Posts by Andrew 16

BT, TalkTalk seek leave to appeal DEA ruling

Ponds. And other measurements.

Half pond of weed. Is this another new measurement unit?.

Roughly how big is a pond?.

Boris bikes for all from next week

Rules.

"10 cyclists killed or injured on the capital's streets every day"

Having spent a few days in London recently I suspect that most of these were down to cyclists not following the rules of the road / highway code. Common ones that I spotted (or were almost run over due to) :-

(i) Not stopping at Red Lights / junctions, not even when pedestrians were crossing the road at designated crossings.

(ii) Going the wrong way up one way streets or going down the wrong side of the road (we drive AND ride on the left hand side of the road).

(iii) Not using lights when it is dark.

(iv) Trying to get up the inside of buses as they pull over or going up the inside of buses on islands.

I've got no objection to these bikes around London saving on pollution / congestion, but until cyclists learn that they also have to obey the highway code, they are going to keep on getting killed on the roads (and usually blaming the motorist).

It does seem to be a bit of a high figure though.....

ACS:Law's mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k

Could the ICO not charge them...

... £500k for each item exposed (I cant find the exact number of people / IP's exposed but I think it was over 5,000).

So that would be a £2.5bn fine then?.

Helpdesk Heroes or unappreciated geeks?

Management

Working back in the 90's our office had recently installed wireless (it had just come out and we were getting fed up of the one manager constantly loosing network cables for his laptop).

I was working on the support desk at the time and had the joy of being on call overnight.

I had a call at 2am from a manager who was pretty irate as he was unable to print out the documents he was working on (it kept telling him that it had failed to print)

First question I asked was to check that the printer was still turned on / online. His response was "It was on when I left the office". It took me a moment to register that he was at home, approx 7 miles from the office. Said manager was under the impression that the small 3" antenna on the wireless router was capable of picking his laptop up from anywhere on the planet.

Same manager also came in and started screaming at the IT support staff the one day demanding to know why he couldnt access the internet or the servers. We pointed out that there was a power cut in progress and that until the lights came back on he would not be able to. It took a further 15 minutes of explaining that his laptop had a battery in it so that it could work without power, while the rest of the building did not, and that no, it was not possible to have the entire building on battery with the budget we had for IT spend (by this point the battery in his laptop died and he buggered off home leaving us in peace).

More recently we had a customer call up panicking as their server was beeping and telling them it was on battery power and had 8 minutes remaining. After several attempts to get them to check the power cable from the wall socket to the UPS (after each request I was told that no-one was stupid enough to unplug it therefore it could not be that) it was down to 2 minutes before shutdown. At which point I said to the customer that they could either (a) check the power cable was plugged in and turned on, or (b) wait for me to make the 90 minute drive to site, during which time they would not be able to work and would be charged a call out fee. Customer came back on and sheepishly informed me that the power cable had been unplugged from the wall so that he could plug his iPod charger in.

I wonder some days how I have not ended up like the BOFH with a collection of cattle prods and alternative user education devices.

Microsoft tells US retailers Linux is rubbish

Re: WINE is not the solution

"Saying that Linux does it all, when it's running an emulator to pretend it's Windows, is really not a recommendation for Linux.

All your end user is going to ask is why am I running one system to pretend to be the other? It sounds like it would be a lot simpler if I just run the latter to begin with."

Read that comment back to yourself, except replace Wine with XP Mode and Linux with Windows 7.

Oh except that you need to have a chip that supports VT (or VT-X, forgot which) or the AMD equivalent to use this, which limits you to the latest processors / motherboards, with certain OEM computers having support for this disabled in the BIOS with no way of enabling it (other than hacked bios's).

Wine doesn't have any specific hardware requirements, other than the ability to run Linux.

Now I work as a support technician supporting both Windows and Linux in server and desktop roles. The problem we have is actually selling a support contract on Linux due to customers rarely experiencing problems, they much rather pay for ad hoc support on Linux as and when required (not very often), while trying to get us to include large numbers of support hours in their contracts for free for fixing Windows issues.