Posts by Big_Boomer

FaxSpam

At a former employers we used to get a lot of FaxSpam in the days before decent e-Fax software. We would have to replace the toner cartridge every month just to be able to receive 20 or so faxes from customers & suppliers. So, we used to keep a stack of black and white diagonal striped paper beside the fax machine and anyone who spammed us got 20 pages of that sent back to them (now they get to replace their toner as well) with a final sheet telling them that if they faxed us again we would send Big John around to insert their fax machine somewhere dark and smelly. Over the next few months the FaxSpam storm declined to a light drizzle. Eventually we got a fax machine that could be whitelisted so we ONLY accepted faxes from a validated list of customers and suppliers. I think the companies initial mistake was publishing the fax number on their website.

As for the death of the fax machine, bring it on. They are an archaic PITA and need to die!

Yet another OBVIOUS problem that all our incompetent governments just "missed".

My Dad worked for Westinghouse Nuclear Europe from the early 70s until the late 90s. He got laid off due to successive governments of both hues, and on both sides of the Atlantic, being unwilling to invest in new nuclear power stations. Gas was cheap and governments are congenitally incapable of seeing beyond the next election, so long term planning was ignored or else setup and then cancelled until now it's too late. I also have every intention of laughing in the face of all the hippies, greens, and nimby's who complain about the power cuts we are pretty much guaranteed to have over the next few years. They believed the pushers of the nuclear "boogeyman" stories and ignored the experts (remind anyone of anything?) and now they get to suck it up.

Personally I'd rather live near a big Nuke than anywhere near a coal/gas/oil/wood-chip/waste burning plant, and definitely rather than near a wind farm.

Awfully Inadequate

That's my take on AI. Not one of these AI systems are artificially intelligent. At best they are neural networks that have learned to take a trained/educated guess at something and have a high-ish chance of being correct. However, they are often incorrect and therefore utterly useless if the data is to have any value at all. I've seen a lot of AI hype over the last few years and I still maintain that at best what they are selling are Expert Systems and that there is ZERO Intelligence in any of their systems. It reminds me of all those silly psychometric tests that HR types thought were the dogs-danglies until someone actually researched their effect and it turned out that they were utterly useless and it would have been just as effective to just bin every other CV. These Expert Systems do seem to be pretty good at pattern recognition and can process data WAY faster than humans, but the positives still need that trained human eye to confirm that they are correct and THAT is where the Intelligence comes in. One day we may well have Artificial Intelligence but not for some time yet.

Home office

I work from home full time and am lucky enough to have a tiny 3rd bedroom that makes a decent home office. I have set myself up with such a good work environment that when I do go to the office it feels cramped and lo-tech with smaller desks and tiny 26" monitors <LOL>. I have a 180cm x 70cm desk that is height adjustable, two 32" curved 1920x1080 monitors, a good keyboard and mouse, and a USB switch for the keyboard, mouse, and video camera. For work I have a high-ish spec Dell laptop and a USB-C docking station (both supplied by the company) which is more than adequate for what I do. The work laptop needs to be portable for the occasional visits to the office and to customer sites so a desktop won't work for me there.

For home use I have an old-ish i7-4790 with 16GB RAM, and a GeForce GTX960 with 4GB VRAM, with a big SSD, a big HDD, and a good 5.1 speaker system. The home setup suffices for the games that I play (Fallout4, GTA5, Outer Limits, Skyrim, Half-Life, etc.) and anything else I need to do on a PC. I have yet to encounter anything that would make me want to replace it.

Both PCs use the same monitors, keyboard, mouse, and camera. All the cabling goes down the back of the desk where it is clipped to the underside of the desk with stick on cable clips. I also have an "ergonomic" office chair. It's tidy-ish but highly functional. Total cost outside of the desktop PC, laptop, and speaker system is about £1250 but given that I spend 50+ hours per week here, worth every penny and then some.

Loads-a-money

"Shut yor maaaaaff and look at my new shiny-shiny fing!" Yet more bling for those with more money than sense.

