Re: I had the opposite problem...
Nope £32 inc vat well it was when I signed up, and if the price moves a lot when I come to renew I will look at the options available
794 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2015
Finally getting my new City Fibre link on Monday after a months delay. Here Cityfibre is in the paths unfortunately they have stuck the termination boxes at random points in front of the houses.
So instead of installing it in front of a gravel path which runs up to the front door (nice and easy), they put it in front of the lawn. The lawn is reinforced to allow a car to park on it and not sink, and in front of the house is a 1M wide section of concrete. It has taken a few weeks for them to move the box 6' to the left which they could have done when they did the installation.
My brother has also gone this route but they put his box next to the fence so had a nice short run to do the work..... Still worth it as Zen are charging £32 for 300Mb whereas EE want £38 for 60Mb
Are the 5si basically armoured, years ago we had one wreck itself, the internals broke down might had had fuser burn out and it wasn’t viable to repair one, someone had the idea to get rid of it a skip crusher, the crusher gave up and the shell of that machine just had a crack in the plastic panel (I think the crusher was rated to 20 tonnes)…
That was a well built printer
I was called by one of the maintenance engineers after leaving a company (I don’t do electrics as I am a networking person). The conversation went something like this.
Do you remember where the cabling runs for a gps antenna in building X.
Me: er why do you need to know
Someone has been in and cut the unused cables as they didn’t think it was needed.
Me: after laughing for a few minutes, well I think it went under the floor out of the window on the car park side but I have no idea which window it was - I did leave 3 years ago…..
I don.t know if they found it or not….
There won't be any more Grand Tour, there is one out tomorrow (Friday 16th) and another later in the year but Clarkson, Hammond and May have decided not to make any more - they are getting too old and have been everywhere (their words not mine).
That will leave Clarkson's Farm and Good Omens as the only things I am interested in watching on Prime.....
I usually think Waterstones and buy books in person in preference to going online as nothing beats a good bookshop for browsing. Unfortunately in Peterborough where I live we only have a single branch of Waterstones, whereas years ago we had them, Dillon’s, Hammicks, Sherratt and Hughes (not sure about the name) and a few more.
Mostly gone due to the push of Amazon…
A few years ago we had the same problem but got round in a different way, this was also an as400.
We picked the space between the concrete sub floor and the tiles with teams of a4 paper. Under compression it is very strong and packed in tightly it should have been fireproof as well (that didn’t get tested when I was there)
Was working like that for a few years before I left the company
I run a slightly newer 4300 only about 18 years old, bought second hand about 8 years ago and turns out 400 pages a month every month since then (printing a club newsletter)
Only costs are original toner carts which you can pick up from Amazon for about £100 (a lot of companies but a printer and a lot of carts then the printer breaks and you can pick them up cheap)
New printers are a different matter
I used to work for one of the biggest insurance comparison sites in the country running the network.
I ended up doing a detailed explanation of how dns worked. As the highly paid programmers couldn’t understand that they needed to allow a drain timer before flipping the application from one set of servers to the second set.
They found it hard to understand the TTL on the dns cache records. It took about an hour before they usnderstood the reasoning and why setting the ttl on a customer facing website dns entry to 5 seconds was not going to work properly,…
This was before Anycast addresses were widely supported.
A few years ago (about 7) I am sure that the IBM system-I that my employer ran used the same system at a performance tier, if you wanted more power then they would install a license allowing you to use extra cpu cores. I think you could do it on a time limited basis I.e. need more power for job x buy a license for two weeks and then go back to the slower level
Seen most of those, I would also add the random sized cage nuts so you end up with M5 M6 and whatever size America use. Fine when they go in but an absolute pain when kit is swapped over as you don’t realise and pull the screws out before spending ages searching for the one that fits.
Does anyone think that Ford would actually save money by shipping you a truck load of car parts to put together yourself, with helpline assistance? Does anyone think we would get a better car, quicker and cheaper?
No but having built a kit car myself and got it road legal. It isn’t faster or cheaper but it is a great experience and fun to do and drive after it is on the road,,,,
I used to manage a network with a couple of those (Galleon Ntp servers) one was fine but the unit at one office had problems.
