Posts by Mike 16 1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
The version of SIMH I have also emulates the IBM 1130 (derived from the IBM 1800), at least well
enough to allow me to port a Fortran program written for the 360/50 to the 1130 and have it run
on a real 1130 (not mine, my storage space is too full to indulge that sort of pack-ratting, and the
missus would object)
That said, I have noticed a bit of fragmentation in the various places one can get SIMH, so YMMV
I suspect that in many cases the gauntlet set up by HR is to make sure a hiring manager will never see the CVs of competent applicants.
After all, if you allow hiring qualified folks, how do you create the crisis which can only be remedied by a large consulting contract let to a firm that by pure coincidence is owned by the CEO's brother in law?
Printers? DHCP? How about we set the wayback machine for early 90s, with some lab gear. The devices did not use DHCP, or bootp, but RARP. Having gotten an IP address, they fetched various config data via TFTP. Worked fine (for small enough values of "fine").
Then it didn't.
One day we started getting complaints that the boxen could not be accessed from Windows (NT3.1?). Worked fine from SunOS, SYSV on 386, even VMS Vaxen. Huh?
Apparently, someone had brought in a "network printer adapter", so they could use their Centronics-cabled printer over ethernet. This box had the charming feature of, if it saw an RARP reply, deciding that it was the intended recipient, and re-assign its IP to that in the reply (which it had not solicited).
When a user initiated a connection, and it had not already, it would ARP for the desired IP address. The actual box, _and_ the "mini network print server" would both respond. Which MAC address should it use?
Apparently, most OSes would take the first ARP reply, while Windows would take the most recent. Since the computers were typically in the same lab, if not on the same bench, the gear was on the same ethernet segment and would be seen first. The printer adapter was on a different segment, so would reply later. Windows, and only Windows, would accept the second, unsolicited, update. So the first packets actually intended for the lab gear were instead sent to the printer adapter, which for some reason was not listening on any of the intended ports.
Sorry about the verbosity. trust me, the actual diagnosis took longer than typing (or reading) this.
Suffice to say that this pioneer of BYODADTI (Bring your own device and don't tell IT) a department head, of course, was informed of what his brilliant actions had wrought.
Then an actual policy about such unsolicited upgrades was written. (and read? don't be silly)
Because as we all know, every law enforcement officer and politician is simply incapable of breaking the law, no matter what riches and powers await.
"You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular" (allegedly said of prostitution by New Orleans mayor Martin Behrman)
One of my employers (a division of a Fortune 500, if not Fortune 100 mega-conglomerate) did exactly the opposite. When it came time to do the big RIF (that had been denied to be in the works for months), Mahogany Row laid off HR _first_. Might have left one standing, but processing the few hundred "grunts" at our site took quite a while.
BTW: I knew of at least two cases of (sexual) managerial skeletons that "disappeared in the turmoil".
It is possible to find people in HR who actually give a damn about the lower level employees, but the other sort are far from rare, and get more rare as company size strays from the median.
If we make that harder, the police will not be able to selectively enforce drug laws against the competitors to their favorite dealers, who are obviously upright citizens, what with the frequent contributions to the widows and Orphans fund.
That could lead to a rapid growth in the "suggested donations" from pretty much all small businesses. When the pub starts passing that tax on to their customers, there may be some resistance from the electorate.
(Above is based on happenings in the U.S. YMMV in the U.K.)
Never seen _much_ illumination from processor chips, but I do recall the days when, overwhelmed by the task of manually programming many EPROMs in a row of an evening, I occasionally plugged one into the low insertion force socket and pressed START. Chips inserted wrong end up (it happens) would emit a small amount of light to alert me to my mistake.
Being geographically undesirable to iPlayer, I was not aware of this. I do know that many Atari arcade games starting with Marble Madness have a volume setting (operator only) that goes to 11.
One wonders which was the chicken and which the egg. Since Marble Madness and Spinal Tap were both released in 1984, perhaps the good folks of MiniTrue, er, BBC, were busy at the time.
I believe the airline will tell passengers to turn off phones (or put them in "Airplane mode"), and I can believe that some passengers will tell the phones to turn off (or go into airplane mode).
What I have trouble believing is that all phones will actually turn off all radios, let alone the other stuff.
So, Teela Brown would be CEO in a week or so?
Without a CV, where would I mention my IBM 1401 experience, thus saving myself and the interviewer who would check "Do not hire" as soon as they saw my thinning grey hair a lot of time and angst.
And don't get me started about how, as a manager with open reqs, I pretty much had to use various unofficial leads to find real gems who had been binned by HR before getting to my inbox (probably for using a font the HR folks found ugly)
Sparked a memory of the cost-reduced IBM 407 accounting machines that rented at a lower price but ran at 2/3 speed.
