Posts by Shoot Them Later

1982 called and wants its ZX Interface 1 and row of Microdrives off the side back.

I had the Interface 1, but only one microdrive. That was enough. I recall it slightly melted the underside of my Spectrum too, such was its monster power.

Re: EPO not beholden to national laws

International organisations enjoy quite a lot of immunity from local laws of the host coutnry, and this generally includes employment law and being sued. Various embassies have also used this immunity to avoid repurcussions for unfair dismissal of locally engaged staff. Here's an interesting piece on what anyone entering into a contract with an international organisation should be aware of: Why contracting with an international organisation is different.

Here's the status of the EPO specifically. You can fire people as you like, but if you get caught speeding you will pay...

Re: Bandwidth ???

If it's mostly text, it would of course compress down pretty well. Depending on what sort of access I had to the target's servers, I might compress it locally and then transmit the compressed files. But when bragging about how much data I liberated, I would of course quote the uncompressed figure :)

Re: 4 year old phone design resuscitated

The iPhone 5/5S/SE case design is (IMHO) by far the most attractive of all iPhone case designs. Far more stylish than the rounded and bland 6 case design. I have both a 5S (old phone, now used for work) and 6S (bought to replace the 5S as personal phone) so have had plenty of time to compare the two. If I were buying a new iPhone now, it would be the SE hands down. If the iPhone 7 looks anything like the 6 design, then I probably won't be tempted to buy one.

From the referenced page:

"if an operand resolves to the root directory, rm shall write a diagnostic message to standard error and do nothing more with such operands"

Which just goes to show that The Open Group have no sense of humour. Or maybe they do - perhaps they are just trolling people to go an test out if their system has a POSIX-compliant rm. I for one am certainly gullible enough to give it a go. Hold on...

Re: Nice to See an Article About This

@Nigel - for me the decision between local/cloud is not really security, but getting a balance of performance & availability. Mail local to my home has best performance and availability for when I am at home, but considerably less so for when I am mobile. If I have my IMAP on AWS or similar, I have better availability and performance when I am mobile (I hope) but worse than when at home. Ideally I'd want a solution with two way replication of IMAP content, but on the other hand I want a solution that is simple and reliable. I think those might be mutually exclusive :)

@Vic - I agree with youur point about backup MX. In my case, my backup server is also Exim with the same spam configuration, and I use rsync to push whitelists and virtual domain lists to it from my main server. It works fairly well, although sometimes I get issues where the backup server has accepted mail that my main server later rejects, but this is handled relatively gracefully by Exim. I go for the backup MX route because I may from time to time turn off my whole home server for an extended period and I want to continue to accept mail. I have on occasion read the raw emails sitting in the mailqueue on my backup box while travelling. It's far from perfect, but works, in a clunky way, within my slightly odd parameters.

Re: I promise I didnt laugh at this.

@Wizardofaus - yep, funny-ish. But the big message I take away from that video is that many people actually prefer a smaller form factor phone, and are happy with one that's a little thicker that maybe houses a half decent battery. So when people are presented with what they are told is the new iPhone, their positive comments on its dimensions are pretty relevant I think.

The other stuff - commenting that the display is so much crisper etc. - well, they are being asked to pontificate on a 'new' piece of tech they've been handed in the street. People have a natural tendency to say what they think they are expected to say in those circumstances. I'm all for laughing at people who do dumb things, but they've got to be properly dumb things.

Re: Hilton, Marriott et al market themselves to business travellers

We spent a night in a Four Seasons in the US on honeymoon. They wanted $7 for the (not very fancy) printed map of the local area that was left in the room (i.e it was a minibar item). There was no tea/coffee provided in the room, although you could of course order it on room service at suitably expensive prices. We were left wondering what you actually get for your greatly inflated room rate, given that the whole experience compared very poorly to the other (cheaper) hotels on the trip.

I won't even get on to their wifi cost, in a city with ubiquitous free coverage.

Upmarket hotels are money extraction machines, or at least they want to be.

Re: Sounds like Vodafone is unhappy

@BristolBachelor, I think you (and many others in this discussion) are missing a fundamental point here. Apple's 'soft' SIM is a physical card with the same form factor as a standard SIM, that is also software updateable for carrier selection. You can remove it and replace it with any SIM from any network and use that instead.

It adds the convenience of not having to acquire a physical card on day 1 with your new device, and as others have noted adds some interesting longer term potential, such as using software to swap between multiple carriers depending on circumstance without needing to juggle SIM cards. Because it is removable, and may be replaced with a bog standard SIM card, the consumer loses nothing here.

Now, if Apple then went a step further and changed the devices so that your only option was to use the soft sim, and baked that into their hardware in the same way they do with RAM in MacBooks now, then I would be the first to complain. And stop buying their devices.

Re: 4S killer

I've just inherited my other half's 16Gb 4S as my work phone (in exchange for a nice new 6...). It works just fine with newly upgraded iOS 8. I've used the accessibility settings to turn off the additional motion in the UI - you should try that (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5595). It compares favourably in speed to my previous work phone, an iPhone 4 running iOS 6.

Re: Regulations, regulations, regulations...

