Posts by AndrueC 5084 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
Wow, a blast from the past. That was the platform a previous employer used. Wasn't it Notes that displayed those odd hieroglyphics as you typed your credentials?
Mind you for a while I managed to avoid it. I and a colleague were using OS/2 Warp so we got to enjoy ccMail instead. To be fair the integration with WPS could be quite awesome at times (I still think WPS was the best graphical shell I've ever used) but unfortunately ccMail would occasionally barf and lock the WPS message queue.
That would require us to ask someone to Telnet into our machine and kill the WPS process. It was solved eventually when IBM relented and gave WPS multiple message queues.
Happy days :)
Why not ping to see if a connection is available?
And another reason is that responding to a ping is not mandatory. Any router or the target device can decide not to bother if it can't afford the time. It might also be configured never to respond to pings at all.
A ping failure does not necessarily indicate a connection failure. It might not even indicate a fault. And if it indicates a fault it could be so close to the target as to be irrelevant/unfixable.
I remember standing in the car park outside the office late morning to see a partial eclipse I think that must have been March 2006.
I also remember going out in the playground as a child to see something. I remember using an unexposed photograph but I'm a bit puzzled which one that was. I thought I was at Congleton which implies 1972/73 but nothing seems to fit even looking a couple of years later when I was at Exeter doesn't seem like there was anything to see.
Puts me in mind of this pretty horrible case of death by cleaning.
Why I always ensure I have a working telephone with me when working in an enclosed space.
Floating point calculations in programs are a horror just waiting to trip you up when you least expect it. It's rather ironic that computers are actually pretty bad(*) at performing floating point calculations. The one thing everyone expects them to do and they are bad at it...
(*)There are of course ways to mitigate the problem but you have to choose to use them. I suspect most programmers don't even know there's a problem. They think that 1/10 is easy to calculate :)
The guy is just a founder of a company who sells a piece of crap os and some other software.
If Windows is 'a piece of crap os' what do you call a 'competing' os that has failed to usurp it in its primary market place?
"In the area of desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft Windows is the most commonly installed OS, at approximately between 77% and 87.8% globally. Apple's macOS accounts for approximately 9.6–13%, Google's Chrome OS is up to 6% (in the US) and other Linux distributions are at around 2%"
A 'piece of crap' has nearly 90% of the market, Linux has 8%. The job of an OS is to provide services and it's clear that Windows is providing services to far, far, far more people than Linux. Measure by what it achieves not what your friends in the ivory tower think.
Even in the server market Windows still has a very healthy share and is continuing to give Linux a run for its money despite Linux being (sort of) free and Windows very much not.
It's only really the mobile market where Windows could be said to have failed.
There are many, many things wrong with Windows. It gets up my nose every day (that and Visual Studio) and Linux is technically superior. But calling Windows 'a piece of crap' is silly and demonstrably wrong. Operating systems and software exist to do a job and it's obvious that Windows and its software stack has been doing the job well enough to remain a dominant force.
This is not true, at least on Teams. I think it must have changed places at least three times in the last year. And they still haven't cottoned on to space bar for mute.
My main complaint with Teams is that you can't maximise a desktop that someone is sharing with you. You can't even remove the icons of the participants as far as I know. All of us have the same screen size so it's now more difficult to read the shared screen because it's always significantly scaled down.
Been that way for nearly a year now.
"i don't understand why they will need extra 3 months to build the Full Screen Feature that is already in the current version? Before removing the feature that is commonly used, why not look at the status of the usage or ask the users? Microsoft has a habit of releasing Beta versions that's really not ready.."
Lol.
the best OpenReach speed I can get is 22MBps. No FTTP. That's laughable in the East.
One person's experience doesn't really prove much. You are well below the UK average connection speed (64Mb/s as of 2020) so all we know is that you're one of the unlucky ones.
Regardless you can have almost any connection speed you can imagine almost anywhere you want it. You just have to be prepared to pay for it. That's been the case for a good couple of decades now. There's almost nowhere BT (or its competitors) can't get a fibre optic cable termination point given enough financial encouragement.
If your use case is important enough to help the UK compete internationally it should be possible to justify that high cost. It sounds like you probably have FTTC available (ADSL can go that fast but not often) so have you checked the BT availability checker? A lot of areas that have FTTC (possibly most) have FTTPoD available.
Incidentally - can you explain exactly what it is you'd like to do that is impossible with 22Mb/s?
And how about not having to run a sodding word processor in your very profitable but very power thirsty "cloud"?
Playing devil's advocate a bit here but centralising the power consumption could make it easier to address power consumption. It would allow the data centre to use mitigation techniques and technologies that are not practical to roll out across the global power networks.
You could for instance build your data centre somewhere really cold to reduce cooling costs.
Of course whether you could ever reduce consumption enough to offset the costs of network access by clients is another matter. But being 'environmentally friendly' shouldn't mean 'never do anything that harms the environment'. If it did that would be the end of human civilisation. There needs to be an element of compromise. Things should be allowed to harm the environment (but with as much mitigation as is practical) if they have sufficient other benefits to our civilisation.
I leave it up to the reader to decide how much value 'the cloud' brings (or will bring) to human civilisation :)
The time has come, I say, to apply for many things. A job as a shoemaker? Shipbuilder? Fabricant of sealing wax? Cabbages? Kings?
How many crashes and deaths have we got so far due to lack of enough fuel on planes?
One pilot managed the world's longest glide in a passenger jet but that was down to a different problem. Although maybe that should be two problems. The main cause was poor maintenance leading to a fuel leak the other was making a decision based on inadequate information.
The last bit of piloting was a nice bit of flying though.
a 120km glide. Scary.
