The top to the right? That's confusing.
I learned many years ago that turn the screwdriver widdershins to loosen a screw and deosil to tighten a screw. Unless it's a left-hand thread. Then someone confused us all by inventing the clock!
25376 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"I then went back to my office and added "and then press 'enter'." to the procedure in question."
There's no key on my keyboard labelled "Enter". What do I do now?
Before answering, bear in mind that the key may be marked "Return". I may have as well as or instead of the relevant word, just a left arrow with a vertical bar and they key may not the be shape you think it is.
"... when the instructions are just '1. do X, 2. do Y, 3. do Z', with no explanations. You often find that once you understand the process you can often improve an old process to make it better/safer/quicker. (I'm thinking of a bunch of old local documentation where, as a newbie, after a few mins research 3 or 4 individual commands were replaced with a single safer all-in-one command)"
One particular brand of kit we maintain, you are not allowed to work on until you complete the manufacturers service training. Then you take a test to prove you have taken it in and understand it. Then you get set loose on the kit to fix it and the instructions are written for dummies that almost anyone who knows which end of a screwdriver is the business end could follow. The procedure involves an almost compete strip down of the kit to replace the part over about 90 mins, including re-assembly and testing. Anyone who has completed the course, by definition, understands the kit and the prcess and can replace the part without a full strip down in about 10 mins with 5 mins for testing. Who's right? Depends on if it works afterward :-)
For whatever reason, I had cause to do a Google search to which countries are not using Metric units as standard/default, especially in everyday life. Apparently, it's only three countries in the entire world. Myanmar, Liberia and, of course, the USA. Both Liberia and Mynamar are currently in the process of converting.
There's a still one or two outliers who have mainly metricated but for various reasons still use some non-metric units, eg the UK still using pints for beer and miles and miles per hour on the roads.
Sometime very soon, only USA will be non-metric. Big enough not to care? Maybe, but I bet it's already an issue with some imports. I suspect they will be forced into metrication by the back door. It took the UK a long time (and in some case still is) in that some products, while measured in millimeters, are just conversion from the inches size. Most food products seem to have transitioned away from Oz and pints to grammes and Litres now, no more 454ml of milk etc.
I'd expect something like NASA is actually metric and they only convert to Imperial for press releases aimed at the local population.
Another good place to look is archive.org
Stability seems to be better with two wheels at the front. I have no idea if it is, but it looks like it might be.
Having said that, I'd not want one as shown in the article photos. I'd not feel comfortable anywhere other than maybe quiet suburbs ona trip to the local shops. Certainly not on a rural country road or a busy city centre.
I did wonder that too. How many of the components on the control boards are made in the UK? How much of the motor is made in the UK? Magnets? Copper wire? And at the end of the supply chain, how much is still coming from China?
Marking something as Made In Britain (or any other country, for that matter) hasn't really ever been 100% true for most countries for 1000's of years, before countries, as we know them today, even existed. Everyone imports something, even it's raw ore. After all, Cornwall has been exporting tin to Europe and the Med since about 2000BC and obviously importing a variety of stuff in exchange.
Agreed. The likely settlement is probably something close to what the litigants expected to get, otherwise they probably wouldn't have accepted. This smells very, very strongly of IBM simply paying to keep the damning evidence under wraps for another few years. I suspect any future cases will be settled in the same way until IBM can legitimately say they deleted those emails as being past the legal age whereby they must be retained.
"Ukraine still needs lots of financial and military (anti-aircraft defences would be good) aid but have from the start demonstrated that they have remembered the lessons of WWII that produced the AK47."
Not forgetting the previous invasion of Crimea and the years fighting the Russian backed and supplied separatists. They have a lot of recent experience fighting against Russian equipment and tactics.
Watching the last episode of the Gadget Show, one of the Air Fryers on tests was controlled by an app, FFS!! And I mean *all* of the settings, as far as I could see, no manual controls other than an on/off switch ie a "sleep button". This is a device you really should not be controlling remotely. They didn't specify how the phone talked to the Air Fryer, so I suppose it could be BlueTooth, but I suspect it's a cloud connected server a few 1000 miles away where they can record exactly when and how you use it.
"Would the dog walkers/gardeners/housekeepers be unemployed burdens on society or would they learn to code or become an architect, or start the next google or amazon?"
Some may succeed but most of them will probably be renting and be priced out of the area. Those better paying but still low paid service jobs suddenly become uneconomic because they can't afford to travel from their "new" poor area to the now gentrified area to be gardeners, dog-walkers, whatever. See for examples, teachers and nurses who work but can't affords to live in London and see their wages eaten up by commuting costs.
Probably because the US, while putting on a public front of being a country is, in reality, more like the EU than they care to admit. A conglomeration of countries with some shared ambitions and an overriding sort of government that can impose some laws on all of them in specific areas. At least they mostly all speak the same language though :-)
I still find it funny every time a left-pondian uses "liberal" as an insult. In most of the rest of the world, "liberal" is what most left-pondians should be aspiring to. Many seem to have a completely arse-about-face use of the term to mean authoritarian or fascist.
I had similar thoughts on reading that same quoted part of the article. Are there any other "crimes" in the use with a standardised bounty ready for the taking by anyone reporting it to the Police? Any at all?
