Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Trudat. Back in '96 I remember a privileged member of the team using his company credit card to buy Adobe Illustrator (about 0.85 Kilobux). He fully intended to re-imburse the company at the end of the month, but couldn't understand why his boss and fellow colleagues were furious about:
a) mis-use of the card for personal needs (a distinct and explicit no-no because our strategic partnerships entitled such purchases to be discounted heavily)
2) how this would set a precedent of mis-use and therefore make the issuing of company credit cards that more rare and difficult to negotiate
$) that bragging about this whole sorry affair did not paint *him* as a wronged hero
Many years ago my Mother (a student of French among her many accomplishments) was amused when watching a late night movie (in French) set aboard ship, that the subtitles translated the captain's "Nom d'une pipe!" as "Shiver me timbers!"
Some of my schoolmates at St John Backsides Comprehensive were hysterically amused that "Name of a pipe!" was a curse.
I only speak broken Franglais, but I've always assumed it was obscene idiom. It has been my experience that all surreal French statements boil down to obscene idiom.
I once flew from NY to Heathrow in a Continental Airlines 747 that was falling to pieces during the flight.
A row of seats just behind mine sheared away from the floor mountings, forcing the crew to have to relocate the passengers, and when the stewardess pressed the button to start the in-flight movie there were problems. She popped open the overhead inspection panel and was deluged in coils of celluloid, which she rammed back into place before departing the area to mixed laughter and groans.
I heard later that the airline had snapped up large numbers of planes from the recently bankrupt People's Express airline.
You had to travel People's Express once just to know what life was like as a boat person.
Yeah, that's the one. Was on a ServiceNow CAB call when I type(oe)d that.
I only mention it because I already slammed into it. We use perl scripts in our tape library infrastructure, and it turns out that there is no way to flag a tape as having infinite expiration, so the tape librarians just tell them to be kept for 30 years and ...
Took ages to track the problem down, too.
It will all be great fun for the hatchlings.
Bah and double bah!
H2S is flammable and can be safely burned off to form sulphur dioxide and steam, which combine and rain out as suphurous acid once they hit the outside air. The heat produced can be used to do work or stave off the Dickensian winters in nearby households if you want, or can also be safely vented to the atmosphere if you can't be arsed to install heat exchangers.
Honestly, I wonder what they are teaching kids today.
Pfft!
When I redid the upstairs bathroom I walled-up a contour gauge.
I love tools and use any excuse to buy new ones, but that one just annoyed the living piss out of me. The very definition of Unfit for Purpose made manifest.
I had great fun imagining the thing wailing "for the love of God, Montressor"* as I screwed in the last piece of wallboard and muttered "Yes, for the love of god".
* - I was *not* channeling Vincent Price. I was channeling William Stendahl .
If the email attached to a PayPal account starts bouncing eg because the mailbox is full, what do Paypal do?
Because it occurs to me that if the domain owner were to bounce incoming emails then he/she might be able to trigger the account owner into making a call to Paypal and fixing the problem from his/her end.
Oh yeah. My managers were constantly asking me for my cell number so they could "contact me in emergencies". I responded that my personal cell phone was for personal emergencies, for situations where my wife needed to contact me when I was at work or I needed to tell her I was delayed at work and would be late home.
I added that if they wanted to contact me out of hours they could give me a company cell phone. I was given waffle in return about how hard and expensive it was to get one of those allocated. I acted puzzled and responded that every single consultant SA had been issued with one in the first week of their employment so it couldn't be *that* hard or expensive, but in any case if it was too much trouble to give me the equipment to facilitate out of hours communication it was obviously not that important that I be able to respond to such attempts to communicate.
I changed manager a few years later and was immediately issued with a company cell phone. I tyook great delight in using it in meetings with the Mr "Too Much Trouble".
The downside is being able to be disturbed at home.
The upside is *overtime* baby!
Win-lose-win.
Thinking process of DBA:
"I want to aggregate a whole bunch of data for people engaging in behavior deemed salacious or illegal in various parts of the world and by various cults. I will, for reasons that will later seem incomprehensibly stupid with a capital stupe, *not* encrypt the records in their entirety. I see no downside."
Whoever designed this database should have their fingers broken.
The money that funded the development of LSI fabrication techniques was derived from the space programs need for more electronics in lighter packages.
