Posts by David Hicklin 2232 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
It will be back once the Senior Civil Servants (Servants? Really? just who the hell are they serving!!) and Security Chiefs starts whispering to them and open their little black book that contains the PM's dirty little secrets.
I can think of no other way that this zombie keeps on coming back from the dead despite all the iron stakes that are put through it.
> MS Promised me Win 10 would be my last OS and I'm holding them to that.
Same here, I am typing away on Linux mint right now.
I still have programs that run best on Windows 7 (or simply don't support anything later or later versions are crap) and for those I have some VM's
Don't do PC games so that is not an issue.
I think that if you are careful, don't visit dubious sites and your browser is still supported* then there is little reason to move. I still think windows 7 was peak windows
* which is what finally forced me off 7 to 10 with Firefox/Thunderbird even if on a VM until Micro$lop decided that the licence it used was no longer valid, so it became Linux Mint.
It does not take much for some people to fall for these scams etc
Take my other half, she has never purchased from Amazon (although I have) but then she got a WhatsApp message asking for payment to complete delivery of an Amazon package she fell for it hook, line and sinker. We did get the money refunded but it took some stern talking from me to get her to report the fraud*
* which is another thing, I suspect a lot of fraud/scams are never reported either because they are embarrassed or just can't be bothered with like "oh its only 20 quid"
In the late 1990's we had a "corporate deal" with Dell for PC's (we had favoured Compaq before then) and got a job lot of Desktop PC's with a 200MHz Pentium and a miserable amount of Ram running NT4 and Office 97 (I think - memory is getting hazy that far back).
They were great at first but soon started running slowly, so I was asked if they could be "upgraded" at all.
Nope, not chance. CPU soldered in, single memory slot so even upgrading the memory would result in all the old chips dumped. And the motherboard was totally non-standard form factor with a non-standard form factor PSU with (of course) a non-standard connector plug/socket to the motherboard.
Maybe that is why the "deal" looked so cheap!
> Now... who do I talk to about removing all the 'driver assist' idiocy that goes into new cars?
Some are useful, on our current car it avoided me doing a rear end shunt caused by being distracted.
But they should assist only, the trend seems to be going into "control" mode which is too far. The driver should be able to decide that some features are "off" and stay "off"
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive— you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.
It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
It will be at that point that you will see how well managed your pension funds are.
Having said that 2025 was a record year for pension funds largely driven by the AI bubble which according to my advisor we won't see again for a long time, so it would seem that they are preparing for the big crunch.
One does also wonder of he stored his files on the C: drive as they did not trust the IT team who might (or probably could in God mode) read them.
I actually had that with an MD who wanted part of the Novell network to be only accessible by him and his secretary. Although I did explain how impossible this was and he backed down, I decided to look for pastures new at that point (which turned out to be a good move for me).
Company my offspring works for were scheduled for relocating offices just after Covid, decided on a permanent WFH policy and cut out 2 floors from the original plan, teams only go into the office for team events otherwise it is WFH from wherever as long as the work gets done. Of course there is the option for those whose circumstances make using the office space a requirement.
> sorting out WCML congestion into Euston
Going to downvote you there as nobody wants to go back to the hell that the WCML "upgrade" was a few years back. Years of Rail Replacement Buses and massive cost overruns that did not deliver fully as it got canned towards the end as thus unfinished.
Main problem with WCML is that there are sections that can't be give more capacity without demolishing a huge amount of housing that grew up alongside it - just witness the protests of HS2 going *near* somewhere.
> Living quite close to HS2, its not so much through farmland as under it. Not that they are tunnelling, the dig down, put the tunnels in and the fill over the top of the tunnels. No idea of what that does to costs though.
It all adds to the cost, I have read that one third of the trip to London will be in tunnels or deep cuttings so not much to look at, maybe the short journey time will be a blessing in that respect
> Making this the most expensive rail project, anywhere in the world, by the inevitable country mile.
However once you look at all the tunnelling (some cut and cover), viaducts and sheer amount of civil engineering needed to build this thing (in large part thanks to the NIMBY's) it is very easy to see why it has cost so much.
Add into that the almost constant changing requirements as bit by bit it got cut back (which in itself cost a lot of planning and land/housing purchases) it is no wonder it is this expensive.
DAB when it started had good quality as decent data rates
Then they started squeezing more in and dropping the data rates to allow it, and now it is worse than FM
Not to mention we have DAB when just about everywhere else has the better (and incompatible) DAB+, and yes there has been discussions for ages about if or when the UK would switch to DAB+ and landfill everything out there
> Maybe not the worst financial collapse we've ever seen because central banks and governments are far more willing to intervene and prop things up than they were in 1929. But it sure looks like the next financial crash is going to be spectacular.
Problem is that the governments are also broke, so don't expect any help from them.
> Poking around with a screwdriver, without even unplugging the power cord?
I built a sound to light box from a magazine design in the 1980's, it came in kit form with discrete TTL logic chips but it worked fine except that if you increased the output level on one channel, one adjacent one would come on partway, and as you increased the level it would eventually go off - despite its control being zeroed.
Poking around with a scope using an uninsulated screwdriver as a probe I touched one of the triac heat-sinks that were mains live. Glowing balls went zipping along the PCB tracks and as they passed each TTL chip it exploded with a POP! .
Amazingly after replacing the chips and wire linking some vaporised PCB tracks it still worked but it never did find out what was causing the wrong channel triggering.
> With the early power N-MOSFETS
Did the same as an apprentice in the dev lab, was putting together a 5v switched mode power supply and had a bank of resistors as a test load. one day I decided to add more load and all was good until suddenly the output voltage started dropping followed by molten globs of semiconductor flying out the MOSFETS. turned out they had a thermal characteristic that caused them to run-away and as they got hotter it got worse until POOF!
> op of a logic analyser, face-up on the floor, which cost the same as my house
Yeah stuff like that was really expensive in the 1980's, first place I worked for had a spectrum analyser in the electronics lab that they has to purchase in two parts due to purchasing limits.
Bank in the 1990's as the sole IT person I took 3 Netware 2.xx servers one by one to a new site , and then a few years later brought them all back again as we relocated back to where we had come from! Not everyone was moving at once, so the network was "split" and then reconnected later. Amazed we did not have password/access sync issues.
Then once we were back the new owners took over 2 other smaller companies who were relocated to our site , and had the joys of driving across the country to collect their servers and drive them back. They were a collect late Friday and they had to be ready & working first thing Monday job
Fun days, I never managed to break anything thankfully.
Last place I worked had fire "zones" with 2 levels of alarm, A single tone meant be prepared to evacuate, a rapid multi tone meant "get out now".
They were painfully - and I mean PAINFULLY - loud, and it was not fun being in an office with the single tone going off especially when they could run for 5-10 minutes. Thankfully noise cancelling headphones reduced it so levels that did not damage* my hearing
* I am pretty sure it must have been doing that, they were really loud
