08:55 – It’s really annoying when a later release of Linux breaks something that worked automagically in earlier releases. When I built a replacement for Barbara’s sister’s old system, I told Frances and her husband just to take it home and connect up their printer (a Brother MFC) and their webcam and it should Just Work. Although that was true on the earlier version of Ubuntu they’d been using, that turns out not to be the case with Linux Mint 13.
Not only did it not Just Work, but getting it to work is going to be non-trivial. The last time I installed their printer, I just brought up the printer administration window, choose Brother in the left pane and the correct model in the right pane, and Linux installed the proper drivers and auto-configured the printer, scanner, and fax functions. This time, Linux no longer offers the opportunity to choose make and model manually; it offers only the make/model it detects and offers no option to change or configure the drivers. So I’m going to have to do this the hard way.
Fortunately, I was able to find a page on the Brother web site that looks as though it should work: Brother Drivers for Linux® distributions
13:23 – We just got back from Frances’ house. Her printer and webcam are now working. Surprisingly, everything went smoothly and quickly.
I feel yer pain; I had Ubuntu 12.10 on this desktop and it wouldn’t see the damned Atheros ethernet controller no matter what I did, and I got tired of blowing time on it; but wireless was OK. Then, after an update, the wireless got borked, too. Between that and the other crap going on with Canonical, I got pissed and loaded Windows 8 on here, believe it or not; need backup for wife’s laptop and might have to take a gig at a Winblows shop if there’s nothing else. I have Fedora running in a vm, however, with no problem thus far, via Virtual Box. And I’m dumping Chrome and using Tor’s version of FF. Still have the RHEL 6.4 server and an old laptop running CrunchBang.
Gorgeous up here in Retroville all weekend and people out on the Bay in various watercraft; Maple Festival running downtown but I hate crowds and just dropped Mrs. OFD at the airport and she’s now on her way to Illinois for the week.
Probably too late now, but get
those tires and boardsChamp in the water now!I’m dumping Chrome and using Tor’s version of FF
Does the Tor ‘browser bundle’ include FF? I couldn’t make sense of the description on the Tor download page…
Tor browser runs FF Portable via Vidalia Control Panel.
https://www.torproject.org/
Will be studying patterns of people and watercraft in the Bay before deploying pseudo-Champ. And I have some nice huge truck tires I can use now.
One of the reasons I chose a Brother printer was the availability of Linux drivers. Having just installed a clean copy of OpenSuse 12.3, all I had to do was download three .RPM files from the site linked by our gracious overlord, install them in the correct order (lpr, cups, sane) and all was perfect. The USB port connects to either the laptop or the Linux desktop, the ethernet port to the Win box, and all is good with the world.
All is well in the world???? You mean every ass-muncher who wants to control other people has spontaneously combusted or had a stroke or been strung up from a telephone pole? Holy smokes, that is good news!
… Aw, crap. Your sights were aimed much lower, weren’t they? Dammit!
and might have to take a gig at a Winblows shop if there’s nothing else
It seems that more and more server shops support Windows Server operating systems nowadays, such as:
http://www.hostgator.com/windows-dedicated-servers
We took a shot at moving from desert back to subtropical yesterday here in the Houston Metropolitan area. Anywhere from 9 inches of rain to 2 inches, we got the short end here on the west side. It has been a fairly cool spring here with several low temperature records busted recently and a couple more potentials this week. I am holding out for more rain to fill my water ponds. We had four hours of power loss here at the house last night and had to find the battery operated lanterns. My favorite lantern is the coleman personal led:
http://www.amazon.com/Coleman-CPX6-Rugged-Personal-Lantern/dp/B00339B0RC/
In a side interest, I talked to a farmer Friday about farming 5 acres of land that I own. No interest whatsoever as the minimum that he likes is 40 acres with his 16 row tractor. It was running while we talked with the engine 6 feet off the ground and the diesel just a cranking. Big powerful John Deere.
http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/18/governments-opinion-of-you-in-thirteen-words/
These senators and other reps and corporate nabobs are in for a very rude awakening in just a few more years. We shall see who will be quiet.
