Posts by John Brown (no body) 25401 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"I hope the PFY wiped down the usb key before he took a day off ~to the pub~ sick."
It crossed my mind that this may have been the PFYs final exam before becoming a BOFH in his own right and moving onto to his own infernal domain, taking a nice wodge of cash with him for "moving expenses".
My UK driving license pre-dates the photocard ones. Occasionally, I have to explain to, usually younger people, that yes, it IS a valid driving licence and it's their problem if they've never seen one before. If part of their job involves checking ID then it's their responsibility to recognise the list of valid forms of ID.
"Masks and social distancing haven't stopped the usual colds and sneezes from going around, especially in my kid's nursery."
Just as a control number, how many of those kids at nursery were staying 2m apart, wearing masks and washing their hands regularly between sharing the toys, like adults were in their work places?
"Talking of acid tests - my workplace has been open the entire time, with technicians making (essential) trips all over the country multiple times a week. 0 Covid so far."
Similar here. But only the essential staff who could not work from home. Those of us making trips all over the country, including hotel stays, were very, very cautious and careful. There has been covid cases, both back at base and the field team, but thankfully few of them, thanks to proper precautions being taken and the customers setting up separate clean areas for us to work in while on site.
BTW, for anyone who didn't get the chance to stay in a hotel for work purposes during lockdown, no, it's not fun. Room service only from a VERY limited menu, bars and all other communal areas closed obviously and nowhere else to go.
"I do believe if it were released today with a modern motor and battery combo it would probably be successful."
Not sure about Canada, but over here, we call the modern incarnation "mobility scooters"
"If it doesn't have a processor, or a network connection, it's not IT, it's Facilities.
Does that mean you now do all the swanky new vending machines, coffee machines, "smart" kettles, and everything else with a "digital" display or "digital" buttons on them now? They almost all have processors of one sort or another in them these days. After all, why build a circuit with a 555 timer in it when you can program a delay in a PIC microcontroller and sell an egg timer as "smart".
Be careful what you wish for :-)
Why would anyone take a job with a fixed salary and no overtime? Unless it's a very big salary that effectively takes into account expected overtime whether it's actually worked or not. I can understand that for contractors who are being paid for an outcome, but not employees.
"Apparently the facilities guy, Windows admins and software developers weren't trusted to read a label on a box of bog rolls, or tell it from a keyboard."
Sometimes, just sometimes, it might mean they REALLY did not see that as part of their job and so deliberately made mistakes so as not to be asked again. Unix guys are just too helpful and superior to do a job a badly, so get lumbered with those tasks while the Windows sysadmins look on and smirk and have lots of extra time to do their daily rebuild of their Exchange databases, do the weekly rebuild of their servers and generally stare at BSODs. Oh, and of course the Unix guys have a plenty of spare time for jobs like portering because they built their servers properly in the first place :-)))
The first "American" rockets were V2 they disassembled (and crates of unused parts) and took back to the US from Germany, so although the display is possibly a bit odd to modern sensibilities, they are genuinely part of the lineage. I suspect the model in his office had a Stars'n'Stripes decal rather than a swastika on it :-)
"The advice I never see given is to use different emails as well as different passwords."
I was about to say the same thing.
For a lot of online stuff such as forums etc, I use variations of a common themed password, but each has a unique username/email address made up from something related to the site and usually some number. If a site gets hacked/raided/whatever, the miscreants won't get enough data to be able to use elsewhere.
"Requiring at least one lower case letter, one upper case letter, one special character, one digit etc. just means that the password will be written down or stored in a text file."
Yes, a password along the lines of SomewhereOvertheRainbowWhereBlackbirdsShagAllDayLong is probably a bit more secure than MyP455word! and probably more memorable for a human. But few system allow passwords that long and they pretty much all requires numbers and "special" characters.
But as you point out, passwords alone can't protect against keyloggers.
Probably, yes. But in the vast majority of cases, there will be no sensitive data on the hard drive that isn't already backed up somewhere else, either the mail server/backups or the synced "home" folders.
I can't remember the last time I dealt with a corporate customer where a users hard disk failure was a disaster. They were just given another laptop from the "spares" pile, possibly had any special software for their role added, logged in and got back to work.
"As if the US do not take the time already spent in prison awaiting extradition off any potential sentence then he WOULD be doing a extremely long sentence for what amounts to a usually low sentence crime of breaching bail conditions."
Again, it's of his own making. Most people in his position would have been out on bail. But to repeat again, he's a proven flight risk. If he want's to keep appealing, then he stays inside until the extradition is either granted or refused. At which point, he gets kicked out of the country either on a flight to the US or somewhere of his (limited) choosing, most likely somewhere he has proven citizenship.
