Posts by Caver_Dave 771 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2018
You can only get an answer when the 'Duty Doctor' is present. Therefore, you can only ask a question when they are present.
Think about the liability of you ask about something that is life-threatening at 18:00, but the 'Duty Doctor' does not start work until 08:00 the next day.
Much better to ring 111 and get an answer straight away (if it is on the script), or a call back from a Nurse, or even a referral to A&E.
Yes, the requirements are getting tighter. My new PC, when I was specifying it, conformed to the pre-release requirements of Windows 11 - only to find that on release, my processor was not supported. I have moved to Linux.
My youngest, although hesitant, has been moved to Linux.
My wife is much more reluctant, but her laptop is beginning to crawl along, and so she is becoming more amenable.
Microshite Sales and Marketing are driving more and more people to alternatives, either out of choice to avoid the enshitification, or out of need as they are not going to buy a new PC.
I was instrumental in getting Gigaclear into my area, after frustrated years with BT and their refusal to upgrade the (as low as) 128K lines in our village!
In those early days, I spoke to the Gigaclear CEO and the Sales Manager in person and over email. They were a genuine company, very clear on the sign up rate I had to achieve and what was involved. I converted that to non-technical language for the villagers and we achieved our sign up rate, despite BT offering free broadband to the residents of the most populated village!
The length from the Pot outside the premises to the house had about a 50/50 split between paid for and DIY installation.
Knowing their costs, the original price for the broadband was fair and the service excellent.
Then the CEO sold (more of a hostile takeover) to a company, who have now shipped it on to an Equity company. Guess what has happened to the prices?
If we had a decent mobile service (we do not!) the cheapest broadband for us would be 1 year on the introductory rate over mobile and 1 year on the Gigaclear introductory rate, repeated.
The introductory rate is roughly what we used to pay (when Gigaclear were recouping their (sunk into the ground) investment over 5 years). But now for us customers with no alternative (except 128K BT) we have to pay twice as much as this and it really rankles. I know their investment was recouped within the predicted 5 years and so this has been 8 years of nearly all profiteering.
I was coming on here to say the same.
After a weekend of caving, I have no fingerprints, but I might well have a few micro-scars that mean that even by (usually) Wednesday when I have regained enough fingerprint for a reading to happen, there will be no match. OK, I am an extreme example, but it took only two weeks for a previous employer to remove the need for fingerprints on door entries after all the problems it caused for many of the employees!
It is a very bad design if the part is not rugged, but used in a rugged environment - any parts should not break in the expected normal operation!
Yes, I have designed S/W and H/W that are used in very rugged environments, including aerospace.
The MOD/DOD/etc. have whole divisions dedicated to logistics and should have spares of everything in stock, and in the places where they can be easily accessed.
"take months and cost $20" - OK it shouldn't take months, but if it's a special part made to order and ship then maybe the cost is not too far out there. Although why it's special and not standardized is another discussion.
"less than an hour and cost 20c" - the 3D printing medium may cost 20c, but then add in in the cost of the machine, the cost of designing the part in the local software tool of choice, the engineer time to set up and monitor the printer, etc.
Typical politician, compare apples and pears and we find out they are bananas!
In the early days of Windows we had a program that implemented all the error checking hooks that we could find.
If the user saw a Windows error message pop up and decide to cancel rather than OK the issue, then the our pop up would appear saying "Believe the Microsoft error message!". Any subsequent keyboard or more than minimal mouse movement would return the action that cause the original Windows error message.
I have often wondered over the years whether the text was appropriate.
Yes, same here! I can't get past the HR droid (or probably a computer these days) who is looking for an "Honours Degree" or better.
I did an HND in the very early days of IT, when it consisted of the full HND courses for Telecommunications (yes, I can still design an Yaggi-Urdu antenna), Analogue Electronics (high speed digital, now looks fairly analogue), Digital Electronics (dot-to-dot) and Software Engineering. I passed with distinctions in every module of every course in the second year nearly 40 years ago. I bagged my first job in the interview with the company boss after spotting him in a TA photograph on the wall with the course leader. He range the course leader immediately and offered me the job on the spot. I've worked at the forefront of technology every since.
