With suitable bows to Sir Pterry, being asked to solve a problem with no data or diagnostics options should be a 1:1,000,000 incident but almost everyone reading El Reg will have a story of when they hit this brick wall...hell, it even happened in those dim and distant days of the Pharoahs when people had to interpret forgotten dreams. Come to think of it, that reminds me of all too many managers I have worked for

Solving a problem without data, diagnostic options or even full access to the device is a bit akin to having to steer a black spaceship where all the controls are labelled in black letters on a black background, and whenever you push one a little black lamp lights up black to show that you have done it.

Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams

Imagining that is making me feel sick. But then you could do with a bit of colour round the place!

Remember the Pentium fdiv bug? It was very, very rare, until you were doing 3-rendering, when the errors made vertices leap about all over the place as you rotated the model.

" The software won't care about a Russian sub in downtown Dallas. "

" How did you know? "

Not that I've been to Dallas, but I'm fairly sure you wouldn't need the software to notice something like a Submarine trundling down the high street there.

> you wouldn't need the software to notice something like a Submarine trundling down the high street there.

It's not something you sea every day...

OTOH a yellow one in Liverpool wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

> To illustrate his point, he joked: "The software won't care about a Russian sub in downtown Dallas."

Shame it wasn't in the UK or there could have been a n excellent dad joke about Wakefield...

That’s very Astute of you…

Here, have a Whiskey on the Hotel, If you fancy a round of Golf later just ask for the pro Victor...

These jokes are HMS Tireless...

Calm down dear, you sound Truculent...

There needs to be a Swiftsure Resolution to all these puns

We need to Upholder some standards...

Be careful though after the Foxtrot and Tango exhibit during the Typoon with Romeo and Juliett you can still hear the Echo of that Yankee Charlie twisting his ankle tripping on that twenty Kilo portable cooler, so Papa and Oscar have to take Mike to Lima for his flight with Delta home to Quebec.

Here, have a Whiskey on the Hotel

I like mine on the rocks.

All the time with BAE and the like. A year doesn't go by with an issue arising, that comes down to usually some simple maths being ignored by the big defence contractors. One sticks out was the Prince of Wales carrier. They were having welding failures, I did some checks with decades old tried-and-trusted standards tables, saw a pretty basic error that made it into the welding procedure. The solution was simple, correct the procedure! Oh no, procedures once approved cannot be changed, can I work some magic? I pointed out that they were asking me to correct their mistake, without changing the materials, the maths or the procedure, and left.

Last I heard the process had descended into farce. They were knowingly carrying out a defective procedure, so they could then follow it with the corrective action procedure for failures which was factors of cost more expensive. It added millions to the job and many months.

I seem to have developed a bit of a reputation in the industry for being that guy that's awkward and unhelpful "He can't help, all he does is come down, show us some maths, and tells us we are doing it wrong".

Time and materials.

The dream of any supplier, and the nightmare of any diligent worker or customer.

My employer had contracted a shiny new building to go up. We were close to "first fix" and discovered an error in some of the cabling specs. We pointed it out and said it the material costs were the same and the installation labour would be the same too, so could they just use the correct cable?

"No. It'll cost too much in lawyers time to get the contract amended for such a small amount. You'll have to replace the cables once the building is handed over."

We had a quiet word with the sub-sub-sub-contractors: We'll sign off the cable installation if they installed nothing. This alone would save us time & money in pulling out the wrong cables (or any potential damage to other things). With it being a new building the runs weren't too bad so the installation of the correct cable was fairly easy. What contractor doesn't mind being paid to do nothing?

Not just big defence clients. We had a complaint from a very large US telco that our X.25 software kept disconnecting when they established a PAD (terminal) connection. After investigation we found that their PAD was sending a parameter value that was illegal according to the coloured book standards, and we were rightly rejecting it. When we pointed this out their response was along the lines of "hmm, yes, you're right, but we have thousands of these systems deployed. Can you change your software to allow for this?". We refused, pointing out that such a change would break our standards compliance certification, and lose us all our government clients. They went quiet.

A few weeks later we got a sharp message from our CEO, who had been golfing with the telco CEO, asking why we were unable to fix our software. Clearly the telco staff had not admitted to their CEO that they were at fault. We replied to our boss with the email chain & support info, and never heard any more about it (our CEO could be very blunt when required).

I've head a story abut Italian trains. Normal Italian trains are running with a 3000V DC supply. French trains are running with a 1500 V DC supply, and Italy and France share a border, so on two train lines there are a change between 3000 and 1500 V. Old Italian locomotives could run on 1500 V at basically half speed, so it wasn't a big deal on a border station to mix Italian and French passenger trains.

Italian railways bough new trains that use a lot of power electronics and forgot to ask the dual voltage option.

The trains could be modified with a relatively small aftermarket extra circuit that makes the computers controlling the engine happy. But instead Italian railways decided to change part of the stations to run with 3000 V power, and maintain in services the older trains and use diesel railcars in the meantime.

I thought you were going to say that someone ran a French 1500v train onto the Italian 3kv rail. I suppose that would have been more of a Who Me story...

