* Posts by jake

26584 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

jake Silver badge

Re: Day planner. On paper.

It;s kind of difficult to be a good programmer if you can't think like your compiler and the target processor.

Scary devil monastery .sigs were usually the playthings of children.

jake Silver badge

Day planner. On paper.

Works for me, and has since I was at Uni.

There are some things that computers just plain aren't good for.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

jake Silver badge

Re: Reminds me of a message I once got.

"Framed *within* the cacophony"

At both Berkeley and Stanford (and SLAC) such messages were deemed "not sent properly", and thus the word not getting out was considered to be the fault of the sender. I managed to convince DEC and a couple other companies to implement the same policy.

Those who refuse to learn from history ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Not really concealing anything, more like technically accurate shorthand.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned INTERCAL, which, for obvious reasons, is the abbreviation for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym".

jake Silver badge

Re: X-Ray

As everybody's eyes start glazing over ...

jake Silver badge

Re: We all know the best Bond film

History suggests we have the capacitance for worse.

jake Silver badge

Re: Security Guard Bothering

If you want to bother people, just use sonalerts. They are designed specifically to drive just about anybody nutty after a couple minutes ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Reminds me of x-ray film fun and games

Same exact thing happened to me here in Sonoma County, California. Twice.

Except I called them when I got home instead of waiting for them to call me.

jake Silver badge

Re: 800008

"a nightmare at 3 am in the morning."

Much, much worse when the computer demands attention at 3am in the afternoon ...

jake Silver badge

Re: "I'm sure all y'all have your favorites"

PBX ... Private Branch Exchange

MPBX ... Manual Private Branch Exchange

PABX ... Private Automatic Branch Exchange

VPBX ... Virtual Private Branch Exchange

YAPBX ... Yet Another Private Branch Exchange

jake Silver badge

Re: The joys of the phonetic alphabet

I thought it was in Northern California.

(The only reason I know this is because I'm helping a friend start a vineyard and winery near there. If you ever drive through, be sure to visit the Bake Shoppe ... 'orrible yuppie-tourist name, but delicious old-fashioned hand-made baked goods. Recommended.)

jake Silver badge

Cheer up.

Arguably, there hasn't been a new Bond film since 1983. Some might say '85, nbut that was the start of the Hollywodization,.and thus doesn't count.

jake Silver badge

Re: X-Ray

Last weekend I pulled a soggy and bewildered X-ray out of a car that landed in my creek. Cop arrived in time to wrap her in a blanked and stick her in the back of his patrol car. Talk about your four-letter fun ... her, not the cop. Mouth like a sailor. Spent the night in the drunk tank. Her car spent the night in the creek. Late the next morning, she blamed me for putting the creek there. With more four letter words. I guess it's true that no good deed goes unpunished ...

jake Silver badge

Not really concealing anything, more like technically accurate shorthand.

"Some might suggest we conceal the simplest of concepts behind a bewildering array of letters."

And to be perfectly fair and honest, sometimes we use abbreviations to keep the uninitiated's heads from exploding. It's the humane thing to do.

CSMA/CD comes to mind.

ADPCM is another ... I'm sure all y'all have your favorites.

Expired cert breaks Windows 11 snipping tool, emoji panel, S Mode features, other stuff

jake Silver badge

I once got a screenshot of a rather small Excel spreadsheet that had been zipped, and then UUencoded & copy/pasted into an email.

They could have just emailed me their hours and mileage ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Part of the OS

"So, not the solution then."

Actually, yes. It is. After several decades of studying how users manage to bollocks up damn near everything out of sheer, unadulterated ignorance, I truly believe that user education is THE solution. No others will work.

"Any proposal in the form of "this would work, if only [...]" is not a solution until the [...] bit is sorted."

All I did was point out the solution. I in no way suggested a method to implement it.

jake Silver badge

"It is worrying isn't it."

Not if you don't buy into it.

I'm absolutely astonished that the Corporate World keeps falling for it, year after year, decade after decade. You'd think they'd have learned by now.

I wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been lost in man-hours alone due to Microsoft incompetence. And the Corporate Lawyers allow this crap in the building? Still? Mind boggling.

jake Silver badge

Re: Part of the OS

"If you figure out a good solution, you'll probably end up quite wealthy."

Nah. I figured out the solution before MS-DOS 2.0 came out. It's quite simple, really.

User education.

Sadly, the users want no truck with it.

Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

jake Silver badge

Re: The medical powerhouse that is CISCO...

So you have just been trolling all along.

