Re: Sergeant at Arms
Speaker of the House (looks up from papers on desk with face like thunder): "Get me ... The Sarge!"
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Given that I was forced to attend a screening of Fantastic Cheek: The Crimes of JK Rowling* at the weekend I'd say that all people wanting to complain about Hollywood also include the crap ideas being fed to it by their own countrymen.
* - A movie with no story and characters recycled from the never-ending HP saga.
Fact is that Hollywood will only make what they think will make money. Come up with a non-comic book, non-remake idea that people will actually go and watch for cashmoney, then you can take the high road and be king of the hill.
Eye-Witness Evidence is that new ideas on worthwhile subjects (eg First Man) are playing to almost empty theaters.
Many years ago, in the last-but-three decade of the last century, a colleague told me of a Systems Analysis course he had attended at ICL.
Everyone sat around a big table. The presenter dumped a huge box of mixed bolts on the table and said "sort that out".
After an hour or so, when the bolts were sorted in order, he said "Well done". Then he picked up the single four-inch carriage bolt sitting on it's lonesome at one end of the collection. "But I only wanted this one".
The lesson being that the course was going to be all about discovering the right questions to ask when given a user request.
I believe the Systems Analyst job position has largely died out. A shame. Many of the issues we read of here at El Reg have to do with not asking the right questions.
Scope creep is a whole 'nother issue and has bee with us since Gak Eisenberg demonstrated his perfectly fit-for-purpose hammerstone to the tribal elder and was asked if he could add an antler handle to it and maybe use a more glittery rock.
I recently pulled an Old Man Idiocy when using TOAD (an excellent tool, but like all tools very dangerous in the hands of the unknowlegeable, forgetful or just plain lazy - last one applies in this case).
Asked to move an Oracle package from a test database schema into our production schema I proceeded to pull up the package in TOAD, did a create script to the clipboard, pasted it into the editor window in the target database session, edited the code to change the schema name and ran said code in the production database that night as requested.
Next day no-one could access the package code. It seems some witless dolt had removed all the permission grants and synonyms from the package.
Turns out I had neglected to double check the check-boxes on tab in the create script pop-up that controls the generated code closely enough, and had neglected to notice that the generated code contained the dreaded "drop object" syntax.
Not only that, I had neglected to recognize that that had happened when I did the code edit for schema name change. I mean, it was only hiding in plain sight on bloody line one.
Unfortunately, I rather like all the people I work with now, so I was forced to do the Bonehead Dance and wear the Pointy Hat of Not Being Smart instead of shifting blame to the intern or new hire as per industry standard practice.
D'oh!
Look, it's very simple:
The FBI is a domestic law enforcement organization with no legal powers outside the USA, so stop recommending people in Europe call them.
The people you need to talk to are the CIA.
Who already know because they put the Pi in your closet in the first place.
Allegedly.
FORTRAN doesn't have significant whitespace.
It has significant character columns. Different thing. All "card based" languages are likely to have that since the first few characters usually were reserved for the card sort order ordinal (line number). FORTRAN also uses Hollerith characters if memory serves.
According to a documentary I just saw there was a bit more pushing and shoving between neighbours* than depicted here.
The murder also allegedly involved multiple "unnecessary" stun-gun burns on the victim's back, leading to a supposition that he was tortured before being shot.
The film purported to have found the person wot done it after being paid $5000 from an account owned by the subject of the article.
I have no idea what the truth is, but I have to say that the youtube screengrab shows that McAffee is capable of producing the most stunning state-of-the-art virtual stately-home class libraries in which to host his blitherfests. Most convincing.
* - Neighbours who were hundreds of feet apart too. Imagine if they'd been in a terraced road near you.
Many, many years ago I used an agent who was somewhat legendary for what would become known as a "wide boy" approach to the business. He was a total villain who would upsell a job and then downgrade the pay once the interview was won, but I learned to factor in the "shrinkage" and he always, *always* paid and paid on time - a major plus in them cowboy days. If I tell you the agency was situated across the road from the Paul Raymond Revue Bar in Soho in the early 80s you may be able to intuit the atmosphere or even recall a contract of your own with the un-named agency that went pear-shaped big time.
