Posts by frabbledeklatter

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

If they should choose to file it where I would like them to file it, a sterile lubricant may facilitate insertion.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

Wang 700. I'm the perp in this one. Story got a bit garbled. The client was using the Wang Super Surveyor package, a really nice land survey program for property lines, but applying it to ocean-size areas. The calculator's firmware could not handle sines and cosines of very small angles, such as those used in lens grinding. Take a very small angle error and extend the line a thousand miles, and you're really, really off at the other end. One of the things Super Surveyor could do was translate coordinates, so it would not have been a problem to relocate the Earth's poles and meridians to obscure the problematic data while retaining the problem.

At another place down the road, nobody checked my cases of tools and spare parts on the way in. Everything got checked thoroughly on the way out. I suppose that meant I would have to have left any explosive devices with the client.

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Little Larry Tables

https://xkcd.com/327

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

The Y2.1K Bug

Wish I could be around for 1 March 2100. A lot of software got lucky in the fact that 2000 was a century year which was also a leap year because 2000 is evenly divisible by 400 as well as 4. There's an awful lot of software which only tests for year modulo 4 = 0. 2100 will pass that test, but is NOT a leap year.

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Re: Did nobody spot a problem with this?

"US homes are wired at 110-120V, so home chargers are level 1 chargers there. Level 2 chargers are 220-240V, which for European homes are home chargers ..."

Not quite correct. US homes are fed 240VAC, two phase, with a neutral connection. Neutral to either phase is 120VAC for most home devices. However, high-current devices such as heat pumps, electric ranges, and clothes dryers use 240VAC by connecting to each phase. Neutral may or may not be used in such devices, depending upon internal requirements, e.g. a dryer with a 120 volt timer motor.

It is easy to have a level 2 charger at a US home.

NIST boffins shrink atomic beam clock to the size of a postage stamp

... Separated by a Common Language

The Reg unit "Scaramucci" is known in the US as the "mooch".

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Ultimate Spyware

This will save MS from baking so much spyware into W11. Booted from the MS cloud, MS will have unfettered system-level access to all trade secrets, corporate financials, personal data, email, online conferences, etc. Then, there's always the possibility of a rogue MS employee taking such for personal profit. AND the users get to pay for the privilege of having absolutely all their data hoovered up -- whenever Office 3xx is operational, that is.

Bias disclosure: Ubuntu and Libre Office user here.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

It Could Have Been Worse

Wang Laboratories' first disk drive was the model 710, a peripheral for 700 series calculators, It looked like a turntable on a pedestal and had a 5KB (yes, "K" bytes!) removable platter and a 5K fixed platter. The electronics were a foot or so down in the pedestal. On the control panel was a "format" button secured by an impressive-looking key switch next to it.

A walk across a carpeted floor to change removable platters or to put paper in an adjacent printer would often cause the 710 to go into its format sequence, wiping out all the data on both platters. We field techs called it "electrostatic formatting"

When the key switch was in the "locked" position, its contacts were open, and eighteen inches of wire floated on a 2K ohm pullup resistor. That was the problem. The solution was to run the wire through a spare inverter on one of the chips, and have the key switch ground the wire via closed contacts when locked. Lotsa data (for its time) gone before the solution, though.

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

An Old Variation on a Much Older Prank

Back in the US day when there was but one phone company, and whose equipment was sacrosanct -- couldn't buy your own phone -- ca 1955, there was this:

Get a friend whose voice is unknown to your neighbor/friend/victim to call and say. "This is [your local Bell company]. We will be flushing the lines in your neighborhood tomorrow. To avoid any possible inconvenience, please put a sponge under your phone or put it in a bucket."

Next day, it was time to visit the victim.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

No Acronym Needed

I always used "Adjusted loose nut above keycaps" when appropriate.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Enhanced User Experience!

I have seventy-seven years of experiences, none of which I want "enhanced", "upgraded", or "improved".

I stopped Microsofting at Windows 7. Firefox is another serial offender, but Mozilla may have gotten enough blowback by now.

