Re: "Get used to the modern"
In the UK a typical socket set will come with half imperial, half metric, tools. Similarly, tape measures and rulers have inches down one side, cm down the other.
6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
Have you ever been learning a new language or something, and then you come across one command or instruction which works in a completely different way to every other command in that language?
That's why they're changing this. It was the equivalent of a car with imperial sized lug nuts when every other fastener was metric.
A few weeks back, one of my friends was explaining to her kid the importance of washing their hands, and how soap would kill the virus.
"In that case mummy, why don't we just eat soap to kill the disease?"
Only three years old, and already plenty qualified to lead the dumbest nation on Earth.
(PS, I'm assuming the QAnon loons are trumpeting it as a sign of how close he is to washing the deep state or some such bollocks?)
"the lift rarely went into the basement"
I wonder what the connection with the lift was then, because the motors for the lifts are stationary, and usually at the top of the shaft. Even if the motors were in the basement, you'd expect them to be causing the same amount of interference no matter where the lift is moving in the shaft.
Perhaps it was the small motor that opens the doors?
A friend of mine had a very minor argument with a bus in his Tesla, just a small scrape and dent in the front wing.
The bus company were reasonably happy to accept responsibility, up until they got the £20,000(!) repair bill.
(That's more than all the cars I've ever bought put together. Hell, it's close to the brand new price of all the cars I've ever owned, put together)
I'm sure all the big aerospace manufacturers (Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup etc.) have various expensive projects to deal with debris, which they'd love to get funded. Ideally on a Cost Plus basis.
This is just a guess, but on one hand you have an industry that likes bribes totally legitimate lobbying, and on the other, an FCC chairman who used to be a lobbyist and by all accounts is still very friendly with the people he used to work for.
Seems like a match made in, if not heaven, at least somewhere sunny like the Camen islands, (or Belize, or Andorra, or Panama etc. etc.)
The shift to PowerPC was a lot better received, because Apple were already using a Motorola CPU, so using one developed by Motorola and Apple (and IBM) was seen as an upgrade. (And of course, it could emulate 68k code faster than any real 68k CPU could run it, so it was a big upgrade).
In contrast, when it was first announced that OSX would be running on Intel's x86 CPUs there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and lo, they did begin to doubt the word of the prophet Jobs and curse the name of Intel.
At Exeter Uni there's plenty of buildings where you can enter on the ground floor, climb multiple flights of stairs only to walk along a corridor into the basement of another building.
I did used to live in a house where the front door was three floors above the backdoor, which was still above a single storey garage.
"Basically, if your job is to deal with the public, you're not working from home."
Broadly true, but the significant exception is call centre workers. A couple of our clients are finding ways to allow their call centre staff to work from home via VoIP over a VPN.
I don't think we've worked out a way to make it PCI compliant yet, so they'll still have to have a skeleton staff actually in the office.
As to whether this will continue past lockdown, for our customers I think they'll probably prefer to have people in the office. However, the call centre industry in general seems to be pretty cut-throat, so if there's money to be saved from having your workforce at home I bet they'll try it.
I can understand average users complaining about an interface changing, but as a sysadmin I've always held it as a point of pride that I can pick up any new bit of software within a short amount of time.
I find Win 10 just as easy to use as any other version (back to 3.0, I was Workbench only before that), or OSX, or any of the variety of Linux window managers that I've used come to that. None of them are perfect, but all of them work. I guess the choice is to learn how they work, or complain on the internet.
To be fair, Microsoft have produced some pretty good hardware over the years. The intellimouse has gone through various versions over the years, and all the ones I've tried have been as good as the first ones. Their ergonomic keyboards seem to be well liked by people who are in to that sort of thing. They've invented a design for a battery holder for AA batteries which allows them to be inserted either way around. And at the end of the day, most of their hardware is relatively inexpensive.
If they never made software they'd probably be a well regarded company.
