Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: German tomfoolery

"That one took a while to figure out."

Over the years, I've come across that sort issue often enough that if I or a user can't log in for some reason, try typing the password (or something using the same set of characters) in the username field first so can see if there any oddities indicating a different keyboard layout.

Re: Very neat episode, nice little cliff-hanger

That's the thing with kids' humour/mischievousness and level of inventiveness. Most of it is not original and they learn it from the year/grade above them so it sort of stagnates at a particular age group with each new year group passing through the "humour field", with possible minor variation based on technology or social changes.

Same seems to happen with technology in general. There's always some "bright kid" whose just "(re)invented something that's been around for years, but they give it a shiny new name and the new kids in marketing spend millions telling us it really is new, honestly!.

Re: ChatGPT

"You absolute donut!"

I see the LLM has noted the Americanization of El Reg :-)

I don't recall the BOFH ever calling anyone a doughnut, least of all a donut. I could be wrong, of course, but if he did, I suspect it would be the former, not the latter spelling :-)

Re: "it was a common skill"

I remember surprising a girl with that skill (she had initiated the canoodling that led to it!). So surprised was she that she made me demonstrate the technique to her as she was always having trouble fastening/unfastening her bra and I was just sooo much quicker at it :-)

Re: PFY's responsibilities

I never went that far, but in the days when users didn't even know what config.sys and autoexec.bat were for, it was easy to check for or instal [n]ansi.sys and set up a few ESC sequences to re-map keys and leave them scratching their heads :-)

Re: The first one is free

"Interviews being a two-way street is something kids need to learn - and many potential employers, too."

While your are correct in theory, in practice it depends on current economic conditions and [un]emplyement levels. The majority of people looking for a job often don't have the luxery of being able to turn down a job.

PS, I didn't downvote you, because your first paragraph is correct even if I don't agree with your second :-)

Re: The first one is free

I'm assuming he's in the UK and yes, the "Nessels" adverts on TV pronounced it Nesswls back in the day.

There's a timeline of Milky Bad Ads and although the lettring on the Milky bar includes the accent on the, it's definitly pronouced "Nessels

This one, from 1991 sounds like it might call it "Nestlé" and may be the start of their UK re-branding.

I remember much more recently when Lidls adverts changed their name pronunciation to the more correct "Lye-dell". Either they gave up or marketing took the UK pronunciation and ran with it because it rhymes with "middle" and one of their current and long running advert "hooks" is the none food section in "The MIddle of Lidl", which clearly doesn't work with "lye-dell"

Likewise, every language/country uses their own localised version of "foreign" names. Few in the English speaking world pronounce Paris with a silent "s" as the French do and few Brits would bother to correct a French speaker visiting "Londres" :-) I can't really argue when down the road from me is a town called Chester-le-Street. Roman, French and Old English/German origins in one name for "The fort by the road" :-)

Re: Certification test

"Being an mainframe expert, there was so much I didn't know so I said 3/5. One of the junior people said he was 5/5 - an expert!"

A lot of these scaled response type things seem to come from US companies where anything below 75-80% is poor and cause for concern. It catches a lot of people out who are used to a simple linear scale as most normal people would expect. Few people ever use or even understand logarithmic scales.

Our company did a staff survey to investigate all aspects of the business. and it used this non-standard scale and unsurprisingly, it showed the employees thought the company was utter shit because lots of people selected 5 out 9 thinkink that was average or fair not "poor". The survey form even said, "on a scale of 1 to 9 where 1 is poor and 9 is excellent". No mention that 5 was also poor and you needed to score at least 7 to get into the realms of positivity. Not helped at all by the fact the survey said all questions must be completed, so many people selected "1" for questions that had no bearing on their job. The survey came around again a month or two later with more clear and corrected instruction, including "Do NOT answer questions which do not apply to you" :-)

Re: I may have told this one before...

When I was in my teens 40+ years ago, I remember my dad coming back from a job interview, fuming! He'd spent about an hour being interviewed where they went over his CV, checking he really had worked all over the world at a decently high level etc and really did have the experience he claimed, all the usual stuff. Then they asked if he had any questions. So he launches into questions about the job, the machines on the factory floor etc etc, ie the stuff he needed to know. "I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that side of the business, I'm from Personal" (which dates the story LOL). Dad says he asked where the technical people were and why weren't they interviewing. "Oh we don't do that here". At which point he got up and walked out saying he didn't want to work for a company hiring people from a checklist.

So yeah, "HR" doing interviews without any input from the department or manager needing the hire isn't a new thing, even if it is becoming more common. HR should only ever be at job interviews as observers, not interviewers (except possibly for unskilled manual work, but even then, the team leader/manager should be there too)

Re: What is going on?

"The UK regulator I work for has a hugely significant legal case coming up that has implications for almost every person in the UK."

Oooh, that's tickled my curiosity bone! But based on the little you said about yourself and the upcoming case, I fully understand that you almost certainly can't elaborate any further on the matter. I'll keep an eye on the news :-)

Re: Too Big To Fail

So much for NAFTA, eh?

Re: Too Big To Fail

"Punishing Boeing hard enough might be essential to retoring enough trust to make it competitive again."