The first antenna used the time signal from rugby which worked until they moved it to Birmingham (I think) at which point a large row of trees blocked the antenna completely.
After this we swapped to a gps unit mounted on the roof which worked until the enclosure sprung a leak and fried the electronics.
The final time I heard about it was about 2 years after I left the company when some builders cut through the cable as it snakes under the floor and they called me to ask where the thing was routed to….
When nobody was trying to sabotage it they were brilliant at their job and ran for about 15 years - they may still be working away…
Ps2 was a pain, two identical (almost) sockets for different devices, yes they were colour coded but trying to refit them behind a typical installed base unit was an absolute pain.
As to printers I had a citizen dot matrix years ago which you could swap the interface from a serial to a parallel as the interface was on a self contained card. It might had had all the printer processing on the card as well…
True but a starship robot in Milton Keynes can carry up to three bags of groceries, assuming your groceries do not consist of blocks of granite then the load can’t weigh in at more much than 30kg which would mean the machine has an all up weight of say 70kgs, a lot less than 500kg.
As a comparison I own a Tiger kit car which is a full road legal 2 seat kit car has a weight of 500kg and that can do some serious damage just coming off a ramp at less than walking place. If it was rolling at 15km/hour or 4m/s I would be hard pressed to grab onto it and bring it to halt.
I think sharing a path with a robot this large and heavy is not a good idea.
Where I used to work we had 3 sites triangulated using 1Gb BT LES circuits this was about 10 years ago,
All was well for a couple of years until the company got bigger and we started running the links at 90% or more all the time.
Eventually we got the budget to go to 10Gb links instead.
So we got them delivered and one long weekend set about turning them on.
A few hours later we were finished and headed home, the next week the previously 1Gb link running at 95% has transformed into a 10Gb link running at 50%
We found that a lot of replication and batch jobs suddenly had there run time reduced dramatically- wonder why….
Have you ever stood near one of the rolling bed type x-y plotters at full speed?
They have to be fenced off as paper moving at several meters per second is very dangerous. I used to work with them and nobody went near when they started working
This video shows one printing in A3 I used to use one with A0 that was quiet a bit faster especially on straight or diagonal lines (it was safer when doing complex stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8N747C-z9w
Enabling spanning-tree will bring down the entire network, and "it never works".
Er no doing the opposite will do that, spanning tree works wonderfully. Although just before I left a company I was on a remote site doing a network upgrade, and got a call from a colleague.
the call went something like this
We have a problem
Really what is wrong
I turned spanning tree off on a port and now nothing in the building is working (the port linked two switches together)
(They did what?) Oh well in that case you need to go and tell the management that we need to shut down the building and restart the network
What?
Yes turn off one of the core switches and if you are lucky the network might stabilise in 10-15 minutes but I would probably reboot them both to make sure (the switches were nexus 7000 series and need 10-15 minutes to restart from cold - and console to the switch you disabled spanning tree on and turn the port off.
Oh how long before you are back in the office
At least 3 hours so get it fixed….
Golden rules for out of hours working
Make friends with security and cleaners - because if you need to get into locked areas or lock yourself out then the pay are the best people to know.
I used to be on first name terms at a previous job with all the security guards across the sites, made things a lot easier, as I was often working late in the evenings when everyone sensible had gone home. This was planned maintenance not being stupid and working 20 hour days.
The first generation Audi TT you need to dismantle the front of the car to change any of the light bulbs.
Mind you a VW Passat from the early 2000s (don’t know about the later ones had a process in the manual that for certain engine maintenance the whole front end was pulled out on a few long bolts.
You mean to rebuild all the gas cylinders everyone has been ripping out over the last 30 or so years.
They probably weren’t seen as modern enough as they worked on gravity, there used to be one outside where my grandparents lived and depending on the time of year was anything from 20 to 100 feet tall
Comms cabinets under toilet blocks - yes with a leak in the large pipe….
Misc kit under floors to extend circuits - yes
But the best was a non IT one builders knocking down some heavy duty partition walls to find someone had mounted a 40 gallon water tank on top of the false ceiling. The walls came down , the ceiling started moving and they found the tank help up by the copper pipes connecting it to the rest of the plumbing and nothing else….