Width
Not only did the El Reg gurus give us threading comments, they also gave us comments with more wifth Thank you!
Any chance we could have a bit more width for article text too?
Yes, yes, I know I'm greedy.
3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010
I seem to recall onetime one of the budget airlines would charge you for correcting a spelling mistake on your name - even if they made the mistake themselves.
You have to remember that the business model of these companies is to sell the bare minimum product at a rock bottom price and them hit you for any extras. Correcting mistakes is an extra....
Companies House don't give a damn
There was an interview with one of the journalists from Private Eye recently. He said that all Companies House have the resources to do is to record information. They don't have the capacity to check anything anyone submits. And if they're told there's something wrong, there's no resource to take action to get it corrected.
If Elon (or anyone else at Space-X) were filmed sitting in the control room at Space-X drinking Whiskey and smoking pot, I could understand NASA taking a look at the culture at SpaceX. But as Elon was off-the-clock, doing something legal, what's the problem?
After all, it's not like anyone at NASA would ever take a drugs in the control rooms, it is?
The theory is that by seeing how much energy you're using, you'll realize how much energy each appliance uses and will either minimize its use or buy a more energy efficient model.
In practice, people will go "Meh" after five minutes and never look at their smart meter again.
* It may be possible to achieve 20,30 or 40Mb/s over 5G. But it that for all users covered by that cell at once, or just one lucky punter?
* "The average consumer uses 8GB a month". That may be the case on 4G data, but on home broadband (which they're saying 5G can replace) my kids are currently eating 200GB a month on Netflix, Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, et al. That doesn't include my or my partner's use for work.
* Indoor coverage is getting more important. The problem is that the carriers don't see that as their problem and expect you to pay for your own indoor solution. For an average building, we're seeing quotes of £250k for setup fees. (This is a proper in build solution, not the mickey mouse femto boxes the carriers fob their consumers off with which barely work in corporate environments).
In the past, WiFi was used as a fill-in for 3G. I think that's going to flip now: 4G (&5G) will be the fill in for WiFi.
A certain group of UK Newspapers all use the same content platform (How can you tell? All the websites look exactly the same)
When you first visit the site, it invites you to accept their cookies or to manage them. If you select the manage option, you have to untick over 200 tick boxes to switch off all the tracking they've opted into. They deliberately do not have a "Select All" option, just to help persuade you to accept their tracking cookies.
The problem with SMBs is in the name: Small. They employ just a handful of people, none of which are employed solely to do IT. You'll probably find the person who does IT is the one who is the least hating of IT.
In the ivory towers of professional IT, we can mock all we want. But is it the fault of the SMBs in not taking IT seriously, or the IT market of making things just too darn complicated?
The brief outage ... caused problems in the organisation's complex MySQL replication architecture
If you have to define a system as "Complex", you can guarantee that when it goes wrong, it will go wrong in a manner that will take a long time to clean up afterwards.
I know you're operating at scale, but Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simple is the only way you stand of keeping big things like this running.
MS need to dogfood their own product. They should be rolling out the updates across their entire infrastructure before letting them loose on the wider world. Imagine the s**t storm if Nadella walked into the dev team's building and said: "The latest update just deleted all my data"
I heard a story about an email server product (now sadly passed away). The users kept on complaining that when they did certain maintenance tasks, the mailstore would get corrupted. In the end the product manager made the maintenance tasks run on the devs mailboxes every few days. The reliability went through the roof.
It's an interesting situation which has also been written about in regards to the US forces. Main point is that those who are good at 'cyber' roles, are probably unlikely to be good at doing it for the military.
In our organization, I'd guess over 50% of the IT staff are "on the spectrum". There's no way they'd last in the military.
When I was a youngster I was in the Air Cadets and I was looking to being a pilot as a profession. As I spent more time in the Air Cadets, I realized that I didn't like blindingly taking orders from complete idiots just because they were "senior" to me so I never went anywhere with a rigid hierarchy.
I'm lucky that I've had jobs where my bosses encourage me to question them. The outcome is that one of us learns something which allows us to make better decisions.
Invoking "personal privacy" is complete nonsense. They're an organisation, not an individual
Maybe you're thinking of the wrong end of the call. Maybe the person at the receiving end doesn't want anyone else to know that they're in contact with medical, law enforcement, etc?
At our place we have a policy that people can either show their individual CLI or the switchboard's number on outbound calls. When people ask why can't they just withhold their CLI entirely, we ask: "What are you doing that you don't want the recipient of your call to know our organisation is calling them?"
He's happy to abandon his family to go talk kernels?
When I was in my early twenties. I was happy to work far too many hours over far too many days. Now, a tiny fraction wiser, I value my time with my family & doing my hobbies. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy my job, I just realized there's more to life.
it's easy to find somebody doing something wrong
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
(Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu but Wikiquotes says this is disputed)