Posts by rnturn

MIPS discloses first RISC-V chips coming in Q4 2022

Back to the Future^WEighties

Ransomware the final nail in coffin for small university

Re: Having backups

How far back does an organization have backups. The school could have been infected with the malware long ago and it was only recently activated. What if all your backups contain the malware?

(Full disclosure: I know a faculty member of the school who recently retired from teaching. Not sure as to his reasons and whether the discovery of the malware and the ransom played a part in his decision to leave but interesting timing on his part.)

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

I was *never* unable to find in the gray/white wall the information I needed to get something done on VMS (heck, RT-11 and RSX as well). It might have been in Appendix J of the Device Driver manual but, darn it, everything was in that docset.

Climate model code is so outdated, MIT starts from scratch

Re: A language they cannot read?

That's called a well-rounded education.

I wish the people I work with nowadays had done something besides just coding before they got into the work force. Most cannot express a coherent thought in writing and what little documentation that's available is mostly unreadable sentence fragments cut-n-pasted from various documents that are kinda-sorta related to the task at hand. As one old hand recently revealed, some parameters in the database are referred to in these documents by as many as four different phrases; if you're lucky, you may be working with a document that uses all four. Or... a set of instructions for an installation process may be out of order (i.e., don't forget to do //this// three steps ago). Crap like that that someone who was forced to take a literature and/or English composition course who likely be aware of and fix before foisting it on their co-workers.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: 'self-taught Visual Basic programmer'

> should the value of pi change

We were always told that the most accurate value of Pi you could use was "4.0*atan(1.0)" (yeah, FORTRAN). Then I started working on GPS applications in the 80s and the official ICDs mandated a very particular value of Pi that had to be used when dealing with GPS positioning. So, while it didn't necessarily change, a specific value might be mandated. (Though not as ham-handedly as the Indiana legislature tried one time.)

Re: Swearing at the programmer, but not in the code

> It contained ZERO comments, and the program came with ZERO code-relevant documentation.

While it does contain /some/ comments, there's behemoth chunk of Perl that I've occasionally had to wade through at work. Around 8000 lines and most of the few-and-far-between comments are about as useful as:

"# include_data method

sub include_data ... "

Gosh... thanks for that. And as mentioned, no documentation. Job security, I guess.

Heaps of tweaks and improvements incoming with GNOME 42

Go-to desktop and SUSE

Huh... I've always seen KDE as the go-to desktop for OpenSUSE. At least, I seem to recall that being the default option when I last installed Leap. I'm stuck using Gnome Desktop on a VM at work -- KDE isn't available to load -- and can. Not. Stand. It. (But it does give me an environment that minimizes my need to use the underlying Windows 10 so it's got that going for it.)

FAA now says 5G airports may interfere with Boeing 737s

Re: Just when they are trying to convince us it’s safe

"Not all radalts are the same."

Indeed. I was involved in some work back in the '80s that discovered that FM radio station transmitters -- and the stew of intermodulation frequencies that resulted from multiple FM transmitters in a locale -- could interfere with ILS receiver front ends. Not all receivers were susceptible to the same degree but some of the more commonly used (especially in general aviation) were affected the most. I recall wanting to be a fly on the wall at the meeting where the report was to be presented to the FCC (who would represent radio station operators who could be denied either an antenna location or proposed transmitter power if either interfered with the landing system) and the FAA (whose interested was in maintaining the protected airspace around an airport)---the fireworks would have been fun to watch.

Aircraft can't land safely due to interference with upcoming 5G C-band broadband service

Band, schmand

Years ago, I was involved in a study that found that radio transmitters -- even though they weren't transmitting in a band protected for aviation use -- could interfere with ILS receivers. Multiple transmitters near an airfield will result in all sorts of harmonics hitting the front-end of the ILS receiver that can result in interference within the protected airspace. The whole study began when a airfield's ILS testing found that signals in the receiver driving the needles were being affected by a broadcast of a Cleveland Indians game. I didn't get to attend the high-level meetings between the FAA -- who was trying to protect the airspace -- vs. FCC -- who were being pressed by licensees/investors who wanted to erect radio towers wherever the hell they pleased -- but I can imagine they were somewhere between humorous and maddening.

