* Posts by BenDwire

795 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009

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Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: "don't even understand how to use document styles, let alone VBA."

Actually, MS Works was pretty good at doing what it claimed it could do. I was of the opinion that it borrowed heavily from the Apple 2c word processing /spreadsheet and database package that was supplied as part of the OS in the 1980's; my previous employer had a fleet of those around their offices.

In the 1990's I bought a bunch of Dell machines that had Office 95 pre-installed, and again it did everything we needed it to do, and it also made us standardise on it rather than the assortment of disparate products we had scattered about the place. All was good for a time, and then the internet arrived and everything got steadily worse as it became far to easy to provide updates after shipping, instead of properly testing stuff before release. I miss the QA teams of the late 20th century ...

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

I've told this tale before, but it seems worth repeating here ...

I used to take my wedding ring off when working in the HV lab in my R&D department, but forgot to put it back on before I went home one night. It was the final nail in the coffin for my (now ex) wife who accused me of 'obviously' carrying on with someone at work. That fact that I'd actually managed to get a 880V shock while developing a 3 phase syncroscope did nothing to convince her of the dangers I faced every day, in an attempt to fund her lifestyle.

Oh well, it was a blessing in disguise, but I've never worn a wedding ring since!

BenDwire Silver badge
Alert

.... and two brown marks appear in the steel

And the third on the underwear, I suspect.

Need for speed? CityFibre punts 5.5 Gbps symmetrical broadband at ISPs

BenDwire Silver badge

From my perspective I wish they would speed up the process of lighting up the fibres that have already been laid. We had fibres pulled through to our local junction boxes months ago, but that's it. No mention on theirs or others websites regarding availability, almost as if it doesn't exist.

Surely someone in the company would like to derive some income from their investment, or don't modern telecomms companies work like that any more?

Thankfully my ADSL connection has become less contended due to Virmin Media also supplying my area, but that's not what I want.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

BenDwire Silver badge
Holmes

Re: The 3 most dangerous things

3 ticks.

I must be 3 times as deadly as everyone else then ...

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Even 2001 is light years away now

In a similar vein, I included the words to "Daisy Daisy" within the comments to a last-gasp watchdog reset routine. Many years later I was approached by the guy who took over my engineering department after I'd quit, and he thanked me for the belly laugh that gave him during a code review.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Shredder

When I ran a small engineering company, I left a box of tissues on the filing cabinet next to the visitor's chair. It was occasionally used by upset employees requesting time off for famliy issues** but came into it's own during appraisal season. After a while, I put a label on it - " HR Department" as that was all we had.

** The usual bereavements the life throws up, but the most unusual was when one production lady's donkey suddenly died. She argued that she had no parents or children like other staff, so should be allowed time off to grieve. She had a point ...

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

BenDwire Silver badge

Nobody said anything about the crisps being within their sell-by date.

Mmmm! Musty Basement flavoured crisps!

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Bin there and suffered

The Australians get very boisterous about that sort of thing too. And don't start me on yoghurt ...

BenDwire Silver badge

In a word, Hollywood. Decades of watching 'movies' has made us bilingual...

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Whoops

We use the term "Car" for the London underground 'carriages' as the Victorians were influenced by the New York public transport system, and Americans were heavily involved.

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Whoops

Back in the day "Are you going to meet me outside for a fag" raised a few eyebrows ...

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

Don't call me Shirley ...

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: So you forgot how your code worked... hold my beer

I had a similar experience when completing a mountain of paperwork for the EU bureaucrats (back in the day). I had set aside a whole day to do the task, and completed it well before home-time. However, when I came to file it away, I found that I'd already done the work a few weeks earlier. I had no memory of doing it at all, despite it being a complete ball-ache to do.

At that point I decided that I was no longer up to the job of running a company, and chose to retire - one of my better decisions!

Ooh! It's beer O'Clock!

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H2O to make it a water world

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: hmm

Were you referring to "Music for Space Travellers"? "Blue Mars" ?

(Mind you, good luck humming along to it ... )

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

BenDwire Silver badge
Go

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

@Gene Cash

I did the same thing a few years back, and decided to spend a decent amount on a decent keyboard that should see me out. The keyboard I chose was a Cherry MX3650 with brown switches from "The Keyboard Company" (UK) but other models have different layouts and features.

My tryping is still crap though ...

FYI: Most AI spending driven by FOMO, not ROI, CEOs tell IBM, LOL

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: This is presumably how the South Sea Bubble progressed.

"Taxiffs" - that's a good one I've not heard before!

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

BenDwire Silver badge
Coat

Re: I was called in ...

Does that mean I need to get an onlyfans account?

Mind you, I'd need to be a Papst dealer for that ...

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: I was called in ...

Back in the 80's my company used to design and manage all sorts of serial interface convertors (The one in the Black Box Catalogue were ours). I would have recommended RS232-485 convertors at each end as a proper solution. Ours were also opto-isolated, which would have been perfect in this case.

