Posts by Mike 16 1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
I first read this to be a selection criterion for "Who do we probe today":
"probes up to two datacenters known to house broken boxen."
So, why are only housebroken boxen privy to the list? :-)
I've wondered why I sometimes get served by a yet to be potty-trained server.
Just got my notification yesterday. Not only very late, and suggesting cures that may be worse than the disease, but
"from" an email address with no clear relation to Xfinity.
"We're from some rando on the internet, and we're here to help"
This tickled some long-napping neurons that led to my searching for an xls file
I received back in 2012. The file name itself should pretty much tell the story,
piglatin.xls
Yep, a spreadsheet to translate English to Pig Latin. My memory is vague,
but I believe it may have been written as a "compatibility test" for another
spreadsheet. Or at least that was the excuse when the programmer was
asked wtf they'd been doing.
IIRC, It did work on Excel as late as Word 2003, but not on Apple's
(new at the time) "Numbers" spreadsheet.
Far from the weirdest thing about the project that led to me being
sent that example. A snippet of the reply I sent, about Excel use (among others)
in a manufacturing QA process:
=========
Oh, and FTP? You wish. How about having to deliver the result by
copying to a windows shared "drive", that you scroll down to in a list
of over 500 such, because the whole freaking company is one Network
Neighborhood, from New Jersey to Penang?
=========
One time I got one of those "security alerts" from my mobile carrier. It seems like it knew
I was on some street named (IIRC) "Oak Park", but resolved that as being in some actual
park with that name, in a different county a hundred or so miles away.
In retrospect, I should have expected as much from a system that uses "WiFi access points
apparently near me" to be good data for location.
A good time to switch from "This data looks funny, so must be a breach. yell and ignore"
to "this data looks funny, time to find out why".
The wife and I often borrow disc copies of movies we missed, or Noir we
never knew existed, from the local library. Often DVD, but since a
DVD/BluRay player cost very little more than just DVD, we got that.
Since BluRay is considered a failed technologt, the demand/wait-list for
any given film is lower for the BluRay version.
Plus, of course, some of the "extras" on the BluRay version actually add
at least a bit of info.
Yes, of course I understand that the player is probably mining my whole
LAN for data it can sell, but then, so are the TVs and appliances.
If the author's VCS had only four switches, it was probably not "original" (Heavy Sixer) which
had a sextet of switches. Perhaps an younger sibling had "salvaged" a few parts for a Science Fair project?
Meanhwile, I "got the message" about VCS popularity when my home was burgled. The thieves took the time to disconnect my VCS from the (17 inch diagonal CRT) television.
left the VCS, took the TV. (1984 or so). Great way to convey "OK, Boomer"
Long ago, I worked in the building housing my University's EE department. We were informed that ours was the second worst building on campus for Health and Safety
(not surprising when it housed lab equipment for folks whose future would include cutting edge distribution gear, as well as at least one generator that looked old enough for Tesla himself to have wound it)
Turns out that the _worst_ building housed the student health clinic, and the office of the campus fire marshal, who had conducted the evaluation.
IIRC (left UseNet in 2000), most substantial conversations (as opposed to quick shots of "first" or "plonk"),
were Interspersed. Not having to start a major research project to figure out the context of a "yes" is
one of my favorite memories of the days. Compare and contrast to the "modern" mailing list which
relies on "nesting" every email in a thread in a "reverse chronological" order. At least so far they
have kept the order of the letters of each quoted copy reading left to right.
BTW: Green Card Lottery was not the first SPAM I encountered on UseNet, but it was certainly the
first to (seemingly) _intend_ to annoy pretty much everybody on UseNet.
I'm torn about "re-upping". I got so much free time back in exchange for the groups I had read.
I certainly could not get my old "name" back, as it was a bang-path. A while back IIRC bang-paths
were still part of the email RFCs. They are/were not handled by the likes of Google and Comcast.
Good times. Now if only I could get things done _and_ graze my groups (mostly comp.*)
Been done:
https://undergroundgardens.com/about-us/
The Forestiere Underground Gardens, in Fresno California.
IIRC, the precipitating event was a would-be farmer finding out that his
newly purchased (sight unseen) land was not really so agricultural.
But of course the notice of selling land that doesn't quite match
the sales pitch is all in the past, right?
> "if they just got 4G working consistently..."