"Cisco router using an RJ-45 for the console interface which was wired differently to the Epson till printers RJ-45 connector"
Which was different again from the one APC used on their UPS's, which they'd usually position so that it was right next to the RJ45 connector for ethernet, and leave you to guess whether plugging the wrong cable in was going to brick your UPS.
A few years back I was working at a company that had an SDSL installed.
One day it stopped working. After escalating through our ISP, we eventually found out that we were one of only three SDSL connections in the southwest, and that a 'helpful' BT engineer had been working nearby, seen the wiring for our circuit and though to themselves "that ADSL is wrongly wired, I will be helpful and fix it", which of course utterly banjaxed it.
It took several days to find an engineer that understood SDSL to re-wire us.
Should have bought a Microsoft Intellimouse back in the early 2000's, those things last forever. I still have one at work that gets hauled out when I need a spare (they came with a USB-PS2 adaptor in the box, but I don't remember seeing a computer with a PS2 port for years).
I think the OP was asking a rhetorical question and meant "why is there no specific law against a police officer abusing their position for financial gain?". He was charged with two types of fraud, one of which was overturned, neither of which seemed to take his job as a police officer in to account. It's not like corrupt cops are a new thing, how come he wasn't charged with something along those lines?
I'd assumed that (eg) connections to the US would go out via Cornwall, without detouring to London first. However, five minutes of tracert
ing seems to show international connections being routed through London (I'm in Bristol, on Virgin).
Hopefully an actual network engineer will be along to tell my why I'm worng.
I was an air cadet in the mid 90's and although we watched the safety videos etc. the extent of the parachute landing training was "and when you reach the ground keep your knees bent so you don't break your legs", but no training or testing etc. I think the assumption was that you were almost certainly not going to use the parachute, so a couple of broken legs would be the least of your issues.
This paper assumes that General Relativity wasn't taken into account when plotting the course, and predicts that the final pass off Venus could be off by ~8x105km.
No idea if they're correct or not.
The number of times a user has called me over to fix a problem, which then magically fixed itself as soon as I was stood there, is enormous.
Possibly the user is taking things slower and more carefully when I'm watching, but sometimes I think it's just electronic fear.
holding down the entire SCSI bus until they returned and the damnable machine would finally boot?
This still happens today. Last weekend my computer started hanging for minutes at a time, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to any attempt to read or write to a particular SSD*.
So, a few days later, replacement SSD in hand, I power off my machine to install it (it had been powered off several times in between). It was at this point that the bad SSD decided to fail completely, and the machine refused to boot until I'd removed it.
I suspect that if I'd been more patient it would have eventually booted after timing out.
* I'm using StorageSpaces with tiering on Windows 10, which is completely unsupported, and I only have myself to blame
It's just as likely that the US TLA's have told Microsoft that they require DNSSEC for email, so MS are adding it to try and get a big, juicy, DoD contract for Office 365.
Plus they don't need to crack the encryption on the emails in transit when they can just grab them at rest.
Fortunately Motorola allows the end user to unlock the bootloader on most of their phones, even the G8 (use this page). It voids your warranty, but that's the fun part imo.
From what I hear they generally don't stray too far from vanilla Android on their phones, but I'd install a custom ROM just as a matter of course.
One of the people I work with doesn't bother setting the language to en-GB when he installs an OS.
Now, as 99% of the time we're accessing it via SSH so it's not a problem.
But that one time when I had to log into the console, with a UK keyboard, it took me several minutes to work out why my password wasn't working. It was (as I'm sure some of you had guessed) that the OS was expecting an en-US keyboard, with it's keys in the wrong places.
Had a similar problem logging into something via a Mac, when I had a #
in my password.
Uptime is just a measure of how long since you last verified that your machine could boot successfully ;)
(Don't forget that a reboot doesn't give anything a chance to really stop. Problems are more likely to crop up after a machine has been powered off for more than a few minutes, and parts of it are cooling down).