Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Either James was ready to fly solo on the update or he wasn't

"If it was his first time doing the upgrade, though, apart from change control, a senior administrator should have, at the very least, reviewed the procedure and expected results."

Based on the article, that all worked and went to plan. It was James' additional work and ideas that screwed up. He did the documented job properly then went on to do some undocumented jobs of his own devising.

Re: Once bitten...

"I brought down an entire bank by doing that once"

I was about to ask if it might be RBS. Then I stopped and thought about all the other possibilities from just the last few years!! There's been so many, you could probably go into some level of detail and still not identify which bank it was and remain "regonimized" :-)

Re: Once bitten...

"I started the update process on all 6 servers that made up the environment. When the first three restarted, they didn't come back."

I also learned a long time ago, update one first and see if it "does what it says on the tin". Then, if feeling brave, do the rest all at once, otherwise, do them one at a time.

Re: Large. Unsightly

"New artists? Adele's first release 2007. Swift's 2006. Hardly new artists. Eilish's recording career stretches all the way back to 2017."

Yeah, new artists. Bah! Kids today! Git of ma lawn!

Re: Not unexpectedly..

I'm guessing that was back when the an alnaogue audio out was used on the CD player to the soundcard, and could be by-passed to play it through something better. Anyone doing that these days will only get the option to play the digital stream through the onboard sound chip if they even have a CD/DVD player in the computer.

The tone of your post is disarming.

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

Thanks both you and Heyrick. To be fair, I've not looked that hard yet. I'll be retiring a couple of years before the new ICE sales ban comes in so probably won't really be looking for an EV until then. I'm currently doing frequent 300+ mile round trips at least 3 days per week so there's nothing useful out there for me yet that's even close to being affordable. Hybrids are shit for long trips because most of the time you are hauling batteries and electric motors that are rarely used. The petrol fuel consumption is worse than my diesel gets, from a one week experience with a hybrid hire car (and yes, I do drive sensibly and efficiently and very quickly learned the "tricks" for the hybrid). Once I'm retired, my daily usage will be almost exclusively "local", ie well within the range of the cheapest EV and time will not be an important factor if I need a longer journey requiring charging breaks.

You can already get a decent and serviceable second hand phone for well under £300. I get your point, but it was a shit analogy. You should stick with the traditional El Reg Comentards car analogies...oh...wait :-)

"Two points - the second hand market is still maturing, and if you add up the cost of running an ICE and compare it with the cost of running an EV... then you might be willing to spend a little more up front (vimes boots, I know) and make savings all the way."

The problem though, as has been mentioned further up, there are many who would have to walk bare-foor for a year or two to save up for those "Vimes boots". And then hope other important things don't eat into the savings for the next pair of "Vimes Boots", like a broken heating system.

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

"Perhaps a car isn't the optimal way to go fom London to Edinburgh?"

Unless you book well in advance and are travelling alone, plane or train is more expensive than car for most trips like that. Not to mention the travel costs to get to and from the airport or station at each end. It might also depend on how you value your time eg is it a work or pleasure trip. Is time a factor? How much time waiting in airports or spent travelling at each end? Not to mention the possibility of missing connections.

I recently was offered the chance to fly down to London for a meeting at HQ. A 30 mile drive to the nearest airport, needing to check-in at least an hour before flight time, then another 30 or so miles from the destination airport to the office, it was just as quick to drive and, from my point of view, less stressful as a regular long distance driver and very rare flyer.

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

"Unless the manufacturers sort out a basic EV"

That's something I really hope the manufactures are working on now. It takes a few years to get from design to road legal sales. Every EV or hybrid I've seen seem to be "top of the range" as far as accessories go. We need someone to come along with the EV or hybrid equivalent of the original Mini or Morris 1000 (Moggie) (but with something other than Lucas electrics!!)

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

"buy a 3.2GW nuclear plant every couple of years"

While logical and sensible, it'll never happen because "big bucks" and no private investment. Renewables, especially solar, can be "sold" easily because it can be very cheap per individual installation and is easy for almost any commercial operation to invest in (especially with all the subsidies) so it looks like "something is being done" on a large scale for little upfront cost and at a short time scale.

Any party in power starting nuclear projects is unlikely to still be in power when the first sod is cut, never mind on first power generation day, so can't claim credit. Even if the same colour is in power, it'll be different people in charge, so only "second hand" credit.

Sadly, few politicians have real, true vision of how the future might be, even after they are gone. It's all about what colour the bike shed should be this week.

Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

"(and by its lapdog the BBC),"

Oh dear. Did you accuse the BBC of the same thing during 13 years of Labour government? Don't worry about it if you didn't, plenty of Tories did. The BBC seem to have the balance just about right when both sides accuse them of being Tory/Labour "lapdogs".

Re: In other words...

FWIW, the flying cars you describe have been built already. Primarily as one-offs, of course, but road legal cars which can convert to flight more have been around sine the 1950's or 1960's. As you say, crappy cars and mediocre aircraft :-)

Re: In other words...

"In 20 years, battery tech is going to be in a completely different universe compared to now."

So what happens in the intervening 7 years after new ICE car sales are banned and before the new "super batteries" come along? Not to mention that if there is going to be a hard 2035 ban on new ICE car sales, they will be gone long before then. No one inside the EU or UK is going to have a production facility still running even a year before the cut-off date and there's no sign of any revolutionary "super batteries" coming along. The Reg has been regaled with stories of new high capacity, low cost, new tech batteries for years. What we actually get is small incremental improvements. The hard switch to EVs in a relatively short times is predicated on improvements we hope will come, not on improvements we know are coming.

Re: Some things never change

"Print to .txt usually works for that sort of crap."

Ah yes, I had to "fix" many documents that came from numerous sources back in the day. "Printing" to fake printer at least got rid of all the weird stuff that some users did and many different word processors did. It was almost always easier to get it into plain text first, then sort it out from there. Many's the time I used a quick search and replace on CR/LF and replaced all double occurrences with @@, repeat until no more found, then replace all remaining occurrences of CR/LF with <space> then finally replaced all occurrences of @@ with a double CR/LF just to get stuff into simple flowing paragraphs. Macros weren't a thing yet and that got most of the document in to more or less a good starting state for proper formatting. This was back in the CP/M and DOS Wordstar days when most users barely understood the bold and underline commands. People who understood the "dot" commands were GODS of formatting!

Re: Under construction

"FrontPage was a latecomer to the web"

Exactly! I thought everyone reading here would be aware of MS being late to whole Internet thing, not just web creation tools. And FrontPage was an abomination in terms of web creation tools. It might have been easy to use for beginners, but was absolutely horrible at how it produced the code to generate a page. Of course, MS kept up that tradition with Word documents too. A "simple" Hello World Frontpage web page or Word document has sooooo much overhead!

Re: 100 trillion digits

Really? I heard he discovered something incredible and promptly disappeared in a puff of his own logic.

Re: Google can't count, nor can most of world

If you watch any US documentaries, anything involving mass or weight that is engineering rather than science based, everything is in pounds. They rarely use tons/tonnes. There seems to be a fascination with bigger numbers so use smaller units to get those bigger, more impressive sounding numbers. The everyday people end up using those same methods because that's what TV has impressed on them for so many years.

"OMG! That 70,000 THOUSAND POUND truck SMASHED over the bridge", sounds, to TV producers, far more impressive than "That 35 ton truck bumped the guardrail of the bridge"

Re: Measurement creep

I'm 60 this year and slide rules were still available but calculators with "scientific" in the name and function had just reached schoolboy prices, so I never did get or learn to use a "slipstick".

My first was a Sinclair something or other. White, with red LED display and two AAA batteries. They were still banned in exams at the time though!

Re: lottery ... numbers are in practice always a random distribution rather than a numeric sequence

Yes, that is true. When choosing numbers, people tend to go for "familiar" numbers, often birthdays. There has been quite a bit of "research" into the "best" numbers to pick for a lottery. Since, as stated, any one combination is a likely as any other, clearly the best numbers to choose are those least likely to be chosen by other players such that if you do win the jackpot, you minimise the chances of having to share with others. Of course, all that "research" might be negated by the fact it exists and now people know about it. On the other hand, "human nature" :-)

Re: Do you also want to return

"(i.e. heat cycling slowly pushing chips out of sockets)"

Easily fixed by going back to valves (or tubes if your prefer) with spring metal retainers. Thermal creep was a thing before socketed chips but the solution was forgotten :-)

Re: 80s

"and binning them produces a lot of waste."

Yes...but 95% easily recyclable! ie, it's mainly metal and some plastics. It might have more electronics than a phone which are not easily recyclable, but it's still only a tiny amount of the whole unit. If more can be recycled, then it must be good, yes? Just ignore the 5-10x more e-waste than a phone. </sarc>

There will likely be some more forward thinking manufactures who already deal with similar legislation in other markets and there will be others who will adhere strictly to the letter of law, ignore the spirit and make it as difficult/expensive as possible for the end-user to get an out of warranty repair. My general sense is that US based companies will most likely be in the latter category.