Posts by A Non e-mouse 3276 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010
This outer ring isn't expected to give Cassini much of a problem, but the engine port has been covered just in case and its high-gain antenna is being used to shield as much of the instrumentation as possible
I'm glad I didn't have to make the choice between protecting the engine or the antenna!
An entire mass transit system's IT gets badly mauled for money and the headline here is "Woot - free travel".
A non-life threatening IT incident occurred and was reported by El Reg - an IT news website known for a heavy dose of sarcasm and humour, especially in its sub-heads.
Move along, nothing to see here.
I've been following Ken Shirriff's blog as he helps to get an old Xerox Alto up and working. One of the (many!) things that impressed me with this machine, was that you could add new instruction codes to the CPU on the fly.
Sounds a bit like an early FPGA to me.
Here's the thing about a self-signed certificate: how do I know that you issued it? If I don't have a method of independent verification...
Because the CA's have such a good track record for diligently checking every certificate request and only issuing them to the correct people....
Absolutely. The famous example is Leicester Square<>Covent Garden. There are many YouTube videos of people walking it faster than taking the tube.
There are also often quicker ways of getting between lines than by using the obvious tube interchanges. That's why Oyster has a feature called "Out of station interchange". Some stations are linked inside the Oyster system so exiting at one and entering at another within a certain time period counts as one journey and not two.
And if you want to get really clever, you use Geoff Marshall's StationMaster app to show you the efficient way to change lines at stations, as the signs don't show you the efficient way - just the way they want you to take.
The thing that puts me off moving to Andrews and Arnold ISP is that apparently Talk Talk is part of their backhaul.
From the A&A Website:
It is important not to confuse the carriers we are talking about here with retail offerings from other telcos. For example, BT Retail offer various broadband services, and whilst they use the same back-haul network, the services they offer depend very much on their business model and their equipment which is different to ours. So just because you have heard bad things about a particular retail offering does not mean their carrier / wholesale back-haul network is bad in some way. This is particularly important when considering issues such as shaping policies or censorship - the back-haul networks we use are transparently passing PPP packets between you and us and we bypass any such measures used in their retail offerings.
Also, TT Backhaul is selectable, depending on the service you want from A&A.
Just looked at their tarriffs - make the rail companies' ticket pricing look simple! There are an awful lot of complicated essential extras, and the prices can be VERY high!
Their Home::1 package is quite simple: Pay £25 per month for 100GB with no filtering. Or pay £10 extra for FTTC. Or pay £40 for 1TB download. Sure, you can make your own tariff, but the Home::1 package is good enough for a lot of people.
Yes, the tariff is more than the likes of BT, TalkTalk, etc. (I reckon I could cut my broadband cost in half by going elsewhere) But their 1st line support staff are more like the others 2nd or 3rd line support staff. And this doesn't just stop at the technical side. Their billing support is good too: One time, they emailed me to say that they were going to give me £10 compensation before I'd even noticed the mess their billing system had made. When was the last time you got cold hard cash out of BT or TalkTalk for their screw-up?
A very happy A&A customer.
The problem is that the average consumer only cares about the (headline) price of the product/service they are purchasing. Support staff are overhead, and companies try and lower overheads to keep their prices low to attract customers. This means support staff are paid as little as possible and overloaded with work.
Good support costs. I bet many El Reg readers know this, and probably pay more for their broadband because they're with smaller players who focus more on overall quality rather than subscriber quantity.
We have problems with our un-staffed sites. We give BT instructions that before they set-off for site, they are to call us so we can meet them there.
They turn up, find no-one around, ring some random number and bugger off when they can't kind anyone. And then have the check to claim we refused them entry.
Later on, when we (finally) met up with the engineer, we ask them if they read the notes on the call about contacting us, and get told "Oh, I never read the notes"
They're absolute muppets. No, that's not fair on the Muppets...
Er, you have read the history of the ARM processor? From the Wikipedia page:
"A visit to the Western Design Center in Phoenix, where the 6502 was being updated by what was effectively a single-person company, showed Acorn engineers Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson they did not need massive resources and state-of-the-art research and development facilities."
And make it difficult to get it back if you're innocent:
The other day, I followed a chain of links from this esteemed website, and ended up on a Wikipedia page reading about how shaped explosives are designed & used in nuclear bombs. Quite interesting I found - especially the bit about where they use air gaps in the explosives to help shape blast. But having now read up on explosives and nuclear weapons, I'm obviously a terrorist and need to be locked up for the good of society.
Why should HP or any other manufacturer prevent me filling MY machine with liquefied dog turds if I want to, what has it got to do with them?
Money. You'll probably find that the printer is sold at close to cost, whereas the ink is sold at a massive profit.
Many consumers make their initial buying decision on the up-front costs, rather than recurring costs. Other examples of this business model include mobile phones & razor blades.
If the two developer teams were made up of volunteers, then this duplicate work could be excused as people scratching their personal itch.
But I suspect the two teams are employed by the Mozilla foundation to work on Firefox. Which means one of them is wasting their time & Mozilla's money, so someone at the top is asleep at the wheel.
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