Posts by Kubla Cant 2845 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Not if it takes 90 min to fold a single load. I estimate that I spend as much as 10 min per week folding laundry (but then I don't fold my pants, and I don't own a "tshirt" - the spelling suggests a Russian garment). At $450/month that works out at about $600/hour. Is that the going rate for laundry-folding jobs?
those young enough that they wouldn't recognise a magnetic tape
For many in earlier generations magnetic tape was the only item of computer equipment they could recognise. Apart from blinkenlights, every film portraying a computer showed lots of the vertical tape units. With their vacuum tensioning system and the captivating stuttering motion they were the only photogenic bits of a computer.
TLO and numerous successors over the past 44 years all suffer from the same shortcoming.
A utility that generates code can only guarantee correct results if the specification is complete and unambiguous. As specifications become more complete and unambiguous, their syntax becomes more formal. A formal language is more or less a programming language. So you end up coding anyway, but in a language that wasn't really designed for the purpose.
10" studio recorded and 12" live with commentary
That solves a mystery for me. I first heard Tom Lehrer in the mid-1950s on a reel-to-reel tape that my father brought home from the lab where he worked. There was a spoken intro for each song, but this wasn't present on the LPs that I subsequently encountered. Presumably they were 10" versions. It's strange to recall that people bought 10" LPs because they were cheaper.
I recently installed Pi-Hole which zaps ads by failing DNS queries for known advertising servers. It works well, with the added benefit that ad supression covers everything on my network: all browsers, phones, tablets. As the name implies, it was originally for the Raspberry Pi, but you can run it on other Linux machines.
I'd forgotten them. Big programs running under RSTS/E on a PDP-11 had to be put together using a tool called the Taskbuilder to manage which bits would occupy memory at the same time. A thoroughly tiresome chore, but get it wrong and your subroutine calls target code that isn't there any more.
Bizarrely, the manual contained lots of cartoons showing a friendly workman with a cap and a toolbox putting overlay structures together. It's as if the guys at DEC thought they might make using Taskbuilder accessible to young children. I think he was called Tony the Taskbuilder (or maybe Terry - it's been a while).
In former times I learned that the time programming a report was usually trivial compared to the hours making it print correctly. And if you really wanted to waste your life, try doing something with printer configuration. I thought those days were over, but...
Last week I replaced all my home wifi and installed a Pi-Hole DNS server. I expected problems, but it all went swimmingly. Everything connected to the new network: two PCs, a tablet, two TVs, everyone's mobile phone, even the washing machine (why?). But then on Friday morning I clicked [Print] and got a message that the printer was offline. Looks like I'd forgotten to reconnect the nasty little black Canon thing lurking in the corner.
No problem, just use the WPS function on a wireless access point and tell the printer to connect. Doesn't work. Oh well, let's try connecting manually. This is not easy, as the printer has a tiny display with no backlight and everything has to be typed in on its telephone-style keypad*. In accordance with best practice, the wifi password is a long string of varied characters, digits and symbols. I spend the next hour searching for the manual page for the keypad, and the next several hours trying to make the printer connect. I eventually give up at 2am.
Next morning the WPS feature works as if there'd never been a problem.
*Although quite new, this printer is equipped to send faxes. They've decided to eliminate the wired network port, but keep fax functionality. That will come in handy if I ever need to contact somebody in 1995. Why don't they include Telex? Put a Morse key on the printer?
all the spinning wheel tells you is that there is not a CPU problem
In an ideal world, perhaps. But an update process that is I/O bound, as most are, is likely to run the spinner in its own thread, so it continues to update regardless. It "tells you is that there is not a CPU problem" in the sense that the CPU is still there, but that's a very small reassurance.
