Ah AST are back! I loved their Bravo PCs.
Posts by SteveCoops
23 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2019
Vodafone claims first space-based 5G phone call – no modifications needed
Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy
Tuesday 24th May 2022 13:53 GMT
Re: Rugged enough?
What rugged laptop were you using? A few months back I picked up an old (about 15 years?) Panasonic Toughbook - I left it out overnight (went down to about -3C air temp but an IR thermometer on the laptop itself and the garden table it was then frozen stuck to was reading about -10C. Upon powering it on, it sits there warming up the hard drive (has a resistive heater membrane wrapped around the drive) for a couple of minutes then booted up just fine, with the LCD, touchscreen and touchpad still worked fine.
We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them
Friday 13th May 2022 15:13 GMT
I simply don't believe you
Many moons ago I was involved in setting up an office in India and we had complaints of performance of Citrix from India to our UK hosted Citrix servers - they said it was unusable, but every network test I could do showed no issue (apart from the 170-odd ms round trip to India over the dedicated rather expensive 2mb Singtel circuit). I even RDP'd to their desktops and connected back to Citrix and it was as perfect as it could be.
In the end I said I just don't believe you and gave up and said "Go to the Video Conference room and set the PC up and show me the delay", which they duly did and it really DID have a massive multi-second delay on doing anything, I couldn't believe my eyes!
It turns out to be a video card driver incompatibility with Citrix! When I tested via RDP, I was bypassing the physical video card's driver (and so getting the Microsoft RDP driver instead) which had no issues with Citrix.
Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts
We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks
Monday 2nd March 2020 16:17 GMT
Err do I know this person? Did exactly the same on an IBM 4Mbps Token Ring (TOKENLINK III 16/4 3C619B cards if my memory serves me correct). In Novell Netware you could run a command to view local PCs (like net show in Windows) and after a while it'd come back and you'd only see the PCs that were playing DOOM :)
A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2
Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse
Friday 10th January 2020 16:09 GMT
Two stories I'm sure I've mentioned in these halls before with interference:
1) Our CEO many moons ago had an apartment in Paris and used to moan that his WiFi (original 802.11b) was unreliable, even after purchasing a full blown outdoor antenna, complete with lightning arrestor. I told him he was talking rubbish so he shipped me out there on the EuroStar and to my astonishment I could stand at the end of the corridor looking at this massive outdoor antenna mounted 5m away at the end of his hallway I lost my signal. Turned out he lived under half a mile from the Eiffel Tower and as you stepped into the hallway where a large floor to ceiling window showed off the Tower you immediately lost all WiFi. The Eiffel Tower was spewing all sorts of EMF. The CEO later told me taxi radios didn't work round here either amongst other weirdness. Ended up putting Wifi repeaters in every room of the apartment.
2) We moved IT into a new office and I kitted out the place network-wise and I also put up a dozen large LCD TVs for various monitoring uses. These TVs used HDMI over CAT5/6 and were SO unreliable it drove me almost mad. They used to blank out all the time at random times. It turned out after one late night working on the screen resolutions, refresh rates and so on that a cleaner walked in and the TVs that had been fine for hours suddenly all blanked out! It was the IR sensors that kept the lights on! Whenever it detected any movement, it send out a load of EMF radiation that messed up the HDMI over CAT6. Had to replace all the cabling with shielded cabling and then it was fine.
F F S
El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail
The time PC Tools spared an aerospace techie the blushes
Monday 23rd December 2019 11:15 GMT
I did the same while sitting in c:\win31 on my dad's IBM 386 PS/2 P70 luggable he'd brought home for the weekend. Undelete saved me, but you had to supply the first character for every file (in DOS 5 anyway) so it took a lot of slightly educated guesses to get Windows 3.1 up and running again! This would have been 1993 ish and a very happy 13 year old I was when I got back into Program Manager!
The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?
Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs
Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday
Tuesday 5th November 2019 11:58 GMT
Re: We shouldn't have skipped the time when it was the Intranet of Things
I have a right mix of smart tech at home, but my Z-Wave stuff is still working fine too. The controller is cloud based but runs happily locally if it loses Internet connectivity, and I'm pretty sure the company has vowed to open source their software should they ever go bust.
Billionaire Bezos unveils plans to land humans on Moon, with a little help from some old friends
Don't look too closely at what is seeping out of the big Dutch pipe
Tuesday 22nd October 2019 09:50 GMT
Re: We never said anything to anyone...
Ah Packeteer's PacketShaper appliances were the nuts! I loved them too. I remember being impressed by the fail-safe failure mode where the appliance just basically turned into an RJ45 connector.
Just Googled and now it's all owned by Symantec (via Blue Coat) so that's sad :(
Biting the hand that feeds IT
