found this whilst researching...
Fascinating read, but 11 years old by now. Here are some more recent stats
M.
2318 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2010
found this whilst researching...
Fascinating read, but 11 years old by now. Here are some more recent stats
M.
one of their consumer drives running 24/7 for over 9 years
More out of curiosity than anything else now, I have some customer-facing machines with Maxxtor 80GB 10krpm SCSI discs now crossing 19 years old. Those are the 'data' drives in machines which boot from similar age 7.2krpm SATA drives, Seagate IIRC (look, it's Sunday evening). Not many such machines left, but more than just one or two. It's amazing how well some things can last.
M.
idiots [...] who expect a free mobile phone just to be used for authentication
Personally, I wouldn't be looking for a free mobile phone; I'd be looking for an alternative method. Even if I already had an authenticator app on my phone (which I don't), I have this thing about keeping work and personal stuff as separate as reasonably possible. Until recently, my "smart" phone was ancient (8 years old when I swapped it) and would not have run such an app anyway, and I have / had colleagues who still run "dumb" phones. I make further complications by refusing to have a Google account so meaning I can't use the Play store to download apps. I realise I'm somewhat unusual among the great unwashed in this regard.
There is also the issue of what to do for (for example) partially-sighted users who can't necessarily read the numbers.
Back in the day, miners were forced to buy their own candles, picks and shovels.
M.
where I use POP3 to get local copies of all email
Can you not get local copies with IMAP? My email clients use IMAP, and Kmail, certainly, has the option to keep local copies. It also has various synchronisation options so email sent from any device ends up in the server's Sent folder and email deleted on the server can, or can not, also delete the local copy. It's been a while since I used Thunderbird but I think it had similar facilities.
K9mail on the phones can (in the interests of space) keep a configurable number of recent emails locally and only download attachments on demand (in the interests of data use).
Local copies once made my wife in to a bit of an IT star, when a group she was involved with held a committee meeting at a venue with no WiFi and no mobile coverage. None of her colleagues could access the emailed minutes or agenda or other notes whereas Kmail had everything locally.
Of course, they could have printed them out ahead of time...
M.
it might seem pointless to keep repeating it
Can be taken to extremes sometimes. The radio station I worked for - the FM one anyway - at one point decided it wanted to be so "fresh"* that the A-list, that is the list of most-repeated tracks, was reduced to (IIRC) 12 songs. With every third played track (again, IIRC) mandated to be from the A-list, this meant that by the last half hour of a typical 3-hour show the poor on-air talent was forced to repeat tracks they had already played earlier and there was a danger that the next show - if not co-ordinated properly - would be repeating them again very soon.
M.
*I think this madness corresponded with the short-lived slogan "Fresh, Fun, Young". So short-lived that I was able to save a couple of dozen T-shirts from the skip, which went down really well at the youth club :-)
Often I get annoyed simply because I heard a good song but the presenters announced the title and performer at the start, before I knew if it was something |I might like
If listening on an FM radio that can show RDS Radio Text (64 characters) or Dynamic Text on DAB, many stations set the text to tell you the name of the artist and song currently playing.
M.
There's a strategy that few people employ
Simple honesty.
That was one of the things which got me my first proper job. It was with a local radio station and after a friendly but quite technical chat with their Engineering Director, I had a chat with the MD. One of the questions he asked was "So, do you listen to <names of the two stations>?"
"Err.. no," I replied, "I'm more of a Radio Four / Radio Cymru kind of a person."
"Aah," he said, "my next question was going to be about which of our presenters you enjoy the most. Weeds out those who are trying it on."
Spent five happy years there.
M.
text messages never state who they are intended for.
I have three mobile phones with Smarty. Bundling them together is great because there is a discount but when the messages come through "you have nearly used your data allowance this month" without either a name or even a phone number attached, it's somewhat difficult to know which user might need a top-up!
M.
Human error, too. Not long after I'd passed my driving test I was driving my mum's blue Renault 11 home and was flagged down by a policeman at the side of the road. Heart rate doubled, I wound the window down and the bloke leaned in...
"Oh, sorry, I thought you were a taxi."
M.
64 US oz is a smidge over 3.3 UK pints.
Or 3.615 grapefruit (1floz US = 1.804 cu in), according to the Register Standards Converter
M.
Unlikely, but you could lay it flat on a good old-fashioned overhead projector and use the combination instead of a video projector.
