Posts by defiler

Friend of mine ended up writing a script to scour the office print queues and bin any job on "Letter" paper.

Seems a bit mean, but that meant they could filter all the users with bad printer settings and get them fixed. After a flurry in the first couple of weeks, hardly any jobs were ever binned. And the printers ran more freely since they weren't waiting for a paper size that'll never arrive.

And every time I visit the USA and see US Letter sized pages they make me twitch a little inside.

Re: Heavy...

Homophobic? Nah - it's a literal swap-out for "shit".

Jobbie (jobby) - n. A shit. A turd. A poo (if you're under 12). A crap. A dump. A bowel movement. A defacation.

"Ahm goan fer a stoatin' huge jobbie, ya fud."

And if it's homophobic to you, I'd genuinely be interested in what dialect you're using. The only time I've heard of it in connection with homosexuality would be "jobbie-jabber", which more-or-less explains itself...

Re: That bloody BSoD Screen Saver

Conversely the Netware Abend screensaver was usually met with a disbelieving "naaaaah..." and then a quick bat of a few keys, finished with a nod of satisfaction.

Re: Heavy...

Oh god I feel your pain.

I had to haul a LaserJet 2 up 3 flights of winding stairs in a warren of converted Georgian Townhouses by myself. That was bad enough!

Programming assembly on one beer was good for just that reason. It dumbed me down enough to think in assembly rather than skimming concepts at a higher level.

Doing a once-through write whilst sober, and then a bug check after a beer was good for finding niggles.

Re: Even to this day...

Yeah. Problem is that in this case the shutdown command was fed into the right computer, but it didn't switch itself off. That really wasn't unusual back in them days. Even if you had a motherboard and PSU capable of giving the power-off command when the OS was halted, Windows NT4 needed a registry entry manually added to actually go and do it.

Makes me glad for the iLO lamp - you can confirm the machine before you do something stupid and physical.

Re: So what?

Everybody is brainwashed every minute of the day. We're all influenced by what we see and what we hear. But when the only source of ready information regarding the European Common Market in 1980 is the TV, which shows political comedy blaming the ECM for everything, and then our own politicians taking turns blaming the ECM for what they do on one hand and taking the credit for what the ECM do on the other, it's a bit one-sided.

There weren't many web pages on the subject in 1980.

Might also explain why constituencies with lower average ages voted more to remain - these people stood a better chance of being exposed to more sources of information.

Re: So what?

The internet buggery seems to have just been the last few stages to swing the last few percent of voters. The fact is that the European Union, the European Economic Community, the European Common Market, or whatever the flavour was on the day the script was written has been the butt of pretty-much any political blame since I was aware there were such a thing as politics.

Go back and watch Yes Minister (from 1980) and "those interfering bureaucrats at the Common Market" are being blamed for all sorts of things. And that was the case in actual political office too. Sure there are things to blame on the EU, but far less than can be blamed on Westminster.

Whether people feel justified in forming their opinions that way is besides the point, so I'm not trying to pick on Leave voters here. I'm just pointing out that we've been systematically brainwashed for 39 years that I can point to.

That's the reason they're taking it off-planet. It's the only safe haven left for strong crypto...

But it still doesn't say 2 - it says "a series". The example afterwards describes one core being reset while another carries on the comms, but the series implies that there would be more cores available to maintain a quorum.

Wouldn't cost much to put a dozen simple cores onto a decent FPGA - not compared to the budgets involved in building, launching and operating a satellite.

I did wonder what they'd be wanting encryption for, because (like OP) my first thought was that the comms is generally a ground->ground relay so the decryption need only happen at the ends. ISS can have the big expensive box because it's a big expensive thing. But then you start considering things like manoeuvring commands, and encryption becomes a real nice-to-have. Besides that there's always a bunch of spooks want their illicit photos from orbit to remain secret.

Re: Tip for VM customers - go business

Oh god - *you* were one of the script-pixies?

I was one of the few people to bother getting an MCP in Internet Explorer. I know, I know, but it served me well each and every time I had to call Telewest because I could be doing other things and still recite the settings from each box in the IE config window. And then I'd be escalated no second-line.

Same questions every time. I could have written an answer sheet, I suppose.