I’ve been seeing writeups recently about the purported connection between psychiatric drugs and killing. Here is a rewrite of the info to date, not much but looking very scary, “Gun advocates and others push meds-shootings link”:
http://www.chron.com/default/article/Gun-advocates-and-others-push-meds-shootings-link-4469277.php
“IT IS NOT GUNS” that are to blame for mass shootings, Piazza wrote. Rather, “the common denominator (is) the creation of strong, mind altering, psychiatric drugs … these drugs create the monsters who are killing their parents, teachers and schoolmates.””
“Approximately 63 million individuals in America are taking psychiatric medications, according to one estimate.”
Both people that I know who committed suicide were coming off depressants and switching to other drugs.
I’d like to see where that estimate comes from; one in five Americans on “psychiatric medications”? How so? How defined? Why not shitloads more related suicides? What the common denominator seems to be with the mass shootings perps is that they all had messed-up heads to start with, due to various issues and circumstances, and then got on whatever meds, and either kept using them, switched them, or went off them, with or without any supervision. The guy out in Aurora and the one down in CT were both wack jobs from the git-go.
In any case they represent a tiny, tiny minority of the causes of death in this country and only get the attention they do because of media sensationalism. A hundred or more years ago it was lurid knifings or stranglings or poisonings.
Two more days on the Plantation and then back on the streets again looking for work. Me and a few hundred others, looks like. New gig I’m being screened for is a Windoze shop that wants clearances, and will provide training for, get this: A+, Network +, Server +, Security +, HDI Help Desk something or other, and ITIL Foundation. Yet another defense contractor. Gotta know AD and Exchange, too. This will be interesting, coming off two years with RHEL. Nothing to lose, though.
Mrs. OFD is in Naperville, Illinois for a week; Princess is in Toronto; son and DIL and grandkids are moving to MA next month. Only ol’ OFD sits here in Retroville still….a busy day on the Bay today; lotsa activity, temps near 70 all weekend and sunny. Worked on lawn and raised beds and will now have plenty of time for housework and yahd.
I’d like to see where that estimate comes from; one in five Americans on “psychiatric medications”?
Aren’t a significant number of kids, mostly male, on ADD drugs?
In any case they represent a tiny, tiny minority of the causes of death in this country and only get the attention they do because of media sensationalism.
Yes, but the point that Piazza is trying to make is that the politicians are trying to make gun laws based on these specific whackjob individuals. And these whackjobs are drugged to their gills with some really nasty stuff.
New gig I’m being screened for is a Windoze shop that wants clearances, and will provide training for, get this: A+, Network +, Server +, Security +, HDI Help Desk something or other, and ITIL Foundation.
Good luck! I have not even heard of even half of those acronyms.
“A+, Network +, Server +, Security +, HDI Help Desk something or other, and ITIL Foundation.”
I think I’ve heard of A+.
Does anyone still go for MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA? 15 years ago I thought about doing an MCSE or MCDBA but never followed through. I get the impression that M$ were throwing them around like confetti.
Good luck with that. At least Insight and Remedy aren’t on the list so you can thank your lucky stars.
I was reading at Jerry Coyne’s website that Sam Harris, one of the four horsemen, is not only a martial arts enthusiast but also a gun enthusiast, and says the solution to Sandy Hook is more guns, not less. Jerry mentioned this without comment (a big surprise, as he usually slags pro-gun people) but one of his fanboys said they’d unsubscribed from Sam’s site over this. I didn’t even know he had a site.
M$ keeps tinkering with its certs programs and they change about every coupla years so no sooner have you got one, it becomes obsolete and you need to move on to the next one. Both because the technology is changing so fast and it’s a nice racket.
