We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

In this week's episode of our On Call column, an exasperated Register reader nearly walks the plank after failing to break the laws of physics. Our tale comes from "Rob" (not his name) and concerns the time he was working for an ISP that sold satellite connectivity to the super-rich on their super-yachts. He had an issue with …

[GlenP]

Unfortunately superyacht owners really do seem to believe the laws of physics don't apply to them.

I was watching something a while back where a Sunseeker owner had demanded red stitching on the deck upholstery then was complaining when it had bleached out after a few months in the Med. They tried every thread supplier they could find and none of them were prepared to say that their products would be colourfast in that environment, something anybody who's been involved in boats could have told them (red is the worst colour there is for fading). The issue was never satisfactorily resolved, I think in the end the owner just had to accept he couldn't have red unless he was prepared to have the upholstery redone every few weeks.

[Korev]

I know a chap whose job it is to work out if an Oligarch/Middle Eastern prince's demands are feasible for a private jet. Some of the things people want are crazy, one guy liked goats' milk for breakfast* and wanted space onboard for the animals.

* No I'm not kidding

[Little Mouse]

"kidding" - nice!

[ChrisC]

I like how your "not kidding" note is related to the idea that someone might like goat milk for brekkie, rather than the idea that someone might want a goat farm on their private jet.

I mean, the latter, yeah sure, what do you expect from an oligarch, but actually wanting to drink goat milk (vs imbibing it via one of its more palatable forms - e.g. cheese, mmmmmm), now you're just being silly...

[adam 40]

Pull the udder one

Are you sure they only wanted the goats for their milk?

[4d3fect]

Re: Pull the udder one

Naaaay.

[bpfh]

Re: Pull the udder one

Goat meat is lovely. Baaaa....becue.

On the subject of goats and airplanes, a friend of my father was working in Saudi Araba and for some reason, the way back home involved several connecting flights, one going through Kabul (in the early 80's).

Getting in the 747, he was escorted upstairs, but had a strange smell of kerosene that would never go away.

After talking to the air hostess who said not to worry about they strong smell (to a senior technical sales engineer who sold firefighting products and worked alongside multiple fire departments - specialising in airport and aircraft fires across the world), he went downstairs, strolled back to economy class, and found passengers brewing up tea on primus stoves using pressurised kerosene, and a couple of goats were on board. He vacated the plane with the quickness and got a different flight on BA.

[MrNigel]

Re: Pull the udder one

Look up Saudia Flight 163, the burnt out TriStar was left at the end of the runway for years.

[cosmodrome]

Somebody in my family is allergic against milk. Cow milk, that is, and allergic not as in "imaginary lactose insufficiency" but as in "lab test says so and immune system will riot against it". So I found out that a) you can get goat's milk pretty much everywhere in the world at Bio Company/Whole Foods, that kind of store -which is notoriously present at airports- b) it's pretty good, c) it doesn't work for cappucino and d) goats are not held in mass farming, eat pretty much everything and procude very little CO₂. You probably have eaten goat's cheese even if you weren't aware, it's pretty common in Europe.

So, I am calling bullshit on this anecdote. Better luck telling it on facebook or 4chan - unless that is where it came from.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing you just said helps prove he's lying. In fact, quite the reverse.

[mistersaxon]

I think the idea he needed goats to get goats' milk on his plane is ... excessive. I mean these people are excessive: the whole idea of private planes is excess writ large but even so.

Intolerance to cow's milk can happen to anyone - my brother had it as a child, had to have goats' milk - I tried it, wasn't keen, didn't feel sorry for him because 'Brother' - and we just got on with our lives. We did not have to buy a goat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago a worked on a military satcom system that was being developed for one of the Middle Eastern nations who had rather more money than they knew what to do with. The satcom system specification included requirements for a number of mobile terminals to provide dedicated satcom for VVIPs that included its own 3G (as it was) base station (allowing the VVIPs to use their phones even if they where deep in the desert).

Anon, just in case ...

[KittenHuffer]

The Dunning-Kruger effect at work!

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Isn't it about time that people realise that citing the joke paper D&K wrote, because you don't know enough about their field to know it's a joke, is in fact the actual DK effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

NICE TRY

Very funny. D-K spans several papers over several years. If you actually knew any psycologists in a capacity other than as a patient, you'd know that. The only issues surrounding D-K are how much of the empirical evidence for it can be explained by regression to the mean and/or what is known as "the better than average effect".

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: NICE TRY

It's obviously a joke. It states something completely obvious. It's been working on various 'psychologists' for years too.

[Justthefacts]

Re: NICE TRY

The DK effect is both meta, and meta-meta.

It’s meta because (contrary to what “everybody knows”), it does *not* claim that people who know less are *more* confident in their opinion than those who know more. What the data actually show, is that people’s confidence in their ability is essentially uncorrelated to their test scores. DK actual graphs just show everybody thinks they got 60-70%, whether their test score is 10% or 90%. It doesn’t really show people being over- or under-confident. They just don’t actually know how they did at all.

What makes it meta-meta, is that D and K think that “test scores of college students” are a good metric for “people knowing stuff”; similar to almost all psychology experiments. It’s actually terrible science, although it’s the way most psychology research is done.

Many important applications of expertise are stuff you can’t just look up: e.g. “best practice” in several professions, politics, economics, law. There’s research there too. Tetlock. And the answer is…drumroll…..it’s experts who do very little better than chance, and experts who vastly overestimate their righteous confidence. Tetlock has loads of data on the aggregate accuracy of 284 experts on 28,000 forecasts, over two decades, from international affairs to constitutional lawyers on the outcome of Supreme Court judgements, to economics. Basically, their opinion is worth a coin-toss.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Dunning-2/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One%27s_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments/links/55ef043008aedecb68fd8f4e/Unskilled-and-Unaware-of-It-How-Difficulties-in-Recognizing-Ones-Own-Incompetence-Lead-to-Inflated-Self-Assessments.pdf

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-experts-are-almost-always-wrong-9997024/

[NXM]

No, I still don't understand that.

[Danny 2]

@NXM

The author misspelled the title, which should read, "I can't change the laws of physics, I've got to have thirty minutes."

Dunning was extremely stupid but he thought he was smart. Kruger was a genius but suffered from imposter syndrome. They found a common understanding and released a paper together about themselves.

I did a year long software engineering course where my project was networking Archimedes via RS-232. I was guilt-tripped into letting my childhood mates older brother into signing his name on it because he had nothing. I bumped into him a few years ago and he's spent the intervening decades working for the Saudi air force - on a very high wage. Repeat, he had nothing. Just saying, if you want to attack Saudi Arabia now is the time. Houtis, assemble!

As I was leaving one European job a local was made the section manager. A self-proclaimed expert in Visual Basic in a job where there was no VisualBasic. He was telling a customer about running dot pat files. The wee English guy next to me whispered, "Does he mean dot bat files?"

"Dinnae worry about it, that's maybe how they pronounce B's here."

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: @NXM

"I cannot change the laws of physics..."

for added effect, should have followed up by...

"Are ya daft lad?"

[Doctor Syntax]

It didn't take Dunning & Kruger to see what was perfectly plain already.

The most succinct statement of it I've ever read was in Tracey Kidder's "The soul of a new machine" when the project leaders had decided to staff the project with recent graduates (who by now, of course, are probably retiring). Having done this they started to worry about whether their new staff were as smart as they'd represented themselves in interview: "Are they so full of shit they don't know they're full of shit?"

In that case, of course, the answer was no.

[storner]

"Unfortunately superyacht owners really do seem to believe the laws of physics don't apply to them."

That belief applies to more laws than merely those of physics, I'm afraid.

[John Brown (no body)]

Some of them probably think Physics is a small country somewhere and of course those laws don't apply to them, the superyacht clearly is worth more than Physics GDP!

[G.Y.]

Australia

An Australian PM said he respects the laws of math -- but the laws of Australia come 1st

[Doctor Syntax]

If they wanted to they could just go out and buy it.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

"Unfortunately superyacht owners really do seem to believe the laws of physics don't apply to them."

IME it's more that no-one is willing to tell them no, and capable of explaining why properly.

