Posts by Bob Royal

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

A healthy mix of supplies

"Other countries have leapt ahead with solar - see Australia."

"Yes it’s not effective overnight … when most people are asleep and charging EV’s."

I agree that most people in Europe might be asleep and charging their car when Australia is basking in sunlight.

Unfortunately, there is no inter-connector yet.

The mega corps building wind farms everywhere, and solar too, should only be allowed to connect WHEN they can provide agreed power 99.999% of the time FROM their OWN resources.

None of this being paid to shut down, they should absorb all EXCESS power INTO their OWN resources. We would find the TRUE cost of carbon free generation at tender time!

Part didn't fit so techie got out his screwdriver. Then something flew off the motherboard

Took out an entire organisational phone system

I couldn't count the times I've done that.

To be fair, that was my job, but sometimes it happened, shall we say, not to plan.

I knocked out the British Rail HQ building in front of Kings Cross Station once (in the working day.)

That was in the days of data tape cartridges, which were never the fastest things.

It must have taken 5 or 10 minutes to reload, but I never heard any complaint. Perhaps no-one noticed.

We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

Easy win for Burnhams new chancellor

I've always maintained that gratuities should have income tax deducted @ 100%

That would increase receipts from tax on work!

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: It's a rare individual...

I was made the company's youngest ever Senior Engineer, in the 70's.

All thanks to Ted Heaths stupid socialistic Price & Incomes policy.

It followed that I became youngest Principle on the same basis.

The only time I was made responsible for an underling, things didn't go well.

The chap who was given the role instead of me, built an empire out of it.

My boss who always kept me, despite other manglement, was a manager, not a mangler.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Only 12 months in a year?

The UK state pension has always been paid 13 times a year, every 4 weeks.

But don't tell HMRC - the taxman, he's never worked out that it's 1 at the old & 12 at the new rate.

They tax you on some fictitious amount rather than what you've actually been paid.

Nowt you can do about that.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Bad data coming

Thort there were a couple and a gooseberry.

Tom dicks Jane, and Harry went to the park.

Connect, disconnect, or just have a lovely beer

Church Tower Stairs

I can confirm that most tower stairs turn up to the right.

Most are too small to enable a sword fight.

Some are too small to accommodate a modern person.

There's usually not much need for defence in such a setting these days,

except possibly against the occasional drunk shouting "Shut up that bell."

Interesting to see the soaks face when encountering 8 or so burly bellringers.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Call that a disk drive?

In the days of the late unlamented President Assad Senior, the (also late & unlamented) Plessey company flogged a load of tech to his military.

We did the PABXs, and one was co-located with an installation of Colour (WOW!) Radar.

This was a computer system including several disk drives which resembled a washing machine (top loading) of an earlier time.

They each had an interchangeable disk pack with several platters on a spindle, and which weighed a (metaphorical*) ton.

The whole lot stood on a raised floor which must have been installed by "Bodgeit & Scarper Carpet Fitters".

The spares kit, I was informed, had a single disk head. Bearing in mind that the disk packs had several platters, this was probably not a good plan.

Consequently, the local (Syrian Air Force) tech's were barred from the room until the whole job was commissioned and our tech's had left the country.

It was expected that the army style boots of the military clomping on the machine floor would destroy the whole job almost instantly.

* something between a metrical & an impirical unit.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Same old same old innit?

Someone came up with a wheeze to have a bonus scheme for some project group.

This was despite there being an overarching bonus scheme applying to "everyone".

"You are working on this, you will be in the scheme."

No, I'm only doing a bit and anyway it will fail. I can't do anything to influence the outcome.

"You are working on this, you will be in the scheme. And you don't get the regular bonus because you are in the project scheme."

Outcome as predicted: "You don't get the project bonus because it failed. And you don't get the regular bonus because you were in the project scheme."

Glad I got the poke age 50, never had to work again.

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Don't like efi?

When Mint 23 comes, around Christmas, we can all kick out efi.

Defenestrate it even. It comes with, I quote:

Live-installer (ported from LMDE to replace Ubiquity; supports OEM installations, BIOS/EFI, SecureBoot, and LVM/LUKS)

Which means 1 EXT* partition is plenty. Much simpler.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: "this is just how MS Word sucks"

EN-MO as any fule kno, is Molesworthy

Sub-edit

EDT on VAX, Shirley?

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: lack any understanding

In former times, an older method of instilling understanding would have been used.

Shame it's now banned.

Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

Re: I have great number memory.

I used to have that. Recalling numbers of circuits I worked on 30 years before, old car registrations etc.

