Posts by Alan Brown 15087 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"I don't give a hoot if you look at p0rn, but not during office hours please; we can't spare the bandwidth."
In an office or lab environment, accessing porn is considered creating a hostile environment.
This is the go-to for discipline and has been since the days when steroidal males would cluster around lab machines making females in the room feel uncomfortable
On shared machines, doing so may leave traces where someone might stumble across it - also a hostile environment
My parents were both primary teachers - and I had to interact with their cow-orkers at times
Unfortunately the stereotypes are frequently true, thanks to poor pay keeping talented people away and more recently (last 40 years) religious fundamentalist groups seeing primary school as a fertile recruiting ground, so pushing their young people to signup as teachers (classic example: railing against halloween as "satanism") in order to get a foot in the door
"Obviously blowing on the end of the cables does nothing"
Until you watch a user do it and coat the end in spit as part of the process - and he does this RELIGIOUSLY every time he connects/reconnects a cable as he's been told blwing on it will ensure it's clean
Feel free to EWWW
"Annoys the marketing team"
Tell the marketing team that this kind of inane shit is a good reason for me to strike your company off as a supplier
Why? Because it tells me they obsess on form over function and it's likely ther company support ethic will follow the same pattern
"I am surprised you can actually delete "Sent from my IPAD/IPhone" because no-on seems to do it."
It's the default sig block - do you think someone clueless enough to not bother reading the "no ipad" rules and deny he has an ipad would have enough clue to alter it?
"The sender retains copyright, and grants the recipient a fairly limited license."
Yes, but damages in such a case are restricted to ACTUAL losses - which if they happen to be zero will be awarded as such - and there's no requirement for the court to award costs to the victor
There have been a lot of cases where the plaintiff has been awarded a symbolic $1 and explicitly refused costs claims (the reason for the symbolic award is to ensure it's virtually impossible to appeal)
The New Zealand solution to the Opnreach Problem was simple:
"We won't provide any more money until lines and dialtone are two entirely separated companies, with separate ownership, headquarters, shareholdings and boards of directors - and don't think of simply splitting off the lines company into a lines "maintenance" company - ownership of the LINES must be entlrely separated from other services"
That was done specifically in response to documenting how BT was and is abusing the UK market and thealmost immediate transformation of their version of Openreach could be likened to the company having had a cattle prod jammed up the nether reaches.
Now the old incumbent dialtone company is looking extremely ill whilst the lines company is quite robust and well respected for their "we'll sell access to anyone - equally" approach.
"Oh, and the Commonwealth countries may find services interesting."
Commonwealth interest in "made in Britain" products can be exemplified in the saga of General Motors attempting to relaunch the Vauxhall brand in Australasia during 1998-9 - nobody would touch those Vectras until they were rebadged as Opels (NZ) or Holdens (Australia)
Ford had similar problems selling Mondeos until they provided assurances the things were built in Germany, not the UK
"... one of the markets both OneWeb and Starlink probably want to disrupt. "
You can guess who's being disrupted by who's astroturfing the objections. US telcos outside of the major metropolitan centres feature highly in that list
There's also the issue of satellite broadband constellations bypassing national firewalls. I could see legislation being passed REQUIRING that UK users only use the UK service, in order that the "porn/piracy wall(*)" stays up
(*) When the porn wall manages to block things like the Saracens rugby club with no explanation, let alone political sites criticising porn wall policies, one has to wonder what they're ACTUALLY blocking and why.
"UK govt had more faith in Germans (particularly) but to a lesser extent French and Italians actually delivering the thing that was procured"
And for bloody good reason - The same reason governments and large orgs around the world tended to bin British bids having being repeatedly stung by fraudulent bidding and suppliers who would "run away" from their obligations
They seem to be well in control of withholding safety critical data and declaring community COVID infection rates (Pillar 2) an Official Secret in order to keep bad news from contradicting the official releases
Except it kind of caught up with them in the end...
"Get back to developing and making it ourselves"
Like the UK's orbital rocket capabilities? Or the jet airliners that fell out of the sky because Manglement wouldn't let the designers talk to and _train_ the assembly line workers about the differences between pressurised/unpressurised construction (and worse, changed key construction parameters without telling anyone what they'd done)?
"Satellite Internet is for users off the grid"
GEO satellite yes. LEO is a different kettle of fish.
One of the very first things it does is provide sufficient competition to keep the incumbent terrestrial operators HONEST
One thing which springs to mind is that satellite broadband is going to punch straight through regional/national government-ordered censrorhsip walls. I could see the UK government making it _illegal_ to use a "foreign" satellite Internet provider because it would allow users to bypass the pornblocks.
"They obviously have some plans for it which aren't immediately apparent."
Plans which usually involve funnelling taxpayer money into the pockets of friends of spaffer and de pfeffel
It's extremely hard to repurpose specialised satellites which are already in orbit. We don't have SHADO It's also vary hard to repurpose such birds even before launch as they're production line items built for a purpose
Oneweb's most valuable asset outside of what's already launched is its FCC license. I can see it being used for a UK military comms network to replace Skynet (which is what effectively kept Iridium going for years) but that's about it and doing so would make about as much sense as building a pair of Nimitz-size conventionally powered aircraft carriers without CATOBAR facilities.
