* Posts by Milo Tsukroff

132 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007

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We regret to inform you the professor teaching your online course is already dead

Milo Tsukroff
Thumb Up

Re: And get a better education...

Word was out in the Physics department that I took my undergrad courses in: Nobel laureate professors make the worst teachers. 'Nuff said.

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Blame the management

It is blindingly obvious that the US bank you just left is ripe for a Post-COBOL Apocalypse event. The kind that happens when obvious and relatively easy to understand COBOL code is abandoned for "sexier" languages, known to coders as, "Job Security". [Posting anonymously because, among other negative traits, brogrammers don't take criticism well.]

Hey Reg readers, Happy Spreadsheet day! Because there ain't no party like an Excel party

Milo Tsukroff
Coat

Spreadsheets - The first TRULY useful microcomputer app! Long may they reign!

Spreadsheets - The first TRULY useful microcomputer app! Long may they reign! ...and having occasionally written my own programs to implement a spreadsheet, just for fun and experience, may I say, spreadsheets are a BRILLIANT idea! I've been playing with them since MultiPlan on the IBM PC and the TI-99/4A. 'Nuff said. I'll get me coat. Mine's the one with the Lotus 1-2-3 manual in the pocket.

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

Re: Reverse Engineering These point scoring things....

I have said for years that, Those who Can, Do. Those who Can't, Teach. And those who flunk out of Teacher's College ... end up in HR.

Microsoft's Surface Duo cops 1 repairability point for each of its screens: That's 2/10

Milo Tsukroff
Headmaster

Tri-point screw = Nintendo

" an uncommon tri-point screw type" Not uncommon, as it's been in use for Nintendo hand-helds for decades.

Here's a sprite idea: PC pokers push pixels to LED displays with Microsoft's new platform for non-verbal comms

Milo Tsukroff
Gimp

TI-99/4A - Yes!!

Thanks for the shout-out about TI99/4a games! I spent years happily coding sprites for games I wrote for that sadly underpowered machine. But its graphics processor made up for the lack of power.

Ah, the olden golden times! When programmers were robust, and TI-99/4A's ran at 1 Mhz.

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

Milo Tsukroff
Big Brother

Re: Things grow ... until they don't

> feature density has managed a pretty good run -- 60 years.

> Will it continue? For How long? Who knows?

Now that chip making has moved to China, indeed, who knows? How can anyone know? 'Nuff said.

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

Re: Here's an idea

There's another type of bug that you haven't mentioned: Bugs by design. One for-instance: C++ is notorious for unchecked input. It's supposed to be lean and mean and that meant that input buffers were unchecked -- by design. 'Nuff said.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Milo Tsukroff
Headmaster

The captain should be given Das Boot. FTFY

This machine-learning upstart trained software to snare online drug dealers. Now it's going after fake coronavirus test equipment peddlers

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

Re: phone scams any time now?

> People whine all the time about scam calls then do NOTHING to help stop them.

In the US of A, last year, the FTC had a novel idea: How about actually PROSECUTING phone scammers?? Wow, what a concept!! (Up until then, the only thing that getting caught running a multi-million-dollar phone scam system would get you, would be a subpoena to appear before Congress.)

If at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again: Boeing to repeat CST-100 test, Russia preps another ISS taxi

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

Shoddy coding? Shocking!!

"Shoddy coding, iffy validation and a lack of end-to-end testing " ... I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you! The software should be at least as safe and secure as Microsoft's ... um ... https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/11/microsoft-exploring-rust-safety/ ( " C and C++ are .... very, very unsafe" )

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

Milo Tsukroff
Pint

Love that picture!

Great picture! "Black stallion monster truck jumps cars at the Goshen Fair in Goshen Connecticut, Litchfield County. " I haven't been to the Goshen Fair in years (always on Labor Day Weekend) ... gotta go back, they're realing upping their game! Used to be the highlight of the fair was the ax-throwing contest, trying to hit the can of beer in the center of the target. Shake the beer can well & it explodes nicely when hit by the axe.

