* Posts by jake

26589 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

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A user's magnetic charm makes for a special call-out for our hapless hero

jake Silver badge

Re: Floppy drives

"Use blu tack and sellotape!"

Not on my equipment you don't. That shit causes stains, makes the gear look like hell, and adversely affects the resale value.

jake Silver badge

Re: Floppy drives

Never say never ...

Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why.

Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.

Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.

jake Silver badge

Re: Always treat everyone like a customer

Going in with a smile, a PleaseAndThankYou[tm], and the attitude of "I don't know if you can help me, let's find out!" when you discover an error helps keep folks on your side ... if you come storming in, looking for blood, you'll only piss 'em off. This is true when dealing with customer service in almost all walks of life. It's basic social engineering, innit.

jake Silver badge

I'll bet a plugged nickle ...

...it was a sump pump in your basement.

jake Silver badge

"I could bring my dog to work"

Good thing he didn't lift his leg on the hitch ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Floppy drives

The one that floored me was the field engineer who opened the back of a server, pulled the diagnostic floppy off the inside of the door where it was affixed with a magnet ... and the fucking thing still worked! Observing my surprise, he just shrugged and said "I know. I don't get it either. They did it this way for years before I got here. I don't ask questions, I just go by their playbook and collect my pay." He claimed to have seen several tens of these things, and the disk was only dead once.

jake Silver badge

Re: Floppy drives

I used to run into programmers who didn't know what a floppy disk was all the time, well into the 1970s, trailing off into the '80s. I even ran across a few in the early 1990s ... These last were mostly folks programming industrial equipment with paper/mylar tape and card decks; seems that general purpose computers were outside their job descriptions. There may even be a few of this last set left in odd corners of the world.

jake Silver badge

In all likelihood, nothing happened to his hard drive. I've been winning bar bets with this one for decades ... Back in the early/mid 80s, a friend and I were tasked with bulk erasing a couple dozen Seagate ST225 20 meg MFM drives. Having recently acquired a couple of rare earth magnets (industrial surplus, as re-sold by the late, lamented Haltec in Mountain View), we figured we could wipe 'em across the drives and be done with it. But first lunch, at Fred's on Middlefield Road.

For those of you who didn't grow up in the wilds of Silly Con Valley, Fred's was (and is!) a dive bar[0]. Heavy emphasis on Dive. Home away from home kind of place, if you're into that kind of thing. A good place for planning destructive testing of all kinds. So naturally, we decided that we'd pull a drive out of the computer, but leave it plugged in, turn the machine back on and wipe the magnets over it "to watch the computer lose it's tiny little mind". Which we did.

To our surprise, nothing happened. The drive trundled on, ignoring us and our magnets. So we found a bulk eraser for tapes and the like and tried that. Still nothing happened. I wrote a simple "walking ones" program to run over them instead.

I've done this with increasingly strong magnets, and progressively denser HDDs over the years and have never, not once, lost a single byte of data EXCEPT mechanical data loss when the drive head gets bent into the running platter (the traditional meaning of a HDD head crash).

Don't take my word for it, try it for yourself. Or read this account of somebody else trying it and getting similar results.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Samuel Langhorne Clemens

[0] If you pointy-clicky around in the go ogle link, you can get a look at the interior. Might not look like much, but a LOT of what happened in the proto-SillyConValley started in there ...

Greetings from the future where it's all pole-dancing robots and Pokemon passports

jake Silver badge

Re: Boats

Boats aren't all that expensive to buy. They ARE, however, expensive to repair. More so if you're not handy. Even more so if you're not handy and think you are. It's easy to get in over your head. Before purchasing, remember your Latin: Caveat Emptor.

Owning a boat is cheap. Just keep it away from the four things guaranteed to ruin it: Sunlight, oxygen, water, and salt. People in the know add humans consuming alcohol to that list.

You can get a used autopilot in excellent condition, built for a boat, for under $500. Bolting it onto your boat would be a lot less work than adapting an automotive product to do the job. Took me about a day to install one in my Monterey Clipper, and that included testing & tuning as I pulled half a dozen crab pots.