Many universities had them (for listing ones card decks before submitting a job, among other tasks).
It seems that if a small piece of card stock accidentally managed to find its way between a certain set of contacts,
the machine would run faster.
But I'm sure this sort of thing was not done at my school's computer center (other than maybe maybe between 2300 and 0500)
Perhaps follow the lead of the SMOM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta ) and be a sovereign nation with no (or very little) actual territory. Then they could move the whole nation to a more elevated location.
Leads to my wondering if TV has any TV broadcasters
One college job was night watchman at a local hospital. It was by this random chance that I learned that at least one hospital in the early 1970s used Telautograph machines to communicate prescriptions from nurses stations to pharmacy. Any method that did not include a signature was not legal, and apparently at that time (at least in that state) a fax (or other image) of the signature was not sufficient.
One place I worked solved that problem neatly. Any Windows user could just use an application with a drop-down menu containing all Unix usernames. Click a name and it logs in as that user. What could possibly go wrong?
(In case you are wondering, actual unix users did not, technically, have this luxury, but since most Windows users never locked their machines, one could always find an open system over lunch)
I just have to wonder if, when they get to using francium (22 minute half-life), the hardware replacement cycle can really compete with the software-forced replacement schedule.
Would it even be safe to be in the same county as a 30cm wafer of Francium?
(not skilled or curious enough to actually pursue an answer)
A working Product? Takes me back to the days when game consoles were occasionally cloned.
One such clone producer demoed a working product at CES, until someone peeked and saw that the "working product" was an empty box with a cable running under the table to the original device.
EDLIN? I was wondering where that name came from.
I thought the woke folk all used regenerative braking, or at least a control computer with a few dozen cores protected by a watchdog that reboots when the garbage collector tasks get over 80% CPU utilization.
OTOH, I'd love to see a car using reverse thrust for braking. From a safe distance...
I note that at least one of the Gummy Bear reviews is a "verified purchase", meaning one of:
They actually bought the product which implies that the review is not completely fictional.
or
The review was from one of those fake-review operations that did buy the product, but shipped it to some unsuspecting person who may have thought "Oooh, free candy". I hope that person read the label.
There are worse things to ingest than sugar.
I tend to refer to this sort of thing as a "not spitting in the soup" surcharge.
For prison environments simply change the second letter of the verb.
The problem is that once the legality of these is firmly established by bought legislators and packed courts, there is only one direction for the price to go.
And as others have pointed out, paying _might_ have the advertised result, but "Once you pay the Danegelt, you never get rid of the Dane"
( I'm sure the Danes of today are a bit more polite in their interactions with, e.g. monasteries of the British Isles. )
Brings back memories...
Hotel keys with a fob with the hotel name and room number, along with a request to
"If found, drop in any post-box to return to the hotel", or maybe just rob that hotel room while you are reasonably sure that the person who dropped that key in the casino parking lot will be gone for a while.
Or how about the states that required the registration card for a vehicle to be visible from outside the car. for convenience of police finding abandoned or illegally parked cars. or for the convenience of folks wandering airport parking noting the addresses associated with suitable cars, then burglarizing that home? One had to hit the sweet spot between "car so crappy, house not worth robbing" and "If the dude can afford this ride, probably has fancy security, maybe even 24/7 armed response".
@doublelayer
IIRC the most recent DST battle in California was about getting rid of the yearly clock-setting festivals, which most people approved. Alas, major support was behind the notion of making DST year round. So kids could have the opportunity to walk to school in the dark much more of the year, and one might get a bit sleepy waiting for the feature at the drive-in movie to start. But shops and (especially) restaurants from extended "after work" hours.
(Yes, I do live in a town small enough that many kids can, and do, walk to school. Yes, the school has more than one classroom)
Taking DST into account? How the heck do you predict the setting for DST past the recess of the current legislature? They can change DST rules at the drop of a gavel, so "future" is far from guaranteed.
Somehow reminds me of how (IIRC) MSFT finally patched Windows to recognize 2000 as a leap year in about November of 1999. The complaints that drove this patch were from financial firms that had to deal with dates in the future (like, loan payments).
Time is tricky enough without politicians and programmers. We will have both until the dolphins take over.
I presume your two downvoters are unaware that filenames on MacOS are not case sensitive, or not always, or not on some of the filesystems used over the years... This manifests in various _interesting_ ways, generally when you have the least time to spend on exorcising the bugs.
I dimly recall reading about a a project by Thomas Jefferson: "The gospel according to Jesus", which involved doing style analysis on the earliest versions in an attempt to separate "stuff reliably attributed to Jesus" from "Stuff tacked on to promote the latest would-be theocratic despot" and "stuff that may have been the result of drug use or STDs". No idea how far he got, but it's definitely an interesting idea.
Of course he is probably best remembered for his relationship to his half-sister-in-law.
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