I only once managed to get first-line to go off script when I stopped him mid-sentence and explained that we'd accidentally put a saw through the cable and it was now in two very separate parts. That was clear enough to short-circuit his questions. :)

Re: Teams

I get where you're coming from, David, but my job is not to give users what they want. My job is to make sure the data is safe. Even if it's not online, it has to be safe first and foremost.

Whilst I endeavour to give users the tools they want (as well as the ones they need) to do their jobs, I first of all have to ensure the security of the system they're using. That's because "I'm sorry - this tool is not up to the job" is easier for them to swallow than "a cryptovirus has wiped out all of your files and I can only restore the ones you saved in the places I told you to save them, and then only up to the point that they started to run amok, and then it'll take days to do".

Sure there are shitty applications that install themselves into the user's profile (hell, Chrome used to be one of them). But Microsoft absolutely, positively, definitely should never be releasing an application that operates in this manner.

Never ever.

Re: Teams

Um, yeah - that. :D

/me hangs my head because I've been getting that wrong for a while.

I'm guessing it can be appropriate in certain environments, but if you're using remote desktops (RDP or ICA) then you should be clearing out the profiles on logout, and that means Teams will have to copy a huge slug of crap back in again on each login. If you're hot-desking between desktop computers then each computer will have multiple copies of Teams shoved in the C drive wasting space.

And in a corporate environment these days you simply should never be allowing users to run arbitrary applications from locations they can write to. It's bad.

Re: Teams

Here's a little heads-up from somebody who was asked to deploy it to a team of a few dozen users on a Citrix XenApp infrastructure. Teams is an unmitigated bag of shit.

You know the bit where you lock down regular users so that they can only run proscribed applications, by installing them as an administrator and setting the Group Policy to permit execution from the "Program Files" folder? Yeah. Teams makes a copy of itself to run from the user's local profile.

So in this dangerous, internet-connected, zero-day-threat world, Microsoft have released an application that insists on installing into a folder where the user has read/write access. Opening the door for all kinds of malware to just try dumping itself into the Teams folder and whip up some mayhem from there.

Cardinal sin.

Then the binaries were signed by a mixed grab-bag of certificates from just about everyone. So that pretty-much ruled that option out.

We had a good long pore over it before I took it back to that team leader and explained how bad it was and what kind of a security liability it would be. She sent it back, refusing to implement it.

That's the good kind of user.

Re: 50 years since landing on the moon...

Well, I believe the Orion capsule can land on land. It uses airbags rather than the Soyuz retros. Good for ten flights.

Re: 50 years since landing on the moon...

Soyuz doesn't go to the moon, hasn't gone to the moon, and has no intentions of going to the moon. It'takes a lot more oomph to get to the moon than to LEO, and that takes fuel. And the fuel takes fuel.

So, whilst we're looking at n kg to fit the retro rockets onto the capsule, you're then looking at 200n kg to get them to the moon and back. (Apollo capsule at 15 tonnes, Saturn 5 launch mass at 3000 tonnes - approximately).

Why the hell would I put 1kg more mass on the top end than I absolutely need? By the time they got to Apollo 17 they were counting the plasters (band aids) in the first aid kit to keep mass down.

The Russians have an awful lot of dry land to park on in their own borders. The USA is a tiny target by comparison, but they have a conveniently large navy.

TL;DR - they're carrying parachutes to slow down anyway, they're carrying a heatshield anyway. They don't need anything else if they plop in the sea. Certainly nothing with the mass of retro rockets or wings.

Re: 50 years since landing on the moon...

Cheap. Light.

Not much point dragging an elaborate landing system all the way to the moon and back. The extra payload would be crippling at launch.

Also not much point in keeping a landing module in Earth orbit and docking before re-entry because then you have the delta-v requirements of establishing orbit on return. You can drag a heatshield and parachutes along for the ride and skip all that malarkey.

Mass. Bah.

I think it largely depends on whether the mod is at lunch. Or at this time on a Friday morning, perhaps dispatched for bacon rolls or ice lollies.

