Re: 2000 AD
Squaxx dek Thargo
191 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2009
Working at a company hosting a reasonably significant online-only trader. Network design, servers etc all set up to be properly redundant for potentially zero application down time. Arse-covering know-nothing senior mangler refused to allow down time regardless, even for patches - didn't want to take the grief if anything actually went wrong.
Come the day when the DC had a massive power outage, taking down everything (I'd left the company by then, but still in touch with good friends made there so got the story). Once power was restored, a goodly proportion of the (Cisco) switches were basically bricked - an actual bug in the Cisco OS (whoulda thought) causing gear that hadn't been restarted for 'n' days (actually years, if I recall) to very permanently retire itself.
Never did find out what happened to the mangler, hope he got dumped on from a great height but suspect he weaselled his way out of it.
The articles I've seen report that the signs were missing "due to vandalism". You'd have thought if the bridge has been out since 2013 something rather more substantial than signs that can be removed by vandals would be there. Like big lumps of concrete, or barriers bolted to the road. Like you, can't see how Google can be liable, but sueballs & lawyers, big target with lots of money...
It's not always the clueless users that are hard work. Dealing with people that do genuinely know their shit, just not necessarily the stuff we have the problem with right now can be tough. Mainly 'cos they tend to interpret what's going on and their responses are coloured by that. Genuinely trying to be helpful, most of the time, not just dick-waving "I am the supreme being in the universe" showing off. Something I always try to remember when escalating calls to vendors, if not always successfully :-)
Most of the competent people I deal with/ have dealt with are more than happy if I say something along the lines of "I know you know your shit[0], but just take your brain out and put it somewhere safe for a bit, I just need you to be my ears, eyes and hands so I can figure exactly what's going on".
RTS
[0] Grammar; the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.
Had a colleague do something similar whilst dialled in (yep, modems) to a customer system, RS/6000, probably AIX 4.3 or 5.1. Fortunately he 1) spotted the mistake/killed the command pretty quickly and 2) called for help immediately instead of trying to cover up. He lost a small amount of weight very rapidly too...
Some judicious investigation ("for $deity's sake don't drop the line"), assistance from several of us and remote copying from customer's other AIX systems on their network followed by a 'fess up to customer and a reboot to make sure all was good and you've never seen anybody look so relieved. We took the piss for a while afterwards, you definitely don't do that whilst the poor bugger's looking terrified.
Ta for that. So it is basically the bleeding obvious, even though I still say I hadn't spotted it as such. Silly me, there had to be a way of soaking up all those spare CPU/GPU cycles just lying around. Presumably reducing it is one of the ways MS have managed to ostensibly get Teams using "half the system resources".
Usual moan, stop giving me pointless 'features' and just give me something that lets me do the job in hand quickly, effectively and without faff. Don't get me wrong, I actually quite like Teams when it's working properly, I just hate having to re-learn application interfaces every time some sodding UI design team comes up with a new 'philosophy'
What the hell is shimmering (apart from the obvious naturally occurring optical effect)? Can anybody remember sitting in front of Teams saying "Bloody shimmering, it's destroying my user experience! Bastards!"? I mean, lots of other things screw the user experience and are the cause of invective, but shimmering? Last time I thought about that, I was using CRT monitors, fercrhissakes.
I must be getting too old for this, losing track of the latest buzzwords, obviously.
"Article suggests that MS submitted the finding with a bit of giddiness"
Oh dear. Reading what you want to read, I guess.
I saw this as a complimentary article describing how MS researchers responsibly reported a flaw in a widely used platform and Google's timely and effective response. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody played the game that way. Which they often do...
The suggestion that MS might be being triumphal about this is 1) yours and 2) a sub-ed's crack at titling the article in true Reg style, i.e. somewhat tabloidy and tongue in cheek playing on the traditional perceived antipathy between the two sides.
(edit: I try not to play Corp A vs. Corp B / Platform X is better than Platform Y games, it's counter productive. Just give me something that works safely, please)
--> It's also lifetime-guaranteed.
Yep, and they don't piss about when you need to use the guarantee either (at least at my local store). Only ever had to replace one thing, a T40 bit socket where the shaft broke. Straight up to the store, showed the lass on the counter, 2 minutes later walking out with the replacement.
Definitely worth watching out for the discounts, although they seem to have shifted to a paid-for loyalty scheme now to get the best discounts
We've come a long way from the 13kg Compaq Portable (luggable) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable). You could even get a carry case with a shoulder strap. One particular example proved to be robust enough (Compaq made a bit of a thing about how tough the case was) to survive bouncing down a flight of concrete stairs after the clasp on the aforementioned strap broke...
