Posted inInformation Technology / Investing

If You Ran OpenVMS You Wouldn’t Have to Be Outraged

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I almost couldn’t write this post.  My sides hurt from laughing so hard.  This story about Google being outraged by the NSA hacking is absolutely hilarious!  Seriously???  You run a business on a “free” OS on a joke-of-the-industry CPU and you are outraged you got hacked?  I got news for you, the source is available to everyone.  Much of the code which goes in gets written by people who are unemployed and may not even have a degree in IT or software development.  It is more than fine for a desktop, but if you think it is something to base a business on you should be polite enough to share what you’re smoking.

There is exactly one OS to use for a business.

July 2001—OpenVMS deemed unhackable
OpenVMS was declared “unhackable” at DEFCON 9 after an OpenVMS Web server was set up at this self-proclaimed underground convention for “hackers” and enthusiasts. Allegedly, the OpenVMS operators were “told never to return” because trying to hack the OpenVMS operating system was too frustrating.

 

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.