* Posts by chris street

96 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2009

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The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

chris street

"No mainstream domestic ISP offer includes a router configured for failover"

Zen Internet. Comes with a router that will failover, and back automatically to a plugged in 5G dongle.

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

chris street

Re: Doesn't TrueNAS Scale work just as well on the HP Microservers?

You can easily buy ram for the N40L though secondhand, and not something that is going to be unreliable if you get it from the larger server parts companies. I was paying about £8 a stick for 8GB ones with ECC that will go in a microserver, certainly worth the upgrade. They are a PITA to get the motherboard out of though for sure.

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

chris street

Re: The Master of understatement

Fortunatly for me, that means the the civilised part of the UK is free from the effects of a half ton of burnt battery arriving.

Those south of Watford though - well you take your chances!

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

chris street

Re: Simple solution?

Why not? Thats excatly how it works in the UK/EU if Amazon sell something dodgy, they are liable.

Not stopped them from being an enourmous retail force here either.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

chris street

The fact that it was a heavy item of kit should have been enough to require two people to install, or remove it. Even with a hoist no one should be expected to be able to move that amount around safely on their own. I'd have to look but 18kg was the limit I think when I was racking and mving stuff in datacentres. Also we were not allowed to take all the HDD's out to reduce the mass either not after the Great Hard Drive Shower fiasco where we managed to spill a stack over over a hundred onto a concrete floor.

Robert I think is lucky that he also didn't get a interview without tea and biscuits, as there seems to be a distinct lack of the supervisory element here...

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

chris street

Re: How to improve AI training in one easy step

However, UK law makes it perfectly clear that you must provide drivers name, address, and index mark of the vehicle, plus the owners name and address if different, so your account above doesnt exactly sound correct.

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

chris street

When Snap gives me something useful over apt - I might use it. But I dont want updates outside my control, I like a lightweight environment, and I dont like the bloat and increased startup time. I dont need cross distro working.

Now if it was an alternative that would be fine. But Ubuntu stuffs it down my throat and makes me use it - yes there are workarounds but if wanted to do that I'd be faffing about with Windows.

So I use Mint.

This is not an anti Ubuntu postion. It's just the consequences of their choices.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

chris street

You mean like Zen internet?

Unlocked router - that gets firmware updates regularly.... and you can buy another unlocked one off the shelf if you want and mesh it out the box....

And they don't connect in... and encourage you to fiddle... as long as you are responsible they don't give a hoot what you are using....

There are still some good ISP's out there.

chris street

That sounds like you should be reporting them for an offence under the Computer Misuse Act.... except the ploddery wont be able to figure that out and will go "Thats a civil matter sir"

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

chris street

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

For many many years the introverted people have just wished that the extroverts would shut the f*** up and let them get on with work. And now that the extraverts cannot interrupt people at pleasure, they don't like it one bit...

Daily standups - why do we have these? Whats the point? It's to make sure that everyone has everything sorted for a days work ahead - a days uninterrupted work. Because thats when you get the most work out of people - clear the blockers out the way, plan the day, and if Bob needs some help, he says so at standup and Alice schedules time in for him and agrees it. If there are critical problems in the day, then Trudy goes to the scrummaster and Mohammed finds the duty person and passes the urgent cannot wait problem to the duty person Terry to sort out.

No one should need to be interrupted at the desk at all....

chris street

You pay us for our ability - not for some arbitrary distance I am from your office. Want to screw me on that. I'm paying for my own heat and lights and internet - you can pony up for that thanks then. Two can pay that game.

My contract is to do the work put in front of me. I had an employer chose to do exactly what you decided.

I left. And it wasnt amicable. That cost them a lot of consultancy fees to pick up after I was gone because their ego decided to summarily dismiss me.

That cost them a lump sum instead of wages - because their ego decided to summarily dismiss me.

Just remember when you think as an employer that you hold all the power.

You don't. Theres a big shortage in tech areas, and employees have the power now.

chris street

Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?

A global pandemic with immediate effects has never happened since 1948 either....

chris street

Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?

And yet this paper from the same institute shows the exact opposite.....

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101022720/https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

chris street

Re: Not holding my breath

Thats great, that nice. And for those of us who cannot walk or cycle what then? We just are left to rot as being inconvenient yes?

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

chris street

Re: Failover backup redlining

Theres enough detail in here for me to know exactly what server was being talked about nearly thirty years later...

Firstly, manglement wouldnt let us have a more expensive failover backup - so thats the first one. With the cost of the machines at the time it was hardly surprising either. Secondly, where is it writ that it must be the same size and specification? The failover box was designed to provide an emergency level of service so you could do the very basics, the custody suite always had the option of running on pen and paper, which they used to do when Oracle 6.5 took one of it's regular sulks and refused to work.

The problem with that is getting a copper to appreciate that emergency use might result in a lower level of service, and also getting them to care a **** about it when they did understand. They were some of the most, obstreperous and wilfully malicious users that I have ever encountered.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

chris street

Re: WTaF?

Have you ever used the phone as a hotspot? I can shift enourmous quantites of data about with no issue at all - think of downloading Baldurs Gate 3 in about three hours whilst out and about. Still plenty of battery left. As long as there is a somewhat sensible connection ro mobile data they work very well as a hotspot.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

chris street

Re: The GPL is about rights granted to *people* not seats or companies or machines

And then RHEL look at the source, note the changes that makes that copy of the source - you know the extra whitespace here, the bit there, an extra newline, all that... that makes the copy of the source unique.

Goes to ACME and says - hey that source leak came from you. Are you sure you are not going to agree to a large uplift in your support contract next year. Be so sad to lose you...

Wait for the employment contracts with severe penalties for leaking "open" source to appear. Won't be long.

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

chris street

We anonymise all the CV's that are put in front of the sifter - in the current case that is me.

Anything that even gives a hint of age, sex, religion etc, and you are disqualifed. Thats the way to have it as unbiased as possible. Why more people don't run it like this I have no idea....

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

chris street

Re: The civil service went to a brewery but left thirsty and sober despite wanting to party

I'm embarrassed to have to admit I work alongside them. I'd not cope with having to admit to working for them.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

chris street

Re: Interesting

I've been onboarding new people for the last year or more, all entirely remotely. We don't have problems - then again we are not stuck in the management dark ages either.

chris street

Re: Yeah right. That explains why productivity has fallen off a cliff due to "W"FH.

And wheres your proof other than a bold faced assertion that it's fallen off a cliff?

chris street

Re: if it ain't broke, don't "fix" it

I have - needed a query about my current P60 sorting.

Took me four minutes to get through and then about ten minutes sorting the issue.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

chris street

My first WFH "office" was a cramped table with no space and a bad chair in a back to back house with crap internet. Going into the office would have been prefereable but you know, lockdown.

Now I've moved I have a large room just as the office and it's well kitted out, private, quiet, and I get tons of work done with no distractions. You are going to find it hard to beat that unless the office comes with a personal masseuse and I get paid a 20k bonus to come in.

The biggest problem with open plan offices is open plan offices. If you dont get that, congratulations. You are part of the fortunate crowd that doesnt get distracted and annoyed by every single f****r coming past and interrupting you. But you are going to run about 2/5th of your workforce very suboptimally if you insist on battery farming them, compared to their nice distraction free spaces at home.

Also if you are going to insist on people coming in, I do hope the company is going to offset the carbon. And report it on the accounts.

chris street

Re: Cat ... bag ...

So why has the list of acceptable documents for voting got an over 60 bus pass on it, the 60+Oyster cards on it - but doesnt extend that courtesy to teenage travel passes...

Almost as if someone wanted to remove a certain demographic from voting.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

chris street

> Again, if you don't want to use any of these packaging systems, feel free not to,

Which brings us back to the point - I'm not ABLE to do that because Ubuntu is forcing them upon me...

Not that it matters now with the decision to jump distro to Mint after the advertising debacle but still...

chris street

Lets look at it this way...

