
Yep, I well remember the Acorn MOS screens showing when things occasionally went titsup.com
235 publicly visible posts • joined 5 May 2010
Lots of fond memories unlocked after reading through the comments here, pints all round!
Writing scheduling algorithms on Tanenbaun's MINIX for my systems programming coursework at OxPoly...
Installing TamuLinux from 17 floppy disks...
Being impressed with OS/2
Being unimpressed with NEXTStep
Suntools!
Silicon Graphics - helping build a better dinosaur (loved 'my' Indigo :D)
The DLL Hell era of all the different versions of Windows 95 when trying to distribute our software...
Being the first in my company to switch to using Windows 2000 (beta) and finding it a vast improvement all round...
er, jumpers for goalposts? ;-)
I remember something similar, working for a company adjacent to the games industry in the 90's. Shiny new playstation, straight from Japan.
Right let's plug it in and see what this baby can d.. *POP!*
Good job they had more than one ;-)
I also remember we were impressed with the Dreamcast as it looked like it had liquid cooling IIRC (was just a head pipe thing I think in the end)
You're being downvoted, but I mostly agree. Have 11 on my work laptop, and 10 on home PC. With some very minor tweaks they are essentially the same user experience.
What I don't trust is MS's ability to update my 10 machine withour royally fucking it up, so I'm holding out to the bitter end before trying that.
Sadly dear old El Reg is a USA focused site these days. Since the loss of .co.uk, we've had to live with English (simplified) as the default language. There are a few of the old writers still about but they are few and far between it seems.
I guess the almighty dollar always wins in the end.
I well remember heading off to polytechnic in 1991, and recoling in horror at having to use Windows 3, after cutting my teeth on various Archimedes machines running RISC OS.
Context menus everywhere just made much more sense to me at the time. Win 3 didn't even have antialiased fonts as I recall.
Going to have to find an old PI and try this out... question is, can it run Crysis, er, I mean Zarch? :-D
I once contracted at a company who had a VERY expensive new server dissapear one weekend. From an internal secure server room. With multiple layers of security do to the fact we connected to other organisations who like to keep things very secure too. And 24hr manned security on site. On a site with only one entrance (past security). With electronic monitoring systems external to the building. And for various reasons the server would not be easy to sell on.
Security saw/heard nothing. The first we knew was when we tried to log on to said machine on monday morning only to find we couldn't connect..
Strangely there didn't seem to be a big fuss about it, and it was quietly replaced. Thinking back now, there was more than a whiff of anchovy about the whole thing ;-) I was just a lowly contractor - so I took my money each month, did what I was told, and kept my mouth shut :-D
Well this has all reminded me of being a callow yoof at polytecnic, and learning to use Sunview/Suntools on some kind of workstation with a giant CRT monitor. Also DEC Ultrix on workstations with those wierd round mice. THen worked for quite a few years with SGI Irix from the old Indigo all the way up to the days of the O2, Indigo2 etc.
Must dig out that Jurassic Park poster SGI were hawking around at the time, and get it framed. It's probably worth several hundred pence these days ;-)
Hmm, AdBlue needs to be topped up (fairly) regularly so is unlikely to be hidden. So I wonder if Ford were also using a similar system to Stellantis - i.e. a hidden fuel additive tank or pouch (Eolys, pat fluid, other names) that the car decides is empty after certain parameters are met (e.g. 100,000 miles travelled / x fuel ups, or somesuch). THat sounds more likely including the price to refill.
I had the emissions light come on on a Subaru once. Of course dealers want to replace lots of expensive parts. Some internetting later and I discovered the issue was that I hadn't closed the fuel cap enough 'clicks' after the last fuel up. This lead to a sensor somewhere getting upset and throwing the code...
Sadly main dealers no longer employ mechanics with diagnostics skills. They seem to be just parts-fitters who are presumably on comission for each unnecessary part they replace!
It's about "my system works just fine now, and I don't trust microsoft not to fuck it up with the upgrade"
My work laptop is Win11, its ok, its just windows, no different to 10 really.
