Posts by 42656e4d203239

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Eletrolytic Shotgun

I am sure I have mentioned this before. Back in the '80s I was working at a place that used and serviced some fairly good "desktop" non-IBM computers which had built in printers.

Fairly good because their internal switch-mode PSU had a specific cable that was un-keyed. Back in those days these things were chunky with loads of exciting voltages, on exposed conductors, ready to bite - they were even repairable should things go awry, so competely unlike their modern equivalents which are much smaller and are, essentially, replacable components.

The hardware engineers must have been distracted one day because there was an almighty bang from the adjacent hardware den (I was software). We rushed next door to see what was up and the room was filled with snow filled with the shredded internals of a pair of electrolytics which decided to RUD.

It seems someone had reconnected the cable backwards in a previously fixed, now faulty again, PSU and owed many drinks to, plus new underwear for, the other hardware chaps.

Icon because thats what it sounded like in the room next door...

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Re: General Dynamics is American

>>British megacontractor BAE Systems

British - with 40.2% of shareholders being left-pondian.

Having, at one time, worked adjacent to them, the British part of their name is a flag they like to wave when convenient.

Last I heard, the strings are pulled, largley, from across the waves.

ATM takes a kicking yet keeps on ticking

Re: That's tough...

>>Research Machines 380Z

Oh the fun we had using ed (or whatever - it was many years ago) to change RUN to NEW on the BASIC disk... and leaving it lying around for unsuspecting plebs to use to further their knowledge.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

Custard powder explosion also has some great pictures around on the interwebs. Any number (well 1 or 2) people I know didn't believe me when I said "... flour and custard powder explode in the right conditions..." and lost eyebrows in their subsequent experiments.

icon cos any finely divided, combustible, material can be persuaded to get all exciting given the right encouragement.

Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year

Re: Microsoft is improving

you haven't lived until you have been in a German household on New Year's eve.... there are even channels showing this work of art on a loop... channels with it dubbed/performed in various German dialects etc. etc. etc.

Here in Blighty we are, of course, stuck with Jools' Hootenanny recorded in August and the great big yawn of the year... I know where I would prefer to be.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: O Rly?

>>For which people?

probably not the people who have to have the ID...

O Rly?

>>Digital ID will make everyday life easier for people,

In what way?

Digital ID won't make my every day life any easier, in any respect. Various random events every few years - perhaps it will streamline the process but somehow I doubt it.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: Poor service from providers

>>Could something like 15 of these help?

Not really; as the desks have to be 0.9m apart its not like the darlings are sitting in a nice row along a bench... so wires everywhere, and, therefore, as another poster in the thread has mentioned, trip hazards are an issue.

Part of the problem is the insistance that the machines are plugged it - get rid of that and much of the trouble with computer based exams in a school goes away.

Part of the problem is the shocking exam software that doesn't tolerate a pupil strting the exam on one machine then moving to another to carry on when the first suffers a problem.

Part of the problem are the interesting requirements for various exam applications used by different boards (and each board has its own variant of the same thing that refuses to co-exist on an end user device, so a school which has several exam boards has a problem; don't ask me how I know)

and the majority of the problem is that the exam boards have been suckered by the "cloud is everything" snake oil and can't see that certain requirements for the exam software contradict the use of the cloud at all!

Hey ho - not my problem - except I have to make the IT here work for the school. I, for one, can't wait till the exams start being electronic only... /s

Re: Poor service from providers

One thing I am not looking forward to is supplying 120 Chromebooks all plugged in (exam board mandates that).

The only space we have that will hold 120 exam regulation spaced desks, for, say, the english exam, is the school hall and that has preceisly 3 13 amp sockets; two on the stage and one at the back of the hall - so none anywhere near where the chromebooks will be required. I wonder where the 30off 4 gangs will be plugged in?

Even if we split the yeargroup up into other 8 other rooms (exam spacing required so only 50% occupancy of seats in a standard classroom) we will still need 4off 4 gangs per room and many classrooms only have enough sockets for the teacher's PC and we would also need to re-room a number of classes to accommodate the exam... into no-existant rooms (or the hall...)

For the IT angle, we have sufficient APs from the LA and bandwidth from PSBA to cope with the traffic.

Still it has yet to come to pass, even on this side of the bridge... so whilst the thought experiments are fun, they serve no real purpose until the dictat comes down from on high.

