* Posts by disgruntled yank

2135 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Rideshare companies in India are asking for tips before the trip

disgruntled yank

Re: It's about time tipping was done away with completely

Not one for extensive research, was AS? It is very true that economics play a big part, and that yesterday's unprofitable slave may be tomorrow's break-even sharecropper. But in the larger emancipations beginning in the late 18th Century--the abolition of serfdom in various German states for example--on through the 19th, it was not in general the oppressed bringing the force.

disgruntled yank

Re: It's about time tipping was done away with completely

I certainly find that I don't miss tipping on European vacations. But the US has a hard time adjusting to the notion. There have been hullabaloos in New York City and in Washington, DC, over lows doing away with the "minimum tipped wage". In Washington one reads of restaurants going out of business and blaming it on the higher base wage. One also reads about restaurants tacking on service or other extra charges without a clear indication whether it will all go to the staff.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

disgruntled yank

pictures/kilowords

@Custard

Data General sold a machine called the MV/2000 DC (department cluster). This had a row of serial ports that were number not from 0, not from one, but something like 18 or 30. I remember a call from a customer who had carefully sketched a picture of the plug layout before moving the machine, but apparently not carefully enough. It was hard to know exactly what to say to her "Well, I drew a picture." I guess that we managed to help her without having to send somebody there.

SEC SIM-swapper who Googled 'signs that the FBI is after you' put behind bars

disgruntled yank

Re: I'm an Author

But you can't come in if you don't say "Swordfish".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Gwe5gKgjo

disgruntled yank

Re: proved once again that cybercriminals are very bad at internet search hygiene.

I have read that Huntsville, Alabama, has more Ph.D.s in proportion to total population than any other city in the US, mostly because of NASA.

But his gentleman seems to fit the expression popular about thirty years ago, "not a rocket scientist".

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

disgruntled yank

"""

reviewing the documentation.

Not long into that effort, he noticed it contained an executable, tested it, and found that it produced perfect reports.

""

The documentation mentioned an executable? One commonly found on all Pick machines, or how?

I will say that it would be useful for all programmers to encounter a system like this early in their careers. There is nothing quite like puzzling through somebody else's undocumented, ill-structured code to give one an appreciation for documentation and structure.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

disgruntled yank

Didn't see it myself

A government techie I worked with years ago spoke of the review of a departed intern's code, which was quite well done, but did have an oddly named function declaration, along the lines of

void twft(...);

X marks the drop for European users

disgruntled yank

Re: 10% down, 90% to go

>> the much further right and more racist US

Much further right, so far.

More racist? I would never claim that the US is great on racial stuff, but it has worked on this and made changes over the last 70 years. I have limited experience of Europe (and all of it as a white guy). But I'd be interested to hear how (for example) the descendants of the Windrush would grade the UK, or immigrants from Francophone Africa would grade France.

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

disgruntled yank

Please

Isn't the organization now the Department of Handbag Security?

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

disgruntled yank

Re: Please do not all power on at once

@ColinPa

I have heard that in the old days American households that had blown a fuse would use a penny as a makeshift. I don't know many houses burned down thanks to this, or how one safely extracted the penny.

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

disgruntled yank

Meh

Our two Azure VMs exist for Great Plains/Dynamics. I am on good terms with the comptroller, but if I suggested that we migrate off Great Plains to save on licensing costs, I might not survive the discussion.

The commentariat is free to tell me that this is our fault for not rolling our own AP system with GPL software.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

disgruntled yank

Re: Only $1M?

@Dances

Who says you can't have both?

Pharmacist accused of using webcams to spy on women in intimate moments at work, home

disgruntled yank

Re: Camera

@elsergivolador

That would make for more entertaining meetings.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

disgruntled yank

Re: "xAI and X's futures are intertwined."

"It's why accounting is often called a art."

The genre being trompe l'oeil?

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

disgruntled yank

Re: The best way to learn something is to teach it

My first college math teacher said that you don't really understand calculus until you teach it. I fear that it is true in my case.

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

disgruntled yank

Re: Oops

Slavery was deeply unpopular in Europe? England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, all had large colonies dependent on slave labor.

The northern states either had abolished slavery (if original colonies) or were founded without slavery before emancipation in the British West Indies. Don't believe everything you read in the 1619 project.

As for religious bigots, one ordinarily thinks of the Puritans in that context, but Massachusetts was the first of the states to abolish slavery.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

disgruntled yank

Re: Early termination fee

I worked for a government contractor at the time of the 1995-1996 government shutdown. The contract was not terminated, the contracting companies simply didn't get paid until government funding resumed. My employer put us on reduced hours, two or three days a week, but continued to pay everyone in the expectation that the government would pay up once funding resumed. The government did pay up.

