Posts by Maximus Decimus Meridius

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients"

It's the reciprocating dingle arm. It's always the bl00dy reciprocating dingle arm.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/806/

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: The mouse doesn't work in the afternoon..

I miss Jerry Pournelle. Just checked - he died in 2017. Time flies.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

If they have leaning difficulties, probably best for them to lie down

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: Are we the baddies?

Interestingly (or not) I had to remove the FUTO keyboard as one of my banking apps (sorry - forget which one) refused to work with it installed.

It wasn't very good at error correction, so I wasn't too unhappy to remove it.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Quite the opposite experience

I used to work on an EPR system. Kim Possible of the kids animated series was our major client. Poor girl had pretty much every problem going including lots of mental health sectioning events.

Must have been the stress.

In the last few weeks I have upgraded the hard disks and memory in laptops for my sister and a female cousin, both of whom are in their 70's.

I made damn sure NOT to look what was on the disks. They booted into Windows and that was enough for me to hand them back, along with the original drives.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: Irate customers

I believe the manufacturer of Polo mints used to steal any spare holes they could find. There was the great hole shortage of '97 where they didn't have enough in stock, so ever after they had bands of hole snatchers taking them to a large warehouse in Luton. Hence why Luton is known as the biggest hole in the UK.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

I think there is something missing here from the story. "someone mentioned that they had seen one of the facilities people in town over the weekend." There must be more to it than that. Were they selling PC's or just doing some shopping?

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Delphi - A fantastic product let down by decades of mismanagement

I have used Delphi for 25+ years professionally (and all the way back to V1 personally). It really was a fantastic product. Unfortunately, it was owned by Borland who didn't really know what to do with it once they tried to go all Enterprisey and turned themselves into Inprise. After that, it has unfortunately stagnated. Coupled with the loss of community and 3rd party support it languishes in a backwater, used only by companies who invested heavily in it decades ago and now have huge codebases that can't easily be replaced.

Such a shame. If MS had bought Borland (or at least Delphi) when they poached Anders Hejlsburg, it would have been huge. It had its moment in the sun in the late 90's and early 00's but just ebbed away.

The joy of receiving The Delphi Magazine every month. The Saturday mornings lost to browsing what was new on Torrys Delphi Page.

I am sad now.

'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel, despite the doubters

Re: If I understand the logic, I understand the reasoning...

Will you stop being reasonable and posting balanced comments? Don't you understand you should be shouting like a toddler for one side or the other?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Comments about BASIC

Surely these should be REM's?

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

The problem with Token Ring was if you unplugged the wrong cable at the wrong time, the token fell on the floor and was almost impossible to find. A replacement token from IBM was very expensive.

Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop

Re: Pah!

Which Navy did the fluff come from?

</PedantMode>

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Conspiracy Theories

Pour encourager les autres?

Just a very unfortunate accident in my view though.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Re: Point

I bought one of these (16G, 512G version) for £98 delivered back in mid April. Installed Linux and using it as an experimental machine. Works well for me. Speed is good.

I was looking at a Pi 5 having already got Pis 1-4, but by the time I priced everything up, the N100 was cheaper and there were more options for OS's.

I am not dissing the Pi, but the N100 as a desktop machine seems better. It may be different answer if I was using the I/O or camera.

CrowdStrike hires outside security outfits to review troubled Falcon code

Zero Content File

So what was the channel file with all zeros then?

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: Really?

I can believe it. I set up an Asterisk VOIP system many years ago and 999 (UK) was a special number in the route. The idea was that in a real emergency, people forget to dial 9 or 0 for an outside line and revert to their primary instincts.

I thought the story would go the other way - someone wanted to dial the internal extension 911 and got the emergency services instead.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Re: Flintstones

Well, I'd go with Betty, but I'd be thinking of Wilma

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Canary Deployment

I have heard a lot over the last week about phased rollout and canary deployment, but no-one has answered the following:

Who chooses the canary? Do the users opt in, or is it random chance that a particular system is chosen?

If it is random, will it be as obvious what the cause of a BSOD is?

Again if random, how would a company feel about being a guinea-pig? Yes, I understand everyone's a guinea-pig at the moment but you get my drift.

If opt-in, who would be mad enough to do so? Yes, secondary or test systems, but in reality, it's a case of "let someone else take the risk"

If there is a new threat detected and in the wild, who takes responsibility for a system infection while the updated software is gradually being rolled out?

Lots of other issues with this I am sure.

Not defending Crowdstrike, just want to know if the solution is truly better with no downside.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Sales Manager Hell

Years ago, the company I was working for was moving premises but the actual move date kept getting delayed for various reasons. The sales manager had spent a fortune on mugs, notepads etc. with the new address, phone number etc. on for giveaways at an upcoming international expo. In my youthful wisdom, I decided to fake a fax from BT saying that as the move was taking so long, they had had to reassign the phone numbers and new ones would be generated.

