Posts by Roland6 10727 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
>£40k for 35 hours/week? Yep, fine with that. £40k for 35 + an unspecified number of other hours? Get to fuck.
Outside of IT £40k is a good salary for 35 plus unspecificed hours job...
Personally, if dev's are being paid £40k then I expect IT experts in non-dev roles to be paid at least £60k for 35 plus unspecified hours contracts.
You probably also signed a Working Time Directive opt out.
This type of contract seemed to be typical of UK contracts for non-dev salaried staff over several decades. I know in one company this did create problems, as we, in pre-sales needed things doing out-of-normal-hours and having to negotiate with developers over overtime payments.
Given we were being paid significantly more than the developers, I didn't have a problem with the clause, given there were times when "the job" required significantly less hours, so provided you were contactable by phone you were free to not attend the office.
>When you leave, you take all the "smart" lamps with you to the new place and put normal ones back in.
I'm probably ahead of you, this strategy works fine whilst few have smart lights, like a few years back when energy-efficient lights weren't widely used and carried a price premium, but once they become more common...
>Had you ever have to teach an adult who's never seen one how to use a light switch
Been there, also had to teach them how to use a western toilet (and wash their hands), among other things.
I can say it is significantly easier than having to teach them how to achieve the same thing via a smartphone app. particularly when a room switch is readily available to all and doesn't more around; unlike a smartphone... So if a static wall switch, which once you've seen one, you are well on the way to being able to operate any switch in any location, is "terrible interface", I suggest the interfaces being offered for smart lights are insane.
>Pushing a specific bit of wall
Not come across this style of switch, all the switches I've come across are obviously not "a specific bit of wall" but an obvious object on the wall.
>got them to do it in person
Don't know if it still is the case, a few years back, the only way to deregister a device was physically on that device.
The Prime forums were full of people who had set up their girlfriends TV, split up and now unable to deregister the device as they no longer have visiting rights...
I frequently find at holiday cottages, previous guest(s) have left their Prime, Netflix etc. account active on the TV complete with auto payment enabled...
>NEVER SET ONE UP WITH JOKERS ABOUT!
I would include children and teenagers in the definition of jokers.
A friends son (with aspergers) has taken great fun in getting their Alexa to make the wrong associations.
Remembering my teenage years and seeing my teenagers larking around with their friends, I anticipate they would have great fun in abusing Alexa.
> Certainly for things like smart lights that you leave switched on at the wall so that they can be controlled by timers etc, its easier to voice control than dig out a phone, open an app etc.
Smart lights etc. might be nice, until you move house and have to get organised and handover the access codes - its amazing how useful a simple light switch is - I don't remember purchasing one and having to read the "User Guide" to learn how to use the switch,,,
Programming is just a small, but important part of software development - just like bricklaying is a small but important part of construction.
Low-code doesn't remove the need to think about the problem and design and implement in a structured and maintainable way, otherwise you are simply back to the business critical spreadsheet some user knocked up and thus is flying under the radar.
The complaint filing seems to be specifically targeting Micro Focus Inc (the US subsidiary of Micro Focus plc) and its distribution of certain products to New York-based companies.
A win for IBM would I suspect mean US law trumps UK law, when it comes to products being distributed (ie. not necessarily directly sold to US-base companies).
>one of the board members thought "big companies use Oracle, we are a big company, we should use Oracle"
Way back I had a client who was a successful mortgage broker handling >£100M of funds. Their datacenter was a rack of NetWare servers, the plan in-progress was to replace these with a microvax cluster. The business wanting to improve their image with their City customers (who provided the monies for the mortgage products) recruited a new CEO from the City. One of the new CEO's first dictates was that the IT should be replaced by a suitably large IBM system... I seem to remember the company disappeared a few years later...
There are two things here: firstly where the app is installed and secondly whether all users have correctly configured permissions to use that app.
For example I can install a version of MS Office (standalone or 365) with company defaults and it is available to all users with no further support effort. Similarly with the Teams msi. With 365 and Teams a user need only to enter their MS login and they are free to create an instance.and personalise it.
With WSL, I expect organisations will want to deploy standard VM's, whether the running versions are common to all users or dedicate (and thus stored in a users profile) is a slightly different problem.
Negative improvement: It is harder to create a standard build.
With MSI's et al, it was relatively simple to build a set of laptops/systems with all applications available to current and future users of that computer.
With Store app's, I've found they tend to only install correctly for the current logged on Windows user.
>the plan is to prioritize investment in those areas where network buildout has already begun, rather than on starting on new builds in new areas.
Given the upfront infrastructure costs, undertaking works that have the potential to more quickly load that infrastructure up with paying subscribers, makes sound business sense.
Also it is probably in BT's long-term interests (wrt Ofcom et al) to have some areas where there is an opportunity for third-parties to deploy first.
> as their home grown companies don't generally scale to Microsoft-sized entities.
This applies equally to the UK...
Part of the rationale for the Single Market was to create a significant protected market/trading block, although not protected to the extent we are seeing with China's walled garden, in which home grown businesses could grow and be better able to compete with the US HQ'd multinationals...
So if I understand what you are saying, we can expect a very mature Twitter lookalike appear in India etc. and or China...
Alternaitvely, can we expect a new site to appear - "GitHubLeaks" to which anonymous users have uploaded the complete source to Twitter, void of copyright notices.
Naturally, with no one left in the company who could verify the code is indeed Twitter property, EM will have problems trying to pursue IP claims
Perhaps a useful abuse of IT access, would be to hack EM's email account and send the missive "Twitter sourcecode is now opensource with immediate effect"...