In the case mentioned in the story, it's ridiculous that no-one was willing to tell the owner 'this is a different kind of connection, you aren't on the end of a wire', which would probably have been all it took.

[David Nash]

Also the owner should have accepted the explanation "we can't break the laws of physics", rather than respond in that way. What did he think, if the guy knew who he was, he would have been able to break the laws of physics?

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

That's more about customer service and how you speak to people than the message itself. The client wasn't asking for the laws of physics to be broken, the techie just wasn't explaining well enough what the problem is.

[TheBruce]

I take it you have never worked with one of these fools. I did for nearly 18 years (I was paid handsomely). Here is one example. This CEO calls the CIO and says his phone is broken get is fixed now. So the CIO sends the top Manager and 5 IT staffers (including me). We get to the CEOs office. He dials the number and it fails. He does this again and it fails. He does it again... He is pissed, he is dropping the f-bomb left and right. Yelling that he is the fucking owner and his phone should never fail.

The Manager calmly asks for the phone number and requests that he try. He selects speakerphone and dials the number correctly and it works. The CEO claims we must have fixed something. We all shuffle out of the office apologizing that we will never let that happen again.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. We had one guy on staff who's job was to take this abuse daily. He had a list of things he had to check every morning before the CEO arrived. The newest thing added to the list was dial a number and check that the CEOs phone was working.

[Cliffwilliams44]

It's not just the top dogs! It can be anyone in even the lowest position of power.

When I used to sit in the back seat of a Lockheed S3 sub hunter. One day a Lieutenant Junior Grade sonar operator was throwing an absolute fit that his screen was not working! Ranting that the screen was absolutely black and he needed to fixed right away. So a technician is summoned up on the flight deck (no small request as it is quite dangerous up there) to climb into the cockpit and "fix" the problem. The tech, pokes his head into the back of the cockpit, reaches over, and turns the brightness up. Then quietly leaves the aircraft.

That was the quietest 7 hour flight I've ever been on.

[Youngone]

A company I worked for had a former Prime Minister as the chair of the board and she absolutely hated being told no.

The joke around the office was that she wound up being PM solely because of the fuss she would make if she didn't get what she wanted.

[Trixr]

Exactly. Saying, "music sounds better from the player attached to your sound system via a cable than from a radio station, doesn't it? Same with data transmission over phone lines vs satellite" isn't that hard.

I don't doubt that the owner was an absolute arseh*le, but it's always better when the tech helps themselves first (and any other techs saddled with the client subsequently) by at least attempting the reasonable explanation once and not going out of their way to piss said owner off when they're fundamentally asking "why is it different here?"

Of course it's glaringly obvious to anyone who's dealt with this stuff, or even tuned a radio, but when they're a rich prat who's had everything supplied on-tap - especially people who never had to earn their wealth doing real work - there are going to be "knowledge gaps".

There's nothing worse than dealing with "demanding customers" (aka rich prats), though, especially when travel and fatigue are factors - we can all can end up in this kind of situation where the filters go off when confronted with rudeness and the blindingly obvious.

[ICL1900-G3]

Rich prat

I had one as a customer. He would never address me directly, he, his wife and I would be standing together and he would say to her 'can you find out if he can do xyz?' Weird.

[Robert Carnegie]

What if your rich guy owns a high quality music radio station...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupidity can be expensive!

In the case mentioned in the story, it's ridiculous that no-one was willing to tell the owner 'this is a different kind of connection, you aren't on the end of a wire', which would probably have been all it took.

Sadly, that wouldn't have worked at all. The clowns who demand "Don't you know who I AM?" are simply too stupid to understand that radio signals take time to travel, and that time is proportional to the distance they have to travel....

I have had multi-millionaire clients who were too stupid to operate their own laptops, and even two who were essentially illiterate. I could make - and support - the case that there is a direct inverse relationship between size of bank balance and IQ.....

[JimboSmith]

I was introduced to an older couple at a party a few years ago who were Yachties and could normally be found on board their sailing boat. They had a satellite modem and were using it to collect their emails whilst on the high seas. These were not the SuperRich more like nomads afloat and the yacht was more functional than luxury. They were bemoaning the cost of Satellite data and that [banner] adverts cost them a fortune. I introduced them to various options including but not limited to noscript, Adblock, not using webmail etc. They were amazed and as a thank you they said they’d be back in the UK in December in Scotland and if I fancied a day sailing then I was more than welcome.

Sadly I was busy that year, so they took someone else I knew who was the party host. It was freezing, rained all day off the Kyle of Lochalsh and they’d ran out of gas for the stove that morning at breakfast.

[Cliffwilliams44]

I've sailed the waters off Scotland in an Aircraft carrier and flown mission while there. Who anyone would consider sailing this waters for fun is beyond me! Riding in an aircraft trying to land on the deck in that roiling mess probably took a few years off my life!

[MJI]

Land and Stop or Stop and Land?

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Sadly I was busy that year, so they took someone else I knew who was the party host. It was freezing, rained all day off the Kyle of Lochalsh and they’d ran out of gas for the stove that morning at breakfast.

You can easily simulate sailing in Scotland - stand under a cold shower with your clothes on, ripping up ten pound notes.

[Anonymous Coward]

That made me laugh!

[Daedalus]

"Sailing: The Fine Art of Getting Wet and Becoming Ill While Slowly Going Nowhere at Great Expense"

- "Ship's Log" by Henry Beard and Roy McKie

[jake]

"A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money." —Unknown, pre 1960.

BOAT: Break Out Another Thousand.

[Daedalus]

"The dance of the lead-bellied lolly gobblers" - once said about the pre-start maneuvering of the more traditional sailboats in the America's Cup.

[Daedalus]

The rich are indeed different

I listened to a radio documentary about the highest of the high fashion industry, in which it was revealed that the WAGs of the rich will buy a eye-wateringly expensive outfit from a fashion house, wear it once, and send it out to be cleaned.

At which point they either forget about it, or simply move on to the next outfit, leaving the cleaners with warehouses full of unclaimed haute couture.

[Rich 11]

Re: The rich are indeed different

This is what body bags were invented for.

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

The guy in the article clearly just doesn't know why it's slow. There was absolutely no reason for the IT guy to be a dick to him at all.

[Intractable Potsherd]

If i was that uninformed about something, and unable to understand the answer but unwilling to admit it, I'd appreciate a simple response like that. It's a reset - the context becomes clear immediately. The owner was clearly an arsehole who didn't appreciate either being talked to as an a) adult, or b) child. There was no way he could have been addressed that would have suited him, as evidenced by "Do you know who I am?" - always the response of idiots with more status than substance.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

well you've clearly got the measure of him1

Although if you read the article really carefully you'll see the true meaning :

There was a lengthy silence, thankfully not punctuated with a "Don't you know who I am?" from the owner.

[Pascal Monett]

"why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

Because the cable is not long enough.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

Maybe suggest he moves the yacht into the mansion's pool?

[TRT]

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

Or install all the servers locally on the boat. All of them.

[David 132]

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

You mean, ask Roy and Moss if you can borrow the Internet for a few days?

[cosmodrome]

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

...plus an aircraft carrier as an escort because we all know what would happen if someone dropped it.

[Daedalus]

Re: "why can't you make it like my connection at home?"

Well you can always tell Mr. Big that, for a modest investment in rockets and satellites, he could have his own personal satellite communications network.

Wait, that rings a bell....

[Pete 2]

Turning a problem into a profit

> But it doesn't happen at my home, why can't you make it like my connection at home?

A fair question and it seems to me to be an ideal sales opportunity rather than a technical issue

P.S. A super yacht owner who only has one home? Doesn't sound like the sort of small-fry to be worth expending effort on.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: Turning a problem into a profit

Where did the story say he only had one home?

[phuzz]

Re: Turning a problem into a profit

When he said "home" rather than "homes".

[Martin an gof]

Re: Turning a problem into a profit

Of course there is - for most people - a clear distinction between 'home' and 'house'. It is probably more common than not for someone who has many 'houses' to consider that they only have one 'home'...

M.

[Korev]

We had complaints from a Very Important Person that his minions couldn't analyse their data at home. Their data consisted of files of up to Gigabyte or so and the ADSL lines at that point were about 2Mb/s. I popped their software onto Citrix and the monster server chewed through the data faster than when they had their laptops in the office. The staff were "happy" they could now waste their evening processing their data to hit his arbitrary deadlines...