Now I'm a GOG (grey old geezer/git) I have to have a reminder card of the current reg. in my car door pocket.

I've lost crypto-ed stuff where the password was noted in aid-memoir form. Don't risk it.

"Private" stuff - OK, it should die with you. Personal stuff, make sure it's accessible to those who come after.

Microsoft wants safer C# without turning it into Rust

Garbage?

I don't claim to be a programmer, (anyone remember Modsim?) but I have to ask:

"Why would anyone use a language which has to have a built-in GARBAGE collector?"

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Snail mail trail fail

Here in UK, I wouldn't depend too much on the Post.

Official numbers, just out, say 73% of post is delivered on time.

Interesting that there is no figure given for stuff that just disappears.

If you do use snail-mail, I suggest encryption on the chip, the amount of stuff that goes to the wrong address.

Company CEO flooded file share with smut, called for help after he deleted it

No Pron (visible) here

When my (university age) son passed on his first (extortionate, limited & short lived) Macbook to me to use (on Mint Linux), I failed to find anything at all dubious before it got nuked.

If it had been the other way round, he wouldn't have found anything either. A few encrypted drives perhaps.

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Re: Which alphabet

Not many years ago, I changed the motherboard in my "Legacy" m/c.

Thort I'd load it with old disks: 2*3.5" plus a Zip ( remember them?)

Turns out all my floppy cables (actually the stiff sort) I had cropped to single point to point! Arrrgh!

Found a computer shop (was a few years ago) with an old fashioned ribbon jobbie.

Plugged it all together and found the "new" motherboard only drives ONE floppy! B***er.

P.s. Philo -- Any relation to the old boy I used to ring with name of Farnsworth?

-- or the chap who invented TV?

Bus station display takes the Windows 10 road to nowhere

Re: You didn't take a pic

Perhaps Briantist69 is one of the five people left in UK who doesn't use a stupid smart phone/camera/internet browser/record player/spy thingy.

Personally, I'm waiting for one with built-in fax before succumbing.

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: Split flap boards sounds

Anybody know if it's true that the announcement screens in Palace of Westminster play the sound of the old mechanical gubbins when a change appears?

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Multi screen desk

Running 5 bi-input screens to 3 PC rigs leads to cabling torture.

Regular VGA & DVI as well as home-made long VGA (can't find ready made with all the right wires),

long DVI-D, DVI-D to HDMI, HDMI couplers, HDMI to HDMI, the lot.

1 rig runs 5 screens, other 2 run 2 & 3. Sometimes leads to keyboard/mouse confusion? YES

nVIDEA/Nouveu PHOOEY. AMD Radeon rules.

(5 screens for lillyPond/Frecso Baldi. Just the job.)

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: Wrong Visa

Hoping to fly via Kuwait one day, I was fogged off (in Kuwait?)

Landed in Abu Dahbi which, of course, was swamped with jumbos.

Joined the scrum, which passes for a queue in those parts, for the desk in the hope of a bus to a hotel.

One chap managed to force himself to the front.

Not a good plan! Bearing in mind this was immigration, with a m/c-gun toting minder.

Clerk opens passport, Bingo! Can't believe his luck, first catch of the day.

The guy was Irish, with a visa for ISRAEL!

He didn't get to the hotel for the overnight.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Re: Sometimes a little human engineering is the key

In the early days of computer controlled telephony, we had problems in private exchanges in India & Scotland.

The software would crash hard on a regular basis, which meant all calls cut, start again.

My mate was in Bombay (before they tried to change the name) & knew it was something to do with the Operators Console, but what?

I was in Edinburgh with the same problem, so off to observe the operators, hei-ho.

(NOT crumpet watching skiveing believe me. Not in Scotland!)

It happens! The m/c crashes.... What did you press? "Nothing."

Come now, which button? "Nothing."

Show me. Seems "nothing" is the Scottish word for zero?!!

AI will write code, but prepare to babysit it – and be sure you speak its language

Re: Transcript?

Shirley there's an AI thingy that does speech to text?

What is it that AI does again?

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs

Re: HP

My HP inkjet-scanner worked fine on Linux Mint, print, scan, USB, WiFi the lot!

Until it didn't!

Don't you just hate software that gets worse when it's updated?

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: Salutations

The problem is the gendered language - English.

Other languages retain more gender: German, French, Thai, etc; and Slavic languages I believe, have gendered surnames.

Of course (I dunno really) name suffices could be for husband and wife, (any body kno?)

so could a male wife be named female and a female husband by named male?

