SpaceX Lands Launches Load to ISS

WTF?

It was a very old and very complex system that was midway through having its replacement built. The system was not something you could easily add resource too. Yes, it was a disaster waiting to happen (although it had DR) but as is often the case, trying to persuade the suits that they needed to spend millions on a system so that they'd get a new one that did the same thing, isn't very easy.

Heck, we have a CR process for anything that touches a live server. I even had to go through the process to get details of a file as it would have resulted in an unexpected file write. By way of background, the server used to fill up during the day's processing and empty out overnight. It got very tight sometimes and when someone made a copy of a file without checking the size, it filled the filesystem and the server fell over. That particular outage cost several million given what the server did.

But here at least, the amount of people who are either self employed, do free lance on the side, or have some kind of investments, is a pretty damn large portion

But at least with the UK system, the bulk of your tax is already covered. I used to submit a self-assessment return online here as I bought/sold shares and had a second job writing magazine articles. I just had o add the details plus expenses I was claiming to offset these, online and the system works out what you have to pay (and takes into account your existing tax from your primary job). You then have a choice to pay it in a lump sum or change your tax code so you pay it off each month (there must be limits to this, not sure, never used this option). The online system is great, loads of information, a clear step by step process and it does all the calculations for you. You can do it bit by bit and it remembers all your details to date. When you finally submit it you get a downloadable PDF that looks just like the paper version but nicely filled in.

And before tools existed to automate it, cut/pasting the various alt.binaries files (1/6, 2/6 etc) together prior to feeding it to your uudecoder.

This situation is far from uncommon. I work in a big UK bank and until very recently we were paying MS for NT4 support because it was a hell of a lot cheaper than migrating the NT4 based systems. We had maybe 100 systems, each of which was coming up with estimates of £1-2m each to move to a modern platform. MS wanted 3.5m to support NT4 for another year. No brainer. Then MS got fed up with that and said next year it will be 7 and the year after that 14 etc which focused people's attention.We did eventually get everything off NT4 but it was a lot of pain. The system I work on ended up costing £4-5m on it's own, no idea on the others.

Yeah, right. They never go bad. Archival grade ones kept in the dark, maybe. Most just give up after a few years.

If you disagree with this, at least say why. Don't just mod it down. I'd welcome others perspectives on this point.

Really? If give it 3 to 5 years tops. I haven't used an optical drive in 3+ years or a floppy in 5+. In fact my last 2 PCs had no floppy dive and I didn't even notice.

Most people I know of my generation (born early sixties) were computer mad and spent their teens in their bedrooms programming away on Atari's, Apple IIs, BBC Bs and later C64s. Then the Nintendo generation happened and suddenly people knew squat about computers for a decade or so. It used to amuse me no end that I knew far more about competes and tech than people 10 to 15 years my junior who used to moan about how of course computers didn't exist when they were young. Now it's better but there's this blip where people just didn't do computers for a decade or so, except the nerds.

15 years? I've had the same email address since 1992, 22 years

Yet you had to spell out ISP in the summary? WTF?

Indeed. Ever since installing BYOD for work on my tablet, it had an icon in the notification bar warning me all communications are being potentially monitored by a 3rd party.

Back in the 70's at least they had white walking sticks with echo location devices on them that allowed blind people to 'see' objects in the room. It was in a 'how it works' book I bought as a kid.

Up until Facebook got them, anyway, I had been a WhatsApp user since the early days. Almost everyone I talk to uses it as their primary chat channel and as far as I can tel, it's the defcato chat tool in Europe. Different countries seem to latch onto different apps though, people in other countries often use Viber for instance. Another plus over SMS (give that with 5,000 free texts a month, price wasn't an issue) is that I'm in a semi-rural location and often have no phone signal so being able to chat via WiFi is useful.