Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Have you let a user wreak havoc on your machine?

Heck no.

I have wreaked havoc on a user's machine, but only after severe provocation.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

"It was fine when it left our router".

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: Pile drivers, cameras, and microscopes don't mix

My Great Aunt Rose lived across the road from a drop forge in the industrial West Midlands of England which ran 24 hours a day. The only time it affected her sleep was during Industrial Fortnight when the factory closed for the summer holiday.

Blue Origin nails the landing, but puts the payload satellite in the wrong orbit

Applause for the subhead

Surprised they didn't just throw it over my fence.

Fission impossible: Uncle Sam wants nuclear reactors in space by 2031

Re: Did Trump and his lapdog...

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

”I think so, Brain, but then it’d be Snow White and the Seven Samurai…”

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Dear Boss, I quit

Standard practice at one place I worked was to use the unlocked, unattended desktop to compose a resignation letter and leave it unsent, waiting for the colleague who had left an unlocked and unattended computer is a secure environment.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Re: Analog mobile phones

On call with a pager in the 80s, one of the most important documents held by the team was the list of nightclubs with no reception for the pager.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

I once went on a visit to a customer office to diagnose a problem in the wild. To fill the time I provided onsite support and training for the poor suckers lucky punters using our desktop software. It was the first time saw someone lift and invert their keyboard after being asked. "What is your password?".

Proxmox delivers its software-defined datacenter contender and VMware escape hatch

Re: Enterprises can't take them seriously...

When a recruiter asks for 5 years experience of a 3 year old product I claim 7 years experience and wait to see who blinks first.

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Dave Cutler's last scion

Windows NT 3.51 was the last serious OS that Microsoft produced before the GDI was moved into the kernel. Everything since has had an element of comedy about it, whether intentional or not.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

IT girls too. It was that or Win 3.11

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

Pulse rate and SpO2 for me, I just hope that as my personal hardware degrades I don't need to add any further metrics to my monitor list.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

That might depend on how often your employer makes you redundant, or makes a change to your T&Cs so fuckwitted that you walk out the door.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

We used to call that sort of person a "Custard".

Re: "You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"

GPWM

Ancient memory dredged up from the murk

All of sudden I am reminded of the VME order code 33552 - UM_HO_HUM_NOTHING_TO_DO which indicated that there was no instruction waiting to be processed.

"You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"

Reaching the end of an error reporting trap that printed a message for each foreseeable error I put in a message for anything unforeseen, which was of course, to my mind, an empty set. The code went live and I thought nothing more of it for a decade or so, until a colleague that I hadn't worked with for may years sidled up to my desk with a handful of piano-lined listing paper containing this message. "Did you write this? We thought you'd like to know that it happened last night".

Failed disc sector. Never forget the hardware.

Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are still chuck-and-buy-again specials

Earrings

I don't buy expensive earbuds for the same reason that I don't buy expensive earrings, which is my fine collection of single earrings.

JetBrains wants to train AI models on your code snippets

No

See title.

Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud

Shorted

Whenever I hear the name "Dell" the first thing that springs to mind is "Capacitor 27". That was the capacitor on the disk controller board that had to be shorted so that it would reboot correctly after a power down, otherwise it would just sit there blinking insolently.

Microsoft cuts off Azure phone surveillance support for Israeli military

Re: Moving 8,000 TB

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes.

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

cookie != biscuit

A cookie is a fine thing in and of its own right, but it is not a biscuit. Nor is it a cake, which might complicate things yet further. I will need tea and biscuits, with perhaps a cookie or a Jaffa Cake (tm) or two while I consider matters.

Cybercrooks ripped the wheels off at Jaguar Land Rover. Here's how not to get taken for a ride

My father worked for GKN Automotive Fasteners, which did not survive the decline in the UK car industry in the early 80s. If the order for the miniMetro had arrived sic weeks earlier it might have saved the factory and several hundred jobs.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Other balls are available

A ball made of rubber bands will also shatter the reel for a 1/2" mag tape drive when the person who should have caught it ducks out of the way rather than fielding it.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Obligatory XKCD

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Yeah, that tracks.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: Excellent

There are times when someone says "cloud" and I have a mental image of a cloud with "X25" written in it.

It still works

The systems written in COBOL that are still running are still running because they're still running. They were rigorously designed and implemented and are still doing the job for which they were designed. If there are too few people who know COBOL these days then it's a simple matter of training people to use a clear, consistent and robust language.

