Posts by NXM

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Hated heater

That's the spec for car dashboards if you ever have to replace the fan. Took me all weekend.

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

Re: Obviously...

Kaboomed with a stick of illudium Q-36!

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

Rob Dalglish, I had one of those Minolta Colormasters. It was enormous, heavy, had an oil reservoir for no reason I could see, and it made rubbish prints.

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

Chainsaws are one of the most dangerous tools you can lend a numpty. We lent one to someone who, it turned out, didn't know what the chain tensioner was for. The chain ended up broken and embedded in a nearby tree. Good job it wasn't a person.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: Pity the poor journalists who have to listen to this demented ranting

Washed down with covfefe

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Re: 40% of the workforce are paying attention & give a damn

A long time ago when I worked for a large aircraft manufacturer there was a bloke who would start at one part of the site, carrying a clipboard with important looking papers, and mozy across to another part of the site chatting to people on his way. The next day he'd start somewhere else.

No-one knew what his actual job was.

NASA's Artemis II Moon rocket arrives at the launch pad

Re: "there may yet be a plucky British alternative"

I always fancied Sandra off Space:1999. Sadly no longer with us.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Re: Blimey!

How are you still alive?

I ask the same question of myself, bearing in mind some of the stuff I did and miraculously survived when younger.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

what a load of bull

Was the 1000kg bull still attached? You'd struggle to put that in the car, never mind your pocket.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

I used to know someone who was bombing along on his Kawasaki Triple (death machine) when a passing pigeon hit his knee and caused considerable damage. To the pigeon, as well.

Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back

Re: V2 ?

Point totally taken. But as a starting point perhaps?

Re: V2 ?

That occurred to me as well. Especially as it's surprisingly accurate guidance system was immune to electronic interference, not having any electronics. And it was supersonic.

Re: Starmer sabotages peace process

When I looked it up last, Russia has about the same GDP as the UK but with 3 times the population. And a lot of that GDP is from natural resources, which means the average Russion produces 1/10 of bugger all. All they manufacture is pain for themselves and everyone else.

Did people buy anything made in Russia even before 2014 apart from possibly vodka? I tried that Mir fizzy drink when it came out in the 80s. It was horrible.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

13A plugs

Not always true. Kettles and heaters quite often have overheated plugs because said plug can't always handle 13A for extended periods of time. Sometimes it's the fuse holder, whose clips don't hold the fuse properly and warm up. Or as Anonymous John points out, the fuse itself warms up because it has to have a resistance, otherwise it wouldn't ever blow.

I dislike those bits of card you get on new plugs telling how to wire it (from the days when you didn't get a plug on new kit and had to put one on yourself, which many people were incapable of doing properly). If the plug overheats, the card catches fire.

Re: Don't blame me - they virtually banned me

Eh? What? Missed the first bit.

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

The party stopped

"The main fuse of my house had blown because we were using way too much power."

Something similar happened in a house opposite us. They threw a huge party - loud music, booze, dancing into the early hours - until it all suddenly went silent.

Turns out they danced so much the floor collapsed. End of.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Ironic considering that just yesterday The Register had...

Couldn't agree more, but as an assembler programmer I'm a bit biased. Used to do C but that job wasn't nice. Now I do everything in assembler in PICs, because they're cheap (1). Very little code space and less ram (2) so you have to achieve more with less. It's only recently the cheaper ones have continuous ram instead of paged for goodness sake.

(1) If I used a more expensive chip it costs me money because I manufacture the product as well.

(2) In an early design for someone else I resorted to putting text strings in external eeprom to save code space.

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

The invasion has started

" No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own..."

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Proper Pasty

Merkins apparently have pasties, but they substitute rutabagas for turnip. And they probably weigh at least 2kg. Therefore totally different and the Reg Standards Authority should not consider them.

NASA tries savin' MAVEN as Mars probe loses contact with Earth

Alan

In an interview years ago, Gerry Anderson said they discussed whether they should bring Alan back during plot development meetings. The general feeling every time was they should leave him there to wank himself to death.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

cooking

As a qualified Pot Noodle chef, I resent that.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Things that didn't happen

That made me laugh so much I had to buy a disc of it.

For similar fun, try Black Sheep or Brain Dead.

Doom hits KiCad as PCB traces become demons and doors

next stop:

Asteroids!

It was vector-plot to start with anyway. Wish I had the time to give it a go.

Majestic work there on doom though.

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

A brand new car

Let's hope it's a 6000 SUX with a Blaupunkt and really shitty gas mileage!

Re: He's not wrong.

I wish I could upvote that more.

Armed with only a slow cooker I can make stock from chicken bones. Then separate it off, add dried beans, lentils and/or veg plus any leftover chicken bits and presto: soup!

Start off with a cheap meat cut like brisket or skirt, apply the slow cooker, and there's a really tasty stew - more tasty than expensive cuts too.

