If you need funding, you're not omnipotent.
Indeed. And also, if you have a supervisor then, by definition, you ain't omnipotent..
6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
make sure that all the signalling and routing is absolutely reliable
I don't wish to worry anyone but one of my older brothers works for Siemens as a railway signalling engineer. And I helped do some of the DLR design work.
Now you know why I drive everywhere :-)
In my very misspent youth I managed 12 days awake
I think I'd be post-chef sushi after about 3. As well as out of my mind on migraine medication (quickest way for me to migraine-hell is not get enough sleep for two nights..)
Mind you, I'm old and crumbly. Or at least, it feels like it some days.
At another client, we had a lightning strik and they lost a couple of hundred VT100s.
I had two defunct SuperBrain computers in the boot of my old Ford Cortina Mk3 when it got nicked at Arnos Grove tube station (this was back in the late 1980's - I'd been given the Superbrain computers by someone who knew that "I did computers" in the hope that I could get them working. With some work I got them to boot to the stage where they were looking for the OS on one of the floppy drives. Given that I didn't have said OS (and neither did the person who gave them to me - they had been chucked away) I decided that it was futile working on them and put them in the boot in order to take them to the dump).
Someone nicked my Cortina from the tube station in order to get home (it was raining heavily that weekend and, according to the police, things like that happened fairly frequently). No damage to the car - it was already pre-disastered so a few scratches round the you-could-open-it-with-a-screwdriver lock didn't matter. The ignition lock was equally as worn and you could pretty much turn that with a penknife or screwdriver too. So the only effect other than a day or so of wondering whether to get another car was that I no longer had to worry about going to the dump.
I'd love to have seen the face of the thief when they realised how utterly valueless the Superbrains were. They probably thought that they could get rich off a couple of computers!
Oh, except the corporations this administration and its minions are in thrall to.
It's particularly ironic that a number of US telcos disable the FM functionality themselves and charge the end-user a fee to reactivate it..
So, Pai is just doing his masters bidding again and trying to gain more money for the telcos.
One other point - the headphone-socketless Apple phones would have great difficulty doing FM as they won't have a nice cable to do the receiving with. I suppose that they could bring out an FM dongle (and I seem to remember that they used to for the iPod). And, I believe that the latest phones don't have the chipset with an FM radio.
it takes about 8 hours or so to drive from Cornwall to northern Scotland in the UK
Huh? Have you ever tried it? Between the tourists, roadworks, psychotic road-users and traffic jams you'd be lucky to do it in 24 hours.
And that's not factoring in food/comfort/de-stressing breaks.
as one cable company is prevented by law from offering service in another companies area
How the hell does that accord with 'Muricas addiction to raw capitalism? I would have thought that the Elephants would have got rid of that law in a heartbeat.
Then I realised two things - the Republicans don't have hearts and secondly, their corporate paymasters would be displeased if such a blatantly anticompetitive law was axed.
they might care to note that it is ALL THEIR FAULT for years of dithering, poor decisions
No, no - you have it all wrong. Any mistakes in the past are quite clearly 'the fault of the previous government' and nothing whatsoever to do with the current incumbents.
Even if they were part of the previous administration.
Politics. Where teflon would be seen as an unacceptably high friction substance and memories are often conveniently short.
A standard? There are lots of standards. Just pick one.
No, no, no. *Far* more fun to generate another one. After all, even if it only becomes the standard in your organisation, it'll be your standard and they can never sack you..
Especially if you make it as internally-consistent as Windows.
It's PR that needs to be hung out to dry
Well - you do have to remember that PR is the slightly-backward ugly cousin of HR (HR exists to protect the company from the employees, PR exists to protect the company from the public).
It's where the people who fail the HR empathy tests[1] go.
[1] Which, in most HR departments I've seen, consists of filtering out anyone that has, or seems to have, any shred of empathy.
Microsoft, however smiley and cuddly the face, are hiding the face of hell: that they are an emissary of Beelzebub, vomited onto the corporate and computing landscape
So, not a fan then?
I have, in my small humble corner of the computing world, a slight reputation for not liking Microsoft stuff.
But it appears that my small flame of dislike is as nothing to the solar-mass of burning hydrogen that is your fear and loathing.
Good work! Keep it up.
Watch out, you're going to get a lot of down votes from people with sleeve tatoos and ripped jeans
It's also going to get votes from people who have beards and have done for a long time (early 90's in my case).
After all, why scrape your facial hair off? It hurts (even with a properly stropped cut-throat razor or one of those fancy multi-blade razors with 'built in lubricant'.). It's not the first one that hurts - it's all the subsequent ones.
And don't get me started on electric shavers - the only time I've ever had ingrowing facial hair (which hurts - a lot) was when I tried using an electric.
After that, I decided that facial hair was the way to go. It gets strimmed once a month or so to keep it short and vaguely presentable.
What sort of idiot takes electronic devices to the USA on a visit these days?
Someone so confident that he is really, really clever and won't ever be caught..
After all, he's got a business to run! He's really just an small-scale entrepaneur. Honest!
have finally arrived at caltrops for kids :)
I remember, as a youngster, throwing one of Mum's crotchet-hooks at an annoying older brother. Trouble is, I'd selected one of the very fine ones and thrown it hard enough for it to stick in..
I still think that he was a wimp for running around shouting at me to pull it out (quite naturally, as the smaller sibling, I'd thrown it at his back. My career as an assassin^W extreme troubleshooter started young..)
keeping the bodyshells of smelly old diesel cars on the road with clean electric powertrains.
And Morris Minors. Don't forget the moggies!
(My wife is actually quite concerned with the lifespan of hers and whether she'll still be able to get petrol in 20 years time. There is one guy in Bristol who is working on a project to electrify the Morris Minor - if he can get it working then I would imagine that the various companies involved in the classic car scene would be quite interested..)