Posts by irrelevant

Re: What is that bonfire for?

Just today I opened a drawer in my parent's house and found a 8" stack of punch cards, compete with diagonal line drawn across the top. Printed line at the top of each has either a selection of numbers, or same interspersed with punctuation symbols. They almost certainly date from my dad's time at ICI in the 1960s, and would I'm sure be eminently readable now. As to what they actually *mean* I have absolutely no idea...

Re: Junking an old system

As somebody on the lookout for a cheap/free (1.2Mb) 5 1/4" drive, due to not being able to afford ebay prices, I cry...

Re: Hamster wheels?

Reminded me of a time, 1990s, we were setting up a system for a leisure centre where all the tasks had previously been done manually. There was one financial report they produced for the council (which owned the place) which we were struggling with. The council said the final figures should be calculated one way. The centre said they did it a different way. The samples they provided didn't match either, and the spreadsheet they used had no formulae in it. Eventually, after multiple discussions, they admitted that they just made the figures up until they "looked right".

We shipped the report using the council specification, since they were the ones that commissioned us.

Re: Lots of questions, notably.......

Probably pretty easy to just iterate over the various IP ranges allocated to the ISP, see what responds to your attack.

Re: and bofh

Don't forget the database that the OCR'd text from those screenshots is stored in..

Re: So,

Not to mention the fact that a significant proportion of purported native English speakers couldn't pick the right word, punctuation or spelling to save their lives... Just look at Facebook, Nextdoor etc.

Re: Software Development Rule #1

Sounds like they also fell into the trap of looking at what new things they wanted to implement whilst forgetting to list the existing features that people actually used.

This is the only site I regularly read the comments on.. Indeed, I come here for them, because I learn so much more!

My first real job, apprentice at Ferranti, I had to use an impressive automated PCB testing machine. Massive thing, size of an upright piano with a desk in front, onto which you wired up the PCB in question. So big it had a room of its own. Whole lot driven by an early PET which just sat on top of it, along with a printer to output the results to.

Idiots

My mother-in-law is on windows 11. About all she uses the laptop for is watching Netflix, and she still manages to break things on a weekly basis. (I think the worst was getting it into Airplane mode, high contrast monochrome display, and switched everything to Albanian!!!)

Re: Fire hazard

I had to deal with a pc in a furniture factory once. Compaq 386 running windows 3,if i recall. Same story, opened the case just to be greeted by a slightly undulating layer of sawdust where the motherboard should be. Think it was still working at the time, too. I'd just been sent to put in a network card and upgrade to WFWG.

Re: Similar story

Argh. I got called out to my mother-in-law just this afternoon. "I've got no sound! "

She uses headphones on a laptop, almost exclusively did watching Netflix. I can't tell you how many ways she's broken things over the years. Anyway, I unplug the headphones so I can hear what's going on.. Sounds burst forth from the laptop speakers.. So I try the headphones on my phone. No sound. Then I look at them...

"Have you got the new ones you bought because these ones didn't work the last time you called me round?"

(she did, and surprisingly, using those solved the problem..)

Re: Ah, MCSE

I was a programmer at a small amounts software shop for a while. The boss took on a new guy, fresh graduate, compete with nice shiney MSCE. No idea why, we didn't use any Microsoft software. We were using "BOS" and working with COBOL.. (Actually, I think we had a couple of DOS machines, the most complicated thing they ran was a terminal app used to access a supplier's BBS.) Lad was completely lost, totally incapable of understanding or learning what we did. He was gone again after a couple of weeks.

Not locked in, but this reminded me of a time one winter evening when a JCB further up the road dug through the power cable feeding our building, among others. We were in an industrial park in an otherwise rural location, so when the lights (and monitors) went out, there wasn't even any light coming through the windows. The way out was through an internal corridor and staircase with, it turned out, no emergency lighting. This was way before mobile phones (with or without torches) were common, so nobody had a light. In the end, I dug out a cheap electric rechargeable soldering iron from my bag, and led my colleagues out by the light of the single tiny bulb (I don't think it was even an LED) it had for illuminating your work, whilst hoping I didn't run into anybody and impale them on the burning hot tip!

