Posts by PRR 907 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Mar 2021
American midwest.....
I assume this means New Madrid Seismic Zone all around the Missouri bootheel. It had a major shiver in 1811-1812. Also 1699. And 1843, 1895, and 1968. Trees and chimneys toppled, a town liquefied. River ran backward.
> Mylar tracing film takes Indian ink nicely.
That presumes an active market for drafting substrate. I remember those days. I even trained as a draftsman: paper, velum, blueprint, and Mylar. I imagine the animation makers worked on Mylar until it became totally digital. While a lighter gauge, I have rubbed many miles of Mylar recording tape. But I could see vast availability of Mylar going the way of the (Mylar) floppy disk, or 1996 Honda exhaust pipes, or DIP RAM. Not in one day, but quietly over a decade.
> engrave it on slabs on granite.
Didn't the Georgia Guidestones try that? Six granite slabs weighing a total of 237,746 pounds (107,840 kg). Stood for 42 years, with cattle using the stones as back-scratchers, some spray-paint graffiti, and then someone bombed it.
> somehow it took a *month* for the battery to run out.
In WWII, grandad Jack had to go away and make airplane parts while grandma Ann stayed home with the kids. They had bought an old Maxwell car when it was assumed Jack would do all the driving; now Ann got the 30 minute driver training as Jack was leaving. She didn't have a license so she drove only once a week for groceries.
SIX months later the car wouldn't work. Towed to the shop. Worry and fret about breaking Jack's car, and how much it would cost.
"When was the last time you put gas in it?" "Gas??" Lady, you gotta put gas in it SOMETIME!!" The garagemen thought this was very funny. Much later my grandma saw the humor and tole the story on herself.
> Called "cycles per second then" and before about 1930 the Medium Wave was called Short Wave.
Looking at magazine THE RADIO RECORD September, 1923. Stations are cited by WaveLength, not CPS or MC. WBZ (now Boston, then Springfield) was on WaveLength 337. (Seems to be Meters which comes to ~~890,207 CPS; Wikipedia gives other numbers in this time.}) Power started at 100 Watts (and less than half of that to the antenna) but was 15,00 Watts within a few years.
Calling the Broadcast Band "ShortWave" is before my time. Lot of turmoil at short waves in the early 1920s.
> might be excluded on hardware requirements (and quite how a browser can test if someone has unmetered / unlimited data ...?)
I think they mean: If you don't have infinite data, we won't listen to your whining and crying.
i.e.: I complain their service sucks. They ask me to check this list. If I fail on any point, then sod-off, we do not care about you.
>> All you have to do to win a game of noughts & crosses is to be the one who starts ;)
>.... I had a program that played it which I could beat if I started first,
> Wallpaper and taskbar?! - So those are the real memory/processor hogs, well well well.
My usual wallpaper is blank black. No JPEG/TIFF/PNG. If I want a picture I print it and hang it on the wall. The desktop reloads a lot faster from blank. Also it is easier to find less-used or stray icons on a blank background.
OK, just to amuse myself I have put the main PC back to "Bliss". Also to remind myself that in California, nothing stays nice.
> I don't think I've ever seen such an asymmetrical service offered in the US. The choices are always fibre at 1000/1000 or 100/100, or cable at no more than 40 upstream.
Far north-east corner of the US: I got 50 down/ 10 up on old TV cable. Obviously "throttled"- it would burst faster then settle down to 103% of contracted speed.
In pandemic they took off the throttle and I often saw 330 downloads. Still solid 11 uploads. 30:1 asymmetry ratio.
That actually works OK, most servers don't have great bandwidth. But when I want to upload 20 minute video lessons it is z-z-z-z-z.
There is 100/100 and 200/200 fiber at the street but the company has fewer clues than TW/Spectrum.
> screamingly obviously a bridging loop, or (love the expression), a jabbering NIC
Reminds me of the network I modernized from BNC co-ax to this new twisted-pair stuff. On nearly no budget so lowest-price network cards. Historically it was at the point that asian copycats could make a fine card 99 times of 100. But then there is that 100th card. Worked fine the first week. Then hours of no useful network. Most of the PCs were back to the wall, and the hub (not switch!) in a box, so didn't see the blinkinlights. But when box was opened it was clear there was a panic going on. And then sometimes it would clear up perfectly. Well, it was bad at times when Judy was in her office. Her net-card jabbered bad.
Of course if I'd labeled the lines I woulda blamed her a lot sooner.
> surprised to learn ...., that Boeing extensively uses the Autocad-on-steroids software ...written by .... one of the members of the Airbus consortium, and major Boeing competitor.