One of my agent's endearing qualities was to tell the prospective employer that I would be arriving in my-estimated-time-of-arrival minus 30 minutes. I drove long distances several days a week and had a very good idea of how long it took to get from A to B even in places I'd never visited before, but he never learned and it always landed my with an initial job of explaining that I was actually wherever-it-was in good time but we had both been had by Mr Never-Learns.
My next job was to ask for the CV they had in hand, before the interview started properly. I would then go through it and correct it for creative writing "slips of the pen".
Lovely times.
Nah, it's prurient interest and nosey-parkerism plain and simple.
Getting rid of this idiotic traffic-jamming practice is one item on a very short list of reasons I can see for virtualizing the view from car windows. No accident/police stop/bloke changing a tire (for fuck's sake), no mile-long tailback on the opposite carriageway of the Long Island Expressway.
(If you are interested, in-fog vision enhancement and heads-up navigation (that blocked lane presents as a simple chicane with no work crew to cause rubbernecking) are the other items.)
It's incredible. You change a tire on the LIE and you have half a million people who need to get a good look because they've never seen such a miraculous sight before. Get rear-ended on the same stretch of road, no-one sees anything.
That cat has secrets! A campaign to persuade the Ecuadorans to take the cat to a shelter must be set in motion soonest.
Then, a special team of fur-work experts can spirit the cat to a secret location where it can be plied with tuna, shrimp, long pieces of string and all the catnip mice it can sniff in an effort to loosen its tongue.
We may yet have found the chink in the vile Assange's armor!
Dry ice requires very hot water to work, and is expensive. Almost every facet of the handling is prone to accidental burning (cold burning in one sense, scalding too).
Glycol foggers are basically vape pens on steroids and altghough there is talk of health hazards, nothing is in print definitively tying any known problem to them, which is how they still get used in clubs etc.. The chilled stuff stays on the floor anyway.
The only real hazard I can think of, and it is a real one, is that hardwood floors will become "dewed" and possibly slippery as a result. Oh, and you can get a burn off the fog projector if you buy a cheap one or run an expensive one too hard too long (intermittent use is the key).
I like the ultrasonic fireplace, and your trident is masterful. Have an e-beer.
So a bunch of tech twonks wrote sniping software to grab phones from those using the "fair" method (a mouse in the hand) and are pissed that the company was just as crummy as they were?
Hard to feel sorry. especially since I'm sure a fair number of them would be spouting "if it looks too good to be true, it is!" in these pages if they hadn't been caught up in the frenzy.
I doubt Alec Guinness is smirking it up for that reason.
He had few happy words to say about Star Wars. I rather think Doctor Lazarus was modeled in part on AG's displeasure at how far he had sunk.
I reckon he achieves brilliance in The Ladykillers (a rare movie where the remake is as enjoyable for different reasons as the original) and Kind Hearts and Coronets. There are any number of "better" movies he has appeared in as grumpy angst-ridden Army Officers/NCOs, but he was a comedic genius and I like comedies that are clever.
I used to be fond of our 1901T's singing "weedleweedleWOOOORP" over and over during a sort. The night shift ops would sit in the OpsMan's office drinking tea and smoking* with the phone off the hook and connected to the console phone while the evening batches were running. Never had a late finish with our own blokes.
One contract op used to like to knock off early so he would poke a metal rod through the louvers on one cabinet, cause a momentary voltage excursion and crash the machine. We caught him because he wasn't bright enough to vary the times or give it a miss every now and then. Idiot.
* - In those days men were real men and our lungs had more tar than the road 'neath your car.
Oh man, I was working late one night and had to perform an operation on a Sperry mainframe that first took away, then reinstated an in-core shared resource pool. The dialogue that the command to release the BDIs brought on was so HAL-like it was damn scary, alone as I was in a big office late at night.
It went along the lines of:
"Are you sure you want to do that?" - "yes"
"I will be unable to do x,y, and z if you continue. Please reconsider."
