Posts by Chris King

Re: Thermal Incident

I've previously documented one machine that was sat on a carpet of cigarette ash. I had to work on that machine wearing a mask and thick latex gloves, and it was totally yellowed with all the nicotine.

By "fix", I meant removing the hard disk and cleaning it outside, placing the rest of the machine in a thick bin bag, and sealing it up tight. "The fans are gunked, the processor is totally fried, and this kind of damage voids the warranty. You'll have to buy a new one and it's not coming out of our budget".

Re: We can take entire 24 ranges back

Do HPE still have two entire /8's ? (Their original one and the one they "inherited" from DEC ?)

Re: No one has mentioned Elite?

I played it on the Spectrum, and Commander King was a serious Space Bastard.

Most of my cargo was drugs, firearms or slafes. and anyone stupid enough to shoot first got added to the manifest as "Slaves 1t" if they ejected and I had space in the cargo hold. I even used the undocumented key to abort hyperjump and pick fights with the Thargoids in their own back yard (Witch Space) because 50Cr a bug-head and a reduced criminal status usually came in jolly handy.

I also hit a weird bug (and not a Thargoid either) with one of the special missions - the one with the ECM Jammer. Normally, this is one hop to the system next door, the jammer kicks in and you loose off all four of your missiles at the hijacked station to destroy it. I had to make a 50LY journey, scooping fuel as I went and having to fight guns-only because I needed all four missiles for the station. That's no fun when most stars are patrolled by some nutter with with a bad dose of sunstroke telling you you can't have any of "his" fuel.

Re: Endless recycling

I used to have a three-tray system...

IN

OUT

SOD IT

Some things never even made it to "SOD IT"...One former colleague kept handing me lots of useless paper to peruse. I solved this by feeding it through the Special Fax Machine right in front of him.

BZZZZP!!!

Re: Remedy

Ironically, A&A supplies lines running over TT Wholesale. I had Home::1 1Tb on TT for a couple of years, and it was surprisingly fast and reliable. If it's good enough for RevK, it'll be good enough for us mere mortals.

The retail side of TT is a total bag of spanners - over-committed, under-resourced and badly-supported - but the underlying whole network isn't that bad. Maybe Dunstone's onto something with these new investments, but I do pity the retail customers if they get sold off to someone else.

Re: This isn't the first time

I suspect someone in the U.S. government arranged the "attack".

"Nice bananas and flowers you've got on the dock, Mister President. It would be terribly unfortunate if merchant shipping was prevented from landing by some surprising well-equipped pirates..."

Re: Some people just don't get it

At least it didn't end like this

Re: Dump the whole bowl on Putin

"Thanks muchly for that - now I have images of Darth Dumbass and his little apprentice licking their balls and sniffing asses"

Was that before or after they got their brains ?

(and would anyone even notice the difference ?)

I advised a different approach - cancel them before the renewal date.

That way, there's nothing to "accidentally" renew, and they'll just get off scot-free if you let the domains just lapse.

It doesn't cost them any extra to cancel, but if forces them to do some extra work for no extra money.

Re: Ageism

"Apparently the intensity of formally resigning was more than their delicate free spirits can handle".

You can have some fun with references in that situation...

"Millennial Mickey started with us on <x> but we couldn't find him after <y> - thank you SO much for finding him, that's such a weight off my mind !"

Re: External memory

My memory plays tricks on me sometimes, it's like one of those things, round and full of little holes so you can drain stuff, it'll come back to me soon enough.

I also make sure to take notes when I come up with a solution to something, because I just know I'll forget it otherwise and have to start from scratch...

SIEVE !!!! That's what I was thinking of !

Re: Seems unnecessarily pessimistic

"Back in the 80s it was switch-on-start-typing"

I think that made kids a bit more bold with coding - if you messed up, you could reset and start again in a couple of seconds, without having to wait for the OS to reboot, or worrying about corrupting the file store.

(That didn't make "R Tape loading error, 0:1" any less frightening though)

Some SBC projects like the Maximite have tried to recreate that experience, and FUZE used to do a version of their kits with a Maximite installed instead of a Pi - the cases were yellow instead of red.

Re: a small number of customers

I feel the same way when someone says they were subject to a "sophisticated attack".

TRANSLATION: I got phished, but I'm not going to admit it.

Re: Small heatsinks are less then ideal

Something like the new FLIRC case ?

Re: A trade delegation of angry Hungarian winemakers arrives...

Yes, this paticular one's from Who.

Re: Sounds like they were being a bit cheap to be honest...

If they'd gone with the SUP720-3C then they could have set up a pair of 6500s as a VSS pair to avoid this kind of thing - the old adage of "why have one when you can have two for twice the price".

Maybe the Pork Barrel wasn't quite so deep that year ?

"Money back from the SLA ?"

Don't blow it all at once, it won't buy you THAT big a bag of penny chews.

Re: Required reading

"get declared end-of-life"

Planned obsolescence, or as the sales weasels might say "periodically-refreshed customer experience"...

"Sorry, your Apple iRobot is on the list of iShiny devices no longer considered Shiny [1]. Would you like to trade it in for the iRobot 4S for $100 off and we'll dispose of the old one for you ? It's very shiny, and doesn't fall over... as much as the iRobot 3 did"

[1] If it happens, they'll be on HT201624 in 5-7 years, just like all their other products.