My course mates (only 6 of us passed) might recognise me, if I remind them that I was the person who left after 1 hour of all the 3 hour exams!
However, I can't get my CV past the HR droid!
Occasionally I have to visit websites that I haven't visited for a while (or not at all). The pages and pages of "legitimate interest" data sharing partners is ridiculous. It can take multiple minutes to turn all of these off as they never seem to have a "respect my privacy" button to turn all this off in one go.
I was lucky enough to go around Bletchley Park soon after it was opened to the public. Speaking to the volunteers who had worked there during the war was such an honour and privilege.
I had made a point of learning as much as I could about the Bombe machines before visiting and the ex-Wren (not Betty) I was speaking to (for approaching an hour) in Hut 11 was more than willing to fill in the gaps and have a good natter about her time there during the war and the secrecy in the following decades.
Allegedly men think about sex 17 times an hour or so depending on the various studies. (Well count me as an outlier on the very low end, if those figures are correct!)
Firstly, these thoughts could be vocalised unimpeded by this technology and cause much mayhem. (I'm glad that I don't have to walk around an office full of beautiful men and women, but I have a filter in my mind that discards such thoughts - if I do indeed have them. The book "The Chimp Paradox" has a good discussion on the filtering.)
Secondly, it might actually come up with a consistent figure for the frequency people think of sex (which I am sure is currently guestimated far too high.)
Icon: Scientist, as I'm sure that someone will get a grant to study this.
A very long time ago I had to man a stall at the "Racing Car Show" in Birmingham UK. I was designing H/W, S/W and radio data comms for most of the F1 teams at this point.
A guy turned up claiming to be from Ferrari - no one I recognised from the F1 team - but I had to believe him as he could have been from the road car team.
I managed to cobble together someone who could speak Italian and French fluently and someone who could speak French and English fluently to join our conversation together. Luckily, it didn't have to go much further than introductions and he gave up and said "I'll get Ross to ring you on Monday". Ross was an English engineer working for Ferrari who I knew and speaking to him on Monday, I found out that this guy was a "hanger on" and was trying to wangle a free lunch.
When I was studying A-level Computer Studies, I was coaching the O-level teacher at lunchtime. I used to run the "open to anyone" lab at lunchtime and so everyone knew that I was coaching the teacher, but to her credit she knew how to teach and most students passed her course. Miss "fingers" Lymm.
Had a lecturer who was only one page ahead of the class. Z80 assembler programming was his subject and I had magazine articles/solutions published on the subject before I went to University.
I was asked to leave his first lecture as I was "disrupting the class and obviously didn't need to attend" - I only pointed out his incorrect bo11ocks 3 times within 10 minutes.
I made a tidy sum from tutoring the students on that class. It paid for a lot of caving gear.
The Barstool only gave me 99% for that course. The Dean (who I was invited to meet due to my mark) said that the lecturer had knocked off a mark for non-attendance at his lectures!
(Just looked up his name and he co-authored a number of papers before he retired - quoting Laminitus as the reason - (just so that if you are reading this, you know that I know you went on to better things.))
Still prevalent in UK Medical Schools.
The best Surgeons are fairly bored and their underlings do most of the routine work under their monitoring (often from a distance, while the Surgeon is musing over his latest round of Golf).
Source: I am the outlier in a Medical family.
Correct. Once took a group underground whose insurance company insisted that they carry a mobile with them at all times in case of emergency. OK, it was chucked in the Pelicase at the entrance, and got out again when we got back to the entrance.
I have used a Hayphone when practicing with DCRO and they are surprisingly effective.
I suggested to many companies that they should not 'upgrade' from DOS-Word Perfect to early Windows. But, it was the new "Kool Aid" and many moved over.
It was when I first started using the phrase "This was identified early on in your project as a likely outcome."
As "I told you f**king so!" is not so politically acceptable.
I spend a lot of my time not doing my main task, but educating the latest batch of recruits to our India site. As soon as most of them are trained up to be more gain than pain, off they go for a few rupees more. It's not as though we don't pay a high salary and provide the training!