An honest troll would have come clean when called on it. For shame.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

"So why aren't these people looking into exactly how each and every COVID-19 vaccines was developed, tested and produced and then having one they can agree with?"

For the hard of thinking, evidence suggests that was a rhetorical question.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

The point is they are not dogmatic on the subject of vaccines.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

bob, I regret to inform you that you are not even wrong.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

"Yet more proof that Darwinism works."

I suspect it's education, not Darwinism.

jake Silver badge

Re: The medical powerhouse that is CISCO...

bob, bob, bob ... Stick with techie subjects. The world of politics seems to make you go all woozy.

jake Silver badge

Re: Religion of all kinds has been on the decline...

2,000 loons in Idaho aren't reversing the trend of 70-odd years.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

"the fact that aborted fetus cell lines are used in either production or testing."

That's bullshit, not "fact".

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are synthetically produced. A computer was used to sequence the genes. Fetal cell lines were used nowhere in the synthesis or production of the vaccines.

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

Yes. Get rid of the religious exemptions, They have no place in tre 21st century. Or the 20th, for that matter. Or the 19th ...

So called "religious objectors" can kiss my pasty white butt ... unless you can show me in scripture (any scripture!) where it unequivocally states vaccines are a big Thou Shalt Not. I've looked, and see no valid examples, just dumb-ass "preachers" rabbiting on about their freedumbs. (The only freedom they actually seem to want is the freedom to collect loot from their flocks, and otherwise maintain their power over other people. Slimeballs, the lot of 'em.)

jake Silver badge

Re: Get rid of the religious exemption.

For the record, Christian Scientists accept vaccination where required by law.

Not that it matters much ... there are probably fewer than 65,000 of them left, world-wide, and under 45,000 here in the US.

Religion of all kinds has been on the decline here in the US since the 1950s.

Facebook ditches its creepy, controversial robot – yes, its facial-recognition AI

jake Silver badge

Re: Shame in a way

"As a regular user it is so cool to be able to search for photos of X"

I'm absolutely certain that Malcolm, were he still with us, would welcome you as a stalker.

As for SciFi, have you not noticed how many of those stories are cautionary in nature?

jake Silver badge

Re: In other words ...

Given that, from all accounts, their so-called "targeting" doesn't work worth a shit anyway, I find this argument somewhat specious.

jake Silver badge

Re: FoIA anyone?

Metaface isn't the federal government, and as such the FoIA doesn't apply.

jake Silver badge

In other words ...

... Facebook has decided that the AI algorithm has had enough training data to ID six or seven 9s of all photos and no longer needs the "help" of the luserbase putting names to faces.

I'll give you even odds that it "accidentally", if quietly, gets turned on again in six to eighteen months to update that data, and stays on until somebody conclusively (and publicly) proves that it is, in fact, on.

As for Facebook deleting the data... bullshit. Facebook has never deleted anything, They aren't going to start now. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool. Even if they very publicly go out of their way to "prove" that the data is off their systems ... well, that's what backups are for. And you know they have backups. They may even "prove" they delete the backups. That's what off-site backups are for. And you know they have those, too.

The pandemic improved the status of IT workers … forever

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Only Mountains are eternal

A Van Loon (pseudo)quote on El Reg. Whodathunkit.

Maybe there's hope for humanity after all.

jake Silver badge

Re: It was all a hoax

Yeah, but those folks are, for all their noise, statistically insignificant. Nobody of importance pays them any attention, unless it's to point and laugh.

jake Silver badge

Status? For IT workers? Y, S, R.

Mid-80s, I was working for a company that built gear to dynamically allocate bandwidth between video, voice and data.

Incredibly Big Monster of a company started getting weird bit error rates on their global T1 (E1, T3 etc ...) network, which was larger than the Internet itself at the time. The network used our kit to terminate the telco supplied wire, and because telcos are perfect ::coff:: & it couldn't possibly be Monster's fault, it must be our problem, right? I was assigned to track down the problem after lower level techs couldn't figure it out.

Going thru' the data, I discovered that once the problem started occurring at any one site, it gradually became worse ... It was never bad enough to actually take down a connection, but network errors ramped up over time.

Further review showed that the same team of installers had installed the gear at the sites with the problem.

I flew out to Boca and discovered that they had installed punch-down blocks in a janitor's closet ... directly over a mop bucket full of ammonia water. A couple quick calls confirmed similar placement in other offices, world wide. Seems it was the only wall space that was unused almost universally in such spaces.

