Posts by meadowlark

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

COMPLETE REWIRE.

Although somewhat off subject, many years ago I went even further down in my late widowed mother-in- law's overall opinion of me. Her light in the hall was flickering so I had a look at it for her. My knowledge of all things mains power in those days was virtually nil. I could replace a fuse in a plug, and before circuit breakers came in, repair a fuse in the house fuse box with the appropriate thickness of fuse wire, but that was it.

So I turned off the electric, took out the light bulb, and checked that the wiring to the bulb holder (pendant ?) was okay, which it was. I then turned my attention to the ceiling rose which I undid to check the wiring coming out of the ceiling. The wiring for the whole house was very old, probably being the original from 60 years before. I could see that there was a loose wire and instead of just tightening the screw, I unscrewed it and pulled the wire out completely (don't ask).

Big mistake. The insulation was so brittle it all came off like a piece of bone china breaking, and I was left holding bare wire. No problem (I thought), I'll just pull a piece of slack through and nip off the bare wire. Well as I did, the brittle insulation just kept falling off like dead leaves from a tree in autumn. I gently kept pulling but eventually there was no slack left, and just a 12" piece of bare wire disappearing into the ceiling.

Even I knew I couldn't put lots of insulation tape on and reconnect it. Well I could but it wouldn't exactly be safe. I therefore had to break the bad news to my mother-in-law that I'd have to contact a qualified electrician for her. I was there when he eventually arrived and I was half expecting what he was going to say. He checked the state of the wiring generally and advised that a complete house rewire was required. The look my mother-in-law gave me can only be imagined.

Because of the age of the house, channels had to be made in the plaster of the walls to accommodate the wiring and capping. So course, she had to get a decorator in to repaper the rooms. From then on, I never once offered to do any more jobs for her as I knew what the answer would be !

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

BOATY MACBOAT

Why do we want a bloody ship when a trade delegation or Bojo turns up in another country ? No one else does this. You just hire a big posh venue in the host country, and then wine and dine your potential clients there. Unless of course it's secretly just for the Queen and the rest of the royal mob.

NASA to return to the Moon by 2024. One problem with that, says watchdog: All of it

Waste of money.

Think of what all that money could be used for on earth rather than going to the moon again, or to Mars. Just giving all the developing world a clean water supply would be a start, followed by proper sanitation and an end to 'shanty towns' which are home to hundreds of millions of people would be another.

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

Having read all of these comments re God/no God, I think that morality basically comes down to: "do to others as you would have them do to you." These words didn't just come from Jesus, all other religions and philosophies said the same thing. It fits both God and no God with just one condition. If someone was going to hit you over the head and steal your wallet, would they do it if they knew conclusively that a bolt of lightening would immediately strike them dead ? No they wouldn't. But I suppose that's not behaving in a moral way, it's behaving yourself because of the awful deterrent.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Sam Goldwyn.

This reminds me of a 'Goldwynism'. Legendary film producer Sam Goldwyn had the knack of saying or doing things in such a way, that they had people in fits e.g. "Include me out."..."A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on." etc etc.

When he asked his secretary what was in the 12 filing cabinets cluttering up the office, she told him that they contained every single detail of films going back decades, even to the start of silent films.

"Well get rid of them all," he said, "but keep a copy just in case."

Amazon turns Victorian industrialist with $2bn building project to house workers near new headquarters

Re: Quite in Favour

The other thing about Cadburys is that they paid decent wages to their employees and provided other benefits such as sick pay and cheap nourishing meals at lunch time. The company was known as a 'factory in a garden' because they moved from Birmingham city centre to a lush rural area. Being Quakers, the family felt obliged to treat their workers with respect and not to exploit them for as much profit as possible. Strangely, two other chocolate and confectionary makers were also run by Quaker families......Frys and the Rowntrees.

Oh crap: UK's digital overlords moot new rules to help telcos lay fibre in sewer pipes

Why not just run the fibre cables overhead on poles ? They used to do that donkey's years ago with copper and they were called ariel cables.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

I know this has nothing to do with IT/computer problems, but it's in the same sort of category. In the early seventies, a friend of mine bought a stereo with a record deck and two speakers from a large department store. It also had a radio built in. After a couple of weeks, it stopped playing his vinyl records so he took it back to the service department of this store and they told him to come in a week later when it should be fixed.

He got a phone call the same day to say it was ready. When he got back there, he was puzzled as to why it took so little time to repair. "Easy," said the assistant. "You had accidentally pressed the 'radio' button but it wasn't tuned to any station. So it was silent apart from a low buzzing sound !"

