Posts by Martin an gof 2329 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2010
Apparently the head of Octopus reckoned 34%, equivalent to 250 people last week, but that's from zero in February. The interview was given to The Times and reprinted in such as the Yorkshire Post, both of which are behind paywalls, so here's the text (I believe) of the YP article from Pressreader.
M.
It'll be an assumption made by some engineer or driver-writer. I have a similar problem at work where small groups of computers interact through the network. As installed, the interaction within each group was via a 'private' network to which only these few computers in a specific group were physically connected. This was achieved with 100Mbit PCI cards, and the computers talked to the rest of the installation (for remote control, system updates etc.) through a second interface - usually a motherboard job.
It began to go wrong when the network to which the second interface connected was gradually upgraded to Gbit ports.
It went wronger when our first rebuild with Windows 7 (the originals were XP) kept choosing the 'wrong' interface for the private network and therefore couldn't take part in group activities.
To cut a very long story short, it seems the software didn't actually care which interface it used; it connected itself to the first one 'up'. While XP was able to force an order on interfaces which usually (but not always) did the trick, W7 didn't bother.
It all came to a head when I started installing switches for the main network which had 10Gbit uplinks, it was now possible to get a response from 'the other side or the network' faster than a single-hop 100Mbit card connected to a 100Mbit switch and computers began attaching themselves to the wrong group.
Eventually I realised that with a very little reconfiguration, the private traffic would happily co-exist on the main network and the secondary network wasn't necessary at all! Disconnect that, change a couple of configurations in the software and it seems to have been perfectly fine since.
And mostly (I believe) down to what us electronics types would probably call a race condition.
M.
these crap TLD's
Define 'crap'? I still find some systems which block my .cymru TLD, and web forms that refuse to accept it as a valid email address. In fact I even came across one which blocked any TLD with >4 characters but accepted anything else, even if it wasn't a valid TLD!
M.
Probably a silly question, but is Suse actually Gnome-default these days? I use OpenSuse quite a lot and am happy enough with its default KDE. However it seems to be drawing closer to Suse over time and I'd hate to get the announcement that KDE is no longer default in the next new version. I've a desktop and a couple of laptops which need updating / possible reinstalling soon...
M.
Came here to say something similar. Apart from a Fairphone (which is expensive partly for reasons other than being "flagship") I've never bought a phone more expensive than about £160* until last week when I bought a second-hand phone at £300 which originally had a price tag of around £700 I think.
There is very, very little to choose between my expensive phone and the cheaper ones. It has a slightly better camera setup (a fixed 5x zoom for example) but for general use I'm all "meh".
There may be certain use-cases for ultra fast processors, ultra high-resolution screens, ultra-megapixel cameras, but if I want a mini laptop I'd rather shell out for something from Planet Computers which has a keyboard, or (if they can sort the software out) a Pinephone with a snap-on keyboard back which also happens to double the battery capacity.
I'm bloomin' nervous even carrying a second-hand phone around given how often I tend to drop the things. The Pinephone and the Fairphone both have reasonably-priced and user-fittable spare parts. My last phone did me for just over 9 years (could really have replaced it from about year 7 onwards but didn't have the cash back then) so we'll see how this one gets on...
M.
*I don't buy a lot of phones for myself (hence the 9-year-old one), but family do tend to ask me to buy for them, so in the last five or six years I've bought and set up six (I think) smart phones (that's not counting the non-smart phones), one of which was a Fairphone but the others all under £160 IIRC. Given that many of these people are teenagers who tend to hammer their phones (though they're not into gaming other than a bit of Super Tux Kart) I've had absolutely no complaints about storage capacity, camera quality, device speed, battery life or any of the other things ("do my mates think it's ok?") that are supposedly "better" the more you pay for a phone.
Once had a line manager who had come from the mining world. Although the company had a general rule that there should always be someone from our department on duty - so ordinarily we were supposed to take staggered lunch breaks - he insisted we all had Friday lunch together, and would personally pop down to the chipshop and buy tons of chips.
It was one of the most productive hours of our week, exchanging news across the table and spluttering bits of chip everywhere.
M.
transcode from written to sound without any comprehension worth of mentioning.
Otherwise known as 'phonics', a teaching method popular in the 1960s, suddenly trendy again in the 2010s and to most right-minded people a surefire way of achieving the goal of reading-without-comprehension. Glad to see it falling out of fashion again.