Re: Similar language problem on Windows 1 0

I desperation I tried using the vSphere Mobile Client to one of my ESXi servers to get at a VM that decided to not talk to it's network. No problem accessing the console. But almost all the punctuation keys failed to give the right symbols. Trying to get | (pipe) I pressed every single button on the virtual keyboard on every page, and couldn't find it. VM is set en_GB, I guess vmware only speaks American..

Re: "something like a dozen CD-ROMs."?

I'm pretty sure it was debian I installed, back in 1995 or thereabouts. Download one floppy, boot of it, and it grabs everything else it needs via a network connection. This was being provided at that time by a windows machine sharing a standard dial-up connection. Whilst it took a while, I don't recall it taking so long that I ran out of free phone call time. (I was lucky enough to find a local (UK) ISP with access numbers on the local cable network; that got me free calls to them, off-peak, once I signed up for a line myself.)

We had a drinks machine at school.. It was, if I recall, 5p for a drink. Until somebody discovered that a particular foreign coin fed into it would get rejected and returned to you. But still give you the drink! For a while just being in possession of said coinage became a disciplinary offence.. Until the 20p coins came out and it did exactly the same thing. The machine was changed soon afterwards..

Re: SLAs make work for idle hands...

"Here's me thinking : yeah, well maybe you should have enquired about what you were leaving and what the replacement tool could do to fulfill the need."

Absolutely. Mid 80s, I was working for a small company, dealership for a particular niche-but-well-regarded accounts software. I'd not long helped install some nifty full tower 80386 machines at a client, a pair of which supported some 30+ serial terminals, when the client decided they'd had enough of us, and switched to the other local dealer. Fast forward a few years, I got a job at this other dealer too, and found myself installing a whole new system at this same client.

It seemed that in the intervening years, they'd got fed up of the new dealer, my new employer, and tendered out for a whole new system. I don't know who or what they chose, but it must have cost them a packet, as it involved PCs on each desk instead of dumb terminals, and thin ethernet everywhere. Then they tried to actually use it.. Apparently they had gone to the new company with a list of everything the existing software couldn't do, and were promised that the new software either could, or could be made to do all those things.

Of course, and I know you all spotted this coming, they forgot about listing all the things that the existing system /could/ do. So they start trying to use the new stuff, and it can't do most of what they were used to doing..

So they came back, cap in hand, to my new employer, apologising profusely, and we set everything back up as it had been, and were also able to address their list of Things It Doesn't Do. They didn't try to jump ship again, at least not in the time I was there. I don't know now - my now long since ex employer has switched over to selling SAP...

Re: Years ago....

I'm still working my way through a part-roll of rainbow ribbon cable I was given when I was an apprentice at Ferranti, 40 years ago, after somebody wanted something like 100mm, ordered it from RS, and ended up with 100 many-meter-long rolls!

Re: Remove, Throw, Call

I used to live opposite a supermarket. It was a fascinating watch on Christmas Day. It was always amazing the number of people who would drive into the empty car park, presumably marvel at finding a space, get out, walk to the store, not even notice the lights were off and security shutters down, and only realise something was wrong when they couldn't get through the door!

I swear people just do not look at anything when going through familiar routines.

(I'm not going to mention all the times I nearly pulled up at the office when I was supposed to be going directly to a customer site that morning... I generally realised as I was making the last turn, when I guess my mind also turned to thinking about what I was supposed to be doing that day.)

Re: Not a million miles away ...

Trying to set up a fediverse instance this week.. Start with a fresh and up to date install of Ubuntu each time.. I tried four different software setups, follow the setup scripts to the letter. Every one failed somewhere along the line. I managed to solve some of the issues, but it wasn't until I tried the very latest version of mastodon, released after I'd started this exercise, that I finally got the bloody thing working, and at that, it had told me to install the wrong version of Ruby than it then required later on.

Re: Russian market?

From what I read, around about the time Russia effectively confiscated all the planes they had on lease, as soon as they stop using certified parts or maintenance companies, the whole plane would need to be pretty much torn apart and every part checked and recertified before it would be allowed to fly again anywhere else. The cost of doing this would probably exceed their book value, thus they are effectively worthless already.

