Posts by collinsl

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

Hospitals tend to have generators though, fire stations for the most part don't (except portable ones they can take to scenes etc)

Re: The kid did

> The PFY was duely grabbed by the griddlins and had his futtock roasted.

Hopefully you twisted his woggling irons as well until his nadgers scroped.

Re: A solution?

Or just do what most of the rest of the developed world does and have the government manage taxes for employed people (rather than self-employed) so that they don't have to worry about it unless they want to claim certain tax rebates etc which they can do from an easy government web portal.

Re: Sell

> Name one country China has invaded in the last century

Tibet, North Korea (to assist the communist government), South Korea (same war as the North), Vietnam (to assist the communist insurgency)

Re: That which does not kill me...

Yes, but now they have it the question is what do we do about it now? Try and restrict them when all the good it'll do is make them make it themselves faster, or something else? Or nothing? Not suggesting I have any answers, just that there are big questions there.

Re: Irony

Plus it's good propaganda for Russia to fire something at the nuclear power plants, then go "OOO look Ukraine is shelling the power plants!" but because we all know it was Russia we also all know that Russia are stupid enough to do it in the future so they're betting no one will want to attack anywhere near the power plants in case Russia blows them up and blames it on Ukraine, which would be a disaster for everyone except Russia.

Or just go the whole hog and get a picture of an octuple pom pom mount on there

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fdpth5pz87kv71.jpg

Never seen it but it sounds like it's something to do with Monty Python

Re: Cloud

> but the old railways still exist - we left most of them in-situ

Except we didn't really - we ripped up the tracks to scrap the steel, yes a lot of them have become paths but only bits of them. More of them have gone back to being farmer's fields or access roads, or having houses built on them, or being subsumed into roads. Bridges have been torn down, tunnels have been filled in.

In order to make any of them fit to use as railways again it would cost just as much as building them from scratch, if not more due to modern requirements for track beds, drainage etc.

In a similar vein a lot of the government networks you talk about will be a) provided by BT or Fujitsu or Vodafone or some such other over fibres which they rent out and 2) will be just random bits of fibre which can and will be reused by their owners (not the Govt) for other traffic. It's not like the Govt owns millions of miles of fibre which they laid themselves, they rely on rented capacity from the Telcos.

Re: This is fairly common...

Keep it close to the truth - the more outlandish your lie the more detail you have to remember about it

So you say something like "I was a civil servant" which usually shuts most people up, if they push further then you could say you were an administrative officer in the department of Agriculture or the Scottish Office or Work and Pensions or something equally boring. Much easier to remember as a cover story than "I worked for McDonalds as a fish descaler" when that process is automated or "I was a yacht salesman in Oxford" when it's miles inland.

Re: Locked racks

Or "The Simpsons" where Burns and Smithers walk through a series of highly complex and secure doors and access methods only to get into a room with a broken door straight to the outside with a stray dog running out through it.

> Some rando on the interwebs can get into the chain

They can fork the code and make their own version, sure, but they can't force people to use the new code in their own projects or replace the one the original maintainers are providing.

In order to alter the existing code base they'd have to get the existing maintainers to accept their branch or merge request etc, which no sane maintainer would do unless they've reviewed the code & verified that they're happy with it.

Re: if some sysvinit script fails to report a startup error, just fix that script!

Then how do the RHEL6 systems I use manage to put [ERROR] on the output of "service xxx start" when a process fails to start up?

Re: USA Free Market

The taxation without representation excuse was just that, an excuse for a bunch of privateers and traders who didn't want to have to pay tax on their semi-illicit trading to rile up the general populace to rebel so that they could eventually carry on trading on their own terms, and maybe get some power over a government at the same time.

And the US has continued in a similar vein ever since, with robber barons and businesses controlling the government, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly.

Personally I always put my date of birth as old as possible - if the system has an unrestricted birth date then I'll happily pretend I'm from 07/03/1792 to share my birthdate with John Herschel

Re: Circular Reasoning

Well of course the way this will be handled is ███ ████ █████ ██ ████ ██ ███ ███ ██████ ██ ███ ████████ with plenty of ████████ and we'll use ██████ broomstick up their ████ .