M.
if the PC has a USB socket on the motherboard
And if it doesn't, and you have a spare header (I've fitted a lot of motherboards with more headers than the case has sockets) One of these little adapters might be useful. I first used them for FreeNAS booting - a pair of USB sticks for the mirrored boot drive, safely tucked inside the case.
M.
I didn't say I was an out-and-out advocate of sprinklers in the home, but this false alarm business must be put to bed:
This (pdf) document sets out reasonably clearly how these things work.
They are not easy to retrofit which is why the building regulations are not retrospective (building regulations very rarely are retrospective), but when major works, rebuilding etc. is carried out it is not actually terribly difficult to run the pipes. Domestic systems often use a heat-resistant plastic pipe (commercial systems are often metal pipe) which has a certain amount of flex and is glued together. You can make it even easier (and other services too) by using open web joists (just an example manufacturer) if you are replacing floor joists.
The main problem in a retrofit to be perfectly honest is likely to be upgrading the mains water connection. Leaving aside situations where a storage tank may need to be fitted and / or a booster pump, many houses in the UK are fed from the water main in the street through a 15mm Copper pipe (or ½" Lead still in some cases) which is inadequate to supply sprinklers directly. Newer houses might have 20mm or 25mm plastic supply (because 15mm can also be inadequate when there's a combi boiler and more than one bathroom), but a sprinkler system really needs a 32mm supply. Obviously the water company will charge to upgrade this (and fit a new meter) though in our area it's not an exorbitant charge.
M.
I have no problem with a requirement for interlinked smoke (and heat) alarms. Smoke alarms are known to have saved many lives over the years since they were commonly available for home use, and making them mains-powered, battery-backed and interlinked removes one of the biggest problems with domestic alarms - that people do have a habit of removing the batteries, or simply not maintaining the units.
We have seven alarm heads in our house altogether. The problem is the very occasional false alarm, which can often be attributed to Baby Spider Season. Ours are also interlinked with a small control panel in the utility room which has buttons for "test" and "silence", with the latter silencing all alarms except that one which triggered, meaning you can in theory trace it. In practice by the time you get to the button, the spider has moved on and the alarm isn't in "trigger" mode any more. Nevertheless it's still a lot more convenient than the way it worked in our old house, which required climbing up on steps to push the button on the alarm head itself. Even so, the children have still been known to sleep through the racket of seven sounders.
Building regulations in Wales changed from 2016 to include a requirement for sprinklers in all private domestic properties (as well as an existing requirement for multiple occupancy buildings). This one is a bit more onerous as it adds a minimum of £1,000 to the build costs, possibly substantially more if you need boost pumps or storage tanks, and in theory you need an annual drain-down and check. Problem there is that installers are stretched enough doing installations and don't have a lot of time for maintenance.
While the benefit of domestic sprinklers - particularly in smaller houses - is debatable (they are not designed to put fires out - they are designed to suppress the heat and smoke to make escape easier for longer, and possibly reduce spread until the fire brigade arrives, thus reducing overall damage) what is surprising and, I'd say, shameful is that while most new-build and re-build public buildings in Wales (schools, hospitals, libraries etc) have been required to be fitted with fire suppression systems since 2011 (I think - couldn't find a reference), proposals for similar regulations in England are constantly defeated.
M.
Having to click through a drop-down to check status is just going to mean even fewer people do it. The padlock might not have been ideal, but it was an instant visual clue for those who wanted to know.
Or, y'know, just stop the practice of hiding "http://" or "https://" in the address bar? Other than saving a little horizontal space, what's the point?
M.
I just think that having an onboard camera capable of snapping pictures of the probe itself is a good idea. There have been many occasions over the decades when I wondered why this hadn't been done, especially since the things are incredibly small and cheap these days and as engineers said things like "we're pretty certain x is the problem, but we can't know for certain because we can't actually see it". In terms of probes, the obvious example is an earlier Jupiter mission - Galileo - where the high gain antenna failed to deploy fully, reducing the capacity of the downlink quite considerably. Engineers determined that a few specific arms of the folded antenna had got stuck and devised shaking operations to try to free them. It's possible that with a proper photograph of the thing, other information might have been available, but instead all we had were artists impressions of the problem (this looks like something done much later).
M.
As I recall, the change from Goldstar (which wasn't a worldwide brand I think) to LG also coincided with a change from outsourcing and badge-manufacturing to in-house. Certainly LG made their own plasma panels (and were the last to continue to do so, after Panasonic dropped theirs) and the quality of the TVs which used said panels was not at all bad (I still have a couple in use, though they are beginning to show signs of age). The same went for subsequent LCD models; I have some LG and Sharp units bought at around about the same time, and the LG still has a significantly better picture for non-HD sources; better processing. Still buy Panasonic for commercial use though.
