Re: "I asked for a car...
And both are prone to crashing!
Posts by DJV
2397 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
Page:
How much does your kid hate exams? This lad hacked his government to skip them
Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it
'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses – just four light years away
Microsoft’s stealth scripting engine arrives on Android
Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors
Glassdoor spaffs users' email addresses in bcc fail
Nope, we can't find dark matter either, says LUX team
Apple kills eavesdrop bug in FaceTime
Microsoft tweaks TCP stack in Windows Server and Windows 10
4-day Fasthosts outage: Customers' sites go TITSUP
Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted
Aquaboffins sink lost Greek city theory
Windows 10 zero day selling for $90,000
Wednesday 1st June 2016 10:07 GMT 
Re: Prerequisites?
Reminds me of a story about someone whose garden was plagued by caterpillars who found an advert for a kit that guaranteed it could kill 100% of them. Kit was promptly purchased and, upon arrival, was found to be 2 small blocks of wood labelled A and B, and accompanied by some simple instructions which read: "Place caterpillar on block A, hit with block B."
Urika-ka-ka-ka! Cray unveils open source big data box
The Sons of Kahn and the Witch of Wookey
Google HQ evacuated
Done making the big stuff better? The path to Apple's mid-life crisis
Don't – don't – install iOS 9.3 on your iPad 2: Upgrade bricks slabs
Wednesday 23rd March 2016 22:32 GMT 
Not exactly trouble free...
I did mine late this afternoon (BEFORE this news broke). It wasn't exactly plain sailing but it got there in the end.
In fact, it upgraded itself twice.
I'd connected it to the Mac as it's often safer that way but, after the first update (full download, restart and update shenanigans), iTunes decided that it was still on 9.2.1 and proceeded to do the whole kit and kaboodle a second time! Well, at the moment it seems ok (as far as an iPad 2 can be on 9.x - fingers and wallet crossed).
Off to Mars this summer? Don't forget your map
Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!
Monday 14th March 2016 15:00 GMT
"Easy Access" (cough, cough)
Yep, Mr Cartwright and I know EXACTLY which university that was as I was one of the students when you were there, though I am definitely innocent of any attempt to install MacWrite!
I do remember that both the Macs and PCs both used compatible* versions of MS Word. Compatible that is until you attempted to edit a document on one that had been created on the other - formatting almost inevitably went completely out the window, quite alarming when coursework was due and there was a scarcity of available machines with the "correct" architecture!
*Obviously, this was a completely new meaning of "compatible" that Microsoft had cunningly devised.
Another thing I remember from those days was that there was a lab set up with a bunch of dual-floppy-capable Macs (possibly IIfx) but they only had one actual floppy drive installed. After a short while you and your colleagues had to go around taping over the unused 2nd floppy disk drive hole because students had a habit of thinking there really was a floppy drive in there. The rewarding clunk of a floppy hitting the motherboard a few inches below would result in one of you having to pull the case apart to rescue said floppy.
Fun times!
German lodges todger in 13 steel rings
'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'
Wednesday 9th March 2016 16:44 GMT
Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000
Regretfully, if someone sends you a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns then opening it in Office 97 (and possibly 2000, if I recall correctly) will just silently truncate each line at 256 columns leaving you none the wiser that there was ever any more data available.
I gave up on Office after 2000 and now use WPS or Libre as they are both less hassle.
Regular Fast Radio Burst detected outside our galaxy
'I bet Russian hackers weren't expecting their target to suck so epically hard as this'
Official: Seagate notebook drive has shingles
Oracle issues emergency patch for Java on Windows
When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'
Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs
Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash
Seagate’s triple whammy: Disk numbers, costs, and flash
Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown
Friday 29th January 2016 16:09 GMT
Re: Acorn System 1
Between 1978 and 1980 I worked for the PCB manufacturing company that supplied the prototype boards for this, though we never got the contract for the production run. I did keep one of the bare 8K memory extension boards with the intention of expanding my CBM PET - a project that never actually happened.
This gun says you ain’t leaving until my PC is fixed
Thursday 28th January 2016 11:07 GMT
Re: In a dim and distant past.
Excellent story! (unless you were there for the 3 hours, of course)
I use to be a TV engineer for Rediffusion in Norwich back in the 1970s. We never had that specific problem though we did have one particular customer who used to swap all the valves around in his set and then call us to put them back into the correct sockets. Being quite hardy things there was (mostly) no damage done to the valves.
Lights out! Newbie IT manager's dark basement trip
Monday 25th January 2016 14:18 GMT
Re: Brand New Column?
Your memory is almost fully functional, CDD! It was actually Network Week and I have proof of this as I have just dug out a copy of the 22nd October 1997 edition. The story I'd submitted for "This Damn War" was published on page 4 of that issue. Page 3 also had the BOFH column long before he'd taken up residence at el Reg.
Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!
'Powerful blast' at Glasgow City Council data centre prompts IT meltdown
Windows for Warships? Not on our new aircraft carriers, says MoD
T'was the night before Christmas, and an industrial control system needed an upgrade
Friday 18th December 2015 12:27 GMT
Re: Which movie was this?
There was a major Perl script running at a company I used to be at. The original programmer, who had departed some months earlier, had made the script as terse and unreadable as possible. The only comment in the whole thing was next to some code whose purpose no one had any idea about.
The comment was extremely useful - it said: "This is a skanky hack"
Hapless Virgin Media customers face ongoing email block woes
Mozilla looses Firefox 43, including Windows 64-bit variant
Hey, Oracle, what's in that VirtualBox security update? *crickets*
Mozilla bins 'Tiles' ads plan in Firefox
Doctor Who: The Hybrid finally reveals itself in the epic Heaven Sent
Sunday 29th November 2015 13:24 GMT
Ashildr "me" is the hybrid?
Hmm, but what if the Doctor really is the Hybrid? And via his "human" mother who just happens to turn out to be Ashildr, once she's been sent back to Gallifrey's past to before he was born. Well, she is immortal, so might be considered a suitable mate for another time lord...
...just my theory...
BOFH: How long does it take to complete Friday's lager-related tasks?
Friday 27th November 2015 13:05 GMT
Re: Time sheet systems
Same here - except I'm self-employed and wrote my own system (as it was simpler to do that than use a spreadsheet). Dead simple, takes seconds to fill in stuff, granularity to the minute, produces monthly invoices in a couple of clicks and provides info to stuff on the tax form at the end of the financial year. No time wasting crap or special codes to remember whatsoever - it works the way I NEED it to work!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
