Posts by Roland6 10735 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010
>Well it might have been progress until you suggested drinking Starbucks coffee
Well, I thought a big part of cloud (ie. off-premises) was to bring everything down to a common global denominator...
Although, from my memories of working in the US, Starbucks is a big step up from the filter coffee that was so ubiquitous.
>You could wake up to a nice cuppa to start the day.
You can probably achieve similar with a regular Deliveroo delivery from Starbucks et all.
Shame, the delivery won't be as consistent or your cuppa will actually be hot, and you'll have to actually go to the front door, but that's progress.
>Most probably if I do come back it'll be because someone has begged me to.
And you are finding "retirement" uninspiring...
I suspect after a couple of years out of the fast lane, you'll have no desire to get back in the fast lane, even though the money might tempt.
56... still time to have a circa 10~15 years second career - at a different pace...
>"Why would an employer run an ad with ageist language?
They don't have enough young blood in the organisation so write the ad to try and appeal to younger workers, rather than simply engage an agency who will only forward CV's that fit your job description. The agency will have obtained the CV's through their usual market trawling techniques.
>I'd expect those sorts of errors to be automatically fixed by a linter, formatter or prettifier that ran automatically
Just need the user to install and enable an appropriate third-party browser extension, that naturally will interact with remote servers not under your control...
On many PC's that MS has determined are compatible with Windows 11 and so display the "Update Now to Windows 11" advert in the Windows Update panel, WUP seems to stop downloading W10 updates. Only by clicking on the "Keep Windows 10" option does it go away and find the W10 updates; it took a while to discover why WuP was returning no updates for W10 20H2...
>[1] why should a receipt require a complex table to format it?
Because they don't actually want people to read and/or print out the receipt.
Don't know about Uber receipts, but Dunelm (and some other retailers) have done some stupid formatting in their receipt emails so that they fail the WYSIWYG printing test (ie. what you see on screen should be what you see in print).
Personally, when a receipt, e-ticket or other document where there is a reasonable expectation people print a copy, cannot be readily WYSIWYG printed it is a failure in the webpage design. I report these everytime, so the worst offenders have had multiple fault reports over the years.
Yes I know there are webpage capture utilities - I often have to resort to using them, but it is still a webpage design failure.
> TCP/IP changed that in a dramatic way, allowing just about anything to connect to anything.
From memory, this only really came about because of Dan Lynch and the series of intensive, behind closed doors, no media access, technical Interop events he started in 1986. I suggest the key events were '86 through to '88, which the MAP/TOP/OSI Interop events paralleled (*).
What these events meant in the everyday world was that those TCP/IP implementations shipped (for free!!!) with Unix systems, could readily communicate with other TCP/IP implementations over Ethernet/802.3 LAN, such as those for IBM mainframes etc. With newly released OSI implementations (late 1988) carrying a price tag and having no install base, it effectively won the battle against both OSI and proprietary networking suites. Obviously, it took a few more years of lobbying before Microsoft and Apple terminated their proprietary networking and also put their weight behind TCP/IP; just in time for them to take full advantage of Tim Berners-Lee's work on the WWW.
(*) I have no idea whether there was some "copying" of ideas or whether because interoperability was a big issue back then it was totally logical to hold multi-vendor interop events and thus the parallelism was just to be expected. However, I am certain, that without these series of events we would not have had fully interoperable implementations of TCP/IP and/or 7-layers of OSI by the close of 1988 and so made interoperability a given rather than an aspiration.
>It was based on Xerox's XNS
Not done a comparison recently, although still got the specifications in the attic, but I suspect there is still much useful (to users) functionality contained in XNS (and Apollo Domain) that hasn't been incorporated into the de facto Internet protocol suite.
When I worked on OSI back in the day, it was always my understanding the reference model was more about the presentation and communication of the functionality required, it wasn't prescriptive about the implementation. I took the work being done by ISO on the individual layers to be just one implementation and if anything the Mk1 implementation ie. a learning implementation. Even in the late 1980's there were protocol implementations that combined layers eg. X.400 and others that 'broke' the strict layering rules eg. SNMP and X.500.
Looking back, it is clear the reference model is now a bit dated - probably because of its focus on the point-to-point, if we look at services such as QUIC (which implements Session layer functionality) we see OSI had little on one-to-many networking, with thinking largely restricted to multicast streaming and nothing on the orchestration of streams (which is QUIC does) and I suspect the operation of swarms and other highly dynamic networks also don't fit well into the model.
> but there isn't anything in there about HOMA being published in an RFC.
