Posts by defiler 1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010
'98 was the good one when compared to '95
Yeah, sort of. But it was a bit of a Hobson's Choice. 95 was like having somebody stamp on your jaw, while 98 was like having somebody stamp on your hand. ME was like having somebody stamp on your balls, then the jaw, then the hand...
I bailed out to NT4 around the time ME came along.
I can't begin to describe how infuriating it is being forced into a biometric registration because you absolutely positively must speak to someone at HMRC. Especially when the reason they're threatening immediate court action is because somebody fucked up and put a number in twice. Also, they send out letters demanding action "within 7 days of the date of this letter", and you don't actually receive them until the 7th day. Which in one case was the 31st of January, so you can imagine how much fun that was...
What I will say, though, is if it lets me in when I'm anything short of enraged to the point of spitting then it's probably too lenient.
I accept that they're just trying to do a job that nobody likes, but so many of them are so incompetent at it, or too constrained to be able to help out.
I'd expect C-level and Veeps to go for these in a big-way
And in my experience they don't care. If they walk into a meeting and don't have the flashest laptop in the room they're not happy. Long-haul flight? That's time to switch off the phone, switch off the laptop, and switch off to work.
The CEO of one of our clients told me that flying is the greatest thing because he doesn't have to work and nobody can get hold of him.
It's a reference to the Titanic, you know, icebergs ahead, but "all ah[...]
You know, if it takes that long to explain then it's not very good.
Also, Bob, it's this dogmatic attachment to these silly names, and totally blinkered refusal to accept that there may be any redeeming features in there at all, that make me feel slightly tainted every time I actually agree with your opinion on something.
Soften up, man. Have a nice cup of tea and a Jaffa cake to calm you down.
alcohol consumption is declining in the UK, and fastest among Millennials
That's because they seem to reckon a pint of dry hops constitutes "craft beer" and some sort of ideal that brewers should aim for. And it's generally awful.
I'm not against a decent beer, and I've enjoyed the local brew in many a CAMRA-registered pub, but some of the crap that seems to be fashionable these days... At some point you have to sit back and think "I'd be better with a Tennents."
Always on internet should be just what it says, lack of service should result in a automatic refund for the whole region affected.
And how do you monitor that? What constitutes a loss of service? BGP reconvergence takes maybe 30 seconds - are you going to refund people for 30 seconds on that one or the whole day?
And, dare I say it, we're talking about cheap consumer lines. If constant uninterrupted internet access is essential to you, you put in two lines from different providers, and you get contracts with stringent SLAs. But that's not cheap enough for you, so things like this happen. And it's fair to say that things like this only really happen occasionally.
Besides which, on the two occasions that my Plusnet line went off (once during upgrade to FTTC, and once due to a fault), I hooked my phone into my computer for my essential stuff. Streaming the football, whilst important to many, is hardly mission-critical.
Honestly, the horse is sick. It only has two legs, and one of those has a wonky knee. Whilst I love to see (what appears to be) institutional corporate lying exposed to the light of day, this one really just needs to be taken away and put to sleep.
Shame because it could have been really cool.
I wonder if the designs will appear in the liquidation sale. Or better the tooling (ha!)
...and somehow force the OS to...
I love when people propose a "solution" and use the word "somehow" in it.
It's like "we've totally got this flying car sorted out - we just need to somehow develop an antigravity paint, and some way of stopping people crashing into each other..."
Presumably then you'll be digging up your old 486 from the cupboard
Not necessarily. I read it that he accepts that what he has is flawed, but has no choice in the matter. He'll just not buy a replacement until the flaws are fixed.
On the other hand, waiting for a bug-free <item> is going to be an awfully long wait.
My WATCH has 50x the CPU horsepower of these rovers so to be able to make these Mars rovers actually WORK, took some SERIOUS engineering prowess!
Not especially. They just didn't fill them with shite. Unlike your watch.