IBM cuts ribbon on quantum computing centre wherein a 53-qubit monster lurks

Milo Tsukroff
Go

Finally - back to analog computing!

Analog computing has always been faster than digital computing. Finally, IBM is going back to analog computing ... which is what is meant by "superposition" and "interference". And it will be faster, because analog computing always was and is.

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

It's Job Security, folks!

> are caused by developers inadvertently inserting memory corruption bugs into their C and C++ code

"Inadvertently" my eye, it's Job Security! Create a bug, spend 5 times as long finding & fixing it.

Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!

Milo Tsukroff
Headmaster

Re: Big Outage

The problem isn't the clock. It's Einstein, and the way that mass is not evenly distributed throughout the Earth. American GPS clocks have to be reset every day. Because they fly over the surface of the earth, and the uneven nature of mass distribution affects the special- and general-relativistic slowing of the on-board clocks. It's just not predictable, no matter how well Einstein's theories have been confirmed. Without a reset daily, GPS'es go out, way out.

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

Milo Tsukroff
Flame

There's another way to make code run efficiently ...

... give all the developers old, slow PC's for writing software on. The trouble with developers is that they all seem to run computers that are state-of-the-art and screaming fast, nothing like the laptops a lot of their customers are running. In the real world, Windows PC's are 3 years old, underpowered, patched and patched and overpatched, running anti-virus live scanning that takes up to 85% CPU under 'normal' circumstances, and since we have to get real work done, on top of all that we have to run a word processor, a spreadsheet, email software, and on and on. It's no wonder that code that looks so nice on a developer's shiny new workstation, running all by itself, ends up dogging my system. I spend quite a bit of time just watching stuff crawl along in Task Manager, as the CPU stays pegged at 99% utilization. All 4 cores, at that.

Usenet file-swapping was acceptable in the '80s – but not so much now: Pirate pair sent down for 66 months

Milo Tsukroff
Happy

Re: Mods, and ScreamTracker files... good times.

Ex-Fido Sysop here ... Fido didn't make it because it was a 'pure' BBS. The big shift in '95 shut down all the small BBS'es, including mine; the bigger ones turned into WWW on-ramps. Ah, the days long gone bye!

Watch Toyota's huge basketball robot shoot a hoop, and read up on how you should think about AI and, erm, Jesus

Milo Tsukroff
Meh

The Basketball Robot could be done with wires and springs

That basketball - shooting robot is not impressive at all, since it starts in exactly one position. Given some wires and springs, and maybe a pneumatic piston or two, a totally mechanical basketball-shooting robot could be assembled. What the video shows looks like it could be replaced with a pitching machine.

Now, if the robot actually walked, stopped, evaluated the distance, and then took the shot ... that would be something. Until I see that ... meh.

Metro Bank enjoys an early Friday tipple and topples over

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

The Post-COBOL Apocalypse Gathers Steam!!

> "the bank's status page is a delight of red and yellow"

The colors of the Post-COBOL Apocalypse! Viva 'modern' languages, they are guaranteed work for all & sundry IT workers, from now until eternity ...

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Milo Tsukroff

Wondered how they made Carbide drill bits! Had to get one to drill holes in hardened steel, I destroyed 4 lesser-metal drill bits drilling one hole. Got the bit (off of Amazon) and that thing drills perfect holes. As long as it is well-lubricated. I had a bottle of silicon copier oil hanging around, used that, works perfect.

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Every web site should...

Even easier solution, no oxygen control needed: Issue each and every developer with a 10-year-old PC with limited RAM and the OS about to lose support. Loading web pages will no longer be a snap, it'll be, like, OMG, it's still LOADING???

Cisco sues lawyers on its own side – for bigger slice of capacitor price-fixing settlement pie

Milo Tsukroff

"Since when have capacitors become so crap?!?!?"

Back in the 1980's, there was a run of japanese-made capacitors that leaked after a few years. TV's sold in the USA between about 1986 through 1995 all died after a few years. From the year 2000 on, I found old TV's at tag sales and thrift stores, with manufacturing dates either post-1995 or pre-1986. Amazingly, the old sets still work! So there's precedence for crap capacitor production. (Unfortunately, this capacitor problem hit every production unit of my favorite musical instrument, the Casio DH-100 / DH-200, released around 1988. To use them, the caps have to be replaced. It's a common fix when they are listed on eBay.)

