Posts by Noram

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Re: Target market?

I suspect the target market is largely people who like PC games, like using steam, but are hitting the point where they can't afford to keep a "gaming" PC going with the average mid range video card now being £300-400 or more on it's own.

I suspect "hardcore" PC gamers are an increasing minority of steam users as steam has been so ubiquitous with PC gaming for so many years that people install it to play pretty much anything and will install it on all sorts of hardware as even on a low end laptop there are games on steam (often good ones) that will play.

I know a few people who would love to get one for their kids to game on, and several very long time PC gamers who are really annoyed with graphics card prices and would jump at the chance to get a whole system that can play most/all the games in their library for less than it's going to cost them to replace their video card,

The thing to remember is that most PC games, even new ones will run on hardware that is ~3-5 years old, I was running quite happily on a PC that was nearly 10 years old for the CPU and 3+ years old on the GPU until I upgraded it completely couple of years back (I had plenty of ram and a couple of SSD's which helped a lot).

Steam is great for that sort of thing, you're not locked out of games that are 5 years old because they've not been ported to the PS5 from the PS3, and a lot of games released on steam are smaller less ambitious ones, but great fun and will run on very low spec hardware.

As I believe has been said before, Steam know exactly what hardware people are playing on, and they know the games they're playing on that hardware, from a quick look at Steam's hardware survey results I always tend to notice the "hardcore" PC gamer with the top end video/cpu/ram tends to be a very small percentage of the total users (I'm always amused that I tend to be in the top range for memory as I put that as a higher priority at build than GPU - 32gb 12 years ago, 64gb two years ago).

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

You don't need to ask for permission.

Just make sure you don't leave any witnesses around to ask forgiveness from.

Mine's the one with the backhoe keys in the pocket.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Angle Park

I think that just unlocked a memory, I'm sure I read that as a teen when a friend gave ne a copy,

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Did the driver get fined?

I suspect after that accident the system was redesigned to give a warning earlier after that.

The thing I note with Tesla and musk in general, is that normally in aviation one or two near misses, or a single accident that could possibly be repeated tends to result in changes once they know what happened, Tesla on the other hand just hides the information, denies anything went wrong and blames the human for not being able to take over and fully comprehend what is going on half a second before it's fatal.

That is a huge difference in ethos and thinking between say the highly regulated and investigated world of aircraft automation and Tesla's "auto crash" software, many of the videos posted by Tesla enthusiasts terrify me as they blithely brush off things like the "self drive" not recognising other vehicles, humans, bridge pillars or recognising them then half a second later having forgotten them driving towards them.

Automation is always good until it fails, but it needs constant improvement when something has gone wrong, but to do that improvement you need to acknowledge the flaws and be willing to make the changes that help prevent that incident from happening again even if that costs a bit more money. Tesla have gone with the cheapest option and won't admit their way of dealing with it isn't working well (or at all).

Unfortunately it seems a lot of the car companies have forgotten lessons from the last 100 years in the rush to "modernise" the cars and controls. I personally hate the idea of common controls becoming hidden behind menus or on a touch screen as I don't want to take my eyes off the road to do something like turn the heating up or down, or change the station on the radio (things you learn to do with muscle memory in fairly short order with physical controls).

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: HDDs

MFM or RLL drives?

I had a similar problem with an Apricot 386, but it wouldn't boot if the drive was cold (the drive spun up fine, just didn't read).

The fix was to either reboot after about 10 minutes of the drive running, or move the computer from the coldest corner of the living room to be nearer a heat source..

Re: Disks

Not quite that old, but I had an Apricot 386 SX16 worked fine in the summer, but come the winter it often wouldn't boot in the morning but give a drive error, but if you left it running for a few minutes then rebooted once the drive had been spinning for a while it would then work ok.

We eventually worked out that the drive was too cold in the far corner of the living room unless the heating had been on for a while, so we moved it to a slightly warmer spot and it booted fine every time.

I later found out the drives that were fitted were IIRC RLL (or was it MFM?) and they did something along the lines of wrote some data on the platters during formatting and if the drive got significantly hotter or colder than the day it was formatted it would not be able to read the data, hence it was fine in the summer, fine when the heating was on abut not fine if it was in a cold room turned off over night.

