Posts by JimC

Re: It's All Down To The Romans or What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

Not only that, but the limitation on the shuttle components was loading gauge, not track gauge - size of tunnels being an obvious manifestation of loading gauge - and not only is the loading gauge on the relevant US railroads far larger than that in use on the earlier british lines, but loading gauge itself was barely a concept before railways, as few vehhicles were significantly wider than their wheelbase.

Re: Idiocy

Half the trouble is that the Ai b*****s is so integrated into web search results that its all too easy to use it without meaning to.

AIUI the system is intended for a fully functional aircraft with an incapacitated pilot, so should never need to land on the Hudson river. Presumably the assumtion is that an incapacitated pilot and a degraded aircraft will rarely happen simultaneously. At least outside war zones.

Re:Notes mail client was a kludge.

Which is kinda ironic when you think about the current state of the Outlook client. Sure makes the Notes client look good. My immediate relations all still use Pegasus mail, which still works just as well as it always has, but we have one friend who is addicted to buying new computers and I end up supporting Outlook. What an unbelieveable dogs dinner the new Outlook client is. After an hour of trying the other day I still didn't find a way to give him black text on white, which he wants because he claims white on black is giving him eye trouble.

Re: Menai Straight Bridges

This doesn't in any way invalidate your point, but pedantically there are two bridges over the Menai Strait, and neither were designed by Brunel.

Thomas Telford’s Menai Suspension road bridge opened in 1826 and the Britannia Bridge, once rail only and now road and rail, opened in 1850, a box-girder design by William Fairbairn and Robert Stephenson.

https://www.visitanglesey.co.uk/en-gb/explore/towns/menai-bridge

Brunel of course designed many fine bridges, the Royal Albert over the Tamar and Clifton Suspension bridges being among the best known, and many of them are still in use. Its probable though that most older bridges have been appreciably upgraded over the decades, if for no other reason than loads are far greater than they used to be.

After digging out an old utility

and modifying it for a new job, my PFY looked at the code and said "when you wrote that I was in primary school". He seems to be a significant player in AWS now, but nearly didn't survive that day... And mate, if you're reading this I reckon you're pretty much as old now as I was then. How are your PFYs?

Re: MIT, BSD, etc... freer than GPL ...thanks to years of large tech companies

Not at all. When I've put my trivial bits of code out with an NCSA license its as a pay forward in recognition of all the developers who've put sample code out there for me to learn from. I'm not concerned with end user freedom to study, share or modify. Apart from anything else I'm well aware that 99% plus of them neither wish or are able to take advantage of that highly notional freedom. What I am concerned about is the freedom for other developers to take it and use it without having to worry too much about licenses.

Re: Yep, rush at your peril...

I used to work on a Novell Directory Services installation with in excess of a hundred servers. If there was a serious problem to fix it was vital not to rush, since the databases needed time to sync up after making changes. So when there was a big fix to do I used to bring in a book, and stop and read a chapter when the directory needed to be left in peace to do its processing. Impatience was always an enemy with NDS, and reading the book took away the psychological pressure to do something when it was better to wait.

Re: Billionaires only do things for money

And fame and ego. Especially ego. Never underestimate a billionaire's ego.

Re: the mast

> You can't send a boat to the bottom due to windage on bare poles in flat seas,

You reckon? Elsewhere someone posted a video of a vicious storm event which included a big yacht being blown onto her beam ends. and in a harbour.

Re: As has been hinted at but not explicitly mentioned (unless I missed it) ....

And I for one can't remember a code editor I liked better then Wordstar. Especially the ability to move copy and paste blocks rather than lines, which I was particularly fond of. And most of all, of course, never having to take hands off the keyboard to grab the damned mouse.

Re: what happens when people who shouldn't have power

In my experience its more what happens when people who aren't chosen for independent thinking and initiative (not generally desirable attributes in a security guard) are given totally inadequate briefing and instructions.

I had a fair sized run in with a security guard at a past employer who threatened me with physical violence when I wouldn't leave the building with the job half finished and potentially hundreds unable to work on Monday morning. The company had just abandoned having a 24 hour security presence and his idiot management hadn't given their security guard any clues as to what to do with an emergency. I passed up through my line management that I felt the problem was entirely due to his line management and that I felt no blame attached to the security man. Thereafter we were good mates, which was pretty damn useful at times.

Re: ... best computer language would be to use the English language?

Grace Hopper for one. That was the idea behind Cobol.

Re: Weren't they the cheapest bid?

Well of course they were. That's procurement rules. You have to go with the cheapest bid unless you can demonstrate that its not going to work.

Re: braindead

Gets you out of the house, active and meeting people, plus making a contribution to the community by helping keep the library open. For folk who are not employed its not obviously worse than lying on the sofa watching Netflix reruns.

> few, if any, people in local councils who can actually grasp the complexity

And, as is painfully obvious from the naive comments every time this comes up, no-one out of councils either. The typical local authority is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any business.

> pronunciation hieroglyphics

Sudden vision of someone converting a message to pronunciation glyphs before encoding it...

Anyone with a brain would provide a single, central, authoritative system

"OK, so here's the situation.You have to write a software system for 317 clients."

- "What 317 different customers? Can I just resign instead?"

"Oh Sorry, that's a bit misleading. There are lot more customers than that, 317 end user departments, 317 IT departments all with different compatibility requirements, 317 finance departments and 317 chief executive's offices."

- "I think I have to go on sick leave..."

Re: Norse gods

When I worked for a local authority, although all internal stuff had boring but meaningful code names, we decided we wanted something more obscure for external facing devices, so everything on the DMZ was named after villages in our territory. The particular advantage was so many unique names, although we avoided anything long and hyphenated.

Re: It's 301 stainless apparently

And wait until crevice corrosion gets in the mix, especially with road salt.

How many leavers.

It is, I believe, the biggest payroll in South East England.

Re: an organisation should modify its business processes to conform with the vanilla package.

At least that's what IT people are taught. The rest of the world tends to think of that as arrogance, inflexibility and incompetence, and a complete reversal of all logic.

Re: If you share you password with me...

Yes its appalling practice. But in the days before widespread remote management it was also mightily convenient, especially as its also appalling practice for first and second line IT support to have admin access. The temptation was always there, and less IT aware management would often approve doing it, no matter how much the likes of people like me objected on principle. I'm moderately surprised it still happens though because now there are alternatives.

Re: This far down in the comments

Personally I claim that there is yet to be a really good Windows Word processor.

Re: " a trust of the people involved "

But of course you're putting a similar level of trust on everyone around you on the road, and with even less justification.

Re: Credentials after leaving

I happened today to come across the email I wrote after leaving my employer of many years listing all the accounts and passwords I had that should be deleted/changed. I have no idea whether they did though, never tried knocking on the door.