Posts by Lotaresco 1501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2007
"Standedge Tunnel"
Probably better described as Standedge Tunnels, since there are four of them, two single track and one double track railway tunnels and one canal tunnel all linked by adits. It's a phenomenal work of engineering, the trick of using the canal to drain the railway tunnels is a clever element of the design.
… a bigger vacuum cleaner. A Spaceballs sized vacuum cleaner in fact.
I see Mark Wood has appealed to the government to overthrow this vote. He's continuing his claims from three days ago that Nominet is "part of the critical national infrastructure" and has stated several times that "The government is watching the situation closely". This sounds like an appeal to cronies in government to back up his particular right to the gravy train. An independent not for profit Nominet would be an asset to CNI since it would be independent of commercial interests and have a vested interest in providing an efficient service. Nominet as-is with its burbled nonsense about "for profit with a purpose" only had an interest in maximising the payments to its officers. That was the "purpose" of profit as seem by the chairman, directors, and CEO.
Nominet claims Government could intervene in boardroom ousting
"Mr Wood claimed the Government may intervene using an obscure claims of the Digital Economy Act to retake control of the registry in the event of a “serious” failing that could harm consumers."
I agree with Simon Blackler that Mr Wood was, and is, trying to spread FUD and I'll add that he appears to be trying to bamboozle the government with technobabble in the hope that he can scare them into letting him continue to profit from Nominet.
Hal Stewart (Tighten) has his own rocket company, we're doomed!
"Officially, for corporates and government departments, so they can keep their data secure when the machines get sent off for repair, or re-allocated to other departments."
Officially according to whom? UK GOV does not trust third parties with their data and SSDs are regarded with great suspicion. Disk wiping is not approved for SSDs so the only permitted option is to remove the SSD and destroy it. The Surface Pro 7+ helps in that respect because it's now possible to remove the SSD and dispose of it securely, but it's not so much "keeping data secure" as "ensuring the data was destroyed".
I'm glad that I didn't take up Fujitsu's Borg offer to join them in 2015 when they annexed the IT services at the place where I was working. It has been a constant round of disappointments for those who did TUPE into Fujitsu and the levels of anger expressed by those people is growing. It becomes counter productive fairly quickly. People I know who were always willing to help are now work-to-rule enthusiasts. They will just do the minimum to avoid getting fired and that's it. Also any change that could possibly be construed or misconstrued to affect Health and Safety results in the instant downing of tools. For example a new data centre was built and someone on a tour didn't see the emergency exit button, even though the tour guide showed it off. When they got back to the flock they told everyone that there was no emergency exit which resulted in every worker refusing to enter the DC, which means that none of them saw the button and the union got involved and... it all dragged on far longer than it needed to. People only do this stuff when they are unhappy.
People were enticed to accept the move with a lower salary but with more "benefits" such as a company car and fuel card. I'll have to go back and see what mood they are in now.
"Unsurprisingly, the politicians refused to implement the ban."
The same in the UK. It's easy to stop scammers making scam phone calls. Just make it illegal for anyone to make an unsolicited sales call or "survey" call. Require any organisation that wants to contact members of the public obtain a licence before they can operate and post a bond to cover compensation claims. All sales calls to be opt-in, and no blanket opt-ins permitted. This went before Parliament and what we got was the TPS, an opt-out system with no real teeth.
"Personally, I call that corruption."
So do I. It's obvious that politicians will not take effective action if there's a chance that a party donor will no longer be able to make money hand over fist.
"I will definitely be using that in future to use asa spam filter and also see who is selling my email address."
I've used my own domain reserved entirely for communication with retailers etc for a couple of decades. Each retailer gets <theirname>@mydomain as an address. That way I can tell very easily who is selling email addresses. So far none of the companies I deal with for banking, insurance, travel, or retail has sold my address to anyone. Sadly the same is not true for conference organisers. Those b*stards sell email addresses to anyone, the spammier the better. All of the spam that gets dumped in the bit bucket has an email address previously used to register for a conference. No, I don't want the once in lifetime opportunity to buy an apartment in Dubai. I think I'd rather remove my nipples with a cheese grater.
I used to work in government. There were three of us with exactly the same name separated in the GAL by putting a number after our names with no other indication of who did what. So as an IT security person I got questions about getting visitors passes (no idea, ask #2) and about some light engineering jobs (see #1). It gets so tedious that at times it's tempting to pretend to be the other person and make up the advice.