In British English we have a salutation which might suit a chap in a skirt: MUSH

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Umlaut, umlaut, stick it up

Dunno what you guys are seeing, but n̈ is displayed on this rig with the double dots shifted to the right.

Consequently the trailing dot is obscured by the closing double quote: "n̈"

and the following space(s) suppressed.

Luckily the UTF8 works fine for me with Thai: ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช for example.

Note upper and lower modifiers (as I said, dunno what you guys are seeing.)

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Lift moter strikes again

A looong time ago I Went to check out a PABX which was crashing regularly at Nuneaton Council.

Approached the reception, staffed by the switchboard operators.

"Here to meet the BT" - "Borough Treasurer? Need an appointment."

I had assumed the phone operators would have heard of British Telecom!

"No I'm here to meet the exchange maintenance chap."

I pointed out that the power was the trouble, not my problem.

Left the BT tech to sort out with the electricians.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Nothing

In the dim and distant past, when computers came to telephony, we had a PABX (main & satellite) at Ferranti (remember them?) in Edinburgh.

The software would crash hard on a regular basis, as did another job in India. We knew it was something to do with the Operators Console, but what?

Off to observe the operators, hei-ho. (This is not crumpet watching skiveing believe me. Not in Scotland!)

M/c crashes.... What did you press? "Nothing." Come now, which button? "Nothing." Show me. Seems "nothing" is the Scottish word for zero!*?

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Spam, spam, spam

I was the victim of TELEX spam!

I paid through the nose for a telex at the only place in Pattaya that still had such a device.

It was to inform my office I would be late back from hols, for personal reasons.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIwkvybNYk4)

When I got back to work, it turns out the office telex had been spammed and run the paper out!

Plug and Play

I worked on telephone exchanges during the evolution from Strowger to System X.

One early step (ho ho) forward was an electro-mechanical thing called Crossbar.

Every job seemed to be a one-off, there were at least 6 unique designs, some with several versions.

One was for the International gateway in London. This called for 4 wire switching with Plug Board control!

Imagine this scene with the fashions of the '70's:

https://culturexchange1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/sans-titre.png

Read all about it: https://www.lightstraw.uk/ate/main/woodstreet/

Step on it

I was still an apprentice when I worked on the last Strowger switch design our company made.

(Possibly the last ever anywhere.) It was a PABX hunter for 2 to 100 line hunt groups.

In the days of dial phones and Strowger switches, it was usual to hear ring-tone immediately after dialing the last digit.

I hope the switches were installed with special grading, it would have taken at least 20 seconds

to hunt through all 100 lines to find a free one. Would have seemed strange to the caller, having to wait.

(I case anyone's interested: it stepped up to the required level, pulsed round to scan for a free line out of 10.

If none found, it tried the next 10 by stepping back round to the start, stepping up the to next level, and repeat.)

Gatwick shuttle screen suffers pre-flight nerves

I was (trying) to fly from Birmingham once, when the inevitable meltdown struck.

Seems to follow me around.

Got herded into a narrow corridor with 2 planeloads of the usual suspects;

most unpleasant for about an hour.

The only apparent working technology was the cleaners mains socket;

which was lucky for the bods who borrowed my boys phone charger,

he should have charged rent.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Memory Lane

I finally retired my dinky little "net-top" (remember them?) when Mint stopped being 32 bits.

My boy had worn out the flash-drive (remember them?) with the "Linspire" distro it came with.

Since I vetoed winders in the house, he got a swanky Apple laptop

(with a crappy screen) which probably saved him some grief at his posh school.

Upgraded (now mine) the flash-drive it came with to compact flash (remember that?)

and maxed out the memory to 1G5! Ran for another ~10 years on Mint XFCE 32.

The horrible Apple thing needed the treatment after about 4 years,

so I inherited that too and he moved on to more Apple landfill.

Old one got new battery and maxed out memory (when you could still do that).

Replace RAM, not just add of course.

No SSD then, so upgrade ONLY cost about same as little blue job cost new.

Still crappy screen and whole thing just died after outliving 3 Apple chargers.

Typing this on a CEX Lenovo special. Special because it runs Mint XFCE 64.

The net-top is replaced by (what else) a 64 bit net-top. It does now have an SSD

but only 2G9 out of the 4G RAM accessible. Luckily that's plenty for Linux.

ACER Aspire rules.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

When I started work (1969) in the training school in an infamous works in Beeston Notts England (UK Europe The World, as any fule kno)

I was shown the spring-loaded safety chuck-key.

This had been invented in, and patented by, the company, but had never been produced commercially.

