Posts by Lee D

Older generations are obsessed with lightbulbs too.

I removed 1.5KW of bulbs from a house I moved into recently (halogens, incandescents, etc.) and replaced them with a few hundred watts - at most - of LED bulbs. There were literally scorch marks in the ceiling paint above some of them, because that's how hot they got.

Yes, a 60W bulb on all day is a big cost. A 6W bulb, not quite so much.

Standby mode? Nowhere near as big a deal as it used to be. They're often basing their stuff on generations-old data that's no longer relevant.

Even kettles - I have a kettle, but for cups of tea I don't see the point in boiling a kettle only to let it cool much of the way before I can drink it, so I have a coffee machine with a plain hot-water adaptor that puts out at 60C or whatever (I don't know what it is exactly, but it's perfectly drinkable immediately) and only heats as much water as you ask for, and does it far quicker than a kettle. The machine uses one tenth of the power of a kettle. I use my kettle more for pre-heating water for cooking than anything else (a saucepan of water takes forever to come to the boil).

Even your toaster, mine is 800W and barely on long enough to bother to measure. If it cost a penny to make toast, I'd be amazed, even at 50p per KWh.

It's the long-draws like the fridge and freezer (mine apparently is only 160W on average, but obviously surges on startup). and heating. Literally £1 per hour at the above rate for a little 2KW room heater, obviously. That could be £10+ a day in the winter if you're not careful.

Hell, my ex had an electric kiln that got to 1100C for hours, and the pricing for that that factored into the price of any individual bit of pottery wasn't actually that much. I think the clay used to cost more. And that used to make the meter (we had one of those old spinning-disc meters) go into spasms. But it was on a duty cycle and insulated so after the initial burst it wasn't actually doing much.

In work, photocopiers can pull stupid amounts of power, especially if people keep turning them off in the day and it has to heat its fuser back up again. I had to put a meter on one to prove it to certain people, it was better just left in standby and at night it would go to sleep anyway so there was no need to manage it - and doing so just made it use more power.

Re: Coverage - Mast sharing

Try changing your water provider, tell me how that goes.

You can change your electricity supplier, but the water supplier is entirely out of your hands and you must pay the local for-profit company that runs your area if you want water, with no competition or choice.

RAR was best for integrity and spanning disks across large sets. ZIP could do it (hell, I even know the PKZIP command-line syntax even today), but RAR allowed you to add some more "integrity" to the files so they were more likely to survive corruption.

RAR should have been dead since the days of the floppy, though, it's only used as some kind of "hacker" cachet label, to show you were around in the heyday of "Software Name (cracked).r57" and hoping and praying you could get the complete set off Usenet before it disappeared.

RAR serves no useful purpose nowadays.

Even PAR (which is designed to have a configurable amount of redundancy to avoid data corruption) is pretty niche and obsolete nowadays. Data storage corruption is far less of an issue than it ever was now.

7z has better compressions, but nothing that ZIP couldn't add with a "ZIP v4" or whatever we're up to now (PK/WinZIP extended ZIP with AES encryption, etc. over the years). To be honest, compression is far less an issue now than it ever was. Short of disk space? Buy another few Tb. Far beyond the old releases where people would down-sample in-game FMV just to try to shrink it into a sensible number of RAR files, etc. and used RAR rather than ZIP (before 7z existed) to get a few more bytes on the disk.

I used IZArc for years until it went ad-ware, and I'm now on Peazip. Because I want one tool that handles compressed files, and only one. RAR and WinZip are dead, and even 7z.exe is only on my computer as a command-line version to plug into Peazip (I think).

Re: Honest question

"You now cannot process EU credit cards, bank transfers, process EU salaries, accept advertising from the EU, do business inside the EU, nor claim to do so."

If you think they'll just shrug that off, I assure you that you don't understand how they make that money.

Their assets in the EU are neither here nor there when 50%+ of their income is literally barred overnight.

Not even Microsoft (convicted) or other large companies were dumb enough to just bow out of the EU entirely. They all end up complying. Because the alternative is that you literally cannot accept money from the EU because the EU banks will refuse all such transactions. A bit like trying to buy Bitcoin using certain UK bank accounts... ever tried to do so? It just gets blocked.

Re: Not the Only 'Unprofessional' Company

To be honest, I had that with a Lenovo device many years ago, because I discovered a bug in their BIOS code and they ended up with a Phoenix BIOS update to solve it - but one they weren't shipping to everyone and the combination of requirements to trigger the bug was unusual(*).

Just because it's says it's for evaluation doesn't mean that it's not actually done without Phoenix's full awareness and co-operation.

Also... I'd be far more worried about a newish machine coming with a 5 year old firmware to be honest.

(*) Phoenix's BIOS bootloader had hard-coded the location of a default Windows 7 install's bootloader files. It then verified that sector had a particular content from the Windows bootloader, and refused to boot if it didn't. Thus on an unmodified or stock 7 system, it would just work.

