Posts by rototype

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

We had a good one in the 90s - the mail order company I was workig for were doing rather well and had decided to extend their warehouse a bit to cope with all this stock they're happily selling (that's another story).

At the time the ssytem ran on an HP Unix Fridge whose 2 19" racks pretty much filled our little server room. We were located in anothe office across the hall with the boss in the next office to ours. On the day in question one of our number was having his appraisal (review) in the bosses office.

The builders were digging trenches with a JCB. Now they did everything theuy were suposed to do, the plans for the building showed that the electric cable went along this end of the building and the water went out the other end - allegedly. Cue JCB digging a trench about 1/3 the way between the 2 corners, now what could possibly happen?

The first we saw was the screens on our PCs went a bit squiffy (this was the era of CRTs - the picture something like a Picasso painting for a few seconds). 'Hmmm, wonder what's going on' I say and wander into the server room - 2 feet inside the door and BOOMM!!

Next, cue the boss & the guy getting his appraisal dashing in expecting to find me with a charred screwdriver or the like. Turns out the UPS protection circuits on the Unix box did their job admirably and protected the main system by blowing themselves to bits. Turns out those electric and water conduits weren't where the plans said they were but instead were in the exact position the JCB was digging, and he caught both of then with the bucket at the same time.

We managed to get the UPS fixed under the 24/7/4 service contract (and that included shipping a new one from 50 miles away, no mention was ever made about the JCB drivers trousers though.

Ah, happy days.......

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

We had one case in the 80s where the cleaners managed to snag a telephone cord withtheir floor polisher and rip it in two (the connector stayed in the socket and the phone stayed on the desk), they very helpfully repaired it - by tying the two snapped ends together!

Re: Never work with children or animals?

I did once hear from a fairly reliable source that Boeing used to use ferrets to run their cables through the narrow cable spaces on aircrafts.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: Fundamentals

Ye Cannae change the laws of physics Cap'n

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Wheeled office chairs

Ever heard of 'Lucky' - GSD trained as a guide dog - See QI for details

Re: Static

Obligatory "Who needs more than 640k?"

Re: Static

1986/7 more likely to be 10MB

Re: Static

Think you mean Stacking - Staking is what you do to Vampyres when they become a pain in the neck.

Re: Static

My first real PC was a Rair Black Box, 256kB RAM, 8085 CPU and a 10MB 5 1/4" full height HDD running MP/P (Multiuser CP/M). It came with DB2, WordStar and after a long slow train journey to Sheffield one evening after work - SuperCalc.

Not a games machine as the input/output was all via RS232 to either printers or dumb terminals but I do remember I managed to get a BASIC version of Othello (Reversi) once and managed to massively increase the speed of it from re-drawing the whole screen every move to addressing the screen locations individually then compiling it.

Such fun we had back in the day but it did teach me how to troubleshoot RS232 problems and that's more than paid for itself.

<Think we need an owd codger icon for 'Back in my day....'>

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: Remember floppy disks?

Reminds me of the time I used to work for a private school, the stdents were supposed to keep their floppy disks (3.5" variant) in a special protective holder - the school shop even sold these but inevitably these got lost, damaged or even just forgotten about because they were 'inconvenient'.

As such it meant that very often the disks just got slung into bags and the metal shield would start to bend. Eventually these got to such a state that the disks would go into a drive but then the shield wuld spring out and prevent the disk from being removed.

This didn't stop the students as they had to either get to the next lesson or go out because it was breaktime - the disks were generally forceably removed leaving the shield in the drive (plus they didn't want to leave any evidence of teh fact they hadn't been using a protective cover as that would have had to be explained to the head). Guess what, next lesson that computer couldn't be used and guess who got a call to fix said computer (along with a complaint that little so-and-so couldn't save their lessons work).

Got very adept at removing said shields with 2 expansion blankers to the extent that I could even do it with the original disk in there - several culprits were actually charged for the price of a replacement drive as a result.

I'd like to be all nostalgic and say they were happier times but they weren't, the school was a git to work for, the teachers treated all anciliary staff as if they were something that had come in on the sole of their shoes and I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Three middle-aged Dutch hackers slipped into Donald Trump's Twitter account days before 2016 US election

Re: Enter the hash into a search engine ...

I really hope Alan Sugar's sueing him for copyright breach

Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout

Re: Epoxy

Nah, that roundabout looks like it's got gravel on top, epoxy will never stick to that. What you really need is quick setting concrete, they'll have a devil of a job getting that off. (and if they're anything like our local council when concrete's spilled on the road they won't even bother).

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Re: a GUI in the office was a dim and distant dream.

