Re: Beware of awkward associations
Crew in Southampton, bombs in Baghdad?
Posts by Phil O'Sophical
7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
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Welcome to Heathrow Terminal, er, Samsung Galaxy S5
Cloud computing aka 'The future is trying to KILL YOU'
NASA agonizes over plan for Mars rock sample return mission
Friday 16th May 2014 08:40 GMT 
Re: Add this to the bill
there has always been concern that Earth bacteria carried on a Rover would contaminate Mars? Surely if there's a possibility of Earth life surviving on Mars, the opposite is as likely?
The worry about contamination of Mars by Earth bacteria is largely a selfish one, to avoid spoiling the science. It would be upsetting to to get excited about Curiosity discovering life, then to later find out that it was just Earth life that had hitched a lift. The chances of such life thriving enough to do harm (to what?) are negligeable.
Any Martian bacteria that makes it back is unlikely to outcompete native stuff, even assuming that the transport craft isn't swallowed by a small dog...
Whoa! NUDE! SELFIES! for! Marissa! Mayer's! Blink-gobbling! Yahoo!
Google Maps adds all UK public transport timetables
Wednesday 14th May 2014 11:13 GMT
Re: Here transit
Google also has ferry problems, it only knows some of them. Ask it for Bruges to Hull and it still takes you either via the channel tunnel, or Hook of Holland-Harwich, despite there being a very good Zeebrugge-Hull service.
The one that amuses me is Expedia, where the list of nearest alternative airports to Glasgow includes Belfast City...
Database down! DBA ninjas to the rescue
Wednesday 14th May 2014 10:54 GMT
Business Continuity
If you really want full DR protection against "fire, flooding and other acts of god." then use Oracle Data Guard, which maintains a near-realtime copy of the DB at another site, ready to go. You'll probably need a full backup as well.
As always, though, you should never start with the backup software and try to figure out what protection it can give you. One thing I hate getting is a call from a customer syaing "I've bought product XXXX, how do I use it to protect my business?" Proper business continuity practice is to work out what level of protection your business needs, and then choose the right solution. It might be weekly cold backups, daily online backups, Data Guard, or some combination of them all.
If you do the risk analysis and the business disruption calculations properly you shouldn't need ninjas.
550 reasons to buy this book for your beloved: COCKROACHES of Oz
Mae Microsoft yn addysgu Swyddfa, Bing, siarad Cymraeg*
Monday 12th May 2014 12:00 GMT
Re: Who is actually going to benefit from this?
The proportion of expenditure spent supporting the Welsh language is so small that if it was all cut tomorrow you wouldn't notice the slightest difference to any public services
That's a specious argument. If I stopped paying my taxes tomorrow you wouldn't notice the slightest difference to any public services. It doesn't follow that we can all stop paying taxes.
so why shouldn't it be spent on something that is so important to many people in Wales?
If it's that important to them, and such an insignificant sum, why shouldn't it be paid for out of taxation raised in Wales?
Monday 12th May 2014 09:44 GMT
Re: Who is actually going to benefit from this?
In many (most?) cases it has nothing to do with culture or "where you came from", it's purely political posturing. If the language is useful enough, and has sufficient interest, it will survive and grow on its own now that we're mostly past the era of official suppression of politically-undesirable languages.
If it can't survive on its own, let it die. There's no excuse for spending taxpayers money to keep it on life support.
A recent example is the discovery of "Ulster Scots" by the N. Irish unionist population. Nothing to do with the contrived rediscovering of a past, but entirely because "the other lot" get special treatment and subsidies for Irish, and that can't be allowed to go unchallenged.
Vinyl-fetish hipsters might just have a point
Friday 9th May 2014 17:46 GMT
Re: RE ChrisJC but it's not hi-fi.
That's what I call customer service!
And possibly why Quad are still around after 30+ years. How many of the current "outsource it to China" race-to-the-bottom companies will still be here in 2044?
I used to drool over Quad speakers. Still do, but still couldn't justfy the price :(
Friday 9th May 2014 07:15 GMT
There's a warmth to the sound from vinyl you just can't recreate with CD's
Of course you can, just pre-process to add more third-harmonic dstortion before recording.
Vinyls may sound warmer, or subjectively "better", but it isn't superior, the sound that comes out is not as close to the original as that from a CD.
