Posts by G.Y.

Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it

Q: Why debug in hex? Re: Debugger Shy Bugs were pretty common in the early days.

A; That's where the bugs live!

Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

ID Re: they even make us write it on the back of the credit card

The back of my debit card saysb "Photo ID req'd"

Google forces Android apps to use memory more wisely as RAMpocalypse rages

Drun//disk

I cut my teeth on a Wegematic (similar to ALWAC); memory was disk, with 4 fixed-head tracks. Optimization, which I never understood, was about putting the next instruction at the point the disk.drum would go next.

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

NSA Re: Healthcare…

I bought something at the NSA (since!) museum. Receipt showed the credit-card; when I mentioned it, they crossed it out with a pen

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Control systems too

Niels Bohr

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

3! Re: I give up, What's a digit?

3 digits: 666 (cf. Revelations)

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

IBM Re: Only half user fail here

When IBM tried the PC on some test-customers, the text said "take the diskette out of the envelope". Some of them took the round thing out of the square thing.

IBM rewrote the instructions

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Re: Just fess up.

“Truth is the best lie”

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

nuclear Re: The guys a hero

I know of a place where the 10%+-+- rule apples:

A reactor company had awards for avoiding problems. A worker notices that the fuel rods, in transport, were in big plastic sacks, tied up at the top. Had water got in, it might have gone critical. They got them turned upside down, and he got an award proportional to the cost of an unplanned nuclear chain reaction.

Tensordyne makes a big bet on log math to beat Nvidia

Babylon Re: I think they just invented the slide rule.

That's how they multiplied in Babylon. In base 60, a multiplication table would be 3,600 clay tablets (1,830 if you use commutativity); a table of squares (really squares/4) would be way smaller

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

watch Re: Compact code

A Microsoft smart watch (1MB ROM) once ran out of ROM, 3 nanoseconds before going to silicon. There was some scrambling to be done (replace a cipher by a smaller one)

Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

professional

A colleague (WA, USA) had an "engineer in training" sign. I asked what does it lead to?

Professional engineer

What kind of engineer?

A professional engineer knows when he doesn't know

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

name? Re: DHCP? I can go lower than that

What does the name Rodney have to do with this?

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Pauli Re: We call her Ruth

Wolfgang Pauli has that reputation. When he was in town, things broke -- a change of trains at the station was enough

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