Posts by Stuart Castle

Re: Stats please

I used to create sites that did that from time to time. It's not that I ever used any code that required a specific browser, it's just I rarely had much time to test any site I developed, so it was easier just to say that only one or two browsers were supported and make sure it worked well on those browsers. I was happy to help if it had problems, I just wanted to have the freedom to refuse support if necessary.

Thankfully, that didn't happen much. I used Opera at the time, so had to keep everything pretty much standards compliant.

Doesn't happen at all now. I don't build websites. If we need one as a department, I have staff to do that.

Re: PC Engineers...

Love the description of a thunderstorm lurking, as if they hang about on street corners like Teenagers or something..:)

Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!

Re : Isn't this a retread of The Third Ronnie, appropriately surnamed Raygun, and his Evil Empire rants of the early 80s? With its very own Budgetary Defense Initiative, nicknamed "Star Wars"?

If they are using 40 Year old hardware, I’d argue it isn’t a retread. This is the old system.

Re: Ensure uninterrupted access?

Re: "This is the typical kind of bullshit spouted by people who have zero understanding of how anything works on a technical level. People who think because something is "regulated" that means everything will be ok."

Regulation enables them to blame someone. All that will happen is that at the end of the inevitable inquiry, they'll announce "Lessons must be learned" and do nothing else.

If it turns out someone has died, or been seriously injured as a result of this, the same will happen.

Re: Noooo! Reeeally? Who would've seen that coming.

Re: What use cases? What expectations? Please show me someone whos first thought in the morning is: "Oh boy, I cannot wait until I can look at my spreadsheets floating as giant panes in front of me in my living room!". Or someone who always dreamt of the day when he could respond to business mails using hand gestures and keyboards he has to look at while typing at a whooping 1-2 characters per minute.

The only real use cases I can see are if, for some reason, a video call isn't suitable and you need to meet "face to face" but a real, in person, meeting is either not possible (perhaps another lockdown) or not feasible (perhaps you are in another country). And, TBH, despite struggling, I've failed to come up with a reason why video calling would not be suitable, and meeting via VR would.

Don't get me wrong: I'm on my second Quest (went from Quest 1 to Quest 2), and I *love* VR for gaming. I also want to see it make inroads into other areas, but I've yet to see a compelling case for it in business.

AR is another matter. Correctly implemented, that could be good for business. For instance, a field service engineer could have a set of AR googles containing maintenance instructions for the the (say) different makes and models of boilers your company support, and when they encounter a boiler they aren't familiar with, they could bring up a virtual manual (or even 3d model) of the boiler next to the real thing.. OK, they could have the manuals in the van, or know a few models, but the AR headset could contain details for thousands of models.

Re: Rarely Useful

I'm no FPGA developer, so could be very wrong, but it seems to me FPGAs are good for short product runs that require custom silicon, whether that silicon is a new design, perhaps in testing, or an emulation of an old design (for retro computing, or controlling old machinery).

It does seem as though once the number of units required gets quite high, you'd be better off looking at making actual chips.

Re: Clean keyboards

Something similar.. Where I used to work, we use to lend students "multimedia" equipment. Basically, Cameras, Microphones etc.

One day, we'd loaned a student our best microphone. A Sennheiser boom mike that could either be powered by a AA battery or an XLR plug.. This was a decent mike, and heavily in demand. When the student didn't return it on time, he was disciplined (not by me), and did eventually return it.

I never found out what happened to it, but the microphone, and the flight case it came in, were both slimy. When I questioned the student about this, he claimed he had not used the microphone. Apparently when he took it home, he dumped the entire case into the linen bin and left it.

I've interviewed a few people over the years, for technical roles within my team. For the last couple of years, we have had a lot of women apply, but generally it's about 90% men. I try and employ a good balance, and feel it makes good business sense. My team is user facing, and women users seem much more comfortable approaching the women of the team. I base this on the fact that calls from women go up if we have more women on staff, and fewer calls if we have fewer women.

