BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "How bad is it really?" the Boss asks. "It's bad." the PFY whispers with some urgency. "It's like the Y2K thing times 10!" And given that the Y2K thing was a big fat zero, the PFY is technically correct. "What are we looking at?" the Director asks. "Well I don't think it's at the …
The zero most people think fondly about is the extra zeroes in their paycheck thanks to knowing COBOL and BBC BASIC and their ugly grandfather Microsoft BASIC. Granted most finance stuff wasn't made in a variant of BASIC but any place that had keep they old machines was running some program made in some form of BASIC that they wanted to be Y2K compatible.
BASIC knowledge bought you lunch and maybe a TV if you were lucky, COBOL got you new cars.
I do remember an older boffin friend of mine in Toronto in 1998 who starting his 4 year contract with a combined group of large financial institutions in Canada that required his COBOL expertise to convert ALL of their active 1950's/1960's/1970's/1980's era COBOL code over to C++. Since he was already about 50 years old, this assignment was basically the icing on the cake for an already illustrious coding and systems analyst career!
The beautiful thing was that the original IBM-specific COBOL banking software was so well written and so well documented in those days, that they were simply able to use the C++ compiler's preprocessor (I think it was Borland C++) to change all the COBOL specific comparison code, declarative and iterative statement and function-like declarations over to C++ functions in mere months using bucket loads of IFDEF and DEFINE statements to get COBOL looking like C++.
They had some young Assembler wizard write an x86 interceptor function which took the C++ preprocessor output and redirected it/converted it to final C++ code source files which was perused and edited by my boffin friend and then sent out to various team members for final user interface re-design and compiling. An ingenious solution I do must say!
The end result was that the Canadian financial systems had VERY FEW HICCUPS compared to the U.S. financial companies when it came to glitches happening just before and after Y2K. While Y2K could have been much more serious on both side of the USA/Canada border, it was mostly a non-event! The KEY thing was that Canada prepared earlier and had better results in the end.
I also remember that after all the bonuses and overtime he did in order to make sure the Y2K re-writes were implemented properly and worked for at least two years after Y2K, that he was able to retire in 2003 being able to buy a very nice 3000+ square foot (278 square metres) custom built log home in the Southern Ontario Cottage Country/Thousand Lakes region, a 26 foot touring power boat, two large touring motorcycles that fit into their large 5th Wheel RV trailer (i.e. a very large pulled caravan) and for the last 17 years him and his wife have done nothing BUT tour all over North America and continue their series of yearly pilgrimages allowing him and the wife to live in Ontario Cottage Country in the summer and live in south Florida in the Winter! In Spring and Fall they still have enough money to travel to multiple countries around the world enjoying fine hotels, fine views and very fine food and wine! (i.e. mostly to Italy, South France, Greece and Spain these days!)
Since he is now in his early 70's and still in very good health, he now has combined his very generous bank employer and government pension (CPP) plans after living off the money he made in his early 50's doing Y2K work. I can say he is doing very well and will continue to do well for the rest of his life.
SOME PEOPLE were very well equipped to take advantage of Y2K spending and in some cases over a 4-to-5 year period, became actual net-worth millionaires from that event and it's aftermath alone!
.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT SKILLS and the RIGHT TIME !!!
Lucky Bastard!
Arrghhhhh!!!!! --- I'm sooooo envious today at his lifestyle while i'm slaving over 1987'era MS-DOS batch code that is STILL being used to convert in 2020 huuuuuuuge Aero/Hydro/Plasma-dynamic scientific visualization spreadsheet data sets over to SQL-RDBMS entries and then into animated 4K/8K video files!
_
In college maybe 96 or 97, I bought my first suit and went to a job fair looking for a summer internship, and this guy recruiter is really pushing doing COBOL programming at financial institutions ... I wanted to be an academic and do research.
And the Engineers used to make fun of the Business majors.
The professor actually said 1.21 jigowatts....
Short piece here about the BTTF's use of jigowatt in the scripts: https://community.telltale.com/discussion/20054/gigawatt-jigawatt-or-jigowatt
.
>I am the point of having one or three hairs left... it looks horrible!
Well on the way to becoming a zed then...
[ https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/miscellaneous/oXdhvfnY-if-only-zeds-could-be-like-what-dr-seuss-had-imaged-it-would-be ]
"Yes, but how would we know that you didn't pick up a couple of dusty old relics at a car boot sale?" the Boss asks."Just tell your wife and sister-in-law not to go car-boot-sale-ing that weekend," the PFY chips in.
