Posts by Mike 16 1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
(Non-human) Primates programming:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180109065503/http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/main.asp
But the managerial tasks may fall to boars (you noticed, right?) if
https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/14/wild_boar_destroys_20k_euro_cocaine_stash/
is any guide to some boarish tendencies.
@JetSetJim -- Thank you. When I saw the reply I dithered about answering, because as always there are at least two sides, and a bit of "Chesterton's Fence" involved.
Again: IANAL!
Not only is any _one_ trial supposed to depend strictly on the evidence, any appeal will depend on the record of that evidence, so "replicating the results" can be problematic. _way_ deeper in the law than I will ever get, but I believe there are ways to deal with juror misconduct.
That said, one big source of inability to replicate conditions is the scene from _so_ many courtroom dramas, where one lawyer will make some outrageous "statement disguised as a question", the opposing one will object, and the judge will sustain and say something along the lines of striking from the record, and instructing the jury to disregard. Yeah, right.
That bell can't really be un-rung, and if there is a retrial, one could _hope_ that the particular incident would not be repeated. But I have no idea whether such entries are completely stricken, so to speak. If the same lawyers appear before a different judge, who is unaware of the previous stunt, the record in the minds of the jurors may be similarly affected as in to the original. But appearing before the same judge, or one with access to an unredacted record, might take an alternate path.
All this to say the law is complex because it tries to be able to account for and deal with a huge variety of behavior and information by prescribing rules ahead of time about what to do.
This is a mug's game similar to programming. As with programming, a lot depends on skill, good-will, and judgement.
BTW: I know of at least two cases where an expert witness lied, so it's not just jurors who might. These case were in civil cases among tech companies, and were settled and sealed (can't take the chance of establishing a precedent that could bite you later, or outraging the customers or regulators), and of course _had_ they gotten to the verdict it would be to a lower standard of proof than a criminal case
(In the U.S. Third time: IANAL)
IANAL, but IIRC, a juror is prohibited from using their own knowledge in deliberation. At least in California, probably much more widely. So, for example, if a Nobel-prizewinning Genetics/DNA analysis researcher were to be impaneled, they must _NOT_ make any comments in deliberation that relate to their own knowledge.
Of course, this unlikely situation would only arise if neither defense nor prosecution challenged them for cause. But then the trial would also be complicated by traffic being paralyzed by snow drifting in from Hades.
More likely it would be something like a reprimand for mentioning (e.g. based on being out in sunlight nearby at the time of the crime) that the sun was quite high in the sky at the time a witness said it was too dark to see clearly
1) To me, and many of my acquaintances, the two-word "blue screen" refers to chroma-key, although the screens tend to be green these days, so calling it that marks one as an old fart. OTOH, had they started with green screens, they would not have had the Paris skyline showing through Dinah Shore's eyes back in the day.
2) Life (even computer life) did not start with the IBM PC. Many home computers were hooked to TV sets, and Blue (actually a bit Cyan) was an easy color to get into an NTSC signal, being the "gold" color-burst phase-shifted by 180 degrees. White text on such a background is "not bad", and then we had all those CGA screens clearly "inspired by" Apple ][, C-64, and the occasional Atari 800.
I included IBM 1401 on mine until 1995 or so. I figured I'd save some time for myself and some interviewers. You know the sort, "guy looked good on paper and has done some impressive work but he probably still has a blunderbuss for hunting pterandons in his desk drawer. No hire" after wasting our time.
Turned out sort of counter-productive when the Y2K effort started heating up.
@fishman: My "introduction to Molecular Biology" [1] course was taught by a Nobel Prize Winner who was an excellent teacher. One of the best in my educational career. Correlation does not imply causation, either positive or negative.
[1] This was one of several classes offered to satisfy a "breadth requirement", that is "for folks with no plan on a chemistry or medical degree, bur curious". Class included C.S. students like myself as well as Music and Philosophy majors. A friend who was a MolBio major later went on to work on image recognition for satellite photos. One never knows what bit off the main stream will be useful.
Well, if IBM's marketing department from the early/mid 1960s was in charge, it would "hextuplet", because one would not want the applications engineer blushing when talking about number systems. Although to be fair they did have hermaphroditic cable connectors. Maybe hardware folks are less easily embarrased?
Just a datapoint, and from the late 1960s, and from friends who worked for a certain very large utility company. Take with appropriate amounts of salt.
There was an election, conducted by mail-in ballot, to move certain jobs from one union (generally "not so bad") to another (at last in some areas, including ours, considered a "company union" with a side of corruption).