"Among the changes introduced in the UK's new procurement law are the ability to exclude suppliers on the basis of past behavior"
That should mean that all the usual suspects are barred then; on the basis of overrun, both in time and budget, on so many prior projects.
I can claim 27 years for code that I know is still running in critical systems (and is still in long term support for 3 years!)
I can claim writing patches for 26 year old OS code and new drivers for a 24 year old version where the hardware has finally had to be replaced.
I can claim 36 years for things running at the Museum of Computing.
What no "grey beard" icon?
I've had that!
Cave Rescue Casualty Care trained (that took many months of evenings)
Wilderness First Aid trained (multiple times, each at least a weekend course including on mountains and in caves for the practical elements)
First Aid at Work (when it was still an intensive 4 day course)
First Aid at Work (many times I've done it as an hour after the Wilderness First Aid training - essentially "immediately get someone to ring for an Ambulance and fill in this form/page in the company first aid log.")
But I was not allowed to become a First Aider at my previous 300+ people site.
First Aid in a work situation - rule no. 1 is get someone to ring for an Ambulance.
Then you maintain the casualty in the best possible state until the Ambulance arrives. (Hopefully within the golden hour.)
Wilderness and Cave First Aid is all about the first 6 hours as a Paramedic (or Cave Rescue or Mountain Rescue) is often going to take at least that long to arrive.
Apparently, this knowledge made me unsuitable to be a First Aider at work.
Exactly the sort of test I am discussing at the moment with our testers. The key difficulty is repeatability - how do I prove that it was mid transaction when the power is removed? - including how fast do the power lines decay?
I think in the end we are just going to have to programmatically put 'many' simultaneous, large transactions into flight at the same time as programmatically (possibly pre-emptively) turning off the power supply.
(I did test a system a long time ago where the capacitors in the PSU were large enough that the power rails to the rotating rust allowed it to run for an extra 2.95 seconds after to 400V inputs were removed. The processor (on different power circuits) had stopped communicating long enough before hand, that the disc heads had parked safely before the disc lost power.)
I worked for a small computer dealer in the late 1980's.
My boss was high up in the local Chamber of Commerce and so we had a fairly captive audience (something critical to this story).
Consequently, most of the local businesses came to us when they wanted their first computers.
I used to go in and analyse their business needs and see where the use of computer would help. (This did not cover the PA typing the CEO's missives - that was always required!)
Around 8 out of 10 times, I would demonstrate to the company management that they needed a business process change rather than a computer at this point in time. But I would also state how this would enable them to use a computer in the future, what benefits would be gained and by which metric they should decide that they needed the computer.
My boss took the long term view and over the next few years we became the almost exclusive supplier to all the local businesses.
I considered myself to be the exact opposite of most salespersons.
In C I once wrote a system that had structures preceded by headers with a 32bit unique ID and a 32bit length. (Would be a 64 bit length now I suppose.)
Then any pointer could be checked (by a macro) that the structure was preceded by a header of the correct type which could spot a huge number of issues and could also (again by a macro) check that it did not exceed the length specified in the header. Macro's also dealt with allocations and frees to maintain the headers.
The macro's became empty in the production build and so execution time was not compromised.
The forerunner of C++ classes I suppose, although implemented in a very different way.
For how many years did the UK banks still have a shim layer to convert from decimal the LSD that the core code ran (on an emulator of the original hardware) and then back with the results?
I will give you a clue - decimalisation was 15 February 1971, and I know someone who looking after one of the afore mentioned systems this century.
In charge of a group of SW Engineers, I used to sit in on the HW Engineers meetings. I usually didn't say much and sat planning tasks for my team, but occasionally they would come up with some wizz/bang new idea or device to use, and they had to be made aware of how much that decision would cost in SW development.
It saved us quite a few 'impossible' requests.
Customers have request it many times. They are ex-customers!
Those of us with professional qualifications, or chartered status, have standards that we may be held against. I do work across multiple jurisdictions, but the chartered status standards are always (in my experience) higher than those of the laws of the land.
It's like asking a chartered accountant to cook the books.
I'm not doing it - never!
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