Posts by uccsoundman

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

Re: That's not the complaint

I am! I'm programming with it right now on the other screen.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: How close have you come to committing a crime while doing tech support?

>> Those of us with professional qualifications, or chartered status, have standards that we may be held against. I do work across multiple jurisdictions, but the chartered status standards are always (in my experience) higher than those of the laws of the land.

Here in the US, the accountant test is "What is 2+2?" The winning answer is "What do you want it to be?". My accounting teacher (a minor for me) said to check your ethics at the door. It is OUR job to lie in behalf of the customer.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

That's the advantage of Agile

Testing? We don't need to stinkin' testing! We're Agile.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

> but would it really pass inspection?

Yes. All it takes is some folding money with pictures of dead presidents or a famous founding father on it.

Ex-Musician here. We called them "Wrigley Spearmint Fuses". 1000 lbs of stage equipment and one 15 amp outlet. One venue had knob-and-tube wiring. Yep, the good old days.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

The oldest phones used 49 Mhz for one side of the conversation and 1600 Khz (the upper side of the American MW Band) for the other side. Under Part 15 of the FCC's rules about low power unlicensed transmitters, you could have up to 100mw of transmit power (at least at the time) I worked for a Radio Shack then, and the manager used to take one of those phones and go two doors down the street to eat dinner and still be able to answer the phone. At that time, radios (such as scanners) that could pick up random frequencies around 49Mhz were not that common, but you could pick up the 1600 Khz signal on just about any AM radio. And it included the sidetone so you could hear both sides of the conversation. I lived in an apartment complex and you could hear some very NSFW conversations on the most ordinary of radios. Also, it wasn't that hard to hot-rod those phones (just change a resistor) and you could go to the next block.

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

Re: Interesting how every other country manages without this tone thing

I'm not sure how it works Britian (I still can't get over the fact you have to pay the government a hefty tax to watch TV). However, that alert tone is DEEPLY embedded in our psyche. If you are from England, watch your parent's and grandparent's reaction to an air-raid siren. Same thing. It was cemented into our brains that tone signaled the impending end of the world. My parents, and then I were drilled MONTHLY on what to do if we heard that tone. You walked around with a keen awareness of where the nearest shelter was in case the Russians dropped the big one on us. In case of emergency, that tone was on EVERY communications channel simultaneously. It elicits a very real flight-or-fight response.

Also, there are (or were) automatic systems tied to those tones. Places like hospitals had dedicated radios tuned to a station (usually a clear-channel AM) and when the alert was tested, that hospital radio alerted and a human was supposed to check on it. Because they did test it, the alert never directly resulted in an action; some human had to push the button.

These days there are other systems now, but all of those are a lot more vulnerable to failure and sabotage than the old fashioned EWS system. So, hands off the tones.

Re: you could see people start to pull over thinking it was the law.

What? Why is it your automatic assumption that everybody listens to music via streaming? There's a world of people who (a) don't have smart phones (b) refuse to pay more than once to listen to a song (c) want to listen to things not available via streaming (d) while they find them annoying, they are mostly OK with ads. And people are keeping their cars a lot longer now (mainly because new ones are much more expensive). My 2005 big-grandpa sedan doesn't have Bluetooth anything, just a good AM/FM radio. Still runs, so why change.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Servers in the hiding room.

Well I've been in meetings where the fire alarms went off and the boss said "Anybody who leaves this room is FIRED!!!!". Somebody left, and he was fired for insubordination. When somebody in security tried to bring up the security violation, he was fired. Eventually everybody learned to ignore the fire alarm. Remember, this is the USA and laws are for the little people.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Didn't we have a tea party up in Boston?

American here: I tried Earl Grey and really didn't like it. It tasted like perfume to me. I like my super-strong Chai tea (tastes like mulled cider). But for everyday consumption I prefer whatever tea Lipton is. If I drink it hot, I change between black and some milk and touch of sugar. But I'm from the South, and the official beverage of the American South is STRONG Lipton tea, over ice, with about a pound of sugar. Iced tea is my preferred beverage too, but diabetes runs in my family so it is unsweetened. And iced tea has the advantage you don't have to light the kettle every day at 4pm.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

> I was working under IR35 at the time...

Can you explain this to the token American? I did Google it and it appeared to be something like "Getting Paid Under The Table" or "Unpaid Work (do it for free or lose your job)". How would the airline suffer if they were discovered?

