Posts by DJO 1890 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2011
I think one of the reasons they went for centralised control is it just takes one pigeon with a good aim to knock the photocell out of operation. The cost of having some poor berk going around cleaning the photocells was deemed too high. But as a backup they are a better option then leaving them on all the time even if a small number of them are covered in crap (or leaves).
We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in our workplace. We investigate any reports of such conduct and take appropriate action against anyone found to have violated our policies.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, To show how much they are against retaliation they will retaliate against anybody who retaliated.
Well that worked for quite a long time. But then someone decided that they could make money by convincing everyone to go back to how things used to be; hence the “cloud”
People have short or selective memories. We went through all this with "Thin Clients" which were going to shift all the heavy lifting to remote data centres. Cheaply. Until customers were locked in then the costs ramped up which is the point we are approaching "The Cloud".
Tesla were the first to market which gave them an initial advantage but those days are long gone.
Almost every car builder now has electric options which are all better than the offerings from Tesla.
Tesla has barely updated their initial models and having a build quality last seen in Friday shift Austin Allegros has not helped - Musk's toxic personality is just the icing on the cake.
At my office we have some publicly available chargers and it's been interesting to see what brands turn up.
Initially it was mainly Teslas but over time it has shifted and Kias and Polestars dominate with the occasional Jag.
Sometime we get idiots who think we don't notice they're just plugged in but are not using the charger in order to get free parking (and block the charger for drivers who want to use it) - every time that'll be a Tesla.
Indeed. As it is now impossible to determine which employees have passed the tests legitimately KPMGs licence should be withdrawn until every employee has passed an independently supervised exam.
This might cause a bit of inconvenience to their customers so any additional expenses to them should be met by KPMG.
The penalty should match the offence, if a university student is found cheating they are generally thrown out which changes their prospects for the rest of their life. But it seems if a "professional" cheats then a gentle slapette and being told "don't do it again (wink)" is a sufficient penalty.
It's 2024, who the hell is still using Batch files
Everybody. They might not do so themselves but loads of programs will run a batch file in the background because it's easy and it works.
Do you sometimes see command windows popping up and disappearing just as quickly? Well that was probably a batch file.
Causing any damage?
Absolutely, all they needed was for the co-pilot to climb out and have a look.
In Aerospace you always assume damage. Steering issues are a lot more serious in the air with 100+ people on board than a Ford Escort being a bit wobbly. Even if there was no damage it'll need a major inspection to be 100% sure of that.
And now the Information Commission and it'll have exactly the same problem as it's predecessor along with almost every regulatory body under a Tory government.
The government know that abolishing or cutting the powers of such bodies would be incredibly unpopular with most voters so they endow the bodies with nebulous and wide reaching powers then strip them of almost all funding until they are completely unable to fulfil their remit.
No, of course not.
"A" golden parachute, oh no there will be several as well as a quadrupedally stuffed pension scheme and a generous allowance because we all know how difficult it is adjusting after a long period of employment when you only have a few hundred million dollars to fall back on.
Cor, I still don't understand what world you live in because it's not the one everybody else does.
The Mirror, Guardian and FT were reasonably honest, but the Sun, Mail, Telegraph, and pretty much every other paper, especially the Red-Tops were vehemently in favour. But I suspect in your book if a paper printed a mild criticism of some point of Brexit that meant they were completely against it even if everything else they said was to promote it. From what I've seen of your posts, you treat anything other than 100% obedience to the gospel of Brexit as an evil heresy. But you are still unable to describe the benefits instead coming up with the empty phrases employed by the Leave campaign like all the sovereignty nonsense, we have no more or less sovereignty in or out of the EU - once again sovereignty shared is not sovereignty lost but you actually need to understand now the EU is structured to appreciate that, something you'll never do as you seem to prefer the comfortable lies that reinforce your prejudice.
The Mail I suppose is an extreme example but in a survey of stories in it on the EU in the years before Brexit was announced revealed that 95% of their stories about the EU were untrue, ranging from slight exaggerations to complete fabrications.
The problem was all Remain had was to retain the status quo, the advantage of staying in was we wouldn't get all the disadvantages that leaving would present but the Leave side were adamant that all would be lovely and exaggerated everything Remain said as "Project Fear".
The vast majority of the press were complicit too in that they parroted the Leave lies and misinformation with zero fact checking on top of their 40 years of casually denigrating the EU with "inaccurate"‡ stories that Boris Johnson and his ilk were writing.
‡ For "inaccurate" read "totally made up" or "seriously misrepresented"
You really don't understand the real world at all do you?
As an island nation we rely on trade and if we want to trade with the richest trading bloc on the planet who are conveniently on our doorstep then we are bidden by the rules of that bloc, we can of course choose not to trade with them but that would be economic suicide. Once upon a time we had a say in those rules but not any more so explain how that gives us more power. We cannot enact laws contrary to EU regulations if we want to trade. So in that respect Brexit created a loss of democratic power.
