Posts by longtimeReader

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

In the early days of the IBM PC, we would have some adapter cards - or even motherboards - with intermittent problems. Send the box to the CE team for repairs, and it would come back with no fault found. (We even got into the habit of putting drops of tippex on cards so we could tell whether they'd actually been replaced.) Scraping a screwdriver across some of the circuit tracks would turn an intermittent into a permanent failure. And replacement parts then arrived.

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Re: There's probably 1,500 disks or more

Hardware - I had a PC AT serial number 8.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Check the power supply

A friend told me that she had once been testing a dozen brand new, very expensive, monitors. They were the first batch off the production line and we needed to check they had been correctly built. After the tests were done, she sent them back to the manufacturing plant in Scotland for repacking and distribution. They decided to do their own basic test that the displays did still work so they could be sold on.

Plugged the first one in, and it didn't work. Plugged the second one in, and it didn't work ... All the way up to 12.

At which point they finally checked the specs and found that they had used 240V power instead of the 120V required by this model. And that they had managed to wreck all of them.

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

Re: rm -r *

I once - very deliberately - did "rm -rf /" on a box that was going to be reimaged anyway. It took a lot longer than I expected to start throwing up errors - so much so that I pushed the command into the background and tried running "ls" to see if it was actually working. Of course, by now it was missing libc (still loaded by the rm command but not visible elsewhere) and the resulting error showed that the deletions were happening. "echo *" still worked for a short time though.

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Got some NSFW merch at W.

I have kept the merch I got at a conference in Australia some years ago. (It's never been used, honestly, but was worth keeping just for the amusement it creates.)

It's an IBM-branded vibrator.

Actually, it's labelled as a USB-powered personal massage device. But WE KNOW.

Former Microsoft UX boss doesn't like the Windows 11 Start menu either

"Designed" is not an improvement

> What he saw was confusing, with a left side that seemed to be created by a designer and a right side that he said looks like Internet Explorer toolbars of 2008.

So the left side looked like a pretty toy with 5 times as much white space as necessary, while the right side had information neatly laid out and easy to follow?

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

CDE seems a bit modern for me

I never liked the CDE environment on my AIX systems - in fact I'm still running Motif/mwm there. The only real difficulty I've had with it was when I needed to make some of the fonts available via my Linux machine which has one of its monitors used as a sort of XTerminal.

Just last week I cleaned out my home directory of the various config files and directories that had been left for so many years by some of the other desktop environments I'd tried and discarded.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Found in translation

A colleague changed an error message that would NEVER need to be printed - it was in one of those cannot-possibly-happen clauses after several other error conditions had been detected and reported - so that it simply printed "Merde!". Of course, it showed up almost immediately after shipping the product. And the customer complaint was that they didn't understand the problem since they were not running with a French locale.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: Sigh

My sister has been heavily involved in looking at ML approaches to analysing images for cancer. She's a doctor who has been doing this stuff in person for years. When she got involved with the ML people she said - it's absolutely critiical that the people working on the algorithms etc have an idea about what the data really means.

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

WTF

Some of us were SO CLOSE to getting IBM to rebrand one of its products as WebSphere Transaction Facility. (And we did know what we were doing.)

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

Just last week ...

I regularly run "rpm -qa | grep [product prefix] | xargs rpm -e" to uninstall development level filesets of my packages, ready to do a clean install of the next build.

I'm sure there are better ways, but that's the one my fingers have learned. Except last week, they forgot to type the middle clause and various messages made me realise that almost every package installed on the image was being deleted. Killing the job didn't really help as by that point too much had gone.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: Secret messages?

DNA: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Full transparency

For a time I had a "special" PC on my desk that was NOT beige. The case was transparent so you could see the insides. Identical in shape but cast in something like perspex. It had been created so the IBM engineers could do things like check the airflow by putting in smoke and seeing how it moved. And after it wasn't needed for that any more, it got handed down and still worked fine..

I often ended up with the ex-test or early-build stuff. A few years later, another machine on my desk was a PC AT. Serial Number 000006.

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

Police Computer

Since you mentioned the Police National Computer ... years ago I worked on a project to support access to the system from some new boxes. Why that project was needed is a story in its own right, thanks to a salesman "misunderstanding" the requirements, selling something totally wrong for the network, and then we had to bail him out.

But in order to test and demo our work, we had to send queries to the real PNC. But because of security/privacy concerns, the only query I was allowed to run was to lookup my own car registration.Unfortunately for readers of the Reg it didn't show as stolen or written off. But I did wonder if analytics (even in those days they did some, although they might not call it that) would show a concern about repeated queries for a particular vehicle.

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Really remote shutdown

Back in 1989 a group of us were working in the company's Texas offices. Some of the rest of the team remained in Hampshire. We were all working with Unix boxes, but there was no direct TCP/IP connection available between the sites - the only communication where we could work on the "other side's" Unix system required using a 3270 terminal emulator and then using the SNA network which did run around the world to log onto a mainframe in the right country from where we could do line-mode telnet to the Unix box. Which was not very usable but just about OK for occasionally looking at any essential logs or executing simple commands. That single line input prompt did make it very obvious whether you were working on your own local Unix system or a transatlantic machine.

So I was very surprised when my machine halted unexpectedly, and then found out that S (for that was his initial) had managed to type "shutdown -f" in the wrong window and sent the command across the ocean.

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

Re: Smoking

Had a manager who was being an arse at checkin for a transatlantic flight. He insisted loudly and annoyingly on being put in the smoking section, knowing it was small and likely to already be full. So hoping for a free upgrade. The agent instead called back the person she'd just processed and asked if HE would like an upgrade freeing up a space in coach smoking for my manager.

Industrial keyboard

I worked for a time on QA of IBM's "Industrial" PC, intended for use in places like factory floors rather than offices. One test put the system in an excessively smoky and dirty environment - after a while the keys on the keyboard could not even be depressed as there was so much gunk caught underneath the keycaps. But we were able to simply turn it over, shake and tap it, and everything started working fine again.

Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?

Someone took down our department network for more than a day by plugging the token ring cable into the monitor adapter in the PC. They had the same connector. Took us a while to work out what had broken.