The latter is pretty common in the USA, so much so that companies brag about how much free overtime they can force people to do. E

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

You have no power here

Musk to Irish court: Put a sock in it. We're a big American company and I'm richer than your whole country put together. My company can put your country out of business. Your puny little laws don't apply to us. He's not getting a penny of our money and there's nothing you can do about it. So go fish.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

That's Agile for you! Test it in production. NOTHING is more important than getting the release out on time, and "on time" means yesterday.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund aims to zap Musk's monster Tesla pay deal

Take my cars and go home

I think you are all missing the obvious. All Tesla cars are online and can be reprogrammed. So he gets on X, makes a post that says "If I don't have that 56 Billion in my bank account in 3 hours, I'm going to push this big red button and disable every Tesla in the world 'on the spot'. Middle of the interstate, on the way to the hospital, doesn't matter. If somebody dies it's YOUR fault, not mine. Signed Elon".

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Re: failed meeting

When I was younger I could drive about 1000 miles per day, but that left about an hour for a catnap at a truck stop. Now my limit is about 1/2 that; 500 miles in 10 hours (that includes gas and toilet stops and time for some fast-food). If you are in a hurry and have multiple drivers, you can make about 1400 miles in a day. That's a rule of thumb however. On the Eastern seaboard it is less. Out west it is higher, and there's a stretch of road in Texas where the speed limit is 85 mph.

Re: failed meeting

When travelling long distances in the USA, at least in the Eastern half, my rule-of-thumb to calculate the travel time is to use 60mph. With gas, food and bathroom stops, that's usually a good predictor.

Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers

But they aren't doing things the old way anymore. If they were, the planes would not be falling out of the sky or explosively disassembling. It doesn't matter if they are using PDF or dead-tree or even hieroglyphics. If they are ignoring the instructions and falsifying the reports (which they are) then who cares how it is documented?

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Well, the trouble is that "Scientific Inquiry" is no longer a sufficient reason to launch any spacecraft. These days there has to be a ROI within this quarter, or it will not get done. I predict that nothing on the order of the Hubble will ever get done again because there is no immediate profit in it. After all, who cares if the universe is 13.1 or 23.2 billion years old? How does that get me any goodies? It doesn't? Well never mind then. Nobody was interested in revisiting the moon until they found minerals they could mine for $$$$. Now there is a mad rush to the moon.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Stop Testing

Or you have the opposite idea "Stop Testing, you're finding too many defects", or "Yes, it's supposed to handle 100,000 users but it crashes and fails the load test. We'll just define the passing load test at 1000 users instead. It'll crash, but we made the release date!".

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

"If a business cannot exist without the unlawful and unethical exploitation of data subjects then in the public interest is should close. Shareholders should not be the number one consideration in every matter regarding business. If they lose out for investing in an unlawful unethical business then they should lose their money."

Obviously not an American. In the USA, unlawful and unethical is the very definition of business. When I was in Business school, a professor said "You know what they call people to obey the law? LOOSERS!!!, Soon to be bankrupt and unemployed. And Shareholders are GODS and their profit is the ONLY consideration. They can do anything they want, any time they want, to whomever they want, so long as it makes a profit. The government and the courts will back them all the way.

WATSON picks up slack on Mars for SHERLOC as Perseverance gadgets show age

If you want the craft to expire on time or before, just have it built by Boeing.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Everything in order

My great uncle told a story. He was working for the FAA in the 1950's, generally doing stuff with radar. The transmitter house featured long lines of high power tubes with wire caps on top for the high voltage. Well one day some big-wig demanded an inspection tour of the transmitter house, and insisted it be live and the cages open so he could see all the pretty tubes (a BIG violation; it should be power (or at least HV) off and cages closed). But big-wig had the power to demand, so off they went. As he's walking down the line of tubes. one of the caps was crooked. So he reached out to straighten it. Woke up 2 weeks later in the hospital.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Re: Emgineering 101

> Oh and agile is shit and we all know it,

Yes, but it's CHEAPER. Not only do you no longer need to do testing, but when the product fails, the contract temps that wrote it are LONG gone to another project at another company. The CIO only needs to point to the cost savings and no further questions will be asked. The shareholders only look at that cost and never at the cost of the failure (so sad, too bad). If you are a customer that lost money, oh well, that's life in the big city. Complain to the regulators? LOL, they are in the Bahamas partying with the CIO.

