* Posts by Boris the Cockroach

3404 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: In hindsight

Quote

"If adding more borders was such a bloody good idea, everybody would be doing it."

Best hope you stuff does'nt come from scotland then....

California’s net neutrality rules good to go after judge boots Big Cable’s lawsuit

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: A question about cost:value of access in the US

Go buy a decent 3rd party router , and set the VM modem to 'cable only' mode.

Makes a world of difference, as the crummy belkin of doubtful vintage I use as a 3rd party router gives far better wi-fi coverage in the house that VM's inbuilt one... plus it does'nt do random drop outs every so often

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

All hail

Emperor Musk.... . on pain of death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqVgrkmRF8Y

Forget GameStop: Keyboard warriors and electronic trading have never mixed well

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Alert

You want a real

oh no second... trying several 100 thousands pounds worth of industrial equipment.. and you're the sucker programming it.

And you hit the oh no second.... and you dont know if its just gonna trip out with a wimpy error message, or attempt to spin the robots arm around at 6000 rpm because you forgot the unclamp command.....

ah... the joys of proper programing.... ;)

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Hooray

About time these new 'disrupting' industries were brought back to earth with a heavy dose of reality.

You see the use of 'gig' workers is nothing more than using casual labour for jobs, the old docks practise of hiring people by the day springs to mind where 200 dock workers would have to turn up at 7am to start work only for the dock owners to say "we only need 50 today" and those 50 would get 1 days pay and no benefits, the next day it might be 150 workers needed or none.

My boss could use such an employment method to cover the high demands periods, but to his credit he wont, he'll say to the temps "I need you for 4 weeks work", and 4 weeks work is what he'll pay regardless if demand slacks off or we complete the job in 3 weeks, but we haven't needed temps in ages(partly covid , partly the level of automation)

As for uber.. suck it up and pay the benefits, it you cant make a profit , then maybe your whole idea is crap, especially when so many older taxi firms seem to be in business....

House Republicans introduce legislation for outright ban on municipal broadband in the US

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Quote:

"The Republican Party seems to be composed of idiots."

No it isn't, its composed of some very clever people bought entirely by the corporate lobbies

hence bills like this.

How do they get the votes in then? easy... use words like 'freedom' 'patriotism' 'flag waving' 'evil socialism' , 'low taxes' , "support our troops" and then claim the democrats are going to enslave the population in gulags, force everyone to worship <insert whatever is seen as evil of the week>, and kill all our babies.

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

Last time I saw

soldering that bad was when I was a 16yr old apprentice... and it was me doing it shortly before having my instructor kick my arse and being made to do it properly.

And that was'nt even on stuff expected to fly (except when the instructor got really pissed off and threw it out of the window)

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

No choice

Its not my boss is an old stuck in the mud.... its just difficult to get a 5&1/2 ton robot through the front door, let alone the noise it creates while running will keep everyone awake 24/7.

Love to be able to do the CAD bit of my job from home, sadly having to sort problems every 5 mins means I'm stuck at work.......... forever...

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

Fears

of a screw up with Nvidia releasing a new driver for my 3060ti that cripples its performance* rather than some random coin miner....

*Not that I'd notice at first....... KSP runs fine on my old rig...

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I'm with the aussies

and tell farcebork to get lost.

If they pay someone to write news articles and publish them, no problem

If they pay the news sites for links to articles, no problem.

If they think they can grab everything on the internet for free, then publish it with ads and get money for those ads, farcebork can f off.

And their ad algorithms suck anyway.... enquire about the best place to buy a new PC, get PC ads in your feed for the next 3 months.........

Another reprieve for exhausted IT admins: Looks like there are no whizzbangers in Windows 10 21H1

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

Re: Remind me

Its a m$ product?

UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

I suspect the

kiss of death here is that his employer paid him an extra % based on the sales of the software.

And he got all pissy because they stopped paying him the % when he left...

Hey, maybe we should all be cat-faced eco-warriors on our daily video chats

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: All we need is ....

I have pointed out the stupidity of that move by Germany, because when they need extra power (such as the past week) its either generated by nuclear (in France) or by burning the most polluting coal on the planet from Poland.