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Might have worked for the yacht owner, only waiting for the citrix video data stream instead of 20+ separate TCP connections all waiting for their answer.

[skwdenyer]

A *very* long time ago now, we set up a test implementation of Citrix running over ADSL in North London. We were pitching the idea to VIdeo Networks, who later became HomeChoice, the grand-daddy of all the modern streaming services. So we had the servers running at Staples Corner and the user terminal in a house a few miles away.

The plan was to offer customers remote desktop sessions on a fully managed high-spec PC instance for a small monthly fee, along with streaming gaming. It worked really well. The thin client hardware was cheap and required effectively no maintenance, the terminal and monitor could be upgraded every few years within the subscription, we could provide limitless data backup, disaster recovery, anti-virus, burstable performance, and so on.

We were just far, far, too early to the party - by at least 15 years. So were VNL / HomeChoice. But we weren't alone - Apple and Oracle went on to spend many orders of magnitude more than we did trying out "network computers" before reaching the same conclusions.

As the old saying goes: never be a pioneer, as the earliest Christian encounters the hungriest lion...

But in the context of the OP's problem, latency via satellite would have been a killer. Customers really don't get on well with their mouse inputs lagging, delays whilst scrolling, etc.

[MachDiamond]

"the earliest Christian encounters the hungriest lion..."

And the second mouse gets the cheese.

[PC Paul]

You don't want to use Citrix over a high latency connection, trust me. I used to install satellite broadband to rural business parks (one ground station then VDSL to all the companies) and it was very much wait-wait-wait-everything. Bandwidth was excellent for the time but latency was awful.

There were even split dialup/satellite systems that tried to push the more interactive bits via the phone lines but that didn't get far before adsl came in.

[Anonymous Coward]

""Don't you know who I am?"

"Unless you are god, you can't change the laws of Physics either" would have been an appropriate answer.

[tfewster]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Best delivered in a Scottish accent. Maybe "Scotty" would have been a better pseudonym for this weeks hero.

[Little Mouse]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I've only heard "Don't you know who I am?" once in my career.

It came from a local councilor whose name & face I have since completely forgotten, and who didn't get re-elected next time around.

[Ozmosis]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I've only encountered "don't you know who i am" once as well. From a county councillor, who turned out to really be an utter asshole, but he kept getting re-elected unfortunately. I actually complained about his behaviour but never heard any more of it.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

It's happened twice to me at work, both times from utterly insignificant micro-celebrities who I delighted in telling them, "no, I don't know who you are"

[MJI]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Was it Ronnie someone or other?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I heard it in an airport where some dork tried to get himself an upgrade which in itself classified him as some douchebag, so when he tried that line I intervened immediately by expressing concern he no longer knew who he was and preceeded to loudly ask other people in the queue if anyone knew. I have no problem creating a bit of havoc if I can annoy a retentive moron.

Besides, I was bored so he also had spectacularly bad timing :).

[Ilsa Loving]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I think that phrase is just wonderful. In one sentence, you know everything you need to about the person who uttered it.

[Marcelo Rodrigues]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

"Don't you know who I am?"

No, not really.

[John Robson]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Either that or "have you forgotten again?"

[Caver_Dave]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Twice I have received the "Do you know who I am?"

Firstly from someone who tells people they are fired on UK TV. It was in the 90's and they were only vaguely famous. I told him "to invent something better if the current best on the market was not good enough." I got a smile from him and he walked off.

Secondly from someone who had just spent 10 minutes looking over my shoulder demanding "is it fixed yet", which gave me plenty of time to think of the best answer when he asked the inevitable. This was about 1990 and my system characterised race engines and exhaust systems. He wanted something that would automatically match the right engine to the right exhaust - something that his very experienced engineers "struggled to do" in his words. So my answer was, "The system does what you specified [characterised the engines and exhausts], no it cannot think like the Terminator [AI] and did you know that the Earth actually rotates? [pure petulance]" He just stormed out of the room and the Engineering Manager who had witnesed it all took me to the Pub for lunch to thank me.

[The H-J Man]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

a friend was working as a bouncer at a local night club when somebody tried to jump the que. He got the "Don't you know who I am?". My mate got his notebook out and this person got ready to give him his autograph when my mate said. "No I dont, maybe you would like to add your name to the list of complete dickheads that I have met"

[logicalextreme]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I ended a conversation with the trading director at my last job with an explanation that, as good as I am, I was as yet unable to control the length of the earth's orbit around the sun.

She'd been ever more insistent over the course of the conversation that there could be no more or less than 52 numbered weeks of precisely 7 days in each trading year, and that anything else was unacceptable. She eventually stormed off and I never talked to her again.

Also spent the Monday following each clock change (well, always the March ones and sometimes the October ones) drawing timelines for various members of the finance department (all chartered) to explain why there weren't any sales for the hour of 0100, or why they seemed to have doubled. More often than not the idea seemed to eventually click with them, and they'd appear to back down. Then thank me for the explanation. And then ask when I'd be fixing it.

[Stork]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

That was at least not a problem at Maersk. As a global organisation, UTC was used.

[logicalextreme]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

We had everything stored as UTC. I did suggest presenting the reports in UTC instead of local time, but that got kiboshed because it would "cause confusion". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The company's currently looking for a buyer and the founder just jumped ship. Pretty sure some of my reports are the only things that have kept them going as long as they have, and they weren't exactly rocket surgery but I've done backchannel support for the poor sod I left behind at least twice a year since I left (popcorn emoji)

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

"And then ask when I'd be fixing it."

Well, yes. Not the clocks going back, the obviously broken logging.

[Sequin]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

"Do you know who I am?"

"No"

"In that case, f%$K off!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

As I work in a hospital, I am ready to recommend one of our "special" doctors who deals with such extreme memory loss.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Trying to get into a secure area....

Me - "Do you know who I am?" (Asked in a nice way!)

Her - "Yes, you're the IT man"

Me - "Could you let me in please, left my Cotag badge at home!"

[TRT]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

And that was just to get back into the house to pick up the badge!

[pirxhh]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Proctologists?

[Plest]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Reminds me of the title of the book, "The difference between God and Larry Ellison is that God doesn't believe he's Larry Ellison."

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

With all this, I've now got a Yes Minister scene from "Doing the Honours" stuck in my brain.

Quote below, courtesy of IMDB.

[talking about honours and the abbreviations of the Order of St Michael and St George: CMG, KCMG and GCMG]

Bernard Woolley : Of course in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.

James Hacker : What does GCMG stand for?

Bernard Woolley : God Calls Me God.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

How do they award the Order of the Thistle?

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

How do they award the Order of the Thistle?

"Bend over and spread 'em!"

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Not in Yes Minister.

[Contrex]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I worked in a banking-regulated environment, no outsiders allowed, in rented accommodation (in the Pithay building, in Bristol) and we were ordered to challenge anyone we didn't recognise or who was not supposed to be there. I spotted a bloke and asked who he was and why he was there. 'Don't you know who I am?' he asked. 'No', I asked. 'I'm the building manager', he said. I replied 'I don't care if you're Father Christmas'. He complained and I was called into our chief manager's office. 'Very good, Mike. We all liked the Father Christmas bit.'

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

"Unless you are god, you can't change the laws of Physics either"

The problem is, in several cases they probably do believe they are God, or at least as important...

[TRT]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Or Stephen Hawking.

[sinsi]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Bye bye, lardass

https://youtu.be/TzvexS4uEdE?t=79

[Peshman]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

Ronnie Pickering!

Who?

I know the name due to a viral clip but still have no idea who he is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

I got asked that a couple of times, both t the same job, but different people. One occasion was when we'd recently hd a new security system fitted on the door, as a few weeks earlier, someone had apparently managed to walk in, disconnect a PC then walk out again, completely unchallenged. So all staff were told that if you see somene that you don't know in the building to chllenge them, and if someone you don't know is trying to access the buiding, don't let them in unless you know who they are.

Can't recall the first instance very well, but the second one was a company director who was usualy at the London office. So I'd never seen them before, ever had occasion to know who they were, and, funily enough, as my days were rather busy doing my job, no I hadn't looked at and committed to memory the corporate website and memorised the faces of the twonks nominally runing the show.

