Posts by Kiwi

At least the proponents of EMF Danger can point to an actual physical mechanism, even if the numbers don't work.

Well.. It's known some humans are sensitive to some forms of radiation, at least knowing it's around regardless of whether or not it's harmful (I'll raise my hand as someone who can sense certain types of radiation, and I've witnessed some basic testing to confirm someone could detect reasonable changes in electro-magnetic fields (perhaps by the same mechanism that lets us tell what direction we're facing).

Animals are well shown to react to coming earthquakes, and much of the research I've seen on that suggests EM effects of quartz being crushed shortly before the quake.

However, there are a couple of factors that are known to make people sick, sometimes seriously so, which can have a direct bearing on this, and that's stress-induced illnesses and psychosomatic problems.

The former - if someone believes that EMF is bad and that our world is awash in it, it will be an added stressor in their lives that could lead to such issues (of course, many "stressed" people are just SJWs/snowflakes etc looking for the latest opportunity for some minor thing to "trigger" them).

And of course those subject to psychosomatic illnesses, well... If you believe hard enough you're going to get sick then you're going to get sick. Or shovel "cures" and "preventatives" into your body till you make yourself sick

Just eat a reasonable diet OK, and perhaps avoid some of the nastier fumes, and you're probably going to be OK, ok? And if you're not OK, then it's either bad genes (you were going to get sick anyway), misfortune (one of the very rare people who gets a bad vaccine or bad oncoming driver or...) or someone did something stupid (Fonterror making baby formula again...)

Re: Poor old Luddites getting the blame again!

and yet the graditude of those who profited most from the war only seems to have lasted a single generation

What upsets me most about this is simply that the things my grandfather's shed blood to prevent are now the things no-one bats an eyelid at, and many clamour for more.

How quickly we forgot what was really worth fighting and dying for :(

Re: Infertility - maybe not such a real problem in this day and age

When that happens, even more of the trees that sequester carbon are taken out of commission, and the typical way of doing that is burning them which exacerbates the problem.

Don't worry about the carbon - we need more of that in the atmosphere (not less!). Worry about other stuff. Besides, old trees don't absorb carbon, only growing ones do.

Food waste - I actually throw more in the bin now I've gone with a "zero food waste" system. What goes in the compost bin today becomes part of what I am planting in a couple of months time, some of which will go into compost and be re-planted later. Also looking at bio-gas digesting (when I get my own place sadly) and maybe to what we might call "total processing of all food waste" (all of you who told me to eat shit - yup, sounds like a plan - and I get "free" energy and compost in the process!).

On the plastic crap and other waste products, yeah I'd dearly love to see them gone. Not necessarily all plastic, and I do worry a little about what might be the result of the compost-able plastic-like bags made from "corn starch" - I like them BUT will we see corn being used for this instead of food?

Anyway.. Limit rubbish, limit waste, be energy/resource efficient, do what you can to improve your neighbourhood - and the whole "global warming" "co2=bad" and "fake climate emergency that isn't even remotely an emergency" will be taken care of. And if you're not living like that, don't gripe about other's actions!

As to 5G - not worried about that or other radio signals per se, but I have noticed that whereas the fuschias and tomatoes used to have abundant bumble bees and the rest of the garden had abundant other bees, nowadays we may see ONE SINGLE BEE in a day despite more plants for them - that is worrying and while I am not convinced it's our RF I am aware it could be messing up the insect's nav systems... Someone needs to find somewhere with a nice flowery field, 0 RF (aside from the sun etc), install BUT NOT POWER some typical RF kit and nearby beehives, watch the bugs for a while then power up the kit. Change in behaviour? Kit could be responsible. No change? Good chance the kit isn't harming them. Anyone know if this is done? Hell, anyone even still here????

After you magically reveal the sign behind the man get in your car and try driving at night with a security floodlight shining in your eyes. Do you think you can digitally improve that?

I could! Would you like me to prove it? Caveat : Must be able to do it in my way on my terms.