Harris fools around with Brazilian ju-jitsu and there’s a piece on him in the current Atlantic Monthly. We learn that he is 5’9″ and 165 and gets off on nearly strangling other people and nearly being strangled himself.
I feel your pain, Bob. I just had a KDE update break DigiKam, and of course Xorg higher than 1.13 breaks the Proprietary ATI graphics drivers. I’m on the verge of switching to Debian Stable; I must be getting old…
Cheers, Rod
I get the impression that M$ were throwing them around like confetti.
it’s a nice racket.
Bingo. Nice cash cow racket for M$ and the training companies. I went to one of the courses thinking I really needed the training. While I did learn something, what I learned did not apply to my situation. If I needed to know that information I could just as well have used the web.
But what was really astounding was the course I took was part of a certification path. The other seven bozos in the class were taking the class, along with several other classes, to get their certifications. Dunces all of them. I would not have hired anyone one of them. I would much prefer to get someone who has been working in the environment and as such did not have time to spend weeks on end in classes. Yeh, the geek level was high for these people, but the smarts were severely lacking.
Of course the training company was pleased to have these people as they were spending big bucks for these courses. And the testing companies were happy because they got a couple hundred every time the geeks failed took one of the tests, and generally failing a few times.
Yeah, I was on both sides of the certification mess. I got my CNE back before such a thing as “paper CNEs” existed. There weren’t a lot of courses available. Maybe none at that time. Novell sold study materials, but to pass all the tests you had to really know your stuff from hands-on work. I ran a 3.12 Netware installation at home, and later 4.0. Once I got the CNE, I proceeded directly to the Enterprise level (ECNE). I think I was the second ECNE in North Carolina. The Master CNE came along later. I honestly don’t remember if I even bothered to get the MCNE.
After I’d started writing books in the mid- to late-90’s, a company called DigitalThink contacted my agent about doing a series of on-line MCSE courses on Windows NT. I’d just done Windows NT Server for Netware Administrators for O’Reilly, so DT thought I was a natural fit. I did five courses for them, and the advance money was decent. They screwed me on royalties, though. The contract said they’d pay my percentage on gross sales, but they unilaterally decided to pay on net, as they defined net. My agent and I considered suing them, but concluded that the costs and hassle would be more than it was worth. Of course, I never did write another course for them.
As others here note, experience generally trumps certs in the job market but still, many places like to see the certifications as some sort of validation that a candidate knows something about the technology, which could all be bullshit, of course. It’s usually HR drones and hags and upper-level manglers who buy into this stuff; the first-line manglers and team leads don’t, as a rule, and many of them who came up through the ranks brag about how they don’t have any certs. The best ones are performance-based, anyway, like Red Hat’s and Cisco’s. Not sure yet how M$ handles their actual exams and not gonna bother looking into it unless I actually land one of these M$-centric gigs. I would look at it as part of the job and I’d only be doing it on corporate time, although I keep hearing from industry pundits that we should be overjoyed to continue our tech learning and cert training “on our own time and on our own dime.” Sure, I bet CEO’s and CIO’s love that!
Meeting with mangler rep tomorrow to “turn in my assets,” i.e., this sweet little Thinkpad laptop running RHEL 6.4 and a Windows 7 vm, and my ID/access badge. What’s funny is that my corporate mangler just re-certified me for ITAR the same day I got the RIF notification.
I’ll spend today and tomorrow handing over any helpful crap like notes and CDs to the noobs I trained to replace me; at least they’re American citizens who speak English and live in the area (they just made it under the wire through some kind of tricky corporate grant from another internal organization). One is even an Army veteran, who, naturally, spent HIS whole tour in Germany. Bugger.
