Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: How deep?

"Really? The deepest oil wells max out around 40,000 ft (12,000 m), a hundred times deeper. Seems to me there is something more to it than this."

Apart from what other have said, it might also be a cost/benefit thing too. Once you've drilled a hole for oil, at great expense, you get $millions as a return pretty quickly. Drilling a much larger hole, building a power station on top of it and then selling KW/hours at a much lower rate than extracting the equivalent in oil might mean it's a much longer payback. Any experts here care to comment on that?

Re: Doncha hate it...

"... when the instructions are just '1. do X, 2. do Y, 3. do Z', with no explanations. You often find that once you understand the process you can often improve an old process to make it better/safer/quicker. (I'm thinking of a bunch of old local documentation where, as a newbie, after a few mins research 3 or 4 individual commands were replaced with a single safer all-in-one command)"

One particular brand of kit we maintain, you are not allowed to work on until you complete the manufacturers service training. Then you take a test to prove you have taken it in and understand it. Then you get set loose on the kit to fix it and the instructions are written for dummies that almost anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver is the business end could follow. The procedure involves an almost compete strip down of the kit to replace the part over about 90 mins, including re-assembly and testing. Anyone who has completed the course, by definition, understands the kit and the prcess and can replace the part without a full strip down in about 10 mins with 5 mins for testing. Who's right? Depends on if it works afterward :-)

5a) NO! STOP! An army boot is not a substitute for a size 2 Philips Screwdriver. Neither is whatever random screwdriver Pte Philips loans you, size 2 or otherwise.

Re: Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Ah, yes, where the "BREAK" key was most definitely not the ANY key to press to continue

Re: Check you can complete before you start

"Complete step 2 of the instructions and hand in your paper. Do not answer any other questions or write on any other part of the paper."

Now THAT'S more like it! In Flocke Kroes example, it was a bit ambiguous.

Re: Zero Knowledge

"We still have to rework 30% of the products coming off the line."

Clearly the quality control is working and consistent. What? You thought QA was there to make changes? That's engineering's job.

Some even start with "remove equipment from box"

Up until someone breaks it by opening the box in some unorthodox way, at which point you need to explain how to open the box properly and safely :-)

For whatever reason, I had cause to do a Google search to which countries are not using Metric units as standard/default, especially in everyday life. Apparently, it's only three countries in the entire world. Myanmar, Liberia and, of course, the USA. Both Liberia and Mynamar are currently in the process of converting.

There's a still one or two outliers who have mainly metricated but for various reasons still use some non-metric units, eg the UK still using pints for beer and miles and miles per hour on the roads.

Sometime very soon, only USA will be non-metric. Big enough not to care? Maybe, but I bet it's already an issue with some imports. I suspect they will be forced into metrication by the back door. It took the UK a long time (and in some case still is) in that some products, while measured in millimeters, are just conversion from the inches size. Most food products seem to have transitioned away from Oz and pints to grammes and Litres now, no more 454ml of milk etc.

I'd expect something like NASA is actually metric and they only convert to Imperial for press releases aimed at the local population.

Re: Sourcing everything from the UK

I did wonder that too. How many of the components on the control boards are made in the UK? How much of the motor is made in the UK? Magnets? Copper wire? And at the end of the supply chain, how much is still coming from China?

Marking something as Made In Britain (or any other country, for that matter) hasn't really ever been 100% true for most countries for 1000's of years, before countries, as we know them today, even existed. Everyone imports something, even it's raw ore. After all, Cornwall has been exporting tin to Europe and the Med since about 2000BC and obviously importing a variety of stuff in exchange.

Re: Recipe for resentment?

"Would the dog walkers/gardeners/housekeepers be unemployed burdens on society or would they learn to code or become an architect, or start the next google or amazon?"

Some may succeed but most of them will probably be renting and be priced out of the area. Those better paying but still low paid service jobs suddenly become uneconomic because they can't afford to travel from their "new" poor area to the now gentrified area to be gardeners, dog-walkers, whatever. See for examples, teachers and nurses who work but can't affords to live in London and see their wages eaten up by commuting costs.

Re: The right to tell you what to do

Probably because the US, while putting on a public front of being a country is, in reality, more like the EU than they care to admit. A conglomeration of countries with some shared ambitions and an overriding sort of government that can impose some laws on all of them in specific areas. At least they mostly all speak the same language though :-)

Re: The right to tell you what to do

I still find it funny every time a left-pondian uses "liberal" as an insult. In most of the rest of the world, "liberal" is what most left-pondians should be aspiring to. Many seem to have a completely arse-about-face use of the term to mean authoritarian or fascist.

Re: Swiss-Cheese Reassurances by Clue Co-CEOs

I had similar thoughts on reading that same quoted part of the article. Are there any other "crimes" in the use with a standardised bounty ready for the taking by anyone reporting it to the Police? Any at all?

