Posts by dinsdale54 85 posts • joined 16 Oct 2015
You've moved in to the "denying Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem" territory
I suggest you watch these videos by Chris Montgomery (who knows a thing or two aboout codecs) which explain why they are correct and you aren't.
https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
Report produced by cloud provider disappointed that not everybody uses the cloud for everything. News at Ten!
I mentioned this previously but a bank I used to do a lot of work with said that for fixed demand, the cloud was just hosting which they could do much cheaper than any of the cloud providers. They already have many large datacentres all over the world and were running at way lower costs than any of the cloud providers.
Another customer in Australia moved a huge amount of their SQL Server workload to the cloud - successfully - and then discovered that the bills made them the biggest customer in the country. They moved most of it back on prem to save money.
Cloud services are very useful to many people and organisations. Not all of them..
For various definitions of "much" :)
The 4 bits of colour information per pixel being every alternate bit in 16 colour mode (mode 2) was a PITA. I hate to think what some of the other machines must have been like to work on!
Also "I Bring Many"
I did some work with IBM about 10 years back when they were reselling our product.
We had a meeting at IBM South Bank to run over a few technical details. 1 person from the customer, 2 from my company and EIGHTEEN (yes, really!) from IBM.
Nice pastries TBF.
The cynic in me assumes this is standard practice in all large corporates. I've certainly seen it.
"Hey, Mr customer, how about we give you a 90% discount on these servers if you buy a couple of cloud software licences?" No worries if you don't use them.
It's much the same as colleagues at a large corporate referring to the busiest sales day of the year as the 32nd of March.
LOL!
A friend worked on databases at UCB, Ingres, ASK, Postgres anf others. He was at ASK when the takeover by CA was announced. More different corporate cultures you could not imagine. Apparently Oracle had a recruitment van parked outside within a couple of hours, Sybase a bit after that.
By the end of the day over 90% of the development team had quit. That was the final nail in the coffin of Ingres as a leading product.
I worked extensively on Oracle & Ingres back in the day. By the mid 90s Ingres was reliable and low maintenance but was looking VERY out of date by then.
That depends on your definitions.
I've done my fair share of tedious online training on the UK bribery act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and one key difference is the FCPA allows for something called Grease Payments - which are roughly defined as something that speeds up the process but doesn't change the outcome. This is not legal under the UK Bribery act.
Having worked for companies doing business in the Middle East, I always assume that every deal involves payments to individuals, it's just you normally have a middleman to make it a bit less obvious.
This is already happening. My local university (a polytechnic when I attended it) has run out of money and is culling not just courses but whole departments where the enrollment numbers aren't covering the costs. It's also trying to nerf the pensions.
This is rough if you are one the lecturers but it's the consequence of overspending and overexpanding during the good years.
40K definitely appropriate for London. A couple of years back a relative started on that after graduating. 18 months later moved to a new job on 60K.
Here's the similar story from a few months ago. Military rather than academia but same issue.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/sas_mab5_secret_hacker_squad_hereford/
Some companies do pay commission on margin, most don't. However while the salesrep might not be paid on margin you can bet his boss has a margin target. The problem is that the margin changes with the amount you sell. i.e. you sell 3x as much then the %overhead of you being employed has just dropped by 2/3 (OK, oversimplification)
This is why sales plans tend to have big commission multipliers once you have sold over your target. You have covered your costs to the company so it's all upside from there on.
A friend interviewed for GCHQ some years back. The process was bizarre. I was his 2nd reference and had a multi page questionnaire to complete. His first reference had an in person interview. My friend was interviewed for 2 days.
All this was just for the security clearance which - get this - you have to go through BEFORE they tell you what the job is and what it pays.
After jumping through the hoops my mate finally discovers that the job was a java programming job at 10K a year less than he was currently on. Much time could have been saved etc.
But it all makes work for the working man to do.
That's the opposite of what's happening.
I live in South London. I have done the occasional pub crawl in my life. About 10 years ago I did my first brewery crawl (in Boulder, CO) I can now do a brewery crawl from my front door.
There are now more breweries in the good beer guide than there were beers when I first purchased a copy.
I had several excellent craft beers last time I was in Vietnam.
Even the USA now has decent cheese - although you still have to seek it out.
Nah, that's bollocks.
As has been proven, you get perfect recreation of the input signal for all frequencies up to the Nyquist frequency - which is basically half the sample rate. This is why digital audio works.
For a decent demo of this from somebody who knows what they are talking about - see here (particularly video 2)
https://xiph.org/video/
Complexity is not the main issue. It's the scummy business practice.
Even if you can't do rework yourself, there are plenty of companies who can refurbish electronics providing they have access to the actual components and there aren't nasty software locks. Go look on ebay for companies selling reurbished control units for various washing machines etc. The exchange prices are quite reasonable.