@Michael Thibault - Presumably because they wanted it to be a surprise. FCC approval means submitting detailed documents. I understand that some can be restricted on commercial confidentiality grounds, but it raises risk of leaks and exposure. Similarly bulk manufacturing nowadays seemingly guarantees supply chain leaks - hence we will wait to 2015.

While the announcement of the watch was hardly unexpected, I think its appearance and functionality was kept well under wraps.

Re: Which Office product is at fault?

Fine, Charlie Clark, I understand your reasoning for eschewing DOM - and let's face it, we've all built XML documents from strings from time to time. But that's not really my point - the case here is where a document has been written to disk that is not even well formed, let alone valid. Are people (and I'm looking at you, anonymous downvoters) really saying that it's too hard to check that the XML document that you've built is well formed at least before writing it? Really? This doesn't require DOM to do - there are faster ways to check that a document is valid and/or well formed.

Maybe I'm somehow unusual in this, but I would far prefer my office software to warn me that there was a problem (and give me the opportunity to cut and paste my work to a fresh document, or make a backup of the existing file) than to silently write an invalid file to disk.

I still maintain - and it shocks me that this seems to be somehow a controversial view - that there is no real excuse for a piece of released end user software writing XML files that are not even well formed.

Full disclosure: despite from time to time being obliged to interact with Lotus Symphony - which I have always found to be an unpleasant and unrewarding experience - I am by no means a hater of LibreOffice. I am also no lover of Microsoft (particularly Word for Mac 2011 with its fun habit of crashing when I try and paste formatted text).

Re: Why?

I'm absolutely with you Ledswinger, bar one detail... The basket case that you describe is now Royal Mail. The Post Office is the branch network, the bit that Gideon and Vince didn't flog off at well below market value to their banker mates.

You can tell what level priority 'Mail' has now for the Post Office by the fact that it appears at item 5 on the tabbed list on their home page, sandwiched between 'Broadband' and 'Driving'.

"- Those who refuse run anything by Microsoft. Macs and various Linux distros make this choice very, very easy now."

Sadly not entirely true. I am sitting writing this on our corporate Red Hat Linux platform which has... Symantec Antivirus bogging it down. What with the mandatory LUKS on the whole disk (and not just selected volumes containing data/swap) it makes for a mighty slow Linux environment.

So I'm sure Symantec still make plenty of money shipping their crap to very large companies that simply must run AV on *everything*, regardless of whether it is effective or necessary.

Re: "The satellite would thus know to keep one of its receiving assemblies aligned..."

Having spent far too much time following the ever-expanding thread on PPRuNe, I found this a good summary. Some issues with it (like the purported alignment of receiving assemblies) but better than most media.

From my perspective, the big unanswered question about INMARSAT is what about the other pings? The distance from the satellite calculated from the final ping is being discussed, but what about the preceding ones. These would give us an indication if whether the plane was moving, and what approximate direction. You could use this information to infer whether the plane was likely to be in the southern or northern corridors for example, and it would certainly be useful to know if it had stopped moving with respect to the satellite. However, this information has not been given - and frustratingly journalists have not asked for it in the press conferences. It's entirely possible that only the last ping was retained by the system, but it would be good to know that.

I would also be interested in what level if detail the system recorded ping send/receive times. +/- 1 ms implies a particular level of accuracy, if this is greater or less then accuracy is changed, possibly significantly. I've not seen this reported anywhere.

With the conspiracy hat on, I find it amazing that no journalist in the press conferences has pressed for a cargo manifest. The only concrete statement made by the authorities is that "nothing hazardous" was on board. A very valuable cargo has not been ruled out. If there was nothing valuable on board, why not explicitly and unambiguously rule this out?

The standard of both questions and answers at the press conferences is terrible. Take the ACARS being allegedly switched off before the last voice transmission. Crucial point but turns out it was misleading; accurate version is that last ACARS transmission was *sent* before last voice contact. Actual ACARS disabling time may have been later. Bad communication of facts, and an equally bad failure to seek clarification from the journos present.

The whole thing is a masterclass in how not to run an investigation and handle the associate public relations. Unless of course [tin foil hat!] it is all an act of pretend incompetence :)

Re: BBC should adopt an airlines business model

Well that's fine if you want to do what airlines have been doing lately - namely racing to the bottom.

The BBC have already been moving in that direction - take the sale of BBC Outside Broadcast to SIS in 2008. Was supposed to save money, but of course it didn't. SIS Live are now getting out of the OB game because the BBC didn't renew their contract (because SIS Live turned out to be both expensive and inferior to the old in-house operation). Now lots of ex-BBC OB staff - techies, not managers - are likely to be out of a job, the BBC has no high quality in-house OB like it used to and no money has been saved.

And how does BBC R&D fit in with the airline model? Obviously, it doesn't.

I'm sorry, but I want my BBC to be like a proper airline that serves free meals and will give you that extra bottle of wine with your chicken/beef with a cheery smile, and not like Ryanair. If that's not stretching your analogy too far.

I completely agree that swathes of overpaid middle management and overpaid "talent" are a problem, I just don't think that outsourcing everything is a solution.