Posts by G.Y.

Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both

wall Re: Trump is a moron

The dead are already more than 2 Vietnam walls, will be more before we are done

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

almost Re: Ah, the days before memory protection seemed necessary...

The RCA spectra was ALMOST compatible with the 360. They "fixed" some particularly crazy op-codes, causing a $200M write-off of the whole series

911, I wanna report a robbery. Hundreds of thousands of stars stolen from a cluster. I think it was the Milky Way

I believe dense clusters come at about 1 star per cubic light year

Astroboffins map engine of a solar flare: Magnetic mega-fields and Earth-dwarfing blankets of electric current

Re: Watts

Mencken was told Welsh Rabbit contains no rabbit. He replied that toad-in-the-hole contains no toad

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Re: Fictional Engineer

I believe such people were referred to as "virgins"

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

Re: Updates are important!

or developing on a fast internal network, in the days were users lived by 56K modems if they were lucky

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Re: The Falkands Connection

"no plan survives 1st contact with the enemy"

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

sylllogism Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

We must do something

This is something

Therefore we must do this

(source: Yes, minister)

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Pauli Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

Wolfgang Pauli had that effect

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I called the cops

Happened to me once, hung up a second later; police officer knocked, I apologized, he was almost apologetic too; I thanked him for doing the right thing.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

ASM e: optimize / optimise

I heard that, when the law "thou shalt write COBOL" came out, lots of COBOL programs were written where line 1 was "enter assembler" and all else was assembly code

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

The 72-column limit came from the IBM 70X/70XX series, which read one row of holes, in binary, into 2 36-bit words. The sequence-number justification came later.

Surge in Zoom support requests was 'unexpected', says tool team as it turns taps down

bug Re: Not surprised

that "which only seem accessible during a meeting" is a bug+-

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: Test, test and test again...

I saw an IDE (ANT?) where the tests are generated together with the code. A new project starts with a test "is 2+2==5?", which fails. The rest is left to the engineers to implement&fix

Re: Experienced tester.

a while back:

Me: I gave the student compiler "ali baba +40 thieves" to compile -- and smoke came out!

Older guy: Hell -- I give my compilers .OBJ files to eat, and they better not crap out!

Family meeting! Chocolate Factory makes its business-like video-chat service free to anyone with a Google account

free?

Plain Google accounts (i.e. not G-suite) can only JOIN meetings, not start them

Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

50 Re: Sounds like a good idea

DEC's RADIX50 (using base 40) was a better idea; hence .OBJ rather than .OB

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

700BC Re: Proper lash up

Carthage is Poencian/Punic for "new town". Founded 700BC+-

Ditto (mutatis mutandis) Novgorod

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

"direct"

direct != nonstop

I hav been on a direct flight where the plane shrank between legs

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

SAK

When I use a Swiss army knife to do a job for a craftsman tool, I don't blame the Swiss army for the resulting debacle

Russian super-crook behind $20m internet fraud den Cardplanet and malware-exchange forum pleads guilty

timetable Re: hostage

That hacker spent a long time in Israel while courts decided on extradition

confirmation Re: hostage

https://www.polygraph.info/a/putin-israeli-pardon-fact-check/30410460.html

Re: hostage

reference: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51301827

hostage

Due to that extradition, the Russian put an Israel girl in prison for 6 years, due to (alleged) 6 grams of cannabis in her checked bags in transit through SVO.

If Russia needs a hostage from your country, watch out for Aeroflot connections

Taxi for Uber: Ride-hailing app giant stripped of licence to operate in London

re: "not going to xyz"

I am sure Uber would be happy to collect complaints about such, forward to TfL, and keep nagging.

Boffins show the 2017 Nork nuke can move, move, move any mountain (by a meter)

Re: Not a big problem, IMO - until

Sarajevo 6/28/1914 was also a family feud ...

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

optimization

W. Kahan: "optimization is replacing something that works by something that almost works &is faster"

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Re: Luxury!

When faxes were new, we asked a supplier "do we need specially beautified paper for it?". He said "you can use bog paper!". We went to the toilet to check this out.

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

I have seen a user SHITE on a list of logged-in users, once at Intel

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: Any key

I gather lots of PCs in Russia have "any" written on the space bar. (Russian has no definite article, so "the ANY key" is now visible)

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

2 or 3 elsewhere

The Israel air force used to take 2 years. Now it is 3, to add time for a bachelor's degree.

Trump blinks again in trade war bluff-fest with China: Huawei gets another 90-day stay of US import execution

j Re: national security

dJt, not dt!

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

Pauli Re: Coding under the influence

Wolfgang Pauli was reputed to need schnapps to do his good physics

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

G Docs

I never explicitly saved a Google Docs document yet; they get saved "by magic"

Cop a load of this: 1TB of police body camera videos found lounging around public databases

encrypted Re: ALL police body cam footage...

But: encrypted hard, only decrypted by court order (or: following policy)

Hot desk hell: Staff spend two weeks a year looking for seats in open-plan offices

Re: Open plan is fine

Way back, Intel/Haifa had some voice-driven CAD systems (?Calma?), and put 4 people in a room

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

838 Re: A new name you say.

If it were named 838 on day 1, it would not ave happened: no pretending it's "just a little change", no covering up new aerodynamics by clever software, no ...

If you're worried that quantum computers will crack your crypto, don't be – at least, not for a decade or so. Here's why

McEliece Re: The article assumes todays crypto is secure.

Daniel Bernstein is a great guy; but his post-quantum crypto is a variation of McEliece crypto

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: Driving staff away

The shekel has been much more stable for the last generation+-

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

galil Re: Miltary testing

and the bottles used to be opened with ammunition clips (magazines), not with the M16 rifle itself

Re: Miltary testing

The galil's bottle opener is in the bipod

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

vacuum

I once had a system was no backup tape; they told me "back up 1 disk to the other"

"what if there's a power cut?"

"you're on a UPS"

Then a technician plugged a vacuum cleaner into the UPS, 4 times running, and blew it.

I politely inquired as to why she was not shot at dawn.

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

MUMPS Re: Remember Y2K?

MUMPS did that; crashed on the 32768th say of the last century ..

Boffin suggests Trappist monk approach for Spectre-Meltdown-grade processor flaws, other security holes: Don't say anything public – zip it

FDIV/FaceTime

Way back then, a prof told Intel about flaky FDIV; he was ignored until the web exploded. Not a security issue.

A few weeks ago, a mother told Apple about flaky FaceTime (her son hit the problem); she was ignored ("go pay for a developer license 1st") until the web exploded. Very much a security issue.

air bags

or your air-bags (just hypothetically) ...

Ouch, Apple! Plenty of iPhones stuck in tech channel. How many? That's a 'wild card'

Re: Apple boredom

Backup video camera

Re: Apple boredom

Backup video

Jeep hacking lawsuit shifts into gear for trial after US Supremes refuse to hit the brakes

switch Re: So...

At least the network should have an on/off switch (default: off!)

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

WHAT? Re: Mythbusters

"most transistors were valve affairs " -- ???

Why, you're no better than an 8-bit hustler: IBM punts paper on time-saving DNN-training trick

codecs

A-law on mu-law codecs use funny 8-bit floating-point formats