Re: As you might expect...
Earl or lady grey singles them out as anglophiles ?? WTF ??
Those are PonceyTeas, incapable of producing Proper Builders Tea. And they taste all, well, flowery.
560 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007
"Every Health and Safety rule is the result of at 3 occurrences"
Ok, now explain why a surveyor working in the middle of a field has to wear a hard hat, hi-vis vest and steel toe boots.
Because there haven't been 3 occurences of surveyors working in fields being trampled by cows becuase they were attracted by the hi-vis and the surveyor couldn't run away fast enough because of the workboots. Next.
You seem to forget the history of "purchase" of "digital content" (it was, of course, digital when "purchased" on CD, DVD, etc., but that tiny factoid has never worried the marketroids).
The narrative promulgated by Apple is that they created the market. Before iTunes it didn't exist. They gave the content copyright owners a way to protect (and grow) their revenue with non-physical "sales".
There's a certain amount of truth to this line. So, as "leaders" in the market's creation, Apple should be pilloried ahead of others if they do anything to make it less frictionless (sorry for the double negative there but I wanted to use that Brexit-related word)
Nope, I don't.
No-one, anywhere, here is talking about "zero-risk". Of course there's no such thing in The Real World.
But, if 30+ years of vulns have taught us anything, it's that far too much stuff that looks low-risk on first, second, or even the hundredth examination, turns out to be easier to exploit that was realised in the earlier stages.
This is especially the case with these side-channel vulns, without too much in the way of thought experimentation, if you care to look at what they're actually all about.
Notice I said Sinclair rather than ZX experience, I was more thinking of the QL.
To say nothing of the black watch and the IC12. And the calculator. Those are what I remember Sinclair for.
Travesties, all of them. As I've said before, Chief Dick Sinclair created the IC12 (rated 12W peak, hence the name) by taking a Plessey 10W peak rated IC amp and, errr, sticking a heatsink on it. That was his level of understanding of semiconductor thermal management. And how I learnt all about it the hard way, repeatedly blowing them up....
The mineral contains small pockets of inert gases preserved from the chemical reactions from when the Sun’s energetic protons smashed into the calcium and aluminium atoms in the crystals
I didn't think energetic protons smashing into atoms and bringing about a change of atomic number or some other nuclear reaction fell into the definition of "chemical reactions".
Otherwise, how do you tell legit residents from those lying through their teeth?
Well, in this case, quite obvs, it was done by skin colour. And that is what was so utterly, utterly disgusting about it.
I don't know, today, just what documentary proof might be demanded in 50 years by some Government to determine my citizenship rights. It could well turn out that I'm missing some bit they consider vital then.
But, my skin is The Right Colour, so I guarantee it wouldn't be an issue.
What you read about stolen identities and frauds in US, for example, or the Windrush story, are unheard of in countries with an ID system.
My bullshit-o-meter hit the endstop with that claim of "identity theft unheard of in countries with an ID system."
So I did a bit of googling. It seems France, well-known for its ID cards, does indeed have an identity theft issue. As does, unsurprisingly, every country in the Known Universe.
Here is but one academic study for your digestion to back this assertion up.
everyone has their own view and even the users sometimes don't know what they actually want/need or their individual needs differ
"T-Government" (Transformational Government - yes, really) which was going to be the successor to E-Government was going to fix all that.
What people needed would be defined by the IT spec, not the other way round. Yes, really. I remember sitting through this crap whilst a minister talked about it.
Why does this keep happening time and time again?!?
Because there are no/insufficient people capable of framing contracts properly and then managing them within uk.gov.
AKA client-side capability. The cost of which is clearly never properly factored into this sort of thing.
DafT are just the same. It's the root cause of the current rail fiasco - and first became blindingly obvious after Virgin's successful challenge of the ECML franchise award. Which, of course, is still to be re-tendered.
Then, of course, there's the Home Office. G4S tagging fiasco. Probation service fiasco. etc. etc.
And the G4S Olympics security fiasco.
Let's not mention DWP and the WCA.
All, every single one, symptomatic of ineffective client-side contract management. And the constant forgetting of the maxim that the Government can (maybe) transfer (some) financial risk, but the risk of service delivery failure can never be transferred. After all, that's the job of the government.....
Yeah. Amey. West Berks Council.
You'd think people would have learnt and wouldn't outsource to them. They have form going back well over a decade. And some of us <cough> saw this coming
We're now over 3.5 years since free-flowing (sic) charging was introduced at the Dartford Crossing.
Also known as DartCharge.
The payment service for this is still in alpha. Yes, alpha. A live service. Nearly 4 years after it went live.
You really, really, really couldn't make it up, could you ?? And these clowns think they can get a technological solution to managing tariffs without turning Kent into one sodding great lorry park ?? I don't think so.
https://www.dartford-crossing-charge.service.gov.uk/Home/Choose
@'s water music: "Perhaps May's genius was to take the famously 'not fit for purpose' department and redefine its incompetence as a performance target."
Oh, you deserve 1000 upvotes for that one. Superb.
And then she claimed that her civil servants were being over-zealous for, errrrr, implementing the hostile environment that was her policy. And anyway, it was all the fault of the Windrush people for not having the documents that they errr, didn't need at the time or for decades afterwards. Kafka must be so impressed.
I don't think it was "fecked up by design" - i.e. the original intention in the design being to feck it up.