That's "long termist thinking". We'll have none have here!!!

Re: Sorry - the documentation...was eaten by the dog.

"I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation."

Their biggest competitor is Airbus, a "foreign" company. Boeing are already protected somewhat by having large tarifs on imported aircraft. WHich is odd when those same aircraft are allowed to fly into the USA so long as it's not a US owned/operated company flying them without tarifs. There's no way in hell the US Gov would penalise Boeing in any way which might give a foreign competitor any sort of advantage, no matter the seriousness.

<There are some problems with your post.

The title is too long.> Chopped it :-)

Re: non-optional updates

You can change your vote at any time by clicking the up or down arrows. You can't, however, withdraw your vote.

I sometimes wish this was possible in all voting procedures :-)

Re: non-optional updates

I think the QA proves that is an MS product :-)

And yet, accessing those MS online service still requires that you have an OS installed on a local device so as to be able to connect and interact with them. And there are still notable differences in functionality, look and feel when access those online service from Firefox/Chromium etc on FreeBSD or Linux compared with Edge/Windows.

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

Interestingly, in the early days of the railways in the UK, that's exactly what the rail companies did. "You want to use us to move your goods? Ok, but if you use any other form of transport, we'll cancel your contract". Rail would have killed the canal trade eventually anyway, but that practice took enormous amounts of trade from them almost overnight. That sort of practice is illegal now. I guess Google et al are getting away with it because "on a mobile phone" or something, but I don't see a difference. Using market power to force a certain behaviour is monopoly behaviour.

Re: A new 'zero day'?

"We must start making systems genuinely resilient as opposed to just assuming that once inside the perimeter the attacker has free reign."

One of the clients I do some work at, I have admin access, but only over the users and what they can access or use and another login for some more advanced, high level stuff. I don't get admin access over the core systems, and over-use of my higher level creds will be queried, especially if it's used for stuff my lower level should be used for. A colleague, spending time at another client site, has both "standard" user and "admin" creds. His admin creds, for doing the same job as me, let him do pretty much anything, anywhere in the system. Madness! It's like they only have two security levels and absolutely no compartmentalisation.

Re: arm64 versions of OpenBSD (and likely FreeBSD) should work too

It's still very much a "work in progress" after a quick perusal of the FreeBSD Forums.

Ignore the first few snarky posts, (which is a bit unusual for those forums). Lots of links to patches, hints and clues to get stuff working, but seems to far from "mainstream ready". In fact according to the "official" FreeBSD Pi Wiki, the Pi 4 isn't fully supported yet, notably WiFi and audio "not supported" and the Pi 5 doen't even get a mention.

I don't think it's at the stage to make it worthy of a review yet, still at the tinkering stage, and based on the apparent Pi 4 hardware support, FreeBSD on Pi 5 won't be ready for a long while yet :-)

Re: Device names

This is why we have coloured prompts and a different colour for the text you type in :-)

Re: TYOS (Throw Your Own Server)

Not enough mass, air drag. Need a NUC-a-like and discus throwing skills :-)

I'm just picturing "comic book guy" from The Simpsons as the stereotype nerd putting his back just trying to lift the server, never mind throwing any distance at all other than maybe dropping it on his toes!

Re: A sample of what now?

"Rockets aren't exactly the bee's knees for reliability."

A production rocket blowing up before reaching orbit is pretty rare these days. There's only been one human rated/crewed failure during launch and only two human rated/crewed failures during re-entry. (Soyuz 11 may count as a 3rd, but that happened during undocking).

That sounds like the pod opening scene of The Matrix :-)

Re: They have a point...

Are you my uncle?

Re: Past their peak

Just wait until it happens to "Sign in with Google" too!

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

"Employers suddenly remembering why they wanted to offshore all the jobs in the first place. If your employer wants you to work from an office, you either do it, or you get another job. Or you be a whiny, entitled bitch about it and get the sack. Seems fair."

This would be the same employers who took "advantage" of work from home to employ people from a much wider catchment area, vastly increasing the competition for jobs and almost certainly in many cases depressing the salary levels at the same time, and now want those remote workers to commute 100's or even 1000's of miles to "the office". For those employees took on during covid when WFH was "here to stay", there is no "return" to the office. They never were based there. It's a considerable and significant change to their contract of employment which they are being forced to accept. In the UK and EU, that would be grounds for a "constructive dismissal" case, ie unrealistic and unreasonable contract changes.

Much of the above may or may not apply in this case, but it's part of the pattern, which is especially common under US employment laws where there is little to no protection on either side, but certainly far less so for the worker. The lack of protection, unfair employment contracts and "at will" is probably not great for small employers too since a worker can just walk out at any time and might be hard to replace to short notice.

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

"Did they choose to be contractors (exchanging more money for less benefits) or was it their only option?"

If the article and video is to be believed, they were on $19/Hr, so I doubt that was a pay increase/benefit loss as contractors over employees.

And likewise, they already won court cases where Google was declared a joint employer due to the level of control Google had over the employees day to day activities.

Re: There will never be a demo

I had some of that! Stupidly, I left the lid off the jar and somehow it disappeared :-(