* Posts by G.Y.

389 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2011

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Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

G.Y.

== Re: Sanitising user input

should be ==, not = (first =)

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

G.Y.

I"t's not the things you don't know that make you an ignoramus, but the things you know that ain't so"

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

G.Y.

Re: CEO once spotted a developer typing at a computer...

Got this query "why not test all possible ...") at Intel. Among other things, we had a 16/16 divide procedure that had "only" 4 billion possible combination; spent a few nights testing 10^8 of them at random -- on the ONE real chip we had at hand. (This is 1981, 1MHZ top instruction rate)

Asahi's plan for Linux on Apple's new silicon shows Cupertino has gone back to basics with iOS booting

G.Y.

VM Re: Serious questions

a VM gives you half+- the RAM available native

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

G.Y.

bedlam3

Those who know bedlam3, know

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

G.Y.

classic Re: It's not just smokers

"waiting for the stationery department" is a classic

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

G.Y.

Re: The secret to intelligent tinkering ....

" a clever man gets out of trouble which, if he were wise, he wouldn't have gotten into"

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

G.Y.

command chain

While at Intel/Israel, my faxes to US HQ would go "mr.X, cc: boss of X". If no reply, next one would go "boss of X, cc: boss of boss of X". 48-72 hours usually would suffice (our day was their night)

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

G.Y.

60HZ+-+- Re: " 220V on which South Korea operates"

At Princeton U, there was a student lab to measure g using a pendulum. g was off more than it should have been. The prof investigated. Turned out the wall clock (used to measure pendulum period) ran off the local power company. The clock at the power company ran off same power. When 5PM approached, the workers' hand would move the generators a bit faster, so as to get home sooner. Hence wong g.

Watchdog urges Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S, X cars to fix knackered NAND flash that borks safety features

G.Y.

plugs Re: Great

Swappable implies plug&socket; In "Old ma Bell" (the old AT&T) these were a no-no (reliability issues).

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

G.Y.

8008

The 8008 was cut to 16KB in order to fit into a 16-pin package

G.Y.

ropes

The Hebrew University got a PDP11/70 delivered, late on a Friday, on a pickup truck. They told us "600Kg, 6 packages". Turned out one package (the 11/70) was 500Kg.

We (the CS department) got it off the truck by tying ropes from it to a higher floor, letting the truck move, and putting a table to stop if moving (said table became matchwood). Let it there until Sunday, when the staff came in.

11/70 worked like a charm

Dutch officials say Donald Trump really did protect his Twitter account with MAGA2020! password

G.Y.

00000000

the PAL code on US nuclear bombs was 00000000 , at least for a long time

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

G.Y.

recursion Re: Those were the days

I taught a course way way back; Pascal first, then Fortran. I told them "no recursion; A cannot call A". One bright student said "I will have A call B, B call A!". I said "Try!!".

G.Y.

2<-1

I recall getting decks back with only one rubber band; I pointed out, the dispatch desk said "oh, it happens" ...

G.Y.

Re: I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Michelangelo: "Give me a block of marble and I remove all the superfluous stuff"

China unleashes fearsome new cyber-weapon: A very provocative meme

G.Y.

booze

Should we all start buying Australian wine? China has a 200%+ tax on it now

BBC picks SiFive RISC-V chip for Doctor Who programming-for-kids kit – with Jodie Whittaker narrating

G.Y.

60IPS Re: Showing my age.

I cut my teeth on a Wegematic (similar to ALWAC); 1KIPS if you "optimized" (i.e. put instructions on the drum where they would be picked up with no delay); 60IPS otherwise.

Bad software crashed Boeings. Now it appears the company lacked a singular software supremo

G.Y.

838

If they named it the 838, and certified it as a new plane, it would not have crashed --at lest not the way it did

Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length: macOS shifts from x86 to homegrown common CPU arch, will run iOS apps

G.Y.

AMD64 Re: "Intel never thrilled me" - "x86-64 isn't at all bad"

I call it AMD64; makes my Intel friends happy ...

Now that's a Finnish-ing move: Finland offers free 90-day tryout of Helsinki tech scene with childcare thrown in

G.Y.

MFGA

Make Finland great again!

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

G.Y.

real rule Re: Sadly, no international jet-settng for me

It is a real rule. My wife once entered Israel on an expired Israeli passport; was told by the consulate (ahead of time) there would be no problem; and there was none.

SpaceX’s Starlink finally reveals its satellite broadband pricing for rural America: At $99 a month, it’s a good deal

G.Y.

20msec Re: Outside America

I rarely get pings as fast as 20msec; I have seen 300 --- and this is all via cable. a Ground station in the same (small) continent should be OK

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

G.Y.

