Posts by swm

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

Re: Made up data ...

Tom Kurtz of BASIC fame when confronted with the requirement for filling out time sheets said, "Can't we just fill out one and just copy it."

Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email

Eudora?

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

When I was teaching C++ a student came to me because his code wasn't working and the lab assistant couldn't find the bug. Turns out the student had written:

if(char == '\\' then { //check for \

etc.

Well the \ at the end of the line deleted the following newline making the next line a comment. This caused errors on the second following line causing confusion.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Re: Tin men vs GPL

Almost all optics designs are computer generated. There is no problem getting patents or copyrights on these designs.

Lab worker built a fake PC to nuke his lunch

Re: Radiation hazards are often overblown.

I have a radium dial wrist watch. Its radiation is much stronger than any radioactive sources they let undergraduates play with.

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Re: I have to blame the mainframe OS for a lot of this

like the linux command dd?

Re: Classic (or clbuttic?) mistake

At the college where I was teaching someone was deleting all the files in the homework submission directory. Nothing was working. I tried submitting something and left the program running. I then went down to the support person and asked him to print out all users logged into the course submission account. My name came up and I seemed to be running rm -rf * in the top-level submission directory.

I stopped my program from running and after some trouble shooting discovered the problem:

The submission directory was over quota and the submission program was unable to create any of the sub-directories needed for the submission. The submission cleanup script then did a rm -rf * on the top-level directory because the system had failed to create the temporary directories so the cd commands were noops.

Once we found the root cause we just doubled the quotas for the submission directory making the problem go away for awhile.

Next day I told the class what had happened. I mentioned that backups would be useful in this case and the class chuckled. I then explained that we had a fairly extensive backup system and could (and did) restore the files from a few hours before the problem. Students did have to resubmit any homework from the previous day but not a big deal.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: Crash of a different sort

I used to work on laser printers (on which I helped to design). Sometimes I used what I call an optical sledge hammer to knock some of the optics back in place. Never had a problem. Of course, being one of the designers I knew what to hit and how hard.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Not major but...

Where I worked I saw several 3 phase fuse boxes with a copper bar in the neutral line.

Re: Outages

When I was working for Xerox in research a major transformer that powered the building blew up. The transformer was in a room opposite to the guarded entry. When asked, the guard said, "oh yes, there was a hell of a bang last night."

"Did you report it?" "No, I thought it was someone else's problem."

When they finally installed a new transformer, they did it live. Two men stood with crossed 2x4's in front of the transformer and braced themselves. A third man reached over the 2x4's to connect the transformer. The job of the two men with 2x4's was to pull the third man off of the transformer/wires if anything went wrong. Everyone was very serious. Fortunately, all went well.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: I just knew this was going to come up

Computers are 100% efficient in converting electrical energy into heat.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Division

But how do you efficiently do division?

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: 44 gallon drums

A meter used to be exactly 39.37 inches. It was redefined so 2.54 cm was exactly one inch shrinking the inch a bit.

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Not Y2K but similar

Not Y2K but when my grandfather turned 100 the life insurance company insisted that he cash in his policy. For tax reasons we didn't want to do this. Turns out that their computer systems had a 2-digit field for age and he was causing their software to fail.

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Fantastic as usual :). kzzzt.

I created a website for square dancing with no scripts - just straight HTML. It has hundreds of pages and pages load almost instantaneously even over a slow link. Another square dancing website uses wordpress and loads slowly even over a direct fiber link.

Re: 650k is enough

1201 - out of real time. But the software did not crash but continued to perform satisfactorily. Unlike windows where normal operation can cause weird crashes.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Tricks of the trade

A TDR can locate the distance to a fault very quickly.

Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority

Re: Rust is the future

In C++ free() also works for null pointers - no need to check. Storing null in the pointer only works for the current copy - there may be others.

I have never had trouble with C++ - just use value semantics and don't use pointers. Just declare vectors, strings, maps etc. and let the destructor take care of cleaning up. Copy the containers and don't use pointers.

Of course, there are still traps for the unwary but trying to determine ownership etc. can't be good for clean code.

If you want a safe language, just use LISP.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

In college we graduated in reverse alphabetical order.

Physicist models new use for nuclear waste: Turning it into super-rare fusion fuel

I understood that hydrogen bombs produced tritium which decays into helium 3. The air in the rooms where the nuclear arsenal is kept is processed to get the tritium which (after decay) turns into helium 3 which is useful for scientific experiments and very cold refrigerators.

Google agrees to pause AI workloads to protect the grid when power demand spikes

Fermilab

I remember a story that Fermilab could easily consume 10% of all available electricity in the Chicago area. Fermilab made a deal with the electric company where they would negotiate power draw cycle by cycle so Fermilab would consume power if that cycle wasn't needed for other users.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

"Sliding down the razor blade of life"

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Pharmacists

My office was arranged in several piles of paper. The rule was: 1 inch per month. I could always find what I wanted but the clean desk patrol was not happy. We once had a security audit and they checked every box including "passed." They must have been flustered - I found this report card when it surfaced a month later.

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

Re: Forbidden

This has all been calculated in detail.

Re: Back of a serviette calculation...

The released gravitational energy outshines the entire universe! Don't do this in your basement.

Re: Wondering

Rochester Institute of Technology has people modeling these events. The spins of the original black holes really warps the space-time around the objects and results in gravitational waves being emitted preferentially in one direction. In this case, the missing 15 solar masses is emitted in one direction and the resulting black hole is kicked in the opposite direction (as much as .01 times the speed of light). During the last seconds of the event, the spins of the incoming black holes rotates by a large amount.

