Posts by Daedalus

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Two possibilities

There are generally two reasons for an American plug to have an absent ground pin. First it just came off and is stuck in a socket somewhere. Cheap stuff will do that. Second, someone removed it to fit the plug into one of the many sockets in the country that take only a hot and neutral pin. The second one suggests shenanigans of the worst kind given the location.

Incidentally, I've long expected ultra-secure establishments to go to "nothing in, nothing out" procedures where people are expected to leave everything, including outer clothes, in an outer locker room, proceed to an inner room in their skivvies, and then dress for the job. So many places just let the cleaners in and out with whatever they can carry or even put on a cart.

And to parody Douglas Adams, in some NSA location one might expect that "the difference between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete will be surgically removed from your body mass when you leave".

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

Re: Thankless task

I knew a guy who did "decision consulting" and wrote books on the subject. He was called in to fix some organizational problem, and walked into a stormy meeting where everyone was upset. He figured out the whole problem was that someone didn't get a promotion, and it involved the very role he had accepted. He gave a quick presentation and ran like the house was burning down.

Thankless task

Helen eventually became a consultant who specializes in fixing technical crises caused by teams who find themselves out of their depth.

"I get it straightened out, upgraded, expanded, and thoroughly documented," she told Who, Me?

This sounds great until you realize it involves stepping on a lot of toes, offending a lot of egos, and generally making you a pariah. Depending on how long the fiasco has been going on, there are often people involved who like it that way, thank you very much.

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

Re: "so that US companies can dominate supersonic flight once again"

"They banned Concorde on noise grounds until BA and Air France proved that Concorde was quieter on approach and departure than PANY made it out to be"

If that's true I'd hate to know how noisy they made it out to be. Back in 1980 the Concorde would be seen relatively low in the skies east of Heathrow, and once I was under the flight path, possibly near Richmond or Kew, when it came in on final approach. Well, it was like an earthquake and a hurricane arrived together. Unbelievable noise.

It was a beautiful plane to see banking over Norbiton, but I'd have hated to have lived under the path where it took off.

Chinese snoops tried to break into US city utilities, says Talos

Next stop : Workday

With this appalling fiasco of an application being pushed everywhere just so HR can have a self-inflicted pat on the back, and pretend they're not pawning their work off on everyone else, it's only a matter of time before malware gets in and sets traps ready to go off, crippling industry or education or even government.

It was once said of American schools that, if their organization and working methods had been created by a foreign power, it would have been considered an act of war. Well, yet again, America has shot itself in the foot, with the added frisson that most of the software almost certainly was created in a foreign country, with all the implications of that.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Plumbing

"Because many coding tasks involve routine implementation of plumbing, myriad libraries and automation tools exist to make sure developers don’t have to re-invent the wheel every day."

Oh yes. Whether coding at a high level, or down to bare metal, coding is mostly taking data from here and putting it there. Even Interrupt Service Routines are in that business, mostly servicing a queue of one form or another. Sophisticated Algorithms? Mostly double talk to make the drones think we're geniuses. Genii? I mean we're pretty bright and all that, but brilliance in coding mostly amounts to Keeping It Simple. Which is how I know code was not written by a bright person: it's a bloody mess.

I wonder if AI's will be spaghetti monsters too.

Re: The Great Replacement

"Translating vague requirements into usable specs."

And Rick Deckard got clues from a random photograph by saying "Enhance" over and over.

You can't uncover information that isn't there to start with. You can invent things out of whole cloth, and so can an AI (let's face it, with these current AI's, confabulation is all too likely) but you know a little more about the client/end-user (for now, anyway). With human intelligence, your feedback from the client goes into the next round of guesses. With an AI, you may start from zero every time unless the AI is feeding off some kind of record.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The best keyboard...

I have to admit of fond memories of the Teletype ASR33 keyboard, which resembled nothing so much as the chord buttons on an accordion. Something about the bounceback that helped your fingers jump to the next key. Although I should admit that at that point I was a one finger on each hand typist.

As for noise: seriously, clacky keys are a problem? Try working where the PA is blaring, the sales droids are yakking, Loud Howard in on speakerphone (yes, I did encounter a real version of the Dilbert character), and the idiot in the next cube is talking all around the point while the people on the other end of the call are seething. And old style telephone bells, and even their electronic replacements. Eee, these modern youngsters don't know when they're well off.