Sadly, it's generally very difficult to get a reasonable amount of women though.

Re: Unique keys

Names are a nightmare..

A few years ago, for work, I had to create a small system to enable users to download software. The providers (mainly Oracle) required that we track who made the downloads, including physical addresses. For security reasons, I was not allowed to tap into any existing systems, beyond Active Directory (which was purely used for authorisation). So, I built up a small website that when a given user signed in, they could download any software they were entitled to, and the system would ask for any details required by the publisher. The site worked well, until we had a student with a long name. The system stored the Fore and Surnames separately, so I thought allocating 30 characters for each would be more than enough. No. It wasn't. A user complained he wasn't able to enter his name in the system, so I went and had a look. Both his Fore and Surnames were longer than 50 characters, and he refused to use a shortened version. So, I quietly altered the table to accept 100 character names, obviously updating the web page check..

Re: Oh, I remember PC front ends to Mainframes

Sidekick was brilliant in it's day. As a programmer, it was brilliant to use as a simple text editor and edit source code as you found things you wanted to change. OK, so you'd still have to quit, possible recompile and then launch the application, but in a single tasking environment, just being able to edit on the fly was a major breakthrough. Not like now, when you can edit the source code, stop your debugger, then when you click to restart the debugger, the IDE will re-compile anything needed.

Re: I can finally admit something

RE: Unfortunately his approval ratings dropped thirty points overnight upon the decision to pardon Nixon, and the electorate did what they did

Sadly, I suspect if the same happened to Nixon today, a large chunk of the populace, lead on by several high profile politicians who really should know better, would start protesting about fake news and a witch hunt, and Nixon would talk about the corrupt FBI and Justice Department.

Re: How times have changed..

I never slated Sinclair for their quality. If you want cheap devices, you have to cut corners, and they did. I do slightly slate them for announcing stuff then delaying it though. With someone like Apple, you can be fairly certain that if they say something will be available in 30 days, it will be available in 30 days. With Sinclair, you could be fairly certain it wouldn't.

It actually made me feel slightly nostalgic that RCL kept missing the delivery dates for the Spectrum Next.

Re: Misdirection

I used to work for a company that had microwave links between it's buildings. The technicians that maintained them always said you could follow the route the transmissions took by following the trail of dead birds.

Re: A welcome change!

The problem with Excitement in the server room is it generally occurs if something has gone wrong. If everything is working, unless you are involved in a particularly exciting project (such as upgrading a system), it should ideally be boring, because boring means stuff is working..

Personally, I think, for me, WFH has pros and cons.

The Pros are that I can get up just before 9am, have a little breakfast, fire up my PC an work. No transport to worry about, and people have to make a real effort to talk to me. They can't just pop in the office. They can contact me via email or teams, but the fact they need to do that seems to cut down on the interruptions.

The Cons are that because I have no room in my house for an office, my PC is in my bedroom. I can't escape work by going home because I am already at home. This means I frequently work on stuff in the evenings, and at weekends, which isn't good from a mental health point of view. Because me "leaving work" involves just logging out and going to a different room, I also don't have time to wind down. I was told ages ago (by a Psychologist) that the journey to and from work can be important because it gives us time away from others, where we can prepare ourself for work, or wind own after work. Don't get me wrong, I travel on South Eastern Railways. I *know* travel involves it's own stresses, but it does give me an hour where I can totally forget about work, and just think about what I want.

Re: Seems to me that the biometric approach opens the door to a whole class of security risks..

It's swings and roundabouts. Biometric ID can be bypassed by the third party holding the user's finger on the fingerprint sensor, or shoving the phone into their face, but a lot of users effectively bypass passwords by using either a simple password (even if you do impose simple restrictions), or use the same one everywhere.

Re: "I expect Microsoft to reuse the existing compiler"

I haven't worked on deploying Windows 11. Partly because my employer isn't deploying yet (although it *is* coming), and partly because it doesn't run on Mac bare metal.. Previously, my responsibility was taking our existing Windows image and adapting it for, and deploying it to, Macs (for dual booting). Long term, we *may* deploy as a VM running on Parallels. But long term, we are switching (where possible) from on prem Windows machines to Azure, so I suspect any Mac user that needs a PC will either have to have a PC laptop, or will get a VM running on Azure.

