Posts by ITMA 1217 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2019
Like certain IBM line printers which cost $xK per month, plus some usage charge.
For $xK times just under two per month, you could upgrade it to a line printer which goes twice as fast.
When upgrade day came the IBM engineer would arrive and usher everyone out of the room. Off would come the covers of the printer and a drive belt moved from one set of pulleys to another. Covers went back on and printer now goes twice as fast.
Lunar seismographs can tell us a great deal that ground penetrating radar cannot.
Almost everything we think we know about the internal structure of the Earth as well as the moon is based on seismographic evidence (along with magnetometers)
However, if you know where you can get a ground penetrating radar that will penetrate 1,737 Km (for the moon) or 6,371 Km (Earth) I'm sure we'd all be very interested.
One has been able to buy gadgets to do that for a long time.
Nothing new in that.
https://www.bestproductsreviews.co.uk/stud-finder?targetid=kwd-299026068905&matchtype=b&device=c&campaignid=12134395330&creative=493317846389&adgroupid=120735521750&feeditemid=&loc_physical_ms=1006621&loc_interest_ms=&network=g&devicemodel=&placement=&keyword=$%2Bbest%20%2Bstud%20%2Bfinder&target=&aceid=&adposition=&trackid=uk_all_top_11_1&mId=407-132-4411&trackOld=true&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInI-JnZiogQMVWfDtCh1L3wobEAAYASAAEgJE3vD_BwE
You mean like this bit of really crap reporting by the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-64668021
1. It is not even in the shape of a "robot". It is a direct copy of a Lego "human" figure.
2. It is does not "melt itself". That is done by the application of an external energy field.
3. It can't move itself when molten. That is done by the application of external magnetic forces which drag it along.
Pure click bait.
If you want to see a true example of this, look no further than:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4QJRLsVtys
And YES. it really is every bit as bad as in the video and YES, it really does comes with a USB memory stick containing cracked pirated software stuffed full of malware.
I know. I had to deal with one someone bought from eBay for..... £2,500 !!!!
"Airliners have advanced automation capable of navigating and even landing and braking to a stop on the runway. The pilots are still fully responsible for the aircraft from brake release to parking at the gate."
And before around October 2021 if that airliner was a Boeing 737 MAX the automation was quite capable of killing everyone on board - and did several times - despite the actions of the pilots to stop it.
This is a technique I have been known to use at times based upon a rough translation of the Christmas song "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow"
"Let it fail, let it fail, let it fail".
If management will just not grasp the consequences of doing nothing. Do nothing and let it all crash and burn. After ensuring you have ample CYA (cover your ass) evidence to prove you warned them and a well prepared plan for GYOOTS - Getting Yourself Out Of The Shit.
According to the BBC's reporting of the NATS report on the incident - it did exactly that:
"This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to Nats' air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing."
According to the BBC's reporting of the NATS report:
"... at 08:32 on 28 August, its system received details of a flight which was due to cross UK airspace later that day.
The system detected that two markers along the planned route had the same name - even though they were in different places. As a result, it could not understand the UK portion of the flight plan.
This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to Nats' air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing."
WTF! Why couldn't it just have rejected the flight plan instead of shutting the entire system down?
And what a surprise - the "backup" system did exactly the same thing.
Please accept my feedback in which ever order you wish to interpret them:
"The", "Off", "Right", "Fuck".
Although they have miles to go to get to the same level of fuckery Microsoft get up to every time they do some pointless update to Edge - usually an excuse to force all of their preferred settings on to you and try to force you to use it.
I could be wrong, but wasn't the single biggest lesson from Three Mile Island to have control room indicators that mimicked the ACTUAL position of valves rather than the "commanded postiion", i.e. the position they were SUPPOSED to be in?
Many mistakes were made because they failed to realise what was actually going on due to control room indicators showing valves were closed when they were actually open.
Because in most ways WiFi is crap.
It sovles ONE problem - not being able to connect to the network using a cable. In situations where you really need that, it is the solution.
In virtually every other way it is crap.
Around our main office there are 50+ OTHER WiFi networks. Not devices, NETWORKS, all within range. It is crowded... VERY crowded. That massively impacts performance and reliability.
On the consumer side when you see all those TV ads (such as BT retail) where people are complaing about "the internet is playing up". Bollocks. Most of the time it is NOT their internet, it is their WiFi which is the problem.