We also used to do protection barriers should the buildings suffer a lightening strike. I would have been tempted to upsell a few of those too!

Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO2

BenDwire Silver badge
WTF?

The next step ...

Well done MS for dealing with the CO2 problem <cough>. Now, what are you going to do about the colossal e-waste mountain that is about to happen due to the demise of Win 10?

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

BenDwire Silver badge
Linux

Re: Haven't used Word in 10 years

Is there a "just sayin" icon?

I think it's the one with the Tux the penguin ...

(No, it's not Feathers McGraw)

KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves

BenDwire Silver badge
Go

Re: KDE4 was horrible but later versions fixed most things

I switched to Debian Testing a few months back (aka Trixie), and I'm very happy with KDE6. I've not had any major issues at all, although I have switched to 'aptitude' for the updates as it seems to be much better at resolving package version conflicts. In my experience Trixie is good enough to use on my daily driver, so why wait?

I used to be a happy Gnome user, but I found tweaking the desktop to how *I* wanted it was easier under Plasma.

HMRC's Making Tax Digital scheme also made tax more expensive – by £300M

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Small business VAT

I hate subscriptions like anyone else, but when HMRC keep changing the rules then the software has to be regularly updated. A reasonable fee is understandable in such situations ... but yes, one man's "reasonable" is another man's "price gouging".

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: dirty power

North of London, actually, just beyond the green and pleasant foothills of the Chilterns.

BenDwire Silver badge
Devil

Re: Please do not all power on at once

I think it was mentioned in this week's BOFH. Something about a liquid filled sump in the basement ...

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: dirty power

In fact, just be near *any* other customers if you want any reliability. My last house was in the middle of nowhere (no mains gas, water or sewage **) and the supply was so bad I ended up with several UPS units throughout the house, including one for the TV & Sky box.

Usually the interruptions were for a few seconds, while the auto-reclosers did their thing. However, if the power didn't coem back in in 3 attempts, we knew that it would take hours before a crew turned up. At that point I had to get the generator started for the duration. The worst experience was during harvest, when I heard the local farmer's tractor crash into one of the poles carrying overhead cables - that took days to sort out, but when they did they also upgraded the cables which improved things considerably.

Thankfully I've since moved, but still have a load of old UPS units festering in the garage, just in case.

** Unbelievably, this particular middle of nowhere was within a 35 radius of central London.

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: No Deal, Broadcom

I fully agree with you, but I doubt Broadcom is listening to anyone. I just simply moved away, and told my other clients to do the same. No-one bothered to tell Broadcom - why waste the effort?

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Fake interest in product

Seeing that reminds me of an old mate of mine in the 1980's who bought a home for him and his new wife. A while later, he was getting endless telephone calls from a local conservatory company, who wouldn't take no for an answer. Eventually he capitulated and arranged a site visit, except he doesn't know to this day whether they turned up or not. He lived in a second-floor flat.

(Apologies to USA folks - I'm not sure this UK tale translates very well)

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: they were "hovering" it a few mm above the surface.

even worse, the physical ball (this shows my age...)

You're not that old - I still recall my optical Sun mouse with the lined mousemat. I used to regularly annoy my CAD operators by rotating the mat if they left the office for a skive ...

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Sigh…

But that can all be turned off. I use Brave as my second browser (to Firefox) and I never get any mention of BAT or any other crypto rubbish.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

BenDwire Silver badge
Angel

Give your old friends a hug

Reading all these comments has made me realise how much I appreciate my old Laserjet 6p. 25 years old, genuine cartridge (off fleabay) and fed with decent quality paper. A bit of minimal maintainence to keep it clean inside and it just keeps on going. Admittedly it's had an ethernet server fitted (PrintSir) to make it available to everyone, but it really is a great little machine.

I really must say thank you to it more often ...

Raspberry Pi launches CM4 variant that laughs in the face of frostbite

BenDwire Silver badge
Boffin

Re: I wonder if...

As long as it's the right kind of epoxy, yes.

In my experience, the bulkiest components with the thinest leads tend to fall off first - e.g. electrolytic capacitors, but most smaller surface mounted components usually survive. I've used conformal coating and even potting compound for some applications. The extended temperature range quoted has been around for years, usually referred to as Military spec. It's not rocket science* to figure out where such components are used.

* or perhaps it is ;-)

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: Confidential.....

...because I knew how to use Kermit

Do you have anything else in common with Jim Henson ?

( yes, yes I know ...)

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Hotmail version

I did that to my users when I changed them from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. They hated OO, but were so much happier with a 'proper office suite'.

Of course those that knew, knew.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

It is, but you can turn that all off. I use it as my second browser for some sites, and it's quite useable. I do browse behind a PiHole which also helps a lot ...