_Only_ the employees who had sent in their ballots by registered mail (with return receipt) ended up being tallied in their selected ("no") column.
There were many "yes" ballots tallied, and quite a few folks who checked with their fellows who had not been quite so careful/paranoid.
Something to consider when posting your ballot.
"only one code that matters. "
Totally agree, that's why I said "maybe" and detailed a case where "can't happen" did.
I generally test as much as I can before doing much of anything on any building. The 3-light testers are the first step, not the last. Visual inspection of every junction on any branch that shows up even mildly hinky is definitely needed. That and a sense of the gap between "legal by the electrical code" and "acceptable to the building inspector", in both directions. Somehow, different rules apply to the local contractors who lunch with the inspectors. "Trust, but Verify" all the way down.
Well, maybe. What about when the tester has a 3-bit combo of lights that the handy code-sheet does not include? I found by experience that the missing code means "There is a ground wire from the socket, along some 4 meters of cable, _almost_ to the breaker box, but not to earth ground anywhere. Makes sense when you consider the strike voltage of a typical NE-2, but I'll leave that to my fellow nerds.
More serious was how loud my mother's doorbell was after a pretty complete rewire and service upgrade, wherein the professional electricians had connected the 110V transformer to 220V.
Yet more serious was when I turned off the breaker for a retiring motor-generator, tagged it with "Man on Line", then went down to the basement to disconnect for removal. Being a paranoid sort I double checked the power as soon as I removed the cover plate, and found it "live" (did I mention this building had a history of "not entirely truthful" documentation?). Back up to the 3rd-floor breaker box I found the breaker on, and my tag missing. Turned it back off and locked the panel with my own lock. Problem solved.
More than a bit off-topic, but a college friend (and photographer for the school newspaper) made a fake license (California, late 1960s) for the usual purpose of obtaining alcohol. He did three things that enhanced my appreciation for him.
1) Created a Rhode Island license (unlikely to be familiar to a CA officer, or barkeep).
2) Carefully selected a section of a half-tone photo to match the "tamper-proof" background on some typed fields when the background and typed info was shrunk to the correct size.
3) Made the birth date such that the coming Saturday would be his "21st birthday", so he could not only drink "legally", but gratis.
Bingo! I was waiting for someone to mention that.
"The state has dropped charges as the evidence against the accused was lost in an unfortunate fire".
As for offline backups, I recently found out (the hard way) that Apple has been doing their part to discourage backing up to network drives by silently (until it's too late) corrupting backups via Time Machine to networked drives. Possibly why they dropped the Time Capsule (Their own handy networked drive, AP, and kitchen sink), although I do wish they had been a bit more candid about the problem.
Remember folks "It's not really a backup until you have successfully restored"
It has been quite some time since I was actively following such stuff, but at least since "64 bit" memory busses/cards came around, the number of bits needed for SECDED and simple byte parity have been the same.
Performance of ECC was/can-be an issue in that correction on read might be needed, and sub-64-bit writes needed to be Read-Modify-Write. Not such an issue when most writes are coalesced in the cache. Anyway, I'm not seeing the "need more bits of DRAM" argument.
Are non-ECC systems also blowing off even byte parity (which would also require 72 bits total for 64 payload) like so many of the 16 and 32-bit era PCs did?
Yeah, I recall memory "cards" that had "generated parity", so even if the system "needed" Parity, what it got was freshly generated from whatever crap data fell out of the RAM.
Have plenty of brown envelopes and cash to fill them.
To assume that "throwing people in jail" as a service, provided by government functionaries (who just happen to live in houses well beyond their visible means of support) do not exist (let alone cannot exist) is dangerously naive.
(blackmail and other alternate forms of payment also exist)
Congress (including staff, apparently) does it all the time. Who has time to read a multi-thousand page proposed bill before voting? And especially who has time to re-read it every time it is edited by lord knows who? It's not like they use revision control, or even publish diffs.
Don't assume this is a random CF. Think "plausible deniability"
While working as a "tech grunt" (mostly pulling cables and plugging in machines that "worked perfectly well yesterday") for a University, I was asked to wire up a recently remodeled room for a research group headed by a Very Important Professor. He wanted the typical "sea of desks" with a terminal each, but I wondered how the data lines were to get to the desks in mid-room. "It's already wired up, see?", pointing to the power outlets recessed in to the poured-concrete floor. When I asked again "what about the data cables?", he seemed not to understand the question. Early 1970's so, no, WiFi was not an available solution, even if WiFi ADM terminals had been available.