"The design was fecked-up" is perhaps what you meant.
Then again, that's pretty standard for any networking protocol designed at the same time, when security was, well, not considered at all. SMTP probably stands out most of all :-) (although that does of course predate SMB by some considerable margin)
Perhaps one of the reasons why meltdown impacted all the major chips in very similar fashion, no?
Indeed not. It's because the meltdown vuln and similar is an inevitable result of the execution-time optimisations common across the x86 arch (and likely also to show up in any CISC execution-time optimisation in some form or another - were there any other CISC arch left around.....)
.....as we saw for example with roaming charges and more recently with environmental legislation.
To say nothing of getting Microsoft to cough up the necessary docs to properly interoperate with AD. Which neither the US government nor the UK government managed to achieve.
Not that that gov.UK could be arsed to do anything about it
Only way things will improve is if the public sector .... starts to police contract awards effectively.
But, as someone up there somewhere said, the set of skills needed to be effective on the client side of a contract of this nature, and the set of skills needed to effectively manage the job in-house have a pretty massive overlap.
Add into that, as I keep banging on, you can transfer financial risk (at least in the short term) from the public sector to the private sector, but the risk of service failure will always fall to the public sector. Along with the concomitant costs....
It's not "terrible coverage" that you're suffering from. It's the Laws of Physics, Jim.
In this case, radio propagation. The idea that coverage can be achieved in every single cubic centimetre of a city is Total Bollocks (tm) (1). With far fewer massive solid objects to reflect the waves and cause multipathing, you could perhaps get closer to that in rural areas. But there, of course, there aren't enough base stations and the issues become signal strength and line of sight rather than multipathing.
(1) Ob. Peter Cochrane - unless we'd put fibre into every home with NTEs that were also pico-cells.
Yes.
When I read "....has descended into a horrible, stinking mess that sullies the Spectrum legacy" I couldn't help but think "more than it did to itself back in the day"
Black watch, anyone ?? Just for starters.
IC12 ? Take a Plessey IC amp, stick a heatsink on it, and uprate it from 5W to 12W. Quality engineering, that was.
My Dad (RIP) was worse on a touchscreen than a kbd/mouse, unfortunately.
He appeared utterly incapable of just tapping the screen without touching it for ages and sliding his finger across, thus generating an entirely different gesture from the one intended.
Also, I couldn't remote in with teamviewer to clear the mess up/show him what he needed to do. Still, on the upside, he was doing he banking online until he reached 95 years old or so. Was even persuaded to give up the paper statements.
DEC-10 KI10 processor, even better. Absolutely massive transformer in each 38" rack (each processor was 2 of them plus a 3rd for console, DECTapes, paper tape reader/punch, hundreds of blinkenlights) full wave rectification, even bigger caps for smoothing. 8VDC or so fed to series stabilisers down to 5VDC for the TTL along each row. The series stabiliser power transistors were in their own airflow up the end of the row.
Aircon and humidifier failures totally swamped any power issues (if any, this was South Kensington :-) )
fairly reliable system.....As long as you can get fuel for the damn thing
And as long as you don't end up running the system in an environment filled with dust (that wasn't in the design spec), you lose access to it, and the air filters get blocked.
See 9/11.
TBF, you did say "fairly reliable". That was an extreme event.
But woe betide you if you have an address that's hard to find (esp by the cowboys they use for Prime delivery)
Told them at least 10 times how to find us. One guy who did a superb job finding us all by himself then spent 10 minutes talking to Amazon Control Central and told me our place was now on their geolocation and there would be no further difficulties.
Hahahaha
So bad, I default to delivery to the nearest pickup point (a 5 mile drive away) as it's easier on my blood pressure. No use for anything other than small items, of course.
Apart from the repeated leveraged buyouts, the increasingly LQT, and the painful greetings on entering the store, whilst I studiously avoided eye contact, that's your problem right there.
Over 2000 stores ?? How could that ever, ever be justifiable for the stuff they sell ? According to Wikipedia, even Currys only has 295 superstores and 73 high street stores.
Oh, hang on, Wikipedia says only 218 stores. Still crazy high if you compare to Currys.
Depends on your use case. If you need to do some serious conditional processing based on headers, postfix just doesn't deliver (sic). As an exim guy needing to do this in an existing postfix installation, I tried, believe me. I really did try. Swapping MTAs in a live environment is not for the faint-hearted.
PDP/8 ??
Had 3 or 4 of those hooked up to our Dec10 at Imperial. And a few PDP/11s too.
Intersil 6100, PDP/8 on a chip, used that to build a 100x100 pixel imaging device. Never did get it following the bubble chamber tracks (neutrino experiment from SLAC, more tracks than you could imagine. The HPD had fun with those)
A properly-resourced client ?? Can't have that else we couldn't keep billing for non-existent tagged offenders or wait until the last minute for it to be found out that we can't actually deliver security for the Olympics (OK, they were G4S, not Crapita or Carillion, but the principle's the same)
Absolutely.
It's a total disgrace.
There's a list of FoI requests that our little rail travellers' association have put to DafT to which their first response is "We think that's commercially confidential, so we'll have to check with Southeastern before we answer it"
Basic stuff like "did the operator meet this or that condition of their contract, and if not what sanctions were imposed ?"
It's OUR money, and the service is critical to millions of people getting to and from work. But, hey, can't have transparency in providing that service, can we ?