* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Elon Musk's new idea is to hook your noggin up to an AI – but is he just insane about the brain?

Stevie

Bah!

When first deployed into a volunteer, Mr Albert Stoat, the approach showed some drawbacks viz:

1) Post operation, the subject would only speak in bursts, and then only to say "Aggleaggleaggle".

2) It turned out that during post-operative recovery a malicious person or persons unknown had installed a coin miner in Mr Stoat's firmware.

3) An MRA scan of the patient's brain later showed activity in the hypothalamus, which turned out to have somehow been overwritten with obscene MPEG shorts.

4) When the diagnostic interface was enabled and connected to a terminal, it would only play animated cat gifs.

5) Upon applying EST the patient became lucid, although only to recite a list of some four million, three hundred and ninety-two thousand, eight hundred and four userid/password pairs, after which he said "Aggleaggleaggle" and passed out.

6) Mr Stoat reacted poorly to static electricity shocks, passing out then immediately waking, saying "Aggleaggleaggle".

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Stevie

Re: Hummmmm

Not ironic at all. Perhaps you meant "coincidentally" or "parenthetically"?

I agree %100 that using languages designed for writing operating systems in are not a great choice for the general ledger, nor those that try and look like languages intended for writing operating systems.

But today's programmers-sorry-software-architects run screaming from languages that do not resemble "C", I've found.

Soon Google will have more bit barns in Texas than you can shake a stick at: Second facility planned for Ellis County

Stevie

Bah!

Makes sense. Put something with massive cooling requirements in one of the hottest places in the country.

Next they'll slam in a few solar panels and declare the whole thing "green".

The Empire Strikes Back: Trump discovers $10bn JEDI cloud deal may go to nemesis Jeff Bezos, demands probe

Stevie

Re: The fact that Trump wants to look into the deal

I think it is rather that OPOTUS saw a $10 bajillion purchase (jobs!) that didn't have his name on it.

Stevie

Re: Single Throat to Choke

Having been trapped in the old "IBM's P8 running badly on ORACLE's WebLogic Appserver" tech support pingpong game - that only ended when I was able to get the whole kit moved to the WebSphere caboodle - I can only agree that the single vendor idea has much merit when nuthin' wurks and it's time to hold feet to the fire.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Stevie

Re: All sounds very plausible...

The ones I took apart were piezoelectric. The wire hammer was held under tension by a peg. When you operated the shutter a small plastic spade was pushed into the slot, forcing the wire hammer off its peg. It in turn swung hard against the center post of the bulb, generating the electricity needed to fire the cube.

A dismantled one once gave a friend a nice belt when he was playing with it.

For a while some stage magicians used them in conjunction with a hand-held gaff (bit of bent metal) as "invisible cameras".

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Stevie

Bah!

<MODE="bewildered"> There's a market for sat-nav mags? </MODE>

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Stevie

Oh dear, you will be downvoted on this advice because it shows that MS does in fact own some brains and even some of the technically astute users of their stuff don't.

You should see how unpopular I was when I told someone complaining about the "mess" MS Word makes of generating a web-page form a doc that there was a simple switch you could flip to stop all the inline styles that were making his head come off and orbit the room.

RTFM is the byword here, unless it is a MSFM, in which case the software should be all things to all people right out of the shrinkwrap.

Stevie

I've had several USB sticks work just fine after a trip through the washing machine.

How many have you had survive the trip through a dog?

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Stevie

Re: Colour coded for a reason....

Again, overthinking. Achieved same thing with strip of masking tape and a sharpie-drawn dot.

Much fun watching the callee beat up his phone when it would not stop ringing at him. At one point he put the receiver on his desk and pummeled the phone base for all the world like a giant cat playing with a ping-pong ball.

Stevie

Re: Colour coded for a reason....

Overthinking phone shenanigans.

I wanted to get a colleague so I stuck masking tape on the earpiece and put little dots on it with a sharpie. Absolutely obvious but who really looks at a phone handset?

He twigged when I melted down with laughter during his attempt to ascertain whether or not a phone engineer was on-site to repair his phone yet with the secretary who sat on the other side of his cube partition, about ten feet away. He could literally have stood up and held a conversation in a quiet voice with the lady.