It's fairly common to be faced with a situation where estimating the size of a data operation (eg "SELECT COUNT(*)" with a complicated predicate) takes nearly as long as actually doing it. In those situations I have been known to display Zeno's progress indicator, where the bar regularly increments by a proportion of the remaining space, and so never reaches 100%. By contrast, Microsoft appear to have used random numbers for time remaining when transferring files: 30 sec... 2 days... 1 hour... 10 sec... 20 min.... This gave the impression that File Manager suffered from something like bipolar disorder.
AI help when searching for a solution to a computer problem is rather like having an enthúsiastic but fundamentally stupid co-worker at your elbow. He's constantly offering useless advice resulting from an incomplete appreciation of the problem and superficial knowledge gleaned from skimming Microsoft's useless help pages.
It's a perfect Dunning-Kruger simulation. General Artificial Stupidity (GAS).
We had a network of diskless (but not floppyless) workstations. All their data was stored on reliable VAX disks that were access-controlled and backed up depth, with offsite storage etc etc. But the Accounts Department insisted on storing their files on floppy disks and locking them in the filing cabinet "for security". Then they'd call us because the disks were unreadable.
I'm always puzzled by the attraction of free USB sticks. I can't imagine any other kind of low cost* personal equipment that people would avidly pick up and make their own.
On my desk the things seem to breed. Worse, they get mixed up with USB receivers from wireless mice, which also proliferate.
* Current price on Amazon < 1p/GB. They can't all be fakes. If they are, customer satisfaction is surprisingly high.
Several comments have talked about this in terms of standup meetings, but most seem to miss the essential point of standups. No chairs (or chairs that nobody is allowed to sit in). Meetings where everyone stands throughout rarely overrun. One comment mentioed people standing up to speak, but that's not a standup meeting. The ideal standup would be barefoot on a shingle beach, but that's hard to organise on a daily basis.
The worst are Zoom meetings, because it's hard to make people stand up at home. They're probably in bed, or not wearing trousers.
I used to work in an office with a vending machine that made perfectly acceptable coffee using freshly ground beans and fresh milk. Once, following a trivial milestone, a colleague said "Let's have a real cup of coffee. To my surprise, he then boiled a kettle and made two foul cups of instant coffee. In his brain, "real coffee" was some kind of performative thing defined by the action of boiling a kettle and pouring into a cracked mug.
Commercial-scale software engineering always benefits from re-use and encapsulation. Doing everything with static HTML is OK for a small number of pages. But a big site with extensive commonality and a complex UI is going to be slow to develop and hard to maintain if it's just a collection of massive HTML scripts.
Syntax errors are the least of the problems when creating HTML pages. Getting the look and behaviour to meet requirements, at all scales, takes a lot of effort (for me, at least). And then you have to change it....
Distributed as part of the free software bundle with the Osborne 1. Alleged to be better than VisiCalc - I wouldn't know, as I've never used a spreadsheet for anything demanding*.
Also a spreadsheet that ran on DEC RT-11 (or possibly TSX). I can't remember its name, but the way it thrashed the disk is unforgettable.
* Many years ago, a customer asked me to build an application in Lotus 123. I couldn't get anywhere with it, probably because of lack of skills. I advised them to let me code it in DBL, a version of DEC DIBOL for the PC, as that was the language I knew best. In retrospect, this may not have been good advice.
To my astonishment, it seems that the DBL language survived until at least December 2014, when "Version 10.3 added support for creating programs that can run on Android and iOS devices".
I can only refer you to Joe Tidy, the BBC "Cyber correspondent". He says They have "god-like" access to all the inner workings of an IT system for obvious reasons..
Mind you, I don't think Joe is really a techie. His next paragraph tells us that "End Point Protection" programmes have to be able to monitor the inner workings of computers. Back in the last century it was not unknown for reactionary UK crusties to try to insist on spelling "program" that way, but I don't think I've seen it for at least 40 years.
The cost of this incident is surely going to run into $trillions. The airport shutdowns alone will see to that. But you can bet that the CrowdStrike licence will have the usual disclaimer for consequent loss or damage in the small print.