I think the point of that line in the article was that the British Library doesn't work with nuclear materials or massive vats of boiling metals or highly toxic chemicals etc.

It also didn't start blaming it's staff and prosecuting them for tens of years as a result of the breach so I fail to see how it's comparable to the Horizon Scandal.

Re: glueing thin clients

You mount the monitor to the back of the VESA case for the PC, then mount the VESA case for the PC to the arm.

My work has them for Dell's MicroPC line, they're quite effective enclosures. Support the usual VESA weights, have a thumbscrew to retain the PC, can be used with the PC's existing locking solution to prevent theft etc.

Re: Laminate everything

So how did laminating the screens make them work better? Was it so poking them did less damage?

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

When is a good time to upgrade supermarket software given their daily opening times?

So should Aus, their legal system is quite similar to ours.

Re: Thank you!

so far

Re: the caching services zfs requires

Disclosure: I run a ZFS on Linux based system at home as my primary server and as my server hosting my backups

ZFS does indeed use a lot of RAM, but it's for performance rather than as a requirement (unless you turn on deduplication which needs tons of RAM on any system, regardless of filesystem).

The ZFS cache is used both for selective read-ahead (predicting which files are to be accessed) and for caching the rest of a file currently being accessed (until the cache is needed again by non-ZFS processes or the file is replaced by a new file in the cache).

ZFS can be run on systems with very little RAM however the performance will be much closer to that of the hard drives themselves rather than anything faster.

If you want you can add ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) SSD drives to improve write performance however read performance will always rely on RAM to cache into. You can set how much cache you want ZFS to use (right now on my main server I have this set to about 50% of 128G so I have some VM space and on the backups server it's at 85% or so of 32G)

Re: "They have that kind of money"

Depends how many trucks carrying computers have crashed over the years ;-)

Re: And another one today

As long as they're not full right up inside

Re: iOS App stores should not be under Apple control

> Apple's private key..

What, you mean 123456?

Re: Nothing on one...

I stick that on my FIuke testers. Note the name is F-capital I-uke. Fiuke in other words.

> ever since signing up with BT for IP telephony (no idea what persuaded her to do that)

Probably because they're turning off the landline network and she still wanted a working phone, and some devious salesdroid convinced her to sign on with BT "as it would all be in one bill" or similar.

You must have had it set in "efficiency" mode then - there are configuration options with the C7000 enclosure which allow you to choose how power is spread out. The "efficiency" option (I can't remember the actual names now, been years since I touched an enclosure) used as few PSUs as possible to bear the load so that they operated with as little efficiency loss as possible, whereas there were some other options to balance load across X PSUs or all PSUs (can't remember exactly) in order to maintain as much redundancy as possible.

> I do not believe Elon intentionally ... endangers his employees

Oh he does, just look at SpaceX

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

You mean this scumble: https://wiki.lspace.org/Scumble?

Re: ZFS subsumes and replaces partitioning and so on.

You can easily set a ZFS parameter to set it's maximum RAM consumption - on my home NAS/hypervisor I have it set to 50% of the 128G installed and on my backups server it's set to 80% of the 32G installed (IIRC)

As for the cache situation, for ZFS on Linux it can't use the system cache because it's licensed differently from the kernel (ZFS uses a CDDL license instead of GPL so the kernel devs won't let it in to the cache). Also the way the cache operates is very different from the system cache so it's best to keep them separate. ZFS will quickly relinquish cache though if the OS requests it to reduce RAM usage (at the expense of performance) so it shouldn't pose a massive problem.

Brimingham has already been authorised to raise theirs 9.99% for the next 2 years.

Re: Failure is an option

Personally I think they should all carry a clone of Razer since it seemed to be almost indestructible and the crushing power would be useful to deal with clangers

Re: Fire in haste, regret at leisure

> Right now, www.nissan.com is dead.

I think that's due to the person who owned it dying due to Covid complications - it was up until a few years ago.

The court cases let him keep the domain but they effectively bankrupted him. Sad really.