Posts by Vometia Munro 171 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2016
I was warned that they were a lot more fussy about speed limits (this was before the UK had its outbreak of speed cameras) and that stop signs meant stop (well, <5mph IIRC) even if there was obviously no other traffic or pedestrians. And some other quirks involving cyclists and the one-car-at-a-time filter lights. But most of all to not get out the car if the coppers pull you over.
Post OS upgrade, I finished off some bits and pieces using the vt220 compatible sat on the minicomputer and turned the reset key. While the key was in the "full reset, yeah you asked for it lol" position I noticed the label on the computer didn't match the name of the system I was working on. And remembered the point I raised myself a few days previously that the new policy of putting consoles on any available surface was a bad idea in itself, but an especially bad idea when "any available surface" included typically unrelated minicomputers whose top was a convenient desk height.
So yeah, having raised this point myself, and having a head full of filesystems, software versions, if the various patches and updates had been invited along to frolic and so on I'd subsequently forgotten that minor point. The computer, the computer. Oh yeah, that thing the console is sat on. Computer! Reset key! Final stage of this tedious experience which my coffee-deprived mid-afternoon crash just thought "thank all the expletives in the universe that is over". And then the realisation. The computer; well it's a computer, but not The Computer. Not the one I am working on. If it is The Compuer, it's... oh bugger, the one that the "Death Row" executive offices use. The executives themselves didn't partake, I mean this was the early '90s and keyboards were women's work, but their PAs were quite fearsome. So, er, sorry about that, couple of dozen high-power and probably now quite grumpy senior people whose work I've just nuked.
The fallout was surprisingly mild. I was sheepish about it and my admission may have got about as far as a rather high-pitched <eep>, the Most Senior Of All PAs seeming actually quite relaxed and "well the computers normally work all the time, these things happen" and while I'll never be entirely sure if she knew "these things" were due to the sleep-deprived figure in front of her having a bad day and inadvertently blundering about and causing chaos... oh, who am I kidding, she knew and was gracious enough to let me go on my way without further ado. No complaints were filed, or my manager did a very good job of composting them. The wayward console problem was solved soon afterwards using a curious little RS232-based LAN controlled by a COBOL application on a 286 PC. Sounds a bit ancient but worked really well.
I didn't reset or otherwise crash any more machines but I did have various other escapades and misadventures, largely because I was in my early 20s.
> SLS Linux is long dead. It never had a chance to get old. Ygdrasil predates Slackware too, but Slackware is still around, the others are not. It continues to set the record for oldest Linux distro every day it remains active.
Blimey, that sentence alone is causing a bit of a ruckus in the retirement home for wrinkly old brain cells. I don't recall anything useful from that time but those names do evoke memories of swapping the same couple of spare 3½" floppies back and forth to my "it's still good really!" 386SX PC. tbf it managed better with Linux than it did with Doom the following year... Trying to get an upgrade out of my then employer was its own entertainment ("er... we have this old Vax you can have.")
Patient Access is another culprit that invites the likes of Google somewhere it really shouldn't be. I haven't spent any time seeing how intrusive it is but the frequent appearance of the "select all crosswalks" menace is enough of a worry IMHO.
Well, that and having to add so much of it's annoying spam to uBlock. Patient Access a dreadful, shoddy piece of crap even without all the intrusive annoyances and I wish I had the option to use something else. :|
I suppose there's some irony in that I ran into this "out-of-band customs charge" not in Turkey itself but on the way back as I entered Stansted 30-odd years back. The git in customs went through a long and complicated calculation about "duty" owed on something I was wearing (okay, admittedly I had bought it in Turkey) which miraculously came to exactly the tenner I had in my possession otherwise I wasn't getting back into the country. Cash only, no exceptions. Couldn't've been more blatant. Meh.
Reminds me a bit of the Students Union elections when I was at college back in the middle ages. The incumbents' mates organised the polling and were conspicuously doing "sorry, the polls have just closed!" as soon as a group of engineers or techies turned up but reopened them to their mates and hangers-on once the nerds had left the building. They weren't even at all subtle about it. Unsurprisingly, results were... well, unsurprising, so we had yet another year of them not representing the students. :|
Yeah. I discovered this when my old but still okay R9 390 figuratively went up in smoke (not sure of the culprit but suspect an updated driver with unspecified tweaks for "quieter" fans hastened its demise). I'd previously assumed the same, people were paying silly money for top-end stuff but everything else was okay. I'd be fine and would be back to being shot at in Cyberpunk in no time.
When I started looking for a replacement I was quickly disabused of that idea. There was absolutely nothing available anywhere except stuff even older than my 390 and whose second-hand prices were rather premium rate.
