Posts by phuzz 6084 posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
That's the sort of question I ask at interviews (although, more politely), after all, I'd like to know what I might be letting myself in for.
Plus, if you keep mentioning things in the vein of "if I worked here", it's gets them into the right mindset of imagining you working there, which is one step loser to them giving you the job.
It's not that inkjet ink has to be expensive either. Ink for commercial sign-making printers are in the region of £60 for a single colour, but that's 220ml of ink. In bigger quantities it's £125 for a one litre cartridge (although you'll need six per machine; cyan, yellow, magenta, black, and also light magenta and light cyan and white for better colour accuracy).
These printers print on all sorts of materials, much of which is destined to be used outside on signs, so it has to be as UV proof as possible, so it's at least as specialised as ink for a desktop printer.
The short answer is, a lot. The slightly longer answer is, a full day* of running experiments, and keeping up with maintenance and chores.
So much so that they have dedicated scheduling tools to keep track, as you can see here.
* The ISS runs on UTC/GMT 'days', although they get a sunrise and sunset every 90 minutes.
Don't forget all the 'fun' of trying to communicate with someone in a different organisation.
Maybe I can start an audio/video call with them, maybe the button is missing today for no good reason. Maybe they'll show up as a 3rd party contact, or maybe you'll have to click over to their organisation to see the chat, or be notified about it. Who knows?
Still, I suppose it gives a handy excuse for why you didn't respond to someone, "sorry, I didn't see that message until later, must be Teams being weird". Not that I'd do that of course...
"what Facebook achieved with WhatsApp"
Facebook bought Whatsapp when it already had a pretty big market share, and I can't think of anything they've done to increase that growth that couldn't have happened under other owners.
That's the thing, messaging systems are heavily reliant on the network effect. Microsoft do seem to have captured a big chunk of the business market, but personally I'm not sure that will translate over to the consumer side. Most people seem to use Zoom instead (or Whatsapp on phones), and I'm not sure what MS can do to change that.
Unless it was a really crappy drill (which is still possible), if it wasn't just arcing between the two cables they drilled, it would have down the drill's power cord rather into the sparky.
Humans don't conduct electricity very well, stray electricity will earth via metal or wires before it tries your arm.
The only wrinkle with that set up is that it's very difficult to get an accurate UPS run-time in this way. The UPS knows how much power it's supplying, but depending on how the PSUs in the servers are set up, that might only be half the total draw when the external power goes off.
Mind you, unless you have two equally sized UPSs, and manage to perfectly halve the power draw between them, you're probably going to run into the same issue. At work we have one large UPS, and three smaller ones and devices have just been plugged into whatever was closest, so our actual runtime is pretty hypothetical. That said, the longest the power has actually been out for, in the last ten years, is just thirty seconds, and I'm pretty sure our UPSs can last at least ten minutes. Probably.
You're right though. Best practice means nothing without the budget to match.
Doesn't Powershell have SCP built in already?
I checked, and yup, OpenSSH (including SCP) has been part of PowerShell since the Autumn 2018 update.
No diss to WinSCP though, I use it all the time, it's great.
As far as I can tell, the argument here is that she exposed wrongdoing by Serco, but she was actually employed by 'Jackpostcomics' and contracted to Serco.
So, when Jackpotcomics failed to renew her contract it was for 'completely unrelated' reasons, and not because she'd embarrassed Serco.
I'm guessing a good lawyer would be able to rip that to shreds, but I doubt she can afford said lawyer.
"Until the woke mobs infested, it was a success."
I'm guessing your definition of "woke mobs", would include all the people who objected at the time, or are they the wrong part of history?
I also doubt the aborigines considered it much of a success either, but I guess they're just another woke mob right?
Still, I'm sure the "enlightened Georgians" who congratulated themselves on how considerate and humane they were being would be glad to know that someone still believes their propaganda.
We had a server that belonged to a customer which had a bad fan for years. It was so loud you could hear it from the other side of the room, but this wasn't a small server room. This was a medium size hall in a colo center, filled with other people's kit, and yet, as soon as you opened the door, the loudest noise was the tiny abused HP fan in a rack on the far side of the room, buzzing away at a frequency that ground into your ear drums.
I can only imagine how happy the other customers at that colo centre were when we finally managed to decommission that machine.
Well, it was sometimes funny to watch from this side of the Atlantic, when I wasn't terrified that half the US thought that an idiot and conman was the perfect person to be in control of nuclear weapons, but "love" is a putting it a bit strong.
I was just making the point that China's political system is very different to the west, and saying it's draconian is, well, from the point of view of the CCP, that's a feature, not a bug.
"on the other hand, it looks like the State telling what is good to think and what isn't, the Big Brother way"
No "looks like" about it. This is absolutely the CCP telling it's citizens what it deems acceptable. It's not a democracy, there's no 'bill of rights' or anything similar. In China, the government decides what people can do online (or anywhere else), and the people have to obey that or face the consequences.
Mostly I agree with the downvotes you're received, however, in TFA:
"Grossman also announced Uncle Sam had indicted 17 suspects on RICO charges relating to the use and marketing of the AN0M handsets. Most of these people are said to be distributors, though the prosecutor said three were administrators who helped run the service."
So they're being charged for distributing/running the handsets that the FBI etc. used to gather intelligence. If they'd not done so then the FBI would have had to find another way to get crims to start using the phones.
That sounds a bit like entrapment, and I'm sure some of their lawyers will be claiming that their clients didn't know that their service was being used for crimes.
