Posts by Andy E

Ironic

This coming from a company that has demonstrated its disdain for employee's who are over 50.

Perhaps that's why they want to recruit more younger people. On the other hand, if companies valued their over 50's workforce they might stick around for a bit longer.

That's a lot of SSD's gone kaputt

The 45% failure rate of SSD's over a two year period is a bit concerning surely?

Just wondering....

I'd be interested to read the report on the stuck canister. What caused the issues preventing it from being opened?

The inspiration for Oolite

I didn't play Elite at the time of its release as I didn't have a compatible computer. Many years later I discovered Oolite which is a modern take on Elite. Over the years it has been expanded and refined. It even includes the facility for people to define missions - tasks which have to be completed in usually very specific ways. I still play it occasionally. Have a look: https://oolite.space/

Many years ago....

...there was a thing called Quality Assurance. I seem to remember it involved a lot of testing. I wonder what happened to it?

It's complicated....

It's fascinating reading the comments but its clear people don't have any idea how complicated air traffic control is or how it works. With long distance flights that terminate or cross UK airspace, the flight plans are passed to NATS 4 hours before the aircraft enters UK airspace. So the plane may well be in the air by the time NATS gets the flight plan. The flight plans are submitted to a local or regional organisation who does some validity checks before routing it to the authorities who manage the airspace the flight crosses. These organisations will have different systems so there may be a lot of data translation involved. The software module that crashed validates the flight plan and adds UK specific information to it for the air traffic controllers before passing it to the next system. That it caught the error is good but that it failed in the way it did was not so good. In the bigger picture, things failed safely.

For an even more embarrassing episode concerning NATS and software not behaving as expected, read the report of the 12th December 2014 air traffic fiasco.

Social organisation?

I'm wondering what type of social organisation they modeled. Initially its probably a dictatorship model with a defined hierarchy but as the number of colonists grow does it change? What if groups break away?

Interesting stuff.

They are very poor

I switched from Virgin Media to BT as I was out of contract and the BT deal was cheaper than any of the deals Virgin Media offered me. Choice from VM was limited as I was not a new customer. When I pointed out that the deal they were pushing was more expensive than the one I had been on and the rival package, they said it was the best they could do. Apart from the hassle of talking to the sales bods switching was relativity straight forward. They did ring me about a month after I had left them to offer me a new deal. Talk about desperate measures!

Another thing I hated about Virgin Media was their Customer portal. It was clunky and hard to navigate once you had logged in. The UI seemed to gave been designed in the last century. And don't even think about IPv6 as they have never heard of it.

What is a "cross-app experience"?

Have I had one? Do I need one?

How do you stop?

Once the craft gets to the SGL focal region does it need to stop to take the photo? Or is the SGL focal region so big it can take one or more photo's as its passing through?

Those were the days

Those were the days! I was a VMS specialist from v3 through to v6 and even worked for DEC for the majority of that time. Writing a file archiving system in Bliss 32 was probably the peak moment. In some ways VMS spoilt me as the DCL command language was consistent and intuitive. Want to print the file Myfile.txt? try $ Print Myfile.txt I even wrote an application in DCL for a client.

Whenever I dip my toes into the Linux terminal it always seems to be just a mess. Non-intuitive commands and each one has its own non-standard switches and options.

While I have a soft spot and high regard for VMS, I can't think of a single application I use that would run on it.

I did wonder

"Microsoft said it is investing the problem..." So that's how they make their money! They invest in problems.

Where is the handbrake?

The only way it can shorten the travel time is by going faster but how do you slow it down when it gets there?

What about the other way?

I can see this working well for lightning strikes that are going earth to cloud but what about when they are traveling down from cloud to earth. Won't something get frazzled?

Shoddy reporting

This is just sensationalism and widely distorting the truth. The various trusts didn't actually pay any money for the shares. They provided data and in return were given some shares which are now pretty much worthless. THEY HAVE NOT LOST ANY MONEY. You could summarize it as they were tricked into giving away data for free but even that's a distortion of the facts.

Support?

One of the things that gets overlooked is the availability of the skill set(s) required to support the end users. With a Microsoft environment there's a ready supply of skilled people mostly due to its sheer market dominance. With a Linux environment the choices of distributions, desktops and applications which will do what the the company wants, ensures that the chosen solution will likely require a rare and possibly unique skill set to support. There won't be many suitably skilled people around to staff up the support team.

Goodbye Windows 11

With no prior Linux experience, I built a Linux Mint system last year for a project. The experience was "interesting", but I got there in the end.

If Microsoft get rid of local accounts then I'm afraid that might be the final straw and the three windows machines used every day will be going Minty too.

Parking like a human

Having to contend with "parked" delivery vans from Asda and Ocado as they deliver their orders is a daily challenge here. They just seem to stop as close to the target address as they can ignoring any no parking restrictions and/or blocking access roads, driveways etc.. How are they going to teach robots to do that?

Additional and unnecessary costs

Developing a DP regime that substantially differs from GDPR will add additional and unnecessary costs to the businesses and organisations that have to comply with its requirements.

I can't see what the attraction is, except to monetarize and share the data subjects personal data without their knowledge or consent (that's the "innovation" bit).

Pot meet Kettle

One of the main points seems to be that Mailchimp fell for a phishing attack which led to the claimants falling for a phishing attack.

I do think they have a valid point about the time taken to alert the users about the attack though.

Solitaire & FreeCell

For those who can remember trying to get through boring shifts, Solitaire & FreeCell were essential on Windows 7. Have a look at what they have done to them in Solitaire Collection for a taste of what an Ad strewn Windows might look like in the future. Imagine opening an application which triggers a video advert (with sound) which you have to let complete before the app loads. That's what the Windows future looks like.

It should be called Team!

You can only be active in one Team at a time so why its called Teams is beyond me.

Anyway, in Microsoft's world if your not using Teams then you aren't working. As the best bit of Team(s) is the Meetings I'm not surprised they are using this as their measurement metric.

CTC Delivery?

In the context of this article what does "CTC delivery" mean? Counselling and Testing Centre? One will certainly be needed as this has all the hallmarks of yet another Government led IT disaster.

I can't see the point

Nearly all the clients I deal with have shunted their users data to the cloud. Very little gets stored on the mobile/desk computer. So if your data is in the cloud, why do you need to take the computer home with you? Just use the one you have at home.

With the advances in the mobile phones these are now powerful enough to use as mobile computers (providing you have the right peripherals). Perhaps another reason why I can't see the point of Apples patent application.

Virgin Media Broadband

I wonder if this is why Virgin Media don't have a Chinese presence. Their home routers don't support V6 and looking at their support forums it would suggest they have never heard of it.

I like it

Using bits and pieces left over from numerous PC upgrades I built a system and loaded Mint to see what this Linux stuff was. There was a steep learning curve but eventually I got it setup as I wanted. Its not a box I use every day but it seems stable and lets me know when there are updates available. The updates themselves have not caused me any issues although you do tend to get more prompts requiring user input than Windows or Mac updates.