* Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

No open door for India's tech workers in any UK trade deal

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

Northern-exit to dump the Saxons and rejoin the Scandinavian empire

Hmm.. who to support? Viking genetics, Welsh genetics and a Celtic blood type..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Nothing economically beneficial will happen until the Tories get kicked out.

keeping Wessex and Mercia out

Which gives me a perfect opportunity to post (some of0 my favourite Saxon poem:

Efstað ye fyrdsmenne to þære ea

wyrmscipu wadaþ on infleowende flod

ure leaffule linde ond æscwude spere

eft scoldon we lædon to þæm hrimceald stæð

gedihtað þa scyldburh eaxlgesteallan

ær oþþe æfter ure lar beo cyðen

hie scoldon singan þe we forðferdon

for landum þe þa suna þære seaxe healden

https://www.reddit.com/r/anglosaxon/comments/1raj1i/saxon_war_song_shield_wall_translated_in_modern/

(sadly, yes, Reddit. Copy it before the site dies..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

No potholes in the roads in the EU countries I've been to

Not been to Italy then? Riding over the Alps from Austia to Italy is a shock in terms of road conditions:

Austia - well tarmaced roads, proper armco to stop you going over the edge if you make a mistake. Good signage.

Italy - poor, uneven, potholed roads, no armco or signage.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

Only after they have Leave to Remain are they allowed to work

Not entirely true - they are allowed to work after two years - irrespective of whether they have LTR or not (it can take 3-4 years for the review process). Also, the allowance they get varies according to their accomodation - in a hotel it's really small (all meals are provided) whereas those in a shared or individual house have a larger allowance so that they can buy food and the like.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: This isn't the Brexit we voted for.

The cheap EU labour has gone for a few years now

My recent incarceration^W stay in hospital (courtesy of a pain-spasming old cat and a panic-bite where two canines (upper and lower) went into my let hand thumb joint - 2 stints in hospital, two operations to clean out the joint and enough intravenous antibiotics to float a small rowing boat..) showed me what a fairly mixed environment the nurses were - about 30% Indian subcontinent & Nepal, about 30% African and the other 40% various Europeans (mostly British but also Irish, Spanish and a couple of Germans).

In general it seemed to work - the ward had them paired off so that ones with more limited English were partnered with someone fluent that also spoke their language.

The ones with the best English skills? Undoubtedly those from Zimbabwe and South Africa.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Skilled Workers?

they've worked out a deal with a newly 3rd world country to sub-contract the work to

So more work coming to the UK then?

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: BT's backend

You have to FTP a COBOL-format file

I'm surprised it wasn't a dial-up zmodem/kermit file transfer to a 14.4k modem on a really bad line that uses a hand-made binary compiled format format [1] that had to have it's own certificate from a known cert server..

(I remember the days of dealing with BT and serial comms lines. Order a 512K line, engineer turns up with the kit to do a 1M line and doesn't know how to reconfigure it.. puts it in as a 1M line, charges it as a 512k line, promises to amend it later and never does..)

[1] That has to be compiled by a BT provided application that runs under MS-DOS 5 and will appear to run under other DOS versions but produce gibberish that the destination can't read.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I still have analog landlines.

I'll be able to summon help if needs be long after the cell towers run out of battery

Assuming that your local exchange battery hall isn't a steaming pile of rubble..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Size.

Isle Of Man

Which has (outside of the TT season) a smaller population than Swindon..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Size.

The US is physically a trifle larger than the UK

You also have a lot of rabidly independent states who would rather die than have a system that links in with the [state of opposite political colour] next door.

And everything relies on ISPs and telcos who have the only goal of making more money by hook or by crook (often the latter)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Multiple redundancy

Sometime around the end of the year, the twisted pair will cease working

At which point, I'll stop paying for it. Which is a shame because I've got a number that's nice and easy to remember..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Multiple redundancy

I can't rely on mobile signal around here

For me, Voda signal is pants (work phone is Voda so gets forwarded to my home mobile).. Anything O2-related (directly or MVNO) works fine but data is iffy (which doesn't bother me - wifi cures that). We're a next to a fairly big park so, when there are events there (or just a nice summers day that brings out the skin-cancer lemmings) then the ability to use the mobile or data gets significantly worse.

