* Posts by disgruntled yank

2025 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

disgruntled yank

Re: Aaron?

A couple of classmates of long ago, surnamed Zugel and Zura, probably wouldn't have minded trading places with you.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

disgruntled yank

Re: "captive hunting operations – aka shooting sheep in a barrel"

Perhaps it was practice for anti-cow defense, which could be important if the French launched cows at you, as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

disgruntled yank

absolute unit

This is a new expression for me--is it from the Register's standards office?

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

disgruntled yank

@Someone else

Prior art: a version of the joke shows up in Bill Mauldin's Up Front, from the campaign of North Africa.

I did once live about five miles from the Coors brewery, and get a whiff of the malt from time to time. Coors (and I am not talking about Coors Light) was not bad when the air temperature was over 90 F and the Coors was chilled until ice crystals just started to form.

NTT boss takes early retirement to atone for data leak

disgruntled yank

Very Japanese

In the US, "I take full responsibility" commonly seems to mean "Shut up, I don't want to talk about it anymore."

Hands up if you want to volunteer for layoffs, IBM tells staff

disgruntled yank

Have you caught the bug?

"circa 50 percent of IBM’s reduction goal will impact staffing levels across the European continent" looks like corporate PR's way of saying "about half the layoffs will occur in Europe."

And when IBM says "corporate rebalancing", I imagine employees walking blanks to port and starboard both.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

disgruntled yank

Re: What an arrogant prat

Not before getting a firm hand on your wallet, I hope.

OpenAI claims New York Times paid someone to 'hack' ChatGPT

disgruntled yank

Re: Strange

@charlieboywoof

Well, with OpenAI, apparently we have a robot to take it over for you.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

disgruntled yank

Re: Ah, LISP

Thank you for that link, and please have an upvote.

The reference I saw was in Stonebraker's memoirs, which for a while were freely viewable on-line. I had not seen this particular item.

disgruntled yank

Ah, LISP

Michael Stonebraker wrote that when undertaking Postgres they started with the notion of using LISP for its elegance etc. etc. The performance was found to be intolerable, and the project reverted to C.

Or so I recall--the book is behind a paywall at ACM.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

disgruntled yank

Re: Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

Back in the early 1990s, I worked on a US government contract. The server room access log was ring binder with forms in which you might write your time of arrival, your task, and your time of exit--office buildings commonly have such at the front desk. The boss contractor mentioned as an additional reason for their use that they could get one out of trouble: somebody accused of smoking pot in a stairwell was shown as have been in a server room at the time of the alleged offense. I don't think that I was particularly conscientious about filling them out.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

disgruntled yank

The rules

Thomas Reed, eventually Speaker of the House, served on a gunboat during the American Civil War. He was quoted as saying, "I knew the rules and they didn't. I had all my rights, and most of theirs."

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

disgruntled yank

Novelty

Isn't this a bit as if the Stasi had sponsored ladders in West Berlin hardware stores so that those who wished could flee over the wall to the east?

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

disgruntled yank

Features

Are Javascript, CSS, and HTML5 features of any operating system in particular? I guess one could almost say the Javascript is a feature of Windows, given that the scripting host will allow one to run scripts written in a subset of Javascript.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

disgruntled yank

Cuban invasion?

Seriously? By the Marielitos?

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

disgruntled yank

Re: Wrong defaults

My favorite self-DOS was editing the inittab to start a task in the background.

FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives'

disgruntled yank

search

Did they train it on James Bond films?

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

disgruntled yank

Re: First time I have heard of the CUA for decades

@Someone else

< "believe that anything created before they were born is of no importance."

Boomer here, but it sure sounds as if you're talkin' 'bout my generation.

Well, actually, we probably pushed "before they were born" up to "before we hit puberty."

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

disgruntled yank

EssilorLuxotica

Couldn't but notice that this is a anagram (spaces and capitalization aside) for Toxic AI Slut Loser. Nomen est omen?

