Posts by G.Y.

Nasdaq's 32-bit code can't handle Berkshire Hathaway's monster share price

Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

In binary FP, 0.1+0.9 (&suchlike) is not guaranteed to be 1.0

1/10 Re: Use of floating point numbers ?

1/10 + 9/10 is just as bad. And many customers have 10 fingers on their hands, think base 19 should just work.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

In NYC, the law of the Medes&Persians restricts the number of sockets, seemingly on the assumption that each socket powers a 'fridge+-.

When you have a few laptops, iPhones, ..., the only way out is lots of power strips

The apartment building's super does this in spades

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

Re: Going out for a curry...

what is a cow ork ?

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

Re: no such thing as a stupid question?

USMC: "The only stupid question is the question you don't ask!"

US Supreme Court rules teens cussing out schools on social media is protected speech

not employer Re: The bigger question

The school was not her employer

'Condolences on the death of your conscience' says card from Indonesian delivery drivers to local Uber clone after payments slashed

also Re: Good on them

also, when I use Curb (the NYC taxi app) and something goes wrong, Curb is not responsible for no nothing -- they tell me to go to the TLC, gripe there; very slow process.

When a Lyft ride goes wrong, I gripe, driver gets a rocket (been there ....t-shirt)

Huawei flings open the doors of its third privacy and security transparency centre

hostage

China takes hostages from time to time (ask Canada); would you want to go there, possibly piss of the party's cousin-in-law?

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

Hoare Re: Possibly the smartest words ever spoken.

Tony Hoare has a para on this in his Turing award lecture

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

undeveloped Re: Trusting trust

If the OTP is sent on undeveloped film, it can still be intercepted -- but the recipient will know it has been

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

666 (feet) Re: Serial printer fun

= the number of the beast

Michael Collins, once the world's 'loneliest man,' is dead. If that name means little or nothing to you, read this

Re: Well...

and the 1st one (until Eve was created)

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

IBM PC

When IBM tested the PC user manual on newbies, it said "take the diskette out of the envelope. Some of then took the round thing out of the square thing.

IBM rewrote the text to make it unambiguous.

Re: The endless story

Standard text: "If you make something foolproof, there's always a fool that is bigger than the proof"

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

Re: Not a translator

When I would make a mistake in Dutch grammar, the Amsterdam cashier would just answer in good English

Intel offers to produce car chips for automakers stalled by ongoing semiconductor supply drought

Re: Automotive qualified parts take a long to time

Parts for cars have higher qualifications than MILITARY -- forget commercial

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

scan Re: documented Communicating with only obscenities?

managed to scan my copy:

At a symposium I attended in

Canada, Peter Vigor, then head of the Sandhurst Soviet Research and Study

Centre, was asked how a Soviet NCO might tell one of his men to do some

simple thing. His sample order contained, I think, seven words, five of them

variants on the soldierly expletive which the Russians, in a true spirit of

democracy, use freely through the ranks. This is a record I have only once

heard equalled. Working on a muddy side-slope, one of my Centurion crews

had just got a thrown track back on and tightened, when the track-adjusting

mechanism came away. Falling back into the mud with the 3-foot spanner

and its contents on top of him, the driver uttered the immortal phrase "The ****ing ****er's ****ed, **** it!" Perhaps Peter Vigor too was

indulging in a touch of poetic licence.

documented Re: Communicating with only obscenities?

General R Simpkin's "race to the swift" has some documented examples (end of his "deep operations theory" book; p.53 of paperback)

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Re: M-16 If China tried to take over Taiwan

even better -- do it while the fab is running at full blast

M-16 Re: If China tried to take over Taiwan

Fire 25 M-16 bullets at a piece of Fab, and it's a total write-off

Pentagon pal Microsoft to supply US Army with 120,000+ HoloLens units in contract somehow worth 'up to $22bn'

s/.../... Re: Just a natural evolution

delete "this day", replace by "that"

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

== Re: Sanitising user input

should be ==, not = (first =)

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

I"t's not the things you don't know that make you an ignoramus, but the things you know that ain't so"

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

Re: CEO once spotted a developer typing at a computer...

