, their pros and cons. Most importantly, if you were to be buying again right now, would you select the same one?

If any of our newsletter readers are in the MSP business or know colleagues running MSPs you can ask about this, please help the above reader out by emailing us your thoughts on this matter.

Thanks!

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Editor’s Corner

In the Mailbag of last week’s newsletter I highlighted in bold a statement a paraphrased from an email we received from reader Brian Poppenwimer an IT Director in New York USA. The email concerning a previous editorial from two weeks ago where I made some comments about the value (or lack of value) of IT certifications. Here is my paraphrased version of what Brian was saying:

We need some kind of governing body for our IT profession that gives exams, maintains certifications, tracks experience and provides continuing education. It should also somehow be government regulated and not in it to make money. That is how our IT profession will earn respect.

I asked what you, our newsletter readers most of whom work or worked in the IT profession either on the tech side (sysadmin, tech support, consultant etc) or management end (IT managers, business owners, etc) thought about the above idea. Here is what a couple of you have replied so far concerning this:

I agree! It’s about time we have something like this for our IT profession. I do have an engineering degree in communications and electronics. All my professional career has been linked to the IT world one way or the other. The fact that they used to call “engineer” after completing a software certification sounds fishy to me. University degrees takes 4 to 5 years of hard work! –Gustavo Diaz, IT Specialist at Husky Injection Molding Systems

Totally agree. Just suffered through one of those employees with lots of certs. ­–Andrey Kalashnik, Director of Technology for a law firm in New York, USA

Then there is the following lengthy response we received from Bill Zilinek a Desktop Support Manager for a community college in Washington State, USA:

I agree that certifications can seem pointless and are endlessly frustrating for a variety of reasons. I also like the idea of a certifying body, but have a different problem with the certification process in general. I’ve been in the IT field for 35 years. Most of my education is completely irrelevant to today’s technology. My few certifications are meaningless. When I look at certification training and testing, it looks to be nothing but a long list of details, most of which have nothing to do with the realities of my day-to-day operations in IT. It begs the question: what would the certifications be for? Are they simply the price of entry to a new job? If so, I’m not job-hunting. If I ever am job-hunting again, will I have chosen by random chance the best certification to get me that shiny new job? Are they a list of things to study; a glorified and expensive study guide for material I may never use? It could be argued that most degrees are exactly that, and are just as useful.

I understand there are many forms of engineering, but there are also many forms of IT. Would we need certifications for the all of them? Finally, what would count as “certified”? Who decides what is or is not important, or relevant? That’s pretty important to me, as I have built a career in one of the least-respected of IT disciplines, desktop support. My career has spanned many technologies, from the era of mainframes and minicomputers, paper-tape and reel-to-reel tape, to today’s server rooms and desktops, SSDs and 8K flatscreens, and the knowledge required has changed dramatically over time. I truly can’t imagine a certification that is useful throughout the course of a career.

As I read Bill’s email several questions came to mind that we might consider:

• Should all branches of the IT profession be certified by an independent governing body? Or does it not make sense to certify certain kinds of IT work?
• Should different branches of IT (e.g. system administrator, desktop support, datacenter manager etc) have different governing bodies? Should they be governed and certified in different ways?
• How should IT certifications administered by independent governing bodies be administered and maintained? Where should the funds come for doing this?
• Will establishing an independent governing body for our IT profession stimulate innovation or hinder it? What will be the economic effects of doing this? e.g. How will affect the tech industry?
• How should one balance the need for accountable skilled IT professionals with the freedom for “backyard” or “basement” IT workers? i.e. think certified plumber vs. the handyman who fixes stuff around the neighborhood.

And so on. I suspect that questions like these are also relevant (or were in the past) with regard to the professional engineering disciplines, but I’m not a P.E. so I don’t have much insight into how they deal with or have handled such matters. But clearly there are some strong winds blowing these days in the marketplace that are pushing at least some parts of our IT profession towards implementing some kind of independent governance over us similar to what the engineering profession has in various countries and locales. Especially since our modern world is now so very dependent upon reliably delivered IT services at all levels—commerce, health, education, communications, government etc—as you’ll be reminded of again when you read the This Week in IT section below in this week’s newsletter.