If however you: encrypted the disk, had a non-standard partition layout, changed the storage, installed another OS like Linux, etc. then it wouldn't find the OS no matter WHAT YOU DO with your bootloader, etc.

Reformat and install Windows 7 in the default configuration... it would boot again.

After a nudge to our supplier and that being escalated, Lenovo immediately leapt in and escalated straight to Phoenix, and we were supplied with a replacement BIOS that carried pretty much the same "FOR EVALUATION ONLY" lines on it, and even a beta version number. We flashed it to a test laptop, it worked. We flashed it to the dozens of laptops that we'd just bought, it just worked. That same BIOS was on there for years, to my knowledge (I had moved on by then). But at all times we had gone through the official channels.

Re: Private Eye named them perfectly!

Only "airtight" because some dumb head in politics who gets a back-hander knows that and signs them.

Nobody with purchasing responsibility and a brain would ever sign those kind of contracts, unless it was basically a back-hander large enough to guarantee their future, that would also absolve them of all responsibility.

Capita aren't some legal geniuses. The heads of organisations are basically being bribed into signing contracts that nobody in their right mind would ever sign, which tie in all their successors for decades in some cases.

I think it should be illegal in government to sign a deal that lasts longer than the next election, and even if you did, the courts should throw it out anyway.

Re: Typical Google doublethink

More correctly: "costs... nothing with tools like Lets Encrypt."

I just started a new job, and my first job I gave myself was to list all the renewals, expiries, etc.

In the process, I discovered - as always - that we're holding tons of unnecessary and unused domain names, and a bunch of paid-for individual sub-domain SSL certificates.

First, they should have just got a single wildcard cart. Honestly, it would have be enormously cheaper.

Second, they need to stop paying for basic SSL certificates. I moved them to LetsEncrypt within an hour for the first cert (quicker than it took to discover how to go about accessing and renewing it!). Now it takes seconds to add other certs in as they expire.

It's 2023. You haven't been able to trust that someone is NOT sniffing your traffic (and that includes your web forum administrator password!) for several decades now.

Even in IIS, there are LetsEncrypt tools that just "do it all for you". You run them, select an IIS site, it generates a cert and verifies and sets up scheduled renewal and alerts you if there's a problem. On Linux / Apache, it's even easier.

There's no excuse now for using any unencrypted service on the raw internet. Whether that's DNS, HTTP, FTP, Telnet or unencrypted SMTP (which is a bugbear for myself because it should be end-to-end, not just you-to-server, it's 2023 ffs!). Even a personal forum, or a login to your own server, or your own dumping-ground storage on a remote server that you own, etc.

You literally cannot trust things to just get to their destination unread or unmodified any more, so you must encrypt.

Would you run wireless without encryption? Would you hand your bank card, or even a personal letter, to the nearest person heading in the general direction of the bank and ask them to deliver it for you?

Encryption is the norm, and now we have the processing power for it to be effectively free, there's no excuse any more. It will be the norm now, and in a thousand year's time.

Chrome - and every other browser - should have done this 20 years ago.

SMTP should have been replaced with an end-to-end encryption 20+ years ago.

If you're doing ANYTHING online and it's not encrypted, you need to stop it now. Across your home network, who cares? But even that is an issue (e.g. internal router compromised by XSS etc.). But once something leaves your house or your phone, it should be fully encrypted - if for no other reason than to stop your ISP reading your email so they can spam ads at you (which has happened!).

Hell, if WPA2 gets weakened any further, I will be forced to buy WPA3-supporting equipment for home use. As it is, at home I've used VPN-over-wireless to my own server as the default route for years as the safeguard when WEP was compromised, when WPA1 was compromised, etc. Impact on my network performance? Zero. Welcome to modern processing. Yes, I've gamed Counterstrike over VPN over wifi to a home ADSL router and had the lowest pings on the server many a time.

Chrome are literally TOO SLOW in this regard, and the OP thinks they're moving too fast. It's NOT fast enough. HTTPS by default is the norm in all modern browsers.

My only problem with it is legacy internal services with web interfaces that will alert because their certs are self-signed. But even now... my opinion is changing on that. It used to be that I'd accept plain HTTP for internal stuff. No more. Those things get replaced now if they can't do it. But there needs to be a protocol for them to secure themselves, some form of opportunistic encryption, that doesn't require clicking through obscure warnings in the browser and having to "proceed anyway". They should warn once, the user can accept, and then the browser should provide an unremovable banner on that site every time you access it to warn that you did previous accept the self-signed cert. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to access a legacy switch or NAS device on a local network - but we have no real way for such devices to "sign" something that will work with the global SSL/TLS system if they are purely internal.

And even that - it's becoming less and less of an issue.