My home machine is Win10, there's no way I'm upgrading until forced - not because I 'hate' win11, but because it works fine now and I don't want it broken by the upgrade (even if the chances are smaller these days of that happening).
YMMV of course.
Biz says folks know the difference between fixed and mobile broadband. Do they, though, asks ASA?
I think anyone event slightly technically minded is well aware that most people have NO idea about their internet connection. As far as they are concerned 'WiFi' is the magic thing that allows them to see pr0n and memes, regardless of how they're actually connected.
"Plus, if you have an emergency in West Wales, are you on your own?"
I mean, quite often yes. But that's more to do with the lack of emergency services coverage here rather than any communications issues. Best to make your own way to hospital here, rather than waiting for an ambulance for example (and that's not a slur on the overworked WAS staff, there's just not enough of 'em).
Gen X here, and I've no idea what the word-salad-wankers are on about either. Having run out of fucks to give years ago, I've no problem with telling them to start again and this time use English to explain whatever the hell it is they're on about. It's probably one reason I'm never going to get promotion :-D
Vulcano, near Sicily.
Ooh, that looks interesting, I'll take a walk. 30 seconds later I'm hop-skipping across the sand like some kind of lizard, heading for the cooling refuge of some concrete that was merely blisteringly hot ;-)
I suggest you wear something on your feet if you visit such a beach in the summer !
(icon for the temperature)
I have very fond memories of RISC-OS at school - we had a 'wacky' computer science teacher who made everything fun and interesting (and also let us take machines apart to fit hardware etc - I seem to remember we didn't destroy the Hawk V9 hand scanner :-D )
It was a bit of a shock when I went to Poly and had to use PCs running Windows 3.0 - it seemed so janky, and only 2 mouse buttons ;-)
I wanted a RiscPC but the price was too high for an impoverished student at the time, sadly.
Now I'm wondering if there's somewhere on the web I can go and play Zarch again, good times :-)
Whenever I see stories like this, I think back to my undergrad days, and a project to write a neural network to recognise patterns. (Written in Eiffel - is that still a thing!?) Long story short, when given a pattern it ought to recognise, it always came up with the inverse of the 'right answer' as the result.
When asked why, the lecturer's response was (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Fuck knows".
In summary, nobody ever knew how any of this stuff works, and probably still doesn't ;-)
I've been searching t'webs but haven't found a straight answer anywhere. Can you actually 'buy a game' for these new consoles, or do you HAVE to subscribe to something monthly? I'm almost tempted by the cheaper one, but it stops being cheap when you're spending loads each month on subscriptions. My IT equipment is low power linux boxen, and a windows box supplied by work which is probably powerful enough for Tetris but not much else. I just want to play Just Cause 3 occasionally for the explosions and sillines ;-) (I am aware of 4, but 3 looks more fun to me)
As someone being run ragged by having to update systems due to covid, I have some sympathy for the developers of this app. If it's anything like my experience they'll be battling constantly changing and contradictory requirements that are generated daily by random members of a hastily assembled 'task and finish' group (barf). They will probably have spotted problems before they arise, but will either be ignored, or railroaded into releasing it yesterday, if not sooner. Of course any actual problems post-release will result in shocked pikachu faces all round by the T&F gang.. (and late nights for the developers where they get to implement what they said was needed in the first place)
Thorough testing? ahahahahaAHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* Yes, nice idea, you need to actually know what they want it to do, first ;-)
Having said that, I'll be seeing if I can contribute to the maintainers of utPLSQL after all this, as it has saved my bacon a few times already....
Given that windows search has been broken for SO long... I always revert to dir c:\<whatever> /s /b to find files with wildcards on my work PC. It runs almost instantly. Is there a powershell equivelant of that? I found the syntax so bizarre and verbose that I gave up with it long ago...
It *is* still handy on locked down machines though, as admins often forget it is there and leave it open.. so I heard, anyway ;-)