@ricedg
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Yes I’m feeling a bit tired of my Lenovos now ? Nothing wrong with them, they are good workhorses, but I know the Elitebooks are built to the same military toughness standards as my T420 so even that advantage is gone. The Elitebook looks so damn good, as does the screen and the trackpads are the best. It’s what an Ultrabook should be IMO.
The one thing that will keep me using the T420 as my “chuck it in the bag” machine is the 1600 x 900 screen and the keyboard, however it’s like a big old lump in comparison. Highly tempted to flog my “everyday” V110 though.
I may get an AC7260, but for what the missus uses it for t’s probably not worth it.
I believe the M2 slot can only take the shorter cards. The Transcend SATA III 6Gb/s M.2 SS MTS400 256GB has been shown to work, so I can’t see why any 2242 shouldn’t. Amazon have a KingDian 240GB for £39 Not a well know name but I’ve bought their 2.5″ SSDs without issue.
Back in January I replaced the ancient CCTV system at the Legion. To view the cameras from behind the bar they had an old TV mounted where everyone in the bar could see it.
So I bought a £85 10.1 Quad Core Android Lollipop Tablet 1280 * 800 IPS screen and mounted it on a stand like you see in shops. It’s on 24 x 7 and has been absolutely excellent.
Integration. Hmm. James Dyson – he of the vacuum cleaner fame – yes he invests in the UK but it’s R & D with massive tax breaks. The manufacturing is done in Malaysia and Singapore and he’s recently opened a Technology Lab in China. That’s why he doesn’t fear Brexit, it doesn’t apply to his business model. Can’t knock it, self made man, go where you can maximise your investment to make yourself even richer. But how rich do you need to be?
He lives on the Dodington Estate near here and is busy buying up as much land as he can (he owns more than the Queen which is saying something). He was asked if he’d like to contribute to the Chipping Sodbury 800th celebrations. No he wouldn’t, but he spends tens of thousands on his own birthday parties to which the locals aren’t invited. But we can watch the helicopters going in and out.
I’m told, from someone who worked for him, that’s he’s the sort of employer who has his feet on the ground but does he integrate with his neighbours? No he doesn’t.
Having worked both in house and then being outsourced your pride in the job is taken away from you. If it’s seen as chargeable, what was routine maintenance is left to moulder. Things like being proactive about disk space running out. Security will usually still be the responsibility of the retained IT but deployed by the outsourcer.
Third parties are brought in to do things like cabling and those third parties will often sub contract, may be many times, until the engineers who turn up don’t give a sh1t about taking things out in working hours etc.
It all becomes about meeting SLAs with fewer and fewer people, because people = cost and costs have to be taken out. It’s often written into the contract that x% of “efficiencies” are to be made cumulatively each year over the life of the contract. Winning bids are usually at less than cost price in the hope of making up the short fall with “project work” i.e. what’s not in the contract.
Bonuses for good work are taken away (except for Senior Management) and / or the goal posts moved so high or the appraisal process made so onerous that they cannot be achieved. Things like the bottom 10% will be at risk of dismissal are brought in (an American trick which didn’t last long in Europe in the face of tribunals). Pension schemes are cut to the bare minimum. Training course are non existent, apart from D-I-Y online ones. In short they don’t give a fig for employee satisfaction.
I loved my job at the Post Office, it was hard work and involved much travelling but was very satisfying. Working for CSC was soul destroying (although my time on the Aircraft Carrier Project was very enjoyable as I was seconded, not outsourced).
From what I’ve seen each client goes off independently doing what its doing then when it’s finished flags it’s free (I believe this is written to a log file on the NFS share). So the absence of the server makes no difference to the client at that stage, it’s got it’s job and gets on with it.
Whether it then picks the next job off the list or the server assigns it I don’t know. My guess would be it’s server assigned to stop conflicts. There is a daemon involved and NFS is not necessary but apparently makes things much simpler.
He keeps taunting me with this via email ?
3 weeks ago I was in a Sam Smiths pub in Holborn – the Princess Louise – sheltering from the rain ? and it wasn’t that cheap!