UK/US English

Personally I have worked with UK, US, CDN, AUS, NZ, SA, Indian, and many other "English" mother tongue speakers for over 40 years. Verbal communication can be difficult due to dialect and cultural differences, but written language pretty much comes down to UK and US English. Most of the world uses UK English spelling, apart from the USA. When people from outside the UK/USA see US spelling then they assume that the site is US based and US culture. When they see UK spelling there is no assumption as the site could be based just about anywhere in the English speaking world, EXCEPT for the USA. There are a variety of reasons given for the differences in spelling and they are all valid for the culture they are used in. Most of us can communicate in both with ease as the differences are minimal, mostly ignored, and are at worst a mild irritant.

However, El Reg started in the UK, has always been perceived as a UK based site, and has built up it's readership thanks to that UK culture and humour. Changing it to US spelling/culture is, in my opinion, a mistake, and in the longer term will change how El Reg is perceived outside the US. It may be a success w.r.t. profitability, especially in the short term, but longer term it will become just another US based IT news site, and there are plenty of those already.

Dishonesty

By taking two simultaneous "whole time" jobs and not declaring them to either employer you are stealing from both. If you choose to work two jobs and declare it to both employers and they accept that, then fill your boots. If you cheat and lie to your employer(s) then don't start whining when you get Gross Misconducted out the door. I have worked for multiple employers on several occasions but none of them involved "whole time" contracts and I never worked them simultaneously so each employer was getting what they paid for.

I am thoroughly enjoying working from home and am doing nothing substantively different than I did when I was in the office. I don't work 100% of the time flat out but then I never did in the office either, and if I tried to I'd burn out like many of the over-enthusiastic people I have worked with. My working hours are more flexible than they were but then I'm not wasting 4 hours per day commuting either and the stress levels are WAY lower than they were. Being able to focus with less interruptions is also a huge benefit, both to me and the company. I know that this wouldn't suit everyone or every job, but it works for me and seems to be working for my employers.

Nuclear Boogieman, woooooooo!!! Be frightened!!

Just mention the word "Nuclear" and half the population has a fit, yet there have been and continues to be plenty of safe, efficient, profitable nuclear power stations all around the world. Yes, there was Calder Hall (Windscale), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as other incidents you may never have heard of, but there was also Aberfan and a great long list of coal mining disasters that have killed tens of thousands over the years, not to mention oil/gas industry disasters like Deepwater Horizon, Piper Alpha, Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez, Kielland, Seacrest, Ocean Ranger, and many MANY more that everyone seems to conveniently forget. If you are talking deaths, injuries, pollution and other hazards to health then even Wind Power is more harmful than Nuclear Power. Don't believe me? Then go do the research yourself.

Darwin in action.

Or at least it would be if the drivers in these "self-driving" accidents were killed. Survival of the Cynical? <LOL> I feel the same about these morons as I do about people who drive off cliffs and quaysides because their SatNav told them to.

Good/Bad

WinXP - Good.

Vista - Bad.

Win7 - Good.

Win8 - Bad

Win10 - Good

See where I'm going with this?

Bawwy wiww be happy

For those who don't get it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhmq7BBnRf4

Phonebling

Foldables are about as useful as a phone covered in Swarovski crystals. Shiny and sparkly, but they just add bling and cost a small fortune. If that's your thing, then good for you, but don't expect it to become mainstream at any price. I will never want a shiny, sparkly phone, not will I ever want a foldable, but then I am an olde codger who couldn't give a flying **** about what my phone (Poco X4) says about me. It does it's various jobs adequately.

Understanding is where it's at!

If you had these issues with mumbling lecturers, poor screen displays, inability to write whilst listening, etc. why didn't you raise that fact with the lecturer? If I attend a lecture and cannot hear them, then I ask them to speak up or use a PA system. If I cannot see/read the screen I say so and refuse to let them continue until I can see/read. Yes, you will mark yourself out but most teachers/lecturers WANT their students to learn and will take an active role in assisting those who actively show an interest, so long as you don't make too much of nuisance of yourself. If you just sit there like a blancmange hoping to absorb the information by osmosis and gain understanding by some miracle, then you are failing the teacher, yourself, and whoever is paying for your training. Get involved, ask questions, speak up if you have an issue or don't understand. The whole point of them and you being there is for you to learn. If you are there just to pass an exam and then forget it all, then you are wasting everyone's time, your own included.