I could write a decent fiction novel using the above plotline, sadly the publishers would reject it as "Unbelievable... nobody is THAT stupid"

President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Skilled workers

ahhh you mean expensive workers,

because you cant take a burger flipper for example out of the grill on Friday and have him being able to produce chips on Monday.

You will have to train them,, and thats before even building any fabs.

All of which takes money, which the companies wont spend in the US because to build a fab in a 3rd world country, and staff it at 3rd world wages with 3rd world contracts(12hr shifts Mon-Sat anyone?) is a lot cheaper than having to comply with health and safety, working hours things, and enviromental controls too

Amazon sues NY Attorney General in preemptive strike: Web giant faces claim it did not fully protect workers in COVID-19 pandemic

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: They make a convenient bogeyman though…

Trouble is that 90% of the population fit nicely in the the '50 yrs of wage slavery' catagory.

ok its good for the 9% your other son fits into(they just make him want more expensive trinkets and junk so he ends up just as broke and in debt as the other 90%)

All amazon are doing is supplying stuff at the cheapest price they can get away with and not caring whether suppliers can make a profit,

What defines us as a society is what to do about the likes of amazon et al.

Do we allow them to exploit their workers to the nth degree or do we force them to treat their employees as human beings? and if they can treat 1 employee as a more valuable than gold, and the rest of them as disposable slaves , what does that say about amazon as a company....

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

There

looks like there is an obstruction in your lane, would you like clippy to help you? please answer before continuing to drive.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday gaffe leads netizens to 'Microosft' typo-squatting domain

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
WTF?

Are all these

tech giants outsourcing their programming to the same crappy code shop?

One has to wonder

Minister tells the House of Lords it'll be another 12 weeks before UK's deleted criminal records can be restored

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

They're probally

figuring out a way to hire crapita for the job.....

UK college courses show decade-long surging interest in computer science – just as new intake was locked down

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

When are

we getting the flood of applicants to us engineering types (we're the E bit in STEM).

Oh yeah we're looked down on even by the IT guys locked in the basement where the servers are kept (mind you, cant blame 'em... today's activities at Roaches 'r us injernears were fixing a burst oil hose , mopping up said oil spill, removing the oil contaminated coolant from the sump, cleaning the pickup filters while I was there and refilling.... and that before the complaints about oily hands on the new laptop started ... )

The problem is that all technical type jobs require people to be trained up to do them, which takes time (and money) and said techies need experience at coping with the job whether its writing a recursive program to do a backup of the current databases or repairing said hose without complaining(too much)

Much easier to waffle on in a non technical role while noticing that manglement all seem to be from the non technical side and paid way more than the techies.

plus its easier on the brain/cleaning bill than struggling to debug code/get the damn hose to fit even if its the same damn part number as the busted one. grrrrrr

War on Section 230 begins in earnest as Dem senators look to limit legal immunity for social networks, websites etc

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Free speech?

Only if you run the servers...

But what is 'free' in free speech? do you allow anything you agree with to be published and anything you dont like to be censored?

I once posted on farcebork a picture of 100 toilet rolls with the caption "Covid-19 spreads via toilet rolls" (posted in response to the great toilet roll panic of march 2020), within seconds it had a "fake news" sticker slapped on it by farcebork.

Next comes along someone whos posted up something along the lines of "dominion voting machines were rigged to reject republican votes", this posting remains up and unfiltered even now.

So it seems that farcebork does exercise editorial control of whats posted on the site, therefore already falls outside section 230.

But going back to my first point, who sets the rules as to whats allowed and what is'nt...... because if you just ban people for being racist twats, you can't challenge their thinking with "Then how come you were cheering on those black guys playing for England last week"

Rubbish software security patches responsible for a quarter of zero-days last year

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: "We need correct and comprehensive patches for all vulnerabilities from our vendors," she said.

I can only upvote this once, but I'd cheerfully upvote this 1000 times.

In my game , there are no bugs in the code, if our boss wants 20 000 widgets made , then the code must be right.

