Posts by My-Handle 871 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2011
4mm wide aluminium pop-rivet? Really? Those things are hollow - I'm surprised if one hard jerk on the petal wouldn't take it off.
If it were me, I'd drill that thing out as soon as I got it home (if I even needed a drill) and replace it with a round-topped coach bolt (stainless steel, trimmed to length). I might even glue the pad down first before bolting it - belt and braces, as my late granddad used to say.
Of course, this would be if I were inclined to get a cybertruck in the first place. Which I'm not.
It happens all the time here in Northern Ireland. We typically get very showery weather. In the mornings, evenings or during winter, the sun is low in the sky. This can mean that the sun is shining even if you have a rain cloud right over your head.
Agree. You don't even need to look far. I occasionally look at El Reg on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker installed. Ads are spliced in after every second paragraph or so, and the content keeps bouncing up and down as ads of different sizes are loaded in. And, broadly speaking, I'd say El Reg's ads are on the better side of other news sites out there.
Generally, I do most of my browsing on my laptop, which is properly set up with an ad blocker.
Came to post something similar. The house I grew up in was built in the 1920's. As you say, it might have had the occasional replaced tile, but the roof was original in thr 2000's. The house I'm currently in was built in the 1970's with a slate roof. 50+ years of Northern Irish rain and the occasional bit of wind with no problems.
If you're going to build something, build it right.
We had something similar at our place. Contractor with a mini-digger (tracks, not tires) put a concrete hammer through a main feed line to the house. Not his fault - some nitwit had only buried it a cm under the surface.
One big fat spark later, both he and the machine are ok, but next door has a power cut.
We called NIE sharpish and got them to repair the line and bury it at a decent depth.
I get the feeling that, as far as Boeing's PR dept are concerned, the "watershed moment" is in a constant state of quantum superposition, with the wave-form re-collapsing every time they have to put out a statement.
Currently, the door plug incident is the watershed moment. Right up until the next incident happens, then that will be the watershed moment.
...that WMP have performed this particular trick. My dad was arrested once, on Easter weekend in or around 2005.
The cops had nabbed someone in Staines for something or other, took the guy's name, DoB and address and let him go. Come his day in court, he didn't show up. The address he'd given turned out to be false. So they looked up the name and DoB in the Dept of Work & Pensions database (which they shouldn't have done, and ignoring that he'd lied once already) and came up with my dad. Then issued a warrant for his arrest. Because they'd knocked on my dad's door on Raster weekend, they were going to hold him until the next working day (tues) because "he'd already skipped bail once".
Eventually, the duty sargeant released him on common sense grounds, but advised he don't leave town for a few days.
Ironically, the police in Staines had a photo of their actual suspect, but never thought to send it with the warrant.
An absolute shit-show, start to finish
I would say, treat a company like you'd treat anyone else. Don't trust them until they earn it. I've worked for a range of companies - some good, some bad, and one pretty bipolar one. Generally, I've found it doesn't take a company too long to show it's true colours.
One employer I once worked for fired an entire team of temp (read - "been there for 3 years") staff on a Thursday. The only obvious reason was that, being temps, they only had a week of notice and the company didn't want to pay for them to attend the Christmas do in 8 days time. Meanwhile, temps who had been brought on 3 weeks ago were allowed to attend.
It showed the rest of us exactly how loyal this company was to it's staff.
In the last job I had, I did actually trust my manager and the director with my personal number. Neither abused it.
Ironically, the only one who ever did was Head of HR. No idea where she got my number from, but she wanted me to amend a new job ad on a Saturday morning because she forgot to mention it on the Friday. The message got ignored. The email she also sent got replied to on the Monday, politely but firmly stating that non-emergency stuff would be dealt with in working hours only. I think I let her request hang for an extra day, just to make a point.
I think I've done it once in semi-recent memory. Something bad(TM) happened at the company and required all hands to help fix it. Cue a couple of 16-hour work days, with 12-hour days for probably another week or more. All voluntarily given.