I had a deaf mate who had major issues in lectures because whilst he was an accomplished lipreader that didn't help if the lecturer was marching up and down, often facing away from him. He was one of the first people I ever saw who videoed his lectures (with permission), mostly so he could watch them back and pause/rewind whilst making his notes. He also asked all his lecturers to face forwards when talking, which most did. He did better than most of the "tourists" because he gave a damn and paid attention and wanted to understand. We used to read each others notes and it often astounded me what he got from each lecture that had gone right over my head,...and vice-versa.

Delayed?

"Fun fact: The mission is named after the Latin word for 'delayed'". Somebody needs to check their sources. Delayed is "moratus" in Latin. If that comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek then maybe mark it that way.

Mac? No thanks, I already have a venereal disease.

There, that should guarantee a few downvotes. <LOL>

Back in the early noughties a marketing guy I worked with insisted he had to have a Mac because the software he used (Adobe Photoshop) was "crap on PC and only on a Mac was it usable" or some such. So, the company bought him his pretty Mac with it's nice coloured case and complete lack of interconnectivity with any of the rest of the world of IT. The company also bought him a WinTel laptop so that he could access his email, share files, and do the 101 things you do when you work for a company. He spent several years copying files back and forth between his Mac and his laptop using a USB key. Oh the Mac could connect to the network, but there were constant file inconsistency issues and in the end he gave up and resorted to a FAT formatted USB key. On the one occasion when he asked me for help with his Mac I handed him the phone number of an Apple support specialists and he had to pay them for support. It just wasn't worth my while to learn Mac stuff for a single user when he could have done it all on the one laptop with the minor inconvenience of a slightly different way of working in one piece of software.

Advertising weary?

People don't want to pay for apps or websites (including ElReg) so the only way to get that revenue to pay for the app/website is via advertising. Then these same people want to block those adverts but still want the app/website to be "free". Well, time to wake up people. FREE is a marketing con. There is no such thing as FREE. You pay one way or the other. I don't blame Google at all for wanting to kill off Ad Blockers as they are devaluing their main source of income. Personally I tolerate apps and websites that have reasonable levels of advertising (like ElReg), and avoid the ones that seem to feel that they have to ram their adverts down your throat.

Borisette

The same people elected her, the same people are backing her, the same puppeteers are pulling her strings, so the only changes are how the puppet looks and sounds. I'll wait and see what her cabinet looks like and see if she does anything that might benefit anyone other than the already rich, but I'm not holding my breath and fully expect it to be business as usual.

Cheap-Cheap-Cheap

The problem is that companies all see Support as a cost centre so they cut costs to the bone and then cannot understand when their customers desert them in droves. It's typical short-sighted incompetence and happens everywhere.

It makes no difference to me if it's a human or an expert system that talks to me as neither of them are of any use whatsoever. When I am confronted by automated phone systems I just swear continuously whilst pressing zero over and over again until the system can't cope and passes me to a human. I then tell the human that I am highly technical and have already done everything that is on their script and several things besides. Sometimes a brave soul asks me for details, but they normally put me through to Tier2/3 after the 3rd or 4th detailed description of my troubleshooting.

Human failures, not Nuclear

Chernobyl, caused by people doing stupid things and a lack of maintenance. Three Mile Island, caused by people doing stupid things but was at least contained to within the reactor building itself. It led to changes in all western nuclear power plant control systems to prevent any recurrence. Fukushima, caused by stupid short sighted management not paying the extra to mount the backup cooling system generators on the reactor building roof where they would be safe AS WAS ORIGINALLY PLANNED, and instead putting them where a tsunami could wash them away. All reactor buildings are built to withstand local geological forces and Fukushima withstood the tsunami just fine, except for those backup cooling system generators. Nukes are not THE solution as there is no one solution, but they are part of the solution at least for the foreseeable future. If you are wishing for cold fusion, why not wish for Zero Point Energy instead? Both are about as likely to be harnessed effectively anytime soon and the 2nd does not rely on water.