360/40 Re: Other counters

The 360/40 had no-ops in the microcode, to slow it down &not dislocate IBM's price/performance curve

Quick thinking and an explanation for everything – key CTO qualities

G.Y.

Decameron, day 6, 10th story, has a story about recovering from an embarrassing AV error

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

G.Y.

and on the back end,

the system should check for 2 identical requests, in very short order, from the same person, and make an extra "are you sure?" check.

Belt &braces ...

G.Y.

Pauli Re: I've had a theory about this since college

Wolfgang Pauli did all his best physics after some schnapps; his mistakes were made when stone cold sober

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

G.Y.

4+1 Re: Not packing material, but

The shuttle had 4 computers running an IBM OS together, and a fifth computer running a separate OS, by a separate company -- just in case the 4-machine OS would crash.

Safety driver at the wheel of self-driving Uber car that killed a pedestrian is charged with negligent homicide

G.Y.

voice Re: highly qualified

if data-entry work were via dictation, that could work

The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon

G.Y.

Vonada Re: the demon earth

Vonada's 1st axiom (in the big DEC book): "There is no such thing as ground" .

See http://gunkies.org/wiki/Vonada's_Engineering_Maxims

Techie studied ancient ways of iSeries machine, saved day when user unleashed eldritch powers, got £50 gift voucher

G.Y.

necessary but ... Re: And in a similar vein...

I heard that Rice University (ages ago) changed over to a computerized system, after a year of running everything in parallel with the old clay tablets.

Then one student cancelled a course he was not registered for. Total crash.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

G.Y.

test Re: Adding a comment sometimes caused compile failure

During test time, we made sure our compiler (long ago) could eat .OBJ files for breakfast, never throw up, just complain a lot about bad PL/M syntax

Trump administration labels WeChat, TikTok ‘threats’ to national security, bans transactions with both

G.Y.

wall Re: Trump is a moron

The dead are already more than 2 Vietnam walls, will be more before we are done

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

G.Y.

almost Re: Ah, the days before memory protection seemed necessary...

The RCA spectra was ALMOST compatible with the 360. They "fixed" some particularly crazy op-codes, causing a $200M write-off of the whole series

911, I wanna report a robbery. Hundreds of thousands of stars stolen from a cluster. I think it was the Milky Way

G.Y.

I believe dense clusters come at about 1 star per cubic light year

Astroboffins map engine of a solar flare: Magnetic mega-fields and Earth-dwarfing blankets of electric current

G.Y.

Re: Watts

Mencken was told Welsh Rabbit contains no rabbit. He replied that toad-in-the-hole contains no toad

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

G.Y.

Re: Fictional Engineer

I believe such people were referred to as "virgins"

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

G.Y.

Re: Updates are important!

or developing on a fast internal network, in the days were users lived by 56K modems if they were lucky

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

G.Y.

Re: The Falkands Connection

"no plan survives 1st contact with the enemy"

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

G.Y.

sylllogism Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

We must do something

This is something

Therefore we must do this

(source: Yes, minister)

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

G.Y.

Pauli Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

Wolfgang Pauli had that effect

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

G.Y.

Re: I called the cops

Happened to me once, hung up a second later; police officer knocked, I apologized, he was almost apologetic too; I thanked him for doing the right thing.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

G.Y.

ASM e: optimize / optimise

I heard that, when the law "thou shalt write COBOL" came out, lots of COBOL programs were written where line 1 was "enter assembler" and all else was assembly code

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

G.Y.

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

The 72-column limit came from the IBM 70X/70XX series, which read one row of holes, in binary, into 2 36-bit words. The sequence-number justification came later.

Surge in Zoom support requests was 'unexpected', says tool team as it turns taps down

G.Y.

bug Re: Not surprised

that "which only seem accessible during a meeting" is a bug+-

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

G.Y.

Re: Test, test and test again...

I saw an IDE (ANT?) where the tests are generated together with the code. A new project starts with a test "is 2+2==5?", which fails. The rest is left to the engineers to implement&fix

G.Y.

Re: Experienced tester.

a while back:

Me: I gave the student compiler "ali baba +40 thieves" to compile -- and smoke came out!

Older guy: Hell -- I give my compilers .OBJ files to eat, and they better not crap out!

Family meeting! Chocolate Factory makes its business-like video-chat service free to anyone with a Google account

G.Y.

free?

Plain Google accounts (i.e. not G-suite) can only JOIN meetings, not start them

Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

G.Y.

50 Re: Sounds like a good idea

DEC's RADIX50 (using base 40) was a better idea; hence .OBJ rather than .OB

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