Posts by stevebp 57 posts • joined 26 Oct 2016
On my Youview box, which is connected to my LG Smart TV, if I disconnect the internet connection, it goes really slow, puts up an on-screen error and refuses to load up much of the content, including the EPG (it does eventually, but it's annoying to use). Other than that, it's far superior to my 2020 Smart TV to use
When I started my course in Computer Studies back in the mid-'80s, the administrators of the PDP-11 system that was running, didn't really understand much UNIX, if at all. However, I was learning fast, as I'd made friends with a 3rd year UNIX geek, who taught me, among other things, how to crack passwords, create trojan logins and clear a room full of people if the computer was too slow to use, so that I could get my coursework finished. Of course I never used this knowledge...
So one day I was browsing through all the UNIX source code libraries that they helpfully left online and unprotected, to try and understand the scripts and pick up some more tips. I came across the source code for "wall" - or for the uninitiated "write all". I copied it, set it to execute and ran it with a message (I forget what that was, but I'm sure it wasn't rude). It then proceeded to write my test message to every terminal in the uni. An hour later, one of the admins sat down next to my 3rd yr pal and complained to him that "Someone managed to write a system message to everyone and we don't know how they did it!". Of course, I kept quiet, but it was rather amusing to witness the consequences of my deed
Paying for a Tesla in bitcoin is a risky kind of strategy for Tesla - if they accept it as payment one day and by the time they come to trade their bitcoins on the market, the price crashes through the floor, someone has just made a mug out of them!
You're basically gambling when you buy bitcoins that the value will go up - but why should it? Eventually, people will want to liquidate their BCs and at that point it could easily start a run where no-one is buying and the BCs are effectively worthless. Have these people not seen It's a Wonderful Life? Unlike banks that now have deposit security schemes, there is no such protection for cryptocurrency and why should there be.
You can bet your life that if your property is so remote that Openreach has yet to reach it with FTTC, then your opportunity to capitalise on a 5G rollout is slim to none - 5G will only ever be available in specific high-volume areas for the foreseeable future and maybe forever. Don't worry - one day you might get 4G
Not "still entirely" but "also now" - I worked in VME Support in East Putney in 1987-88 - primarily in my sandwich year of my HND as a support technician but they taught me VME base and comms, so I did some second-line comms diagnostics too. I worked with John Mearns, who designed TME (on ME29s) and then TME* (which ran on VME) and I supported an ME29 and a Series 39 Dual (the wrong half however - but that was no obstacle for the brains in the office who got it fully working!). I then worked in Stevenage (STE04) 1989-91 in Office Systems Support (leaving shortly after ICL got completely swallowed by Fujitsu) next to some of the best IT brains in the industry. It's true though that much of the 3rd line was based elsewhere (Alsager/Manchester)
I was taught by an accountant (my ex-wife), that if you add up anything in Excel, make sure you put in another addition, using a different method to check that the first is correct - only if the two complement each other can you have surety over the answer and even then you would do a "reasonable check" in your brain to make sure it had the right number of digits.
This all came home to roost (not with Excel) when a colleague of mine at a large bank got fired because he failed to notice that when he got a message from the backup software saying "Backup complete", the amount of data it had actually backed up was miniscule and when the corporate email server took a dive and a corruption, there were no valid backups to recover from. All due to lack of admin permissions on the target server.
If I read one more report/news article/dire warning about how we're "falling behind" in technology, I swear I might just explode.
All these efforts to worry us about 5G are just so that the operators, who paid £billions for the rights to the bandwidth and £billions to build the infrastructure, can make a profit (eventually).
The Gov't needs to concern itself with ubiquitous 4G first and worry about 5G if, and it's a big if, the world determines it actually needs it.
How do we know this was a long way into her drive? She may have only just taken it out of the garage. If her mind started to wander, surely Uber should have been monitoring that and therefore should accept some culpability for its poor testing conditions that seemed to disregard safety!
