Posts by G.Y.

Security needs to learn from the aviation biz to avoid crashing

state pays? Re: Who's is going to pay an investigation?

When a state licenses an IT guy, will it pay for salary if he/she screws up? for consequential damages??

BOFH: Who us? Sysadmins? Spend time with other departments?

Re: No fenestration?

DEfenestration!

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

parkinson

the old Parkinson's law book has a chapter on this

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

tables Re: The guiding principle

cf. Johnny Tables

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

JCL Re: Bills with punch cards

I know of someone who added punches to the card, creating a card starting with "/*" , causing horrible JCL problems to the utility

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

draft Re: Exchange

I have seen a fair bit of documents watermarked "draft -- for discussion purposed only"

Re: Breaking VSAM in IBM COBOL

IBM salesman: "this is not a bug, its a hitherto undisclosed limitation on compiler performance"

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Re: I believe the story

What is TS?

Google location tracking to forget you were ever at that medical clinic

Re: Google's minimum viable response

also Stalin

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Re: Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Happened when the IBM PC people were testing bit out on beginners.

They rewrote the instructions

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

FarewellRe: Intermediaries

Check “ the farewell file” for what can happen

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

kitchenRe: Everybody knows...

We bought some German kitchen equipment in Israel. Not having Hebrew documentation , they gave us the "sundry languages" docs -- in Finnish, Portuguese, Turkish, ...

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

One place I know of decided to use BASIC because it is interactive. The system worked by schoolkids filling up coding forms , MAILING them to that computer center, and waiting, and waiting, and ...

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

I has 24 hours (a batch place, long ago)

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: Not that surprising

" The average person does not understand the speed of light ..." -- Grace Hopper has a good video on the subject

Also, "time machines" (one of the Royal Society lectures for your people, ages ago) with a loopback video via a satellite

latency vs. bandwidth

An IBM manager has been quoted that it's possible to have a baby delivered in one month -- by using 9 women.

Australia

An Australian PM said he respects the laws of math -- but the laws of Australia come 1st

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

PC

IBM PC manuals originally said "take the diskette out of the envelope". Some of their test subjects (a.k.a "virgins") took the round thing out of the square thing. The manual got rewritten.

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

old trick:

Gilbert's "De Magnete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Magnete says navigators would claim the compass misbehaves if a garlic-eater enters the room. He did an experiment to check

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

recursion

In a compiler project, an engineer once told me recursive decent is the right way to go, but recursion is rumored to be very slow. Asked for my opinion.

I used my stopwatch, got some numbers, told her "recurse all you want, but please don't divide!"

(This was an on 8080)

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

Re: The Parable Of The Handyman's Invoice (a.k.a Knowing where to tap)

I heard Steinmetz did that one on a $100,000 invoice

Russian court deems Instagram and Facebook as 'extremist', WhatsApp spared

Russian has no definite article ("the")

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Re: Read canaries ... How I became Director of the Secret Police

In one monthly report, I wrote "X had to stop work on Y (which is on the critical path to V.2) and start masturbating the Z". No comments back.

A few months later, I wrote "The ayatollahs of X have shown us our un-islamic ways'. They told my boss "Make G behave"; I replied, & he did too (all the way up the chain) "The M-word is OK, and Ayatollahs are not?". THAT'S when someone read my old monthly report.

My immediate boss had a good excuse: his native language in Hebrew, and they don't teach that word in school. He shared my opinion about X wasting his time

A memory chip was once designed. They expected the Russians to steal it, so it had a message "when you care enough to steal the very best ..."

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato

China's chip-making ambitions face setbacks

Re: Exit plan

firing an M16 into the machinery, while it is working, should suffice

BBC points Russians to the Tor version of itself

text vs. image

Is there a place where that long TorBBC URL appears as text? this is a LOT to type by hand

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

"bribed through customs" is a great phrase

I know a company where they had a summer intern do the Email system. It doesn't matter if his name was Albert Einstein -- he was not there when the shit hit the fan (which it did)

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

compilers Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

I once let some compilers compile a 1-liner: "ali baba +40 thieves". Smoke came out of quite a few

Told an old guy about it; he said "I give my compilers .OBJ files to eat!"

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

VT99 Re: In the pilot's defense...

I have seen an allegedly-VT100-compatible CRT terminal where turning the brightness all the way (away from "off") made it dimmer.

Eltaterm, a long time ago

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

1ppm Re: Forgetful

The Doppler shift at airline speeds is about 1ppm, I.e 4Khz

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

nail Re: Boom .....

"for want of a nail" Ii.e. bulb) ...

elevator Re: I say it's plausible

I recall an elevator ad (Otis?): "if you haven't tested the emergency brakes on your elevator, how do you know they work?".

The picture on top was the view from the 60th floor, looking DOWN

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Oppenheimer Re: I recognise the story

When Robert Oppenheimer spoke about ("born classified") nuclear issues, he would pull a page from his briefcase, speak from it -- and hand it to an FBI guy, because he had no security clearance for his own text.

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

plastic

Doesn't anyone make/sell PLASTIC(or ceramic) screwdrivers??

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

0d Re: Sentencing will be interesting

Time served is 0 days

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

-10%

Decimate means reduce by 10% (as in Roman armies)

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

Re: The plan is obvious

That's what the SX chips are for

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: Divert

I was at a company where this was set up by the company, so we could call during main office. business hours -- which were our evenings.

Going Ubuntu on an M1 Mac with Multipass: Thanks VM, it's Linux on the desktop

GUI

Is there a GUI option?

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

7!

7-track is better (has a parity-check bit)

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

old hacker

I've been into computers for 2 (human) generations; I STILL use the mouse, so my Linux memory for shortcuts mix up my Mac and Windows short cuts

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

C != 0

An old program of mine (integer linear programming) had an error message "fuckup -- C is not zero".

Boss: "if they see this, they will come running at you!"

Me: "that's exactly what I want them to do!"

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Documented? Re: Snap!

I dount it was documented ...

Progress report: Asahi Linux brings forth a usable basic desktop on Apple's M1

virtual

Any chance of running it as a virtual machine under a Mac virtualizer?

D-Wave claims it can build a gate-model quantum computer

Elliptic Re: How's factoring coming along?

Elliptic curves have way shorter key length at same security level, so they are more exposed to quantum. I notice that NSA/NIST have abandoned their elliptic push, are doing lots of post-quantum crypto.

Intel's Mobileye unveils first 'production-grade fully electric self-driving vehicle,' partners with Sixt for Munich launch

Hammurabi

Hammurabi's code says that, when scaffolding is removed from a new building, the chief builder should be sitting under the keystone

Trial of Theranos boss Elizabeth Holmes begins: She plans to say her boyfriend and COO Balwani abused her

Re: My take:

Believeing "possible" != believing "it's there" !

In other contexts, this is called socialist realism

Re: We'll see if the old court saying holds true

Classic text: "when your law is weak, argue the facts

When your facts are weak, argue the law

When both are weak, pound the table"