Posts by swm

HPE's Spaceborne supercomputer returns to terra firma after 615 days on the ISS

I don't see how running a computer slower would protect it from radiation. A flipped bit is a flipped bit at any speed. Did this machine have parity or ECC?

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

60 years ago I wrote a simple LGP-30 program to execute statements like +'a'b'c' (add a to b and put the result in c). Then I discovered that the math department was using this program in a class. Some of the original BASIC restrictions (identifiers: a letter followed by an optional digit) can be traced to this program.

I say, Eaton boys are flogging spare capacity on data centre UPS systems to keep lights on in Ireland

I understand that the ring at Fermilab uses a huge amount of electricity to charge their superconducting magnets (10% of the available grid electricity). They negotiate, cycle by cycle, with the power company to level the load. This gets them a cheaper rate.

The superconducting magnets do require energy to keep them running despite being superconductive.

Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let's have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage

I just spent over an hour trying to figure out why my wife's email wasn't working. Now I know.

The cloud is not your friend.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Now where do humans put all their capital cities?

Is this where all of the politicians reside? Maybe rising sea levels aren't all bad.

Want to train a dragon? You'll need 500 million files, 730TB of data, 54,000 CPU cores...

Wow! However they do it the end result (movie) is impressive!

Comcast – the cable giant America loves and trusts – confirms in-home health device to keep tabs on subscribers

Re: The basic idea may be sound

Where my mother lived (independent living) they had a motion sensor under the refrigerator. If there was no motion detected the staff checked up on the person. My mother also had a "panic button" (which she used once). Both are useful.

Comcast is not useful.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Audit tags

We used to buy computer boards with capital money. The auditors wanted to stick an asset tag on the board but there was no room where the tag would adhere.

Re: whether if they'd had their sidearms they could have shot the lock off instead

Tried that once and the pins came out but the door still wouldn't open because the hinges (without pins) still wouldn't clear each other.

Making great grand master keys is easier and quicker.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Couldn't play video

The video didn't play - something about copyrights in my country.

Wanted: Big iron geeks to help restore IBM 360 mainframe rescued from defunct German factory by other big iron geeks

Re: Yeah, but...

As I recall, originally software was free with the machine.

Re: My first job

A RAMAC 305 was a wonder to watch running. One head bouncing between many platters.

Yep. Change the add and multiply tables and you had an octal machine!

Re: Just bunged them a tenner

I started on an LGP-30 vacuum tube (valve) magnetic drum machine. 4K of 31-bit words.

Modern kids don't know about "real programming".

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: Childish but satisfying...

In the 1960's on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System all terminal entry was in ASCII. There was a translation from ASCII to a 6-bit character code and another translation table from the 6-bit character code to ASCII. One day, in a moment of boredom, we caused all ASCII 2's to be converted to 3's on input and vice versa. Users would type in programs and print them out but the line numbering (BASIC) had 3's before 2's etc. Childish, I know, but we were college students.

When we were patching the translation tables we changed the 2's to 3's and then realized we had no 2's we could type in. Second attempt we changed 2's to a's, 3's to 2's, and a's to 3's.

Bloke accused of conning ARIN out of 750,000 IPv4 addresses worth $9m+ to peddle on black market

Re: *COUGH* "Now if everyone would just move to IPv6... "

$ nslookup -q=aaaa www.google.com

Server: 127.0.0.53

Address: 127.0.0.53#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: www.google.com

Address: 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004

sidney@server ~-1

$ ping 2607:f8b0:4009:807::2004

connect: Network is unreachable

If you're ever lost on the Moon, Ordnance Survey now has you covered for Apollo 11 anniversary

I remember watching the first moon landing descent (with the computer program alarms) when I was in college. It was exciting.

I was also listening to the live feed when Apollo 13 blew an oxygen bottle. The only time I heard an astronaut get excited was when ground control said, "turn off the react on oxygen bottle #1."

"Did you say, 'turn off the react on oxygen bottle #1?!?!' "

"That's affirmative"

At that moment the mission was scrubbed. The news commentators never had a clue and were wondering if the mission would proceed. I was wondering if the astronauts would make it back. They were not on a free return path to Earth, They had powered down the command module's inertial platform before they powered up the lander's platform and had to align it. They couldn't see any stars because of the debris from the explosion.

