Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper

Re: pop corn time !

Has he ever been seen in the same room as Steve Bong? Enquiring minds need to know.

Re: "cartoons depicting lazy American workers"

It was a few months after we were sold to a Big American Corporation that I saw a picture of Pearl Harbour used as wallpaper on a colleague's PC. When asked why, I was told that it reminded him of his current project, which largely consisted of Yanks running round putting out fires and scooping up the dead and injured having actively ignored all warnings for several months.

Re: Alternatives are good.

I was young and still drinking. We were at the right end of a particularly good bottle of wine at the time and I was in a forgiving mood, for the short term anyway. The chillis on the shared pizza were for me, so his picking them off was his way of sharing, I guess.

Re: @Iglethal - Damage the hard drive?

Au contraire, Apple kit makes an excellent platform for many a Linux distro.

Re: "I'm the IT director for ..."

A Large Government Department doesn't get to pick and choose its customers. That's why they aren't customers. Service has to be delivered to all, no matter how much of a custard they might be. We were a third party supplier so we had to play the same game. If the Department were so minded I am sure that they could have made this person's life uncomfortably complicated, but that, fortunately for this guy, was not how they rolled.

Re: Memories

A memory upgrade was usually the next purchase after spending £59 (1995 pounds, at that) on the upgrade CD-ROM. 4MB to 8MB led to usability, going to 16MB was expensive but felt smoother and racier than silk knickers.

Re: Press the button Max ...

After six months in a hotel in Basingstoke on a project that started as a Death March and got worse, I'd have pressed that button.

Re: And what about the people ...

I tend to use B12 2JP. Tiswas FTW.

Re: Experienced tester.

We used to treasure our colleague Gordon who was born to be a UAT specialist. Our software would pass unit testing and integration testing, then we'd give it to Gordon. It was only a matter of time before he'd wander round to our desk.

"If I select this, then this and press this, is does that. Is that right".

"Why would you even try to do that?".

"Because the software lets me".

A perfectly reasonable response. He always found things to do that none of us could imagine. I loved him and I loved his work. Once Gordon couldn't break it, it was ready for the great unwashed.

Re: the picture in the article

My favourite safety instruction: “Accidents with chainsaws are rarely trivial”.

I’ve always taken the same approach with angle grinders.

Re: "We are good at winning over the tech people; they are good at the C-suite."

Not in this case, I’m afraid. Boss man thought that the sales droid had shown them Satellite applying hardening rules. What he had been shown, without realising, was Satellite coordinating OpenSCAP to do the job. Cue two days of, “But it was Satellite, we don’t need anything else”, “No, it was SCAP”, on a loop for two days, because it wasn’t the simple fix-and-forget he wanted. Unless the next version of Satellite incorporates the functionality of SCAP then it won’t fix that issue.

He’s generally a smart guy, but he’s a sucker for a sales pitch.

Re: “Old Hardware” is fake news

"However most COBOL is dependent on the unique and complex mainframe environment."

That's why ICL (then Fujitsu, after they bought them, but the people were largely the same) made sure that the emulated versions of VME running on Linux look to the code exactly like a VME box soldered together in Manchester in 1974.

There's still a large amount of the United Kingdom's IT infrastructure running on ICL VME mainframes, as well as the fine manufacturer's you name. Sperry-Burroughs had a particularly fine salad bar in the canteen that I visited, I recall.

Re: The Radio Series and Only the Radio Series

The announcers' comments are certainly on the BBC CD edition that I have. They are very much part of the episodes as broadcast.

Re: A wunch of bankers ...

The bankers can do what they want - I would hope that the fellow toilers at the IT codeface would stump up for the beers.

Re: One Per Desk

My then employer, a heavy user of ICL kit, took one look at them and ran away as quickly as they possibly could. For a company that could produce some excellent and far-sighted technology (e.g. CAFS), they could turn crap out some real turds when they wanted to.

Re: What's in the box Doc?

" what had probably been yogurt"

This phrase genuinely scares me.

Re: short but somewhat formal dress and heels

Every time I get caught out by Rule 34 it's when I'm using a work machine. Still, at least I wasn't the person who searched for Shrewsbury College of Art and Technology using its initials from a work machine. The look on his face (and his manager's when they pulled the logs) was priceless.

Re: Were we not told...

And the "Boris" bikes scheme was planned and partly implemented by Livingstone's city hall before "Boris" took over - he just took the credit. Yer man Johnson gave us the Emirates cable car and an un-built bridge.

Re: No hammer needed

A hammer has been known to serve as an improvised, if less subtle, screwdriver.