Bollocks. New keyboard time.
Now, where did I put that requisition order for a nice shiny Steelseries Apex Pro?
Ahh keyboards..
It amazes me that people will spend a lot of money getting the fastest CPU, as much RAM as they can buy, the fastest (and largest) permanent storage and the fastest gfx card, then plug in a cheap keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse are probably the things most people use most on the computer. You don't need the full LED colour changing some gamers keyboards and mice offer, but you do need a comfortable keyboard and mouse, and some backlighting might also be good, particularly on the keyboard.
Indeed. I'm still using a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro that's at least 20 years old (proving that Microsoft can actually make something decent once in a while). The hand rest at the front is worn smooth, the cursor keys no longer have markings on them, and the left shift key and space bar have had depressions worn into them. It gets ripped into pieces every 2 or 3 years for a thorough clean and degunk, and it's seen off at least 5 PCs and is still going strong. Thank goodness it has both a PS2 and USB connection as it comes from a time when PS2 was predominant.
I will be extremely sad when it finally bites the dust.
Almost every piece of M$-branded peripheral hardware is actually really well made. All the ones I've encountered, anyway. Their hardware group is definitely not their software group. (Though there's a lot of variation even among the software groups, really.)
They went down some wacky roads with the whole "Natural" keyboard thing, but even the most preposterous of those were well-constructed, stupidly-laid-out keyboards... and they still make variations on the split/vee models today, so "Some people like 'em, I guess."
Hmm. My experience was the opposite. I got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse set. The keyboard was ok, but the mouse scroll wheel was busted out of the box. They sent me a replacement SET, and didn't ask for the old one back, so I popped open the mouse, realized the scroll wheel was sitting just a *hair* too far down, applied a couple layers of Scotch tape, and it worked ok. Ended up selling one set used - not sure which one!
A year or so later, though, the left-click microswitch got flaky. Grr. Back to Logitech.
Still using my Logitech MX-1000 after (at least) 13 years. Still going strong, microswitch wise. Did have to replace the battery and strip the rubber "tire" off the scroll wheel (it had swelled and become sticky), so gave it a thorough cleaning while doing that. That was 3 years ago.
>I bought a Logitech Trackman Marble FX, somewhere in the 1990's. ... No microswitch problems at all.
Given the prices they command on ebay, your experience is typical.
I wonder whether any of the more recent Logitech Trackman have similar build qualities...
Given the prices they command on ebay, your experience is typical.
I got five of them, all from before their prices went through the roof. One is used at work, with the added benefit that no-one wants to sit at my desk when I'm not in.
There are a few more Trackmen around here: a couple Trackman Marble/Marble Wheel (non-FX); same vintage probably, one even older model that clips to the side of your laptop (probably used only rarely), and a moderately recent wireless model. Which I got off Marktplaats for a piddling amount because "one of the microswitches was flaky", though that appears to have been a software problem as I've not seen it under Linux. But I've no idea of how much that one was used.
I tend to hang on to my mice as long as I can as well they are like a well worn set of trousers, best just before they fall apart, luckily I I have managed to keep my current one going for a good while now, had to replace the microswitches in it (ok, only the lmb switch was bad but might as well replace both when you have it apart) and have another set of fitting switches and replacement glide surfaces on standby when / if they decide to give up the ghost again.
I'm not quite sure how many years my once-beige and silver Intellimouse has on it, as both it and the Microsoft media keyboard I'm typing on are definitely older than the 13 years I've lived in this apartment.
My office setup has the identical keyboard (just as old) but a slightly newer mouse with a blue laser instead of a red one. Sure, the paint has rubbed off here and there and you have to be a touch typist in order to use the keyboard, but while I've looked I've never found a better keyboard.
I latched on to a new-old-stock keyboard still in the box a couple of years ago just so that I will have another should one of these somehow die.
Agree - I'm a massive MS hater, their software stinks.
But dam, MS Ergo keyboards are beautifuly done. Their ergonomic mice were also exceedingly good.
If you're suffering from RSI, definitely buy a Microsoft Ergonomic 4000 keyboard. They are technically well built as well, just the coffee-proofing is not that good (as I have demonstrated many times).
I got a Natural keyboard with a work PC, and found it was really good. When I left (4 years later), I was allowed to take it with me ('cos no one else wanted to use it), and it did sterling service for many years at home, until some arsehole spilt orange squash into it.