It's been about 30 years since I used that machine, but still remember the "Oh" moment when I found out what the specific problem was.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

Re: So sad

I hope you remembered to take off your tie.

My dad used to sing Poisoning Pigeons when I was younger, occasionally mixed with "I Hold your hand in mine".

About the only CD's i've actually kept in the car for the last 20 years are of Lehrer songs, mainly because when I'm giving my father a lift i'll sometimes put them on for him.

The Smoot – How an MIT prank became a lasting unit of measurement

Re: Priceless

I'm guessing for the contract it might have been worth the contractor offering to make a few moulds for the odd size, or it might even have just required changing the cut point on an automated line.

I'm not sure if the slabs will be individually molded, or made on a convayer with a slice at the required timing for the size.

either way if, as seems the way the authority in charge of the work respects the history of the measurement it seems like something that any canny supplier might consider worth trying to show they were willing to go the extra mile (or 945.7 smoots).

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

Re: The sooner the better,....

Ah the dreaded Gas/Electricity not where they are meant to be, and not buried deep enough.

We've drilled through our gas line internally, as it turned out the gas to the cooker was buried about half an inch down, just inside the kitchen doorway, so when we went to fit a siding door that needed a stop we got it with the hole for the rawlplug.

That wasn't as costly as your example, although it was still a couple of hundred for an out of hours gas fitter.

The other one we had was the Electrical supply to the house cooked itself one day (I woke up to the sound of silence, no computer fans, no hum from the freezer etc), like your example a fairly impressive turn out by the distribution board, at one point something like 3 vans and talk of getting in a mini digger, the initial guy spent something like an hour trying to fine the line with a trace thing, it turned out it came in from a different direction to what he thought, and when it was located it was about 150mm under the surface, a surface my father had added a couple of inches of soil to over the years.

It was pretty impressive seeing the guys fixing a live incoming mains, without turning the power off to the street from what I could tell. I think heavy insulated orange rubber was the new black..

As it was deemed normal wear and tear we didn't get asked to pay anything, apparently that particular type of cable just degrades over time, especially I suspect if it's too near the surface and has people doing stuff routinely over it.

We also had roaming BT engineers for several days a while back, apparently they were trying to trace their cabling and access points, one of the more experienced older guys ended up going door to door asking residents if they knew of any access points that might have been buried, as at that point they'd had something like 3 guys spend a day each with tracing tools trying to find it.

In the end I think they gave up, as they put in a telephone pole fed from the last access point they could find.

Re: Cost?

You're assuming a level of competence from the contractors that isn't always there.

My home town had a massive power cut a few years back, half the town lost power when the builders working on what was (from memory) part of an old cricket pitch dug through the main power feed for a good part of the town.

A few hours later power was restored.

Then they did it again 2 days later, again power restored after several hours.

After the third time, I think the electrical distribution company sent out one of their guys to monitor what was going on, as it turns out the contractors didn't learn to be careful and check after their first two fireworks shows.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Re: Works for me

Not just Wales.

I'm fairly middle of England and it doesn't recognise my location either, I tried letting it "know my location" and my postcode and the ones either side.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: A memory issue

64gb of ram in my system, and windows will sometimes throw a low memory message, when it's still got 32gb or so spare...

It's like windows declaring "insufficient resources" for USB devices, it took me far to long to realise what it meant was that I could not add another device to that USB root controller (where did the promise of 128 devices go? it throws that message at about 8).

I think with my last machine I ended up with 2 additional USB controller cards, and all the optional motherboard headers in use as I tend to have 3-4 external drives, some USB sticks, a memory card reader or two, printers etc, and used to have something like 8 input devices (my normal mouse, a track mouse, gaming keypad controller, normal keyboard, joypad etc).

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

God yes.

Same with physical design, if you design a building and propose to use things like doors of X width and weight, if this is the first time you've done this then before building commences get a bunch of elderly and disabled and see if they can actually use it by mocking up a door and corridor somewhere*.

I'm shocked at how poorly designed many new buildings are for disabled as an example they meet the legal minimum for access but that's it, and new build housing is even worse (you might be able to get a wheelchair down a hall, but turning it to get into a room off to the side is another matter).