Speed is relative. And expensive. You can get a go-fast that'll take you across an ocean faster than legal driving speeds in most civilized countries, if you choose to throw enough money at the problem. At my age, I've leaned boating's about the journey, not the destination. My advice is to spend money on reliability and comfort, not speed.

jake Silver badge

Re: But the drones!

I wouldn't live anywhere within view of an apartment block with a 20th floor. Humans aren't supposed to live in warrens. It drives 'em nuts, makes them into 'orrible neighbors.

jake Silver badge

Re: Dot Matrix printer?

I use a Daisy Wheel occasionally, but it's hardly a new affectation ... and I have the receipt dated in the late 1970s to prove it. I don't have a 1053, but I do have a couple working 2741s. Prefer the 1403, mostly for speed (and shock value). And of course there is the Smith Corona portable, which works quite nicely even during power outages.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a hipster. Packrat maybe ...

jake Silver badge

"the novelty wears pretty damn thin the very first time your thumb accidentally brushes against the screen when someone forwards you a razor wire pic."

FTFY

jake Silver badge

Re: But the drones!

"Similar to having a leaf-blower passing back and forth outside your window."

Except there are no actual people connected to them, so when you use them for target practice there is no collateral damage.

jake Silver badge

Re: Crypto currency?

Unfortunately, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District's Board of Supervisors (a largely appointed group of typical San Francisco political shysters) is unlikely to allow you (or anybody else) to invest in their cash cow.

Remembering Y2K call-outs and the joy of the hourly contractor rate

jake Silver badge

Re: An '80s what now?

Their first album was better than good, IMO. It's in my personal top ten list of all time. Their second album was commercial and crap. They went down-hill from there. There is no accounting for the taste of the GreatUnwashed.

jake Silver badge

We all get old, eventually ...

"I still can't understand why my daughter and her future husband just stayed indoors in a pub down in the village."

Cast you mind back to when you first became engaged ... Would you have preferred to have partied down the pub with your mates, or would staying in with your parental unit(s), partying like it was 1999 have been attractive?

jake Silver badge

Re: Ah, mandatory minimum callout times...

I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me".

A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours (or more) for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although about a year and a half ago, a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

jake Silver badge

The new-fangled alpine and Mutt can both be configured to do exactly what you ask. I still use (Al)pine for the bulk of my email. Works a treat, even over a 2400 baud dial-up. Or in a terminal emulator, if you insist on the massive overhead of a GUI for a function that is primarily text based.

(What do you mean, 2400's too slow? How fast can you read and/or type?)

jake Silver badge

Re: users would learn

To be fair, probably not. In the early days floppies stored under 100KB.

jake Silver badge

Re: No Limits!

"I think the point is that email is not a general purpose filing system."

The point is that people like the user in the story aren't even aware that the concept of "file system" exists. Software designers and support personnel should be aware of this and take it into account when doing their jobs.

jake Silver badge

As any fule kno ...

... one should always takes a quick peak and ask the user "Are you sure? This file looks like it might be important!" before nuking the trash. Preferably with a witness or two within earshot. This has been true ever since Apple, Inc. invented the "special" class of computer user with the advent of the Lisa, and then lowered the entry bar to this "special" class with the Macintosh.

Behold Schrödinger's Y2K, when software went all quantum

jake Silver badge

Helpful hint.

"That said... "I do confess that I had pulled a few hundred dollars out of the ATM in advance, just in case.""

I have had a couple of hundred dollars in cash available to me "just in case" since the late 1960s (a trifle more these days). It has saved me more times than I can count. Recommended.

Today's budget for application improvements is brought to you by the letters "Y", "K" and the number "2"

jake Silver badge

Re: Y2...um... okay?

No, the clock flashed 88:88 ... and as any fule kno, that punts the problem 76:88 down the line and so is no longer our issue.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

jake Silver badge

Re: ObXKCD

16 up and 16 down. That's good enough for me to sample them again ... it used to be more like 32 up and none down. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever admitted in public that they liked sprouts.