(Do note that the 'digital' involved may actually refer to the fingers I use to wield a blunt object (or anti-sat targeting system, or ground-air-ground missile system), said blunt object used to 'encourage' said installer of bright objects to make better choices)

Re: You are putting your company, its staff, and data at risk

Since Windows telemetry only reports limited Windows data, I don't see how it puts YOUR data at risk.

You are correct. It's only limited Windows data and it's not at all YOUR data.

The issue is, the limit is "limited to what is stored on the system" and "YOUR data? If you wanted it to be yours you should never have let it near our machines. Didn't you read the EULA?"

In all seriousness though - that data is 'limited' to the contents of ram, "suspect" files etc etc etc etc. Any file on the computer is fair game. Any data.

Read the EULA. Better yet, get someone versed in legalese to explain it to you.

Re: "Not a Linux issue at all."

And even when you're just an amateur, if your hobby is not IT and trying to make your OS do what you need, you will prefer a simpler way to enjoy your time.

I run Linux simply because I want my system to work. There's nothing more to it. When I was working with them, I got sick of spending all day working on broken windows crap and then having to come home only to be told I'd have to wait while updates were installed. And when it came to going to bed, couldn't turn the machine off as I'd have to wait ages for windows to finish updates (which weren't finished).

Linux does that stuff in the background and is done with it in minutes.

As to hardware support, well the number of times people have had issues with windows updates killing the network drivers and all sorts of other problems, or the huge number of devices that are no longer supported. Friends of mine use high-end printers, and we've been working to have them working with a secure system so that they don't have to spend thousands on replacing hardware that works well but that MS decided was not going to be supported any more.

Today I swapped GPUs in a couple of machines. Total time to fix drivers? 0. In Windows? Well that's still sorting itself out, thank God I have a 2nd machine to work with.

Anyway the cost will be lower than having to move to a system where the unknowns are too much and you have to fight your way across a lot of unsupported devices and features. Need to rework old files, lost customers, failed deadlines, more work hours are what any business wishes to avoid.

Yes... All those times of waiting for updates to install, reboots when you have jobs running, updates that disable hardware or remove applications you use.. And the biggie I am still expecting to see very soon now - the lawsuits when it comes out that MS takes data from your machines... The cost of breaching various privacy laws can be quite high. Hoping it comes real soon now...

Most people can use Linux with no problems. A few people have specific needs, but that's almost 0% of home users and only a few % of business users - and many of those won't be able to change away from 7 or earlier.

Re: RE: Who did the testing

Boeing are just following Microsoft's example of shifting the burden of testing to end users.

Seems like Boeing certainly have "end of life" processes for their products down pat :(

Re: What about the integrated standby instrument system

Most airliners will use mechanical backups and the few that have switched to glass backups are air-gapped from the rest anyway;

Good. Glad they're keeping the planes air-gapped from each other. Could get quite messy if they didn't! :)

Re: Lifestyle change

As for landing on an area "about a foot wider than the skids" - that's no more an issue than parking your car in a space that's about a foot wider than its wheelbase.

I do believe you on the manoeuvrability of choppers.. But if I was to 'touch the sides' while parking my car, or somehow back into a building or mast or powerpole or something, most I'd get is some scratched paint work or perhaps a dent. I don't think I'd like the idea of doing that with some fast moving rotors, even though they're likely to be moving away from me very fast should that happen.

I would dearly love to fly a chopper. Especially if I not only have a landing I can walk away from, but one the craft can immediately fly away from as well :)

Re: Lifestyle change

I was almost as relieved as I was when I discovered I was too heavy for the tandem parachute jump I'd booked in for,

All I can say is... If you have the opportunity, go for it! And if you cannot for some reason you can fix, FIX IT!.

Jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane with little more than a silk sheet strapped to my back is one of the best experiences I've ever, well, experienced. Those all-too-few seconds of freefall are incredible, very much worth the (sadly rather high) price of admission.