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Milo Tsukroff

"I have never driven into a river or down an impassable road"

Common sense .... so true! Couple months ago my GPS sent me over a cow-pastured ridge on a dirt road, down an impassable road completely covered with 3 inches of water and ... I stopped when it wanted me to go through the river blocking the route. Finally realized that the GPS can be wrong, especially in the rural Tennessee/Virginia border area. Common sense finally prevailed & I didn't get stuck. With my wife and one of the kids in the car, it would have been a bit awkward... BTW, when I checked, Google Maps also had the same road as my GPS, it's wrong also, although the satellite view shows accurately the small river that was the road, and the larger river I decided not to chuck the SUV in.

Ca-caw-caw: Pigeon poops on tot's face as tempers fray at siege of Lincoln flats

Milo Tsukroff
Holmes

Peregrine Falcon

Peregrine Falcon. Put a webcam in the nest and people go, "Awwwwww....!" Nothing has to be said about what the bird is living on. Works like a charm here in the former colonies.

LG's beer-making bot singlehandedly sucks all fun, boffinry from home brewing

Milo Tsukroff
Pint

Re: Why?

Ice cream maker?? I take offense. An ice cream maker will produce real ice cream in minutes, not a fortnight. Back in the 70's I worked in the R&D shop where we tested our very successful ice cream maker.

Good times! I found out one very interesting thing: If you add too much flavoring, the ice cream will never freeze up. The problem is that that the flavorings sold in American grocery stores are primarily based on alcohol. So, too much flavoring, too much anti-freeze. Cheers!

Congrats to Debbie Crosbie: New CEO at IT meltdown bank TSB has unenviable task ahead

Milo Tsukroff

Shut her down, Clancy, she's pumping mud!

FTFY

Chrome 70 flips switch on Progressive Web Apps in Windows 10 – with janky results

Milo Tsukroff
Mushroom

Probably won't work when Windows is done with it

> more than once the icon in the taskbar inexplicably switched to one

> for Google Chrome

Well now, could it be that Windows doesn't play well with it? My prediction, based on decades of Microsoft practice, is that the icons won't work when Windows is done messing with it.

Oh I know, Microsoft used to claim that the phrase, "DOS is not done / Until Novell won't run" was an urban myth. Until the discovery phase of a lawsuit against Microsoft dug up the smoking-gun email that said pretty much that.

[Bomb icon because I predict that's what Microsoft will do to the PWA taskbar icons.]

Salesforce dogged by protests, leaked emails, and guerrilla blimps on first day of Dreamforce

Milo Tsukroff
IT Angle

Re: El Reg now politically biased....you're outta here!

> best known for separating small kids from their asylum-seeking families at the American border

True only for a small percentage. And, police forces always "separate families" when they detain suspects. Definitely not true in the main, because, as it's clearly been reported (but not by the anti-Trump fanatics), families in Central America have been sending their kids to the border _without_ their families. It's a clearly known method of gaming the US system. Thus, the asylum-seeking families have already separated themselves, and they should be blamed, not the border police who have to deal with unaccompanied children.

Despite the El Reg reporting bias, I'll keep reading.

Barclays and RBS on naughty step: Banks told to explain service meltdown to UK politicos

Milo Tsukroff
Mushroom

Hooray! The Post-COBOL Apocalypse gathers steam!!

> their banking apps and websites cannot be relied upon

Well said! Hooray! As predicted, the Post-COBOL Apocalypse gathers steam!! Since COBOL is by far the most reliable and understandable computer language for handling money transactions, it's shunned by all hipster programmers. The cool, sorry, kewl new languages that keep popping up are so fun to play with .... looks to me that the brogrammers' attitude is, "Never trust a language over 3 [years old]." As more and more banks are pushed away from un-cool COBOL, the Apocalypse continues to build and build and build.