Got this query "why not test all possible ...") at Intel. Among other things, we had a 16/16 divide procedure that had "only" 4 billion possible combination; spent a few nights testing 10^8 of them at random -- on the ONE real chip we had at hand. (This is 1981, 1MHZ top instruction rate)

Asahi's plan for Linux on Apple's new silicon shows Cupertino has gone back to basics with iOS booting

VM Re: Serious questions

a VM gives you half+- the RAM available native

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

bedlam3

Those who know bedlam3, know

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

classic Re: It's not just smokers

"waiting for the stationery department" is a classic

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

Re: The secret to intelligent tinkering ....

" a clever man gets out of trouble which, if he were wise, he wouldn't have gotten into"

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

command chain

While at Intel/Israel, my faxes to US HQ would go "mr.X, cc: boss of X". If no reply, next one would go "boss of X, cc: boss of boss of X". 48-72 hours usually would suffice (our day was their night)

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

60HZ+-+- Re: " 220V on which South Korea operates"

At Princeton U, there was a student lab to measure g using a pendulum. g was off more than it should have been. The prof investigated. Turned out the wall clock (used to measure pendulum period) ran off the local power company. The clock at the power company ran off same power. When 5PM approached, the workers' hand would move the generators a bit faster, so as to get home sooner. Hence wong g.

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

plugs Re: Great

Swappable implies plug&socket; In "Old ma Bell" (the old AT&T) these were a no-no (reliability issues).

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

8008

The 8008 was cut to 16KB in order to fit into a 16-pin package

ropes

The Hebrew University got a PDP11/70 delivered, late on a Friday, on a pickup truck. They told us "600Kg, 6 packages". Turned out one package (the 11/70) was 500Kg.

We (the CS department) got it off the truck by tying ropes from it to a higher floor, letting the truck move, and putting a table to stop if moving (said table became matchwood). Let it there until Sunday, when the staff came in.

11/70 worked like a charm

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

00000000

the PAL code on US nuclear bombs was 00000000 , at least for a long time

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

recursion Re: Those were the days

I taught a course way way back; Pascal first, then Fortran. I told them "no recursion; A cannot call A". One bright student said "I will have A call B, B call A!". I said "Try!!".

2<-1

I recall getting decks back with only one rubber band; I pointed out, the dispatch desk said "oh, it happens" ...

Re: I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Michelangelo: "Give me a block of marble and I remove all the superfluous stuff"

China unleashes fearsome new cyber-weapon: A very provocative meme

booze

Should we all start buying Australian wine? China has a 200%+ tax on it now

BBC picks SiFive RISC-V chip for Doctor Who programming-for-kids kit – with Jodie Whittaker narrating

60IPS Re: Showing my age.

I cut my teeth on a Wegematic (similar to ALWAC); 1KIPS if you "optimized" (i.e. put instructions on the drum where they would be picked up with no delay); 60IPS otherwise.

Bad software crashed Boeings. Now it appears the company lacked a singular software supremo

838

If they named it the 838, and certified it as a new plane, it would not have crashed --at lest not the way it did

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

AMD64 Re: "Intel never thrilled me" - "x86-64 isn't at all bad"

I call it AMD64; makes my Intel friends happy ...

Now that's a Finnish-ing move: Finland offers free 90-day tryout of Helsinki tech scene with childcare thrown in

MFGA

Make Finland great again!

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

real rule Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

It is a real rule. My wife once entered Israel on an expired Israeli passport; was told by the consulate (ahead of time) there would be no problem; and there was none.

SpaceX’s Starlink finally reveals its satellite broadband pricing for rural America: At $99 a month, it’s a good deal

20msec Re: Outside America

I rarely get pings as fast as 20msec; I have seen 300 --- and this is all via cable. a Ground station in the same (small) continent should be OK

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

360/40 Re: Other counters

The 360/40 had no-ops in the microcode, to slow it down &not dislocate IBM's price/performance curve

Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities

Decameron, day 6, 10th story, has a story about recovering from an embarrassing AV error

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

and on the back end,

the system should check for 2 identical requests, in very short order, from the same person, and make an extra "are you sure?" check.

Belt &braces ...

Pauli Re: I've had a theory about this since college

Wolfgang Pauli did all his best physics after some schnapps; his mistakes were made when stone cold sober

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

4+1 Re: Not packing material, but

The shuttle had 4 computers running an IBM OS together, and a fifth computer running a separate OS, by a separate company -- just in case the 4-machine OS would crash.