I was in a retailer the other day that had a "disabled lift", which is great, not so great was the fact the door was extremely heavy to open (I struggled with it, my dad was in the wheelchair and we needed a member of staff to hold it whilst I pushed him in),and the actual lift was barely big enough for the wheelchair to go in - you could not easily have opened the door from the wheelchair, you could not turn the wheelchair around in the lift, and if you were being pushed, your assistant could not fit in the lift with you, and the internal control for the lift was a little black lever. that was pretty much behind the wheelchair on one side and hard to see in the dim glow from the low output bulb in the ceiling.

I think the lift was about 75cm wide and maybe 90cm deed, literally the "footprint" of a wheelchair.

The similar disabled lift at my GP's (both are the sort that are retrofitted into a small space), actually has lightweight doors that are mildly assisted in opening, large button controls that light up on both sides of the lift once in, and actually has room for a career to get in at the same time.

One was I suspect designed for a small stock trolley (push it in, walk up the stairs and call it) and redesignated so the store met the legal requirement for access, the other was designed with an actual disabled person in a wheelchair in mind.

So much UI both in tech and the physical world is designed and built by people who have no clue about what the users actually need, or can use.

Sorry minor rant there, but whilst I'm not disabled, I've spent 40 years seeing how utterly useless many corporate attempts at "disability access are", and how rather than things getting better in many cases, especially tech they're getting worse. Simple things like remote controls getting smaller with fewer buttons and a reliance on screen displays or voice make it actively harder for those with poor manual dexterity, eyesight or hearing - pretty much everyone over a certain age ;)

*An example of this was back in the late 90's several of my local stores were actively trying to make it easier for disabled people and had staff asking customers, the result was during refits several stores fitted automatic doors or added assisted opening devices to the existing ones, and the local bank converted a side door to a ramp access for disabled and buggies (the main doors were huge, heavy and up several steep steps).

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Yup Translation is very hard, you need someone who is not only fluent in both languages but quite often also very familiar with the subject being translated. I've seen professional translators who've been replying to "you got that wrong, I prefer X translation" go into quite deep detail about exactly how and why they made the choice they did and point out both might have been correct for general use but they chose their version because of something like "it was more accurate for the context and time period" or "It was the better choice for the character.

in my youth I spent far too much time laughing at some of the anime fandom who were convinced fansubs done by people who often had very little experience of the language were always better than the "official" translations*.

For legal stuff every single word and bit of punctuation can be vital, as any ambiguity can change the meaning of the contract or provide an unintended way out of it (or worse for the company, bind them to something expensive they didn't intend to do).

*Possibly my favourite one was an argument that went on for dozens of comments over the bra sizing of a character of all things, where it was claimed the official translation was censoring or something because it gave a different size to what was "clearly said" in Japanese, It turns out the Translator knew something the "better fan translators" didn't, Japan used a slightly different size chart, so for the translation they'd actually converted it to the US size as leaving it at the "clearly spoken" Japanese size would have been wrong in American.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: Not rude but still hard to look the user in the eye

Ok that one had me laughing.

Especially as whilst it's a bit of a silly string to use, it also presumably ensured that some random user couldn't make a change that would have stopped it working.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Hm

The vagaries of time might have caused a mistake.

From memory (I can't pull it out at the moment) the Saturn had an external supply, so it might well have been that rather than the Dreamcast.

At some point I need to actually sort out the old consoles and see if any of them still work, although I'd need to get a voltage converter for the Saturn as IIRC it had a 110v supply and needed a 240 to 110 transformer (Japanese model with a multi region mod/cart from memory).

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Re: A drunk's dream...

For it's (minor) faults I have been very carefully guarding my Harmony Ultimate for the last few years (it's nearly 10 years old).

Best remote I've ever had, and I was very annoyed to find out they'd stopped the entire line very quietly during the first Covid wave.

Mind you I suspect I'm a little bit of an outlier, I've got multiple disc players, the TV, sound system and HDMI switch etc all hooked up (around 7 or 8 remotes and a need to do things like "TV input 3, HDMI switch input 2, sound on, DVD on, TV on").

The truly annoying thing with remotes is that with modern phones the Harmony "hub" type device should be easy and cheap enough to make, and then an app to use on your phone as an option (which is what the Harmony hub did so you could use your phone/tablet or the supplied remote).