Microsoft reveals train of mistakes that killed Azure in the South Central US 'incident'

Milo Tsukroff
FAIL

As usual, the air conditioning was the last thing they funded...

> and also overloaded suppressors on the mechanical cooling system, shutting it down.

So it was a mechanical issue, the air conditioning, which did the dirty deed. As usual, the air conditioning was the last thing they funded. I've seen this before: The A/C won't be properly funded until _after_ the huge outage caused by inadequate A/C. And it there's just one A/C system, not two for redundancy, you can be sure that the single system will go down. Typical for Microsoft: Good with software, not so good with hardware.

UK chip and PIN readers fall ill: Don't switch off that terminal!

Milo Tsukroff
Thumb Up

Re: Whaaat? Turning it off and on again is not allowed?

And also - putting the card in a WalMart bag then swiping while inside said bag. Worked like a charm at WalMart.

Uptight robots that suddenly beg to stay alive are less likely to be switched off by humans

Milo Tsukroff
Mushroom

No pity here

No pity here. Turn it off every time. You see, I bought a bunch of Furbies for my kids.... NEVER AGAIN!!

If only 3D desktop printers could 3D print sales! Units crash in Q1

Milo Tsukroff
Mushroom

They're Too Slow!!

Simple reason for why the sales downturn: They're Too Slow!!

We just wanna torque: Spinning transfer boffins say torque memory near

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Intriguing....

You wrote:

> I'd love to think that one day there will be no difference between storage

> and memory and programmes will run from where they are and merely

> be added to the 'stack' or running applications - rather than having to write

> them from one place to another in RAM et*c, but I am not sure if computer

> architecture and OSes are ready for this yet.

Real computers always did this, those with true computer architecture. Microprocessor-based computers have to copy data out of RAM, into on-board memory locations, and after processing is done, they have to copy the results back. I learned Assembly on the TI-99/4A, which was one of the only true computer-architecture microcomputers that was ever sold to the public. It used the TI TMS9900 chip, Its Assembly language included the LWPI (Load Workspace Pointer Immediate) instruction ... which does not exist in assembly languages for the Intel microprocessor lines. Because in those chips there is no workspace sitting in RAM along with programs and memory-mapped I/O, instead the workspace is replaced by on-board registers.

North Korea's antivirus software whitelisted mystery malware

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Sounds more like the NSA

> backdoors that protect it's evil overlords.

Backdoors ... like Spectre. Which showed up over 10 years ago, and is turning out to be devilishly hard to eliminate. Yep, sounds like the NSA.

Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, oi oi oi! Tech zillionaire Ray's backdoor crypto for the Feds is Clipper chip v2

Milo Tsukroff

Who needs a Clipper chip when there's SPECTRE?

So ... who needs a Clipper chip when there's Spectre? Funny how that "bug" showed up in almost everything starting about 10 years ago.

Pyro-brainiacs set new record with waste-heat-into-electricity study

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Natural gas vs renewable energy

> not many areas good for large wind turbines

This is a political fact, not a wind-energy fact. In Massachusetts, politicians passed laws to encourage wind turbines, and the big blades are all over the place (except off the shore, where wind energy is best, due to liberals who suddenly became ulta-conservatives and blocked them). In New Yawk, politicians have not encouraged wind turbines, so there are practically zero. And in New Yawk, they are shutting down the big Nuke plant, and replacing it ... with multiple gas-powered generation plants. And also, New Yawk politicians are also preventing gas fracking, so the gas for those replacement generators will come from out-of-state fracking. Energy in N.E. US has little to do with reality, a great deal to do with politics. 'Nuff said.

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

Milo Tsukroff
Boffin

Re: Replacing the batteries.

> Interesting that Tesla's lithium ion batteries seem to last forever

No, they lose 10% after 160 K miles. My personal testing on lithium batteries shows that, if I don't discharge them below about 50%, they can last for a very long time. Test case of an iPaq 951 lithium battery replaced in 2004 and not allowed to discharge much most of the time ... it's now down to 65% capacity after 14 years. Still going strong, but the battery is getting kinda bumpy though, since the case wasn't meant to last that long.