Sort of like what some people did back in the 1980s.
M.
And in the interests of dissemination of knowledge, herewith repeated the two links at the bottom of every BOFH story documentary:
The earliest (officially) remaining BOFH, from around 1995 or so: The BOFH Archive
The continued adventures of BOFH since his tenure at Vulture Towers (2000ish): El Reg BOFH Archive.
From the first of the above, the official origin story: BOFH Prehistory, which confirms my dodgy memory of reading BOFH articles at university in the late 1980s.
Hope this helps.
M.
Can I put in a vote for Garibaldi? And a proper ginger nut as the dunker. Both have the advantage of being chosen last by others, meaning more chance there will be some left for me.
And definitely plain chocolate digestives, not the milk kind (ugh). All four have the advantage of being "cheap" biscuits. If budget is less constrained then a Borders chocolate ginger is welcome (but tends to disappear very quickly).
M.
I've literally never met a manager who tells(*) you he's(**) got an MBA who is anything other than negative capacity.
I once worked for an extremely talented engineer as manager (and director of the company) whose one real foible was a reluctance to share the pager (we were supposed to do 50/50, but it was more like 75/25). He actually studied for an MBA while he was my manager so in that instance the "MBA is bad" mantra (which seems to work most of the time, if I'm honest) wasn't valid.
Another manager in a different job, who was time-served in coal mines, defied company staggered lunch break policies to insist that our team lunched together most Fridays, with bags of chips bought by said manager. Needless to say, he was too good at his job so top management brought in a middle-manager to manage my manager (and only my manager). Said MBA-wielder lasted less than a year but succeeded in putting large numbers of backs up and making "redundant" a couple of skilled and knowledgeable engineers with an entirely rigged "skills assessment", simply because he didn't like them.
M.
In general, machine manufacturers don't make their own bearings
And this is true with many things. Had the AdBlue injector fail on a Citroën. Garage offered to fit the Citroën-branded part or, since the car was nearly out of warranty, the exact same part from the exact same production line at Bosch without the Citroën stamp for about half the price. Part had the same warranty too.
Colleague used to work at a factory bakery down the road. Sponge cakes rolling off production lines into Asda boxes for a couple of hours, order complete, packing machine is re-stocked with M&S boxes.
And this answers the commentard above worried about inferior third-party parts. In many cases - something like a screen for example - it's not going to be inferior at all. It will be the same part without the official stamp of approval. In some cases it might even be the official part bought direct. If I had wanted to fit the 'original' injector in my example above, I would still have had it done by the garage I've been using for decades because I trust them, they can squeeze me in when they have a gap and their labour charges are lower than the dealer. Oh, and when that car had a major repair done FoC by the dealer because of a known manufacturing defect, I'm sure my local garage would have done better than the dealer did - "yeah, this doesn't extend the warranty mate. You just get six months on the repair" - this for a part which should be good for 200k miles at least.
M.
As a taxpayer this sort of thing makes me angry
It seems to be a perennial problem. A slightly different circumstance, but nonetheless breathtaking. During WWII my father was growing up in a South Wales port which happened to be one of the places the US Army used for shipment of supplies, food mainly I believe. He and his mates discovered that a lot of supplies were coming off ships - bear in mind these things had run the gauntlet of the Atlantic U-boat fleets and were destined to feed the troops - and being sent more or less immediately to landfill. The US Army had a policy that if the outer packaging was damaged, the entire contents were suspect. Even tins. Once sent for disposal these items weren't under so much security...
Not that tins were terribly interesting to my dad. He apparently had his school desk full of sweets and chocolate and did a roaring trade, while his schoolbooks languished in his satchel.
On a totally different scale we have the modern scourge of the "use by" date and "not suitable for freezing" packaging. We do work with a local foodbank which takes (among other donations) "expired" food from some local supermarkets. Bagged salads are a constant problem (but we have a compost heap) and sandwiches (which can't be put in the compost), but why would one supermarket's carbonara ready meal (for example) have "not suitable for freezing" while another's says "can be frozen"? Food safety rules means that even on the use-by date, the latter can be frozen and used within 3 months while the former should be binned.
M.
Are the British still using the antiquated ring system?
