Posts by CrazyOldCatMan 6355 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015
same thing applies to unauthorised horse dismounts
.. and motorbike ejection events...
I've seen people riding around (in the days when I rode as well) in helmets that had clearly been dropped and/or potentially crashed in, judging by the scuffs and impact marks. They obviously don't value their heads..
(Even though the contents of such heads have themselves taken a physical and chemical battering over the years!)
I use Sophos UTM as my home firewall (used to be Astaro Linux then it got borged by Sophos - fortunately they didn't hack it around much and honoured existing home, free licenses..).
The issue is that they don't support UEFI booting. My old firewall is an elderly HP Microserver - Intel Celeron processor... Which was OK in the old DSL/VDSL days - or even the FTTC dats since it was capable enough to keep up with the bandwidth available. Then I got FTTP (900Mb) and it's struggling..
So I bought myself a refurbished Dell Poweredge T40 - nice little server with many multiples of CPU uplift over the old HP.
I soon discovered it wasn't going to work - Sophos UTM will not boot from UEFI and the T40 *only* allows booting from UEFI (or so it seems - I couldn't find a BIOS boot made in the usual places in the BIOS).
But I could stick in a small USB stick, tell the Dell to boot from that and have it chain-boot from /dev/hda thus booting into Sophos UTM.
sharks aren't kosher
OBPedant: Sharks, being sea creatures, are kosher.. (in the original definition - I'm not up on modern kosher rules.. just don't cook them in fish broth or with their own eggs and you'll be fine!)
ARM merely joins the long, long list of successful companies/products that got zero support or interest from the British establishment and so ended up in the hands of overseas entities..
(Some of it is even semi-deliberate - how many of our utility companies were floated so as to be attractive to foreign buyers?)
who took out their first mortgage when mortgage interest rates were at 13%
Ditto (I think ours might have been taken out at 10% though - then worked it's way up to 15%). And we had an endowment mortgage that we eventually converted to a tracker mortgage so that we could overpay once the rates went down.
Which meant that, when our woefully underperforming endowments eventually matured, the lower-tan-advertised sums that they produced were actually enough to pay off the mortgage.
I would have preferred policies based on pragmatism rather than party dogma
Sadly, Truss seems to consider herself the seconding incarnation of Maggie. Like her or loathe her - one thing Maggie had was competence[1] and confidence.
Sadly, Truss only has one of those and it ain't competence.
[1] Bright enough to get a chemistry degree, bright enough to actually work for a living. Her economic polices though could be summed up as 'full speed ahead and damn the horses'. She too believed in trickle-down economics despite the fact (as acknowledged by Biden recently) they plainly don't work because they don't take human greed into account.
Someone or something with lots of money gets more and more money. They sure as hell are not going to invest that in a long-term (and possibly risky) business upgrade - they are going to either through it to their shareholders to make hedge funds richer or sock it away into their favourite tax haven a-la Rees-Mogg.
we were hit at only a glancing angle.
You can't do that with just one hand on the steering wheel
Wrong - you can if you have a steering knob (properly) attached - I can spin the steering wheel a good deal faster using mine than I could with two hands - especially using the Highway Code approved hand shuffle.
I know of at least one stroke victim who has a door-knob type of addition to the steering wheel
As do I (cos arthritis) - I generally don't use it about about 20mph because I'm old-fashioned enough to want to have both hands on the wheel.
For low speed manoeuvring it's great - means my left (more painful) hand and shoulder don't have to be involved.
So you think alcohol isn't a drug??
As my dad used to say (industrial pharmacist) - anything that causes a physiological state change can (technically) be labelled as a drug..
Of course, we exclude food generally from the list of drugs but under some circumstances (late night, heavy meal) food can be a cause of traffic accidents.
Prescription drugs can also cause accidents - I was (for a while) prescribed amyltriptalene as a low-dose migrane preventative. It made me very, very, very sleepy - to the extent that I was really unsafe to drive for about 8 hours after the dose kicked in. I stopped it pretty quickly.
fraught with accuracy issues
Especially if the utterly sober driver has recently applied aftershave/cologne/perfume/mouthwash - most of which use alcohol as a base..
(Well - maybe not mouthwash - unless you use a nice whisky to clear away the whisky breath from last night..)
Intel needs to get back in bed with the rest of the supply chain
Intel grew so big because (in part) they made a really good strategic partnership with Microsoft (hence the 'Wintel' abbreviation).
And now? Microsoft is fast diversifying off to ARM (and potentially RISC-V) and their dependency and strategic alliance with Intel is fast disappearing. Adding the fact that AMD chips are faster, cheaper and *available* means that Intel is going to have to do something special to survive in it's current form.
Chipzilla is the got fat, dumb, and happy many years ago
AKA 'The Motorola strategy'..
