Posts by big_D

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

Re: office chairs from hell

1950s H&S standards, i.e. hardly any, plus playing a prank on the newbie... Could have been a fatal one though, he was very lucky.

Re: noise. Or the lack of it.

We had a line of VAX 11/780s in the mid 80s. A DEC engineer came out to do a memory upgrade on one of them. All the jobs were shifted from the affected machine and it was shutdown (console said it was shutdown and the power could be turned off). The DEC engineer disappeared behind the boxes and threw the power breaker on the wall... And nothing happened, he reappeared and the ops sitting at the console looked at him questioningly. Then the screams started, from the next VAX in the line, the one where all the users and jobs had been pushed from the machine getting the upgrade, he had thrown the wrong breaker!

Re: office chairs from hell

My father worked for a company that did a lot of the overhead electrical pylons during the 50s and 60s in the UK. When he was an apprentice, one of his first "field" assignments was a downed power cable in a field after it had rained. All the others got out of the van and put on wellies, my father didn't have any and didn't know better... Until he took a step into the field and got blown off his feet! The power was still running through the downed cable!

We have offices in America, where the UPS alarms go off every time it rains or it is very windy...

The alarms on the European servers have only gone off in one location, once, in the last 6 years, apart from the times we've replaced the batteries.

We had an AS/400 at one place I worked. The APC UPS said the batteries were 100% on the weekly self-test. Then we had a power failure and the batteries held for a whopping 2 seconds, before the power dropped completely. All the batteries were dead, but the UPS said they were all healthy and 100% charged! Needless to say, after that the tech in charge of the UPS didn't rely on the self-test and did regular load tests, after putting in a redundant UPS. When the AS/400 came back up, it had lost one of its DASD's, the drive had been running for so long the bearings had dried up and as soon as they cooled down, they seized solid. That was an expensive lesson.

Our little IBM PS/2 Novell Netware server in the corner carried on merrily during this, its UPS didn't have any problems.

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

Great time to buy?

Doesn't that come under insider trading rules, if he tells people to buy, just as he is changing the rules that will make the market rebound?

Pot, Kettle, black!

over a "lack of respect" shown by Beijing

ROFL, sorry, what? Trump shows a complete lack of respect to the rest of the World, then complains when the rest of the World says "f' you!"?

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

Re: DOGE incompetence

Unlikely, you don't let your core systems anywhere near the Internet, especially if they are from "1979"... They are firewalled to hell and back and as the OP says, SOP is to use an intermediary database that is updated at regular intervals and a webserver to handle the web pages themselves.

School children?

Is the whole US Government being run by petulant school children?

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Abuser doesn't like being abused...

No joke: Microsoft foolishly published inaccurate price list on April 1st

Re: E&OE

Shops were different and the price on the shelf cannot be higher than the price paid at the checkout. But company price lists and brochures often had printing errors and often came with errata sheets, it was just too expensive to reprint hundreds of thousands of copies of catalogues, brochures etc.

E&OE

I remember every price list and offer, when I was younger, had E&OE stamped on it somewhere (Errors and Omissions Excluded), meaning if there was an error on the price list/offer, it wouldn't be honoured.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: I feel liberated already...

If you have a negative balance of trade, maybe you need to start making products that other countries want to import.

E.g. US vehicles, the president ranted about imports of VAG, Mercedes, BMW etc. and that the EU doesn't import many US models. Well, the US companies make a lot of their cars in Europe to start with, and they make for the European market - smaller, more economical cars that fit on the generally narrower roads, with tighter corners. Ford has a large market share with their EU models, but. Ford F150s and co. just don't make any sense over here. There are a few around, but nobody really wants them, because you can't drive them in the city and you can't park them anywhere, because they are too big for the parking spaces.

Likewise with food, Trump got upset last time that, for example, imports of chicken and beef were rejected, because they were not fit for human consumption. Instead of making US producers improve their standards, so that the food is safe to eat, he threatened the EU telling them they need to reduce their standards to accept US chickens. Likewise the beef mainly comes from genetically modified stock, which is illegal in the EU, again, instead of getting the suppliers to breed more "natural" cattle, he whined about the unfairness of ensuring the beef met the standards set for human consumption...

