I had a real problem with an on-board sound card (Oak Mozart) and DirectX. I bought a game that needed a DirectX upgrade, but no drivers had been released for this card. I tried using drivers for the simillar Opti chipset, but they didn't work properly. Further investigation revealed that the Mozart chipset was based upon an early Opti chipset, but with added MIDI support. When Opti came to add their own MIDI support they enabled it in a completly different way.
I couldn't rip out the card as it was integrated into the machine. I had to add a second ISA card.
Under Linux, supporting this card was a lot easier. I just amended a few lines of the source.
At work I use a system that sends financial transactions over an IP connection, writing them to an RDBMS. Depending upon the configuration this consists of between 3 and 5 processes per environment. Each process consumes a minimum of 6MB. but I've seen processes of 400MB in size, caused by handling a modest number of transactions. Everything is coded in C++.
10 years ago, the entire system would probably run as fast on a machine with a total of 6MB of RAM. Progress?
Sorry, but I've never been convinced by OOP. There is too much abstraction between the source code and the processor.
My dialup ISP account has been getting Hong Kong spam for around 4 years, and it started less than a week after I joined them. I got one last week that contained a 700K attachment - not nice over a 56K modem.
The funniest one was one promising to send me a made to measure suit within a couple of hours of placing the order. Hmmm!
I too worked with Unicentre in the past. I would not recommend it to anyone.
Unicentre is more of an excuse to sell CA's consutling services. In other words CA staff were constantly on site, yet none of them had any idea how the software functioned.
The project got no-where in 18 months, yet a large fortune had been spent on it.
And don't get me onto the subject of the Software Update module.
Not all tech support sucks. It didn't with a position I held for many years.
We were a reseller for a number of products. As well as selling the main OS we also sold many third-party add-ons, many as the exclusive dealer in the UK.
We'd typically take hundreds of calls a week, but hardly any of them were the RTFM type of call. Resolving problems was a challenge.
My reputation in resolving problems correctly and quickly gained us a lot of business, including some major-named customers. Co-workers were generally not as good, so much so that I dreaded leaving the office as they tended to jump to the wrong conclusions when investigating problems. The pay was good, the hours were not that bad, and the working atmosphere generally pleasant. (There were a couple of ignorant PHBs to put up with, but they eventually moved on).
Then things went wrong. We merged with another company. The other company didn't understand the workings of my team. Their customer base were of a much lower standard than ours, and support calls generally tended towards trivialities. The last straw was when we became a call centre for one of the other-companies customers, spending 5 or more hours a day logging calls and chasing on-site contacts with software we'd never seen.
The new PHB was a complete fool with almost no technical knowledge. He lost a lot of my hard-won customers due to cock-ups on his behalf - such as sending his un-trained cousin to a high-profile customer site to do critical maintenance work.
These problems, together with customers migrating to the dark-side and the general down-turn in the quality of the software of our supplier made me quit in early 1999.
I don't know if the company still exists. The web-site hasn't changed in almost 2 years.
I had a job where I worked 9am to 5:30pm in 3rd line support. We'd have other members of staff manning the helpdesk until 8pm. Work was around 12 miles from home, and to get home I walked for 15 minutes and then caught the next bus home, typically arriving home at around 6:30pm.
One evening I had plans to go out at 8pm. Unfortunatly as soon as I arrived home I received a phone call from work asking me to help with a problem with a customer site which he was unable to resolve. For the next 3 hours I was on the phone to the customer, attempting to resolve their problem with little success, due to them neglecting to tell me important details. My evening was ruined, and I'd done an extra 3 hours work unpaid in my spare time.
From then on I became difficult to contact on an evening. I purposly avoided purchasing a cell phone. I'd ensure that I never returned home directly, or that my phone was constantly in use. I also refused to do weekend work without first being assurred compensation.