Once they got things more or less under control they did a small burn to get them back to Earth. "The Atlantic ocean?" "We're working on it."

Eventually another small burn got them to a Pacific ocean landing.

Just before landing they powered up the command module. The news commentators were worried if there was enough battery power - still no clue as the battery in the command module was designed to handle re-entry.

These are just some of my my recollections - I never saw the movie.

Register Lecture: Hidden heroes of Alan Turing's Enigma

Re: Cryptologists were left out of the war credits....

Almost all of the photos of early computers showed women programming or operating the machines. Most were not given the credit they deserved.

Take my bits awaaaay: DARPA wants to develop AI fighter program to augment human pilots

I remember a program (about 40 years ago) for cruise missiles (using PROLOG no less) designed to carry out missions autonomously. The program could dodge enemy fire, adjust for decreased maneuverability caused by damage, go for secondary targets if the primary target was unobtainable etc. Modern aircraft combat is a lot about energy management (height and velocity) and I would think that both strategic as well as tactical assistance would be appropriate.

Of course, it is sad that all of this technology is for killing people. An AI program for negotiating peace would be most welcome.

A2 Hosting finds 'restore' the hardest word as Windows outage slips into May

Re: Servers..

I run a website and I keep a mirror of its contents on several machines at home and one on a backed up account at a local college. I update the website by updating one of my home systems and copying the changed files to the website provider. Once a previous provider lost all of the website and when they got the site back in operation I just reloaded the site. This is a site with static pages so it would be more complicated with a data back end but surely not that much harder.

I talked with a Paychex IT person who said that they have 6 duplicate versions of their data with UPS backup etc. Even with a city wide power failure of a week all of their servers continued to function perfectly.

If data are your crown jewels you should protect them.

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

Re: "WTF do you think you're doing?"

When I was writing the Phase II Dartmouth Time Sharing executive in 1967 I keypunched all of the code. They offered to get me a typist but I refused because the act of keypunching was my final examination of the code.

The A in AMD stands for 'Aaaaannnyway...' Q2 is gonna be good, chip biz vows, after dismal Q1

I hope AMD makes it. At least Intel will have competition.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Sexing up the good old CV

I was once assigned to recruit candidates from Cornell. I put on a coat and tie so I looked like a "suit" and started interviewing students. Each student was allotted 1/2 an hour (minus 5 minutes I used to scan their resume). One candidate was optimizing something to do with integer programming but the resume was weird. So I thought i would cut to the chase. My first question was, "do you mean that you can solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time?" The response was amazing - he looked at me and said, " Oh, you understand this stuff - let me tell you what I am really doing." He was quite bright and we had quite an interesting conversation. I gave him high marks for intelligence but unfortunately couldn't find a match in our company for someone with his skills.

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Re: "their freedom to wear whatever they want"

I've noticed that wheel chairs are now incredibly wide.

Re: Poor Grammar C-

One of my kid's English teacher was proud of not being able to spell!

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

Re: Help! My stiffies stuck in the slot

AOL used to send out 3.5" disks to install AOL or something. I always formatted these disks for reuse. At a conference someone wanted one of my files so I put in a newly formatted AOL disk, copied the file, and handed it to him. He made some comment like, "Oh, that's what those disks are for."

Thank you, your DNA data will help secure your… oh dear, we've lost that too

Re: My mum got asked to prove her age at a pub

A bunch of fellow students went to a beer bar in Arizona. After we had been seated one of the students said that the bouncer wanted to see me. So I went over and he asked me if I was over 21. I started to pull out my wallet to prove that I was over 21 but he waved it away and just wanted me to state I was over 21. Since I was I said so.

None of the other students I was with were over 21.

Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper

Back in 1965, the Dartmouth Time Sharing system uses two computers - a GE 235 for computation and a DN-30 for everything else. The DN-30 was a real-time communications processor that handled ~40 teletypes and scheduled jobs for the 235. We would sometimes enter patches from the master teletype to the DN-30. Once the patch was in we would plant a branch instruction to the new code. If we got a line feed after the carriage return we were good. If the DN-30 proceeded to reboot then we knew we had made a mistake somewhere. 40 users would be instantly annoyed.