So when I turned up to work one morning to find a besuited bloke I'd never seen before unable to get into the building, I was rather taken aback when he asked me by name to let him in. I just told him, "Sorry, no can do, company security policy, as I don't recognise you". To his credit (and believe me the directors of that particular company rarely deserved any credit) rather than get cross about it, he just seemed bemused that I had no idea who he was, and waited until the receptionist arrived and let him in If he'd been hostile about it, I'd have told him that I was simply following company policy, and if he didnt like it he could take it up with whomever set the company policy. Woudn't have been the first time I've told a director "no!"

[ravenviz]

Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"

“Yes of course, you submitted a support ticket!”

[Mishak]

Not breaking the laws of physics...

But I did once work somewhere where the algorithms for a physical system were based on "myths and legends".

The system worked much better when I explained the physics (mainly basic geometry and switching power supply theory) to them and rewrote the code.

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: Not breaking the laws of physics...

Here be dragons, or at least grey bearded wizards...

[UCAP]

Re: Not breaking the laws of physics...

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not breaking the laws of physics...

I like that, and it made me laugh, so upvote.

But you can have a virtual second upvote (as a beer) if you can give the full and proper quotation from source :-)

[Doctor Syntax]

"Don't you know who I am?"

"no, but I'm sure one of the crew must. Why don't you ask them."

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 'no, but that's probably a good thing, since I will tell you the truth instead of what you evidently want to hear'.

[YetAnotherLocksmith]

*This* is why I get called to consult.

[ColinPa]

You cannot bend nature; you have to bend

Two similar incidents

A Canadian bank had two data centers - one on the east coast and one on the west coast. They wanted to use mirrored disks! The only problem was the network latency, so they moved the data centers closer to the middle of Canada, far enough apart to provide isolation.

(I heard of a bank in the US which had two data centers, one in North California, one in South California. Which was fine till someone pointed out the San Andreas fault line went through both data centers. They moved one east)

The other incident was someone complaining about performance of stuff across Asia. They said when they tested it - it easily out performed the requirements. When they rolled it out - the performance was terrible. I was one of a team who was sent out to help. In their testing they had two sites, but "one site" was on the second floor, and "the other site" was on the floor above. The network distance was about 30 ft! (Not the 4000 miles true distance between sites).

When we probed the requirements, they did not actually require each transaction to go to the remote site and back in under 10 ms. They could "batch up" the work. Do 1000 transactions, then check the status of the first transaction etc. Problem solved... every one very happy - especially as the CPU cost was reduced significantly.

[TheFifth]

Re: You cannot bend nature; you have to bend

I had a sort of similar experience back in the early 2000s when building a bespoke CMS system to run a company's website.

This was the days before Wordpress was king and .NET was a thing, so we built a bespoke system using ASP and an SQL Server backend (at their request). All went well with our testing and development and the site ran fast and smooth on our servers.

When we installed it onto the customer's server however, things slowed down to crawl. After much messing around, we finally narrowed it down to the SQL server taking a long time to respond. Each request was taking seconds. When we asked for more information about the server, they told us it was in the US. They were in the SW of England. For some reason, even though they had their own data centre, they farmed out all of their SQL Server requirements to a company in the US.

So every time a page on their website was accessed, their server would make a request to a database that was over 4000 miles away. We added some local caching, which helped a lot, but still not exactly speedy when accessing things outside of the cache. I have a vague recollection that at the time there was a bug in ASP that made accessing remote SQL instances super slow, but even without that I doubt, given the Internet speeds of the time, things would have been much better.

[adam 40]

I don't see the fault... until

"two data centers, one in North California, one in South California. Which was fine till someone pointed out the San Andreas fault line went through both data centers"

You know I had to quote this, and then my brain stopped autocorrecting California as Carolina!

Very very strange...

[wub]

Re: I don't see the fault... until

My experience as well - I didn't clue in until I hit San Andreas and did a double take.

I think it may be because we're American, and over here we say "Northern California"/"Southern California" vs "North Carolina"/"South Carolina" and as experienced readers, we tend to see the first/last letters of a word and approximate length, then jump to an identification.

Makes me wonder what else I've misread recently...

[druck]

Re: I don't see the fault... until

I did exactly the same!

[MJB7]

Re: I don't see the fault... until

I'm British, and I did the same at first glance too, so it's not just an American thing.

[-v(o.o)v-]

Re: I don't see the fault... until

Didn't even realize I did that until it was pointed out in a reply, and English is my second language. Interesting!

[KittenHuffer]

I love demands to do the impossible

I can't remember what one of them was but when I told the 'Boss' his request couldn't be coded I was told that he was in charge and that I would do it. My reply was along the lines of "You can order me to walk to the Moon, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to do it!"

Another contract, another request. This one was to write predictive algorithms for an engineering database to predict the changes that 200 aeronautical engineers would be making given the changes that they had already made. This time they were told that if I could write that then I certainly wouldn't be doing it for them for the hourly rate that I was on!

[Wally Dug]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Many, many moons ago, probably the mid-90s, I was asked by someone to do <something impossible> with the system. When I replied that I couldn't, I was told that I could... because <my PHB> said it could be done. So I had to spend some time explaining why it couldn't be done, along the lines of the system wouldn't allow it that way.

This happened on more than one occasion.

It was the old adage that the guy had a computer at home, so therefore he "knew all about computers".

[heyrick]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

I got that once, but it was the guy's cousin.

Great, I said, so you now know exactly who to ask to do such and such.

Cousin was taken on, paid a hell of a wage, and let go after a few months when out turned out that for all the promises of how well things were going, not one single thing had actually been done. Not a one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Ask before you tell. If the PHB or a customer want's you to do the impossible, politely ask them how they envision you doing so. Then you can respond, either directly to their suggestion, that you have though about it and have identified (list of problems) as issues, or ask for a budget to start and R&D group to look into it if you are bored and tired of succeeding. :-)

Also from the original article, while it can be tough with the big wigs, try to reproduce the issue yourself face to face. Often the ground level truth doesn't match the ticket, as people often don't describe the problem correctly or in enough detail. Working backward to the user when that is an all day process can ruffle some feathers. Doubly so when you look at their screen for three seconds and confirm nothing you did all day was related to the issue. Not that would of saved today's hero, at least how they tell it. But sometimes starting with the space between the chair and keyboard can jump start that light going on.

[eionmac]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Ignorance here. What is meaning of "PBH"?

[J.G.Harston]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Pointy-Haired Boss. See Dilbert.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Here's a classic to start you on your journey: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-03

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Asking "What is <whatever>" is never ignorance. On the contrary: Accepting not knowing everything, including things that a obvious to others, and simply asking instead of pretending: Deserves a thumbs up.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

And for elonmac, many happy hours of catching up.

[MJB7]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Asking "what is <whatever>" absolutely _is_ ignorance. (The asker was ignorant of a fact.) However there's no shame in not knowing everything provided you ask for clarification, _and then remember it_.

(Forgetting something which you asked about a long time ago and haven't used since is OK too.)

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/

[eionmac]

Re: I love demands to do the impossible

I have a computer at home, I do not think after many decades of Linux and LS OSs I can even start to know what I do not know. But I do 'know a 'little', like how to press the on/off switch.

[Filippo]

As a developer of industrial automation software, I get unfeasible requests all the time. Most of them are about how I should have some magical algorithm that takes the wildly swinging, semi-random output of some hardware system that's not fit for purpose and never has been, and get a stable, fast and accurate measurement out of it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Stable is easy. Just take all the outputs and average them. It won't be fast and accurate only applies if you knew what the correct answer should be.

[phuzz]

Just work out what the correct answer should be, and then hard-code it.

[Arthur the cat]

ObXKCD.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's 42, obviously... now what was the problem?

[Graham Dawson]

My mouse keeps complaining.

[John Brown (no body)]

I had mine neutered and removed it's ball. Unfortunately, that means it's now armed with a frikken laser instead!

[Paul Crawford]

Out of cheese error?

[Filippo]

That reminds me of the other frequent class of unfeasible requests I get: given a sensor that is the only source of information on a physical process, have the program throw an alert when the sensor is giving bad (but within bounds) values.