Nuclear power production is MASSIVELY safer than any fossil fuel system even when you add in human stupidity and short-sightedness. Yes, there are issues but the over-reaction to those issues is ridiculous when coal and oil is killing so many more people right now.

Spamhaus are NOT the problem, spammers are the problem!

I have my own domain but I pay for it to be hosted, like many do. I have quite often had issues with emails being blocked due to the IP address of the email server being blacklisted. In 100% of those cases, the cause was a company whose email server was blasting out spam and their domain was hosted on the same host as my domain. Most of the time the issue was resolved within a few days, but in one instance I complained to the ISP who went into head-up-arse mode and nothing changed for months despite multiple calls and emails from me. So, I contacted Spamhaus directly and THEY contacted the ISP and within 24hrs the offending company was kicked off the server which then was delisted. I assume that Spamhaus threatened to list ALL of that ISPs servers if they didn't get their sh!t together. On renewal I moved to a different domain host (Krystal) and I have not had a single issue since then (thanks Simon!). If it wasn't for places like Spamhaus and your ISPs spam filters, you would currently be drowning in spam. Lots of companies use the Spamhaus lists because THEY WORK. If you don't like them, then chances are that you are a SPAMMER.

Waaaaah!,...

We want our sides lies to be allowed and the other sides lies to be reported/blocked. What a shower of self-centred babies! Do you really believe that your "side" in this is any better than the other "side"? Almost all politicians are the same. They are lying, corrupt, bottom-feeding pond-scum and never have AND NEVER WILL represent you. They represent whoever pays them the most and under our current systems, they always will. The only difference Twatter/Farcebook, and other anti-social media systems have made is that now you can get your daily dose of confirmation bias and mis-information (Why not just call them ****ing LIES) at WARP SPEED, and our flawed "democracies" have yet to take that into consideration. Previously it took days for the newspapers to try to whip people up to fever pitch over some fabricated pile of steaming horse crap. Now Twatter/Farcebook can do that in hours if not minutes, and the gullibles can't be bothered to check if the utter bullsh!t they just read is true or not since it agrees with their biases anyways.

The fuel salt is never allowed to solidify. It is introduced to the reactor vessel as a liquid and drained as a liquid. There is a primary circuit that contains the fuel salt (salts of fissile materials) which transfers heat to a secondary circuit of non-fissile salt, which then transfers heat to a tertiary circuit of water that produces steam to drive the turbines that drive the big alternators. It's no different to any other nuclear reactor. It requires power from outside to power it when it is not generating. The advantages of MSRs are size, cost, ease of refuelling (normally an ongoing process) and safety. I believe that nobody has yet built a commercial MSR.

As for being "clean", they aren't. They are low carbon though which is good for our immediate problems, but longer term we need to find a way to deal with radioactive waste safely, or ideally only produce waste that has a low-ish half-life.

Covid ignorance

Covid-19 (SARS-Cov-2) is a Coronavirus. Coronaviruses have been around as long as hosts to spread them have been around. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that such viruses are responsible to a greater or lesser extent for the mutations that all living beings experience.

Prior to the current pandemic most Coronavirus infections were diagnosed as Flu or the Common Cold infections right up to the point where the actual virus was identified when they were separated out into Influenza/Rhinovirus/Coronavirus. Previously dangerous/fatal versions of Coronaviruses include SARS-Cov and MERS-Cov but there are far more identified (and probably millions of unidentified) but mild versions out there that at worst give you a mild cold or "flu".

What showed quite clearly during the pandemic was that LOTS of people could effectively work from home. Something that many employers had been actively resisting for years was shown to be entirely possible and in many cases led to increased productivity. Now that the pandemic phase is over, some of them want to pretend that the last 2 years didn't happen and for everything to go back as it was. Well, NEWS FLASH, the world moved on and changed, as it does every day and they are just going to have to deal with the new reality. I know plenty of people who have either renegotiated their employment contract with their employer, or else simply left for a company that was more sympathetic to people working from home.

Independant testing required.