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

>>is your surname Mcleod?

No, and he isthey aren't Spanish, he is they are Egyptian....

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: Fortune and Mason

>>Pricey!

Depends what you are buying. Some things are indeed pricey but others... more reasonable. To be fair, its a long time since I exercised the store card...

As with all of these places you need to actually shop for what you want rather than buy everything, in one establishment, without thinking.

/mines the one with a store card and a case or two of claret in the pocket...

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

Re: Not quite terminal

We had a similar incident, only it was an actual fire at the three phase incoming termination from the grid.

Someone had used an incorrect crimp and, becasue the incoming cable had been stretched to fit (or cut off really close to the exact length required), had, instead of faffing around getting the incorrect crimp off, just drilled the fixing bolt hole out a bit so the larger (correct sized) fixing bolts would fit.

The load in the building was particularly high one day, becasue of reasons, and with a high ambient temp the insulation started to get very warm and started letting out the magic smoke... Much fun was had by all and many curses uttered towards the installer by our, by then, tame sparks.

Oddly he was an apprentice on the job when the building was built and knew who installed it though he never let on (I always suspected it might have been he who made the error of judgement)

>>BNC networking being a ring

Nope - or rather nope when it comes to Thinwire Ethernet (as the marketing used to call 10Base2) - that was a washing line with 50Ω terminator at each end; each machine had a T-piece to connect.

The only ring I can remember is IBM's Token Ring but I don't know if that was actually a ring (two wasn't it? really don't know - I never thad the misfortune) or a logical one...

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

>>I thought the original idea of Darpanet was to automatically route packets around breakages...

Routing stiIl does.

Trouble is that the re-routing fails when many routes point to Cloudflare and the target server is behind Cloudflare's infrastructure with no "real world" IP address, so then any re-route attempt will just wind up hitting a Cloudflare gateway... and consequently be, effectively, black-holed.

Alibaba releases chatbot that produces error when asked about Tiananmen Square

Re: Tiananmen Square

>>they'd just give up on trying to censor Tiananmen Square.

They don't need to try, Winnie the Pooh is managing it rather well.

>>It happened

Did it? /s not from the CCP's point of view it didn't.

>>The entire world knows it happened

no - the enitre world doesn't know it happened. The entire world believes a propaganda film created to discredit the CCP. Apparently.

>>Vast swathes of their own population knows it happened.

I don't think you realise quite how big their population is nor quite how many of them won't be aware of things that happen in Beijing...

In other news our "own" orange ape is trying the same thing about Jan 6th the other year... and what may or may not have been in certain files regarding people, places and situations he, or, more likely, his handlers, would rather the public don't ever get to know about.

>>Why is Tiannamen (sp?) still off limits

Because, according to the CCP, it didn't happen. Becasue it didn't happen, why would anyone want to ask about that?

>> we all know something happened

No we don't - again according to the CCP. We (The rest of the world) were all fed propaganda designed to discredit the regime.

>>I bet all the Chinese know something

You would lose that bet. The vast majority of Chinese (as in the population living within the geographical boundaries commonly accepted as mainland China) won't know much/anything about it; the new generations will never be taught about it and so, eventually, it won't have happened - for the majority of their population.

Note - in no way am I saying that the terrible events that DID happen in Tiannamen square and the surrounding area did not happen. I am sure they did, but from the CCP public frame of reference they most definitely did not.

>"how should I toast the buns[baps]"

Nope - no good.

has to be "how should I toast the buns[baps]barms"... pretty sure that is not slang for bodily appendages (granted, a burger bun isn't, per force, a barm cake but needs must)

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: Good enough solutions

>> If you do it wrong, well, the problems not the methodology, is it?

To mangle Mr Ian Anderson MBE (no less)...

" just remember, if you don't mind --- it's not the gunmethodolgy that kills screws up the project, but the man behind."

I guess that's why SSDAM is(was? does anyone use it these days?) so hard to get right in the real world - there can only be a handful of people who actually understand how to implement it and many hundreds who claim that they do!

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

Re: AMOS

>>in AMOS Basic.

Like the multi-user pacman with invisible ghosts?