[Paul Cooper]

This is actually a real class of problem in Operational Research, and it has answers. Don't ask me to explain them; I don't understand the maths. But I know it is a real, answerable problem.

[adam 40]

Can you tell Boeing then?

[Filippo]

It is - at the expense of fast and accurate.

[Robert Carnegie]

I imagin that you can dtrmin that somthing may b wrong with my kyboard? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

2oo3

You need three sensors for that

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Demand a clear specification what is considered as bad and what is considered as good. If it is not clear enough prove them it is not clear enough until they give you specification which are clear enough. Continue this circle until the universe ends.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Yes, that's easy enough to do by looking at the distribution of a bunch of results. If you're e.g. still getting the same shape distribution, but the centre has shifted, it's a sign the sensor is drifting.

[Doctor Syntax]

If you get a subsidiary peak you know that some of the results under it are wrong but not which.

See Boeing.

[Zarno]

"What do you mean we can't use the armature voltage on a DC motor controlled in torque mode, with external field from rectified mains, tied to an operator changeable gearbox, without any way to know selected ratio, to get actual speed of the system?"

Or:

"The speed demand output from our system should match the actual product speed". Drive has 'X' second internal ramp, speed demand is 0-5000 RPM instant with no ramp...

Beer because it always seems to be needed after explaining.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember being tasked to get some figures about the performance of remote engineers. Location and status coming over mobile data. Uneven compliance with setting job status.

I figured that by playing with the error bars that I could make the answer anything that they wanted. Also that most of the data was shite.

[BeverageBeast]

Overinflated sense of self importance

Back in my helpdesk days, I had an "important" customer with a completely F'd laptop. We went above and beyond for him, got a replacement laptop spun up in record time and had a priority courier pick it up to drive straight to the customer for same day delivery. When I kindly informed him that a new laptop would be with him in just a few hours, he was furious! "What am I supposed to do for the next few hours!? Do you know who I am!? What are you going to do to make this right!?" After much pointless discussion I ended up saying to him something to the effect of "I don't know what you expect me to do, it takes time for an object to travel through physical space."

He asked to speak to my manager.

[GlenP]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

I think the worst one I had in a similar vane was the customer demanding that I attend site *immediately* when I believed a reboot would cure the issues. Given that the site was an hour's drive away common sense said they should do the reboot themselves, first, before I travelled. After a slightly heated discussion he finally agreed that would be the quickest solution. I did have to go in the end, but that's a different story.

[Belperite]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

Well it's obvious. A same-day courier isn't good enough. You should've helicoptered it to him personally.

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

"I'll just phone Mr Wells and see if I can borrow his time machine."

[Stoneshop]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

"I'll just phone Mr Wells and see if I can borrow his time machine."

Then inform his mother about the beneficial effects of contraception.

[Anne Hunny Mouse]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

I'll just fire up the DeLorean

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

A really good support engineer would have anticipated the failure and shipped a replacement in the bottom of the box that held the original.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

But they threw away the box...

[Stoneshop]

it takes time for an object to travel through physical space.

One night, some time in 1990. I am called to fix a b0rked VAX. Go there, perform diags, find the culprit.

19:45: order replacement part. Which has to come from central stock 180km away.

19:55: part is available and ready for pick-up by courier. Courier has been called but hasn't reported at the stockroom yet.

21:30: duty guard calls the operator room to say the courier had arrived.

The stockroom was close to the motorway, the customer was slap bang in the middle of the city, next to the main railway station. Also, at the time about 20km of the route would have had a 100kmhspeed limit, hard to exceed as that would have been just bloody impossible due to traffic density, even at that time of the day.

That same courier driver was once stopped by a police motorcyclist. For speeding, of course. "So, can I please see your flying license?" Which was offered. After which the plod had the good grace to reply "Next time, please file a flight plan first."

.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: it takes time for an object to travel through physical space.

That same courier driver was once stopped by a police motorcyclist. For speeding, of course. "So, can I please see your flying license?" Which was offered. After which the plod had the good grace to reply "Next time, please file a flight plan first."

I've heard a very similar story about a airline pilot on his way to Schiphol when called at the last minute to fill in as replacement.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: it takes time for an object to travel through physical space.

A mate of mine has a private pilots licence. I always suspected he drove fast in the hope that would happen to him. Eventually it did. And yes, the copper let him off with a stern warning and a smile.

[Sam not the Viking]

Re: it takes time for an object to travel through physical space.

Early one new year, a long time ago, I was sent out to investigate two sites which were not working. The small buildings containing the control panels were out in the middle of nowhere, about two miles either side of a bridge, and alongside a major drain/waterway. The access was along the bank and was not made-up so it was a careful manoeuvre along very muddy tracks. It was obvious what the problem was at Station A, very humid weather had suddenly arrived after an ultra-cold spell (for the UK) and the electrics were dripping with condensation. Electric fans, driven by small generators were organised to dry things out. A trek back along the track and then along a new muddy track to investigate Station B which was suffering from the same problem and would need the same kit currently being used to dry out Station A. Back to Station A to see how things were going on before taking the drying-kit over to Station B. Back to Station A, restore power and a quick check reveals a faulty relay.

"Could we take a relay from Station B?"

Back along the two tracks in the gloom, salvage a relay (and a spare). It's now dark, return along the tracks and get things working..... Back along the track, late in the evening, homeward bound. The (company) car looks like it's been in a rally, which I suppose it had.

Next morning, find two relays at a stockist. Go and collect them, drive back to nowhere, along the track and exchange the faulty components. After another long day with more trips along the muddy tracks, all is operational. Personal award -->

Back at the office, I get criticised for the state of the vehicle, inside and out.....

A few days later, the boss goes out to receive the praise and honours in a hired 4-wheel drive......

[JimC]

Re: it never actually happened but...

I always kinda liked the thought of being stopped when I was on my way to police HQ to sort out a problem with their overtime payments system...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it never actually happened but...

On-site engineer, had a call about something or other that would potentially cause a delay with payment - flagged as urgent. I did query it, as I was paid by a different company...

(I did treat it seriously, and resolved it!l)

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

" When I kindly informed him that a new laptop would be with him in just a few hours, he was furious!"

I suspect that if you had delayed the phone call for the few hours and said "It will be with you in a few minutes." then you'd have been more popular. You and I both know that this would have been poorer customer service, but he is a jerk and so probably doesn't see the world the way we do.

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

Company I worked for once spent £400 to motorcycle courier a "vital" laptop halfway across England, only for it to sit in a manager's cupboard for a month.

She was a miserable bitch, but a large customer, so...

[Trixr]

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

That's a better deployment of the "rules of the physical universe" talk than the OP's. At least you tried. And at least "speaking to the manager" meant your ear was no longer being bent with the circular argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sat Comm

Not as bad as the catamaran super yacht that had its DBS-TV radome re-sited below a deck during a rebuild.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: Sat Comm

Anyone who spends half a billion on a superyacht to sit on it watching telly deserves neither half a billion dollars, a superyacht, nor the ability to watch telly.

[nintendoeats]

Re: Sat Comm

I dunno, what are you supposed to do with a super-yacht?

[Alumoi]

Re: Sat Comm

Coke and hookers, obvious!

[Outski]

Re: Sat Comm

I suppose some of them are big enough to play rugby on, yes :o)

[adam 40]

Re: Sat Comm

Funnily enough, when I get my coal delivery, my son, who plays number 2, does help stacking the bags...

[Outski]

Re: Sat Comm

Did you follow me here from Dabbsy's column?

[Unoriginal Handle]

Re: Sat Comm

If the hookers are big enough to play rugby on, count me out.

Coat...

[MiguelC]

Re: Sat Comm

I can only afford Coke at Hooters...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sat Comm

Funnily enough, said catamaran had been known to be chartered out for the "alternative" Cannes Film Festival.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sat Comm

Normally coke 'n' hookers will be on another boat. Not on the main one.

[Korev]

Re: Sat Comm

Show your fellow oligarchs that yours is bigger?

And has a helicopter -->

[timrowledge]

Re: Sat Comm

Only the one helicopter? Oh dear.