We test.. and we test, and we run slow motion tests, verify tool paths, verify the robots are coming in and clamps are firing in the right order, because its not a case "oh well.. whats a bit of data loss?" but the likelyhood of pieces of metal being fired out of the machines if we get it wrong.. (and yes, it does happen)

Again with our customers, they know if they screw up, its not a matter of "oh well lets patch it", its a case of "oh f*** the landing gear is staying up because numb nut didnt design the correct clearences when they sent the parts to be made"

Until software is treated as a proper branch of engineering, you will always get the bugs, but the correct mindset in the first place will say "we will get bugs.. but we will test them out of existence before the product has a chance of losing all your data/flying the aircraft into the ground"

Chrome 89 beta: Google presses on with 'advanced hardware interactions' that Mozilla, Apple see as harmful

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

Looking at the

RS232 bit , I'm thinking "eeeeeeeeeeeeeek Stuxnet made easy"

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Also

Some of us are dredging up their C knowledge from 20 odd years ago and then writing it in pseudo code

(remember I'm a Java/ robot programmer )

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Should have

wrapped it up in a nice decent func with its own set/get commands

Set buffer(data)

If data > 128 throw exception (you're an idiot)

etc etc etc

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Wow that

escalated quickly.

From "lets get these vaccines out" to export bans, threats, and throwing various Irish treaties out of the window.

Just goes to show that when you appoint someone into a position of power , that does not mean that they are any more qualified for the position than someone voted in by us mere plebs.

And remember the head of the commision was appointed, she was "elected" to the position because the EU parliment got a list of condidates for the job that was 1 person long, and while she was the head of the German defence department, she proved rather useless at that job too.

And if our government had 1 ounce of common sense , they should be saying "You can have 100% of our output of the vaccine after our population is jabbed(or we have enough doses in stock to jab everyone)"

No cards, thanks, we're contactless-less: UK supermarket giants hit by card payment TITSUP*

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I suffered

yesterday .... jeez the no waving of a card.... the horror of having to put the card in the machine and type my PIN on an ikky keyboard (paise whatever for the foresight of rubber gloves )

oh well... back to cash it is... wont be long before we're exchanging rocks again

Wheres the 'end of civilisation" icon?

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

I with

the hold on to it crowd.

My last phone (galaxy S3) lasted until the battery died and the USB charging slot was knackered (I could replace both and have a usuable phone ) and I went for a samsung galaxy J3... based not on technical capabilites , or on contract price etc etc , but based on what was the smallest phone that could safely live in my jeans pocket.

Its worked very well and even though its coming up on 4yrs old, still holds a charge, does the job and I see no reason to change.

But then I'm an old fogey and not impressed with the need to have the latest 'bling'

And it can play missile command too ... eeekk smart bombs :D

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Flame

Kwalifried sparky

Yes been there ,been on the receiving end

Assurred that the house had 2 rings and the upstairs ring had its fure removed....attempted to disconect power socket only to have my best electrical screwdriver explode in a blinding blue flash

Upon recovering my eyesight and ceasing to swear at the hapless houseowner who'd employed said 'sparky'.... I found there was only 1 ring and he'd wired each of the ring into 2 different fuses.....

2 years later when the kitchen was rebuilt , I found further work.... a spur off the ring, feeding into 2 more spurs and a further spur off of one of those.

Feeding things like kettles, deep frier, washing machine , cooker oven.. etc etc etc.

Ended up rewiring the entire place

Flames .. because the houseowners were lucky their place didnt go up in them

Tesla axes software engineer for allegedly pilfering secret Python scripts after just three days on the job

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

New worker same old

Fired for being an idiot I think would be closer to the truth

I mean, who installs dropbox(or any other cloudy backup) without knowing its going to start leeching copies of your files...

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

Re: Not all countries are founded on socialist beliefs

I often wonder at the levels of thought involved in posting stuff on the internet

Do people take a considered approach to their typing, or simply bash out the first thing that comes into the head.

there is NO freedom of speech if you are using someone else's printer/website/cloudy computers to publish your speech, you have to agree with the terms and conditions when you buy their service, and if the terms state "No hate/racist speech" and you put something racist up, they have a right to terminate your use of their services

As for the whole "other people have a different viewpoint" thats a bit rich coming from someone who seems to support the whole "stolen election" thing when more people of another viewpoint voted for a new president and you went "whaaaa not fair"

Anyways , as the US has a new president in charge, I guess its time to do 2 things, sit back and relax now an adult has the job, and look up stuff I can use to make fun of Biden

Have a nice life

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Hmm ...

We use touchpads now.