That particular shutdown was widely thought to have resulted from Newt Gingrich's grudge against his treatment on Air Force 1 on the way to and from Itzhak Rabin's funeral, and was not regarded as having accomplished anything. But I see from Wikipedia that Newt says that 'twas a famous victory.

DoorDash sued for allegedly branding customer a fraudster after delivery photo query

disgruntled yank

Casing

""Many of these riders are likely using their time riding with Dashers to case consumers' residences so that they can later return to burgle the home, steal vehicles in the driveway or kidnap the children who live there.""

Fifty years ago, I briefly held delivery and pickup jobs. I guarantee you that I did not case residences, or imagine stealing vehicles (though it was a lot easier then than now).

Kidnap children? I would refer you to https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1595/1595-h/1595-h.htm#chap08.

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

disgruntled yank

yeah, well

Above the fold on page A1 of today's New York Times is the headline "Organ Transplant System 'In Chaos' as Waiting List Is Ignored."

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

disgruntled yank

Re: Not a very bright boy...

Actually, the US Court system is set up. for the greatest number of defendants to make plea bargains, pleading guilty on certain counts in return for a shorter sentence. If every defendant had his day in court, there would be enormous backlogs of business.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

disgruntled yank

Consequences

"""

It's called "the consequences of your actions" – something, we admit, Musk is not at all acquainted with.

"""

Wasn't being forced to buy Twitter at a ridiculous price something of a consequence?

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

disgruntled yank

JD

There are many odd and objectionable aspects to the vice-president. But given that American finance was for quite a while dominated by J.P. Morgan, I don't think we can beat up too much on J.D. Vance for using initials.

disgruntled yank

Re: DEI

Right. If a member of a minority group cannot get the required SATs, he should do it the old-fashioned way and hire a friend to take the test for him.

Or the new-fashioned way: get a diagnosis of ADHD and have half again or double the time to take the test. Curiously these diagnoses are much more common in the better-off part of town, which is not to say a minority-heavy part.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

disgruntled yank

Not just on UNIX

For some years, I worked for a government contract for the tending of Data General minicomputers. There were a lot of machines and a lot of operators and analysts, so that it was probably inevitable that now and then somebody would

CDIR :

DEL #

Once I was that somebody. What I discovered early on was that the peripheral manager, :PMNGR, was early in the usual order of files and so one of the first to be deleted. But once it was gone, there was no way for the system to delete (or create) files. Owing to our loose discipline in cleaning up after updates, there was usually a copy of :PMNGR.x.y.z that one could rename, and from there begin the recovery. And I think that the CLI used a sort of breadth-first discipline, meaning that the subdirectories of root were not purged until all the standard files were. One did not want to run with an obsolete :PMNGR, so that one then had to go to the latest systape.

Then there was the customer's employee at a previous job who was working his way through the commands and utilities book one evening until he got to FORMAT. It worked as described, but not as he'd have desired.

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

disgruntled yank

Somewhat off topic

Thanks to The Register, I know what " Europe's largest local authority" is, despite my never having visited Birmingham. If the question ever arises in a trivia night, I'll be all set.

But why shouldn't The Register include "Birmingham" as one of its standard units of measure? London could be 75 centi-Birminghams, a small city one deci-Birmingham, and so on.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

disgruntled yank

SQL or C

@that one in the corner

> Building a new database - are you using SQL or trying to do it in C?

Here I suspect the answer is C--you will, if you want anyone to use the database provide SQL as the standard language of the database. I recall that Michael Stonebraker wrote that his team thought that it would be useful to write Postgres in LISP; but the need for reasonable performance drove them to C. (Or was it C++? It has been a while.)

But in general, I agree with you.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

disgruntled yank

Re: "Blackcurrants" or "Currants, Black"?

Or leave it up to the user so that you can have alternating currants. (With a nod to Flann O'Brien.)

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

disgruntled yank

Re: Really?

" Software engineering lecture from a Government that still uses ancient mainframes reliant on COBOL... "

Is COBOL subject to buffer overflows? Somehow I am not scandalized that anyone, government or not, does accounting in a language designed for accounting.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

disgruntled yank

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1428/

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

disgruntled yank

Rarely

I have seldom been called on work matters out of normal hours.

But a few memorable incidents have made me prefer vacations east of the office rather than west, though. The crisis discovered when the office opens on the East Coast can lead to a call that awakens the techie on vacation in California at 0600; if the techie is vacationing in Europe, it will be early or-mid afternoon, the techie will be awake and alert, and the techie will have readily understood reasons for not having a computer to hand. (Gee, Mike, I'd like to help you, but I'm at the British Museum right now.)

Call of Duty studio co-founder pleads guilty to crashing drone into firefighting aircraft

disgruntled yank

Re: Canada tariffs....

@jake

Why do you think MAGA world is so down on gender-affirming care? (Though actually the women of the Senate Republican Caucus have shown the ability to stand up and do their duty.)