If you get that specific reference you probably know who I am (or at least who I worked with/for)

/beer cos not everyone knows about AMOS Basic --->

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

I Hate to be the one to grab all the down votes but, Hibernation, for me, on an oldish ACER Inspire laptop running Manjaro with 12Gb of RAM, suitably sized swapfile and a 250Gb SSD has been mostly painless!

It used to crash the lockscreen on resume if I had a second monitor plugged in when suspending and not when resuming, but that just meant swapping to a text console and killing the lockscreen (or rebooting).

These days I don't have a problem, other than it takes a while and at abouot half way through looks like it has finished - sadly the laptop doesn't have a drive activity light so learning about how long it took was interesting - opening the lid only to have it switch off almost instantly when it should have been resuming was puzzling to begin with (never said I was a quick learner).

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

>>Windows Update or REFS

ReFS has had a regression type bug in Server 2025 since December 2024 and Microsoft, despite claiming that they are fixing it as a matter of urgency, has a "Not Fixed Before" date of December 2025.

The bug shows up when you try to delete huge files and results in the server using up all available RAM/CPU and requiring a hard (power cord) reset. If you should, for example, be using ReFS for, say, a backup repository and upgraded your server to W2025 you are in trouble. ReFS worked fine in Windows Server 2022.

So yeh - ReFS isn't ready for mainstream use, despite its name.

Oh and the least said about Windows Update the better.

/me looks around for the dried frog pills

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

>>"Grew like Topsy"

*grow'd

Original is "...I 'spect I grow'd."

/mines the one with Uncle Tom's Cabin in the pocket... you did use quotation marks after all!

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Once upon a time...

There was a remote property that had a landline installed (about 1934 iirc).

One quarter, many years later (2000s somewhere), the phonebill showed active use on the line when there was definitely no-one at the property; coincidentally the call was 30 minutes after it had been secured for winter. One of the numbers called was AOL... interesting, we thought, as there was no electricity or, indeed, electircal equipment at the property at all.

When challenged on the veracity bill, BT claimed that their billing was world leading and never made mistakes. Our position was that we weren't denying the calls were made on BTs network but that they definitley were not made from our line.

Further digging (thanks to fully itemised billing) revealed that another number dialled turned out to be a builder in Radnor, someone we had no dealings with.

The builder was contacted and asked if he had a client in the area, which he did.

BT eventually conceeded defeat, without prejudice, refunding the invoice but maintaining their innocence.

That line has now been ceased owing to the lack of electricity available to run an ONT.

This story aside, it has always amazed me how BT ever got the reputation for being a source of truth.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Re: £1.6B eh?

>>Schools are often the worst places to approach

I dunno - our LA has a (minimum)5 year replacement policy on classroom hardware and 7 years for servers. They also operate a sustainability swindle (actually not bad value) where we buy gear, with a 5Y RTB warranty, at a decent price, then pay 20% (out of our annual capitation budget) for 5 years so we have the cash available to replace it when it fails/is required. There is no "must have the latest and greatest" driver.

Much of Wales, hence many (but not all) schools, operates along similar lines.

I don't think the same thing happens in England though - it certainly used to be that the school would buy a load of the latest and greatest then, 7-10 years later, realise that it was all falling to bits and have to rush around to try to find the substantial sums of money required to update their gear...

>> Although it's rather sad the number of staff I deal with who went through school "learning" Windows

There is no "learning Windows" done in schools - it's not on the curriculum.

Anything pupils learn aboout Windows (or indeed common office packages) is by osmosis rather than training.

The number of people who use <caps lock> to get a single capital letter is way too high as is the number who use Excel as a database or Word as a spreadsheet and don't get me started on document templates/tables/layout/fonts etc.

/nurse - Dried Frog Pills STAT!

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: One letter makes all the difference

Coffee -->

That is all.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

>>GDPR isn't a Tory law. It's adopted from the EU

Err I think you will find the main driver behind the GDPR (EU) was.... the UK! When we divorced our geographical neighbours we just copied the GDPR(EU) legislation into our own as an interim measure (and we all know how interim measures go)

>>is actually a pretty damn good bit of legislation

Yup. It, unusually, does what it says on the tin

>>If you can't comply with GDPR then you really shouldn't be providing web services of any sort.

Indeed.