Of course, IBM would have the best keyboard, having created that marvel, the Selectric typewriter. Probably my wife learned on that, because even with a flat Mac keyboard she can still be heard hammering away. It's not the keyboard, it's the fingers that make the noise.

Thanks to the confusion caused by the lockdown, the vacation of the office premises etc., I came into possession of a couple of good Dell keyboards, which I intend to use until my mentis is no longer compos, which may not be far off.

Till then,

Farewell IBM PS/2 keyboard

You live on in our memories

While we still have them

(E.J. Thribb, 13 3/4)

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

Re: Divers log

On the other hand if you're in a smallish motorboat you can easily exceed hull speed and wind up riding the front edge of your wave, commonly known as "planing". It's all fun and games until you cut the throttle and the back half of the wave hits the stern and pitches the whole boat forward, as I found out the time a friend let me pilot his boat. After that it was "ease off gently".

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Neasden beckons

I'm reminded of one of Le Carre's novels where they are considering the difference between what they could offer a defecting Russian General compared to what he might have already. "A dacha by the Black Sea, and what do we have? A semi-detached in Neasden?"

Also, having glimpsed the luxurious flat of an American professor while at Uni in the UK, I toyed with the idea of using my relative wealth to enjoy similar facilities, if only for a while, back in Blighty. However, with the sky high cost of living in the UK now, compared to where I live in the USA, there was no way I actually wanted to do it. I'm pretty sure that any American landing in the UK would feel the same way. I mean, there was that astronomically priced former bus shelter of legend. At least it had a view.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Hindsight

Ah, the days of early interactive computer use. Compared to the steam-driven Teletype machines I started on (writing BASIC to a PDP-11 fronting for an ICL 4130) the appearance in select areas of campus of DECwriter II's and even VDU's was revolutionary. And of course, an opportunity to waste time playing STRTRK on the new DECsystem 10.

Being of the "I might need it later" persuasion, I may even have some of those 50-year-old dot matrix printouts squirreled away somewhere. And let's face it, without the opportunity presented by all that tech, I might never have had a software development career to retire from, shuffling instead through the stinks of chemistry.

Re: Have you hired kids and regretted it?

It'll be in BOFH first. Given the horror stories I'm surprised that there hasn't already been some threatened defenestration.

Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

A world of pure imagination

I can't wait to see all those imaginary flights to imaginary places leaving from nonexistent gates on invisible aircraft.

With fake references to made-up court cases and pleadings. of course.

AI does speak truth sometimes, of course. Unfortunately what it says about Musk and Trump is what we already knew.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Gone fission

There's an old story about the days of above ground nuclear testing in the Nevada desert.

Everybody was in place, Far Far Away, for a test. When the time came, nothing happened (but it happened suddenly!).

After much wailing, gnashing and drawing of lots, a couple of intrepid engineers drove to the test site, aware that they could be ionized vapour in an instant, to find out what went wrong. Telemetry was not a thing then, so nobody had a clue as to the condition of the Gadget.

Long story short, they found that, after thoroughly testing all the electronics and pronouncing them sound, the engineers had disconnected all their test equipment, which had in fact been putting a load on the system. Prompt removal of the load caused some kind of spike, and a breaker popped.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Like looking through a hole in a fence

That's how I used to describe the view from a CRT screen, even a larger one at decent resolution. If the engineers want hard copy, give it to them. Depending on what era we're talking about, this could be A4 paper or even A3 if the printer can handle it. And plotters, however expensive, pale in comparison to the money thrown around on engineering projects. This sounds like corporate penny-pinching at its worst, hobbling themselves to keep the bean counters happy.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Slight case of IT Aura?

This was yesterday. I had gone to the main desk at the gym to inform them that, contrary to expectation, I could not use my NFC tagged wristband to log in to their elliptical exercisers. Not one of them, I thought. Error message: No internet available, try again later. One of the desk people took my name and cell number and told me they'd call the responsible person.

I was on one of the machines, not logged in, when a charming young lady asked if I was the person complaining and what was the problem. I took my wristband, placed it on the machine she was standing near, and lordy lordy it worked! I jokingly suggested she had IT Aura, that etheric fluid that causes problems to disappear when the possessor is near the machine.