The director even went out to get lunch & dinner for us while we worked. Overtime was never discussed and, technically, never received. But the company got dug out of a big hole and a couple of months later a whopping big bonus landed. So yeah, if I'm needed I'll be there.
The same company once gave me a right old telling off for merely suggesting the idea of overtime, so mixed signals were definitely given.
Technically, there are similar laws and regulations where I live as well. They are just poorly enforced.
If a manager hassles you out of hours, the first step (other than talking to the manager concerned) would be to go to HR. Who will likely brush it under the carpet and mark you as a troublemaker in your file (effects of this could vary, from getting excessive numbers of undesirable jobs, passed over for promotion / raises, to being the first on the chopping block when "downsizing". Or just being "persuaded" to leave). Next step is an employment tribunal. If it gets that far you've already likely been fired, and the legalities can take many months in which you're either still out of work, or still in work having to deal with shitty corporate behaviour.
All of that hangs over an employee as a potential threat.
"It's really that simple, and I don't get why anyone thinks it isn't."
To be the devil's advocate for a moment, I've been in jobs where I've had that kind of weight to throw around. I've also been in jobs where I haven't, with no easy prospect of another job in case I needed an exit strategy.
In the latter case, it's all to easy for a boss to abuse an employee with these kinds of tactics. So, should bosses do this kind of thing? Absolutely not. Should employees stand up to it if it happens? Absolutely. Is it that simple? No. Call me jaded and a cynic, but I've never found anything in life that is simple.
There's a saying that I'm not quite remembering properly - it's something like
"When the punishment for breaking the law is a fine, it's no longer a law but a transaction"
or
"When the punishment for breaking the law is a fine, it becomes two laws - one for the rich and another for the poor"
Can anyone remember the actual saying?
So... your choice was to write a comment (making you a commenter), to commenters, about how commenters in the specific forum that you are commenting in are ridiculous. And you expect that to go down well?
If you really believe that the post is being downvoted in error, you could do any number of things, from asking why commenters were downvoting, to offering reasonable supportive arguments of the original post. But you decided to go with an ad-hominem response to the entirety of the post's audience.
I don't think the VP "should have found" this issue. It's the kind of thing that anyone could miss. I once called out an electrician to fix my kitchen light because it was getting no power, regardless of which of the two switches I used. Turns out that the fridge had backed into a third, unknown switch and had trapped it in a half-switched state, effectively cutting both lines. SMH, thanked the electrician, and decided that I was just happy that the light worked again.
That's the kind of attitude the VP should have taken in this circumstance - thanking the person who diagnosed the fault and going on with her day now knowing how to get around that issue. Instead she had a reputation for finding insult where it didn't exist and firing anyone nearby when it happened. That's why the VP is at fault here.
I agree, the tone of that statement was definitely off. It's a little disingenuous to compare a highly experimental test article, being flown as a test, to a commercially available, publically used vehicle. I know self-driving cars, electric or otherwise, aren't in common public use, but that is how the statement presents that scenario.
The vehicle's shape also helps mitigate re-entry heating. The bow shock sits closer to more tightly curved surfaces (e.g. the leading edge of the shuttle's wings). Because Starship is very big and curves very gently, the bow shock should sit a lot further from the surface of the vehicle, which should help reduce the heat transferred to the vehicle. Tiles missing from these areas might not matter so much. Any tiles knocked off from around the control surfaces might be a much more serious issue.
I once worked for a company that had this issue. IIRC, they got around it by virtue of their products being highly customisable. The products sold on their own website were "different model(s)" than the ones on Amazon. The pricing scheme was so amazingly specific to the model / size / colour / extras on any particular product that it was effectively impossible for Amazon (or other 3rd party sellers) to prove otherwise.
Not a solution that would work for everyone, unfortunately.
I dunno, I've worked with a couple of totally clueless users before. One was so frightened of her PC that she'd call for support for excessively simple message prompts (up to and including "Do you want to save your progress?"). The first of these I "solved" by literally asking her verbally the question that the message asked, and when she replied "yes" I recommended that she click "yes". After the third call for that same message I got a little less sympathetic. I get that some people really don't understand how computers work, but in an office job that heavily relies on use of a computer a certain amount of computer literacy really is a basic requirement for the job.