Later I was asked to carry a cell phone all weekend as cover for a customer site. The particular network that this phone connected to had terrible reception problems in the vacinity of my home (hills, cathedral 100 yards away) - hence my usual weekend routine was severely interrupted. Due to an adminstrative cock-up on behalf of someone else, the customer was given the incorrect number for the phone, and consequentially it didn't ring. I wasn't paid a penny for the inconvenience.
It was an Amstrad PC1512 that I had on loan. All the cables were non-standard and fairly short, making it almost impossible to build extension cables cheaply. The power supply for the base-unit was in the monitor, and it wasn't possible to put the monitor anywhere other than on top of the base unit. Due to the depth of the base unit it took up half of my desk, and I had to place the keyboard to the left of the base unit, stretching the keyboard cable to its limit. The only place left for the mouse was to the left of the keyboard.
At work all the mice are awful ergonomic things. My work involves a lot of jotting things on forms whilst operating a GUI and typing the odd number. The work would be a lot easier if I could use the mouse in my left hand whilst writng and using the numeric keypad with my right hand.
Due to the nature of my first PC I was only able to operate the mouse left handed, and have prefered to do so ever since.
The 3G rollout in the Isle of Man is supposedly to support the TT race, a week long motor-cyle race that covers a large stretch of major roads on the island.
However it looks likely that the TT races will be cancelled due to the Foot & Mouth epidemic in the UK, so the 3G rollout will also be postponed.
A few years ago I was tidying up the storeroom at work and came across some really weird hardware. This consisted of a pizza-box style unit with an EGA video port, a keyboard port and a serial/mouse port. There was also another connector which resembled a SCSI-2 port. I had no idea what these things were.
A few hours later I discovered a full-length card with 2 on-board 80286 processors, and simillar SCSI-2 like connectors. Also with the card were a pair of long cables for connecting everything together.
I later found the documentation, but not the relevant software. The card went in a Netware server, and acted as a pair of pseudo-PCs, with all filesystems running off the netware server. The idea dated from around 1989. The SCSI-2 like cable carried all the video, keyboard and mouse signals, whilst pizza-box unit presented them to the relevant hardware. I've no idea of the maximum range of these, but the cables with the card were only around 10 feet long.
There was also a version that had 4 8086-class processors on a board, and used dumb terminals to emulate the PC screen and keyboard.
I read slashdot from a payphone a few days ago!
on
Is the Payphone Dead?
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· Score: 1
In Leeds railway station, British Telecom have installed payphones with integrated web access. The access is free until June.
Between getting off a train and waiting for the bus home on Monday, I spent a few minutes reading various web sites, including Slashdot.
The system is X based. It appears to be using a customised version of Mozilla, using a touch-screen for input. Can anyone shed any more details on this device.
This version number war between Mandrake, SuSe and Redhat has to stop. Each of them appears to attempting to bring out a version number higher than the others, and ends up releasing a product that hasn't had enough testing.
The same also happened to Banyan. Banyan's licensing costs were high, and the NT migration started to ripple in early 1995. Some of this was due to some incompatability problems introduced by changes in Microsofts applications, particularly with handling UNC names.
The introduction of Windows 95 really kicked it off. Banyan didn't support roaming profiles until it became too late. Banyan's print queues didn't really integrate with 95. Long filename support took time to arrive, and when it did there were severe problems with European codepages. And so on.
Management couldn't wait for things to be fixed, and installed NT instead, despite NT not being as advanced in the enterprise.
The real killer for Banyan, though, was internet Email. StreetTalk addresses became obsolete, removing the requirement for Banyan's naming services.
Banyan are now history, just another e-commerce consulting firm.
Firstly I live in a small town in the UK without DSL, cable or other broadband, and have to use a 56K modem. This is painful when tracking unstable, particularly if a package changes the day after it has been downloaded.
Secondly I've been hit with serious problems with unstable in the past, broken LILO, inability to compile things and so on. Unstable is just too unstable at the moment.
Packages just don't appear to be migrating from unstable to testing quickly enough. It can be months before something finally migrates, often due to problems on the lesser platforms. Testing has been around for over 3 months now, and a lot is still grossly out-of-date or unavailable. A lot of this has to do with debconf being updated 2-3 times a week for the past few months, preventing packages dependant upon the newer debconf from migrating. The debconf issue is now fixed, but testing is still too far behind to be of any real use.