Another reader Jeffrey Harris also shared some interesting thoughts with us about this subject along with some ideas for implementing a solution:

A government based vendor neutral certification would probably be useful, but to one end? Other government certifications/licenses, such as architects and professional engineers, are designed to protect the public from bad actors without the knowledge or experience to properly design structures or buildings that could cause substantial harm to people or damage to the public. While IT is becoming a more pervasive technology with automotive self-driving technology and safety systems (such as automatic accident braking), and cybersecurity, we do not hire IT generalists these days, except for very small companies that can only afford one or two IT people.

I am not sure how we design a government exam that is both vendor neutral and useful for industry. Furthermore, there are a number of companies that make generalized, non-vendor specific exams and certifications (ISC2 for CISSP, ISACA for Security+/Network+, SANS for GIAC) that already fit the role that a government exam probably would. It is interesting that the US Department of Defense more than 10 years ago mandated certain cybersecurity certifications for many of its critical IT positions, and instead of designing and mandating government exams, it leverages different industry certifications (including some of the ones above) depending on the level and criticality of the position. These requirements apply to both government employees and contractors.

Maybe the solution for industry is not a government exam or vendor specific exams (except where the hiring requirements are specifically for a vendor specific product), but one of the more generalized exams and certifications. Companies could work with SANS, ISC2, ISACA and other independent organizations to design exams that fill any gaps in IT that currently exist outside of a generalized exam.

There is good stuff in what Jeffrey says above, but his comments also raise some additional questions that may need to be grappled with. For example:

• Aren’t professional engineers also specialists in various categories rather than generalists? Could not an IT professional association license IT professionals in various specializations like the various engineering bodies do?
• Couldn’t licensing exams for IT be designed via collaboration between a governing association, a cross-section of industry representatives and major vendors?
• Wouldn’t exams, both generalized and vendor-representative, only be one portion of the certification process for IT professionals? To practice engineering in Canada for example you must satisfy requirements in the areas of academics, work experience, professionalism/ethics, personal character and language. Couldn’t a similar licensure system be established for the IT industry to give it greater accountability?

What do other readers thing about all this stuff? Are there already movements underway in some countries or jurisdictions for establishing governing bodies over the IT profession? I seem to recall that the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) made a few noises in this direction some years ago. What’s happening in other countries where our readers reside? Share your thoughts with us!

And enjoy this week’s newsletter! —Mitch

This Week in IT

A compendium of recent IT industry news compiled by Your Editors. Feel free to email us if you find a news item you think our newsletter readers might be interested in. And for more tech news coverage see the News section of our TechGenix website.

Here in Canada the big news this last week is the network outage that happened at Rogers Communications which left more than 10 million Canadians unable to use their cellphones or use WiFi Internet for almost a whole day (Global News). A class action lawsuit has been filed over what happened (LPC Avocat). The Government of Canada has tasked Canada’s big telecom companies with taking steps to prevent such occurrences from happening again in the future (CTV News). Meanwhile experts say that the outage shows that even though we live in an increasingly digital world where introducing digital currencies is currently being discussed, it’s still a pretty good idea to keep a stash of cash around in case it’s needed (Global News). Meanwhile, life in Canada has returned to normal. WiFi and cellphones are working again, and everyone is blissfully happy. O Canada, eh?

Here are some other news items we’ve been following recently:

Microsoft bans commercial open source apps from their online store (TechCrunch) and then reverses their decision (BetaNews). Yes, Microsoft listens to their customers. But why not think about your customers *before* you make decisions?

Denmark’s data protection agency says that Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive) do not satisfy GDPR requirements and is banning their use in schools in Denmark (TechCrunch). Sounds like a good excuse for not getting homework in before the deadline.

Facebook is embedding tracking information directly within URLs instead of appending it to the end of URLs in order to work around URL stripping technologies that browsers like Brave and Firefox use to prevent users from being tracked (ghacks.net). Meanwhile steps taken by the Irish Data Protection Commission may result in Facebook and Instagram being shut down this summer across Europe (Politico). Wouldn’t that be nice.

A recent ruling by a Japanese court may have a big impact on how tech companies use algorithms in delivering services to their customers (TechGenix). The struggle over intellectual property rights as it applies to algorithms is going to be one of the major issues facing technology companies over the next couple of years.