One of the directors was in on the joke. He hauled the sales manager into the boardroom and gave him a real earful about wasting so much money. The SM turned an interesting shade of red and would have rung the poor chap at BT (who's name I had found and signature forged) to give him a real earful if he hadn't been restrained and let in on the joke.

He was never the same again.

This was also the same sales manager who never actually went out of the office but was always demanding a car phone (yep - it was that long ago). He was presented with a new mobile at the works Christmas do, all wrapped up. His face was a picture. Even more so when he unwrapped in and it was a box of Smarties in the shape of a phone.

Mega city council's Oracle ERP system still not legally safe, compliant... 2 years after rollout

Re: Recoup costs?

If that is the case then other councils would have been caught out in the same change. Given I am not seeing this anywhere else, that would lead me to the conclusion the feck up is Birmingham's rather than Central Government's

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Re: EPOS

I don't think this is so unusual. I was at a large garden center the other day with different concessions throughout. We were able to pay for any item at any till and were not limited to that concession only.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

Re: so why not just shut Boing (sic) down ?

Politics. No US politician would let Boeing fail, no matter how bad the products were, civil, military or space. The loss of 'national prestige' would be too high. This knowledge has allowed Boeing to get where it is today.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: Power

I love a good laugh. Thanks for that

Power

Where is the power for this going to come from? The LHC already shuts down for 4 months over winter due to power demand in Europe. If things carry on as they are, Europe won't have the spare electrickery to light a lamp, let alone run this.

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Dye Houses

The smell of a dye house is unique. I have been in many over the years in the UK and US and they all had the same aroma.

One particular place in the US was dyeing sheets for major hotel chains. The whole place had a 1 inch layer of cotton fibres covering everything. In harder to reach places it was even thicker. It looked very pretty - like a thick layer of snow, but did nothing for the ventilation of the panels that housed the electronics.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Another vote for Brother Lasers

Bought a dual sided Brother Laser 4 years ago for £85 after cashback. Replaced the supplied black toner cart a week or two ago after 3k pages. The web interface shows it has had 2 paper jams in total. It just works. Exactly what I need.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Answered your own question

Believe me, some people can write truly awful Delphi programs. Today, I was looking at a D7 app with a single procedure (fired by a timer every second) that was over 4000 lines long with 18 levels of indentation.

And the interface has to be seen to be believed.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

Armateurs?

I rather have them designed and operated by professionals.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Wouldn't be so bad if they actually worked

Wait, you have an electricity meter under a sink? Near water? Seriously?

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

They sure surprised me

"Apple surprised almost no one on Thursday". They sure surprised me. I thought it was Tuesday

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Compared to the £760m legal settlement for equal pay, the £80m cost overrun with Oracle looks like a drop in a bucket.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: I spy a business opportunity

Sorry - forgot the icon

I spy a business opportunity

If all they are policing is badges scanned in/out, what is to stop some enterprising person who does work in the office regularly having a handful of badges from remote employees that they scan in together? $20/day/badge could add up

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Correction - you get a bollocking AND you have to do it again next time

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Re: stored in a mix of over one thousand [AWS] servers and related system architecture

Maybe they had scripts to spin up the server every morning and stop it at night, but the night script didn't stop it and the morning script created a new server each time?

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Re: Formatting DVDs?

Replying to myself - the article says DVD-RAM. I don't remember those. Looks like it was less prevalent than -RW and I never came across them.

Formatting DVDs?

My memory may be getting hazy, but it was only the DVD-RW that needed to be formatted wasn't it? Standard DVD-R didn't need a format before burning.

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

Re: $800 for a cheese board and cheese?

According to Clarkson's Farm, supermarkets pay around £1200 per cow, so you could have the back of one and make your own cheese for $800

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: Concrete dust = Kryptonite

Had a system in a mill that had a train derailment and chlorine gas spill outside.

https://eu.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2015/01/05/years-graniteville-train-wreck/21278089/

People died.

All sorts of machinery failed over the following years until they gave up and shut the plant. Very sad.

Japanese convenience store chain opens outlet staffed by avatars and robots

Re: Sounds good

Oh, so you are a waffle man!

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Ribbons

Why were there no 'Remove Before Flight' ribbons on these caps? Long colourful ribbons are a lot harder to miss than some plastic caps high above head height.

Chinese Go Association suspends player 'for using AI'

The AI's play differently enough that an experienced player can tell. There is a documentary on Netflix called AlphaGo about the AI/Human tournament. The human players were surprised about the strategies the AI used - certainly nothing like a human player.

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

Server Screensavers

Does removing the OpenGL screensavers from servers count? I have done that a few times.

Imagine surviving WW3, rebuilding computers, opening up GitHub's underground vault just to relive JavaScript

Maybe not such a daft idea

Anyone remember the BBC Domesday project? Less than 20 years after it was published it was already becoming a fossil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Douglas Adams saw the future

"Incidentally, the first ARM1 chips required so little power, when the first one from the factory was plugged into the development system to test it, the microprocessor immediately sprung to life by drawing current from the IO interface – before its own power supply could be properly connected."

vs

"And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off."