Not just food, but the wines
There is zero point in trying anything "delicate" in the air because the airconditioning will whip just about all of the important bits away before you get a chance to experience them. Stick with simple chardonnay, etc.
That said: I don't recommend drinking and flying - it's a fast way of getting badly dehydrated and arriving feeling like crap (stick to the non-alcoholics on long hauls and if you must indulge try to run 3 glasses of water per glass of wine, with no more than one wine/beer per 3-4 hours - Seriously, drink LOTS of water. You're losing it like gangbusters out of your lungs to the dry air. I spent half the 1990s flying around the world and that advice kept me functional)
It's not just the pressure chamber though. The airline experience includes having most of the smell whipped away by the air handling system before it even gets a chance to get near the parts that can sense them (IIRC it's something like a complete air change every 90 seconds with primary airflow from the top of the cabin to the floor vents)
"Isn't unintentional environmentalism fun?"
An anecdote from my telecommunications tech days:
It was pointed out that _every single time_ there had been a pandemic ('56, '68 and '77 given as particular examples ) or a fuel price surge ('74 and '79 given as examples there), travel had been set aside for teleconferencing (or the phone equivalent of it in those days)
And every time things had returned to "normal", the surge in demand for telecommunications services had not eased off, whilst increases in travel normally only came with subsequent growth in company business
"Covid's kind of turned out to be a bit of a damp squib."
I suggest you familiarise yourself with pandemic curves over the last 150 years. Traditionally the SECOND wave has been the one which takes out the most people - usually by a factor of 10 or so - and we haven't even seen the peak of the first wave worldwide yet, let alone the begeinnings of the second one.
Take onboard the 1918 lessons of Philadelphia, San Francisco and Apia
> "56 High street" will be accepted when the actual address is "97 Church Rd".
As will businesses with registered addresses that turn out to be MBE drop boxes (Hint: it's not legal in most countries as the registered address is the place where legal service by a bailiff must be accepted by a human)
" Why? Because the boss - a former salesman - had sold that we'd already developed this software in house and it was ready to roll out. It was a big enough order to bet the entire company on."
That's the point at which you update your CV and leave - because he bet YOUR future and sure as hell wasn't planning to share any of the results with you.
less stressful and your bank account is more likely to be better off.
"sometimes a strowager relay would stick and not roll through the correct number of contacts,"
The odds of this happening went up with the number of times someone had poked at it.
The very best way of maintaining Strowager relays was to leave them the hell alone until they actually played - never EVER let the junior tech staff near them - and chuck 'em out if they were out of tolerance/couldn't be adjusted
Unfortunately it was ALWAYS junior tech staff maintaining them, there was a rigid schedule of maintenance and they were always bodged back into service somehow
Unsurprisingly, during the 1980s BT strike the number of faults recorded at BT Strowager switches went through the floor - which mind of made the points above
"no, it really has sent it, even if you have the original in your hand (they honestly believed it somehow sent the original like a letter! "
Honestly the easiest way to describe it as "It's taking a picture of the page and sending that to the other fax machine" - which seems to be the lightbulb moment
and "look at the little diagram on top which shows you which side the text needs to be on"
"for when you want to send a slow, low resolution, black and white copy of an document you could easily have scanned and attached to an email."
Or as we used to put it back in the 90s - "a fax is a picture of a page, an email can have the actual content of the page - and one is 1000x smaller than the other - which means it gets there faster or costs you less on an international call"
> Not long after a Police car turned up at the office with a very irate PC demanding we turn the "bloody fax machine off".
The lesson there is that the external access code for your PABX should NEVER bear any similarity to the local emergency numbers.
But, "quality british design" and all that......
"Once had a fax try repeatedly to connect to my parent's house number. Drove us all mad (I was living at home at the time)."
I had this happen too. The much simpler solution was to grab a fax and plug it into the line - to discover that my home number was the same (but a different area code) as a major finance company's fax line.
After the company ignored complaints about their agents faxing the wrong area code, we took to faxing back the (highly senstiive) application forms with "APPLICATION REJECTED. POOR CREDIT RISK" in scrawled over the top of the form in large black marker
The calls stopped after about a week
Another person I know took a similar path and found out the home number of the CEO of a company whose fax machine was dialling out at 2-3am then rangi that CEO up every time he received a 3am fax call - at 3am.
Unsurprisingly the 3am fax calls stopped happening within days.
"There is something called "Malicious prosecution" in English law which could be used against The Post Office and senior managers, to seek redress for the PO's appalling treatment of their sub-postmasters. "
nematoad is being too circumspect. AIUI, this is still being actively pursued - and the fact that Post Office settled for £60 millioon is a substantive admission of wrongdoing. People want their names (or names of now-dead family members) _CLEARED_ and they see this as a path to exoneration.
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