More security worries about NAS devices from QNAP (BleepingComputer). Maybe it’s time to build your own NAS? (YouTube)

Is the tech industry headed for a recession? Industry behemoths like Alphabet, Amazon and Apple are giving some indications that this might be the case (TechGenix). Better start dusting off your resume!

And finally if it’s not enough that we have to worry about the privacy and security of our computers and phones, there’s also our cars now that we may need to worry about. Because hackers have apparently found a way they can unlock and start almost all modern Honda vehicles (The Drive). Guess it’s time to bring back the club!

Windows news

Windows Terminal Preview 1.15 has some useful new features users have been asking for (Windows Command Line)

Want to try out Windows 11 but too lazy to install? Download a free virtual machine image from Microsoft (Windows Dev Center).

Microsoft still plans on blocking Office Macros by default (The Verge). Or maybe they don’t (BleepingComputer). Perhaps they’ll change their mind again?

Windows Server news

While Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will be EOL’d October next year, you’ll still be able to purchase Extended Security Updates (ESUs) until 2026. But take note however that the Azure AD Connect Sync will no longer work after August 31st this year. (Günter Born)

Microsoft now lets you issue time-limited passwords for Azure AD (BleepingComputer)

Worried about the different NTLM/Kerberos vulnerabilities nicking you? 0patch has a solution. (Günter Born)

Upcoming webcasts, events and conferences

Got an event, conference or webcast you want announced in our newsletter? Email us!

VMware Explore is returning as an in-person event – Aug 29 to Sept 1 in San Francisco, California – Save your seat!

Also be sure to check out the following event listings:

• Redmond Channel Partner’s calendar of upcoming Microsoft conferences for partners, IT pros and developers.
• TechRepublic’s 2022 tech conferences and events to add to your calendar.

Got comments about anything in this issue?

Email us! We love hearing from our readers!

Meet the Editors!

MITCH TULLOCH is Senior Editor of WServerNews and is a widely recognized expert on Windows Server and cloud technologies. He has written more than a thousand articles and has authored or been series editor for over 50 books for Microsoft Press and other publishers. Mitch has also been a twelve-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the technical category of Cloud and Datacenter Management. He currently runs an IT content development business in Winnipeg, Canada that produces books, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, courseware, documentation, newsletters and articles for various companies.

INGRID TULLOCH is Associate Editor of WServerNews. She was co-author of the Microsoft Encyclopedia of Networking from Microsoft Press and collaborated on developing university-level courses in Information Security Management for a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program. Ingrid also manages Research and Development for the IT content development business she runs together with Mitch.

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IT Workshop – tools, whitepapers and more

Got a product or solution or some other resource you’d like to tell our readers about? Email us!

Our TOOL OF THE WEEK is Exinda SD-WAN a solution from GFI Software that lets you leverage low-cost transport technologies and carrier diversity to enable fast and reliable connectivity between branch offices and data center.

Confused about containers versus running virtualized workloads for your enterprise. Check out thesetwo articles by Eric Eissler on TechGenix.

This free toolkit from SANS has expert guidance that can help your business stay ahead of the ransomware epidemic.

Confused about the broad range of update services Microsoft offers? Get clarity by listening to this RunAs podcast.

Tips and Tutorials

Got tips or tutorials you’d like to recommend for our readers? Email us!

PowerShell:

Check Wi-Fi Signal Strength on Windows with PowerShell (Windows OS Hub)

Format the output of a string in multiple columns with PowerShell (Mike F. Robbins)

Open Up Wide (The Lonely Administrator)

How To Create Functions in Powershell Scripts (ITPro Today)

Hosting PowerShell in a Python script (Powershell Team)

Virtualization:

3 Possible Reasons Why Your VM Is Running Slow (TechGenix)

Virtual Machine – What to Do When Yours Doesn’t Boot Up (TechGenix)

IP Address Management (IPAM) Best Practices for VMs (TechGenix)

What Hyper-V Admins Need to Know About Hosting VMs on Azure (TechGenix)

Microsoft Azure:

Getting rid of credentials in Azure – Part 1 (Azure Developer Community Blog)

Getting rid of credentials in Azure – Part 2 (EasyAuth) (Azure Developer Community Blog)

Getting rid of credentials in Azure – Part 3 (EasyAuth & Managed Identity) (Azure Developer Community Blog)

Getting rid of credentials in Azure – Part 4 (Kubernetes) (Azure Developer Community Blog)

Freebies!!