Datsun --> Nissan in the 1980s (Europe)? Also coincided with a step-change in build quality.
Royal Ulster Constabulary --> Police Service of Northern Ireland? Not sure how well that one's going.
Marathon (a name apparently unique to the UK) --> Snickers? Still smarting over that one (and Opal Fruits to Starburst; I don't think I've bought a pack since!).
Jif --> Cif and Oil of Ulay --> Olay simply so they could use the same labels across Europe?
For the past several years I've been buying AMD processors for building computers. In general they have been cheaper and less power-hungry than the equivalent Intel parts. For moderate desktop use, the A-series processors might not have been (quite) as fast as contemporary Intel parts, but other than that they worked really well for me.
Ryzen is fantastic, but expensive in comparison and I was utterly gobsmacked when AMD dropped the older (and cheaper) parts altogether. The price difference with Intel is not as great now, and if chiplet manufacturing can reduce the costs further, I might be on my way back to Intel.
That said, if the performance/efficiency cores thing is there mainly to deal with Intel's historically poor power consumption, I'd prefer it if they'd get their act together on that front first. Oh, and if they are going to rebrand, make it easier to understand what you are getting. Cars (particularly of the 1970s and 1980s) are a fantastic example; is the "T" better than the "L", and what about the "TL"? Is the "GTL" a better spec than the "TX"? (my dad had a lot of Renaults in the 70s and 80s) Even aged about five I spotted the cynical marketing behind Ford's "Ghia" - this is the car we've fitted all the "gear" to... (this in the day when a neighbour had a company Vauxhall Viva, bought as a fleet car it didn't even have a heater matrix, so the air coming out of the vents was always cold!)
That seems to be a common theme with failed rebrandings - confuse the punter.
M.
Do that myself, but it does rely on having an earthed case, and leaving it plugged in. Much safer these days of enclosed power supplies, but potentially quite hazardous in even fairly recent times with open-frame PSUs, and I've met more than several items of consumer kit (CD players, amplifiers, video recorders, that sort of thing) where the supposedly double-insulated (hence no earth) appliances have the mains cord soldered to two large pins sticking straight up out of the PCB with nothing to stop you touching it once you've taken the lid off. Utterly criminal for something that very often you have to diagnose "live" so that you can see exactly which of the nylon cogs is jumping so that the tape won't come out...
M.
we have three words for the same garment
It's possibly a family thing, but around here,
M.
$25/mo with no data and $10 a gig up to six?
I knew mobiles were expensive in the 'states, but by European standards that's pretty awful. There are MVNOs in the UK which offer £5/mo with no data (unlimited calls & texts), a contract minimum term of 1 month and £1/GB. In fact here's one for £5/mo with 4GB included (albeit only for 12 months, after which it reverts to £6/mo for 4GB). Wikipedia adds that Google Fi group plans cost an additional $15 per user - I have a couple of phones on a group plan which gives a 10% discount to each additional user!
M.
absorbs sunlight directly on some panels and converts it to ....
Thing is, you see, let's think about it. (yes, I did see the icon...)
What is the footprint of a typical datacentre rack? Let's be very generous and imagine it's about the same as a typical roof-mounted solar panel (that's about 1m x 1.75m by the way, considerably larger than most racks I know).
Let's be even more generous and imagine that there is only one floor in this datacentre and that this floor has an area of 20x the area of a rack for each rack installed - that's to accommodate the plant, the staff facilities, store rooms, corridors etc. We'll assume that the whole of the roof is available for solar panel installation.
Now let's assume the panels can be ideally angled to the hot Arizona sun and that 1m of panel requires 1m of roof to avoid shading and indeed, how about motorising them so that their angle can be varied through the year so that they are always square-on to the sun?
A typical panel of the size I've mentioned might have a peak output of 350W so again, let's be generous and imagine 400W and ignore inefficiencies caused by heat and all the other stuff which means that kWp is rarely reached in practice.
According to Wikipedia, Phoenix receives about 3,800h of "bright sunshine" a year, which is only a little less than if we assume 12h of sunshine a day, so let's go with 12 hours of generation per day and that all of this is at peak output.
In a typical day then, the 20 panels available for each rack could potentially produce a maximum of a generously-calculated 20 × 0.4kW × 12h = 96kWh of electricity, which is quite a lot.
