Posts by Rob Daglish 503 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2007
Without turning into the Yorkshireman sketch, I'm not sure my first 486 was that well stocked - it definitely had 4MB of RAM, and I remember upgrading the hard disk to 127MB... It was definitely pre '93, possibly 90/91 as I seem to recall having it before I started secondary school in 1991.
It eventually got 8MB, with the hard disk growing to 500MB, and at some point I believe 16MB (4*4MB SIMMS, which now live in my Korg Triton keyboard!)
I personally know of a motorcycle trailer being fabricated by a welder with materials from a site he was working on which was then driven off site with no questions asked by the security guards*
The same “company” had another occasion where a large (20kwish) diesel generator was ordered, then pretty much straight away trailered offsite to provide power to an employee’s house while waiting for the mains to be connected, again right past the guard house.
*Guards are more interested in who/what goes in, the scans on the way out are more interested in radioactive materials.
Anyway, the answer is obvious. You don’t take any car parts home, you stash them onsite, build it and drive the finished thing away.
I suspect you've never had to bid for work at Sillyfield?
The normal rules of business don't apply, and you can expect many, many questions about costs. Like how much do you pay your staff? What does your electric and insurance cost, and who supplies them? Will they be raising their prices? Can we have five years of your accounts, please, so we can audit you?
These are genuine questions from a tender for occasional coach transport. Having seen some of their construction tenders too, it seems like their contract department likes to be busy!
What seems to happen in reality is that there are three or four firms whose work seems to be bidding for work and buying or selling each other and infinitum* - one of my mates has worked in the same office for ~10 years, but has been employed by around 8 different versions of the same company in that time.
Those mega corps then sub work to the same bunch of local subbies, who occasionally go bust, but then start up again with a slightly different name. They, in turn, subcontract all the work out, usually to one bloke** who is quite busy doing the actual work of around 9,999 people who seem to be able to just push bits of paper around.
*This makes Joint Ventures a great game, especially when it comes to IT support
**Hi John! Hope you're keeping well?
Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue.
Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions - one friend has gone from a highly stressful Senior Management role in a school, to basically delivering lessons that are already planned, and got doesn't have to deal with angsty teenagers, parents or Ofsted, has for a significant salary bump and still regards a 40 hour week as part time!
This is very true, but simply being good at something doesn't mean you can teach it. Some of the worst people I've seen at explaining things are those who know a product inside and out - simply because they don't understand how little other people know about the product!
Well, 3G didn't really live up to the hype, despite its improvement over 2G.
4G was definitely hyped too far for what it (eventually) delivered, and 5G was so over hyped it's unreal*.
Sorry Prof, but I don't think the MNOs are learning anything here.
*E.g. Keswick - now, instead of not working, my phone doesn't work really quickly, so that's nice
Presumably, Linus now has to send himself a sweary email castigating himself, which he'll reply to, a flame war will commence, and then he'll resign from the project in disgust at the way he's treated himself...
Seriously though, fair play to him for being so honest about it. He *could* have blamed anything or anyone, but didn't. Definitely earns him a beer
I'm with cyberdemon on this one. You could have significantly more delay on MS365, or Google, or any one of a host of other data centre hosted stuff and never notice the delay. I can confidently say that as they are as slow and crumbly whether I'm in that London or at home in the frozen North... No, the real north. Beyond Manchester, but before Scotland. What do you mean, you didn't realise that was part of England?
Did you read TFA or just decide to get on your high horse about cloud on every comment section?
I think your ire would be better directed at the bad actors who are extorting money from people (no, not Oracle on this occasion;) )than at cloud in general, especially as the gang involved are going after on prem stuff, mainly...
I don't know about German radio procedure, but "Zwo" is an older german word, which I think is used more commonly in southern Germany and Austria. I've certainly used it a lot, and I prefer it to zwei, but as my son is now learning at school I'd better not get him into trouble by using the wrong one... err... two?
I'm not sure you couldn't just go to a different station though - there's still an element of discretion involved. I've seen two testers at the same station have different opinions on the same component, in which case it would be down to who tested it whether it was pass or fail.
A friend of mine works at a test station, and there is quite a list of things they aren't allowed to do when testing - like they aren't allowed to poke and prod at corrosion to see whether it's surface or all the way through, for example.