Dunno if it was ever taken up after the patent expired, but it shows the attitude to safety in those days.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: Added RAM to a server

I did that with an 8 core CPU! Running now with the 4 core I'd taken out. ****er!

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Critical infrastructure

In the days of regional bunkers, we put a PABX (massive racks of clickety clackers) in Swinton (near Manchester).

Except that according to one of the drawings 1 rack should have been in Swindon 136 miles away.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Wow! A Tektronix Phaser

I bet that was a stunner!

Re: Ah, end users and basic printer maintenance... Other way round also

If it was Black Power, it probably was a Brother.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Since I was offered change from a £7 note in a pub in Scotland years ago, I always said "£20 should cover it" when handing over a note. Cash doesn't happen so often now of course.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Since you mention Nvidia, I endorse not bothering with video drivers. I always used Nvidia cards with Nvidia drivers which had to be installed (what a fag! (english-english term.)) I gave all that the elbow when their driver started giving less than subtle hints that it didn't like my cards (which were older). So sod it, down to CEX to trade 'em in (for about the scrap value of the massive heat sinks.) So: 4 screen's-worth swapped for 9 screen's-worth of lightweight, slim & silent AMD Radeon cards, no cash exchanged. Shame my desk is only 5 screens wide, but no fuss, no muss; Linux native driver on Mint just does it. (Not talking gaming, never done that.)

P.S. Talking about printing, that works fine, but don't ask about scanning! What is it about software that just works, and then just doesn't at the next release?

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Quadrilateral Triangle?

Not $ but £ Phase of course! Sorry.

A bit late to comment, but since the subject of PBX has been raised:

In the days of the late unlamented Assad Senior, the Syrian Military (and Secret Police) imported our PABXs .

One site had the usual dual 3 phase mains feed to the telephone exchange power.

In those days everything telephone ran from a battery floated at about 54V DC.

Being a military site, the spec would be for a decent standby battery.

Of course, both mains cables ran in the same trench, which was inevitably breached by the first cut on site.

Also inevitably, all was overspecced to the point where the job lot ran for the whole weekend (Thur & Fri),

not just the 8 hours in which the problem should have been discovered (and fixed) but naturally was not.

As an aside: to show how reliable the mains supply was, the socket outlets were 4 pin jobs,

with earth/neutral in the middle and 4 phase pins in a triangle. If your power went off, just unplug, rotate 120 and try again! Simples.

Re: Being a techie site....

Easy: Stupid Network Monitoring Protocol or similar I seem to recall. OCIMHMR!

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Names are fluid

I managed to avoid a photocard driving licence until I officially became an old git at age 70. The tattyist bit of paper sufficed until then because no-one ever consulted it. My lovely wife still has a (pristine) paper version which has never seen light of day for 30+ years. However; try not to become old, because you can't even get a bus pass when you don't have a passport or driving licence any more. Funny how you cease to exist when your passport expires (or sooner in EU). Under common law, you used to be able to use any name or many. Not any more, thanks to computers. If your name happens to be something like ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช you can't have a British passport with that on it. Come to think of it, most all the boat people have probably got names written in arabic, so they'll just make up a name in english (or several at random), how is that definitive?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

In Thailand you learn the alphabet phonetically. It starts: Gor Gai, Kor Kai, Kor Kuat, Kor Kwai, Kor Kon, Kor Rakang etc. You see the point, no need to import from NATO/OTAN.

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

A "toaster" that doesn't do CRUMPETS!!!!!

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Not data but phone network

Back in the day, when telecoms ran on 2Mb BT branded lines (can't remember the name, arrgh.) Descended to the basement of an office in London of a well known British bank. Had to duck under the cable, stretched across the middle of the room from the multiplexer to a wall socket! This muxed the carefully configured redundant 2Mb links to a single 8Mb line. Did the work on the PABX and left 'em to it.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Good? Old Sysyem X?

The only time I ever had a scheduled overnight shift was to interface test with (YES) System X. I swore never to do it again, tired or what! Turned out, System X had a somewhat different reading of OSI 7 layer protocols than our "designers". Main and standby processors on a single shelf are good. Ever pressed the reload button on the wrong CPU? What fun! Especially when the reload comes on a cartridge tape and takes about 10 minutes to load. How about redesigning a cabinet with 2 CPUs on a shelf and 2 shelves of telephone gubbins with split power supplies (not duplicated) to a 4 shelf model? Easy, just connect the 3 shelf interfaces A to power breaker B & v.v. Good job it was only the 1st production model for review in the lab. Still - made a living and a nice pension sorting out other peoples ***k-ups, (especially salesman's fantasies.) Happy daze.