Re: I do hope there's a list of the MP's on the European Research Group.
Harmsworth (Viscount Rothermere) of the Daily Mail.
Quite the ominous name.
Posts by Stoneshop
5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
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IT systems still in limbo as UK.gov departments await Brexit policy – MPs
BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave
Friday 4th May 2018 18:24 GMT
Re: Things have changed,.
Well, El Reg got back at HPE with that at the opening of the Hewlett You Inn, by offering the sign in a brobdignagian box stuffed with packing foam.
I wonder what the current state of that joint is, given how HPE are trimming personnel levels to way below any sensible minimum level. It's either closed, or employees are using it[0] as a last resort to make their lives bearable.
[0] in contravention of the 'For Entertaining Customer Use Only' directive slapped on it.
Friday 4th May 2018 18:12 GMT
Re: How to
Really!! After reading all the BOFH stories over the years, you really want to risk doing Simon out of his rights as author?
As long as you're not printing and selling them, just printing one for yourself, use as described, I think you're fine. Else you should be offering him a suitable cut of the profit in a form of his choosing, no? And if it's to keep your cow-orkers and manglement in a state of sullen obedience I expect him to approve anyway.
Friday 4th May 2018 18:05 GMT
Re: I've been there
And the sheer genius of HPE making you have a support contract before you can download it from their website, but leaving it free to download on their FTP site...
That can't be anything but FTP access left open from when they uploaded the drivers, and no-one knowing how to close it.
Friday 4th May 2018 12:20 GMT
The difference
Apparently Amazon reckon that if their pages have a 100ms extra lag time, then they lose 1% of global sales
Amazon sells stuff that people WANT, and if they can't get it from Amazon they go elsewhere.
HP and DELL support have something that people NEED, and can't easily get somewhere else (and even though incompetence is widely available anyway, people often prefer the vendor's incompetence over a third party)
Friday 4th May 2018 12:14 GMT
How to
Turn the BOFH stories into a suitable PDF, add a topical cover picture with the title artfully added via your graphical editor of choice, and send it off to a Print-on-demand shop.
When you get it back, add a few bloodstains, a bit of discoloration and damage caused by quicklime, and a few brownish patches like some lumps of soil had fallen on it at some point.
Blame everything on 'computer error' – no one will contradict you
Friday 4th May 2018 15:17 GMT
Re: I have always said...
Like with Cortana? Or siri? and what's that other woman's name? Lexie?
My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?
Friday 4th May 2018 08:53 GMT 
Fire
In Field Service we did stints screening customer calls (usually two weeks every three or four months), trying to narrow down the parts to have the assigned engineer take with him. A full CPU parts kit for an 11/780 or 8600 was rather voluminous, so you would try to keep it down to a subset. Same with tape drive and disk drive problems. After some troubleshooting you were supposed to send your analysis, plus the parts advice, to the branch office so that Logistics could collect the required parts and get them to the customer, while an engineer was assigned and sent.
So one day a customer calls that one of his DECservers was on fire, and that he had already put it out but that he would like very much have it replaced with a working one. Fair enough, that's what service contracts are for.
As a joke, I added "A bucket of sand" to the parts advice ("DSRVX-BA"), prompting a puzzled Logistics engineer to call me back and ask what the bucket of sand was meant for.
"You don't put out electrical equipment fires with water."
Shocking. Lightning strike knocks out neuro patient's brain implant
Thursday 3rd May 2018 19:23 GMT
Re: I have a DBS installed
As for the recommendation to use a surge protector when charging, there's a reason the UK uses fused plugs in addition to household circuit breakers
As mentioned already, surge protectors may protect the charger and other mains-connected devices from overvoltage, but a lightning strike close by will induce currents in any piece of wire that happens to be at an unfortunate orientation with respect to the strike, and which forms a loop in some way. For which they don't even need to be connected to the mains. Mains wiring does have longer lengths over which they can pick up the strike's induction, in addition to earth potential differences.
Electricity is dangerous even when you're not plugging it into your head
The charger is supplying a low DC voltage to the device, and not running mains straight into it.
But the DBS, connected to the charger or not, could well have gone haywire from the EMP and provided a rather overstimulating pattern. Instead, luckily, it shut down, although that did have some unpleasant side effects too.
Texas residents start naming adopted drains
The steaks have never been higher: Swiss Lidl is selling local cannabis
Blighty: If EU won't let us play at Galileo, we're going home and taking encryption tech with us
Thursday 3rd May 2018 11:48 GMT
Washington is broken. Period.
That wouldn't stop British law being made in Washington, just that whatever is cooked up doesn't have to pass through the House and Senate, who, despite both being controlled by Repuglicans[0], appear to not be able to pass much of substance.
[0] being held hostage by the loony House Freedom Caucus and their Senate confreres doesn't really help there.
Thursday 3rd May 2018 06:13 GMT
Re: Fucking Brexit
It would allow others (Catalunya to name but one) to make the same move
Catalunya would first have to gain independence from Spain, which is a whole other kettle of calimari, before it would be able to exit the EU. Which doesn't seem to be what they would like to happen, anyway.
Exclusive to all press: Atari launches world's best ever games console
Thursday 3rd May 2018 09:00 GMT
Has the author been a speech writer for The Donald?
You would never know. Speeches by the Orange Turnip go off the rails after three or four short sentences, and from that point on contain a lot of repetition as well as stuff contradicting what he uttered five minutes before, so you'd be hard pressed to find any traces of the original speech in there.
Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata
Thursday 3rd May 2018 08:38 GMT
Re: Only defence
They should, but unfortunately it's easy enough to get them to divulge their most personal information in exchange for a 50 cent rebate with their next purchase of what's actually some piece of worthless tat anyway.
Seen in an Usenet .signature:
- People are not inherently stupid
- Cite?[0]
[0] more commonly expressed nowadays as [citation needed]
NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede
Wednesday 2nd May 2018 12:23 GMT
Re: Keep old drives
I can still feed a tape leader on VAX machine in my sleep. I remember I never felt happy with the self loading tapes unless I did the finger dance as the machine made the noise of an asthmatic inhaling an orange.
That's a fair description of the TU/TA77/78 (Pertec) drives, indeed. To get them loading reliably they needed vacuum and pressure settings juuuuust right. There's a Kennedy 9100 in our collection that's even more hairy.
The later TSV05 was an front-loading auto-loader that was much less fussy. We've got one that was stored for at least 15 years, probably more like 20. Powered on, slid a tape in and it loaded without a hitch.
Wednesday 2nd May 2018 11:34 GMT
Re: Computing power...
Of course, one might try using a Raspberry Pi for the computing, as it has close to the same power as an original VAX.
Eh, I don't think so. The 11/780 had a clock speed of 5MHz (actually 'cycle speed', 200ns). The slowest RasPi still has a clock speed at least 100 times faster, and while the VAX is a CISC machine, with some of those single instructions doing *a lot* that a RISC processor like ARM needs several tens of instructions for to perform the same action, those VAX instructions weren't just a single cycle either.
Even a RasPi running SIMH is way faster than the same code run on one of the early VAXen.
Wednesday 2nd May 2018 10:47 GMT
Re: Paper tape anyone?
I wonder how many paper tape readers still exist?
At least five. One standalone, serial interface, three Fridens, and one ASR33. The standalone one is incredibly useful; one of the museum team wrote a utility to write a couple of common formats with it.
Some time ago someone I know wondered how much space 1.4PB 'printed out' on vellum would take. Couldn't help there, but as paper tape it would fill about 11.5 Albert Halls.
Wednesday 2nd May 2018 10:14 GMT
Re: The problem probably wasn't the software...
The VAX architecture was pretty well defined + documented in the manuals (including the FP formats) - and those documents still exist (in my bookshelf and likely bitsavers.org)
Just yesterday I was scanning a couple of PDP11 FORTRAN (1975, so upper case) manuals, which will be uploaded to archive.org in a couple of days. And here is a VAX FORTRAN manual we did earlier.
Enjoy.
(And we really deserve that cobwebs icon. It came out of the crawlspace under a flat on the Twente University campus. Icon as replacement for dust mask)
Windows USB-stick-of-death, router bugs resurrected, and more
Saturday 28th April 2018 08:51 GMT
Oh, that's one I recognise
"Bitdefender bloke Marius Tivadar has developed a dodgy NTFS file system image that crashes at least Windows 7 and 10 systems: popping it on a USB stick and then plugging that into a vulnerable computer will cause it to fall over with a blue-screen-of-death when a mount attempt is made. "
W7 also keels over when you offer it an ODS-2 formatted stick. I see a need to check if W10 has the same flaw.
Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year
Friday 27th April 2018 17:09 GMT
ICANN might be making themselves look foolish, but looking at the broader picture, they do actually have a point.
No they don't. They've been plain ignoring the requirement for GDPR compliance, wishing it away by pretending it wouldn't apply to them, then latching onto a baseless belief they'd be granted an exemption. And now, with just a month to go, it's "Waaah, we can't fix this in so little time. Please don't punish us, ahplease.".
They need to suffer the consequences of their attitude and lack of action. Whether, and to what extent other organisations are trying to be in compliance or not is not relevant.
Friday 27th April 2018 11:26 GMT
Re: Special process...
it's implementation time that's the stickler.
Indeed, finding those particular printf statements so that private data is not printed, and replacing them with the registrar's contact data a Herculean task beyond the capabilities of the most competent programmers[0].
[0] employed by ICANN, that is, as they're just a bunch of pen-pushers.
Friday 27th April 2018 10:58 GMT
Re: No public details, no domains
Its small countries separated by natural barriers.
If you look at the amount of trade and, with it, exchange of people and information that happened as far back as the 12th and 13th century[0], then those natural barriers apparently weren't as much of a hindrance as you think they were. And while there are some major natural barriers[1] between a couple of European countries, going by their borders at various times in history, barriers at least similar to those are often slap bang in the middle of several countries.
[0] easily twice as far back as that colonisation stuff in what's now the US.
[1] never mind that the technology that made those barriers much less of a bother has been doing just that for at least a century.
BOFH: Guys? Guys? We need blockchain... can you install blockchain?
Noise from blast of gas destroys Digiplex data depot disk drives
Friday 27th April 2018 09:06 GMT
Power cut
It should have the power supply, including air-con, linked so it powers off any kit before the gas goes off.
Congratulations, you've now buggered up that entire datacentre compartment. Transactions halted mid-stream, file systems unclean. Systems that were running 24/7 now having to cold start. And spinning rust doesn't stop and retract the heads immediately once you kill the power, so the danger of sound damage is still there for a moment.
And all because just one piece of kit was getting rid of its magic smoke, and the fire suppression system going about its business in trying to keep it contained to that one box. Which, in this case, didn't work out so well, never mind that it was a false alarm, but I doubt very much that a power cut would have made for a better outcome. See, for instance, the Heathrow data centre failure a couple of months ago.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
