Posts by disgruntled yank 2211 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Don't bet on it.
The one Ivy League football game I actually saw part of left me thinking that the level of play would get a Texas high school coach fired. To be sure, at that time the schools could not offer athletic scholarships, and the whole "name-image-likeness" trade may have some effect. But I think that the Ivy League is attempting to control NIL spending.
If you are sure you are right, why bother with the modest "guessing" part?
I knew a fellow, quite competent by all accounts, and of impeccably Irish surname and face, who once spoke of his days as helicopter pilot for the police, when on spotting a strange car in an ex-girlfriend's driveway he had noted down the number and had a buddy run the information. He had also learned the name of his wife through friends on another law-enforcement agency.
All this is long covered by statutes of limitations, and indeed the gentleman is dead.
Are male and Irish EEOC categories?
For the last year, my LinkedIn profile has included '(Retired)' at the end of my title. Yet I still get messages from vendors who think that my former employer could use their newer shinier whatever. Perhaps LinkedIn's AI could help these messengers pick up on the Retired part. A one-liner in sed/awk/Perl would suffice, or a moment of attention. But failing those, yes, by all means burn through watts and evaporate aquifers to refine their searches.
Another tale from the days of CLI:
The CLI for RDOS (a 16-bit, two-ground OS) had a MOVE command with the destination directory as the last argument. The CLI for AOS/VS, the successor to RDOS, had a MOVE command with the destination directory as the first argument. A co-worker, who hardly every worked with RDOS, forgot the distinction while trying to help one of our customers. He told our boss, "Don't ever let me work with RDOS again.") In fact, we fairly shortly upgraded that customer.
I never fell into that particular trap, which owed something to caution and plenty to luck.
Around forty years ago, a customer admin was working his way through the AOS/VS Commands and Utilities guide when he reached FORMAT. The good news is that he then got to test his backups, and the better news is that they must have been OK, since there wasn't extended downtime drama.
(Unlike the customer who called me up to say that she had put up a tape, and entered PCOPY at the console. The dialogue had reached "Is this a tape-to-disk PCOPY?". She had entered "Yes", and only then thought to call us. I think that it was the best part of a week before they were running again.)
Supposedly the average debt for bachelor's degree students is $30 thousand, roughly two-thirds the cost of new Jeep Wagoneer sports ute. Admittedly, Brown is a private school, and will charge much more than e.g. the University of California. But the admissions system for schools such as Brown is implicitly biased toward prosperous families, ones that can afford private secondary schools, tutoring, travel sports, and so on. It is not impossible that the ability to afford this has some correlation with a certain ruthlessness in getting and staying ahead.
Giving students an exam that is a) closed-book and b) take-home is relying very much on their integrity. One does not need an LLM to open the textbook that is supposed to remain closed. I have been in classes, many years ago, where I certainly would have trusted the students to follow the rules for such an exam. I have also been in classes where I would have expected widespread cheating.
(Many years ago: all the classes I have taken were many years ago. I don't claim that students have become worse or better.)
Forty years ago, I worked for a company that used DG minicomputers as its platforms. The parallel output board was a modified tape-drive board, and for some reason was a bear to seat. If you included one-thumb push ups in your daily exercise routine, you were probably fine. If not, seating these boards meant strain and frustration. The head tech support rep when I got there said that you just about had to take a flying kick to seat them.
A couple of years later, a co-worker was at a customer site and called to have one of these units sent overnight. Nobody was particularly surprised at the request, and nobody inquired. It was some time later that I learned that the other guy, having exhausted what he had of patience, placed the board so that some inches extended out from the chassis, then gave it a kick. I am a bit surprised that the customer's manager didn't call and complain. The kicker, it is true, was laid off somewhat later, but this was in the nature of a reduction in force, when a couple of other people from other departments were laid off as well.
@Fred Daggy
I was once at a presentation on monitoring and improving Oracle performance. One case mentioned involved a major Danish brewery that had just switched to Oracle. The system ran so slowly that orders could hardly be placed, but Oracle sent a team of wizards who promptly resolved it. A Dane who had introduced the main speaker said that that kind of thing could be what brings down the welfare state.
(The database needed more writers configured. Once they changed the configuration for that all, all was well.)
@Kurgan
Yes to write protect.
About forty years ago, my employer promoted a guy from the loading dock to the job of running update tapes for customers. The fellow who was his mentor insisted that he bring him the write wring from each tape he cut, which the mentor would toss into a drawer. One of us once asked, Gee, Ham, what do you do with all those write rings? Ham said, I give them to the orphans, pal.
Back in the last century, I came into the office on a weekend, and discovered that my office door was locked. The ceiling had acoustic tiles, so I commandeered the stake for a potted plant down the hall, stood on a chair, pushed the tile aside, and used the stake to push down on the inside door handle.