As I've argued previously, the ring final layout has several advantages - not least of which is economy of cable use - though it also has one or two disadvantages, particularly in modern times. In the UK, the ring final is still an acceptable way of wiring sockets (nothing else, mind) and radials have also always been possible and are often preferred if you have enough "ways" in your consumer unit (fusebox) for the number of circuits you need.
UK sockets are not "overbuilt", they are "well engineered" (in stark contrast to some common practice in the US) and the plugs which fit them are quite likely the best design of low-power plug other than its unfortunate habit to land pins-up if dropped.
M.
Not sure about putting water from the teapot back into the kettle to reboil - after all, the kettle might next be used to boil water for something that won't benefit from a slight undertone of tea. I usually put slightly more water than is required to boil and take a bit off to warm the teapot just before the boiling completes. By the time you've swilled out the pot and put some tea in (personally, good quality tea bags are nearly as good as loose leaf and somewhat more convenient), the boiling is finished and you have near 100 degree water to get the brewing going.
Milk first. Pasteurised, preferably non-homogenised (but well-shaken), full cream or semi-skimmed to taste but absolutely not skimmed, and definitely not UHT. Just a little, though adding more can help make poor quality tea more palatable.
No sugar.
And never* wash the teapot.
The only place where I don't do this is at work where speed and convenience mean bag-in-cup does the job, and lack of fellow tea-drinkers means UHT milk is the only practical solution.
Scum on top of the tea is usually because the water you've boiled is "hard". Around here that is never an issue (some of the softest water in the country - don't even have to put salt in the dishwasher). Not sure if there'd be a benefit to pre-softening water used for tea. I've never lived in a place with water hard enough that I felt it necessary to experiment.
M.
*ok, so perhaps you can wash it once a year or so, but give it a good swill with boiling water afterwards and don't expect the first couple of brews to be quite up to scratch. If bits of stuff start flaking off the inside when you pour the tea, this is absolutely not a problem if you are already using a tea strainer. Oh, and make sure you empty it and swill it out and leave it with the lid off if you're going away for more than a few days. The last thing you need to find when you get back, desperate for a cuppa after a long trip, is that your teapot is rapidly evolving new lifeforms.
Conversely, we've stuck with them because every time I've needed to report a problem I've got straight through to someone who actually knew what I was talking about, in some cases did some twiddling there and then while I was on the phone, in others rang back when they said they would. Admittedly the only thing I've had cause to talk with them about in the last five years or so has been this re-bundling, but we've been with them over 15 years (and my parents maybe 11 or 12) and, yes, ok, their offerings are fairly basic, but no serious complaints from either of us. Even get a teeny tiny discount for self-supplied router, which more than pays for the (single) fixed IP.
We'll look again when the time comes for FTTP...
M.
I looked at A&A a couple of years ago. In the end, didn't switch as they wouldn't carry over our landline number. The ISP we were with was buying from TalkTalk* who were 'unbundled' in our exchange and that was the reason given. Since then TT has 'withdrawn' from our exchange (wan't even aware that was possible) so we've been 'rebundled' back to Openreach. Maybe I'd have better luck if I tried again.
Still on ADSL Copper, by the way. FTTC is available in our cabinet but since it now involves a mandatory move to IP phones I'm (probably) hanging on until FTTP comes and we're forced to move. Gives me a while more to get proper power-out mitigations in place rather than the rag-tag collection of small UPSes I currently have. Being semi-rural we get more than our share of power cuts - usually short. One this morning in fact: a planned one (and a planned twin later this afternoon) so they can shut down the overhead cable in order to prune some trees. In the meantime we're on a generator.
Hope they've sent the right one this time. A couple of times they've sent the wrong size one and been surprised at the teatime load in the village - gas only came to the village 40-odd years ago and many houses still have electric cookers and heating.
M.
*I've never dealt with TalkTalk directly. Any problems we had were dealt with through our ISP - The Phone CoOp - who have been very good over the years.
Although the rules aren't perfect, country of origin and location of last major process rules in the EU and UK do mandate this sort of information on most (all?) goods and foods. It's printed on the label and/or the box, which might not be much use if you are buying something online I suppose. Not sure what the rules are there. Other countries have similar rules, is that not the case in the US?
M.
I've often wondered that about the original projector fit at the museum. Fetish for hiding projectors which meant that many of them were hidden above ceilings, aimed at awkward angles to their screens, requiring vast amounts of keystone correction and awkward to get at for maintenance (those had 1,000hr lamps so 2½ lamp changes a year). Not a huge problem if it's just SD video, but really doesn't do justice to computer output. When replacing them I managed to get better angles by not hiding the projectors and buying units which had more lens adjustment. I quite like the projectors being on show :-)
M.