Boeing discovers Dreamliner defect, delivery delay decided

Re: What you get

-> You got what you paid for, boys.

Yes they did. They got the company, bumped the stock price, cashed out, and set the company on auto-destruct. Once it is dead, they will send in the buzzards to feast on the carcass.

Tech companies cut jobs to chase growth, but watch out for those shareholder returns

"None of this is conducive to long-term shareholder gains. "

That's the trouble. NOBODY is interested in "Long Term". Shareholders are only interested in the next quarter's results. In the long term they have long since cashed out to go milk some other cash cow.

Microsoft not a Teams player as admin center, 365 service suffer partial outage

Re: Completely agree

Yes, but when the cloud companies go to the pointy-haired-bosses and say why are you paying for computers, space to store them, and engineers to keep them running? Instead, outsource to us. We'll pay for the computers, space, and engineers, and rent them to you for a very modest sum.

So, they move to the cloud, sell their computers and their building, and fire the engineers. Just then, as if by magic, the cloud provider starts raising their prices and charging by the transaction. The resulting bill is DOUBLE what it used to be, and they're now in the grip of another company for their existence. And they can't go back, because they jettisoned everybody who knew how the old system worked.

But by this time, the CEO has been rewarded for cutting costs, and the stockholders have taken their money and run.

Happens.Every.Single.Time.

Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub

I'm astonished that she might be going to jail. SURELY there's some powerful person she can sleep with to get this conviction overturned, or at least keep her out of jail permanently. I don't have such power, but if I did, I'd love to make that trade.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: Why would one ...

Another reason is that these toaster ovens gobble gigantic amounts of power, and most office wiring isn't hefty enough to support them.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Higgins

Oh, around here Higgins would be fired! The chorus of "he's finding too many defects" would be so deafening that development management would waste no time in showing Higgins to the door! How many times have I been ordered to change sev-high defects to a feature request or lose my job, and told "Stop Testing; your finding too many defects, and we won't be able to release".

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

Re: Notes? How old school!

I eventually took a Shorthand class so I could take notes at talking speed. Not 100% effective (I wasn't that good at it) but better than writing longhand.

Amazon internal chat app that censored talk of unions and ethics may 'never launch at all'

Re: What an idiotic waste of time and effort

It's something you learn in business school, even undergrad. Capitalism ruthlessly rewards efficiency and punishes inefficiency. The most efficient business model is a Monopoly, and the most efficient labor model is involuntary servitude.

Re: Slack can already do this...

Amazon can do anything it wants in the USA. Remember that money = power and now Amazon has so much money they are FAR more powerful than the government. If really pushed, they will just lock the unionized warehouse and move next door. Yes it's against the law, but who cares; Amazon is now above the law. Remember in the USA, wealth equals absolute power, well above any government.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Re: I replaced a network cable. -> We replaced a power cable

Q: What's a "Dicky Plug"? I haven't heard of that.

Big Tech revenues under threat from EU law proposals

Regulate me? I'll shut down your government!!!!

So, if I'm Amazon, I know that all these government and banking systems have long since moved all of their computing to the cloud. So, I just put up a bold and brazen warning; if you implement any measures that bother us in any way, we'll just turn off your cloud computing accounts. In 1 hour all of your governments and all of your banking systems will collapse. We will turn them on again only if you make us king and give us absolute autonomy. Long Live King Amazon!!!!

What's to prevent it?

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Stealing more than fuel

> The thieves turn up with a large powerful pickup...

They have Large Powerful pickups in the UK? I'm actually astonished. From what I've seen on TV the biggest pickup trucks I've seen appear to be about the size of a Tuk-Tuk, and would easily fit in the bed of the average size pickup truck here in the US.

Beware the big bang in the network room

Re: Service Windows

Or better yet, the only person who either had permissions and/or knew how to do the maintenance quit long ago because the company across the street was offering 2X the salary and was offering benefits like not being on-site 24/7/365 because you were the only person on staff. And BTW, he was the only one that knew the key-codes to get in the server room door and the only one who knew how to change them. So, as time goes on, the company has less and less access to its computers.

Or, how about maintenance is required but nobody knows where the machine is? Indeed in one case they didn't even know what CITY the machine was in.