I eventually lucked out and managed to grab myself an Nvidia 2060 at probably its original RRP. In normal times not an especially wonderful deal but right now I consider myself to be very fortunate. I just hope it doesn't develop a fault in the foreseeable future...
There is indeed. A chap called Soarer makes a contraption that does the job nicely. The only problem I've had is plugging it into my KVM, but my KVM seems to have an interesting view of USB standards so I don't think it's the fault of Soarer's converter.
Most modern keyboards are dire: I'm really not a fan of the squishy rubber dome things which often seem to evoke the feel of the Spectrum only with actual keys perched on top. There are various modern mechanical keyboards of varying quality (currently using a Durgod with MX Reds in it; feels a bit like a BBC Micro or Dragon from years past) and you can still get Model M keyboards from Unicomp but a lot of people think the vintage Model M and especially Model F keyboards are superior.
I feel lucky that my first job (Philips, around 30 years back) had an IT department staffed by a bunch of long-time mainframe beards who had a lot of experience with that sort of thing and took it very seriously. 24 hour ops did daily, full backups, the tapes were kept in a fire safe and alternated with another set (I think they kept four sets altogether) in their other nearby data centre on a weekly basis and the recovery procedure was fully tested. An engineer visited regularly to check the tape units were in proper working order and aligned correctly. My own contribution was to change the system to use incremental backups six days a week; given that each of the dozen minis needed 2-3 QIC tapes to do a full backup the ops seemed happy with the reduction in faffing about.
What's surprised me is that so many places I've been (or encountered) since aren't anywhere near as fastidious with their backup strategy. Considering so many organisations are just one incident away from a crisis I'm surprised disaster doesn't strike more often.
Making the escape doors inoperable seems like a fundamentally bad idea. :| A previous employer had what was effectively an anti-thievery system on the fire door which prevented it being opened by not-particularly-obvious means; cue fire alarm and large crowd of people at the bottom of the stairs unable to get it open. I managed to do so (definitely a case of "stand aside, determined idiot on the scene" and lacerated my hand in the process) and complained to the building manager about it not being fit for purpose. She insisted she could see no problem with what I described. Sigh.
I Am Not A Kernel Developer, but I'm vaguely aware of problems that can occur with paging and caching tripping over each other. ISTR FreeBSD's unified paging & caching system was a big deal, and that e.g. ZFS can still have "issues" if paging is invoked on something it's trying to cache. I dare say in some operating systems where they want as much stuff as possible to live in paged memory, even the filesystem code could theoretically be paged out! So it seems there are reasons to avoid going through the filesystem, though if there's any overlap between the reasons I've given and the actual reasons remains to be seen.
From somewhere around 15 a day to none overnight. Can't see what the fuss is about myself.
I gave up four times in total, I think. Restarted because I was bored/depressed/daft or some combination thereof. First three goes were easy, I just stopped and that was that. Fourth time was nearly impossible. Nasal spray was the answer: it was disgusting but it worked.
After all the worrying about cancer it was an early heart attack that nearly got me: apparently trying to treat diabetes by drinking lots of fruit juice wasn't one of my better ideas. I mean lots: "more is more", and all that, so I drank pints of it a day, my rationale being that fruit is good for you so enormous amounts of fruit juice must surely be awesome. Fortunately I got better; even the diabetes has gone, though I do wonder if the absence of IV fruit juice isn't entirely unrelated.
Some of the Philips computers from that era were quite interesting beasties. The P4000 and P7000 minis were always a bit of a mystery to me (I was the new girl they'd brought in to do stuff with these suspicious new Unix systems) but quite fascinating in their own way. I remember the P7000 had to be coaxed into life from a cold start by using a hairdryer. The P7000 is no doubt long gone but I rescued its hairdryer which I still have lying around somewhere.
On topic, I remember pretty much everyone at Philips smoked at the time and it was probably the main cause of grubby keyboards which were always a bit... ew. Maybe there was a good reason both the computers and office decor featured a great deal of brown. For a time I was sat just on the other side of a partition to a Frenchman, who was a lovely guy but he chain-smoked Gauloises all day long. The atmosphere was, erm... thick.
It depends what you're doing. If you need a couple of documents open side-by-side, such as something you're working on and something you're referring to swapping workspaces doesn't cut it.
Well okay, "better than nothing" functionality, then. :D But y'know, thinking back to early in my career when development (er, such as it was for a junior programmer with bad habits) consisted of an 80x24 green screen using ed on a Unix with no job control. Then one day I managed to get a second terminal. Wow!
A bit. I know there are lots of people who have bragging rights with their trio of 54" monitors but even as someone who's not destitute, I'm not made of money and don't have enough space.