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Defects appearing like magic

Possibly to try and pretend that it was something the dev already knew about and was in the process of fixing, as opposed to it being something he'd not noticed when he possibly should have done before sending the code out? (something really obvious if he'd tested it and easy to fix but he wasn't checking the code at all).

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Colour Me Shocked...

I remember the my dad's purchase of the Electrong, and the Plus1 (I think it was) for an accounts package on a rom cart, alongside a serial printer that drove him and his friend who worked for ICL nuts trying to get working.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: Doh..

Yup

Something like a bright coloured slider with a simple "red" for "covered" and "green" for "open", so your eye is drawn to how you turn it off, and there is an easy, readily understood colour code for it's current state.

If they wanted to get really fancy, have a light that comes on next to the slider when the camera is plugged in and corresponds to the status of the slider.

Even better also then print what the status light/position of the slider means near it.

One of the things the Amazon Echo show's got right was the privacy slider does have the colour coding showing depending on it's position, what they didn't do well was make it a little more obvious at first glance or if you've never used one before what the slider is for, it can look like just another one of the buttons.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Re: unnecessary updates

Re the non updated app.

I've got a very handy one for DVD's on my current phone, unfortunately as it's not had an update for 2 years I can't seem to download it onto my tablet.

It's a mature app that hasn't really "needed" updates for a while and I think the last few were basically to keep Apple and Google happy.

Tesla FSD faces yet another probe after fatal low-visibility crash

Re: Camera only is bad ?

"But we let millions of poorly sighted people drive on the roads every day"

And we have increasingly strong measures to ensure that they use the corrective measures for those sight problems, and it is from memory an offence to be driving when your sight is below the minimum required standard with penalties ranging from fines, points and loss of licence to jail (if your sight is dangerously bad it can fall under dangerous driving etc). Even going back 30-40 years if you needed to wear glasses to pass your driving test you were told you needed to wear them whilst driving and I believe it is noted on your licence (the 01 after the category).

We as a country are actively tightening up on people driving who have medical issues that make it unsafe, with things like doctors being required to report people who no longer have the eyesight to do so, specifically because of accidents where it turns out people knew someone was driving with poor eyesight that fell well below the safe level and didn't do anything.

It is nuts that we're looking at "driveless" cars and are willing to accept that they're going to be worse than a human for their input, especially if like Tesla's they're aiming to do it with just a camera that can't move, can't adjust for light being too bright, and has blindspots directly in front of the vehicle (meanwhile the average human will automatically make corrections by doing things like adjusting where they look without thinking about it).

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

You can very easily check your O2 levels...

the equipment is really cheap (under £20 for a half decent brand).

And as one of the other posters has said, many studies have shown that masks don't lower your O2, as they're designed to allow gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide through (if you want a "mask" that stops normal gasses you'll need something that has it's own air supply).

Certainly not the sort of masks that are worn normally to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

From a personal note, I've used both "proper" respirators (IIRC P3E2 filters), and things like the 3MAura disposable masks, neither affected my O2 levels, although the proper respirator was very uncomfortable after a few hours (fortunately I was wearing it for hobby stuff so could just stop and take a break).

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: Whoops there go the tape drives

I'm probably showing my age a bit here, but I remember one of the old Computer magazines having a cartoon about it, from memory it was an office full of people (including a couple of women) in leather cat suits and one of the men stating to a visitor(?) "the new anti static policy works wonders".

Or the slightly newer one from megatokyo.com where the main character walks in on his friend upgrading a computer with no clothes on and asks what's going on and gets given an explanation about static safety and told "fear my leet naked skills".

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Working Smarter Not Harder

Reading this reminds me of why I got my personal barcode scanner, not for work but home.

I was doing an inventory of my DVD, CD and books, and realised a barcode scanner could save so much time.

As this was 20+ years ago proper barcode scanners were expensive, far too much for me to consider, but there had been a failed internet startup/dot com boom company *CueCat" that partnered with various companies (including radioshack) in the US to make it easier to use vouchers/enter long URL's and a cross platform loyalty scheme type thing, so they created a very cheap "drag along" barcode scanner that theoretically only worked with their software as they encrypted their output and included a unique ID for each scanner (something that apparently was easy to break, it required cutting one pin on a chip or something so it just output the plain barcode).

When they went bust you could pick them up at something like 2 for $10 for "declawed" CueCats shipped to the UK.

I've had a couple of newer and much better scanners since then including my current one that can be wired or bluetooth (with 200 line memory), and they've proven so handy for everything from dealing with my DVD collection (now in 4 figures), to RMA's as I can scan the barcodes for serial numbers on hardware much faster and accurately than I can read and enter the numbers, especially as I get older.

Given the cost of even really small/pocket sized ones now they really are something everyone who has to handle things like serial numbers or barcodes should have in their kit, as it can pay for itself within a couple of hours use.

UK Surface owners can now take misbehaving laptops to Currys

Re: Bad experiences

I've not bought anything from Curry's/Dixons unless I had zero choice and it was just a cable in nearly 30 years.

As a young teen I'd saved my pennies and bought a console (Snes), and ended up returning to the store every other day for a while.

The first one died after 2 days, I then had a succession of "new replacements" that had to be "swapped out the back due to store policy".

IIRC replacement 1, dead (no indication of power).

Replacement 2, obviously been used for a long time, was incredibly grubby (greasy fingerprints, cake crumbs in the cart slot etc) returned as we'd bought a New unit and this replacement wasn't even wiped down so no way it had been even checked for any fault..

Replacement 3 DOA (no power)..

Replacement 4 (or 1 redux) same serial number as the first replacement (a week after I'd returned that), we checked the SN in the car and were back in the store within about 10 minutes..

Replacement 5 DOA.

Replacement 6 some memory issue, in Mario Allstars (the collection of the NES games) it had an issue with the memory controller or something and the initial start of the game where you fall out of the sky just kept happening, I'm fairly sure Mario would still be falling today if it had been left running.

The store employee ended up spending an hour or more running a store copy of the game on their machine then on the faulty one repeatedly as if it was magically going to sort itself out the 5th time he swapped machines. My father had to start talking politely but loudly about how he wasn't going to make yet another trip taking an hour+ and he wanted a replacement that was taken out of the factory packaging in front of him regardless of what the store policy about swapping them round the back. IIRC the manager appeared and wasn't happy but ended up complying, I suspect because by that point several of the customers who'd been browsing had seen at least some of the performance with an obviously faulty device.

That final replacement ~6 was still working ~10 years later and I suspect would still work if I dug it out.

My suspicion is that they had a stack of returned devices in the storeroom and if they hadn't tested them just gave them out as replacements hence the "we'll pull one out of the box round the back" nonsense, this was in what was one of their bigger stores at the time in Milton Keynes.

That little issue has basically meant no one in my family has ever used Curry's etc for any appliances or more expensive than batteries for 30+ years and we've warned many others about it.

IIRC PCworld have proven to friends that the system is still the same, including a friend who dropped a laptop that had failed under warranty off for repair and went back 4 weeks later after multiple calls telling him the supplier was slow in repairing it, he spotted the laptop on the "waiting to be looked at" shelf with a sticker on it that apparently said "do not tell Mr Smith his laptop has not been sent for repair yet". I think at that point he started reminding them of the sales of goods act in a high level of detail, possibly including landmark cases given "Mr Smith" is a lawyer...It was fixed and back in his hand about 3 days later.

Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers

Re: Architects

A friend worked in a uni.

His opinion of the "wonderful new buildings" would probably put the reg at odds with the obscene publications act.

IIRC it won an award or something for design, but basically none of the special features ever worked properly (many were custom parts so once something died it couldn't be repaired or replaced), and it was actually worse than the "outdated" building it replaced that didn't look pretty and wasn't "green"*, and had actually been designed by people who talked to the departments who were going to be using it, and listened to them!

IIRC one of the features was that it was meant to regulate it's own temperature automatically with minimal energy input, but the system never quite worked.

SpaceX set to literally rock Florida with more and bigger Starship launches

Re: No EA yet.

I suspect NASA might prefer "not so rapid prototype testing" if it means there is less chance of it destroying their facilities, especially if as has been said those facilities have historical significance.

I'm sure if Space-X really dislike the conditions of use they can find somewhere else where the local governor can be persuaded to let them build a facility where they can destroy stuff near the site thinking they know better than the people that did the testing for the forces involved multiple times in the past.

