Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
No, it's not ED-209's big brother, but it will still blow you away if you don't show it any respect.
I made the mistake of demo'ing one to colleagues using an old desktop PC, and I really should have taken it outside.
The atmosphere wasn't thick with dust bunnies... It pretty much blew them apart on contact.
They say the motor is a three-quarter horsepower unit. One thing is for certain - the missing quarter of the horse isn't the back legs, as this thing has quite a kick on power-up.
Check out the Dilbert animated episode "The Takeover", where executives throw themselves out of a window (including the PHB).
Turns out it's a ground floor window and they're all piled up on top of each other.
"Take me home Saint Peter ! Why hast thou forsaken me ?"
"Because you were an atheist until you hit the ground"
"Mental note: Find religion first !"
I had one idiot yoof call me an "IT dinosaur" recently because I started my career before he was even born.
"Yeah, that's right... Big head, fat body, little arms. That must make me a fuckin' T-Rex and WAY higher up the food chain than you !"
Apparently, I have the kind of Stare that makes people back off. I haven't seen him since.
"Many ISPs already are doing CGN".
Virgin Media is considering it.
Hyperoptic have already deployed it to customers because they're not in a position to offer IPv6 yet.
They also offer a L2TP service you can use over another ISP - £10 a month for 1Tb.
Okay, so it's not unlimited, but it comes with a fixed IPv4 address and a block of IPv6.
SIXXS may be shutting down, but Hurricane Electric still offer free IPv6 tunnels AND tutorials to get you up and running.
Ditto your basement. Nothing like running round a basement for an hour with a cardboard box, trying to catch one particularly skittish squirrel.
I got him though, and I let him go in the nearby park. The ungrateful bastard promptly ran out into the road and got himself squished under a bus.
Oh, and he crapped in the box before being let free.
"The Whippets and feral cats agree, squirrels are quite tasty. Only thing the two seem to agree on".
"In the UK it is an offence to catch and release Grey Squirrels as they're such a bleedy menace"
They're especially bleedy when they run into the road and straight under vehicles.
Greys have ZERO traffic sense, while Reds tend to stay up in the trees - no doubt sniggering as their more drab cousins get squished.
"He wasn't initially bothered by the rustling in the roof but eventually drew the line when the squirrel decided that his office printer made an ideal latrine".
In a previous On-Call, I had a similar experience with a colony of bats roosting over my head. Fortunately, they picked another part of the building to "go potty".
I'm guessing that in your boss' case, Tufty was relieving himself when the printer was switched off ?
I thought "fingerprints" too, but wondered if he could have been OCD ?
I knew a student who wore thick rubber gloves all the time, because he considered the PC lab keyboards, library books and so on to be "unclean".
(Looking at the proxy logs for the labs, he may have had a point, dirty little devils - mind you, the staff were FAR worse in that gig !)
I'm not talking about ordinary Marigolds here either, these were like extra-thick gauntlets and looked like the sort of thing you'd wear for handling really nasty chemicals - so you can imagine what that did for his typing speed.
Eventually, he sought treatment, and it was heartening to see him switch to lighter surgical gloves, then cotton ones, and eventually stop wearing them altogether.
The EdgeMax kit (EdgeRouter/EdgeSwitch/EdgePoint) uses PHP 7.0 for its UI, and current UniFi controllers run 5.6.
EdgeMax got some upgrade love when Rasmus Lerdorf bought an EdgeRouter:
https://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/59-Upgrading-PHP-on-the-EdgeRouter-Lite.html
I once worked for a company with a Staff Association that was much like the ECC. Very good at organising staff jollies for the more loyal drones, but very quick to push you under the bus when you had a disagreement with management.
Been there, done that, got the tyre marks on the t-shirt.
"Mine are all named after minerals but then maybe I have rocks in my head. Seriously though, why would the fact that you named your server 'Thor' or 'Draupadi' be of any interest to the spooks. ('Isis' on the other hand. . .)"
I used to help run a box called Thor, and in my job as "The Decommissioner", I ended up nursing it through the last months of its life - sadly, work wouldn't let my boss give it a Viking funeral because it would cost too much to hire a skip, let alone fill it with petrol.
EVERY place I've worked has had a machine called "Merlin", and said machine became progressively larger with each job. The first one was a MicroVAX, the last was a HPC cluster.
Depending on your provider and your usage patterns, PAYG may be cheaper than SIM-only - especially for low usage.
I'm very light on data usage, and I don't use enough minutes per month to make even the low-end SIM-only contracts worth my while. I rarely spend more than £2 or £3 in a month on 3's 3-2-1 tariff.