It suprising how few end users bother to install patches, even if told by their vendor that the patch must be installed.
One OS we resold included a must install patch on a floppy disk with the normal distribution CD, together with a note detailing the fix. The note was difficult to miss, being placed in the same envelope as the CD-ROM, and printed with large red type. The fix bumped up the minor revision number of the softeware, to make it easy to discover that the fix hadn't been applied. We still took support calls from customers who hadn't installed the fix, even though it would only cause a system outage of 10 minutes or so.
The other alternative in the UK is a line-of-sight microwave link via Tele2. Fairly cheap (works out at £10 a month), but nowhere near as fast as cable or ADSL.
Unfortunatly I'm not in range of one of the current transmitters.
This is no more than an Anti-Virus software vendor getting free publicity, trying to score brownie points over their competitors.
Re:Mike Singleton, Mathew Smith & David Braben?
on
Godfathers Of Gaming
·
· Score: 1
Matthew Smith was odd. Only produced two real games of note, both on the Sinclair Spectrum.
Manic Miner was a 20-screen platform game that drove the Spectrum to its limits - flicker free sprites and background music had not been attempted before at the same time. Other action games were poor in comparison at that time (mid 1983) - Imagine (one of the few other software houses producing anything of quality) had the graphics but lacked the gameplay and suffered from bad flicker too.
Jet Set Willy added to the formula by adding more rooms (now 60) by using an encoding system instead of the one-byte-per-character of the original. Extra hazards had been added - ropes, arrows etc. The graphics of the hazards were astounding and really well animated.
There were also a lot of odd references in the rooms - Pink Floyd, Furry Freak Brothers, Imagine Software (also dug at in Manic Miner) and many more. The game was impossible to complete as it was just too big.
Jet Set Willy II appeared later. By this time Matthew Smith had disappeared, and the game was basically a back-port of the Amstrad version of JSW 1. More rooms (40-50?)had been added, by means of a more sophisticated compression mechanism, but the colouring of the screens suffered as a consequence. The new rooms were not as good, with nowhere near as intricate designs. The new sprites were on the whole a poor imitation of the original.
FTP's first attempt at a Windows telnet client must have been the worst terminal emulator ever. It was utter junk, and proprietary as well. What made matters worse was that at the time there was no other TCP/IP stack that ran with our Banyan PC clients. Finally WINSOCK appeared. and we could use anything.
There were a lot of real nasty bugs with later versions. Version 2.3 was really nasty, causing all kinds of compatability problems whose details I have since forgotten. These were so bad that Banyan dumped them and when to IPSwitch instead.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in a small market town and can recall at least 3 places where I've seen them on sale in the past week.
I had a real problem with an on-board sound card (Oak Mozart) and DirectX. I bought a game that needed a DirectX upgrade, but no drivers had been released for this card. I tried using drivers for the simillar Opti chipset, but they didn't work properly. Further investigation revealed that the Mozart chipset was based upon an early Opti chipset, but with added MIDI support. When Opti came to add their own MIDI support they enabled it in a completly different way.
I couldn't rip out the card as it was integrated into the machine. I had to add a second ISA card.
Under Linux, supporting this card was a lot easier. I just amended a few lines of the source.
At work I use a system that sends financial transactions over an IP connection, writing them to an RDBMS. Depending upon the configuration this consists of between 3 and 5 processes per environment. Each process consumes a minimum of 6MB. but I've seen processes of 400MB in size, caused by handling a modest number of transactions. Everything is coded in C++.
10 years ago, the entire system would probably run as fast on a machine with a total of 6MB of RAM. Progress?
Sorry, but I've never been convinced by OOP. There is too much abstraction between the source code and the processor.
The funniest one was one promising to send me a made to measure suit within a couple of hours of placing the order. Hmmm!