Of course, few people get to hear "original" sound, in a recording studio, and how often have you been to a concert and thought the atmosphere was fantastic, but the audio quality just wasn't as good as the record? You probably blamed it on the accoustic of the hall?
Solaris deposed as US drone-ware, replaced by Linux administration
The amazing .uk domain: Less .co and loads more whalesong
Tuesday 6th May 2014 14:28 GMT
Re: Finally catching up?
No, France doesn't use second-level domains.
it does, there are six main ones:
.asso.fr, the equivalent of .org.uk
.com.fr, equivalent to .co.uk
.gouv.fr, equivalent to .gov.uk (for example, to pay your taxes, you go to http://www.impots.gouv.fr/ )
.tm.fr, for trademarks
and s0me less-used ones:
.nom.fr
.prd.fr
.presse.fr
and others that are used at local government level.
Tuesday 6th May 2014 07:37 GMT
Re: Finally catching up?
what was the original thinking on this
The US registrars chose TLDs like .edu, .com, .gov, leaving such "generic" names unavailable for wider use, so the UK had to go to second-level ones to get the same flexibility. For the three mentioned, for example, it uses .ac.uk (ACademic), .co.uk and .gov.uk. Some other countries follow a similar pattern.
Personally I get irritated by the muppets in intermal IT, which in the company where I cirrently work have decided that that local office nets will be xxx.uk.company.com, xxx.us.company.com, xxx.fr.company.com, etc. which means that internal addresses which use .uk or .de etc always have to be fully qualified. If they'd picked things like ".france" or ".germany" it would have worked better.
The quid-a-day nosh challenge: Anyone fancy this fungus I found?
Marauding quid-a-day nosh hack menaces teepee hippie villages
Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap fears for his waistline
New .london domains touted tomorrow amid usual tech hypegasm
Monday 28th April 2014 12:43 GMT
Re: Bah humbug.
Going by the comments in the article, the people taking up .london are the ones with enough money not to care what it costs, and a strong desire to stop anyone else grabbing in and squatting on "their" name. That is, no-one actually wants .london, they just want to make sure no-one else gets it. Registrars are making money out of TLD prophylaxis, the internet gets stranger every day.
DeSENSORtised: Why the 'Internet of Things' will FAIL without IPv6
Space station astronauts pop outside to replace crippled computer
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: Great changes, but sssh don't mention the...
Red-faced LOHAN team 'fesses up in blown SPEARS fuse fiasco
Win gorgeous strap-on, enter whole new world with Reg compo
Report: Apple seeking to raise iPhone 6 price by a HUNDRED BUCKS
France bans managers from contacting workers outside business hours
Friday 11th April 2014 08:02 GMT
Re: 9 to 5
Unless it's in their contract to be available 24/7, why wouldn't anyone in any country do the same?
Exactly. My boss is 6 timezone hours away from me. We both take a very reasonable position, phones have an off switch for a reason. When we're happy to be contacted, during the day or otherwise, we leave the phone on. When we feel it's time to be off-duty, with family or whatever, we turn them off. Anyone who calls can leave a message. In special circumstances, maybe an unhappy customer, we arrange to make an extra effort.
Sometimes I do conf calls at 11pm. Sometimes I decide "fuck it" and turn the phone off at 4pm. My choice, and I'm fortunate to have a boss who feels the same way. So did the boss before him. It's called a "decent job". As long as I get my work done, when I said I'd do it, no problems.
Friday 11th April 2014 07:55 GMT
Re: Draconian
Polish your skills, act like a fucking professional and schedule the next person that calls for an after lunch slot two weeks from next Thursday and charge them for setting the appointment.
Would that be after lunch my time, or after lunch their time on the other side of the world?
I know which one will lose the customer...
Friday 11th April 2014 07:49 GMT
Re: Allowable overtime means they can creep up to almost 40 hours?
That's exactly why the 35-hour week screwed the very workers that it was supposed to be for, the ones who vote socialist.
Martine Aubry (daughter of Jaques Delors, of Sun headline fame), who introduced it, initially suggested that it would reduce unemployment because companies would have to hire additional staff to make up for the 'lost' hours. After that was ridiculed by economists she changed tack and said it was a "progressive social measure to give French workers more leisure time". At which point the white-collar unions, whose members are not paid hourly, asked how their members would benefit from this increased leisure time. The result was an extra 5-12 days per year of "special" vacation for white-collar staff.