Free PDF guide to Google Cloud backup from Veeam!

Got a freebie you want to offer our readers? You can reach almost 200,000 IT pros worldwide with our newsletter—email us!

IT Bookshelf: Fraud Investigation and Forensic Accounting in the Real World

Fraud Investigation and Forensic Accounting in the Real World (CRC Press, 2022) is a riveting book that deals with real world problems that have arisen in fraud investigations. Why is a book about forensic accounting relevant to us in the IT profession? Because crimes involving fraud are rampant nowadays due to the ever more sophisticated phishing attacks that businesses are experiencing. While phishing is perhaps more a behavioral problem than a technical one, IT is nevertheless tasked with doing everything it can to prevent or at least mitigate the fallout from such attacks. And one can almost assume that One Day or Another (YouTube) the IT infrastructure that you manage, administer or support is going to get compromised by a phishing attack and the result is likely going to be an attempt at defrauding your business—which will likely elicit a forensic investigation at your company.

Reading this book can help you prepare for such an investigation—and it may also help prevent you from being charged with obstructing a criminal investigation and being heavily fined or going to prison! This came into focus when I read chapter 3 which began by describing the kinds of things you should—and should NOT—do when you learn about a possible irregularity or crime having occurred involving the IT systems and data you have oversight or operational control over. For example I’ll bet you weren’t aware of the fact that if you learn of such irregularities at your company and then immediately call a staff meeting to inform employees they are entitled to have legal counsel present when they are interviewed by federal agents, you have just opened yourself to being charged with one count of obstruction of justice. At least that, according to the book’s author who has over 40 years of experience in forensic accounting investigations, is the case under the U.S. federal judicial system, which is the main context of this book.

What I love about this book is how the author combines real world stories taken from his own experience in forensic accounting investigations with detailed examples of the steps one should take in performing such investigations. Explanations, examples and legal issues to keep in mind are provided for conducting a preliminary investigation, initiating a formal investigation, properly gathering and analyzing evidence, interviewing witnesses and evaluating their testimonies, evaluating financial damage to the enterprise, documenting findings, writing and presenting reports to staff and to law enforcement, and presenting evidence at criminal trials. Now since IANAL much of the stuff in this book goes over my head. But the real life examples and sidebars containing investigative notes are gripping to read and bring home important points that everyone having responsibility over corporate IT resources should at least have some basic understanding and awareness concerning. Just reading a short section like the one in chapter 13 that describes factors you need to consider when deciding whether or not to contact law enforcement when a breach has been detected can keep you from unwittingly committing a crime that could cost you and your company a lot of headache and regret!

Whether you’re the IT Director at a large enterprise, or just provide IT support to small businesses in your area, you should get hold of this book. Read through the parts that are written in story form first, bleep over any legal details you can’t follow, and make sure learn the basic steps involved in fraud investigations—that’ll be enough. Then loan your copy to the CEO or President of your company, or to the owners of the other businesses you support, and watch their eyes start to bug out from their sockets as they work their way through the book. You can buy this book from Amazon!

Factoid: Lunch, anyone?

Our previous factoid was this:

Fact: The first ever COBOL front-end for the GCC compiler was released recently a few months ago (Hackaday)

Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/05/31/making-the-case-for-cobol/

Question: Have any of our newsletter readers ever programmed in COBOL? [EDITOR’S NOTE: I have—once.]