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: Hugely inaccurate

My Fitbit reads 2 percentage points below the finger pulse oximeter which I keep at home. I assume that most wearables are calibrated with a similar latitude. For accurate measurement you need to use an accurately calibrated device.

Re: not presenting the blood oxygen measurement on the Watch

I see zero utility for it in healthy people.

Quite so. For those with normal pulmonary and cardiac function it is irrelevant. For those with such conditions it is on great interest and very useful to have an always-on device on your wrist to monitor things to supplement the pulse oximeter you are likely to have at home. It's a feature I looked for when buying a FitBit as it had become relevant since I last bought a wearable monitoring device.

Icon: everything is monitored for your benefit.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

The books

At a recent job interview I talked about "sitting down with the books" when talking about something with which I was passingly familiar but keen to learn about. It only doing the post-interview mental review as I drove home afterwards that I started to wonder when I last sat down with an physical book in my hands, probably from O'Reilly.

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Re: Lawsuit culture

With you all the way, right until I bought my last car which rather than being run for 150,000 miles like most of the ones that I've had has been sold at 90,000 as all the fancy stuff that allows it produce 140bhp/litre fails and needs to replaced piecemeal and expensively. The new car is a Toyota.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

"Hi, this is networks"

"I don't mind the team building session, but can you stop firing the fucking chain gun?"

That was when I bought the hub on expenses.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Stop doing this

Every time Simon seems to be transcribing a meeting/shitstorming session that I have sat through I get a crick in my neck from nodding along. The older I get, the more it hurts.

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

Still the best keyboard I used in my career. Not sad at all.

Re: Science Museum

I do much the same whenever I go the TNMoC at Bletchley. I was only one interview away from working on one of the actual machines still running there.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

On a job very early in my career I was driving a van, delivering meat products and picking up stuff for the factory. Having driving from the factory in the West Midlands to a warehouse in Bolton, I checked in with the boss on the warehouse's landline (mobile phones only being found in the boss' Jag in those days, rather than a Transit van).

"I've made the drop, I'm on my way back now".

"Can you do a pick up on the way back?".

"Sure, where is it?"

"Poole".

"The one in Dorset?"

"Yes".

"I'll need a stopover. Do you want me to wave as I drive past?"

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"Get the map out, Dave".

"Oh".

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Nuclear power is so highly regulated in the 2020s because of the move fast and leak nucleotides phase of the 1950s.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: According to Pete Hegseth...

I enjoyed the description of him as a DUI hire.

Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales

Ah, Ace Ventura

Having worked on a project that had to interface with another system delivered (well, sorta kinda) and supported (well, sorta kinda) by Accenture my sympathy is rather constrained.

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Mmmmmmm ... chips

I fancy a portion of chips right now. With gravy.

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

We've been here before

Someone else with a penchant for a Roman salute lobbed projectiles into Poland in the C20th.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

C is the new COBOL

I assume you mean that it will underpin more of the world of finance, banking, transport and government than you image for many decades to come and provide employment for many grey-haired code-slingers in the West and fresh-faced young programmers in India for as long as it does so.

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Re: Feh!

The 10th March this year is Bob's 30th birthday.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: The Power of Fear!

One of the best testers I ever worked with had this skill. We called him, "Entropy's Little Buddy". There was nothing he could not break.

Re: Bluffing

Same here.

"So what language was it in the end?"

"No idea. It had curly brackets though".

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Wait for the business' response when your colleague's code spins up an extra million or so instances due to a mistyped bounding condition. All of a sudden the management overhead that stops that sort of thing looks like money well spent. Ask me (or better still, my colleague) how I (we) know.

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

MS Guru

Many years ago, when SQL Server 6 was US and Canada only and we were definitely not supposed to be developing on that version in the UK, we found an issue with the database that we were creating. We called Microsoft and after going through several layers of tech support they decided that it was beyond their ability to fix over the phone (this was many years ago, after all) so they would despatch a human being to investigate.

The next day a giant of a bearded man with poor personal hygiene arrived from Seattle to stare at our database and our code. After three days of staring, occasionally typing and even less occasionally grunting or asking for coffee, he said, "Got it, I'll send a fix". He flew back to Seattle and a fix was emailed to us a day later. Our stinking, silent, staring guru had fixed things and all was well. We went live before the UK & Europe embargo expired.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

The same techies that put the Shut Down command on the Start menu?