He said he pulled his collar right up when he left in case anyone wondered why his face was now the colour of crimson. When he got home, he permanently taped down the correct button as he never listened to the radio anyway.

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

Many years ago now, I went over the mother of all holes in the road and wrecked the suspension on my 1 year old Mini. I contacted the council and they said it was the responsibility of the local Gas Board who had just finished work there. On to the Gas Board and they said it was the contractor I needed. On to them and lo and behold, they had sub-contracted the job out to another lot.

After going through about 7 different companies/contractors etc, I ended up with a one man band - some Irish bloke living in a caravan who said he couldn't afford anything as he was skint.

As with Virgin Media, I concluded that the council should be held responsible because their clerk-of-works should have ensured that the road was filled in, and then tarmacked with a barrier around it until it hardened off. None of that had happened.

I took my case to the small claims court and the council agreed to pay for the repairs to my Mini.

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

Re: Had the fire brigade called to a five star hotel, in Malta....

Conveyor belt toasters - harder to burn the bead ? Eh, no it's not. I had a queue of people behind me for the three conveyor toasters, so as mine was too under done, I thought it was okay to put it through again. Wrong decision ! It was only a third of the way through again before black smoke started billowing everywhere.

Trying to look nonchalant while people around me were coughing and gasping for breath, the bread finally appeared as a flaming piece of charcoal. One of the kitchen assistants suddenly arrived and put it out with an extinguisher as all the fire alarms were going off.

I didn't go down for breakfast after that !.

There will be blood: BT to axe 13,000 employees

Do you remember when BT was privatised and then Norman Tebbit got himself a job on the board ? A year or so later, he was boasting that when BT was a civil service department, it took longer than 6 weeks to have a phone installed whereas now it was 2 days.

This wasn't true but what he didn't say was that before privatisation, it only took 2 days to get your phone fixed when it went out of order !

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Why does everyone assume that alien life, if it exists, is more advanced than we are ? After the 'Big Bang', if other lifeforms developed, why shouldn't they have all developed at the same pace ? In fact, we might be the most advanced of the lot, and so it will be a long time before any of us contact each other - assuming that there are others of course.

Openreach ups investment plans: Will shoot out full fibre to 3 million premises

Re: FTTP

I used to work for BT and helped on a few change-overs from the old electro-mechanical telephone exchanges (e.g. Strowger/Crossbar) to the new digital ones (e.g. System X and System Y). This would have been the mid to late 1980's.

Early one morning, myself and others were down in the basement of a very large city centre exchange waiting for the signal to pull the pegs to disconnect the old, and bring customers onto the new all singing, all dancing, digital telephone exchange upstairs.

I was looking down to where the old underground cables came into the building, and the incompatibility struck me. The cables going to the customers, 95% of whom were business ones, were the original early thirties lead covered type, with copper pairs covered with paper insulation.

True, fibre optics and broadband were in their infancy but to me, it seemed that only half of the job had been done. A fortune had been spent developing digital telephone exchanges, but not much on the external cable network. It could have been done relatively cheaper back then to replace the lot.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

I remember a friend years ago who wouldn't get around to using the computer that had been installed on his desk like everyone else's. Despite his manager ranting at him to take the company's in house training programme, he just ignored him and quite a thick layer of dust built up on it over the months.

Eventually, colleagues got used to telling him that "there was a message on his screen for him." If he had been out of the office on business for a couple of days, his computer would be plastered with yellow notelets where people had stuck them on !

Trevor.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

PERMANENT SLOW MOTION REPLAY ?

At the age of 74, I was born slightly too early for the digital age. I can still remember seeing those giant spools of computer tape spinning in massive cabinets in the background on the TV show: "The Man From Uncle." And apparently, when the Americans first went to the moon when I was 25, the memory of the on board computer systems was about a tenth of what is now in a smart phone.

However, I'm fascinated by all things IT wise even if I'm not up to speed with all the subjects discussed by the very highly qualified experts on this site. But the analogy you've given is spot on and I can't believe that this problem wasn't anticipated years ago. If I've got it right, then even if hundreds of thousands of software engineers, programmers etc were trained up to the degree required, it would take years before any difference was noted. And because of this deficit, all things IT are going to be relatively sluggish from now on.

Trevor.

P.S. Does this also mean that 'A.I.' will come grinding to a halt and so we can all sleep sounder now that super advanced Androids won't take over mankind after all.