I wouldn't want to be near any such event.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: Phone bill must have been astronomical

55 years ago I wrote the major part of the second Dartmouth College time-sharing system. Everything was teletypes. We used DN-30's to multiplex 50 ttys (2 remote and 2 local) to a GE 635. In the real early days the Bell system was leary of computers on their lines so all datasets connected to a computer reversed mark and space. Repairmen had no clue as to why there testing didn't work. BASIC was the language of choice for users.

It was fun bending a giant mainframe to your will.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

In college I wrote an ALGOL-68 compiler. I was at the December 1968 meeting that "finalized" the report. It is a fairly clean language with a garbage collector (although the specification didn't require collecting everything but it could have). It had a strict type system and clarified many type issues. The two-level syntax made the standard somewhat hard to read until you got used to it.

All in all, I thought it was a step forward in language development.

It answered the question as to why you can write:

x := 2

but not:

2 := x

I did not write all of the transput though.

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

At Xerox, many years ago, we had an off-site garage used for building computers. They had a large stock of RAM chips kept in a locked cage with 12' high walls. One night some people entered the facility and climbed the 12' high walls and went shopping for RAM chips. On the way out they told security not to worry.

They got away with it!

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Re: Things Which Ought be Considered About ANY Add'l Language for Kernel Work

Is there a standard for the RUST language?

Is there more than one compiler for the language?

Does the gnu compiler collection support RUST?

Will future versions of RUST invalidate old code?

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: I'll get my coat

LISP is older than almost all other languages and is memory safe. A modern LISP compiler can produce code just a fast as C. Modern GCs are very fast and can do hard real time. Memory allocation is much faster than malloc. etc. Yes, operating systems have been written in lisp, smalltalk etc.

Re: "it would suck"

Where is the rust standard? Is it just what the compiler does?

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: "Tips and Tells"

My father once complained to the railroad that his wire (one inch in diameter) was arriving tangled. So the railroad put a monitor in the next boxcar. They came back red-faced because the monitor was driven off-scale in the local switch yard and stopped recording for the rest of the trip.

Re: Gravitational attraction

Computer scientists start counting with zero.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

At RIT we had our own support group in the computer science department. They ran file servers, mail, web server etc. They were excellent. Then the university decided that all web pages belonged to them, the mail servers belonged to them etc. So now there is a crappy home page for the CS department, mail is microsoft crap etc.

Oh well.

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Test translations...

I remember "the spirit is willing but the mind is weak" back and forth to "a drunk idiot" or something like that.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

Re: Simula-67 for the win!

ALGOL 68 had garbage collection but it didn't collect everything.

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Crashed an IBM 360 mainframe

A student of mine had a program with a syntax error but couldn't find the error. Turns out he had a comment ending in '\'. This caused the C++ parser to delete the '\' and the new line effectively deleting the next line of code.

Re: Crashed an IBM 360 mainframe

I once got 40,000 errors on a simple assembly program. It had a source code loop that generated lots of lines of code. The error was not prefixing the assembly with a character set card changing EBCDIC codes to ASCII.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

In 1965 when teletypes were the main device to communicate with computers our secretary at the computer center received a call and shortly hung up laughing. Seems someone called with a problem and she said before the caller explained the problem, "Please press the left button on the teletype to turn off that buzzing." The buzzing stopped and then she asked what the problem was. The caller said, "that was the problem - I couldn't figure out how to turn off the buzzer."

Problem solved before being explained.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Re: I like the naming of stuff

These names were named by Kemeny who loved acronyms.

Re: Royal-McBee's *other* connection to Computer History

This is how we all programmed in those days. You had to modify instructions as there were no index registers.

A multiply or divide took one revolution of the drum. The LGP-30 was a bit serial machine. By properly positioning the instructions and operands one could get the speed up to about 200 instructions per second. Otherwise it ran about 60 instructions per second. It had a drum memory of 4096 31-bit words. The accumulator, instruction register, and program counter were also recirculating registers on the drum. A fun machine to work with.

Yes - I programmed DOPE on the LGP-30 in 1962. Tom Kurtz just threw an LGP-30 manual at me and said, "go to it." My first program played NIM and then in the Spring term I wrote DOPE and then discovered that Kemeny had a freshman class use it to verify that amateurs could use a computer. Tom was always smiling and enjoyed life. The actual time sharing system was programmed by undergraduates John McGeachie and Mike Bush and went online in 1964. Tom Kurtz was an excellent statistician and mathematician. He was always ready to talk with anyone. I knew him for many years. He will be missed.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: Making things worse

If your grate BMT put: If your grate B. putting:

I learned this from my grandfather too.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: He's right, of course

class X {

}

X::X::X::X();

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Re: This is a common problem

"Those can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach teach teachers"

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Rust

I was interested in Rust but couldn't find an authoritative definition of the language. Is there a standard or at lease a current language specification draft?

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Two significant characters?

The original BASIC (1963 or 1964?) was at Dartmouth and all variable names were either a single letter or a letter followed by a single digit. It was also compiled but the system hid that fact from the user.

Re: Liam...You Forgot About......

Apple got the idea for the Lisa from Xerox when the top Xerox executives insisted that PARC show Apple their ALTO computers. Typical (Xerox) management screw up.