Posts by TonyJ

@Andrew... the shoes etc were known about, for sure. What has become apparent, (from listening to the radio yesterday) is just how much core and spinal strength is required and what damage can be caused.

@MR W B Jones - try a different launcher. I find either Nova Prime or even Microsoft Launcher to be superior to the Samsung one, but there are plenty of others you could also try.

Re: I'm wary of geeks bearing gifts

"...When Sony dominated the market they used to be standards-avoiding bastards who forced you to buy their $200 Sony peripherals instead of $20 generic jobs..."

This is one of a few reasons I will never buy Sony again if I can help it.

My wife and I had recently moved into our new house and she'd saved money to buy me a PS2 for Christmas.

Having just moved, and being fairly young, as you can imagine money wasn't exactly something we were awash with so to find out that I couldn't save my game unless I bought an expensive and proprietary storage card was a kick in the nuts.

Then there was the time I'd bought a second hand 8mm camcorder that failed. I took it into the local Sony repair centre where it languished for weeks and weeks and upon calling once a week, I'd be told different things. One day they forgot to put me on hold and I heard the guy I was speaking to say to his boss "i'ts that moaning c**t asking about his f***ing camcorder again...what bulls**t do I give him this time?" Needless to say my complaint was listened to at that point.

And of course, there are the things they've done since that don't directly impact me but are still disgusting behaviour...no we don't have to pay the additional tax on our PS3's m'lud as look - that little tick box means a version of Linux can go on and make it a general purpose computer...fast forward and if you want to be able to play online you need to accept this update that turns that functionality off.

Then there's the whole way they treated Geohot and his family.

The root kit.

The way they mishandled the major breach some years ago on PSNet or whatever it is called.

And so on.

Not a company I'd be particularly sad to see go, to be honest.

Re: GDPR

"...All working now? Crisis in the future? Nah, it's all working now, we'll deal with it later..."

On the plus side this attitude keeps me in work.

On the down side, the number of times I'm faced with legacy systems that were pushed to be dealt with in the future....and now is the future and the options are slim to none, is increasingly frustrating.

But then again...I like to eat :)

Re: We need some ...

Some of the signs I've seen over the years:

Warning whomever is self pleasuring themselves AND leaving behind their magazines that they WILL be caught and severely dealt with;

Warning males that the female toilets are for females only;

A reminder that the urinals aren't meant for shitting in;

A reminder explaining that it's unhygienic to leave your number two on the window shelf...now bearing in mind that said windows were about 8 feet off the ground, it was presumably also a falling risk!

And not in the bathroom, but in the kitchen area, a sign asking people to use the microwave to boil milk, not the kettle.

Re: The UK is not geographically well positioned from a renewable energy perspective.

"...Have you tried to generate power from rain?..."

Manchester would generate more energy than the sun! :)

No, sometimes little parts of Bob's weird rants make sense..

FTFY

At the same time, XenServer pushed VMware pretty hard for a free hypervisor, back in the day. They chucked in live migration between hosts, which everyone else wanted you to pay for, and you could remove snapshots without powering down the VM, which also kept it well clear of the bottom-end of the market.

And there are those who'd say "don't use snapshots for backups", but I had a very good system running based around Bacula, which did both file-level and VM-level backups. Wasn't the nicest for restoring, but it was cheap!

You make a fair point - with VMware's price gouging, XenServer was a viable alternative, even if you went down the paid route: I forget the exact pricing but certainly <10k got you most of the way to a VMware platform.

It just so often felt less intuitive than the competition.

Also...no problem with snapshot-based backups. The problem is when people take a snapshot thinking that that itself is a backup solution. Then another and so on, not realising they're now just writing to difference disks, and burning through their storage.

Re: Sense of humor

"..At least now we know what the Canadian equivalent to "Here, hold my beer!" is..."

Presumably, in this case at least, it's "Here, hold my bear..."

Come on...it is a Friday afternoon...

Re: Had the fire brigade called to a five star hotel, in Malta....

Ahhh toast...

Way back in the mid 90's I changed jobs. My first day on the new job and I was a bit surprised to learn that the company had a proper kitchen area where people could prepare their own food for breakfast and lunch.

One of the elder ladies there (she was past the official age of retirement even then) had made some toast and done the same thing, forgetting about it.

As the fire alarms went off and we were walking out, my new boss was saying to her "the fire brigade will come out you know" but she was having none of it, thinking he was just winding her up.

Then they duly did arrive. No fines or anything ensued as they had the burnt evidence of why it'd happened.

Quite a memorable way to start a new job :)

Re: Exactly how much "reinvention"?

