Posts by G.Y.

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: Good article

I gather 0.12% of Europe's GDP would suffice to keep the Ukrainian arms industry going at full blast; and Putin won't look for trouble elsewhere as long as he's bleeding white in Ukraine.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

broken link

The URL for the paper is broken

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

also known as a pearl harbor file

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: old swears No Comment!

heard, not "hear"

Re: September!

to be unambiguous: that message came from the company rep, who said it with a straight face

old swears Re: No Comment!

The author of https://www.amazon.com/Race-Swift-Twenty-First-International-Technology/dp/0080311709 quoted a trooper making a longer reference . I also hear canon Duckworth of Churchill college refer to a similar expletive in his POW time

Re: September!

We once got "the DG Algol compiler does not work in the state of Israel". I suggested using it to trace the country's borders ...

impossible bug Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

A compiler I once did had an error message: "this error message should never appear. If it does, call [company]" , plus an error-number

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

fax Re: Feeding the Beast

When faxes were new, we asked the salesman "do you need special paper?"; he said "you can use toilet paper!". We went to the bathroom & checked on his demo machine. He was right.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

name e: Calm down...

call them "Dachau west"

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Feynman Re: Ryan's Law

Feynman (video on Los Alamos) hit that jackpot, too

old DG ad:

"batch is a bitch"

Appeared once. Replaced by "your mother cannot be disturbed when she's busy"

Picture was a glass"holy etmple" computer room

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

super? Re: Did you really pull the big red switch?

Power comes in an 50 or 60Hz anyway; why does the normal capacitor in the power-supply suffice?

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

IBM Re: DIMMs

This happened to an IBM VP , but with a 487SX -- in a big demo

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Parkinson Re: Meeting Metastasis

The classic Parkinson's law book has a chapter on committees expanding into uselessness

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: It takes too long

Nothing is as permanent as a temporary measure

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Hindenburg Re: Remarkable front

re: 1914 battle of Tannenberg: "I don't know who won that battle, but I know who would have lost it"

no sword

There is no sword to break; but I think the CBE medal should be publicly broken with a hammer; I nomintae young prince George for the job.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

If you know German:

"Wachten sie eine minute; ich muss win stunde geben"

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

2-way

Loyalty is a 2-way street

Off-topic Re: One chance...

We were arguing Bluetooth authentication, re: claim 4 digits are all people can use. I suggest that manual say "put the number of the girl who would have been your girl-friend if only ...". Coleagre says "722.. ", I interrupt, say "hey' that's a Seattle number". He "I didn't say which area code". Number (east coast area code) was that of his then girl-friend, now wife.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Fireman

A fireman told me that if you leave a bare naked fireman in a circular room with 2 ball-bearings, he will lose one & break the other

cartoon

The cartoon on p.77 of Hey & Pappay's "the computing universe" is appropriate here

bottle

There was an army whose soldiers used ammunition clips (magazines) to open coke bottles. That army redesigned the gun's bipod to have a bottle-opener slot

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

political compiler Re: Workstation

I once heard a reply "the DG Algol compiler does not work in the state of Israel"

Re: Small boys are good problem finders

Carnegie-Mellon (circa 197X) had an ultra-secure OS called Hydra. One employee had a small (1yr+-) baby, got a home TTY to use on the system. That baby crashed the system, but could not explain how he did it.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

I think this is due to Socrates

Re: Not so Civil Engineers

Do you mean names like FDIV?

Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

also,

Ditto our aircraft (esp. 737max)

Intel to shed at least 15% of staff, will outsource more to TSMC, slash $10B in costs

Ntel

with 15% laid off, the company should now be called Ntel

NASA gives Falcon 9 thumbs-up to launch Crew-9

Re: Just give up on Starliner already.

"Even Boeing can't string it out much longer" -- you're optimistic

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

terminology Re: But as Watson might say

minor. cash cow = "revenue enhancement"

Microsoft sued by ParTec in Texas over AI supercomputer patents

eastern

Once again -- the notorious eastern district of Texas ...

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

measure g Re: IT Crowd

Princeton physics lab had an experiment to measure g using a pendulum's period. It was wrong enough that the prof looked it up.

It turned out the clock used was a line-frequency clock, using a small local power company. When 5PM got near, the crew wanted to go home, so they sped up their line-frequency clock (and all others) a bit, got home a few minutes early

? Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

what is the issue with Scottish addresses?

Checkmate? AI's pawn-pushing prowess proves partly pitiful, partly promising

13%

If they do 13% illegal moves in chess, I don't want them running law, navigation, machine tools ...

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

heaps Re: Not screwdrivers but...

A bigwig ioce came to visit our office, so everything had to be tidy

I moved 1-2 feet of listing/octal-dump archeology to the desk drawers

The guy with me said "what have you done?! You destroyed months of archeology!"

I said "don't worry"; as soon as the bigwig left, I opened the drawers, put the archeology back on desk in the same order it was before

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Re: 1 in a million scenario

Nebuchadrezzar, not Pharaoh; see Daniel 2:4-5

BASICally still alive: Classic language celebrates 60 years with new code and old quirks

Re: More BASICs still

I believe Dartmouth BASIC was compiled

Bill advances to exonerate hundreds in Post Office Horizon scandal

source code

and the opposite side should get access to the source code!

Intel, Ampere show running LLMs on CPUs isn't as crazy as it sounds

Re: When your best is a CPU.

Everything can CRAWL on a CPU ...

(cf. running FP code without an FPU)

The chip that changed my world – and yours

8051 in PCs Re: It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it

I believe the canonical PC keyboard has an 8051 in it

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

IBM PC Re: Never assume, always check

When IBM put test audiences on the PC, the documentation said "take the floppy out of the envelope". Some users took the round thing out of the square thing.

IBM rewrote the documentation

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Bedlam3

For those who know: bedlam3

Cloudflare defeats another patent troll with crowd-sourced prior-art army

fix

possible serious fix: a patent application should describe the prior art, PLUS the problem(s) the invention is to solve. This is published immediately. Anyone can then show obviousness (of solution, as of filimng fdate) by commenting online.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

700 Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

It seems there were at least 700+ blue moons ...

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

contact supplier Re: Errors that *should* never occur

"cannot happen" errors in the PL/M-51 compiler (at least version 1) would give the user a number like 3-123, and request he 'phone Intel for help

(single digit was pass #, other part was decimal address in core)

Re: Errors that *should* never occur

The Unix listings in the Lions book are full of

error("can't happen")

messages

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: I hope they also covered

What is the Hatfield reference here?

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: Out in the fields

That's what offline maps are for