This one must have struck a chord as we received a bunch of responses from our readers. For example:

Yes I did, back in the day. When I went to university, one of the courses was COBOL. I haven’t use it since then, but I do recall it was “easy” to learn (at least the basics). Back then (1981) we had to create the program, then send it to “compile” into IBM 360 server, and after a few hours pick up the print out to check the result. For whatever reason quite a few of my friends found it difficult to learn, so I offered my services (for a small fee of course) to debug or create their programs. Besides a bit of extra money, this was a great way for me to practice! –Gustavo Diaz from Ontario, Canada

I too have programmed in COBOL. I started in 1970 and continued on until about 1990. During the 1980s I also programmed in C. I continued maintaining COBOL installation well into the 1990s. I always felt that it was an excellent language for business. –Hugh Cruickshank from BC, Canada

I have programmed COBOL. Once. It was one summer while I was in High School, I was looking for anything computer related that I could do, and there wasn’t much available. You would think there would be plenty, but this was in the days of punch cards and remote job submission through a leased line to a mainframe somewhere. Consumer telephone modems were still rare and very expensive, and the community college class was my only opportunity. – Clint Chaplin, Senior Principal Standards Engineer at Samsung Research America

I took a COBOL course in college wayyyyy back when, and I did some programming in COBOL a few times after graduating, but I soon realized it’s a lot less typing to use just about any other language! –Jim Ruby

And here’s what Andrew Wong from Toronto had to say about COBOL:

I did COBOL programming for about 3 years before I specialized in an assembler language (same company where I worked). At that time the company had ten or so COBOL programmers while I was the only one trained on the assembler. (Talk about job security?) Assembler is a very cryptic language whereas COBOL is almost like writing English prose. BTW, I am amused at how you decipher the COBOL acronym.

You can thank Google for the funny COBOL acronym “Completely Outdated Badly Overused Language” that we used in the title of last week’s Factoid. Here are some more COBOL acronyms:

• COBOL: Cowards Only Build Outdated Languages
• COBOL: Crap Operated By Obsessed lunatics
• COBOL: Compiles Only Because Of Luck
• COBOL: Cumbersome, Overdone, Badly Organized Language
• COBOL: Coded Only By Obsessed Lunatics

I’m sure our dedicated readers can think up several others. Then there’s this great photo on Reddit showing the last existing team of COBOL developers hard at work. And here’s a COBOL joke that may only be funny to those who have actually programmed in COBOL:

A COBOL programmer’s husband asks, “Honey can you go to the store and get some milk. And if they have eggs, get a dozen.” After twenty minutes she returns and flops 12 bags of milk on the table. He looks at her curiously, “Honey, why did you do that?” She responds flatly, “They had eggs.”

Actually I suppose that same result could happen when programming in other languages as well.

Then there’s this interesting comment we received from Carl Webster a Citrix Technology Professional Fellow and VMware Influencer 100:

COBOL was my first mainframe language. i will gleefully exclude that blasted IBM card punch contraption that was a programming skill i never mastered. One week ago, i met a freshly minted CS university graduate with a specialty in AI/ML. He asked me if he should learn COBOL because the job offers for even basic level COBOL programmers was more than what he was offered for his AI/ML skills. –Gustavo Diaz from Ontario Canada

Wow! So I guess there’s a glut of AI/ML programmers in the marketplace these days? If you’re a developer and somewhat entrepreneurial it might just be a very good idea to learn COBOL inside out and get some gigs going on the side with your newly acquired skills. Which brings us to another question of course: What’s the best learning path for becoming a COBOL Warrior? Any thoughts?

There’s also the following story that we received from Dennis DeMattia who lives in Spokane, Washington USA and which we very much enjoyed reading:

Most of my industrial career was working with minicomputers and microcomputers to do process control. Initially (1969) that was done in Assembly, but soon after that Fortran was available on cheap (eg less than $100K, not IBM 1800) minicomputers, and some years later, Ratfor. The problem was, feast and famine. Because they were so expensive, I only had a computer available for my use when there was a project. Between projects, which could be a year or more, I had to find something to do or go beg for parity bits on the streets. The accountant for our engineering projects came to me during one of those times and wanted me to program a funny report to help him keep track of not only the cost of a project but also the money committed to the various aspects of the project. Today you would call that a spreadsheet, but I had never heard of that term in 1975. Fortran IV had essentially two variable types for calculating: floating point and integers. These guys wanted to keep track of millions of dollars, to the penny. Floating Point becomes imprecise to use when you are looking at 10 digits of precision, and while Integer * 4 scaled by 100 could maybe do the job, it would be awkward. Cobol was designed to not only handle such sums precisely, but also to print this stuff out in nice organized columns, which with Fortran was difficult to do. Since all kinds of management types would see this report, it had to look pretty and business like, something that engineering types rarely cared about. Cobol was fairly easy to learn, at least for what I needed to do. I think we used a timesharing service (IBM’s CP/CMS) to run the program. This guy later gave me a couple other similar jobs, which helped me survive for 31 years at that company.