Another would run into occasional issues (like claiming her email wasn't working, when the actual problem was that she couldn't find Outlook to open it), but would stand over my shoulder and give advice / make recommendations all the while. The phrase "If you knew how to solve it, you wouldn't have needed me" or something like it might have passed my lips after one half-hour session of this (hardware issue that time round).
They might not produce the most complex problems, but they can be difficult to support in their own ways.
"Astonishingly, the inability for those people to think rationally about technology and money is now being applied wholesale to the AI industry... here we go again."
Quite a few of our (the UK's) political figures are currently engaged in an AI summit, to try and figure out how AI will affect the course of humanity. Given how much most politicians know about tech, that sounds about as effective as a bunch of brickies discussing the finer points of quantum physics down at the pub. Ol' Musky also got involved, finding an ear to fill with his "AI will doom us all" opinions. Now, he could be entirely right, but currently I wouldn't be assuming that his is an informed opinion. Not with the other claptrap he's been pushing around Twitter.
I have.
It turns out you're actually supposed to be held accountable for rather a lot. And you are held accountable, at least when you own a company at the small end of the scale.
If what you actually mean is "maybe he's filthy rich, try it sometime", I'd love to give it a go. I'm not certain, but I'm fairly sure I could comport myself in a more civil and beneficial manner.
Clearly they're going hard-ass on me then - they usually start by telling me that a warrant has been issued for my arrest by HMRC.
Despite the fact that HMRC usually writes to you, not call you. When it does call, it doesn't do it from an unknown mobile number. They don't use a robot to talk to you. And they can't (directly) issue warrants for your arrest. Still stressful to hear a call like that.
I usually twig that it's a robot call by the two or three second silence at the start, so I'm usually already on the way to hanging up by the time the robot gets two words in.
Absolutely. We'll not talk about the pinnacle of 80's Soviet naval hardware, the Admiral Kuznetsov, that has been out of service and in dry dock for several years. Until the dry-dock sank. You know, the ship that had to be followed by a tug because it broke down so often. We'll also not mention the Moskva, the flagship and pride of the Russian Black Sea fleet. The one that sank either due to a Ukranian missile strike (which the ship should have been able to defend against, but didn't) or an internal fire (which frankly sounds more humiliating) depending on whose narrative you believe.
You're completely right, Russian tech is obviously superior. I can't imagine why this man would have risked criminal charges by importing millions of dollars worth of the stuff that Russia clearly doesn't need.
/s
When they said they would get rid of something like 1/5 of the workforce and replace them with AI? What actual planet are they living on if they think that's actually going to happen?
I mean, they got rid of most of their customer service department ages ago and replaced them with a circular-referencing combination of a "smart" (i.e. "not smart") phone system, website FAQs and a chatbot, none of which are capable of solving any real-world problem that you're likely to have. I don't think stirring AI into that mix will make it much worse, apart from making it that much harder to talk to an actual person (who might or might not be empowered enough to do anything about your problem anyway).
It could be, but even if true it has still generated a huge amount of mistrust and negative attention. Even if they walk back on it now (and I hope they do), there are going to be a huge number of developers who'll avoid them like the plague in the future, just in case they pull the stunt again and this time mean it. Any developer currently in the early stages of developing a game with Unity is going to be downing tools and looking at alternatives.
I spent a bit of time on the Ars Technica forum on this subject yesterday. A few posters there called this before it was known that it was an employee who made the threat.
What's even more dumb is that the town hall meeting was largely going to be online (I mean, not like they can move all 8000 of their worldwide staff to their SF office). Even if they did have to close those two offices (which were about 1k miles apart) because of a post an employee made (who lives in a different state, btw), why do you need to cancel an online meeting? It only makes sense if they're trying to dodge the PR fallout.
I also heard that a lot of Unity's own staff weren't informed about the change until it was publically announced, and a lot of them were highly annoyed about it. That sounds like another heavy incentive to use any excuse to hand to cancel that meeting.
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