Why not spend a million euros on a printer that won't fit through your door?
Posts made by spike_tt
-
RE: I hate printers, with a passion
-
Not very positive
Linda Rogers may be a great journalist, but she's not too good at sums.
-
RE: Would you?
Reminds me of the time we were driving down a quiet country road at about 2am and to my surprise we came across a traffic jam. We sat patiently for 5 or 10 minutes and then I got out and walked to the front of the jam to see what the problem was.
I found cars on both sides of the road just sitting looking at a tree that had fallen down blocking the road. I went back to my car (a Landrover Defender), drove past the waiting traffic and backed up to the tree. I hooked a rope around it and was just hooking the rope up to my towbar when the driver of the front car came across. "About *$%£ing time!" he shouted., "We've been waiting here for half a %$*#ing hour!"
I unhooked the rope chucked it in the back of my Landrover, drove across a ditch to bypass the fallen tree and left them all to their now extended wait.
-
RE: Management Email WTF
If your supervisor sends you an email, does he have to CC himself?
-
RE: Construction WTF
@savar said:
30 minutes with a hacksaw would fix that right up. but i guess 1 minute with the wood pallet is easier.
You wouldn't even need that. If you look closely you'll see that the railing across the gap appears to be secured with nothing more than a few twists of copper wire.
-
Before the internet...
I was responsible for the X.25 network joining our worldwide affiliates together. An application developer came t me one day and asked "Is it possible for us to do a test to see how my application performs when the user is in a different country to the mainframe?"
"Yes" I replied, "I can set up a loopback in Amsterdam, you can connect via Amsterdam back to the application on our mainframe here in Brussels."
"But, wouldn't that be TWO international boundaries we'd be crossing? Not really representative of a user in another country accessing us directly?"
"Well I don't think that would make a lot of difference. but we can call a user in Amsterdam and ask them to do your tests against our mainframe here."
"No, I'd like to do the tests myself."
"Well we can send your application to Amsterdam and have it installed it there. Then you an access if from here and that will be one international boundary crossing."
"That sounds like a lot of work."
"Or, you could travel to Amsterdam and access the application on our mainframe here?"
"No, I don't want to travel."
"Well if you want exactly one international boundary crossed in the test then either you or the instance of the application are going to have to be in another country."
"Is there no other way?"
"No. It's called topology."The developer wandered away looking puzzled. I then realised my boss had been listening in to this conversation. He came up to me and said "If I was the customer in that interchange, I don't think I'd feel that I'd been well served."
-
RE: Marketing - by - Insult
Truprint use an even better one. Marketing by blackmail. truprint is a UK photo printing service. You register an account with them, upload your pictures and then select the ones you want printed, pay, and they send you your printed pics.
I must say their service is cheap, good quality and fast. I planned to use them a lot. But then for a while I just didn't take any pictures.
Then one day I got an email from them basically saying "You haven't asked us to print any pictures recently. Unless you order some pictures through us within the next 30 days we will close your account."
I mailed them back "I'm not scared of you. Do your worst".
-
RE: XXXXXXXXXXX
404
But surely the BBC News home page is http://news.bbc.co.uk ?
-
RE: One Way to Abuse COBOL
COBOL was great for things like this. I used to be the 'techie' (what back then was called a "System Programmer") in a site with large Honeywell mainframes. I had a programmer come to me one day who'd recently joined from an ICL mainframe shop.
He wanted to know why his program wouldn't run. A little investigation revealed that it hadn't even compiled. It was full of compilation errors. "But on ICL kit you run COBOL programs even if they have compilation errors" he explained.
-
RE: Customer not well served
@Nandurius said:
Just throw a traffic shaper between a computer and the local network. You can then throttle the bandwidth, increase the latency or add packet loss. Since everything is configurable, you just need to come up with some sensible "profiles" -- easy enough, just ping sites in a few different countries and record the latency / packet loss.
If I'd had a time machine that's exactly what I would have done. That would have shaken up those peeps back in 1987 wouldn't it. Unfortunately, at the time my options were actually kind of limited to those listed in the original post.
-
Customer not well served
A few years back I was working for a large multinational company and a large part of my responsibilities revolved around the provision of wide area networking services to the company.
One day an application developer comes to me and says he'd like to see how his client-server application performs when the user is accessing it from a different country. The application is currently installed on a minicomputer right here in Brussels.
So I tell him I can set up a loopback through one of our foreign offices so his comms will bounce off their site.
Being observant he points out that that would involve two international hops and so would give an unfair portayal of the reponse of his app.
Okay then, I suggest we can get a tame user in a foreign office to connect to his app in Brussels and tell us how it performs. But that's no good because he really wants to see the performance for himself.
Well then, we can send his application (on 3/4" mag tape) to a foreign site and get them to install it there. He can connect from Brussels and see for himself how it performs. That's not acceptable though because the foreign host might not have the same characteristics as our Brussels hosts. And besides, it'd be a lot of hassle to get his app installed somewhere else.
Well then he'll just have to go to a foreign site and logon from there to the Brussels host and see for himself how the app performs. After all, Amsterdam is only a two hour drive away. Well that's just ridiculous, he can't be expected to travel abroad just for a simple test like this.
Now we've run up against the laws of topology. If he wants exactly one international hop in the test scenario then he and the app are going to have to be in different countries. And he's ruled out all those options.
By now I'm starting to wonder why he's being so obstructive, maybe he has some other agenda. I think I need to investigate a little and find out what he's really trying to achieve. Office politics you know.
So I tell him I'm going to have to get back to him on this one and he strolls away.
My boss has been eavesdropping this whole conversation and after the developer wanders off he says to me "You know. If I was the customer here, I don't think I'd feel that I'd been well served."