I don't need that kind of manual, I know the practical stuff when you get down to strip down and rebuild stage.
I if you wanna turn this into a car thing, engines are easy. Haggling for a good model to work on is the hard part.
I don't need that kind of manual, I know the practical stuff when you get down to strip down and rebuild stage.
I if you wanna turn this into a car thing, engines are easy. Haggling for a good model to work on is the hard part.
Four bytes walk into a bar and ask for drinks.
They each ask for a drink and the barman asks "Whats have you got?"
The first byte says "Well I've got 0x47"
The barman says, that'll get you a third of a Gin.
The second byte says "I'm worth 0x49"
The barman says, that'll get you a third a Gin too.
The third byte says, "Well I have 0x4E!"
"Third of a Gin." says the barman.
Then fourth byte walks up and says "I'd like a whole Gin please!"
"How much have you got?" asks the barman.
"Absolutely nothing!" says the byte.
And the barman says... "Now you are just trying to string me a long."
@anotherusername said:
@dhromed said:For about 0.2 seconds I considered getting the scope out and seeing what the waveform looked like. Then I remembered that if I wanted to electrocute myself playing with 120 VAC today, there's a light at home that doesn't work and I still haven't figured out what breaker it's on. I think I've narrowed it down to either the fixture or the wiring between the switch and the fixture. The bulb works and the switch is brand-new (and yes, I managed to electrocute myself while I was replacing it)...Exactly how freakishly distorted do these things output the original AC before a crude device such as a UPS can't eat it anymore? We're not doing signal processing near 1/2f here, so a little distortion shouldn't matter.
Over here we use 240V so you get twice the buzz when you brush against that heatsink someone decided to attach to the live centre pin of some rectifier. Great fun.
Ten to fifteen things make me think WTF everyday, sometimes I even think about writing a post about all the WTF I have encountered since starting in this job, sometimes I even start but then give up once I realise the enormity of the task I so foolishly embarked upon.
So rather than try to rant about everything I will confine myself to the product I find myself working on today.
The product which I shall call the B600 (not its real name) is used around the world to analyse gasses, it is subject to many checks and balances imposed by law, various bureaucrats, traceable standards of calibration and regular testing run by various national metrology institutions (NIST, UKAS, Etc..).
As such when it comes to actually doing its job it is very good, however peek under the hood and you will be surprised at how it does it.
Before you even reach the WTF in the software you find that you will be re-programming this thing pretty regularly even if you don't make any changes.
This is because the older models were designed to store their software not in flash, no not in an EEPROM, not in SRAM but in volatile RAM with a battery backup.
That's right folks, if you leave it unplugged for too long it bricks itself!
This issue doesn't show up too often in the field as these things are left plugged into the mains 24/7 and have a large lead acid battery built in, but of course every now and again one is moved, or put into storage or just subjected to an unusually long blackout and the software disappears into the wind...
The solution? Every unit was sold with an accompanying UPS!
I once encountered a similarly poor router when sorting out WiFi for friends of the family in a small office, having not consulted anyone before buying the equipment (knowing only that they needed 'One of those rootah thinigies') they now decided they needed help to set it up.
It was some cheapy plastic Chinese attempt from a brand I had never heard of in a box plastered with Engrish.
The first thing was of course to hook it up to a laptop, log in with the default login and start configuring the thing... I wish it was that easy, up pops the login page and as I start to type, my text disappears, 'How odd.' I thought.
After a couple more attempts I realise that the page is being refreshed, so I could mess about killing the refresh or try and post the information myself... ahh sod it I'll race the router.
The easiest way to log in was to copy the password into the clipboard and then race between page refreshes to type 'ADMIN-TAB-CTRL-V-ENTER' as quickly as possible.
This is something which has bugged me for years, Windows Update downloads hotfixes and wotnot into SoftwareDistribution right...
Then it runs them which means they get extracted.
Some of them probably involve Windows Installer.