Screwing people on contracts is a big nuisance. A lot of companies have a lot of specialized experience in calculating just how much they can cheat on their contracts before it becomes worthwhile for the other party to sue. For example, General Electric Power Systems is big in Schenectady, NY. They’ll sign contracts with consultants agreeing that payment will be, say, net 30 with a 10% discount for early payment, but they’ll actually take 90 or 180 days to pay and still take the discount. Consultants are invited to sue if they feel cheated, but it doesn’t do much good because the Schenectady judges know which side of their bread is buttered. (No, I’ve never been burned by this myself. Not taking a GE contract was one of the few good business decisions I ever made.)
Part of the problem from the cheatee’s point of view is that you can sue for damages but not for a penalty. That is, if CompanyA cheated you out of $1000, you can sue only for that amount. Thus, there really is no reason for CompanyA not to cheat as much as they think they can get away with. One remedy would be some kind of penalty, such as 10x damages if they cheat and you have to sue. I’ve never found a single company willing to sign a contract with a penalty clause in it, even after I suggested that they had nothing to fear if they didn’t try to cheat me.
Similar applies to royalties for articles and books and music. Probably applies even more, because the author/artist/creator is totally dependent on the company’s statements regarding sales and therefore royalties due. If I understand the situation correctly, cheating on royalties began about five minutes after the concept was invented.
re certifications, I’ve never had any use for them. The first I encountered was Novell’s CNE just as the “paper CNEs” were ramping up. I, a programmer who picked up some stuff while helping my employer set up networks, was advising CNEs on this-n-that with network setup and telling them why whatever they were trying wasn’t going to work. How impressive. Then the same with MS certifications, then a few years later with Java certs. Left a bad taste in my mouth, so I’m defiantly uncertified. Moreover, I take a hard line now and refuse to assist certified whatevers on stuff they should know.
Yep. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never written since the DT thing for anyone other than O’Reilly. O’Reilly is honest.
I also got screwed by Microsoft, who hired me to write a white paper about Windows NT versus Netware 3.12. Supposedly, it was for internal use only and they wanted me to be critical of and completely honest about the things that NT didn’t do as well as Netware. So that’s the paper I wrote, and they were outraged. They claimed it wasn’t what they’d contracted me to write, even though it clearly was, and they refused to pay the $25,000 they’d agreed to pay. My agent ended up settling with them for a lousy $2K kill fee.
Basically, what they wanted was a marketing white paper that would whitewash NT flaws and present it as a superior choice to Netware, which at the time it clearly wasn’t. They intended to post it on their web site for potential buyers to read. I don’t know why they lied in the first place. If they’d told prospective authors what they really wanted, they wouldn’t have had any problem finding one to do it for them. I wouldn’t have done it, but someone sure would have.
Come to think of it, that MS whitepaper may have been contrasting NT 4 against Netware 4. The only specific item I remember was that NT had a flat userspace across domains, which is a serious flaw in an enterprise-level NOS.
I’ll spend today and tomorrow handing over any helpful crap like notes and CDs to the noobs I trained to replace me
Why? I see no reason to assist the incoming worker drones. Give them the company documentation as that is owned by the company. What is in your head is yours.
Last time I left a company that was not by my choice I gave all the documentation that I had, including signons etc. What I did not provide was the tidbit of information about that complicated line of code that had to be changed monthly or the system would crash. (It was not my code.)
25 days after I left I got a call about the system crashing and the new worker bee wanting to know what to do. I just said that I was no longer affiliated with the company but was available for consulting at $1,000 an hour portal to portal. They never got back to me. Probably just rewrote the system.
OFD wrote:
“Harris fools around with Brazilian ju-jitsu and there’s a piece on him in the current Atlantic Monthly. We learn that he is 5’9″ and 165 and gets off on nearly strangling other people and nearly being strangled himself.”
In other words, he’d make a good Tory cabinet minister…
As far as knowledge domains go these days (you can take or leave the associated certs as previously discussed), SAs should be familiarizing themselves with virtualization in all its forms (compute, storage, network) and cloud if they can. One can also branch out to security. FWIW, the VMware cert has value as does the CISSP.