"Then a little later, if memory serves, I got the game Zanthrax on my Speccy, complete with synthesised speech, and my ghast was even more flabbered."
My first experience of speech on 8-bit was Robot Attack on TRS-80.
Skip to 58 seconds if you get board watching the "Star Wars" scrolling intro. And bare in mind this is simply pulsing the the single bit cassette output port. It was mind blowing at the time. With add-ons like the Orchestra-80, it was capable of some respectable sounds and music too.
I suspect there will have been a lot of CMOS backup batteries failed while so many places were shut for so long and PCs were left powered down for many, many months, especially on older kit where the battery might have been a few years old before the kit was switched off for it's long hibernation.
180 comments at time of posting and no one has realised that California et al are at the forefront of defeating The Rise Of The Machines before it even gets started!
If compute power is restricted, how can true AI ever work at anything even close to human brain speeds? At best, we might get AI robot snails which can easily be defeated :-)
"which is recommended by most techies for the health of your printer"
In my work, yes, use OEM "because". Personally, I never buy OEM. On very rare occasions, I've seen printers with poor quality prints improve by replacing the toner cart, but generally only where the toner cart is more than just a toner hopper. The most likely fault from cheap 3rd part carts is poor seals on the mechanics and toner leaking out into the workings. But even that is pretty rare IME.
"The box of inks I bought about 5 years ago is running low and cartridges are now £7/set but there are continuous ink supply upgrades available..."
I ran an Epson Photo printer for a years on a CIF system. Ink bottle were cheap, way cheaper than even 3rd party replacement cartridges and it came with an adaptor to printer directly to printable CDs/DVDs which were all the rage back then. Far superior to printing on labels and sticking them on the discs :-)
I used a laser for everything else.
"Imagine if the car company's tried to fix it so that if you bought one of their cars, you had to stick to one brand of petrol, or you invalidate your warranty."
FWIW, and I'm just being a bit picky here, but that situation does already exist. Like, for example, when unleaded petrol first came out. Or currently, where some car warrantees specify no more than E5 fuel and that's in the process of changing to E10 on the forecourts this year. (E5/10 is 5% or 10% ethanol) Although in practice, E10 should be usable in anything built since 2011, that still leave lots of cars on the road that will have to switch to so-called "premium" petrol which will remain E5 or lower.
"Bought my HP laserjet 1320n duplex mono"
That's really worth considering if any potential buyers are wonder. Paper is cheap, but if you use both sides, you can almost halve your paper usage costs. Ok, it's only about 0.3p per page, but that's still a significant portion of the per page cost of laser printing. It's less of an issue with inkjets where it can be 15p per page on pay as you go plans.
Also, both ink and laser printer cartridges are almost always quoted with a "number of pages" they claim to print. This is usually calculated on 5% coverage, which is probably about a paragraph of text per page, so not really realistic in the real world.
"are they still called cartridges for laser printers?"
Yes, although depending on the printer make and model, it may be a lot more than just a toner cartridge, it could include the transfer drum and other parts too. And there's no ink in it. It's toner, a polymer powder.
They are almost certainly contractors paid a fixed rate per job. Anything "complex" will be bodged and rarely will VM bother to spot check any of the work done. Customers who complain will likely get the same firm of contractors back who, if you are lucky, will bodge it up to minimal standards and almost certainly won't be getting paid again by VM. They rely on getting as many jobs done as possible as cheaply as possible to maximise the profits from the fixed price installs on the basis that most people will either not know or not care if the job is done properly and the few that do and require a no-payment "upgrade" won't eat into the profits as much as just doing all the installs properly in the first place.
Having said that, I don't know how much VM pay their contractors. It's probably a lowest tender bid and there might not be any profit in doing the job properly so a good reason for VM to not bother to check if the job is done properly.
"At least you have choices."
It's a bit of a Hobsons Choice in many cases though. No matter the provider, they all come via the same OpenReach lines. If that's where the problem lies, then changing provider won't help. Those us us with different options on who provides the cabling are in a better position, but that is generally limited to two providers in most cases. And then, like many people, there's satellite with all it's own problems such as weather, latency, cost and not having large trees or hills in the way. (Although Starlink seems to obviate most of those issues apart from cost.)
On the one hand, sometimes things change and that means some specialist businesses go to the wall because their market dries up. You don't see many buggy whip makers these days. On the other, it's pretty clear that MS are offering significant discounts to get their on-prem licences transferred to SaaS cloudy licences because they know in the long run it will be far more profitable for them when the tipping point is reached and the prices start the inexorable climb beyond the cloud into the azure blue sky.
"knowing that there was a finite amount of time he could spend talking to her before it was deleted."
Everyone is different, and each to their own. Personally I find that a bit creepy, especially knowing the avatar has a short, fixed life-span and will soon "die", potentially starting the grieving process all over again.
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