Audit the Fed (cube)!
Readit Newsdlinder commented on The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million calvin.sh/blog/fed-lie/... · Posted by u/c249709
Around 1995, our high school "Pascal I" and "Pascal II" classes were taught in a forgotten Apple //e lab in the Math wing of the school. The PC and Mac labs were occupied by typing, word processing, and desktop publishing classes. I think every other kid in class groaned, but to a hamfest scrounger of PDPs, Vaxen, and weird UNIX workstations, UCSD p-System Pascal on Apple hardware was weirdly intriguing, the cherry on top being that the whole lab was served by a Corvus hard disk shared over, I think, an "Omninet" network. We'd all come in, turn on the lights, turn on the computers, and then have the lecture portion of class while this poor early NAS would serve Pascal to 20-odd machines simultaneously. I think we saved our work on floppy disks, though maybe that was a backup, as I think I recall turning in our work by saving to the Corvus? Even at the time, it all had a very "you are living the early experimental days" feeling to it.
dlinder commented on Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/signa11
This brings to mind the legendary "property passes" from Commodore / Amiga. These were passes to remove property from the office, so if you brought in personal property, you'd need to get a property pass issued to remove it at the end of the day. Of course the security guy handing out the passes was clueless, so the engineers would get property passes for Boeing 747s, Cray X-MPs (just in case Commodore ever bought a cray, the lucky holder of the property pass would presumably be able to wheel it out the door), and so on. Dave Haynie records these stories in his "Deathbed Vigil", though the property pass story seems virtually unmentioned on the textual web, aside from an everything2 source.
What email should they use?
You can also write to longbets@longnow.org - but we will have the registration open again shortly (within weeks).
Dan @ Long Now
WarGames and Real Genius were the regular weekly watch (on VHS!) between my brother and I growing up. What WarGames is to computer hacking, Real Genius is to hacking, pranks, and working hard / playing hard.
"It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility."
That's awesome and the solution is not as uncommon as you'd imagine.
At "a large telecom" I used to work at, we had a specific process that handled billing that relied on a DOS application which was written targeting a specific modem's hardware. They'd tried to migrate it to something else for quite some time but the guy who wrote it lived in a different state and was let go from the company when we closed that site down and moved all of its equipment to Detroit. It ran on an old Compaq (not HP Compaq, Compaq) desktop PC and in 2014 or our VP received a frantic call that the drive had failed and the computer wouldn't boot (from a younger tech who was used to working on server class hardware). The code for this application had been lost forever and nobody had any idea how it actually worked but my understanding was that with it not functional, we were losing enough money to make it a "drop everything priority".
They brought the machine over to my building and the VP of my department called me to assist[0]. Sure enough, the system wouldn't even see the drive. It was at this point that I noticed three numbers with the letters "C", "H", "S" next to each. This had happened before, apparently, and someone discovered the BIOS battery had died. Thankfully, they were kind enough to put the drive parameters on a label for me. I popped into the BIOS, put 'em in and it booted. The computer remained powered on in the cubicle I repaired it in (just outside said VP's office) for a year until the dev team got around to modernizing the code.
[0] I was not a support person at this time but was in the past and it wasn't unusual for them to call me in on strange problems. I was also known for having recovered a hard drive with important data on it using the break-room fridge (though I'm not sure this VP was aware of that).
You sound like a kindred spirit. I have put hard drives in freezers to release stiction; I have baked motherboards in the oven to re-flow questionable solder. I wonder if anything in our kitchen is sacred! Sometimes I wish I had "MacGyvering goofy tech junk" as a full time job!
I worked on a social news product and part of our look was to have an icon for every story - either an image pulled from the page, a user-uploaded image, or, in the case of Flash content (say, a video player), a screen capture.
We had it all up and running - loading the content, waiting for the player to initialize, taking the snapshot, generated sizes - on a windows machine when, one day, the request came in to migrate that machine to a VM. After the migration, things were fine - until we disconnected RDP. Snapshots were coming back at the right size, but totally white.
The eventual "solution" was a laptop in the engineering area RDP'ed into this VM to keep the snapshots from going white. It got unplugged one holiday weekend, earning it a red hand-sharpied sign - "PRODUCTION LAPTOP: DO NOT UNPLUG". It was unplugged again one fateful weekend, this time prompting a healthcheck to be written that looked for all-white images in its output.
That rig ran that way, I believe, until someone had the insight to make a second VM, this one RDP'ed into the first.
Turtles, all the way down!