Posts by C R Mudgeon

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

I already had this exact same snippet in my paste buffer, ready to make this point.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Indeed.

Re: Quite a rare sight

Somewhat similar here. I submitted a couple of essays late in highschool that I'd done on my local university's mainframe, with punch-card input, using a text formatter called, improbably, XREF/Jones (I might have the capitalisation wrong).

I don't know what my teachers thought when they got my work typed on lined, tractor-feed computer paper, in all upper case and with constructions like DON,T or DON"T (I forget which I used) because Burroughs's 6-bit character set didn't include ' or lower-case letters. But I'm pretty sure I wasn't marked down for it. Maybe they just thought, "Thank God I don't have to read this kid's handwriting!")

ISTR worrying that they'd think I'd used the computer to write the text, not just format it, but the question was never raised. (Nowadays a handwritten essay would be the oddity, but concern that it was AI-generated would be legit.)

(The Burroughs character set *did* include a left-arrow character, because their mainframes were Algol-based, and that uses left-arrow as its assignment operator. (The more familiar ":=" is an alternate-spelling kludge for systems without left-arrow.))

Some CRT monitors were literally lead-lined. I don't now recall whether anything they produced was in fact dangerous, but that was the theory at the time.

My doctor has two exam rooms which she shuttles between. One has a standing desk and the other a regular sit-down desk. So she gets the benefits without having to constantly adjust the furniture, or even really think about it.

Of course, most of us don't have the luxury of two desks, two computers, etc., but in professions like hers, it's more efficient.

The story is told (I don't know whether it's true) that Thomas Edison [1] found that often insights came to him in the reverie between sleeping and full wakefulness. So he'd allow himself to start to nod off while holding a ball in each hand. When he fell too far asleep, the balls would drop and the noise would wake him up again, at which point he'd write down any interesting thoughts he'd had in that twilight state.

A number of songwriters -- I think Paul McCartney is one, but not sure -- have talked about keeping a notepad or tape recorder by the bed, so they can capture ideas that come to them in dreams or half-sleep. Often the results prove to be junk in the light of day, but sometimes there are gems.

[1] Edison has a reputation for having stolen others' ideas, but I guess he invented *some* of his inventions...

I've told the story of having to do essentially that to my own desk chair, as a workaround for a not-quite-level floor. I used duct tape, not a grinder, but same basic idea.

"Present posterior to superior"

It's a yoga position common in any dysfunctional hierarchy.

See also: U S. Executive Branch and Congressional Republicans, ca 2026.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Exactly. The cracks already existed, but Russia is more than willing stick a crowbar in and pry at them.

Which I think is what Liam meant. I didn't read his comment as suggesting that Russia *created* any of those problems.

Re: Reality bites

"disentangling the UK's intelligence and military from the USA would take years"

Then the best time to start is years ago. But the second-best time to start is now.

Which is why I hope Canada will go with the Gripen over the F-35. I don't know which is the better and/or cheaper plane. I do know that it would make me quite nervous to hand, to the country whose leader has openly and repeatedly expressed a desire to possess my country, a potential kill switch over a significant chunk of our air defense.

Call me paranoid if you will, but things under the orange baby have already gotten far worse than I'd have imagined a year ago. And, as his niece Mary Trump says, with him "there's no bottom".

Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

Re: Oh come on....

Of course they will. That's coming in the next update.

Because they can't enshittify a thing unless there's already been an unshitty version to tease you with.

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

So, they chose to name their company after a tool of evil [*], they created a tool of evil, and now they're trying to convince the world that they're not evil?

Good luck with that.

[*] Tolkien was more subtle. IIUC, his original palantíri (the so-called "seeing stones") weren't created for malign purposes, but had mostly fallen into evil hands by the time Lord of the Rings takes place. Thiel, Karp, et al have simply skipped over that and gotten straight to the point.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: This isn't a move forward towards better personal computing.

"[...] if the open source community had a trusted platform they could hand to journalists that isn't just a thumb drive with TOR and old fork of Firefox on it."

Maybe Qubes is what you're looking for.

Or, since you mention journalists, perhaps SecureDrop, which is a much more specialized to tool. (It runs on top of Qubes, I think).