Unicentre is more of an excuse to sell CA's consutling services. In other words CA staff were constantly on site, yet none of them had any idea how the software functioned.
The project got no-where in 18 months, yet a large fortune had been spent on it.
And don't get me onto the subject of the Software Update module.
We were a reseller for a number of products. As well as selling the main OS we also sold many third-party add-ons, many as the exclusive dealer in the UK.
We'd typically take hundreds of calls a week, but hardly any of them were the RTFM type of call. Resolving problems was a challenge.
My reputation in resolving problems correctly and quickly gained us a lot of business, including some major-named customers. Co-workers were generally not as good, so much so that I dreaded leaving the office as they tended to jump to the wrong conclusions when investigating problems. The pay was good, the hours were not that bad, and the working atmosphere generally pleasant. (There were a couple of ignorant PHBs to put up with, but they eventually moved on).
Then things went wrong. We merged with another company. The other company didn't understand the workings of my team. Their customer base were of a much lower standard than ours, and support calls generally tended towards trivialities. The last straw was when we became a call centre for one of the other-companies customers, spending 5 or more hours a day logging calls and chasing on-site contacts with software we'd never seen.
The new PHB was a complete fool with almost no technical knowledge. He lost a lot of my hard-won customers due to cock-ups on his behalf - such as sending his un-trained cousin to a high-profile customer site to do critical maintenance work.
These problems, together with customers migrating to the dark-side and the general down-turn in the quality of the software of our supplier made me quit in early 1999.
I don't know if the company still exists. The web-site hasn't changed in almost 2 years.
One evening I had plans to go out at 8pm. Unfortunatly as soon as I arrived home I received a phone call from work asking me to help with a problem with a customer site which he was unable to resolve. For the next 3 hours I was on the phone to the customer, attempting to resolve their problem with little success, due to them neglecting to tell me important details. My evening was ruined, and I'd done an extra 3 hours work unpaid in my spare time.
From then on I became difficult to contact on an evening. I purposly avoided purchasing a cell phone. I'd ensure that I never returned home directly, or that my phone was constantly in use. I also refused to do weekend work without first being assurred compensation.
Later I was asked to carry a cell phone all weekend as cover for a customer site. The particular network that this phone connected to had terrible reception problems in the vacinity of my home (hills, cathedral 100 yards away) - hence my usual weekend routine was severely interrupted. Due to an adminstrative cock-up on behalf of someone else, the customer was given the incorrect number for the phone, and consequentially it didn't ring. I wasn't paid a penny for the inconvenience.
It was an Amstrad PC1512 that I had on loan. All the cables were non-standard and fairly short, making it almost impossible to build extension cables cheaply. The power supply for the base-unit was in the monitor, and it wasn't possible to put the monitor anywhere other than on top of the base unit. Due to the depth of the base unit it took up half of my desk, and I had to place the keyboard to the left of the base unit, stretching the keyboard cable to its limit. The only place left for the mouse was to the left of the keyboard.
Due to the nature of my first PC I was only able to operate the mouse left handed, and have prefered to do so ever since.
Pity it wasn't posted at 4:55pm on a Friday.
Note: This will have no relevance to those outside the UK, and even some younger UK readers will have no idea what I'm talking about.
However it looks likely that the TT races will be cancelled due to the Foot & Mouth epidemic in the UK, so the 3G rollout will also be postponed.
A few hours later I discovered a full-length card with 2 on-board 80286 processors, and simillar SCSI-2 like connectors. Also with the card were a pair of long cables for connecting everything together.
I later found the documentation, but not the relevant software. The card went in a Netware server, and acted as a pair of pseudo-PCs, with all filesystems running off the netware server. The idea dated from around 1989. The SCSI-2 like cable carried all the video, keyboard and mouse signals, whilst pizza-box unit presented them to the relevant hardware. I've no idea of the maximum range of these, but the cables with the card were only around 10 feet long.
There was also a version that had 4 8086-class processors on a board, and used dumb terminals to emulate the PC screen and keyboard.