Then the blue-collar unions pointed out that it would be unfair for their staff to have their pay cut by being obliged to work fewer hours, and threatened strikes, result was that they got paid the same for 35 hours as they would have done for 39. This included raising the minimum wage. At that point the employers realised that they couldn't afford to hire additional staff, and the least-worst option would be to offer overtime pay to the existing staff, to get them back to 39 hours. Since this would make it look even more stupid, the government placed limits on overtime to avoid the whole exercise being moot.
Unfortunately, lots of very low-paid people had been used to doing large amounts of overtime, 10+ hours a week, to make ends meet. They got really screwed since they lost almost all of it (or moved to the black market, paid under the table, and hence not paying tax on it).
End result is that the hourly-paid workers who voted the government into power came off worst, the employers' costs went up, and the white-collar workers who would normally vote for the rightwingers were laughing all the way to the beach. Needless to say when Sarkozy came to power and tried to relax the 35-hour rules to make France more productive it was the very people who supported him that refused. Helped by the blue-collar unions who promptly said that if their members were going to work more hours in a week they obviously expected more money...
The only real downside was that those white-collar workers with the extra vacation didn't actually see their workload decreasing, they just had to do it in fewer days, hence each working day got longer. That, presumably, is the reason for this new legislation.
The whole thing is a gigantic clusterfuck, from an economically incompetent government, greedy intransigent unions, and 19th century labour laws. And the government still can't understand why the economy is in the shit, the president has a record-beating 19% popularity rating, and the Front National had their best ever score in the municipal elections.
UFO, cosmic ray or flasher? NASA rules on Curiosity curiosity
USB reversible cables could become standard sooner than you think
Ancient Earth asteroid strike that dwarfed dinosaur killer still felt today
Apple to flush '£37bn' down the bog if it doesn't flog cheapo slabtops
How Brit computer maker beat IBM's S/360 - and Soviet spies
Wednesday 9th April 2014 14:23 GMT
Re: Plus ça change...
There's the assumption here (it seems) that the ICL 1900 and 2900 were, in some way, poorer hardware/software compared to that being offered by IBM. I can't agree with that idea. I spent about 10 years programming on ICL mainframes (mostly 2900) and when ICL lost bids it was rarely on a technical basis.
They also had a wonderful (for its time) OS, George IV. 1900s were so well liked and used that many (most?) 2900's sold were actually used to run a 1900 emulator to keep old software running.
Broadband Secretary of SHEEP sensationally quits Cabinet
Wednesday 9th April 2014 12:31 GMT
Re: The needle returns to the start of the song...........
UKIP are the only real option in the next elections
Well the next elections are the European ones in May, and I certainly would ike to see UKIP sweep the board, if only to see the reaction in Brussels and Westminster.
Heaven help us if they ever got elected to a position wiuth any power, though.
I am sure UKIP don't smell of roses, their leader at least has the virtue of not always avoiding the questions
Yes, but only because he takes the Salmond approach: "The answer is Independence. What was the question again?"
Bendy or barmy: Why your next TV will be curved
Tuesday 8th April 2014 18:29 GMT
Re: Pincushion effect
Was pincushion distortion, if it exists outside curved TV sales meetings, reduced by the old fashioned curved (outwards) CRT screens ?
Yes. When TVs moved from scanning an angle of 90degrees to 110, to allow a wider and flatter screen without getting deeper, the correction circuitry for things like pincushion distortion got much more complex. Anywhere that you're projecting the image of a sphere onto a non-spherical surface will result in pincushion distortion. It's particularly awkward with colour TVs that have three guns (RGB) in a triangular pattern, since each gun needs it's own, different, correction.
Wookiee! CHEWIE'S BACK in Star Wars Ep VII – blab Hollywood 'sources'
Beat it, freetards! Dyn to shut down no-cost dynamic DNS next month
Tuesday 8th April 2014 14:57 GMT
Re: $25 per year sounds really cheap to me...
When you add in the $10 for your domain, another $12 for email, $20 for hosting, it not only all adds up, but there's no reason why something a simple as a dynamic DNS service should be the most expensive component. Obviously I wouldn't run a business on services at that price-point, but for domestic use looking after the pennies is important.
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