How much electricity does a rack actually consume? I don't build racks (not this sort anyway), but I've had a look around and it seems as if a low-density rack (I'm being generous again) might be rated for 10kW and require about half that again for cooling, so the power consumption of a rack over a day is 15kW × 24h = 360kWh.
Not even close.
Ok, so I'm being a bit devil's advocate, and I have to point out that if someone did cover the roof of each datacentre with panels and generate ¼ of the electricity consumed onsite (it'll actually be less, but the point is the same), that's quite a lot of electricity that doesn't have to be sourced from coal, oil and gas so it's definitely beneficial if you can afford the initial costs...
M.
It's not like this would be quick or quiet.
If that picture is genuine, it looks (as far as I can tell) like a fairly standard plasterboard stud wall (sheetrock to our leftpondian friends). It even looks as if they avoided the studs. I could cut a hole like that through a single sheet of plasterboard with my penknife in about 10 minutes with low noise levels - certainly low enough that a security guard wandering past the front door of the shop wouldn't hear it, given that toilet cubicles tend to be behind a couple of closed doors. With a "proper" handsaw - something like a pruning saw would be good - maybe five minutes. There's a couple of layers to get through of course. Electric saw would make a bit more noise.
Not 100% certain, but in the UK I believe that the partition between two separate businesses (or fire-compartments within a business) like this would have been built with at least a single thickness block wall for noise as much as fire protection.
There are also much better materials than plasterboard; Fermacell is a good example. We have it at home (for those walls which are not built of block) and it's a dream for hanging shelving, pictures, safety fixings for tall cupboards etc.
M.
When I worked in local radio my boss was very proud of the fact that he had "obtained" (somehow) the direct-dial number for a telephone in the racks room at the local BT tower. If we ever had a problem with one of our circuits (analogue lines feeding our FM and AM transmitters or running to local sports venues etc.) after checking it wasn't anything at our end, the next thing to do was to ring the phone in the racks room. Usually an on-duty engineer would answer, would exchange a few pleasantries with my boss, would wander off to look at the circuit in question and either get it fixed pronto, or be able to say what was wrong and escalate the issue.
Much, much more efficient than trying to get through BT's service centre*.
NTL cable, of course, was some kind of offspring of NTL Transmission who actually ran our transmitter sites so when they started cabling up the area we had a couple of their ISDN lines installed at half the price (installation, rental and call costs) that BT were charging. Our OB services were moved from analogue lines to ISDN dial-up around the same time.
Virgin has recently been expanding their network in the next town along. There's no way they will come to the hamlet where we live, but I had been wondering about signing mum & dad up, not so much for the internet but for the TV. Maybe now is not the time.
M.
*Of course, the absolutely most efficient fix we ever had was when one of our AM services suddenly went off-air. I'd just come back from lunch and nodded "good afternoon" to two engineers up to their waists in an underground DP jointing cables and listening to our station on a little radio. On the offchance, I popped my head out of the door to find two sheepish engineers looking at their silent radio... the AM programme was in the same bundle of "telephone" cables they had just disconnected**. Needless to say, we were back on air before the automated systems had "failed over" to rebroadcast our FM signal.
**The FM programmes went up special starquad cables, so were much less likely to be confused
Show me a product that doesn't have flaws.
And at least the older Drayteks are still getting updates - thanks to this article I was alerted to look, and downloaded the latest firmware for the three Drayteks I run. Given that they were replaced with newer models nearly six years ago, which have themselves been replaced with even newer models (I reckon the oldest one I run is 11 or 12 years old) the fact that they are still getting firmware updates is pretty good, though every time I update them I have to deal with the self-signed certificates.
I inherited some Cisco switches when I started a job in 2008, they were about four years old at the time. There was one IOS update for them and nothing after that. Performing that update was pretty scary, given that I'd never used IOS before; finding out that there was only enough flash for one copy of the OS such that updating meant overwriting the "working" copy was one of those deep-breath moments because if something had gone wrong I would have been left with a pretty blue brick bolted in my rack. Ugh. The Draytek routers (and indeed other switches I eventually bought to replace the Ciscos) are a doddle in comparison.
M.
And indeed Bob. Have you had the misfortune to see any recent episodes of Fireman Sam, Postman Pat, Bob the Builder and (possibly the worst of the lot), Thomas the Tank Engine? If those puppets ever developed sentience they'd be out on strike immediately. In the case of Thomas there are fan-produced episodes that have better stories and higher production values than the "official" ones.