Hell, even at home I run another VPN out of my network through to an external server which reverse-proxies any internal services I need to be remotely-accessible (e.g. my TVHeadend and Plex servers). The remote server does LetsEncrypt on a fixed IP under my domain to secure it, then tunnels access back to my local network to actually pick up the devices (and verifies their self-signed certificates that would otherwise make a browser balk at them). I get secure end-to-end and remote access that passes all tests, and the internal devices know nothing of the encryption that's being applied to them. And I therefore get no "browser warnings" when browsing my TV or media libraries, internally or remotely. I set it up once, it's been working for about 6 years now.

Pretty much all of the basics that are just skipped over, it's because we don't actually know in very much detail at all.

Neurons.

Photosynthesis.

Smell / taste.

We have a vague model, we know what's going in and out, but the actual workings are a black box for the most part.

If we *knew* how they work, we'd have actual, proper, real, intelligent AI. We'd have buildings that would make their own food from the sun falling on their roofs. And we'd have robots that could tell you that the wine is off, and the recipe for Coca Cola was this, and industrial computers that are able to smell leaks in factories.

We have "some of" that kind of thing, via very limited mechanical means, but nothing anywhere approaching even a basic plant or insect's capabilities or senses.

Re: So?

Yes, the remedy we used was to hire IT recruitment specialists at enormous markup to field a couple of suitable candidates at a far lower level than we ever wanted to, because it was a struggle to find any replacement at all - even before we eventually had to concede and sacrifice a huge percentage of salary ON TOP of our offers to finding the right person.

The real answer for places that can't afford to do that is not to hire because they can't justify the expenditure. So they've dialled down to paying for lower-level staff only, thus stripping people of the opportunity of progression.

It's not a case of "just offer more money". We had candidates refuse because of commute distance, working hours (bog-standard!), not being able to work-from-home (but their rule is entirely hands-on tech support, so it's not practical), refusing above-market rates, with above-market benefits.

The market is pants at the moment. I think people are too scared to risk moving to something new, but it's really hard to quantify.

Re: Corporate uses

Every company I've ever worked for are still hoarding a bunch of sound-a-like domain names, for no particular reason.

There was a point at which it was deemed critical that a company hold EVERY variation of its domain in every TLD they could, yet nobody ever uses them or even cares about them (sorry, but if the official website is domain.co.uk and your customers are going to domain.com then you need to educate your customers on the perils of not using official links, not babysit them).

Twitter is in much the same vein... you have to have a Twitter "because everyone else has one". Even if you never post anything on it, or only ever mirror the exact same posts that you put out on a dozen other social media accounts that you also "have to have", even to the point of buying software specifically to do so without needing to copy/paste it to each account.

I cannot imagine for a second that any of that actually adds ANYTHING to a company either.

Last place I worked at, we discovered that hiring the "marketing" person actually cost more than their own budget, which in itself never actually made any difference whatsoever to the bottom line of the company (literally that rare instance from going without any of that gumph at all, to full-on full-time person doing it all day long over many years).

Ironically, they made one mistake with over-ordering which wiped out their entire budget overnight, so they actively ended up costing us money even if there had been any measurable difference. And over-ordering because they totally misjudged quite how many people were seeing their tweets, were interested in participating in events, etc. - the exact stuff that marketing should have figures and experience for.

I can't believe that any company actually does anything but throw away money on the majority of their advertising, and almost their entire social-media interactions. They always hide behind some mysterious "intangible" benefit to the company but there isn't one. And if the benefit is intangible, that means you can't see it on your sales figures anyway, even via a roundabout route with "reputation" or "appearing high quality" or whatever.... so why are we bothering?

I can just imagine going to the guy who authorises budgets and telling him that I need money and a member of staff, but for which there would be no visible, tangible impact whatsoever on the business by doing it. Just "trust us". But that's what many marketing departments seem to do all the time.

Re: Volt

Show me a product that doesn't have flaws.

I never have remote web or SSH admin on (dumbest idea ever!), and the firmware is already fixed for these problems, including for many old models.

Like mine - which has had a firmware update.

Re: "with rival network operators complaining that Openreach is unfairly undercutting them"

They've always done that kind of thing.

I've had the same problem with leased lines.

One workplace, they ordered a leased line and the only place that served us anywhere near reasonably was BT.

I took over the IT three years later. No leased line. Every six months or so, someone would kick up a stink, force BT to do something, they'd come to site, put a piece of tubing through somewhere, and then leave site never to return. It happened so often, the tubing they used changed several times over the course of those installs and was always left in place (eventually, there would have been a point where trying to join that tubing simply wouldn't ever have been possible without replacing the tubing from previous installs).

I decided not to propagate this nonsense when I took over. All the availability checkers said that there was no existing connectivity to the (quite rural) site, except through BT. So unless we wanted to spend six-figures-plus on installing a line to the nearest town, we could only use BT. That's what the availability checkers repeatedly said for all kinds of companies we tried.