Re: I feel liberated already...

Those Penguins are communists, just look at Tux supporting those lefty FOSS trolls! :-D

China’s chip champ Loongson teases trio of new processors for lappies, factories, maybe servers too

Re: Good for the whole world

Brexit applies to the European Union, not Europe...

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: So, we have finally come full circle

I've been saying this for years.

I loved a DEC VT100 connect to a VAX in 1980, sitting in southern England and chatting to operators in Houston, Texas. That was thrilling for school-boy me, when I got to go around the computer room of the oil exploration company where my mother worked.

Then I got my own computers. They were great, considering I couldn't afford a VT100, let alone a VAX! But in the intervening time, PCs have made terminals and time sharing redundant, but now the companies want to claw back timesharing, because it means more money, not a better experience.

The Link box is as expensive as a half decent desktop PC for the office, but you then have to pay 100€ a month to actually get a reasonable spec virtual PC to connect it to... Yeah, er, no!

Just got a leasing offer. An equivalent to the 102€ a month Windows 365 configuration costs 12-15€ a month.

The Link + 1 Month Windows 365 buys you a fairly decent compact desktop... I'm not seeing the benefit.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

When I did my CSE in Computer Science, my teacher proudly announced he would be taking the exam with us! There were 2 of us in the class that had Commodore computers at home and were already fairly familiar with how to program them, even if I only had a VIC20, not a PET. I grabbed the system manual, which included a lot on machine code and sys calls.

Within a couple of weeks, the teacher was doing the history of computing part of the course and Alan and I were coaching the other pupils on the practical side of writing programs. Although I was only doing CSE, I got several As (anonymously) for O-level projects as well. One of the pupils needed a lot of help and just to make sure he read my code and understood, I put in a copyright notice at the end, I managed to give him a hint about that just before he handed the project in for marking and he removed the lines, with a very red face!

PHP Developer...

I spent New Year at a friend's place in North Germany, I was living in the South at the time. He started a new job on the 2nd January and I had just met a girl where he lived and as I was between contracts and waiting for confirmation on the new one, I was spending a couple more days at his place...

He rang up in the late morning and asked if I could do PHP and whether I wanted a couple of weeks work, his new employer was looking for someone? YES, of course I wanted a couple of weeks work in the area!

I had an interview the next day... I quickly researched and found LAMP, installed it on my PC and went to w3schools... By the end of the day I had a basic website up and running in PHP and had taught myself a few basic bits of JavaScript (I had developed in C, COBOL, VB, C++, 4D, FORTRAN, Pascal, Jaca and a bunch of other languages over the year. so there wasn't anything terribly new with PHP or JavaScript, except they weren't very structured).

Aced the interview the next day and started 2 days later. Luckily I was working on an existing project, so I could look through the existing code. It started well, I was holding my head above water... Then there was a big problem with one of their eShops (they built shops for big customers, mostly in the clothing industry). Every time the customer's site appeared in the PayPal newsletter, the site collapsed and the dbadmin spent his time restarting MySQL ever 2-3 minutes. They saw I knew SQL Server and called me in to analyse the problem.

I'd never used MySQL before, but I quickly dived into the documentation and started looking at the code. They were busy adding more and more fields to the indexes, in the hope it would speed up - the code to call up the menu took around 60 seconds, when the server was under load (250 users across 3 front end servers and 1 SQL server on the backend). I quickly came to the conclusion that the coders had never learnt how to write SQL queries and were just writing them as if they were being interpreted by a human, starting with the biggest dataset and whittling it down through additional clauses in the WHERE statement, until they got what they needed.

I just turned the query on its head, started with the most restrictive table and built out from there. The query time dropped from 60 seconds to 0.01 seconds and the 3 front end servers could cope with 750 parallel transactions without breaking a sweat... The company was so impressed, they offered me a permanent position - the first person to not be on a rolling 1 year employment contract.

