Posts by disgruntled yank

Wonderful

I first heard of ERP systems from a techie who worked for a company that had been bought by SAP., and who described SAP and the course of a usual implementation to me. I said that it sounded to me like Vietnam: by the time you understand that you have made a mistake, you have invested so much in blood, treasure, and prestige that you sort of have to keep going and find a point at which to declare victory and cut your losses.

My own later brushes with ERP stuff were brief, and not personally painful. My employer paid for a system considerably over-engineered for our needs, but after a couple of years backed off to something more manageable without undue bleeding.

the history of smart phone market

I must ask whether we are counting according to Sark TLD rules. In other words, does the history of the smart phone market go back 450 years, or only 20?

Might work to track the young

If I go for a walk around my neighborhood, I might or might not take my phone along. My wife is as likely as not to leave hers charging when she is out and about. No, we are not millenials, we are (OK,) boomers.

"an overgrown and woefully misguided sense of self-belief who have no idea what working in them can be like"

I think that you got the We Work folks there, but "in them" is redundant.

Around 30 years ago, I worked on a government contract supporting Data General MV/Eclipses used for office automation. It turned out that some gifted person had written a terminal-based version of Space Invaders that ran on these machines. Now, they were good-enough minicomputers, and would support a lot of people writing documents and sending email, but they were not made for the sort of computing to support descending and exploding aliens.

One day, one of our operators decided to fire up Space Invaders in the middle of working hours, and brought that machine to its knees. A quick run of the equivalent of "ps -ef" quickly identified the problem, we killed the process, and talked to the operator.

What? You're right, no network was involved.

Brigham?

I would just point out that Brigham Young was the second leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, otherwise Mormons, and led them from Illinois to Utah. Brigham Young University is said to be an excellent school. I have to imagine that Utah has more than a few young Brighams.

Ah, yes.

A while back, somebody showed me an AppSheet app. It looked pretty clever, but I thought, and may have said, "And the underlying data is updated how?" A couple of years later, when somebody noticed how far out of date it was, I learned the answer: it was up to me to write a script.

What has changed?

The information is out there now for free, while one once had to pay. CheckPeople looks stupid--I don't know whether that's a change.

Radiation

Many years ago, I heard a talk by a fellow who had been TV critic for one of the local newspapers. He claimed to have been told that TVs brought on sterility, and to have guarded against this by turning an armchair around, and watching while he knelt on the seat. I assume this was facetious.

Those with eclectic tastes in reading may remember a bit in Thomas Pynchon's novel V in which a sailor considers exposure to radar as a method of birth control.

Been there, done that

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I worked mostly with Data General minicomputers. There the equivalent of "cd /; rm *.*" was

DIR :

DELETE #

The good news was the :PMGR.EXE, the peripherals manager, was fairly high up in the order of files in the root directory (hash-organized), and once it went the system would forget how to talk to the disks, halting the operation. If you were lucky, the slob who had run in the last update would have left :PMGR.EXE.OLD in place, and you could rename it, and start the recovery. If not, you would have to go to the "Systape". I first ran into this when a system halted, and a guy from another contractor called from the server room to ask where we kept the systape. I later did it myself, but I think only once.

$4.4 million

Given that Uber lost about $1.3 billion during its last reported quarter, $4.4 million is about the amount of VC cash it burned every eight hours.

Read the story

How long has IBM been running Linux VMs on its big iron? Not just since it bought Red Hat. Any bets on the revenue split there?

How much more did Facebook make off the LAMP stack than the developers of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP? (Yes, I know they aren't pure LAMP, and haven't been for a long time.)

What is the role of OSS in Google?

Yes, Amazon definitely falls in the "view with concern" category. But I thought the story could have been more nuanced.

Stems

"he whole idea behind the book stemmed from the fact that as a child she was offered a place at a school for gifted children but her mother turned it down because she feared it would result in her becoming socially difficult."

Apparently Mom was locking the stable door...

Elf?

Nur elf? Nicht zwölf order mehr?

the poser in your life?

The poseurs being all devoted to their iThings?

(Don't shoot! I do carry an iPhone.)

Ok, now

Can we arrange that Windows 10 doesn't take me to the Microsoft Store when I enter "python" at a command prompt?

(Yes, I know this can be done, I just don't see why it must be done. My impression was that anyone willing to write Python was capable of downloading and installing from the master site.)

Legality

The Washington, DC, Metro has rules against eating in its stations or on its trains and buses. These rules no longer seem to be enforced, but years ago I saw a kid of about 10 being led out in handcuffs with the evidence--a bag of potato chips and a bag of cookies in his cuffed hands.

minijupe

Do the folks at Gymglish not understand about kilts?

Because ABDA worked so well in 1942?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-British-Dutch-Australian_Command

emailed all the contacts?

Who do they think they are, LinkedIn?

So

Who goes to jail when the Internal Revenue Service dumps many citizens' data?