Ofcom promises to have details on duct and pole access by summer

New Zealand has a population of just 3 million people, so separating and allowing anyone access to their equivalent of OpenReach would obviously work. But Britain has 63 million people, with a mammoth amount of ducted cables, telegraph poles etc. in all its cities. London alone is so gigantic, nothing on earth in Zealand could compare.

So the idea that because it works in NZ, it would work here, is just ridiculous.

I worked for BT when it was privatised way back in 1984. I thought at the time that it was like running a railway, and some competitor was going to hitch its coache(s) on to the back of our trains. Everyone would then say:- "look, competition works. The new company only charges half of what BT charges !" Since 1912 when telecomms were first nationalised, billions have been spent on the infrastructure and development over the decades, and now everyone is taking advantage of that without paying very much. If these companies were forced to cough up a fair proportion of what has been spent since 1912, they wouldn't have got started in the first place.

Linux kernel dev who asked Linus Torvalds to stop verbal abuse quits over verbal abuse

Opposite and Unequal Reaction.

Re "You have the right to be offended and I have the right to 'effing' well offend you." This could one day lead to some undiagnosed dangerous psychopath saying "Well you just have, and although you're totally unaware of this, in my (deranged) book, I have the right, which I'm now going to exercise, to put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, and with a serious brain injury to boot."

Such things don't happen often, but they have been known.

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

The original article that we're all commenting on is the influence of the press on people's opinions of political parties, especially at election time. Do they reflect opinion or do they form it ?

What most of us forget is that it's the Conservative party that creates wealth, but even more important is that it's the Labour party that tries to share out that wealth a bit, to the millions who helped to create it. They also concentrate on social justice, an example of which was when they abolished the workhouse in the late twenties during their first ever period in power. That has continued ever since

In my humble opinion, the Tory supporting press, especially The Mail (middle class ) and Murdoch's titles (working class) do an excellent job in persuading the undecided, and it's that relatively small number that decide the outcome of elections elections. But let's face it, those who own, run, and work for these titles have no interest in social justice, nor in my opinion does the party they support.

Without Labour, the workhouse would have continued, the NHS would not have existed (anyone fancy the USA version ?), no right to buy your leasehold; landladies would still be putting up notices saying 'no coloureds, no Irish, no dogs'; no equal pay; the list goes on and on and includes things we now just take for granted. These includes protection from criminal landlords; unfair dismissal; protection from working in death trap factories and building sites - hundreds were killed every year; a decent safety net for those unemployed, sick or disabled ( again, if anyone fancies the US version, go and take a look at motor city Detroit ); maternity leave with pay; minimum wage etc, etc.

As a working class retired bloke who belonged to a union throughout my working years, I agreed with the Tory union secret ballot law etc because the big union beasts led their members out on strike when often, the members wanted to keep working. I also know of people who abuse the welfare system, and although two wrongs do not make a right, this doesn't come close to what the tax evaders owe.

To end a long ramble, at least Murdoch's papers don't go in for much racism although gays and single parents got a bashing in the old days. But they do resort to low abuse and insults of those politicians that they're against. However, the Mail's racism can only be described as vile. Apart from Amanda Platell ( did she change her name from Amana Patel, I wonder, to fit in a bit more perhaps ? ) I'd like to know how many black and Asian people work for the Mail ? Of course they've got a long record of this when they attacked Jewish people in the very early day of their publication. They then switched to the Irish, then people from the Caribbean, then Asians from the sub continent and Uganda etc, then illegal immigrants, then asylum seekers, and now it's east Europeans and those fleeing the war zones in the Middle East and Africa.

What is really annoying is that these 'viewspapers' print opinions as if they were fact, and If the right wing press so wished, they could even demonise Mother Theresa.

Elderly Bletchley Park volunteer sacked for showing Colossus exhibit to visitors

Loss of Old Museums

Regarding superb museums being turned into 'Disneyland' type attractions, the 'Science Museum' in Birmingham suffered just this fate. The cradle of the industrial revolution and known as the 'City of a Thousand Trades', Birmingham had probably the richest industrial heritage of all. This was reflected in its old museum until it was summarily closed down without any consultation with its citizens.

In its place is a shiny new glass and steel megalith of nothingness at a new home called 'Millenium Point ThinkTank'. It doesn't even have the names of either 'science' or 'museum' in it. It should be renamed as 'Pointless Nothingness' because all the really interesting exhibits from the old place have disappeared. It now encourages self led learning for children and it seems to me to be more like an exhibition of computer games.