In any case, the chances of CrowdStrike having the resources to cover the cost of having crashed the world are infinitesimal. So the world will soon have obstructive security software that's supported by a company that has vapourised.
More popcorn, please.
A few years ago I was involved in a project to present a large and complex database as a GraphQL model. The idea is that downstream users of the data don't have to know the details of the relational model, they just present a JSON template of the data they need, and the software generates SQL. Essentially a duplication of the effort that had once been put into SQL interpreters.
an eldritch spark that fused his consciousness with the computer's newly sentient circuitry
DEC made wonderful computers, but this sounds like a grim fate. Best case the computer might be an Alpha or a VAX, but the environment sounds more like a PDP/11. Imagine spending the rest of your life running RSTS/E, unable to understand anything but the word "PIP".
I too used to think "burglarize" was illiterate. But it seems that it's the correct* verb for what a burglar does. The alternative "burgle" is a back-formation based on the misapprehension that the "-ar" suffix is just an eccentric spelling of the agentive "-er" or "-or", but "burglar" dates from the 1540s, while "burgle" doesn't appear until 1869, and it seems to be a joke.
* There may be some dispute over "-ize" versus "-ise".
Horizon is a Point Of Sale system
It certainly seems to be a POS system, but I don't think that stands for "Point Of Sale".
The problem with using accounting methods to correct errors is that it depends on the recording system being reliable. If, as seems likely, Horizon just makes stuff up, it won't work.
SPM: sells a 50p stamp
Horizon: debits an account by £50
Back-office: creates a correcting journal for £49.50
Horizon: debits the account for £4950
Apparently this code is in Visual Basic 6 which seems where the max int is 65,535
(Reluctantly dredging up past knowledge of VB6)
In the absence of any type declaration VB6 will use a Variant. What the underlying type will be probably depends on the phase of the moon, but it's likely to be a float of some kind. Of course floating point arithmetic is not really suitable for accounting systems anyway.
Since it's a Variant function, you can pass it anything you like - string, date, boolean, object... and it will faithfully return something or other. Unless it errors, in which case the lack of error handling will probably make itself felt.
The judge's summing up in the class action against the PO makes it fairly clear he thought the technical witnesses from Fujitsu and the PO were either evasive or lying.
It also appears likely that the PO lawyers failed in their legal duty to reveal to the other side facts that would harm their case. This is important: a trial is supposed to be a mechanism for establishing truth, not a win-at-any-cost competition.
The unfortunate thing is that the poor old taxpayer will end up footing the bill, as the PO makes no profit and can't be allowed to cease trading. And if the lying bastards get sent to prison we'll be paying thousands to keep them there. But it'll be worth it.
"Did anyone benefit financially from the errors in Horizon or the unauthorized activities of Fujitsu employees accessing terminals remotely?"
It seems the "reimbursements" paid by the SPMs were held in suspense accounts for a year or two, then rolled up into PO trading profit (aka loss).
For reasons I can't recall, I upgraded to Windows 11 a few months ago. It's buggy junk. Several times a day copy/paste stops working, and the only solution is to restart Windows Explorer.
I've been using Windows for 30 years, since 3.1. I've used GUIs on Linux, Mac, and even VMS. The clipboard always just works, and you come to rely on it. How on earth can Windows reach version 11 with instability a fundamental service like this?
The useless Microsoft forums suggest that I look for an application is the cause of the clipboard problems, but give no idea how to identify such an application. It seems unlikely, as the applications I run are far from exotic. In any case, what kind of Mickey Mouse architecture would allow such interference?
The Post Office fiasco has all the hallmarks of an incompetent attempt to take a monolithic legacy system and tart it up to meet requirements for massively distributed transactions. Confirmed when I read that Horizon is basically an old ICL system. Lipstick on a pig.
It says a lot about Fujitsu that they claimed there were no error logs*. Whoever heard of such a thing? And they apparently allowed support staff unrestricted access to live financial data without logging that. Has anyone here ever worked on a serious system where that was allowed?
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