Of every thing I have done in my life, everything I have experienced, only my faith has held anything more enjoyable - and even then the tandem jump rates higher than most of that stuff :)

Icon ---> If that does happen, you won't have long to worry about it. But it very rarely happens, I can't remember the last time I heard of it in NZ.

Re: Inconveniently placed keys

Brilliant piece of design...

In HP's defence.. They've had so many problems with laptops (and AIOs) overheating and not acting to protect themselves from overhot situations.. So it's nice if them to at least give you a very easy to reach OFF switch and, lets face it, there's at least a 75% chance your HP is overheating and really should be shut down right now...

(Worst I've seen is a melted CPU socket in an otherwise nice HP AIO - because the fan clogged, was quite hard for the user to clean, and HP would rather you buy a new machine than chuck in a .002c sensor and "kill power NOW" circuit)

Re: Inconveniently placed keys

The most patently dumb keyboards have, or had as luckily I haven't come across any recently (they get immediately skipped with prejudice) power and suspend keys on the keyboard itself. The most utterly idiotic thing to put on a keyboard near guaranteeing regular shutdowns in the middle of work.

Those buttons on the KB itself aren't so bad - when they're away from the normal keys and in an out-of-the-way area. One of the shortest lived keyboards I've ever known was one a mate had that had the '"sleep" key at the level of the "home" key, and the home etc keys dropped a row.

I can't imagine how it was that I simultaneously accidentally spilt a glass of coke (which I didn't touch back then), a cup of coffee, a bag of sugar and something else into it. It certainly wasn't keyboard malice, and I did give him a very nice replacement immediately afterwards anyway (which by pure coincidence I'd purchased on my way to see him that very day, which I really was wanting just as a spare for home and not at all because I was planning to make sure his existing keyboard was destroyed and irreplaceable). And when trying to clean all this mess out,I did accidentally break a couple of keycaps and accidentally pushed my screwdriver through the membranes of a few more keys. And in my shock and frustration of how bad things were going, I did also purely accidentally use the longer screws in shorter holes, driving them in with such accidental excessive force that they drilled a new hold through part of the circuit and out the top of the case...

Such a shame. It was such a nice keyboard too! :)

One thing I found really annoying with certain laptop brands is the swapping of F1 etc keys with the 'media keys' so you need Function+F1 instead of just F1. Being someone who seldom uses media keys and often uses function keys, especially when I was using a lot of repair tools each day....

(FTR, I usually set the "sleep" buttons to "do nothing" anyway, just in case I come across a stupid keyboard again).

but didn't that process usually work by nuking the first letter in the filename, that you later had no way of retrieving unless you knew?

That's how I recall it as well. Undelete would find the file OK, but you needed to provide the name.

I do have a niggling memory that there were pointers to the next part of the file or something that may also have contained the name, but I did often do data recovery for people so my recollection of this stuff is an amalgam of remnant bits of lost knowledge :)

Re: The scariest word in IT....

"Oh! How do you manage without him?".

"Quite well, we're powering through all of our work and are already a week ahead of schedule" doesn't go down well when a) it's the first day they've been away and b) it's their mother on the phone... :)

Re: Show this to the Mexican police

"The alternative is to just obey the rules"

The whole point is that it can be *impossible* to obey the rules. If there is insufficient time to clear the junction between the time the light turns amber to the time it turns red, you can never guarantee that you will not be in the junction when the light changes to read, and so are hostage to fortune.

and :

Erm - the whole point is that the engineer showed that the duration of the yellow was *too short* to cope with a worst-case scenario. Of course there are relatively few people who get caught out that way, simply because there is a low probability of arriving at the lights at exactly the worst possible moment.

In NZ the answer to both questions is the same and very straightforward.

#1 It is illegal to enter an intersection if your exit is blocked. Sure, lots of people do it and enforcement is lax, but it is an offence that you could be ticketed for.

