Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

I based my comments on what I learned in O and A level Computer Studies at school from before the BBC got involved, pre-BBC Micro era :-)

It's more likely that the industry had already decided but the BBC, being British through and through, were not going to stoop to the level of accepting new spellings from the colonies :-)

Not to mention that the spelling on the BBCs The Computer Programme was actually a TV show and so correct by both our definitions :-)

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

Update: I mis-read the question. It's just over a decade since they stopped making new ones. As per the linked article, they are still selling "new" ones. It's just that they've been sat in warehouses, shops, stockrooms and filing cabinets for years, so "new" as in in not used or 2nd hand, uit not new as in they are at leats 10 years old even if still shrink-wrapped :-)

Re: Never under estimate peoples ability to make it fit

"Their fix - put a this way up sticker on the cards!"

Sometimes, proper labelling and instructions can be far better than an expensive mechanical/technological solution. It's a waste of time and effort making something idiot proof and we all know why.

Re: Users and Cables

On a smaller scale, USB-C ports damaged by users. For some reason, no matter where the USB-C power port is located, the users will ALWAYS lift the laptop up one handed from the opposite side and so the plug takes the remaining weight of the laptop as it tries to bend in place.

Apart from the USB shenanigans, that was about the time there were still digital cameras that used floppy disks for storage. That would have solved his problem in a way that was satisfying to you and he couldn't really argue with. :-)

And then there's the ones with only one latching clip, you put the other end in first, then the end at the latch. It feels "wrong" somehow. Probably years of muscle memory telling me to make sure it goes in straight and level so as not to damage the contacts.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

Maybe with some, earlier systems, so by definition few people ever saw or used them, but from the early 8-bit micros of my youth, once floppy drives arrived, they had a proper "up side". There was an index hole and putting in the wrong way up would mean no index hole on the side where the sensor was. There was also a felt coating inside the sleeve designed to pick up any dust that got in. It had a nap so rotating the disk back the other way was not only more abrasive on the disk surface but any dust collected was more likely to come back out onto the disk, causing even more abrasion. Not to mention that single sided disks often did not have the magnetic coating on the obverse side, although as single sided disk drive were obsoleted by double sided ones, single sided disks were often just those that failed quality tests on one of the sides and so put in the sleeve with the good side as the read side.

There were, for a time, "flippy" disks made to work both ways but they were uncommon. Most of us would just cut an extra "write protect" notch on the other side of the disk and use a small single hole paper punch to carefully add the new index hole on back and front of the case on the opposite side and take the risk to save money.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

"Pretty much depended whether it was pay as you go or a support contract, you can guess which would be which."

Didn't matter to us. It's user damage and chargeable anyway and it was rarely worth the effort of repairing a fuser when the customer was paying for it. It is, after all, a "consumable" with a finite life. If we'd replaced it already and it was still showing as at least 25% life/page count remaining and it wasn't obvious user damage, we'd not charge to replace it.

Apart from one customer, who paid us a small fortune annually to fix anything, user damage or not + parts cost on top.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

"I did try and clean it after removing the labels but no chance."

I assume that was the first time you had ever seen a damaged imaging drum? Anyone who has instantly learns that once it's damaged it MUST be replaced. You might, MIGHT, get away with carefully polishing out a slight blemish that may last a few 100 pages, but anything worse and it's toast and you don't waste time even trying to "fix" it.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

Here in Right Pondia, it's *always* disc *except* for floppy and hard disks. We acceded to Left Pondia on the spelling for those specific items. Most optical formats like CDs etc are discs, not disks though. Not so sure on the magneto-optical jobbies.

Likewise, computer "programs". All other uses of the word "programme" is spelled as...er...programme, eg TV programmes, Theatre programmes etc :-)

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

About a decade, according to This El Reg article from just over a week ago.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

"no obvious benefit...for a massive financial outlay and huge amounts of work"

Hence the reasons various adaptors or whatever other solution is needed to get modern hardware talking to RS-232C and other "old fashioned" interfaces built in to very very expensive devices in universities too.

There's lots of old expensive machinery out in the real world that could cost many, many £1000s if not £millions to replace for the sake of non-fashionable interfaces and computers able to run old software. There are still companies out there that will sell you IEEE488 or RS-232C PCIe cards because there is still a demand. Sometimes it involves emulation or virtual machines to get the old software to think it's running on real hardware because some programmer hard coded the RS-232C port address.

