Posts by BenDwire 829 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009
We had a shared machine in the middle of my engineering department which often had the Pipes screensaver showing. The apprentices used to shout "Teapot" every time one appeared, and yet never understood why I berated them for timewasting ... Back then, just staring at a screen while the computer did all the work wasn't considered a useful role. How times have changed ...
What, you're too bitter to eat them?
Anyhow, you made a typo with "White Chocolate Digestives". Look at the packet properly, they are simply "White Digestives" - No mention of chocolate at all. Look at other offerings - they too are "White" but not "White Chocolate". Look at the ingredients list if you don't believe me - no cocoa = not chocolate.
The whole industry is gaslighting the general public by selling a white palm-oil and sugar mix instead of proper white chocolate. Sorry to have ruined your day, but you'll never eat them again now that you know.
Which just goes to show how completly inadequate government computer systems are, being designed by committee and implemented by a cartel of the usual expensive IT suppliers. Politicians seem to implicitly believe the vendor's sales pitches, so they end up implementing a new system to superceed the old defective one ... rinse and repeat. Brown envelopes may or may not be involved ...
My opinion of the AI usage is that I consider any company using it demonstrates that they can’t be bothered to do the work properly. And if they can’t be bothered to provide what I need, then I can’t be bothered to engage with them. I don’t read AI slop ‘articles’. I don’t listen to AI slop music. I don’t use AI chatbots. I simply take my business, and £££, elsewhere. Surely I’m not the only one that thinks like this?
I admit that I have no interest in gaming, and therefore don't know much about GPUs. That said, I do use FFMPEG a lot, mainly convering H264 videos to H265 (for reasons, mainly disc space).
So what are the requirements for this use case? Will a £100 Radeon show a marked reduction in encoding time, or do I need to spend £1000 on a higher spec card? I'm a Debian Linux user, so obviously Vulkan 1.3 support is a given, but what else is needed? I assume more £££ = more speed, but as it's doing maths rather than outputting to a screen, I wonder if a lesser card is good enough.
Anyone?
I used them for everything my small business needed, and was very happy with their service over many years. Even once I hit retirement I still used them for consumables, disk drives and cables for my home network. Like many others I will mourn their demise, and move back to Scan or Novatech, who were also good, back in the day.
You've reminded me of a comment I posted on a Linux sysadmin forum while trying to set up a file server
"I'm more than willing and capable of RTFM if someone could point out which FM to R"
IMO open-source documentation in general can be a minefield of obsolete, superceded and badly written information. Yes, I try to give back by improving it where possible, but the world moves far quicker than I can type ...
Last century I recruited a replacement Manufacturing Manager to work with my design team, and I was so keen to get someone started to help with the workload that I neglected to listen to my inner voices. The guy got the job purely because he attended the same (engineering) university as me, so he must be good. Right? Right?? Of course reality dawned rather quickly, and I was left to work with with someone who was completely hopeless in the real world. Paper qualifications may imply one thing, but actions speak so much louder; He was always asking for help with even the simplest of tasks, and my patience was worn down on a daily hourly basis.
The final straw came on the fateful day when he asked me how to format some superfluous procedural document, to which I simply said "Richard, RTFM"
As I walked out of his office I glanced back and saw him just staring at the keyboard, and then he uttered the words "Which one is the RTFM key?"
I learned a lot that day and have been far more diligent with the recruitment process ever since.
Back in the early 1990's, my lunchtime Doom sessions with my design team caused the entire factory network to slow down to a crawl. The BOFH took a while to work out that it was us causing all the problems (made worse as we were in a separate building) but rather than get all stroppy with us, he simply bought a network switch which constrained the IPX traffic to our local subnet. He was a good guy, and we got along just fine after that.
You VIEW MP3s? Do you see sounds, or have your headphones simply slipped onto the front of your head?
Joking aside, rich people don't get rich by spending money unnecessarily. If everything works for him, then there isn't really a problem.
(Typed on a 2015 Dell Optiplex, with onboard graphics and a very large pension fund, thank you very much)
Oddly enough we had a UV eraser and EPROM programmer ( I still do ... ) but the BIOS chips in that PC didn't have a quartz window, but were simply plastic and therefore much cheaper (Technically they were PROMs, but they kept the EPROM part number which made life easier)
Of course back then it would have involved Zmodem / Kermit and a 14400 baud modem to connect to Viglen's own BBS to get the hex files, but that wasn't offered as an option at the time. People these days have no idea just how difficult stuff could be last century!
Now there's a name I haven't heard in years.
Back in the early 1990's we had one in my engineering department, and for reasons I've long forgotten, it was unable to recognise a replacement (probably larger) hard drive it needed. I recall contacting their support team (possibly by fax) asking for assistance, and to my amazement they said I needed a BIOS upgrade, and they would put the necessary chips in the post, free of charge! Yes kids, the BIOS was in a couple of EPROMs and couldn't be updated by mere software. Once installed, all was well and the new drive was installed with no further issues.
Because of this experience, I regularly recommended Viglen to anyone and everyone who needed a new PC.
I miss the old days; Real support by real humans. Progress, eh?
Oddly enough I'm currently using one of those as a door-stop in my home office, as the huge cooling fan I have makes the door wobble in the breeze and knock into my filing cabinet.
When the summer temperatures cool down I'll take it to the recycling centre, and by next year I'm sure one of UPS's will have donated another door stop.