Then there's the commercial aspects of banning abortion. There are occasions when it's possible to effectively sell a baby. Will we see companies setting up, with expensive lawyers, clamouring to help these poor, unfortunate women to "give up" their babies for adoption? At least one "pro-lifer" as said there is a demand for babies to be adopted. Looks like supply might be about to increase too. Will this lower the costs or create a whole new industry? Ads on TV? An online service, EBaybies,com? Look at our range! Choose the specs! Click and Collect!

Re: It's a trap!

You sure it's an ink problem? It's saying "Load Letter". Ah, I see what you mean. It's not printing because it's run out of letter ink. It should be ok for printing pictures though.

Re: 500 words about breaking her favorite coffee mug

My everyday mug broke the other day. My wife bought it for me about 10 years ago. It got used every morning at breakfast and sometimes through the day too. I don't care that it broke. I have others. Yes, I said my wife bought it for me. Sentimental value? Not really. It was her who dropped it in the sink and broke it. It was her fault, not mine :-)

Re: "tediously lengthy and needlessly double-spaced humblebrags"

"Thanks. It all makes sense now. Except the IT angle, as I'm not even remotely in IT, other than reading the reg in the morning to see what new security breach I need to look out for."

You just answered your own question. You read The Reg therefore you know waaaaay more than the average person about IT. You're nearly an expert!

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

And "thermal creep". Probably one of the most common fixes on a failed PC back then was pushing all the socketed chips firmly back in their sockets. And there might well be 36 DIL chips in sockets if the motherboard was fully loaded with an ENTIRE ONE MEGABYTE or RAM!!! Possibly many more on an ISA card if there was an EMS or EMM RAM expansion card in it. Or RAM on a SCSI card.

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

I've not upgraded in a long times, and this last decade or so, upgrades have been so far apart I've needed the faster CPU but also a new motherboard and new RAM. Back in the day, faster CPUs commonly went in the same socket on the same board and you just changed some jumpers to match the new required clockspeed, often for two or three sequential upgrades, before needing a new motherboard, let alone new RAM.

I get the sense that AMD outlasted Intel in terms of how many times you could upgrade a CPU before needing a new and different motherboard with a new and different socket, as well as new RAM. Maybe because the AMD model didn't rely on selling motherboards as an income stream. Intel, of course, have sold motherboards for a long time, so having every new iteration require a new socket helped that bottom line more than it did AMD. Am I being cynical?

Re: Brilliant...

"Done for security as the ground floor door was a fire door that lead onto a public road."

That sounds a bit over the top. Fire doors such as this are usually emergency exits and should only open from the inside. They normally have a door open sensor linked back to security too so unauthorised use to let someone in, assuming you jave some "naughty" staff, can be detected.

Re: Heh. A classic.

On our email system, the default retention period is 7 years. Other stuff, in special categories has longer or "never" retention periods depending on the legal rules surround the data. 7 years for "everyday" non-sensitive emails seems more than long enough and is most likely a legal minimum.

Re: Assisted in a TLA investigation once.

How do you know s/he didn't use random length redactions? :-)

"Apparently the local suppliers liked to drop gifts off with the purchasing manager when chasing contracts"

LOL, that must've been a good few years ago! These days, that would be bribery and even the attempt must be disclosed if the intended recipient doesn't want to land in hot water :-)

Re: Email backups

The "dodgy" was most likely the MD shagging the secretary and trying to keep it private :-)

Re: Email backups

Apart from anything else, despite the metaphor of an "envelope" around an email, we all know it's more like a post-card and anyone with access, legitimate or otherwise, at rest or in transit, could read that email if there's no encryption. Most users have no clue how email works and are happy to send all sorts of confidential, sensitive or otherwise private details via email.

Re: re: deleting data from backups

Possibly, but if "instructing a builder", then normally you go choose the kitchen and either buy it and have it delivered or "instruct the builder" to go buy what you have chosen, and he'll want the cash up front, ie is only acting as an agent.

Re: re: deleting data from backups

"but left in offline backup tapes, and only deleted from those were they to be used for a restore of data at some, unspecified, future date."

Assuming that the original removal is part of an accessible and usable transaction file ready to be run against a backup might be a bit optimistic :-)

It may well be a required function, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of recovery strategies, disaster or otherwise, neglect that. There will most likely be an inherent assumption that there will be missing data, not additional data when restoring a backup.

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

Yes, it seems weird using a new name now.

• PROM. Can't be erased
• EPROM, erasable (by UV light)
• EEPROM, electrically erasable

There's no need, ever, for the term UVEPROM :-)

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

It was the high bit of the first byte of the filename. You just had to flip it back to 0 to get the original filename back. There were/are plenty of undelete tools around to make it even easier.

The character set was quite limited, upper-case only (lower-case letters you type in are auto-translated to upper-case on accessing the directory), some limited range of non-alphanumeric characters and DEFINITELY NO characters above ASCII 126 so the high bit of any character in a filename will never be set other than the special case of setting it for the first character marking that file as deleted.