Posts by Stevie

Infosys CEO promises jobs to 2,000 graduate recruits it has kept on hold for two years

Re: Good news / bad news

Good News: You start tomorrow

Bad News: Taking the unremunerated six-week training. Again.

India delays planned space station and moon base by five years

Re: Why stop at 5 years?

NASA: "Oh no, the Mars rover's drill has stuck! We can't get it out!!

Me: "Oh for a human with a Stillson's to give the drill a tap."

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: Closest experience I had

The *proximate* causes of the blackout, as detailed in the official report on it were:

1) The power company had fired anyone with any real knowledge of managing power infrastructure and replaced them with cheaper computer-literate staff.

2) Computers had frozen on "nothing bad happening" screens because too many real-time problems were being received and no-one realized that.

3) because of point 2, no-one believed the field reports being phoned in of shorting lines.

4) Said lines were shorting to ground because they were heavily overloaded and the proper tree-trimming had not taken place (see point 1). Sagging lines arced to tree limbs causing line breakage and fires.

5) The overloads were happening because the power company had 6 "resistive load" type power generating stations and only one "reactive" load station (with the required I/V phase corrective hardware), which was down for maintenance during the heaviest reactive load season (summer, a/c etc) because, well point 1. The current in the transmission wires was, as a result, way higher than spec.

6) When the computer staff finally got a clue, they didn't get a proper clue and rebooted the computers, which helpfully re-instated the message queues that jammed them again. Time was wasted because this was seen as a computer problem, not a power distribution disaster in the making. See point 1.

7) The people in charge of mitigating the situation (more experienced staff would have started rolling "brown outs" to decrease loads, but see point 1) had an actual, honest to Cray playbook. It was set out in "Failover Class" order, a class one being that one power station was down, a class two that two stations were down and so forth. The staff were working the book from the class 0 situation, failing to recognize that because the "reactive" power station was down they were already in a class 1 failover. The mitigation script they were following (blindly) was the wrong script.

When the power went out, the grid momentarily reversed "sense" before throwing open all the breakers everywhere all at once, which caused a false assumption the problem was originating in Canada when in fact the problem was entirely localized in Ohio.

All in all a self-fulfilling prophecy of cheap-out economics, and a wonderful fiasco if you weren't unfortunate enough to be caught in it in, say, Manhattan on a hot August night.

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Re: Claims 'everyone on Earth is going to want one'

Thumbed down?

That fuck faced fucker narrowly missed a Mom-mobile with a kid inside and left a 70ft evidence trail including his passenger-side front wheel c/w motor and wishbone assembly in addition to the sheared-through telephone pole that took out power, cable and internet for several hours - in a heatwave.

Fuck him and fuck the twat who thumbed me down.

Probably a Tesla owner fond of attempting his own Donald Campbell impersonation on the public highways.

Claims 'everyone on Earth is going to want one'

Well the bloke who destroyed his Tesla along with large parts of the local infrastructure when he attempted traveling at Time Distort 7 outside my house will certainly be in the market for a new one.

Assuming a) He stays out of jail and 2) Can get insurance.

HCL's back-to-office plan: Come in three days a week, or forget about holidays

Bah!

I'm really confused by companies that are blowing a gasket over remote working.

Pre-Covid The Register was alive with tales of "Hot Desking" and down-sizing offices to cut costs.

Post-Covid businesses are bleating about the need to fill those same offices they couldn't afford three years before.

Baffling.

Security biz KnowBe4 hired fake North Korean techie, who got straight to work ... on evil

Bah!

Just an observation on the comments here and elsewhere (especially Twixxer):

Why is it that posts with missing words are becoming more prevalent on SocMed?

Is it an edit fumble or is it foreign AIs with poor grasp of grammar making the posts?

China's Honor debuts laptop with bonkers removable camera that lives in a little slot

Bah!

And this is better than a mechanical occluding shutter because ...

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Earlier days, simpler amusements....

I made a flying Klingon battlecruiser out of a couple of punch cards while working on a contract at Bitney Powes (name changed).

One staffer tried to harsh my 60s show mellow by stating I couldn't possibly know how it flew, but I went on a two minute monologue about how the canard design I had used would not only fly but was effectively stall proof as the "deck" above the "globe" was set deliberately at a slightly higher angle of attack than the wings, and the "globe" (actually just a 2d silhouette) acted as a rudder until he begged for mercy.