Between getting off a train and waiting for the bus home on Monday, I spent a few minutes reading various web sites, including Slashdot.
The system is X based. It appears to be using a customised version of Mozilla, using a touch-screen for input. Can anyone shed any more details on this device.
I'm sticking with Debian unstable. :-P
The introduction of Windows 95 really kicked it off. Banyan didn't support roaming profiles until it became too late. Banyan's print queues didn't really integrate with 95. Long filename support took time to arrive, and when it did there were severe problems with European codepages. And so on.
Management couldn't wait for things to be fixed, and installed NT instead, despite NT not being as advanced in the enterprise.
The real killer for Banyan, though, was internet Email. StreetTalk addresses became obsolete, removing the requirement for Banyan's naming services.
Banyan are now history, just another e-commerce consulting firm.
Firstly I live in a small town in the UK without DSL, cable or other broadband, and have to use a 56K modem. This is painful when tracking unstable, particularly if a package changes the day after it has been downloaded.
Secondly I've been hit with serious problems with unstable in the past, broken LILO, inability to compile things and so on. Unstable is just too unstable at the moment.
Packages just don't appear to be migrating from unstable to testing quickly enough. It can be months before something finally migrates, often due to problems on the lesser platforms. Testing has been around for over 3 months now, and a lot is still grossly out-of-date or unavailable. A lot of this has to do with debconf being updated 2-3 times a week for the past few months, preventing packages dependant upon the newer debconf from migrating. The debconf issue is now fixed, but testing is still too far behind to be of any real use.
The version of Gnome in testing is still 1.0.55!
As for KDE 2.0, it hasn't appeared yet, except for the i18n files, which are no use on their own.
So why doesn't it display a message stating that the patch is for the wrong version, as every other patch system appears to do?
One OS we resold included a must install patch on a floppy disk with the normal distribution CD, together with a note detailing the fix. The note was difficult to miss, being placed in the same envelope as the CD-ROM, and printed with large red type. The fix bumped up the minor revision number of the softeware, to make it easy to discover that the fix hadn't been applied. We still took support calls from customers who hadn't installed the fix, even though it would only cause a system outage of 10 minutes or so.
Some people are just stupid.
Unfortunatly I'm not in range of one of the current transmitters.
This is no more than an Anti-Virus software vendor getting free publicity, trying to score brownie points over their competitors.
Manic Miner was a 20-screen platform game that drove the Spectrum to its limits - flicker free sprites and background music had not been attempted before at the same time. Other action games were poor in comparison at that time (mid 1983) - Imagine (one of the few other software houses producing anything of quality) had the graphics but lacked the gameplay and suffered from bad flicker too.
Jet Set Willy added to the formula by adding more rooms (now 60) by using an encoding system instead of the one-byte-per-character of the original. Extra hazards had been added - ropes, arrows etc. The graphics of the hazards were astounding and really well animated.
There were also a lot of odd references in the rooms - Pink Floyd, Furry Freak Brothers, Imagine Software (also dug at in Manic Miner) and many more. The game was impossible to complete as it was just too big.
Jet Set Willy II appeared later. By this time Matthew Smith had disappeared, and the game was basically a back-port of the Amstrad version of JSW 1. More rooms (40-50?)had been added, by means of a more sophisticated compression mechanism, but the colouring of the screens suffered as a consequence. The new rooms were not as good, with nowhere near as intricate designs. The new sprites were on the whole a poor imitation of the original.
FTP's first attempt at a Windows telnet client must have been the worst terminal emulator ever. It was utter junk, and proprietary as well. What made matters worse was that at the time there was no other TCP/IP stack that ran with our Banyan PC clients. Finally WINSOCK appeared. and we could use anything.
There were a lot of real nasty bugs with later versions. Version 2.3 was really nasty, causing all kinds of compatability problems whose details I have since forgotten. These were so bad that Banyan dumped them and when to IPSwitch instead.
Are FTP software still going? I hope not!
Like the AV-8?
Probably the same computer illiterate management responsible for installing Windows NT, back in the days of version 3.5x.