Bring back Johnny Morris I say!
M.
Raspberry Pi 2s - they take SD card - yeah full size SD cards
From memory, only the Pi 1s take full-size SD cards. The Pi 2s came with the new board layout and a really nice click-click microSD slot which was then dropped for a non-clicky slot in the Pi3 (and 4).
Yes, I have large quantities of everything back to the original 256MB Pi 1B, a dozen or more of which are still in use as looping video players, and have been since mid 2012!
M.
**I loved these boxes except for one major design flaw - the power button glowed red when the device was on and blue when off. It was enough of an issue we had to print labels to say red is ok.
Two LEDs back-to-back? Couldn't you just reverse the connections? Personally I'd remove the "off" one altogether.
(speaking here as someone whose "other half" at work keeps telling me that one or other of the LED indicators are broken on the PC they've just rebuilt but otherwise the thing's working fine, but next time I need to take the lid off and remember to look I find that the connector is put on backwards. It's amazing how frustrating the lack of a little green "power on" LED and/or a flashing orange "HDD activity" LED can be when all you want to do is check that the machine is powered up and doing something! )
M.
Talk Talk (well, you did mention them) was being used by our ISP as only they and Openreach were available at our exchange.
TT have now "withdrawn" from our exchange (I didn't know that was even a thing - I've no idea why they needed to do that) so our line had to be migrated back to OR. Our ISP was pretty good about the process, but the first bill after the change was a bit of a mess, with some double-charging (refunded as soon as I'd pointed it out) and they sent me a new modem/router which really wasn't necessary and still (after a couple of reminders) haven't told me how to return it. They still give me my £1 discount for self-provided router though :-)
M.
Probably told this tale before, but when we were moving house some years back, our buyer - who was a bit of a pain - obviously telephoned BT to inform them that they were going to take over the line and would like the number changed.
Three or four weeks before the moving date - and at the point where everything begins to move fast and you absolutely need to have good communications with estate agents, banks, utility companies, movers etc. - BT cut our line off. Not just a changed number; completely dead. No amount of calls to BT could get them to re-instate the line and even after the ombudsman was involved, all we got was a refund of our last month's line rental.
ADSL stayed up for three or four days before "someone" noticed the lack of a line and Demon Internet ceased to exist as far as my computers were concerned, meaning that there was a whole different bunch of companies and people to inform (somehow) that not only was the telephone number they had now invalid, but the email address (@hostname.demon.co.uk) was invalid too.
Some years later we carried out some major building work at the house we had moved into. Fortunately for us we found a rental property in the same street but no way was I tempted to "move" the phone line and then move it back later. Nope, I kept some kit in the house connected to "our" phone line during the building work, used a point-to-point radio link for the internet access and DECT phones for telephone (just about enough range). Worked a charm, and so much easier to put back once the building work was complete.
Had a nightmare with the electricity but that's another story (gas and water were just fine), and we are still finding address databases which do not include our address because for a short period our house was de-registered for Council Tax. Definitely wouldn't do that again. Firstly it has been annoyingly inconvenient at times, secondly it only saved a few hundred pounds and thirdly, upon re-registering, the property is revalued for Council Tax (as if it had been sold) and because we'd added a couple of bedrooms we jumped up a couple of bands. Within three years (IIRC) the money we saved by de-registering was paid back in higher ongoing tax bills.
Never moving again.
M.
First time I came across sharp practice by John Dere it was a story that farmers couldn't even perform simple everyday maintenance tasks, firstly because every part (say an oil filter) is 'chipped' so third party products can't be fitted, secondly because even if you could get hold of a 'genuine' part, the machine wouldn't recognise it until it had been registered using the diagnostic tools, thirdly because even just opening the bonnet for a look triggered some sort of trip wire, again needing a dealer reset.
Is that situation any better now?
M.
It isn't intelligent. It cannot care or not-care.`
It will do the same thing that it was trained to do. True, it doesn't _care_ about being discovered, but it will stay consistent, even to the point of spouting bullshit when challenged, because that's what humans do, therefore that's what was in its training data.
This is the bit that confuses me about the manufacture of the completely false but plausible-sounding URLs as references.
If the thing is just a massive database with a mechanism for sorting the data and producing easy-to-read text summarising it, then it could never, ever, have produced a completely false URL as a reference. In response to the questions "how do you know he died" and "what was reported in the media" such a system should have spat out something along the lines of "I'm sorry, I can't find a reference to that" and left it at that.