Long story short, I did get the problem to occur on another machine, and she immediately went into diagnostic screens I would love to know how to access. The machines are all on WiFi, and any cables you might see are power and television. Yes, you can watch soap opera, sorry, daytime drama while you sweat. Me, I just enjoy virtual hikes through scenery I might never visit.

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Unnatural selection

Forcing RTO out of paranoia or to shake out the people you "don't want" (but maybe really need) is a good way to ensure that your in-office staff will just be sales droids, schmoozers, climbers etc. Which is fine if you can out-source the real work to Asia, but then you've basically got a hybrid environment anyway, just with the remote people being cheaper (for now) but less reliable.

It looks good on paper to manglers, Unfortunately it takes a while for the bill to come due, and often the perpetrators have moved on by that time.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Get that sky scorcher ready

When AI threatens our existence, running on solar power, it'll be Matrix time. Be ready to become a power cell.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Remember the Watergate Scandal?

Let's remember that any halfway decent alarm system will get very annoyed and start calling in reinforcements if a door is detected as being held open for more than, say, a minute.

But of course, halfway decent is entirely too expensive for the tastes of modern management. It's a wonder they don't just put up phony alarm boxes on the outside, as I hear is now the fashion in the UK.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Sadder tales...

A now much happier redditor told of many quick fixes in his job. Unfortunately, the way he got to do those fixes was to be uprooted from his current assignment, frog-marched through the corridors, and thrown into the room where the fault occurred, whereupon he usually diagnosed the typical not-plugged-in, not-turned-on, and lens-cap-still-on faults that bedevilled the cut-rate educators working the establishment.

Since the uprooting was usually done by someone in an official uniform that tended to induce obedience, he had little choice in the matter. Also his real work was rarely acknowledged despite keeping a woefully poor setup working. He has now moved on to better things and the institution that treated him so cruelly is hopefully flailing.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Dirk Gently link?

Maybe Douglas Adams knew of this publisher, for he created the character Michael Wenton-Weeks, fondly nicknamed Michael Wednesday-Week, who always promised publication of his rather esoteric quarterly a week on Wednesday, but never followed through, preferring to continue using the money for lavish lunches etc.

Fittingly when the BBC did a radio serialisation of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", he was played by Michael Fenton-Stevens.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: No good deed …

aka "You touch it, you own it."

Never touch anything you aren't specifically told to touch, and get it in writing if possible.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

"Golf" prank

So there was this Golf program written in Basic back in a time when you could write anything to anywhere without it being traced back. And I took a dislike to it because reasons.

So I edited a line or two to detect when the file's "owner" was using it. Just asking for UserID, and springing the trap if it was him.

Whereupon a message appeared saying he'd been "sent down" as we artlessly put it in those days. Various shenanigans then erased all traces of the trap while sending a message that it had, indeed, hunted and caught the Snark.

Well, I got the message and observed him later staring disconsolately at a printout. Never did let on to him.

Another time during a course where we all had terminals and the ID's popped up on the trainer's screen as we logged in, we decided we didn't like the boring default names and substituted our own. However the list cut off at 6 names or so. Borrowing a tip from Ender's Game, I started prefixing my ID with a space so it would pop up at the top. The final time was when the trainer came in sporting a very loud tie. I changed my ID to " A Nice Tie, Dan"

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

1 MB? Luxury! Try living with 64K on RSX-11 when every page of Pascal generates 0.5k of object code. Wrangling overlays was the art of the day, but most people had no clue, especially when they coded great globs of "common" code that just sat in RAM. If I say so myself, I came up with some neat ways of dealing with that. Moving to the VAX was like sloughing off a strait-jacket.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

It was one of those "white heat of technology" things in the 1960's. There was coverage in Tomorrow's World from James Twerp et al showing two pieces of metal welded perfectly after a whizz bang cleaned off all that surface stuff and brought the two pieces together. Like things such as fluidized sand reactors, it faded from view although I'm sure they're all very important somewhere.

Meanwhile British industry kept on adding go-faster stripes to everything.

You touch it, you own it

So be careful what you touch.