I've found many other "digital" chips to be surprisingly analogue
A previous boss had the habit of using NAND gates (7400 Four in a DIP) or even inverters (7404, six in a DIP) as op-amps. I suspect this worked better with some technologies than others (LS / HC / plain ol' TTL?) but it did seem to work.
M.
Well-said, that man. Good to hear some basic explanation, however:
Optical media however can do that, the marks made on optical media are either there or not there.
While noting your use of "can", I'd like to put a word in here for Laserdisc, where the video signal is encoded as an FM signal (composite video) reconstructed from those on-off lands and pits, which are used to create a PWM signal. So, in contrast to all the media previously discussed which take an analogue signal from an analogue medium and "process" it to produce a digital signal for the computer, Laserdisc takes a digital signal from an (arguably) digital medium and processes it to produce an analogue signal for the display device!
M.
Or - and think about this - the original targets were set when more men did more manual work. It's the joy of averages. In fact they were largely based on experience during wartime (WWII) rationing (see p4 & p5) which was itself based on research carried out following the awful experiences across Europe during WWI. These days when the average man is not a steelworker, a miner, a farmer or a shipbuilder - or indeed a squaddie - and does not take large amounts of voluntary exercise, a lower average calorie intake is to be expected. In contrast women were never (wartime aside) big manual workers and still aren't. However, the key takeaway from both the sources I linked is that it's not just the number of calories which counts, it's the makeup of the foods which provide those calories.
M.
In a grid-connected system, all they can do is pump electrons into the grid. If, one day, there simply aren't enough "green" electrons to top up the grid with enough for all the customers, of course it'll be made up with other ones, however across whatever accounting period applies (1 month, 3 months, 12 months???) there should be enough to at at least cover actual usage, if not a little more. In that way, we all benefit, even those who do not subscribe to a green tariff.
M.
It's similar to the wording they've started printing on "Fairtrade" chocolate packets (and other foodstuffs). Enough Fairtrade cocoa is bought by the company to cover the production of <named chocolate bar> but it's actually all mixed together with cocoa from other sources so the amount of genuine Fairtrade cocoa in your Fairtrade cocoa bar is not 100%.
The similarly named Gridwatch and Gridwatch sites give near-live data for the UK. At the time of writing it looks as if about 3% of UK generation is coal.
M.
I believe a variant of this steam turbine was used to turn a shaft on which a rope was wound which would open a door. Sure I read that in a textbook many years ago but can't find the reference now.
Maybe I'm misremembering because this link suggests the doors were operated by an expansion-powered water balance mechanism. Ho hum.
M.
And in Welsh, for (English word) "now", northern Welsh dialects use "rwan" while southern ones use "nawr". Never heard a satisfactory explanation of that other than it being bloody-mindedness on the part of the Gogs (northern types) or the Hwntws (them over there), depending on your own point of view.
M.
pretends it can't find anything
I find search in Outlook (desktop app) like this. Search for a word or a phrase in the subject line of an email, if it finds anything at all, guaranteed it will only find one or two randoms from a whole thread, meaning you then have to do a manual search around the dates it did find to get the email you actually wanted.
Hateful thing.
M.
Don't forget that there was a huge political row about Channel 4 / S4C. The Conservatives had promised the creation of a Welsh language channel in their manifesto for the 1979 election but following their landslide win they went back on that promise in favour of a UK-wide fourth channel with a vague promise of possible opt-outs. Eventually Thatcher ordered a U-turn and S4C launched the day before Channel 4 in 1982. Up until then Welsh language television was limited to a few hours a week on the BBC channels and a slightly lesser amount on HTV, the then ITV incumbent.
However, not only was there a large number of people in Wales who actually wanted to watch Channel 4 (which among a few jewels, in those days seemed to me to be largely composed of TV intended to shock for shock's sake, or cheap tat as a way to fill the vast number of hours in the schedule) but S4C was severely lacking in content despite the valiant efforts of dozens of tiny startup production companies and the transfer of the existing BBC and HTV content. In my opinion it actually worked quite well that S4C rebroadcast the "better" C4 content*, albeit mostly late at night. Then again by 1982 quite a lot of people had VCRs so time-shifting was quite common and certainly around the southern coast quite a lot of "high gain" TV aerials were installed pointing at Mendip rather than Wenvoe.
