Posts by big_D 6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
I remember a UK TV ad during the late 70s, early 80s, where the electric company was talking about how they pumped water up into a reservoir over night using cheap electricity and used that to run generators the next day during peak times.
As to 500km lines, no idea, but Europe's network stretches from the Nordic region in the north to Portugal in the south west. But it is more densely populated, so that although it is a very long distance, the distances between stations is not so great.
It is interesting, we had similar temperatures and about 50% more snow, yet most things kept running here. I live at the bottom of a steep hill and was still able to drive out the next morning. I did nearly get stuck in a snow drift on a back road, when taking the dog for a walk, but managed to rock myself free...
But, even though this is the worst winter since '87 here, most things kept running. There were delays on trains due to the availability of snow ploughs and the autobahn, mainly lorries without winter tyres getting stuck. But power, gas and water kept flowing here.
Also, there are building codes, where you have to have a minimum amount of insulation, so that it doesn't lose too much heat in the winter and doesn't warm up too quickly in the summer.
Planting trees to offset ones carbon footprint is wrong. Planting trees, generally, isn't, as is preserving what we already have.
I agree with what blankhand wrote. What is being planted is not enough. And without actually reducing the CO2 footprint at the same time, it is pointless. The problem is many people see planting trees as "offsetting" their CO2 footprint, they shouldn't be offsetting it, they should be reducing it!
This is part of the problem, as long as companies can continue to green-wash with tree planting programmes or buying carbon credits off cleaner companies, the situation won't get any better.
There should be no such things as carbon credits to trade. If you produce a lot of CO2, you should have to pay the green tax on those emissions, not get a discount by buying credits from a company that hasn't produced as much CO2 as they were allowed to... As long as it is cheaper to leech of cleaner companies than it is to stand up and take responsibility for their own shortcomings, nobody will invest in being better.
No, this is the other way round. Patent trolls, sorry, PAEs, have invented nothing, they bought up patents "going cheap", when the inventor either went bust or needed a cash injection and sold off their patents. These entities then go around taking pot-shots at companies in the hope they will capitulate and license the patents they bought.
I'm guessing that the banks are using a lot of Linux and open source databases etc. on their back-ends and are being approached by patent trolls to get them to cover the use of Linux on their servers, plus bespoke software for certain common banking tasks.
With "real" patent holders, you can often go into a cross-licensing agreement, but with a PAE, they only want money, because the only thing they "make" is money through licensing their dodgy patents.
(EU)-GDPR requires that a business cannot hand over data on EU citizens without a valid EU warrant or the written permission of the identifiable persons in the data.
As the UK is no longer an EU member state, it cannot issue an EU warrant, so companies handing over EU data under a UK warrant would be in breach of the EU-GDPR, if they didn't hand over the data, they would be in breach of UK law...
This is part of the problem with the USA, there are no exceptions for EU data and it has to be handed over if there is a US warrant, or even without a warrant under National Security Letter / FISA Court, CLOUD Act and the Patriot Act. The UK'S RIPA would also fall into this same category.
If the UK-GDPR complies with EU-GDPR and the issuing of a warrant in the UK requires similar levels of proof as in the EU, things will probably be okay. As the European Court of Justice has already sent RIPA back a couple of times as being unlawful, it could be a sticking point on what should otherwise be a formality. Otherwise, the UK will have to officially exclude EU data/communications from RIPA's remit.
I was "lucky", I saw it by other people first.
I tend to have the problem that I have so many copies of the bits, I have to shuffle through and find the "latest" copy.
I currently have Carbonine for continual backup, a cloud drive for sync (sync is not backup!), rsync from SSD to spinning rust, rsync from spinning rust to NAS and manual backups from NAS to an external drive.
But the point is the same, such PCs have no business anywhere near the Internet.
We still have analysis equipment that is run by Windows XP, same for production kit. Heck, we even have a metal and plastic printer, for printing industrial signs, that requires MS-DOS and an RS232 port!
But none of it is allowed anywhere near the Internet.
