Flashback
Those with children born ca. 1990 may remember the computer game Monster Truck Madness. It did not involve eBay.
2036 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Illusions about Hillary Clinton, on both sides.
A lot of people invested a lot of time, money, and energy over 24 years arguing that she was the Queen of Night. Numerous people, paid by the US to know better, spent a lot of time trying to prove that she had murdered an assistant.
On the other hand, a lot of people supposed that because she was married to a politician she was one too. The first time she ran in a contested election, the Democratic caucuses and primaries of 2008, a young guy with very little experience beat her like a drum. Somehow this made her inevitable for 2016.
I worked on a government IT contract once where we spent part of a winter uncomfortably cool. We pushed the thermostat to what should have been greenhouse temperatures, but it didn't help. Then one day somebody noticed that we had a LaserJet parked immediately beneath the thermostat. We moved it, and the thermostat became much more responsive.
In an interview collected in the book Coders at Work, Allen said that Cocke sketched out many innovative ideas on paper napkins over beers after work, and that such napkins were much sought after at IBM. No doubt the Register commentariat will think well of such a working environment.
"exposing weak links in value chains, illuminating how companies struggle cross-functionally to deliver the workflows that create great experiences for customers, employees and partners"
Honestly, El Reg should offer a Bingo Card as a Service (BCAAS) API so that its readers will have a way to focus while reading articles with large stretches of management-speak.
I thought GroupWise was fine, but my recollection is that WordPerfect Office's email was something quite different. A government contractor where I worked used WP's email on Data General minis, then the successor contract used GroupWise with Solaris servers. I don't recall there being much similarity between the two.
"The cloud is just a computer in Reston with a bad power supply."
https://twitter.com/pragmaticandy/status/1168916144121634818?lang=en
(For those not familiar with the Washington, DC, area, Reston is a vaguely defined area in northern Virginia, close to Dulles airport, fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.)
Americans don't insist on call that sport football, they just call it football. It is affected for a native-born American to refer to any other sport as "football", roughly on a par with referring to the "boot" of a car or proposing to travel vertically in a "lift".
Hope this helps.
Joe Biden largely stands for not being Donald Trump. In 2016, Donald Trump mostly stood for not being Hillary Clinton, so we shall see.
Date of election:
"The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States."
(U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 1.) Note that the day here mentioned is for the Electoral College to vote. In the early Republic the states held their elections at considerably varying times. In some states the electors were chosen by the legislature.
The reference to Roosevelt above presumably refers to the 20th Amendment, which moved the date of the presidential inauguration back from March to January.
Long ago I worked for a company that put its systems on Data General minicomputers. The system administrators at the customer sites were not highly trained, but could be counted on to do backups, restart the machines, etc. One day we received a call from a customer. The administrator there had been working his way through the Commands and Utilities handbook, and had arrived at FORMAT. I don't think he managed to format the root drive--for that, as I recall, one would have needed a systape. However, the disk that he did manage to format had a lot of files.
@DoctorPaul
By Kent State, I assume that you are referring to the Ohio National Guard. Most of the time National Guard units are under state control, though the federal government can put them into US service.
@Miketfr
During the 1967 riots in Detroit, the Michigan National Guard went in to restore order. As was common at least then with National Guard units, they were under-trained. I don't think the Guard then had training in riot control, and certainly their fire discipline was deplorable. Some poor guy was shot when he lit a cigarette while standing in a dark window.
The US then sent troops for the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. I doubt they had been trained in riot control, but they were otherwise far better trained, and they improved matters as the Guard had not.
It is certainly unusual for regular troops to be used for such purposes, but it does happen.
You mean I can go to the nightclub with the cool kids and have a perfect excuse not to dance?
Because of America's odd relationship with alcohol, dancing has here and there, now and then been prohibited in bars. I remember reading of the college students in the 1960s somewhere in Ohio being allowed to do the hand-jive to the jukebox, but causing the owner to intervene with "You kids wanna lose me my license?" if they got up to dance. (OK, maybe it's America's odd relationship with alcohol and sex.) But I doubt anyone ever regarded Ashtabula, Ohio, as being as cool as Berlin.
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Historian Hugh Bicheno, in his 2006 book Razor's Edge: The Unofficial History of the Falklands War, excoriated Rowlands, writing that "this was the precise equivalent of publicly announcing, during World War II, that the Allies had broken the Enigma system used by the Nazis."
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Actually the Chicago Tribune stated after Midway that the US had been decrypting the Japanese Navy's traffic. The attorney general wanted to try the publisher for treason. The Pentagon, though, considered that this would in effect confirm the information; taking no action would encourage the Japanese to suppose that this was idle brag.
I first heard of ERP systems from a techie who worked for a company that had been bought by SAP., and who described SAP and the course of a usual implementation to me. I said that it sounded to me like Vietnam: by the time you understand that you have made a mistake, you have invested so much in blood, treasure, and prestige that you sort of have to keep going and find a point at which to declare victory and cut your losses.
My own later brushes with ERP stuff were brief, and not personally painful. My employer paid for a system considerably over-engineered for our needs, but after a couple of years backed off to something more manageable without undue bleeding.