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Bah!

So, it got uglier, all 2d squareness and shades o' grey?

Fab.

But did they get rid of the double delivery problem? Or do we still need a 3rd party plug-in (which will probably stop working with this "enhancement") for that?

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: This wasn't even Microsoft, but a third party

I think the OP meant Crowdstrike, not Redhat was he 3rd party.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: Gas

"NO! You're dead, Colin."

Brittas' fire drill.

Re: Pheasants

Pheasants are thick as bricks, about as aerodynamic and have the taxi-to-take-off acceleration of an ice-cream van firing on two cylinders.

And their feathers squeak loudly as they ineffectually flap their wings while strolling out of harm's way so predators can track them even in dense fog.

So slow and stupid, in fact, that it was illegal in Norfolk in the 70s to pick up a pheasant you'd hit with a car.

Which is why poachers of my acquaintance (M'lud) would use two vans.

Re: Snopes says

Stop harshing our mellow, Mr Scientist!

Re: Strangest?

Rats with wings.

WAY worse than pigeons.

Re: Iodine free

You'll regret not having all that thyroid-saving iodine in your system, Jake, as you scarf down your 5-alarm chili just as an unfriendly atom bomb goes off down the street.

Why are people so blind?

Well, of course, in your case it is the fumes from the eye-watering hot sauce.

Around the same time the good folk of Guernsey decided they were tired of looking at the Nazi-occupation-era fort in St Peter Port (built with local slave labour I was told) and so experts were called in to demolish it.

It made the Book of Heroic Failures as he least successful demolition. From memory:

The first time there was a bang and nothing else of note happened.

The second time the fort lifted off its foundation, but safely landed on it again. Bits of demolition shrapnel were found in local walls, though.

The third time they did it at night to avoid the possibility of shrapnel casualties, and woke the entire island population, but achieved no actual demolition.

At which point the people of the island demanded that the demolitions should stop, and they turned the fort into a museum.

Wow.

Flixborough.

Remember that one happening in my first year at UEA.

Prof. McKillop used it in a seminar to illustrate why chemists could make a decent living in the stock market. "Who else can predict that the price of everything from nylon shirts to bleach is going to soar in the next 9-12 months because of the shortage of precursor chemicals?"

Never fix cyclohexane pipes with duct tape, especially if they run parallel to dry steam lines.

Re: Old computer, you say?

The ICl operators at my first job were impressed by the fact that Univac tape drives could be started with the glass down and liked to do that until one day the outer side of a tape spool fell off the other bits and 2700 feet of tape went corkscrewing all over the room.

This will be confirmed by any Univac operator except those from a certain large dairy operation, whose tape drives were intercepted on the road and redirected to our place by the salesman.

Long lead time on those tape drives in '79.

Re: they'd decide I was a "spy"

A dead spy, and therefore no risk.

Do keep up, tovarisch.

Bah!

Sounds like the fire drill from Brittas' Empire.

Second NHS IT system confirmed to be affected by CrowdStrike issues

Bah!

Looking forward to the Crowdstrike bod's "Who Me?" writeup.

If you think AI labs wouldn't stoop to using scraped YouTube subtitles for training, think again

Bah!

Good luck with that.

In every single yootoob video I've seen with subtitles those subtitles are riddled with gibberish created by the speech-to-text software being almost good enough for primetime. The hallucination issue will fade into insignificance behind the nonsense used as training issue.

Naturally, the "creatives" responsible for the content are too busy (ie bone idle) to proofread their visual word salad - which is a problem I foresee getting well-and-truly out of claw when AI software starts authoring everything from stereo instructions to software modules.

Once humans start automating things they forget the need for sanity checks or won't afford the staff to do them. "Yippee! It's Free" thinking goes all the way down to the Earth's core.

The noise to signal ratio will look like a tangent curve plot over time, making for medical procedure documentation and legal contractese that could have been written by Donald Trump.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Bah!

Looking forward to Mr Musk's reaction the next time mother nature visits Texas and all his Space-X grid are belong to weather for a few weeks.

Worra wally.

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

Bah!

Any bolts "left over" in the VAB?

What?

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Bah!

And another stupid cnut ignores the cybercrim rules of thumb:

"They" are never as stupid as you think.

"You" are not as smart as you think.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Sometimes, when the stars & planets align just right ...

