Posts by grumpyoldeyore 108 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2010
When I worked at a large mobile phone manufacturing company we had a talk on upcoming re-use recycling initiatives. Once the battery (and possibly the display - 20 odd years ago) the remains would be crushed and put into essentially a bessemer converter and the metals seperated out. The casing would burn and the released heat would count as oil-reuse. I didn't get a clear answer on my question of how the toxic fumes from the burning plastic would be dealt with.
I caught Covid for the first time at the end of March 2023. This was six months after my last booster. I didn't realise it was Covid at first but took a test which came back positive. I tried to log it on the NHS website but I wasn't allowed to because it was a test I'd bought and paid for. At that point, the website informed me, "only results from test kits supplied by the NHS to eligible people can be registered on this website" .
Many many years ago I was working on a legacy project which used a real time operating system, and we needed some support. The RTOS vendor did not believe that we were still using the version that we were, and asked for an image of the labels on the installation disks. This resulted in yours truly having to put the 8" (yes EIGHT) floppies onto the photo copier to get a paper image to go through the fax machine. Of course half the company passed by the copier while I was trying to get the contrast right. Cue many humerous comments.....
(Where's the Paris angle ? )
They have: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/08/thinking-inside-the-box-the-welsh-teen-who-tried-to-post-himself-home-from-australia .
There was also the Nigerian politician who didn't book the freight trip https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20211380
The Warrington Cycle Campaign has a "Facility of the Month" page. Here from April 2018 is a facility in Cambrigeshire with a bypass for the cycle track...
http://wcc.crankfoot.xyz/facility-of-the-month/April2018.htm
(Apologies - not HTTPS)
Is that the sound of the air ambulance I hear? ---->
The last company I worked for - an SME with R&D and manufacturing in the UK and big sales in the US:
1) Signed all employees up to PerkBox ( a ligitimate enterprise) but the invite emails came from Perkbox before the briefing from the company ......
2) Signed all UK employees up to an online training portal but the invite emails came out before the company briefing....
3) Changed the financial institution supplying the UK pension scheme but again failed to brief employees, not only before the invite emails came out but also before the switch had actually been made
4) On at least 3 occasions the CFO (US based) sent out warnings to the whole company of fake invoice emails ... by forwarding the fake invoice emails with the live link .....
5) We had to go through a mass password reset after the CEO (US based) fell for a phising email (possibly off the LinkedIn leak) and gave away her domain login credentials ....
I decided that the stress of working out if I could to afford to retire was less than the constant head-banging against a manager who would put the whole company ( approx 80 people) in "required" and the people that were needed in "optional". And don't get me started on the colleagues who would lob up 15 minutes late, interrupt progress to apologise for being late then demand to know what they'd missed.
Oh, and I needn't have stressed the financials.
Off to walk the dogs.
When Spanair flight number JK 5022 crashed in 2008 one of the "holes in the cheese" that lined up was that the maintenance database (or the computer systems attached thereto) had been infected with malware, which meant that it wasn't flagged that the plane in question had suffered multiple problems over several days and so should have been taken out of service on the first failed take off.
Subsequently the crew made a configuration error and theconfiguration warning did not sound, so the second take off attempt was made with fatal consequences.
https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/20/spanair_malware/
http://avherald.com/h?article=40b73189/0024&opt=0
... most existing EU countries have ID schemes already, a large number compulsory. (I think it it is only the UK, Ireland and Denmark that don't), and the non compulsory ones make having some form of Identity compulsory.
The UK's been bringing it it by the back door anyway - notice how you have to use your NI number now, for example to validate your driving record when hiring a car.
I do indeed. In 1995 we set our new recruit the boring task of setting the clock calendar chip on our kit to just before midnight 1999, No problems. He then used his initiative and repeated the test for 2000, 2001, 2002 , 2003 at which point we were back in 1897! Was a bug in in a calendar library. Updated the library, issue fixed. Many of these bought for our persient apprentice.
@Steve Todd - I never knew it went back to the 9900 - all the early technical press referred to it using the 9995. The 9995 was designed to be cheaper by having a lower pin count - hence the multiplexed bus. I'm pretty sure that the 4 phase clock went as well. We used the 9900 where I worked, and looked at the 9995 as a possible cost saving but decided that the re-design was not worth it, I've also a vague recollection that the hardware integer divide was removed from the instruction set which was the USP for the 9900 in the first place. (memory may be clouded by the passage of 35+ years).
From memory, that actually depended on which version of which data sheet you read. A new circuit was being built at the first company I worked for, using aTI9900. At board bring up, the data bus was fount to be "the wrong way round". The PCB design team had a V1 data sheet with D0 as the MSB and created the library shape thus. The HW designer had a V2 data sheet with D0 as the LSB. I also recall that the programming manual had A16 as the MSB and a long philosophical discussion about A0 which didn't actually come out of the chip, but was replaced by a "byte selector".
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