There does seem to be very little actually published about the actual details of the HOMA protocol specification, as you intimate with the GitHub link, it does seem the protocol specification is the source code...
Aside: I would be interested to know whether HOMA includes QUIC functionality.
>We use TCP/IP on our LANs because it's there and easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away.
I think you are getting confused, yes we use TCP/IP across our LANs and WANs, however to resolved the local/remote printing problem we use services based on mDNS such as Bonjour, which locate devices such as printers on the same network segment as your computer; the computer transfers the print job to the printer via TCP/IP using Airprint, Mopria etc..
The only problem is with RDS servers either not correctly detecting the site a user is connecting from or the user selecting their favourite printer, forgetting they aren't actually at that site...
The press release section of the CWU website is quite educational - very few releases in the years prior to June/July, where there is a flood of releases about the postal worker's strike, including one crowing about how it will be the largest.
It would seem, although you won't find this out from the CWU, the fundamental complaint is that BT gave the workers the bonus without getting the CWU's prior approval.
Not saying that BT couldn't afford to give more, but my approach would be more along the lines of thankyou very much, now when are you paying the remaining 25%...
No mention is made that MS would enable EU operators be price competitive, just that they will help EU operators run MS products...
Nice example of how the EU is a sufficiently large block with an antitrust watchdog who has a reputation for sinking their teeth in, for MS to sit up and do something to appease that market.
I suspect the issue is that being so much smaller (than Openreach), CityFibre doesn't have the deep pockets and revenue stream needed to gain the same economies of scale that Openreach enjoys and hence was/is unable to match price.
However, if CityFibre had won, it would have meant that Ofcom approved Openreach customers being overcharged - in the interests of competition intended to lower prices...
I suspect the solution is for Ofcom to be more proactive in reining in predatory practises, so Openreach can't do market spoiling installations, as we saw with BDUK.
The trouble is coming up with reasonable use cases for this specific corridor.
As whilst this is a scaled up testbed, it does need a reasonable amount of traffic to work on.
Another potential user is Amazon - with all their warehousing at Milton Keynes. But then if that was the case, they would probably be mentioned as being an investor in the project.
I was wondering if the primary purpose of the Oxford - Milton Keynes - Cambridge route, was to connect the Radcliffe, MK and Addenbrookes hospitals - primarily for organ and other urgent medical transfers.
Obviously, it only needs the corridor to be correctly defined for these to be within the "SKyway" and thus avoid the "The off-Skyway last mile of a drone's trip".
>If China weren't spying, they wouldn't be doing their job.
They, like others, are most probably using the NSA backdoors in US manufactured kit...
What I like is that US telco's are supposed to be removing Huawei kit from their networks, so why are US telcos installing Huawei kit in new cells...
>Competent secretaries/PAs won't tell you any secrets
But they are the gatekeeper, you want a slot in the diary...
For one (important) client, the PA got a night out in London (meal, theatre, limo) with their partner, the boss? tickets to the cricket and a seat in the company booth; I know which one I would have chosen and thus who got the better deal.
>the longer purchases are the more expensive ones and that the final decision is made at a level above one that actually understands what is needed. There, the gloss and promises often carry more weight... ... but I doubt anyone actually understanding the technique is ever involved.
From experience of getting board sign-off in FT100 companies, I suspect sign-off is also well above people who actually understand the business.
>make use of the changes in access to space the result could be very different.
But JWST took advantage of the changes in access to space, hence why it was origami folded to fit a specific sized payload container.
The frequency of launches is largely irrelevant; the launch gets scheduled as and when the satellite is ready to go.
>A return to the moon mission should not carry a $175 billion budget just because that is what it cost then.
Suspect it will cost more, because a return to the moon will be more than just getting two men to make a few steps, plant a flag, go for a drive, collect a few rocks and come home.
> ...it's the first thing that changes on the design of a successor with cheaper and, importantly, more timely access to space....
Err you you have any appreciation as to where in space JWST resides?
I don't see any of the current launch operators - including NASA - offering a return flight to JWST anytime soon.
So the successors are highly likely to be built to the same.
> Why not make a bunch (18) of them
This would be an interesting project, however, given JWST was built as a production run of one, building 18 will require much R&D ($ and time) to build the production line and to modify the design to facilitate larger scale production. So expect those 18 to cost closer to $180Bn than $100Bn.
>He's quite rightly pointing out how much more value for money it could have been had it been on time and on budget.
It's the first one they built, at the cutting edge of engineering.
Unexpected problems and thus delays are to be expected with this sort of project.