If your proposal - that it has been trained on human responses so it responds like a human - is correct then that's a completely different kettle of fish. Somehow it has to "know" that it has provided false (or at least unprovable) information, "want" to cover that fact up and then be "creative" enough to produce an utterly plausible URL. And why a URL instead of a made-up quote?
The incorrect information might have been dredged up from a half a throw-away sentence in something buried deep in the training data, but when prompted to look further, it "cannot care or not-care" that "admitting" the previous response is unprovable is in some way "bad" for its reputation.
So my own conclusion is that when it comes to things like this, ChatGPT is actually running - at least partly - a Mechanical Turk. Somewhere, when it encounters a problem like this, a jen-you-ine hooman bean gets to intervene, and it is this intervention which results in the "lies".
ChatGPT is itself a lie.
M.
Does anyone have any information about whether such tweaking happens (if so, how much?) or whether such tweaking is even vaguely possible with ChatGPT?
From the actual article:
since posting about my experience with ChatGPT, several people have since told ChatGPT that I am alive and that it was mistaken. As such ChatGPT no longer tells people I am dead
HTH
M.
A bit of research and a couple of calls to the MoD revealed that this issue could possibly be caused by the aircraft's radar
For a temporary job placement I once rented an attic room with an elderly couple in a farmhouse near Hereford. Took an old B&W TV with me and my BBC Micro - left my Archimedes at home. There was reasonably regular fairly low-level overflying by something noisy and military and every time the TV would go all 1960s Sci-Fi effects.
The BBC Micro never once crashed.
M.
barriers, unless locked in the open position, should always be accompanied by a member of station staff
I believe there were staff at the station, just not at that particular barrier at that particular time (small station with only two platforms) and had the off-duty member of staff not been on hand it probably wouldn't have been too difficult to get the attention of staff. Barrier itself would have been simple enough to vault anyway, in an emergency.
M.
Different angle, but just this week I took the family on a short train ride into the nearest town. Many stations along the route are barrier-less, but the one where we got off has unmanned barriers. Card tickets, so just before the stop I handed them out. Three of us popped through the barrier no problem, fourth, the ticket kept coming out and the barrier refused to open.
Turns out that in the minute or so between handing out the tickets and arriving at the barrier, this person had been holding the ticket and their mobile phone - with magnetic clasp - together in one hand. Presumably the phone's magnet had scrambled the magstripe on the ticket.
Fortunately there was an off duty member of staff on the same train who spotted the problem and waved their pass at the barrier. Not sure what we'd have done otherwise...
M.
Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.
We don't have any such system because we don't need one.
Just prior to my ILR days there was a nascent system run up leased lines. Normally used for contributions to IRN and bulletins from IRN I believe the system could have been used to "take over" downstream stations if necessary; IRN would broadcast a code up the line and sets of relays would click over. I don't think my station ever wired it in to do that, though there was a tape recorder set up for automatic record when IRN sent news reports. These were later edited for use in locally-presented bulletins.
This had been superseded in my time by a satellite-based system which ISTR had a similar theoretical capability, definitely not wired-in (except, again, for the auto-recording tape). Instead we had the "obit alarm" - IRN would cause a relay to close at our end which would activate a strobe beacon in / near the studios and it was an entirely manual process for the on-air talent to PFL for instructions on the IRN audio feed and if necessary cut their programming in favour of IRN. The only time I saw it used in practice was with the death of Diana, princess of Wales. Our orange strobe light was accompanied in the lobby between studios by a little buzzer playing "Yellow Rose of Texas".
RDS has a PTY (programme type) of "ALARM" which can, in theory, cause RDS-equipped radios to retune to a station with that flag active. It's part of the standard but I have no idea if it has ever properly been implemented. Certainly when I was in ILR, our RDS encoders were hard-coded with our station name, PTY and TP flags (Traffic Programme) and although they could have taken an external signal to raise the TA flag (Traffic Announcement) we never did that. Other stations - if they couldn't do it out of band - used DTMF codes in the traffic bulletin top & tail jingles. Not sure about DAB - after my time - but it wouldn't surprise me if it had a similar facility.
M.
but have you tried buying a decent not-smart TV lately ?
It's getting to the stage where I'm seriously considering a "commercial display" for my next TV. For example, something by Panasonic (PDF). They've just redesigned the website, sorry. Obviously other manufacturers are available.
Those are the types of thing we use at work, and despite some smart features they generally keep out of your face.
M.
