Posts by G.Y.

Whitehall can't cost digital ID until it decides how to build it

what is T&G B?

expanding acronyms on first use is good

TerraPower gets permission to build, not operate, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor

60%

60% U235 is a step away from bomb-grade, has no civilian use. Iran had half a ton of it

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Guide to redaction

And then, a talk at Crtypto XX said proportional fonts, even if redacted, pass info out -- and an NSA guy walked quickly out of the hall

Re: Guide to redaction

That's what the NSA does

Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

FRAND=

If the FRAND terms were defined at standard-setting time, it would work. As it is FRAND is a Humpty-dumpty word -- it means what the patent owner wants it to mean

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Re: Nothing new

I recall seeing 4 generals rebuke a newspaper for saying "kick ass"; the said it should say "kick arse", ended "for shame, sir!:

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

naming Re: Nah

"email where you listed the potential consequences and their refusal" is commonly known at "the Pearl Harbor files"

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

uninitialized

At least the student got a good feel for uninitiaalized-memory errors

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

bedlam3

bedlam3 springs to mind

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Solicitors

The receipt only shows the recipient's RAM/Disk got the bits. If there's no paper, and then a power cut, the fax disappears

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

Good reason to

get the BItChat app

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

"Most engineering calculations are quite fine with about 4 significant digits"

Intel tried that line when Pentium went from 18-digit accuracy to worst-case 4 , back in 1994

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

bible Re: Success Awaits

There's a US state that has strict specs for the bibles that schools must buy -- and it just happens the Trump bible is the only one that fits ...

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

G voice Re: PayPal

I give out my Google voice number in such contexts

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

Re: "Tan has yet to pull the plug"

The i960 had 1 thing going for it: the author iof Dhrystone was on the u960 payroll (at the Siemens end)

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

break! Re: The criminals involved need to go to jail

rescinding is too slow & invisible; the relevant medals should be publicly broken by sledge-hammers, and young prince George should have first dibs on doing the job.

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

here's a way:

The "prior art" part of the patent should be published on day 1, giving interested parties a chance to show what solutions are "obvious to one skilled in the art" BEFORE the patent issues

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly I'm bilingual

Astronomers have particles per square cm per parsec

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

At one place. there was a money/purchasing app. To buy a widget, you had to go to ch.4, which started on p.140 ...

response Re: manuals

The textbook response is RTFM

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

Re: Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

and Trump university, "we teach success:, paid $25M compensation

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: POS Systems

Not $32,768? (that's when signed 16-bit values go negative; cf. MUMPS)

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?