The law firm is probably from the same school of thought that considered a takeaway that supplied a coffee cup containing a hot coffee - the customer ordered, to be negligent for not labelling the cup "caution: contents hot". Ie. it made no difference to the way customers handled their cups of hot drinks, it just made it explicit the liability for the correct handling of the cup was the customer's...
>If a cable burns becasue it's not been put in just right that's not the users fault it's a problem with the design.
And how many times has a user said their laptop isn't charging, only for the support person to discover, its not plugged in correctly to the wall socket or (more frequently) the mains cables isn't fully seated in the adaptors socket. Obviously, in these cases the fuse (in the plug) or the RCD circuit breaker tend to prove their worth.
The real concern has to be whether the cable actually burns ie. bursts into flames or not.
I see you didn't keep up with the news...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/14/paris-overtakes-london-europes-largest-stock-market/
and yes I've also read:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/16/sorry-remoaners-london-still-beats-paris/
But then you didn't specify the criteria for your No.1 rating.. :)
I've encountered this, but only with 'local' US sites with little interest in the world outside of the US. Basically I have taken it to mean they have heard some scare stories about GDPR and just can't be bothered to find out any more, and why would they given the world outside of the US is remote and of little concern to them...
Take comfort that they've heard of GDPR, it means the EU has achieved something in disturbing the slumbers of small town Amercians.
I suspect just as cache is tiered, the idea is to tier pages. Which makes sense as we move to larger "in memory" programs and datasets. So a 'page' the OS fetches from RAM is broken down into smaller segments which a firmware memory manager probably can manage better.
> But who needs actual money once you’ve got crypto internet money?
So provided FTX can give the owners back their crypto currency deposits (obviously lminus their fees...), nothing has been lost...
As a shareholder, I'm used to the value of my holding going up-and-down, yet the number of shares I hold remain the same...
So either Zoom don't really understand object-linking or the Outlook API is rubbish.
In Outlook I have installed the Zoom tools, so from the Outlook toolbar I can one click into Zoom.
It shouldn't be that difficult for Zoom to implement similar tools in its toolbar, so when for example I click on the Calendar tool/icon in Zoom, it takes me straight to my Outlook (or whatever calendar application I've defaulted to).
The problem Zoom have created is that now users will have two different email clients (one being much less functional) with access to their mailbox with different ways of achieving the same thing.
> I remember the killer feature of cheap Japanese cars and motorcycles is they didn't need an oil drip tray in the garage.
The Japanese did more than that, they built the motorbike the British motorcycle were both unable to build and unwilling to build. This meant a 5 foot tall petite woman could ride a Japanese 650, but not the British one it was based on... Hardly surprising the British motorcycling industry went the way it did...
The reason why I know this? My older sister was one of the two blondes' known by repute in the early 70's motorcycle community, who rode Yamaha XS650's.
Interestingly, a few months back had cause to locate an A0 flatbed scanner and discovered a local "print shop" that had behind the counter a set of large format scanners/printers/plotters (along with one of the more fancy A3/A4 MFP's). Their basic premise was that many smaller local architecture and technical drawing businesses (ie. operating out of spare rooms or small shop style offices) couldn't justify the space and expense of these devices... They were obviously doing nicely, maintaining 3 full-time staff.
And MS have made it even harder to setup a MS account if you attempt to use a "work" email address; been locked out of a VLSC account because MS have decided the old way of using a standalone account is less secure than an account that is linked to and controlled by some other MS account...
>But what prevents you from starting ten projects at the same time
I thought that was part of the rationale for the Sizewell design - build a fleet of identical reactors.
As to how much you can do in parallel, I suspect the real limiting factor is going to be manufacturing - for example the manufacture of the steel containment for Hinkley seemed to be highly problematic.
>Right now there are +50 new coming up during the next 10 years, probably more.
Who said going green would deny us economic growth?
Don't remember the 20 years panic, but the forecast from the early 1970's studies I remember reading suggested circa 200 years, which given the massive increase in consumption since then and the forecast in the late 1990's for 50~80 years, means the observation of someone with a vested interest in there being a fossil fuels market isn't too far out of line.
However, note I omitted any reference to how much of our consumption in the coming decades needs to remain in the ground and not put into the atmosphere...
> a lot more effort into discovery and, lo and behold, there's suddenly more oil to be had! But, of course, the prices don't go down..
However, none of the new reserves have the efficiency of extraction as arabia hence why the prices aren't coming down.
Also it is because of this discovery effort and the nature of the reserves they are discovering and wanting to exploit, we can be reasonably confident there isn't another arabia to be discovered.
Interestingly, Putin has a vested interest in the reversal of climate change and for Russia to get colder, as Russia has massive reserves of natural gas trapped in the permafrost, so temperatures rise so that reserve simply escapes into the atmosphere.
@Codejunky - I didn't mention Brexit, just making an observation based on the viewpoints you've been expressing.
Okay Farage was a reference to Brexit, but only in the sense that you seemed to be a devotee.
> I am happy to stay here and see if we can make a good go of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing your start-up or were you intending to be more of a spectator?
Well taking some things on face value...
According to an oil industry analyst a few weeks back there are roughly sufficient known fossil fuel reserves to maintain current consumption levels for circa 35 years. Now I know Tim Worstall will have things to say about reserves, but it is probably a safe assumption there is no vast (ie. 200+ year) reserves yet to be discovered. Likewise we can assume that consumption levels will actually increase in the coming years...
So things are not looking good in circa 25~35 years. Hence the really important question is how long does it take to build and commission a new nuclear power plant?
Well we know from Hinkley Point and Sizewell-C that once site work actually starts that's 8~12 years. However, planning is a big variable and unknown adding a further 5~10 years on to the above.
So things are starting to look very tight...
It does look like they will complete HS2 and have to immediately mothball it - unless we use smart meters to cut people off so there is spare electricity to run the trains...
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