Aha!
So it now matches the 8 bit ZX Spectrum palette of the Metro UI. Nice move.
9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
instead of arseing around with UI, they'd fix some basic stuff like Apple Mail's Exchange Connector not working properly anymore. And before anyone says that's Apple, not MS, I'm reliably informed that it was MS wot broke it and it's them wot's gotta fix it. You just don't know how important it is to be able to ditch as much MS crap as possible. I've had to revert to using Outlook for Mac, and it's pants, or OWA, which is also pants, but the UI is slightly more fun to play "guess the hyperlink / interactive region" on.
Good point. Hm... I think I'll just go for installing a cabinet with DIN rails and relays next to the incoming data network. Manual overrides on everything... a Raspberry Pi with an onto isolator on the GPIO... custom web interface that's responsive and can be webapp'd onto the home screen... should last a decade or more. I pity the fool that has to rely on Google et al supporting their shit for the lifetime of the house.
Second this. Never had much of an issue with Virgin. Took their TV & BB, but there were no spare phone lines available. Started off at £20 a month 10 years ago for 10Mbps, then about 4 years ago it started going up and up and up, and although I get consistent 70Mbps, I'm paying £80 a month. When I move, they can go whistle.
Bacon, smoked back or middle
Lincolnshire sausage (or other with a light herb)
Baked Beans
Fried bread
Fried tomato
Fried mushrooms
Fried egg, over easy, runny yolk,
Black pudding & mustard (if north of Watford Gap)
Chips, hash browns or potato waffles (if south of Watford Gap)
Brown sauce
Toast, butter & marmalade (optional)
Massive mug of hot tea, builders or English Breakfast or Assam (white, no sugar for me).
Identity Services Engine Admin portal from Cisco, for example. At least the version our network group have just deployed. Seemed most bizarre that the very thing I'd been tracking down and killing on my user's machines for the past year over security concerns was suddenly required to be on my machine when the network team implemented the new authentication system.
Agreed. We had code for a breadboard light sheet microscope, and I was called in to have a look at a dropped frames issue. I got all the stepper motor pulses on a dual beam scope, as well as the camera and shutter trigger pulses,it all looked good, but at some seemingly random point in time they went out of synch, skipping a frame and re-synching part way through the cycle. All the instructions and scripts were supplied by a collaborating laboratory. The set up of the script for the D to A convertor was fine, but they did have a bit of code they'd written themselves for the image acquisition, which they hoped to commercialise, so they only provided the executable. Turned out that it was that code that was causing a resource blip all down to a silly little timeout waiting for a response from piece of hardware that was superfluous in our rig and so wasn't on there. Took months and months and months to sort that one out by a process of trial and error, mainly because although that bit of code was the only one left where there might be a problem, they refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with it and in their opinion not having this bit of hardware wouldn't be an issue. We had the D to A system shipped back to the States for a full diagnostic, which took up a lot of the time. Turned out that WAS faulty as well, but not in a way that should have caused that fault. The frame dropping was still evident even with a replacement known, checked and recalibrated D to A.
when you are looking at a study of, say, time course studies from 2000 zebrafish brains, scanned at sub-cellular levels on a high speed, multi/bi-photon matrix lightsheet microscope, generating around 200Tb of data alone, then ongoing storage costs are a real issue. How long should these data be made available? 5 years? 10 years? Forever? OK, it's nice a cheap to stick them on tape or freeze them in AWS glacier, but even then you are looking at a good few thousand pounds a year, and it's hardly freely accessible.
And putting it all on ice gets even more appropriate when you consider, say, keeping a set of plasmids in liquid nitrogen for the next 20 years. Space in the -80°C freezer, anyone? And you have to keep track of the samples as well. Barcodes and QR tags on everything, then there's the company that's going to rake it all in with a laboratory management solution - unless there's a reliable and flexible open source solution for that too. Has to be cross compatible with other institutions of course, because researchers are a mobile lot, and when they go, they tend to take their samples with them.
All told, this, although it's been on the horizon for a while now, is going to provide some real challenges.
If they only CAN work during possession, why would it be overtime? They're contracted at the rate they are and the hours of possession are very, very tightly controlled and defined in advance. Very predictable. Over-running a possession is severely penalised, so no incentives for overtime are offered.
the regular tube communication system though. I understand that relaying communications manually between two systems is a major issue with getting things done right. At the moment, I understand, the emergency service controllers can broadcast messages to TfL/LUL staff in a defined emergency zone using an override channel on their regular radios - it seems like a pretty advanced system in that respect.
Also:
POTS is analogue duplex voice frequency over copper / steel. i.e. DIAL-UP. We've all heard of that.
Broadband from the exchange uses ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+. Lots and lots of people have heard of that.
3G/4G. Internet for mobiles. Everyone has heard of it.
Fibre-to-the-cabinet uses VDSL/VDSL2. No bugger outside the telecomms industry has ever heard of it.
as an on-spec add-on to another call out...
You know the sort of thing. "While you're here, do you know anything about these? I mean, I know you're computers, but... ", "Actually, I didn't start out as a computer technician, I'm an electro-physiology technician but the pay's better. So yeah, I'm pretty familiar with these."
I disassembled their signal amplifier, continuity tester confirmed the fault, three minutes with a soldering iron... find the replacement part... another three minutes to solder the new one in and test it all - (cost £20 for the switch incl shipping & duty from the US). When they asked me about it, they were just in the process of reluctantly packing up the (out of warranty) equipment to send back to the United States - the OEM's repair estimate? £4,300 incl shipping, about two-thirds of the cost of a new one.
So I wait with baited breath - I think that's worth a thank you or two.
My mate nicked a lorry load of incomplete ones en route from the iron casting place to the factory. Couldn't sell them like that, so I had to finish them off myself before we could sell them. I got done for handling stolen items, and he was charged with dealing in forged goods.
Now I know where I've seen that shape before!
Probably just got bored and thought it would act out part of a movie.