Posts by Old Used Programmer

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Those Facility Guys!

In an IBM mainframe shop, get to know the CE and, if possible, the SE.

I was let go in a major Reduction in Force at a Large Telecoms Company. I turned over everything I could think of that I was keeping going. I was told later by people I knew that were still there for something a year after I was let go, various things would need some attention and there was asking around "who used to take care of that?" and my name would come up. I was also told that when the person taking over from me told other people, those people gave him their condolences. Apparently quite a few of those in the trenches knew I'd be a hard act to follow.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

I once solved that sort of problem. Turned out that on the other side of the wall from the--then--top of the line Viewsonic (23", I think) monitor was a un- or poorly shielded power distribution panel. The correct fix of properly shielding the panel was off limits because it would have been too expensive. So I suggested replacing the video card in the PC with something that could drive the monitor at a frame rate other than 60 fps. The client put in a Voodoo 2 (then rather obsolete, an therefore inexpensive) cranked the frame rate to 85 (avoiding an obvious beat frequency) and was very pleased with the steady screen.

Philadelphia tree trimmers fail to nip FTC noncompete ban in the bud

Then there is California...

The the best of my knowledge, in California, you can be required to sign a non-compete contract, but the company can't enforce that if you leave. So...it's functionally illegal. If that works in California, I can't see why it'd actually be an issue anywhere in the US.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Feh... 110F is nothing. I've been outside in 122F.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: The next....

Rather a long time ago, I was working on a project to collect data to enable the company to do longitudinal studies of health safety of their workforce. The intent was to hold the data for life-of-emplyment plus 50 years. At the time, I pointed out that they were talking about holding data, at a minimum, twice as long as commercial computers had been available. So I asked what data media they were planning to store this data on?

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Crows: It starts at the top

Many years ago, I found out what the policy at the University of California at Berkeley had for policy to get a personal parking spot on campus. It was "win a Nobel prize".

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

You mean project Dynasoar?

Oracle changes its tune with HQ move to Music City

Re: We want to be a part of a community where our people want to live

And the state legislature is on the verge of passing a bill to allow school teachers and admins to carry concealed guns as a way to prevent school shootings. Yeah...*that's* going to be popular with families with kids...

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Do sheep care about electric dreams ?

The grease in the wool is lanolin. go to the nearest drug store to see how much you pay for what the sheep produce for free.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: What ?

San Quentin is a California state prison. His sentence is a Federal one. Almost a pity that Alcatraz is long closed.

Re: What ?

The "close to the Bay Area" is probably meant to mean "close to where his parents live." Given some of what else has come out, I'm not sure that would lead to beneficial influences...

CNCF boss talks 'irrational exuberance' in an AI-heavy Kubecon keynote

Regisdtration nightmares...

Those references to con reg failures are the nightmare of anyone who has ever run one. I've been running con reg for a mid-sized gaming con for years. I've seen my share of disasters, but--so far--none that meant that I couldn't put badges on people in a reasonably timely manner. Granted, I'm working on a much smaller scale--1700 people this year--but I could probably scale what I'm doing up to 12,000, given a big enough budget and staff.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Say, what? The leap-day-every-four-years is part of the *Julian* calendar, and that dates back to Julius Caesar. The correction that makes on century years leap years if they are evenly divisible by 400 is the correction that was introduced with the Gregorian calendar.

If only it was that simple...

The English-speaking world changed in 1752. Catholic countries changed in 1582. In places where Orthodox Christian churches dominate, civil calendars changed at various other years. Greece, for instance, didn't switch until 1923. At least some Orthodox (e.g. Russian Orthodox) churches still use the Julian calendar as their liturgical calendar.

All of this has led to one of my favorite questions... If it is claimed that someone was born on 29 February 1900, can that be true? Lots of people have such a poor grasp of the Gregorian calendar that they don't see why there is a problem. Those that do understand the calendar ask, "Where were they born?"