Schools are swotting up on security yet still flunk recovery when cyberattacks strike

Re: Teachers are receiving cybersecurity training

>>What good is teacher cybersecurity training if your entire totally unified, software-defined architecture can be compromised by clicking on a malicious URL or opening a malicious email attachment.

Fair.

>>Whatever happened to restoring from last-nights tape back-ups?

Unfair. Tape infrastructure is expensive and of limited use (data egress fees apply for several Tb of data) if everything is on "someone else's computer".

>>Have the manufacturers of the devices design an OS that can't be compromised by clicking on a malicious URL or opening a malicious email attachment /s

Whilst a valid point (and one you made already) that doesn't even address the statement from the article "One in five incidents resulted from employees sending work data to personal devices" - the answer there is to stop staff from accessing school networks/resources on personal devices. Its not hard. The two big ecosystems typically used by schools can do that with a simple setting (I know its simple, I have used it sucessfully and so it must be simple!)

As an employee one should never have/access work data on a personal device. If work want you to access that data they should provide the hardware with which to do it.

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

>>Such individuals get given houses/hotels to stay in in, mobile phones & internet, food, full access to the NHS & Schools etc

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof... care to link any? (preferably UK GovLocal Authority rather than partisan sites form either side of the debate)

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Re: Groups

>>Groups in the Microsoft world are a mess.

They were pretty straight forward back in the day. Sadly they have suffered the ravages of time and software "improvements"

>>Exchange mastered groups, Entra mastered static groups, Entra mastered dynamic groups, AD mastered groups, Office 365 groups.

>>(Have I missed any?)

Yeh. InTune groups - they work worse than any of the others....

The siloing of products inside Microsoft has lead to the dog's dinner that we suffer today. Every silo has "NIH syndrome" with respect to things developed in other silos and then someone decides it should all be OneMicrosoft and here we are with sticky tape barely covering the cracks.

>>In an ideal work you'd used dynamic groups

Yeh - I would if I could define the rules based on any Entra/AD user attribute rather than just the ones Microsoft deem sensible (State or Province, Company, Department, Custom Attribute[1-15]) and also have multiple rules with definable logic for each group (like you can for (on prem)AD GPO targetting; yeh that isn't great either but that's a UI thing rather than a functionality thing). As it is I have to mangle the usage of state, company & department to not mean what they imply to get anything that vaguely fits my use case.

Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing

Yeh - Sometime people forget there are actually symbols available in charachter sets these days. Not like when I were young - we carved holes in paper tape with blunt toothpicks and had to live with 7 bit+parity character sets!

800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics a little more expensive

Re: No big deal

>>The other thing ring mains have to have is a fuse in every plug

You say that like it's a bad thing? Can't see the problem myself.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Oh no it won't...

>>Of course I'm polite to them, which no doubt helps.

Likewise. There is nothing the person in front of you can do about whatever issue you have with the system.

Be nice - they are doing their job as efficiently as they can and they have the power to make your day go very badly indeed.

Re: Oh no it won't...

>>Could it be you?

tl;dr - could be but unlikely.

err ad hominim for what reason?

I have no trouble with border control at all - other than once in Paris (so English border officials) coming back from a week away in company with my daughter (different surname) and then girlfriend (another different surname) so they were concerned about me traffiking a 16 year old... understandable and soon sorted out. Why piss off someone who can make your journey complete hell?

The comment about customs officials muttering darkly aboout bloody "tourists" was intended as a humourous aside - I have worked in an adjacent role and such comments are commonplace after dealing with a MoP, regardless of the behaviour of the 'customer'

My issue with the automatic facial recognotion system is that it took well over 30 minutes for the poor chap at Timpsons to get the automatic system to realise he was in fact pointing the camera at my face (yes, I was relaxed, unsmiling, glasses off and no the chap wasn't a new employee unfamiliar with the UK passport system or how to work a camera). There is something the system doesn't like about, I presume, my full beard - I have no evidence that the EES facial recognition will be any worse or better but after a long life in IT I feel that EES will be no different to the UK Passport processing system... these things tend to use the same or similar algorithms to achieve their ends.... hence it is a reasonable assumption to make that EES will inevitably increase the stress involved in crossing the channel for me and, presumably, others with similar facial hair.

Oh no it won't...

>>The EU says EES will make border checks more efficient

Title says it all.