At that time I was at Uni and all of my housemates had either Atari STs or Amigas. Not for me, I had a green screen dumb terminal connected to one of those old Rair Black Box computers (Think mine was badged as BT Merlin) running MP/M, still, I was the only one in the house with a wide carriage printer and 'professional' software (Wordstar, SuperCalc and DB2).

I still managed o get my reports/assignments submitted on time and since I'd spent some time working in industry before I started Uni I managed to get them looking a lot better than many other submissions.

Having that old Rair Black box stood me in good stead for sorting out all sorts of Serial Comms issues, and for a while (only threw them out last year) I had an extensive range of RS232 cable adaptors.

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

Re: Do you recall the smell of burning UPSes in the morning?

Yes, or more accurately an exploding one...

This happenned one time when they were extending the warehouse at the firm I worked for and the JCB bucket found that the plans for where the water and power feeds came in were both wrong and they were in the same trench as the JCB was...

Most stuff survived, but he UPS for the main system (since it was alone on it's circuit) took the brunt of the surge and promptly sh*t itself to protect the main unit. Pretty much destroyed the power input stage of it but fortunately we had 24/7/4 hour cover so we had a replacement unit in place by lunch time...

A side story to this was the face that one of our crew was having his annual review at the time, so the other 2 of us were in the office when this occurred. First thing we noticed was the screens on the PCs were doing strange patterns so I got up to check the main unit oin the next roomand almost as soon as I set foot in there the UPS exploded. Cue the Boss and our colleague who was being reviewed running in expecting to see me with a charred screwdriver in hand, sadly disapointed they had to accept my explanation of what happenned.

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Re: "The IT manager turned up clutching a clipboard"

It's important to make a differentiation between someone who uses a clipboard as an essential way of organising paperwork on the move and an eejit with a ticklist.

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: If Daleks drank coffee...

Re-caffinate! Re-caffinate!

Re: We have a similar one at work

I was on holiday in France the other year and in the public toilets (in the town hall as I recall) the urinals had recycling labels above them accompanied by a selection of beverage images (eg: urinal a was beer, b was wine, c was tea/coffee etc...) taking he recycling concept a bit far.

Re: GPP

They Were...

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Re: I did use a saw once...

Would have thought it was more Hammer Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_wS0Kw6k9c

Re: DIMM Slots

I remember a bransd of machines that used particularly thin SIMM slots that would only take their brand of memory (this was 486 SX25 era).

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: Amiga C compiler

I remember seeing North-C on my flatmates Amiga 500**, as I recall the icon was a picture of an oil rig - very witty.

** this was one of 4 machines that we networked together with RS232 cables (the other 3 were Atari STs) so they could play games together. Couldn't join in though, my 'puter was an old RaIr Black Box running MP-M (Multi-user CP-M) with a Getronics green screen terminal (back in the day when Getronics actually made stuff, not just contracted to repair Dells), so I couldn't join in - although I did have WordStar, SuperCalc and dBaseII on it (and a massive 10MB full height HDD!!!).

I'm pretty sure it was something to do with the Muppets, or maybe just that damned annoying frog...

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

In my experience, I COULD NOT GET a permanent position for many years - there just weren't the jobs in my area to have so I didn't have any choice - if I wanted to work I had to go contracting. This is the case for a lot of smaller and less skilled contractors, the employers don't want to take on a permanent employee if they can see that role being phased out after 6-12-18 months, such as hardware and software roll-outs. This sort of job will always exist as long as technology keeps moving forward and things need to be periodically refreshed where companies don't have the in house resources to do this. (read most companies). I do agree with a previous comment about contractors needing to talk to the cowards of employers and make sure they can be placed outside this legislation - it can be done and quite legally, I managed it when I worked for the NHS at a South Wales health trust but we were about the only contractors who weren't 'in scope' (I think the thought of either losing us or having to pay a lot more urged the contract manager to do something about it.)

I've moved on from there now and I was in the position recently that the company I was contracting to saw the value of taking me on permanently and my salary has even improved slightly as a result - this is the position I wanted to be in from the start. Many many others aren't quite as lucky.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Crazy Hammer Guy

That sounds like my comment whenever things are looking like being a little troublesome -

"I've got a 3lb forge hammer in the car if you need it..."

I ACTUALLY DO carry said 3lb forge hammer in the car but only for if I ever need to change a wheel since they have a habit of seizing onto the bit around the hub. Scared the life out of one user when I got it out of the car and brought it in (we were re-adjusting the shelves in the store room at the time, theirs was just an incidental job as I was passing).