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

Of course the steps are the responsibility of the airport, but they'll pass their costs on. And what if the options are 737-height steps vs jet bridge? That means many many airports will have to reduce volume or expand the terminal. My closest airport is Edinburgh (EDI), and I'm struggling to think of a time in the past 5 years that I've used an enclosed jet bridge to board the plane rather than steps on the tarmac.

The bigger lifts - can they? Everything works to a budget, so if you need a lift that'll take you up 2m, the manufacturer does one that takes you to 2.2m, you buy it - all good because that was the nice cheap one. Then you find you need a lift that raises 2.5m for the new aircraft. New lifts are more expensive and old lifts need to be replaced. I'm just plucking numbers out of my arse on that, but the 737 is famously low to the ground (which is why it's in this position today). If you're budgeting for maintenance of a 737 fleet (let's pick Ryanair as a real-world example), do you spend the extra on bigger lifts because they'll also accommodate the Airbus planes that you don't have and nobody is looking at purchasing? Of course not.

You're right in that retraining needs to happen anyway, but differential / incremental training is much, much cheaper than starting at the basics on a totally new aircraft. And when it comes down to it, airlines are companies - cost is critical.

Boeing may be able to make some concessions on a new model such that major components are identical in parts / maintenance to the 737, which would help to assuage the short-term concerns of the airlines. On the other hand, that may constrain their ability to produce a better aircraft, and they land in the same situation 15 years down the road.

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

Moving to Airbus is a big commitment for an airline, though. Not only do they need trained pilots (and fully type-qualified, not just a quick iPad update), they also need ground crews that are familiar with the aircraft. They need maintenance crews who know the different procedures. They need a comprehensive parts store for the different manufacturer's components. They need bigger lifts to raise mechanics up to the higher engines. They need taller steps to get passengers on and off. It's a step-change in infrastructure at the back end.

Largely these are one-time costs. Higher steps will cost slightly more at each replacement, for example, but the rest are swapping out one Boeing cost for one Airbus cost. Still, airlines are not keen on making these changes, and I expect that many will just carry on as usual with Boeing unless the passengers vote with their feet. Many won't.

And for the poster above who suggested backing out the engines to the previous models and fixing the aerodynamics accordingly, airlines pay for fuel for every mile they travel. The moment your plane costs more in *fuel* that the competitor's is the moment your customers dry up.

Boeing are committed to a race with Airbus such that they can't back out of the 737 MAX. They need to get it running, and they need to have another team in the background designing the next generation of craft in this size and preparing it for production, because the wheels are clearly coming off the 737 model nowadays. Boeing need to see the MAX as a stop-gap until that new model is in production.

Re: Is it me or it's just unfit for purpose ?

That's the beauty of it to you. The beauty of it to other people is that it's a teeny board with a lot of poke. Some people will want to use these as desktop replacements, so having a little fan is bearable.

Me, I'm in the middle. Some of mine are used for Kodi and others for MiniSatIP. MiniSatIP doesn't take much grunt and is in the attic, so no-moving-parts is nice there. Kodi takes a bit of power, but I like it to be silent, so to me there's a limit on how many Watts it can draw before it runs too hot. It may be that a Pi4, underclocked hard, could run all the 4k H.265 stuff from my UHD Blu-Rays without cooking, and that would be adequate for me.

Other people will have different use cases which are just as valid as yours or mine.

Re: Underclock/volt?

I have a Pi3 under my telly running OSMC, but the Leia builds seem to hit 100% CPU on a single core from time to time and stay there. I capped the CPU so it wouldn't bake. Runs fine for everything I need.

With the heat recently I've run it topless, but that's about it.

Re: Peltier cooling and funking great heatsink

I was hoping somebody would say Peltier. Just so we can have a 100W Peltier to cool a 15W computer. :D

Re: Ranger etc. missions

I'm pretty sure Kennedy didn't "believe" in space exploration. The simple fact is that the Soviets had a new shiny-shiny and the Americans had nothing equivalent. Putting aside the fact that the reason the Soviets had the shiny-shiny was because their nuclear warheads weren't up the US specs, they had demonstrated a clear technological superiority in the new field of spaceflight. And that wouldn't do.

Hence Kennedy picking a target which was so far out it made previous accomplishments fairly irrelevant.

Is it Y2K-Certified?