You see, he assumed because he could not hear anyone clearly, *they* could not hear him. He would strain to hear the screaming person at the other end of the call, then deafen them by yelling his response at the top of his voice.

That call went like this:

Him: IS THAT PHONE ENGINEER HERE YET?

Unseen Shrill Lady about 10 feet away: "NO NOT YET!"

Him: BECAUSE I CAN'T HARDLY HEAR DIDDLY HERE!

(catches sight of me doubled over in my chair, crying, biting hand, in serious danger of pissing pants)

... UNLESS!!!

I swear as he held he handset at arms length and glared at it his eyes did that Roger Rabbit "awooga!" thing where they come out of the sockets and go back in. Of course, I was suffering acute oxygen starvation by then on account of not wanting to give the game away by laughing out loud.

A couple of weeks later I decided to see what it must have looked like on the other end of his calls so I put tape over the mouthpiece and drew more dots with the sharpie. Yup. Half a day of screaming into his phone and then holding it as far away from his head as he could when they screamed back.

This was the same bloke from the "Unisys messaging subsystem 'ambush reversed' revenge ploy" I wrote of a while ago.

Stevie

Re: Error Messages

Written one Pascal program in me life.

Prediction: Missing punctuation in long-time-previous statement.

Reminds me of the time a new hire with the usual-for-these-days sneering attitude to COBOL and one whole semester of COBOL 101 under his belt came running to me in a panic with a sheet of greenbar with the line "TOO MANY ERRORS - COMPILATION ABANDONED" on it - the only output from the compilation of his first real COBOL program.

I suggested he check that he had not mis-spelled "Procedure Division", and he was a bit snotty, so I told him to make *sure* the "O"s were all alpha and not zeroes.

One quick check and exit one gobsmacked new hire.

Rule Zero of COBOL: You only have to be able to spell about twenty words, and the rest you have to be able to mis-spell consistently. But you must spell those twenty (or so) exactly right or, in the words of Catweazle: "Nuthin' works!"

Who needs a supercomputer when you can get a couple of petaflops on AWS?

Stevie

Re: 3x cheaper...

Aircraft carrier plus crew, of course. Can't ask a crew to put to sea in a vessel they have never sailed, maintained or fought before.

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

Stevie

Bah!

I get automagically docked an hour.

It is the way of things.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Stevie

... singing 'Hallelujah.'

Y'soft southern jessie etc etc.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Stevie

Re: but was probably just a poor squaddie expected to fend for himself

Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin might change your mind about those "poor squaddies".

Did mine. I take tales of the Gentlemanly Wehrmacht As Opposed To The SS Scum with a pinch of salt after reading them at the end of the last and the turn of the new centuries.

Hee hee. Love being able to say "A century ago, we used to etc etc"

Wait. No, I hate that.

Where's my dinner?

Stevie

Re: Mrs Curie

Discoverer of Polonium, the minty element of death.

Minty death with a hole in the middle.

Stevie

Re: asbestos mines

A buried munition that cannot be set off by heating it, but when it does go off adds a nasty bout of silicosis to the removal of limbs, eyes, eardrums & sundry organs?

Inhumane!

Stevie

Re: Small point

I believe a "flail mower" might be a wheeled, upscaled weed-whacker (UK: Strimmer).

The materials used in the flail might vary depending on the expected brush to be demolished.

All guess work.

Later

Completely wrong, except for the "materials used" bit. It's a small cousin to a mine flail. It appears it thrashes the brush into submission.

I approve.

Stevie

Bah!

I know I shouldn't have been, and I know that this is probably a marker of my passage from late-late-late middle age into solid geezerhood, but I was literally agape at the revelation that there were people on the planet, American people, born in the land where this story played big (though not big enough it turned out) on scant information at the time it all went down, people who did not know anything about Chernobyl.

A whole generation of people who go "say whaaat?" when it is pointed out on Twitter that "That HBO show - it's a real thing that happened in Russia!"

