Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

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

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.

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..

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..

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

call it Vodafee

Or Vodabunny.

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

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..

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.

Re: Beware drones carrying genies

My chem teacher in school was a huge practical joker

Our A level lab tech's favourite phrase was "put a bit more in".. right up until overenthusiastic application of quantites of the stuff for thermite resulted in a large number of melted overhead ceiling tiles..

He was a bit more restrained after that.

Re: The old adage

But given this is Meta, then perhaps it should be "do not credit conspiracy, when cock-up is more likely".

AKA "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence"

The living motto of the US armed forces, especially to allies..

I was wondering why there are 787 parts in a spacecraft

Elon bought them cheap off Ebay in a lot marked "unsafe gear, not to be re-used"?

@shardik

now only have my own fingers to blame when nothing I say makes sense

Although Kelderick-plays-with-the-children can doubtless translate it for you..

Re: This sounds like

three can keep a secret if two are dead

That's a very.. cat-like attitude..

Re: And before iPods, there was Usenet

So, without naming names, we sent out an email blast to world+dog in the company, with a USENET traffic graph

One of my orkplaces we had a packet-switched connection to th outside world with fairly strict policies about what people could and couldn't do.. (this was in the days of Napster - so that was the biggest "don't do" of the lot).

One day I noticed that our link was pretty saturated and the devs were complaining that with code sync jobs with the Paris HQ were failing and that email was very, very slow.

So I fired up the trusty Packeteer to see what was going on - to find that rtsp was taking about 80% of our (fairly expensive) bandwidth. Turns out one of the devs had discovered that he could stream Radio 1 (can't remember whether it was a legitimate stream or a pirate one). He was warned and stopped - but as it turned out, not for long.

Sure enough, in a couple of days the problems resurfaced, and remonstrating with him didn nothing and his manager didn't seem to care.

The Packeteer was a wonderful appliance and had a very useful function - you could control bandwidth allocation on a per-protocol basis..

So, after a few days (and with the nod and wink from my boss) I reduced the bandwidth usage of rtsp by 5%. And by another 5% the next day - until it would eventually just sit there 'buffering'.

Because it wasn't an instant cutoff, he never seemed to realise what we did. To rub salt into the would, we managed to find an old AM transistor radio and put it promenantly on his desk - at which point he got severely told off by the electrical safety team for having a non-PAT tested device. It wasn't planned that way but was the final cherry on top of the cake.

Re: Ahh but it does!

And ring 0 was "internal"

Or, in the real world, reserved for the most privileged processor instructions..

(I wish people like MS wouldn't repurpose specific jargon in order to make themselves look clever!)

Re: You missed a question.

Its only job is should be to start them

Much like the only job of an init system should be to make sure that system daemons are started correctly (and re-started if necessary).

And we all know how well that's going eh DedRat?

Re: Pay

So, medical debt or death?

I recently found myself enjoying^W enduring a 4-day stay in hospital [1]. Intravenous antibiotics 3/day, painkillers and other medication 4/day. Since then, several follow-up sessions and more antibiotics plus anti-nausea medication. Leading to an operation under general to open up my hand to drain the infection from the joint at the base of my thumb. Plus various tests done on the bacteria that they cleaned from the wound to ensure that they were giving me the correct antibiotics as well as hand x-rays to make sure that there's no other joint damage.

Because I'm in the UK, it was free at the point of use (paid for by all our taxes). I shudder to think how much it would have all cost in the US.. (in addition to the regular medication that I'm on - one of which, if I had to pay for, would be about £10k/year)

The NHS certainly isn't perfect (and the 4 days proved that - the ward was way understaffed with the nurses on-shift working at top speed all the time just to manage the workload and left hand often didn't know right hand existed let alone talk to them - as a T2 diabetic, when I was on nil-by-mouth I should have been on a drip to maintain blood glucose but, even though the surgeon knew that, the ward staff manifestly didn't until I made a fuss about it) - the staff in the wards did their best but were being managed by people who made Edwardian time-and-motion martinets look like relaxed stoners.

[1] Embarrassingly, a cat-bite to the base of my left thumb (cat was having a pain seizure, tried to bite his hip and managed to get me instead with a full-pressure bite that punctured the joint capsule.). Cue hand that started to bloat alarmingly after a day or so with a red line starting to move up the lymph pathways of my arm, almost up to the armpit. After 3 days of intravenous antibiotics, infection wasn't under control, hence the operation. A pure accident that no-one could have forseen.

Re: It's the humans that are insecure here

Of course, no offer to pay for fraud monitoring

Which is basically pretty useless anyway.

One hopes that the ICO actually grows a backbone and starts hitting Capita with the sort of fines allowed under the GDPR.

Re: Don't get your hope up...

If the sun dares to peep through in Yorkshire

It's because they are beating Lancashire at cricket.

So, as you said, not much sun in Yorkshire :-)

(I should point out that my dad was born and raised in Halifax, West Vale and so qualified as a Yorkshireman. One of my nephews currently resides in Castleford.. )

And we are stardust as they say

I think the phrase you are looking for is "Stardust we are".

It's a very fine song by The Flower Kings. One of their longer ones (the live version is 26 minutes long) but well worth listening to.

(Yes, I'm old as well *and* I like prog musi)

Re: All you need to know about Musk

chances are good you'd get all of the Jamie Oliver that you want

Just as well i don't need to pay for anything to get the amount of JO that I want.. (As you can tell, I'm not a fan. He's undoubtedly a good chef but his recipes are (to my mind) fussy, overcomplicated and more performance orientated than food orientated. I am, however, a fan of Gennaro Contaldo..)

Re: Tír na nÓg

but it's about Thor and Loki or something

Which is ironic given that they were a competely separate mythos..

(It's a Gaelic phrase meaning "country of the young" - implied is that everyone who lives there is young and beautiful forever)

Re: "Google will no longer provide staples and sticky tape at print stations in offices"

Hate to think what would happen if they weren't absolutely making bank

Their major shareholders would only be able to afford one tropical island..