As to managing hours, try to hook up with software development as they keep reasonable hours and you can do much remotely. You’ll need to know SOME programming to converse with the team.
Funny how one of the holy grails of certs, the CCNE, is now devalued due to Cisco vendor backlash at a not insignificant number of businesses.
I’m nearly sixty now and not about to learn a new programming language; I can manage shell scripting via PowerShell, bash and vim and that’s it. And the VMware certs and CISSP are too expensive and too long to do; I’d be dead before I finished those. That advice is probably good for a younger person starting out and getting their feet wet; and ten or twenty or thirty years from now, after they’ve been put through various wringers and wrung dry, they’ll be in the same boat I am now. (damn, that’s a lotta nautical imagery, ain’t it, funny how that just rolled out…). Sinking, that is.
What’s gonna suck is having to mess with a whole raft of Windoze stuff again, looks like. This job I just got dumped from is the best one I’ve had in fifteen years. Oh well, time to hit the bricks again.
Have you thought about starting your own business, maybe part-time to start with? Even if you’re working full-time at a regular job, if you can make something that people want to buy, it’s pretty easy to get a web store front set up.
http://www.unc.edu/courses/jomc050/idog.jpg
Yeah, I have thought of that; will have to study on it some more; had a good talk with the guy I turned my stuff in to earlier this afternoon; he works at the Plantation but has some sort of internet commerce thing going after hours from his home and it’s growing to the extent that he’s looking for people or will be shortly to help out. Dunno if it’s b.s. or not but he seems on the up-and-up. Hope it’s not more sales/marketing junk; I get enough of that in spam. We shall see.
Mrs. OFD actually has an internet biz already selling the beach glass and clay jewelry she makes; so fah, though, it looks like more time and expense go into the making than is justified by the returns, and she can’t really spend much time on it anymore because her regular gig is going crazy now; she’s gone for the next three weeks. Since the various shootings and bombings in the country, the thing she and her colleagues do is in increasing demand.
I will have to study up on it, though; must be something I can do/make/sell.
Services is where it’s at, not physical goods. Haven’t you heard we’re in a service economy now?
How about… an alibi service. “Why, yes, I was having dinner with ol’ Steve last Friday between about 6 and 8 PM. No, I didn’t see anyone else as we were sitting by the side of the lake.”
Not bad. Alibis, arrangements, assassinations……and we’re still on the A’s here…
Yo, anytime ya need one just call. “Yeah, Steve? Him and me were cleaning up all the dead alewives that gave off that awful stench on the shore last night; took us hours.”
Actually said alewive fingerlings have been devoured in their entirety by shore birds. They got caught under the late ice and then pushed ashore; whole village here smelled like a friggin’ cannery for a few days.
Sounds like a plan, OFD, except for one leeetle problem: I made a crockpot of homemade pork and beans a few days ago, replacing some of the water (to rehydrate the dried beans) with vinegar. That was the only difference from how I normally make them, and I’m going to have to call it a disastrous experiment. I don’t care how bad dead fish, a nitrogen-rich compost heap, or Champ’s breath smell, I smell worse.
I’m not a chemist nor do I play one on tee-vee but I am guessing the vinegar had a bad reaction with either the pork or the beans.
My Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors down in Maffachufetts learned how to fertilize their corn, squash and beans with dead fish; if I’d thought of it in time, I woulda run out and grabbed up a few bushel-fuls of them for our gahden here.
OFD wrote:
“I’m nearly sixty now and not about to learn a new programming language…”
Oh come on!
Learning programming languages is easy. I became proficient in Pascal after a few months in 1977, then Fortran in a few weeks, then…
Once you learn a language it just gets easier and easier to learn more. Some languages (Cobol, I’m looking at you!) are evil and unpleasant, but not really hard to learn.
I grew up on Fortran and assembly, but I always kind of liked Cobol.
