Posts by G.Y.

!Re: Steves Failure

old rule: There's no "why" in the army!

You could ALWAYS download the browser of your choice & install it on windows; I had 3-5 browsers ready to go all my time 1989-20165 at Microsoft (and later too)

Mandarin Re: Excerpt from the User's Guide

I suspect the documentation in Mandarin is better

Re: Heavy elements

"metal", not "heavy metal", e.g.oxygen

Re: Manual is optional,

My son once brought a proverb to kindergarten: "I heard and I forgot. I saw and I remembered, I did and I understood"

traffic light Re: Problems in search of solutions

At one place, they set up a light sign "system up/system down" -- bur when the system was down they were busy, and had no time to flip the sign ...

POTS Re: We do security by obscurity in the US

POTS is way more secure than a lot of internet stuff, esp. if you take care to dial back (preferably from another 'phone)

purchasing Re: Customer pushback

At one university, we repaired a cable for a year+-, while the purchasing bureaucracy did its thing

1931-20xx Re: Torn

A crypto patent, filed 1931(+-) by Friedman, was granted & published 20XX, after the secrecy order ended

Looks like the SIGABA machine

Iran is a republic, too

Re: Haven't they seen Mr Robot

I took one to a stair, stomped on it, bent it 45 degrees; but I'm sure motivated professionals could still pick bits of the (now) non-rotating rust

1YO Re: glorification of the monkey test

I know of a 1-year-old who crashed a "secure" OS that way. But he couldn't explain how he did it

Lampson Re: The Cloud vs Mainframe+Terminal

Lampson: "a distributed system is one where a machine I never heard about can bring my code crashing down"

Latvia Re: Another Rich Corn Flake?

I believe that, immediately after independence, Latvia made it easy to buy guns

3mo

I believe the taliban permit abortion in 1st 3 months

negotiations 101 Re: Just for starters

In 1949 armistice non-negotiations,

Syrians: we want haifa

Israel: and we want Damascus

(check map, see where lines got drawn)

state pays? Re: Who's is going to pay an investigation?

When a state licenses an IT guy, will it pay for salary if he/she screws up? for consequential damages??

Re: No fenestration?

DEfenestration!

parkinson

the old Parkinson's law book has a chapter on this

tables Re: The guiding principle

cf. Johnny Tables

JCL Re: Bills with punch cards

I know of someone who added punches to the card, creating a card starting with "/*" , causing horrible JCL problems to the utility

draft Re: Exchange

I have seen a fair bit of documents watermarked "draft -- for discussion purposed only"

Re: I believe the story

What is TS?

Re: Google's minimum viable response

also Stalin

Re: Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Happened when the IBM PC people were testing bit out on beginners.

They rewrote the instructions

FarewellRe: Intermediaries

Check “ the farewell file” for what can happen

kitchenRe: Everybody knows...

We bought some German kitchen equipment in Israel. Not having Hebrew documentation , they gave us the "sundry languages" docs -- in Finnish, Portuguese, Turkish, ...

Re: 41 hours of latency sounds bad...

One place I know of decided to use BASIC because it is interactive. The system worked by schoolkids filling up coding forms , MAILING them to that computer center, and waiting, and waiting, and ...

Re: Not that surprising

" The average person does not understand the speed of light ..." -- Grace Hopper has a good video on the subject

Also, "time machines" (one of the Royal Society lectures for your people, ages ago) with a loopback video via a satellite

PC

IBM PC manuals originally said "take the diskette out of the envelope". Some of their test subjects (a.k.a "virgins") took the round thing out of the square thing. The manual got rewritten.

old trick:

Gilbert's "De Magnete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Magnete says navigators would claim the compass misbehaves if a garlic-eater enters the room. He did an experiment to check

recursion

In a compiler project, an engineer once told me recursive decent is the right way to go, but recursion is rumored to be very slow. Asked for my opinion.

I used my stopwatch, got some numbers, told her "recurse all you want, but please don't divide!"

(This was an on 8080)

Re: The Parable Of The Handyman's Invoice (a.k.a Knowing where to tap)

I heard Steinmetz did that one on a $100,000 invoice

Russian has no definite article ("the")

Re: Read canaries ... How I became Director of the Secret Police

In one monthly report, I wrote "X had to stop work on Y (which is on the critical path to V.2) and start masturbating the Z". No comments back.

A few months later, I wrote "The ayatollahs of X have shown us our un-islamic ways'. They told my boss "Make G behave"; I replied, & he did too (all the way up the chain) "The M-word is OK, and Ayatollahs are not?". THAT'S when someone read my old monthly report.

My immediate boss had a good excuse: his native language in Hebrew, and they don't teach that word in school. He shared my opinion about X wasting his time

Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato