Posts by Contrex

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

This vulture was 16 years, 8 months, and 15 days old On December 20, 1968, and was getting all excited about the Apollo 8 mission, and his new Country Joe and the Fish album.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

I had a colleague just like that, and people used to be disappointed if he didn't insult them. How are you, Mark?

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

Re: This kind of semi-random, intermittent error is such a pain to diagnose

In 1985 I had an add-on 3.5 inch floppy drive in a case, for a Sinclair QL, that used to malfunction (Disk read/write failures) after you moved it until you tapped it in one particular place. Turned out the one-man-band making them had not actually soldered the connector onto the power cable properly, just dabbed the terminals and bared wires with the iron.

I also had the same types of problem (bad solder joints that flexed) 20 and 25 years later with two different models of Shuttle small form factor PC.

Magnetic personalities at Tokamak Energy form separate division

Hone that blade!

I wish people wouldn't write 'hone in on' (see article) when they mean 'home in on'.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: Bad Sparky, bad!

"After about 10-15 minutes of pulling wires I suddenly hear 'I wonder if I turned off the mains....'."

I once worked for a firm where someone got a broken nose for pulling a stunt like that. And the breaker kept his job.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

I can remember going through the classified small-ads in the back of the Bristol Evening Post - so many computers by 'Commador', and so many printers by that well-known Surrey company, Epsom. I think they were phoned in.

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use

It's still up

That link still works, I just did

wget https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/17.5.1/23298084/windows/core/VMware-workstation-17.5.1-23298084.exe.tar

today August 16th 2024

The update server is still up, and you can download a tar archive of the Windows installer for 17.5.1

https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/ws/17.5.1/23298084/windows/core/VMware-workstation-17.5.1-23298084.exe.tar

I just did it, and in the newly installed Workstation, clicked 'Help' in the menu bar, then 'Software Update' and was offered 17.5.2 build-23775571 which downloaded and worked fine, along with drivers, etc.

By the way, I suppose we won't now be needing the free licence serials that bloke on Github has been allowed to give away for a while now?

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

I don't know if it's a thing about plumbers' merchants, but my local one in Bristol is like that (willing to rip open a pack for one washer to help a customer out). I'm sure a lot of the reason is that they are nice (it's a family business) but also they probably, and rightly, reckon that any time someone in a 50 mile radius asks that customer if they know a decent plumbing supplier, that's the name they'll remember and pass on.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Are we sure the printer model was 'LN06'? The description reminds me of the DEC LA600, which was a rebadged PSI (Printer Systems International) PP405. Weighed 22.7 Kg

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

I worked in a Civil Service office with highly confidential documents stored in steel filing cabinets. If we couldn't find a key, or if it snapped off, we'd call the Mitie building services bloke and he'd nip round with a bloody great big screwdriver and a new lock and key.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Douglas X-3 Stiletto, anybody?

And it's shiny like the Bristol Type 188, another fast experimental UK plane.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Windows CLI text editor?

You mean

winget install gnu.nano

I think

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

A funny thing I have Geany, SciTe, Notepad++ installed on all my Windows and Linux machines, and guess what I use, and prefer? Kate. I don't know why.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

Did you copy this, or was it you that posted it the first/last time?

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Rigor or rigour?

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Re: No! No! No! No! No!

Why would Arm want to 'extinguish' the Raspberry Pi?

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Before I retired, I worked in a large public sector finance office, that paid fees and expenses to thousands of individuals each month. The payroll process consisted of emailing Excel spreadsheets monthly to the outsourced payroll provider. The emailed spreadsheet was made by copying over rows & columns from individual spreadsheets maintained by different sub teams. I was responsible for the final upload. One month I was on leave and came back to turmoil. My line manager, the office leader, who was always banging on about paying attention to what you are doing, had managed to paste the amounts payable to each of 6,000 people one row below where they should have been. Everybody got the amount due to the person above them on the sheet. Not to mention the tax and NI. What fun. How do you think the matter was fixed? Yep, another spreadsheet!

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

I have a Pi4 4 GB running Libreleelec (Kodi) and connected to a TV via HDMI. It sees a mounted drive shared using Samba by another Pi4 NAS on my home LAN. The NAS is connected to the router with Ethernet; the TV Kodi one uses wi-fi. I can stream even 1080p x265 material stored on the NAS with NO glitches or any noticeable problems at all. I get a lot of stuff by putting on an eye patch and going -oo-arrr me hearties'.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: It doesn't always smoke though

Did you have DC mains at that location?

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

Style guides generally advise using words for numbers smaller than some limit, often 11. So a six-day war, but a 21-gun salute.

Netflix flinging out DVDs like frisbees as night comes for legacy business

Re: Good old Pirate Bay

Works OK for me. Also a decent Usenet subscription is a handy thing.

UK health service has £1.5B to put toward Digital Workplace Solutions 2: Electric Boogaloo

When I saw the headline I read the capital B as a figure 8 and thought 'the NHS has £1.58 to put towards...' and thought 'Christ, the Tories have screwed us over even worse than I thought'.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

I wouldn't equate liking film photography with being an audiophool. You can see that a decent photo is good, but a lot of audio nonsense is just hocus pocus woo-woo.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

Re: Using the right tool for the job..

In the 1970s I worked for a motorcycle dealer that sold XXX brand machines made in Japan. It was one of a network of XXX Main Dealers, who were the only ones allowed to sell official XXX branded spare parts, everything from complete engines, frames, down to headlight bulbs, brake cables, gaskets, etc. Even screws, nuts, bolts and washers were listed and stocked. The contract with the XXX Motor Company (UK) Ltd stipulated that only genuine maker's spares were to be sold, and any infraction could lead to withdrawal of the contract. XXX company inspectors could in theory arrive unannounced to perform inspections of the warehouse and retail stocks. They never came on Sundays when the whole business was closed!

A big seller was brake shoes for a number of smaller motorcycles. The official XXX Company margin on these was not enough for the company owner. Unofficial Sunday overtime was sometimes available to unload the truck bringing 'pattern' brake shoes round the back of the warehouse, and to discard the incriminating packaging. They were stacked along with the official versions, and sold at the same high price.

At the time I just thought (I was young) how devious the very self-important owner and founder of the company was. I now strongly suspect that the potential 'inspections' would never come, and the reasons might have been contained in brown envelopes, and also that the brake shoes were exactly the same as the ones that XXX Company wanted us to sell.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Unique keys

There is a bloke with the same first and last names as me at my NHS GP practice in Bristol. I was once handed his meds at the pharmacy. They are supposed to ask for the first line of your address but one time they asked for my name

Posing as journalists, Pink Drainer pilfers $3.3M in crypto

A fool and his money....

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

"Upton told Geerling that Raspberry Pi users tend to horde their machines, keeping several in the back cabinet for a rainy day."

I have accumulated quite a collection of Pis, but I have not tried to form them into a large unruly crowd.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Anyone who's tried to run a Raspberry Pi 4 on a random phone charger will tell you that they don't necessarily provide a stable 5v at all loads, and they'll tell you that the official Raspberry Pi power 4 supply is rated to provide 5.1v up to 3.1A.

An important system on project [REDACTED] was all [REDACTED] up

Re: The Italian Job

Or Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon?

Re: The Italian Job

Is that an Irish relative of the actor Michael Caine?

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

I used to work for a UK government ministry and the guy in charge of a very important system came to visit us. A lovely bloke. Beforehand we had been told by a very hierarchy minded manager that he was a 'Band A' grade and we should mind our Ps and Qs. I told him that when we were alone, and he rolled his eyes and said 'they had to give me that grade to make me stay - I'm no different from you'. A band A was on around 50k at the time.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: I can see how this will work out...

But what about how much Gordon Ramsay pays?

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: pizza is the perfect food

People who sarcastically write 'Elf N Safety' or variants thereof really grind my gears, having seen or heard of accidents resulting in injury, disability and in one case, death, all from ignoring H & S requirements in some way. Most safety rules are written in peoples' blood.

Texas mulls law forcing ISPs to block access to abortion websites

Won't Tor get around this proposal?