What will happen is a percentage of booths won't work at any given time for registration, a percentage of travellers will not be able to register at the booth and will need assistance, then, once registered, many travellers will fail the automatic biometric check at the border and still have to be diverted to a real customs official who will sigh deeply, curse the English under their breath, and wave them through.

Call me cynical if you like, but the trouble I had getting the UK Passport Application system to recognise me as actually looking at the camera in my photograph was immense. There is no reason at all to suuppose that the 'automatic border check' will be any better. I am not looking forward to EES in the slightest - it will just add stress to the trip.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: Tea..

you ask a gin and tonic!

Turns out Hayabusa2's next asteroid target isn't much bigger than the probe itself

Re: Images

>>no mammalians will be injured in this particular wild adventure

Tell that to the bowl of petunias...

ChatGPT joins human league, now solves CAPTCHAs for the right prompt

Re: I was working as a chat bot on a graphics card...

Thanks very much for the ear-worm, you glorious bastard... Have a beer --->

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: I make a zip

Real UNIX admins use tar and pipe the output to zip....

UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime

>>who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?

ESS/ParentPay? No wait, they make a basically unusable MIS in the first place so you don't notice when stuff breaks becasue of them, you just blame the crapware.

Well said sirrah!

Chapeau - its all a complete nightmare here in schools.

ESS/ParentPay/SIMS (my current bête noire) does the hosting thing exactly as you say; Just a VM running the applications on a AWS/Azure/whatever service - exactly the same as would have been running on a server in the LA DC with none of the advantages of local people being able to fix stuff when it (often) breaks.

They also have security theatre on the front end that includes sending you an email saying "We have detected a logon from a new browser or device at 01-09-2025. For privacy reasons we do not store the specific details of the device and this may have changed because your browser has updated, used a new device or logged in from a different network. If this was you then you do not need to take any further action." so expect you to decide if it was you based on 0 information other than the date!

It's all a bit shit and a great example of why vendor lock-in is bad. Unfortunately change is difficult becasue of the immense quantity of badly structured data in SIMS needing transport to a.n.other back end. Some people have made the leap and have found that whilst the grass may only be slightly greener, that little makes all the difference.

Integrated MIS vs Disparate systems

As someone who has weathered the slings and arrows of school targeted MIS systems and, in other lives, non-integrated entry/registration/contact systems, I know which I would prefer to use for anything bigger than a 3 class primary school with 9 children per year!

SIMS is the most famous of all completely rubbish School MIS systems - a victim of successive take-overs and consequent loss of touch with their customers.

As a database it was once competent but has suffered from function creep and a lack of will to actually spend nmoney on redevleopment.

SIMS Next Gen is trying to get where its competitors already are and I, personally, hope SIMS dies a death becasue it is starting so far behind.

Sadly as SIMS is embedded in the functions of many LAs and Schools, UK wide, it may twitch and jerk in its inevitable death throes but everyone has had enough of it. The lastest (last year-ish) "Oh you can only use SIMS if ESS host it. BTW you have 6 months to decide and if you go with us, hosting it will be 3 year contract" stunt by ESS/ParentPay has reduced managability and reliability massively over the LA hosted on-WAN servers. Some lucky LAs had the nerve to call ESS/ParentPay's bluff and jumped ship. Ours didn't.

The other school MIS systems - Arbor, BromCom etc. have taken the good bits of SIMS and webified it, hopefully sorting out the heinous back end. Sadly as they are (all?) cloud based, they suffer from 'it will never break' syndrome and fall mightily when it does.

/icon cos its skools innit bruv?

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

No AI required

Teeth have growth rings... so every inbound person must donate a tooth... this has the added benefit of being able to locate their origin fairly accurately using isotope analysis. What could possibly go wrong?

/icon just in case anyone thinks I am serious...

Hmm I wonder if you could develop a machine than can image a tooth in situ and count the rings using AI? now that might have legs...of course if the putative migrant has no teeth there might be a problem.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Floating point

>>Putting the two together, for a game like Elite, well you’d have to be extra-bright for something like that!

Absolutely the best example of concise programming ever!!11!!!11!!! (hyperbole - don'tcha love it?)

I remain in awe of Elite - the authors managed to get an open(ish) universe, deterministic, 3-D spaceflight game into 64k (or less? can't remember, it was a while ago) and it had a reasonably sophisticated profit protection system built in as well.