I have about a pound (half a kilo-ish) from a local grower, will cook them tonight and report back :-)

jake Silver badge

Re: ObXKCD

"In a pan with just a few drops of your choice of vegetable oil, slowly cook some fat bacon until it's crunchy"

Instead of veg oil, use a tiny bit of water, 2-3Tbs (50-75ml) or thereabouts (experiment for your quantity of bacon). The water comes up to boiling, which is hot enough to melt bacon fat but not hot enough to cause sticking. As the bacon renders, the water boils off leaving pure bacon fat to finish the cooking, un-tainted by any lesser grease.

jake Silver badge

Re: Flashback

Nuts make better cheese than tapioca. Cashews are by far the choice of various vegan friends of mine, followed by macadamias and almonds.

Note that I said "better than tapioca". While I've sampled a few concoctions labeled "vegan cheese" that were actually edible, not one of them seemed like any kind of actual cheese that I've been in contact with.

jake Silver badge

Re: ObXKCD

The only way sprouts can be made tasty is to deep fry them in bacon fat. Then serve the bacon to humans and feed the sprouts to the hogs for the next batch.

jake Silver badge

First aerial food delivery?

I'm sure the folks involved with the Berlin Air Lift will be surprised to hear that. (Like myself, I'm pretty certain that our correspondent from France learned about the BAL as a nipper in the wilds of Eurvicscire back in the '70s.)

The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes

jake Silver badge

To be fair ...

... in the late 1980s many businesses didn't yet realize that a PC could, in fact, be business critical ... even when they blatantly were. This was especially true of mainframe houses.

jake Silver badge

Re: Gateway pc

I'm pretty sure you are joking, but ... From what I remember, in the late '80s Gateway 2000 (as they were then known) didn't sell PCs to the UK quite yet ... they were still doing mail order out of a small warehouse in Iowa, selling to the US and Canada only.

jake Silver badge

Peter Norton's commercial UNERASE from '82 was probably ...

... one of the most pirated small bits of code out there in the early 1980s ... for those who didn't have his earlier version that was shared through user groups, that is.

And who among us didn't have a series of bootabe floppies with the necessary system files for all the variations of MS/PC-DOS that were in the wild at the time? I still have that box of disks (and a couple releases of 4DOS). Comes in handy six or eight times per year ... you'd be surprised at how many pieces of decades old computer controlled equipment still runs on MS/PC-DOS. Bridgeport CNC machines of the era, for one example that is going to be around for decades to come.

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

"Seems as though it has been approximating that goal."

So has EMACS, these last forty-odd years. And systemd is attempting a latter-day coup. But that still doesn't make either of them operating systems. And they won't be, either, until you can boot from them as a stand-alone kernel (monitor, executive, whatever).

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

"A browser is an Operating System Application"

A browser is an "Operating System Application"? Oh, c'mon amfM ... I thought better of you. Inventing new concepts that don't actually mean anything doesn't help your cause. Try again?

jake Silver badge

Re: Browser Restrictions

I didn't. But then I never had a Geocities page. When they came about, I would have been downgrading compared to my own portal ...

jake Silver badge

Re: Let me use whatever browser I want to use.

For greater than four nines of all WWW sites, there is another pasture. I can afford to miss out on the one in ten thousand; one can only laugh at so many cute cat pics in a lifetime.

As for .gov ... I visit them in person. It's much less trouble, and I usually get whatever it is I am doing done in a single visit, instead of it taking several trips and many days as it so often does on the Web.

jake Silver badge

"At least it's a problem when they don't move in concert."

Sometimes a split in the standard is logical, and not a problem. See email vs. USENET headers, for a simplistic example.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

The modern day OS, to all intents and purposes, is the traffic cop between CPU, memory & I/O and applications. An easier way of looking at it is that the OS is in charge of the hardware's on/off switch. The OS can contain code to turn the machine off, user-space can't. Browsers run in user space q.e.d.

Note that it doesn't matter one whit what the guest OS or application "thinks"[0], what matters is the reality of hardware ownership.

An operating system living in a virtual machine is just that, virtual, not a real machine. It is not in actual control of the hardware that it is running on, therefore it is not a full OS, it's just a virtual OS. Note that browsers run on virtual OSes, not in lieu of them.

