Raymii

You are obviously new to the computer field. Back in my day (he said from his rocking chair) we had to modify hardware to get things to work.

For example, a teletype (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33) used either current or voltage in the interface so you had to physically modify the computer motherboard (https://www.foxdata.com/blog/time-to-test-the-data-general-mv2000-dc/) with wire cutters or a soldering gun.

Or you had to muck about with the patch panel in your card sorter (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html)

Or you had to "reseat" (open the computer, pull out each card, and plug it back in) the cards every morning when you started the IBM Series 1 computer. (http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/equipment/ibm-series1)

Or you had to read (by eye) your paper tape looking for a jump instruction you could hand punch (https://collection.maas.museum/object/373326 or one you made yourself) a "JUMP" instruction to your new "SUBROUTINE" (that you hand punched) to splice the old one out of line and hand compute the return address to skip the old routine.

Or hand wiring your own core memory array (http://www.ricomputermuseum.org/Home/interesting_computer_items/magnetic-core-memory) since an order for 64 "bytes" of core was delivered as 512 tiny core "donuts".

Or physically enter the paper tape boot loader from the front panel…

> COBOL devs are a specialized niche these days and they get paid accordingly.

In my experience the well paid COBOL devs are those with 20+ years of experience, often in one specific system, often bumped by being re-hired a bunch of times for the same position.
I've been doing COBOL since 2018 and younger devs my age (late 20s, early 30s) with a few years of experience make decent money, but the average is bumped by the teams having a lot of devs near retirement age.

If you want to learn:

The language isn't very complicated. I'd recommend grabbing the Visual Cobol for Windows trial just to get coding (and then shunning anything MicroFocus when you are done ;) )
https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overview

If you want to/will end up tinkering with IBM systems, check out Jan Sądek's Mainframe Playground: https://mainframeplayground.neocities.org/

For running COBOL on VMS, comp.os.vms is a common place to hang out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms?pli=1
A dev named Remy documented his first steps on OpenVMS and it was a great help when starting out: https://raymii.org/s/tags/vms.html

There is some actual training material from firms specializing in COBOL training floating around, but they are mostly IBM and/or MicroFocus documentation with some suggested example programs.

I hope the resources above are useful and good luck!

> At least with macOS its all "encrypted" and has sane defaults with a consistent user interface and when some settings are turned off, they stay completely off.

Wait, what. You can completely disable any "phone-home" features of Ubuntu. Actually, you can make sure that this feature is disabled by removing the corresponding package of your system, something that isn't possible in macOS. And you can also audit the code, because all this code is actually open-source [1].

Also, this controversial feature of Amazon search could be disabled quite easily [2], and this motd can also be disabled [3].

So sorry, Ubuntu may have some controversial features, however saying that using macOS is more privacy-respecting than Ubuntu is a lie. They are at least at the same level, however considering that I can't get the source code of macOS and make sure that turning off a knob will stop spying on me, I still think Ubuntu is better than macOS in this point.

[1]: https://launchpad.net/unity-lens-shopping

[2]: https://www.howtogeek.com/126995/how-to-disable-the-amazon-search-ads-in-ubuntus-unity-dash/

[3]: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Disable_dynamic_motd_and_motd_news_spam_on_Ubuntu_18.04.html

"rsync.net is also pretty usable, but I wouldn't trust there is any in-flight or at-rest security http://www.rsync.net/"

rsync.net service is only available over SSH, so there's your in-flight security.

An rsync.net filesystem is an empty filesystem for you to do with as you see fit, so encryption at rest is completely up to you.[1][2]

Related: rsync.net accepts ZFS send/recv over SSH.

As always, ask about the HN readers discount.

[1] duplicity.nongnu.org
[2] https://raymii.org/s/articles/Set_up_your_own_truly_secure_encrypted_shared_storage_aka_Dropbox_clone.html

OpenVPN is SSL VPN, relatively easy to setup, it operates in transport layer. strongSwan (IPsec) works in layer 3.

To properly install and configure strongSwan, following the tutorials available over the Nnternet is not enough. One needs to have basic networking knowledge (NAT, iptables in particular), good understanding of IPsec protocol suite (including IKE, AH, ESP), PKI, Linux skills and etc.

This is a good reference but still needs the knowledge mentioned above to get it to work: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/IPSEC_vpn_with_Ubuntu_16.04.html

Uh thanks, they moved in MAR 2024 i wonder why they have not migrated to the V9 x86 version instead.

But that's probably why the Uptime changed, before it was always around 300-500 days, now it's around 5-14 day's ;)

>I wonder far away QEMU is to supporting OpenVMS on Alpha...

It's not great:

https://raymii.org/s/blog/The_sad_state_of_Alpha_emulators_for_OpenVMS.html