Beer for all the old school coders who know what they did and what they were doing ---->

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Re: Pro tip for DELETE queries

yeh this - SELECT the things you think you want to delete and see if they are the things then swap SELECT for DELETE when you are super sure you are right!

I guess thats why having a "hidden" column called "reallyDelete" is handy... so you can practice the where with update <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true where .... and check with select * from <wherever> where <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true before you "delete from <wherever> where <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true"

Yeh - what could possibly go wrong there? I definitely haven't ever had to restore tables/databases for DBAs who got it wrong even with a reallyDelete column

/mines the one with a backup tape in the pocket

Telefónica Germany offloads VMware support to Spinnaker due to high renewal costs

Re: Spinnaker *not* a recplament for VMware?

This is a total guess...

I assume they are going to "wherever" (on site KVMs, Xen, ProxMox, whatever Hypervisor is the flavour of the month or AWS/Google/Azure) for VMs and using Spinnaker for "middleware" so that the VMs are hardware host agnostic.

Telefonica should be able to say "spin up another VM" and Spinnaker just does it wherever there is resource available; I imagne that as Spinnaker is continuous delivery it will notice when it needs more VM capacity and can do the spinning up/down on its own... The end users see no difference. The backendy chaps no longer have to wrestle VMWare/Broadcom whenever the license renewal comes up and can swap physical/cloud hosts whenever by adjusting where services are provided in Spinnaker.

Everyone is happy. Except Broadcom. But we don't mind that, do we?

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Impaired vision

>>My eyes can't cope with black text on a white background...Chromium doesn't let me....

The Chrome-ish extension DarkReader may help - you can map a key to switch on dark mode, which can either just invert everything, or take white down to a manageable grey.

I use it to have a mostly red & grey El Reg experience. It doesn't work with every website, or every element on a webpage, and certain page models seem to protect themselves from such meddling (one I came across reloads content every few seconds, undoing the changes DR made, so I noped out of there) but on average it does work and I find it helpful. YMMV.

Gone in 40 days: US drops ban on export of chip design tools to China

TACO

TACO - it's always "The Art of the Deal" that wins bigly.

Coveffe of this latest, errr, "course correction" to be found in the usual places I guess, or, more likely, not.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

>>This could be solved by a system of nets and scoops alongside the track.

You jest, however I remember a cartoon by W Heath Robinson in "Railway Ribaldry" from 1935 espousing exactly this.

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Re: Back in the day....

>>niceness levels, not priority.

Nope - not Niceness. Priority. Wasn't *nix but (Open)VMS. Very different - I knew about niceness and assumed that priority was the same.

Have looked it up, just to be sure; n was, apparently, 0 to 31, with anything above 16 being realtime.

Sigh - I remembered it wrong, but the effect still stands. Anything in the highest bracket (16-31) always gets executed.

For reference I include some OpenVMS Guidance on priority

SET PROCESS /PRIORITY=n

SET QUEUE /ENTRY=xxxx /PRIORITY=n

When real-time processes (those with priorities from 16 to 31) execute, the following conditions apply:-

They never receive a priority boost;

They do not experience automatic working set adjustments;

They do not experience quantum-based time slicing;

The system permits real-time processes to run until either they voluntarily enter a wait state or a higher priority real-time process becomes computable.

So Yeh crash and burn if you set a priority to >16 because, IIRC, not even OS processes run higher than 15 - it's the co-operative in co-operative multi tasking - everything promises to be nice and not grab the CPU for (potentially) ever.

Back in the day....

Someone let me loose on the MicroVAX console... I had little to no sysadmin experience and a fairly interesting (I have mentioned her before, regarding tape spools; this incident was before the tape spool incidents) analyst wanted her job doing at a slightly higher priority than everyone else's equally mundane tasks.

What could possibly go wrong, you may be asking... well, young and impressionable idiot me decided that, as priorities went from iirc 16 (do anything else first and if you feel like it run this job for a bit) to -16 (real time) what's wrong with -16 for a quick job?

Let me tell you, dear reader, that -16 means everything else (terminal IO, other proceesses, Swap, everything!) stops until the -16 job gets finished.

The job crashed/terminated after a few minutes and released the cpu to do other things else but it was a "learning experience" at the time and something I still remember nearly 40 years later.