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

disgruntled yank

Ouch

Many years ago, I worked for a contractor at a US civil agency, supporting mostly WordPerfect Office. The email did not have auto-forward, so our programmer wrote one. He wrote it in COBOL, since that's what he knew best, and I don't recall how he kicked it off--a batch job, probably.

it had no loop detection. We fielded many calls from users upset to find that their in-boxes had thousands of repeated messages. It seems to me that I tried to introduce loop detection, though given that I knew, and know, essentially no COBOL, I can't think how.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

disgruntled yank

Re: Two head scratchers...actually, it was old school

It is my impression that Italian bookstores still shelve books by publisher. On the other hand, I have encountered the system only once in the US, in a store that has been gone for years.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

disgruntled yank

Re: preliminarily?

According to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, published in 1983 by Merriam-Webster, yes it is a word. Should it be? That doesn't seem to matter much now.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

disgruntled yank

Re: Customers are the security liability

Marketing: Shortly after my employer signed up with KnowBe4, a building-wide email went out for an umbrella organization for charitable giving. The domain name did not match the organization name (not well, anyway), and WhoIs was not forthcoming with domain ownership. I thought it was real phishing, not KnowBe4, because the quality of the clickable link was a step up. It was later in the day that I managed to find out that this email was legitimate. But it certainly looked like phishing.

Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns

disgruntled yank

Re: Cognate disciplines

I suspect that the backgrounds you name are supportive of getting well-paying employment. I'm not sure, though, how far that culture can hold out before being absorbed into the broader stream. Apart from anything else, smart kids will figure out where to power lies in the corporate world, and who gets to declare whom redundant. A co-worker, born in Asia, reported that a lot of her friends' kids were off getting law degrees and MBAs.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

disgruntled yank

Question

Did those readers offer suggested emendations of "Regomize"? I've been trying to imagine what path could lead one inadvertently to "Regomize", and failing.

NTT Data to monitor ten million hotel guests and sell data about their sleep

disgruntled yank

What can I say

but "in your dreams"?

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

disgruntled yank

Re: NerdRageQuit

In the US vocational-technical high school is a step down from a university. In fact, in the old days most of the students at such a school would not have been expected to attend a university--the instruction focused on trades, not on college preparation.

Having said that, US school districts often have IT departments that manage the systems of several or many schools. Whether that is the arrangement in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I don't know

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

disgruntled yank

@secondtimeuser

You mean UK-lalia?

Royal Navy flies first mega Mojave drone from aircraft carrier

disgruntled yank

Re: Interesting...

In fact, Uncle Sam specifies that it must get the best price going. You can't sell something for nickel to random customers and try to charge the US government a dime for it.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

disgruntled yank

Re: Stabby stab

You're not wrong. A couple of years ago, a co-worker's husband was killed by a gunshot aimed at somebody else. Not long after that, a co-worker was badly injured by a bullet from a gunfight he had nothing to do with.

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

disgruntled yank

Re: lower than a maggots scrotum

@blackcat

Well, but if most of IBM's revenue these days comes from services? IBM is doing its best to increase the number of personnel out there who are a) trained by IBM and b) not employed by IBM.

Microsoft creates a new kind of credential: the 'Applied Skill'

disgruntled yank

Maybe

I can see the contracting officers' world looking favorably on these, which would lead to government contractors urging their employees to go get one.

Years ago, I had the impression that the Cisco certifications really meant something. (I know very little about networking, though, so it could have been the leather jackets.) I did have an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) card back in the Oracle 7 or 8 days; after I went to Open World and found what esteem grizzled DBAs found the OCP credential, I lost interest in keeping it current. (I lost even more interest when, Oracle being Oracle, it revised the requirements so that one had to keep taking classes in order to take the exams.)

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

disgruntled yank

testing and drinking

About 40 years ago, a techie friend had arranged to do some contract work for a big government contractor. All was going well until somebody within the organization called him to arrange for a drug test. He certainly had nothing to fear from such a test, but thought it very bad sign that the company should mention it only so late in the process. He told them so, and broke off communications.

On the other hand, I am no teetotaler, but would just as soon that those who have been drinking go home and sleep it off before they work on computers. I remember (also from about 40 years ago), and operator with a blood-alcohol level approaching "embalmed" who left a customer's mini unusable for a couple of days.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

disgruntled yank

Re: Little hamsters on wheels.

@TimMaher

That sounds like the unit Data General used to sell--a 25 MB hard drive with an 8" floppy one could use to back it up. I remember being at a customer's site and hearing a "spang", which was followed immediately by a system panic. The sound was that of the belt drive falling off. We left replacement to the FE.

disgruntled yank

Re: IBM, too, maybe...