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's in the contract

I was once asked to review a connectivity contract a salesgoon had drafted. It promised the customer sub-10ms latency between silicon valley and Singapore. Company politics meant I wasn't allowed to say this was impossible. The sales dept would once again accuse the engineering dept of being difficult. So the clause that said the contract was bound by the laws of California got an addition: this contract was bound by the laws of physics.

I don't know if that made it into the final version that went out.

[Cederic]

Re: But it's in the contract

Surely you manage this through a specified tolerance?

sub-10ms, with a tolerance of +/- 4 seconds.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: But it's in the contract

"sub-10ms, with a tolerance of +/- 4 seconds."

I think +4/-0 would be more achievable.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: But it's in the contract

Yes, negative latency is an .... interesting...concept :-)

[Cederic]

Re: But it's in the contract

In the unlikely event the Sales team challenge it though, there's a simple response: "It's just as likely as the sub-10ms you've promised to the customer."

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: But it's in the contract

There was a young lady named Bright,

Whose speed was much faster than light.

She departed one day,

In the usual way,

And arrived the previous night.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: But it's in the contract

I knew you were going to say that!

[ttlanhil]

Re: But it's in the contract

Well, if they're willing to pay enough to move a continental plate or two...

[Stoneshop]

Re: But it's in the contract

Well, everything west of the San Andreas fault tends to move west, closer to Asia, but probably too little to meet the network delay limit specified and satisfy the customer.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: But it's in the contract

Depends on who the contractor is and how long it over runs. Crapita maybe?

[jake]

Re: But it's in the contract

Actually, at the San Andreas Fault Zone the Pacific Plate is shifting in a North-westerly direction with regard to the North American plate. So no, the bits of the US that are on the Pacific Plate (mostly California Coast and bits of the SoCal desert) are NOT moving closer to Asia. They are moving towards Alaska.

[Uncle Slacky]

Life imitates...

...Avenue 5 (but at least the techie doesn't end up dead).

[Empty1]

nautical tems

"The boat was anchored in the right direction for the chimney stack to not be in the way etc... All these things checked out."

Being an ex sparks,some words or phrases grate a bit

right direction = correct heading, (Right could mean "right hand" or Starboard)

Chimney stack = funnel

[Cederic]

Re: nautical tems

Right direction however could not.

Nautical terms are just jargon. A docked boat is de facto land, they can handle normal English.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: nautical tems

Apart from which, in context, "right direction" ie which way it's been docked sounds correct while "heading" implies moving in a specified direction. Chimney stack sounds wrong, but not too wrong since "smoke stack" was a relatively common term in the days of coal-fired steam ships.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: nautical tems

Well, shiver me timbers!

[Doctor Syntax]

If we were able to fix it your radar wouldn't work.

[45RPM]

I had an issue with a super fast cluster that I lead the team writing the software for. In test, it all checked out. In integration and UAT it all checked out (this being in the days when we could touch the hardware in those environments, and check it was all correct).

In production? Where we weren’t allowed to go without filling in copious amounts of paperwork? Nope. Not working properly. Odd timing issues were buggering up the software. Right away we were fairly sure what was happening - but the guys who set it up insisted that they’d followed the instructions exactly.

Paperwork was filled in, and three of us marched into the server room only to discover that the instructions had been followed only in the broadest sense of the word. The fibres connecting the cluster were supposed to have been cut to the same length. One was about 80cm long (which was fine). Another was about five meters, and coiled up in rack. Which was not fine. And, in fact, the source of the problem.

Physics. It’s a bugger. And the speed of light particularly so - at least until someone invents Tachyonic Subspace Data Transmission (or maybe Quantum Entanglement Data Transmission)

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading a story ages ago (can't find it now) about a call being logged that emails couldn't be delivered to recipients more than (IIRC) 250 miles away.

It was set in an university with a statistician, and it will how he analysed the data and came to the conclusion. The engineer confirmed the fault and the solution was to increase the time out on something or other.

[A.P. Veening]

Here is your link to the 500 mile email story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, would probably helped if I remembered if it was 500 not 250!

[Anonymous Coward]

Different acronym priorities

Right now they're focussed on Tachyonic Interstitial Transmission Systems and Quantum-Untangled Information Management which are a very different matter.

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Different acronym priorities

Fnar! Fnar!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Different acronym priorities

"Tachyonic Interstitial Transmission Systems"

Is that the one that uses Universal Protocol?

[MachDiamond]

"Physics. It’s a bugger. And the speed of light particularly so "

I was working on the satellite crew at Disneyland's 35th(?) anniversary for the press pool. One connection had a delay of several seconds between the broadcast channel and the backhaul. I can't remember the exact timing, but it was around 10 hops between Earth and a geosynchronous orbit. It was a very strange patch between the US and Canada. Due to regulations, it couldn't be one up/one down. The signal had to be downloaded at a particular site and re-transmitted on a Canadian satellite before the news agency could use it. We couldn't squirt the signal directly to a Canadian satellite due to other laws. Bonkers, but a good demonstration on the speed of light.

I can just imagine the oddities of shipboard comms regulations when it comes to internet. How many Netflix accounts would you need to have to meet locality requirements?

[Andy A]

When they were installing a DVD player on the ISS, Region Encoding was a killer. Which region are we in now? Which will we be in 4 minutes from now?

In the rest of the world, "chipping" a player to ignore the region code was ordinary, but the US has laws meaning that possession of such a device results in automatic incarceration. The RIAA paid for that law, so it MUST be upheld!

So a player was supplied from the UK, and delivered to the Shuttle launch pad in a Diplomatic Bag.

[the Jim bloke]

Define the ISS as a place of incarceration, and the penalty period the same length as the mission.

Issue solved. This isnt rocket science.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember who it was, but a company was supplying UK/rest-of-the-world coded DVD players and for something like £25 extra you could have a universal machine

That £25 was for a photocopied list of instructions for switching the machine to universal

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

I'm a technician, not a magician

(Yes, I've used that one on a VVIP client, who stopped complaining and started laughing.)

[Stoneshop]

Re: I'm a technician, not a magician

"It would be so much faster if I could create the replacement part out of thin air, but unfortunately we'll have to resort to Logistics sending us one."

[hammarbtyp]

Not so much yachts, but i did here a story of a Middle east billionaire who built a house with a huge swimming pool in the middle of the desert, but then complained that pretty well every bird (of the feathered variety) came to quench its thirst.

It's not only the law of physics that such people do not believe is sacrosanct, but also the law of nature

[Robert Carnegie]

That's not a swimming pool, it's a bird bath.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in my years serving as a Uni head UNIX/Network/Web/Mail/Security/Infrastructure admin, I had one of those irritating, nitpicking professors who almost daily walked into my office to casually complain about how his lab's "web leaf" (no, I'm not kidding, in Spanish he said "hoja web" instead of "página web", or web page) didn't load fast enough for his EU- and US-based collaborators. He hadn't even put any dynamic/donwloadable content in there as we're talking about mid-90s and lousy Latin-American download speeds and data was exchanged mainly through email, but he still liked to swing by our small DC/IT office on a daily basis to slip some insidious comment about the bad network performance he and his foreign colleagues experienced, and how it was a visible stain in the otherwise immaculate trajectory of our University.

We showed him ping tests, latency tests, we even showed him we had reverse cached his static website in the Squid proxy and made it serve said site to any outside connections... I even made arrangements with a fellow student doing an internship in Germany to run the same tests and mail them over to us, but no matter what we did, he always had to come back and plaster his CV in front of us -not in a really nasty manner really, but still being a PITA- to justify his ire towards our network's perfomance.

So one day, as his local lab started to grow in junior staff, we convinced him to donate one of his old desktops and we promptly converted it into a local Squid proxy sibling, sharing its cache with the monster one sitting in our DC. We made absolutely sure to create a local ACL mandating the specific website for this particular lab was cached/refreshed daily (without explaining this particular setup to our PITA professor), and then showed him how the local "hoja web" was springing into his lab's computer screens in milliseconds.

That alone was enough to keep him from paying us his daily visits. So, in a way, we didn't break the laws of physics, but we merely made them work for us, by making the data travel the shortest path from its (faked) origin to its destination.