Fortunately, Sky Mobile does wifi calling so, as long as my fibre isn't being borked by the CityFibre installers, I should be good..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Why the down vote?

far more robust than traditional POTS relay exchanges

More robust than a bunch of Strowger switches? I hardly think so..

How a dispute over IP addresses led to a challenge to internet governance

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

OPNsense

I'm about to migrate to that (from Sophos UTM nee Astaro Linux) - UTM doesn't seem to be under active support any more and the home 50 IP address limit is starting to be irksome.

I have OPNSense all ready to go, just need to bite the bullet and do it. OPNSense is running on one of the Lenovo mini-PC thingies whereas UTM is running on a very old HP Microserver with a Celeron processor..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: No winners

They going to be in various "set and forget" blocklists all over the world

China [1], Russia and a few other places are already in my country IP blocklist - which reduces the attacks on my network by about 70%..

[1] I allow traffic to but not from..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Time for IPv8

NAT serves as a basic firewall - either you know which port(s) will let through traffic (typically because you were just told which to use), or your traffic doesn't get through

Which is why nmap was invented - especially if you don't have port-scanning protection enabled on your firewall. So NAT is essentially security by obscurity - with the tools needed to remove the obscurity easily available.

In other words, no security at all.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Time for IPv8

almost all of the arguments about IPv6 boil down to either "my business is based on charging people for IPv4 addresses", or "I don't like colons"

Or "it's a confusing mess of kludges, designed by people who had never run a real network in their lives"..

Report reveals US Space Force unprepared to counter orbital threats

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Think Tanks found to leak; use New Never-Before-Seen Sealant for Instant Repair!

there is only the huge pork barrel

Presumably not char sui pork.. far too... Chinese.

Hmm.. char sui pork!

Microsoft signs 1.5 million seat contract for Office 365 and more

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: $940 million for a million and a half users ?

$18 per user per month.

Which is odd - we are also a Government body and get Government pricing. An E5 license costs us a hell of a lot less than that (even adjusting for £/$ pricing).

I suspect that there's a whole bunch of other stuff bundled, most of which looks whizz-bang but will never, ever be used. Makes you wonder whether *any* techies were involved in the process at all!

(Sadly, I think I know the answer to that one - i'll be the men and women in nice power suits who did all the 'negotiating'[1] and a token tame 'techie' [2] brought along to give the gloss of appropriateness..)

I think I've got old and cynical.

[1] AKA nodding wisely as they were being fleeced by the reseller. And picking extra-cost shiny from the list when prompted to.

[2] He/she once built a PC! Must be an expert!

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I... don't think so

Besides, how can they say such bollocks when we were locked in during Covid and the work continued just as well ?

Our employee satisfaction indexes went up and out IT engagement indexes also went up. We're still working on improving the infrastructure (new firewalls/VPN concentrators and an uplift of the internet link to 10Gbps) but, in general, the workrate is the same or higher than it used to be and people seem happier in their work.

It helps that our employer has publically stated that, absent of Government rule changes, they will never force us back into the office fulll-time. *And* it's now in their policy statement and HR handbook..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: It's such a North American viewpoint...

*don't* have such huge commutes

Whattdamean? It takes me at least *seven* minutes to drive to work - or an astonishing 15 minutes to cycle!

I'm amazed I can cope..

(We have a 'one day a week in the office' semi-official policy. We can go in any other time as needed - generally I'm in 1.5 days/week)

Alphabet, Bharti Airtel to bridge India's digital divide with frickin' laser beams

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Monsoon

Have the "blue sky thinkers" never been to India?