I had that about six years back and then again just recently. In the first case someone misspelled their own email address. A single character omission meant that all mail relating to their Next online account was coming to my domain. I tried to notify Next that the mail was not being delivered. And all I could get was autoreplies that they are not authorised (DPA) to talk to me about someone's personal details. They were particularly obtuse and refused to recognise that if mail is sent to my domain then it's my mail. I solved that problem in the end by configuring my mail server to auto-forward all of the mail for that account to their CEO, CFO and postmaster, adding a note to each email to tell them why they are f*cking idiots. It took a year before they did something, during which time I accumulated many demands for payment, threats of court and bailiff action etc. Presumably their poor customer never received a request for payment. They has interesting tastes in wellingtons and big knickers.
The second time was weirder still. I started to get lots of mail to my .eu and .it domains. All of it about the funeral trade, adverts for coffins, cremation devices, shrouds etc. At first I thought someone was taking the p*ss but then one mail arrived with an invoice that had an address and I recognised the address as being in the same city as one of our offices in Italy. Next time I was over at the office I walked around to the funeral director and asked why they were issuing accounts that were using our domain. Their IT guy looked puzzled and said that he assumed that since their business was named after the city he could just use that name in their domain and mail would mystically be routed to their servers. I stared at him and suggested that either they get their own domain or I'd start charging for their use of our servers. Oh and BTW what did he want to do with all the mail that we had ended up with? I told him I was going to charge him if we had to forward it to them. It all ended up being deleted.
Alas, it is Patel burnishing her hard Brexiteer credentials
It doesn't matter how extreme, divisive or even murderous a political movement is. There are still those who will support politicians who are actively targeting their own community or religion because they see personal gain in being a collaborator.
I am a first generation Imigrant to the UK. I was born here but both my parent are Italian and came here in the 50's, but because I am white I am treated as English, My name is NOT English but people just accept it.
You're lucky. I'm a first generation migrant the other way - to Italy. My friends left Italy to work in the UK on the South Coast, they've had to return to Italy because of the racist attacks they have suffered at home, at work and on their children in the local school. They speak fluent English, so this is targeted racism. Someone has worked out they are Italian and is orchestrating attacks against them.
We encounter racism in Italy. I've been told to go home, had hunters on my land shouting racist insults at me, and even had racism from public officials. When I tried to register my car the official refused to process the paperwork and told me "Brexit has happened, go home, we don't want you." It's common for people to pretend they can't understand me speaking Italian too - yet north of Perugia everyone understands me and I get complimented on bothering to lean Italian.
Racism exists everywhere, but it has got worse in the UK and in Italy since the rise of populism in politics. Salvini encouraged anti-immigrant politics.
Compact code simply didn't fit the corporate style.
I was once reprimanded because in the Monday team meeting I announced that in the previous week I had spent time pruning the cruft out of the code and had speeded up execution times, improved reliability and got rid of many, many errors that had been fixed not by correcting the errors but by writing a routine to "adjust" the outputs.
Fixing our own mistakes was a revenue earner. Slow execution time a good reason for marketing to sell the customer a new improved system and keeping a large farm of coders in work made the boss look good because he was responsible for a large team.
Oh and of course the thousands of lines that I pruned away looked like negative productivity on the metrics.
Our helldesk is outsourced to an outfit with a name very similar to a well known brand of brown sauce.
IIRC that means that the work is done in the Czech republic. Their English language skills are much better than centres outside Europe but they are under the usual pressure to get you off the phone ASAP and aren't going to be spending lots of time on actually fixing the problem.
A quick web search confirms that Pen Island, maker of branded business gifts, still has their original domain name online.
It is very important, in a work context, to note that www.penisland.net is the domain name for Pen Island. Do not confound it with www.penisland.com.
This has been a public service announcement.
"Now publish all your personal data online so that you can experience what it is like to be a TalkTalk customer."
I was very tempted to Tweet that in response to her Tweet around 08:30 today. However I decided to stand back and avoid getting crushed in the stampede. Although AFAICS you're the only other person with a mind running on the same wonky rails as mine.
"...while it's incredibly impressive to do it, is there any real advantage to this approach (other than you don't have to dry them out)?"
With SRBs they were recovering metal rings from the sea. The Falcon is a more complex liquid fuelled system with turbopumps and electrical systems. For the SRBs, a good wash and dry and then inspection and that's it, ready to add propellant. The amount of work to do after getting a Falcon booster wet makes it prohibitively expensive to ditch and recover.
"I was tempted to buy a black Audi/BMW/Merc a couple of years ago, but I didn't fancy the operations required (fingers surgically removed to prevent signalling, and lead weight added to right foot)."
You also have to have the latest iPhone superglued to the palm of your right hand and to your left ear.
