Posts by Mike Pellatt

Re: Hand cranked code?

IIRC MS Publisher could also output crap

FTFY

Real issue I think is a quick and effective means of saying Oy! this email is genuine which the spammers won't find a way around in milliseconds.

Good luck with that.

Re: Idiology: the beliefs of idiots

Much the same with building control here.

Whilst not wishing to pre-empt the conclusions of the inquiry - it does seem Grenfell is (partly) a result of this.

And the Tories, without a hint of irony, still speak of a "bonfire of regulations".

Re: How do you hold a supplier to account?

"If you refuse to work with them again, you run out of contractors because the number of companies in any area of industry capable of taking on a hundred million pound project can be counted on the fingers of one hand."

See "Railway franchising"

Re: Joining the Lib Dems

Absolutely. So it left in place the uber-tribal party system with the execrable Whips' offices.

This is why she voted the way she did - it's the only way to climb the greasy pole.

Re: Uneven Distribution

Indeed. It's never (fortunately) happened to me, but that bland assertion he comes out with that "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to be worried about" flies in the face of all the, errr, evidence.

Incredible that a 21st century copper should actually come out with that. No self-awareness whatsoever.

Re: Whats this BT company?

I did think if we could use share and host multiple instances of Zoneminder

Immediately has visions of Hot Fuzz and the Neighbourhood Watch

Re: um

Chapter 11 puts an automatic hold on civil proceedings unless specifically lifted (on petition to the bankruptcy court)

As those of us who followed tSCOg aka Canopy vs The World learnt.

Re: A raft of senior techies

Hipster, bullshit ideas

All to be coded in JS, no doubt.

Re: scaling up is the answer?

Talk on JET at the IET last night.

Power out/Power in is "Q". Jet manages a Q of around 0.6. ITER is targetting 10. But this is just the plasma power in/out ratio. It ignores the power used by the excitation systems and, of course, losses in energy extraction for Useful Work.

For a commercial system, you need a Q of 30. So ITER is the next step on the road towards that. But it won't get there.

The Stellerator is the interesting shape you describe. The (quite believable) view of the tokamak guys is that they will be very difficult to maintain given their shape.

Re: We should have just let dodgy banks go bust and pony up compensation [..]

All of Lehman Brothers top 100 (if not top 500) managers deserve 20 year stretches apiece.

You know all of Lehman Brothers unsecured creditors were repaid 100% in 2014, and since have been paid interest ??

Not saying that they behaved ethically, but it turns out that on unwinding things, it wasn't quite so bad.

PWC made a tidy penny out of it......

Re: Sigh.. if that floats your goat...

Just remember that your convo with the London cabbie must always, always commence with

"Been busy tonight, mate ?"

Re: This reminds me of when...

Indeed they were. My saviour when all that was available just round the corner from Borough Market was EO lines. Their bonded ADSL product was superb value for money. Of course $ky dropped that.

Reborn as Hyperoptic (same management team) in case you weren't aware. Funnily enough, migrated from said bonded ADSL to a 100Mbps Hyperoptic business connection at a stupidly low price.

Whereas the lightweight 5G techs blather on about fibre replacement, and rural broadband.

Then Government and "regulators" latch on and so sensible rural broadband (except for the B4RN model) gets dropped for wireless USO. Bleah.

Re: They knew who sent the e-mail - Were they sacked?

There's a difference between overseeing and trying to directly influence.

A world of difference.

If you can't see that, you're as bad as what seems to be 90% of our local councillors. I know of what I speak, having been one once.

It's also those (apparent) 90% who ensure that morale and service quality in our local government remain appalling.

British public life absolutely gets it right in principle. The elected body sets policy, and ensure that the resources are available to deliver it, the paid staff implement it. Of course, in local government that all falls apart thanks to the responsibility/authority mismatch enforced on LG by Westminster - all of the responsibility to deliver delegated, none of the authority to ensure adequate resourcing delegated.

Re: What's the problem....