Still, not downvoting because I kinda sorta agree with you in some regards: virtual desktops provide "good enough" functionality, and efficiency doesn't matter if it's fugly, even speaking as someone who still uses fixed-pitch green-screen applications because I like the aesthetic (well, and functionality, e.g. Alpine for email). Er, I seem to have digressed; where was I...?
I'm not sure my PC counts as "decent" these days: the i7 6700 is "good enough", the ATI R9 390 is definitely getting long in the tooth and I still mostly keep stuff on spinning rust, but other than a couple of adjustments (it decided for me to max out everything it could in graphics, so I turned shadow quality down to medium: it looks terrible but I'm used to it and it gave me a few more fps; I also turned the crowd density to medium too, but that wasn't so much performance as finding them annoying!) it runs just fine. It seems it's definitely a PS4 problem and it's not clear whether the fault there lies with CDPR or Sony.
While I started off saying "God the bugs!", while they can be conspicuous they strike me as being rough edges for the most part. No, they shouldn't be there and we're used to better from CDPR but is it really worse than the competition? I mean I was playing AC Valhalla beforehand and that also has its issues but didn't get quite the same degree of publicity. Horizon Zero Dawn did, albeit fairly briefly, but that was very much worse.
"I wonder if they tried to write a whole new engine and that is what is causing the problems?"
I was wondering the same thing. It would explain why some aspects of the game seem much less complete than others. It seems slightly reminiscent of what I've read about the difficulties faced by Bioware's Inquisition team after EA foisted Frostbite upon them.
It seems most games consider loose files or those in patch archives to supersede those in the base game's archives. I guess the reason for archives rather than loose files is because opening and maintaining lots of file handles is expensive; istr some games run rather poorly if I extract everything. Contiguous allocation is something that is a bit prickly, and Steam's recent attempts to guarantee it by its glacially slow pre-allocation was an unwelcome development. One they have reportedly rolled back, thankfully.
Some games have varying levels of detail with models, others seem to do it on the fly or just make do with "one size fits all". One of the worst was Dragon Age Oranges' approach to textures: in spite of DDS files containing mipmaps anyway (i.e. with multiple copies of the same image, halving the resolution until it's just 1px) it still had high, medium and low-res versions. :|
I've just put it down to the strange inconsistency with the game, which is that there's absolutely incredible detail in some regards such as world-building, soundtrack and so on whereas other bits are rather conspicuously unfinished.
Yeah, it's nonsense. They may prefer to do play-testing in a controlled environment for various reasons but as long as NDAs are signed I see little problem to doing it remotely and a few advantages (i.e. a more diverse sample of hardware and less coaching of prospective testers).
WFH or rather the lack of it prior to the plague has been frustrating. I did it in the mid '90s because my then employer wanted to close yet another office and knew its staff were getting tetchy about being repeatedly relocated. It was simple to do then: they gave me a desk, a nice chair, a Vax and a laser printer, installed a KiloStream leased line with a network bridge* at either end, don't remember if the phone was piggybacked onto it or another line, go into an office once or twice a week so I don't fall out the loop (and do it in work time: yay!) and it worked perfectly. But trying to get any subsequent employer to do the same thing even though it'd save them money and me stress was practically impossible. Usual excuse, "staff are bone idle and won't work without my 1337 overseeing skillz!" as we saw plenty of managers still wailing, but who were happily increasingly overruled this year.
* sort of on-topic, the network bridge was pretty beta quality and I'd have to phone ops at least twice a week to reset the bloody thing at their end... :|
IME it's not as bad as yer typical Bethsoft game. FO3 had some pretty nasty bugs, particularly the "dead cell" bug (i.e. something with out-of-range coordinates caused an instant CTD forever more when entering that cell; and the longer you play, the more inevitable it becomes. It is fixable on the PC at least but it's extremely laborious to do so) though at least for me, FO4 was a big improvement.
It's just what Bethsoft do (or did, I'd like to think) but I dunno what happened with CDPR. CP77 feels like it had rather chaotic project management. As much as it's lacking in some areas, I suppose at least it didn't go full DNF.
I'm enjoying CP77 a lot, but God, the bugs. I'm perhaps fortunate to have not to run into anything game-breaking yet, at least nothing that can't be recovered from a save/reload, or worst case one of the happily quite frequent auto-saves, but there are so many little annoyances and a few fairly big ones. As well as a lot of stuff being conspicuously unfinished: being able to redo the player's appearance, the paucity of items available, the weird lack of third-person mode with no apparent reason for excluding it; the driving, which is supposed to be a core part of the game being so dysfunctional I wonder if any of the developers has ever driven a car; the awkward controls which often don't work correctly; and so on. The excuses for it being in this state are a bit flimsy too, comparing it with Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 which, however much debate it might generate in the precise implementation and storytelling, just works. At what should be the other extreme, CP77 has more glaring bugs than Ubisoft's Valhalla. The maker of The Witcher 3 failing such a low bar is... well, it's surprising.