Really, what was our brave engineer thinking? Even a perfect job leaves the window open for repercussions if anything, even something unrelated, goes wrong in the immediate vicinity. Printer on the fritz? Too bad, buy a new one.

Treat anything client related as radioactive, only touch if ordered to do so, in writing.

OpenAI to buy electricity from CEO Sam Altman's nuclear fusion side hustle

There's a slight issue here

Sure fusion power is more or less infinite in fuel supply, even if you're restricted to deuterium, but note the following:

At the core of the Sun, energy is generated at a rate of less than 100W per cubic meter. For comparison your body does about 10 times that just sitting around. A compost heap does about the same without needing a temperature of 10 MK and a density thousands of times greater than water.

An internal combustion engine generates power in the cylinders at roughly 50 MW per cubic meter, or 50 kW/litre.

So your fusion technique needs to be 500,000 times better than the Sun to be comparable to fossil fuels. Or you could have a reaction chamber that's 100m square and 50m high.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

A not entirely unrelated example of uber-secrecy

The Polaroid SX-70 instant camera was revolutionary even by the standards of Polaroid. Apart from its much better optics, it boasted the ability to deliver a picture in 10 seconds without the need to peel off and discard icky chemical film.

It came to pass that someone was contracted to produce a certain part for the camera. However, in order to do that the person was given no access to cameras and when the time finally came to do a test installation, they were only allowed to fumble inside a black bag that contained the camera hardware. This came as quite a surprise, but fortunately the part fitted and the contract was fulfilled.

Re: Debug by research and guess

At a recent contract, and one might say, a career ending one because I finally retired, many TLA's were being thrown around and black/red was definitely in play. In order to get up to speed with the technobabble going by in meetings, I asked if perhaps there was a glossary being maintained somewhere.

The answer was, appropriately, a TLA. That is to say, TIO - There Isn't One.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Xeeted?

Well, there's an opportunity that Elon missed. If he'd felt a bit more masculine when renaming Twitter, he could have hijacked a bit of the current nasdat for his own purposes.

NE1 4A Yeet?

I'll yeet myself out.

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

Re: High tech farming

Joker goes on the lamb

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

The cheaper option

After all, hiring competent cyber security people is expensive. As certain online tales demonstrate, the problem of security is really one of ego, incompetence and bureaucracy.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Hoary chestnut

Seriously, this is one of a set of standard stories that surface from time to time. Along with "something pressing on the keyboard", "wireless keyboard in cupboard going nuts", "part of anatomy resting on keyboard", "wireless mouse swap", "magnetic jewelry" and that old, possibly obsolete one, "water dripping from pot plants onto monitor" (modern flat screens having much smaller impact cross-section for falling water)

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

Selling their souls

When cloud computing came along, all these companies signed up, not counting on the fact that a few large suppliers were going to control access to all their data.

Now AI is going to be supported by a few large companies, and everyone who signs up will eventually face the choice of paying through the nose or trying to implement AI themselves without having anyone on board who can actually do it.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Sometimes it's good to be a jobsworth

Maybe I'm old and bitter, but faced with this kind of cockup, I would simply have said "too bad, not my job" and let the higher ups argue about it.

The rule is: the last person to touch it gets the blame.

WTF is 'deployment phasing'? One reason Cisco revenue just went backwards, is what

Oh dear

All these deployment delays have nothing to do with the suits outsourcing everything, so that they have at best skeleton crews on site. Or worse, perhaps, the dress shirt and designer jeans crowd are staring at stacks of boxes while their minions desperately phone around for any kind of help.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: Questionable resolution

That's what I would have done, if only so as not to come back to do it in the future.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Correctness and Simplicity

"If your code is complex you've either made a mistake, or you're about to make one"

That's a quote from, er, me.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Wear and tear?

Did the writer of this article take account of the likelihood that all those scrapped Chromebooks would not be quite, what is the expression, fit for purpose because of not being gently handled? Cracked screens, abused and contaminated keyboards, broken hinges, destroyed data ports and other motherboard issues, and of course the horrors of old batteries.

People and electronics are a bad mixture. It's no coincidence that in the days of photocopiers, having the copier in a locked room with a designated operator, however inconvenient it was for the "got to have it right away" brigade, improved the MTBF immensely. Now we have the same problems with printers ("How was I to know it needed special transparency sheets?").

