Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
After leaving elected office, Blair set up a foundation bearing his name which aims to influence governments and political leaders around the world into following his brand of "third way" politics funnelling vast sums of money into a 'charity', which can then be used to fund the Blair family lifestyle without the inconvenience of paying very much tax.
FTFY
the MoD had also purchased a whopping 9,476 Office 365 licences. Mr Nadella and the crew in Redmond will be rubbing their hands together with glee.
A single copy of Microsoft 365 for Business is £45 pa. I sincerely hope that even the bozos in MoD purchasing could get some sort of discount for 10,000 off. But even on such a silly basis, that's under $500k pa (or 1/250,000 of Microsoft revenue). A lot of money to me, but I doubt any Microsoft salesdroids will be bathing in champagne as a result.
The PCI DSS security standard for handling credit cards mandates this. If easyJet (subs note sp) were doing so (about as unlikely as storing their site password in clear text), they'll be in a world of trouble. The standard also requires all CC data to be strongly encrypted.
Security is always a trade-off between the value of what you're trying to protect (and the threats against it) and the cost of protection (in terms of user time, added complexity etc.) There are surely situations (for many users, it will be the majority of situations) where a password is sufficient security. How much would I be prepared to pay to protect someone else posting on here in my name? (Not much.)
Windows wasn't happy with a read-only folder
We ran a couple of thousand Windows 3.1 PCs from Netware 4 servers, all with read-only Windows directories. It wasn't completely simple or straightforward to configure, but it could certainly be done. Since the only local data was the swap file, it meant any failed PC could simply be swapped out and as soon as the user logged onto the server, everything was back to normal. No malware either, though once you could embed a virus in a document with the wonderful Visual Basic, that changed.
Early 90s was very late to be putting in a new 4Mb Token Ring network. The 16Mb (yes, children, this was once considered high-speed) version was launched in 1988, and by then most new networks outside IBM shops were Ethernet.
I remember the shock on moving from a large company with Ethernet LANs to one using Token Ring. Patch panels that would easily fit in a standard rack needed an entire room - IBM Type 1 cabling and connectors were solid and reliable, but perhaps a tad over-engineered for those used to RJ45 and UTP.
Many computer rooms suffered similar accidents. Before the days of online systems, often the ops were the only ones who were aware of them. The simple solution was a cover for the big red power button. But the bigger danger was the fire alarm that dumped halon into the room - which took more time to recover from.
thanks to the super-fast wavelength of around 220MHz
Apart from all the other idiocies, if you don't understand the difference between frequency and wavelength, you won't get far with the more technical stuff. I realise the press release was written my a marketing droid, but don't Halfords employ anyone with a GCSE in a STEM subject who could point out these flaws?
If this object is a neutron star, we would need a new physical theory to explain how it can prevent collapse against the force of its own gravity. If it's a black hole formed as the stellar remnant of a supernova explosion, we need a new theory about how supernova explosions proceed; but a simpler explanation would be its formation by accretion onto a smaller neutron star.
PC security wasn't all that great back in those days, so our approach was to warn users to "Please change your password, because someone else may have access to your PC, as we've seen a lot of activity on xxxx.com". The realisation (even though we'd told them this more than once) that we could see exactly which sites they were visiting was usually enough to put a stop to it.
There are two ways in which minimum wages can work. If you set it at a level of around 60% of median earnings (as in the UK), then it has very little effect on either wages (because employers would need to pay that much to recruit anyone) or unemployment. Or you can set it a significantly higher level, in which case it increase wages for some low earners, but also increases unemployment as people are replaced by automation or jobs move to cheaper locales. Because if you increase the cost of something, people will buy less of it. Who knew?
In the 90s I was working for a life assurance company, so most systems could handle dates of birth in the 19th century and policies had had maturity dates in the 21st century for decades. But as database administrator, I enforced dates with a century code (0=18xx, 1=19xx, 2=20xx) because saving a single byte meant an reduction in total data size of hundreds of megabytes, which was worth having given the cost of mainframe storage.
Most 'charging locations' have one or two chargers which need to be occupied for 30-60 minutes to achieve a charge. In reality, most of them are in car parks and are occupied by one car per day.
My village petrol station has 12 pumps and services ~1,000 vehicles a day. There are several supermarkets within 10 miles that do an order of magnitude more business.
VAT is paid by the customer, this new tax is supposed to be paid by the company
Companies, being a very convenient legal fiction, cannot pay a tax, only people pay tax. If you increase company taxation, the only thing that can happen is that they charge their customers more, pay their suppliers (which includes staff) less, or reduce profits (which affects their owners, mainly pensions funds and other investment vehicles). To state this is not to make a political point - it follows directly from the definitions of these terms and the associativity of arithmetic.
Sorry to break it to you, but there is no magic money tree.
Amazon's primary 'accounting trick' to reduce their profits is to reinvest them into their business. This is usually considered a good thing, which is one reason why corporate taxes are levied on profit.
I thought this was going to be similar to some of my war stories. For redundant systems, the biggest cause of dual failure is an engineer arriving with a replacement unit and then trying to swap out the good one instead of the failure.
But in one machine room I was responsible for, we had the usual three-phase power supply and the critical kit had dual power supplies. At one point we lost a phase and no-one noticed, except for a group of servers (not my responsibility, thankfully) whose dual power supplies were both powered from the same phase.
A Florida dialect word for 'rascal', according to Wiktionary. That's increased my vocab by one :)
We're all supposed to say aluminium (as decreed by the final arbiter of such things IUPAC. In return, I have to remember to spell sulfur with an 'f'. (The original spelling, I think, until some Jacobean scholar decided sulphur looked Greeker - many differences in US English are based on British English c.1600, e.g. 'gotten'.)
I've been using Nikon 'super-zoom' compacts for many years (and the missus has a 15x Canon pocket model for when even that's too much of a faff). The current models go up to 60x which is just about usable in good light with a steadyish hand. Very good for bird identification.
The best camera in the world is the one you have with you - right now.
I wonder how much that would have cost commercially. Would it have been cheaper to buy a supercomputer?
Iwao has been interested in the famous irrational number from an early age.
Not merely irrational (like root 2), but transcendental, as proved by von Lindemann in 1882.
My electric car* has (by default, there's a button to turn it off) an electronic noise (Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System) that plays if the petrol engine isn't running at speeds below ~35mph - I assumed all EVs did something similar. It vaguely resembles the noise of a conventional ICE, but I wonder if there might be a hack to replace it by a recording of a good 'ole V8 burble (or a TIE fighter, if you must).
* Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV
It's been illegal to pay men and women differently for doing the same job for almost a decade in the UK, and it (to a very good approximation) doesn't happen. What does happen is that men and women tend to make different career choices, particularly when it comes to work/life balance issues. And though these attitudes are changing, those occupying more senior positions tend to be older and hence come from different generations.
The scene is the late 70s - mainframes, fanfold paper and lengthy batch processing. Senior analyst called in to fix a problem with a run over the weekend. His wife is out so he has to bring the kids with him. It's raining hard, and the kids end up playing football in the computer room, until a perfect kick makes contact with the big red button ...
There are!
I can personally recommend the third.
Unless you're into classics, the car manuals are of limited use, as modern cars can no longer be fixed with an adjustable spanner, screwdriver and hammer.
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