Big IT projects tend to have "first-time" and "unique" aspects to them resulting in them having some elements of the R&D project and hence why they tend to be delivered late and over budget.
So as the article writer works in IT, you have to question why they even think such a project could be delivered on-time and within budget.
>The dispute is centered on the £1,500 flat rate pay increase BT paid workers in April, a move the CWU did not agree to. BT has originally offered £1,200. The union has repeatedly pointed out this is a pay cut in real term after RPI inflation in Britain hit 11.7 percent.
The CPI was 6.2% in March 2022
On April 7 BT announces it will pay workers a £1,500 instead of £1,200 py increase (according to the BT release: effectively an 8% for the lowest paid, declining to 3% for the highest paid).
In June 2022 the CPI rose to 11.7%.
Perhaps someone at the CWU can explain how BT in March (or prior) when the final details of the April payout would have been finalised, could have known that the CPI would be substantially different in June...
>we'll need to open more copper mines...
And the one thing missing from the article is the size of the known copper reserves...
As this is an ore with a long history of usage and value, it is unlikely that there are massive unknown copper deposits in the way we discover deposits of rare earth metals in the spoil heaps of other mining activities.
One of the things that irritate me is the waste of copper (and other metals such as gold). We've become so good at optimising usage that there is now very little actual metal: Gold is now just a few microns on the contacts (which themselves have shrunk over the years), the amount of copper in a metre of Cat6 is very small and to get at it you have to strip away a substantial amount of typically fire retarded protective PVC. Not surprisingly much now gets thrown in the general waste rather than (the more costly to dispose of) cable waste.
>"The server calls the function ...to calculate the size of each opcode response, but it does not include the size of the opcode itself."
I anticipate there are other similar buffer overflow issues caused by developer miscalculation, lurking in system software.
I wonder if we will get the hear about all the vulnerabilities in the massive amounts of code underpinning cloud...
This draws attention to another difference between generations of emoji.
The first emoji eg. :¬) could be keyed on a standard ASCII keyboard - AltGr, extended character sets and Unicode came years later.
The Unicode shrug emoji takes advantage of the adoption of Unicode and thus devices having code pages for character sets other than ASCII installed as standard. What I like (sarcasm) is that the easiest way to use the shrug emoji is to either cut-and-paste the text or install ASCIImoji and type (shrug)?
Obviously, to use the pictogram emoji more effort is required.
Aside: Reading the history of the shrug emoji (https://www.theawl.com/2014/05/the-life-and-times-of-%C2%AF_%E3%83%84_%C2%AF/ ), I suspect there has been some licence taken with the truth, so as to create a nice story.
A little understanding of the development of Unicode and the internationalisation of the Internet, OkCupid rejecting it (at the time) is totally understandable and not "almost strange".
You can't directly key this emoji on a US keyboard without knowing your way around the Unicode character maps and how to get non-Japanese Windows to show the Unicode Japanese characters. Which given Caroline Eisenmann's LinkedIn profile doesn't give any indication of her having a working knowledge of Japanese and thus a reason to have this character set readily available...
>No point using emojis at work as so liable to be interpreted in a different way to which it was intended
This is the fundamental difference between the ASCII emoji and the pictogram emoji's.
The ASCII emoji's were a shorthand form of adding emotion to a text and were few and defined, so that it was relatively easy to remember or look up one you didn't know - either to know what it meant but also to see if there was an emoji that conveyed the emotion you wanted to express.
With the pictogram emoji's there seems to be no such reference. My Andriod phone simply displays lots of pictograms, but without any indication of what they might mean; so giving ambiguity to pictogram emoji's.
>I saw the EUR dropped below the USD. Was kinda hoping it would be more prominent in the news. We were very lucky in the UK not to have joined the EZ.
Possibly because it looks like the GBP is trending the same way...
I seem to remember some Brexiteers wanted the ability to devalue the GBP to make UK exports more attractively priced and the country more attractive to inward investment...
Obviously much depends on how high you want the BoE to increase Base Rate to, and thus further fuel domestic inflation, so as to make the currency attractive to overseas investors.
The X131e (and all Thinkpads) isn't on the Lenovo list of laptops affected by this vulnerability (see link in article).
However, I've also had BIOS/NVME/UEFI updates that have failed on first attempt this year.
I found sequence to generally be reliable:
1. ensure all other updates have been installed
2. disable the AV software so that it doesn't restart on a reboot
3. as local admin, install only one BIOS etc. update at a time.
4. reboot and re-enable AV software.
Only issue I've had is that it has taken a couple of loops around (allow a few days between each iteration) to get the NVME update to install.
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