
Re: My collection
Sporting goods.
440 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007
Could you try fitting a cheap replacement pickup roller from $ONLINE_TAT_BAZAAR? I got my 14-year-old laser printer working again recently using a £3.33 part and a youtube tutorial, though an a3 printer might be harder to source bits for. If the alternative is binning it then might as well have a go...
Probably not down the pub, IBM used to be a bit funny about employees and alcohol. Back in the nineties some college friends of mine applying for industrial placement years with IBM were expected to supply information about their drinking habits.
Icon because I don't work for IBM and hope never to have to.
Apple absolutely have handed out free machines in the past. Our company received a bunch of macs around 2003/2005-ish because Apple wanted us to port our product to their platform. They all mysteriously vanished before they reached the devs. We think some of them ended up in a bar in town that someone in the office was involved with. Good times (not really).
I have a low-end 2019 43" Samsung with the same stupid content-suggester thing on the home ribbon. It can effectively be disabled by putting a PIN lock on it. Sure, I would rather have the option to take it off the home ribbon altogether but since locking it last November I had genuinely forgotten it existed until I read these comments, so that's an effective mitigation.
(But yeah... the software on this is riddled with bad choices.)
At our place we've all been in the position of being asked by our PHB to apply an untested tweak to a critical live system. It happens approximately once per project. Those of us with an ounce of professionalism and self respect decline to do so, stating our reasons in writing.
The PHB then works their down the chain until they find somebody who does what they're told. The live database or whatever is then destroyed, as per instructions. The rest of us then hear about the problem, recall the dodgy instruction we declined to carry out the previous day and see what can be done about recovery.
My favourite was the utter disappearance of the data files for an Oracle instance. It turned out a couple of entries had been removed from /etc/fstab, because for reasons we never got to the bottom of the PHB wanted those entries removed from that file and didn't want backchat about it. At least that one was a quick recovery.
It gets better... I think those thresholds are for a single ad. So presumably a page containing a dozen of these, requiring say 40MB of network data and completely choking the CPU for several minutes would be tolerated?
Nah. My data quota, phone battery life and my actual life is worth more than that.
We just ditched Vodafone. Their routers are amazing, they last about six months on average. I just took a big bag of the ones we killed to the recycling centre.
(I wanted to just buy a good router and swap it in but the person whose name is on the bill wouldn't let me.)
You've got it.
Historically industries have often benefited from "externalised costs", i.e. costs paid for by someone other than themselves. Some decades ago in the west this might have been the factory that dumped nasties into the nearby river and didn't worry about the people downstream. More recent examples include web companies who can't be bothered to secure their customers' details. Many classes of overt crime are simply taking the externalised costs thing to an extreme.
The answer is to identify externalised costs and re-internalise them through regulation. This can be a whole spectrum of measures but should definintely include scope for criminal charges because otherwise most players will continue not to care.
I'm not sure who will still want to write software though. I prefer to do good work but I haven't always had that option and the day I'm held legally responsible for the quality of code I write I'll be quitting.
I attended some sort of festival in August. It was near Gloucester.
We all got a badge that was also a phone (no, really) plus a sim card. There was an intention to provide a site-wide cell network. The conference organisers said they'd bought the necessary license from a bloke in a pub.
Sadly the network didn't work. It was a noble failure though.