The patch system also seems a little unrefined when it has to download basically everything whenever there's an update instead of simply downloading, y'know, the update. As most other games have done for many years.
At the moment it's a mixed bag. I love the game, there's loads to do, loads to explore, the story is interesting and it has Keanu etc. But quality control is pretty arse.
Dunno. I just remember way back when (around the mid '90s) there was a really strong push to move to Windows for everything amongst ATM development teams. I never did figure out the rationale, though I do remember one of their managers asking me with genuine confusion why I wouldn't replace a router with a Windows PC with two network cards.
I heard a somewhat apocryphal story about a financial institution that had a very reliable MicroVax that after several years needed to be relocated or some such, and they couldn't find it. Turned out to be still living in a long since bricked-up part of the building, quite happily left to its own devices and unmolested.
I'm slightly sceptical as I would expect facilities management or whatever they're called to pay at least some attention to turning off the power in disused areas but I also know better than to not just assume, so it could well be true. Depends how many years as VMS had some obscure bug that would cause a hiccough after a long enough period of uninterrupted uptime.
I still have a couple of VaxStations in the garage. I would've been happy to run them if not for their somewhat enthusiastic power consumption. Well, that and my VMS licences expired about 20 years ago.
I get what you're saying; I mean I hate twitch-games because I have no concentration nor dexterity, but ACV's "parkour" pretty much translates into "keep the spacebar pressed and pray to Vindy that it doesn't decide to randomly change direction by 89.9⁰ because you weren't perfectly perpendicular to a brick wall or just because it felt like it." Which is to say it's kinda briefly entertaining but mostly doesn't work.
tbh I'm mostly enjoying it in spite of numerous bugs and idiosyncrasies. The most painful bit for me is that most of the kids sound like Bart Simpson. They're even more distracting than the unloved and unwanted animarse and modern-day nonsense.
Based on these recommendations, I gave a Durgod K320 a go: I've been looking for a new TKL for a while now, something with "MX Noisy Reds" in it, and haven't found very much that took my fancy. Pleased to say it's every bit as good as implied. I stuck a set of Drop MT3 keycaps on it which complements it quite nicely.
I did something similar during holidays at college, data entry clerk at a local business. The machine in question was some IBM midrange horror but the keyboard was lovely, though I still never appreciated what I was using at the time. IBM 5251 twinax beastie, probably weighed more than I did, its beam-spring keyboard was a delight to type on. As if the tactility wasn't enough, it had a clunker with enough enthusiasm to make the desk shake with every keypress just so you were absolutely certain it'd done it. Even as a rubbish typist I could get up to machine-gun-like speed using that thing's keypad.
But as I moved on to writing tangles of C and too much time playing chase-the-clicky-box with the mouse on badly-designed GUIs, keypads are now a thing of the past for me.
tbf the DEC LK201 keyboards were a thing before desk-rodents were commonplace. Well, IME at least. I actually came to like All-In-Bits' use of the keypad as a bunch of function keys, though I never quite understood why it was chosen in place of the actual function keys; nor why the latter were numbered the way they were.
The IBM SSKs are nice, much the same as you describe in that they're a PS/2 buckling spring without the keypad; though the massive bezel still makes them nearly as big as an original PC keyboard.
Huh, I've been typing for nearly 40 years and still need to look at the keyboard otherwise I get completely lost. At my first programming gig a cow-orker who did things with a mainframe was formerly a secretary and she could type without ever looking at the keyboard. Witchcraft, if you ask me. She also used to tell me off about my spelling. Often.
My first job was with a Dutch company. They were wonderful to work for. But the UK part was given increasing autonomy and UK/US-style sales-led MBA madness took root instead. It went through a fairly brief phase of rapidly becoming a horrible place to work before it was no longer viable and the remains were bought by a US competitor. Which was a US-based company who had a similar ethos to the Dutch one but by then were already a sinking ship thanks to some MBA taking over the helm and crashing it into an iceberg. At our induction speech, the suit said "out favourite word is 'paradigm'", so one could see from the outset where we were headed.
We have the newer lardy-arsed version but it's still pretty lively and just seems to get more enthusiastic at speed. Which I'm not 100% convinced is a good thing. Ours is an automatic which isn't normally what I'd choose, but it's what they had and it has its benefits as there is a pretty much perpetual traffic jam here. Still, in spite of that it remains pretty keen and will quite happily wheelspin when the traffic lights change. Not much, just enough to let me know it's not faffing about.
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