I don't know if modern programmers still have the skills to enter programs in octal (or hex, now a days) any more.

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

Re: Seriously?

The LGP-30 used paper tape (around 1960) and the initial bootstrap consisted of storing three instructions in memory. You type c0000, press A-> I, i0000, execute instruction, c0004, A -> I, c000j, execute instruction, c0008, A -> I, c000j, press 4 buttons OCNS, and, with luck, the bootloader (10.4) would load from the photo tape reader. You would see c0000i0000c0004c000jc0008i0000 on lots of scrap paper. (I am skipping some of the button presses.)

Around 1968 we got a GE-635 (a machine that filled a room) and the boot procedure consisted of stopping everything, setting the mask register in the memory, loading cards in the card reader, setting the processor to be able to run, goto the IO controller and jump to a card boot location, hit run on the IO controller and one card would be booted (we had bootstraps that that only needed to boot one card) then do this again for the second card. They eventually put some boot buttons on the console to simplify this.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: What's Wrong With a Loop?

I liked the entry statement in FORTRAN II - you could call one entry point to initialize and another to compute. As far as GOTO is concerned Dijkstra's diatribe was written against certain FORTRAN II programs that jumped all over the place so he was really speculating how far one could go without a GOTO. Certain flow diagrams require either a GOTO or a subroutine call.

When I taught C++ I commented that jumping out of multiple loops is much cleaner than using flag variables etc. I also told the class that I was grandfathered having been coding since 1960 so I could use GOTO and so could they if the use resulted in more structured code.

Absolute mad lads are teaching physics to AI because how else will it learn to solve real-world problems (like humans)

Re: “Fallen on hard times”?

The reason was that the alto wasn't ready was that top management kept trying to kill the project. Each build was said to be the last build but secretaries, researchers etc. kept demanding more of them. The garage shop that built them said that they were continually going out of business. Therefore, it was never able to engineer a cheaper version.

Top management also invited Apple to see all of the work over vehement protest of the PARC employees. Top management said that the alto didn't fit into any of the copier divisions so weren't interested.

I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords

Re: Here have a can of worms...

About 50 years ago my father was flying and at one point in the flight they stopped serving drinks. When asked why, they said that in the state they were flying over had a law that said they couldn't serve drinks if someone complained. Who complained? A competing airline.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: When Urban Myths Come True

We had a problem with the cleaners using and unplugging stuff until we discovered what was going on. After being informed, the cleaners used the hall wall sockets ant everyone was happy.

On another note, a water pipe broke above our offices and hundreds of gallons of water per minute were released over the ceiling tiles. The ceiling tiles immediately turned into mush and started dropping. A mad scramble ensued to cover up the computers as the wave of falling tiles progressed. Can't say that this was the result of human error though but it was an exciting ten minutes.

Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep

Re: And now for something completely different

The book is better without all of the hype.

Amazon boss snubs 'expensive', 'sub-optimal' relational databases. Here's looking at you, Larry

My financial advisor has one of these black cylinders in his office. He doesn't understand my concern. The last time I was there I said, "Alexa, buy me a doll house." The response was, "I've added your request to your wish list." I have no idea whose list this was added to.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

At work someone stuck a floppy disk labelled "master ... disk" to a door with a magnet. People would walk by and cringe.

US boffins tangle with quantum entanglement in spooky rack-mounted networking hardware

Re: One does not know the state of anything until it is measured.

Bell's theorem is merely an experimental setup where 2 entangled photons cannot have a hidden state that explains the weirdness. The experiment has been performed and Bell's theorem is violated so there is no hidden state in the photons. What is happening is that the 2-photon state has zero angular momentum and all measurements will conform to this fact. When the photons are far apart and the angular momentum of one photon is measured then we know that any measurement of the other photon will agree with this measurement.

The "collapse of the wave function" gives a misleading picture of what is happening. Your view of the wave function is certainly different after the measurement but there is no time dependence on this collapse - the other photon might be measured before you do your measurement and your measurement just confirms the remote measurement. If the measurements are separated by a space-like interval then it is impossible to tell which measurement occurred first.

Actually it gets weirder than this but the margins of this note are too small to elucidate.

