Posts by skswales 69 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2013
Our company had the misfortune to purchase one of their systems. Trying to fix said system on receipt, got through and was put in what I can only describe as a conference call with around six other folk support were trying to help at the same time. Support were so useless some of the callers got their fixes from the other callers.
My issue was hardware related. Monitor was poorly focused. Support's solution was to only run it in VGA mode. It was a 21" monitor.
I've had one of the 'speed sign recognition' cars as a courtesy car. Wrong far too much of the time. And GPS maps can't know what's right. I updated my satnav just before the car went out of warranty and quite a lot of the speed limits were wrong even then.
Up here a load of 20 mph signs were dropped seemingly permanently in place early on during COVID as the local council wanted to encourage people to walk locally on the roads without pavements. Of course the temporary speed order for these signs lapsed over six months ago but the council can't be bothered to remove them (I checked with them)...
I still have my Acorn-issued M2 book from the days when EVERYTHING was going to be written in M2.
Even just before Arthur 1.2 came out, Acron manglement were still talking of the OS being written in M2, just that we were 'still working on device drivers in assembler' - or rather that was the lie that they were being fed!
The code generated by M2 was 'interesting'. For some reason it seemed to avoid using R6. In the early days of Arthur, one of us had fouled up something sitting on TickerV with the result that R6 was being corrupted at 100Hz. BASIC went TITSUP almost immediately but AAsm happily kept going. Found it never ever referenced R6.
Other fun fact - clicking in the scroll bar with the right button scrolled the contents of the window in the opposite direction, so it was easy to quickly scroll back a page, look at something, keep scrolling forward without moving the mouse to opposite ends of the scroll bar. And here we are in 2022...
When I make payments on a business account, it attempts to verify the sort code and account number with the payee's name given. Somewhat amusingly, given GDPR, Data Protection and all that, it most often gives me the person's full name, which I was usually unaware of before. Some people do have very interesting middle names!
When school got an RM 380Z with a floppy drive, our head of maths (isn't it always) was convinced that CP/M only allowed single letter filenames. His SOP was to have one floppy disc per class, and assign a letter to each pupil. Some pupils had to share their letter, with predictable results... He thought it was wizardry when I showed him what was possible. Didn't ever change though, as it was written down.
Bought a Panasonic last year specifically for Freeview catchup over t'Internet. Which doesn't work unless it's plugged into the TV aerial, which I don't have. That one went back, and I got its cheaper sibling without this feature. Curiously this one regularly tries to find a software update, indicated by blinkenlight, which is quite difficult for it as the set has zero networking capability.
My Sinclair Cambridge calculator no longer works, but my 1975 Sinclair Oxford Scientific does. Only quibble was the cheap deg/rad switch: had to send it back for repair under warranty three times - the final time they resolved it by replacing the switch with a much meatier one. Thanks to my dad for that - it was probably what he took home in a week.
My better half fell foul of over-zealous new filter blocking all messages to the exam syndicate referencing one of the books on that year's syllabus. Can't remember which now. But it did cause a bit of a stooshie in their manglement when they had a team of irate external examiners who believed all their emails had been ignored.
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