Then again I know of at least one French mainline station where they had to take an angle grinder to the concrete platform edge, after discovering that the new (German ?) trains theyd bought required a few cm larger loading gauge than the older ones...

I worked as a food delivery driver for a couple of years while i was in university, and one of our repeat customers worked late shifts at the Royal Dutch Mint. I've never seen a bag of chips be so thoroughly checked and cleared through security. (A prison i also regularly delivered had significantly less security in place).

Fatal* mistake. These types have absolutely zero sense of humour. Dealing with them a) avoid, b) run away, c) [1]three wise monkey ¤ time.

Given this must have been ca 1965-70 I suspect the state of art of civilian (satellite) infrared imaging was no where near the capability of detecting the small temperature differential from the heat from a Soviet ☆ nuclear submarine up to 30 feet (~9m) below the surface that Tristran surmised was the case. Probably highly classified.

Another thing about these nutjobs is that they are incapable understanding how a reasonably intelligent, rational human being could take the evidence of their eyes, apply a little logic and smidgen of imagination and arrive at largely the correct conclusion.

So long ago I suspect that the usual hardware guy's ploy of shifting responsibility to the (client's) software developer wasn't routine.

The "Cone of Silence" and 86's shoe phone are fond memories from Get Smart (99 was cute too. ;)

* potentially literally ¤ graphic's chosen for the 4th monkey ☆ AFAIK never actually enemies of the US

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Four_wise_monkeys.jpg/800px-Four_wise_monkeys.jpg

These types have absolutely zero sense of humour.

Even though that doesn't exactly reflect my experience. Then again, I also discovered sparks of humour in US immigration officers.

It probably would have been Green-Red-NIR film (compared to normal film which is Blue-Green-Red).

With this type of film once developed green shows up as blue, red shows up as green and infrared shows up as red. This was a popular type of film for military surveillance since foliage reflects IR nearly completely but most manmade objects absorb it. Kodak Aerochrome is an example of this type of film if you want examples of what it looks like.

Maybe submarines operating near the surface were churning up algae and that is what they were detection?

I know of one very small piece of gernment was instructed by spooks to have a forensic security assessment carried on on one innocuous application as it may have been attacked.

How was it attacked? Can't tell you

Who attacked us? Not telling

What did they do? Not saying

Who is paying for this? You are.

So they forked out 30k for a forensic analysis and I don't think the spooks ever shared the results.

Seriously, you leave us here without naming the calculator model in question?!

I do know an engineer who was called out to a government office in London to fix a reported hard disk failure. When he arrived he was escorted to a bare basement room containing just the computer, with the offending disk removed "for security"! Not really much he could do, other than arrange for a new HD to be shipped for the department's own team to install and configure.

Ahh yes, removable hard disks. I did work for a certain UK military agency that had loads of desktop PCs (laptops not allowed) that handled SECRET aand above; they all had removable hard drives that where taken out when not being used and locked up in a safe. The also rand Windows XP (this is only a few years ago). A friend of mine took his hard drive out at the end of the day then realised that the PC had not finished shutting down. Subsequent checks found that a lot of files on the drive had been trashed, and there was no backup (because of the classification of some of the data). If you think security are humourless, wait to you see an IT geek tasked to recover that sort of data SNAFU.

While not classified stuff, client of ours sold a set of xray machines to HMRC to use in airports (when this was spun off into borderforce, the xray machines would change hands too)

We were working on one in birmingham airport, about a week after the jeep hitting glasgow airport incident.

Naturally while we are running the scanner itself, there's big red lights on outside the doors of the room, you know the sort of thing, no entry when red light on, danger XRAYS, etc.

The room in question is in the customs area between departures and arrival corridors.

The red lights are on, the doors aren't locked, but we suddenly see faces at the door on the far side of the room to the console we're controlling the system from.

As soon as the scanner finishes, I hit the "safe" button to turn the lights off, and 3 armed officers pile though the door with MP5s, with a 4th who slowed down a little to say "Thanks!" before dashing out the other door into the departure area.

We never did find out what actually was happening, and just hid in the xray room working for as long as possible!

I took the tech support call from [REDACTED] regarding a program that was core dumping. I asked the usual questions, all of which were replied with with, I'm sorry I can't tell you that over the phone or send anything in email. An onsite visit to [REDACTED] was scheduled. Submit all identity and employment information before travel. Once escorted through the three layers of security I got to sit in front of an isolated, green screen terminal, in a windowless room, connected to a test system. How do I run the program? You can't touch the keyboard. Can you install a debugger? No. Can I see the source code? No. Can I access the database? No. Can I have my laptop back to check on something? No. A few other options were floated, all were "no". The impasse was only solved when a copy of The Official Secrets Act was proffered for to me to sign.

One of our people had to visit a certain establishment in Cheltenham. Apparently getting in wasn't too bad but getting out again was dire.

Did they give the error code or message?

With the calculator grammar/flow chart you could sketch the code out.

A duplicate calculator could demonstrate the sort of problem. There operator/programmer may recognise the problem.

If the tone is a collaborative/help me then sure give them all the help you can. If the tone is adversarial then why am I fixing your code?

My gun with the magic bullet is at home.