Posts by Jonathon Green 611 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
…I’ll take a wild guess that in the majority of cases where an owner, or manager objects to broadband installation it’s because they’re hoping to find a way they can take a cut of both the installation and service costs for themselves by acting as an intermediary.
As long as you’ve had the foresight not to make heavy use of an email address associated with your broadband supplier you absolutely can say “no thanks” and migrate elsewhere (and I know a number of people who’ve successfully done so without significant interruption). The worst thing that can happen is that you end up with multiple grey boxes tacked to the outside of your house….
Yeah, but when managers don’t see values in that kind of skillset because it’s “legacy” you can see why the youngsters have followed the money (and/or the requirements in the job descriptions).
While I fully (and sometimes vociferously) agree that those skills are still relevant and necessary if the managers who set the recruitment targets and create the roles don’t see it that way you can’t exactly blame the kids for following that lead…
Bizarrely aformer employer has recently been bought out and the resultant (and inevitable) headcount cull has fallen disproportionately on more experienced people with exactly that sort of skillset (and corresponding experience). Possibly because they’re more expensive, possibly because of the unfashionable “legacy skills” tag, but either way I don’t see it ending well, because even if there were any evidence that the AI enabled development model they appear to betting heavily on worked they’ve also got rid of most of the workforce who actually understood their flagship product, including the former Chief Architect…
Well, not yet, but now that the trigger words are being used it’s surely only a matter of time before a bunch of the usual suspects go full January Sixth on one or more Smithsonian sites, hurting somebody and/or doing serious damage to something important and irreplaceable…
Yeah. I think it was updates associated with major feature releases which brought things to a grinding halt, and either fortunately or unfortunately (I’m still not really sure which) my experiments took place at a point in the release cycle where I very quick got caught out by one of those. At the time the only way past the bottleneck was a re-installation (and consequently reinstalling all the apps in use).and I wasn’t sufficiently sold on the experience to go down that road.
I’ve done this, and as you say, with the help of tools like Rufus it’s not *too* hard to do and works fine. The trouble is (that in my case at least) you end up with a fully functioning Windows 11 installation which refuses to accept updates, which kind of defeats the point of the exercise.
If the state of the art for this stuff has moved on from there then that’s great, and I’d be keen to give it another shot, but otherwise it doesn’t really help.
…that if that was going to happen it already would have done.
We know Win11 can runs perfectly well on machines without a TPM, if you jump through a few pretty easy humps you can do it right now. It’s just that MS have made the *choice* to cut installations like that off from updates and if they haven’t backed down in the face of the loud, relentless complaining we’ve seen so far it seems unlikely they ever will.
…or the use and distribution of tools which could be used to facilitate it, and so I definitely haven’t enrolled my Windows 10 PC on the ESU channel through “unofficial” channels, you shouldn’t either, and I’m sure El Reg definitely wouldn’t have published an article telling you everything you need to know in order to do that a little while back.
'We know what you're selling, and we're not buying it..."
And the unbossing thing is not a a new concept. My former employer (I'm retired now) to their great credit created a new job title, a new role, a new space in the org chart, and facilitated a corresponding salary bump in order to recognise my contribution (and level of seniority) after I repeatedly declined management track promotions. Management is a discrete specialism requiring its own specific set of abilities and talents which I acutely aware of not possessing...
The issues with Shuttle were, as I understand it were pretty much baked in by (military) requirements for a specific payload shape, size, and weight (hence the size of the vehicle) and (military) requirements for sufficient cross-range capability to support “pop-up” (single orbit) missions (which is why it got wings).
Relaxing either of those constraints even a little could have resulted in a significantly simpler, cheaper, more reliable, less maintenance intensive, and safer design. As it was engineers did their best to address those requirements (which had become obsolete before the first test articles rolled out), but, well, if you ask a stupid question you’re going to get a stupid answer…
…the EU and/or Netherlands simply embargoed sales of ASML kit, consumables, and services to the USA and US controlled entities as a response to the tariff nonsense?
Kind of a nuclear option (“Nice semiconductor manufacturing program you used to have there, shame it’s just a bunch of buildings containing big lumps of expensive machinery you can’t use now…”) but…
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Although what I think meta the Zuckburghers deserve, and would constitute fair compensation may differ from what they think they deserve.
They probably had fewer face eating leopards in mind for a start…
“ I'd put money on it that the CEO - had he been awake - wouldn't have decided to close the entire airport for 20 hours when the fire had only been burning for an hour or so.”
You may well be right, but I’d also put money on it that had a decision not to shut down went horribly wrong resulting in wholesale death and/or injury said CEO wouldn’t be in a hurry to step forward and accept responsibility for it. Well, maybe in a mealy mouthed, platitudinous, statement to the press kind of way, but not in an actual personally accepting consequences way…
Management absolutely is a specialist skill.
It’s just that (in technical fields at least) it’s orthogonal to the skills of those managed and not neccesarily (or in the tech field often) more valuable or harder to come by, making it doubly stupid and frustrating that management is depressingly often the only career path available to senior technical staff.