Re: Just Say it Like it Is

My preference: "make inadvertent contact with the terrain"

Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon's open-source license with botched social network launch

Yet another "Oops!"...

... that anyone with a half a brain would have learned from by now.

I'm a little surprised that Florida Man hasn't made any public pronouncements that he knows more about software licensing than anyone else in the world. That's sort of his shtick, after all. Even after having been proved wrong over and over and over.

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

Re: Why is there a shortasge of candidates?

While the ATS seems to do this checkbox ticking, it's even worse when the hiring manager sits there checking things off during the interview. Normally I loathe dealing with HR. In that case, The time spent with HR was the enjoyable part of interviewing with that company. My blood pressure rose considerably as I watched the manager ticks things off -- or fail to tick things off -- on his clipboard. No questions about how I handled this or that but a rapid fire series of questions like "Have you used <technology>... how long have you used <technology>." I was tempted to ask if he could simply hand me the clipboard so I could fill it out myself.

Re: And that degree ...

At one early employer (aerospace/defense), some of the best programmers I encountered were people with Physics degrees. And they were writing in Jovial... not something they learned as a student. Of course, this was back in the days when companies actually offered training

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Re: Interesting previous interviews

``Needless to say, despite having told HR we wanted to see people's CVs in advance of them being invited to interview they kept ignoring us and, sure enough, this guy's CV was indeed an accurate reflection of his abilities.''

Wow. I would never again trust HR's judgement with respect to the candidates they've decided to bring in for interviews.

I was part of an interview team for data center types (Wintel, UNIX, storage, etc.). HR sent us one candidate for a mainly Solaris role whose resume showed that he had a lot of experience with other UNIX variants. My boss looked at me and said "Looks like we might have finally found a backup for you". The interview team was unanimous: we wanted him on the team. Sadly, *because* he had all that experience, his salary requirement was above "Market Rates" and HR flat out refused to hire him. So we still had *two* open positions. Idjits.

Even Facebook struggles: Zuck's titanic database upgrade hits numerous legacy software bergs

Re: Waiting for the Big Crash

On a related note: Don't try accessing the citations at the end of Wikipedia articles. The majority of them are dead links nowadays and nobody seems to be interested in cleaning them up. When my daughters were in school, they were forbidden to use a Wikipedia article as source because of this---those dead links may as well be fakes.

Cloudflare launches campaign to ‘end the madness’ of CAPTCHAs

How do I put this device on our home LAN so that it can be used to allow everyone in the family to browse from any computer -- and any TV -- that I wire up or connect to our WiFi?

People have been pushing the idea of dongles since PCs were invented. I had coworkers that had multiple dongles connected to their printer port (one for AutoCAD, another for... you get the idea). Either the same thick-headed folks are still pushing the idea or a new generation is re-discovering the idea... and forgetting or ignoring how it failed in the past.

Re: Hardware dongles?

> And then you have website designers where they assume everyone uses Chrome, like them, has a really fast computer, like them, and has really fast internet, like them. If none of those conditions are true, they blithely tell you to switch to Chrome and never think that some people cannot afford fast computers or cannot get fast internet.

That's been a problem forever. One former employer hired people to create the company's first web site. It looked great in the conference room where they demoed it---just steps away from the data center where the web server sat. The trouble was that, at the time, there were huge (and I mean HUGE) numbers of internet user who were still using dial-up connections. The corporate web site was unusable over that type of connection. Sadly, the web site designers still got paid.

I rarely see CAPTCHAs any more. Sites appear to have responded to their users/visitors and dumped them. I'd estimate only dealing with less than five in the last year---so few that it always surprises that some site is *still* using one. I think Cloudflare is seeing the potential for making big Zorkmids in the hardware token market.

NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft

Meatball?

I once worked with some folks at Ames Research Center and they called it the "vector" logo.

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Serial printer fun

In a former life (early-ish '90s), myself and others got caught up in problem figuring out why the printer sitting on the desk of some self-important bank exec's wouldn't work. It connected directly to a mini in the data center. The complainer's office was at least ten floors above the data center and the printer was connected via RS-232. Our initial tests showed that there was nothing wrong with the wiring---no breaks. In that hi-rise, all floor-to-floor cabling was all done via phone punch-down blocks on each floor and we checked those multiple times. Eventually, we contacted the networking team to help us out with their TDR. As it turned out, the printer cabling was 666 feet in length. Not willing to accept that his office's cabling should have to be governed by some standard that he'd never heard of before, we had to have a manager two levels up explain to him that he was not going to have a printer working yesterday and that we'd have order equipment to allow him to have a private printer. There /was/ a shared printer in the general office area just steps from his office but, apparently, his ego wouldn't allow his print jobs to be mixed in with those of underlings.

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Re: SQL resists this workflow

> "note that the CAPS-lock is typically optional"

I haven't encountered any RDBMS that insisted on uppercase SQL statements. Most people I know who generate SQL simply use uppercase as a convention to help in distinguishing the SQL from column/table names.

Google's research labs are far from the only culprits coming up with strange and, frankly, questionable "innovations". The trend lately seems to be that "new and improved" replacement utilities are needed that take what has been a fairly easy to read and understand command syntax and transform it from a single line into something that requires multiple lines, braces, odd punctuation which, frankly, hides its purpose behind the new, obtuse syntax. It's hard to escape the feeling that all this seems to be getting done not because the current way of performing function X is broken in some way but, rather, just because it's "old".

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: The question of who?

A little late for that. Who does Oracle appeal to now that The Supremes have ruled in Google's favor.

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

``In one case, the person who marked up the corrections has struck through the words `a quarter' under a chart summary and replaced it with `four times less'.''

I see and hear this all the damned time. Apparently, it's because "fractions are hard".

The Audacity of it all: Version 3.0 of open-source audio fave boasts new file format, 160+ bug fixes

Re: Detecting track breaks

I'm waiting for the 4h33m stretched "ambient" version to make it onto the 'net.

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: Too late

For me it's using "ask" as a noun.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

FLAC

I ripped all my CDs to FLAC and can hear the difference between those that I originally ripped to 320Kbps MP3s. It's not dramatic but content that has a lot of high-frequencies -- cymbals, plucked strings, some electronic music, etc. -- benefits. It surely sounds better than most streaming content that I've heard. I can't imagine Spotify streaming FLAC-encoded music, though.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Re: Wikipedia is far from perfect...

It's far from uncommon to find that many of the URLs at the bottom of a Wikipedia entry return 404 errors. Nothing makes you wonder about the credibility of an article when you can't check the sources. (This is the sort of thing that used to drive me crazy about some academic papers. "No references? So you came up with this all on your own? Ri-i-ight.")

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: Cores?

Who left Oracle and took a new job with IBM/RedHat? What's next? License terms specifying CPU clock speed?

Leaked memo suggests LG is thinking about quitting the smartphone biz in 2021

Re: Still loving my G5, too

Same here. I've had replaced the battery holder (w/ the USB-C charging socket) and the battery itself (once) since I got it but, otherwise, it's been trouble free. I do wish that an Android update would be available. For some reason (muscle memory?) I never have any problems with the LG's buttons. I wind up doing something weird to the Samsung my wife's got just by picking the darned thing up and accidentally pushing a button. And her phone is so short of memory that some normal functions don't even work. Notification sounds when receiving text messages? Hit or miss. And she hasn't even installed a bunch of third-party applications. (IMHO, it's a POS.) An iPhone will never be under consideration as a replacement for my LG and the missus's experience isn't a great selling point for Samsung.

