Posts by TeeCee 9435 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
My favourite is the man page for "sh" on HP-UX 10 and above (i.e. post POSIX).
It's a long rant[1] about what a bunch of twats POSIX are for insisting that the manual page for the POSIX shell be invoked by "man sh", when everyone who knows their arse from their elbow will be expecting the Bourne shell page.
It closes with a note to the effect that "man sh-posix" will get you the posix one and "man sh-bourne" the real one, which obeys the letter of the law while also riding roughshod over the spirit of it.
[1] While perfectly civilised in its language, it really does manage to convey that the author was spitting bullets while writing it.
Except that most consumer devices will set the date and time themselves when first powered on OOB[1] by the grinning monkey that bought them. What they have at that point is, more often than not, more than 24 hours out from current.....
[1] A "must have" feature, unless you are prepared to hire a shitload of call centre staff who all have the patience of Job and an infinite supply of Ritalin within easy reach.
......sometimes regular status meetings can be really great.
One office I worked in had a critical shortage of meeting rooms. We noticed that the pub up the road had a nice little partitioned off "booth" section in one of the bars that was both just the right size to accommodate the senior project team members and handily adjacent to the bar, so project status meetings were scheduled for 15:00 on Thursday (i.e. deserted pub time) therein.
We found that there tends to be way less confrontation and a lot more constructive dialogue when the meeting's held in a booth around a round table and each attendee has a pint in front of them.
Actually, I'm 100% sure that I remember seeing it stated that, while them may be the roolz, it's bollocks.
Apparently a natural wood board kills bacteria on its own, something the glass and plastic varieties do not. Thus, unless you have access to an industrial boiling dishwasher to clean the things, wood chopping boards are the way to go.
....also has the 'advantage' of a typically limited range to help with physical security....
A very similar approach to security as that adopted by the Ostrich. IIRC the range of NFC is supposed to be in the centimetres and hackers have already got to the state of being able to interrogate NFC enabled stuff at 25 metres. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Bluetooth's possible range can be waaaay more than advertised with suitable kit.
Paris. Another well-known flightless bird.
Go on then shithead, name a consumer OS that doesn't push updates if you don't deliberately turn them off?
Just out of interest, do you actually know where the having a central update source for all your OS and application updates was first formalised? HINT: Well-known OS, begins with "L".
The problem in this case is you have software provided by third parties which is not vetted or tested being given the keys to the device's update system. MS are one of the few that actually don't do that.
That's almost sensible.
As I may have mentioned elsewhere here, I once worked for a place where the Management Accountants had replicated the entire Nominal Ledger structure in Lotus 123 V3......(!)
A spreadsheet for each account, using V3's "3D" link feature, so that actions in the base level accounts cascaded up the structure, just like the real thing......only much, much more slowly[1]. It was like a software version of a massive ziggurat built entirely of turds.
[1] Some of the more senior lads has 386SX 16s....Woohoo.
A car analogy is always good.
Once upon a time, car manufacturers would keep their diagnostic codes and such a closely guarded secret. In addition, the secondhand car trade would mark down a vehicle that had been serviced outside the manufacturer's dealership network and all manufacturers "approved used car" scheme would refuse to accept such. Finally, the manufacturers would refuse to supply manuals and service bulletins to third parties.
Then the EU ruled all the above as anticompetitive and illegal.
The end.
Worse still, you need real Teradata types on staff to look after / extend what you originally built. That's a minimum of two FTEs on your payroll to ensure continuity. The alternative is spending seven figures on something that looks more and more like a bog standard disk array as time goes on.
So that's both the CAPEX and OPEX side off into the stratosphere.....
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that geenstijl had come across the location of a long forgotten arms cache containing a couple of hundred AK47s, 20,000 rounds of ammo, 12 RPGs, and a half tonne of Semtex for good measure and had gone on to publish said location, along with a "fill your boots" message.
Are they then guilty of anything?
The arms cache was already there, anybody could have found it just by looking in the right place..........
The words; "There's no correct answer" spring to mind.
Hang on.....this is an interwebs thing, right?
Surely Uber have as much right as all the other web darlings to expect their contributors to provide their shit for free? Presumably all that's happened is someone's noticed that they're paying for shit and in a fit of astonishing generosity they've decided to phase it out rather than just stopping.
You have it. Without an endplate of some sort, high pressure air below the wing spills around the end and equalises pressure, meaning that the last couple of feet of a naked wing contribute nothing to lift (but still to drag).