(I worked at MotRot ECIG many years ago for a couple of years - they took the idea of internal competition to an insane level - both within the MotRot group and within each company. We wanted to use the Motorola Computer version of the Mac - not only was their quoted price to us *more* expensive than an Apple, it was more expensive than they would sell to a non-Motorola company. So we stuck with Apple.. ECIG made cellular basestations - they were, in many ways, the first to mass market successfully and, for a time, all the sales guys could just phone up the mobile companies and ask them how many they wanted this month. Then the mobile companies started to not buy - Ericsson had started to sell compatible cellsites for less money and more features and, due to us having not bothered to innovate because 'we owned the market' we had nothing to compete with them. )
There's a reason why a search engine look for 'Motorola CIG' mostly finds links from before the millenium!
My NEWEST laptop is a 2018 MacBook Air
Up until recently my main machine was a 2016 Macbook Pro (with the infamous butterfly keyboard - I missed the deadline cutoff for getting it replaced by less than a month :-( ).
One incident involving a cat, a glass of orange juice and said keyboard later, I was looking for a new machine. Yes, I probably could have tried to sponge out the keyboard but, considering that the keyboard and battery are all pretty much one unit, I didn't fancy that option. And the keyboard was pretty crap to start with...
So I now have a nice shiny M1 Macbook Pro 16". It's very, very shiny. And Gog/Steam are good at trying to present Apple Silicon versions of my games (although Baldurs Gate 3, on startup, offers the Intel or Apple choice and warns that the Apple version doesn't yet have full Galaxy integration - which I can live with because it's a *lot* faster.
The only fly in the ointment is that Parallels doesn't support x86-64 bit VMs (understanable) so I had to put by inherited Windows stuff into a Windows 11-ARM VM.
pay per minute Internet access (pre-0800)
At one point I had a flat-rate Home Highway (BT ISDN) setup - two channels bonded to a MASSIVE 128k of always-on internet feed. And, since I was with Demon, I had a real internet IP address.
Ah those were the carefree days when having a firewall wasn't an imperative!
my home 386SX16
Mine was a 386sx25 (4 mb RAM, 80 MB hard drive). Hard drive was later upgraded (thanks to a local computer fair) to a massive 330 MB ESDI drive (full height, full noise, full heat :-) that I bought with the requisite interface card which, fortunately, linux supported.
That machine lived for many years as my mail server (initially sendmail, then I discovered qmail).
My current linux mail server still uses qmail but, I suspect, not for much longer.
Also mine. Didn't have an internet connection but a friend did. He downloaded the images to 3.5" floppy for me, I started the install.
Floppy 5 was corrupt - he re-downloaded it and copied to a new floppy. Floppy 8 was corrupt, rinse and repeat for about 3 more floppies.
Eventually had a working linux setup (including dial-on-demand to Demon (they had a FAQ on how to do it - one of the reasons why I picked them) then managed to damage it severely with a poorly crafted rm command (turns out that putting a space in between a / and tmp is a *bad* idea). Salvaged enough to rebuild a fresh build without having to reconfigure everything.
That was Slackware pre-version 1 (0.99 pl (15?) I think - it was SLS at that point). Used it for a number of years then 'upgraded' to Mandrake because it was better at the GUI stuff and I was using it as my main home PC.
I suspect a few people would be surprised what can be achieved with sendmail.cf if you have half a clue of what you are doing
For my sins, I spent two years doing Unix and Network admin on Solaris.. and we used sendmail extensively.. We didn't need anything too extreme out of the sendmail.cf but I do remember breaking it quite a bit in the early months..
With an option to remove or not spiders too
Spiders are good - they kill the flies (the ones that get through the patio & kitchen door screens) and clothes moths!
(We made the mistake (about 25 years ago) in bringing a large bag of clothes back from M-i-L's house. Needless to say, it had a small colony of clothes moths which proceeded tp make themselves at home. We can't do a house fumigation because of the pets (and tropical fish) so we just have to squish them as we find them. Or hope the spiders do their job..)
The wife has a pet spider that lives in the kitchen window. Although it's been moved out to the greenhouse now..
Artex removers are more commonly known as steamers.
Or the Luftwaffe..
(The house I grew up in had large crack in the Artex due to a near miss from a bomb in the 1940's.. fixing it would require removing all the artex (it was a large room) and re-doing it. The crack was stable (partly because of all the polyfiller and paint that had been subsequently applied) so my parents didn't bother..)
I used to expect better from the BBC.
The BBCs technical coverage (IT, medical etc etc) has always been really poor (although good when compared to some of their competitors). Which is what happens when even their 'specialist' reporters (RC-J - I'm looking at you) don't seem to have a clue what they are talking about and seem to mostly just regurgitate press briefings..
And when they have stand-in generalist reporters doing technical segments it gets worse.
There are lots of cats too, posting cute videos of themselves
My cats don't use twitter - it's *far* too much effort. And there are not many Koi there for them to eat..