From memory the launch pad in Texas they destroyed was basically known to not be up to the job with the forces involved because both the Russian and Americans had done studies and worked the maths and materials going back to the 60's, and Musk's idea was nothing new for the pad design and construction, and if you're building rockets with a view that it's ok for them to blow up on a regular basis, you probably should understand that the people that own the facilities you want to launch from might not be happy with that idea if it means risking their facilities..

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Re: Simple Test

And he has to do it with a randomly chosen example for every hardware revision of every model, under varying lighting conditions including with the car heading towards the sun when it's low.

And then redo it with every software update that affects the system

I like the idea of the snake oil salesman proving he trusts it, but I don't trust him to actually do it under conditions we know the Tesla's have issues with*, and with a vehicle that hasn't been specifically chosen for the task and made sure it's working correctly.

*I seem to remember the Tesla cameras have issues with the sun being "wrong" and the tesla fans saying "well humans get dazzled as well", ignoring the fact that humans can adjust the position of their head/eyes and do things like drop the sunshade, and will typically slow down if dazzled.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: Games

The memories.

My experience of an Apricot was the fun of the Ram upgrade (basically strip half the internal chassis out to fit the add on board over the existing ram), and bodging it to let me hook a cheap CD-rom drive up externally.

That and the MFM or RLL drive it came with that didn't like it being too cold or too hot, so I had to place the machine in just the right place in the living room in the winter, too close to the window and it wouldn't boot, too close to the fire and it wouldn't boot, but there was a sweet spot where it was reliable. It also taught me to never trust a hard drive and make sure I always had backups on multiple media ;)

On the plus side it let me experiment and taught me not to fear working inside a computer, so much so that the auction bought 486 I picked up for a friend didn't worry me when I saw an DX4 chip for a fiver and went to install it (no manual, but the motherboard had the settings screen printed).

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

Re: Multi-CD hell

I remember those, I seem to remember that WC3 wasn't too bad in terms of swapping between discs unnecessarily, but I remember FF7 (which from memory was basically a single game emulator of the PS game) seemed to need to have the disc swapped practically every time you changed location.

I remember getting a second copy of Baldurs Gate when I bought a DVD drive, purely because I could get the DVD version cheap and it meant I didn't have to do the disc shuffle.

It was an odd time, there were games that you basically just used the disc to install and do the initial game start up from, then could pop in a music disc and use the games CD player, and at the other extreme games where you due to fmv etc you had to constantly swap them (and even the likes of Warcraft 3 where you used one disc to "spawn" 2 disc free clients for network play).

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

From memory non metered water bills are based on the rateable value of the property pre council tax.

So a large property that was high rates in the 80's is assumed to use a massive amount of water (as a high rate house could be 8 bedrooms in a bad area at the time, or on the other side of town in a better area 4 bedrooms and a nice garden).

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

Re the imprint machines.

Maybe ten to twelve years ago (at most) a new Boots opticians opened up in my town, about 18 months later a friend went in and got a new prescription and glasses, apparently the card system was down and they don't take cash, but the older assistant went rummaging through the storeroom and came out with a what was by all accounts a brand new imprint machine in it's wrapper and showed the young assistant who'd never seen one in use (I'm sure doctors, police and shop assistants get younger every year) how to process a payment with the paper system. My friend was most amused by the youngster's reaction to something that he had seen introduced and used for decades.

So by the sounds of it the system was still usable as a backup and being supplied to at least some stores as recently as something like 2010-2012.

Of course now that more and more cards don't have the embossed numbers etc on them this is no longer an option, even if the banks/card processors did still accept them.

I always try to keep some physical cash in my wallet, if just because at times i've been the only one in a taxi with cash when the driver's card reader wasn't working or whatever, and I've seen the chaos that happens in a large Tesco when the internet line they used for payment processing was down (pretty much every isle had abandoned trolleys, despite there being 3 cash machines just outside the doors that were still functioning and obviously on their own connection).

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: I need classic outlook

I'm still trying to find an email client that lets me import from windows mail, and keep the 20 years of pop3 emails from that.

I like the ability to keep copies of my old emails, and access them even if offline or the ISP etc goes wrong.

I've been using Outlook for a few months and loath it for my usage compared to Live Mail etc, for one thing it doesn't default to letting me see the email from all my accounts at once, instead I have to remember to go through a dozen different tabs.