I, Personally, would _love_ to see the carriers (looking at _you_ Comcast)
provide voice via 4G LTE with fewer (preferably 0) cases of my own speech
from 1-10 or so seconds ago competing with the other person on a call.
Halfway decent echo suppression has been around for at least 50 years,
with far less hardware.
Yeah, I know, it's no longer a hardware problem, as pretty much everything
has been punted to software. We all know software is perfect, right?
One place I worked solved the password-inconvenience problem by having an application on all the Windows machine that would allow the user to log on as any (Unix) user they wanted to be.
Another had the "network neighborhood" password be COMPANY_NAME_MONTH_YEAR (got to obey the frequently change passwords" order).
Above brings to mind two memories from the early 1970s.
A minicomputer (vendor to remain anonymous) had the nifty feature of a "AC Power fail" interrupt, which could "freeze" the current state of the machine in core memory, such that it could resume where it had been when power came up. Sadly, the interrupt would not be invoked if the front panel power switch was used to turn it off. So the least-bad way to shut down the machine was to yank the power cord.
An example of a non-power-related "unscheduled shutdown (of a task, not the whole machine) was found by a friend (like me sort of a IT wannabe) when he heard some salty language from another user in the terminal room. We were evaluating a new great-leap-forward time-sharing OS in the most logical way: turning it over for "testing" by random undergrads who had managed to justify a login.
Seems that one such user was "testing" the chess-playing program, and had just gotten it in a fork when the operator killed ("dropped") his process. We were guessing that this was a "we don't play games with expensive research systems" situation, but my friend was suspicious _and_ knew how to read the logs, where the death of that process was immediately preceded by a request from the running process for the operator to kill it. Um... isn't there a way for a process to exit? Why yes, but that would not produce a message about the operator having dropped it. This was apparently a case where the computer player, seeing itself in a fork, "kicked over the table" to avoid taking the loss. 50 some years later I wonder if modern "AI" game players also include "not in the official rules" moves.
is in fact still being manufactured, but you can't (legally) get a 6501 (Because Motorola sued and won). So I'm glad I got my 6501 before the gavel fell.
That said, it took some years to get me to drop the practice of writing code that could run on the early 650[12] with no ROR instruction, and on the newfangled ones.
Resale Value? That must have been important to the folks who broke into my house. They took the time to disconnect my Atari VCS and leave it behind while taking the TV. "OK, Boomer" decades ahead of time. Also took some old silver coins, and probably used them in a vending machine.
As for VOIP landlines, unless you provide uninterruptible power, good luck.
My recollection was "Eve" as in eavesdropper.
OTHO, when using voice rather than data I suppose one could place Yyes Saint Laurent in the middle.
His death over a decade ago might seem to present a problem, but with the sort of delays delays I have experienced with Volte, there might be traces bouncing around the telesphere.
Nice thought, but pretty much every communications device available to "common folk" is not all that trustworthy.
If the "client" lives in a smartphone, the already built-in capability to snoop the keyboard and display mean the "ends" are basically "Somebody Else's Computer"
True end to end would be my fingers to your eyes or my mouth to your ears (or vice versa) Not between two bits of software controlled by the developer, manufacturer, network provider, various government agencies, random criminals with "friends" in any of the above, etc. etc.
Of course, very few are likely to be willing to procure and manage a device less likely to be suborned. Available bandwidth for streaming is _far_ more important than staying solvent and out of the Gulag. :-)
Good chance that being found in possession of such a device is a quick ticket to that gulag.
IIRC, back quite a ways some researchers into HCF for latency pivoted to "energy delivery" in the form of laser surgery using HCF to minimize tissue damage from "waste energy". This was (according to the article I read at the time) in place of a previous system involving mirrors (but hopefully no smoke)
Perhaps MSFT is looking to make the Blue Screen of Death more literal?
Reminds me of a certain Pascal compiler that suffered (well, its users did) from a mismatch of expectations when run on RT-11 (PDP-11).
RT-11 has (had?) an odd convention that opening a file with only the disk name, not a filename, would return a file structure that referenced the physical disk (imagine any random program opening / on Unix and you get the idea)
the compiler, OTOH was a bit light on input validation, so when run without specifying any file, would open the system device Read/write,
and then abort when there was no source file named. But not before writing the boilerplate of an executable header over the boot block.