#2 It is illegal to be travelling through a light-controlled intersection if the light is red. We even have cameras in a few places now to catch you (though I wish bigger fines for runners). If the light changes to red while you're in the intersection, you've failed and have earned a ticket (no ifs buts or maybes, if the rear of your vehicle hasn't exited the intersection by the time the light changes you can be done). It is up to YOU to stop when the light changes to amber, if you can do so safely before entering the intersection (and again, you must also be able to exit the intersection).

and the key part, #3 - the lights are timed for a worst-case scenario. Aside from very rare glitches (I've seen one once in 30 years of driving and >40 years of paying attention to lights) the lights are timed to give anyone with a road-worthy vehicle time to safely stop. If you're not in a road-worthy vehicle you're committing another offence anyway.

There's also often a slight delay on the next green as a bit of a grace for those who're getting the green, in case some idiot has gone through a red. On 30-50lph roads that delay is only a second or so, on some 100kph roads I notice it's a good 3 or 4 seconds, maybe even 5 seconds of all red lights before the next green.

But it's a simple system. Drivers are not allowed to enter the intersection on amber unless they're so close they cannot safely stop when the light changes (and the timings are based around trucks as well who have a lot harder time slowing down - although a pro would be slowing down expecting the change), and it's an offence to be in an intersection on a red light. If your exit is blocked then you're not allowed in.

I often drive through Melling/Block Rd/SH2 (co-ord 41°12'10.12"S 174°54'23.87"E) and Fairway Drive/Major Drive/SH2 (co-ord 41°11'24.51"S 174°55'46.39"E) intersection pairs. It's normal to see people stop at the first set of lights while on green until the queue at the next set of lights is clear. Same for the many roundabouts in the area, stopping and waiting until the exit is clear to let others get through.

It really isn't hard to do. Light is amber,I'm to close to stop, I don't stop. Light is amber, I have time to stop, I stop. If the person behind you is too stupid to also stop in time then you need to work on your license issuing practices.

And yes,I ride a motorbike so being rear-ended is quite a dangerous proposition for me. What would cause minor damage to 2 cars causes major damage to me. Thankfully the standard of driving in NZ (at least outside Auckland - will get to you in a moment KiwiMuso :) ) isn't too bad, and I can legally lane-split if needed/desired (within limits).

Re: Deleted

Yes! Emails opened from the deleted items folder should require clicking a button to make them visible, with a 5 second delay before it enables, for each and every email.

No.

A 30 second system lock out (like the "anti-RSI" things we had a while back, or modern anti-clog or whatever) with appropriate signage, perhaps even annoying sounds like variants on "this idiot accidentally deleted an email and needs it back" playing for the duration.

Even then, I doubt that'd be enough for some users. They think they're so smart having a folder called "nroP" that we could never find in a billlion picoseconds....

Paris coz.. At her dumbest she'd be better than whole officeloads of some users I've dealt with :(

Re: Still an issue today

With some of my users I think it's a case of...

The thought obviously never cross their mind that it could be emptied at any point.

:)

Re: Deleted - why is it a problem?

Its moronic surely , but whys that our business?

If a person uses the wastebasket to store their tv remotes , who are they hurting?

Many of us are tasked with keeping systems running, often on tight budgets. Often those tight budgets mean limits on storage space (more so in the past today). Clearing out 'junk' becomes a regular part of the job. You don't put important stuff in the office waste bin and expect it to be there the next morning.

Many of us also are or have been tasked with migrating users data from one machine to another, often in the case of a hardware failure. There's automated tools for this, and often said tools ignore the trash bins for obvious reasons.

Who does it hurt? The IT people who did a proper job with the tools they have, within the limits of the budgets they're constrained by, and who still get abuse from idiots who think the sewer is a good place to keep their lunch.

Re: Still an issue today

Why not call it compost pile, or septic tank? How about hell? They are all equally valid.

A compost pile is a great thing to have, and a real benefit to your garden (or any other gardens you can supply - I'd encourage anyone to get a cheap lidded bucket (there's ways to get them free), dump your kitchen waste into that, and give it to anyone local who has a garden).

The rest of those labels, however, are already 'reserved terms' that describe the OS itself.