OpenAI goes public with Musk emails, claiming he backed for-profit plans

Re: Musk OpenAI and Microsoft

If the emails were relevant to the law suit, which the contents would appear to suggest they definitely are, then Musk was utterly stupid to try and sue with the claims he made, at least if he didn't want them public as discovery would have brought them up, and Open AI would have filed them as part of the defence with the result they would have been on part of the public record of the case.

In short it sounds like Musk forgot that those emails would have been part of a valid defence against his claims.

Twitter's ex-CEO, CFO, and managers sue Elon Musk for $128M

I've looked at a few of his cars, and a friend put it really well.

"They've got worse build quality than a ******* Kia Rio."

It amazes me how many people will spend 40k on a car with panel, paint and trim issues that make 2003 Kia Rio look good.

The aforementioned friend had one from new, it lasted him something like 10 years without any major issue, not bad for a car that apparently cost him under 7k (it was really basic, but it was put together properly which doesn't seem to be the case with Tesla's).

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

Some of those postmasters were calling the helpline hundreds of times each, with calls going in on days when they could see a problem at the end of the day/week.

This wasn't some "rare" bug, it was happening hundreds/thousands of times for a lot of the victims, and there were hundreds of victims.

If the post office/fujitsu couldn't work out a problem with the transactions from a single terminal over a set date, and that it had been happening repeatedly then they really were worse than you can imagine, or they just didn't care.

Especially as there were times when the the subpostmasters were on the line to the "help desk", following instructions and it went wrong again whilst they were on the line, meaning there was not only a known issue, but the call centre had the exact time, date, terminal user (and terminal), and transaction as a pointer to the problem. If they couldn't start working out the issue from that information then they really didn't care.

If they'd just bothered following up one of those cases, and actually fixing the problem there wouldn't have been hundreds of people (and their families) with ruined lives over this.

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

The archive.org stuff would still be, but it may not have everything unfortunately as I believe they don't routinely "mirror" full sites, especially ones with a lot of data due to the cost and complexity.

I'd hope they update to as complete a mirror as possible, or another organisation can get permission to run a full mirror.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

One of my friends currently has his younger brother living with him.

The younger brother vapes and has one of the really heavy duty "custom" things that is more like a low quality smoke machine than a vape.

He's adamant that it doesn't put out anything unpleasant, the coating on the walls, glass, mirrors and screens tends to disagree. IIRC the base material for the vapes is is similar to a very watery jelly (glycerine?) and once it cools and settles out of the "vapour" you're left with a thin, but increasing thickness of it on every surface that attracts dust.

I had to sort out one of his computers a while back (about 6 months after the brother had moved in), and it gave me flashbacks to when I used to fix computers for my dad and a couple of friends who smoked, it was a very similar tacky sensation with the thick blocks of dust.

Re: These stories are crazy

That sounds like something was renovated/moved around and no one was willing to pay (or deal with the disruption) to potentially reroute a load of cabling to another location that might have been a long way off.

The description reminds me of some of the unit's i've seen in warehouse retailers, where they've had an island with POS/information kiosks and then a decorative duct/pillar going up with all the cabling in it (if you looked about 8 foot up you'd see the "pillar" end in a frame with the cabling etc), but for whatever reason they didn't bother with that part, probably because it would have "looked wrong" or someone didn't want to pay to run it up high enough/run the cabling through one.

Never underestimate how manglement and accountants can look at two options and decide the one that is cheaper in the short term but has the most potential for things going badly wrong (and costing far more) is the one to go with.

Or how many designers and even techs will decide to do something without taking into account human nature, or where it's going to be placed.

How hard is your network really, comms watchdog asks telcos

Re: Yes but no but

Given the likes of VM are shutting off their POTS (I had to move over to a dongle on the modem last week*), and offer to supply an "emergency handset" if you're "vulnerable" I would very much have hoped that the system to have your mobile automatically work with any tower without any additoonal cost to you would have been in place already.

Related to this is the fact that the mobile companies are determined to get everyone onto expensive contracts, evne if they just want "PAYG"

A friend who has an old PAYG sim that he was very careful to keep in credit for his mobile he mainly uses for emergencies/taxis (he's disabled, on a limited budget and basically suck in the house) was furious that his phone provider apparently cancelled the sim without any warning to him, no message about "you need to make a call in the next week" or "you need to top up again in the next week to retain functionality" the first he knew was when he tried to buy something and didn't get the code SMS from his bank and someone not being able to contact him via his phone mentioning it in an email.