"Daisy" was running loud and strong in my head as I typed in the confirmation order, and it took me almost a minute of paranoid re-checking my notes before I nerved myself up to do so.
Bad news is the subspace quantum nuclear magnetic flux buggers up mechanical *and* digital watches, so while you might know exactly where you are, you won't ever be able to calculate your average speed over the orienteering course.
I had a pedometer once. I switched it on and walked twelve miles. I checked the output on the device while celebrating in the pub and it correctly showed I had two feet.
World War Three will not be televised. Or browsed, apparently.
As I read the article, for some reason that Monty Python/Terry Gilliam "bit" with the German fish being eaten by the Japanese fish, which in turn was eaten by the British fish was running in Mr Brain.
I may have the order of fish wrong, because the nationalities don't matter in the analogy.
All our cat pix are belong to bad actors at the state level t'would seem. Then again, given the three-letter agency oversight it turns out *isn't* just a paranoid fantasy, that's been the case since, well, forever.
I imagine everyone who grew up in the interface between greenbar reports and print-to-disc has at some point spent all morning getting more and more annoyed at a fix that won't, only to find they've been editing the bloody output from the compiler. Found a boss doing that, gently pointed out the error (and pointed out that the reason I spotted it was been there, done that) and got snarled at.
But the best was when I returned from a stint in a youngish start-up to an enterprise I had years of working for/with/in and was given the task of administering the product I had been supporting while on the bleeding edge.
One day I get an incandescently angry phone call from someone who has never thought much of me over the years and who is trying to administer the same product on a different site where they flew in the face of Sperry's advice and eschewed the software-building tool in favor of "pick what's best".
This has meant that a certain vital shared memory resource with absolute addressing involved (BDIs for the cognoscenti) is a jumbled hodgepodge and that now *any* software install must be a very manually intensive thing indeed instead of a few parameters and a COMUS script. Think IRQs in the bad old days, and raise it a few binary orders of magnitude if you don't know Sperry stuff.
Anyway, the lady is screaming at me because she has been looking at "my configuration file" and is demanding to know why I set all the values the way I did. This means of course that she is trying to sneakily take over my project - which unbeknownst to her is jake with me.
"I didn't fill in any of those fields" I say, baffled. I've no idea what you are talking about. I accepted the defaults in every single case when running the set-up utility."
"Oh yes you did! I'm looking right at the file as I speak. Why did you even set all those field values?" she howled.
The penny dropped. I dialed down my own reaction to her snottiness in order to get exactly the right tone. I was aiming for George Sanders at his evil lizard best. It probably came out more like Snidely Whiplash, but that's life.
"Which file are you looking at?" I asked innocently.
She told me.
"Ah, I see the problem you are having now. I'm afraid that *isn't* the configuration file. What you are looking at is the report you get when you run such-and-such a utility, which fills in all the missing info with the defaults that will be assumed by the software. I can understand your confusion now. Why on earth didn't you simply call me and ask me which file you needed to look at? You must have wasted your whole morning."
She hung up with ill-grace once I had told her where she should be looking for her sneaky recce, she in the sure and certain knowledge that the story would be passed to people she *did* respect.
Because I can be a miserable c*nt too if the circumstances call for it.
Your understanding is incomplete. Metals are created by the fusion process in a star, as far down the periodic table as iron. You don't have to start with them in the mix.
Citation: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec18.html
When the star makes iron, that's the end of the line, because Iron takes more energy to turn into other elements than it throws out in the process. That's when the star starts wending its way toward a possible supernova event, but starts dying whether or not it will experience a giant space kablooey.
Okay, lesson learned: Attention entry-level Java programming new hires!
a) No more doing currency calculations in real data types.
2) Those huge negative numbers on the monthly sales report? They mean whoever added a second title line to the report needs to go back and look hard at their code too because the word "total" is being read as the total.
*) Perhaps cracking a manual instead of breaking from twitter just long enough for a search of Stackoverflow will save your jobs.