At least we would if you did'nt have to scrape a coating of grease and god knows what off them, on the bright side , you'd never get covid on them...

Wheres the vomit icon?

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

I bought a new keyboard on Tuesday

Its dead now

My cup needs refilling

Android 10 ported to homegrown multi-core RISC-V system-on-chip by Alibaba biz, source code released

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Terminator

Oh god no

More shite interfaces for industrial gear...

"Your robot appearing to being killing the operator, would you like to read this ad before continuing onto the emergency stop screen?"

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Not really the brightest bulb, was he?

But just like F1 suspension structs , they are very storng and very rigid in the direction the forces are ment to go. in other directions... not so much.

for example, take the blade edge.... its not designed to go through anything but air, put a drone in the way and.... who knows.... once you've got a crack forming in the blade from slicing the drone in 1/2, its very easy to see that crack spreading across the blade due to the action of the blade during flight... and oh look 4 mins after impact the end 15 feet of the blade goes off for a wander by itself.... at which point gravity takes a very great interest in the chopper (gravity gets scared away from choppers by the noise.. thats how they fly.. any less noise and gravity comes back)

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Geeks versus Politicians

Thats a very false idea.

The 1st amendment states that the government cannot restrict the peoples right of free speech.

However amazon is not the government, what you put on there has to agree with the terms and conditions of the contract you sign with amazon.... so amazon can pull the site if its hosting something thats outside the terms of the contract.

There is nothing the US government could do if parler bought themselves some servers, an office, and started running the service from that.

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

A relative

mentioned he was on a PAYG deal with his phone, a quick look showed that he was paying about £25-30 month for it. And not being technically very alert, thought that was a good deal.

Sim only contract from 3 (surprisingly) 12 quid a month 12 gig of data and a shedload of texts/phone calls, and I'm damn sure theres better deals to be had out there.

Oh and steal the work's wifi for updates/ large games ;)

Boffins store text message inside E coli bacteria using electromagnetic signal – and you'll never guess what it says

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Domestos* - kills 99% of all known computer bugs ;o)

Quote

"After all, the thing about living cells is that eventually they evolve."

Into what?

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

1st amendment

only applies to the government.

If you sign up to use farcebork or twatter or amazonian forest servers , then you have to abide by the T&C they say.. as they are private organisations not government. dont abide... they have the right to pull the plug (just wish they'd done it sooner)

As for Trump, most of the US citizens I know (from both democrat and republican sides ) are all of one opinion..... what the hell is trumpy still doing in the white house....

Buggy code, fragile legacy systems, ill-conceived projects cost US businesses $2 trillion in 2020

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: To quote someone I know

Quote:

"I wonder what would happen if modern "developers" were put on 1970's / 1980's (or even 1990's) systems and told to write a stock control application (or a spaceship flight control program). You only have 1MHz of CPU, 128K or RAM and a 20Mb hard disk. Users are connected via RS232 terminals of a variety of types and in a variety of locations and you can't claim FrAgile development methodologies and you can't access the Internet to research things. The space spec would be far lower."

Seems a pretty easy challenge , I'll do the low level RS232 comms section first since thats what I'm good at heh.

Although considering your idea to be a valid one, I think it would be better if the application under development should be motion control of large bits of machinery, or critical flight or nuclear plant control stuff.

Write bad code here and you will kill people, that will teach 'coders' to do stuff right, and then make manglement personally liable for any bad code that gets through QC as well.

might make people sit up and pay attention, but then it all falls back to cost.... bid to build a website, sub it out to the cheapest coders you can find, pocket the money and move on.

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I'm a coder

Java, smattering of C/C++, Basic (hah) and Z80 assembly, also Heidenhain TNC, and Fanuc ISO code and mastercam(spit)

In my job, you have to do it right, theres no second chances with "Just run the code and hope", that way lies much insanity (and a shedload of very expensive machinery lunching itself), we have to test, and test again, and then make sure we've even specified what tool holding to use (gets fun fitting a 40 mm dia tool down a 30 mm hole at 10000 rpm... and yes we had someone do that).

But thats the correct way to program/design our work, theres no short cut, no publish and hope, and it always boils down to how much the company is willing to spend on skilled staff...