The bands used by WiFi, Bluetooth etc are unregulated.

No, they're not. They're not even really unlicensed. They're more accurately described as license-free. But you're not allowed to pump out 100MW ERP on them (for instannce), so they are regulated.

All HMG websites are beta.

No they're not.

Some are alpha. See the Dartford Crossing Payment page.

52 months since it went live. And counting.

"That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that" - Zaphod Beeblebrox

Re: Who the hell uses Linux

And FreeBSD isn't a bundle of userland from different developers ???

Re: Age discrimination

16 ??

I joined the school CCF and ran around a local beauty spot on "exercises" firing .303 blanks when I was 14.

Re: Remind me again why ...

it's difficult to extract yourself from it if you get wrapped into it

And therein lies the real issue.

Remind me again whose data it is.

Re: Nooooooooooooo

158.152.1.222 (the "virtual" default route for any demon ROMP, IIRC, after one Network Tidying Purge by them) was my goto test IP to ping for many a year until it finally disappeared. Now it's just 8.8.8.8 :-(

Re: Exchange takedown from a single message isn't new. . . .

Remind me again how to configure Sendmail to perform message storage for MUAs

(Not to say that Sendmail wasn't a PoS for many, many years. But that really is an apples and oranges comparison)

Re: Network tests

That "always" bit is so true.

Sometime around 1984, I was at seminars or training (I forget which) on the new stuff in Unix System V Release 3. This included AT&T's "competitor" to NFS, RFS (Remote File System) together with, of course, a whole new layer to support it - FSS (File System Switch - which Unix couldn't do before that). I remember asking the RFS guys a question over the FSS functionality which would clearly have significant impact on RFS (again, I forget exactly what - but it was critical). The guys said they knew absolutely nothing about the FSS implementation, just the interface they were developing against.

Doomed, Capt Mainwaring, we're all doomed.

Or even if it was.

See "PS/3 Linux"

Re: -->Please don't. You're only encouraging that Fry chap.

Fry just thinks he's very clever.

There, FTFY.

They point the train in the right direction ??? <shrug>

I'm really, really, really not going to get into a debate over the two versions of English.

It is what it is. Neither is right. Neither is wrong.

They're valves to me, and I'm quite happy with them being tubes to you.

Courgettes to me, zuchini to you.

Aubergine to me, eggplant to you.

etc. etc. etc.

Re: Routers are not firewalls

Nope, routers are indeed not firewalls.

But NAT has persuaded far too many people that they are.

(I remember NAT capability being introduced into the Linux IPv4 code. Just as I needed it to solve an issue a customer at the time had)

Re: Dumb execution to be sure, but:

Not when it comes to encrypted data-at-rest, no.

Re: “A trip to Wookey Hole“

And for some bizarre reason, advertised on the A303, which at its nearest point is some 20 miles away.

Re: From A&A to Z?

Or no mention of equally-equally good IDnet. My only downer on A&A is their cost of traffic, but I fully understand their business model and why they do it.

Bizarrely, a recent survey by Not Connecting Devon & Somerset At All had A&A in the ISP list but not IDnet.

Re: America

I was looking for the famous Gotts assault case, where a member of the Jackie crew was assaulted by a Post Office employee (in those days it was the GPO who issued and enforced radio licenses) and found it here

Ah, them were the days.....

I admit to having a few rooms wired up with smart lights and Nest, but I made sure I still have an actual light switch on the wall as well as a thermostat!

Abso-fucking-lutely. All my Fibaro dimmers are wired up to real switches as well. As making the summerhouse watertight, the garden looking decent, replacing safety-critical stuff (like the power socket wired with 1mm cable...) is more critical than whizzy smarthome stuff, getting all the Z-Wave stuff working to OpenHAB is a back-burner job.

I do have buyers' regret over the Honeywell EvoHome, because of its reliance on Honeywell servers for the smarts and their non-publication of the API, but then that was bought when we were planning to holiday let the place.....