KDE Plasma 6.3 released – and 6.3.1 is already here

BenDwire Silver badge
Go

It's arrived on Debian Trixie

A few weeks back I updated my Debian Stable system to Testing (a.k.a. Trixie) and so far it's been a smooth ride, at least until a few days back when an update wanted to remove Plasma, and not replace it. I left it a few days and this morning took the plunge (after running Timeshift, just in case).

And here I am, on Plasma 6.3, on Debian and it seems to work better than ever. Admittedly I chose to do an apt full-upgrade while logged out of KDE, but it was a relatively painless experience. So far I've not found anything broken either. YMMV

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: I wonder why

It amounts to the same thing - the costs are lower for the employer.

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Shareholder opinion

You can blame Gordon Brown for forcing Lloyds to purchase HBOS during the financial crisis. The shares are worth a fraction of their previous price, but they do pay out a pretty good dividend.

Lloyds have been getting rid of managers at all levels, counter staff and advisors, many of whom now have to work at home. I'd be surprised if many of the good IT staff hadn't noticed this and made a move yeears ago.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: The "technical boss"

The best manager I ever worked with was female too. Nobody else on the management team liked her, due to her abrasive manner and her complete inability to suffer fools gladly. Being a colonial-era engineering firm in the South East of England, you can imagine the people who inhabited "Mahogony Row" upstairs.

She introduced a weekly (sit down) meeting that lasted no more than a few minutes. People grumbled at first, but having hardware, software and production engineers talking to each other regularly really helped get things done.

Of course she got fed up and left for pastures new, but for a few short years we had the happiest and most productive design team.

Even Linus Torvalds can have trouble with autocycle … autocracy… AUTOCOMPLETE!

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

Re: My favorite youngster ...

I suspect his parents may have been part of his education. Well done!

(And even if said youngster is not one of your own, you can still raise a pint)

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

How close have you come to committing a crime while doing tech support?

I couldn't possibly give any details, but "close enough" is probably the best answer I can give.

It's the mid 1980's, and the stock control system falls under my administration because I decided to connect all the PCs together with a 1M 10-BaseT LAN, and the now multiuser system was sitting on my (Tandon 286) server. Long story short, the MD had his fingers in the till, the corporate credit card funded his house extension, and he regularly revalued stock items to pretend that we were making money to the company owners. He even managed to invoice customers before we'd even started purchasing components. Needless to say, he used to get the external auditor very drunk on his annual visits.

Apart from being the only engineer in the business, I was given a directorship which suddenly made me liable for any tax implications of the MD's misdemeanours. I decided to have the conversation with him to mend his ways, and crafted a way of revaluing the stock each month, with the aim of correcting the stock valuation by the year end. This involved low-level editing of the database, leaving no audit trail of what I was up to (The 1980's were far simpler times ...).

It nearly worked. We got to month 10, but the call of the dark-side got to him and he committed more fraud to fund his wife's demands. There was no choice but to ring up the owners and present the facts on a Sunday afternoon - the MD was gone before Monday. I deleted the last few transactions, and no-one was any the wiser to my part in the scandal.

Was that a crime? Probably, although the people it was committed against were grateful that I put a stop to the rogue MD's actions. I even got another promotion higher up the chain of command, so no real damage was done. It will come as no surprise to learn that all the companies involved went bust decades ago, many years after my departure.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

BenDwire Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: All you need

Oh I don't know - I use Debian and I regularly swear at my computer!

Only yesterday I was thwarted by my Dymo Labelwriter 450 that refuses to change orientation. I gave up and ran a Windows VM. What's recently changed? I decided to update/upgrade to Trixie, and a few things are now broken. Mea Culpa.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: 100V

Akai GX4000 perchance? I've got one of those somewhere, but I expect it'll need lots of capacitors before it ever turns a reel again.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: Here are the copies

I found my stash of QIC tapes from the Win3.11 days, and for a laugh tried to restore one. It soon became apparent that the pinch roller in the drive had liquified over the years, which of course wrecked the tape too. Black goo everywhere.

These days I use a portable hard drive for backups, and blue-rays for archives. So far, so good ...

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: In the opinion of this Englishman

At my age I'm definitely more tepid than hot, as my ex would confirm ...

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: In the opinion of this Englishman

My ex used to refer to it as "Hot Snot"

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

BenDwire Silver badge
Coat

Re: Its a mystery

It seems to me that BMW and Audi don't fit indicator stalks, or even indicators any more. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an orange flashing light on one.

And on that bombshell ...

/s

Trump scrubs all mention of DEI, gender, climate change from federal websites

BenDwire Silver badge
Pint

I had to wipe my keyboard for that one too. Beer for you and Boris the OP

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

BenDwire Silver badge

Re: There a starman....

Unless you're moving around ...

BenDwire Silver badge

Not in the USA, and ElReg is a US site these days. Sad, but true.

Bring back Dabbsy! (And Paris!)

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