Maybe programmers should be exposed to "Trust, but verify" along with Hoare's advice on complexity.
I have been on (almost) two ends of this sort of thing.
First (Which I think I've mention before) was the time some bright spark removed my "Man On Line" tag and turned on the breaker for the roughly Austin-mini-sized Motor Generator that I was removing.
Second, while sidling down the inside of a wall (left when a rectangular space of the original building was "updated" to an irregular polygon).
I ran across a (turned on) switch on a piece of the old wall. The memory of my first experience aided the angel on one shoulder to override the devil on the other, who wanted to turn it off and see who hollered.
"Fools-proof, yes._IDIOTS_ proof no"
Boris Badenov
They made some interesting laser printers back in the day. Maybe that helped out on the "text to image" gig.
Is there a warehouse of old tech-company names somewhere, for cases like this? Or was that all handled by new tech companies buying older ones only for their horde of IPV4 addresses?
Back in the day, the 1401 jockeys on the business side of the "computer center" (A porta-shed) got a program to play music via RFI modulated by the length of data in "MOVE" instructions. Not to be outdone, the 1620 pilots on the "engineering" side reverse engineered the code, ported to the 1620, and added a percussion section, issuing appropriately timed "seek" commands.
It may help to know that these were all community-college students, with a certain amount of youthful enthusiasm. And spare time...
(The practical side I have mentioned before. Having a reliable "audio signature" to track the behavior of the code allowed us to leave the machine room for next door while a longish task was running, secure in the knowledge that the distinct whine of the "waiting for next console command" state would cue us to put our parkas on and go start the next job.)
For completeness (sound from unexpected computer systems) I must mention Ken Shirriff's blog entry about using a printer for music:
http://www.righto.com/search?q=printer+music
Was SYNC the infotainment option Ford offered some years back? The one deeply intertwingled with the whole car network? The one that could "brick" the car by "playing" an evil .mp3 file?
From the rush of "Vital Security updates" lately, it looks like bothering to check the validity (format wise) of media before attempting to "play" is still out of fashion.
That old thumb drive labeled 'Stones Royal Concert Bootleg' that you picked up in the parking lot may not be a gift from the gods (unless you count Loki).
I once read that the drafters of the U.S. Constitution were very aware of Cromwell, and what he wrought.
Some saying about it being "written by 39 men and a ghost" (Cromwell). Some other bits of wisdom on the web indicate 55 delegates, but the votes to adopt were only 39 of them. We still have the ghost, of course, for those paying attention. Most are too busy to care.
Good, but incomplete advice. Unless a fit of sanity has hit gcc developers since I stopped caring, to really
catch _ALL_ warning instances, you have (had?) do use
-Wall -ansi -pedantic
and of course -Werror
Apparently someone quite important considered standard compliance to be of lesser importance than continuing to "honor" a bug left over from some versions of the (pre-standard) Portable C Compiler.
In short (and invitation to the rabbit hole) the result of a pointer cast is not a valid modifiable lvalue
(I think I have that wording right)
Int myint;
char *myptr;
[...]
myint = *((int *)myptr)++; /* modulo some paren juggling */
[...]
Not that the gcc folks are alone in this. A very respected programming columnist lost some of my respect for flaming a compiler for having the audacity to issue a warning for this construct.
You have lived a charmed life.
Synchronized audio came to film in the 1920s, and lasted (for TV) until the early 21st century. It was there that I first noticed significant lack of sync, but not via a Digital TV. It was apparent;y a case of the networks using DTV to distribute programming, but still transmitting in traditional (NTSC in my case) analog form. I knew something was up when my old CRT-containing TV "got the bug", a year of more before DTV transmission (other than tests) for over-the-air. Synchronized audio/video is pretty rare these days.
I'm still not sure how the arcane art of audio/video sync as lost. Did the last person who had read a spec die?
If any of them get thawed and re-animated, I'd also love to have a phone conversation devoid of long-delayed (sometimes 10 seconds or more) echoes and twilight-zone worthy audio artifacts.
IIRC, some years back a court in the U.S. ruled that candidates (for a job on the police force) who scored too high on "intelligence" (yeah, I know) could be rejected on that basis. In effect "Not that one. They're too smart of be a cop".
I assume that a plausibly accurate test of ethics could be used to disqualify political candidates. As if this hasn't already been implemented.
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