And yes, I am aware of Intel's Management Engine and AMD's Platform Security Processor, but unlike the OS vs. Application dividing line, the OS vs. ME/PSP is dancing on the head of a pin territory. Besides, both of those technically have their own CPU core that they are in charge of, with hooks onto the main system bus of the host computer. I look at them as parasites more than anything else.

[0] Indeed, the point of good virtualization is ensuring that the OS+Application doesn't even notice that is, in fact, virtualized ... to the point of the OS thinking it is capable of turning off it's virtualized hardware. It's still just a virtual OS when running on that machine, in that manner. Without specifying context, these conversations are meaningless. The devil is truly in the details.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

"Isn't debating with amanfrommars almost as much a sign of madness as trying to extract meaning from it's high-faluting algorithm?"

No more so than debating with you is as much a sign of madness as trying to extract meaning from your high-faluting(sic) algorithm, nagyeger.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

Can I boot into a browser? Sure. Substitute lynx for your favorite shell.

Can also set your init to lynx on the kernel command line.

Either way, the browser still isn't the OS, though.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

amfM isn't (entirely) a bot. There is organic intelligence in there, if you look for it.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

As I said, "in which case, I submit that your actual OS is very, very b0rken.".

jake Silver badge

Re: Standards

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

jake Silver badge

Let me use whatever browser I want to use.

If it makes your badly designed web page look like shit, I'll try another browser. Or, more likely, I'll pass on your badly designed web site entirely. But leave the choice to me ... that way, at least you'll have a chance of me trying another browser. Blocking me outright right from the git-go doesn't give you that second chance; I'll assume you're either hostile or an asshole and move on to greener pastures.

jake Silver badge

Re: A Ubiquitous Weapon for Mass Distraction and Destruction and Disruptive Creation?

You've said that before, amfM. You are still incorrect. A browser is an application, not an OS, no matter how hard you squint at it.

Unless your browser controls your hardware, of course ... in which case, I submit that your actual OS is very, very b0rken.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

jake Silver badge

Re: It's not about JavaScript

For the record, there is still far too much work for not enough Fortran and COBOL coders. If you know either of them well, you can make a lot more money than a common or garden Java Script coder. If you know both, you can pretty much write your own ticket.

Good old fashioned C will always have a place in the world of coding. It should be a part of any real programmer's toolbox.

Who's that padding down the chimney? It's Puma, with its weird £80 socks for gamers

jake Silver badge

Re: It's made of gamers!

But if it's liquid, you can't fry leftover breakfast for supper.

jake Silver badge

Re: PUMA Socks

"Proper racing gloves are a must too, if you have a direct-drive wheel, because those things can mess your hands right up."

If you're all that worried about your girlfriend getting hurt when gaming, a good set of gardening gloves will work just as well as proper Nomex when you're in your mummy's basement. Besides, I really don't think that my SFI-15 gloves would be conducive to fiddling about with your joystick.

Remember Unrollme, the biz that helped you automatically ditch unwanted emails? Yeah, it was selling your data

jake Silver badge

Re: This is, of course, not illegal.

Why is it that whenever I see EPG my brain parses it as Eggs Per Gram?

What do you mean your eardrums need a break? Samsung-owned JBL touts solar-powered wireless headphones you don't need to charge

jake Silver badge

Re: Why not recharge cars via solar?

Cost/benefit says no.

There aren't enough usable square $UNITOFMEASUREs to do more than trickle-charge the system, giving you a couple miles of extra travel per day at best. In other words, your round-trip before range anxiety starts to set in is increased negligibly for a relatively high cost.

By way of reference, good consumer grade solar cells typically put out about 15 Watts per square foot, or 160 Watts per square meter. Keep in mind this is under ideal conditions. A Tesla Model S takes about 13,000 Watts to cruise at 55MPH, 20,000 Watts at 65MPH and 32,000 Watts at 80MPH. More if fully loaded.

At current technology levels, solar is good for one thing when it comes to automobiles: Keeping the battery from going flat during long periods of non operation. But you'll have to park it in full sun when you leave it in long-term parking ... don't pick that shady spot, and forget the garage.

jake Silver badge

Re: samsung audio brands

"a standard desktop PC"

Who makes that?

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