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: As little tale from my former banking life .. (tenuous ATM connection)

"In the UK, notes have been different sizes for some time."

When did that begin? I believe it was already the case on my first visit in 1984 (as it also was in pre-Euro West Germany at that time).

Re: The Key to Everything

For my simpler needs, I swear by these. Car key on one ring, everything else on the other. When I take the car in to have work done, it's easy to detach its key fob. And if I'm going out and won't be driving, it's equally easy to almost halve the bulk in my pocket.

Each ring has an ID tag -- the smallest (and cheapest, but *smallest* was the deciding factor) laser-etched dog tag from PetSmart, with only my phone number on it.

"You were supposed to leave your keys at reception when you left and pick them up when you came back, so they didn't leave the site."

I stayed at such a place in Frankfurt am Main in the mid-80s. The fob loosely resembled a miniature bowling pin. It had a rubber bumper around its widest point, presumably so it wouldn't mark up the door while one was fumbling with the key.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: C over 50

"After 50 years, its like walking."

That's how I feel about vi and perl -- well, not quite so many years, but same idea.

Which is why vim remains my daily-driver editor, and perl is what I instinctively reach for when a shell script won't quite do the trick.

Both are pretty horrible usability-wise -- Liam Proven recently referred to "Stockholm Syndrome" re. vim and I don't disagree -- so I wouldn't dream of recommending either to someone who didn't already know it, but I've already paid the price, so...

Re: In the raw

In defense of Comic Sans, it has its uses. It's what I reach for if I want something to look informal -- hand written but not like a wedding invitation. In such cases a script font like Zapf Chancery would be way over the top.

Comic Sans would be a good fit for a UI prototype, along with slightly wobbly lines that looked as though they'd been drawn freehand, as a visual cue that "this thing doesn't actually exist yet; it's just a mock-up."

Re: In the raw, use markup

I kind of get the benefit of that relationship to paper manufacturers, and sure, it's kind of elegant as a standard, but why does it matter to an end user?

If I want to gang up two copies of a thing on 8.5" x 11" paper which I then (have the printing house) cut in half, I can do that. What's the disadvantage that my 5.5" x 8.5" end product is a non-standard size?

(If I were used to A4 and friends, maybe the answer would be obvious, but as a left-pondian I'm not, so it isn't. Guess I need it explained like I'm 5, please and thank you.)

Re: In the raw

Never heard of the place, but if there was ever a jazz festival there, it would *have* to be called Bebop al Ula.

That sounds like the Mackenzie Printery & Newspaper Museum, which also has a collection of old presses, a Linotype, etc, much of the equipment in working condition.

It's in Queenston, Ontario, Canada, not far from Niagara Falls.

If El Reg ever decides to do a Geeks' Guide to not-Britain, this place should be on the list.

When I was there in Aug(?) 2012, the most modern of their vintage presses was busy cranking out brochures for the then-upcoming anniversary/reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights just up the hill. (Most of you won't have heard of that, but it looms large in early Canadian history.)

Re: In the raw

I suspect that "RS232 in it's full glory" has already died out. But as you say, the three-wire minimum subset [1] is still going, if not strongly, and the small renaissance it's seen courtesy of Pi's etc., suggests that'll be with us for some time to come.

Given the amazing breadth of experience among Reg commentards collectively, I imagine that, for every pin on a DB-25 connector [2], there'll be someone here who can say, "I've worked with a device that used that pin." But: (a) how many of said devices were made after, say, the mid-80s?, and (b) how many of them are still in service?

Though I've been dealing with RS-232 since 1980 or thereabouts, I personally have never seen a device that used pins other than (1-8, 20, 22) -- but then my experience, though long, is rather limited in breadth. I spent most of my career in business computing; ASCII terminals and the occasional pen plotter are all I dealt with.

I've just in the last couple of months encountered my first *synchronous* RS-232 interface, in a very obscure synthesizer from the 70s. Haven't worked with it yet, but am excited to have the chance in the next few weeks, trying to get that connection working again.

[1] Strictly speaking, the minimum is two wires, if you only need one-way communication, e.g. some sensor that only transmits.