I went on to write a tracking system for their photo studios, which were getting hundreds of products a day to photograph for the shops, brochures and adverts. It was fast, simple and worked flawlessly... I documented it as I went and the PHPDoc generated around 1,500 pages of documentation on using the various classes APIs I'd written. I left the company soon after. About 5 years later, a new dev added me as a contact on LinkedIn and thanked me for the documentation, he had taken over the project and it was still going strong.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Re: Pointless

They need to sort out what is already in place before expecting people to stump up more cash for something that they likely don't need.

That is a major difference to here in Germany, where you get 5G automatically if you take out a new contract with one of the 3 carriers - some MVNOs want 5€ for 5G and double the speed of the standard LTE line.

If you have a 5G device, you get 5G coverage, if the device is only LTE, you get LTE coverage.

But, on the other hand, who needs the higher speeds, when they are only streaming music or videos? LTE is more than fast enough for that, and that is all that a majority of people are doing with their data.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: Slower and harder to use

At the moment, new means "we've removed all the features you've relied on for the last 30 years and around which you have built your workflows, and we have added new garbage nobody needs, oh and we've built in ads that look like emails!"

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

Re: However ...

Tell me which part of it is illegal to output incorrect information about real persons?

I have been saying for years, outputting incorrect information is illegal and these companies need to solve this problem before they start pushing their systems on the public. It is the same as the copyright violations instead of licensing the information they use, like everybody else, they want exemptions because they are too important and paying the licences would affect their bottom line... If the cost of licenses isn't calculated into the bottom line, they didn't set up their business model properly. Likewise, if their products are in violation of the law, they should be pulled off the market until they can comply.

Ford had to pull the Pinto from the market, when it was shown that the fuel tank configuration could lead to explosions in low-speed impacts, my last 4 cars were all recalled because there were defective parts that could cause accidents or break the law, this is no difference, the LLM is defective and can cause damage, it should be fixed. OpenAI should invest the money on developers instead of lawyers trying to make them exempt from the law...

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

Re: Given this....

I keep trying to turn it on, but it keeps telling me it isn't available...

Re: Given this....

On the other hand, I waited 3 years for the Knightrider game to appear, GTA VI is at least half a decade late, our ERP supplier has been promising fixes to bugs for 18 months, some of their updates were so bad we had to sit them out (their tech eventually complained that it had taken a whole weekend to install the missing 18 updates, we pointed out that it was his company's development team that caused the extra work)...

Siri being a little behind schedule isn't that uncommon in IT circles, good, we are due to get the first Apple Intelligence features in April, so we haven't seen anything yet. And, to be honest, I'd rather all AI companies held back on chucking out their error prone models and get them working reliably, before exposing them to the public...

I'm not saying that Apple didn't do anything wrong or shouldn't have addressed the problem sooner, but this sounds like it is just a matter for the Advertising Standards body, whichever agency in the US that is, to deal with, not private lawsuits...

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: MS AI running out of steam?

Yes, but do people want AI to slice their bread?

Oh, go stick it up your nose!

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

New login

Interesting, both my wife and I got a notification to reauthenticate ourselves on Sunday 2nd March on our iPhones and iPads.Going into Apple Mail settings and re-authenticating worked on the second try. I haven't seen any outages since. I just logged in on the web and it is showing the same email that is shown on iPhone and macOS.

But, in this case, it is Apple Mail with the private outlook.com accounts that isn't working, not the Outlook App for iOS.

Re: Dump Outlook and replace it

We are talking about the email service, not the client here... It is the email account not working with Apple Mail that is the problem, not the Outlook App for iOS.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Not a very bright boy...

It is a shame, the previous version was written in COBOL for UNIX in the 80s and converted to Windows and Microfocus COBOL at the end of the 90s. It could cope with 100 users on a single server (application, database and terminal server, 4 cores, 32GB RAM), the new system requires 3 terminal servers (8 cores & 128GB each), an application server (8 cores, 64GB) and a SQL Server (8 cores, 64GB) and is 10x slower than the old system... :-S

Re: What?