Windows Product Activation – or just how many numbers we could get a user to tell us down the telephone

Re: Arrrgh the suppressed memories......

Yeah. I seem to recall I had to burn a day of vacation to spend on the phone with Microsoft reactivating XP following a problem. I did that once. The next time XP scribbled on itself, that PC was converted to Linux. The idiocy of having to activate XP over the one phone was the reason that, one by one, all the XP-based PCs we had at home were converted to Linux.

Re: as long as that hardware hash didn't change too much

One data point: Adding a SCSI controller (in order to add more disk space to an existing IDE-based system) to a working XP installation was "too much" enough to invalid the system to Windows. It only took a couple of hours to recover from that: by booting a Linux CD, transferring all the Windows data to the SCSI disks, and repurposing the IDE disks for Linux. Windows problem solved.

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Re: Praise Where and When Praise is Due.

> I even bought a couple (not many as I didn't really have the money at that age)

Neither did I but even my grade-school math skills were enough to convince my parents the advantages of getting me a subscription as a Xmas present.

Re: I'm a coder

> they are all too happy to open up another can of manglement layers

Because, of course, the reason the code failed is that there weren't enough managers overseeing the process.

Re: The reason I'm only a geek in my private time

> I bet you could randomly fire at least half the management from any company and when the shock settles down, you'd realise that they weren't actually that necessary...

At one former employer, it was nauseating to see just how many people in the company org chart were directors---directors with nobody reporting to them. When a big chunk of the IT team were laid off during an ill-considered outsourcing arrangement (it got several higher-ups, including the CIO, a personalized escort out the door by security), the jobs of those directors-with-no-reports were untouched. I'm aware of a couple of them that, ten years later, are still there---directing nobody in particular.

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

Re: Sounds like my house

Hmm... Normally, 11/70s needed three-phase power.

If it were me, I'd have installed it on a lower floor and let it heat the house. When I last encountered one of those systems, they had a thermal switch in the CPU rack that would power off the system when the air conditioning went on the fritz---otherwise, it would have cooked itself to death.

Data Center Down

I didn't get a page. I got a phone call from my manager on a Saturday morning. Thinking I'd screwed up and slept through a page, my boss assured me that it wasn't one the clusters I was in charge of but that the entire damned data center is down. It turns out that, after ignoring the pleas from the technician who'd previously alerted management to the problem, the UPS supplying the data center finally fried after running so close to maximum capacity for an extended amount of time. So the company experiences a lengthy /unscheduled/ down time -- during year-end processing -- rather than the much shorter one the tech had repeatedly requested. Major components of the UPS were going to have to be replaced. I got into the data center along with a dozen other admins and we all physically switched off the systems while the work on the UPS was taking place. Oh... the UPS? Some Einstein installed it so close to a wall that it couldn't be worked on---the vendor had to cut through the drywall in the adjacent room in order to access the fried electronics. Oh yes, the UPS vendor also determined that whoever had installed the transfer switch did that incorrectly, too---the backup generator was, essentially, useless and correcting that was going to be needed as well. When the work was all complete, management was anxious to restart all the systems. Until I asked: "So the repaired UPS has successfully been load tested and is good to go?" "Well, No..." "Don't you have a dummy load to test the UPS with?" Awkward silence "So the plan is to test the repairs using the production systems as test loads?" After a lot of hemming and hawing, someone from the UPS vendor finally admits that they /do/ have a dummy load... but didn't think to bring it with them. More delays while that's brought onsite and the UPS tested. Roughly a day and a half later, we're back up and running, full of free coffee, donuts, and pizza, and on a first name basis with the electrical contractors.

Basements might be as bad.

