Posts by DJV 2666 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
Damn, that rings a bell that I had almost entirely forgotten about! As a Norwich resident (still!) I do remember a crazy evening when the mains went haywire. As someone who was into electronics, I had a multimeter and could see that the mains was fluctuating rather strangely. Was it late 70s/early 80s?
20 or so years ago we had a Perl programmer whose main script generated static web pages from the stuff (pseudo/simplified text and images) that the designers wrote.
It had exactly one comment in it. At its most incomprehensible core section, the programmer had added: // This is a skanky hack
To this day I have no idea what it was doing!
Possibly, but if it's a higher-security password manager you'd definitely need the extra leverage of a hefty crowbar. Unless you're the LockPickingLawyer, of course, in which case it would only take a rake and the "Pick that Bosnian Bill and [him] made™"!
Yeah - one of my early jobs was as a trainee TV repair technician. Working with Cathode Ray Tubes taught you to respect that 12-15kV (black and white TVs) and up to 26kV for colour TVs.
One senior technician once got zapped with around 25kV between his little finger and his wrist. The muscle between the two stood to attention for several long minutes and he was feeling a tad unwell for a couple of hours afterwards. He certainly didn't do THAT again in a hurry! As this was back in the early 1970s I'm not even sure if we had proper accident report books back then. It was just one of the hazards of the job though it was drilled into us that you NEVER had both hands inside the back of a live TV while fault finding.
Very interesting - thanks for bringing that term to our attention. A combination of this and "biting the hand that feeds you" is probably behind a good number of failures.
Of course, when "biting the hand that feeds you" is what your users love and have come to expect... and then you stop doing that very thing, might also be a reason why other things (well, one in particular - not mentioning any names) feel like they are slowly failing and fading away.
"Bring back the days where HDD's were easily removed, RAM upgrades was via a 2 screw slot at the bottom and batteries were not embedded within the guts of the machine."
Oh absolutely! I recently upgraded a small batch of HP laptops from HDD to SSD for a friend's organisation. Both the RAM and drives were accessible via a one-screw slot on the underside. As part of the payment, I was gifted one of the laptops, which I upgraded similarly, as well as upgrading the RAM. However, not long afterwards, I discovered it needed the CMOS battery replacing, and THAT required the laptop to be completely dismantled and the motherboard removed!
Ah well, 2 out of 3 wasn't too bad, I suppose...
I remember when this was all fields.
I remember when a quid could buy you a full tank of petrol.
I remember when the streets were swept clean at least once a week and litter wasn't a problem.
I remember when politicians at least pretended to be honest.
I remember when El Reg was a UK-based publication and fun to read...
...sigh...
Of course, if there is a "camera on" policy and you really don't want to show your face/house or be involved at all, then there are always ways and means to achieve this without it appearing to be your "fault"!
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-purposely-slow-down-the-Internet-connection-for-everyone-in-my-house-discreetly
The perpetrators of ransomware should be punished just like football hooligans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04clpd7h0b0