Product X doesn't work because distro has library issues etc...

Vendor can either fix these issues and get it included in the distro, or build a repo for it.

Or build a snap, that screws up home folders, takes control away from the end user, is a fecking PITA for secuirty, is slow, is bloated, gobbles disk space, is not transparent and doesn't follow the unix ethos.

Why would snap ever be considered a good idea? Just deploy the thing properly in the first place FFS. It is MY system - if you want me to use it, you need to remember that.

chris street

"If you don't need it, feel free not to use it, " - so why does Ubuntu use it for Firefox then - when there is a working version in the repos?

And it's not solved a problem - because as you demonstrated there are other ways to solve the problem that still leave you in control of your systems.

chris street

ZFS solves a problem that needs solving - raid 5 write holes. Copy on write, checksumming, very large file sets, all useful good stuff. Btrfs does the same thing and despite being complex as hell. I'll even allow that systemd is a good thing overall, despite it's tendancy to reach out tendrils everywhere, it does solve problems.

What precisely does the abominal problem children called snap and flatpack solve? They bloat stuff up, and take control away from me. I want updates WHEN I choose - not when some faceless gnome decides to push shit out to MY servers and desktops. They offer nothing beyond apt or yum for my convenience.

Ubuntu Advantage is being wired deeper into the distro

chris street

Re: @VoiceOfTruth - Users is the correct word!

> If Linux Mint uses a single line of code which has been contributed by Ubuntu anywhere along the line, that is called hypocrisy.

And what do you call Ubuntu using the many many KLOC contributed by Debian then?

chris street

Im not actually that bothered about telemetry, advertising, forcing Snap on us, even charging for updates etc. All those are avoidable with some work.

When they start making it deliberatly awkward to remove the stuff though, thats a different matter. Canonical take the Debian base, FOC naturally, and use it to make something improved, and make money from it (fair enough they have done considerable work on Debian) and then make it so that you are less able to fiddle and tinker with it. That is, no matter how small, a closure of the openness of the software and directly contrary to FOSS principles. That's the real issue in my mind here.

chris street

Re: Users is the correct word!

You've heard of Redhat and Fedora right?

chris street

Re: Users is the correct word!

Yes I'm a user. I contribute to the ecosystem. So thanks for self rigteous high horse. What have you done for things FOSS lately?

I don't want spying software thanks. I don't want nagging messages thanks. I get enough of that shit trying to just buy groceries online and Tescos 5 clicks to get out of the upsale and actually to checkout is as annoying as f*** as well. I certainly don't need it every damn time I run an update.

Combined with adding it into a core blob you cannot remove? Fuck you Canonical - you just jumped the shark and made the decision easy, Ubuntu is toast and LMDE is going on the laptop this weekend.

Google's Go may add telemetry that's on by default

chris street

Re: Confused.

However did people cope before the lazy and intrusive option of telemetry came along? I assume that no one managed to write good code at all and delivery features without focus groups, without feedback and forums, hell without even knowing what the pain points were without writing in the language themselves...?

"Without the telemetry, the slow drip-drip of confusion and inefficiency will cause those resources to rust away anyway?" - because that stopped Rossum writing Python since 1990, and Java never evolved beyond version one in 1995, and C of course is stilll primitive and inefficient (ok bad choice).....

But we will take the easy way and slurp the data, and hey it's the users data but they are just scummy users, we are the *developers* so we are gods and rockstars and get to do what we can... I wonder how the users will feel about their data being stole away - no - the one thing I can be sure of is that the Chocolate Factory never even considered what the users feelings were. Just how much they can screw them over.

You want to try this - go ahead. I'll be doing what I do to all the data slurping - writing an app to poison the well and truly trash the data that you get from me - beause it will bear no resemblence to reality.

Americans have the right to livestream police traffic stops … probably

chris street

This is why you livestream it. The thugs in uniform in Bigotsville, Iowa for example will find it tricky to delete the footage that people saved in a dozen places across the lower 48....