Same job, different person whose sky was a different color, I got angry call from outraged grad student that the scope we had sent out for calibration would now not power up. I knew better than to ask if it was plugged in, so headed for his lab, where the first thing he said was along the lines of "you can see it's plugged in", and indeed the scope was plugged in to the power strip on the cart, which was also plugged into itself Ouroboros style. I guess if I had been braver (and more willing to find another job) I might have asked if he had the budget and lab-safety permission to slap a generator on the bottom shelf of the cart. Instead I plugged the power strip into a real outlet and powered on the scope. The E.E. grad student was mystified, albeit not visibly grateful.
My most recent trip to Italy (OK, the second in my lifetime), we made sure to get to the railway station in plenty of time, only to find it snarled by some sort of "labor action". The bright side is that a station agent took pity and gave directions to a walkable nearby smaller station. Small enough that the organizers apparently decided it was not worth shutting down. Also some instructions on "will probably work" transfers to get to our destination.
I reassured the missus that it just wouldn't be an Italian experience without a transit strike. And to have the warm feeling that people do help other people. Those computers, though...
There's a reason for that.
Once upon a time I needed to deal with files generated by a very popular sound-editing application. The file format was very well documented. I (and a "second witness") very carefully checked that my code matched the spec. Unfortunately, it immediately started reporting errors in nearly every file that had passed through that application (and only that app, not, e.g. files written by the authors of the standard). A few minutes with a hex editor revealed the problem: the very popular app did not follow the standard (basically, it started an index at zero, rather than the specified 1).
So I had to change my code to match what the app did, rather than what the spec wanted. It's not like I could force the app's developers to meet the spec, and my customers were unlikely to value my compatibility with spec over their use of the app.
I suspect a lot of this goes into the decision to elide error checking. Much like when one could choose to follow the (IIRC) ESMTP RFCs or interoperate with Exchange.
@Mike the FlyingRat Looks like I've been shunted into the "Mike channel". Anyway:
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in telephony most of these issues can be sorted out with a bit more thought.
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Maybe. One of my previous employers (highly capitalized large scale networking startup) had a mix of "BitHeads" and "BellHeads". Despite having been out of Telcom for over 20 years at that point, I ended up being considered an honorary BellHead in a majority BitHead place. Of course, we later cratered and were bought for ten cents on the dollar by a large competitor, due to some major issues which IMHO had a lot to do with a modern software attitude.
Previous job was working on embedded systems that were bought as capital equipment, so we knew we were on the hook for any failures, not able to wash their hand of any responsibility for software issues. That may have contributed to my acceptance.
Anyway, I see no reason to believe that a modern Telcom company is anything like the "20 year minimum service life and repairs are on our dime" Telcom companies of the old days. Especially in software.
A friend (no, really) was the IT guy at our employer (early 1970s), and finally got permission to upgrade "the" printer from an impact dot-matrix (DecWriter) to a snazzy VersaTec electrostatic printer/plotter ( much like this:
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X163.83A
but without being cut away ) that would print and plot at dizzying speeds.
When he submitted the initial order for supplies, the bean-counters balked, since "we only print X pages a month". His explanation that when it doesn't take hours to print a document (and the labor charges to keep updating paper documents with Sharpies are on another department's books), people print more often. Not gonna happen. Until he had to go back to explain the charge for expedited shipping on the supplies re-order.
Oddly, one of the first uses of "AM Radio receiving RFI from computer" I ever encountered involved hanging out in the (not arctic) room next door to the "you could hang meat in here" computer room. The distinctive tone of the "Idle, waiting for next job" loop cued us to suit up and attend to the needs of the Frozen one. Other (thankfully less common) tones included "blocked on I/O", e.g. card jam.
Even a 90kHz clock can be useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI
Now I have to modify the Radio Music program from that clip to send Bell 103 (or maybe baudot at 850Hz shift) AFSK data.
Yes, the side panel of that machine is missing, but I can attest that it works with the panel in place.
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Typewriters are themselves apparently less likely than the things typed on them to be securely stored when not in use:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/soviet_spying_o.html
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A friend who was a radio technician in USAF told me of a coworker who could claimed they could "read" the text being received by a Teletype(tm) machine by ear. A test was designed (and presumably bets were laid), and it was indeed true. (Note, IIRC, a Model 28, so _not_ distinguishing the sounds of individual type-bars)
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If enough people paid for a user-respecting OS
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Thing is, it would be software, and software, unlike physical goods, can usually be "improved" (in the eyes of its owner, which is not you) at any time.
Much like buying a Jaguar XK-E then walking out one morning to find that is has been "upgraded" to a 2CV.
