Posts by Andy Taylor 371 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2007
Not any more, most modern systems do not need a prefix to be dialled for external calls.
Best practice for phone systems is use 4 digit extensions.
If the customer insists on 3 digits, ensure numbers are all between 200 and 899 to avoid any conflicts with emergency services/special numbers such as 101, 105, 109, 111 etc.
"The Titanium PowerBook G4 was the Apple laptop that broke the curvy plastic mould in favour metal rectangles. Polycarbonate, albeit white, would live on for a bit in rectangular Macbooks and iMacs, colourful polycarbonate having a last hurrah in the iPhone 5C..."\
All the plastic MacBooks cracked, every single one. 2006 models around the edge of the keyboard, unibody machines around the Ethernet port and display hinges.
This was also the method for the original Concorde simulator. I visited Filton in 1991 and had a go in the simulator (take-off, circle, land at JFK airport) with the more recently installed computer generated display. I only needed a little help with the landing.
The computer room was mostly taken up with the older physics simulator part of the system (complete with paper tape readers) with all of the graphics being handled by a single rack in the corner.
"Then they got on with the rest of the play (which was actually really good)."
This must be a different play to the one I remember then, a play so boring that I once missed a lighting cue as I hadn't noticed the actors had all gone off stage.
The most interesting thing about it was programming the shiny new computer lighting system to "flicker" some candle bulbs for added realism.
Alan Turing’s sole contribution to Colossus was
recommending Tommy Flowers (who actually designed Colossus) as a Suitable
Person to look at the problem. Turing made valuable contributions to the Bombe machines which help break Enigma. By 1943 he was at Hanslope Park working on speech encryption (Delilah).
Starship was trialled in London but first operated in Milton Keynes where there were around 200 robots last time I checked. Now also in Northampton, Cambridge, Bedford, Leeds and Manchester plus other countries including Finland and Estonia.
I came here to say this too. Applause.
Re. the old school upgrades, many computers back in the day were made to a particular specification and then crippled to reduce performance after demands from marketing/sales.
Often an "upgrade" to an old mainframe was to *remove* whatever was slowing the machine down.
I'm sure I have posted this before but when working at an about to open fruit store, we discovered the hard way that not all TVs have universal power supplies. It was for a window display and had been shipped from the US *with* a power converter but was plugged directly in to 230V. The most remarkable thing is that it lasted nearly a whole day before failing. A replacement was sent overnight from another store at great expense.
Appeasement Engineer
"Because he's NEW and ALONE, he's what you call an appeasement engineer, the new guy they send so they respond within the 4 hour guaranteed response period. (Things are getting better and better) Your average appeasement engineer is about as clued-up on computers as the average computer "hacker" is about B.O, and their main job is to make sure the power plug is in and switched on, then call back to the office for "PARTS". The really keen ones will sometimes even take a cover off the equipment and pretend that they see this stuff all the time. I wonder what sort today's is...
DP Review informed my first DSLR purchase in 2004 (Nikon D70) and all subsequent purchases.
I stopped reading or contributing to the forum when I got bored of the "measurebators" and CAG (Camera Acquisition Guys) but still drop in once or twice a week.
Imagine selling your entire Company A system because Company B announced a slightly better camera then selling the entire Company B system to switch back when Company A makes the inevitable upgrade to beat company B's offering...
There are other sites, but I'll miss DPReview.
I am pretty sure I have told this story before. My dad managed the telemetry systems for Thames Water in the 1980s back in the days when they had a 24/7 control room where a duty controller would watch over their domain *and take calls from the public* as well.
At some point the decision was made to install air conditioning and a suitable unit was plumbed in and commissioned. A week or so later my dad went in to see how they were getting on.
"This new airconditioning is rubbish" was the response. On probing further, he established that it was blowing hot when they wanted cold and vice versa.
Further investigation revealed that they didn't understand the controls. They thought the snowflake icon meant "when it's cold" and the sun "when it's hot", not "blow cold air" and "blow hot air".
My dad moved the control to the correct position and all was well again.
Another story from a little later - I used to do a bit of contracting work for Thames Water (thanks dad!) and was asked one day to visit a water treatment works where their shiny new SCADA system wasn't working too well. On arrival I found a PDP-11 sitting in the middle of the main control room which was a massive glass walled room which wouldn't look out of place in a Bond film, but was not air conditioned. The ambient temperature was that of an average greenhouse.
I quickly realised the issue was the poor PDP was overheating, this was fixed by installing some portable cooling, I forget exactly what they did, but it was enough to reduce the machine's temperature to within the operating window.
All the 200x Nvidia powered MacBook Pros were affected and Nvidia paid the bill.
I replaced hundreds of logic boards on up to 6 year old machines when I worked at the fruit store.
One of the Apple-centric YouTube channels featured an early prototype iPhone. It had a plastic screen similar to the iPod Classic - that would have scratched so easily.
When I worked for the fruit shop I worked out several “short cuts”. One particular model of the all-in-one desktop machine shipped with defective hard drives and we had to replace a significant number of these.
