Posts by disgruntled yank

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

January 1, 2000

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.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

C

This fall, I wrote a C program for the first time in more than 20 years. It was very short, intended to confirm my diagnosis of an error co-workers had encountered. And it worked.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

pre-bloat

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.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Boulder

The adiabatic winds on the eastern slope of the Rockies can be remarkably strong. Boulder County used to have some of the country's strictest regulations for the securing of mobile homes, lest they follow the tumbleweeds.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Blame the computer

Oops. Can I plead that they've had forty years to grow?

Have an upvote.

Re: Blame the computer

@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.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Nothing

This is more or less G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown story "The Invisible Man."

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Dunno

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.

Amazon is forging a walled garden for enterprise AI

Advanced technology?

I have heard of forging of course, but only of metal objects or important documents. Hats off to Amazon for discovering how to forge not just gardens but walled gardens.

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

Re: Lost for words

Without telling tales out of school, I will just say that the notion of "least privilege" is lost on a lot of people. There are commercial, widely used platforms out there that appear to regard as standard the use of root-level credentials, of course saved in clear text.

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: 20 million cells?!

@david123

The truth hurts. Ouch.

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Gazpacho Day?

Doesn't gazpacho require a lot of vegetables that are out of season by now in the northern hemisphere?

Highly processed

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.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: "colored pencil office"

@M.V. Lipvig

The US, not to say "u"-less, spellings such as "color", "harbor", etc. were chiefly the work of Noah Webster, who lived in the northeastern US, and who died while California was still the property of Mexico. So, sure, a California liberal.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Templates

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.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Pranking

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.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Happens

1. Some years ago I got a call from a fellow in a related organization, whose database we hosted. He said "I tried SELECT * FROM important_table, and it says that important_table doesn't exist." I connected with full privileges, checked, and said, Well, no, it doesn't exist. My recollection is that he was down to about three tables out of about 100. Fortunately, this was after Oracle had introduced the recycle bin, so restoring his tables took only a few minutes.

2. Some years before that, some people on another team found a certain table, or maybe two or three tables, vanishing. I suspected that this came from clicking the button in TOAD that runs everything in the edit window, rather than just the command under the cursor. They said not. I created for them a table of tables not to be dropped, and then a before DDL trigger. Whether through more cautious use of TOAD or because of the trigger, their work ran more smoothly.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Time to rename OpenAI?

Might I suggest WeThink?

And maybe SoftBank could rebrand as SoftTouch while they're at it.

Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles

Re: Other issues? Ballroom

@codejunky

On this one, I have to give credit to the British. Admiral Cockburn initiated a rethinking of the White House with a lot less hullabaloo.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: As well as brain drain at Amazon, there's brain rot (AI)...

Cline, as in Patsy? Because I'm crazy for crying/And crazy for trying/And crazy for trusting you? Or because It Falls to Pieces?

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Faxes

@MiguelC

Yes, quite. Have an upvote.

Faxes

Some evenings I teach English as a Second Language (ESL). earlier in the year I stepped into a class as a substitute, and starting going through a lesson with the students. One of them started laughing when the dialogue reached "What is your fax number?". Evidently the fax is as dead as a hammer in Sao Paolo, and it is only in backwaters such as the USA where the fax lingers on.

Also within the year, I have found and discarded spam faxes on a departmental multifunction printer, so I guess the student wasn't entirely wrong.

Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco

> the benefits of the National Guard coming in.

Yep. They mulched gardens on public property, they did general clean-up and tidy-up work here and there. Most of it was on the level of a high-school kid's public-service project, only carried out by adults in uniform. If you weren't in an area of Washington, DC, that is recognizably so on a TV screen, you wouldn't have seen the guard.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Barge?

The Potomac River is navigable, but it isn't the Delaware. NOAA shows a channel depth around 20 feet at Alexandria. And where exactly would the shuttle be loaded onto the barge? I don't think that the old port of Alexandria has the facilities that would be needed, and I don't think the facilities downstream are greater?

(I am not an expert in shipping, but I've seen a lot of mud flats in the tidal Potomac over the years.)

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

>> You don't expect the office workers to change how they work to accommodate how the power grid operates, you expect the grid to deliver power.

Doesn't On Call now and then have items about the careless frying a power supply by forgetting to switch from US to UK settings?

PACER buckles under MFA rollout as courts warn of support delays

Seriously?

MFA for read-only access?

Space Command gets Trumped out of Colorado, voting conspiracy cited

Re: Alabama and Trump, a Match Made in Heaven?

Huntsville has a remarkable number of Ph.D.s. Colorado Springs, as somebody remarked earlier, is notably conservative.

>> "and they don't call the center of the US 'flyover states' for nothing"

For the information of Britons who don't think that often about American geography, Colorado is quite near to Lebanon, Kansas, the geographical center of the contiguous 48 states.

Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders

Thank you

I was wondering why so much of the spam filter catch came from onmicrosoft.com.