Development grants will not happen, we don't have the money and Westminster does not care, do you really think given the choice between spending a billion on redeveloping somewhere in North Wales or something like cutting inheritance tax that Wales would stand a chance. Under the EU a proportion of funds was earmarked for development and regions could lobby for consideration. Now there are no funds set aside for development. In that respect we are far worse off.
The point about "standards" is they are, well, standard. Introducing different ones would be absurd. The only logical option is to adopt the standards from the leading agencies which all just happen to be in Europe, many used to be in the UK like the NPL.
What world do you live in? You cannot unseat a bureaucrat, they are not voted in and out of office. The EU ones are fixed term appointments so they do get shifted out unlike our ones who have jobs for life. So the truth is pretty much the exact opposite of what you say.
But we have to leave the best to last. You do understand that when the UK ordered up every possible vaccine at about 10x the market rate we were still under the EU rules, Brexit made no difference to that decision, we could have done exactly the same as full members of the EU. So like every other supposed benefit it is utter bullshit. The short advantage we had was squandered almost immediately as crap policy from №10 ruined everything the NHS was trying to do and we paid far more than everybody else because of stupid no penalty for failure contracts.
Sovereignty - A total red herring, Shared sovereignty is not lost sovereignty. In that respect we are worse off because we no longer have a say in the decision making process but if we want to trade with the EU we have to obey their rules.
For incompetency, give me a Brussels bureaucrat over a Whitehall one any day of the week. Anyway we are hardly blameless, we supplied a lot of the EU bureaucrats.
Money, ho hum. We no longer get billions in regional development grants. We now have to pay for our own standards bodies rather than spreading the cost over the EU. Customs and import/export costs we previously didn't have to pay a penny for now will cost hundreds of millions. Overall the spend to replace the services and grants we used to get from the EU would if they bothered with regional development far exceed our contributions to the EU. Of course by abandoning the development grants we will be a bit better off unless you live in an area that needs development (anywhere north or west of Oxford) in which case, move while you can because there isn't going to be any money to help you.
While all bureaucracy is inherently inefficient as far as these things go the EU was better than most, certainly better than our collection of Oxbridge idiots. Don't forget most of the stories in the UK press about the lunacy of EU regulations were either complete fabrications or misrepresentations by "journalists" like Boris Johnson.
Also many of the EU institutions were modelled on long established UK institutions. I'm not going to comment on if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Neither point really represents a benefit to the majority of UK citizens, probably the opposite. So thanks for playing, nice try but no cigar.
Possibly but my question was for an effect that benefits UK citizens. Changes to the EU as a result for better or worse don't affect us directly because we are no longer members.
But we need to trade with the EU so we are still subject to some of the decisions made. Of course as members we had a lot of influence on those decisions, something we no longer enjoy so in that respect at least we lost some of the nebulous "sovereignty" Brexiters are so fond of (but seem unable to describe).
Wow! Talk about projection.
I'm more than willing to discuss this but I am still after all this time yet to hear a single fact that explains why we are better out of the EU. It's the people who fell for the lies and unachievable promises and were suckered into voting for Brexit who have their fingers firmly in their ears and you are right, it's tedious.
So once more, tell me a single benefit of Brexit.
I'm not an extremist, I wanted to maintain the status quo which by definition is the very opposite of "extremism", the extremists were the people who got us into this mess in the first place.
Ho hum, one hour in, 3 downvotes but not a single reply to my question: "state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit."
Come on, if you downvote please explain why we are better off in the sunny Brexit uplands.
Let's face reality, as far as anybody can tell there is no benefit and it's time the Brexit cheer leaders either come up with some genuine benefit or finally admit they were wrong.
I can tell you've not ventured out to a High Street for many a year. Bank Branches! How quaint.
I've no idea where my nearest branch is any more, 5 years ago 5 banks had branches in the town where I work, now there is one building society with an ATM and the post office will process payments and also has an ATM. And that is the banking provision for the area.
We've been through this a million times. Yes the UK briefly had better growth than some EU members because our economy crashed further and there was the inevitable rebound. Known in the economics trade as the "dead cat bounce".
But growing from much worse to slightly worse is still pretty grotty and over the period from before Brexit to now the UK has fared far worse than most EU competitors and will continue to do so until we eventually and inevitably rejoin.
But prove me wrong, state one thing that is better for the majority of UK citizens that's a direct result of Brexit. Just one indisputable benefit.
You are arguing with yourself.
You can't say that having training does not help and then state that you are OK because you had some safety training. Training comes under the heading "well regulated" - nobody should be allowed to own a weapon unless they can prove they can use it safely and responsibly, you know like when they get a driving licence and have to prove they can handle a car.
Anyway you are demonstrably wrong, how many US gun owners have proper gun safes and use them, how many leave a gun in a drawer, how many leave guns with a round in the chamber, how many break every single rule pertaining to the safe handling of firearms? Hint, try "far too many".
You cannot argue with the statistics, the USA has a far higher rate of death by firearm than any other advanced country. Also in the US and only in the US you have this infantile fetishising of guns. I wonder if those two things might be related.
It does not matter if the training is "formal" from the armed forces or informal from relatives and friends, the important bit is the training happens. If it does not you get the shit-show you have in the USA.