Ah, the things we used to do with 25MHz, when I was a lad... I'm off to stew carrots or whatever old people do these days. Probably go on lots of holidays.
a computer built with expandability in mind, like my Amiga
Don't get me wrong, the Amiga was indeed an awesome computer in its day. My Archimedes could do most of what the Amiga did in hardware, but in software. But that's only most. The thing that (to my understanding) broke the Amiga was that Workbench had some nasty bugs on memory allocation. It wouldn't check if the memory was available before allocating it (or something like that), so you had to verify it and constantly micromanage malloc(). So people just dropped Workbench and programmed to the metal.
So far so good, but when the metal changed (AGA, anyone?) half the bloody software stopped. The software worked perfectly on only one iteration of the hardware. So when better silicon became available (and the support chips in the Amiga had some fairly tight memory limits, for example), they just couldn't deploy it without breaking the user base. So whilst it may have been expandable in some directions, it wasn't easily upgradable.
At least when the MEMC1a allocated RAM it was your bloody RAM to use. :D
Shame really. I never had an Amiga myself, but sometimes I'd quite like one. And most of the best Archimedes games were Amiga ports :)
Harumph. Some of us had to pry out our ARM2 CPUs and put ARM3 daughterboards in to get the FPA socket before we could even think of floating point copros... With the speed of FPEm, is it any wonder I learned to use integers with a liberal sprinkling of LSL and LSR?
Oh, and can I borrow that mobility scooter? My UPS needs new batteries.
Oh for fuck's sake. I'm getting tired of the bitching around here regarding "oh noes my CPU is not secure!!"
You know the stuff that you're talking about is (for the most part) ludicrously complex and obscure. The CPU designers have had a shake and realised that this is a valid attack vector. They will now proceed to figure out ways of plugging these holes, and we'll all be happy if they can do it without dropping speed. The milk has been spilt, and the tearful little boy has been told to be careful in future - there's no point in dragging the fucking thing on and on. I really hope you don't have kids before you learn this.
Also, I will be pounds to pennies that when you went CPU shopping you had a pretty short list of requirements:
1) Will it run my software?
2) Is it cheap enough for me?
3) Is it the fastest I can get for the money?
4) Is it going to burn my house down or make the electricity meter spin like a top?
5) Will it work with all the other bits I've got?
I bet security did not even factor into it for even one second. But now there's a public hoo-ha? Give it a rest.
Weren't the last round of "super lit" laptops diagnosed as faulty batteries from Sony?
And then there were the "super lit" Galaxy Note 7s.
I once opened a server to find a DLink NIC in the process of becoming "super lit" inside, too, but that was nothing compared to when the electricity meter in the office became "super lit". Good times...
The only reasonable use I can think of for it is as a toolbox window for graphical applications. Your Photoshops, Gimps, AutoCADs etc. That'll give you a separate display where you can select tools and effects without having them obscure the main display.
It's not something that I really want, but I daresay others could be swayed if there were software support for it. The question, of course, is are there enough people (more imaginative than me) who can see the potential, coupled with enough people with deep pockets to buy into it?
5 years is nothing like the acceptable lifetime of a TV or fridge, imho.
It may not be the "acceptable" lifetime, but my telly is away for a warranty repair at 4 years old and it seems that they're unable to find a replacement screen panel for it.
I like the telly and I don't want to replace it, but that may be the way it's going here...
(My old Panny plasma screen lasted >11 years before it went kaput. The replacement LG went for 14 months and wound up as landfill when it croaked - cheaper to replace.)
"What you're asking is plain impossible."
If you tell them it's impossible, you don't get funds to try to make it work. And if you tell them that it's really, really hard then you get even more funds.
These people have mortgages to pay and empires to build too, you know?
To be fair, we call it The Tip around here. It's actually a site with big containers for sorting different types of waste into, including small electrical items, TVs, batteries, glass, wood, metal etc etc. Only a couple of the containers are actually for landfill, which is a separate location.
Still used in refrigeration, yes. Not, however, used in domestic refrigerators.
Well, I can't say for certain that it was ammonia. As I say, it smelled like ammonia (having tinkered with such at high school), but I didn't keep my pocket gas chromatograph handy! :)
Fire brigade didn't say what it was other than throwing the fridge out the door and pointing angrily at it as if it was us who'd chosen to waste everyone's time...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