Sitting at a screen all day coding is not my idea of a fun way to earn a living. I much prefer working with the hardware. But I had considered possibly learning Python or Ruby at one time, as I got deeper into open source stuff. Now, why bother? If I gotta learn another language it should probably be re-learning French, for starters, and a refresher on Latin. At one time I considered classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic but I do not have our daughter’s gift for such pursuits; she can pick up any language in about a week and right now is taking Intensive Russian and Intensive German simultaneously at McGill.
As for pooters, the shells are about all I wanna mess with from here on out. bash, vim and Powershell, if I have to.
Mrs. OFD just called from Naperville, Illinois and she’s in a hotel inside some office park there and there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. My next-younger brother was out there for biz years ago and said it was cornfields in the 70s and then Megalopolis by the 90s. She’ll be home for Saturday night and then back out to Illinois again for another week and then straight to a gig in CT. Recent events on the national scene and business is booming, pun intended.
You “kind of liked” Cobol? How weird.
I hated it from when I first learnt it in 1978 but took a pragmatic decision to get on top of it because knowing Cobol was a meal ticket for computer programmers. I was overjoyed in about 1982 to learn PL/1 and use that instead. I then moved to a different organization and got to use Pascal, Fortran and Compass assembler. Talk about the best job in the world!
Fortran used to be the computer language of heaven, but was replaced in that role in about 1970 when Pascal became available. CDC 6000 Series Compass has been the assembly language of heaven since Seymour Cray (may peace and blessings be upon him) and others developed it in the Sixties.
OFD wrote:
“…a refresher on Latin. At one time I considered classical Greek…”
Since I’ll soon have mucho time on my hands I may brush up on my Latin too, as Cicero (may peace and blessings be upon him) spoke it, not the bastardized version used in the Vatican cafeteria. 20 years ago I did a year of NT Greek, my tutor said I’d need to do another year at the same intensity to be able to read the NT fluently. Hebrew is in the too hard basket at the moment, as it isn’t Indo-European.
“Have you thought about starting your own business, maybe part-time to start with?”
One of my pals toyed with the idea in 1999-2000. He was quite good at Perl and participated in various Perl fora and IRC channels. Some people made very good money and had as much piece work as they wanted, all online. But those people had become known and trusted. Breaking into the select group wasn’t easy, and he went to work for an employer, which he hates. Getting known and trusted is going to be Dave’s biggest problem if he goes down that path.
Now that’s weird. I grew up on Barbaric and Sadistic Instruction Code (BASIC). I found Fortran to be a slight improvement, but so far my favorite programming language has been Pascal. C and its derivatives aren’t bad, but they can be tedious.
I predate BASIC.
Well, technically not, as Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1964. But when I wrote my first program in 1968 I’d certainly never heard of BASIC.
I only did a week of Basic back in the stone age (1978), and it never really grew on me. I very much liked Fortran and loved Pascal.
All Hail Niklaus Wirth!
Dave,
If it’s hardware you’re interested in, consider storage: DAS, NAS, SAN, SATA, SAS, FC, SSD, a veritable alphabet soup of possibilities ^_^. Seriously, every business needs storage and someone that’s good at it, and vendor neutral (don’t just do EMC, but look at NetApp and others), is very much in demand. Just being able to present the LUNs of a given box as an iSCSI target for VMware or HyperV goes a long way…
.mg
Thanks, Mike G.; as it happens, I have been noticing what you’ve said about storage both at work in my most recent position (NetApp was starting to rear up but then got shoved down again by upper manglers) and the job descriptions I’ve seen lately also mention this stuff a lot more than they used to. Good point!
I grew up on Fortran and assembly, but I always kind of liked Cobol.
I’m very sorry to hear that. Real programmers can write Fortran in any language, I’ve proven that many times in C and C++.
I wrangle 800,000 lines of Fortran code and 800,000 lines of C++ code every day. For programmer convenience, C++ wins the battle hands down for me. Both generate fast code which is very important for three phase thermodynamics due to frigging non-linearities in the various equations of state.