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

Not just VPs but any managers can be susceptible... reminds me of our office/server room (this was at a private school by the way) that was about 6 x 15 feet and the "aircon" was 2 pedestal fans pointing in different directions in front of the windows (one blowing in and the other blowing out. Most mornings in the summer I had to clear the drift of dead midges of my keyboard. Didn't stay there long and took a pay cut to leave and was glad of it.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Re: The big red button

If your power was as prone to dropping the main breaker as ours is here you'd be happy for ANY UPS - just added another on one piece of kit that wasn't previously protected and was a pain in the arse when it had to be restarted (sometimes 3 dropouts in a day, and at random times upto and including 3:30am) Last one was 11:20 last night.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: Beautiful

... And how adept did you become at removing the little metal covers off the floppy disks from the drives? Been there, seen it, done it, thrown away the t-shirt (was full of holes) - 2 expansion blankers and a little wiggling and it saves the price of a new drive.

Got out of education very soon after this and I've given up on council and NHS work as well (nope, never got IR35'd) - private only now.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

Re: Been there...

Nearly as bad as those blasted ergonomic things (that the keytops always wear off in no time) - unfortunately my company insists on buying them for anyone who wants one on 'H&S' grounds.

Personally I just stick with a decent quality normal keyboard and have done with it.

Re: Been there...

Seems strange, they must've gone backwards on the design phase then (that or the beancounters have vitoed it on cost grounds or something).

I remember a LOT of laptop keyboards not that long ago were built with a sealed plastic tray under them and drain holes going through the laptop to the bottom. My Lenovo Wireless desktop keyboard has drain holes as well - didn't help it that much when I knocked a glass of red over it - still had to give it a good scrub but at least it's still working (it's what I'm typing this with).

(and why's no-one used the keyboard icon yet...)

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Re: whether if they'd had their sidearms they could have shot the lock off instead

Definitely RED, one of my favourite films.

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Re: Endstop recalibration

I remember them, a box called a disk drive exerciser - think I've still got one in the garage if you'd like it (for a fee of course...)

Tell me about it - I used to work in a school and became very adept at removing the metal covers from discs from the drives they had been jammed in.

The students were supposed to keep their discs in a protective cover at all times when they were not being used but often this did not happen (translation - maybe 10%) as a result the metal cover would become battered and inevitably the sides would spring out and as the discs would usually go in, the metal would then spring back and prevent them being removed, not that this stopped the students, they'd usually just pull until the disc came out minus metal cover. (occasionally they'd be good and put their hand up and say they couldn't get their disc out, but since this usually meant trouble for not keeping it in the cover the quickly stopped doing this).

The next lesson someone couldn't use the drive and we were eventually called, sometimes they'd even trace the culprit (depending on the teacher) and since it was a private school the parents would be billed for a new floppy drive.

The moral of this story is if you get the metal off a floppy stuck in the drive, 2 expansion blanking plates and a bit of wiggling are often your saviour. (I mus have unclogged dozens of drives and only once lost a drive, and I think that was on the way out anyways).

Re: Reliability

They used to sell these for the BBC specifically called 'Flippies'

Re: Reliability

Mine don't, worn out

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

Re: I rather like it, but for one detail

Dell 5590

The best way to screw the competition? Do what they can't, in a fraction of the time

Re: Nah.

LMFAO - That's Compo!

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

Re: Fiat 500

Can't see that page, it's complaining that I have adblocker on and wants me to turn it off, which is NOT going to happen.

Apple MacBook butterfly keyboards 'defective', 'prone to fail' – lawsuit

Re: The only Mac I ever owned had the worst keyboard I've ever used

I've had many laptops of many different brands over the years and I now ONLY use Thinkpad T series machines, it saves a lot of hassle. (and I don't mind the styling, in my mind that's what a laptop SHOULD look like).

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

Re: Magic blue smoke...

Reminds me of an incident that happened one time we were having the warehouse extended at work. Apparently the plans showed the electrical feed at one end of the warehouse and the water at the other - they weren't, they were both in the same trench that just happened to be where the JCB was digging (thinking he was well clear of both).

Here's the IT angle - the digger bucket hit the pipe and cable at the same time and caused some sparks (OK - it took out the whole power feed to that end of the building, sending massive spikes up the earth line) . The first we knew about it was our screens wobbling a bit - went to have a look at the big main server (HP D series Unix box) and as I walked in the room there was a HOOJ explosion as the UPS just shat itself (managed about 30 seconds before it did so pretty good). Managed to protect the main server as well and the only problems were from a couple of incorrectly closed files from the sudden power outage and a new pair of trousers required as I was the one to go in to see what the trouble was just before it went bang.