But yes, for a long time, Intellimice were the absolute cats' pyjamas.
" (Though there's a lot of variation even among the software groups, really.)"
The SysInternals guys did some really solid work. Their 'wares are still useful.
Meanwhile, just as contrast, there are the Office "ribbon" and "Clippy" among other horrors.
Wouldn't it be lovely were all Microsoft 'wares as good as their SySInternals and hardware?
At home both my iMac and RasPi have some fairly old school (and now somewhat yellowed) MS mice attached. Come to think of it the keyboard on the RasPi is also MS.
So another agreement that every now and again MS can make something good (and hardware too!). A special shout also goes out to their Sidewinder joysticks, also quite long lasting and not crap.
Back in the days when mice still had balls, the MS Intellimouse range was the bees knees - had one on my PC at uni, which then encouraged me to buy one for my PC at home, which then encouraged me to buy a newer one for my PC at home so I could take the old one into work to replace the brick on a string masquerading as a pointing device on my PC there...
I do however recall their early attempts at optical mice were less than stellar, which is what prompted me to jump ship and see if Logitech were as good as everyone was suggesting - the MX510 I bought as a result is *still* going strong.
My favorite trackball is still an old Kraft from like 1989. Connects via serial port, so it takes some finagling these days, but the sensors and switches still work beautifully. Only problem is the lack of a scroll wheel. But I haven't found a good replacement. All the modern ones have too much damping on the movement so you can't just flick the ball to move the cursor to the other side of the screen.
All the modern ones have too much damping on the movement so you can't just flick the ball to move the cursor to the other side of the screen.
The Logitech MX series I bought to use at work has a nifty thumb wheel on the side (more of a roller really) that lets you flit from side to side (or to another monitor) with simple up/down flicks.
And it also has a button for the scroll wheel that let's you switch off the scroll wheel ratchet and plummet down the current document at several times the speed of dark.
"1366x728 panels"
1920x1080 here but only 15.3".
Why is it that laptop makers seem to assume that if you want that resolution in 17.3" you must be wanting to pay stupid money for something they call a gaming laptop. No, I just want to be able to read multiple documents side by side. And I want a DVD drive in it as well.
Dell Precision M6600 here, beautiful 17.3" screen, and a pre-chiclet backlit keyboard. Use it for video editing, Photoshop and photoshoot editing, DAW with FL Studio, the odd bit of GTA 4, and general Windozy stuff. 16GB RAM, two hard drive bays, external eSATA, and 1.8" MSATA 250GB boot drive, all for just under £250. Custom added my own slim Blu-ray burner for backing up music compositions and photoshoots.
Not the newest i7 but she boots in 4 seconds from MSATA SSD, so good enough if boot time is anything to go by, still got 5+ years in her yet, maybe 10 :). The day Hell freezes will be the day I use a laptop with Chiclet Scrabble keys crap, which is most of the modern ones!
Of course not. These are not disposable consumer models, but business models built to be in one piece for at least one corporate refresh cycle, the warranty of which starts at three years instead of one year for consumer models. If you want to buy these new, you'd order them directly on the OEM's website.
After the "unboxing the new toy"* rush ends, believe me, new vs. used becomes very irrelevant.
I'd gladly take {$500,$1000} off the retail price of a {one-,two-}year-old $2000 mobile workstation in exchange for a year in processor tech (which has really stagnated between 2013's Ivybridge and 2017's Kabylake, only showing meaningful progress in 2018, before stagnating again in 2019). Heck, one year old models have two years left in the warranty (assuming quality business-grade stuff), so you should be as safe as if you bought it new. (Used laptops have the risk of previous owner damage or shipping damage, new laptops have the risk of factory or shipping damage, so it's all the same, you're simply swapping in one risk for another.)
Linux support is better for older hardware, where the devs had taken enough time to code and fix their drivers.
Personally, whether I've bought laptop X for $1600 new or $160 used after two years, I'm ending up with the same laptop in either case. Except that in the first case, I would have wasted $1440 for a temporary "new toy feeling". This is especially true in your case (as you explained in the post above). You simply wanted a 17.3" panel to view two documents at once, which suggests that you aren't doing anything that requires a really beefy setup (where one is better off with a desktop anyhow). A $250 ZBook from 2015 would do just fine for that.
But to each his own, I guess.
* The "new toy feeling" can also come from a used gadget as well. In my case, at least.
