setquk

I love blowing electrolytic capacitors up. I still do that today.

Good to know. Thanks for posting.

That’s terrible. I hope nobody is hurt

Ouch!

I've done stupider things during last ditch repairs. Once time I replaced the tantalum caps on a board blindly hoping that it would cure a power rail short. I'd never used SMD tants before and didn't know that the band was a + band and not a - band. Within 3 seconds of applying power, there was a fireworks display which destroyed the board entirely :)

Neither. They are an infection vector.

Well at least we're leading in something in the UK still: craziness.

Well that was depressing. My wife has sarcoidosis.

However while depressing it's gloriously mind opening and motivating to do some quality stuff.

I could generalise it as anything with fast rise times. A 74lvc14 can kick out a 400ps edge even if you clock it at 1Hz for example. That's got quite some harmonic energy.

Also it's usually the really slow stuff I have that oscillates madly :(

Totally agree with direct to PCB if the problem domain does not fit manhattan or dead bug. I usually do that if anything is non trivial anyway as it's less of a PITA generally

Trying to express a circuit design onto any fixed layout has non trivial side effects that you don’t want. Parasitics and poor grounding are a nightmare. I don’t know why people use prototype boards at all.

I am using this construction technique which is good down to DC and good up to 1GHz or so. I’ve built very non trivial things with it:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2403/db840e6874e29f55ad9a45...

I don't want to live anywhere other than London.

In UK that's downpayment for a shed.

Three worries for me:

1. I know the risk of only being able to peer through the fence at the distant piece of software that is running your business, unable to gain any insight while your production application is limping badly and customers are running away like water. On top of that, thrashing it out with Mr Clippy is better than average support. If my business depends on it I want experts at hand who have the tools and the access they need to do the job they do.

2. The insane pace of serverless is entirely fad driven and lacks quality engineering which is required for critical pieces of software. The tools are universally poor quality, unstable, unreliable, poorly documented and built on gaining mindshare, making IPO and selling conference seats. Best practice never materialise as the rate of change does not allow an ecosystem to settle and work the bugs out. The friction is absolutely terrible but no one speaks of this in fear of their cloud project being labelled a failure. Every person I have spoken to for months is hiding little pockets of pain under a banner of success. Some people clearly will never deliver and burn mountains of cash hiding this.

3. Once you enter an ecosystem, you are at the mercy of the ecosystem entirely, be that a service provider or a tool. Portability is always valuable. It has cost, scalability, redundancy and risk benefits far beyond the short term gain of a single vendor decision. I'm currently laughing at an AWS quote for a SQL Server instance with half the grunt, no redundancy, no insight possible for only 2x the capex and opex combined of dedicated hardware including staff. But can't move to Azure because everything is tied into SQS.

I can never be behind anything but IaaS myself. This is contrarian especially in this arena but I will put my 25 years of experience on the line every time and say that it is the right thing to do. IaaS is choice, flexibility, allows you to gain deep insights and protects you from serfdom, fad technology and pick and choose mature products rather than what the vendor sees fit.

This is just another rehash of buying a mainframe. It's just bigger and you pay hourly to write COBOL.

Sorry for the delayed reply. Have been too busy.

Today I got a delivery for 6 revision books for my daughter. One is incorrect. I know when I return it, I'm going to get the same damn wrong book again because somewhere along the line someone doesn't give a fuck and everything is so utterly compartmentalised.

I only say this is going to happen because it has happened to me twice before.

Then there's the two marketplace sellers I've complained and complained about and they didn't deal with it at all.

Whereas the OP got shafted once.

It's an efficient bureaucracy, reminiscent of the film Brazil, nothing more.

plusnet and EE are turds. Total turds. The worst of all of them to be honest apart from possibly Talk Talk.

I'm only talking 2 years ago. And we do have netflix and it's simply tough shit!

In 2002, I had 1mbit.

Perhaps the poster has a new MacBook Air with butterfly keyboard? :)

There's going to be a massive rise in this sort of stuff over the next few years. Firstly consolidation, then organisations too large to care about their clients, then semi-automated punishment. Always remember that Amazon is in the same business as everyone and they can burn you down in a second if they decide they don't care. It's a pond full of bureaucratic crocodiles and the biggest one is boss. On numerous occasions companies have shipped me "fuck you" instead of what I paid for and Amazon won't deal with that. It's no better than a traditional market now. The good traders lose to the bad ones, the customers lose to everyone and the only winner is the landlord.

The only thing you can do is refuse to play.

I'd get a (off shelf) storefront up on a domain you control and can remain in control of and start looking for alternative sources of customers. If you have a customer database of any kind, send out marketing emails with product / brand relaunch. Start posting on twitter, insta, google adwords, popular related forums, everything you can. If you have a loyal customer base they will find you again. I know I would.

I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.

Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.

They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.

Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.

This is what I’m doing. Linode box.

You’re probably on a major ISP. Only the major ones in the UK are blocked and regulated. The smaller ones aren’t deemed as important.

The only reason I don’t run a BSD derivative is laziness. It requires more maintenance effort than xubuntu. Back in the distant past I ran NetBSD on SPARC at home.

I’d quite happily be paid to work with it all day but no one wants to hire me to do that. So centos it is.

I returned it because of duplicate keypresses being registered. Same problem my friends faced with their machines. The keyboard feel was fine. Takes a couple of days to get used to it but I prefer it.

I had it for three weeks. They had extended return times around Christmas which was handy or I’d have to have fought the repair/replace process.

I’d just sold my old 15” MBP before it failed so I am now using an old thinkpad T440 running xubuntu.

I’m more glad I have £1630 of cash in the bank than having the MBA if I’m honest.

Everyone I know who bought a 2018 MBA, me included, has returned it due to keyboard issues. Which is a shame because I loved the damn thing apart from that.

Non issue. This is just haptic feedback when you get to the limit. I hope it does log the speed as well as the last two accidents on the road I live on people were killed by idiots doing 40+ mph in a 20mph limit.

What is a problem is fixing this shit when it breaks. Which it will because it adds to the bottom line cost of the vehicle so will be done by the lowest bidder.

Having had chicken pox as an adult I hope he enjoys it as much as I did.

Took me two years to get over it completely.

Because you're not exfiltrating data on a web server. It's already there!

No because we formed study groups and did it collectively.

I think they understand that if you give customers no option they will be forced to comply with their wishes and act as a monthly revenue stream.

However they also misunderstand people's reluctance to put all your eggs in a large basket out of your control that disappears in a puff of smoke if you stop paying for it plus their ability to want to avoid paying a monthly fee.

At some point it'll backfire.