I would suspect that a vulture sitting in front of a dish wouldn't be ideal either. Or a monkey stealing the shiny bits!

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "it is so easy to forget that terms and conditions are, in fact, a contract"

UK law can make certain Ts&Cs unenforceable

I came this > <. close to having an argument with a checkout lady when she grandly informed me that they items I was buying were unreturnable.. (LSS - no they are not. UK law specifies that *anything* can be returned if it's broken/not fit for purpose/etc etc. The retailer is free to charge 'restocking fees' and the like but they are legally obliged to take back the items and either refund the money or, more likely, give a credit note.)

As it is, the blinds are now up and past the return period anyway.

Attorney sues Microsoft for $1.75M, claiming his email has been useless since May

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Second email account

Becoming a globally "trusted" email server is as simple as setting up SPF and DKIM

And not trying to send emails from a known residential IP address block..

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Clean keyboards

where the keycaps are so black that you can't read the letters underneath, and sticky as well

I started my career in support in the days when smoking in the office was still legal (albeit heavily discouraged). The people who used to smoke at their desks had a rota against their names - if you visited fag-ash Lil last week then it's my turn when she next calls for assistance.

We used to keep dust masks and rubber gloves for opening PCs where the user smoked. One particular one I remember - the user (a really nice Dutch bloke who smoked like a chimney) called us apologetically to say that his computer had 'made a funny noise' and now didn't work. It was my turn on hazard duty so I went along. Opening up the PS/2 revealed a motherboard with several inches of brownish/grey gunk [1] over it, the CPU fan was completely seized (as was the power supply fan) and the motherboard had literally cooked itself under the cloak of gunge. Even the token-ring card mount was covered in sludge - and he did report that, some days, the network was a 'bit iffy'.

Fortunately, the hard drive was still viable so, after a good clean, got put into a new chassis and he was able to work again.

Fairly soon after that, the rules changed and smokers had to go outside to smoke and smoke detectors got fitted in all the toilets to stop people nipping in there to inhale their toxins.

[1] We assume it was a mixture of fag ash, dust and tar. Not good for electronics apparently.

US vendor accused of violating GDPR by reputation-scoring EU citizens

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Yet again

Belgian

Ah yes - Belgium. The place where, as a motorbike rider, I felt most unsafe. France is good (probably because just about everyone seems to ride a scooter as a kid and so grow up very aware of two-wheeled traffic). Germany is good (operating a bike is quite expensive). UK is *mostly* good (apart from the nutcases in the cities that seem to take personal offence at the fact that a motorbike can filter through traffic and will try to block your path). Ireland is good. The Netherlands are *really* good.

But Belgians are the rudest, most selfish drivers I've ever come across in Europe. They seem quite happy to use other cars and bikes as bumber-stoppers, cut you up and seem blind to the existence of two-wheeled traffic.

I'll never willing ride there again - I'd rather take the long way round and have the expectation of surviving.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

human who hordes millions of times the wealth

Hoards. The word is hoard, dammit.

An horde is a large, often uncontrolled group of people, usually out to destroy.

I know ElReg is trending towards Septicism but can we please actually use the right words rather than picking a random homophone?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: A fitting epitaph

Have you ever read the list of possible side effect all medicines come with

Yes. With the number I have to take, I can't afford not to..

(Also, Dad was a pharmacist and trained us to educate ourselves about the drugs we have to take, their half-lives, side effects and interactions..)

Google has blocked in its in-car software rivals, claims German watchdog

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Potentially?

Reminds me of all these TVs with Android baked in

Some while ago I was in one of the big kitchen applicance shops (you know the ones). Promenently featured was a Samsung fridge, proudly running their version of android and advertised as wifi and PnP enabled (presumably so you can check at any moment to see if it's been pwned yet). The SalesThing was waxing lyrical to some poor couple about the advantages of spending the extra £500 on the monstrosity.

I managed to refrain from butting in to ask about update cadence cycles and how long would it be supported.. But only just and only because my wife would have given me grief about being impolite!

