Posts by Phil O'Sophical

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: VMS...

You could abbreviate any cli word to its lowest unique form and, at least in the early days, everything was guaranteed to be OK down to 4 letters. No need to type "directory" when "dir" sufficed.

Fedora backs down on removing BIOS support… for now

Bricking ?

If you can recover by reformat+reinstall the system isn't bricked, merely trashed. Bricking is an unreversable transition to the state of a house brick, i.e. a permanently nonfunctional lump.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Don't look

insisted on sitting on her right foot!

And rocking gently?

Re: College Tales...

I remember Arcnet. I especially remember the hours I spent pulling up floor tiles until I eventually found the one bit of (93ohm?) Arcnet cable someone had used in the 50ohm Ethernet network and where the impedance mismatch was causing collision storms under certain load conditions.

BT signs deal with AWS with aim of speeding up digital transformation

Re: You would think BT could do it themselves.

Perhaps AWS works out cheaper.

I'm sure the beancounters incorrectly think so. By the time they learn otherwise it will be too late. Again.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

Uninterruptible Porn Supply?

Accenture announces 'Accenture Song' – not a tune, but a rebrand

Re: The 'creatives' strike again

but only in French

Unlike the big telecoms merger between GEC and Plessey, which created GEC-Plessey Telecommunications, a mouthful generally shorted to "GPT".

This always caused amusement among French colleagues, where it would have been pronounced the same as "J'ai pété" - "I have farted".

Re: Might be just an internal initiative?

To keep their drones happy…

If that's their aim, perhaps they need an Accenture Snog?

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: It won't have Bugs

And we'll need Elmers to get rid of them?

US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens

Re: Just what a grunt in a muddy trench, in the rain needs ...

"OK men, we attack in support of the landings in 30 minutes"

"Hang on,Sarge, I've just rebooted my helmet and it's downloading an update. Says the connection is poor, but will be done in only 2 more hours"

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

Re: Just how would everything being internet addressable be helpful for china?

You think that every citizen will be issued with a New IP address at birth, to ensure that the state can "look after" them?

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: You were lucky

Punched card chad was OK, it was rectangular (cf "hanging chads"), but paper tape chad was round, and slightly concave as a result of the punch operation. It could get stuck to the eyeball, requiring medical intervention.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

So what we really need is a Space Janitor Service.

Robots are creepy. Why trust AIs that are even creepier?

I remember being in a BT training centre, and being slightly disturbed by a door with the sign "AXE TRAINING ROOM".

I eventually remembered that the "system Y" exchanges were officially Ericsson AXE equipment.

Broken password check algorithm lets anyone log into Cisco's Wi-Fi admin software

Re: Anyone ?

It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

Re: Save the oceans

How, precisely, does one save an ocean? I've tried, but after a few pints even I have to recycle it.

Re: Opinion

I thought that horses couldn't puke, which is one reason that feeding them bad stuff is so dangerous.

Then again, I probably got that from a Dick Francis novel, so YMMV.

Amazon expands: Datacenter site planned for Santa Clara

Not sure I'd like to work there

Gilroy claims to be the garlic capital of the US, at certain times you can smell it from the local freeway as you drive by. They hold an annual festival that notoriously features garlic ice cream...

Stolen-data market RaidForums taken down in domain seizure

The secret service was originally a branch of the treasury, it was founded to combat currency counterfeiters.

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

Re: Where's Elon when you need him?

Litres/Hertz? Surely there's a correct Register unit for that?

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

Re: C of the '80s

Indeed, the idea of compilers having front/back ends that could be individually adapted long predates GCC. As we see all too often, people who grew up during the Linux years assume that everything in Linux is new, because it's different to Windows. They don't realise that it was almost all done before, both in the various Unix flavours and in the OSes that predated Unix.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: Because they didn't ask "Alan" before booking the flight

There might not have been The Internet, but many international companies had alternative connections via X.25 networks. Remote login was not unusual.

Electric Vehicle DC charging tripped by a wireless hack

Re: Yes another possibility...

If the car park was empty when she arrived, wouldn't the car most logically be parked in a row near the swimming pool entrance?

Re: Security is for the weak!

At 600V and 10-40A there will be lots of pretty sparks too.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Always a sound strategy, but sadly screwed up these days by IT forcing everyone, even admin accounts, to change passwords every month or two.

Outsourcing firm Serco wins £212m UK Test and Trace deal

properly aligned, going forwards.

They would have their ducks in a row too, but avian 'flu makes it tricky

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re: an oldy

Private Data is getting in his way?

Re: One from years ago...