What goes around comes around. In the 1980s many industries used BoeingCalc spreadsheet which was something less and much more than Lotus 1-2-3. (Would run on a mainframe, could chew huge spreadsheets in virtual memory, but in many cases slower than 1-2-3.) There used to be other US airframe makers, and if they didn't use BoeingCalc surely the mutual suppliers did. Boeing tried to spin it out but didn't.
This one was at work but all on me. I often had hammers at work, from half-pound tappers to my father-in-law's short-handle 3-lb sledge for pounding-out car ball joints. (May have been using a star-drill for wall anchors.... this was some before affordable 'lectric hammer-drills.)
But for some reason I had the 10-pound long-handle sledge at work. When I took it home I set it on the passenger-side seat. WHACK! The head slid off the plush velour to the floor, the handle levered-up and smacked the windshield. Foot-long crack in the glass, grew edge-to-edge by the time I got home. Tole my boss I needed the next afternoon off to get a new windshield. (Didn't take that long but why rush?)
> racks that were hundreds of years old! That means a lot less merchandise sold by rack mfgrs.
> The modern 19" rack is from AT&T and that itself comes from the telecoms relay rack before that.
I suspect the 19" rack is from Strowger, or Western Electric. AT&T owned patents, even claimed to invent stuff, but there's little credit for "a mere rack". Who knew it would get taken by radio, TV, radar, instrumentation, and even gunnery and payroll machines?
There really are reasons for different racks and different makers. Actual relay racks are in secure spaces and like to be totally open. Other types need more stability and even security. Some times blue paint is the most important detail. Historically it has been easier to build a rack-factory than to build a market segment. Broadcast makers had to have the metal-whacking machines for quick model changes. Inventorying complete racks is huge warehouse so keep a shallow inventory and be ready to whomp-up more as ordered. (Yes utility racks store knock-down but other types will be welded and finished complete.)
Relay racks can't go back much before 1880, <150 years, but I grant your point because I have worked in racks that looked medieval.
> What I recall, and seems to be true even unto Win11, is MSOffice updates along with O/S updates.
I happened to be in my Windows Updates log today. Adobe had one WU back around 2020. H&R Block (tax) had a whole run, both federal and state, in late 2010s. Of course MS Office over and over. And if I go way back, WU was pushing an Intel video patch which consistently crashed my machine, so fug it, I blocked it.
> I'm sure we got Flash and Adobe Reader at one point in the dim and distant past (Windows 7).
Your dim past Win7 is my everyday, and no: AdobeARMservice is installed but "stopped". I do remember it running at least every patch Wednesday, but as I am tired of that I'm sticking with the Reader I have.
What I recall, and seems to be true even unto Win11, is MSOffice updates along with O/S updates. It's still trying to update my Word2003, and does, all but one file.
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.
'winget' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
> ... in for laproscopic surgery ....ending up having major abdominal surgery where they manually check every inch of your intestines and then tuck them back in...
And that scar! Filleted like a fish, breastbone to pubes. (Encysted and leaky appendix.) Mine is fading.... after ~~37 years. My later actual laproscopes, for gallbladder, faded much faster.
one production lady's donkey suddenly died.
I (finally!) got promotion..... the afternoon of the morning my dog Morgan died. We camped all over New England, climbed hills, he was a great dog. My boss is explaining why my salary would be less than it should be, and my cheeks are wet. Not all his fault, but I noted he was taking care of his #1 and I began plans to leave that place.
> possession of a keyboard is not an indictable offence
Seems to be a crime at Amazon. Now predicting near 3 weeks for an in-stock(?) Das Keyboard. 2 weeks to get word to the furthest Amazon warehouse in the US, and now UPS is predicting another week on the road. We had just as good service when it was literal Mail Order.
> Is the UK the only jurisdiction that uses what normally be interpreted as a quality classification to denote the hazard of particular illegal drugs?
US likes Roman Numerals. I is Horse, V is codeine: https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
State of Massachusetts goes by letters A to E in unclear categories: https://www.rsweeneylaw.com/massachusetts-drug-crimes/illegal-drugs-and-related-penalties-in-massachus/
144 apartments in one building? How do people live that way? (I did, once.) Here is 2 dogs 2 people and 300 feet to the nearest neighbor. I can see his WiFi but not connect unless I stand in the woods between our houses.
However the cheap "free!" WiFi box from Spectrum (Sagemcom F@st 5260) gets laggy from just phones, laptops, and a Kindle.
> implements RFC 1149? I've got a message I want to send to long distance Clara...
"IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to operator error), and a response time ranging from 3,000 seconds (50 min) to over 6,000 seconds (100 min). Thus, this technology suffers from extremely high latency."
That's even worse than here at the far corner of Maine.
> Asian-developed systems, really aren't "Automatic" at all ...I have an (older) Japanese luxury car ....."Automatic" modes are absolutely worthless! "Automatic" to them means "I'll just stay at the minimum settings no matter what..."