An IT manager I know runs a CNC machine, which requires Windows XP. The manufacturer of the CNC machine has no upgrade software for the machine (you have to buy a new CNC machine for high 6-figures to get software compatible with modern Windows). When they need support, the manufacturer tells them to give them the TeamViewer number for the machine. After quietly explaining that XP is not going anywhere near the Internet, she then tells them they will have to "remote control" the machine operator to solve the problem. If they want to use TeamViewer, they will have to provide her with a modern, secure version of the software.
At another company I know, they were still selling an ERP system in 2015 that was based on SUSE Enterprise Linux from 2000! They only, finally, got around to upgrading to a more modern OS because they couldn't get any RAID cards anymore that would work with the old Kernel! And that was connected to the Internet at their customer's sites and was remote managed by the company.
TV runs over the Internet and there was a known 0-day that got patched a while back that all devices registered in the cloud portal could have had their access details compromised...
We still use it with the local management tool. The local clients are configured, so we can't gain access to the machines without the user of the machine allowing TV to connect or the machine is locked, in which case you need a valid local/domain username and password to get into the machine.
For remote user support, you need something like this. But our production facilities are on a separate network segment and can't be accessed from the Internet and TeamViewer doesn't work on them. Those machines still need a physical visit.
I'm much the same. I spend most of my time in front of a 43" 4K display and a 34" UWD display connected to my laptop. When I need to be out and about, my phone is fine for emergencies, otherwise I'll get my laptop out or, better still, wait until I get back to my desk and have a real keyboard and a decent sized display to work with.
We got DOSed by them a couple of years ago, they were pushing nearly a gigabit of data down out 10mbit pipe at work!
Phoned them, no humans for 20 minutes, jumping around inside the phone system, with "look up the relevant section on google.com" being repeated every 30 seconds or so, before the system eventually hung up.
Emailed them at abuse@google.com, postmaster and webmaster. I got 3 robot replies stating that they get so many emails that they are simply deleted and nobody reads them!
They didn't even respond on Twitter. In the end, I went to our ISP and they put a block on the Google IP address at the border of their network - I'm guessing a badly configured server, somewhere in their datacentre in Silicon Valley (that is where a traceroute of the IP ended up).
Luckily we were in the middle of swapping ISPs, so I switched everything over to the new IP. A month later, the old ISP wanted money for the DOS protection, so we cancelled it and moved on. But the line and old IP address remained valid for a further 6 months. 4 months later, out of interest, I checked the line again. The same Google server was still bombarding it with data!
don't actually sell any Chromebooks in their store, in Germany.
Although I see a dozen or so Chromebooks in the top 50 laptops on Amazon now. Until 2018, I think I had seen 2 in the top 100, when I had searched.
But Germany is very sensitive about its data and cloud services are still taboo in many companies, certainly the last 5 I worked for have all been strictly against using cloud services to store data, everything has to be behind the firewall.
At one company, they made me redundant and then hired someone else straight away - against the law here.
Unfortunately, my lawyer was on holiday and his office said, it was no problem, he would deal with it when he got back. I had an appointment on his first day back... We had missed the deadline by 1 day! Grrr!
Getting a lawyer to sue another lawyer isn't fun. I had another gig, so let it rest and moved on.
Been there, done that. A couple of times.
Although I was made redundant from one job, only for them to hire a new admin immediately afterwards! 2 weeks later, the new admin wrote to me, to thank me for all the documentation I'd written on the systems...
They made him redundant a year or so later as well.
You'd be a bit of a fool if the money was the only thing you looked at. I've had well paid jobs and have left them for lesser paid jobs with better work conditions or better opportunities to use new technology and advance my knowledge.
I could earn a lot more than I do now, but it would mean moving to a big city and actually having less in my pocket at the end of the month, due to higher costs of living and it would be more stress and I couldn't take an evening stroll in the countryside. The work-life balance is just as, if not more important than pure monetary considerations.
And RedHat aren't much better, canning CentOS Linux...
I tried openSUSE last year on my main machine (Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM, 3 SSDs). Playing a video in Firefox and opening Thunderbird had the video pause for 10 seconds, whilst Thunderbird opened! Not something you expect on that sort of rig... :-S
That said, Mint, running on my 10 year old Sony laptop is doing fine, as is Ubuntu on my Pi400, if a little slow on a 4K screen...