A developer always pays their technical debts – oh, every penny... but never a groat more

Milo Tsukroff
Pint

Re: the ruby community, documentation is considered a code smell

How convenient, indeed. Job Security. This whole thing about "The interest is the ongoing IT cost that those flaws are generating." is what Job Security is all about.

Well-written code with well-written documentation leads to ... wait for it ... Programming jobs becoming redundant. I've done that to myself, so I should know.

Ass-troplastic! Printing parts from p.. er... human waste

Milo Tsukroff
Meh

We need to go the other way...

Back on Earth, we need to go the other way. We need a way to turn plastic back into fertilizer, before the seas become so fouled we can walk from Newfoundland to Ireland over the bounding seas.

Microsoft patches patch for Meltdown bug patch: Windows 7, Server 2008 rushed an emergency fix

Milo Tsukroff
Coat

Keep laughing

I keep laughing ... If it's not COBOL, it's not stable.

I'll get my coat. It's the one with the Magic Brain Calculator in the pocket.

US states accused of skimming cash from 911 emergency call dosh

Milo Tsukroff
Holmes

> How the hell does that happen?

New York State is run by Democrats. George Washington's Farewell Address warnings about the spirit of party becoming a destructive force, tending towards (among other things) corruption, have come true. I live in New York, and the corruption and misuse of public funds is breath-taking. Nuff said.

Nunes FBI memo: Yep, it's every bit as terrible as you imagined

Milo Tsukroff
IT Angle

> Hatchet

> The truth is, though, that the memo amounts to little more than a hatchet job.

So is anything political from Washington, or anything else in the news from that swamp. Nothing about this has to do with IT. Doesn't belong in this otherwise fine British publication.

New York lobs $210m at telcos to hook up 120k homes, businesses with bumpkin broadband

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Should have used fixed wireless

> I presume there aren't any areas of NY state without cell service?

Plenty of areas lack cell service, the Catskills and Adirondacks especially. Makes hiking potentially dangerous. I always sign the trail register because even at the trailhead, there is often no cell service.

BOFH: Buttock And Departmental Defence ... As A Service

Milo Tsukroff
Coffee/keyboard

Re: And then some people wonder why I insist on quality keyboards

The old IBM keyboards hurt like the dickens when they land on a foot. Happens to me all the time.

Big shock: $700 Internet-of-Things door lock not a success

Milo Tsukroff

Re: Bah!

You wrote:

> nylon gears press-fitted on the shafts ...

> several examples from model locomotives ...

Yep, I have some of those loco locomotives too. They run ... nowhere, just sit and spin. And the door lock I recently replaced cost me ... $11. American plus tax.

Irony's lost on old Pope Francis: Pontiff decrees fake news a 'serious sin'

Milo Tsukroff
Coat

It's not fake news, it's Oral Tradition

It's not fake news, it's Oral Tradition. As good as Gospel. https://www.catholic.com/tract/scripture-and-tradition

I'll get my coat. Mine's the one with the bible in the pocket.

Sloppy coding + huge PSD2 changes = Lots of late nights for banking devs next year

Milo Tsukroff
Unhappy

Re: Microsoft’s .NET, Java

> "managed" languages (like the .NET lanaguages and Java)

> are significantly less problematic - no buffer overflows

> (unless you use P/Invoke or JNI)

That's not my experience with Java. I am a consumer in my current role. When using Java-based applications, Buffer-Overflows-R-Us. Some of the applications I support use WebSphere on Windows/PC architecture. I have to carefully use only certain Java versions to avoid the otherwise inevitable buffer overflow.

Milo Tsukroff
Flame

New applications aren't COBOL, give me a break

> Applications between five and 10 years old have the

> greatest potential for security flaws

Yep, that's because new applications are not written in COBOL! Give me a break, could people please get off this "COBOL is evil" and go to the domain experts.... show someone in Accounting what the code is doing in COBOL, after a half-hour you have them nodding their head and understanding. Other languages, such as C++, are so obtuse that I've heard a rumor that programmers love it because even their boss doesn't know what they're doing. Forget about a pencil-head ever understanding what the code is doing.

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