For a while after that I was pretty good about carrying the office key.
At some point during the Hoover Administration (1929 - 1933), sportswriters pointed out to Babe Ruth that he was making more money than the president, and asked for his thoughts on the matter. Ruth said, I had a better year than he did.
In general, positions in elected government have not been that terribly well paid in the Anglo-American world, have they? It was quite late in the history of the Mother of Parliaments that MPs were paid. In the US, Senators and Members of Congress get $174 thousand base pay, though admittedly with excellent benefits. A fair proportion of The Register's commentariat could earn that kind of salary.
Some time ago, my employer had [big vendor] in to run scans on our network. There were some findings that pointed to configurations we need to update or otherwise secure. Then there were items like
[weird IP address]: obsolete version of Apache
[another weird IP address]: obsolete version of PHP
To the best of my recollection, one of these was a conference room camera and the other was a projector. I don't remember what we did about them--perhaps a bit more tightening down of the egress rules.
>> Comparing someone to the Nazis is shameful.
OK, and generally I don't. However, a number of people on Trump's side got very wound up over the status of Nick Fuentes--pariah or pal.
>> Go and read some Socrates or Plato...
You will recall that Socrates did not write.
>> then it's time to leave the basement
No, leaving the basement is usually tied to laundry cycles.
I was not at work or on call on New Year's Eve then. I was comfortably seated in view of a TV showing happy crowds here and there as midnight moved west. After enough such scenes, we decided to drive down to the area between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, in hopes of seeing fireworks comparable to what we had seen on TV. It was very cold, though not cold enough to keep one hefty man from shedding his clothes and running towards the Reflecting Pool. The cops got him before he reached the water (and I suppose locked him up for the night to reflect on his decision). At midnight, what appeared to be a screen of fireworks went off to the west, lasting less than thirty seconds. We waited a bit for more fireworks, grumbled, and went home.
A co-worker at the office not for work but for the view said that the real firework show started about 12:30, and was quite good. Was it delayed by a Y2K bug? I never heard.
I can remember my employers' customers upset because the new release of the software would require the machines to have 4 MB of RAM. So I "grew up" on command-line interfaces, modal editors, etc. I can still edit more or less efficiently with vi. Honestly, though, I find it more comfortable not to.
The 4 MB requirement goes back not quite 40 years. In those days I would also haul my groceries a mile or two home in backpack. There was definitely a savings in gasoline over using a car; but one gets used to convenience.
@flightmode
Forty-five years ago, the boss typesetting unit was the Linotronic 202. The font definitions were on an 8.5" floppy disk, which would hold eighteen of them. (Probably because the last of the units that used film negatives had three drums of six negatives each.) The 202 made a clack-clack sound that I suppose was the heads seeking here and there, and I believe that it had a signal to indicate that a font was not found.
So perhaps your colleague had some experience of the old 202 days and supposed things were still that way. But she does sound to have been unduly stubborn.
The programmer/blogger Joel Spolsky claimed that Microsoft had done a survey and discovered that most Excel users used it to make and save lists. Those users one could win away to something else, and Google Sheets would be a candidate. But I'd hate to try to take Excel away from an accounting department.
My real complaint about Excel is that some people will use it as if it were a database (lists, yes, but really big lists), which leads to problems.
If you want soup that is not highly processed, you can make it yourself. The whole point of Campbell's Soup is uniformity and predictability. I got through quite a bit of it my childhood, now I'd just as soon get my excessive salt from pretzels.
Andy Warhol made quite a bit of money selling prints of Campbell's soup cans. Perhaps The Register's Standards Soviet can denominate the takings of this lawsuit in Warhol prints.
Steve Goodman's song "You Never Even Called Me by My Name", as recorded by David Allen Coe, suggests how much of country and western music is paint-by-the-numbers. And Goodman's upbringing on the north side of Chicago might for some call into question the down-home authenticity of his c&w tunes. But I wouldn't switch channels if one of his songs came on.
The CLI that came with the AOS/VS operating system had a LOCK command that would put the CLI in a mode such that it couldn't execute certain commands, including BYE (exit). It could not, for example, enter superuser mode. Now the ordinary CLI prompt was ")" but in superuser mode it was "*)". However, there was also a PROMPT command that let one set the prompt characters, or for that matter the command to be executed next--"PROMPT BYE" was useful if you wanted a session to run a command and then exit. One day I found that one of our network guys had left a terminal logged in. I LOCKed the CLI, then used PROMPT to set the prompt to "*)".
He was unable to figure out why he could not log out. Eventually, he asked our DBA, who was a pretty hard-core techie, and the DBA figured out that the session was locked.