The case for AT&T was for multiple-devices belonging to 1 person being reachable over a single number.
In Europe, this has been possible with the multi-SIM technology for a couple of decades. The different SIMs log into the network and get assigned the same number and ring at the same time.
I agree, for the plaintiff, their technology solved a bigger problem, with the calling groups, something that PABX systems have been able to do internally since at least the 80s, but wasn't generally available to small customers (i.e. individuals and families) from the telcos. I am referring specifically to the AT&T usecase.
What happens when your mistress calls and Granny is first to answer as each phone in the group, all having the same number, all ring at the same time?
Sorry, that argument doesn't hold up. Even with the plaintiff's system, if you aren't quick enough to pick up, it rings by your granny, or your wife, anyway...
What was wrong with simply using multi-SIMs on the accounts, where they have multiple devices?
My T-Mobile contract (Germany) includes 3 SIM cards with the same number, one for the phone, one for an iPad or laptop and one for a smartwatch, for example, or multiple phones. All the SIMs are connected to the same number, they don't each have a different number that is "grouped", they just have the one number.
That has been the case for a couple of decades. A friend used to have it with his car phone and mobile phone, for example.
Yep. Me too.
Although I am glad that my current employer has a different attitude. I get a company phone and I am supposed to turn it off / leave it in the office, when I am not working. I generally tend to turn it to mute and stick it in my work backpack and just leave it there when I leave work, or at the moment in home office, I leave it on mute in my office in the cellar, when I stop for the day.
And overtime has to be taken as time off in lieu as quickly as possible.
The last 2 places were similar. Any weekend work was planned in advance (E.g. server maintenance that couldn't be done during office hours) and was minimal - 2 or 3 times a year.
But before that, the place was horrible. Long hours and last minute call outs. I had the CEO turn up at my desk at 16:30 and say, "I need 50 slides for a presentation at CeBIT at 09:00 tomorrow morning."
And calls from customers at 01:00 through 04:00 weren't uncommon either - we sold software for meat processing plants and the slaughter lines usually started just after midnight.
Back when I started in computing, the Macs were the most affected devices at my first company. Although there were more Macs than PCs at the time and most wanted to use the Macs. The rest used VT100s.
Macs had a very poor virus record for a long time. It was only with OS X that the problem really died away.
Given licensing issues, data protection issues and security issues, everywhere I have worked has had very strict rules on what software is allowed or not.
All too often people will say, "but it is free, I use it at home," yeah, home fine, but actually read the license and it is only for personal use, you can't use it for business without buying a license or professional support.
It is nice that your employer is a little more lenient. Although, working in IT and responsible for licensing and security, I'd prefer to deal with our locked-down model.
6300 files isn't that much for a complex system. They can quickly run into the 10s of thousands. As to this case, I can't comment.
And, yes, installing "personal", i.e. not from IT controlled and installed, is generally a big no-no in most companies I've worked for, either it isn't allowed or you have to get special permission and a damned good reason for doing so.
Or those good ones who "zone out" once in a while. In our office, the sparky had wired up over 50 plugs in my area, but crossed live (phase?) and earth on one plug... Just happened to be the one where I touched the earthing prong (German socket with exposed earthing prongs, to well, you know, earth things, before the hit the current), very useful for earthing yourself when working on delicate electronics - assuming the pulg is properly wired!
Yes, in my old office, the electrician had wired up one socket "wrong", phase to earth. That was literally hair-raising, when I touched Earth prong! I had a pain in my arm and shoulder for an hour or two afterwards, but was very lucky!
The techs in the production area wouldn't believe me, until they turned up with a multimeter. They promptly cut power to the wing and checked all the remaining sockets. From around 50 sockets in the area, the electrician had messed up on only one... But it only takes one to cause an accident.
Somehow, over 15 years in the building, nobody had ever stuck anything into that socket, until I did.
Or Windows (8/9/10, Server 20008 - 2019) on VMware with Paravirtual SCSI driver and VMXNet network card. You need the VMware Tools ISO to get the PV-SCSI driver installed, then you need the VMware Tools to be installed after Windows is installed, before you can use the network.