It's still around, unfortunately.
I remember work thinking about getting a private island, and all the things they were planning to do with it. Pointing management to some of the stuff in Something Awful's Second Life Safari killed the idea stone dead.
Amazon Logistics doesn't get used much round my way, but Amazon do have some perverse algorithm for picking carriers...
Anything cheap/difficult to break - expensive courier (usually DPD) or Royal Mail
Anything expensive/fragile - Amazon Logistics/Yodel
The only deliveries that are consistent are Locker deliveries, which I believe are exclusively handled by TNT.
Don't forget the one about the drugged-up dolphins earlier in the week !
In one of those strange pub conversations I tend to get dragged into, we all agreed that three things would survive a nuclear apocalypse:
* Cockroaches
* BBC Micros
* Those big cans of industrial-grade sweet-and-sour sauce you find in takeaways
We then tried to imagine what a post-nuclear winter would look like... A giant cockroach playing Chuckie Egg while another giant cockroach pedals an exercise bike to power the Beeb, with the rest of the tribe swigging from sweet-and-sour cans and egging Player 1 onto a new high score.
We decided that the cockroaches probably wouldn't play Elite because (a) the whole Thargoid thing and (b) the poor bastard on the bike would be there for a while - "Keep pedalling, I haven't got a Docking Computer yet !"
If you're out in the sticks and need to get a PC fixed, you can usually find some half-baked "expert" preying on the locals, and charging them over-the-odds for shoddy repairs.
"Cowboy Keith" was something special though. I could have made a career out of cleaning up the mayhem he left in his wake, but then I would have had to charge danger money to make some of his "repairs" safe...
One machine had a RAM upgrade, with four completely different sticks of RAM - FPM, SDRAM, EDO and who knows what the hell the fourth stick was, but "compatible" it certainly wasn't. He also claimed to have fitted a "brand new" CD drive in the machine, but I found it was caked with dust.
Another machine got a new no-name PSU which promptly set fire to its own cables (I've never seen PSU cables that thin before or since) and he'd used super glue on a CPU heatsink, to hide the fact that he'd overclocked a slower processor and charged the customer for something faster.
There were several other "experts" I encountered in that job, including the local "computer shop" that complained that I wouldn't send business their way. Maybe if they hadn't stiffed me on a personal order and caused me so much data recovery work with their "generic" (spelled C-R-A-P-P-Y) floppies, I might have been a little more charitable.
Then again, wailing that I was threatening their business and demanding my dismissal hardened my stance somewhat.
"Although manufacturers including Volvo, Google, and Mercedes say they will accept full liability if their autonomous vehicles cause a collision, this is not currently a legal requirement."
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Writing bad code has a cost. The cost of putting it right later.
Not fixing things has a cost. The cost of lost customer confidence when things break.
Keeping quiet has a cost. The cost of lost customer trust.
And if you're cutting corners on bug-fixing, where are other corners being cut ?
VMS is already on it's way to x86-64, but not as a HP product - https://vmssoftware.com/
Non-Stop supposedly has Xeon-based hardware available, but I haven't seen any roadmaps for a couple of years.
HP-UX 11i v3 will be supported until at least 2025, earlier 11i's are now "PVS without SE", so HP will "support" you (but you don't get any new patches/updates) until 2019 - no idea what happened to HP-UX on x86, but I suspect it was taken round the barn and shot a while ago.
I was with Orange throughout the 90's and most of the 00's, as they had a great reputation for good customer service. Then in the space of a couple of years they seemed to stop giving a crap, and that was when I jumped ship."
Ditto. Customer Service pretty much went to crap soon after France Telecom got their claws into the company, and they ceased to innovate on the technology - but hey, we got the "Animal" plans and 2-for-1 cinema tickets and pizzas instead, yay for mediocrity !
So, we can add "addiction to recreational drugs" to this list.
Apparently, they're STD-riddled, sex-mad killing machines that will quite happily get jiggy with passing humans, murder their own young and play volleyball with baby sharks. Don't even get me started on reason #10.
I remember being forced to watch a video telling me that we should all behave more like dolphins ("Dolphins work in teams" yadda yadda yadda), and it was about the time some of this stuff first came out.
Asking the "motivational" speaker if we should also kill porpoises and take bites out of colleagues if we're feeling hungry didn't go down very well for some reason.
Icon, because the dolphins' behaviour isn't all that different.
I once had to deal with an infected laptop, where the user knew a download was likely to be infected (cracked software), but he still wanted to see what happened if he clicked on it anyway.
He'd also turned off the AV because (his words) "it got in my way".
Icon says it all.
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