* Posts by anothercynic

2067 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2014

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

anothercynic Silver badge

Banyan VINES? Christ... that's a ghost from the past.

How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'

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Facepalm

*points at icon*

There's nothing left to say.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

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Re: Similar issue with Quickbooks

Same with QB for Windows to QB for Mac. Was told that QB for Mac was not available for UK customers, and that cloud-only was the answer. I abandoned that idea, virtualised a Windows box to run QBW for a while longer, but since then... I'm without a decent macOS accounting solution. It's not ideal really...

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Re: Defect at the point of purchase

The regulations are still in UK law...

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Re: Workaround?.....

Ummm, that's what this has been about since the beginning. The LICENSING server's TLS 1.0 is being turned off, and as such, anything attempting to check its LICENSING STATUS is buggered.

The actual software does TLS 1.2 and thus has no problem.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Asked whether customers would lose access to their data

This. 100% this. The cost of the goodwill you earn by doing this is unmeasurable... Sage is truly cocking this one up!

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

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Re: Work share

Well, that process of work share has done remarkably well for Airbus... They've got the JIT dance down to a T. I've seen their production facilities...

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Move it up north

Moving up north didn't stop a data centre in Leeds having a cooling moment though...

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Heat island

Heathrow's also been at it with the "buying on the sly". They bought quite a bit of the two villages they want to raze for the third runway; of course Greenpeace, HACAN etc all caught a whiff of it and bought land too (and sold off parcels to their supporters - trying to do a Narita in West London/Middlesex).

It makes a lot of sense to buy the land, sit on it, rent it out until the time comes that the development starts and you start booting people out.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Heat island

Hence TeleHouse being all over the Docklands and East London.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Heat island

Apparently that moniker comes from "an hour's travel" which makes Stansted worse than Oxford. Even us Oxfordians shake our head at that ridiculous rebranding exercise (and it's not helped - at all). It continues to just be a distant cousin of Biggin Hill or Farnsborough with lots of corporate jet traffic.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Heat island

The only reason the massive data centre in Olympic Park exists because it was the press centre for the 2012 Olympics and the plan was to put Amazon in it (and they didn't want it). Whether any of the universities from oop T'North use any of it (since it's just on the other side of the park from them) is another guess.

But yeah... London is getting hotter every year, and yeah, cramming more data centres into Canary Wharf and other parts of East/Central/West London is not helping.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

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Re: We all know why

Correct. In the UK, the big snoop HQ is in quaint lil Cheltenham. They have (they refute it, but pretty much every fool no/assume) that the GCHQ has several sub levels underground. They are the second-largest round building in the UK (Diamond Light Source has the honour of having a larger circumference), and Cheltenham also happens to be in the kind of place that you can easily reach the fibre running along the M4 in two places: Swindon and Bristol.

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Re: Not near wind farms

10C is already a pretty big win. The ground source heat pump at the Chatsworth Estate has made a huge difference to their energy needs. There it's just about that heat difference that they then uprate to get pretty warm water for the heating system (which dries out the massive house, and actually makes it feel livable).

You can do a lot with 10C.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Not near wind farms

This already happens with some data centres, in that district heating systems are being designed to help the nearby houses with cheap heat/airconditioning (look up the Sterling engine for that). I'd be all for that, but a) I'm too far from the nearest bitbarn, and b) my little conurbation is also full of NIMBYs who'd prefer it quietly die (because it's so pretty and nice and... and... and...).

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Not near wind farms

Correct. The larger the reactor, the more efficient the power station. This is why the new gargantuan one (well, 2) being built in Somerset is... gargantuan.

The thing about water as a moderator is that it is self-moderating, although you have to dope it a lot with boron to maintain the envelope of reactivity.

The small designs from RR are... cute, but they are awfully wasteful. They're based on submarine designs that will never be opened (to be refueled), and that kind of thing doesn't particularly fly well with those who want to milk every bit of juice out of every bit of the radioactive actinides in the reactor.

Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols closes hailing frequencies

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Re: UK Born in 1966

Who are the pooh-faced people who downvoted this! George is a legend!

And yeah, Nichelle will be missed by so so many. She was an absolute legend too.

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

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Re: Wow

I was terrified of showing my father my IKEA furniture (he's a master carpenter by trade), but much to my surprise he nodded in that inimitable begrudging acknowledgement way and said "Not bad! Not *my* quality, but not bad". If he'd said "WTF is *that*", that would not have surprised me, but him actually acknowledging that IKEA stuff was not all rubbish, that was completely unexpected.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Wow

Actually, don't slag IKEAware off too quickly. I bought two office chairs from IKEA in 2006 (£49.95 each), and they lasted a damn sight longer (collectively until 2021) than their rather more expensive predecessors (£150 each). So yes, IKEA does do good stuff, if you treat it well. And I have cupboards and shelves from IKEA that after 12-16 years still hold up well too. Although - a century? I don't think that's quite on the cards ;-)

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Hot stuff

Excellent work, although no doubt with some... sinking feeling on your part.