Corporations don't pay tax. Only people pay tax.
Taxation is just another business expense and all companies just pass it on to owners, staff and/or customers along with every other business expense.
That's why politicians like it. Most of the public don't understand this concept because their natural tendency is to anthropomorphise businesses. This makes them pleased when they hear that 'big bad business' is paying more tax.
We've tried VS Live Share but it seems a bit too slow and clunky. Our team tried to use it but we all reverted to just sharing our screens over Teams. Last time I used Live Share it appeared that I could only navigate those files that the host had already opened and I felt like a second-class citizen so retreated back to my own IDE instance.
Maybe the JB version is better but as an inveterate R# user I have my doubts. R# is two steps forward, one step back. Absolutely wonderful and essential right up to the moment when i-t s-u-d-d-e-n-l-y slows down, starts forgetting about things or just flat out chucks out garbage. It's been doing that since we first used it many years ago and there's no sign of them ever fixing it so I'm not going to risk using their IDEs.
On the pricing front another thing to consider is that the less BT charges the harder it is for alternative providers to get a look in. If you make BT operate at a loss then other CPs will have to do the same thing and their pockets are not as deep.
To understand pricing changes there are two things you have to realise:
1. Openreach cannot arbitrarily change their prices. They are subject to legal regulation by Ofcom. BT are adjusting their prices because Ofcom is allowing them to. There have been cases where BT was forced to raise prices specifically to help their competitors.
2. The marketplace is price driven. This might come as a surprise to some but it absolutely is. Only a small minority want 'the fastest connection I can get'. The vast majority want 'a connection I can afford'. Simply making FTTP available does not guarantee a sale. Nothing like. Very few people currently pay for the best connection available to them. Virgin Media has several times closed down older products and given people a free upgrade because it was the only way to make them move.
In that scenario making legacy products more expensive while holding down pricing on new products (and assisting alternate providers) is not a bad solution.
In general, customers who can get FTTP take FTTP. At least, in our customer base.
Well yes but that's because most of your customers are discerning and demanding and already prepared to pay a premium for a better service. Out in the greater world I very much doubt that's true. Most people are buying on price and just aiming for 'good enough'. Those customers won't give AAISP (or other top shelf ISPs like mine - IDNet) more than a passing glance. They will similarly dismiss FTTP until/unless it is actually cheaper than the alternatives.
Ofcom have proven this strategy before (and this is openreach doing what Ofcom allows rather than openreach randomly raising prices). They know full well that this market is price driven. We've known pretty much since the early days of DSL that price is how you move customers. People don't buy on speed. They work out how much they can afford then they pick a service. So the intent here is to price legacy products to extinction.
Not a terrible idea but don't overlook the fact that openreach pricing affects all communication providers indirectly. Raising the price of your legacy connection makes you a more attractive target for altnets because it closes the charging gap and reduces their costs. It becomes easier for them to offer you something better at a price you might accept.
Eg;
Current situation:
£20 for FTTC. £30 for FTTP. Typical consumer doesn't want to pay £10pcm extra just to stop the kids moaning about game downloads.
Then the cost of your legacy product goes up and the cost of providing an alternative goes down..
£25 for FTTC. £25 for FTTP. Suddenly it's a no-brainer and consumers switch in droves. Sadly they are still bugged by their offspring because that's life.
If openreach was forced to charge low prices for legacy products it makes modern products look more expensive. And the market is very clearly price oriented. Anyone looking at the business case for laying providing a service will be well aware of that.
Yes and it's boringly predictable and sticks out like a sore thumb. I suppose that might be deliberate to deter people even trying the number but the UK system is more opaque so at least phone numbers look realistic. They even allow numbers to be localised to reflect where a film/show is based.
I thought Linux had done much the same thing for the same reason - performance.
Admittedly though it's been a long time since I've worried about the finer details of operating systems so I could well be misremembering. I can believe that MS moved too much of it into the Kernel though. Video is probably worth moving but printers don't need that kind of performance.
Damn, I didn't think of that. Yeah it makes sense. Annoyingly.
I have two printers now. A laser printer that is almost never used (which is why I went laser for the long ink shelf life) and an inkjet that is used to print textures for my model making.
Printing to the laser opens HP eAdvantage. Printing to the Inket just goes straight to the queue. I can't be bothered to try and work out what's going on. Mind you trying to print anything with colour on the laser is a bad idea. For some reason it takes forever to prepare the document. I rarely do any printing other than the textures so for now I'm putting up with it :(
Come on, let's be realistic rather than simply trashing MS at the earliest opportunity. Exactly how many thousands of possible combinations of printer configurations, just to name one subsystem, does MS's OS support, exactly?
Not when it's a BSOD. It's only a bloody printer driver. Sure, it needs to respond to interrupts and have some form of I/O so at the very lowest level it must run at a high privilege. But that stuff shouldn't have changed for years.
But then the need for printer drivers has never made sense to me. Given how much intelligence we can pack into a printer why does any OS need to do anything other than say 'here's the data, get on with it'?
I spent a fair chunk of last Thursday fixing a collection of unit tests that had a similar problem. I removed a redundant class and suddenly found myself facing over a dozen test failures relating to code that I hadn't directly touched.
I was in a bad mood by the time I was done.
Dyson spheres are highly unlikely to ever be constructed anywhere. They would have a totally devastating impact on the climate of any planet orbiting the star, so are not a practical solution even if the means existed to make them.
Once you have the sphere you don't need the planet ;)
Assuming you can solve the gravity problem you have so much surface area to inhabit inside a Dyson sphere that the loss of one planet or a hundred, even a thousand is no big deal.
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