Posts by Alan Brown

"is it never possible that Linus is wrong? Does he never say BS?"

He gets things wrong regularly - and admits it, and sometimes calls himself evil names in public for it.

"He needs to learn some social skills."

He's got plenty of social skills. The harsh reality is that being "nice" and using "soothing" language simply results in clues bouncing off the clueless.

Adding a few barbs tends to make them stick.

Re: As I've said before ...

"As long as it works, and has equal performance, and doesn't change the userspace interface."

Linus isn't the only one who'd heave a sigh of relief. Some of those decisions made a long time ago when we were younger, more foolish and had less grey hair seem less smart with 20+ years of hindsight. kernel NFS in particular must die.

"A lot of these rocks, as reported in the Daily Minor Planet newsletter, aren't spotted until they are a few days out from doing their (hopefully) flyby"

At lot more aren't spotted until a few days AFTER their flyby. They're dark and we're blindsided by the sun as they come from that direction. They show up as they go past and are intensely backlit for a few days.

Re: Indeed

"Any major asteroid strike in a populated area will just be mayhem, pure and simple"

Airbursting fragments are worse, believe it or not.

Check out the simulations at https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/the-planetary-scaring-of-the-younger-dryas-impact-event/a-thermal-airburst-impact-structure/

Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...

"About 20 minutes was all I could bear to watch."

It's a pity you didn't. It's deliberately set in a future where the Nazis won(*) and in the style of Triumph of the Will. Once you get into the meat of the piece it's clear that it's an antiwar film.

(*) Didn't you notice everyone was blonde and aryan? Including the troopers from Buenos Ares?

Re: Windows for Worgroups

"Except most definitely NOT TV aerial cable which was 75 ohm when network cable was 50 ohm."

ARCnet was 75 ohm (and only 2MB/s). A lot of older Netware installations used it

(the installations I encountered used genuine Novell cards)

"they would sprint to the user concerned to get there before the keyboard got smashed into the screen, or worse."

User destroys his system. Very much a "not my monkeys. not my circus" event.

"we end up dealing with multiple upgrades and obsolete cable runs, often with little and/or poor documentation."

Documenting everything is part of the job. if it's not done, then make sure the contract includes sorting this out.

manglement will buy it if you explain that spending N hours sorting this out _and_ forcing subsequent work to be documented properly will save N+M hours later on, especially when shit and fan have a smelly encounter.

"after a stern talking to by Someone Senior in Ops Management."

The stern talking to should happen _before_ they're allowed near the cables.

If this kind of event happens before the talking to, then it's a _management_ failure. Afterwards it's just a pink slip event.

Re: So ...

"There's better ways of dealing with such issues than bringing the place to its knees and firing people the moment someone plugs in an unauthorised laptop."

Yup. If someone plugs an unauthorised laptop into _MY_ network, they'll find they can't do anything. They can plug into as many wallports as they like across the site, they'll get the same result, but putting the authorised device in will work instantly.

If they get clever and plug a hub into the wallport, the system will either disable the port the moment a second device is connected or (at my discretion), continue working but disallow the unauthorised devices. I don't like the latter option as it opens the possibility of sniffing.

Gotta love 802.1x

It still sets an alarm, but there's no need to shut the site down.

Re: So ...

"Now ask me what I think of BYOD ..."

It's perfectly fine as long as you can ensure that the BYOD is attached to a different network to the internal one if plugged into a wallport or attaching via Wifi (dynamic Vlan assignment via radius)

Giving staff a sandboxed network to run their personal kit which doesn't touch the internal one but gives a modicum of Internet solves a number of issues with people doing stupid things.

Re: What is this ?

"All of which go out of date about 5 minutes after you walk away from the machine. Or so long and bitter experience tell me.."

There's plenty of software to keep up with that. GLPI + Fusioninventory is a good (cheap) starting point.

Re: What is this ?

Presumably this was in the days of hubs rather than switches.