Articles like this really put me in a bad mood when I realise I used to use such "Vintage Kit" as an undergraduate engineer. No wonder my body aches so much, as I'm obviously vintage too.
(In fact I'm so old that I've even seen some of my product designs proudly displayed in museums. Now THAT was a very bad day ...)
Oddly enough, I used to meet Heinz Wolff most mornings on my walk into university (well, the ones I actually managed to get out of bed in time). He was one of the lecturers, and always managed a cheery smile and a bit of banter with us undergraduates. I believe the uni has deservedly named a building after him now.
We were lucky to have a range of programs and TV presenters back in the day who made science interesting, and my inspiration came firstly from "How" and latterly from Tomorrow's World. James Burke was simply brilliant at conveying all sorts of rocket science in a very digestable way. A golden age, indeed.
And there was me thinking that the Americanisation of ElReg.com had taken another step. Is the term "Egghead" more of a USAsion thing than "Boffin"? Apart from the TV program, us Brits tend to use "Boffin" more, but I suspect that's a reflection of our childhood comics such as Whizzer & Chips. Now that was a worthwhile read ...
That's not me doing the thumbing down - I don't give a toss about other people's opinions, even if they're wrong ;-)
Try googling if "ethanol attacks carburettors" and you'll see plenty of results that supports my "specious" claim. You'll even find suppliers making replacement parts for old fuel systems, so there must be some truth to it. Or is snake oil still being sold?
As for my own real world experience, I have had two floats collapse and disintegrate in two different carbs. You appear to have tools that were either designed for modern fuels, or used metal instead of plastic. Yet another difference between the USA and Europe I expect.
Vivre la différence
They may run for a while, but all the plastic parts turn to goo when bathed in ethanol. And that tends to be terminal.
In general, fuel pipes and injectors on modern engines are made with resistant plastics, but old carbs never had to worry about such things. Briggs & Stratton will even sell you additives, but they're far from ideal. Synthetic fuels are the only realisitic option, if you can afford them.
You've reminded me of the cockup made by the transport department at the time. Whilst they successfully argued against changing all the signs to metric on the road network, no-one paid any attention to the fine detail ... and that is why all our waterways now have speed limits in km/h. The company I worked for made a tidy profit supplying new scale plates for all the existing speedometers.
IIRC the same bunch of civil servents allowed ethanol to be added to fuel as no-one used carburettors any more. Try telling that to my lawnmower.
Actually, MS Works was pretty good at doing what it claimed it could do. I was of the opinion that it borrowed heavily from the Apple 2c word processing /spreadsheet and database package that was supplied as part of the OS in the 1980's; my previous employer had a fleet of those around their offices.
In the 1990's I bought a bunch of Dell machines that had Office 95 pre-installed, and again it did everything we needed it to do, and it also made us standardise on it rather than the assortment of disparate products we had scattered about the place. All was good for a time, and then the internet arrived and everything got steadily worse as it became far to easy to provide updates after shipping, instead of properly testing stuff before release. I miss the QA teams of the late 20th century ...
I've told this tale before, but it seems worth repeating here ...
I used to take my wedding ring off when working in the HV lab in my R&D department, but forgot to put it back on before I went home one night. It was the final nail in the coffin for my (now ex) wife who accused me of 'obviously' carrying on with someone at work. That fact that I'd actually managed to get a 880V shock while developing a 3 phase syncroscope did nothing to convince her of the dangers I faced every day, in an attempt to fund her lifestyle.
Oh well, it was a blessing in disguise, but I've never worn a wedding ring since!
From my perspective I wish they would speed up the process of lighting up the fibres that have already been laid. We had fibres pulled through to our local junction boxes months ago, but that's it. No mention on theirs or others websites regarding availability, almost as if it doesn't exist.
Surely someone in the company would like to derive some income from their investment, or don't modern telecomms companies work like that any more?
Thankfully my ADSL connection has become less contended due to Virmin Media also supplying my area, but that's not what I want.
In a similar vein, I included the words to "Daisy Daisy" within the comments to a last-gasp watchdog reset routine. Many years later I was approached by the guy who took over my engineering department after I'd quit, and he thanked me for the belly laugh that gave him during a code review.
When I ran a small engineering company, I left a box of tissues on the filing cabinet next to the visitor's chair. It was occasionally used by upset employees requesting time off for famliy issues** but came into it's own during appraisal season. After a while, I put a label on it - " HR Department" as that was all we had.
** The usual bereavements the life throws up, but the most unusual was when one production lady's donkey suddenly died. She argued that she had no parents or children like other staff, so should be allowed time off to grieve. She had a point ...
I had a similar experience when completing a mountain of paperwork for the EU bureaucrats (back in the day). I had set aside a whole day to do the task, and completed it well before home-time. However, when I came to file it away, I found that I'd already done the work a few weeks earlier. I had no memory of doing it at all, despite it being a complete ball-ache to do.
At that point I decided that I was no longer up to the job of running a company, and chose to retire - one of my better decisions!
Ooh! It's beer O'Clock!
Were you referring to "Music for Space Travellers"? "Blue Mars" ?
(Mind you, good luck humming along to it ... )
@Gene Cash
I did the same thing a few years back, and decided to spend a decent amount on a decent keyboard that should see me out. The keyboard I chose was a Cherry MX3650 with brown switches from "The Keyboard Company" (UK) but other models have different layouts and features.
My tryping is still crap though ...
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