In times gone by the slow cooker would've been the oven on your range which also heated the house, set to slow. Roasting was done by suspending your meat on a chain and rotating it with a clockwork thingy over an open fire (or a spit dog if you were all posh like). In rural parts like ours, people made hams and bacon in autumn because if you didn't, you'd starve over winter. Our farmhouse still has the meat hooks on the ceiling.

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

watches

I have a 20-year old Mondaine Swiss Railways watch because it only needs "charging" once every year or two, and I can tell the time even without my glasses.

I too am getting older. It comes to most of us, so just roll with it.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Re: "Lasers"

Wikipedia says yes, there have been several HMS Shark ships. Quite a lot met a bad fate.

Maybe name the laser flagship Sharky McSharkface?

Re: power cost

Pah! Rubbish.

They have a really long extension cable from the nearest mains socket.

power cost

If they're paying £10 for 50KW in 10s for eg, they're overpaying. They ought to switch suppliers.

50KW over an hour at 25p/unit is £12.50, and in 10 seconds that's about 3.5p (not including the standing charge of course). Even accounting for the cost of gas, £10 is severely too much!

Re: Coherent Beam Combining?!?

You beat me to it!

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: Who, me?

Quite similar to a whoop of gorillas or a flange of baboons then.

(Not the nine o'clock news, appx 1981)

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: One place I used to go

I love Dessert Island Discs on Radio 4.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

near squeak

I almost got hit with this when I was staying in Broadstairs and could only get an intermittent signal from France. I turned roaming off pronto!

(For those who don't know, Broadstairs is on the South Coast of England down a steep hill and the UK mobile service there basically didn't exist at the time)

There's mushroom for improvement in fungal computing

Breakfast

Oops, I've fried your memory!

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: Customer loyalty

For more information please re-read this poster.

(See Scarfolk)

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Pure Silicium

Is this only found in Silicy?

Are we at war with Silicy??? Should we be?

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: BT

Yes, I was weak. Or more exactly, very overworked, and lacked the time to really give them a kicking via the direct debit guarantee and the small claims court.

I'll get my revenge when the voip and broadband contract is up.

BT

'efforts to "seek further information from BT... yielded no meaningful response." '

No surprise there. They overcharged me more than £3000 and wouldn't admit it for over a year. Couldn't get any sense about of them at all despite clear proof they were in the wrong.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Fax machines, that brings back memories

I was on the receiving end of that sort of nonsense from a supplier trying to fax invoices at 3AM to my 'receive a fax when I press the button' machine. It took several nights of lost sleep to find out who it was.

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

Re: BOSE

That's a sad story, sorry to hear it.

I read of a bloke in the states who became obsessed with building the perfect LP sound system. Self-built deck with 3 tone arms for different types of music, self-built amps, self-built speakers, special room in the house for it all. He roped the kids in to build and constantly tinker with it, but they flew the nest eventually. Wife left him. The whole thing cost decades of life and >$1m.

Then when he died it was split up and sold for a few thousand.

Stick with the HomePods.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: Issue diagnosed in 0 seconds/fixed in about 6 seconds (excluding walking time)

A relative of mine complained her printer didn't work. She'd managed to get a piece of paper into a tiny slot so it went into the print head compartment, making a nasty inky soggy mess in the works. Easy to diagnose but took ages to pick all the damp paper out.

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Re: It will be kind of hilarious though

Make America Grate Again. Certainly grates on me.

Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat

Re: Read a comment recently

Well after the German Democratic Republic (Soviet East Germany) fell, all the Stasi operators simply merged into the crowd. Never happened, move along please.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Rage

That's one heck of a story, thanks for taking the time to recount it. I sense a large amount of unresolved hatred here, so well done for getting out of that situation, but I reckon you're at risk of a coranory. You deserve a pint to chill out with.

upside down, inside out

Sometimes the pick & place machine will flip a chip while picking it up, and it looks the right shape so gets mounted anyway. It stays in place after reflow because the flux from the solder paste glues it in position.

It can happen several times in a row if the pickup targeting is slightly off.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

My mum was targeted by this filth

She was savvy and didn't get scammed, but the calls wouldn't stop. Having redirected the line after her death, I suspected these were recorded speil: same friendly Australian accent, same approach, and they wouldn't respond to questions. Boil these scammers arses.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

CNC routers

"I have a CNC router on my wish list"

Try Boxford, they do really good, small, CNC routers and lathes. No idea if they have a dealer in West Pondia though.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: Many moons ago, when I was gone for a week ...

This where I thought the original story was going to go!

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Microsoft

How did this mangler get the job in the first place?

Anyway, since Microsoft is so marvellous and wonderful, why can't they have a full instance of excel running within word, which runs within powerpoint, running in another excel instance. And so on and so forth, gobbling up all your memory.

Quickbooks

He was right. I ditched QuickBooks years ago because it wouldn't calculate the vat correctly. It still can't.