Wonderful thing, the internet.

I love being told I got things from it when sharing something I was here for before here was an internet.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Bah!

TL:DR

We're DOOMED!

Micron mega-fab mildly endangered by definitely endangered American bats

Re: Dimensions?

Swampy wetlands. Have to measure them in Okefenokees.

Bah!

And in 20 years this will be a superfund toxic cleanup site just like the ones the Pataki admin "bought" from IBM.

And decided would be used as-is for government staff, heavy metal contamination be damned.

Chip fabbing is dirty. That is why we let other countries do it and buy from them.

Luckily this one will be situated somewhere the pollution won't be noticed for a bit.

I'll be dead before the crocodile tears start flowing.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

Bah!

Back in the late 80s/early 90s an ATT spokesman said his biggest fear was that someone would realize how much copper they possessed, buy out the company in a hostile takeover so they could strip-mine the copper and not only bankrupt ATT, but leave the country with no comms infrastructure.

This was not an unrealistic fear in those Gordon Gecko days.

Re: "should they take the trouble to recycle them"

My late father once told me of a tramp found rolling up a copper strip he found in a stream bed.

Turns out it was the grounding electrode from a local power station.

Lucky, lucky man to be spotted by the rozzers.

T-Mobile US drags New Jersey borough to court over school cell tower permit denial

Bah!

So T mobile recover the monies paid, with interest and penalties, and the now-healthy citizens of Wanaque can get back to waving their phones in the air looking for bars as their roads degrade and their services fail and their schools close due to lack of funds until the council raises taxes to cover the shortfall.

Win-win.

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Bah!

In the early days of Office, PowerPoint saved my company a contract.

I was in a quandary about how to re-explain a concept involving the switch from a DMS-style set-based database to a relational model for something the set-based model did extremely well. (Clever use of manual sets, if you care). I'd covered the subject already but the customer was understandably skittish and my words were inadequate to the task.

On my plane journey to the client I wondered if this "PowerPoint" thing, which I'd never so much as seen before, could help.

Yes it could.

I quickly put together a set of pictures to help me convey what my explanations had so far been unable to do. Same talk - with pictures.

Sat with small group of client's staff, in a cube, using my lappy and a (wired) mouse as a clicker.

Intelligent and probing questions were asked about the approach being described as each slide was shown and explained, and I was able to answer them. A marked contrast to the silence that greeted my previous attempt.

Job done, on a plane with a Windows 95 laptop with a battery life measured in hurryhurryhurry units.

So I quite like PowerPoint and it's free office clones. Don't use it much, but it does what it says on the side of the tin, which is unusual for anything computer-y.

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Re: There is no Me in Teams

Nonononono.

No.

*Attempting* to chat on teams without the blasted thing hanging is work. Restarting teams to make the borked MFA thing work as advertised is work. Attempting to place a telephone call using Teams without the seemingly mandatory three hangs-up-on-answer thing is work.

Teams meetings are what they've always been. An excuse for managers to schedule staff meetings in the unpaid lunch hour of their "subordinates".

Bah!

Wells Fargo?

The same bank that was in trouble for having employees open hundreds of unwanted, unrequested bank accounts for random people?

Now wants to fire people for not working?

Irony abounds.

Re: "Achievements"

Counting tickets as a measure of productivity. Yep, had this one, with EXACTLY the same issue. Meeting called. Example of "golden employee" was helldesk quick fix ticket history. Others pointed out that one ticket assigned usually encompassed 15 minutes of effort (assuming requestor had all ducks in a row, and was contactable if not) and could often take one or more days of effort (switch work, provision new server etc).

Water off a duck's back.

Re: work gets done

Back before remote work, before PCs in the workplace, I had a manager who was convinced I was not working to my contracted effort level.

I suggested he "ghost" me (pre-social media meaning) so he would have eyes-on while I was in the office.

He would come into the office and find me working already. He had to stay past his end-of-day too - I preferred to blitz problems and had a policy of "If I broke it, I fix it" that superseded my contracted work day (ie I was working for free, but that wasn't a problem since there was absolutely nothing to do of a weeknight in that benighted town. They closed the swimming pool at 7pm FFS I digress).

Manager lasted exactly four days, and never questioned my timesheet again.

Covid-era had me facing a similar issue over remote-maybe-he's-not working and I used the same tactic. This time the fish didn't bite, but did stop with the nonsense.