When there were 3 maybe 4 houses in a street which used WiFi it could be great. Now EVERY house has multiple WiFi devices all trying to shout each other down. Flats are much worse.
"It has some decent improvements over Windows 10"
But you just can't get past that God awful user interface and making so many things which were not hard (if not excactly always "easy" in Windows 10) into a bloody nightmare.
And where has the option to completely turn of this "focussed session" shit gone?
We use a bunch of "hobbyist" 3D printers (Prusa etc) for in house manufacture of an assortment of bespoke "widgets" for use internally.
Remote - across a network - monitoring of jobs complete with webcam view of the build area are very useful.
Simple solution - a bunch of Raspberry Pi 3B+ running OctoPi (suitably locked down), one for each printer.
And if we need to keep an eye on a many hour print job, connect in securely via VPN.
No cloud needed.
That reminds me of when the internet was a new thing and lots of drivers etc were downloaded from manufacturers' dial up BBS.
We had a bank of USR Courier 56K modems connected to a Netware Comms Server to "network" them.
Used to have great fun - at a colleague's expense - sitting at my desk in the IT office a few feet from the "target", using terminal software to connect to one of the modems (which were in the server room) and repeatedly dial his desk phone.
The hard part was keeping a straight face while watching him progress through puzzlement, irritation, annoyance, frustration to slamming phone down anger.
When the penny finally dropped what was happening, it was still very hard for me and the 3rd person in the IT office (who was in on it) to not laugh as the "target" loudly demonstrated his extensive knowledge of swear words and repeatedly questioned my parentage LOL.
"Westminster Abbey (the UK parliament building next to Big Ben) needs major renovations"
The Palace of Westminster is where Parliament is and Big Ben is the bell which chimes the hour.
The iconic tower was originally called the The Clock Tower then recently renamed The Elizabeth Tower.
Westminster Abbey is over the road from the Palace of Westminster, although the major parts of the Palace of Westminster (the House of Commons and the House of Lords) are both in need of serious renovation - and that is just their inept decrepit occupants.
When I did a PostScript programming course BITD the guy running it put it this way:
"Printing is a side effect of executing a PostScript program".
Plus:
"A PostScript program is not 'run' or 'compiled' but 'consumed' by the printer".
Which is true.
My "demo page", which was only 20 or 30 lines of (condensed) handwritten PostScript, selected a font, then scalled that font vertically using a sine wave (plus an offset) and output text along the lines of "Oki OL-480 Genuine PostScript" with the height modulated by the sine wave. On the next line the text was slightly offset and the sine wave shifted in phase by 270 degrees. It then filled the page before doing the final showpage.command.
Getting used to the stack orientated RPN was hard.
I still have the book we were given on the course:
PostScript Language Refence Manual, Second Edition.
ISBN 0201181274
Most of that cost was I believe the cost of licensing both the PostScript interpreter and the RIP board it ran on. Both horrendously expensive from Adobe.
Oki got around this on their Oki DOC-IT multifunction devices by using TruImage (a PostScript clone) and putting the RIP and rest of the printer's "brains" on a full size ISA card with an Intel i860 RISC processor.
I did some handcrafted PostScript to do a fancy demo page while working for Oki. It worked perfectly on their genuine PostScript printers but broke TruImage LOL
I've came across those pieces of utter shite.
You can't even change the settings on a LOCAL printer connected via USB without using an effing online account. And if that account doesn't work, as one company I came across found, you are fucked.
My advice to anyone who has one - phone HP and tell them you want an full refund as it is "unfit for purpose". There is no bloody way a printer or scanner needs an effing online account to work.
Total shit.
"I remember back when someone got the bright idea to use software in the driver to replace some of the logic that was previously done in dedicated silicon and thought that was probably about as low as companies could go. What a sweet summer child I was."
You are describing "Windows" or "GDI" printers. Known in the (PC printer) industry as "brain dead printers" because that is litterally what they are.
They are a bare print engine with all the rasterising done on the host PC. An (old) example being the OkiPage 4w.
Crap printers. Always were and always will be.
There is a fundamental truth here that is not being said outright:
Inkjet printers are not sold to print. They are sold to sell more ink.
That is the top and bottom of it.
I've worked for two (Japanese) printer manufacturers and injkets "printers" where litterally a loss making "carcass" to sell very profitable ink cartridges.
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