Ah, the joy of the diskette. Figuring out which manufacturer's media worked most reliably in which manufacturer's drives. Explaining to users why diskettes shouldn't be used as coffee cup mats. Carefully extracting the (usually 5.25") diskette from its jacket, rinsing it under a tap, drying off and replacing the diskette in the jacket of another sacrificial one, because the user (accountant's secretary) ignored the bit about cup mats. Explaining to a customer who was having trouble with reading diskettes that folding them in 4 to fit your shirt pocket really isn't a good idea. Turning single-sided diskettes in to dodgy double-sided by cutting the notch on the other edge of the jacket (it was an emergency, game state needed saving). Trying to get some sort of recognisable tune out of ACT Sirius (Victor 9000) diskette drives - which had variable speed zones across the disk. Attaching 8" drives ("Big D", I think?) to PCs for data transfer (EBCDIC to ASCII, anybody?).
Them were the days :-)
Our misdeed, if such it was, was using the Norton hex editor (this was when you could actually meet the guy and the utilities were genuinely useful) to change the internal commands in command.com. No checksums or anything awkward like that so you just overtyped the characters and wrote back to disk. Handy number of 4-letter commands to work with...
One of our corporate customers' support guys (good drinking buddy) got wind of what we were up to and did a rather more SFW version to defend against some of their more curiosity-driven/careless end users.
I can hear it now...
I had that bloke Bezos in the back the other week, wanted to know if I thought it'd be worth setting up a Martian doorstep delivery service. So I says to him "Nah mate, won't get a look in there, bloody Martians have got it all sewn up. You should see what they want for a cabbie licence, criminal I calls it. And they gets preferential use of the saucer lanes anyway so there's yer profit margin straight out the airlock. And that bugger Musk got in first with delivering a vehicle for type approval so all the cabs have to come from Tesla, looks ok but you try finding a charging point that's working this side of Phobos..."
> Microsoft focused "on our customer, and not politics or litigation,"
Amazing how virtuous you can be when you won the damn contract. Bet you many $ that had the contract gone the other way there'd still be the litigation, just with a different name attached. sed 's/Amazon and Oracle/Microsoft/g'
13A UK mains flex (not solid core) does the trick. Saw it used (carefully hidden from the eyes of the great unwashed) at an audio event for some pretty serious (read expensive) kit. Had a bit of a chuckle with the guys behind the stand about it, their professional take was that cable thickness/no. of cores was the important bit unless you run unfeasibly long lengths...
Y! made it pretty difficult to get info out of the groups even when you owned the group. As mentioned elsewhere a lot of active Y! groups migrated to groups.io, in our case mainly because it's one of the few that still support email-only operation and we (still) have some very web-averse members...
There was a lot of traffic on the groups.io forum around Y! groups whose owners had either disappeared, or weren't interested. Y! were completely unhelpful so there will be a lot of active groups whose archive will basically be lost.
Sigh. Yes, regular Ethernet is potentially lossy. No, gold plated cables won't help 'cos there are so many other funky ways and places that frames could go missing (like cheap switches that can't support all ports flat out at wire speed).
Lossless Ethernet is intended to guarantee frame delivery so's you don't have to add in things like error checking and retransmission further up the stack. Different animals.
I'd be curious to see if there's any research comparing the (rate of) development of fine motor skills in young children between handwriting and using a keyboard. It's at least partly the lack of those that produces the 'spider on acid' effect, so maybe there;s a spin-off benefit?
Possibly because 1) dragging weapons-grade nukes with you to Mars etc. might get a few people asking questions in the first place, and 2) getting to the point of being able to mine & refine nuke fuel once you're there probably isn't going to be top of the list of priorities for an new colony?
Guess you'd also have to hope the colonists have a bit more common sense to work with as well. Or maybe that we'd have worked out how to colonise other places apart from Mars, so that there's a chance of at least one colony (and thus humans) surviving.
@Bloodbeastterror
Spot on. Have an upvote. If you're going to be careful anywhere, do it with the headlines, First two comments (three with this one) are about the grammar - says it all, really. From the context of the article it should be 'lose' (something I've posted about before on ElReg, btw).
As a callow youth I used to think on the same lines. Started networking with sub-Mbps networks, where yeah, faster would be nice, through Mbps, then 4, 10, 16Mbps (spot the tech), and by the time 100Mbps appeared it was 'why would you want 100Mbps to the desktop?'. Same sort of question with 1Gbps, of course.