In his case he rang up and after a discussion and the call handler talking to a manager they reactivated the sim on the old number but without any credit.

I've since found the emergency phone I bought for my dad has done the same thing because he didn't use it for a couple of months, so the loss of physical landlines if there is a power cut means that unless you're on a contract phone there is a very good chance your occasional use mobile is going to be worthless when you need it most.

*The "Instructions" supplied made it seem like you needed to call them if you had a simple double adaptor for your phone.

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Re: In the glorious past

The problem with canning the bean counters is that you really need access to some specialist food production equipment, or some 55 gallon drums and a printer that can do very large labels.

On the plus side, you can sell the tinned mystery meat for pig food to top up the bonus.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar...

Yup A bit like anything with a pattern.

The size of panel probably didn't change, the ability to get them in the same style, or there was a change in the regulations that mean they can't make them in the same manner any more so new ones might be the same general style but look different.

You get the same thing with carpet tiles, and wall tiles, always buy plenty of spares as the chances are if you need to replace some a few years down the line they won't match even if you can find "the same" ones.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Imagine the meetings

II was thinking that, my meters have a third little box wired to them with IIRC a WAN and HN or something light, one obviously for the suppliers network and the other for the "in home display" device.

Possibly because both the gas and leccy were with BG and from memory fitted at the same time (I can't remember if we had one guy, or two working as a team, I think they were doing several nearby on the same day).

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

A modern moto compo?

My first thought upon seeing this is that it's basically the modern moto compo, which was a small folding scooter designed to fit in the back of some of their smaller cars.

IIRC Tokyo police used them for traffic officers working in the city as they could have one officer staying near the car and another roaming around on the scooter issuing tickets/going down side streets.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: Pretty sure NASA's budget...

IIRC it's also the case that the cost of building upkeep is or was born entirely by projects that used them, with the result that if say the main assembly hall was only being used for the Shuttle program one year, and that year only two flights were planned, then the entirety of it's maintenance work (planned or otherwise) had to come out of the Shuttle program, so if it needed a new roof for it to remain usable it had to be paid out of the budget for those flights

And there were apparently years when the Shuttle program was covering the cost of pretty much all of NASA's bigger building at some facilities.

It's one of the main reasons that the Shuttle program was often so expensive per launch, it had to cover the cost of every bit of infrastructure it used even if only for a few weeks a year if it couldn't be shared out with other projects.

Basically IIRC NASA never got a proper baseline "facilities" budget as such from Congress, it was always taken out of whatever projects they were working on, so for the moon launch they got all the money to build everything needed, but since then the cost of maintaining them has been down to what they could pull out of the budget for other things usually based on what was going to use it. Hence if only Shuttle flights were using something like the Main Assembly Building they got all the costs associated with it.

There is a blog by one of the old NASA guys, who I think retired at some point after reaching the level of Flight Director (or higher), which does a really good job of explaining various bits about the space program, and in one of the entries where he's talking about why the Shuttle missions cost so much per flight he explains a bit about how NASA's funding works.

Author discovers fake, likely AI-generated books written under her name

Re: Keyboard Sounds

I'm fairly sure they did this "we can tell what you're typing by the sound of the keyboard" at least 10-15 years ago, i guess it's another case of "AI" meaning "we're doing something that's been done before, but adding a new buzzword to it".

IIRC the old one listened to the sound and basically ran the unique sounds through a program that matched the pattern to words after you'd got an hour or so of material and then could do it in real time. I think you had to have a different "learned" set for each user and keyboard.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

My memory may be playing up, but from what is surfacing I think the old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice is quite wrong, when lightning strikes it ionises the air and actually makes it easier (thus more likely) that you'll get another hit in roughly the same area.

I'm fairly sure there is/has been research into how to utilise that to direct more lighting to where you want it hitting thus building a better lightning rod by effectively creating that ionised pathway through the air before the first natural strike.

Millions of Gigabyte PC motherboards backdoored? What's the actual score?

Re: You missed a question.

I would have suggested the use of a roll of cheap carped and a couple of bags of quicklime to be a suitable option for the offender, if not for the first offence, then for the second. Very few third offences.