India’s homebrew RISC-V CPU goes on sale in new development board

Not the only comparison

That Indian RISC-V board has specs that are a lot closer to an RPL Pico MCU--as are the suggested uses--but has a minimum price 5 times higher.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

My late wife made the transition from typewriter to computer--by way of the MTST AND MTSC--to the point that she wrote an entire novel using vi and nroff.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Many years ago, my late wife had a temp secretarial job at the UC Berkeley Space Science Lab. One of the people there came to her with an MS Word question. She said, "I know this isn't rocket science because I'm a rocket scientist..."

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Shaky location

Talking about big things in basements... When I was a student there was a motor-generator set in the basement of the EE building, Cory Hall. The DC output side was 1000v at 980A.

Re: Curious 6000kva?

More like 4.2MW. Multiply VA figure by 0.5 * square root of 2 to get W.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: GUIs were and are intended to demystify the computer

First time I ever encountered a Mac, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. "Double clicking" is not intuitively obvious. (And, no, I couldn't look it up in the manual. The owners of the Mac didn't have the manual yet. It was a test and evaluation system owned by UC Berkeley.)

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

Try "cal 09 1752". Then figure out why the output is correct.

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

Check out the "apropos" command.

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

I can give it a shot...

vi is dual mode. You're either in command mode or append mode. In append mode, what you type goes into the file. So...<esc> gets you out of--or makes sure you're out of--append mode. Then, because vi is built on top of a line editor (which is why it can do global commands), you use ':' to tell it you're going to issue a line command. Followed by 'q' (quit) and '!' don't save, just do it. Unless I've screwed things up, I'm much more likely to use '<esc>:wq'.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: Resilience and redundancy

Some years ago, the University of California at Berkeley had two backbone lines to somewhere on the US east coast. The contract required independent routing of the lines. One day, a farmer in New Jersey took out both lines with a backhoe. To the best of my knowledge a significant amount of money changed hands in compensation for both lines being in the same place, contrary to the contract.

Raspberry Pi OS goes goth

Re: Why dark mode

You might be surprised. There are people that have been using them as "primary" desktop systems. Some have been doing that as far back as the Pi3B, and it became more common with the Pi4B. That trend will most likely accelerate with the Pi5, as the specs aren't that far off an entry level x86 PC.

Re: My Pi5 arrived today. One happy bunny

I got one today, as well. Actually, it's the second one I ordered, but the first to arrive. The first--pre-ordered--is waiting on the reseller getting in some black/grey cases.

UK govt finds £225M for Isambard-AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia

A bridge how far...?

I presume these various systems are named after Isambard Kingdom Brunnel.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Most-Inappropriate Computer Repair Tool

I knew a retired master machinist whose motto was, "Never use force. Just get a bigger hammer." On one job he worked on, they were putting together a press-fit pipe...6 feet in diameter. The "bigger hammers" were two guys with 100 lb. sledges driving the fitting home.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

I make considerable use of fruity named company computers. Just not *that* fruity named company.

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Re: <Shrug>

As regards "most people can't install Linux"... The Raspberry Pi folks have a solution to that one. It's still in beta, but if you update the EEPROM on Pi4B/Pi400, just put in a blank uSD card, connect to the internet and you'll get prompted to install the OS. While that feature will--I'm sure--be in the Pi5, I don't know if it'll be there right out of the box. Still, it'll probably be in the EEPROM as it comes off the production line within the next year. (And, if it comes to that, the Pi5 is probably enough machine for 90-95% of all users. Had a chance to play with one over the weekend.)

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

Re: A quick question

For code I wrote for companies, no idea. I retired a decade ago. However, I have a convention registration system that I wrote in 2002 (to run on a Dual Opteron 240 running SuSE 9.2) that I'm still maintaining and using for con reg. Now running on a Pi4B-4GB running PiOS. I'll probably update the hardware next year. Not because there's any problem with the current hardware, but some of the features and add-ons for the Pi5 will make for a neater package.

Russia to ban all VPNs – again – says senator

Re: Everyone's at it..