Congressman proposes bringing back letters of marque for cyber privateers

Question

Marque Zuckerberg or Marque Andreesen?

Meet President Willian H. Brusen from the great state of Onegon

Pushkin your luck

Can't but recall that the University of Onegon is located in Eugene, Onegon.

And actually a lot of people do pronounce Colorado as Colarada.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Java to .net

"In several shocking cases, Java developers have been forced into .NET roles,"

What next? COBOL? Haskell?

Now, if a highly proficient, $$$ Java developer is pushed into an entry-level, $$ .NET position, then I agree that this is wrong. If the pay stays the same, I'm not sure.

In the course of my work, I have had to learn PHP and VisualBasic.NET. The cases were annoying, but if they were shocking I wasn't among those shocked.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Putty

I expect that we have some glazier's putty downstairs, probably by now petrified. More recently I have used plumber's putty on a connection that dripped very slowly, but persistently. A relative told me that real plumbers don't use plumber's putty. Maybe not, but it worked for me.

Lovestruck US Air Force worker admits leaking secrets on dating app

Umm

A mathematician I knew spoke of "LTC syndrome". She had that when she was jogging before or after work near the Pentagon, lieutenant colonels would fall into step with her and complain of boredom in their marriages, with a clear suggestion that she could help cure that.

I don't think she said anything about this syndrome persisting into retirement, but those were the days before computers were everywhere.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

weight

> A few minutes later, that manager stormed into IT and demanded to know where he could find the iPads, as someone had made a razor-thin cut through the plastic in which Apple wraps its tablets and made off with the machines.

Never having purchased an iThingy in person, I don't know what a wrapped iPad should look like. But even given Apple's taste for slimming products down, shouldn't an empty iPad wrapper weigh noticeably less than a full one?

At a long-ago department store job, a kid was caught leaving with a power saw, still boxed, and claimed that he had thought it was empty. The manager said, "Send me to school" and fired him.

Georgia court throws out earlier ruling that relied on fake cases made up by AI

Georgia and Georgia

> Why does this article not make clear that it's referring to a US state, and not the country?

Do the courts in the country quote the US Supreme Court? Are there commonly attorneys there with the surname Lynch or parties with the surname Shahid?

Or perhaps the odds? If one can believe Wikipedia, the country has a population of about 4 million, the state a population of about 11 million. I would not be surprised to learn that the proportion of legal cases is even more heavily weighted in the state's favor, given the Anglo-American tendency towards litigiousness. (Yes, Anglo-American--we got it from you.)

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Hmm

In those days, long-distance calls were very expensive, but the rates went way down out of business hours. It is fair to say, though, that I never managed to find more than about 20 minutes worth of things to say, so I may exaggerate the savings.

The librarian was savvy in more than technology. I attended schools in the suburbs of large cities, and never heard of inter-library loans until I got to the university.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

Re: It's no suprise.

> Americans just like to use proper English units because they are nostalgic for the good old days when America was great.

On a Chinese forum that might sting. On a British forum it makes me cock an eyebrow.

Re: It's no suprise.

10 liter tanks?

a) Red-blooded Americans tend to regard the metric system as a mark of the beast.

b) Ten liters of gasoline will hardly allow a sports ute to get across many metropolitan areas.

Now 100 liters might be more like it.

Dems hyperventilate about Palantir's work with the IRS in letter to CEO Karp

Re: Yep!

> One of the theories about Moscow Mitch staying in office until he drops dead is that he fears investigation of his dealings over the decades.

He has announced that he will not run for re-election next year. But hey, it's a theory.

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

trends

A dozen years ago or so, I attended the commencement at a well thought of American university. I has heartened to see all the gowns, or perhaps they were caps, in a color indicating that the wearer had studied engineering. Then somebody told me, Yes, but they're all going into finance work.

AI coding tools are like that helpful but untrustworthy friend, devs say

Friends

Sounds a bit like https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

grass painting

In Denver it was not unusual to see lawns, usually on office or apartment buildings, that were dyed bright green when all other grass was a dull yellow or brown.

Re: Rowies

In the summer of 1944, my father was in a quartermaster company that traveled by some small ship (LST?) from England to Normandy. After a meal, the soldiers didn't consider themselves adequately fed, so the sailors brought out hardtack that had been baked and canned for WW I. The soldiers ate it all.

Hardtack has not been universally popular among the military, though. U.S. Grant told of hearing low calls of "hardtack" from Union troops then beleaguered in Chattanooga and ill-supplied.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: IGY

I remember discussion of ozone in connection with the SST back then.

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: Ukraine did

"Siberia managed to break away in 1917 for a couple of decades"

I don't understand. What with the Japanese, the Americans, and the Czech Legion, it took the Red Army a while to establish control over eastern Siberia. But it didn't take decades.

Rideshare companies in India are asking for tips before the trip

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.

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

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

Re: I'm an Author

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

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

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".