Next up: The Great Tweet Awakenings when we get HBO's "3 Mile Island" and "Love Canal" miniseries.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Stevie

Re: Dolt

Bah and double Bah on screenshots!

I have a Service Now "staff liaison" who bombards me with witless requests to 'update the following' - with a screenshot of his widescreen browser window.

List the change numbers giving you (and no-one else) piles: OK.

Screenshot the offense-to-Azathoth change numbers with the fitted-as-standard Windows Snipping Tool: OK.

Screenshot it so the important info can only be read by electron microscope eyeballs and zooming to human-readable sizes pixelates the info into gibberish: idiotic. Go boil your e-paperwork-for-its-own-sake bottom, son of a silly person.

Stevie

Re: longest word in the dictionary

For such an expert on dictionaries you still managed to mis-spell "althrorough".

pfft.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Stevie

Re: Could it be

Actually, this anomaly can only be fully explained as a fragment of the Extremely Large Hyperhadron Collider.

Stevie

Bah!

It's a smegging garbage pod!

Bear insistent on playing tonsil tennis with you? Just bite its tongue off

Stevie

Re: But don't forget your Bat shark repellant.

It's in the rack in the Batcopter, along with the Bat Anti-Whale and Bat Anti-Squid sprays.

Stevie

But he didn't take the bear spray

Maybe more people would trust it if it were labelled "Bat Anti-Bear Spray".

Stevie

Re: Canadians I know recommend a stout stick

FYI: Those Canadians are secretly jealous of your boyish good looks and have a death wish for you.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

Stevie

Bah!

"If we were put under any pressure by any country that we felt was wrong, we would prefer to close the business"

Cue:

a) Laughing Policeman chorus

2) "No True Scotsman" weasel clause as required (when found out).

US border cops confirm: Maker of America's license-plate, driver recognition tech hacked, camera images swiped

Stevie

Bah!

"As of today, none of the image data has been identified on the Dark Web"

Er ... isn't that because no-one knows where to look?

JavaScript tells all, which turns out not to be so great for privacy: Side-channel leaks can be exploited to follow you around the interweb

Stevie

Bah!

JavaScript is a security threat? Who could have predicted that?

Oh that's right. No one needs to because we have a new vulnerability announced every twenty seconds.

All for the shiny.

Stevie

Re: JavaScript is only a threat when it runs

Get Rid Of Useless Javascript Now!

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Stevie

Re: BANG!

Tee hee. My first job was in the late 70s and in a closed shop running under the iron screwdriver of the ASTMS (at least, the IT bit; there were several other unions in the mix as this was a manufacturing plant).

I come in one morning and our chief programmer is whining because the heat is off and her little one-bar electric heater has a blown fuse. She is moaning because this has happened before, and it took hours for the Electricians to dispatch someone to fix it. No problem I say, do some quick arithmetic (1000w/240=4 anna bit amps) and I fit a 5 amp fuse I just happened to have in my pocket no I don't remember why.

I go out of the office to do some stuff in spares and come back to chaos. I am called into Mr Rumbold's office (in fact this is the guy who was in every way the model for Dilbert's boss, down to the hairstyle and dimwit observations) where the head electrician is sitting. I get a lecture about how I am not a member of the electrician's union, how my doing electrical work results in an unsafe installation that could "kill someone".

When Mr Sparky has wound down and Mr Rumbold has finished mournfully shaking his head I ask if I can speak.

I point out that the electric fire had been repaired by a union electrician the year before. Mr Sparky agrees. I then pull out the blown fuse I took out of the plug and drop it on the desk in front of him.

"In that case I don't understand the fuss. The qualified electrician fitted this 13 amp fuse that is about three times more tolerant of a problem than the five amp job I put in after working out the proper expected current load. Clearly I am making a better job of staff safety than the electricians are in this case."

Mr Sparky's eyes do the AWOOGA thing and Mr Rumbold hastily says "Well I think you've learned your lesson and we can agree this won't happen again", and waves to show I should leave now before I "accidentally" trigger a factory walk-out.