Back while working at a University, the main data center where all the Big Iron (IBM 43xx systems), a roomful of DASD enclosures, and what seemed like 1000 miles of cabling lived, was located in the basement of an old building that had once been a post office (complete with Ionic stone columns). Removing and installing new equipment was accomplished by via a ramp laid down on a long flight of stairs. I never saw it happen in person but I'm told it was a process that involved a large team of people from the Uni's physical plant department following a procedure not far removed from the way ancient Egyptians hauled the stone blocks for the pyramids. I felt bad for the folks that still relied on those systems -- and would be down while that Herculean installation effort was being performed -- when the most difficult part of setting up our LAVC was running the coax into the offices and labs.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Re: So it seems nothing wrong on the police's part.

No. It's entirely wrong on the police's part. This kind of crap happens all the time in Chicago. In fact, one reporter has done so many reports on these cases that it almost seems he's able to do nothing /but/ that. The hell of it is that so many of these raids are taking place at the wrong addresses.

Re: Worldometers next

> Florida was one of those states that didn't do the testing just before the election to make the numbers look they were falling.

SOP in Florida. They rigged their unemployment system to make it extremely difficult to qualify for unemployment insurance and then tout how little unemployment there is in the state (as measured by those actually receiving UI payments).

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Star Writer

Oddly, I've been seeing the same problem with LibreOffice on a newly upgraded openSUSE. Launching Writer can take several minutes. Then patches come out and it launches in a few seconds. Come the next round of patching and we go back to "click and go for coffee" load times. I'm about ready to have it autostart when I log in and just leave it loaded all the time---just to avoid the awkward delays when someone calls to discuss a document and I have to make them wait a couple of minutes while Writer loads.

Re: What ?

> I take it you haven't re-mapped your keyboard to swap capslock and ctrl?

Still pining for the days of WordStar? :^D

Re: Annoying little Libre ? well...........

Ha! The CIO at a job many years ago hired someone he'd met at a bar to be our "documentation specialist". One day I discovered that our new MS Word "expert" had been manually numbering lists and pages. When I showed her how to do it the right way it was like introducing a cave dweller to fire. If memory serves, she may also have been the force behind ordering the company phone list by first name.

OpenZFS v2.0.0 targets Linux and FreeBSD – shame about the Oracle licensing worries

Re: I can't stand misleading charts

The Wall Street Journal used that trick for ... well, ever. "OMG, look at that stock price volatility!" but when you look at the axes you see that the chart maker has accentuated tiny changes to jibe with whatever point the accompanying article is trying to make. As Oracle used to be quite rabid in their disallowing independent benchmarks to be published without their consent, one might as well assume that that chart came from Oracle itself.

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

Re: What's wrong with stuff that works????

I'm in agreement with your on "it's not dead just because nobody's making new releases". I can't see how new features would need to be added. Perhaps simply making sure it compiles with new library releases might all most people would want or need.

> So please stop making it so hard to disable the "nolisten tcp" in X.

It's been years since I needed to disable "nolisten" with X11 forwarding via "ssh -X" (or "-Y").

RIAA DMCAs GitHub into nuking popular YouTube video download tool, says it's used to slurp music

So now... when my browser is unable to play a video because GoogleTube has screwed up the capability for the Nth time this month, I'm not even able to download it and view it directly on my desktop using some other application. Nice move RIAA---I'll bet the recording artists that were counting on views of the video by potential music buyers are thrilled to have you screwing up their royalties.

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

We used to live just south of the IL/WI border and watched/heard/read about this fiasco as it unfolded. Everyone knew it was all smoke and mirrors and that the jobs were never going to materialize.

Oracle starts to lose patience with Solaris holdouts

Re: Why?

That's one of the big reasons I dumped a used Ultra60 years ago. Solaris use was already dwindling (as was the need for me to support it) so I couldn't justify the cost of running that space heater.

Re: Left for Red Hat when Oracle bought Sun

s/pools/domains/

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Re: Postscript

The first laser printer we used at home was an LX-29000 from The Printer Works that used a RISC-based TrueImage engine. Worked like a charm for any PostScript files we threw at it. When it died, I had a heck of a time finding something to replace it that didn't either a.) cost twice as much as the LX-29000 or b.) have its PostScript feature implemented in a Windows-only driver (and often both "a" /and/ "b").