Posts by miket82 53 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jan 2012
Have 7 machines. 2 laptops, an i5 3 year old Dell and a 5 year old pentium Acer Aspire, a 5 year old i3 HP desktop, and 4 home built desktops (1*i3, 2* i5 [all 3 gen], 1*AMD II x2) all on mobos bought over eBay using whatever memory and HDD's I had laying around. I updated, manually, each one to Creative, starting from the most ancient first, ending with the Dell. All have VMware and Oracle VM Virualbox loaded as well as other stuff I experiment with. All work!
Signed up with Demon in 1992 but before then I booked a holiday to the Faro's in 1987 using a BBS system. At the same time I bought 8Mb of RAM for 32 quid and a 32Mb HDD on a card for 230 quid and wondered what I could do with all that space. But, I could shell out of NewWord into VisiCalc without the machine crashing.. Progress eh?
My son, living in NZ, tells me he has many customers using Win 95 on a regular basis. Shops, gas stations and farms. Reason, they are not web attached and it does what they want it do do. His biggest problem is finding hardware replacements when something goes belly up.
I also have 2 consumer units with no problems with powerlines. Check your connections. In times past I have had complaints of slow dial up connections (any one remember them?) and simply re-tightening all the connections removes the problem. Even more important with a.c power lines where they can work loose if the original connections were a bit dodgy.
Otherwise, why not use a powerline wifi range extenders?
In the early prehistoric days of spreadsheets I remember my budgeting numbers were always +/- 2p out. Our accountant, trained as an auditor would always bring this to my attention despite my always noting that the true figure was whatever it was below the bottom line.
Because I could never be sure whether the 2p would be up or down I couldn't fiddle (amend) any figure because whatever numbers were entered the total was always +/- 2p.
The danger is not with the software rather with the user who should not assume the machine is always right.
How many time has the shop assistant said 'it must be a million because that's what my calculator says.'
Or how about this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPbxYsWxp8A
Only interesting thing about this is once again British Industry screws up. Takes me back to the sixties when everything was on 6 to 9 months delivery, if you were lucky. I recall waiting for a lift to arrive before we could continue building. After some six months of phone calls it turned out the lift had been dropped off at a layby halfway down the A1 for another unit to pick it up. No one had told the pick up firm it had been dropped off! Nothing changes except the incompetent who seem to survive what ever is thrown at them. No doubt the CEO of Datawind got his Christmas bonus and the shareholders their dividend.
Once asked where I wanted to be in 10 years time. Alive and doing your job I replied. I got the job. He had seen my c.v and knew I would move on long before that and wasn't threatened he told me some weeks later. We got on very well and more than a few bevvies were downed before I did leave some 2 years later.
The comment about printing the £ (I hated the # sign) reminded me of my DOS days. I solved it by writing a small 90 byte machine code routine (most bytes were my credit line) that loaded through config.sys that redirected the print code to see the £ code rather than the hash code. Staff often asked me what the line
"Money added to system"
meant when they switched the machine on but then I always did have a weird sense of humor.
Been with BT since before carrier pigeons. Always on time and I always benefit. Most recent : I complained that the external cable was coming off the wall. Result, he rerouted the master cable to a more convenient position and gave me a new router.
Worst case : we had been abroad for some three months and had stopped all outgoing calls during our absence. On arriving back, no connection, our line had been used to service another user. On complaining and on the same day, they attended and fixed it. What happened to the person using out original line I've no idea but that's another story.
Moral : BT equals Best Telecomms.
Lots of chatter about O/S, hardware and less often the cloud.
Anyone remember dumb terminals?
May be a bit early whilst the big boys fight it out but I can see the return of dumb terminals on the horizon. Switch on, the bios connects to the internet, downloads whatever it needs to fit the hardware and away you go.
Big advantage, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ et.al can save all that money spying on us as they will be the source of all our needs. Oh dear, maybe not such a good idea after all. Scrub this post.
I once asked a woman I was interviewing what her skills were.
She replied 'none, for the last 22 years I've been bringing up our 4 children'
I replied 'so you don't consider that being an expert in HR, financial management, social work, catering, health and safety, time management, transportation logistics and well developed negotiating skills to name just a few are important?'
I doubt the current crop of HR based assessment centres and their psychological tick boxes would have picked her skills up.
She got the job and went on to become very successful.
My point. Forget the past, look at the future and the potential. Gender is only one aspect to consider and is no less or more important than any other attribute.
I take no credit for this but it sums (pun intended) the question up so choice your answer.
A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job.
The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."
Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."
Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"
Once worked for a government dept and prior to the mandarins deciding to out source our I.T maintenance I did most repairs myself. Being a taxpayer and saving myself money I used to buy whatever I wanted using a personal account and invoice the cost to our treasury. This saved pounds as I always managed a better discount than their purchasing dept.
Then we went all contractee and the work was passed to a well known National service provider.
A PC fan failed and I knew I could do the job for under a fiver. But, following the book (the treasury stopped me doing my own thing) I rang and placed an order, including the details of the machine. Details not required as they already had them, or so they said. 3 weeks later a parcel arrived and I phoned the contractor to say the part had arrived. Another 2 weeks passed and a ‘tech guy’ turned up. Gave him the parcel, directed him to the machine and left him to it.
Thirty minutes later he came back to me and explained he couldn’t do it as the wrong part had been delivered. How long does it take to remove 2 screws I wondered so asked him to show me how he knew. At that point he hesitated and admitted he didn’t know how to get into the machine. So how did he know the wrong part had been delivered I asked. It was too small was his answer. A bit of a shaggy dog story followed but I won’t bore with the details. Come with me I ordered I’ll show you.
Removing 2 screws I took the fan from him, replaced the faulty unit and in probably 5 minutes the machine was up and running. You can’t do that he said you are not qualified. OK, at this point the farce is beginning to make me smile at the idiocy of it all so I said OK, here’s the screw driver, you do it.
30 minutes later he heaves a sigh of relief, switches on and the machine blows up. Told you it was wrong he says, hoping I had failed to see him drop and leave a screw laying on the mobo. Listen I said, if you say nothing about me being ‘unqualified’ I won’t tell on you, just give me a new mobo, I’ll fix it and you can go on your way. Don’t have a mobo but I do have a new machine he replied. Deal done.
Cost of fan if I had done it my way £3.59p.
Contractor cost (eventually all passed on to the taxpayer of course), £726 for the new machine, £24 invoice price of ‘wrong’ fan, £49.50 per hour not including travelling time for the ‘tech guy’.
I feel sorry for whoever who got our old machine which mysteriously was DOA.
Government contracts eh, don’t you just love ‘em.
This for a man who thought he could beat the system by funny quackery and was wowed when it all went fruit shaped and ended up beaten by a higher and more intelligent being who had the nerve not to agree with him. No doubt visitors will charged outrageous fees for viewing and patents will be applied for for the rights to erect statues. Oh, provided you have paid for the right to have eyes that work. Who threw that curve? Sorry patent not applied for, scrap that.
No idea why India is causing problems but my guess is somebody wasn't offered enough money. That's how the system works, I know, I worked there. The people are great, innovative and willing to learn. The problem, much like elsewhere in the world are the people in power who cry democracy but only when they benefit.
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