By preventing spillover, this air forms a neat vortex. Drag is reduced and lift improved. They serve the same purpose as the five large feathers that stick out from the end of an eagle's wing, which is where the A380 design team got the idea from (and as they came up with the system and are adamant it contributes to lift........!).
A necessity for the 380 to keep the wingspan down to acceptable levels and retrofitted to other aircraft as more lift and reduced drag reduces fuel burn on takeoff and climb.
Maybe when retrofitted to an older wing design it merely serves to reduce drag but when coupled with a wing surface designed to get the most out of the system...................?
I was once awestruck by a piece on the old System/38, while looking for a problem that had come up.
It was a CL program.
It had 25 lines.
Most of these were comments on what the thing did, leaving three lines of actual code.
Two of those were "PGM" and "ENDPGM".
That left one.
Which was wrong.
On the plus side, it was quite easy to find the error.
More to the point, who writes malware that will only work on a previously rooted device?
So you're only going to try to pwn the devices of tech-savvy types who are waaaaaaayyyyyyy more likely to notice something's up and remove your shit.........right...........very clever, I'm sure.
Wow, that caused a nostalgia moment.
First actual, honest-to-god "PC" I ever got given as "mine" to work on was an XT 286.
Provided to me with a shitload of figures, a copy of Freelance, a pen plotter and instructions to put something on foils that the Chairman could use to impress his peers. Colour monitor too, no expense spared when He says "Do it".
First thing I did on being given this unexpected and extraordinarily expensive[1] present was to wheedle a 5250 card for it so it could replace my terminal and (as a side effect and more importantly) also ensure that no other bugger could take it away......
[1] As in more than twice the cost of my car at the time.
.....the sensible version.
Eject the wings.
That's the engines and fuel tanks[1] gone and the rest of it, including the crew parachuting down safely. Simpler to implement too as the wing roots are major assembly joints anyway and merely replacing the existing bolts with explosive ones sorts the "ejecting" bit. This just leaves the parachute system as a new thing to work out.
Yes, this is a really fucking stupid idea, but I reckon it's not quite as stupid as the original one on offer.
[1] Before anyone says "belly tank", look at the original idea.......!
Another one.
An ex-squaddie mate was in the Balkans. They learned very quickly to sleep in their Land Rovers as, if one was left unattended overnight, it would magically change into a shiny, new Humvee.
A Land Rover would fit down all the little village roads in the Balkans, whereas a Humvee wouldn't and the American army is actually quite resourceful when it comes to securing the correct kit for the job in hand.
Having actually been in the situation of being out in the arse-end of nowhere with both a Land Rover and a Toyota Land Cruiser, there was only one thing that stopped the Land Rover.
It had to, repeatedly, to pull the sodding Toyota out of whatever it had got stuck in this time.
...it’s a radical departure for the Shenzhen outfit.
Er, no it isn't. Some time before the Two came out, the One got a honking price cut and went over to "no invite needed". Last time I looked (last week) the only product that was still on invite only ordering was the OnePlus X.
This seems to be standard policy. Once production and supply can hold their own against demand, they drop the ordering restrictions.
No. 1 Son has a OnePlus Two. As far as I can make out, the only thing missing that stops it being the undisputed king is about 250 quid on the price tag.
Well when your core business is dressing chav muggers, it makes sense to do it as cheaply as possible.
The majority of their customers can't tell the difference between a quality product and cheap, Chinese tat with an eye-wateringly expensive badge on it........ a bit like Apple really........
The resulting condensed unikernel package cooperates with other unikernels running on the host for resources and processor core time.
That's cooperative multitasking that is. Not DOS, but early Windows. The problem is when one of the tasks doesn't play nice and in the absence of a preemptive supervisor program to take its toys away, we get the return of the "General Protection Fault".
The GPF was the poor old system tasks given the job of monitoring the shitfight saying; "Oh fuck, something went wrong.".
Some years ago, I was forced to wait several hours for a visa in central London. By sheer good fortune the pub opposite the embassy had just been refurbed and was now open for business and by even more good fortune had Leffe Blonde on draught!
Jackpot was finding out that none of the staff present had worked out what the line a (very long) way down the side of a large Leffe glass was for. This rather serious oversight meant that it worked out somewhat cheaper to drink than the rest of their offerings, being pretty bloody close to a "buy one, get one free" deal.
Which begs the question as to how After Earth got released without them having to sit through it.
(If you haven't seen it, imagine what WWW would have been like if Will Smith had written it too and then selected a director based solely on how far up his own arse he was to really guarantee that sweep at the razzies.)
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