Another time we moved offices and had to call union desk movers. It was agreed in a lengthy meeting that Carpenters would move the wooden desks, managers for the use of, and Tinsmiths would move the steel desks, programming staff for the use of. All went well until they came across a wooden desk with steel drawers fitted. Chaos ensued. After another lengthy inter-union negotiation it was agreed that one Carpenter and one Tinsmith would move that desk. I don't know what process was used, nor how long it took, for them to decide who got which end.

Stevie

Re: BANG!

Hm. Smug English Person talking trash about the electricity supply. Time for a tale:

I got home from school and turned on the lights. They seemed very bright. Turned on the TV. That seemed very bright. Powered everything off and waited for Dad to arrive in theatre from his Technical College Teacher job.

Told Dad, who dug out his Avo and did some poking around in a socket, then at the fusebox. Then got on the 'phone to the Electricity Board to complain about there being a 44ov supply Chez Us. Was ridiculed by EB phone guy, but they dispatched a technician when Dad trotted out his Chartered EE status in stern tones.

Technician arrives in full "pooh-pooh" mode, pokes a tester into the nearest socket, squeaks loudly and grabs the phone to yell that there is indeed a 440v supply at Chez Stevie and probably for the whole street and the next one too.

A quick trip to the little substation in the next street proves what Dad already knew: some "properly qualified" electrician had connected our street supply across two phases instead of the phase and CT.

All this went down in in the Early to late summer evening, Merrie England. Whitmore Park, Coventry to be exact. The little substation was on Harborough Road, top of the hill, next to Rotherham Road. It's the shed with a green gate these days, according to Google.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Stevie

If you fly from a Schengen country to a Schengen country,

Can't one just avoid the issue by traveling between cities by Shengansen?

Stevie

Re: does it become a problem of Decidability

If so, then we need George W. Bush, aka The Decider.

Judge slaps down Meg Whitman for accusing Autonomy boss of being a 'fraudster who committed fraud'

Stevie

Bah!

I rather like the legal system outlined by Frank Herbert in his Jorj X McKie stories, (Gowachan Law I think but it has been three decades since I read the books) in which Legal Precedent was to be avoided at all costs, to win a case one had to prove not only that the defendant was guilty but that the plaintiff had no culpability, and the winning lawyer had the right to kill the losing lawyer.

The object being to reduce the number of cases brought to court, given that the costs of doing so were literally ruinous to all concerned.

Can you imagine?

"I'm afraid ReallyBig Conglomo Ents has failed to show that Mr Everyman downloaded their content, moreover that RBCE housed said content on what expert witnesses have called a "honeypot" server and have indulged in scattershot subpoenas to scare people into paying "settlements". Thus the Plaintiff has failed to show due cause and isolation of interest."

"I find for the Defendant, who having represented himself, may now avail himself of the ceremonial dagger should he so wish and ... DEAR GOD, THE BLOOD! THE CARNAGE! OH THE HUMANITY!"

"Someone get a sling for Mr Everyman's sprained arm. Does anyone have a bucket and mop?"

One man went to mow a meadow, hoping Trump would spot giant grass snake under flightpath

Stevie

Re: childish

On noes, thumbed down!

Was it because I pointed out the mis-spelling of "Auschwitz" I wonder, something the auto spell-checker in just about ever piece of software that cares would have spotted?

Perhaps it was because I didn't cite my sources for the oil import data I quoted? I just pulled up google and typed in "Where does the US get its oil from?" and used the first result (which happened to be NPR, but I would have used one from FOX had there been one).

If it was because of the "Windmill noise causes cancer" remark, that is a direct quote from OPOTUS himself, made by the great man about two or three weeks ago. As I said before, don't blame me for that one.

It occurs to me that the 1/6th shortfall of oil sourced from Arabian and African wells could also be ameliorated by making domestic use of Freedom Gas instead of selling it.

I hope the down-thumber is mollified by this admittedly late addendum to my original post.

Stevie

Re: childish

"Auschowitz"?

Moving on.

Turns out we get most of our oil from domestic sources, then Latin American sources, Then Canadian sources and finally about 1/12th of it from the Persian Gulf. We get almost as much from Africa as we do from the Persian Gulf, so call it less than 1/6th overall sourced off the North and South American continents.

