Posts by TWB 318 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2010
But I concur, too many specialist parts - I found my creativity was much better when there was a narrower range.
I get Lego sets for my son and he loves building the model(s) but does not create many of his own ideas yet - fingers crossed this will come - I want to share ideas!
We used to get tea and biscuits at BBC meetings until one DG (who was alright in other ways) cancelled/banned them. Probably a good thing for my waistline.
Later in my career with another organisation, repeating meetings used to get scheduled for things which people thought would go bad. Fortunately after the first or second, people would usually start not turning up and they would get 'forgotten' - I think staff at all levels felt the same.
Where I have worked for the last 25+ years we never had RCDs (or RCBOs) on power circuits for apparatus rooms as we called them - except for test benches. IIRC they were deemed too risky from the point of view of losing service - and also a few mA leakage is a pass, but once you have a handful of kit all running on the same RCD (or RCBO) the combined leakage could cause a trip and not all our kit was dual PSU.
I presume we passed all the regs or else the 600+ bays should not have been live.
Maybe Maplin will close this year, hopefully not just before Christmas which seems to be a 'popular' time for some of these big organisations.
It'll be sad and I'll be sorry for the staff, but I cannot see how it can keep going with staff costs and high street rents and rates etc - there is only so much tat that people want to buy.
@Niall Mac Caughey
Anyone else encountered this? - yes, when I were a lad of 8 or 9, a new family from Yorkshire moved into my village in Oxfordshire. I made friends with the boys but it always seemed really odd to me that the youngest never seemed to lose his Yorkshire dialect and accent - he was only 7 or 8!....
This is where I think we'll end up - standardised 'intelligent' batteries in cars, automated swapping at 'fuel' stations, some bulk moving of batteries for recharging at mega centres, some charging of these batteries at the 'fuel' stations - but probably not all. At the same time, charging of batteries/cars possible in many places BUT dynamically priced to help control the grid and generation loading - and this will be the same at home if you have it - the cheapest charging will involve the risk that it might go off when more important demand increases. Guaranteed charging will be more expensive etc etc.
It'll be a nightmare for many consumers who will not understand it. I imagine the consumer TV and radio programmes will talk of little else.
Current petrol/diesel stations will migrate to the battery swapping systems over several years as many are already ideally placed.
"A retail business that doesn't train it's staff to up-sell is just incompetently managed." - hmm, I wonder .... I don't like shopping in places where they are over pushy and do this so they miss out on my custom (money) and I buy elsewhere.
Maybe your tongue was planted in your cheek.
Apple and Google have used the drug dealers technique, get 'em hooked and they'll come back for more.
How many of would readily give up their smart phones with now?
There is a gap in the market for a new platform/phone OS - one where tracking/collecting data is the exception and most apps are merely help me and not third parties. Maybe even 'free' ad laden apps are the exception and the paid for ad-free ones come out first. It might get rid of a load of bloat. Or maybe the masses don't care enough and are happy to put up with it.
So many apps I have seen seem to want to know more about me than I really think is necessary. I am happy to pay for apps - i don't expect free.
As a level headed cyclist and a car driver (though not at the same time) - there are bad cyclists and bad car drivers. These are the ones you notice - that is human nature.
Good road users - cyclists and car drivers - you don't notice as they are unremarkable.
As a cyclist I actually believe most road users are OK - I have been cycling in London since 1990.
...has a DAB radio - woo hoo!
I am not a convert to DAB - I nearly only ever listen to Radio 4 and have it on in many rooms at once on multiple radios so would have to change all of them to DAB to keep everything in sync. I don't understand the push for DAB over FM - yes it is supposed to go up to 20kHz but I'm not listening in a silent environment and my hearing rolls off at 13k...could they not cram the metadata* into the RDS part of the signal? (I really ought to know the correct terminology here)
[*station name, frequency, programme, song title - what else do I need - I'll watch TV if I want pictures]
I don't see the need for great numbers of radio stations - I'd prefer a narrow choice of quality rather than a wide choice of crap.
"Can't understand why cyclists seem to wear headphones" - many of us don't - I tried it once and felt far too isolated - in fact I used to drive a Mini Moke for years without windows/sides and tired headphones once for music* but much preferred being able to hear/sense everything around me.
I would love to listen to music while I'm cycling but have not come across a method which would keep it personal to me but also allow me to be be aware of the sounds around me - if anyone has any tips let me know.
*I believe this is illegal - I'll hand myself in when I'm very old.
Having worked for years in a place that tried to practice disaster scenarios, those scenarios never occurred, but having staff who understood how things worked meant that we could work out what to do when the shit hit the fan as it did from time to time.
Having said that I'm surprised that something more serious has not occurred to date.
'Len reckons the moral of this story is to listen, really listen, to customers' - I think it s more that Len observed his user.
I like this story as I have worked in broadcast engineering support where the engineers seem to prefer to talk to the users over phone or talkback(intercom) rather than visit them (in the same building) and actually see what is happening.
I always advocated visiting users for several reasons:
1. You really see what is happening - users are human and can use the wrong terminology for something causing much confusion - you may see they are 'doing it completely wrong' or learn new things eg. shortcuts.
2. Exasperated uses, more often than not, like someone to turn up - it makes them feel that people care about their problem - even if you don't fix it.
3. It gets you off your fat arse - lots of little bits of exercise, getting up and down etc etc - much better than sitting for hours in one sweaty chair.
4. You might get to meet some nice people - and even become friends etc.
5. An exasperated user is usually much gentler face to face than over the phone/talkback and will see you as an individual rather then just a voice in support.