Brit rocket boffins Reaction Engines notch up first supersonic precooler test

Then there was the story about the RAF having trouble getting leather seats for their aircraft because of the lack of supply of camel dung. The specs said to rub the leather in camel dung as part of the manufacturing process.

Well, this part of the process came from making saddles and the camel dung was so the camels wouldn't be afraid of the horse smell. These specs were copied to the airplane seat specs although the reason for this step was lost in the paperwork.

In Milwaukee, 50 years ago, a company had a problem with a jammed piston. So they got some dynamite to shake it loose. The piston flew a good part of a mile after piercing the roof of the factory.

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

Re: You should have been sacked

The same thing happened when they benchmarked a P & E machine. There was a loop that iterated some calculation 1,000,000 times but since the results of the calculation were never used the compiler deleted the loop body, then noticed a loop with an empty body and deleted the loop.

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

Re: Common Problem

When I worked for a living there was a security audit of my very messy office. When I found the audit a week later I noted they checked all of the boxes (papers not locked up etc.) including the box that I passed. So I ignored it. My boss said my office was pretty secure - nobody else could find anything.

Re: Set up Guide?

The manuals of 50 years ago were quite good - especially from IBM. They told you how things worked in understandably written prose. Then Apple decided that a manual should tell you how to do certain things (but not other things) and you had to puzzle out the underlying model. Now instructions seem to be a mixture of poorly translated instructions peppered with meaningless icons.

In college on the Dartmouth time sharing system I saw a user enter their user number and patiently wait for the computer to respond. They didn't know that you had to hit "return". This is not stupidity but unfamiliarity with the new technology.

Plasma bubbles 500 times the size of earth, ultra-hot rain - let's face it, the Sun's not a place to hang out nearby

Absolutely amazing!

Phew... Oi, was that you, Curiosity? Euro Mars sat inhaled mega methane blast, boffins baffled

Re: Whoopsie

In my daughters high school chemistry class the instructor asked how to find a gas leak. The instructor suggested using a match. The class responded, "No, use a flash light." So the instructor turned on a bunsen burner and followed the tubing around with a flash light and nothing happened. He repeated with a match and when he came to the bunsen burner part it ignited. He said, "See, the match works but not the flash light."

Homework assignment: find out how the gas companies do it. Answer: soap suds.

Googlers, eggheads urge web giant's bosses to kick top conservative off its AI ethics council

Wow! El Reg commentards can really get riled up. I wish I liked popcorn so I could have some and enjoy the show.

(I'll probably get downvoted for not liking popcorn.)

BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...

Musak

In the research labs I used to work in "they" decided that we needed mind-numbing music piped in to all of the offices and labs. I watched one scientist open up the control panel and started cutting random wires until the musak stopped. At this point "they" realized that scientists had tools and weren't afraid to wield them. The music stopped permanently.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Drilling for Electricity

In the computer room at college they decided to put in an elevator from the basement to the computer room to make it easier for the operators to bring up paper supplies etc. The workmen used a carbide cutter and lots of water to cut through the floor of the computer room. Sparks flew when they hit the main power cable for the computer room. Their reaction: keep cutting.

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

"did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?"

At our computer center at college we had a computer who was a retired marine gunnery sargent. One day someone complained about the low humidity. The HVAC people made some adjustments and the computer room filled up with a dense fog. The operator justifiably hit the emergency power off button on the way out.

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

When I was writing the Dartmouth Time Sharing System I realized that I was the only one who knew how to bring the system up. So one Saturday morning during experimental time sharing (when the sysprogs could hack away, cause crashes etc. - not a critical time for anyone) I made myself unavailable for bringing up the system. It took them 2 hours to bring up the system - there were really sharp people there - and then I had their attention so they listened when I explained the details of bringing up and running the system.

I maintain a website for the local square dancing federation. I made it quite clear that there should be people backups for me. The master password for the web site is known to several officers of the federation and to some others who are actually skilled to maintain the website. There is complete documentation for procedures for maintaining the website stored on the website which anyone is free to download (without the master password).

This same federation lost the entire subscriber database when the person managing it was secretive and stored everything on her personal computer. She died in a car accident and nobody could get into her password-protected computer.