The more cops around the world that became aware of this, the higher the chances that one of them would be bent and would leak, either to a criminal, or the press (or to someone 'in confidence', who then tells someone else, who talks about it in a pub, etc. etc.). Or eventually it would come out in court.
This was always going to be a limited opportunity to get as much evidence as possible before they had to reveal its source.
Employers, especially in smaller companies, are also looking for someone they'd like to work with.
I'm pretty sure part of the reason I got my current job was because I share a sense of humour with my boss, and we've not hired people just because they annoyed everyone in the office.
There's not any way to prepare for that sort of selection though.
But going through finance vetting just to buy (eg) lunch on a business trip is a chore, so in a lot of places, managers are able to spend a certain amount at their discretion. This guy made sure that all of the invoices he submitted from his own company were within his discretionary spending limit.
Another way to play this (that might have been harder to detect), would have been for him to sell via Amazon's 'Marketplace' or similar. That way the invoices would come from Amazon. Of course, then he'd have had to find a way to make sure other people didn't try to buy his, presumably non-existent, products via Amazon.
Sure, but all the kinetic energy it releases when it hits the target come from the kinetic energy used to put it in orbit in the first place.
At the end of the day, if you want to drop things from orbit you need to use a boat-load of energy to get the thing above the atmosphere, then another bunch to extend that into an orbit, and then a similar amount to get it out of orbit and onto your target.
If you just use a sub-orbital trajectory like an ICBM, you only need the original boat-load of energy to get above the atmo, without needing to get into and then out of orbit. (and your weapon doesn't need it's own propulsion, or systems to survive for long in space etc.)
Pretty much the only benefit of a weapons system that can stay in orbit is the element of surprise, ICBM launches will probably be noticed, but a 'rod from god' is probably not going to be detected until it's too late. However, for a country with the resources to build and field such a weapon's system, it could be easier and cheaper to just get some special op's types to smuggle in a bomb.
The reason for the Shuttle's big wings was so that the USAF could use to launch southwards into a polar orbit, deploy or retrieve some kind of surveillance payload, and then land back in Vandenberg. They were not there to help it 'turn', more so that it could glide the ~1000 km back to the launch latitude after the Earth had turned underneath it's orbit. NASA incorporated the military requirements in order to get more support in Congress (in the end though, the military barely used the Shuttle).
Spacecraft are no use for 'dropping bombs'. If the shuttle had a bomb in it's payload bay and opened the doors in orbit...nothing much would happen. Depending on where the centre of gravity of the shuttle is, the bomb might slowly drift to the front or back of the bay.
Getting a bomb to drop down from orbit would involve scrubbing off ~7 km/s of velocity, ie, the same amount of energy used to lift it into orbit (although atmospheric drag would do most of the work, to be fair). As others have mentioned, if you want to drop a bomb on a country a long way away, the easiest way is to strap it to the top of a rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory. This would also be a lot harder to detect than launching a Shuttle.
The Soviet rocket scientists had looked at the Shuttle's designs, and couldn't work out why the US were building it that way, when the sensible option would be to build a civilian Shuttle with smaller wings and payload bay, and to use rockets for military payloads. The Soviet leaders saw the US spending loads of money on something which didn't make sense according to public information, and assumed that therefore it must have a secret military purpose! Hence, the USSR must have one too.
"when your NAS is Debian based, everything is supported"
Except weirdly a cheap 4-Port SATA RAID (maybe 'RocketRAID'?) card I had, which worked fine with OG FreeNAS (back when it was BSD based), but which had no linux support whatsoever.
IIRC I stuck with FreeNAS for a bit longer, then went back to just using DAS for simplicity.
Well, if you prefer, there's always Windows XP 64-bit ;)
(I wonder how many people actually ran that)
"When exactly was this golden age of F1"
Generally when someone is talking about a "golden age", or "the good old days", they're referring to their childhood. When everything seemed amazing, because they weren't yet old enough to see the flaws.
To quote DNA:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
GCHQ just collect the information, it's up to The Security Service (aka MI5) or the Police to do something with that information. They're the ones you should be aiming your rant at.
Although I presume you have a cast iron method for them to pick out the one idiot who is actually violent, out of the hundreds of others who say the exact same thing but never do anything about it...
In my last job, one of my users decided to get clever and added a BIOS password, which they then promptly forgot. After trying pulling the CMOS battery etc., my boss came up with a...different...solution.
He grabbed a 9V battery, and dragged the terminals across the motherboard until it was completely dead. Then he got me to ring up Dell and get them to come swap out the mobo under warranty.
I managed the opposite. I accidentally jiggled the power cable going into one of the PSUs in an HP blade enclosure, only to have all the PSUs trip, taking down every blade.
It turned out that one of the other 'redundant' power supplies was kaput, and failed when it experienced more load.
There's still a possibility, although not a plausible one, that they might agree a deal before the end of the year, but it won't be much different to 'no deal' because that's what the brexiteers want. No deal means they can rewrite any regulations and make money for them and their chums.
Had GMail created different domains at national level
IIRC in the UK, they started off with addresses @googlemail.com, because of another company already owning the 'gmail' trademark.
Eventually I assume they threw enough money at the trademark holder that they sold up to Google, and everyone went back to their @gmail.com addresses.
(Reminds me of Sony finding out that my boss had trademarked 'PSP' in the UK)
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Sadly, we are unlikely to see another 25 years. While the probe continues to perform admirably, and engineers reckon the solar arrays will keep power flowing at least until 2026, other spacecraft carrying more advanced versions of its instruments are due for launch. It therefore looks like 2025 will see SOHO made redundant and the plug pulled.
That's not sad, that's good! It would be sad if it reached the end of it's life and there was nothing to replace it.
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