* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

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Re: same old

I particularly like the third one after they roasted Bezos in Spitting Image:10, which has to be one of the best skits ever.

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The cloud is infinitely scalable, but you occasionally have to reboot not just the sky, but the entire universe.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

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Re: What I'd really like to know ...

I discovered you could swap the discs with Action Man’s RT backpack.

Little Tears apparently came under heavy fire in an ambush and needed reinforcements.

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Re: MP3?

But the Beeb did have a teletext adapter which was done kind of voodoo in my day. Programs and data with no physical medium??? Witchcraft!

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

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I expect...

It’s left over from the filming of some kind of man’s perfume advert starring Johnny Depp. So no one will ever be able to understand it. Ever. The adverts that defy all comprehension.

NCSC's London HQ was chosen because GCHQ spies panicked at the prospect of grubby Shoreditch offices

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*bad accent*

Most of vork of agency, done in Moscow.

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Re: mandarin-friendly Victoria

The Chinese, obviously. Or the Lord of the Tangerines. Or both.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

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Re: Potted plants

If the plant had stayed up there much longer, there would be a root kit installed.

Test and Trace chief Dido Harding prompted to self-isolate by NHS COVID-19 app

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One wonders how much she's benefitted from this COVID business...

I mean there's also that hand soap business that her and that there Trevor Bayliss started. ;)

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

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Re: Nobody wants to use this stuff. It's dehumanising.

Turkeys voting for Christmas...

Or...

"An Amiglion Major cow. I'll bring him over.

OK, we'll meet the meat. That's cool!

A-hem... Good evening, madam and gentlemen, I am the main dish of the day. May I interest you in parts of my body?

Something off my shoulder, perhaps? Braised in a white wine sauce?

Your shoulder?!

Well, naturally mine, sir. Nobody else's is mine to offer! The rump is very good, sir. I have been exercising and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there. Or a casserole of me, perhaps?

You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?

It's the most revolting thing I've ever heard! I don't want to eat an animal that's inviting me to!

It's better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten.

That's not the point. Well, maybe it is the point. I don't want to talk about it. I'll have a green salad.

May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver? It must be very rich and tender by now. I have been force-feeding myself for months.

Green salad, please.

A green salad!

Is there any reason why I shouldn't have a green salad?

I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point, sir, which is why it was decided to cut through the whole tangled problem by breeding an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am!"

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Re: Nobody wants to use this stuff. It's dehumanising.

Have you tried a Kahuna burger?

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Re: Nobody wants to use this stuff. It's dehumanising.

And the mere cattle become tasty burgers.

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No standard you say?

H.323 anyone? Been using it for many, many years.

Zoom & BlueJeans do offer it. But they charge you an arm and a leg!

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

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Re: Not a shock

Actually... no. Not really. Just the searching bit of it.

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Not a shock

My firewall / gateway traffic analysis shows huge data uploads to Google servers, overnight usually, from iOS and Android devices alike.

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

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Re: I'm fondly remembering the time years ago

I'm sure I can arrange an electric chair if anyone wants one. And one of those foot spas that you fill with mineralised water.

Transport for London dangles £1.1bn carrot in pursuit of suppliers for new revenue collection deal

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Re: London?

Moscow’s in Eastern Europe. It’s not in the EU, but then neither are we now.

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London?

Hm. I thought it was Moscow.

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

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Re: I was dead set against these Ring things

*BOOM*

Hm. The postman doesn't always ring twice.

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Re: Whilst I know..

Or design it to be intrinsically safe to begin with by not having the overdrive area of the screw sitting above a battery.

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I was dead set against these Ring things

But an exploding door bell... that’s got to be worth it.

Banking software firm tiptoes off to the cloud with MariaDB after $2m Oracle licence shocker

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Re: Nice ending

How much do they charge for a comment?

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

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Re: Drawer

Copy cat?

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Re: I'm sure everyone must have seen this.

Almond Mangum, eh? How things have changed! In my day it'd have been a lick of a raspberry ripple.

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Re: Cleaning

Or use Walsall gauge sockets.

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Re: Low IQ or low volition?

It would be even better if we had an OS where reliability INCREASED the longer you left it between boot-ups but that too is fantasy.

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There’s the well known I assume tale of a user who couldn’t log in when standing up but if they sat down on their chair all was well and good. Carpets were ripped up looking for damaged wiring but nought to be found. In the end someone spotted that at some point two key caps had been transposed and when they typed their password when seated muscle memory took over but when standing up they were one-finger typing.

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Re: Low IQ or low volition?

Turning it off and on again regularly? Sounds like the kind of IT auto fix. If we had PCs that rebooted every time someone sat down to do some work help desk calls would halve.

Network driver issue shaves 12 more hours off Microsoft's '365' infrastructure, and yeah, it was Exchange Online again

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He won't but I heard Catherine wheel.

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Oh come on, surely... just this once you can let him off.

BBC makes switch to AWS, serverless for new website architecture, observers grumble about the HTML

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Re: Does this change explain

Good point. Indeed it is. And as a lover of the typographic art form, long may it continue!