The result of this is a middle management class packed with people who (again depressingly often) hate their jobs, aren’t terribly good at them, and get far too involved and “hands on” in the work they’re supposed to be facilitating. I consider myself extremely lucky to have ended my career working for a company who (while not neccesarily perfect in every regard) were prepared to be creative with roles, job titles, and pay scales because I am in no doubt that I would have ended up amongst that number…
I have a vague recollection of a game/challenge involving two (or more) chunks of code executing concurrently within the shared memory space of a simple virtual machine with the objective being for (human) participants to produce a piece of code which could locate and then disrupt, corrupt, or otherwise disable its “competitors”.
Anyone else remember that, or did I just imagine it or come across it in a work of fiction….?
Have you tried making things people want to buy at a price they’re willing to pay?
That may sound trite and obvious, but, taking the specific case of automobiles, when Ford started offering the Gen 5 (2005) and later Mustang through regular dealerships, with proper factory warranties (and in the case of the UK from 2015 on with the steering wheel in the right place) it actually did rather well…
That’s actually not a bad use of a nominally “in office” day, especially if the management justification for a mandatory “in” day is to build relationships and networks.
Years back I did a few years contract work for a company based in Sweden, I used to fly over to Stockholm regularly to spend some time in the office and the first time I went in I was absolutely gob-smacked to find that every week there was a day when the whole (small, maybe a dozen people) would get together to prepare and cook an actual meal from scratch in the kitchen area, set a table, sit down to eat together like family, and then clear away and wash up together, any management team members present would join in alongside. That could easily take up three hours in total but it was the best, most effective way of getting a team to communicate and build relationships I’ve ever seen…
“ Having a single person's DNA sequence tells you nothing about your family members if you do not have the said family members DNA to compare it with.”
I suspect that comparison would quite often result in some awkward conversations… :-)
People keep saying there was no upside to Brexit (and on the whole I completely agree with that judgement) but it did buy my youngest son (who’d just started a job as a customs clearance agent with FedEx at Stansted Airport) a BMW M3, a wedding, and a nice starter flat on overtime/shift payments… :-)
Do the Oligarchy reckon that they can drive down wages and enshittify employment conditions sufficiently to sell domestically produced goods at prices which can undercut current producers even with the advantage of tariffs or is the USAnian consumer just going to have to get used to everything being at least 25% more expensive for the foreseeable future?
I can’t help thinking that’s ultimately going to be tough sell once the reality sets in…
Well, they probably can. If a manufacturer claims that their TV is 4K resolution then that’s an objectively verifiable claim, and if it turns out it’s got a boring old 1920x1080 panel in it then they can be nailed to the wall. Similarly, if they say it’s capable of displaying a particular brightness level and it can’t then again it an objectively measurable claim, and if they’re challenged on it and can’t demonstrate compliance they’ll be nailed to the wall, likewise for contrast ratios, colour gamuts etc.
In this case the complainant has simply fallen for a bit of marketing bullshit and been disappointed. Sucks to be them, film at eleven…
As far as I’m aware all LEDs rely on quantum phenomena to do their turning electricity into light thing, and all flat screen displays are pixel based (meaning that they’re made up of a bunch of dots). Ergo any LED TV has as many quantum dots as it has addressable pixels in it’s display panel (possible plus a couple more for status indicators) and every LED TV is a quantum dot TV.
I’ve always assumed that the words “Quantum Dot” in the description of a TV is simply a bullshit marketing term with no objective definition that a piece of hardware can be tested again are. Somebody somewhere may have registered it as a trade mark for their partic7display techno6, but as far as I can see it such a generic term that I can’t I imagine it would be enforceable in practice…
It’s almost as though different users doing different jobs on different hardware have different requirements/preferences for how they interact with a computer and that forcing a single model upon them in the interests of consistency was a bad idea.
Who would have thought it?
Speaking as a person rather than a standardised unit of productive capacity I’m all in favour of this kind of choice and think it’s long pst time developers finally started writing/designing applications to conform to the UI guidelines of whatever platform/desktop/whatever the user wants to run them on rather than using ever larger hammers to impose The One True Way on their customers…
So no downvote from me.
‘Call me a boring old fart, but the whole point of PDF was supposed to be that it was as immutable as a paper document, didn't run code in the background, and is pretty safe to open.”
Oh dear sweet, sweet summer child… :-)
I have made quite a decent living over the last 12 years ago out of the fact that if you set out to design a file format specifically to act as a delivery vehicle for malware you’d be hard pressed to “improve” on PDF, and that’s just the documented bits working as designed before you consider the possibility of implementation flaws…
Seriously, have a very quick skim[1] through the specifications…
https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/#pdf-1
https://pdfa.org/resource/iso-32000-pdf/
…and if it doesn’t make your blood run cold you’re either not looking properly or shouldn’t be working in the IT industry.
[1] Given the size of them more than the most cursory glance would be a big ask, but that should be enough.
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