Re: I recall even my mum (a bit like Dilmom) telling me a fire story

Try looking for paint with the really nasty environmental hazard stickers on it - they generally come in metal cans. (don't think plastic can hold it)

Re: I recall even my mum (a bit like Dilmom) telling me a fire story

Our Chemistry teacher used one of those wide glass bowls for that experiment - Sodium was fine, fizzed and popped over the surface but the Potassium exploded (I think it ignited the gas it was producing) and split the glass bowl drenching the teacher from about the waist downwards. He didn't do Potassium the next year...

RIP... almost: Brit high street gadget shack Maplin Electronics

Re: Well at least

Anyone else tried RS recently, good prices (I remember they used to be horribly overpriced, or so I thought at the time) and good delivery, as well as 'Trade Counters' which can act as 'Click & Collect' or just pop in if they've got what you need. Or there's CPC/Farnell - similar but don't remember seeing anything about trade counters with them.

Maplin have been going down the tubes for a long time, ever since some Eejit put the beancounters in complete charge of the company, ditching any product if there's a momentary dip in sales. A story I remember from a good few years ago (when the staff actually knew what they were doing) was that the D25 plugs weren't selling as well as the D25 sockets so they were discontinued, 3 months later they discontinued the D25 sockets as well as no-one was buying them there since they coundn't get the mating plug!

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Re: What no-one has mentioned yet... - DRUMS

They were still using MTS when I started there in '89 - just for the 1st years, I seem to remember the machine was an Amdahl, no idea what model it was though (I suspect we night have been told but I don't have any notes from back then any more). I also seem to remember they had a cluster of *nix machines that the 2nd and 3rd years were allowed to play with instead of being hobbled by the old system.

I also remember an old HP analyser system when I started at RR with a fixed/removable platter on it - I only saw the cover off it once when it was being serviced and was told in no uncertain terms never to get your watch or anything that might be magnetic anywhere near the voice coil, even when it was off. Didn't need telling twice on that one.

The analyser was 'donated' to a college (who also had another virtually identical one) when we were granted funding to purchase one that could be moved by one person and was considerably more powerful (it even used 3 1/2" Floppies!!!)

BOFH: Come on, PFY, let's pick a Boss

Re: Explains a lot

A company I heard of did exactly that. I can 't remember who it was or where but here's how it went...

They were a production company and the product they made was pretty successfull and sold well, however they were still making a loss. They analysed the time usage of the higher wage earners of the company (ie the managers) and found 50% of the time they were at meetings, 35% of the time they were preparing for meetings and 10% of the time was spent writing up after meetings, leaving just 5% of actual productive time. They let go 90% of the managers and turned the company around overnight.

House Reps grease the wheels for hundreds of thousands of robo-cars on America's streets

Not quite the right statement

"we must ensure we stay in the drivers seat..." - albeit one without any controls - don't think he properly thought that one through.

Tech contractors begin mass UK.gov exodus in wake of HMRC's IR35 income tax clampdown

Re: Wait until next year..

"Therefore, expect Her Majesty's Arse to announce that the rules will be expanding to the whole economy, not just the public sector."

As far as I was aware that was always going to be on the cards, hit the public sector this year and the private sector next year.

Funny how the amount they hope to raise (£440M) seems to be about the same as they expected to raise from stopping Umbrella companies allowing contractors to claim expenses. I sense that they'll probably just about make as much from this as they did from the umbrella 'clampdown' so will want to somehow make even more the following year with another hair brained scheme.

UK.gov tells freelance techies to slap 20 per cent on fees as IR35 tax hike looms

Re: > Just the first stage

Of course they don't want self employed people - this means they actually have to individually sort out peoples tax meaning they actually have to earn their fees rather than just having the megacorps hand them the figures (and money) on a platter.

@ Doctor Syntax

Only the liability falls to the agency, it's the end user (Gov/Health/public sector department) that actually decides whether the contractors are actually within IR35, so expect some 'interesting' anomalies due to differing departments policies regarding contractors, and with some policies being blanket applied from several layers above this means some departments that can't afford to lose them will lose their contractors even when the managers of that department can prove their contractors aren't IR35. (think Dilbert and lazy/incompetent managers)

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Re: Food is not only sustenance

A colleague of mine always gets his lunch from the canteen as a carry out and always eats it at his desk - he has found that this is the only way to avoid having the users pestering him with IT issues that should be logged in the proper manner (ie helpdesk) while he's trying to eat.

Burning desire helped us collar arson suspect, claim Danish cops

Re: Evidence

Or perhaps when this evidence was presented to him he 'fessed up to the crimes - what we really need is an update on the story as to what happened once it made it to court (if it did). Playmobile recreation optional in this case...