Re: RAM removal

One customer, they used to do maintenance on mobile cranes. Massive heavy bits of machinery on lots of wheels. Absolutely nothing will stop them if, say, someone hotwires one and drives it into the side of your office building, as they found out one morning...

After losing too many computers too often, they came up with a system where all the PCs we're locked in a room at the back of the site, enclosed in a cage that looked like welded rebar. They then used VGA/keyboard extenders to drive monitors on the desks elsewhere..

Re: Anecdote

Same at my GP.

25 years ago, new house, new phone line, asked to be ex-directory. Then discovered from people who wanted to phone us, and had called Directory Enquiries, that there was someone else with the same name half a dozen doors down the road, whom were not XD, and, being the only match on our road showing up, had their number given out instead!

Re: Nothing so severe

Many years ago, when the supermarkets had money to waste on such things, a nearby ASDA had a greeter who would wander about the store with a microphone linked to the tannoy, making announcements about special offers, discounts, etc. If he got called away for something, he had a habit of stashing the mike on the top shelf somewhere.

This stopped after I was in one day and was suddenly greeted by the not-so-pleasant warbling of a very small child doing their best to bash out some unidentifiable song, amplified across the entire store. I can only presume he'd not hidden it well, or it had fallen off it's place, and been found by said youngster!

Re: Years ago....

I generally put my return address on the back of a letter as simply

"From: <number> <post code>"

The one time it turned out to be necessary, the letter did get back to me successfully. Complete with a sticker with the full address printed on it - presumably the system still relied to some extent on humans needing to parse a conventional address..

Hmm. TRS-80 was the first computer I used, at school. Model 1 machines, linked via their cassette port and a switch box to a model 3 with a disc drive - it could share programmes by using "cload" on the stations while saving on the m3..

First with a floppy I got to handle myself, either an RML380Z, or a Data General Nova, both at dad's work (Tameside College of Technology.)

First floppy off my own, hung from a BBC Micro..

I did try writing my own operating system on the Beeb, though it was more of a task switcher/scheduler, for a second processor equipped machine, with terminal sessions coming from other machines on the LAN. Would have been cool if I'd ever finished it.

Re: Under construction

I can't remember its name now, but CompuServe had a free "homepage" generator you could use to create your HTML.. It was dire - each paragraph could be either plain text, OR a link or other element. No in-line links here, thank you very much! Front Page was a dream, after that, although even then I realised that the HTML it created was dreadful.

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

And predictive text is a right pain in the bum, especially when using a phone with a dodgy screen, so I miss the occasional incorrect word. Sigh.

Re: It was BT for me

Yups... Checked my emails: October 2000 I was one of the first 1000 to get ADSL installed by Freeserve. I'm not sure if anyone else was doing it any earlier

Re: No lessons learned

Set of temporary traffic lights near me failed just a couple of days ago. Gone are the days of an electromechanical timer and wires strung between them; these have smarts and link via radio. Much more to go wrong. And they did.

At least they failed to all-red. Chaos on the street though. I let the cops know (driving through a red light is still an offence) but some good samaritan decided to push them all over instead..

Re: COBOL IS DEAD!

Seconded. I'm another who spent two decades with COBOL on the wrong systems. In my case BOS/COBOL and a database driven variant carried Speedbase running on BOS, a now-obscure cross platform operating system geared up to provide multi-user business applications on commodity hardware. (24 serial terminals on a 286 was one system I supported. It worked well.) I never even came across the Big Iron ecosystems.

(if anybody has any work to offer.... )

Re: The joy...

I seem to get a lot of "but before you do that.." when I'm about to go do something. Usually followed by the aforementioned "can you just.."

Re: Firefighters

I'm not sure I had a job title, but turn of the century I was working for a small (not-my-)family business, reseller of a now-obscure accounts software suite. I was doing everything from installing serial terminals, Windows networking, general tech support, writing custom software in COBOL, debugging and patching crashed data to reverse engineering third party software to create data extraction tools. No day was the same. Massive variety, loved the work and the customer interaction, shame my boss, MD of the company, was a dick whom took advantage and ended up forcing my hand into leaving.