To be fair, a relatively small number of day-to-day problems are caused by the train companies, the majority of difficulties stemming from network problems.
"when the train passes through a tunnel, 4-6 cellular phone links are used in parallel to maintain the Internet connection, and even if the speed decreases temporarily, the connection will entirely not drop."
Just a shame that GNER don't actually operate this far West in the UK.
Not having a laptop is probably going to be an issue as well, I suppose.
You'll no longer be surprised to get a call from the repair center at Sears or Maytag saying your washing machine is using too much hot water and needs adjustment -- information the washing machine has sent through the Net, without any action of your part, back to the factory where it was built.
Sounds familiar. A friend's Dad used to be a minion tending to the needs of a mainframe in the south east of England many years back. Apparently it wasn't unheard of for an HP engineer to walk in through the door and announce that he'd come to replace a processor without the admin even being aware that a processor had died.
This happened a few years ago now, before anybody even had the faintest notion of making Linux easy to install. I was manually partitioning a drive for Slackware, and, for some strange reason, it allowed me to enter a negative partition size. A stream of errors went flowing past before the message appeared on the screen:
"Don't look at me, but something went wrong there. In just a moment, I'm going to continue. Try not to look."
I mean ok performance degraded on 11/9 but that was the only event I can think of that made the news sites shudder.
That was an event that had global repercussions and people everywhere wanted information. News has a nasty habit of happening when people don't expect it. The editor of a news site can't just say to his admins "I think something big is going to happen next month, better get another OC-3 ordered".
Do they have any obligation to serve under high load?
No, but if a news site goes down then people will just look for another site that can cope with the traffic. The ones that can't keep their head above water when something happens are going to lose readers.
I'd like to try running one of the benchmarking programs of the day. I've got fond memories of programs telling me that my 486SX25 was in fact a 250MHz 386.
I also remember chuckling to myself thinking "250MHz? Processors will never get to that speed!". Ah well. Wrong again.
I hate to be boring and pedantic (OK, I don't, I quite enjoy it, but that's just me), but Minesweeper didn't appear until 3.1, and I don't think (I may be wrong) that Solitaire was around back then either.
Whilst the die hard Linjx crowd may be crying into their keyboards at the moment, it'll be interesting to see if a move like this will make Linux more accessable to Joe public.
If this sort of thing could be combined with the Linux PCs being sold at Walmart stores in the States then who knows, might just be the push that Linux needs to get itself a wider home market.
I had a bit of spam today alleging that someone fancied me, and inviting me to phone a premium rate number to find out who it was.
Thing is, it didn't actually *say* that it was a premium rate number. In the UK, the regulator (ICSTIS) requires that the charges for the call are attached to all advertising for these services. I've dropped a little e-mail to ICSTIS regarding this. Hopefully it'll turn into a very nice LART for this spammer.
Amazing. The site gets pulled just at the point in my degree where I really need it for some form of iterative method of solving something or other, now, just when I reach the point in my degree where I'll never need to do that *ever again*, it reappears!
Fate, it seems, doesn't like me solving differential equations the easy way.
I'm an undergraduate Materials Engineer in a UK University and many of the students that I've met from the US can't believe just how specialized the course is, concentrating almost purely on metallurgy, with a bit of polymer science and a couple of odd-ball materials thrown in for good measure.
Ultimately, this should give a good depth of knowledge, although not a very broad knowledge base. The upshot of this is that the British education system produces few "holistic engineers" with companies needing to call in contractors/consultants to deal with a problem that one engineer with a broad skillset could handle alone.
Whilst this seems to suit big business fairly well, having experts in particular fields in-house, smaller companies may struggle to find the money to employ contractors to carry out the work that could otherwise be handled by one employee.
I just want to know if it's possible to squeeze something like a 12" SVGA tube (surely someone makes them?) into the old monitor casing just for added cheese value!
True. The possible problem here is that you're going to end up with a single class of criminals, once a criminal, always a criminal.
How about the kid who nicks something from a shop when they are in their early teens? As a 40 year old, are they still going to be asked to leave the shop, or have their every move watched?
Let's just hope we don't end up with a case of "I got a speeding ticket a few years back, and they won't let me into Tesco because I'm a known criminal. Maybe a little extravagant, but I think you can see where I'm coming from.
In the US, prisons are being dubbed "Correctional facilities", I believe. This is more the sort of attitude we need. "You've done the crime, been punished, now get out there and live your life normally. Don't do it again."
