Posts by Anonymous Custard 3082 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
But knowing what you did to break them is a very important part of being a tester.
And seemingly for being a user, so they know exactly what not to tell the poor helldesk person assigned to fix it (at least until afterwards).
Or is it just the ones I have to deal with occasionally (when the helldesk dumps it on me as it's non-standard tool specific software).?
Although could NASA afford another $400 fine for littering?
That said, it was only actually paid in 2009, and not by them.
The UK, Brexit or not, is heading the same way, putting more weight behind domestic AI compute, cloud infrastructure, and homegrown chip efforts.
So the UK govt AI policy will be running it on a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting somewhere in Whitehall?
Or at least it was until this morning's price rise announcement, which has probably put the hardware beyond the budget...
Companies that have signed up to the scheme include Microsoft and Cisco, each – we're told – with a particular focus on AI skills in adult education and SME support.
So basically MS have run out of orifices in Windows to stuff Coprolite, and so they're now resorting to attacking local councils with it?
Still, all those former coal mines in the area offer a very good place to bury it somewhat more permanently.
Or the other peach, of using for example an M3x6 and an M3x10 in close proximity, but in such a way that if they were swapped the M3x10 would protrude just enough to catch on something moving within the tool and cause all sorts of interesting mechanical collisions and interactions with automation.
The other fun one is when some bright spark gets the brilliant cost-saving idea of flexibility and "cross-training", so that one person can work on multiple products or toolsets, because "there are always quiet times for each product and people are not utilised fully".
Then of course they are seen as an available resource and headcount by each of the support groups for said products, and so are assumed to be available at all times for call-out and work generally.
And Sod's Law dictates that nothing will happen for a while, then three calls will come in for urgent support for different products in different locations (always of course on a Friday afternoon around beer o'clock) and the real fun "discussions" begin about who has priority/seniority etc, and why no-one has yet realised that being on three different headcounts doesn't make you three people who can be in three places at once.
Ah, the old mantras:
1) why use one screw when you can use 20.
2) at least one screw must be hidden away and positioned such that half the machine has to be dismantled to access it.
3) another screw must be in a position which requires the engineer to have an 8ft arm with at least 4 double-joints in it to reach.
4) as many different screw head types and sizes must be used as possible (with extra points for using Torx, or Allen bolts in spaces too small for an Allen key or driver),
5) non-standard sizes must be used, ideally positioned over gratings or other locations where they can fall and be easily lost.
iFixit are your people for those kind of things. They make some very nice sets.
This one is similar to the one I have, just the small pocket set for "useful" hobby jobs.
It gets both a lot of use and a lot of comments about the weird shapes of some of the bits, and they make some much larger/more varied sets with even stranger bits.
Oh and the lid is held on magnetically, and doubles up as a very nice and retentive place to keep the screws you remove, to stop them from wandering off and exploring the floor.
Or maybe just blow his mind by telling him that at their closest points, Russian and American territories are about 4km apart (the Diomede Islands)?
One of my abiding childhood memories is from the old QED programme that the BBC did.
There was an episode on testing, including exploding custard powder.
Prof Anthony Clare's narration somehow made it stick in my (warped) mind.
And yes, finding that link did take a nostalgic half an hour out of my day, now that you ask...
SiC (and similar stuff like GaN and other upcoming wide bandgap materials) are generally for power, rather than logic or DRAM.
Whilst the market there is certainly expanding nicely (from device chargers all the way up to solar/PV convertors and electric vehicles/chargers), TSMC have stopped their work in that area a while ago.
Presumably as they are riding such a giving cash-cow already, it is in their interest to focus all their efforts and investment in it, at least for now.
There was an article on this very website over the holidays for doing something similar for Chrome and google search therein.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/26/disable_ai_features_chrome/
I do appreciate the not-so-subtle irony there, but some of us are forced to use it as the chosen browser by our employers (who should know better, but don't given their current push for all things DX).
I would certainly have to agree there.
Especially as I had a teacher who was mad enough to lend me the manual, so I could go on to code up my own versions with some *ahem* tweaks.
That said he was also mad enough to make me a privileged user in my upper 6th form year, at which point the fun really began (as I've recalled in these pages on occasion).
He should probably take part of the credit (or blame) for how I turned out...
Some of the (very much) older kit in various 8" European semiconductor fabs for making today's less cutting edge chips still have floppy drives in them for data transfer.
I know as I work with people who support them hands-on every day, and as you can understand getting hold of the discs is becoming more and more of a challenge.
Fortunately as a well known hoarder, I have a large plastic box in the bottom of one of my cupboards in the office that's full of recovered discs (from when other colleagues have left, retired or just had a clear-out) that is now a guarded source of them to help keep things going.
Amazing sometimes how many brownie points (and beers) can be earned for supplying a few floppies from the stash...
I was going to say it was a lot more people than Turing who would have been required, and not just mathematicians as well.
The other (ironic) problem is the official secrets act. A lot of people who had the information were bound by it, and took it seriously enough that the information went with them to their graves.
Even those who could have been tempted to share probably saw what happened to some who did (look up the story of Gordon Welchman) and were "dissuaded" from doing so.
All in all, the numbers of "presentations / papers" would be far less than it could have otherwise been.
It may be better to use the "second hand" (in most cases) information from the fine folk who still run Bletchley Park and similar establishments as historical sites of interest (I won't call it a museum).
Been there a couple of times, and the depth that some of the volunteers know both the history and indeed how the kit actually worked (well enough to make working recreations) is breathtaking.
But if nothing else, a pint raised both to those who did it all when the country needed them to, and those who keep the memory and technology alive for we who came later.
You might get lucky today and it doesn't kill you, or you might not.
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