Re: Deleted

Really? Do you really honestly believe that? Because I can tell you now that you're 100% definitely wrong.

I disagree. I do know some users who would learn from this...

Can we agree on 99.975% wouldn't?

And may all y'all have a great new year!

In a lot of cases users do this because there's no quota enforcement on "Deleted" or "Trash" folders - something to be aware of when you're adminning a network (and to check for)

Would be cool if you could set a quota on them - but not only set one but one that is much smaller than the normal quotas - say 100x the average email (including attachment) size (or whatever sizing floats your boat but sinks your users' ideas of using it as a bulk storage medium)

Re: Lookout

Thankfully, I restored these from backup, but how anyone could program such mallevolence under the auspices of 'repair tool' is beyond me.

Those MS "repair" tools were programmed for a specific reason, and I believe that they succeeded in their job exceptionally well.

They were made so a user would go online, find that tool, download and run it, and wind up with an even worse problem then before. They'd finally give in and take the machine to a repair shop.

Just so happens, and completely irrelevant to the story and completely done in total innocence (honest!) that the writers of those repair tools also had shares in large repair franchises.. Which did not in any fashion cause them to make their tools such a steaming pile of corrupted turds...

That, or it was to give the MSVP or whatever they called them people on the MS forums something to make them sound useful and intelligent, for a moment. Until someone tried to follow their advice (when the advice actually showed signs of them listening to the user rather than repeating instructions the user has said several times don't work - like the old "I get BSOD 0x7B immediately on startup, even safe mode - help!" "Oh that's an easy fix. Just let your machine boot, then go to system restore.. " "It doesn't boot, just bluescreens" "you're not listening. When it boots, go to system restore..." "doesn't boot" "to fix that, when it boots go to system restore.. why won't you listen? I'm an MSVP and know everything about your problem without even once listening to your issue!"

I'd be very surprised if they ever worked, even once.

[El Reg, we need an icon for PTSD-levels of frustration - the windows icon is close but not quite close enough!]

Re: (not) deleting emails...

and, now, backups are someone else's problem.

Well.. Backups are only "someone else's problem" when you don't need them. When you do need them, they become your problem - and when they become your problem, the other person can say "that's not my problem".

Re: No Limits!

Both Nextcloud (IIRC) and PiWiGo insist on having your media in their "private" folders. No thanks.

???

Nextcloud does tend to encrypt the stored material by default, which is generally considered good practice with web-facing servers but IIRC it doesn't have to.

However... It does have WebDAV which any decent OS should be able to talk to natively in this day and age, and decent enough clients most of the time (though the .htaccess thing bugs the hell out of me!).

I currently only have "142,618 items, totalling 514.9 GB" across 3 servers (one heading into retirement very soon now, I promise!), with the bulk of that (all but about 10g or so) on the one machine - and that's a Dell D630 running Devuan ASCII (no GUI) with a whopping 2gb of RAM and 2TB HDD. Small stakes I know, but it does what I need and I don't need to keep that much stuff around! (he says as he tries to surreptitiously tuck the 300GB of mostly crap photos into a corner out of sight)

Re: Always work on a copy!

Perhaps he did, and thus likewise did plan accordingly.

Yes.. The article did say the offender left not long afterwards. It doesn't say he was ever heard from again, or whether or not his leaving was immediately prior to a long stay at a local asylum or quiet forestry plot......

(El Reg, can we get the BOFH icon back?)

Re: users would learn

I remember a time when a complete backup would probably fit on two floppies.

I still have a 250MB tape that holds many backups of my old drives (assuming the tape is readable - think I know where the drive is even). Largest non-NASA photograph I've dealt with was more than 10 times the size of that drive, and I frequently play with files much larger than that.

And I still have both of my backup floppies from years back. Hell, I could fit OS, graphical game and save files on a 720K disk! Still haven't played Quake Champions because by the time the latest steaming pile of updates is down I'm off doing something else, and by the time I get game time there's another 20+ GB update to be downloaded. Glad I got that game for free...