Face Off: IRS kills plan to verify taxpayers with facial recognition database

Re: Simpler Solution

Because generating revenue is only one purpose of the tax system. The other is social manipulation. For instance, you can deduct the interest on your house mortgage, thus encouraging home ownership. Also VAT taxes only tax the money that you spend. Income taxes get a piece of any money you receive. So, if you win the lottery, the government gets about 1/2 of it even if you never spend a dime of your winnings.

Midwest tornado destroys Amazon warehouse, killing six after worker 'told not to leave'

This is because every minute of idle time costs Amazon money, and Jeff Bezos did not become a bajillionaire by wasting money on things such as safety. Besides, in the USA employees are disposable cannon fodder and we can always get replacements... or so they taught us in business school.

Better CEO is 'taking time off' after firing 900 staff on Zoom

Re: Making people redundant

> How would you prefer your company to be regarded?

Well it depends. A lot of Wall Street types and Boards of Directors PREFER heartless SOB CEO's. In the Al (Chainsaw) Dunlap school of management (we worshiped him when we were in business school), being a sadistic ass is a sure way to greater profitability. Reputation means NOTHING. However, I wonder how long it will be before said employees make it their life mission to punish these sadistic people.?

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

.-> Let's not even get started on the US's weedy 110V system which means that an electric kettle draws so much current it melts wires. At least they finally settled on AC as a sensible system, despite Edison.

We solve the electric kettle problem by not drinking tea. Of if we want tea (generally iced and sweet) we boil it on a stove.

But don't forget about our other odd electrical voltages. My great-uncle's farm ran on 32 volts DC. His lights were all 32 volt. You could even get a vacuum tube "farm radio" that ran off 32 volts. The system was charged by a windmill. I was a tiny boy when I saw it so take my observations with a grain of salt.

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Re: "two main reasons why the Royal Navy no longer uses [paper charts]"

"He confirmed the same situation on US ships: no paper charts. The reason given was that they're a huge problem to store and keep updated."

Because I don't know: Why do paper charts need updating? Land masses don't generally move very much. Yes I understand that near a coastline you might have changes, but I'm thinking more about where on the face of the Earth are you. And storage? How much does a nice closet cost?

IMHO sailors need constant practice and refresh on the ancient ways. All you'd need to do is generate a nice EMP (even a "Carrington Event" would do) and all that electronic storage is toast. All they needed in the 19th century is a sextant, a paper chart, star tables and an accurate clock.

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

Re: Lines of Code

Spaghetti code and lines-of-code = pay. Sounds like an outsourcing company I worked with. We used them for software development AND writing test cases. Their metric was number of test cases per time period. They actually wrote a system that automatically generated unique test cases. As an example, instead of opening the app and clicking on options 1 through 100 in a loop, they wrote 100 test cases, all the same except for which option to click. 100x increase in productivity, so they asked for (and almost received) extra pay. Turns out the guys writing the checks knew nothing about code but just saw the spreadsheet metric and were taken in.

Needless to say the guys who pointed that out were not very popular with the contracting company.

No change control? Without suitable planning, a change can be as good as an arrest

We don't do change control and you can't make us.

A long story can be summed up by this: "We don't need to test, and we will not submit to change control. We're Agile, and agile can ignore all processes". Trouble is the PHB is only worried about "speed to market".

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: Hands in Pockets!

I had a father-in-law with 9 fingers. It seems he was once a soldier, drunk on leave outside Ft. Knox, and somebody at a local bar pointed a gun at him. He somehow decided that sticking his finger in the barrel would keep him from harm.

Re: Access denied

I'm very surprised that the Boss did not self-certify, you know, because he is god.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Nobody leaves

How about "I don't care if there is an active shooter in the building, anybody who leaves this meeting is FIRED!". Real life; several people died.

Re: Constantly, in a fashion.

So often the answer is 15 minutes of gathering, 10 minutes to explain is preferable to the 30 seconds of fixing because "I said so"

Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens

Re: High-level manglement can be just as much a nuisance as unions

In defense of the suit wearers: I took typing in high school when typing was still done by girls in typing pool. I actually had to get SPECIAL permission from the school's principal to take the class since that was designated as "girl only" (like shop class was boy only). I also got my manhood questioned and received a few beatings from the jocks to remind me to stick to boy-stuff.

Re: Free school meals

>>All too often, we see situations where we'll pay more but claim to be saving money) just to be sure "they" don't get a free ride.

In a modification of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 (which at least in America is a root-level national policy, beaten into us as Children) "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not PAY, neither should he eat."