Re: Smoke

"I doubt you have ever been hit by lightening."

Yeah, that was Michael Jackson :-)

Re: Insufficicent

Or the entirely unpredictable Microsoft time. Something almost, but not entirely unlike real time.

"The best politiicans are not driven by ideology but by pragmatism, common sense and flexibility."

They're also the ones accused by aggressive media interviewers of "U turning" and being "wishy washy" by changing their political stance to suit the circumstances. The media environment seems to favour politicians who stick to their guns no matter what.

"They think that the BoE spent over a decade sitting on record low interest rates and that has had horrible but quiet consequences."

The worst of which seem, to me at least, that many people have grown up with low interest rates, expected them to last forever, and are using credit up the hilt so now that interest rates have risen can no longer service their debts. As someone who took out their first mortgage when mortgage interest rates were at 13%, I took out one I could afford and assumed that interest rates might climb even further. Because of that, I've also been very careful with any form of borrowing, preferring instead to do without until I could save enough to afford $whatever in most cases. I've been lucky enough to never quite be on the borderline of having no savings and barely enough to make ends meet, living from one payday to the next, but certainly been in the position of having to budget very carefully.

"She would have been better to find a policy / policies that would have the support of the wider electorate, not just those who happen to be card - carrying members."

That's true from the point of view of a general election, but her "election" only had "card carrying Tory members" voting so the candidates had to schmooze their particular foibles rather then the electorate as a whole. And unlike in a general election where the opposition can make all sorts of wild "promises", there's no "get out clause" of "well, until we won we had no idea of the real state of the finances"

Re: IMF

"We haven't got a new government,"

It might be the same party, but IS a new Government. New PM and an almost entirely new Cabinet. That's the Government. The House of Commons is NOT the Government.

No, she was just poor at public speaking. You can tell by her more recent statements and interviews that she is more confident, more experienced and possibly has had public speaking lessons and sounds completely different to those early speeches. This can be seen with quite a few politicians over time who come to prominence. Thatcher is another good example of how her public presentation changed quite dramatically over time.

Re: Who voted for whom?

"They are, by any sane measure, the bad guys."

Not to be picky, but who gets to define "sane" and "bad"? I'm sure Russia and China would see it differently to the rest of us. On the other hand, even if they see themselves as the "good" guys, what do they *really* think about their "allies"?

Re: And the winner is...

Yeah, the "Uodated to add..." came in barely 12 hours after the story was published. If they'd waited for the result it would not have been a story at all.

Did El Reg jump the gun to get an "exclusive" or was it click-bait? In hindsight, it seems the outcome is as expected by those in the industry.

Re: Priorities

To be fair <spit!> to Apple, although replacing the battery ought to be easy, would YOU replace the battery in an expensive watch rated to 100m water depth and still trust it to be waterproof to 100m? Likewise, apart from the battery, the vast majority of people would never attempt to repair their own watch, digital or analogue. The more costly the watch, the more likely to take it to a specialist repair technician with years of training and experience.

I'm no expert with expensive watches (anything that tells the time +/- a few minutes per day is good enough for me), and certainly not with "divers" watches, which I assume are the sort of watches normally rated to 100m depth, so do correct me if I'm wrong about the ease of replacing a battery in a 100m rated watch.

Re: NASA insurance hike

Yes, it's something that really ought to be spelled out more clearly to drivers. They might drive more carefully!

Re: There goes the prime directive... Murica Successfully Saves the world AGAIN with a bomb

"Not very helpful if you want to swerve past a target (Earth) of diameter 12,600 km."

You do know this was only a proof of concept, don't you? Or do you think airliners are not possible because the Wright brothers barely managed to fly 100' on their first attempt?

Re: Take only photos, leave only footprints

...and burn marks from landing rockets. And left over tools, instruments etc. And remote science experiments. Bits of the lander not need for the ascent. A golf ball or two. That's just on the Moon. On Mars there are the remains of parachutes, inflated bouncy balls, crashed skycranes and dead or soon to be dead rovers, some with nuclear power plants in them.

Of course, on an entire large Moon or planet, it's a tiny amount of "rubbish" we've littered the places with, but it's lot more than just "foot prints"