It sounds like our current Java based ERP system, to be honest.

Re: Not a very bright boy...

It sounds like he also worked on the ERP system we use... That is written in Java, spawns thousands of processes and brings the system to its knees, so the users can't work...

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Such awful interop

My point exactly, I guess I should have used the /s at the end...

Re: Such awful interop

Moving away from horses and buggies is a big ask when they have been so central to the field of human transportation. This means that if there is gonna be a move towards internal combustion then it better be for a good reason.

HPE revenue outlook feels the thump of Trump tariffs

Re: Tariffs are a tax raise

The problem is, everything is just in time these days, which means those huge warehouses of parts, finished PCs and servers that used to kick around in are much smaller, or non-existent today. Ramping up production and buying/renting space to store the products is going to be expensive as well.

Despite Wall Street jitters, AI hopefuls keep spending billions on AI infrastructure

Re: Distortion field

My 2014 car came with a GPS navigation system built in, it was included in a bundle of features that I actually wanted - Bluetooth, handsfree etc. I've used it, maybe, a dozen times since. I'm just glad it was a 1 time payment as part of the entertainment system. I've never bothered to update the maps.

But car manufacturers don't want phone integration (look at GM, for example). They want to own the data in the car and rent all those features to you, something that goes out the window, if you are using a smartphone... It will backfire, of course. People want their smartphone to work in the car and the car is something most will keep for 10+ years and those electronic dohickies will have no support after about 3 or 5 years...

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

I saw them at Wembley for the Magic Tour. Electrifying live.

Still the best concert I ever went to, and the "warm up" bands weren't too bad either, The Alarm, INXS and Status Quo...

I'm with you on Autotune, modern pop music is like saccharine, much too sweet. I find a lot of modern music simply headache inducing. There are some good singers around and I do enjoy some modern music, but the general "pop" stuff is just sickly sweet diabetes coma inducing stuff.

That said, I was never really a U2 fan, a couple of their tracks were okay, but it isn't a band I could sit down and listen to a whole album.

Broadcom starts beta for VMware Cloud Foundation 9, the release it reckons will douse user anger

Re: too late

We are just starting our journey. We are decommissioning one site, which doesn't need local infrastructure any more - all central workloads in the central data center, plus some M365 thrown in for good measure - and moving that infrastructure into the main data center and putting Proxmox on it for testing and initial non-critical workloads, then the plan is to expand that platform out...

VMware splats guest-to-hypervisor escape bugs already exploited in wild

Encrypted LUNs...

We had an infrastructure consultant visit yesterday to discuss plans for the coming year.

Several of his customers have had VMware vCenter/ESXi exploited in recent months. The last one, they encrypted the start and end point of the LUNs attached to VMware, making them invisible. The customer got the decryption script (VMware host script), which had them back up and running within half an hour of receiving it from the hackers.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: Keeping a backup...

We had version control, I had booked the code out, but, because I had started work on the code, but it wasn't compilable, because it was incomplete, when I had my brainwave, I couldn't book it back in, so I made a local backup, in case my idea didn't work and I had to go back to what I had started...

Keeping a backup...

I was working on a COBOL based finance system in the late 1980s, running on a VAX. I booked out the code I needed to adjust (it was part of the preparations for the Y2K, turning 2-digit years into 4-digit years). I did some work and then had a brainwave...

So I stopped what I was doing copied the .cob files I was working on to .cobol, then went back to the .cob files and re-wrote the code. 2 days later, I had tested the code and the way I had made the changes was better than what I had originally started, so I deleted the .cob files... NO WAIT! GAH! I deleted the actual changes! I had to copy the .cobol back to .cob and start all over again. At least I knew what I had done the first time around, so it only took a few hours, not 2 days, to write the code again, in fact I came up with some other improvements along the way as well and the code was even more efficient...