Of course, once DTT came along and both channels were available across Wales, it really didn't make sense for S4C to continue broadcasting Channel 4 content. By then (2012 was thee official switchover) there was actually a thriving independent production industry in Wales and quite a lot of spin-off benefits from the decision of the BBC to move a large amount of drama production to Wales so content was less of an issue and while S4C is as guilty as any channel in these cash-strapped days of over-using repeats, clip shows and the like, it's also hosted some top-notch programming.
I don't know how much licence fee money S4C gets "direct", as it were, but the BBC provides all the live news programmes for the channel as well as hosting S4C on the iPlayer, (available branded as Clic or simply as S4C on iPlayer) which I imagine is worth quite a lot of money.
M.
*well, some of it. I have clear memories of cobbling together an an ancient black-and-white TV set in my bedroom and tuning in to Eurotrash, which was probably as unintelligible (in culture terms) to my younger self as Welsh language programming would have been in language terms to my English-only contemporaries.
Play Services is continuously logged in
Why, though? Even without going to the extent of installing something like LineageOS, it's perfectly feasible (if a little less slick) to run an Android phone without a Google account and with Play Services turned off. Several phones in this household do that. Others run Lineage without any of the GApps even installed.
I think the point I'm making is that while taking the above steps might not be entirely Joe Bloggs-friendly, the fact that it works means that being signed-in is not necessary, so why is it the default?
M.
As mentioned earlier, Director, Quicktime, some bespoke .exe.
Web tech wasn't up to the job in 2008, especially as some "kiosks" are connected to each other for group-play (as it were) and several have two screens (monitor / projector). I've also had trouble with Elo touchscreens under Linux (an older type is ok for position and left-click, but not dragging, a newer type works upside-down (Y-position reversed, X-position is fine) and I've not been able to flip it...
M.
That's the conclusion I'm coming to, but unfortunately this place was built using lottery money and there is absolutely no budget to do anything more than replacing the odd bit of failed hardware (where possible - have you tried finding a motherboard with Windows XP drivers these days? I have a stock!)
There is the more pernicious problem which created the whole edifice in the first place - management believes they have no expertise in the matter and so will inevitably outsource any replacement installations, which will undoubtedly therefore consist of more proprietary locked-in bespoke applications written by "specialists" with a vested interest in a maintenance contract.
M.
I'm already looking at how practical it could be to migrate to something where I have a little more control, but my Linux experience is purely as a home user and I've no idea how easy or otherwise the sort of central account management Windows Server facilitates would be (perfectly honestly I could use some centralisation at home too!). Problem is many of our apps won't run well under Wine (I'm already experimenting) but then again, some of them refuse Windows 10 too, due to incompatible proprietary drivers... (and they nearly all rely on Director, Flash and Quicktime)
M
The first paid job I ever had - working for a small electronics company near Hereford during a sandwich year for my degree - the company's founder / owner / CEO had made a policy to be on first name terms with every employee. There were about 50 in those days. He reckoned he could cope with about 70 and if the company grew larger than that it was his policy to split the company into smaller divisions.
There was also a free drinks machine in the staff room which made passable tea, non-poisonous coffee, decent chocolate, hot & cold water, fizzy drinks and soup. When the service engineer came there was an informal staff poll to decide which two flavours of soup should be restocked.
Slightly different at my first proper job after graduating where management struggled to remember the names of their 'star' employees - y'know, the people who were the public face of the company and brought in all the business.
M.
That's a 20W adapter which will charge a phone just fine. The more expensive one is probably (no, I haven't looked) a 90W adapter for laptops. Actually - unless you are happy buying random no-brand Chinese cardboard - those prices don't seem to be hugely Apple-tax inflated. You could get a decent charger a couple of quid cheaper perhaps, and because everything-is-USBC these days, there's no problem doing that, even with Apple kit.
M.
bugger-all data transfer until suddenly the gates open
That's interesting. Although I am a customer of SMARTY it isn't for my own phone so I'll have to check with the others whether they experience the same thing. They've not complained yet (one account has been active for over 18 months, the other for a year or so).
One thing I didn't mention above is the 10% group discount too. Means that most months my backup modem costs me £4.50 (£5 plus no data used).
M.