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..
6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
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..)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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..
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..
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.
$18 per user per month.
Which is odd - we are also a Government body and get Government pricing. An E5 license costs us a hell of a lot less than that (even adjusting for £/$ 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!
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..
*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)
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.
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.
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.
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..)
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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.