So I decided to ignore them. I went straight to Virgin Media and told them our problem. They realised that actually they had a customer nearby which they could piggy-back off, and because of the rural postcode thing it wouldn't have appeared on the availability checkers. We put in an order with them.

Literally THE NEXT DAY, I had BT engineers crawling over our (privileged) site, uninvited. I had them removed. They were suddenly trying to put all the tubing and blow the fibre in order to complete a THREE YEAR OLD installation contract that they had never fulfilled. We escalated that with them and cancelled the contract. They tried to resist, and kept turning up to site uninvited to "complete your install" even after the contract was cancelled. BT claimed all kinds of contractual disputes with us, and then I said... okay... install.

Turns out - and I already knew - that they couldn't. The local exchange simply never had capacity enough, and never had enough, to install our line anyway. I know that, because their engineers knew that, and a cup of tea and a chocolate hobnob go a long way.

When they finally admitted that, we told them never to contact us again. We even terminated our ISDN/analog lines and went full SIP once the VM leased line was up.

And the VM line went live just a few weeks after our order with them. It's still in use, still doesn't appear on the availability checkers, and has provided flawless service for nearly 10 years now, including a 10Gbit upgrade.

So for three years plus, BT were basically pretending to install our line, never had any intention of doing so, and couldn't even if they'd wanted to without huge investment in the local exchange (which was never going to happen). Then they lied about it, tried to bluff us repeatedly and somehow found out that Virgin were delivering a line and then IMMEDIATELY turned up to try to look like they were doing something about it once again. And action only happened ONCE we basically found a way to use a competitor that they thought they didn't have.

As far as I remember, there are still about half-a-dozen unoccupied pieces of tubing underneath various buildings at that site, that never were joined, touched or filled after their install. And a shiny VM line right next to them.

Another part of the same site, about half-a-mile down the road... sadly BT only. Virgin say they could deliver to it but the costs were stupendous because it's the wrong direction (i.e. further away from their kit). We got another leased line over there (for connecting sites and for redundancy) from BT and we have nothing but trouble with it. They delivered only TWENTY MINUTES before our final, business-critical deadline that we informed them of nearly a year in advance, leading me to have a full and complete backup plan in action involving point-to-point wifi and church steeples (and I already had all the permissions lined up, I just needed to say the word). The engineer who finally saved their butt on delivery of that contract nearly got himself removed from site too, because he was so rude (mainly because his bosses were telling him that this HAD TO COMPLETE there and then and the guy took his frustrations out on his customer too).

Re: It's a feature

Patent already pending by Mr Bean.

Re: who pays for the API

Most of those bot-like things are used by corporations to bring together all their comms in one format.

Same way that Twilio can message over SMS or Whatsapp - so you don't need to change anything. You just add a Whatsapp account, advertise it, and your media people, your employees, your customers, still talk to you over the same channels as always. No retraining for your staff required.

Bots like those (and I don't know those in particular, but those kinds of things) are used as part of a "This is our Monday company message". Write it once, press a button, it goes out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, the website, email, etc. all together in an appropriate format, with link modification, etc as necessary.

Because none of those companies will work together to help you do that, so you have to have 3rd-party software to do that for you.

Sure, "nothing in it" for Twitter... but find me a large company nowadays that doesn't offer their own customers an API of some kind for things like that. Hell, I've spent this morning looking at my cloud-switch/routers API and tying it into a status dashboard along with a dozen other programs, including the site access control management panel which also offers REST/JSON etc.

"Nothing in it" except your customers making greater use of your system whereas without it they may not even bother to get on there because they can't use their normal tools to do so.

Re: Open source

If you are peer-pressured into slaving away on a open-source software project for any return - whether reputational, monetary, or otherwise - then you are particularly mentally vulnerable AND absolutely in the wrong part of software development.

"You know if you don't have OS contributions in your CV then you are a less worthy hire and so on."

Nonsense. Don't work for those companies, ever.

"And let's not get into the social aspect of this where mostly people from privileged background work on those Open Source projects."

Puh-lease... I was hacking on Slackware 3.9 and kernel 2.0.38 for years as part of floppy-based distro Freesco - precisely because I couldn't afford a real router or a hard drive, after I had spent most of my youth programming and giving away the results of that programming to friends, family and the Internet at large (my state-secondary in a deprived area that I grew up in LITERALLY hosted an assembly to show off that I'd created software, my brother had used his college account to upload it to a Usenet newsgroup (we didn't have internet!) and then I (my brother) later got an email from a woman in Canada saying how she loved it and thanking me for it... part of the assembly was literally the "Wow, look at this amazing new tech, a MESSAGE FROM CANADA sent over THE COMPUTER!").

And you think a giant PC heatsink is any different?