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

I prefer Sergeant Porno and Inspector Bribeasy, personally, but they wear the wrong uniform...

Bribeasy: Right, Porno, we'll shown the Chief how intelligent I am!

Porno: Yes Sir, you get the tape measure and I'll get the two short planks!

Re: FORMATS

Most of the people I know use Zwei, but use Zwo when reading out telephone numbers or long strings of serial numbers etc.

Re: FORMATS

It is often used when reading out telephone numbers, for example.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: In any unstable system with a feedback loop.....wild output swings

The problem is, you use something and it starts providing answers that look right, in a domain you already know, then it gives a totally silly answer...

We are replacing a few hundred PCs this year and I was going through the list of some of the PCs that weren't fully documented when they were rolled out... So I was asking the AI "which Intel processor does PC manufacturer and model use". For the first 5 attempts, the answers looked correct. For the 6th attempt, I wanted to know what the PCs used that were rolled out last year by an ex-employee that didn't really believe in documentation... The AI answered "Core i3 2xxx"! I'm really very certain that Dell isn't currently selling any PCs with 2nd generation core processors! But that had me then go back and double check the previous 5 answers, which were correct.

But this was in a domain where I knew roughly what answers I should be getting - in this case, it was a question of whether the processors were 12th or 13th generation - but what if it had made such a huge mistake in a domain where I wasn't looking for confirmation, but was looking for new information about something I didn't already know?

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Funny coincidence...

Funny, half an hour ago, I was double checking the status of some of our laptops on the Dell Support website.

I put in the TAG and called up the specification of the laptop and one line item in the BoM (Bill of Materials) caught my eye:

Item Description

57154 Service Charge,Software, Windows 98,Fully Integrated System Test

Erm, that is a 2021 laptop and Dell are still doing a fully integrated Windows 98 test on it? :-D

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Twister

As the HP was going more overboard, I thought, hmm, fake audit to dump on the boss... After over 30 years reading Simon's rantings, I'm fully in the BOFH zone.

If you don't mind, I've just finished adding this to my offline BOFH Tome, "The Complete Bastard" and I'm going to start again at the beginning...

Genesis (Striped Irregular Bucket #1)

I'm really bored. You know how bored you get when work's going on and on and on, and nothing interesting is happening, and you're listening to a radio that picks up ONE station on FM, and it's always the station with the least records in the city, about 5, and one of them is "You're so Vain" which wasn't too bad a song until you hear it about 3 times a day for a year, and *EVERY* time it plays, the announcer tells you it's about Warren Beatty and who he's currently poking, someone you'll never sniff the toe-jam of, let alone meet, let alone get amorous with. And EVERY time someone mentions Warren Beatty, someone says that he used to go out with Madonna too, and have you seen "In Bed With..."

Singapore says Nvidia's astounding local sales don't mean it's the source of DeepSeek's GPUs

Re: Tesla FSD and bus lanes...

Worse is lane assist. A local bit of road here is notoriously bad.

I've driven along it with Assist from Nissan, Audi, VW, Skoda, Ford, Kia and Tesla. ALL of them try and follow the tar-strip that was put down during a repair to the surface, straight into the crash barrier!

Likewise, an offramp further along, the same sort of tar strip, I was driving my daughter's boyfriend's new Skoda RS and as I pulled off the dual-carriageway, the lane assist tried to steer me physically to the grass bank and back down onto the dual-carriageway! I had to physically fight the steering to stop it crashing!

I'll stick to the assist my Qashqai has, it just has a lane departure warning, which beeps but isn't connected to the steering.

What does it mean to build in security from the ground up?

Re: What it is, exactly, that’s unique about security as a system requirement?

We were programming in house for systems used to manage power stations, missile systems, radars etc. The code had to be efficient (due to the systems of the time) and robust and secure.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: This, we're told, is progress

And they can put in price creep as well. We don't have freeview satellite at the new flat, so we have TV over IP... 250 channels for 9.99€ a month, only it has gone up to 11.99€ this month...