I built a new PC in 2004, Athlon64, SATA HDD, DVD, no floppy... And swappable hard drives. The drive with Linux installed like a dream, slap the DVD in the drive and wait 30 minutes while it chugged away.
Windows? No. No hard drive attached to the PC! Hmm. The motherboard supplier provided a floppy with the drivers. I borrowed a USB floppy from a friend. Windows found the drivers... Then reset the USB bus before trying to load them! Luckily the shop where I bought the components was very friendly and lent me an internal floppy drive, 10 minutes later, Windows had found the drivers and loaded them! I then returned the floppy drive to the shop.
I also had an Acer laptop, with ATi Radeon X800m graphics. That couldn't even install Linux in VESA mode! I had to do a command line install, then download the ATi drivers and link them into the Kernel... I think it took a good 18 months, back then, before even rudimentary support was built into Linux for the graphic chip!
Both sides of the fence "could do better". Although, these days, both do a half-way decent job of installing from scratch, as long as you have a compatible network driver in your toolbox...
That is a whole different matter. Are the companies getting too big and too powerful? Absolutely. It is also how capitalism works.
But that is a completely different issue and has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the US First Amendment and contract law.
I'm no supporter of Big Tech, but I also see the stupidity and futility of Parler's case here. They were allegedly warned in November and again in December that they weren't fulfilling their contractual obligations.
No, the government can't interfere, mostly (shouting fire in a theatre and all that).
But a private company is not the government and they do not have to work with people they don't like or who break the terms of their contract. That is not censorship, that is capitalism at work.
AWS not hosting their site isn't censorship, Parler can go and buy their own servers and plug them into the internet or their users can go out on the street or into public parks and shout their heads off.
If the government turned around and said, "we don't like Parler and we will stop them from being on the Internet and stop their users standing on the street and saying what they want," that would be censorship.
I was contracted out to GPT in Coventry in the late 80s. The managers there invited me to lunch every day and were annoyed, when I declined one day, because I had to go to the bank at lunch time.
When they had guests, they could get a free meal, with silver service, at the on-site golf club! Luckily, my company had no rules about being fed by the client - in fact, they preferred it, because I didn't then submit an expense claim...
The US Government has done its best over the last 4 years to destroy big tech,outside the USA.
With failing to implement its side of Privacy Shield, not revoking the Patriot Act, FISA courts or NLSs, plus adding the CLOUD Act into the mix, they have done their absolute best to destroy cloud computing.
The problem is, it takes a lot of effort. It isn't just writing a law, you need to give companies time to adjust their systems, change how they work, re-write systems, in some instances, so that they can comply.
They need to train staff, appoint a data protection officers. The government would need to create a new body, like the ICO.
All of that in 6 months? Hard to do.
We are lucky. No BYOD. We get a company PC/laptop and a company phone, if we need it.
No private data allowed on company devices. No company data on private devices
No company laptop and no company phone, no access to company data.
It also makes "signing off" easier. You leave your company phone at work or you turn it off when you leave the office, unless you are on call.
Frowned upon and pretty much banned here. Definitely can't be done without first getting the employee's consent and if they don't consent, you can't take any retaliatory actions.
At my employer:
We can't monitor email, for example, without first informing the user. If a user is long-term sick, they are sometimes informed that an out-of-office message will be set and their supervisor will be copied in on email, so that nothing important slips by. (They are also not supposed to use email for private communication, so there is generally no real problems in that area.)
Listening in on/recording telephone conversations has very strict rules in Germany, both sides have to agree, before the recording can take place, there can be no automatic recording. (Warrants for police purposes excepted, but the employer can't spy) The employer has simply deactivated all recording on the telephone and in Teams by policy.
No monitoring software on PCs, smartphones etc. Only the app for clocking on and clocking off for remote workers.
No monitoring of internet access (anti-virus excepted).
In Microsoft 365 all the monitoring tools are deactivated / access removed.
It makes for a much more relaxed and efficient atmosphere (you aren't constantly "looking over your shoulder").
I've been using Jabra DECT headsets for about a decade now. They are great. Generally more reliable than BT, especially in crowded environments (at a previous office, we had around 50 people in range with wireless DECT headsets.
At home I use a simple Jabra wired headset or my Sony BT cans. They are generally good enough for my home office.
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