[2] Including the three that are "reserved" or "unimplemented". I suspect those have all seen non-standard usage at some point.

An early end to the holidays: 'Heartbleed of MongoDB' is now under active exploit

Not sure, but I suspect that the goal isn't to reconstruct a big picture out of all those little chunks, but rather to hope that one such chunk contains the whole of something interesting, e.g. a clear-text password.

Repeat that probe enough times and you might get lucky...

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Y2K - Learning to be Paranoid

It's not a bug; it's a feature.

"that shouldn't have crashed the system, just the application."

I don't think we know that it's the screen saver that crashed the systems. Perhaps its Y2K bug was innocuous, though of course embarrassing, but perhaps there was a second Y2K bug, in some more critical subsystem, which took the systems down.

In fact, the directive to shut down the PCs over that critical night suggests that inability to handle the century rollover was a known issue.

Another Y2K screen saver

I thought I'd told this, but a search doesn't turn it up, so here goes...

I had a couple-of-months' gig at a major stock exchange in 1999 (not on Y2K work). The screen saver on all the desktops was counting down, but not to New Years Second as one might expect. If I reconstruct correctly, it was to 10:00 AM on Tue, Jan 4. At any rate, their zero hour was the start of trading on the first business day of the new millennium.

Plus ça change

"in December 199 he worked in the IT department"

In December 199, they didn't know it was the year 199. AD (more modernly, CE) dating wasn't invented until Dionysius Exiguus came up with it in the year he called, and we still call, 525.

I wouldn't nitpick your joke apart if it weren't that this might be surprisingly on the topic of calendar-based hysteria.

Dionysius's main reason for the AD thing is irrelevant here: that he didn't like the epoch in use at the time, which was based on the reign of Diocletian, a notorious persecutor of Christians.

It has been suggested, however, that he had another reason as well. It seems that some believed that (to oversimplify) Christ's Second Coming and the consequent end of the world were due to occur exactly 500 years after his first one -- and that Dionysius hoped to dispel any panic by pointing out that the forecast Doomsday was already 25 years in the past.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

Re: Hypoxia

Is there a reasonable comparison to be made with drunkenness? The externally noticeable symptoms you describe don't match, but some of the effects sure seem to. For hypoxia, Wikipedia lists among other things:

- Decreased reaction time, disorientation, and uncoordinated movement

- Impaired judgment, confusion, memory loss and cognitive problems

I have enough experience of over-indulging back in the day that I'm hoping it provides a useful analogy to how hypoxia messes with one's thinking.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Buzzword overload

I instinctively distrust people who talk like that guy. The same buzzword four times in three paragraphs. Yeesh!

I can just picture the Hunt household yesterday morning: "Merry Christmas, kids, at scale".

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Blame the computer

And I'm still chuckling about this days later. Guess OP deserves another v-beer.

So basically it's a phone/tablet in a different form factor and with a physical keyboard? That makes perfect sense. Thanks.

Can you install another distro?

I've never had reason to touch a Chromebook, so it's a serious question...

Re: Blame the computer

"I mean, printer is out of paper is such a vague message ..... it could mean anything"

I needed that laugh today. Thank you.

Re: "But it didn't take that long to break it...."

How long does it take to crash a car, and how long to repair the damage?

How long does it take to un-break an egg?

I had one such, who happened to have phone extension 333. I privately(!) called her the half-a-beast.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

That reminds me of Bill Mumy's story of the time they pranked the guy who operated the Lost in Space robot by leaving him locked inside it over lunch. But the joke was on them. When they got back, they found him still inside it, totally plussed (i.e. not nonplussed), just chilling and smoking a cigarette.

Harassment and unsafe, but yeah, those were different times...

Subliminal pizza

I saw the same done on early Unix (6th Edition, to be precise). Didn't do it myself; to be honest, I don't think I have the creativity to think of the idea. At the time, I was a complete newb; even if I'd thought of it, I wouldn't have known enough to implement it.