Backlighting on a keyboard? What for? I don't look down there - freaks the shit out of people who walk up and ask questions whilst I'm still typing away. Worth the time spent learning to touch type for just that alone.
But yes, a decent keyboard is definitely on the list of essentials - you spend so much time fingering them. Unicomp UB40B5A (that's the 122 key 5250 keyboard) wired up with a Soarer adaptor to connect PS/2 to USB (and gives me keyboard mapping/macros).
Running an IBM Model M keyboard (still with manufacturing label 1986 on the back) and it's still solid. A few keys have lost some of their texture (but not the lettering), it gets stripped every year or so and the keycaps take a trip through the washing machine & dryer (tied in an old football sock).
when it finally dies I will have to replace it with one of my 1987 ones.
the only downsides are that it can sound like a machine gun and there are no windows keys for various shortcuts.
"the only downsides are that it can sound like a machine gun and there are no windows keys for various shortcuts."
I can't try this as I don't have a Windows PC handy right now, but CTRL-ESC works to bring up the Windows start menu. Maybe CTRL-ESC-R will work as, for example, WIN-R. Anyone care to try and confirm?
You don't need the full LED colour changing some gamers keyboards and mice offer
Oh you do - you really do. The flashier the better. Since finally retiring my IBM Model M, I've discovered that these modern young people still remember the importance of good old fashioned engineering married to unnecessary, in your face bling.
I love my proper mechanical Black Widow Elite (coupled with a Lancehead mouse), both for the clicky mechanical feedback and the "WTF is that?" pulsing light displays.
Yes, I'm a child, a 64 year old child - why do you ask?
I totally agree with you. Nowadays people are looking for cheapest mouse and keyboard or buying it with useless options (LED, additional sinkers and so on). I used to use some gaming mouse and i can't say that it was really helpful in games (maybe i was bad at this, of caurse). It was like a common mouse. But i can say that wireless mice are better for me. It's really handy not to hitching on the wires (so if someone interested in wireless mice you can read more in my review here https://www.bestadvisers.co.uk/wireless-mouse).
Oooh, all the shiny in that one!
I have a Model M 13 clone. Sounds like war when I get typing. It wasn't expensed, because it will never leave me.
https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/FeaturedProducts/UB40PGA
Also have an MX Master 3 that went on expenses, because mice tend to not last till the heat death of the universe.
A virus:
"a piece of code which is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data."
MS pushed Windows 10 onto my Windows 7 machine.
Had a detrimental effect in corrupting my system such that some of my drivers for legacy (yes go out and buy new shiny shiny toys, I know) peripherals no longer worked.
Destroyed data in that my XP Mode VM and all it's contents and applications was suddenly wiped, couldn't find it anywhere, and the built in executables sol.exe and winmine.exe were long gone, to be replaced by ad driven freemium 'adventure' games.
(If I wanted to play freemium games I'd load my mobile full of crap like candy crush, which seemed to be installed, unwantedly, by windows 10)
Also added unwanted Adware to my start menu, what was previously an operating system control for launching applications was now telling me to go buy an Xbox or to subscribe to the weather channel, alerts telling me to buy subscriptions to Office and Skype premium. Urging me to use their Cortina spyware, and "BING!!" search engine.
I was half expecting the Bonzi Buddy to pop up.
So we got extra budget to remove any remaining windows 7, which was helpful as we don't have any windows 7 devices left. We did have 20 VM's running windows 7 for the developers to test things with, but they had been off for months. So we all got a weekend overtime and a new coffee machine for the office.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure one of our BMS systems is still running on XP. It's definitely the only analogue phone left in the building, because the antique modems can't talk to Skype - or at least that's the explanation I've been given.
(No, I don't know where the IT angle is in two tin cans and a piece of string.)
You can get some inexpensive ones off of Amazon without a license. I bought a couple to keep my son in law (who tried to think of himself as an entrepreneur) in line. Whenever he got off-topic and wouldn't shut up the arcing of the taser probes definitely got his attention. I even gave one to his personal assistant.
Sadly, I didn't use it enough.
I had two but, unfortunately, had to sell one due to a very tight financial times. The one I kept is still functional except, the two little metal balls at the base of the trackball cavity are worn flat from use. So, now the trackball wont move smoothly but, basically "shudders". Recently purchased tools may let me turn the little metal balls 180 degrees and get it working again.
150 pounds? that would work out to be around $300 each down here in Oz.
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