Posts by DJV 2750 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
Ooh! Which one was his? I built several things from that magazine over the years, some of which even worked properly!
The largest project I attempted was Joanna piano from the May 1975 issue onwards - it did work for several years but took me a couple of years to hand-build the case, hand-draw and etch the PCBs and assemble everything! It was built like the proverbial brick shithouse but did suffer from a lot of sound breakthrough! I think it died sometime in the 1980s, after which it got replaced by something off the shelf.
That reminds me of a story I was told back in the 1970s when I was a trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion.
When designing new TVs, they would build the prototypes with slightly longer legs on the components (usually the resistors and capacitors). Then, with the TV up and running, someone with insulated side cutters would come along and snip one of the legs of a component and, if the TV remained working, that component would be removed from the final design - if it stopped working, the TV was switched off, the leg resoldered together, the TV turned on and the process would continue with a different component. The TVs would then go into production with only the components fitted that enabled it to work.
Sometimes the removed component might have been doing something important in the long term - e.g. preventing a different part from overheating, compensating for the different tolerances in other components etc. Whether the story was true or not, I cannot say. But maybe it accounted for the booklet that was issued to all engineers. This listed all modifications that HAD to be made to various models of TV sets either out in customerland or if they happened to pass through the workshop and were found without the specified modifications. Most of these mods were to prevent known/regular component failures and burn-outs.
"But when the AI bubble finally pops, it could bring down money-losers OpenAI and Anthropic, and maybe even Oracle, which has gotten in a bit too deep."
We live in hope!*
* Actually, I don't live in Hope, but I did stay there one night way back in the 1990s when all the B&Bs in nearby Castleton were fully booked up.
Dear Customer,
You have just received an Irish virus. Since we are not so technologically advanced in Ireland, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know. That'd be grand.
Tanx.
Paddy O'Hacker
Yes, and given the number of bugs fixed, what's the chance that one or two will, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, cause some sort of bricking to occur? I will be keeping Update Blocker turned on for a few days until I am sure that there aren't any hidden gotchas waiting to spring their little surprises.
The fact that Microsoft let installer programs stomp over system files without any care for the damage they were doing just shows how little they understood about how to write an operating system (not that Windows at that time was anything like an operating system in the first place - it was just a shell stuck on top of 16-bit DOS with kludges to hide the sticking plaster).
I had to do that on my original Amiga 500 but it definitely was not "upside down" as the chips would have fallen clean out of the sockets! Dropping them had to be done with the computer the right way up down onto a bed or something else softish that wouldn't have caused any further damage.
I had something similar way back in the previous century. I had an Amiga 2000 around 1990-ish and splashed out some serious money on a Quantum 80MB hard disk and associated plug-in card. It worked fine for about 3 years, but then developed the habit of failing to start up in the morning. My solution was to pull card plus drive out of the slot, shake it around a bit, slam it back in and it would then power up for another day's work. It got replaced after that with a much cheaper and "massive" 540MB drive until I had to reluctantly retire the Amiga as they went out of fashion.
I wonder what they were listening to when they came up with that name.
