Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: Joke ?

Do they really intend to mass-produce and -sell them ?

Intend? Yes, Succeed? We'll have to wait and see (and be utterly unsurprised when the "mass" part is very, very limited. Won't stop Elmo from trump(eting) their success..)

Re: Why do people keep trying to go off road in those things?

meant the leave the road any more than my Audi coupe is

Just asking - does your car have the (apparently) entirely optional turn indicators? Just that a lot of the Audis around here don't so it must be an expensive option..

Re: Sports Futility Vehicle

That was the Tiger P (VK 4501 P) not Tiger II

Yeah - the Tiger II's always seemed to stop just below the crest of the hill, with only the turret peeking over..

Re: Should have left some "bugs" in place

BREXSOD The Brtitish blue passport economy's screen of death

There FTFY

Re: Forewarned is forearmed?

wasn't available in Gin, which I mainly used

I mainly use gin too - with a nice tonic. Althouygh sometimes it's whisky (without tonic thankyouverymuch - I'm *not* a barbarian).

Sometimes, rum is nice too.

(13 days until January ends. And I can have a nice G&T again. Admittedly, I *did* need a break from alcohol because the 'one G&T' had crept up to 2 G&T then 3 G&T.. and the G wasn't a single either.)

Re: 2038?

I wonder how much of a problem the POSIX timestamp overrun is going to be

I'll be retired then so probably won't care :-)

(Unless someone wants to pay me mucho dinero to care.)

Re: Time Bomb Y2K

Oh, and the person we had an argument with worked in IT at the time and by his own admission did Y2K checking

A hell of a lot of the Y2K people I worked with were purely script-runners with minimal technical skills.. that relied on the few of us that did have the skills to actually interpret the output and decide what to do.

logical thought needed to connect all the work done before 2000 with the fact that nothing bad happened at 2000

I'm old enough to have been a Y2K contractor (and, unlike a lot of my colleagues, had actual support and techie experience beforehand). Spent most of my time dealing with non-Microsoft stuff (SunOS/Solaris/HP-UX/GuardianOS on firewalls/etc etc) - mostly because most of my contempories would freak if faced with a command-line and I'd already been using linux for about 4 years (and was a quick learner - this was pre-internet days so it was a case of "sit down with the manuals and learn how to do it")

Did some MS stuff as well and had the particular joy of seeing fully-patched and 'compliant' servers become non-compliant (or differently-compliant) with each successive patch. And applications (which at that point hadn't been patched) crash when the dates offered by the system differed from what they were expecting.

Then the Y2K projects started winding down, releasing lots of badly-trained and inexperienced 'IT engineers' into the contract market and my contract rate dropped and dropped - from £40/hour at one point to £15/hour - at which point it became less financially-viable to be a contractor.

So I blagged my way into a Solaris/NIS/network engineer permie job despite never having done it formally before :-)

Re: any fashion house

it should protect against the unwanted attention of Tiddles the leopard

Since it has a bite force of 621.1 Newton I think you'd be better off with kevlar-backed full plate.. (11th highest bite force in the animal kingdom apparently).

(Plus, the teeth would go though the chain mail links and then split them apart unless they were proper riveted links. Which are by no means cheap).

And, unlike most cats, leopards are happy to eat meat that isn't fresh so even rolling in a week-old dead skunk won't save you!

What you dont know cant hurt you?

Or, at least, only briefly..

I also remember having a toolkit, gallon of petrol, engine oil, water, spare hoses, bulbs, plugs, etc and lots of rags in a box in the boot

Ah - you've seen our Morris Minor boot-box then?

Spare can of petrol (when she refills, that goes in first then gets refilled)

2L bottle of water

Antifreeze

Damp-start spray

Pack of light bulbs

Spare distributor cap

Spare coil

2 spare spark plugs

Small toolkit for fitting any of the above

Re: The comment on AC is pure BS

Just to guess maybe it takes away 5% of range

I think the "AC uses lots of power" trope is based on the old systems (as in 1970s and 80s) where they would sap a huge amount of MPG to use. Which is definately not the case with modern systems - the AC fitted to my Toyota has a negligable effect on the MPG (I was bored one week so measured the MPG of a weeks-worth of travel to work with the AC on and then again the next week with the AC off. Difference was about 2%).

So no, modern AC fitted to cars are not the power/MPG sapping units from 30 years ago.

Re: Yes ... But

hree wheel tricycle with a maximum speed of 30-40kph, but with enough power to lug 400kg of crops or the wife and three kids 20km to a market town ... and back

I'm sure that there will be plenty of backstreet mechanics in India, China and Pakistan offering to convert a Tuktuk to electric. It could probably even use lead-acid batteries like the old milk floats..

can have an 800km range with 10 minute recharge time

Saw an article about a new battery technology using charge-carrying nanofluid - essentially, you fill up with the fluid, as it passes through the battery unit it loses the charge and powers the car. Next fuel stop, you discharge the spent fluid (it can be recharged and re-used), fill up with charged fluid and continue.

It (currently) isn't in production but offers similar power density to the previous generation of batteries and is being actively worked on.

Found a link about it:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-battery-2666672335

I had a Honda Civic and the stop-start would auto-disable if the battery voltage was too low.

That's probably a paid-for option on a German car :-)

Last task of the day was to take the car battery into my apartment at night.

*Proper* cars don't need no steenkin' battery to start - insert starter handle, turn until resistence, use motorbike kickstart technique..