I've never bothered to find out which is to blame but I continually find it annoying to find folders with names like F:\4c8ad71cdf3c3031a87bb6c56e lying about in the root of drives
The drive where the operating system is installed, okay maybe I can understand that, it is the lazy and untidy equivalent of "Sharon" from admin who saves everything in the root of drive C: but at least the operating can claim some right to work with files on the drive where it is installed (even if it should use TEMP for TEMP files).
What gets me is that it uses any drive it likes the look of, often one with lots of free space and it doesn't really care if that drive belongs to it or not.
This then combines with something that used to be another pet hate of mine, write caching on removeable drives although I noticed recently Microsoft do now tend to treat my USB devices as such and not cache writes to them, using my removeable drives as if they are scratch space for Microsoft to perform operating system updates has bought back a similar problem, I unplug a drive I am not using and something breaks, in this case whatever service pack or update was running at the time.
I know its not a biggy, it is made slightly worst by the fact I'm re-installing an ancient laptop for someone and as such every update takes some time.
And this all brings me to two other rants which lead on from the point that whatever update is creating these folders does not delete them when it is done.
Microsoft have been for many years now treating hard drive space like its free, they have features which aren't joined up as if developed by different companies (left hand/right hand) and they often end up causing conflicts or quite literally, duplication.
Download update into SoftwareDistrubtion (1 copy) complete with the installer which is same for every hotfix but must be downloaded (although they have fixed that now), extract to some random folder (2), create a system restore point (3), apply fix and backup files to $NtUninstall...$ (4), if windows update was used keep a copy of the original package tucked away in Installer (5)
Then, and this is just a perfect example, I had two windows installs on partitions on the same drive who could see each other's file systems. Now admittedly one of them was Vista so I never expected it to end well. Both decided system restore should be on by default and should track changes on the other drive...
You do the math ... it was only a matter of switches between operating systems before one of them backed up the other complete with the changes the other had backed up of itself before it became an exponential runaway train.
To get slightly more back to the original point, another two things spring to mind all of a sudden!
thumbs.db - Its okay, I like thumbs.db, I mean if you are going to have a thumbnail feature it makes sense to keep it in the folder so that it moves when you move the folder rather have to be recreated ... but is it really more important than the actual work its thumbnailing.
Create a folder, maybe I just call it 'New Folder', start moving photos into it. Rename it - Can't, being accessed. Okay so I call the folder what I want first, then I want to move it onto the network share where it shall live once I have completed making my changes locally - Can't do that either, being accessed.
Basically the message is 'Pretty thumbnails are actually more important that letting the user get on with work.
And finally, desktop.ini. I write a CD, I close the CD! But still windows thinks, you know what I'm going to auto create a desktop.ini (and maybe a thumbs.db too!) and keep remind you there are files to be written.
To reply to the signing out thing.... yeah fire safety, scanning the replies I see that has been covered so no further comment needed there..... If I read all of them I will probably see more in depth discussion but I just scanned over and saw a lot of typical forum stylee arguing.
I don't really care, and as you will see if you look at my other posts, I am now as I like to be, Titty much Protally Fit Shaced. (Morbo).
But if you think signing out was bad.... how about being frisked out.
I used to work at this place where had so little trust in their employees (and rightly so because they paid peanuts and hired loosers like me!) that getting out at the end of the day involved a pat down and full body metal detector sweep!
Lets start a forum style rant about that!
Woah, woah, woah!!!!!!
Before this even started even kicking into forum crazy it kicked off... Racist? W...T...F... I was talking about cats and someone draws the race card, I hope that was trolling.
P.s. appologise for crazy formatting errors cus I'm using chrome and putting the line breaks in myself, also apologize to any grammer nazis for spelling etc cus I'm REALLY drunk.
I llike to take my forum mentality escalation more slowy, we should start with pants and move up to racisms....
That asside I should point out, I am a cat person, I love cats....
Oh hang on, I get it, I can see the meta-troll now.
I quit, I'm too retarded to work this out.