Re: "the [sic] National Disability Rights Network"

Re. [1] Even the UK comes some way behind that other country in this regard…

Even? I've never thought the UK forgets other countries exist. We [*] do seem to hate them, and our government certainly blames them for it's failures, but we acknowledge they are there..

[*]. The Brexiters at least, I voted remain. I like other countries.

Re: "it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

Customer experience improvements are usually good. Hopefully, when you buy something, you won't need to contact the provider much, but if you do, it's good to get good service.

Branding? Not so much. Branding might get you noticed in a busy market, but once you have a product or services, Branding doesn't matter one jot. Unless you are a right winger. In that case, you probably do think beer tastes worse because the brewer decided to put a photo of a trans person on the can, or criticised it's own use of women in bikinis in advertising in the past.

Re: If you want secure elections

Good point..

I think that the cause of the Republican lack of mail in ballots is more simple than the Republicans will admit. They (and particularly Trump) have spent 4 years saying that mail in votes are susceptible to fraud, so their voters likely didn't bother. After all, they thought it was insecure. They then put the low number of votes down to tampering, which backs up the idea it's insecure, and they have low numbers of postal votes in the next election.

And another problem they are causing that will impact democracy. Regardless of how secure the election is, if the results don't go their way, the MAGAts will claim the election is not secure. By doing this, they *are* destroying democracy, and I think they need to be stopped. I'm just not sure how.

Re: It's not for everyone...

I'm the same. I quite like working from home, but find myself doing work outside hours, which isn't good.

Our old fire alarm used to go off regularly. I was friends with the office manager for the facilities management dept, and we were talking about it once. Although she didn't work in out building, she had com over to monitor the drill we were having, so I took advantage of the opportunity to ask her. The alarm was triggering several times a week at that point, and we were getting to the point where the users were starting to ignore it.

She said the problem was simple. We have several buildings close by. All listed, and due to the listings, when the buildings were refitted for our use, to minimise the damage to the buildings, they went for an alarm that mostly used battery operated sensors, sounders and buttons, all connected together via radio.

The problem is that the alarms in the different buildings frequently interfered with each other, and when that happened, they tended to go off. The system was ultimately replaced. Not sure how the new ones work, but we have a lot fewer false alarms.

Of course, the new system won't stop the cause of most of the other false alarms (we have a small kitchen for employee use and people frequently burned stuff while cooking it, which tripped the smoke detectors), but working from home has pretty much stopped that.

Re: Year of the Linux Desktop

I was going to post exactly the same. Being a keen tinkerer, I usually have several VMs with different Linux distros. I like to play with them, and do, unfortunately, need Windows on my main home machine. Not that I have any particular problem with Window. I believe in using the correct tool for the job, whether that tool is a Linux, Windows or macOS. I'm primarily a macOS user at work.

Linux, given a good UI, is an ideal choice for novice users. Most software is free, it has much lower system requirements than Windows, so can be used on old PCs.

The problem is choice. Windows and macOS have one "distribution" each. If a user wants to use either, without hacking, they have one choice.

Linux has a lot more. There are potentially hundreds of distros. Which do users use?

Re: "I wonder what that device could be?"

It could be a dedicated thin client. It could be an old PC. It could be a laptop. It could be a Tablet. It could be a Phone. A company could even roll out a fleet of single board computers (such as a Raspberry Pi). It could be any device you can hide behind a firewall as long as it can access the cloud Windows install (which is any device that can run the software, or possibly can access it via the WWW).

In fact, I believe one of the big selling points for VMWare Horizon is that it can extend the life of your old PCs by enabling users to access the latest versions of Windows remotely using them.

Re: Hmmm

Re: "Please, please shoot me."

Well, you could go to Australia and have someone drop a helicopter on you.