My dad's "smart" Panasonic TV is unplugged from the internet. In this mode he can still access "teletext" (MHEG on the red button) which is not quite as quick and simple as Ceefax was, but does the job of letting him keep on top of the cricket scores (and they still haven't actually turned it off).
Plug the thing in to the internet, perhaps to watch something in iPlayer, and MHEG disappears. There's no good reason why.
M.
There is always a counter-example. I have had several Beko (that is, cheap) kitchen appliances over the years. One of them - an undercounter freezer - is nearly 20 years old and still going. Not that we haven't had failures with them, but that when we have had failures, the parts seem to be reasonably easy to obtain and reasonably-priced. The freezer needed a new thermostat when it was about 5 years old, which cost me something like £20, and it hasn't had a failure since, even through three housemoves and several kitchen reorganisations. By contrast our slightly more expensive fridge - some 10 years old at this point - needed a new bottom pin for the door hinge after the last house move. This tiny piece of metal cost £35 and came with a warning from the supplier that we were lucky they still had one in stock.
As regards shoes, even the expensive ones (well, expensive in my eyes) are built cheaply these days. I've just had a teenager point out that the sole of one of their 6-month-old "big brand" school shoes is beginning to come away from the upper. They are merely glued together and while I know he'll manage to fix it, I'm not looking forward to the withering look from my local cobbler / leather worker when I take it in for re-glueing.
I am reminded of the other end of the scale; Douglas Adams's Shoe Event Horizon.
M.
Panasonic vierra TV's Plasma from 2006
The museum I work in has four Panasonic plasma monitors from around 2004/5 (this part of the museum re-opened in late 2005 so the monitors were bought some time before then) which have been on for approximately 7½ hours a day, 362 days a year (bar most of 2020) and are still going strong with pictures almost as good as our very latest 4k LCD units. That's approaching 50,000 hours*. They (and about 50 other displays) are fed by video players which are of a similar age (obviously they were installed at the same time) and in which we are only now beginning to see PSU failures, though many have had HDD failures. The video players "start" and "stop" under centralised control, but are never actually switched off other than in power cuts and run what appears to be a customised version of DOS6 on an 8086-class processor with specialised MPEG decoding hardware.
We even have a few "original fit" Pentium + SCSI machines still running with original 10krpm Maxxtor HDDs. Those machines take about 160W in "idle" whereas our more recent AMD-A8 machines use below 30W so we tend not to resurrect the Pentiums when they die.
Projectors, on the other hand... well, some eejit decided to fit LCD-based projectors at the outset because the badge-manufacturer claimed "28,000 hours MTBF" while totally ignoring advice from people who had previously worked with projectors that this was obviously impossible. Indeed, it turned out that the OEM only rated the "optical block" (three LCD panels, three dichroic filters and a clever prism) for 4,500h and as I was happy to point out, the cost of the block alone could pay for a better specification, cheaper-to-run DLP-based projector from a different manufacturer. Those original replacements easily made their claimed 20,000 hours and some beat 30,000h (indeed I have just retired a couple which were well over 30,000h, only because we can no longer get original lamps and my experience with "remanufactured" lamps has been awful). Nowadays, with Laser and LED lamps replacing discharge lamps, we're looking again at LCD. I'll let you know...
M.
*7½ hours x 362 days x 17 years (to account for the missing days in 2020) = 46,155h but I've added a few because this part of the museum holds quite a lot of evening events which might carry on for five or six hours past the normal switch-off time.
It claims to be warning me the battery might go flat!
It could be worse, my wife's Citroën - which has the "stop-start" feature and hence an absolutely massive battery, and does quite a lot of long runs so the battery is rarely less than full - will only allow you to run the radio for 20 minutes with the engine off, after which it goes in to "battery save" mode from which the only escape is to turn the engine on. Run the engine for five minutes and switch off, and five minutes after you switch off the thing goes back into battery save mode.
There is absolutely no need for this, and it's a right pain in the backside when parked outside a local village hall or playing field waiting for the football or ballet class to finish, especially since the interior lights go out at the same time so in the winter you can't even take a book to read, and the 12V sockets go off so you can't charge your phone!
As for system updates - which involve bunging a USB stick into the display - the manufacturer reckons that they could take 45 minutes or more, so you must only do them with the engine running to avoid the power being turned off during an update!
M.
Our LG also plays a happy "finished" tune and the children sing along, but the tune is only about 10s long and isn't repeated, so it's not terribly annoying.