BTW, I ran my first Basic program in 1971 on a Univac 1108 teletype. Lunar Lander. I was hooked for hours and ran through an entire roll of paper.
CDC 6000 Series Compass has been the assembly language of heaven since Seymour Cray (may peace and blessings be upon him) and others developed it in the Sixties.
And God spoke to Seymour and said, “36 bits is not enough”. And Seymour said, “how about 60 bits for them words?”. And God was pleased.
And then it came to pass that IBM created words with only 32 bits. And the market was pleased. And then God created the dreaded silent underflow error to punish programmers.
In the Eighties I thought IBM personified evil. I’ve calmed down a bit since but I still think the BUNCH, especially CDC, made technically superior hardware and software.
32 bit words are freaking evil. 36 bit words was ok but needed 8 bits instead of 6 bits so we could have lowercase (I noticed that the IRS finally got rid of their Univac 1108s three years ago). 60 bit and 64 bit words are sweet!
Lynn wrote:
“60 bit and 64 bit words are sweet!”
Amen brother! You would have liked dual state CDC Cybers, which had two instruction sets: one for legacy 170 mode operating systems like NOS and NOS/BE and the other for a really sweet operating system called NOS/VE. The former used 60 bit words and ones’ compliment. The latter used 64 bit words, twos’ complement and had a vast (for the time) address space.
A site could run a single Cyber that would flip between the two states without the user being aware or needing to know, depending on workload. We had six Cyber 180s at one stage, but the dopes in management wouldn’t let us use NOS/VE except in a trivial sense. (They were hell bent on getting IBM type gear and MVS.)
All Hail CDC! All Hail Seymour Cray!
And don’t say too many nasty things about 32 bit words. OFD was a DEC-head and probably still has wet dreams about VAXes.
All Hail CDC! All Hail Seymour Cray!
And don’t say too many nasty things about 32 bit words. OFD was a DEC-head and probably still has wet dreams about VAXes.
Yes, Seymour was visionary. I never saw a Cray in person but they look cool in the pictures:
http://www.craysupercomputers.com/cray2.htm
I have an extreme right to gripe about 32 bit computers. We developed our software on 36 bits (6.5 digits of precision in floating point). The roll down to 32 bits was a major problem for us trying to get 6 digits (1 ppm) of floating point precision. We had all kinds of patches in our software trying to get to six digits, especially in our thermodynamic three phase adiabatic (constant enthalpy, constant pressure, varying temperature) flash. Our algorithm would drop a half digit and then we would be hosed. I finally decided about 15 years ago that we had to go double precision come hell or high water. Then we had to reverse our single precision fixes. Took years to implement and find all the bugs.
Wet dreams about VAXen, yep. And that’s “DECoid.” Not “DEC-head.” I worked on DEC stuff from the PDP-11 through OpenVMS 7.1 and would happily work with it again, but the only activity with it seems to be in the northwestern European countries, particularly Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Maybe I can score a gig over there…
I’d work on CDC Cybers running NOS/BE in a flash, even though NOS/BE is circa 1975 software.
the only activity with it seems to be in the northwestern European countries, particularly Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Maybe I can score a gig over there…
if only you knew someone who was traveling to that area soon and could pass out your bona fides throughout the area. Oh well… 🙂
Oh crap, that woulda been Ray; too late. Oh wait–Princess is passing through for the summuh!! She ought to be happy to pass out my c.v. there and get rid of me, if possible.
Excellent idea! The hen party can stay here and I’ll be over there……. mit den Mädchen in ihren tief ausgeschnittenen Blusen trägt riesige Bierkrüge Bier zu mir und flüstert schöne Lieder in meinem Ohr …
Hen party?
Hen party = two or more of the Other Gender yakking away incessantly about nothing much.
Ah, in Australia a hen party is the female equivalent of a buck’s night. I thought you were about to become a father in law… 🙂