The answer is generally that most people, to begin with, don't need the higher bandwidth. But eventually, the ability to push high-bandwidth stuff around means apps appear which do exactly that. Then there's a killer (or at least ubiquitous) app that everybody uses and suddenly the big bandwidth connections start making sense.
Actually, I suspect what makes more of a difference is not so much the bandwidth as the improvements in stuff like latency, which tends to make the 'feel' of things that bit nicer. Kind of an intangible for most end users. Add in rapidly falling cost and a decent bit of backwards compatibility and it's just easier to put the new stuff in. As I think others have pointed out, the headline speed is more of a hook for marketing; fairly pointless unless you also develop the techniques to exploit it fully.
These days, I try not to think in terms of "what's the current use case?". If I can get the tech at a sensible price, the use case will probably turn up in due course, In the meantime, if all the extra tweaks improve my current usage, then that's a bonus to me.
Well done chaps, starting to tone it down. It's surprising what just darkening the side bars does for you, isn't it. Now all we really want is for the font sizes to be dropped a wee bit; that should increase the overall text density on screen and help to bring down the impression of burnt-out retinas.
Pics; still too big. And frankly, just plain pointless at times. And a banner ad above the Reg masthead? Why? In the name of any four gods you care to name, why? It just looks silly, as well as wasting vertical screen real estate. Put tower ads down the empty space at the sides or something, maybe.
@Betacam
Think you've missed the point of many of the comments - fix (or set a maximum for ) the width of individual articles by all means - once you're reading them. That's fine, for the reason you state.
However, on the front page, each article link is already constrained within its own container (essentially an 'n' column table (or grid if you prefer), whatever the markup used to achieve it). Allowing the value of 'n' to vary with the screen width is not that complex, frankly, and would allow more article links to be displayed. Which is highly desirable, given the larger text and wider spacing around the article links now which has reduced the number of articles visible at a glance.
And just to add another voice to the 'too much white' theme running through the comments, El Reg - it bloody hurts with all the clear space on the page. Way too bright. If you must keep this new theme (please don't), at least knock the background colour down a notch or two, even #fafafa would help.
First up, it would have been nice if you'd posted an article at the same time as pushing out the change so I didn't waste 20 minutes trying to work out what I'd done to my browsers
Second; there's a huge amount of wasted space on my main screen. Either make the page aware of what it's rendering on and use the space accordingly, or don't bother. And please don't make the header pic a third of the screen, it's pointless and irritating. I read the articles for the information, it's not a picture book fer chrissakes.
Third; not opening the article in a new tab? That's so basic I can't believe it's a deliberate design choice rather than a cockup, kindly fix it forthwith (edit: ah, it changes from black to a dark grey. Didn't spot that on the screen set the way it was. Grey. Really? C'mon...)
Fourth; what have you done with the 'visited' CSS so's I can see which articles I've already read? I use that sometimes as a fast-scan when looking for an article, not to avoid the article.
Fifth; article spacing on the main page; too much. I'm spending far more time scrolling up and down than before, it's a pain. And if you've got to have pics for the article, leave 'em in the rotating banner, or on a mouseover or something, don't throw another another possible row of article headers away just to look exciting and funky (or whatever).
That's from five minute's worth of browsing, so first impressions. But I'm concerned that as it stands it's not going to grow on me. The value of El Reg to me is the content, not the presentation so much. By all means make changes, but please don't lose sight of what people come here for. We enjoy the tabloid humour, since by and large it's not accompanied by tabloid-level journalism; let's not have the tabloid presentation style suited to limited attention spans for people who struggle to reach the end of a sentence, let alone a whole article.
Obligatory knee-jerk reaction from people who know sod all about the subject but think they need to be seen to be on the side of the poor old travelling public. Politicians should obliged by law to keep their mouths shut until they've had it explained to them with pictures and short words exactly what happened and why they shouldn't overreact.
There may well be areas where more money could be usefully spent, but it'll never stop something like this happening; all systems are fallible. It's how it's handled that matters, and in this case nobody died. The disruption (or length of it) could have been reduced if the major airports weren't running so close to full capacity, but that's a different argument for the politicians to get excited about / duck depending on where their constituencies are.
'Johnny Foreigner can't buy gasoline (petrol) from the pump in the USA.'
If you have more time to waste, try leaving the car at the pump, going through the queue to get pre-authorised, getting back to the car to realise that you've parked with the filler on the wrong side and the hose doesn't reach, getting back in the car to turn it around, grab the hose again and then realise that the authorisation has timed out, meaning you've got to do the whole thing again. This at a Wawa in Collegeville, PA, where the counter staff just randomly walked off leaving the queue wondering...