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

disgruntled yank

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

@SD 3

I came here to say that. With a president who is down on electric vehicles, what are the prospects for Tesla?

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

disgruntled yank

RFI

Is that what one calls marlinspike moxie?

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

disgruntled yank

Re: Auto-Account Deletion

@An_Old_Dog

Homo Martianus sub nominem novum es?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

disgruntled yank

Basic, etc.

I wish that I had learned BASIC, given its widespread availability. Eventually I learned VBScript and VB.NET, but I don't know how much they had in common with the older BASICs.

It is unfortunate that Dijkstra is so much remembered as an insult comic. I suppose that to some degree he brought it on himself.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

disgruntled yank

Re: If Y2K had been coming up yesterday

Yep, no conspiracy theories back in they days of the Clinton Administration.

It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever

disgruntled yank

I retrospectively became fonder of Peoplesoft when I encountered the table-naming conventions of Microsoft Dynamics: two or three letters to indicate the kind of data (GL, DTA), followed by five digits to specify it more closely. In my relatively few dealings with Dynamics, I kept a spreadsheet of descriptions handy. Peoplesoft had tables named along the lines of PS_PERSON, PS_COMPANY, and so on.

Peoplesoft was over-engineered for the needs of my employer. I imagine that an organization with an order of magnitude more employees, say five thousand, would have been a better fit. I did like what I saw of it, though.

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

disgruntled yank

No, not Penn State

The suspect attended the University of Pennsylvania, which is in Philadelphia.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

disgruntled yank

Re: Thermostats

And don't park a LaserJet underneath the thermostat. One winter, our office was uncomfortably cool until somebody noticed where the printer was.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

disgruntled yank

Re: We all learned the same way...: mv and move

Forty-odd years ago, Data General took the odd decision to reverse the sense of the arguments of the move command in its CLI. In the RDOS CLI, the arguments were evaluated sh style, with the destination directory at the end of the list. The AOS/VS CLI had the destination directory as the first argument. A fellow support guy, who hadn't worked on an RDOS machine in quite a while, dictated the command AOS/VS fashion to a customer, helpfully wiping out the recovery floppy. Neither party was happy with this.

(Or so I remember the commands: it has been almost thirty years since I dealt with an Eclipse.)

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

disgruntled yank

counting

A long-ago co-worker, then in the USAF reserve, explained that one always counted tools before and after working on a plane. A missing tool, if not found, could mean that the facility would X-Ray the plane looking for the stray tool. I assume that crew who let things get to that point were handed a broom and sent to sweep the runways.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

disgruntled yank

Re: The boxes are labelled on the outside

During my late teens and early twenties, I worked a few months as a stock boy for department stores. I don't remember us every opening boxes until it was time to put the goods on the shelves.

(This was the days before much of the store's work involved computers. The second stint was the first time I saw computerized cash registers. I was impressed, but I was not allowed near them.)

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

disgruntled yank

Not quite Excel

A friend and co-worker was set to inspecting lists of purported phone numbers and discarding any that weren't apparently standard US, i.e. ten digits. I sat down and set up a table or two and a query in Access and showed her how to to import a list and reject those not matching. She thought it was magic, and I trust it made her work less tedious.

Cybercrooks are targeting Bengal cat lovers in Australia for some reason

disgruntled yank

I blame it on J.D. Vance

He's out to get childless cat ladies wherever they may be. Yes, yes, this is Australia, but J.D. has a J.D., and the American bar has a casual attitude towards national borders.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

disgruntled yank

Fusion

So-called because at any date you care to name it will be working in ten years?

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

disgruntled yank

power off

It is pretty hard to break a modern database. There was a maddening stretch some years ago when a switch would reboot itself once a week, interrupting a SQL Server machine's connection to its storage. I ground my teeth a fair bit, and I did get tired of running dbcc checkdb. But we lost no data.

disgruntled yank

Re: flicking the switch

"Convincing the area manager to sign off the rewiring job was difficult until there were a few "full office shutdowns" in the middle of the working day due to someone flicking the switch by mistake."

Did you help the process along with a flick or two? Were you tempted?

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

disgruntled yank

Halcyon days

Has somebody on TV started using the expression? I hadn't seen it for a while, but this weekend it appeared in print in The Washington Post. I would remark that in its original use, halcyon days meant good weather around the winter solstice.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

disgruntled yank

DSThesia

The Congress of the United States suffers from a belief that Daylight Savings Time saves energy. In the winter of 1973-1974, after an early oil shock, the US was on DST. I did not enjoy it. It was a nuisance, though a lesser one, when the government extended DST about 30 years ago--there were operating systems to patch, one had to update Java, etc.

Putin's pro-Trump trolls accuse Harris of poaching rhinos

disgruntled yank

Re: All or Nothing

> Hmm.. 2016, Hillary, "I had the election stolen from me"

Right. We still have PTSD from the mob she sent to storm the Capitol.