OTOH, my 2022 Toyota has "Automatic" on the cabin heat/cool fan, and the darn thing is magic. When the engine is cold it hardly blows. When the engine gets some warmth it blows hard. When the cabin comes near the set temp it throttles-back for quietness.
That's the ONLY "smart" thing about the car which really works. The "automatic transmission" lugs and surges as the "cruise control" teases it. The "automatic" wipers are sluggish, the "automatic" lights hardly ever blind anybody to anger. Today the navigation was "loading my settings"... for an hour.
> risks opening hardware up to attack.
"Opening"?? Microsoft IS attacking me. Yes it is not malice but negligence (or arrogant negligence), but I'm out of action anyway this goes.
What a trainwreck. Today my Win7 is telling me "No network access". So how am I here? At that, and despite lack of serious updates, my Win7 mule is more stable than my Win10 ultrabook (which I don't dare update today) or either Win11 flaptop.
> try talking that much to the AI and hope that the specs it makes after that process will represent that talking
AI has some advantages. It can listen to idiots all day long; most of us won't. It may even compose polite explanations of why the user is confused (I can't). And (after some development) it can build demonstrators for users to poke-at, and intimately watch their fumbles and guide them in its use.
That won't prevent, say, a sales-app which charges 650% tax (unless one of the testers has intuitive tax skills), and it does not cure tester fatigue (I've seen a user try one query and sign-off, much to her later regret). But AI can reduced some of the drudgery and time-waste.
> Well at least the CPU packaging didn’t fall apart in the process, exposing the silicon
One of my first jobs was maintaining Apple ][ s. The motherboard RAM could often be fixed by pressing on every DIP chip, cut the tarnish on the pins. Magic fingers. These ][s had external floppy drives. One was sick. I opened the case to apply magic fingers...... hey! That's pretty! Like a tiny mirror inside the epoxy chip. This was the step-motor driver chip, hard work, it had overheated and blown its lid. Naked Silicon! So long ago that I got the chip (ULN2004) at Radio Shack and it worked forever after (or until I left that place).
FWIW, the ULN2004 is still in Full Production, 47 years later.
> Bell Labs developed DTMF as a computer input device?
The box in the CO which decoded TouchTone was a computer, even though it didn't do DOOM or FaceBook.
The predecessor, the rotary dial, was widely used as a data entry device. One of the very early DIGITAL catalogs listed a module with a dial. It works great with stepping switches.
> Keyboards use to have a raised line on the two home keys but I am not sure that is still the case as a surprising number of those in IT etc are of the uni-digital pick and poke persuasion.
I am a 2-finger typist since manual typewriter era. But when I had to use a KB with no home-key tiddies, I tapped my soldering iron on those keys. Tactile bumps, free.
A century ago, Tesla (the man not the car) proposed transmitting all the world's power through air/space. He demoed small systems and Wardenclyffe was going to be world-wide. Naturally the Edison Cartel and Marconi's telegraph undercut his funding and reputation so they could keep billing for power and messages.
Bruce Davie> All of these experiences led me to appreciate the value of both written and spoken communication
elsergiovolador> This whole “engineers should tell stories” narrative is just a way to shift the burden of comprehension.
My father became a computer engineer in the 1950s. The thing he most wanted to pass-on to me was that he wished he had worked on his communication and persuasion skills as much as his brilliant logic minimization. (I now think he was wrong here: he got caught in the collapse of RCA while Sarnoff retired and died, and nobody talked/wrote their way out of that.)
I recently found an article he wrote in 1953. As my father's son, I see his shortcomings in me. Enthusiastic about possible results without explaining the groundwork or the advantage over other routes. He had it all in his head but did not get it on paper. He wrote about computer-guided war in an era when computers would just about do a payroll or inventory. Many of his readers probably wondered what loco-weed he was smoking. Not a way to sway decision-makers.
> Do they really spell archaeology like that over there?
I look-up my medical troubles online, and sometimes Google offers me UK sites. It is good to have the second opinion, but the medical lit is full of ae.
We took a very short cruise on the QE2. The staff offered to knock up both my wife and I.
> "Main Streets" instead of "High Streets" in their towns.
Town near here has both. Main starts from Water St (by the river, the only way to travel) and runs up the hill to timber country. High St is a later addition crossing Main St and running toward the poor overland highways west and east. In the 1960s High St took over from Main St as the shopping district.
> last time I used walmart.com, it complained I wasn't using IE (not Edge, IE) and refused to work with Firefox.
I order snacks from Walmart.com monthly, and last month a commodity laptop delivered at my door.
> ..... homedepot.com says they don't have drill bits. Really?