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Re: Dirac

It can be used for files I suppose, but the primary rationale behind it was as a mezzanine encoding format for use in live production. You see it's all well and good compressing video, but if you have to make frame perfect cuts you need the codec to do its work in less than a frame. With HD looming on the horizon, the amount of video you can shove down a single connection quartered, and it would only get worse with 4K and 8K. Hence the need to develop a lightweight, fast, digital compressor. Back at its inception you had to run a CPU flat out in order to squish the data. Dirac could loss-lessly quarter the bandwidth with half the CPU power. I moved on from broadcast studio work quite a few years ago now, but oddly I'm still coming across the same challenges with the bandwidth required for video now I'm back in the biomedical science arena.

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Re: Does this change explain

Well, Dalton Maag created it. They also revamped KCL's custom typefaces for the digital age. The original King's Logo from the 90's was created by Alan Kitching. Companies are ALWAYS knocking out new typefaces and updating branding and the like. We quickly get used to it. The Circling Hippos and the Teams Together and the Spinning Globes and the Sliding 2... never as good as what they had before, and this feeling will be repeated the next time. There are, however, a few genuine cases where the new isn't just a case of getting used to it but is an actual FUBAR of a job. King's recently attempted a rebrand at some expense and binned the whole deal because it stank. Rinse and repeat for Leeds, UCL, ICL, KCH etc etc.

And the cost is quite high because of all the various languages that the BBC supports. The BBC needed a considerable rage of character sets.

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Re: Does this change explain

Waste? It turned into VC-2. That's still very much in use in the industry and has been for at least 10 years, though HT-J2K looks to be nudging ahead.

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The Daily Fail has one of the worst websites of all time. You can't zoom in or out without adverts flying over the content, you can't reply to comments in the mobile view, half the time comments fail to be recorded... I could go on. Having said that, HYS on the BBC is also pitiful, lacking threaded comments for one.

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Re: Clueless

Yes, well, if you are thinking about rendering on the server rather than what the CLIENT will be doing with the page... what does one expect?

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Re: Lost opportunity

"What the BBC chose to use is about what is available..."

Same can be said for stereo sound, outside broadcasting, digital text service over the air, etc?

The BBC had internal networks from the 60s, discrete IP networks in the 70s and business wide in the 80s - working WWW services from 1994 on, which I regard as pretty quick to the game; they have always been at the forefront of communications technology, digital and analogue, because communication *IS* their business. Hardware, software and content.

I'll concede that there is stiff competition from the tech giants (NB who have moved into content generation), and there is a standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants things going on, but the BBC exist in a special niche where they have the freedom to develop their own technology to meet their own needs, be they commercially questionable or not. They are innovators and long may they remain so.

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Re: Server side rendering is as it should be

Ah! Same as Cloud-on-Prem and Dev-Ops then.

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Re: Server side rendering is as it should be

Is that what it means? I thought it was a case of the client side just being told where to get additional content from. No Javascript required.

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

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Re: The "book of dreams" indeed...

Laminated, of course. One wonders how much of the world's micro plastic waste is shredded Argos catalogues from their display stands.

The car you buy in 2025 will include a terabyte of storage. Robo-taxis might need 11TB

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Makes me want to park the car on the drive.

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But where about inside the vehicle will this storage live?

What we really need to know is... will it be a boot drive?

Report: UK colleges face testing times with ageing kit, iffy connectivity, and some IT staff supporting 1k+ users

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Many of the CIOs were brought it from outside HE and were of the opinion that universities were just schools for grown ups. Focussed on a service delivery revolution for undergraduates, leaving postgraduate and research behind a locked door for later. Many university staff however see universities as centres of postgraduate study and research that offer undergraduates the benefit of their experience and an insight into the cutting edge of knowledge - how to discover new things.

This creates a digital divide. Some institutions manage this well. Others the IT departments tend to treat the research business as petulant ignorants. Never forget... most of the IT stuff on your desk is a product of something dreamt up by a boffin in a university lab.

Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner

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Don't forget the requirement to ruin someone's holiday. No action required, just sit there hidden in the sand and let them blunder into you. Life's a beach.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

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Re: Kardasians

Pro-celebrity molar extraction. Has possibilities.

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Re: Kardasians

I didn't ask you about Minos Korva. I asked does my bum look big in this?

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Re: “Quick Bites, Big Stories”

Short, Quick Bites, Big Stories.

SQuiBS. Damp ones.

Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV

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Re: Oh dear...

Oddly for the first half of my career the phenomenon of colour was the something worthwhile I was doing. Except it was a little bit wetter, ickier and "taking aparty of brains" than the wankbot marketeer-o-tron has ever done, I expect.

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Re: Idiot marketing people at work again

e-Ink?

To stop web giants abusing privacy, they must be prevented from respawning. Ever

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Re: And if that doesn't work.

I'd favour a delivery of cookies to the board room. They'd have to sign their consent to accept the box of cookies of course. Including the consequences of eating them. Mind you they probably have shares in ex-lax.