Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
panzer:
Number 7: Steve Irwin
Steve Irwin was a famous wild life presenter. He died in 2006 while filming his documentary “The Crocodile Hunter: Ocean’s Deadliest”. He died when a Stingray fish bit him.
[ Invalid Attachment ]
-IainB (April 08, 2017, 06:47 AM)
--- End quote ---
A comment from some other site:
"Steve Irwin ... died when a Stingray fish bit him." ... "Stingrays don't bite people, but they can kill them with a bony barb they happen to have in their tails though."
IainB:
^^ Yers. Very droll, no? (or maybe sad).
That's not the only thing that was wrong/ignorant/silly about the article. I think I emphasised the main bits as an attempt to save people the trouble of figuring it out.
I find it hard to believe that people actually set out, in all seriousness, to write that sort of nonsense. It's unwittingly a depressing comment about the prevailing standard of education. Maybe it's just an ignorant mistake and whoever made the post associated Steve Irwin with crocodiles and thought that "sting ray" was another name for a crocodile - hence the photo of him with the the croc? Who knows? And maybe that's a lake in the background to the photo because the stingray is a freshwater creature, and the croc's mouth is being held open by the Invisible Man. Stranger things have happened at sea. Oh, wait...
Arizona Hot:
silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]
Viral Sign Inside Deli Asks Customers To Refrain From Discussing Mathematics
IainB:
It's alive!
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Extracts from: Trump orders government to stop work on Y2K bug, 17 years later
The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that many feared would afflict computers at the turn of the century.
The Pentagon will also be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed about 1,200 man-hours every year.
“We’re looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters at the White House. He likened the move to the government “cleaning out our closets.”
Deregulation is a major ambition of President Trump’s agenda; he has signed more laws rolling back his predecessor’s regulations than the combined total of the three previous presidents since the process was established by the 1999 Congressional Review Act.
Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot because those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
Mulvaney said he hopes that by publicly eliminating the rules, departments and agencies will be inspired to review their own policies and procedures to reduce inefficiencies.
“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long since somebody asked them to look backward.”
____________________________
--- End quote ---
Recalling what historically (and from experience) appeared to be a barely-concealed and huge money-making Y2K hoax that IT consultants pulled on the world at large in the late '90s, I found the above news report (which I at first took to be "fake news" and a joke in the style of The Onion) both mind-boggling and amusing. It's also the closest I have seen anyone in govmint coming to publicly pointing to the lack of "the Emperor's new clothes" (re Y2K), without actually saying so in words. Yet, apparently here it is, identified and discovered, a zombie process buried in some continuing obscure US government business processes.
I've encountered some pretty awful revelations of mindless ritualised time-and-money-wasting bureaucratic behaviour and mumbo-jumbo, in different organisations/countries over the years, but this one is probably up there with the the worst of them. This zombie process has apparently been left undisturbed/intact for at least 17 years too. Pretty impressive! Well done chaps! :Thmbsup:
Probably the tip of the iceberg... (mutter, mutter)
IainB:
IB note: The song copied below is exactly as saved by me, as an external file to my Lotus Agenda database on 1998-06-24 20:36hrs, approx. 3 months before I was assigned to work as a consultant to manage the Change Mangement component of a huge Y2K project for PLDT (Philippines Long Distance Telephones) - this was the major telco and (copper wire) telecomms network operator in the Philippines.
I didn't ask for the job, but was assigned to it and could not be picky or refuse it, as I had put my hand up for work in SE Asia (good experience to put on my CV). The consultancy was getting paid approx. US$1,000/day for each of the several (including myself) senior overseas consultants who had been assigned to the project. The client (PLDT) had put out a tender for the work, as they assumed they needed the work done as an urgent risk discovery and mitigation exercise.
We duly assiduously slogged away on the project, holding action meetings to identify the Y2K and other cross-project risks and develop plans for mitigation of same, and where necessary, padding out technical reports to hundreds of pages when 20 would probably have sufficed in many cases. It was like being paid by the word.
"Our clients are paying us a great deal of good money for this work and they expect long technical reports as deliverables and as evidence that we have thoroughly covered the ground and done the work they tendered.", as our lead consultant put it, after I had politely suggested that we could consider planning for an early completion, shortening the duration of the project and the length of the reports.
Our consultancy had bid for and won the tender for this lucrative project (probably after paying the usual bribe agency marketing fee) and thus we were cynically hardly likely to be motivated to attempt to disabuse the clients of their largely false assumptions. (Who knows? They might have been right! Ha-ha.)
I promised myself that I would never allow myself to work on such a pointless, greedy and cynical exercise again.
The song below is actually quite good. It sounded quite rousing too, if a group of blokes with half-decent voices sang it together after lubricating their voiceboxes with half a dozen cans of San Miguel or Asahi Super-Dry beers. Or maybe the beer made it sound good. I forget. It was adopted as the unofficial "project song".
=================================
Works best if you sing it out loud!!!
--------------------------------------------------------
Two Digits for a Date
(to the tune of "Gilligan's Island," more or less)
- Author Unknown
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
Of the doom that is our fate.
That started when programmers used
Two digits for a date.
Two digits for a date.
Main memory was smaller then;
Hard disks were smaller, too.
"Four digits are extravagant,
So let's get by with two.
So let's get by with two."
"This works through 1999,"
The programmers did say.
"Unless we rewrite by then
It all will go away.
It all will go away."
But Management had not a clue:
"It works fine now, you bet!
A rewrite is a straight expense;
We won't do it just yet.
We won't do it just yet."
Now when 2000 rolls around
It all goes straight to hell,
For zero's less than ninety-nine,
As anyone can tell.
As anyone can tell.
The mail won't bring your pension check
It won't be sent to you
When you're no longer sixty-eight,
But minus thirty-two.
But minus thirty-two.
The problems we're about to face
Are frightening, for sure.
And reading every line of code's
The only certain cure.
The only certain cure.
[key change, big finish]
There's not much time,
There's too much code.
(And Cobol-coders, few)
When the century is finished with,
We may be finished, too.
We may be finished, too.
Eight thousand years from now I hope
That things weren't left too late,
And people aren't then lamenting
Four digits for a date.
Four digits for a date.
__________________________
The Y2K bug:
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version