Posts by David Roberts

Concorde

See title.

Recent problem?

A few years (4?) since I last visited the States but I don't recall any problems buying fuel or shopping with a UK credit card. Visited most of the West Coast.

Oh, and for drawing cash from an ATM you may be better off with a credit card.

Counter intuitive, but banks normally gouge you on the exchange rate and transaction charges.

There are some cards which don't charge for currency conversion, and only charge a small amount of interest on cash withdrawals which turns out to be cheaper than being gouged for using a debit card

Fool me once

Shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me!

People are actually buying bundled loans as an investment?

What could go wrong?........

Agile?

Is this the same as "Knock out something quickly to get Marketing off our backs!"?

Back in the day the longest time to deliver a "product" was always 6 months because that was as far forward as Marketing (the customer) could see/think.

Saying "It will take 18 months to deliver and test that." would never get approval.

Taking 2 years in 6 month chunks however seemed fine.

I realise that in Agile you probably need to substitute weeks (or even days) for months.

NHS?

Or is the NHS just carrying the can for the charity they contracted to do the work?

If so it is possible that the charity doesn't have any proper IT infrastructure or professional mail server admins.

Use of English?

The difference between "must support IPV6 only" and "must support only IPV6"?

Then again, sadly you can't always trust El Reg for correct use of English (or even proof reading).

Business model?

I am regularly amazed that people use Trainline which charges all sorts of fees, instead of the National Rail system which doesn't.

Is there more than advertising to this?

Of course, I don't often book journeys which span several different train companies. However I can book online with the local rail franchise after National Rail hand me off to their system. I can also pick up the tickets from a ticket machine.

So, no, not seeing the USP.

USA system issue?

This kind of fraud doesn’t seem to get reported for the UK.

I can't work out if the UK system is more secure or too cumbersome for the fraud to be effective.

I don't recall online access to the company payroll system from the Internet, though.

Tax returns based on a paper P60.

DD-WRT?

No mention of this so far, which used to be an alternative to Open-WRT.

Distant memories

Once in my youth I was a COBOL programmer and I still remember the heady excitement of a week writing all the active code.

Followed by a month or so writing all the exception routines which made up over 90% of the average programme and were probably never used in production.

So sheer volume is no real measure of how good or reliable the code is. Although the more lines of code there are the higher the odds of an undetected flaw.

Fatal flaw in self drive?

Leaving all the shagging on the side, if self driving cars require someone to be alert and in charge at all times ready to take over in an emergency then what is the point?

Long journeys are deadly dull anyway and it is hard enough to maintain alertness and concentration. If you are just sitting there for hours on end poised for an emergency beyond the capabilities of the AI you might as well be driving.

If you expect to benefit from the self driving capabilities by doing something productive (um...) with your time such as catching up on work or the latest news then you aren't going to be poised to take over in an emergency. Certainly no chance to catch up on your sleep.

More thought required.

Internet of Things

Comes of age.

Charred beech marten?

According to El Reg.

Footpaths?

Downloaded the app to my tablet and had a quick scan of a local route we walk on a regular basis. Using the guest account.

There seem to be a lot of footpaths missing.

Some may be permissive by the generosity of the land owner, but some at least have "Public Footpath" signs.

The footpaths also disappear when you zoom out to a realistic view for route planning.

Internet?

I seem to recall that most telephony is now IP based because companies like BT realised that they were running telephony and data networks side by side and a common underlying protocol would give economies of scale.

So I find it hard to draw the line between cable TV and the Internet.

If you have a clear point to point connection from the home to the nearest content server for TV, say over a VPN, then this looks very much like a "soft" cable connection regardless of the physical carrier. These days trying to define something purely by the physical connection is getting hard as so much is software defined.

I can't see much (if any) difference between Comcast and any other content provider providing TV programmes over an IP connection apart from the fact that Comcast usually owns the wet string.

Which makes me wonder about the UK market. There seems no technical reason why Sky can't offer their service over Virgin Media cable or VM offer the same content as cable over BT ADSL.

Are we about to become more restrictive than the US cable industry?

I would certainly like to be able to use a 3rd party STB or an HTPC instead of my current Virgin Tivo.

Undeliverable emails?

One thing that occasionally winds me up are the sites which insist on an email address on sign up (or form submission) but never use it to authenticate the user.

[I happen to have a very short and guessable email address, which is sometimes used by techie numpties as a test address because "it is kewel" without any thought that almost any short address they can think of has probably already been registered. But I digress. ]

So are we saying that they never validated the email addresses, or that they were blocked after initial validation? Over a third of all registered users?

I would like to think that this was a sign of security awareness in the users - only use an address that wasn't valid after registration or block the compromised site's email domian as soon as word got out, however I feel that I might be being too generous.

Wonder how much

They got in grants to locate there?

Isolating each tab

Lets Chrome hoover up vast amounts of RAM very quickly.

Trying to relate this to the UK

There has traditionally been only one country wide supplier of paid TV, which is Sky. However this has been via satellite. Sky has been kept mostly honest by Virgin Media which offers cable to about 50% of the country. BT has now entered the market place but this is too recent to skew traditional marketing.

We don't seem to have the extreme customer abuse reported from the USA but the services are tied to the suppliers' hardware using smart cards to authenticate. Charging is high, but most kit seems to be modern and well featured. As far as I know I can't buy a 3rd party Sky or Virgin box.

Is the USA market held back by the lack of alternatives?

In the UK we have a reasonable service from free to air terrestrial and satellite providers so nobody really needs a cable box unless they want the extra channels. I assume that there is no nationwide satellite broadcast service in the USA? If so I do wonder why because Europe as a whole is covered by satellite broadcasters.

Recursive?

rm = remove

"- f" = just f*ing do it

"-r" = recursive - that is work your way down the directory tree and nuke everything

Noting that the author has no Unix/Linux expertise, I was expecting a poster to have mentioned the word "recursive" by now.

PFI?

Outsourcing data centres is just like PFI - it takes the cost out of the capital budget and removes the provision for ongoing maintenance.

All you have is payment from the current account for the service.

It may turn out to cost you more, it may turn out to be less secure efficient and reliable, but meanwhile you have maximised value, sold off a capital asset, reduced headcount and returned cash to the shareholders.

Future problems? Blame goes straight outside the company to the service provider.

Exoplanet? Endoplanet??

So an exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star?

Presumably then there is an endoplanet which is a planet inside a star?

Else why the qualification?

I naively assumed that most planets orbited stars.

I feel there must be something lacking in the provided definition but I'm just too idle to Google for it.

Kickstarter?

In a very big way, of course.