Posts by Korev 6375 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2016
For the benefit of younger readers, it's worth noting that this was an era when telephones did not fit in your pocket, but sat in a more or less fixed location on the desk, and you operated them using a handset that was attached with a length of coiled wire a meter or so long. Yes, it's all very primitive.
You've made me feel old!
Back in the UK our landline had a constant ticking noise (annoying whilst talking on the phone, but killed the ADSL). I rang BT and the lady told me that her system said the line was fine. I pointed out the ticking noise and she laughed and then got someone to look into it which fixed it. Thankfully she had the sense to ignore the system and get stuff fixed...
Pharmacist wife, (was NHS county head level), and her friends from University who now work for big Pharma, all say that there is no money to be made from curing people. The money is to be made by keeping people going as long as possible and using their drugs.
Anyone who has ever taken a short course of antibiotics to completely cure an infection knows that this is bollocks
I've heard of at least 2 drugs that in the initial trials cured people of the illnesses, but were not progressed further by big Pharma, as if successful, that would dry up one of their best revenue streams.
Citation needed
I work in research for one of the big pharma and the aim is generally to cure.
And while I do kinda miss that quest to find new music, I do like Spotify suggesting new stuff, and being able to just try it, right there.
Yeah, in a way I miss listening to John Peel, The Evening Session etc on Radio 1 to find new music. In theory I could listen to Radio 6, but I find most of the DJs irritating....
I flew through Heathrow last month with a bike (ie too big for their normal conveyor belt) and there was an Airtag in the bag. My phone claimed the bike was with me for over quarter of an hour before it was brought into the luggage room. I assume that it was dumped on the side for a while...
The fault in the primary line was a severed cable and the second failure, in the backup line leading to the other DC, was due to a failed network card.
and
The Aer Lingus exec pointed out that their data had been mirrored to two separate sites, a datacenter in Manchester, and the second one in Birmingham by their IT services provider, and that the lines had been replicated into both
Why didn't the primary DC use the backup line?
It's easy to hate O'Leary, but what he's done (and continues to do) with Ryanair does show that Aer Lingus really are that bad. They are managed in a way that they essentially think "We're the flag carrier, we don't have to change to suit you. You have to want to fly with us". A bit like British Airways can be sometimes.
Anyone would think they're the same company...
This kind of analysis could be used by orthopaedic surgeons, physiotherapists to guide treatment. Companies like the one I work for use devices to measure a patient's improvement (hopefully!) once they've been treated by one of our drugs in a trial. You could even see how athletes and their coaches could use these to monitor aspects of their performance.
Similar to the bulb bug, a malformed Zigbee frame renders the gateway unresponsive so that it can't control the connected lights and other devices via the Ikea Home Smart app.
That doesn't sound too different to how unhacked Ikea Trådfri are to be honest.
I bought some as an experiment as you can only use the app if you're local to the controller, they didn't need stuff hosted in the Cloud to work and they were cheap.
The lightbulbs seem to love ignoring their controller and then need to be re-added. I also needed to re-link the app to the controller a few times too.
They're also "fun" if your network has multiple VLANs, in the end the only way I got them to work was by setting the port to only have a single VLAN on it. I have a vague memory of setting a fixed IP address too.
We once had a vendor come out to upgrade the OS on an instrument controller PC, the hard disc chose that moment to die and the technician got full blame from the scientists...
I ended up going over there, explaining that it was bad luck[0] and digging out a spare disc which meant he survived the day...
[0] Of course the disc wouldn't have had much longer to live and OS upgrades are IO heavy
I was able to get my Jaybird Vista headphones to stop using this ghastly American voice and use the Queen's English[0] instead - it was great[1]
[0] Should this now be the King's English
[1] Not that you're allowed to be British on El Reg any more of course...
I used to work for a company whose test setup had little automation (although I tried to improve this). One thing we had to do was install Oracle into quite a few different languages - I managed to learn the Oracle database installer so well that I could do it in any language...
How would they cool the batteries? I assume that they'd get pretty hot with all the current going into them. I could see how putting cooling systems (which I assume are bulky and might involve nasty stuff like liquid nitrogen) into the chargers which don't move is feasible, but not the car's battery without making the car massive.
Icon to signify "watt" might go wrong -->