A simple Linux desktop does all I want and nothing I don't.

Micro Focus bought by Canada's OpenText for $6b

I worked for MF for fourteen years in the 90s and 00s. Went from MF to Merant and back to MF. That last incarnation of MF saw its top management lie to, then get rid of, a world-class support organization. Since then, they have kept lurching from one disaster to the next. I am surprised they still exist.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Correction from "Rich"

It wasn't a copier manudfacturer, That's an editorial error. it was a then well-known maker of desktop CALCULATORS, often found with printers.

Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave

Exactly the reason I quit a publicly held employer in 2007 and refuse to work for another. With IPO, the business model changes from producing excellent, well-supported products to making the numbers imposed by martet analyists. Those imposed numbers expect endless growth, even for mature products which produce consistent profits. Management does whatever damage needs to be done to the company to make the current period's numbers with no regard for long-term anything.

The only thing which grows endlessly is a malignant tumor.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Windows-like Ubuntu

Under Ubuntu, the article could have mentioned Zorin, a Windows-like Gnome tweak riding on Ubuntu. It does a decent job of emulating the Windows user interface from selectable Windows versions. My only gripe is that the Zorin installer crashes on machines where straight Ubuntu installs perfectly.

My non/anti-tech wife is OK with Ubuntu after trasitioning from Windows 7. However, we have always used Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libre Office, so the move was just about seamless. Outlook users will feel pain, but Thunderbird seems worth it.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Oh. My. God.

Don't forget the original MS-DOS classic: "Keyboard not found. Press f1 to continue."

The month I worked for DEADHEAD: Yes, that was their job title

Job Titles

Having spent most of my career in hardware diagnostics, system kernels, and such "close to the metal" software, my colleagues at one employer christened me "Lord Parity, Last Count of Register". That was on the outside of my cubicle in lieu of my name for another thirty years at several different employers.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

Very Nice for Single Machines

I saw this article, and as an Ubuntu geek, was intrigued. I installed it as dual-boot on a couple of Ubuntu/Gnome boxes over the weekend. It is, indeed, a nice way to make the move from Windows, provided there is no need to interact with other machines on the LAN. It's right for my wife's machine when her W7 finally keels over.

For a small home network with a mix of Windows and Linux, though, it's still Ubuntu. One must install Samba, etc. to play nice in a Windows workgroup. If all machines on a home LAN were Zorin/Ubuntu, NFS would be new and mysterious to naive Windows users. One would need to do some programming to make NFS look and feel like Windows file sharing.

I ended up testing support on one minor matter, due to a lack of documentation. I send the question at midnight UK time on Sunday night, and got a correct, useful answer in less than an hour. That is a huge plus for beginners,

In short, Zorin seems to be a significant step toward seamless Windows migration, but there are more steps to go. I'm happy enough to have Zorin for my daily driver laptop.

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

Plenty of Oil, But ...

Huge generator along one side of the building had not been tested in quite a while. Someone rightly decided that it needed testing, which they initiated late one morning. The engine had been sitting so long that it started with an immense belch of black smoke, behind which the four-story building disappeared for a minute or so.. What little breeze there was wafted the smoke into the bulding's air handling equipment. Fire alarms went off throughout the building. Everyone got out to the parking lot safely, to wait for the Fire Department to show up, ventilate, reset the alarms, and declare the building safe three hours later.

It's one thing to show up at home in the evening with a faint smell of perfume and a bit of lipstick on the collar. Coming home reeking of diesel fuel and a bit sooty is quite another.

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

You Might Like Prostate Cancer

Back when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Alta Vista was the search giant. Wanting to know more about the condition, treatments, and long term outlook, I searched "prostate cancer". "Alta Vista found about 13.1 million search results for you." I was not certain I had time to read through all that, but there were two helpful ad links on the side:

"Click here to see what savvy inverstors are saying about prostate cancer."

"Click here to shop for prostate cancer."

I clicked neither, read zero of the 13.1 million results, and restarted my research by other means.