Posts by Antron Argaiv 2820 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2016
Fluke makes some very nice meters. Some of them even have a logging mode, you can leave them connected and they will periodically sample and record voltages, and even time stamp the samples.
However, the application to read the data off the meter:
- is licensed and sold ($$$ IIRC)
- requires Windows of a certain vintage
- requires Excel of a certain vintage
- is marginally supported (I think it's written by a third party)
- will only import from the meter into an Excel spreadsheet thorugh some archaic Windows magic which MS no longer supports
The IT department of my former company did not permit "lab computers", because accountability; required all machines to be running the latest version of Windows, no exceptions; charged for MS Office installs (again, latest version only); strictly controlled what software is allowed to be loaded on machines; and required all machines to lock after 5 minutes of inactivity.
I think you can see why this quite useful feature of the meters we bought remains unused...
I hate to bring facts into this flamewar, but Linux made a design choice when they included proprietary drivers.
Yes, Linux to this day contains proprietary binary blobs.
The choice was: write network and display drivers from scratch, with minimal documentaion and no cooperation from the vendors (many of whome are in China), or make deals to include binary blobs and deliver an OS with up-to-date support for popular network and display devicest. The Linux developers held their noses and opted for the latter approach, even though they would have preferred to have all-open drivers.
It's just not reasonable to expect open drivers for highly proprietary chips where even "legitimate" developers can't get full chip documentation without licenses and NDAs. Many of these manufacturers write (or wrote) their documentation only for the market they were targetting: Windows PCs. Getting any other support from them was...unlikely. I know, I have tried. And often, the Windows drivers were...less thn perfect (I have heard them called "barely functional" and sometimes worse).
Personally, I think they made the right decision, as I remember the "good old days" when getting a network or display card up and running involved a whole lot of messing about, and you had very limited choices about which hardware would work.
There's a point to be made here:
Windows, for WAY too long, had no native TCP/IP stack, and required a third party memory manager (QEMM, anyone?). Linux had both, from early on.
Around 1994, my employer had me doing schematic capture on a 486, running Win3.1. Open too many pages in ViewDraw, and the OS would crash. I got tired of this, brought in a spare HDD I had at home, and installed (Slackware?) on it. Set it up for dual boot, and used it as a remote X display off our Solaris system (10BASE-T network), which also had Viewdraw, but was faster and did not crash. That was the moment I realised that Linux was far more useful to me in getting my work done, than Windows. Linux was free and worked better, even then, than the OS my employer had paid for.
Linux is free enough for me.
I remember downloading diskette images from ftp.tsx-11.mit.edu It was great when Walnut Creek CD started selling CDs of Linux for like $10. Yeah, I'm old. Started playing with Linux around 1993, and it's been my daily driver for years.
Thanks, Linus and friends.
If I needed a random string, I'd go here:
https://www.random.org/strings/
Any number of these sites show up when Googling "generate random string". I would probably do some additional testing, and not use it for anything really secure (because we have NSA for that) but it's probably more trustworthy than some AI bot.
Ditto.
Add:
Multiple time zones, Windows and Office versions, & languages
Shouty client people constantly bitching about how they wanted things and why hadn't their comments been addressed yet
Track changes and comments enabled
Multiple simultaneous editors (in different worldwide locations)
One poor Sharepoint server
And, finally, the obligatory tight deadline
It was an unmitigated disaster and an experience I would not like to repeat.
(the client terminated the project before completion)
Lot of haters here.
You have two options with a Linux car:
1. Get it configured as a committee of nerds think it should be
or
2. A truck dumps a pile of parts and a couple of cans of paint in your driveway, with a one page set of instructions
I may see the humor in the above as I've just been configuring an Asterisk PBX for "fun"...
:-)
My satnav is a $25 Garmin I got used off Goodwill, with free traffic and map updates for "life" (it doesn't say whose, mine or the gadget's). But it works well, even when SWMBO's phone can't get a signal, and it's miles better than anything a car manufacturer would include (and it doesn't send my movements to anyone). Also, I can remove it when I need it elsewhere or when I'm leaving the car for a while.
Son once had a BMW. Map updates were some number of hundreds of dollars and required a trip to the dealer.
Thankfully, I managed to avoid those fads.
However, a close friend got caught by Lean Six Sigma, complete with all the trimmings, at a manufacturer of audio equipment that shall not be named. He told me that the process became so ornate that it not only overpowered productivity, but actually affected production. People were so busy tracking their quality, that they had significantly less time to do their actual jobs.
However, he did say that there were loads of inexpensive plastic tchotchkes handed out to remind everyone of quality goals.
The gears I had to replace (fuser drive gears) were plastic. Designed to fail and protect more expensive parts, I suspect. $30 the set, IIRC, and childishly easy to replace. I'm impressed by the (Canon) engineering that went into that printer. Someone kept it vacuumed out, as well, so I try to live up to the care it had received before it came to me.
The "firmware date" on the status page was 1993. You have to be impressed when a piece of gear is still working to original specs after 32 years. Which is why my home computing stuff is almost entirely surplus or refurb commercial gear...built strong and available cheap when superceded by The Next Big Thing. That 48 port HP gigabit switch works fine for my needs, and was free from the IT guys at work when they upgraded.
I was WFH, so I pulled out the HP Laserjet 5 I had picked up (for free, because not working) and decided to get it working.
I have to say, at this point, that machine is one of the best built, best engineered and easiest to work on that I have ver seen. Also, I soon discovered that there are (or were) a large number of companies selling repair parts for it at very reasonable prices (as it was pretty much the standard office printer for years). Refurbed ones are also available. No DRM or expiry dates on these blokes, they're pre-enshittified HP. Mine came from a legal office in town, and seemed to work, except that the paper that came out of it did not have the toner fused to it. The test page said it had 300k copies through it, and I am told it is good for three times that.