This is all very interesting, however, a good professor friend of mine told me that the reason chips emit so much heat is that when the electrons flow along the logic pathways, as soon as they hit a full stop (i.e. a decision pathway which involves a change of flow (essentially any logic gate), the current flowing down the unused branch is dissipated as heat.
The answer then - and apparently this is being worked on - is to redirect that current through the chip reducing the power requirement for processing and emitting less heat as a consequence!
I would be interested to know if any of the good people on here have come across this research and know where we are with it?
Apparently, the flood of oestrogen when pregnant with a girl creates the "blooming" mother effect, conversely, the flood of testosterone with a boy causes spots and a more 'masculine-looking' face. If you're around pregnant women (you know well) a lot, you can spot this quite easily - it can be upended though by twins (non-identical) and situations where a girl gets a larger dose of testosterone than normal (apparently that's a "thing").
Whoever is giving them advice should be taken out and shot. No-one in their right mind would put an infrastructure control and monitoring tool outside of their own, discrete management network due to the (almost certain) risk that a hacker will gain access to it or disable it with DDOS attacks. I see a worrying trend with Data Centre DCIMs and BMS too.
That's an interesting point - the other thing that is notable about the UK workplace is the *very* rigid emphasis on Health and Safety. Any company deemed to have been found "cutting corners" would likely find its senior management, even its top executives, in court explaining how they are going to avoid receiving a jail sentence. If there is a serious-enough incident at a warehouse, the HSE (Health & Safety Executive) can even enter a premises and *close it down* for up to two years while they undertake an investigation. It's just not worth ignoring it.
Is that the East Putney Building or the Management Centre (Lon03-05 I think they were - it's a long time ago!). My first real job was with ICL at East Putney in 1987-88 on a work placement for my HND. After I 'diplomated' I worked for them at STE08 until Fujitsu took them over completely in 1991
Actually, it would be the PRA (Prudential Regulation Authority - cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudential_Regulation_Authority_(United_Kingdom)) - the job of regulating the banks was hived off the FSA some years back because they were useless at it (think 2008!) and the Govt created the PRA and FCA.
There is a recently published requirement from the PRA to be able to sustain a major outage and run off backup systems for an extended period of time - I think Smile may be getting a visit from the PRA after this - I hope the investigation is made public (it won't be)
There's a principle here, that techy geeks on El Reg would do well to remember: when designing a UI that may be used by a wide range of people, from old grannies to hip young dudes who have lived their lives online, be *very* explicit about how everything works and the effect of carrying out any instruction in your manual. I recently had to contact a cooker hood manufacturer because their manual was so poor, I couldn't work out how to change the filter "Oh yes, we have an instruction video for that, but I can't send it to you because I'm working from home", I was told by the friendly lady on the call.
Then you should read Edward Gibbons' "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" and you will understand that the "Trinity" was a way of the Catholic faith competing with multi-theism (i.e. Paganism), including the use of Saints, statues of Mary, relics, etc. No wonder Protestantism dispensed with all that other crap later on - presumably they kept the Holy Trinity because there was actually some base for that in the bible
You complete the article with the news that JKRowling et al have signed a letter against the hate culture on the internet that inhibits free speech. I don't see the connection to this story at all? This man's behaviour was totally unacceptable, as was the other stories you mention afterwards. There is a world of difference between political, religious and economics discourse, and hate speech, violent abuse, threats and trolling - whether you agree with J K Rowling or not, she is allowed an opinion and is allowed to voice it without people being personally hurtful, spiteful and abusive to her in return. It is impossible to avoid someone being 'offended' by what you say, since the offence comes from them, not from you. I believe Voltaire had something to say about it...
I work in the Data Centre industry and I lost count of the number of times I went to a conference panel where some marketing fool/CEO/COO stood up and pronounced "5G will usher in the dawn of self-driving cars because the need for micro-second response times is critical to avoid catastrophe".