Switzerland has compulsory national service for men (optional for women) so every man and a lot of women have had weapon safety drummed into them. In the US any idiot can own a weapon with no training whatsoever.
It makes a big difference, you know, having weapon usage "well regulated" - now that's a familiar phrase!
No it really does not. When an incident does happen it hits the news because they are so rare. If they were regular events they would not be newsworthy.
2023 US Murders: 18,450
2023 UK murders: 571
The US population is about x5 of the UK so the rate is about 8 times higher. And that's before we consider how many deaths in the US are misreported as natural or self inflicted.
$1m in restitution to 132,000 people. Ter-fucking-riffic, roughly $0.8 per person and with handling charges will mean a final payment each of probably under 1 cent.
Seize all his assets and make a significant payment to the victims - enough for life long credit monitoring or sufficient funds to get new credentials. One year of monitoring is completely inadequate, it assumes that the criminals are not smart enough to sit on the data for a year or so.
Just because Nokia don't make consumer phones does not mean they are not in the telecoms business. Pretty much every bit of data zipping around the internet will at some point pass through some high end Nokia networking kit.
As noticed elsewhere it takes time to get from design to market so a 2 year cut off is impractical and if a company has developed a technology and then superseded it should not mean it's then open season on the patents they are no longer fully using, they are entitled to recoup their investment by licencing their work.
Now there are some entities that just buy and hold patents and try to sue everybody who gets remotely close to the patented subject but they themselves make or develop nothing. Those companies are scum and spoil the entire system for everybody else and should probably be nuked from orbit (metaphorically).
They need 3, one for each axis.
With software interpolation they can jury rig it to work with 2 but they'll probably need to reorientate the craft each time to get readings from different alignments to replace the missing data.
Question for space nerds:
Do they now use solid state gyroscopes like we have in our phones or are satellites still using old-school gyros?
Edit: It seems, yes, and no. Cassini–Huygens uses a solid state gyro but not like the ones in phones
Got to be careful there, "Intelligence" has many levels across the range of animals exhibiting some "intelligent" behaviour.
Using "Organic Intelligence" could mean you have a marmoset picking names from a bag. Which might work quite well as tests using random selections have occasionally performed better than advisors. (but not often enough to be worth considering with real money).
The same problem is everywhere, housing costs are out of control. Massive housebuilding programs are needed but politicians can't allow that to happen because while houses should be cheaper, the ones owned by their voters which must continue to inflate.
Ludicrous property prices are entrenched and many peoples entire worth is locked in property so if there was a (much needed) revaluation downwards of all property these people would have a lower book wealth, it probably wouldn't actually affect them much but they would think it did because the bottom line figures would be smaller.
You are of course conflating two completely different things to object to one of them, a classic straw man.
Firstly the "state aid" you decry, well yes to a degree, if a company can pay below subsistence and have the state pick up the balance they will. There are circumstances where this is necessary but it should never be by design. If a company can pay a dividend, if a company can pay outrageous amounts to the C suite then they can meet the wage bill and any state aid given to underpaid staff should be clawed back from the company once they are profitable. The government should never subsidise badly or maliciously run companies and they should definitely prosecute if such schemes are exploited.
This is mainly a US problem, in most countries workers have rights and enforceable minimum wages and things like tips are extras not an undefined part of the wages.
As for coverage, that's dumb argument. With people working 40 hour weeks companies manage 24/7 or 9 to 5 for 5 to 7 days with out any problems so reducing the individual hours should present no problems whatsoever.
Common misunderstanding. Big Iron is not about processing speed, many mainframes are not that well endowed in that department but what they can do is I/O, lots of simultaneous I/O, very fast I/O.
Most mainframe tasks involving moving data around and not do a lot of processing on the data.
Consider a Telco, they'll have millions, maybe billions of transactions (calls made) a day and they need to record the details of each one and make sure the right person gets billed for each. Not much processing but a huge data volume to move around.
If they were 100GB+ then yes but these were just 4.3GB around 20 years old that had not been spun up for 10 years.
To be used someone would need a working ultra wide SCSI card that fits a current motherboard which if new would cost a fortune, if old would probably need some capacitors replacing.
Then what would you have? If they used 5 drives then about 21GB and an annual power consumption that would be greater than just buying a USB stick of higher capacity. Unless the starts can be staggered it'd need a really beefy PSU to cope with 5 drives starting up together, more unnecessary expense just to use drives that are long past their use by date.
OK there might be one person out there with some archaic kit that just has to have a ultra wide SCSI 4.3GB disc but really I doubt it.
These have no viable use that can't achieved easier and cheaper with less old surplus kit. Also after sitting unspun for 10 years it's probable that some if not all wouldn't work and I was not going to waste my time trying to get an ancient SCSI card to work just to test drives prior to disposal.
Zip will live on under other guises for ever. A huge number of proprietary file formats are just zips with the name changed. Lots of them like the MS office docx, xlsx etc are just zipped up XML.
Also Dave Plummer was only involved with this specific implementation of zip, it was Phil Katz who came up with the format.
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