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

I see Crapita hasn't changed much since I left them in 2006. There was, and apparently still is, a culture of bullying that seems to extend from top to bottom.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: South don't work in the North

Sony Trinitrons came first, around 1968 but generally colour CRTs with the 'delta gun' arrangement were displaced by 'precision in line' (PIL) tubes during the early 1970s. RCA introduced theirs in 1973 and Thorn marketed the design in the UK. Philips/Mullard had their 20AX around then too,

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

As I get on well with my line manager, and her line manager as well, I would ask, in a constructive way, whether she really meant what she had just asked for, and outline what I thought the drawbacks might be. I would regard it as silly and unhelpful to compound the foolishness by just blindly charging ahead, and might expect, if I did, at a subsequent post-mortem, to be asked why I hadn't said why it was a bad idea, considering I was paid to use the material between my ears, and the tongue in my head. This sort of this has happened, and I regard navigating such obstacles as a a key skill. I'm sure, given the tendency of toxic management to take credit for underlings' sucesses, and to blame them for management's errors, that I'd come off worse. If the management was toxic, I'd be off anyway.

No more free love: Netflix expands account sharing restrictions

Yes. Raspberry Pi running Tor proxy, browser using that for access to search sites, same Pi running miniDLNA, 10 year old Samsung smart TV.

Software engineer accused of stealing $300k from employer was 'inspired by Office Space'

Re: Code review is for wimps

I also read about such a case, and that it was detected when bank staff wanted to demo a search function to some visitors and chose to see the first and last accounts (by some metric) and the thief had created his fractional-cents-dump account to be the last one, and the transactions looked distinctly odd.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Re: Non-binary memory?

What is a 'gammon'?

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: What waste

Will they have to have Cockroft's Follies? The ones that saved Northern England from catastrophe?

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

"US regulators want to fine the operators of a claimed massive robocall operation almost $300 million that made more than 5 billion pre-recorded calls over three months" - doesn't anybody proof read on here any more? Or is this American English?

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Surely, if El Reg is now written in US English, the injured people went to **the** hospital?

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Re: Oh sure, inkjets are "green". Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

In 2015 I decided I wanted a colour laser printer. My Canon inkjet needed a set of replacement cartridges that cost £50. The printer only cost £80. I found that my local Staples branch in Bristol stocked a budget colour laser for £100. I rang them to enquire about stock. The guy said 'Sorry, they've all sold out. Did you want that particular model, or are you just after a colour laser?'. I said 'Why do you ask?'. He said 'We have an HP ex-display model you can have for £50. No packaging, manuals, or driver disks, but it has unused starter cartridges. You'd have to collect it.' I asked 'What model?', He went away and looked and came back. 'It's an m251nw'. A quick Google... List price £200. 'Hold it for me, I'm coming down!'.

It's big, heavy and black, and wife didn't like it until she started her OU course.

With our usage the original cartridges lasted to May 2020. I bought a set of 'compatible' full-capacity replacements from a smelly-sounding UK supplier. Showing 80% remaining.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: Socket Tester Plugs

About 60 years ago, my uncle, who worked for a Ford main dealer, told me about a visit to their factory at Dagenham, which had its own steel rolling plant. He said that he was told about an incident not long before his visit. A man needed to get in amongst the rollers, so he removed the fuses for the motors and put a note on the cover. The shift changed, the new operators replaced the fuses and started up the mill, rolling the poor guy flat. They were made to join the crew that had to dismantle the equipment, get all the bits out, and clean everything.

LockBit suspect cuffed after ransomware forces emergency services to use pen and paper

I just uploaded a picture of myself to PimEyes, and it returned two images, one of me, and one of someone who looks a bit like me. The one of me shows me holding up a bit of paper with my partially blurred out name on it!. I think I know when it was taken. I would have to fork out for a subscription to see the full url. Not happy.

Boss made dirt list of minions' mistakes, kept his own rampage off it

Re: Not IT-related

I once had a copy of 'Electrical Safety' by Herbert Swann, in which he talks about substation workers 'blowing themselves up' by putting steel rulers against live busbars.