Then there's the commercial aspects of banning abortion. There are occasions when it's possible to effectively sell a baby. Will we see companies setting up, with expensive lawyers, clamouring to help these poor, unfortunate women to "give up" their babies for adoption? At least one "pro-lifer" as said there is a demand for babies to be adopted. Looks like supply might be about to increase too. Will this lower the costs or create a whole new industry? Ads on TV? An online service, EBaybies,com? Look at our range! Choose the specs! Click and Collect!
Depends what you mean by "someone" really. If you believe it's "someone" from the moment of conception, that's your perogative, but not everyone thinks that way. There are various legal definitions around the world for when those cells become "someone" and clearly, even in the US, it's defined as at least 6 weeks, much to the chagrin of some "pro-lifers".
Yeah, but when that was written, people thought men planted the seed in the woman. She was just a vessel to carry the mans seed which grew into a baby. Other may say that the Bible is The Word Of God, of course. Some may say it was written by men. Others will respond that those mens writings were guided and inspired by God. I say that either they weren't listening properly or even God didn't know how babies were made back then. So, how many other "mistakes" are there in the Bible?
It's interesting to see a Bible "literalist" tie themselves in knots :-)
Unfortunately, many employers now actively look for LI or other social media presence when culling the pile of applications, so those of us with no presence don't even get passed the "bin and move on" stage. Likewise, many employers are concerned about applicants who don't change jobs often enough, seeing it as a lack of ambition or drive or something instead of the potential asset of a loyal employee with years of experience..
Whether you want to work for a company like that is another matter of course.
My everyday mug broke the other day. My wife bought it for me about 10 years ago. It got used every morning at breakfast and sometimes through the day too. I don't care that it broke. I have others. Yes, I said my wife bought it for me. Sentimental value? Not really. It was her who dropped it in the sink and broke it. It was her fault, not mine :-)
"Thanks. It all makes sense now. Except the IT angle, as I'm not even remotely in IT, other than reading the reg in the morning to see what new security breach I need to look out for."
You just answered your own question. You read The Reg therefore you know waaaaay more than the average person about IT. You're nearly an expert!
And "thermal creep". Probably one of the most common fixes on a failed PC back then was pushing all the socketed chips firmly back in their sockets. And there might well be 36 DIL chips in sockets if the motherboard was fully loaded with an ENTIRE ONE MEGABYTE or RAM!!! Possibly many more on an ISA card if there was an EMS or EMM RAM expansion card in it. Or RAM on a SCSI card.
I've not upgraded in a long times, and this last decade or so, upgrades have been so far apart I've needed the faster CPU but also a new motherboard and new RAM. Back in the day, faster CPUs commonly went in the same socket on the same board and you just changed some jumpers to match the new required clockspeed, often for two or three sequential upgrades, before needing a new motherboard, let alone new RAM.
I get the sense that AMD outlasted Intel in terms of how many times you could upgrade a CPU before needing a new and different motherboard with a new and different socket, as well as new RAM. Maybe because the AMD model didn't rely on selling motherboards as an income stream. Intel, of course, have sold motherboards for a long time, so having every new iteration require a new socket helped that bottom line more than it did AMD. Am I being cynical?
"Done for security as the ground floor door was a fire door that lead onto a public road."
That sounds a bit over the top. Fire doors such as this are usually emergency exits and should only open from the inside. They normally have a door open sensor linked back to security too so unauthorised use to let someone in, assuming you jave some "naughty" staff, can be detected.
Most probably because the amount of "damaged" stock wasn't in the main reports and not looked at very often because it's normally quite low and after all, who would steal the damaged stock? The waste skips would have been the most obvious indicator of an increase in damaged stock, and obviously that wasn't changing in a noticeable way. It was quite a clever fraud really and may not even have been discovered if the thief had kept the "damages" lower. But, of course, greed. It works, so let's take even more!! The downfall of many thieves and fraudsters.
On our email system, the default retention period is 7 years. Other stuff, in special categories has longer or "never" retention periods depending on the legal rules surround the data. 7 years for "everyday" non-sensitive emails seems more than long enough and is most likely a legal minimum.
Apart from anything else, despite the metaphor of an "envelope" around an email, we all know it's more like a post-card and anyone with access, legitimate or otherwise, at rest or in transit, could read that email if there's no encryption. Most users have no clue how email works and are happy to send all sorts of confidential, sensitive or otherwise private details via email.
"but left in offline backup tapes, and only deleted from those were they to be used for a restore of data at some, unspecified, future date."
Assuming that the original removal is part of an accessible and usable transaction file ready to be run against a backup might be a bit optimistic :-)
It may well be a required function, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of recovery strategies, disaster or otherwise, neglect that. There will most likely be an inherent assumption that there will be missing data, not additional data when restoring a backup.
It was the high bit of the first byte of the filename. You just had to flip it back to 0 to get the original filename back. There were/are plenty of undelete tools around to make it even easier.
The character set was quite limited, upper-case only (lower-case letters you type in are auto-translated to upper-case on accessing the directory), some limited range of non-alphanumeric characters and DEFINITELY NO characters above ASCII 126 so the high bit of any character in a filename will never be set other than the special case of setting it for the first character marking that file as deleted.