Yeah, nobody is selling anything to HMRC on eBay after their latest cash grab - sell more than 20 items in a year now and you're "a trader" and need to register to pay tax on your earnings. So now there's eBay, payment processor and HMRC grabbing your cash - hardly worth bothering with selling stuff there!
I always feel that if you've gone as far as looking for other work, then your heart isn' in your current employment, and no bigger, better desk, pay rise, inducement, is likely to fix the reason you started looking, so isn't it better to just go for the new thing? No law says you have to stay there if you don't like it...
Without wishing to continue the four Yorkshiremen of the apocalypse... Maybe power cuts are "insignificant" where you live, the village I'm in has an unusually large representation of analogue phones for when the power goes off, usually with a torch beside it so we can ring ENWL to see how long it's going to be this time. There is some form of backup power to the local mobile site, but it appears to consist of the run down time of whatever capacitors are in the kit, so that's gone within 5-10 minutes usually. We also have a strong representation of gas hobs or Aga type cookers, because they will run on Mains/LPG/oil while the power is out so we can still cook, as well as open fires so there's some heat. Don't get me wrong, I love living here, but it really doesn't take much wind to take out the local power lines!
Fibrus will provide Static IP on "business" connections, which seem to be around the same price as "home" connections, but come with the ability to get a static IP, use your own router and a VoIP connection, or at least, they did when a friend of mine got his connection. It's been much more reliable than the previous OR copper connection.
Brother in law has their "home" service, and he is CGNAT'd, but seems very happy with the service (apart from targeted ads thinking he's in NI these days!)
"Why the hell was dragging only done with the right mouse button? What conceivable benefit did that have?"
I don't remember this one - I only came to OS/2 Warp, but I _like_ this idea. The amount of users I've seen click and drag things by mistake, I'd be really grateful if things were only dragged with the right mouse button. It would certainly save a lot of "and then all my files disappeared" type calls!
XP had something similar, but I think it was 2024 that was the cut off. It's finally broken a friend's DOS based practice management system, which has pushed him towards retirement as it's simply too expensive to replace (which is why it's never been done before now)
Having been in the control room of a nuclear reactor... Nothing that advanced was in use. A well known facility near me was controlled and monitored by some very clever pneumatic, hydraulic and electromechanical systems, and as a side effect pretty much immune to EMP, a side effect of being designed in the 1950s when computer control wasn't really a thing!
Or not. The tachograph fitted in a lorry is much more accurate than your car (+/- 0.1% Vs not showing more than 110%+6MPH). Also, the lorry Speedo is calibrated every two years to ensure it's accurate, and has a more full inspection every 6. When was your car Speedo last checked out?
I used to drive coaches, which were fitted with the same tachograph, subject to the same inspection, and my satnav would indicate the same speed as the tacho - ie if the tacho says 50, the satnav did. Put it in the car, and it was way out - car says 50, satnav says 45, car says 70, satnav says 62... Those numbers haven't got any closer together since then either, so possibly that wagon is sat at 50 in the roadworks and your Speedo is over indicating, and believe me, it's no fun getting something like that back up to speed when someone in front is going that little bit slower!
Those chartered architects, would they be the ones so designed a hospital without checking that the corridors were wide enough for two beds to pass each other in?
Or the ones who designed a new school music room with no space for a piano, on the end of a corridor of open plan classrooms?
Being chartered doesn’t stop you from being an idiot, it just means people have less comeback when you do stuff it up!
More to the point, suggest stupid things for the NHS such as 12 hours of paid shift, bookended by another hour of unpaid time…
I’m fairly certain an 8 hour shift would be better for the employees and the patients, and I figure it’s going to be cost neutral, but any time you talk to anybody about it you get “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way”.
I can’t help but think if we’d only invented anaesthesia last year, the NHS would still be pouring rum into patients and gagging them while they chopped limbs off, screaming “we’ve always done it this way!”
...and this is why schools round here use non-named accounts on shared mailboxes for things like the office, the exams officer, the chair of governors etc...
Still doesn't solve the issue around similar names, which crops up more often than you might expect - it seems that many teachers work in the same school as their spouse!
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