To this day, thankfully, I've never had to deal with stolen goods, especially stolen goods tainted with child pornography!

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Now 100,000kg smaller

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Re: We're screwed!

This planet *lives* on SEP.

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Given much of the plastic is really small and really light, I think it's a great achievement for the first iteration of their project. So... you may want to consider it in that frame, not "oh, it's just a 100 tonnes, that's not much"

That's one 747 full of plastic fragments of various sizes, and a *lot* of ghost nets.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: hype

I suspect a lot less than you'd think, given that they're careful about how the stuff is separated.

Also, the density may reduce, but it certainly won't diminish exponentially given that more plastic is added daily through the glorious mess of us pouring plastics into the sea at an exponential rate.

Have to agree on the recycling part. Burn it, or frack it into fuel.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Units, Please

Only Belgians (and maybe the Luxembourgers) know there's a province of Luxembourg in Belgium. ;-)

So of course they mean the Grand Duchy.

Cheap cellular data list is out: And US doesn't make top 200

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The irony...

Ghana and Nigeria are cheaper per GB than the UK...

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

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Re: Years ago....

Princely amounts, I might add.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Years ago....

But the OS *do* have a licence to print money... their non-digital maps are also extortionate.

At least they are not quite as extortionate as Royal Mail plc with the postcodes database (the GPS mapping of *every* address to within 3 ft or something like that).

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

anothercynic Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Nice try

I know, which leads me (and many others on here) to point out that the whole TLS 1.2 excuse is a red herring.

anothercynic Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Nice try

Bingo. Absolute bullseye there. I also very much doubt that Sage wrote their own implementations of TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1... they took a library from somewhere that does it. Now if they were to tell us that they can't be arsed paying for another licence (for TLS 1.2, if it's a commercial library), or can't be arsed doing development work at all to ensure TLS 1.2 only is used, then say so. Don't hide behind some pathetic excuse of 'oh, but TLS 1.2 is all new and stuff...'

anothercynic Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: I don't get it

Unless Sage wrote their own implementation of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 (which I *very much* doubt), adding TLS 1.2 support to the licence server should not be a difficult change to make. I call bullshit on their asses.

Dmitry Rogozin sacked as boss of Russian space agency Roscosmos

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: When it comes to unhinged....

Well, he's not wrong about some of the utter nutcases in the US Congress and in the UK Parliament... nutcases who are given airtime and are voted in again and again...

And yes, he's not wrong about the continual dissing either.

However - You are correct in questioning whether he's seen Russian 'media' (the propaganda antics of the 'good old days' are well awake and functional) and whether the Duma outdoes the US and the UK in terms of nutcasery (is that a noun?) or not. I'd say the Duma is definitely way beyond us already, and the Russian media, well... like I say, they know the propaganda drill.

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: News just in

You could trust British courts not to do something crazy - future results may not reflect this

Could, yeah... these days it's debatable. But yeah... agree with you about this (and corporate law in Delaware).

anothercynic Silver badge

I called it the minute he started making noises about the amount of bots on Twitter. It screamed 'I'm desperate to get out of this deal' because he seemed to finally realise that he would have to give up a lot of his shares in Tesla to do the takeover (and share with 'friends' like Larry Ellison).

He wanted to get out, and using excuses like "they only gave me a PDF of the slidedeck from Goldman Sachs" just highlight how desperate he is.

I hope Twitter takes him to the cleaners and walks away with a billion in their pocket as per the agreement signed between the board and Mr I'm-the-big-Lebowsky.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: News just in

Delaware is the biggest US tax haven (closely followed by Nevada)... wanna do 'interesting' deals with minimal fuss and minimal oversight, get a Delaware corporation... As long as you pay your $200/annum in taxes/fees, everyone's happy.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Ah, twitter

Mastodon = IRC with a new name? ;-)

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

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Re: Why aren't Twitter happy

Bingo.

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

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Re: Moo

This classic never gets old. Ever. No matter how much you watch it :-)

Google location tracking to forget you were ever at that medical clinic

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Google's minimum viable response

That's pretty much my concern... if there's a 3 hour gap in location data, and the gap starts a couple of hundred yards away from a clinic and restarts again in a similar fashion, the fact that gap exists is as much a so-called reasonable inference that the 'suspect' at the time may have spent those 3 hours within the vicinity/on the premises of said clinic, as location data that doesn't vary much for those 3 hours and *shows* that the 'suspect' spent their 3 hours at said clinic.

