Posts by Roger Kynaston 868 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Many years ago i worked in an Off licence. One Sunday a bottle of our best burgundy (£31 in early nineties) went walkies. We checked the CCTV and identified a probable punter. I had two staff who had lived in the town all their life. Both of them said "oh yes. That is blah." Plod went round to his house and the empty bottle was on the draining board.
He was duly pinched, hauled up before the beak and pleaded guilty. He had to pay it back at £2 a week.
If self service tills are the future, I want out! I loathe those bloody things and refuse to go to a shop that won't provide a human to serve me. Supermarkets are dreadful enough without a stupid machine saying "unexpected item in bagging area" (its cpu if I have my way). At least Brixton market is still going strong(ish).
</rant>
I know that things are difficult for you at the moment but please find the resources to migrate iPlayer off Flash.
I wrote to you direct once and you said it provided a secure platform to provide protected content.
The secure thing is not true and there are other means of providing protected content whatever that means.
I have always had is to collect some sea water mid ocean and boil it off to make salt. it can then be called pelagic salt and I can ascribe all sorts of mystical bullshit to it in order to sell it for a fortune in Covent Garden. After all, some idiot does that for rock salt from the Himalayas.
Beer because, I would be able to get lots of it if the idea took off.
You could really put yourself in harms way by adding a bit of a highly inflammable and volatile liquid with the chemical formula C6H6O which is known to have serious psychoactive effects on human brains and make them do stupid things but it does guarantee that us ugly buggers get to have sex.
I remember a 20 year old Ultra1 running some business critical system. Over and over I said it was a huge risk running an unsupported version of solaris blah blah. The answer, we don't have time to upgrade/migrate/decommission and it would be too expensive.
It never actually fell over while I was there but it was no fun being the only one left with some knowledge of Solaris 2.5.
The challenge is often getting the business to recognise the costs and risks with legacy stuff rather than precious old timers guaranteeing their pensions.
Not OOO but still a heart stopper at the time. Some workmen were doing things in the computer room. They were hammering away when they hammered so hard they triggered the emergency cut off switch.
Most of it went down with a bang but a few things had standalone UPS so we spent a mad few minutes desperately shutting those down.
As I remember nothing got seriously borked.
Beer because lots of it is needed after such events.
Typical Reg. I ask a semi flippant question and get a load of sensible ideas.
I have actually looked into solar stills. The trouble is keeping it stable on a moving platform like a small boat (10.4M in my case). I will think more about it though as I think it would be the best solution for water. No good for distilling shit though.
I agree that it is much easier to process sea water than poo but if the poo could be reduced a bit for storage and disposal offshore it would be all to the good. Think anchoring in remote coral atolls here.
1) Get a reverse osmosis machine.
yes, but they need a shed load of energy - either electricity or run off the engine flywheel. Both options mean running the engine more than is preferable.
2) Sail more than 12 nautical miles from land. and 3) Throw sewage overboard.
That is what we do (I won't admit to doing at less than 12 miles though). Holding tanks are horrible things and being able to reduce the amount of shit being lugged around would be nice.
I just like the idea of being able to get water from shit as well as carrying jerry cans lashed to the guardwires.
Just got back from sailing an Atlantic circuit and dealing with poo|shit|effluent was a pain in the arse. We also had a challenge carrying sufficient drinking water for the long passages. The chance to recycle the water out of the holding tank would have real appeal.
Many years ago I spent the best part of two years (I was only 25 then and two years felt a lot longer than it does now) driving taxis in Taunton. It was OK at the time but the pay was abysmal, the hours unspeakable and there was a lot of abuse from passengers. Now I work in IT for less abysmal pay and (slightly) shorter hours but still get grief from customers though it is of a slightly different kind. At least it is not my problem if the punter does a runner now.
In conclusion, were I a cabby, I would be happy to retrain and provide the extensive second line support these new toys are going to need.
We Europeans should be looking at this as an opportunity. It is time to for there to be a credible non US based cloud provider.
I know that this would be a huge challenge to break into a maturing market but surely not all the tech giants have to be based in Silicon Valley?
So, either this company out googles google or out Rackspaces Rackspace or both. I suspect that breaking the MS monopoly would be too big a challenge.
I am only a lowly sysadmin so don't have the nous/contacts to get VC funding or whatever but it _should_ be possible. Also, I want to go sailing again in three years time.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
