Posts by Maximus Decimus Meridius

Mega city council's Oracle ERP system still not legally safe, compliant... 2 years after rollout

Re: Recoup costs?

If that is the case then other councils would have been caught out in the same change. Given I am not seeing this anywhere else, that would lead me to the conclusion the feck up is Birmingham's rather than Central Government's

Fancy building a replacement for Post Office's disastrous Horizon system?

Re: EPOS

I don't think this is so unusual. I was at a large garden center the other day with different concessions throughout. We were able to pay for any item at any till and were not limited to that concession only.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

Re: so why not just shut Boing (sic) down ?

Politics. No US politician would let Boeing fail, no matter how bad the products were, civil, military or space. The loss of 'national prestige' would be too high. This knowledge has allowed Boeing to get where it is today.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

Re: Power

I love a good laugh. Thanks for that

Power

Where is the power for this going to come from? The LHC already shuts down for 4 months over winter due to power demand in Europe. If things carry on as they are, Europe won't have the spare electrickery to light a lamp, let alone run this.

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Dye Houses

The smell of a dye house is unique. I have been in many over the years in the UK and US and they all had the same aroma.

One particular place in the US was dyeing sheets for major hotel chains. The whole place had a 1 inch layer of cotton fibres covering everything. In harder to reach places it was even thicker. It looked very pretty - like a thick layer of snow, but did nothing for the ventilation of the panels that housed the electronics.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Another vote for Brother Lasers

Bought a dual sided Brother Laser 4 years ago for £85 after cashback. Replaced the supplied black toner cart a week or two ago after 3k pages. The web interface shows it has had 2 paper jams in total. It just works. Exactly what I need.

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Answered your own question

Believe me, some people can write truly awful Delphi programs. Today, I was looking at a D7 app with a single procedure (fired by a timer every second) that was over 4000 lines long with 18 levels of indentation.

And the interface has to be seen to be believed.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

Armateurs?

I rather have them designed and operated by professionals.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: Wouldn't be so bad if they actually worked

Wait, you have an electricity meter under a sink? Near water? Seriously?

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

They sure surprised me

"Apple surprised almost no one on Thursday". They sure surprised me. I thought it was Tuesday

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Compared to the £760m legal settlement for equal pay, the £80m cost overrun with Oracle looks like a drop in a bucket.

Google launches $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers

Re: I spy a business opportunity

Sorry - forgot the icon

I spy a business opportunity

If all they are policing is badges scanned in/out, what is to stop some enterprising person who does work in the office regularly having a handful of badges from remote employees that they scan in together? $20/day/badge could add up

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Correction - you get a bollocking AND you have to do it again next time

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Re: stored in a mix of over one thousand [AWS] servers and related system architecture

Maybe they had scripts to spin up the server every morning and stop it at night, but the night script didn't stop it and the morning script created a new server each time?

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Re: Formatting DVDs?

Replying to myself - the article says DVD-RAM. I don't remember those. Looks like it was less prevalent than -RW and I never came across them.

Formatting DVDs?

My memory may be getting hazy, but it was only the DVD-RW that needed to be formatted wasn't it? Standard DVD-R didn't need a format before burning.

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

Re: $800 for a cheese board and cheese?

According to Clarkson's Farm, supermarkets pay around £1200 per cow, so you could have the back of one and make your own cheese for $800

Cleaner ignored 'do not use tap' sign, destroyed phone systems ... and the entire building

Re: Concrete dust = Kryptonite

Had a system in a mill that had a train derailment and chlorine gas spill outside.

https://eu.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2015/01/05/years-graniteville-train-wreck/21278089/

People died.

All sorts of machinery failed over the following years until they gave up and shut the plant. Very sad.

Japanese convenience store chain opens outlet staffed by avatars and robots

Re: Sounds good

Oh, so you are a waffle man!

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Ribbons

Why were there no 'Remove Before Flight' ribbons on these caps? Long colourful ribbons are a lot harder to miss than some plastic caps high above head height.

Chinese Go Association suspends player 'for using AI'

The AI's play differently enough that an experienced player can tell. There is a documentary on Netflix called AlphaGo about the AI/Human tournament. The human players were surprised about the strategies the AI used - certainly nothing like a human player.

The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget

Server Screensavers

Does removing the OpenGL screensavers from servers count? I have done that a few times.

Imagine surviving WW3, rebuilding computers, opening up GitHub's underground vault just to relive JavaScript

Maybe not such a daft idea

Anyone remember the BBC Domesday project? Less than 20 years after it was published it was already becoming a fossil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Douglas Adams saw the future

"Incidentally, the first ARM1 chips required so little power, when the first one from the factory was plugged into the development system to test it, the microprocessor immediately sprung to life by drawing current from the IO interface – before its own power supply could be properly connected."

vs

"And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off."