@Glenp

Many, many years ago, while taking a break from school, I worked as a driver. The printing company had what appeared to be a moderately sized truck, but was van with a truck box fitted on. Normally this wasn't something one noticed, but then one day it was necessary to load it with considerably more than the usual two or three pallets. The front rose up in a manner that reminded me of pictures of 1940s aircraft with the little wheel at the tail. The tilt was not so bad as to dangerously obstruct the view forward, but the ride was squishier than usual, and I drove very carefully across town.

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

disgruntled yank

One in a million

From the early days of microcomputers, there is the story of the coder stating that something had a one in a million chance of occurring, and another saying that at the then clock speeds the millionth time would occur would occur "tomorrow morning".

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

disgruntled yank

Underlying issue

@AC

I suppose that people who do not trust the babysitter would like to use a monitor when out and about.

Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team

disgruntled yank

Re: Hey Elon

Trump was impeached (the first time) for saying making US military aid a quid pro quo, the quo being dirt on the Bidens.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

disgruntled yank

Re: "If he downloaded Hallelujah, the problems would have been much worse"

Well, at about age 10, we rhymed it with "ruler": "Glory, glory, hallelujah/Teacher hit me with a ruler."

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

disgruntled yank

Hopefully

"In any case, if we were all paywalled out of using Twitter, hopefully the world's discourse would become somewhat saner."

We are hopeful because

We don't remember Usenet and its odder corners.

Before Usenet existed, we never listed to late-night talk radio. (OK, maybe only an American thing.)

We have no knowledge of the practices of newspaper empires before that--Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Northcliffe.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

disgruntled yank

expressions

Is the expression "short arm inspection" current in the UK or is it purely an Americanism? The author could announce that the next edition is being held pending a short ARM inspection.

Google wants to takes a byte out of Oracle workloads with PostgreSQL migration service

disgruntled yank

legacy

After enough meeting with sales teams, I understood that "legacy" means "that which we didn't sell you."

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

disgruntled yank

Only self-damage

Many many years ago, I put in a couple of weeks filling in for a friend doing paste-up at a company that did computer animation. One day, having cut something or another to my satisfaction, I pulled the xacto knife away with a flourish, which ended up about the midpoint of my right quad. There was not much damage, for such knives are very small, but I suppose that I learned some caution that day.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

disgruntled yank

IP addresses?

It has been a long time since I sat at a D210 terminal, but it seems to me that even at the end of my involvement with the MV/Eclipse systems they were using DG's own Xodiac networking. This does not of course affect the burden of the story--but what would the comments section be without a bit of gratuitous pedantry.

I never got to work with anyone prosperous enough to hook DG servers together to fail over.

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

disgruntled yank

Re: I have zero sympathy for him

In one of Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls books, the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter quotes Fred Brooks: "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

I think one could forgive a newbie on something like this

We'd pay good money to see... oh dear, Elon Musk 'needs an MRI scan'

disgruntled yank

An old expression

About forty years ago, I heard the expression "checkup from the neck up", as in "They need a checkup from the neck up" used of persons doing reckless things, e.g. selling fake gold chains to persons possibly armed and dangerous. I don't suppose it's current now, I don't know whether it really was then.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

disgruntled yank

Re: Florida driving license

I have heard of the experienced police officer who disliked riding with rookies, because rookies had a tendency to believe that the lights and siren worked magic.

Couple admit they laundered $4B in stolen Bitcoins after Bitfinex super-heist

disgruntled yank

$4 billion in Bitcoins

How much is that in Monopoly money?

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

disgruntled yank

Re: socket is still a socket...

Surely Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (recently placed by the author and performer in the public domain) will clue in the younger Left Pondians to Gilbert and Sullivan.

I have met a man not 40 who wrote his senior thesis on Wodehouse. My next-door neighbors, neither yet 40, and one a native of the US, were happy to accept a volume of Heinemann's The Great Sermon Handicap project that I wished to give away.

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

disgruntled yank

Prices

A suicidal pigeon took out the wing mirror of a truck I was driving ca. 1977, and the cost must have been about $20 to replace the mirror--not the frame, which was fine. A careless turkey (me) took out someone else's wing mirror ca. 2003, and that was not cheap--somewhere between $200 and $500 what with the controls.