@AC - Well, it's been a few years since they had a rebrand so one was due, I guess ;-)

I've worked with Citrix since WinFrame days. I was CCEA #54 :)

Re: First, they came for the CD-R's

@Lord Elpuss - one of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/iStorage-256-4-datAshur-256-bit-encrypted/dp/B0061DBZ2C

Not the cheapest or physically smallest USB stick by any margin but works well. Can even decrypt first, plug in and boot to one if needed.

Re: Caveat Emptor

"...A URL or two would be welcome there...."

Jeez...see that magnifying glass icon at the top right of the page? It's a search. Autonomy CFO - third story down. Not that hard, but here you go let me do the work for you:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/19/hpe_lesjak_leo_apotheker_autonomy/

Re: relief arrived a long time ago

"...Downvoted for pedantry - ..."

Welcome to The Register forums. You must be new here :)

Re: Price...

"...I had 10/1 before and thought of it as OK-ish (though upstream sucked a bit). Now I have 50/10 and it's a different world. I'd HATE to go back..."

Same here - I went from 512kbps to 1Mbps and eventually all the way up to 3.8Mbps ADSL.

Then FTTC arrived and I jumped to around 69Mbps. In a house that streams a lot of TV (Netflix etc) as well as gaming consoles and streamed music, all concurrently, it works a treat and I'd shudder at the idea of going back, not to mention it'd kill the entertainment for the family.

Re: 402 customers?

"...Me, I keep my personal account in a completely different bank for multiple reasons including that they can't rob 'Peter' to pay 'Paul'..."

This is called "setting-off". I must admit, I'd thought they'd been stopped from doing this, but apparently not: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/setting-off

It allows banks to take money from savings or current accounts to pay debts such as credit card or loan arrears

Re: " Still funny, even after all these years"

"...Utter bollocks! I have a Dell XPS 13 (i7, 16gb RAM, with Windows 10 etc etc)... Had several BSODs..."

Sample size of one. What, exactly, have you done to diagnose the issue on your Dell? Ever stopped to consider it could be hardware related? Or even Dell-created? Tried blowing it away and putting a vanilla copy on?

Or was it a corporate image? I've never seen them be problematic...

"...Luckily I have another machine running Linux Mint... which never fails..."

I had a Mint Cinammon VM that would freeze almost without exception. It was being run on VirtualBox and was a know, but to the best of my knowledge never fixed, issue.

Sample size of <some> as it was on the various forums.

Wait one moment whilst I rant about how crap it was...oh hang on.... one use case was problematic and using an alternative OS fixed it.

Dime Bar...Harry Enfield..."Aaarrmmmadillo...crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside...." :)

"...... so another set of (re)moans from someone who's bid lost out...."

However...

Whichever side of the political divide you happen to fall on, if - and only if - it was a free and fair election would your comment stand up to muster.

If, on the other hand, it turns out that people were being manipulated wholesale in illegal manners then that's something else entirely and by all standards of common sense the vote should be nullified.

But...before we get there, we would need to understand just how much meddling went on, to what level, and by exactly whom and to which target groups. I mean, if you're running adverts in the Daily Mail for your right wing border guarding nazi hound, you'd expect the market to already be fairly amenable to the message/product.

Lots and lots of popcorn required.

Re: At the risk of becoming tiresome...

And do you really check your tyres weekly? Rather than just going Oooh that looks flat or relying on a TPS which of course may be faulty

Yep...ever since losing a tyre at 60mph going through Derbyshire (although it turned out to be debris causing it, but lesson learned)

How often do you check the seal on the filler cap?

Ok...you have me here. Never checked that per se, but the nice sucking noise I get as I open it to refill reminds me it's got to be sealed ok

Check your lights?

Regularly - whenever there's something with enough reflection, I'll check they're all on

Check screen washer levels?

For this one, I have a light to warn me but I never check that ;-)

Check all the warning lights come on when you turn the ignition key?

Every time. Not even consciously - it's just what I was taught to do when I was learning to drive and it stuck

It's very patronising of IT people to go they should do this or that, when lets face it, they should these days be as easy to use as white goods....which reminds me, did you also check the lint filter in the tumble drier (major fire risk), the drain filter in the washing machine and the drip tray on the fridge recently?

Lint filter yes...ever since, of all things, an early episode of The Big Bang Theory when they talked about it.

As for the drain filter - monthly, since having an engineer out who removed what appeared to be half a sodding tree...nope, no idea either.

Re: Silk Road

"...Yeah thats fine for the drugs (and 'affectionate waresa' )on the dark web , They're the fun part...."

Which was exactly my point. Police the stuff that, utlimately, a) matters and b) has actual victims< of crime.