Waiting for speedy broadband? UK's Openreach prioritizing existing work over fiber expansion

chris street

FIBRE - repeat after me... F*I*B*R*E

please - this is a UK story on what was a UK magazine site, can you please spell the damn things correctly!

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

chris street

Re: Stack popped reading that procedure....

From what recall of such a system, you cannot copy from removable to removable. It has to be copied to the fixed disk, and then to another removable.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

chris street

Re: So CO2 is a gas at RTP and becomes supercritical at much lower T & P, but...

Well, the cold side is going to be down about say 60C if you use CO2. Thats a much more useful temp - it's a longer working range than SC H2O and it's just the right temperature for district heating as well - I can see one of these plants generating electricity and the waste heat from it being piped around for a communual heating scheme. Not a very big thing in the UK, but for the USA with a small community in the middle of nowhere having process heat and electric from one plant is quite attractive.

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

chris street

Its Fujitsu all over again.

Well it's not like these people dont have form for billing errors and deliberatly concealing them is it - Im sure that this was nothing to do with the culture that led them to lie about Horizon and the sub postmasters etc....

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

chris street

Re: NextSTEP (pun intended)

Using it wrong - or holding it wrong?

Data-breached Guntrader website calls in liquidators, is reborn as Guntrader 2 Ltd

chris street

Re: Limited company, protection and liquidation

" I closed down primarily to retire but I had a long-term employee who'd be entitled to a redundancy payment greater than the annual profit." - and you failed to recognise this liability, and decided to foist it off onto us the taxpayer?

HMRC should throw the book at you.

Cleanup on aisle C: Tesco app back online after attack led to shopping app outages

chris street

Re: Very poor customer relations

"the website is back," - and you think they didn't have BC in place?

It seems they did and they worked. Although the PR droids apparantly seemed to be totally absent telling people what was going on, they appeared to recover a total disaster ina weekend. Thats not that bad TBH

chris street

Re: Non story - the press tried to big up to another fuel shortage..

What that means is "we now have space for you in intensive care" It doesnt mean the risks of Covid are any lesser than they used to be, vaccines not withstanding.

chris street

Re: Non story - the press tried to big up to another fuel shortage..

Yes - I can tell you've not tried getting a slot when you want/need it only 2 days out - I found it impossible and I get to use the reserved slots that the regular people dont as well.

chris street

Re: Non story - the press tried to big up to another fuel shortage..

Which is fine unless you are still having to shield, have mobility issues, have no car, or live a long way from the stores. All of which will stop you from just pushing round a trolley.

BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master

chris street

This story is not over....

Simon will shortly be "persuading" another luser to push the first luser off a balcony into a waiting roll of carpet

Possibly in the boot of an annoying late model Mercedes that so far remains undamaged and grinding paste free...

Reg scribe spends week being watched by government Bluetooth wristband, emerges to more surveillance

chris street

Re: I'll be tracked almost everywhere I go...

I see your abelism again, hiding behind the AC label.

"The accusation of selfishness of others coupled with rampant self-interest." Self interest yes - I don't want to die thank you. Go and have a little prick, rather than being one - you will feel so much better for it.

Your response is no different from denying rights to someone in a wheelchair because it's too inconvenient for you to deal with it. I'm not forcing a vaccine on anyone - but I'm saying that your choice not to have one has consequences which mean your right to society is curtailed, because you dont have the personal responsibility to protect others.

Like your right to drink and drive is curtailed when it will come into contact with others. You can get a pissed as you like when you are driving on your own land but don't try it on the highway.

chris street

Re: Over-reaction

I guessed you wounldnt answer Chips. Lots of waffle but you missed the point as I knew you would.

chris street

Re: I'll be tracked almost everywhere I go...

Empathy goes both ways, though. - and my empathy for the antivaxxors, the apologists for them, and all the others prolonging this shit is long gone. You talk nice, sure but it's been far too long and I'm sick of the abelist shit that drips non stop from the apologists mouths.

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