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Eye of an eagle

Its more fun just to lean against the machine , and then say "Its about to blow up"

The nay sayers will chorus, and about 20 secs later it goes down

Impressed a machine salesman/tool seller after his 1/2hr speech about how this new tech was the dogs balls and save us umpteen 100's in production.

Started the test job, it did 1 part and told him "it wont do 2".... "naaaayy it will do hundreds of " <BANG>

Exit salesman stage left.

sometimes its good to be a geek

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Not just money

The original idea of the EU was the european Iron and coal confederation

A plan put forward in 1948-49 to tie french coal/iron ore production to germany's steel production, binding the french and german economies so tightly together that any attempt at war would destroy their own country first.

Because europe had been trashed twice in 30 years at that point by french/german rivalries (and thats not including the wars in the 1800's too ......)

Trade yes... but political union without the consent of the governed....no

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

The big question here

is

"Does it goto 11?"

PS I'm very sorry for the constant Spinal tap jokes... but had to watch it again recently......

18" stonehenge bwwwhahahahahahhahahahahha

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

Which

country are we at war with?

Because I'm now thinking that about 50% of the staff are in fact enemy agents intent on destroying any production whatso ever...

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: 20 year old tech...

Quote:

"you couldn't have free trade with the EU unless you conformed with the EU's laws"

Funnily enough, the stuff we send abroad has to comply with US* regs.... or it does'nt go

we have no say on what those regulations are, nor any vote on who gets to set the regulations in the first place, and yet we trade with the US very successfully

We make the product(well part of it) it gets assembled, tested, exported. And hopefully money comes back.

If the product goes into the EU (which it does), then it has to comply with EU rules, if they change the rules to specifically exclude the product, then they will be excluding 2 or 3 rival US products as well....

*insert any number of countries here

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: 3

Its when you find 11 in the machine/network...

But then everything is better when it goes to 11 ... right?

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
WTF?

Re: SteamOS

Quote

"Yes you can install Steam for Linux on Ubuntu or even Fedora but it is a load of faffing. This isn't even remotely as easy to do as it is on Windows."

Ermm for mint its

Click software manager

Type steam into search box(assuming it does'nt pop up on the menu of programs)

Click install button

Login

Windows

Goto steam website

Download installer

Find where IE has hidden the installer

Run it

Login

Hmmm not much choice there really is there...

US Department of Homeland Security warns American business not to use Chinese tech or let data behind the Great Firewall

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Not long to wait

Quote

"I can't believe the large-mass, high-capability Ariane rockets would also be used for nuclear ICBM rockets. Not only are they hugely over-capable, most liquid fuels, even if not cryogenic, are highly-corrosive, can't be stored for long periods in regular tanks. Solid rocket fuel is much better for ICBMs."

In the first days of ICBMs it could take 20hrs to fill and prep a missile to launch with liquid fuels ... which is fine if you want to fire at the enemy 1 day after you've said "stop within 24hrs or you'll die"

Sadly it came to notice that you could secretly fill your rockets up, fire them at the enemy and he gets 8-10 mins warning before his rockets get blown up... hence the need for solid fuel rockets that could launch the instant the pyrotechnic ignition charges go off inside the thing.

Arriance rockets as ICBMs? only if you're aiming at the alien moonbase on the far side and they've got laser guns to shoot down incoming rockets

Hong Kong's Hutchison Group, which runs mobile carrier ‘3’, protests as USA puts it on new China ban list

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: we'll be ejecting his slimey kiester out

I think that the secret service will carry him out of the white house at 12.01 just after Biden starts his term, as trump will have returned to being a private citizen and therefore not authorised to be on US government property

Of course he can kick and scream like a 3 yr old.... but once Biden is sworn in, the US military aint gonna listen to trump.

I think in 4 yrs time , its going to be amazing how many republicans will being saying "trump? I never supported him"

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

If mask

wearing had been mandated in March , did we have enough masks to supply the NHS AND the population?

Was there enough manufacturing to make the masks?

If the answers to the above questions are no, who would you suggest gets priority in being supplied with a mask?

In any case, given the speed the UK borders have been closed by various countries.... its strange how when the Wuhan virus jumped from china to outbreak in Italy back in Feb/March, no one jumped up and shut the borders/closed travel down.....

Oh well back to waiting for me jab