* Posts by Andrew Beardsley

16 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Andrew Beardsley

Re: Let it slide

Working 4 days out of 6 is 2/3rds or just under 67%. Sounds like an improvement to me.

Andrew Beardsley

Re: I'm sure a certain somebody

Maybe it is just the population becoming denser?

/s

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

Andrew Beardsley

C for continue, B for boot and 'setenv boot-device' are the only ones that I remember now, but there were a lot of things you could do from OpenBoot PROM.

Andrew Beardsley

I remember having to set the alternate break sequence to avoid this problem.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

Andrew Beardsley

Re: ... what was at the time quite large hard drives ...

5 1/4 inch.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Andrew Beardsley

Re: Bank of England notes.

Actually cheese pasties.

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Andrew Beardsley
Flame

Re: sudo shred

You need to install the following 2 packages first:

aluminium

Iron-oxide

Then run the magnesium installer:

magnesium --ignite

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Andrew Beardsley

Re: This is well beyond my knowledge and experience but....

My contribution to this was to point out that the DR/BC plans were all stored on a network share which would probably be unavailable if needed. Solution was that the BC team were told to periodically replicate onto their laptops. No idea if they really did this as I was not involved in the testing.

One of the last remaining clerical admins had the job or printing out 6 sets of the most vital BC information quarterly and distributing to the team tasked with BC management. Pretty sure that nobody took on that task when she retired. Left that job many years ago, so not my problem.

Andrew Beardsley
Facepalm

Re: Flashlight

I had a similar experience when doing some cabling in a server room. Crouched down behind a rack with several floor tiles lifted and was out of sight of the sensor. After a fairly short delay, all the room lights go out and I am stuck with trying to get to a point to trigger the sensor without falling down any of the holes from the lifted tiles.

After I complained about that, an override switch was added to the lights.

Dodgy dealer on Amazon lures marks towards phishing site

Andrew Beardsley

Re: I was surprised Amazon are not more on the ball

I saw a couple of these before Christmas when I was looking for some camera gear. One seller claiming to be from Holland had what I was looking for much cheaper than the going rate with the 'used to display in shop' description. It had the 'contact us before ordering' line. Seemed too good to be true but I thought that I would be covered by the Amazon A-Z guarantee. I added to my basket and tried to checkout. However, it would not accept any payment methods. Now pretty sure that it was not kosher, I sent an email to the seller through the Amazon system. Not surprisingly there was no reply.

The quantity available kept decreasing; so they had either managed to con some people or it was another part of the trick to create a level of urgency. My suspicions were confirmed when an almost identical listing appeared as soon as this one disappeared. This time claiming to be from somewhere in East Europe.

Lucky escape.

Strong non-backdoored encryption is vital – but the Feds should totally be able to crack it, say House committees

Andrew Beardsley

Re: 2 + 2 != 5

Actually 2 + 2 = 5 (for some values of 2)

2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8. Working to 0 decimal places, this gives 2 + 2 = 5

It is always fun puting that into a spreadsheet to show people. Everybody trusts Excel, right?

Fox's meal Sky ready to smother Europe with foreign language OTT content

Andrew Beardsley

BBC iPlayer

Does this mean that the BBC has no excuse for blocking iPlayer in the rest or Europe? The reason given was that they only had the rights to show things in the UK. That would now not seem to be the case.

Web backup biz Monster Cloud monstered after monster price hike

Andrew Beardsley

Re: Livedrive

Crashplan have this announcement on their support site.........

============

On January 4, 2016, we will discontinue our optional, paid Restore-to-Door service for CrashPlan Home subscribers. It has been our pleasure to offer this service for several years, but due to declining interest, we are choosing to focus these resources on improving our customer support responsiveness.

There are other ways to quickly retrieve large amounts of data using CrashPlan beyond this service. We recommend configuring a local CrashPlan backup, either to another computer or to an external hard drive, in addition to your backup to CrashPlan Central.

This yields multiple benefits:

Fast backup to the local destination so you're protected while your offsite backup is completing

Fast restore from a local destination in situations where a full restore is required (e.g. laptop theft, hard drive failure)

Meanwhile, your CrashPlan Central backup ensure offsite backup security in the event of a local disaster (e.g. fire, flood, home theft)

This way, if your main computer fails, the local backup data can provide a timely restore for large amounts of data.

Thank you,

The Code42 CrashPlan Team

=========.

So do not bank on getting your data back on HD.

Looking at their website the offering did look interesting, but I could not fine the prices for their non-free home service anywhere.

Irish electricity company threatens to cut off graveyard

Andrew Beardsley

Who opened the letter?

Who opened the letter?

Last I heard it was illegal to open post addressed to somebody else. So presumably whoever opened the letter is accepting responsibility?

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

Andrew Beardsley

"I thought that the worst thing that could happen from shoulder surfing was that my passwords were stolen"

Heathrow to trial RFID tags

Andrew Beardsley

"update the information stored on the tag without recourse to a central database."

Surely if the bag gets lost, the information regarding its location needs to be in a central database, rather than just being on the tag on the bag.