Gosh I hope I never have to go beg for parity bits on the streets!

And here are some comments from Thomas Könen who lives in Cologne, Germany:

No, you’re not the only one who ever programmed in COBOL. I did so back in the 80s and, to a lesser extent, in the 90s. In fact it was the first programming language I ever learned. In the first years, we had a Siemens mainframe computer with an OS called BS1000. We had to punch every single line of code on paper cards and got the output on continuous fanfold paper. Later on, we upgraded to BS2000 where we had desk-top terminals, which made the programmer’s life much easier. We used COBOL mainly for financial and administrative applications. Those mainframes were really good for sequentially handling large amounts of structured data, and this was well supported by COBOL, also sorting data.

A COBOL program is relatively easy to read and understand as it resembles natural language – unless someone prefers spaghetti code (yes, the GOTO statement…). You can give your data a hierarchical structure with e.g. multi-dimensional arrays. On the other hand, there is some formal overhead with all those DIVISIONS and SECTIONS, and periods/ full stops/ dots you have to put after each “sentence” of code.

I was glad to hear that COBOL isn’t dead yet. An intelligent text editor may help with the formal obligations nowadays. And as long as the compiler produces efficient, fast machine code, we don’t even have to be afraid of Big Data…

Yep, programming languages are simply tools, and you just use the best tool for the job. If COBOL gets the job done well, then use it!

Finally here is a link to a classic Dilbert comic concerning COBOL that was sent to me by Angelika Steckel our Content Coordinator here at TechGenix:

https://dilbert.com/strip/1997-11-04

FWIW we wanted to include the above comic strip in this week’s newsletter but the cost of purchasing syndication rights was above our pay grade.

Let’s move on at last to this week’s factoid:

Fact: The Business Lunch May Be Going Out of Business (DNYUZ)

Source:https://dnyuz.com/2022/07/11/the-business-lunch-may-be-going-out-of-business/

Question: When was the last time you had a business lunch somewhere with someone? Think with COVID changing everything you’ll ever do it again?

Email us your answer and we’ll include it in our next issue!

Fun videos about DOOM

We’re taking a short break from Flixxy this week to check out some YouTube videos about DOOM which next year will be reaching it’s 30th birthday. Your Editor was attending a workshop in 1994 in Victoria, BC Canada when he first saw someone playing—and obviously addicted to—DOOM. It was awesome.

You can run Doom inside (DOS) Doom, for real (YouTube)

History of DOOM (1993 – 2020) (YouTube)

How to Play Classic DOOM on a Modern PC (YouTube)

The New DOOM Game Is About To Be Revealed.. Apparently. (YouTube)

Awesome. Can’t wait.

And Finally

The odd, the stupid and the remarkable. Great for your mental health unless you’re an alien.

New processing technique could make potatoes healthier (American Society for Nutrition)

https://nutrition.org/new-processing-technique-could-make-potatoes-healthier/

[Why not just dip them in cement? That should slow down digestion a bit.]

Apple vs. Feds: Is iPhone Privacy a Basic Human Right? (Harvard Business School)

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/apple-vs-feds-is-iphone-privacy-a-basic-human-right?cid=wk-rss

[I prefer not to share my opinion on this matter—please leave me alone!]

Remote Screen Viewer is Text-Only (Hackaday)

https://hackaday.com/2022/05/31/remote-screen-viewer-is-text-only/

[I’m looking forward instead to the day when we can ditch typing text entirely. Didn’t Marshall McLuhan predict something about that happening?]

Was the Pentagon’s UFO Study Led by a Crackpot? (Slashdot)

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/07/17/2043256/was-the-pentagons-ufo-study-led-by-a-crackpot

[Yeah sure, that’s just what the aliens want us to believe!]

Hey reader! Got an amazing or weird or funny link you’d like to suggest for this section of our newsletter? Email us! But please make sure that it’s G-rated as in “Gee whiz”, “Golly!”, “Good grief!”, “Gaaahh!!” and so on. Thanks!

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