"An impossible error has occurred"

Along similar lines: "Bob said this could never happen"

We got a code drop from an OEM which contained the error "Fuck me! Out of memory". Fortunately discovered during code review...

Re: string manipulation

Unless it's an AmEx card, so clowns who write validation code that assumes Visa 4x4 format will get failures.

It's as annoying as people that assume phone numbers only contain digits (no +) or have area codes, or postcodes are digit-only zipcodes. If you can't fully and correctly validate the format, don't try.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Re: Nostalgia

Lemmings on an Amiga has one advantage that I've not seen on other platforms - you can plug in two mice and play competitively again someone else. It can get very vicious... :-)

Next-gen Moon buggy FLEX conquers California desert, seeks lunar speed record

Reminds me of childhood soapbox derbies.

ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

Re: There is no such thing as a prototype

I've lost count of how many times I've seen people writing C in Java.

Ah yes, marketing selling the prototype as a product. We've all been there.

Still, hardly surprising that it's unfinished, 50 years on and they're still taking Requests For Comments :-)

Volcano 'shredded' submarine cable, vastly complicating repair job

Re: 90 kilometers of cable impacted

Indeed, interesting that they prefer to make 6 splices and reuse cable, rather than just replace the whole 90km with a new piece (and repeater).

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

Re: wait , what??

you can play CD's more than once?

As long as your name isn't Ethan Hunt.

China makes using cryptocurrency a crime – again

Re: But....

It's certainly generating a lot of interest.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

If we're going to continue to use gas, it certainly makes more sense to use our own than to spend more money and generate more pollution importing foreign gas, as we're currently doing.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Re: Special characters

That kind of algorithm tends to fall over when presented with non-8-bit characters, especially if the front- & back-ends aren't using the same settings.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

As long as Frank had documented the behavior ...

Such as by having the demo clearly display a "this is a time-limited demo, valid until dd/mm/yy" on startup.

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: The Great DeResignation

belting down corridors to the free drinks laid on in Meeting Room 0

Really? I thought the garden was the expected place for that, with drinks delivered by suitcase?

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

unfortunately she used the facility name which was also a printer in that facility.

Logical names, the VMS equivalent to an environment variable. Won't the same happen on Windows? Save something to "LPT:" (or is it "PRN:" ?) and I don't think you'll get a file of that name. Been a while since I tried, though.

VAX/VMS roolz ok

Didn't VMS (RMS) files also have a file header with metadata which described what the file type was, so you could see if a file was object code, indexed, stream, or whatever? The Unix-style "every file is just a stream of bytes" is why people have to hide magic numbers inline, and tools like 'file' have to make educated guesses.

This data center will be Europe’s first with hydrogen backup power

Re: A Step In The Right Direction

It does seem odd to choose hydrogen as an energy transport for backup applications, given the difficulty and expense of storing it. I can see benefits in using it for daily power, but keeping tanks of it around for years "just in case" doesn't seem efficient. A liquid fuel like (bio) diesel would be more practical.

Will we be reading an On Call article 10 years from now, about the DR failover that didn't happen because someone forgot to refill the H2 tanks?

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

In my day, the Highway Code had a special section dealing with police officers on point duty, a whole concept which has disappeared.

That's a shame. The town I used to live in had a light-controlled junction that was always jammed at rush hours, except when the lights failed (not uncommon) and a motorcycle cop from the nearby police station turned up to manage the traffic. It always flowed much more smoothly then.

The French managed to build large booleyvards which are piss easy to add cycle lanes to

They built them like that because it's much harder to build and man an effective barricade across a wide avenue than across a typical city street. Know your citizens, I guess...

Re: Here is an interesting to make traffic better in general:

a hell of a lot nicer than the concrete wasteland our cities have become

Come friendly bombs...

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

Re: Where is the UK in all of this ?

You seem to be saying that you're perfectly willing to let Google harvest and monetize your customers' personal data in order to make your business life easier and cheaper, and if the law prevents you from doing so you'll simply abandon those customers.

Doesn't sound like a company I'd want to do business with.

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

What is 'Fibre'?

What exactly is included in the term "Fibre Broadband" here, just pure FTTP, or also FTTC? I know many people who have decent speeds (20-80+ Mbit/s) via DSL or FTTC, and see no reason to move to FTTP to get higher speeds which they don't need. That would certainly affect the figures for "uptake", even when the actual availability is much higher.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

Re: Mazda's Infotainment is a pile of garbage

Also, nobody hates BMW drivers any more, we pity them. It's Audi drivers we all hate now.

That's because the BMW drivers got fed up with the hate and bought Audis, taking their driving 'skills' with them. I wonder where they'll migrate to next, Mercedes or Tesla maybe?