The official process involved completely removing the LCD panel to access the drive. I worked out it was possible to simply unscrew the display, unplug one cable and then tip the display onto my chest while I swapped the drive. It saved so much time and reduced the chance of damage to the screen as well.
Parking companies have no shame.
I recently helped a lady who had overstayed at a car park when heavily pregnant and unable to move around quickly. She had to endure discussing her personal medical history during a court hearing before the case was dismissed. This was despite telling the parking company from the outset that she had a medical need for more time.
I won't name the company but they are one of the largest and most litigious.
Recent statistics show that around 89% of County Court claims are not defended. Based on the number of hearings in 2020, that's around 90,000 claims or around £18 million in default court judgments for an outlay of around 300k in court fees. Not a bad return.
Don't pay the parking scammers, especially those who believe compliance with the Equality Act is providing some blue badge bays.
There is probably a reason why cameras and signs disappeared abruptly in the article - no planning permission.
Several greedy parking companies have altered the "free stay" limit only for it to be discovered that free parking was a condition of planning department.
pepipoo is great, also MoneySavingExpert forum and several Facebook groups (but beware the ones that provide poor advice).
In short, if you get a private parking charge:
Complain to landowner. Escalate to CEO if needed
Ignore the "discount".
Appeal as Keeper/Hirer of the vehicle
Do not reveal who the driver was.
Expect any appeal to be rejected by the parking company
Use POPLA secondary appeal service if offered, but don't just repeat the original appeal.
Do not use the "IAS" appeal service, it finds against the motorist about 85% of the time
Ignore debt collectors - they are unregulated and cannot buy up the "debt" because it's not really a debt.
Respond to Letter Before Claim if received, demanding all information including authority to issue charges and pursue them through the courts
Defend court claim if issued.
Wait for parking company to discontinue or have your day in court where there is usually a good chance of winning.
Parking companies rely on people not knowing the law to extract payment. Sadly it works.
The correct format is, of course, 020 xxxx xxxx
Down on the south coast, the traditional rivalry between Portsmouth and Southampton means that although they share an area code (Solent, 023), all Portsmouth numbers begin 023 9 and all Southampton ones 023 8.
A certain Southampton based telephony provider named after a Greek letter still lists the two locations separately in their number allocation tool.
It's a well known fact that the original iPhone demo had to follow a carefully arranged sequence otherwise the phone would crash. They also hard coded the signal strength bars to show good signal.
This also reminds me of the time I was the person in charge of the dumb waiter for the play "The Dumb Waiter". During one performance the actors managed to skip 3 pages of dialogue, go through another couple, skip back to the pages they'd missed, did those and then skipped forward past the pages already done. Meanwhile I'm going frantic behind the set trying to work out if I'd missed a cue. Luckily I hadn't.
Component level repairs are available from many independent companies. I know of several who offer a flat fee service at reasonable prices.
Why pay £600+ for a logic board when you can have the faulty part(s) replaced for a quarter of that?
When I worked on VOIP systems, I often had to deal with support queries like "why is my exchange getting hammered by SIP registration requests?" The reason was always because the relevant ports hadn't been closed properly and the box was under attack from persons unknown trying to get free calls.
There's no need to set up as a private parking firm, you only need to do that, and sign up to a recognised trade body to be eligible for access to the electronic "Keeper On Date Of Event" (KADOE) system.
Unfortunately the current situation is that any company with the right membership of a trade body is trusted to always have a good reason or "reasonable cause" to get that data. Many of these companies have a poor reputation and are part of what was described as an "outrageous scam" by MPs. Thankfully there is upcoming statutory provision on the way to curb some of their bad behaviour.
Outside of the murky world of parking companies, anyone with "reasonable cause" can request keeper details from the DVLA via a form V888 and the payment of the requisite fee (currently £2.50 or £5 depending on the reason for the request).
I help people who have received unfair parking charge notices from unscrupulous parking companies and have had some success in making DPA breach claims against them when they have obtained and processed keeper details without "reasonable cause". £250 per breach is the going rate, more if the data is passed to a third party.
My dad's workplace had an air conditioning unit fitted to the 24 hour control room which contained many displays with information about all the water treatment facilities in the area plus someone to watch over them, call out engineers to fix issues and answer the phone to the public. These were the days when calling the water company out of hours got you through to someone who could actually tell you what was broken.
The control room staff all complained that the shiny new air conditioning unit must be broken. Turned out that they thought the symbols (frost and sun) were meant to match the prevailing weather conditions and not the temperature of the air being emitted, as a result they had the system set to "hot" on a summer day.
Luckily it was a simple fix to turn the control to the opposite setting.
Back in the dim and distant past when I was supporting CD-ROM networking, we found 13 month hardware timers for sale. For a brief moment we were tempted to fit them into our hardware to ensure future revenue, but quickly realised how suspicious it would look if all our hardware failed after almost exactly 13 months.
I believe these timers were designed for use in industrial equipment to automatically power off if no one had been inside to reset them.
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