In those more innocent, collegial days, it used to be that one's login terminal was given mode 622 (crw--w--w-), the idea being that, although people couldn't snoop on what you were typing, anyone could send you a message by just writing it on your terminal. That's how "you have mail" notifications were delivered, among other things. [1]

Well, one of my acquaintance group (I don't even recall who) wrote a program to write an "f" to stdout at random intervals, and redirected it to their friend's /dev/ttyN. Trivial on Unix.

The funniest variation wrote "pizza", then backspace-space-backspaced over it to make it disappear again. I think the notion was to subliminally induce the victim to want pizza, in the hope that they'd agree to split one with the prankster. (This was in 1976, and subliminal advertising was much in the news at the time. The book "Subliminal Seduction" had come out a couple of years before. At 9600 baud [2], parts of the word would be visible for something like 15 ms.)

[1] One of those "other things" was an early chat program called "write", which depended on this configuration. You could turn off such messages with "mesg n", either to avoid interruptions or because you wanted to generate clean output on a hard-copy terminal. It worked by just chmod'ing your terminal 0600. There are relics of those days on my Ubuntu 22.04 system, but they've bitrotted over the years. write(1) still exists but doesn't work. mesg(1) exists and still works but is pretty unnecessary. My tty's mode is 0620 -- no world write permission -- and it's in the "tty" group, but there's nothing setgid to that group to take advantage of the group-write permission that remains.

[2] As we erroneously called it then, either not knowing or not caring about the difference between "baud" and "bits per second". TBH, to us then, the difference was purely academic, since the only modems we had available were 300-baud (= 300 BPS) ones with one bit per symbol.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: I'd jump ship if..

"Maybe a microphone and a speaker for fun"

... which only Inner Party members are allowed to turn off.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

"quite un phased by the additional voltage"

That's 'cause they're DC volts.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" - The Chicago Transit Authority

25 or 6 to 4. If the atomic timekeeping hadn't failed, we'd be able to pin that down...

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

"give that girl a coconut!"

Hold the lime.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Happens a lot

...

Me: So, the next time I ask you what's on the screen and you say "nothing" ... [pregnant pause] ... Should I believe you?"

Re: Error message

Indeed. In movie mode to catch the ones that fly by too fast. You only need one frame, but timing a still photo just right can be a pain. (Obviously the movie thing only works if you can reproduce the problem.)

Re: screen messages

The worst time-sheet program I ever used was the one that required you to log exactly 35 [1] hours per week, regardless of how many hours you'd actually worked. If you'd put in 10 hours of overtime to meet a deadline? <fingers in ears> "Lah lah lah lah lah".

And this was for a salaried position, for which overtime wouldn't have been forthcoming in any case. But that they didn't even want to know how much unpaid work they were getting out of us? That was adding insult to injury.

[1] It would reduce that for weeks containing statutory holidays, but still, it knew exactly how many hours it expected you to work in any given week, and wouldn't let you report either more or fewer.

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

"Do they have access to the email address they set up the account with, 20 years ago"

That, at least, is one problem I don't expect to have. I registered a personal domain (nigh-on 20 years ago, as it happens) for precisely this reason. Email providers and ISPs come and go, but a domain that I control insulates me -- and more to the point, those I exchange email with -- from any changes.

A few years ago my then email provider went titsup. Selecting a new one and switching over to it was a pain for me, but nobody else was any the wiser.

(All your other objections to passkeys, I emphatically agree with.)

Re: Joined up thinking

And build even more complete profiles of everyone. Sure, it's frustrating when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, but to my mind the alternative is worse.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Re: Shiny not always better

"Asynchronous is good."

This!

It used to be that I could email someone at any time of day or night, trusting that they'd read my message when it suited them.

Now I have to worry that they'll be awakened by a notification -- and resent me for expecting a response at 3 AM, when in fact that wasn't my expectation at all.

This modern always-available expectation sucks from both sides of the exchange.

Re: Might?

Back in the day, one could *expect* email to take days. Ah, the joys of UUCP.

(It was fun, back then, to read through the Received: headers to see what circuitous route the message had taken. No longer; now it's one hop from your organization to mine, preceded and followed by a bunch of bouncing around each company's internal infrastructure. Boring...)

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain

Re: Planned Snapdragon goes puff and disappears

Yeah, Tuxedo ICEd it.