My espresso machine requires a fair bit of servicing which I am able to do myself, however the manufacturer refuses to sell spare parts in this country. As the chap at their authorised service centre apologetically explained, they have all the parts but are banned from selling them so I have to buy them from Australia/NZ. Just like the tractor manufacturer they would prefer me to pay 400 quid for a service rather than send me a £5 plastic hose or a £10 temperature sensor.
This is the sort of crap that laws need to address.
Don't overestimate the competence of local government.
Some years back my company was designing a computer system for tracking and managing payments to care homes from the council.
During the design process we asked :
Company : "How do you make and audit payments?"
Council : "The care homes send us invoices and we pay them"
COmpany "But how do you audit them?"
Council "Sometimes we check at the end of the year"
I don't consider Newcastle Brown a good drink but I drank it as a student for the same reason as you - it was something the bar staff couldn't screw up.
On a slightly more important note, dirty lines are the single biggest contributor to crap beer quality in pubs. If an automated line cleaning system means more lines get cleaned more often then the can call it anything they want. Even better would be a line monitoring system that would refuse to serve beer that was warm or off.
Me : I'd like a pint of bitter please.
HAL : I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave
A friend works at the company where Wills did his rescue helicopter training and work. My friend is also a keen supporter of Gloucester rugby. At the time Mike Tindall was playing for Gloucester and due to being married to royalty they used to sing the National Anthem when he scored.
My friend recounted this tradition to Prince William. The answer came back, with a smile -
"Gran won't be happy about that"
I forget the exact details - this was over 10 years ago - but IIRC systems that had generated these errors were put in a radiation test chamber and radioactivity measured. Once you have demonstrated there's a problem then it's down to the chipset manufacturer to find the issue. I think it was just low level contamination in the packaging material that occasionally popped out an Alpha particle and could flip a bit.
The remediation is a massive PITA. I think we were dealing with it for about 2 years from initial high failure rates to having all the faulty systems replaced.
Over the years I have spent far more of my career dealing with these issues than I would like. I put in a big shift remediating Seagate MOOSE drives that had silent data corruption as well.
I have worked for a few hardware companies over the years and every single one has at some point had issues with random errors causing system crashes at above designed rates - these were all bit-flip errors.
In each case the people who noticed first were our biggest customers. In one of these cases they way they discovered the problem was products from two different companies exhibiting random errors. A quick look at both motherboards showed the same I/O chipset in use. Radioactive contamination in the chip packaging was the root cause.
You can mitigate these by putting multi-layer parity and ECC on every chip, bus and register with end-to-end checksumming. That will turn silent data corruption in to non-silent but it's also really expensive.
But at least let's have ECC as standard!
The issue isn't computer systems making mistakes. The issue is pretending it doesn't happen. As the judge said at the trial, denying that there are bugs "amount to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat"
That's about as harsh a putdown as you are likely to get.
The advantage is the curved screen provides a greater exposed area to crack the screen when you drop it.
Oh, you meant advantage for the owner, rather than Samsung? Nothing I can see.
I'm on my second Samsung, S4 then S8, Due to the reasons on this thread there won't be a third.
Decent companies stick a large percentage of revenue in to R&D. I think it was ~14% at the last few companies I worked for - most of that is salaries. The senior tech people at my last 3 companies were very well paid - several hundred thousand dollars a year for the experienced people. The money for those salaries has to come from somewhere.
There's a competitive market for experienced tech people as well. It's a symbiotic relationship.
This.
I had 5 years at Sun and loved it. The company went from 24,000 employees to 42,000 employees in that time. When the dotcom bubble burst and the revenue shrank Sun should have shrunk the numbers down to match. I left and watched my colleagues spend the next 10+ years constantly under threat of redundancy. That's not very motivational.
I can confirm this. I'm 15M from the substation. Some years ago I was blowing lightbulbs at quite a rate so I checked the mains voltage and the highest I saw was 256V. The electricity company wound it down a bit but it's always high.
I assume there's a voltage drop towards the end of the network and with lots of blocks of flats in the area, they crank it up so the people at the far end still get a useful supply.
I spent 25 years in presales - the techie working with the sales folks. I have never seen a situation where a sales rep can price a deal at low margin without approval from a long way up the management chain. Salesfolks are often targeted just on revenue but the levels above them have a margin target as well.
I have on two occasions worked with sales reps who had recently joined from HP and were sueing HP for not paying commission. It's been standard practice there for a long time.
This is normal if you are serious about trying to provide enterprise level kit. You are selling kit with a support contract and with performance & reliability expectations
I had 10+ years at an enterprise storage vendor. Disk drive validation by our engineers took a lot of time & resources. It would usually take a couple of firmware revisions before a new drive actually worked satisfactorily. To quote the guy in charge of testing new drives/firmware - "You'd be amazed by the new and creative ways the disk drive manufacturers find to screw this up"
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