My local, the Beaufort Arms in Stoke Gifford, always has 10 real ales on pump and their own Ember Inns Pale Ale (3.8%) is £2.49 on a Monday (brewed by Black Sheep). They have loads of the fizzy stuff too, like Peroni and Budweiser, for the girls ?.
The foods not bad either, but a gastro pub it isn’t. The chip tanks are great beer food though. If you find yourself stuck at Bristol Parkway waiting to change trains it’s a 5 minute walk (through the church yard is quickest).
Ah I see. I think the techie may have been answering a different question, aimed at the jobs not the output. Torque uses an NFS server and client shares to co-ordinate the nodes. It may be he’s using the same share as the local target for the job output (I would unless there’s a very good reason not to).
So my guess is it works something like Synology Drive (ex Cloud Station).
Yes, but the question is does it play catch up when the server come back online? Given all the fail safes in Unix file systems, like journalling, my guess would be yes. But that is a guess.
Like Ed I’m wondering more what this clearing the queue is all about?
Not exactly the drop of a hat is it? We have an uncertain future ahead of us, that makes us more of a risk.
I would imagine the client would begin writing where it left off when the connection was lost.
That rang a bell. Just looked it up and their pension fund had a stake in the venture capital firm behind Wonga (that firm also invested in Spotify and Facebook among many others).
Thatcher: “live within your means”
It was during her era that consumer credit was deregulated!
The original was created in Google Drawings and amended using Paint.Net
I use Paint.Net for most things these days.
OK, so the backbone of your network is basically the Powerline, which is what mine used to be. The problem is it’s easy to saturate them and the bandwidth is shared so the more nodes the less bandwidth. If it does what you need then that’s fine, don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. Using an old router as an AP is a great idea.
What I would do these days is use a “mesh” WiFi as the backbone. You only need the units near a mains power supply, after that positioning depends on the physical needs. They create the backbone using 5 Ghz AC 887 and broadcast that and a 2.4 Ghz N 300 locally. Each unit has a Gigabit Ethernet port which can be attached to a device or a switch.
This how we implemented a CCTV system at a farm. All the cameras were mounted on outbuildings with the NVR in one of them too. They were linked internally by a PoE switch or in the case of a single camera directly into the mesh unit. Geographically the farmhouse was the location for the “base” unit (and the monitoring PC) but it wouldn’t really have mattered. Rather than a star formation we could have had an “inline” one or any combination.
The farmhouse had an internal non mesh UAP AC Lite already, but they were all joined together to provide an all encompassing indoor and outdoor network with the cameras on their own secure SSID (VLAN). A guest network is baked into the system that only needs a tick box to turn a SSID into an internet only one.
The AC 887 backbone is running at an average of high 500 mbps, so tons to spare. The real world usage rarely goes over 10%.
I think it’s 100 metres.
We used to route phone cables through a buildings Ethernet network (using a Balun at the desk end). There is no reason you couldn’t make up a Cat 5 cable with an RJ11 plug (there would be unused pairs) for really long cables, but you can buy 25 metre ones off the shelf.
The TP-LINK TL-WA801ND and WA901ND 300 / 450 Mbps Wireless N Access Point comes with a PoE adapter allowing you to place up to 30 metres away. I use these to attach the Sky box and the upstairs bedroom network (PC, X-box) to my main AP.
From Linked In today:
British pharmaceutical companies have been cut out of medicine contracts seven months ahead of Brexit. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has told British companies the long lead-time involved in assessing medicines means it can no longer fulfil lead contracts, as there’s no guarantee the expert would be part of the EU after March 2019. Instead, existing contracts with the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in Britain are being reallocated to bloc members. The EMA has already commenced its move from Britain to new headquarters in Amsterdam, resulting in the loss of 900 roles.
That’s not good for the WD Red series. They used to be my favourite for NAS drives but I moved to Toshiba P300 3TB (HDWD130UZSVA) a while ago for 1 or 2 bay.
WiFi depends a lot on the physical construction of the house and the position of the Access Point. Where your BT socket sits is not usually a good place.
Then you have the device itself and it’s capabilities. An ISPs router should be up to the average household usage in the average house, but push them and they will play up. People try WiFi extenders but often put them in the wrong place. They aren’t a brilliant solution in the first place.
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