Of course, making tracking impossible by widening the circle in which tracking is deleted is an option, but even then, with some reasonable footwork (all it takes is a pernicious private eye and/or their flunkies), it can be deduced that the 'suspect' was not in any of the establishments covered by such a location-blank.

Google said to be taking steps to keep political campaign emails out of Gmail spam bin

anothercynic Silver badge

This is spam...

... I don't want this rubbish in my mailbox. Thank you!

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

anothercynic Silver badge
Pint

And Korev is here all week. Boom boom tish! ;-)

Have a beer on me!

Password recovery from beyond the grave

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Devil

Re: Not happened to me, but

Bit late for that by then, mate. Worse she could do is pee on your grave. Or set fire to it. ;-)

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: R.I.P.

Nooooo... that's not sudden enough. Being run over by a bus is something significantly more sudden than being given instant P45-and-marching-orders.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: R.I.P.

Yes, people always titter nervously when I say "And what happens when X gets run over by a bus?" about some colleagues in certain positions in the company that would, if disaster were to strike, potentially leave us all in the proverbial canoe without a paddle, up a creek...

I guess people don't like being confronted with a crass "yeah but what if..." but I keep making that point because I do get concerned that some people just won't have the ability to recover critical services if they *don't* face the fact that accidents happen, people in critical positions will die in some form or fashion, and that sticking your head in the sand whilst chanting "la-la-la, don't wanna hear it, la-la-la" will not protect you or your business from that reality!

I also get concerned when I see multiple business-critical people on the same plane together. As much as flying *is* safe, and the chances of something catastrophic happening are minute, never should a bunch of people working together for the same organisation in the same function be on the same plane.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Not happened to me, but

Yes, this is particularly now the case, especially when you have digital assets (like digital copies of books, music, etc). And social media (yeah, yeah, yeah...) also requires that now.

I would not trust a business to close down my accounts. If anything, I would request that someone competent in my circle of friends to do exactly that.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

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Re: Long and thin eh?

3-4-3 seating is the bane of *all* airlines. Any airline that does that to its economy passengers needs their head checked (although we know full well *why* they're using that layout... because it makes money).

I've done the Air New Zealand B777 experience in both Premium (hello Space Seat!) and Economy (surprisingly roomy for the 3-4-3 layout, and I'm not a small person), but the 787 arguably sucks worse. Do not use a window seat on a 787. Even (and especially) the last row where there's an empty space next to you. Just. Don't. You will regret it.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Long and thin eh?

Well, we'll have to see what happens... Emirates is arguably the largest operator, and it's done wonders for their revenue. Lufthansa currently is expecting to reintroduce the A380 to some routes (despite saying that they'd be phasing it out for the A350 on many of them) purely because of pent-up demand.

I personally don't think the A380 is quite dead yet... GE and Rolls can still do tweaks on the engines to make them more efficient, but that's something they'll do when they've got the A350 line stocked with enough of them.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: 515 orders

Sorry Fred, but you're looking at two vastly different flight markets. There is *zero*, and I mean *zero* chance of an A321XLR *ever* flying to Oz. From Oz to Bali, maybe, or from Oz to Christmas Island, or from Oz to NZ, but nothing further than that. There's a) too much seat demand for a plane for long, thin routes, and b) it makes zero economic sense.

And no, luggage, sorry to disappoint you, is still only a fraction of what an A320/321 carries. If anything, there'll still be the luggage you want, your ticket price won't change much, and it'll be freight that'll be cut. If they need something bigger, it'll get upgraded to a widebody. Airlines like JetBlue like the idea of the XLR because it will fly a certain number of passengers on exploratory routes until such time that it proves more seats are needed and an upgrade to a widebody is economic. Delta wants something to replace the 757, so the XLR will do for the city hops they've done with the venerable Boeing.

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Why

Blimey! That's a bit of a change... I must've missed the announcement somewhere. *goes off to peer at Business Traveller*

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: Why

There are plenty of people who still like flying in the 757... Sorry, but it's true. Compared to the A321, it's a crapshoot (almost like when you stepped into a BA 767 going to Athens and it felt like a true throwback to the nineties), but Icelandair and Condor are trying to make do with ancient* metal because it's a damn sight cheaper than a brand new A321 you have to wait for 5 years for.

The A321 would at least improve the cabin experience a *lot*, despite the weirdness of being in a very, very long but narrow tube.