Posts by AndrewDu 137 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2014
I have several PCI-bus Token Ring adaptors.
Oh, and one of those hub things that the "hermaphroditic" connectors go into.
They were only known by their IBM four-digit machine number iirc, and I am too lazy to go up to the loft and see what it was. But those readers of a similar vintage may remember...
In the basement of a large factory I used to work in, I once came across an old Compaq Deskpro 386 (yes!) running with no case on, and no monitor, attached to various serial cables and such. I asked the person showing me round what it was for and whether it mattered, and how long it had been sitting there hoovering up the considerable dust in the (very dirty) operational area where it was.
DON'T TOUCH THAT, IT RUNS THE WHOLE FERMENTATION PLANT was the answer.
Later, I found that this was no more and no less than the truth.
You don't seem to understand how the EU works.
The EU is not a democracy; in fact it's deliberately designed to bypass and nullify democracy.
The Commission is the only body that can propose laws, and if it does, the Parliament can do no more than discuss, object, and (slightly) delay.
This is not a Parliament in the normally understood meaning of the word, it's just a bit of window-dressing; what the Commission wants, the Commission gets.
"Very few houses are going to invest in extra networking gear just to be able to turn a light on and off with an app when you are five feet from the switch anyway."
Uh-huh.
So why would you EVER want to turn a light on or off with an app when you are five feet away from the switch?
Fools and their money...
"probably some implementation stupids when it comes to switching provider "
You are so right. The stupid is, that if you change provider, the smart meter doesn't work any more. End of.
Apparently they forgot that bit when designing them, probably because the implementation phase goes back to nationalised industries, at which time you couldn't change provider because there was only one.
Cynic_999 posted while I was writing this...but I'll leave it up anyway, since it can't be said too often...
At what point does "hate speech" morph into "fake news" and then into "anything tptb disagree with" and then into "anything that the people in charge don't want talked about"?
This is a very dangerous road to start down; pretty soon we're back to just hearing and knowing what the state and its satraps want us to hear and know.
"give every one of those people a hundred addresses and still have some 231 trillion addresses spare."
That's only true if you keep away from structuring those numbers.
As soon as you (e.g.) start incorporating MAC addresses into the IP address (just to pick a completely random example...!) then the number of available addresses starts to shrink rather quickly.-
The joke about all this is that while private companies risk £20m fines or whatever, the government (any government) will just carry on doing exactly as it pleases.
Call your bank to make some trivial query about your account and you get the ninth degree of security nonsense, but if the NHS wants to hand over your data to Crapita, that's just fine and dandy, they don't even need to tell you.
Data protection works for them against you, but not the other way around.
Actually Trump was complaining loudly about this sort of thing all through his campaign, and promises to "do something" about it. Whether he can or not, (I think not, personally), remains to be seen. It's probably one of the main reasons he was elected.
But don't let that get in the way of your knee-jerk.
" a highly developed, relatively very secure and stable OS"
Hmm, well, maybe so.
But it would frighten the pants off any new start staff who would then need a lot of training and hand-holding before they could do even the simplest thing. Whereas anybody off the street kinda knows how to work Windows - which is what they think "computers" are, anyway.
Before you sneer, go check out a few of your own users, and imagine the panics.
Thin end of wedge...
"There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services"
"There is no place for content that promotes hate speech"
"There is no place for content that promotes hate"
"There is no place for content that promotes extreme views"
"There is no place for content that promotes views we don't like"
"There is no place in society for people with views we disagree with"
Job done.
Always the same I'm afraid.
Do next year's budgets in October; discover the business doesn't have the overhead cover next year to support the existing workforce; quick exercise on who's going and who's staying; hand out the P45's - then "Oh look, it's the week before Christmas - just like it was last year".
It sucks, but at least those left do have a business next year; if you don't do this when you need to, everyone goes.
"surely they would not have a web page that just said "err=unknown_driver_fail please uninstall the driver for Unknown Device" and nothing else...?"
Oh, yes they would!
Reminds me of the old IBM error messages that used to say something like "Error 10042fcd occurred" and you thought oh goodie that's nice and specific, the big blue book will tell me what's wrong. So you got out the big blue book and looked at the list of error codes, and the numbers jumped from 10042fc7 to 10042fe0 or something like that. Gah! Foiled again, curse you, Red Baron!
BT certainly have a problem with their pension scheme, as do almost all large companies (and many small ones too).
But this is not down to their own mismanagement - it's due to the grasping hands of G. Brown esq., and then after that to the endless ZIRP and QE that's been foisted on us by the Govt. and the Bank of England. Nobody can make investments pay in this environment, which is why they are all falling over each other to renege on their promises to their employees. This will not end well.
"nearly everyone is capable of succeeding in the computer science curriculum if they work at it."
Nearly everyone is capable of succeeding in the computer science curriculum if they're interested and they work at it.
FTFY.
This, I suspect, is what lies behind the much-vaunted gender mismatch in the IT business. Yeah, I'm pandering to stereotypes. So sue me.
PV arrays should not be installed on new build houses in the UK because they're useless at our latitudes.
It doesn't matter how cheap the panels themselves get, the cost of the inverter gear, the problems of cleanliness and maintenance, and the hopelessly intermittent nature of the output (sunshine at night, anybody? Or any time between November and February?) means they will never be anything except a cost overall - though of course a nice little earner for the rich people in big houses who already installed them before the government woke up and cut the feed-in tarriffs.
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