At one point, my colleagues had to physically restrain me from yelling out that they had absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
This really irritates me because, even from a layman perspective, this end user case makes absolutely no sense: Given that most people struggle to get a consistent and ubiquitous 4G connection even after all this time, why on earth would anyone build the decision-making logic for driving safely on the road into the assumption that the car can maintain a 5G connection everywhere it goes? A connection, by the way, that will rely on the receiver being fairly close by - so an automated car driving into the mountains will suddenly lose connection and drive you straight off the edge of the road...will it?
The 5G uploads, *may* be required to send all the telemetry data back to the factory, but even then, if that is it's operating paradigm, it's poorly designed - why not use the home WiFi as you plug your car back in to recharge and why would you send *all* the data back anyway, when you only need the processed (i.e. small sub-set) data unless you're investigating a fault. In which case, you can request the entire historical data set.
So much to get annoyed about...
I believe it did say that "You can continue using legacy products after May, but your system will no longer receive software updates and new features. Over time, this is likely to disrupt access to services and overall functionality." They're pretty much damning any new products unless you swap out the entire system. Sounds like corporate blackmail to me
I had Virgin for a year and while the TV service, when it was working, was actually quite good, I was plagued by problems:
1. The TV service on a certain set of channels was digitally corrupted (pixellated) and two fruitless interventions (many days) later by an engineer who came to the house, I eventually got through to him that he'd temporarily fixed it (he didn't believe me at first). So he then went back to the street junction box and got it working. Apparently he fixed it by swapping my port over (which was defective) with one of my neighbour's. I assume my neighbour wasn't too pleased with that temporary workaround
2. Their DNS service regularly (almost on a daily basis) went down, stopping all connectivity not related to the TV service anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours
I've switched to NowTV and don't get any of these issues now and the service is £15 cheaper/month
Interestingly, the university I worked at, went hell to leather to replace all it's paper books and journals with digital resources *despite* the evidence, in front of them, that students prefer paper because they can spread multiple paper resources out in front of them and flick easily between pages and sections without worrying about charging cables and screens. Electronic devices are also disruptive because they tend to have email loaded on them - which distracts constantly, and the software encounters issues or needs upgrading (Windows is really bad at this), both issues which eat up the available study time. I marvelled at their arrogance despite the facts and the student satisfaction scores went tumbling downwards, of course...
I saw the opening on BBC London News last night and the whooping, arm waving and general pant-wetting excitement displayed by the staff reminded me of the cringe-worthy Windows 95 launch with Steve Ballmer and equally cringy Bill Gates trying to dance like Theresa May (or is it the other way round?). There was your definition of MS coolness right there - it doesn't exist...
I think what happened was, the guy from DT brought his 6 yr old into the auction room and he wasn't paying enough attention because angry birds on his phone was distracting him. So his son decided to wave the bidding board around for him. Before he knew it, he was the proud owner of an old set of recycled bandwidths at an exorbitant price....I wouldn't have liked to be him explaining that to his boss...
Why would IBM buy a "failing mainframe" division off another company when they have pretty much divested themselves of all manufacturing? Is it just me confused or have the board completely lost the plot? I do know, from some of the people I know who have recently joined IBM, that their hiring standards are definitely lower than they were!
You're assuming that FB would charge users and *not* then indulge in data slurping? How likely is that? If the primary intent is to make as much money as possible - an organisation will do that whatever the social cost unless reined in by legislation and regulation (i.e. whatever they can get away with). Some organisations might actually care about their brand image, but my confidence in that has been undermined by the Co-Op's example of CEO misdemeanours
GIven that WiFi on trains is pointless unless you're trying to work (usually on a laptop) and require a seat to do so, to have those two rare events coincide on one overcrowded commuter journey is just stretching coincidence a little too far! I'd just settle for the train to arrive (maybe even on time would be nice) and there be some seats.
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