Only my experience.
"Try as I might, I've never been able to climb aboard the blagging train." - sadly I am also deficient in the blagging gene or whatever it is. If a stream of people are passing a ticket check point all without tickets - I'll be the one who gets the 'Excuse me Sir, can I see you ticket....."
Keep up the rest of the good work, maybe your luck is changing.
BTW - just to be boring, those rubber padded/dipped/whatever gloves are really good for picking up heavy items like sheets of plasterboard - far easier to grip than with bare hands and fingers.
Honest question so please be gentle.
In the article it says compression can be used to up the capacity of the various tape systems - I presume this using lossless data reduction techniques - the equivalent of zipping up files on write and unzipping on read - correct me if I'm wrong.
My question is - what happens if all the data is already compressed .e.g .jpgs, mpegs etc?? (Where I worked, we had an LTOx archive just for video - so no compression used)
Is there an assumption that most users will have a mix of data which is readily compressible and hence the manufacturers can quote compression ratios?
My son took an interest in my Macbook when he was much younger and one day the occasionally used slot loader stopped loading discs - it would only take them in so far and I knew pressing any harder was not going to help. One nightshift I finally decided to do the 30 to 40 step strip down and ultimately found an old car tax disc had been inserted and then crumpled itself nicely in the drive.
I removed it, reassembled and all has been OK since.
My son no longer inserts things in the slot....
Years ago my wife managed to spill hot tea in my Macbook. It failed immediately and after a stripdown and dry out I only had to replace the wifi card and it has been fine since.
While she was away once with her laptop, my then toddler spilt water over it. This time we could not revive it. I called up the insurance company saying was my laptop covered for damage in the home to which they replied - no it is only covered outside the home - I felt that saying 'Oh it got damaged outside the home' at that point somehow would not wash, although completely true.......
We sold the damaged one for a couple of hundred and bought a refurb.
We're still married.
Years ago when I used to train broadcast engineers in analogue TV, I needed a way to show how RGB gets changed to YUV - loses or gains levels and then gets changed back again to RGB in TVs - I could not afford signal generators, coders, processing and waveform monitors, but excel was great as a way to show multiple waveforms and with slider controls I could vary levels.
I've done it a few time with mobile ops and ISPs and only once has it been smooth and all I lost was a few hours connection time.
Often it is difficult to compare like for like charges, Halfmad has a good example - I found for ISPs/broadband I had to consider line rental which I pay yearly up front but which is not cancellable (normally) and then whether to move my phone as well and whether I could get a similar call plan, so I suspect all these things hold people back.
or Jo Brand, or maybe Sandi Toksvig - though I cannot imagine any of them running around much.
I would like to see a non-white and/or non-male though and nothing made of it at all - no remarks from the new doctor when he/she appears about skin colour or sex - this could be truly non-racist and non-sexist.
Now that 'the masses' are getting sick of the bloat of the main desktop and phone OSes, could this herald a new era of devices where you get a a lean OS with bare minimum included but decent support/updates for say 5 years?
Not sure what I would call this business model, but I sometimes wish I could buy [IT kit, phones, tablets, laptops, PVRs etc] which was a little more expensive but worth the extra as some of the cost would go towards supporting it in the future.
Maybe the masses just prefer to buy something new every year....
On a recent Easyjet flight - which got delayed by an hour - we finally belted up, pushed back and taxied towards the runway. On our way there, the crew read out that it was not allowed to bring a Samsung 7 on board - as we were all belted up and about to take off it seemed a rather daft time to mention it - if I had had one I certainly would have kept quiet.
Maybe this is normal - I don't fly much....
As an Apple buyer since 1998, I can also add my voice to the list of people who feel their current hardware from them may well be their last. I liked the 'whole-system-works-well' but it is getting too clever and bloated. I tried a Rasberry pi recently and really like the bare minimum set-up you get - maybe Linux next time....
I know many people who have been fans for years who feel similarly and have moved away or will do soon. It saddens me as there are many aspects of Apple I like, but they [Apple] seem to always be coming up with new ones I don't.
Hint to Apple: 'Sony'
A couple of things I took from the article - HDDs are very reliable - yes and reliable things when they fail seem to often have a dramatic effect. I can make an analogy here, where I work, slightly less reliable systems that need 'occasional' nursing become far more familiar to the support guys and so when they go wrong, they can be restored and fixed very quickly. Stuff that runs for years and years gets forgotten about, so when it fails, often can take a long time to fix.
Secondly - the bit about HDDs retrying a mis-read - important for my bank balance and detailed documents, but for a video server playing a TV programme out to an audience, you don't have time to have another try at reading - much better to have a bit of mangled image and it press on regardless than it stutter and skip or stop.
@Are car fires usually that hot?
Where I work, the building engineers use a figure of 1MW for 'each' car on fire in the basement car park (if such a thing were to happen) - they have this figure in mind when they consider the resilience of the building in relation to the services we provide - if we had to evacuate and how long it could sustain it etc.
We do lots of different things for different people and do not have full DR for everything.
I thought you could no longer buy OSX except via the app store as a download and you need to have a Mac with OS X on it to start with - can anyone enlighten me? Or are they suggesting you buy something like a Snow Leopard CD secondhand then upgrading from there? I'm interested. If I did'nt have a machine already I'd consider it.
The website lists the machine as a Mac - I strongly suspect Apple will go after them for this if nothing else. (I wonder what happens for rain coat sellers....)
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