Wind tunnels for fluid dynamics boffins among UKRI's £72M funding

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Jeez

What are these people smoking??

If you want them to be able to give more, persuade the Government to increase their budget..

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Lots of paperwork and some money needed

Where the facilities are available - the Government made a big song and dance that they were 'establishing an office to process claims in France' that turned out to be one desk in an airport - one that wasn't manned most of the time..

The whole focus is wrong. To deter illegal migration, you need to offer legal options that the people who want to migrate can access. If you don't, people turn to the people smugglers (they are the people that the home office should be going after, not the migrants!) and the whole cycle turns again, with more people dying in overcrowded fishing boats just so that some criminal can make lots of cash.

Given fair legal options, the 'illegal' migrant number will drastically reduce. But this (or any UK) government doesn't want to do that because the same people who voted for Brexit will be manipulated into frothing hatred of migrants by the likes of Priti Patel, Braverman and Johnson (who, ironically, are all descendants of immigrants!) and the government doesn't want people unhappy enough to vote for any alternative.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: What type of "hate speech"?

Real people? I hate those guys.

Which is why the sensible among us do network/server support. Less contact with the unwashed masses (apart from the devs sadly)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: A poop emoji

Tesla 3 Long Range does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds

And costs substantial multiples of a vehicle that can already do that..

(ie - a motorbike..)

Where are we now, Microsoft 362.5? Europe reports outages

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

it's a single service that is down. Not everything

Previous orkplace the aircon for the (new) server room was wired to the lighting circuit for the floor. Which got shut down once a week so that work could be done. The aircon wasn't configured to come back up automatically..

When we got in in the morning, the air temperature in the server room was 65C. The servers (Sun [1] mostly) were struggling, but still up. One Sparc disk array 1 had fallen over but, once things cooled down, we powered it back up and had only lost 2 drives out of the 20 or so in the array.

Next maintenance window, the aircon was put on a dedicated circuit with a big "Do not switch off" label taped over the switch. *And* the aircon was reconfigured to default to powering up automatically..

[1] Yes, it was that long ago. Pre-y2k from memory.. or maybe just post-y2k

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

I do wonder how it really compares to self hosted

Has a better uptime than us currently..

(LSS - 4 chillers in the server room. Due to lack of maintenance [1] two of them don't work. A day or so ago, the other two turned themselves off. One managed to come back online when we power-cycled it, the other one is deader than Boris' political career..)

[1] We are not allowed to do it - it's the responsibility of Building Maintenance. And, apparently, fixing the server room aircon (or even making sure it's serviced regularly) is *expensive* so it hasn't been done.. Well, it's a damn sight more expensive doing an emergency callout for an aircon engineer then rapidly buying two mobile units when you discover that they have a 2-day lead time as well as having the entire dev team sit around doing nothing because their servers can't be bought up because the 1 working aircon unit wouldn't be able to cope and will go into thermal shutdown again... I think we'll be taking over the aircon maintenance from now on.

Third MOVEit bug fixed a day after PoC exploit made public

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Value Subtract?

FTP is not secure

But can be made so (use of ssl, ftp/s and all that jazz). Better than a festering pile of closed-source commercial crap with multiple *known* vulnerabilities (and how many others left to find?).

Difficult to scale, yes. But to say it's not secure it wrong - in its default state sure - but no sysop should *ever* put stuff into production in its default state.

Not even Dynamics 365 ERP is safe from Microsoft's Copilot splurge

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: A match made in hell

frequently misleading and incorrect, and then there is the AI

For which there will, of course, be a premium cost..

Microsoft remembers it was going to bring Windows 11 to HoloLens

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

as well as other benefits of Microsoft support

.. like:

Endless waiting on the phone,

Trying to explain to someone that, no, trying to do it the MCSE way will actually destroy your data,

Getting an answer that, while being technically correct, doesn't actually fix the problem,

Finally, when you sort the problem yourself, endless follow-on 'how did we do' emails.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Women in Jobs?

populating a country with convicts turned out to be a bonza idea

I'll wait until after the Ashes before deciding to upvote you or not..