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Beware the beehive

I never did find out what the Beehive was, but it was somewhere and we had to write code as if it were going to run on the Beehive. Or at least take account of the Beehive's data protocols. You see, it was the 80s and a world famous chemical company had been in the process control automation business for decades. So many decades, in fact, that there was a machine colloquially known as the Beehive that dated from the 60s.

Never mind that there were systems that could run whole sections of chemical plants autonomously. There was still the Beehive, and there was Fortran IV, which was the language in vogue when the Beehive went into service. And which therefore was the language in which all work had to be done. Just for good measure, the programming rules said that each statement had to have its own label number whether it was the target of the dreaded GOTO or not. Earlier writers had helpfully left gaps in the numbering to allow statements to be inserted between, but of course those gaps were usually filled up by the time I fetched up there for the worst year of my career.

Did I mention that the developers there were among the least talented I have ever encountered? There were two gurus who weren't going to let new ideas get in the way of their retirement.

Oh well, they want editing, I'll give them editing. Delete 100 statements and replace them with the originals plus whatever I needed to add, all nicely renumbered. Make that 200 when necessary. This all had to be submitted as a "job" rather than done on the fly with an editor, as I was used to by then. That's their problem.

Turn the wheel the way it goes, only more so.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Follow the writers

I just bookmark Simon Sharwood for "On Call" and Matthew JC Powell for "Who? Me?"

Random noise

Who knows what mysterious parameter was being monitored?

I'm reminded of one of Asimov's Multivac stories. The three controllers get together after Multivac "won the war" to compare notes. One admits that the incoming data was so bad he fudged it a lot, even adding random numbers sometimes. The second says that he had his suspicions about the programming, so he would adjust the output to fix it according to his thoughts. The third, being the top guy, admits that he himself had many doubts about the whole thing and occasionally resorted to the most ancient of computers.

"Heads or tails, gentlemen?"

No no no no no

That's not how you modernise an old solution running on ancient hardware. As an intern?

You find somebody who can do it outside the company. You agree on a price, get them to submit for the job, split the proceeds, then both of you disappear so there are no comebacks.

You might have to change your name.

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

Re: Great ...

My feelings exactly. Granted some people have no ability to put things into words, but that's what L1 and L2 people are for. If only they would do their jobs instead of just "the needful".

How many times have I sat there steaming while some bozo Ummed and Erred their way through what should have been a simple speech? I want to grab them by the throat and say "Talk as if it was important for people to understand you!".

Once I overheard a cubicle drone trying to contact somebody in Mexico without knowing Spanish. I offered the services of a bilingual friend, who got him through to his contact who actually spoke English. The drone then proceeded to talk in circles, wasting the effort and everybody's time.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Grant who?

For a moment I thought it was that actor on Murphy Brown. Maybe it should have been.

Oracle, SUSE and others caught up in RHEL drama hit back with OpenELA

Hats off

Didn't Red Hat put out Fedora to undercut the FOSS versions? Won't they do it again?

Lost in Translation

[日本語] just translates to "Japanese Language", not the name of the OS. Phonetically it's "Ni Hon Go".

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Wouldn't it be funny if.....

Florida Man, in addition to his other mistakes, has "sold" his Fortress of Floritude to a company "controlled" by none other that Florida Man Junior. With the expressed agreement, no doubt, that he be allowed to reside and continue all his activities, legitimate or otherwise, in that place. This is evidently to prevent said Fortress from being breached by the Evil Empire of the Law. As a bonus, he gets funds which will aid him in "campaigning" (no doubt against his imminent incarceration).

Of course, Junior, being a chip off the old block, may have ideas of his own. Including, possibly, deciding that Florida Man needs a dose of what King Lear got, sent off on his wanderings, perhaps with New York Mayor Emeritus as Fool (a part he appears to have rehearsed for in recent years).

Looking forward to Florida Man and Fool braving the blasted heath in a storm. In orange, of course.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

The 402 was 404

I'll get my coat.

Quarter of tech pros say they're considering quitting jobs in next six months

De-evolution

For some reason, competition and natural selection don't improve the intelligence level of the decision makers. If anything, they're dumber now than when I blagged my way into software development all those decades ago. And woe betide he who questions their reasons.