[Irony Deficient]

his lab’s “web leaf”

(no, I’m not kidding, in Spanish he said “hoja web” instead of “página web”, or web page)

Hoja has multiple meanings; it can be used as “leaf”, “sheet”, “page”, or “form”, among others. The phrase “hoja web” doesn’t seem to be completely unknown, judging by a search engine’s results for the query "hoja web" -"página web" .

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: his lab’s “web leaf”

Yup, but it was pretty much anachronistic back in the 90s, and it still is.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like to resort to the y'cannae change the laws o' physics quote too often, because in most cases where you would want to say it, the customer doesn't have a clue. Unfortunately for me, when my primary customer are representatives of UK Govt' quangos; science has nothing to do with reality. Often, nor does economics.

I still find it hilariously good fun to brief two quangos with conflicting objectives on the same subject; put them in the same room and let them argue inconclusively. Such is the farce that is trying to do anything on the basis of national needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Laws of physics

Not only don't apply to very rich people, but also to average "know it all" managers mounted very high on their horses and with very weak brain.

Some years ago, I got to explain why synchronous replication would add X ms latency to the storage service in a dual DC setup.

This mgr would have none of it, and I had to end up computing the cumulative latency caused by DWDM + latency caused by speed of light/km.

The fact I had to teach some college physics to someone higher ranked than myself played a big role in me f***ing off this dreadful company.

[This is not a drill]

8ms latency to India.

We had outsourced some our development to India and set up a VPN to their office. As I had experience of doing this at other companies, I explained to the development manager that trying to sync software repositories "over the wire" would be very slow due to latency and they should consider a thin client solution.

However the development manager knew better, Every week we would have a meeting about the performance and every week I said it was a latency issue and couldn't be resolved as we had said initially.

It came to a head in the twixmas period, which was really a slow period because we were in full change freeze. The development manager said that they were having problems with a piece of software and he had read the manual which said that the network must have a 'ping latency' of 8-10ms or less and that If the network team couldn't FIX the network VPN to India he would have to report our incompetency to the the IT director. I downloaded the manual for the software and the first paragraph said in capital letters "this product will only work on a LAN with a latency of 8-10ms. It will not work over a WAN"

I calmly replied to to the development manager that manufactures of the software stated that it would not work over a WAN, so a WWAN was out of the question. I then proceed to describe the lengthy calculations explaining why even with dedicated circuit, utilizing loss-less equipment, the most perfect fibre-optic and copper connections, the wind in the correct direction, etc, the best latency we could get on the 9000 mile round trip from London to Mumbai would be 80-90ms. I finished it off with the following

"I'm sorry that due to the laws of physics we can't provide you with the service you require. However I have read that CERN are doing some amazing work on theoretical quantum teleportation, and as soon as they prove this and release the associated technology to us we will endeavor to install it as soon as possible"

I ensured that the IT director was cc'd in.

The thin client project was initiated shortly afterwards.

[adam 40]

Re: 8ms latency to India.

So often I work in companies where I know more about TCP latency than the IT guys installing stuff.

Same happened in my previous job, the Perforce repos would take an age to clone when our new Pune team attached to Cambridge over the VPN.

After working out that each file did its own interaction, and there were 12000+ files in the codebase, a quick bit of mental arithmetic showed that a full sync would take many minutes, no matter how fat the pipe.

Eventually, they were persuaded to get a remote proxy server....

[Barrie Shepherd]

Re " Don't you know who I am"

I experienced this in reverse once.

I was working on a new installation poking test leads and looking at traces on scopes being careful not to utter any expletives as there was a tour of the site by a load of HQ Directors taking place and management wanted the place to look busy.

A grey suit approached and asked me what I was doing, I described the test activity, in layman's terms, and responded to the fairly detailed return questions honestly.

The suit then thanked me with "Thank you, you seem to be the only person here who does not know who I am so you did not see fit to give me a load of bullshit about what is going on". I must have looked like a deer in the headlights of a car when he said "I'm the Company Chairman BTW",

[Anonymous Coward]

That story has Martian vibes.

Rich: "And you... I'm sorry, who are you again?"

Ted: "I'm Teddy. The director of NASA"

Rich: "cool"

[SteveCoops]

I simply don't believe you

Many moons ago I was involved in setting up an office in India and we had complaints of performance of Citrix from India to our UK hosted Citrix servers - they said it was unusable, but every network test I could do showed no issue (apart from the 170-odd ms round trip to India over the dedicated rather expensive 2mb Singtel circuit). I even RDP'd to their desktops and connected back to Citrix and it was as perfect as it could be.

In the end I said I just don't believe you and gave up and said "Go to the Video Conference room and set the PC up and show me the delay", which they duly did and it really DID have a massive multi-second delay on doing anything, I couldn't believe my eyes!

It turns out to be a video card driver incompatibility with Citrix! When I tested via RDP, I was bypassing the physical video card's driver (and so getting the Microsoft RDP driver instead) which had no issues with Citrix.

[Anonymous Coward]

Escher prints

The impossibility I always liked was the demand to have an extremely large spreadsheets or building plans, printed on a single sheet of A4 large enough to read.

Multiple A4 sheets not acceptable,

A3 sheet still not legible enough

A2 Plan printer sheet legible but too big.

Some people just couldn't get it into their stupid litigious heads that it was impossible

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Escher prints

So they were demanding "The Fellowship Of The Ring" to be printed on A4 and still be readable... (That is the usual comparison I use).

[DS999]

Not that surprising

The average person does not understand the speed of light relative to modern human scale distances like geosynchronous orbit (not that they know how far that is either) or a fiber path across the globe or even a large country.

The megarich person on the superyacht has probably been told "no" enough times where it turned out the answer was "yes, so long as insane amounts of money are spent" that we shouldn't judge him harshly for at least testing the theory on his satellite internet connection.

As it turns out, he was right, just wrong about the magnitude of money that had to be spent. If he had deep enough pockets to have paid to launch a few hundred low orbit satellites, along with ground stations located anywhere he thought he might cruise, he could have eliminated most of the latency he was observing from the use of GSO satellites. He might be willing to accept that latency if he was told "yes, it can be fixed, but it will cost $10 billion and require 10 years to deploy".

[G.Y.]

Re: Not that surprising

" The average person does not understand the speed of light ..." -- Grace Hopper has a good video on the subject

Also, "time machines" (one of the Royal Society lectures for your people, ages ago) with a loopback video via a satellite

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Not that surprising

A Grace Hopper nanosecond would probably be a good start for an explanation.

[Marty McFly]

Variable bandwidth on cross-country back-haul

Late 1990's, company acquired, new owners wanted to back-haul all traffic from west to east coast. No split-tunnels here! The cross country network connection had a variable speed & a variable cost. As newly acquired unwanted step children, the connectivity sucked.

That is until some young upstart ran a continuous ping with a max packet size against the east coast Internet gateway. Did it from multiple machines too. Co-workers marveled at how much more work they could get done because the network was so much faster. The more bandwidth being used, the more the pipe was opened up. Should not have left it running over night though.

Next morning I found myself explaining to HR, "If PING is such a dangerous command, why is it pre-installed on our systems?"

Ooops.

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to consult our dictionaries and realise that issue is not a synonym for problem.

Its a euphemism that started off in the US and made its way to the UK.

[5n0wcha1ns]

do you know who I am?

odds on it was either Jamie, Robert or Richard ??? (anyone else really would be a rich nobody)

[Danny 2]

I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

Charming, attentive, witty. I just wanted to hug them and pet them and call them George. One of them told me he'd put a turntable floor in his garage because his trophy wife couldn't reverse a car, and not every trophy wife gets spoiled like that. I related because I had to reverse my car into the garage for my girlfriend.

They know you know who they are, or just find it amusing if you don't. They love it if you don't know because then they get to have a real human interaction

It's the middling, piddling rich who are so disagreeable. Football 'stars', company owners, corrupt politicians - do I even have to mention lawyers? Slightly rich people give the ultra rich a bad name.

I think Elon Musk is a prick, but I'd still have a night with him if only to check. I think I'd make a good ultra rich person but I also make an excellent ultra poor person so why change?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

I've never met a billionaire, not that I know of anyway.

But I was invited to one of a multi-millionaire's houses for lunch.

It was a bit out of the way and hard to find but we knew the way as one of the party was familiar with the area.