Over the next couple of weeks, in between doing Real Work, I fixed up a basement office for myself, and worked on the printer. About $200 later, I had a working printer with a rebuilt fuser, maxed out RAM, network card ($15 off eBay) and a recycled toner cartridge. Hooked it up and it did what it was designed to do...printed beautiful black-on-white documents. When it was idle, it would "sleep"...drawing only 7 watts. I configured my desktop Linux box as a print server so SWMBO could print from her Apple gear. It is still running to this day, and still using the same toner cartridge (I have three more NIB genuine ones, $15 each off Goodwill). It will outlive me.
WAAAAAY back in the day, the Engineering department at university had one of those desk size flatbed Xerox (yes, it was that brand) machines with a slot for the "counter key"...an odometer-like device with six pins that needed to be inserted before the machine would make copies. Annoying, you had to go, cap in hand, to the department secretary and ask for the key. Depending on her mood, you might or might not get it.
I was browsing one of the electronics magazines (yes, this was a while ago) and noticed that one of the surplus places had the key counters for sale at a very reasonable price. So I ordered a couple.
A week or two later, I waited until no one was around, and tried the keys I'd bought in the machine. Sad trombone...neither worked. So, I went up to the lab, procured a multimeter, and measured the resistance between the six pins. Sure enough, a couple of them were shorted together. Then, I went and borrowed the official key, and measured its six pins. Different pair shorted. Returned the genuine key, after making a note of which pins were connected, then proceeded to dig the epoxy out of the screws in the case of one of my purchased keys. A bit of fiddling with the soldering iron and I had what I hoped was a duplicate key...which worked just fine when I tested it in the machine!
Of course, the statute of limitations (as well as counter keys) has long since expired. And I never misused my bounty...but it sure was a timesaver when I needed a quick copy.
Back when I was working at Data General, we were all suddenly supplied with Sun workstations (for simulation and schematic capture). We were made sysadmins, the workstations had a world-visible IP. we configured and ran our own mailservers, and as far as I know there was no firewall (early, early days, and much more trusting than now). I spent a LOT of time on NNTP, mostly on comp.os.linux, downloading many floppies of the early distributions.
It was a different time, the early 90s, to be sure, but I knew enough to stay away (except for the briefest of peeks) from the alt.* stuff.
The only "problem" that I recall involved "xnettrek" and its ability to bring the yellow-cable Ethernet to its knees in short order. A memo was sent out restricting play to after 4PM.
...someone to get in the back room and use the underlying PC for something more interesting...streaming TV, whatever.
When visiting Australia recently, I was surprised to find that all the payphones displayed a message saying "Free calls to anywhere in Australia"
All the abandoned payphones in Hawaii are trashed and useless. Sad, really, when the hardware is still useable.
WMP is useless. From time to time, I have tried it and I cannot remember a time when it did not return a message saying it did not have the necessary codec to play whatever media I had asked it to play.
VLC is my go to for videos, and there are so many audio players, I don't have a favourite. But WMP would not be missed if it disappeared entirely. Possibly next to GameBar, it's the least used app on a Windows machine.
Same here. In my career, I found it helpful to gain a basic understanding of fields outside of my direct responsibility. This helped me, and our support organizations. Me, because the fix, when it was possible, took a lot less time, and our support orgainzations, because, when they got a call from me, they knew I wouldn't be wasting their time.
In the late 80s, Data General switched us engineers from in-house schematic capture on DG machines, to ViewLogic on Sun workstations. Dumped on our desks, with the instructions to configure them and get them running. "Learn UNIX", they said. Luckily, we all enjoyed a challenge...and then we discovered xnetrek and Usenet! Learned just enough to be dangerous.
The "little something" to the support folks at the holidays helped a bit, as well.
MY LG can listen all it wants,but it's MAC blocked from access to the Internet, so it can't tell anyone what it sees. Nor can it update its firmware. It keeps whining at me that I need to agree to its terms and conditions, and go online to do so, but it plays files from my media server and the FireStick and AppleTV attached to it just fine.
Has anyone else noticed that the WebOS is ridiculously slow to do almost anything? I can easily get ahead of it clicking buttons on the remote. And this has been the case on every WebOS TV I've encountered.
(there seems to be no "middle finger" icon, so this is the best I can do...)
Over the century change, one problem we experienced was the coffee machines stopped work, so people working through the night could not get their dose of caffeine. The boss brought in his coffee maker.
Good on the Boss. Never trust a computer-controlled coffee maker.
It's just part of the job. Government will always be, at a minimum, inefficient, and typically a bunch of self-serving wankers. Given the chance to profit from their positions, they will first carefully look around to see if anyone's watching, then give the contract to their friends in industry. It's the way of the world, unfortunately.
(Although, every now and then, you find an honest one -- see prosecuter Jack Smith in the US -- and his lack of success prosecuting The Orange Menace)
There is a prevailing suspicion that tSCOg was being "coached" in their baseless suit by a much larger company which had more to lose if Linux succeeded. There was also a suspicion that some of the costs of litigation were being underwritten by the same large company. That tSCOg was using the same firm of lawyers as said large company had used added to the suspicions.
Before you hate too much on VW, they restarted after the war as a make-work project by the Brit officer in charge of the Wolfburg area. He figured putting the residents to work getting the factory back up and running would keep them out of trouble and bring in some money.
My first car was a 1959 Beetle, much used and in need of repair. Sixteen yearold me learned a lot from fixing up that car, including how not to do a brake job and how to handle a sudden loss of brakes (yikes!). I still think it was an excellent example of simple, functional design.
Sadly, VW is now a much different company.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2026