(My wife managed to prevent our youngest cat carrying off and eating one of the koi from the pond yesterday.. The cat is still giving her evil looks.)
pace rocks have to be a fair bit bigger than a marble if they would have to have a marble-sized remnant hitting the earth
This is true. Even an anvil wouldn't do much damage on impact since there would be little left.
A nicely-shaped penetrator made out of tungsten, that's a different matter..
Their collective IQ is
The IQ of a crowd can be calculated by taking the lowest IQ value of those present and dividing by the number of the crowd.
Given the IQ of the British Standard Middle Manager and the size of most management groups I suspect that your guess is not far off..
Battle of Agincourt anyone?
The British gesture of the two-finger salute is said to have stemmed from English & Welsh archers gesturing to the French to indicate they still had the fingers required to fire a bow..
The French had a habit of cutting said fingers off if the captured a bowman.
'poors who refuse to work'
Looks like the US hasn't progressed much past the Victorian workhouse mentality..
(I know, glass houses and stones - but at least (at the moment) unemployment end job seeking is a Government function and not doled out to the private sector..)
.. I *hated* Exchange 5.5..
All of our network was Solaris/Sendmail except for one office that had mysteriously migrated to Exchange 5.5 overnight. Mail looked like it was still flowing so everyone relaxed.
Until the director of that office complained that he wasn't getting some emails. And it seemed to be a random assortment that he was missing. This was pre major search engines so I spent a lot of time trying to debug the issue. I finally found a found on an obscure forum where someone was complaining about failed SMTP pipelining.
Sendmail, on contacting the destination server, would parse the server capability header response and tailor the session accordingly. And Exchange 5.5, coming from that bastion of conformity to standards that late 1990's Microsoft was, proclaimed that it could use pipelinging (ie - one SMTP session could accept multiple emails). Which was fine except that it couldn't - or at least, not from sendmail.
Fortunately, with sendmail being an insanely complex beast, it could be configured on a per-destination server to over-ride the declared capabilities and, once we told it to *not* use pipelining with that server, all the mails started being received. It took more traffic though and, since we were all on frame relay, more cost.
Perhaps people in North America read that book
US 'English' is largely a constructed language designed to be simplified enough for new immigrants (initially the German ones) to learn easily. In some ways it was a noble effort - it's just a shame that it hasn't progressed since.
(There was real concern early on that the dominant US language wouldn't be English.. Just like now where the dominant language is starting to shift to be Spanish - certainly in the southern US)
Giving 1150 AD to be generous, it seriously took you 600 years to document your own blasted language?
It didn't start being modern English until about 1550.. So that's only 200 years!
And for a lot of that, consistent spelling was somewhat of a luxury - until you get near-universal literacy then some variation is to be expected. As we are finding out now[1].
And let's not forget, English is (and always has been) a living language that shifts and changes constantly[2]
[1] I was moaning to my wife recently that no--one else seems to remember how to parse verbs correctly any more. More and more, the grammar structures of US English seem to be creeping in (AKA 'verbalising nouns', the inability to use the part tense properly etc etc). It's even affecting her even though she's a fairly well educated woman.
[2] Not always for the good. See [1] above. But trying to resist change leads one down the French path and as a British male it's not a comfortable idea..
I enjoy hearing Scots speaking English
Favourite accents:
Highland Scottish
Western Ireland
Newcastle
Devon[1]
Yorkshire[2]
Accents are good - they show the malleability of English. I really, really don't have time for people who discriminate against people based on accent..
[1] I have to say that one - my wife is from just outside Plymouth..
[2] And not just because my dad was from there..
The lenses are different for left and right
Ditto.. -12d in the left eye but only -10d in the right..
If I take my glasses off my maximum focal distance is about the end of my nose with my right eye. Slightly less with the left eye,
I'm very, very glad that modern materials are better at bending light than glass was. Even so, the edges of the left lens are about 12mm thick.
I qualify as partially-sighted and the government gives me a generous £5 towards the cost of each lens (which cost roughly £100 each. The optician gives me the discount but doesn't bother getting it back since the time spent dealing with the paperwork would cost a lot more than £10..
So I'd have to wear my glasses anyway with a headset unless it uses some sort of beaming method that could overcome the extreme myopia and astigmatism.
First HD was an 80Mb drive.. When I moved that machine over to run linux (Slackware 0.99pl15) I managed to acquire a massive 330Mb ESDI drive and controller. The drive was too big into the chassis (it was a full-height drive and the desktop chassis was too small..) so it sat outside the chassis on the floor.
Kept that room quite nice and warm too.
insufficient QA before a change, unclear responsibilities during a major incident--are relatively easy to fix
Not in my experience - they speak of the root culture at a place and that's really, really not simple to fix.
All those things are needed for operations at scale and, if CF don't have them, it's a miracle that this hasn't happened before.
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