You may not like it, but your cell phone is in your hand now as opposed to maybe 20 years from now because of the push to beat the Russians to the moon.
Only military-type projects get that sort of acceleration in the 60s. Civ manufacturing was happy to sell stable old tech as long as they could.
Civ manufacturers know what happens when they get caught up in tech races. They alienate customers and drive retail prices down while pushing R&D budgets through the roof and landing themselves with worthless inventory every time there's a "quantum" leap.
See: VCT/CD/DVD/Blu-Ray/Download media formats.
But if you can land a military/NASA project to pay for the R&D with tax monies, you are in like Flynn.
Digital watches were developed specifically to go to the moon as regular watches were deemed "inaccurate".
Then it was found that relativistic effects caused a measurable time difference over the course of the trip anyway.
DAMN YOU, LAWS OF PHYSICS!
Nonono Old Boy, you missed that gentleman's subtext. His initial move was to get elbow room so even *more* of the "right" people could breed freely.
I believe the poster you were responding to was suggesting that there is a simple, non-lethal method for reducing the load on the Earth's finite resources - contraception.
Proper education and easy access to contraception would solve many of the Earth's resource-stress-induced problems and kill no-one. Of course, then you wouldn't be able to view pregnancy as God's Punishment for Ungodly Behavior inconvenient blessing whose life is to be treasured until old enough to hold a gun.
First landing test on the Moon
Grumman test landed the thing dozens of times on Earth to figure out how to properly build those folding legs strong enough to withstand a hard landing but light enough to take to the Moon.
Let's not undersell the effort that was made in the effort to seem superior.
You have to admire that the article gave two large paragraphs of the short article under that link over to the "custom cooling" system, a description which boils down to "two fans suck air in the back and blow it out the front over the top of the graphics processor gubbins".
In other words, the custom cooling solution is like any other computer's cooling solution, just with the outside-to-inside-the-casing airflow reversed.
You can't be jocular with anyone anymore. Anything you say will be used a a lever against you somehow, be it in a sleet of "Insert Favorite Red Button Issue-ism" accusations on Twitface, Arsebook etc or straw man attacks on same for any bloody thing the read imagines can be got away with on the thinnest excuses.
Go on. Fire away.
Dettol (or the US equivalent, Pine Sol) will turn plastic parts into chewing gum in about 6 hours according to my experiments on GW Termagants. It also doesn't fetch the paint particulalry well, and requires that you "air out" anything soaked in it for days top get rid of the "school bog" stench.
If you want to fetch paint off a plastic or partly plastic thing absolutely safely (with respect to the item to be stripped of paint) the cheapest Castrol brake fluid* will do the job nicely sans damage. In my experiments the paint pretty much fell off after a night and the plastic was still sound after two weeks immersion.
But everyone knows someone "on the internet" who swears blind the floor cleaner "works".
* - If you use the more expensive Castrol products the paint stays on because those fluids are formulated to not attack paint.
Only if you insisted on running your enterprise on toy computers.
When I took my first look at a DEC Alpha after being spoiled by years working on 1100/2200 series Unisys machines I was appalled that the man pages listed known bugs in commonly used utilities - that were 20 years old by that point. Even ICL (bless their oft-darned cotton socks) could do better than that.
It was the push to internet-enabled updating that fueled the "ship any old crap and fix it in 1.1" attitude that is the standard operating procedure of all software companies, it seems.
It was dynamic linking that enabled and continues to enable the malware merchants who can change the fundamental way one's legacy software works overnight with no warning they have done so.
It is late binding that makes all this easier when using the hated Javascript, which can so easily become the slim-jim that cracks open the doors of your computer so the evil doers can have a good root around before crapping all over the seats.
Rules of thumb for anyone contemplating shenanigans in our line of business:
1) You are nowhere near as clever as you think.
2) Everyone else is nowhere near as stupid as you think.
Of course, not believing these rules is what makes people undertake unethical shenanigans in the first place.
But why would anyone sell me software that is broken or can't do what it says on the side of the box it came in?
And why would anyone update software they sold me that was working properly?
I begin to suspect that the entire post-internet software business model is fundamentally flawed.
Tsk! Late binding, dynamic linking and silent downloading, eh?
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