Posts by Wensleydale Cheese

Re: My Vega+ console...

I believe I've still got a Psion IIIa mains adaptor on order.

And a test trial of a Dyson robot vacuum cleaner which "should be availabe shortly".

Oh wait, the former was circa 1993 and the latter circa 2001.

Re: The end

"I have taken stick from modern IT guys for not using the cursor keys with VI but got my own back just under a year ago. A system got damaged and lost its advanced key mappings."

This.

I had one of these moments a few months ago. I think the remote session was expecting a Sun keyboard, which I don't have.

It was ages since I had used the vi move-by-character keys, but knowing they are there, all I needed to remember was 'hjkl' and 5 minutes later I was rattling away as if I used it every day.

Re: Sublimated Ear and Gaseous Elbow.

I misread it as "Gaseous Below"

Re: Once it is able

"Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."

I always suspected that Synchronised Swimming was an attempt to undermine Society and Life As We Know It.

Re: TT's TV Adverts

"the rep just kept putting his hand out to shake mine and asking what my name was."

Avoiding eye contact in the first place is your best bet.

Re: Sigh...

I dont care what System you're using, but this is "Targeted Malware".

Well said. Even air-gapped systems can fall prey to targeted attacks.

See Ralph Langer on Stuxnet, where he suggests that compromising a laptop used by a hardware engineer might let the bad guys in.

Daleks meet Dialects!

"Huddersfieldian"

Skelmanthorpe, apparently.

Which has a place in history as one of the locations chosen for the Survey of English Dialects, which "was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds".

Unique in that survey for the topic of conversation being ghosts.

"But Murdoch isn't a Labour supporter, so surely the Government will welcome him purchasing the rest of Sky?"

What a short memory you have.

From 2009, Sun turns its back on Labour after 12 years of support

Re: re COMPLETELY NEGATES

"With closed source if a vendor goes toes up then if their product range has any value then it will be sold to another company and you have a support path provided you trust the new company."

Not necessarily. There may be bits of software (e.g. library routines) in those products which were originally licenced from a third party. Any software licencing agreement I have ever seen has had a clause stating that the licence is terminated when either company goes bankrupt.

Re: New comedy show. Brandis Laws

"Jean has a long moustache."

Oh dear, the invasion/liberation of France is going to happen with the next 48 hours. Will this madness ever stop?

Well, the post you are quoting was made on 14th July, Bastille Day.

Re: The science fiction angle did immediately jump to my brain

"A sort of Plannet of the Apes, where humans (and perhaps most animals) are no more but the Tardis have plenty of time to evolve and fill all vacant ecological niches."

The Tardis?

Methinks being able to skip ahead and see how things are turning out could significantly speed up the evolution of the line.

Re: Help Me

"Is it my imagination or does Google make it difficult to find things that were previously easy to find?"

It's not your imagination. Apparent bit-rot in their indexes started for me about half a dozen years ago,

That, plus websites either dropping off the web, or getting a rewrite without a full migration of data, has definitely changed the experience.

Sorry, can't help with your Olympus tale, though I can attest to how well an Olympus lens can catch details like the one you describe.

Re: Already??

"It seems like only yesterday that we had the 'billennium', where Unix timestamps went from 9 decimal digits to 10 and broke some locally-developed stuff."

More than 20 years ago. May 1997.

Even VMS, which doesn't use Unix timestamps itself, needed patches to stuff which had its origins on Unix, like X11.

Re: If the government were serious ...

"then all new build houses since (say) 2000 would have been FTTD as part of planning regulations."

Yorkshire Cable were rolling that out to existing properties in bits of West Yorkshire back in 1997, so it was possible. Granted, they were only offering TV, not internet services at that time, but it was a start.

On the other hand, the new build house I lived in before BT's privatisation already had a phone line laid into the house. I still had to face the standard 6 month waiting list for new subscribers.

"the school used punch cards as it didn't have a computer with terminals the year I started.

I used old cards as bookmarks for years (okay, for decades, I had a lot of the things) afterwards."

Punch cards were also excellent for shopping lists.

Unfortunately I never managed to snaffle as many as you did.

Re: The unexpected perils fo data centre migrations

an explosive event the UPS manufacturers described as "unprecedented"

Translation from UPS-manufacturer-speak:

"We've encountered plenty of explosive events. We've never seen one this big."

Re: Local admin rights

"Why on earth does an accounting application require local admin rights other than perhaps for installations"

Far too often it's because they haven't paid attention to file ownership and permissions. It goes something like this:

Step 1: Install one or more data files under admin ownership

Step 2: Oh Noes, the app won't run, let's run it under admin instead

Here, the installation program or script is usually to blame, by omitting Step 2a, setting those files to have the correct (non-admin) ownership.

ACLs offer powerful functionality in this area but are all too often ignored.

Practical considerations

"That's an inaccurate description of what's going on. The "proprietary" systems are designed to prevent farmers from making their own repairs, or from going to a non-Deere-authorized repair center. And those rules are starting to be overridden by state "Right to Repair" laws."

There's another angle here with heavy construction vehicles. A lot of these are leased or rented out on short term jobs and the leasing/rental company wants the location (so that expensive kit doesn't simply disappear) and working hours (to organise servicing).

The manufacturer also has a leasing division, so there's competitive data involved. The first thing a leasing company wants to do is to disable the manufacturer's feedback and install their own.

Re: An admirable effort.

"Chrome, for example has made it increasingly difficult to check certificates, you can't even get them from the lock icon anymore. They're hidden in the page inspector."

aka the "Trust us, we know better than you" model.

Re: They came for the journalists, but I was not a journalist...

"But actually they came for the semi skilled and low paid jobs first..."

And they came for the skilled technical jobs next,

Re: You can be too cheap as well

"You missed e - you were cheap, but that's because you did not mark up the cost of your product to cover the "hospitality" lavished to win the contract - no "hospitality" no contract is often the case."

It doesn’t even have to be "hospitality". A residential training course for all the staff will do quite nicely.

ICL's Beaumont Training Centre just outside Windsor was a nice treat at the beginning of my career and it was a rather good computing intro course.