On arrival we found another group of people having drinks with our guest.

It turned out they'd got a bit lost on a ramble and ended up on his property, he'd spotted them and invited them in for drinks.

So, yes, you can be rich and nice.

Lunch was excellent by the way, not that it was fancy food, quite the opposite.

Just good company, good conversation and a friendly atmosphere.

[anothercynic]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

On Instagram (yes, I use it), you will find an account that explains the interactions of the rich and the *really* rich. The basic premise is that it shows the rich try to impress everyone and regularly pull the 'don't you know who I am?' card, while the *really* rich just don't care about impressing or telling people who they are.

It tallies with the experiences of a friend who lives in West Hollywood. It's her impression that it's usually the flunkies, not the actors/directors/bigshots, who are being the asses, albeit with the 'don't you know who I work for?' thing.

Of course, there are always the exceptions (see Musk, Ellison and certain directors who will remain unnamed).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

Think Elon reads el reg and downvoted you...

[nintendoeats]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

That's a disturbingly intelligible idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

One of the nicest people I’ve ever known (a grad student) is a billionaire now. It’s been 15+ years but I’d bet money he’s still as nice as ever.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

Elon Musk is a bit of an outlier, because he's less a typical billionaire, and more an obvious Bond villain.

[YetAnotherLocksmith]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

Careful! He'll be buying El Reg for £120 billion and kicking you off if you're not nice to him!

[MachDiamond]

Re: I've only met three billionaires and they've all been perfectly lovely

"It's the middling, piddling rich who are so disagreeable."

Sometimes it's old money vs nouveau riche. Other times it might be that a person has been taught over time that being a complete prick gets them what they want the majority of the time.

One of the most memorable nights out knocking back a few was at an event after hours with a guy that walked on the moon. One of the coolest people I have ever met and as down to Earth as they come. I can also recall having to deal with rock stars whose mothers never should have let the pregnancy go to full term.

[Man inna barrel]

How to get the right answer from an engineer

In the perception of sales and marketing bods, engineers are often viewed as pessimists. So when an expert declares that some bright idea is science fiction, the sales bod will ask the same question in a different way, in the hope that all it takes is a bit of persistence, in order to achieve a miracle. In fairness to the salesman clan, they are not all total idiots, and a layman's explanation of the the technicalities can be worthwhile. I put a great deal of effort into describing a product I helped develop, its strengths, its weaknesses, and so on, for a managing director who did not have a clue what he was selling. The document took some literary skills on my part. I think the MD appreciated my efforts, because he preferred not to be found out talking complete bollocks, when doing a big deal.

Not all sales bods have this practical attitude. There are courses where you learn how to talk complete bollocks. It generally helps if the people you are dealing with are also talking complete bollocks. Entire businesses can be built on talking total bollocks. The trick is to take the money and run, before anybody notices.

I have found that a good strategy as an engineer is to cultivate a reputation for arcane knowledge, beyond the ken of mere mortals. However, you do have to deliver results. What I have learned with my current employer is that sales people can be highly effective, if you develop a product that people want to buy, at a good price. This reduces the temptation for talking total bollocks. When I joined my present employer, the top sales guy was managing several million pounds worth of accounts, and he was still not twenty years old. Unlike the idiot type of salesman, this chap had a talent for selling technical products, and would ask pertinent questions from engineers, to make sure he cope with any questions customers might raise.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: How to get the right answer from an engineer

"Not all sales bods have this practical attitude. There are courses where you learn how to talk complete bollocks."

My experience of most salesmen is that (a) they don't need the course and (b) would be too arrogant to accept that they needed a course for anything.

I agree that not all salesmen talk bollocks. The exceptions were selling Leitz microscopes and HP kit back in HP's glory days.

[Danny 2]

Re: How to get the right answer from an engineer

"In fairness to the salesman clan, they are not all total idiots"

Great chieftain of the pudding clan!

No, a few salesmen are psychopaths, but most of the better ones are just total idiots and of course liars.

I was third line support in one job, mostly on-site configuring or fixing our systems. During daylight hours I'd get some technical support or at least a telephone pep talk from the developers.

But there was a bit of a war between the engineering director and the sales director. Both directors insisted I went out to sales events because 1) I could turn on a computer which the sales director wanted and 2) I would correct the salesmen's lies before the developers got blamed for not living up to promises.

It was actually quite an effective sales strategy. Folk would ask me if the kit did what the salesman said, and I'd say, "No, he's exaggerating but it does do this and that's better than our competitors."

I was hauled up before the Sales Director by a bitter man who I'd contradicted/corrected.

"Well, we got the sale and we cn deliver on it so what's the problem?"

"But they don't trust me now!"

"I don't trust you now."

We were given an unlimited drinks budget to schmooze a hotel full of academics. I was pulled up by the Sales Director again for the £324 bar bill. I pointed out the word unlimited, and that I'd barely drunk a quarter of it. 7am, breakfasting with the academics, their talk was all about someone who'd passed out in the lift, and the doors kept shutting on his forehead. I asked why they didn't help him and they said they'd met him and it was funny. Then my salesman walks in with two big bruises on his forehead. I know that is a Simpsons cartoon, this was before that.

I did not share that information even though I had every reason to.

He called me 'tapes', for tape worms because I was skinny. I waited weeks until we and his boss were lifting gear into their car to remark, "I have to compliment you, you don't sweat much for a fat guy."

[G.Y.]

latency vs. bandwidth

An IBM manager has been quoted that it's possible to have a baby delivered in one month -- by using 9 women.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: latency vs. bandwidth

I think you've just achieved a breech presentation of Brooke's argument in TMMM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: latency vs. bandwidth

Indeed. I have on occasion used a rearranged version 'you can't create a.baby in one month by impregnating nine women'.

Mostly said to project managers when things aren't going well.

[TRT]

A sailor went to sea sea sea

To see what he could see see see.

But all that he could see see see

Was an increase in his latency.

[FeRDNYC]

We canna change the laws of physics!

We had one of those, though not quite as colorful.

Back in the late-mid 1990s I worked for a backbone network operator. (Shoutout to ANS.net, long subsumed into UUNet, then MCI, then who knows where?)

One week, our backbone techs had been fielding complaints about round-trip latency in some customer's inter-city (interstate, in fact) link. They route-optimized, they load-balanced, they pulled every trick in the book to make sure data was flowing as smoothly and efficiently as possible from point A to point B.

So much so, in fact, that eventually someone sat down, did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and determined that the link's current latency was consistent with packets flowing between the two endpoints at roughly 0.9 C, aka 9/10 the speed of light!

Further attempts at achieving FTLTCP/IP were immediately halted, and the customer was informed that, regretfully, we would not be able to "clear up" their supposed "lag" any further. Perhaps, as a non-relativistic solution, they would instead consider relocating one of their sites nearer to the other? The speed of light in a vacuum is generally considered a non-negotiable constraint.

(Background: I actually wasn't a backbone operator, rather I worked on our dial-up systems. Which were quite extensive, at the time, because ANS was several years into a massive project to build & operate the network for AOL, by whom they'd subsequently been acquired. — Yes, that narrow sliver of the pre-dotcom-crash 90s was the sweet spot during which AOL had the juice to buy a backbone ISP of its own. For the sole purpose of having a team responsible for keeping their nationwide network of over half a billion modem ports humming along. — Anyway, we all tended to eat dinner together often, so even though I wasn't directly involved in backbone operations I still got to hear most of the stories.)

[FeRDNYC]

Re: We canna change the laws of physics!

> "half a billion modem ports"

Yeah, let's not go crazy now. I meant half a million. Which is still a pretty crazy number of simultaneous phone calls to be fielding, during peak hours. (AOL going unmetered in 1996 nearly destroyed us. The company spent the following 18 months frantically spinning up additional banks of modems just as fast as we could get the hardware from 3Com and the capacity from the telcos.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Moored, Somewhere Warm and Sunny

You lucky, lucky b*stard.

(Or not, after reading to the end).

[ecofeco]

It's amazing innit?

How dumb the rich really are.

[CarsenForgue]

Rob should have brought his nanosecond...

....as adviced by Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper.

https://youtu.be/Sn0f0vpn8jE?t=582