"The Middle Lane Owners Club seems to have markedly increased its membership since lockdown"
The same people have also joined the OLOC and the "I'm going to pull out of a junction without looking" clubs. One of the latter did that to me this morning, fortunately on a dual carriageway so I was able to steer around him rather than slam into his car. As I did so he was frantically flashing his lights at me. What the actual? In fact light flashing now seems to mean that the driver flashing their lights just did something monumentally stupid but wants to blame everyone else for it. See also "behaviour when a 40 everywhere twonk is overtaken on a straight road, no oncoming traffic, NSL (60) applies.
"The Hindenberg fire was intense but extremely vertical"
I know people like to get worked up over the Hindenburg disaster each time hydrogen is mentioned, but the fact is that the disaster had a remarkable survival rate. Of the 97 passengers and crew 62 survived, a 64% survival rate. All the more remarkable because the fire started when the Hindenburg was 295 feet above the ground. It was a tragedy for the 35 who died and their relatives, but if we compare it with heavier than air crashes the odds were pretty good.
Part of the reason for the high survival rate was as stated that the fire tended to lift vertically away from the airframe. Also unlike a kerosene fire hydrogen burns with a blue flame and emits relatively little radiant energy. People in the gondola were not subjected to high temperatures. Finally although the hydrogen was burning it continued to provide enough lift to lower the airframe to ground at a survivable velocity.
Yes it was a disaster but given the engineering of the era (no seat belts, no crash protection structures) it was the use of hydrogen as the lifting gas that actually saved lives.
"This being a British website, how come there aren't any references to the R101?"
The R101 was a flawed design, hence the crash. I'd prefer to see references to the R100 designed by Barnes Wallace and Neville Shute which was a success, it managed to visit Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls in a single tour. The R101 only just made it across the Channel. 69 miles from Dieppe before crashing, roughly outside a McDonalds, had one been there at the time.
"Hydrogen is extremely difficult to store, because it leaks through any container, including solid metal. The molecules are small enough to get through tiny imperfections. I am not sure how this is fixed in practice."
Given the rate of fuel consumption by an airliner it's not really a problem. The aeroplane will need to be fuelled before take off and will use most of the fuel to get to its destination. Aircraft don't hold full tanks for long periods. Although hydrogen does diffuse through metals the rate of diffusion is relatively slow.
It may be a problem for cars, where the car sits around losing fuel in a parking place, but not so much for air transport.
I was a very early customer. But I left at the time of the Godfrey debacle. I didn't object to the way they handled things, I objected to their "crap legal team" which tried to get me to sign a document that indemnified them *without limit* for the consequences of their own decisions.
All a shame because some of the Demon higher ups were friends but the wheels started to come loose with the sale to Thus plc. At least Cliff got a pink Rolls Royce out of it. Never found out who eVaPoR8 was.
I still own one of Demon's domains that they let slip in a previous cock-up, but it's not demon.co.uk.
"Hailing from a WordPerfect/SuperCalc5/AllyCad/Lotus1-2-3 (for DOS) world, I can say that the software was well thought out, so once you got good muscle memory for the / commands (in SC5 and Lotus) then you can get really up to serious speed, especially when doing fancy things."
I started with those tools in the 80s because they were all that the IT department in the biotech business that I worked in would support. They were useless for my purposes (statistical analysis, clinical trials, regulatory submissions) Lotus 123 had severe limitations and was actually slow to use. Even a slew of add-ins to supposedly improve functionality didn't help.
I went out and bought my own Macs so that I could use Excel and a number of statistics applications as well as Mathematica. None of these were available on Windows at the time. I can recall MS fans at the time telling me that my SE/30 8/80 was "ridiculously over powered" at the time and that they couldn't see the point of Trinitron monitors, dual screens, and the 24bit RasterOps Colourboard 264 that I had fitted to the SE/30 so that I could code on the 9" B&W monitor and see output on the colour display.
Now everyone seems to have a multi-monitor setup and more RAM than I had hard disk storage until around 1992.
I remember when all round here were fields, you know?
"There is the 800kg gorilla in the mists - Illustrator"
Well yes there is Illustrator but Adobe's interfaces, Illustrator being one of the worst, can suck army boots down 15mm tube. The previously mentioned Aldus Freehand had a superior interface and much better control of points, handles, and curves. It also handled objects within objects and intersections between objects better than Illustrator does today. Sadly defunct because Adobe bought it and killed it.
People tend to want whatever they use next to look like whatever they use now. Having just bought a Japanese car and spending a week frantically wiping my windscreen when I intend to signal a turn, I appreciate standard interfaces. But could we at least ensure that the interfaces are fit for purpose rather than "something I'm used to"?
Yes Persuasion was my preferred presentation package. Back then Powerpoint didn't understand transparency which made doing any graphic on a background irritating.
I've tried Inkscape over the past few days. It's far too much like Corel Draw for my liking. It has that awful ribbon swatch of colours at the bottom of the window and feels primitive, more so than Libre Office Draw.
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