Apparently, the tuneful ability also allows the machine to "sing" down a phone line to tell the service department what's wrong with it, but we've not yet had to try that feature out and I suspect that with the machine now being at least 10 years old, the service department's probably forgotten all about the system. Reminds me of "V GER" in that Star Trek movie...
M.
Of course, "back in the day", the US and UK (and others both state and private - I used to know someone who worked on the Seychelles-based transmitters of the Christian Far East Broadcasting Association) erected mahoosive shortwave aerials on friendly territory nearby and blasted megawatts of RF propaganda towards countries whose populations "needed educating". One thing you could say is that the internet has democratised that. It does lead to sad stories such as the closure of the BBC Arabic service after 85 years though.
M.
equal the power and slash the energy & complexity
Re-using old kit with which they are already familiar? Spend the limited capital budget on displays, upgrade the back end in the next round of funding?
Why, only this week I revived an old Core2 Duo machine by fitting a new power supply, despite having newer parts (processor, motherboard, memory, storage) in stock which would have given a faster, more frugal machine. £70 for a PSU (also in stock) and 15 minutes to de-rack, swap and re-rack for a machine which has one function and works perfectly well as it is.
Actually, a more appropriate example might be the display to which that computer is attached. The original projector was 1024pixels, as was its replacement. The current one is 1280, but running at 1024 becauee the software is hard-wired to that resolution. The next projector (about three years away) might very well be 1920, but if the budget can't be found to re-engineer the backend, it will still be running at 1024 pixels :-/
M.
I've been a longstanding fan of LG, started because they were the last manufacturer left producing plasma panels and because their upscaling algorithms (from SD anamorphoc widescreen to 1080) were an order of magnitude better than some competitors. However the last LG TV I bought for home has the EULA nonsense and can't do anything network-related (such as browsing files via DLNA) without that being agreed-to. When network-connected it also always puts up a 'home screen' about ten seconds after switch on, and usually just as you are trying to swap channels.
Cost aside, my next TV might very well be a 'commercial' display for use with a nice 'set top box'. At work (which is where I preferred plasma to contemporary LCD) I now refuse to recommend a 'TV' for any new display, partly because of that malarky but also because the more TVs you install, the more tedious it is going around every single one in the morning to switch it on. The commercial displays (I use Panasonic) talk the same language as my projectors, namely PJLink, which makes automated control almost trivial.
The downside, of course, is that while you can get a 4k TV for £500 or less, you are talking three times that or more for a commercial display, and I'm not sure where you would buy one as a non-commercial customer.
On the upside you get a panel with thin bezels that is rated for a minimum 18 hours a day (some are 24h), in some cases brighter than a TV and toys such as basic colour calibration and video wall capabilities built-in - feed the same signal to all the TVs and tell each one the dimensions of the wall and its own co-ordinates and hey-presto, impressive wall with the only additional expense being an HDMI splitter.
M.
WeCanUsePowerPoint Consulting Group
Recently found this, sorry it's on iPlayer and probably not available everywhere, but if you can watch it, this should be required viewing for anyone about to undertake the design of a Powerpoint stack:
Age of Outrage (starts at 0m45)
M.
Still gets my goat how many web forms claim an email address with a plus sign in it is not valid.
Speaking as the owner of one of the 'new' gTLDs created... erm... nine or ten years ago, it still annoys me how many web forms seem to.validate addresses based on the length of the TLD; they will accept any old rubbish so long as it is two or three characters, but will reject anything with four, five or more characters, even if it's a well-established TLD.
M.
...after P&O got away with essentially the same action and actually admitted they broke the law!
Something seriously broken in UK employment practice.
M.
I can scan negatives using Skanlite (it has an invert colours option somewhere). I can also scan positives (slides), and the application also has "on glass" and "above glass" focus options but other than that it's a very manual process. Once you do the pre-scan it attempts to isolate "areas of interest", but invariably gets them wrong, so for a slide carrier I might have to outline - manually - a dozen frames. On the Mac it was much better at detecting these, presumably because it knew where the frames were *meant* to be; each different holder had a code on it. Also on the Mac, each frame was presented individually at low resolution, but sufficiently high to notice if the cropping was wrong, or the colour balance needed adjustment. I've yet to succeed in getting Skanlite to do that.
Then again, if I do find a better backend, maybe this sort of thing will be improved too.
Yes, not aware of any drivers beyond 32 bits for the Mac, but then this Mini has a Core Duo (not a Core 2) and and is maxed out at 2GB RAM so can't take the 64 bit OSes anyway!
M.
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