The Arabian Oil component of our energy budget would seem to be significant, but not strategic, something that could be made up with renewables if OPOTUS wasn't afraid the noise of windmills would give us all cancer (his own words, from his own hands, in print; don't shoot the messenger).

Stevie

Re: childish

"Cause"?

Stevie

Re: post the documentation

From his own public record: "Many sides ...", "Shithole countries..." and of course the whole immigrant rhetoric.

Stevie

Re: Sad news everyone

I hear OPOTUS brought his own security because it would take too long for Scotland Yard's best to get to London.

Stevie

Re: Childish Dick Move.

As childish as, say, having the sharp end of a warship hidden from The Presidential Eyeballs because of its name?

Court drama: Did Oracle bully its customers into the cloud? Nine insiders to blow the whistle

Stevie

Re: Do you HAVE to use Oracle?

The putative site is following all the "best practices" they can get out of Oracle concerning their kit.

Going all cloudy is not an option unfortunately.

Stevie

Re: "They don't dislike the technology, they just dislike how Oracle treats them."

Yes Will, that's what the AC was implying.

Stevie

Re: Do you HAVE to use Oracle?

So lets say we have a multi-terrabyte database used for a transactional database application with connections topping out at around a thousand a second, servicing exabytes of data. Said database leverages RAC and Dataguard to the fullest. The support staff, DBAs, developers and managers are all Oracle trained. The application must be up 24x7 or there are expensive legal ramifications.

How much kit, time, retraining and migration cost do you think this environment can stand?

Oh yes. It's a government installation so budget for staffing, training and new kit is tight as a fish's arse.

In the real world, swapping a technology is often a process measured in years, during which costs escalate often to the point the proposed change is abandoned even before the new platform starts to show the "interesting to Chinese philosophers" problems that will require rethinks, restests and, inevitably, more bugs and more cost.

The change in locking philosophy alone would require massive redesign for most models I know of.

If you are starting from scratch, yes I'm with you 100%. If you are dealing with a small manufacturer, yes. But when you start talking the sorts of applications Oracle was built into - the proposed functions people wanted driving the design of the Database suite - nope. Not remotely an easy choice, or a cost saver in the near term.

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

Stevie

Bah!

If this is true, and I have no reason to believe El Reg made it up out of thin air, wouldn't those involved be in danger of some sort of Insider Trading prosecution. I know Insider Trading is about stocks, but there must be anti-Gitface laws on the books to prevent such Victorian Railroad Magnate behaviour, surely?

She's just a Cosmic Girl but UK.gov is dangling £20m to have Beardy Branson's 747 launch satellites from Cornwall

Stevie

Bah!

The danger here is the same as in days of yore. The locals will set up fake landing lights to lure the returning spaceships into crashing on the rocks so their cargoes of space-rum and space-gold can be looted.

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Stevie

Bah!

In a new-ish job. Called out of comfy bed early on Saturday. Big client who was watching closely had a problem. Please could I log on remotely on my spiffy IBM laptop (the one with the butterfly keyboard that sprang out to full-sized like something out of Thunderbirds or a James Bond movie) and do my little rat dance and make it go faster?

Sure, no problem I'll just log in and sit on the carpet and type some simple commands and ARGH!

Ten seconds of white-out vision and some quiet screaming. Then I remembered two things: I was working on Unisys equipment (which had a crappy SQL database engine but a recovery model second to none) and the client was employing ex-Sperry people so *everything* was configured by-the-book and working like a Swiss watch (only time I ever saw an honest-to-Cray Poisson distribution on a DMS database in the wild) so I took a deep breath and typed "RECOVER DATABASE TO <ten minutes ago>" and Hey Pasta! Instant Make It Didn't Happen!

Boss called to report odd fluctuation in database activity. I told him I was doing some preliminary groundwork before implementing my Make-It-Go-Faster plan. He hung up and I did it the right way this time.

Everyone impressed. Nobody mad. Sausages for breakfast. Total Win Scenario.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Stevie

Re: Terrorists with spanners

Nah. UK spanners are metric mostly. Boeings are A.F.

Stevie

Theatre de Securitie

Upvoted for last line.