Well... No, actually. Hilary Clinton got about 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016. Biden topped him by about 8 million votes in 2020. It the 18th century Rube Goldberg contraption of the Electoral College that let Trump win on 2016 and lose in 2020. Biden's EC vote was about the same as Trump got in 2016....and then claimed it was a "landslide".

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Black screen

My home-brew alarm clock has both of those features. But that's because it's based on a Pi2Bv1.2.

Re: Landscape/portrait

I was once helping out as the support (is the software installed? is the network working? is everything plugged? if "yes" to all, go sit in the back of the room and wait for something to break) for the trainer to test the *training* instructions on a naive user. Because everything was working as it should, this left me to just sit and observe. The trainee was having a terrible time using the mouse. When there was a break, I went to the trainer and informed her that (a) the trainee had a death grip on the mouse and (b) the trainee appeared to trying to rotate the screen pointer by rotating the mouse. After the break, the trainer worked her way around behind the trainee and checked, then went to back to the usual spot and launched into a lecture on how the mouse worked and that you *couldn't* rotate the screen pointer. The trainer gave me very thorough thanks at the end of day for uncovering why the trainee was having so much trouble.

And here I remember when having a *flat* display was a top-of-the-line option (instead of one that bulged toward to user).

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

Randall Garrett claimed to have been at the lunch with L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Campbell when the exchange took place.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Re: For readers outsie the US

US 1 (or parts of it, anyway) started life as the Boston Post Road.

The other requirement for Interstate highways is to have enough clearance under overpasses for a tank on a transporter to go through. As tanks have gotten bigger, older Interstates sometimes get overpasses re-built for more clearance. (The four in the town where I live got re-done by raising them about 18 inches within the last coupe of years.)

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

The doctor probably needs to think about what he says when someone answer the phone. I get calls that are obvious recordings that start with, "this is a call from your utility company." My utility company starts with "This is <name of company>." Therefore, the former start is clearly spam.

I refuse to give them any data they don't already have. I would have stopped at the "you have the wrong number."

I get calls for my late wife. I tell them that she is no longer at this number. If they persist, I tell them that I do not have a new number for her. If they then try to pitch *me* for whatever scam they're on about, I have no compunctions about how to deal with them.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Unique keys

Actual Social Security cards have text on them stating that they are not to used for ID purposes. I pointed that out to a bank official when he asked for mine as verification. He said that impersonators almost never thought to carry a matching SS card. Might be different now. The late 1960s was a more innocent age.

Re: Unique keys

He missed "All names, when rendered in the Latin alphabet have at least one vowel."

Re: Unique keys

Then, of course, there is Iceland, which is still using patronymics.

Re: Unique keys

My maternal grandfather had a hyphenated last name (Ravn-Jorgensen). He dropped the hyphen and following when he came to the US through Ellis Island and later changed his last name because no one could properly spell or pronounce it (Ravn to Rawn).

My son's fiancee used a stage name, but (like so many aspiring actresses) lacked funds, so my son legally changed his name to the surname of her stage name, and when they married, she changed her name for free.

Re: Unique keys

My wife hated her middle name, so when we married, she just dropped it and used her (prior) last name as a middle name/middle initial. My mother had a second middle name, but I never saw or heard of her using it.

Re: Unique keys

My uncle (my father's older brother) got the same name as my grandfather. As did my cousin, and--by now, so far as I know--a couple more generations.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Needs to be a floow up...

I look forward to a report on how the conference(s) go. Do the organizers have plans in place if they lose their (financial) shirts?

FYI...the cost of function space in hotels depends, in large part, on how many room-nights get booked and picked up. If you can't get people to show up and pay for hotel rooms, the areas in which you hold the convention get to be *very* expensive.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Or any official RPF PSU from the Pi2B (5V, 2A) onwards. Pi3B was 5V, 2.5A.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

There are others....

Don't forget the data entry supervisor and the IBM System Engineer for your installation.