Corroded metal replaced and blocks relocated, no more bit-errors ... Rather than a "thank you" and a bonus or raise, I got the task of updating the installation documentation. Naturally.

jake Silver badge
Pint

Re: Only Mountains are eternal

Mono no aware (物の哀れ).

jake Silver badge

Re: It was all a hoax

There is a big difference between ones and zeros in computers and a virus in humans. Most computers kept on trucking at the dawn of the year 2,000, and not by accident. However, the graveyards are full of humans lost due to the Covid pandemic. That'll be rather harder to debunk.

jake Silver badge

Re: break out the moon boots...

"They" (whoever that is) were claiming the Millenium Bug was a con in 1990. "They" had a point ... Almost all critical soft/firm/hardware was patched or replaced in plenty of time, with no real cost outside that of the regular upgrade cycle.

Honeymoons last a couple of weeks – the same goes for any love for the IT department

jake Silver badge

Depends.

Is the company still run by the engineering team that started it?

Or have they grown so large that the shareholders insisted on a management change?

jake Silver badge

IT is not a product.

IT is maintenance. Overhead. A cost center.

Think janitorial, or grounds/building maintenance, only slightly more spendy.

IT is needed in this current era, and IT costs money (sometimes LOTS of money), but in reality it doesn't, in fact, actually MAKE money in and of it's own, any more than cube farms full of people using 13-column pads and 10-key calculators did in the 1960s and '70s.

It's up to Management to figure out the direction any given company is going ... however, Management rarely looks into the details of how the plumbing works, or who is cleaning the windows or trimming the shrubbery. That is left up to the maintenance people.

Unfortunately, computers (and the use of computers), gets very expensive when you head into the several hundreds of seats range ... and extremely expensive when your eclipse 1K seats ... I won't get into the costs & complexities of 100K+ desktops spread world-wide. That's a lot of money being spent on what traditional management sees as "just maintenance" ... So traditional management thinks that it must be something more than maintenance. IT isn't.

Any company with half an ounce of common sense in this era will have both a "technical" track and a "managerial" track ... In this scenario, management does management stuff, and a more technically inclined person with managerial ability, hopefully sitting at the Board level, manages the technical side of things that most management quite frankly aren't properly equipped to understand. This person's duties should include hiring, firing, and promoting of more technologically capable employees (or, in larger companies, appointing staff to do same).

Traditional management's feudal derived mindset doesn't work with IT. IT changes too fast. Traditional management can't cope with fast changes. Trying to define IT in traditional MBA terms is, in my mind, an exercise in futility.

So no, as far as "The Corporation" is concerned, any "status improvement" won't last any longer than the plumber's status is improved after unclogging the executive washroom's bog.

jake Silver badge

Re: Y2K all over again.

I and several hundred thousand (a couple million? Dunno.) computer people "worked through the Y2K problem" for well over 20 years, on and off. Come the morning of January 1st, 2000 damn near everything worked as intended.

Brilliant minds concluded Y2K was never a problem to begin with.

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

jake Silver badge

Re: oh, btw

Ticker?

jake Silver badge

One wonders If Australia is taking notice.

Big companies are not afraid to pull out of the HUGE Chinese market now that it's becoming expensive to do business there. Can little tiny Australia (by population, of course) be far behind?

jake Silver badge

Re: Applaud The Move, Despise The Reasons

On the other hand, China is making it difficult for Western companies to do business in China. Perhaps they think they have enough dollars?

jake Silver badge
Pint

And as El Reg helpfully pointed out in TFA ...

...the angrier you get, the funnier it gets.

A beer for the editors.

Real-time crowdsourced fact checking not really that effective, study says

jake Silver badge

Re: S/he who controls the facts controls the future

A "wetlands" in the North San Francisco Bay was "restored" a couple years ago, to great fanfare by the denizens of Novato. There was a huge song and dance about it. Now the very same green-and-granola people are bitching about the large swarms of salt-marsh mosquitoes eating them alive. And the smell of decaying plant matter and the odd fish whenever the water is low (it's tidal).

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

jake Silver badge

Re: I live half way up the hill ....

Common misconception. The only survivors will be tardigrades and Keith Richards.

jake Silver badge

Re: My Fav

Why pick on that poor person? What did they do to deserve it? Or are you just out to prove that you are an asshole by nature?

Those paying attention know I'll have nothing to do with go ogle ... and run my own mail server.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

jake Silver badge

Re: Second Life

Excuse me? The Residents aren't saddos or losers ... Freaks, maybe, but then we all have a little bit of freak in us. Their art might not be for everybody, but calling them that is kinda harsh, don't you think?

jake Silver badge

Re: Parallel World

"I doubt it"

Well, people have been getting sued for things they say online for a couple decades now, so ...

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