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, a relatively small number of day-to-day problems are caused by the train companies, the majority of difficulties stemming from network problems.
"when the train passes through a tunnel, 4-6 cellular phone links are used in parallel to maintain the Internet connection, and even if the speed decreases temporarily, the connection will entirely not drop."
Just a shame that GNER don't actually operate this far West in the UK.
Not having a laptop is probably going to be an issue as well, I suppose.
Sounds familiar. A friend's Dad used to be a minion tending to the needs of a mainframe in the south east of England many years back. Apparently it wasn't unheard of for an HP engineer to walk in through the door and announce that he'd come to replace a processor without the admin even being aware that a processor had died.
This happened a few years ago now, before anybody even had the faintest notion of making Linux easy to install. I was manually partitioning a drive for Slackware, and, for some strange reason, it allowed me to enter a negative partition size. A stream of errors went flowing past before the message appeared on the screen:
"Don't look at me, but something went wrong there. In just a moment, I'm going to continue. Try not to look."
I mean ok performance degraded on 11/9 but that was the only event I can think of that made the news sites shudder.
That was an event that had global repercussions and people everywhere wanted information. News has a nasty habit of happening when people don't expect it. The editor of a news site can't just say to his admins "I think something big is going to happen next month, better get another OC-3 ordered".
Do they have any obligation to serve under high load?
No, but if a news site goes down then people will just look for another site that can cope with the traffic. The ones that can't keep their head above water when something happens are going to lose readers.
I'd like to try running one of the benchmarking programs of the day. I've got fond memories of programs telling me that my 486SX25 was in fact a 250MHz 386.
I also remember chuckling to myself thinking "250MHz? Processors will never get to that speed!". Ah well. Wrong again.
I hate to be boring and pedantic (OK, I don't, I quite enjoy it, but that's just me), but Minesweeper didn't appear until 3.1, and I don't think (I may be wrong) that Solitaire was around back then either.
The Lightning Seeds seem to have answered the question that most people will be asking.
"Why?"
"All because. The only reason is just because."
Impressive though.
Whilst the die hard Linjx crowd may be crying into their keyboards at the moment, it'll be interesting to see if a move like this will make Linux more accessable to Joe public.
If this sort of thing could be combined with the Linux PCs being sold at Walmart stores in the States then who knows, might just be the push that Linux needs to get itself a wider home market.
I had a bit of spam today alleging that someone fancied me, and inviting me to phone a premium rate number to find out who it was. Thing is, it didn't actually *say* that it was a premium rate number. In the UK, the regulator (ICSTIS) requires that the charges for the call are attached to all advertising for these services. I've dropped a little e-mail to ICSTIS regarding this. Hopefully it'll turn into a very nice LART for this spammer.
Amazing. The site gets pulled just at the point in my degree where I really need it for some form of iterative method of solving something or other, now, just when I reach the point in my degree where I'll never need to do that *ever again*, it reappears!
Fate, it seems, doesn't like me solving differential equations the easy way.
I'm an undergraduate Materials Engineer in a UK University and many of the students that I've met from the US can't believe just how specialized the course is, concentrating almost purely on metallurgy, with a bit of polymer science and a couple of odd-ball materials thrown in for good measure.
Ultimately, this should give a good depth of knowledge, although not a very broad knowledge base. The upshot of this is that the British education system produces few "holistic engineers" with companies needing to call in contractors/consultants to deal with a problem that one engineer with a broad skillset could handle alone.
Whilst this seems to suit big business fairly well, having experts in particular fields in-house, smaller companies may struggle to find the money to employ contractors to carry out the work that could otherwise be handled by one employee.
That's really, really cool.
I just want to know if it's possible to squeeze something like a 12" SVGA tube (surely someone makes them?) into the old monitor casing just for added cheese value!
True. The possible problem here is that you're going to end up with a single class of criminals, once a criminal, always a criminal.
How about the kid who nicks something from a shop when they are in their early teens? As a 40 year old, are they still going to be asked to leave the shop, or have their every move watched?
Let's just hope we don't end up with a case of "I got a speeding ticket a few years back, and they won't let me into Tesco because I'm a known criminal. Maybe a little extravagant, but I think you can see where I'm coming from.
In the US, prisons are being dubbed "Correctional facilities", I believe. This is more the sort of attitude we need. "You've done the crime, been punished, now get out there and live your life normally. Don't do it again."