Even if _i_ don't know where a device is located, Netdisco will nail it to X switch Y port and each one of those has the cable plugged into it as the description field.

It only cost 130k to sort the network out, but I'm happy.

Re: There's a fix for this

"Two words: hanging chads."

1: The USA is one of the few countries worldwide where voters punched a tabulating card.

2: That wouldn't have been an issue if the bloody things were maintained.

Re: Now watch the companies chaff clouds

> I recall way back then, when motorolla introduced the 68000 series, hearing of a company using the 6809 as a "display processor".

Z80s live on as the core logic of many keyboards (Which led to some fun'n'games fitting rechargeable battery packs to Atari ST keyboards to keep the daytime clock running when the computer was switched off (yes, the CMOS clock lived in the keyboard))

6809s were/are popular because they were more-or-less a system on a chip and didn't need much external glue logic.

Re: Babelfish

"it wasn't computerised it was purely rostrum camera."

Considering _when_ the series was produced, that shouldn't be a surprise. The real surprise is how so many digital effects try to ape it.

Re: In my day they called it Vaporware

"Vaporware was a popular term in the first decades of personal computing, "

What do you mean "was"?

We get a regular stream of salestwunts trying to flog us stuff (invariable only for MS platforms, which we don't use) and if we're bored we like to start asking technical questions about the product, usually to find that XYZ feature isn't ready yet and will be in version 2.0, etc.

It's on par with pulling the wings off flies, but more satisfying.

Re: Talking while driving is a moving violation

"I admit driving 110 mph last night the cops can't show up and give me a ticket,"

However if they seize your phone and find it was recording your travels & confirmed the speed, or if you were stupid enough to film it, they can.

It's happened a few times.

"The Spanish governor of Guam discovered that Spain was at war with the US when he woke up one morning to see lots of American ships in the harbor."

Similarly the newly independent Philippines discovered Spain was at war with the US the same way - and that they were no longer independent. (This is where the americans perfected waterboarding as a torture treatment about 1902 and first discovered that fighting an insurgency can take several decades)

Re: Ah nuuu Cheeki Breeki!

What should be of more interest is that someone was apparently controlling the website whilst young Roman was in a coma.

There's more to this case than the feds are letting on.

Re: ID10T

The most successful fraudsters have victims gladly throwing money at them, and refuse to believe they're being scammed.

Take a look at the darker history of many of the USA's more high-profile evangalists.

Re: Groan...

"because flammable batteries wouldn't have to be transported as far."

Solid state LI-Ion batteries don't catch fire. You can chop a fully charged one up and it won't burn. You can overdischarge one and it won't gas up.

There are already some on the market. the limit they have is lower absolute charge/discharge rates but this is improving all the time.

In the meantime you can avoid Li-Ion battery fires by not allowing the to discharge past about 30%, as it's from this point they seem to start developing lithium dendrites.

Re: So where would that leave developing a sugar solution fuel cell?

"If you are serious about environmental issues, then direct renewable electricity generation and storage is the way to go for most temperate countries"

If you actually do your homework about the _true_ lifecycle costs of windpower and environmental costs of solar PV, you'd say:

"If you are serious about environmental issues, then Nuclear power generation is the way to go for most temperate countries, preferably using safer generation 5 MSR systems - but as they're not commercially developed yet we'll have to make do with existing tech until they are."

Re: Working as intended

"That said, do you need to do a hot wash very often? "

if you don't hot wash regularly you'll get a nasty biofilm buildup inside your machine and things start to _smell_. Those of us with skin conditions often get them aggravated by such things, especially when compounded by the lack of outdoor drying facilities in dense urban settings (Also, if you happened to live in central Wellington in the 1980s and were near the motorway, putting your clothes out to dry would frequently result in them coming in covered in sooty flakes. The same applies lots of other places)

Besides, if you wash at 30-40c with a cold powder you can use less than half as much. The overall impact of generating the hotwater is lower than that of the extra detergent in your waste stream.