Posts by A Non e-mouse 3275 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010
The El Reg side-bar on the Demon Core incident is a fraction too simple.
The Demon core was two hemispheres of Plutonium. The experiements were to bring the two halves almost together to understand criticality.
Unfortunately, the process for ensuring the two hemispheres remained far enough apart was crude: LIke holding a stick or screwdriver between the two halves.
Guess what? The stick slipped. Twice.
The radiation doses killed some of the people in the room.
A field engineer once told me he got sent to a server at a school. As this was a school, the staff didn't want the pupils playing with the server so they built a little box around it. The engineer opened the box and found that the plastic case for the server had heated enough to soften and had sagged onto the motherboard.
Personnally, I'm suspicious of this: Surely if the box had gotten warm enough to soften the plastic, wouldn't it have gotten hot enough to fry the chips?
Vendor, lie???
Shocked! Shocked I tell you!
I was using a vendor's system for about five years and we decided to go to tender for a replacement as the vendor couldn't provide certain features. We made sure to detail these features as mandatory in tthe tender. Our incumbant bid claiming they could do these missing features. I challenged them on this and they said "Ah, we added those features just now." Bollocks they had. I asked legal about this contradiction and legal said there wasn't anything we could do: We had to believe what they wrote in the contract.
Fortunately the vendor lost the tender due to other flaws in their bid.
I'm gonna say that it's probably management (or the councillors) that flip-flopped. The article says the original plan was to change process to match Oracle. I bet someone got cold feet at trying to push through change (or someone "important" complainted). So they then swapped to hack customise Oracle to match their processes. It's that core change mid project that probably did it in.
It's always the mid-project changes that kill you.
This is my beef with El Reg's articles on the Birmingham Bungle: They present the story as the failed Oracle implementation has brought down the council. My reading of El Reg's articles are that the failed ERP project is just one piece of the puzzle and not the catalyst. If the ERP project has suceeded would Brum council still have gone backrupt? Yes. The £760 million equal pay claim is gonna be a big part of the failure to balance the books.
I'm going to disagree here.
If I'm using a work supplied device (Laptop, mobile phone, tablet, car, etc) then I think the business is justified in ensuring I'm not misusing the business asset it has given me to perform my duties.
If you're using your personal devices to do work, then you're a muppet.
Sounds like Unity has just fallen over the trust thermocline.
Three and a bit years ago people were already doing this. Smart employers were already offering some kind of flexible working as they saw it made their employees happier and hence more productive.
Lockdown made people realise how unpleasant big commutes were and so people lept at a more flexible working environment.
At our place, I'm hearing stories of people who have moved to be a 5 or 6 hour commute from their new home to the office and are refusing to ever set foot on company premises ever again. If that's part of you working your notice so be it, but as a permanent working arrangement? I'm not so sure.
Setting organisation wide mandates for how often staff need to be in the office will only breed (more) resentment. As a manager I see the benefits of both working from home and staff coming together in person. For me, different teams come into the office different amounts depending on their needs. Some come into the office almost daily, whereas others come in maybe once every six months.
Flexible working is here to stay. Let's be sensible and let teams and managers decide what works best for them. If a team or person aren't being as productive as you think they should be, then that's a HR matter for the people involved that needs to be addressed.
A corporate edict of "You must be in th office X days out of Y" is pointless. There are only two possible reasons for these edicts:
1 - Stupid top brass
2 - The company has signed expensive leases on offices which they can't get out of and want to see some return on their money.
Maybe someone needs to send the military's top brass a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" short story.
I've seen both Dell & Cisco servers with SD cards inside them - usually two in a mirrored configuration.
They usually use the SD card as the O/S boot device as ESXi isn't a storage hog for nor does it require high performance. (The shared storage the VMs sit on however, is a very different kettle of fish)
This is, however, why I tend to be a bit nervous about unlimited packages.
In my day job, I refuse to purchase services with "unlimited" in the sepcification. I always push our lawyers to replace "unlimited" with an explicit number in the contract. My lawyer loves me for it, but it always blows the minds of the sale droid desperate for their commission.
Most people charging at home will only be topping the battery up.
Most of my charging is at home at less than 10p/kWh. My parents do most of their charging at home too. (Lucky buggers have solar so it's "free")
I feel that destination charging is the way to go as it's much cheaper than the public high power chargers.
J.D. Power, also cite a lack of charging infrastructure and price as factors influencing purchasing decisions.
I own an electric car. Whilst the amount of chargers and their prices are issues, they're not the number 1 problem for an electric car driver. It's the availability/reliability of chargers that's my biggest worry on longer journeys.
If I can guarantee getting to a charger and it working and being able to use it in a timely manner (i.e. not having to wait an hour or more before I can plug in) planning longer trips is much less stressful. At the moment, I work on the assumption that my prefered charge point won't be working and plan backup locations.
Some of the newer motorway service stations have large rows of chargers, but some motorway service stations have just two chargers.
I seem to recall an annecdote about the Apollo program. During one of the moon landings an astronaught said "Ooh, that's interesting" and completely changed what they were going to do to investigate.
Robots are great at doing what they're told to do. Humans are great at changing plans on the fly.
"While I think it is very unlikely, given our size difference, perhaps you are a modern day Bruce Lee and will somehow win," Musk added.
Whilst size may be an advantage, that is all it is: An advantage. If you have no idea how to fight and are unfit, your smaller, well trained opponent will still cream you.
3G & 4G were noticeable improvements for the end user. I'm not sure 5G is such a game changer. For many use cases 4G is perfectly usable - providing you get a signal. I think the only thing 5G has done for the consumer is get more frequencies which equates to more network capacity. 6G will be a "rinse & repeat" of 5G.
Just as the pace of innovation in smart phones and slowed, so has the pace of mobile network innovation.
If all he's doing to prep is lifting some weights in the office he's doing it all wrong. First off, he needs to be doing some cardio & strength endurance work. Then he needs to learn how to fight. Without those things he's going to get creamed in seconds.
Fail icon as that's what Elmo is setting himself up for.
And he's just made the first step in pulling out: theregister.com/2023/08/07/musk_cage_fight_latest
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