If you are going to deliberately falsify your emissions data then the best way to avoid getting caught out is to put the blame on inadequate data storage systems and processes rather than on the people who implemented those systems. Much like all the other diesel fraudsters this stinks like an overripe Durian. I'm sure lots of Hino owners will now be contacting HinoDieselClaim.jp to get their hands on some cash, whether they gave a rats arse about their trucks emissions or not.

The only way to do that is for all testing to be independent of the manufacturer and for the test methodology to not be revealed or to be as close to a real world scenario as possible.

Puppets

Whichever side of the debate you are on I suggest that you take a good hard look at where you get your info from as the media are pulling your strings like there is no tomorrow and they have been for years. Yes, I am as vulnerable to it as anyone which is why I read a variety of different sources for my news, not just the one(s) that agree with my personal biases, and double/triple check the stuff that matters most to me.

What I find most despicable in the world today is the unfettered greed shown by almost all politicians and their owners, coupled with their utter disdain for the people that they are supposed to represent. Whether your politician is red, blue, yellow, green, pink, etc. they all represent whoever pays them the most and that is most definitely not you or me. If you want to know what a politician stands for you only have to FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Sensors

Good luck securing VR systems. The more sensors you attach to your body, the more info they can get/infer from it, and the bigger dataset they have on you. They can quite easily calculate your approximate weight, height, fitness level, and probably age, amongst a whole load of other info just based on how you move and react to stimuli. By attaching those sensors you are giving up more data than you thought possible. No, it probably can't measure how accurately you think, but coupled with the right scenario in the game you are playing it can probably be used to discover your morality, and other personal traits. Look at the data that they are mining based on what clickbait articles you "like" in anti-social media, and on your comments on all other items. We are in the age of Big Brother and anti-social media & VR systems are just the thin end of the wedge.

Alleged?

"It was further alleged that he had stolen credit cards and checks from elderly Spectrum subscribers, and that the corporation turned a blind eye to a pattern of theft by its installers and technicians."

Was any of that proven in court? If so, then that is 100% criminal negligence on the part of his employer. Anyone who is accused of theft from a customer should be immediately taken off of customer facing duties whilst it is investigated.

The Jury seemed to think that they had been criminally negligent and from what I have read, 2 different judges agreed. Sounds like a typical case of corporate incompetence coupled with them just not giving a rats ass about their customers. I imagine they will soon be having a shake-up of their HR procedures and probably a culling of incompetent middle management.

As for the award amount, it's the US legal system so everything is blown massively out of proportion and then later reduced to something approaching reality.

When the sh!t hits the fan...

it's great to still be around and see it splatter. When they realise that there is nobody left who knows how it works or how to fix it. When they finally understand that being "positive" and holding endless meetings is NOT going to fix it. It's such a hoot to see, and better still to then walk away and leave them to their misery. Bitter? Me? <LOL>

I got out of electronic engineering in the late 90's as there was no money in it, and the skills (plus my languages) were transferrable to software support. Support is of a similar "social standing" to engineering, but better paid, and your skills and knowledge are at least partially appreciated.

Apple - "Remote brick all iPhones within the borders of The Russian Federation". <LOL> Well, it'd guarantee some good sales of phones once the sanctions get lifted, although they would probably just replace them with Chinese Android phones. I'm guessing that Apple, Zoom, and Ookla really don't give a flying ****. I hope the Russian people appreciate the lengths that their great leader, Pootin, has gone to to drag them kicking and screaming back to the 1950s.

TSUNAMI!

All that water is going to start oscillating and before you can shout "It has nothing to do with tides" you will be swept around the inside of a big wine glass and get to be famous for drowning in the most ridiculous and expensive way imaginable. In zero-G spinning large diameter habitats make a kind of sense as there are no bearings to consider and all other rotations can be minimised. On the surface of a planet/moon your bearings are going to be carrying a lateral load as the planet/moon drags your great big centrifuge around with it in addition to the downwards load of the weight of the "wine glass". I know the Moon has only 1.625m/s² gravity, but even that is going to amount to a sh!tload of weight pushing down on your bearings given the mass of your "wine glass" and the water/land it contains. All in all, it sounds to me like someone ate the wrong mushrooms.