Paying for something does not guarantee getting what you paid for. The old "You get what you pay for" has never been true. Even "You never get more than you paid for" is subject to interpretation. Does the boot full of rabid weasels count as "more"?
(Yes, I understand that "software" can effectively change the "hardware", but some aspects of hardware still have to respect the laws of physics.)
Just here to nit-pick/update the info on "Community Memory" (not Computer Memory).
All this is IIRC, of course.
While the organizers were mainly Berkeley folks, and many terminals (originally TTYs, later "glass TTYs"), the actual computer was in San Francisco. Also IIRC, it was an XDS 940 (aka SDS 940) formerly owned by Transamerica. The 940 was a production version of the modified SDS 930 developed at U.C. Berkeley as "Genie" and was pretty popular back in the day (see also "Tymshare")
The "coin op" part was for posting. It was "Free to read. $.25 to write". Imagine how _that_ would be today. "You mean I have to _PAY_ to annoy every internet user?"
I don't know if the group always called themselves "Project One", but at one point they did. One member was Lee Felsenstein, later of the Homebrew Computer Club.
I suspect you haven't heard the news about how the new SCOTUS majority just ruled that things like the prohibition against establishment of religion and separation of church and state no longer applied, so that "Do what you want. it's not a crime if you claim to be a church" (as long as you claim to be a _Christian_ church) was Okey Dokey
Anyone else remember when the Win95 ad campaign featured "Start Me Up", including the line "You make a grown man cry"? How about the Vista ad with the choir singing in Latin, something like "and they are doomed to hell"?
Just saying software companies and musicians certainly have an interesting relationship.
Long ago (well, about 15 years) and far away (Milpitas) I was "acquihired" (aka "Borged") by a major networking company.
"Onboarding" involved a pep talk by a high muckety-muck of the sales group, who pledged that we would deliver "nine fives" by the end of the year.
I glanced at a fellow bit of plankton and it was clear from their expression that they agreed: "Yep, that's about what this lot can hit"
Am I a bad person based on my reading about sndcut and thinking :
At last! a 'good' use for that babble/cry player from a pull-string doll in my junk-box.
I could cut a new record and have the doll shout Marxist slogans or sing It's a Small World.
?
Or not. One of those is illegal, and the other could have you dodging Disney assassins.
Brings back memories, but in the 1970s, and with ROMs rather than floppies.
We typically shipped early builds of a product on PROMs (programmable ROMs), while waiting for the cheaper masked ROMs to come in. The program image took 6KB, so 3 2Kx8 PROMs (or six 2Kx4 PROMS for the more expensive but easier to get bipolar ones).
All went well until the Masked ROMS (two 4kx8) arrived, and we got an urgent "Line Down!" call from the factory, saying _ALL_ of the new ROMs were defective. Turns out that rather than verify the checksums, they had checked and found that the first few bytes of the first ROM were _BLANK_!!! So the sky was falling.
I managed to talk them off the ledge, but to forestall a repeat performance, I made a revised image that filled the first 2KB with a character set I liked (Hey, it wasn't blank...) and later used one of those chips in a homebrew terminal.
Sounds like they are quicker at turning over a domain to scammers than at allowing the legit owner to take it to another service. At least I had the presence of mind to make sure my off-GoDaddy backups of all my content were in order before asking about the process. I could imagine that letting them know I was planning on leaving would result in "For security, we have rate-limited FTP service to 110 bits/second."
As I've mentioned before, I did eventually get things straightened out, but still get regular notifications that my account (dead for over a decade) is locked because the credit card number for auto-renew has expired. Muppets or Evil Geniuses? You Decide!
Just Say NoDaddy
Why do folks always seem to omit the second half of that saying?
"One bad apple spoils the barrel."
It is as true now as it ever was. Tolerate bad behavior from a few (even one) member of an organization and the entire organization will inevitably be corrupted. It was not (until maybe a few decades ago) a simple substitute for the equally inane excuse of "Boys will be boys"
That said, before we crucify anybody, we need to answer the question of who offered/requested the bribe and whether the other party agreed to it, or reported it.
-- Same company ...
Not exactly. "Boeing" is the same company after the McDonnell Douglas capture (mid 1990s) in the same sense that Atari is the same company after being laundered through at least five new owners, or that AT&T is still a company that at least tried (pace - Ernestine) to keep the dialtone coming rather than spending all their effort on innovative ways to screw customers. The Fish rots from the head.
(That said, my first commercial flight was on a DC-10, albeit after those pesky engine problems had been encountered and "dealt with". mid 1970s, so it's not clear that McD-D were quite as dodgy back then)
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