Posts by Cessquill 31 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2019
That takes me back - the days when Windows wasn't an OS, most of your software was still in DOS, and a smattering required you to type win.
I was using WordPerfect, Lotus Freelance and Supercalc mainly in DOS - can't for the life of me remember what I used Windows for originally. Eventually Aldus Pagemaker.
Off on a tangent, you had to make up presentations in Freelance, then render them to see what they looked like. I'd then send them off to get printed on slides for my boss to give a presentation.
Had a very similar incident with a Sun Microsystem pizza box (SPARCstation 1?). Had a fancy optical mouse while I still had a 386 PS/2 with a clunky old mouse, but it needed the shiny metal mouse mat. At the time I thought it was all cool and space-age. Until the summer sun caught the mat.
I used to sell DAT players back when they were part of hi-fi components, and have had a few gigs recorded to DAT (which meant I needed to find somebody with a player for transferring). I remember demoing a Sony separate (and maybe others), but don't recall ever selling one. An interesting, but largely unnecessary format for the general public, but a great uncompressed format for the industry.
AFAIK, DDS started of with the same design as DAT, and I think initially the tapes were interchangeable - the only difference being the players / recorders themselves and what they're able to read/write. As DDS developed in capacity (thinner, longer, broader tape), they forked off *. Would love to know more though, as I've not had any experience with DDS.
* my patchy memory, not fact
Unless this is something I've misremembered or just hogwash (and may no longer be the case)...
NASA has redundancy from different companies, so they can't both fail for the same reason.
The European Space Agency has redundancies from the same supplier, so when there's an inherent problem in one, both fail.
A cross-street network going down is nowhere near as bad as a code error borking a space mission though, so it'll probably be fine.
The customer may always be right, but they rarely ask the right questions. Amongst others this week...
"Have you got any spare keyboards? Mine's not working" transpired to be "I've left the dongle for my wireless keyboard at home"
"Can you update a graphic - we've got a newsletter going out today with a typo" was really "the person who made the graphic has gone home, and the source files are on their laptop"
And - as this one - external customer chasing up an order for another company.
Always respond with a question. You might come across as a dick, but you'll hopefully get to what they're not telling you, and hopefully solve the problem rather than patching it.
Also, "energetic optimism of a Monday to the deflated downtime of Friday".
Is that a thing?
Had two accounts with Lloyds before the merger and when they split I'm automatically with TSB, as with a lot of people I guess.
And immediately Lloyds ran a series of adverts saying they'd "been by your side for 250 years".
Not cool, Lloyds. You left me and my overdraft high and dry.
Funny that - I don't use the app, but sometimes visit via the browser. Noticed this week a slew of "jobs available near you" posts. They were all in Greek and represented roughly where I was a few weeks ago. Even then it was for low-pay work in a 60 or so mile radius.
So on the one hand they're sneaky and selling me without my knowledge. But on the other, they think a 65 mile commute to wash plates in a cafe is logical.
Back in 1990 it wasn't so hard since work was about to start rolling out a country-wide fibre network. Thatcher decreed it anti-competitive and pulled the plug. Politics aside, we could be so much further on if not for this. Shame really.
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
Yep. In 2005 I went for a Web Developer job interview at a small company. They told me that staff do not get internet access. And then fired a series of questions asking me to justify why a web developer needs the internet.
Didn't get the job.
Admittedly, the first site I built was in Notepad, and the MD dialled up on his 14.4 modem to publish it for me, but c'mon...
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