Using the exact term 'drill bits' I got 7 suggestions, including metal, wood, steel, masonry, concrete, tile. For metal they claimed to have 1,800 choices. Some like hole-saws were near-misses, but on the whole they got lots. The website has had a flaw for over 14 years: on a multi-page listing next-page goes to the bottom of that page, you have to PgUp PgUp PgUp.
This in Win7 FireFox 115.23.*esr Walmart.com has never discussed InnerNet Expoder with me.
Something is wrong but it may not all be on their end.
> ...nowadays everything is controlled by a computer including a furnace or a rolling mill.
OTOH, back in 1961, RCA worked with US Steel to put essentially mini-computers in the mills. Steel production and shaping has a lot of critical points to monitor and control. I think it was DIGITAL who made it work good/cheap a bit later.
But I recall he said a preliminary study at RCA LA leased telephone lines from 3 or 4 *different* telephone companies (Los Angeles had a mess of telcos). Wired one to the next and back to the same lab. Two jacks a foot apart were really 20 miles of bad wire up into the hills, over, and back. They thought if they could put data through that, they could put data anywhere. The start of industrial data networking.
They were wrong: they had never seen electric motors as big as a rolling mill used, constantly reversing at full power. And the motors ran un-grounded: when a winding shorted to the case, no fuse blew. A light on the panel tole the operator to finish this billet and park it for repair. The motor cases would give 600V shocks, but the place was full of thousand degree steel so nobody got close.
> I learned touch typing with Mavis Beacon
Seeking Mavis Beacon review – tracking a Black female tech icon, who didn’t exist
Seeking Mavis Beacon: the search for an elusive Black tech hero
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/06/seeking-mavis-beacon-review-documentary
In 2024, a documentary titled Seeking Mavis Beacon premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, which investigates the origin of Mavis Beacon. The creators of the film discovered that the image of a corporate-attired Black woman on the software packaging was not of someone named Mavis Beacon, but rather a Haitian model named Renee L'Esperance. She was paid $500 for posing for the marketing photo, wasn't involved in the development or the sales of the software, and did not share in any of the presumably significant profits(*) generated by the product. L'Esperance herself neither appears in nor is directly quoted in the documentary.
(*) 6 million copies by 1999
> Worst?
Logitech Bluetooth Multi-Device Keyboard K480, the thing with a slot to hold your pad/phone. I paid $60, now it is $29. It never wanted to pair with my phone. I thought I was doing it wrong. The Logitech site was no help. Cheap phone so I got another one. Still reluctant to pair. When it did pair it would type about a dozen characters and quit. THEN I blew $11 on Amazon for a no-name kluge, and it works spectacularly. I got a kickstand for the phone.
Someone said "DELL". I worked in a school that was Dell-dominated. They ship all kinds of keyboards depending on price and package. The cheap ones I never bother to use, they are not worth $10. The very best are 9/10th of a classic 1980s IBM, at least/lease for the first 3 years. But they keep changing the part number so you can never get the same thing again.
> Very glad to see ElReg didn't "reach out" to Microsoft. Perhaps we're winning the American v. English debate.
"reach out" isn't good American, or never was. I first saw it in customer support staffed in India. If so it could be lingering British influence, re-interpreted?
----
However, Google reveals 'In 1979, an AT&T advertising campaign co-opted the expression to praise long-distance calls. The campaign became one of the most successful in the history of advertising. It had its own addictive jingle ("Reach out, reach out, and touch someone!").'
> It's squirrels here in northeast USA
So many that the squirrel-tracking site https://cybersquirrel1.com/ quit taking reports.
At my work it was a possum. They stink worse.
> the fuse(/breaker?) feeding the power transformer
High voltages on poles stuck with fuses long after 240V stuff went all breakers. A hi-volt breaker needs a very long throw to out-run the long arc. The workers are paid to not use pennies in fuseholders. Ideally fuse failure is a rare thing so breakers don't pay-back well. Often it is just a housing or 'drop' with a foot of special-size wire, and there's a roll of fusewire on the truck, so it is a few-buck fix.
> never to stick things in the socket again.
I had a US power strip in the bottom of the record-player cabinet in the next room. And a short-leg Corgi-dog with metal dog-tags.
Lights dim, ZAPP!!!, ooooorhoorh! She thought there was food back there. It wasn't clear what happened until I saw the arc-marks on the tag; even then it was some deduction. I try to be good about shoving the dangerous US prongs ALL the way in, but she managed to wedge the metal tag across prongs. Dead short. Sparks under her chin.
Still have that power strip, now on the 2nd shelf where Corgis can't reach. (The Pyr's head is too big to sniff shelves). I also have a rubbery tag-holder to silence the ting-tingh-ting and also be double-insulation.
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