After all, stuff was demonstrably getting done.

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Bah!

MTG is on the committee?

On a committee to evaluate a technical issue?

JFC.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Re: Proper line printers on the other hand,

ICL line printers used a barrel, not a ribbon.

A colleague of mine had worked in a place with an ICL "shuffle" printer. This beast had 120 character lines as per usual, but only a 40 character barrel. It would apparently print the line by doing the first 40 characters, then a carriage mechanism would pull the barrel back and shift it 40 characters, then shift it forward and he next 40 characters would be printed, then it would do it all again for the final 40 characters.

Thing is, the barrel was quite massive, as was the carriage mechanism (British engineering, built to last), so inertia was a bit of a bugger.

My colleague (who was not prone to tall tales, though who knows?) said that when the payroll or general ledger was being run they would use three operators; one to enter the console commands and do the running-around necessary for the old GEORGE-powered machine, and two to steer the printer away from important bits of the machine room when it went walkabout and prevent it pulling its plug out of the socket.

True? Who knows, but it's a great image for the old brain on boring days.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: Breaking [physical] windows

Fuel is so ridiculously cheap in the USA that cars here often have a remote starter so you can start the car and have the heater, defroster, heated seats and heated steering wheel run up to comfy while you get ready for work or walk from the train to the car park.

Used to scoff at this, but I guess I'm going native because it saves oodles of time in the winter (and nothing beats having a computer activated warm steering wheel in an otherwise freezing cold car should one forget to set the heater up appropriately before putting the jalopy to bed).

Re: Breaking [physical] windows

Cars in Alberta Canada have not only block heaters to keep the oil loose and stop the coolant icing, but also have cabin heaters to prevent windshield damage when using a warmed up engine's defroster.

You can often see two extension cords peeking out of the radiator grills, and motels usually have electrical stands for overnight use.

Re: "Users would type into an X-terminal"

That was using Sperry Univac 1100. You remember those? The ones with 6-bit bytes and no lower case charcters. Solid as a pile of jelly.

Oh, you were working with FIELDATA encoding. The 1100 word was 36 bits and could easily hold four ACSII bytes if you told it to. Indeed, you could chop up the word in any number of novel ways to get your job done on 60s, 80s 90s and Clearpath machines running Exec-1100.

FIELDATA was and probably still is used on 1100-derived mainframes running Exec-1100 for file system naming and related stuff because you don't need lower case or special characters that aren't allowed in the filenames anyway, and using a six bit encoding scheme gains you 50% more usable bytes over ASCII encoding under those conditions.

Solid as a depleted uranium anvil - if you knew what you were doing.

Of course, most banks in the city used IBM hardware back then, so banking staff who were introduced to Sperry 1100s often had to unlearn a bunch of stuff. I had a supervisor once who blithered on about how much trouble I would be in with a solution I was deploying when it came across packed decimal fields - of which we had none and which the 1100 Cobol did not support natively (though it could read and write them using one of the umptytump special COMP-n formats listed in the Supplementary Reference).

Let's do select jump keys next.

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Re: But don't mention the Morris worm.

AARGH!

Hot potato

Off his drawers

Pluck will make amends <tweaks nose, hard>

Bah!

In the Badole Dayz of NT I once listened sweetly to a unix "expert" rant about how he had to install cigwin to get anything done because he only knew how to do things the correct, POSIX-compliant way.

When he paused for breath I said "So you don't remember about the POSIX API in Windows NT?"

It was dropped because it was never really popular, but the look on said expert's face was worth the wait. He and I had sat together in the NY course but he was so busy asking "Can you turn off the GUI?" at every new topic he had obviously missed most of the content.

UK tech titan Mike Lynch's US fraud trial begins today

Bah!

Cripes, is that train-wreck still happening?

Talk about grinding slow.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Bah!

That sort of thing would make you a mail ex in my book.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

From my archives, Bob.

Re: Too many to count

I used to think lawyers had to be smart, but than I met a few and belatedly realized they only have to shine twice in their lives: Once when they take their law school finals, and once when they sit for the bar.

The rest of the time they can be delightfully thick.

Re: not "British English"

Is there actually a Britain anymore, post Brexit?

I heard the bits not identified as "England" were looking to quit the Empire, soonest, so they could get back to traveling & working sans passports & paperwork.