It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The resulting company has yet to have an official name

call it Vodafee

Or Vodabunny.

(Breaks into your field, steals all your carrots..)

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Even a turd

Michael Portillo would have remained an MP in 1997

Is it bad of me to admit that I quite enjoy his train-travel series? Despite the somewhat.. 'interesting' clothing choices..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Even a turd

The PM is appointed as being the leader of the party with the most MP's backing them

Which is how we got Liz "less than a lettuce" Truss..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: They Have You For A Ride

That bronze badge you are toting is tarnishing fast

Pah - it means *nothing* After all, even I have one and I'm a well-known victim of my own cat attacking me!

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: They Have You For A Ride

and NONE of that is covered by the espionage act

sadly for your case, a lot of very intelligent and skilled legal people (who actually know the law) seem to disagree with you.

But I guess you are used to that.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: What About The Current Resident?

secure rooms without external walls or windows, controlled entry

Including the removal of any and all recording devices (in some cases, not even pens/pencils/paper are allowed).

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: What About The Current Resident?

but you might be showing card tricks to a dog here

Or mud-wrestling with a pig..

(Don't do it, you just get dirty. And the pig might enjoy it..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: What I cannot understand ...

He has a strict personal liability to obey national security laws, president or not

Y'see, this is the flaw in all this. In Trump's tiny little mind (of inverse proportion to his ego) the *only* law is "Do I want it?". This is why he can joke about committing sexual assault, this is why he can incite people to commit treason (or whatever the term is for the Capitol rioters), this is why he can hang on to classified documents, lie about it *and* show them to people with no security clearance.

Because he wants to. And, in his mind, that over-rides anything else.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: narcissist egomaniac

Also, one of them is overweight while the other is fatter than is healthy

And one is a serial womaniser whereas the other is... a serial womaniser.

(which, I guess, goes hand-in-hand with the inability to make a promise and keep it)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

when he might be able to (invalidity) pardon himself

This is the one thing I don't get - in most jurisdictions, spending time in jail automatically excludes you from the executive branch of government (so, in the UK, possession of an uncleared [1] criminal record bars you from Parliament and/or the Lords).

In the US, it seems that even criminals currently serving their sentence can be president!

[1] IE - after a certain while, the criminal conviction is cleared from the record. The time taken is dependent on the category and seriousness of the criminal conviction.

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Senior manglement, of course

You never get fired/lose your bonus/lose your share allocation/golden parachute for buying IBM/Oracle/Microsoft

Delete as appropriate.

Oh - and fire a few more techies. Useless, good, for nothing layabouts! They don't sell *anything*

(Yes - I've had a 'senior sales executive' scream at me that I should be grateful and do whatever he asks because 'he pays our wages'. Strangely enough, when the economy took a downturn and he *actually* had to work to sell stuff (and pay for his vastly overpriced company car - he'd pushed hard for one that he wasn't entitled to by his grade and got it because he was willing to pay the substantial difference). Sadly (!) it turned out that his opinion of his selling abilities wasn't matched by his *actual* selling abilities.

Where his colleagues put in the extra hours and schmoozing to actually get to know the customers (and work with us to help them talk to customers) and still get orders from them, he simply attended the site and expected them to order in the quantities that they used to.

They didn't. He very quickly found out what happens to arrogant sales types who have a vastly overinflated veiw of their abilities.

The final irony - when he came to hand his car back, he discovered that he was in hock for the rest of the contract term cost over and above what the company was prepared to pay for his grade. I'd like to think he learnt a valuable lesson but, knowing his personality, I very much doubt it. He's probably a senior manager somewhere (he had the right psychopathic tendancies for it) that's absolutely dependent on his staff yet treats them like garbage.