(Tried doing it with my hands and the kickback, even from a puny 1100cc A-Series engine nearly broke my wrist.. Morris Minors can be viscious beasts if you don't treat them right!)

the seat warmer keeps my body warm, and my body keeps my hands and feet warm in their gloves and boots

Ah - to have an actual fuctioning circulation system and not have your hands (and feet) turn an unpleasant shade of white and blue, even in faux-fur-lined boots and double-gloves (silk undergloves, suede outer gloves). Even the vaso-dilation from coffee helps.

And that's only in -2C conditions. I love snow but there's no way I could move to somewhere really cold.

Re: Time to insource

The truth is that back in the eighties when they said "the private sector is more efficient" they were really looking at projects run at smaller scale in private sector settings

The inescapable fact is that outsourcing is *always* going to cost more:

A project requires X in people costs and Y in hardware costs when done in-house (where X may include an amount of recruitment and training).

The same project outsourced will cost X in people costs and Y in hardware costs plus Z in outsourcer profit margins. Any slim down in X due to 'synergies' is more than going to be swallowed up in the Z costs.

Also it has hidden costs - no in-house knowledge of how the system works, making you dependent on the outsourcer and then a huge pain when you (eventually) kick them out. We even had one outsourcer try to take their system with them "because it used their IP" - having forgotten that the contract terms specifically stated that any work they did on our behalf remains our property and they grant us a permanent, non-removable license for any of their IP used in the system. The hardest part was watching the system fall over when it could no longer reach their management system.. (which broke the terms of the contract - it was supposed to be stand-alone and fully managable from within our network but obviously the contract devs they got in hadn't bothered to read the project spec and just re-used the management module from another project that hadn't had that stipulation).

At the last outsourcer change we brought a bunch of functions back in-house. As far as I can tell, the only outsource contract that makes sense (other than network provision) is Service Desk - especially if the business wants it to be 24 hours but won't fund the staff to enable that in-house.

I've yet to see a good outsourced service desk though - most of them have a really high turnover rate which means, given that most of them don't actually seem to train their staff, more work for internal staff.

Re: oh do FOAD

How about a phone network that works and is cheap ?

Don't be silly - the first one costs money and the second one loses money! (Or at least, reduces the amount of money coming in which, to an MBA-polluted mind, is the same thing)

First computer I had was the Sharp MZ-80

Mine was a homebuild Nascom 1 (Z80A at some numbingly slow speed, 1K RAM, 500? BAUD tape interface. We eventually bought an additional 1K RAM card - the same size as the main board.)

Then upgraded to a BBC Model B.

Re: Paper Tigers

it was a pain having to save everything to tape....and one bad tape

I used to save to two tapes (three if it was critical stuff and I was feeling paranoid).

It's where my lifelong hatred and distrust of tape backup came from.

Re: Knowing your audience is important.

Sometimes you have to tell them to know themselves.

In the Biblical sense, of course.

ah. The Elon method. Works really well if your goal is to turn a large company into a small one..

Re: outSHONE

Sadly, the US lack of spelling and grammaer is becoming ever more present in the English language. At times I wonder if I'm the only one left who knows how to conjugate verbs..

Re: Hello. I'm Clippy. You're fucked.

https://www.prajwaldesai.com/disable-copilot-on-windows-11-intune-gpo/

All very well on a corporate PC 'managed' by Intune but less useful on a home PC..

Re: HELL F**K NOOOOOOO...

It's bad enough getting my laptop to "start up" without me drinking 3 coffees and smoking 3 ciggies

You clearly don't have a Mac - that would be "3 soy lattes and 3 vape refills and one vial of beard oil[1]" :-)

(I cleaned up the "start at login" settings on my Mac - it's amazing how much old cruft was there - even stuff left over from applications that I removed years ago! That's what happens when you migrate from Mac to Mac and don't actually start from fresh at one migration..)

[1] I've had a beard for many, many years [2] and I have yet to purchase said mysterious oil..

[2] Shaving hurt. So I stopped shaving with the (eventual) consequence that I have a beard. Fortunately, my wife is entirely happy with the situation and, on the very rare occasion that I remove it, wants me to grow it back as quickly as possible. A less secure person might wonder why..

Re: When did Windows turn into Linux?

My main interactive device is an M1 MacBook Pro

Let me see: for work I use an Intel 16" MBP (with Parallels running some Windows corporate-build VMs) and a 14" M3 MBP plus one HP 15" running Windows 10 Enterprise and for home I use a 16" M1 Pro Max MBP.

Servers at home - 1 Supermicro and 2 Dells - two of them running proxmox and one running TrueNAS scale. VMs - 2 Windows server, 4 FreeBSD and the rest one variant of Linux or other (mostly Devuan). Plus on physical server running Windows 2016 (mostly for DHCP/DNS resilience if my proxmox cluster goes down)

Re: When did Windows turn into Linux?

More of a pacman fan?

Nah. I always got eaten by the ghosts quite quickly.

Re: I bet they had ISO 9001

ISO Auditors are only interested in if your company adheres to ISO they don't care if you software has more bugs than a hotel bed.

And will even sign off a policy that says "we have no policy for this".

Some (ISO27001 for example) do have actualy concrete stuff that you have to do and is audited but most of it is "do you have a policy and do you have documentation to prove that you adhere to it?" To which the answer is sometimes "yes - and I was up all last night making sure we did.."

Re: Paula Vennells: Ex-Post Office boss was shortlisted to be Bishop of London

Christianity slipping too?

it's amusing that you think that the Anglican church has much to do with Christianity. It's more of a social club these days..

Re: So what was actually wrong?

One CBE, slightly used?

Just needs a bit of attention with a file and an engraving tool.