* Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

6335 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2015

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: CEO contempt of users ends badly as predicted

The very idea of charging per install is lunacy

And also strongly implies that Unity is gathering data from your PC and sending it back to HQ. Else, how would they know whether it's a fresh install on a new device or a re-install?

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Regrets? I've had a few...

Was given a 21 inch, high res (1600x1200) CRT monitor from work, many years ago

I still have a 21" Sun CRT upstairs in the computer room. Until this Saturday when I'll be tidying up all the cruft, recabling with the new KVM and, potentially, switching to the new OPNSense firewall from my old Sophos UTM running on an old HP Microserver..

I'd hoped that my shiny new (well reconditioned) storage server would also be going in but the supplier had forgotten to test the drive backplane - which didn't work. So they are building me a replacement.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: A first?

masochists enjoy Windows

"Hurt me" says the masochist.

"No" says the sadist as he gives them a linux box instead..

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Eh?

There are other sorts of watts?

No - but power is also measured in "Where's" and "why's".. As in "where the hell is the power going" or "why the hell is it drawing so much power?"

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "Google Privacy Sandbox"

"War Is Peace."

Bah. You beat me to it.

One more:

Military intelligence

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: They can both go away.

Sinister, Dexter

Ob FlandersAndSwann..

You obviously twine to the left *and* to the right. Careful you don't fall flat on your face..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: They can both go away.

Christian Nationalists

Another oxymoron..

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

The nature of Tesla driving was all fierce acceleration and braking rather than smooth anticipation of traffic flow

When we got the C-HR, we were given info on how to most efficiently drive it (apparently Toyota had done a fair amount of research). The answer - accellerate hard up to destination speed, then maintain speed. Up to a certain speed, most of the 'maintain speed' phase will be mostly EV mode. Then brake hard as this maximises regenerative braking.

Under certain circumstances (ie open road with little traffic) the accellerate/cruise suits my driving style. The 'brake late and hard' really, really does not.

You also have several driving modes - economy, normal and sport - which affect the accelleration profile, how much it goes into EV mode and (I think) the suspension stiffness. Most of the time mine is in econ mode.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

Most cars are difficult to get to accelerate rapidly

This amuses me - a car driver breathlessly recounting how his car can do 0-60 in 6 seconds!

Most of the bikes I've had would easily do that with the Fireblade 900 taking less than that to get to 100mph.. (that's the value of an 18,000 RPM red-line and a set of well-selected gear ratios - only 3 gear changes to get to there and, because you are going up the gears, you can do clutchless gear changes..)

The Fireblade cost me £5k second-hand.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: WTF

had just 3 minor accidents

Total of :

1. On the 125cc bike - following a woman away from a roundabout and she decided to slam her brakes on as she suddenly wanted to turn right. My fault, I was too close.

2. In the pre-disastered Cortina, pulled out onto a roundabout only to discover that the van that had been indicating that it was turning off had decided not to. My fault and the last time I trusted anyone elses' indicators.

3. Again in the Cortina - rear-ended my dads car as he was towing me - to be fair, not my fault. He'd got his hazards on while towing me (at about 20 MPH). Woman was wating to pull out of the station, saw his indicators were on and assumed that he was turning into the station so pulled out in front of him. He hit her, I hit him.. (the Cortina brakes were, at the best of times, pretty ineffective and even more so with no servo assist due to a dead engine).

4. Again the Cortina - after fixing the dead engine issue in (3) above (distributor shaft split pin had sheared so no drive to the rotor..), pulled out of my parents driveway only to find that a woman was pulling out of the driveway about 50 feet down the road on the opposite side. I *almost* managed to stop in time. She claimed that "I was speeding and hit her". My response was "how fast do you think a 1.6l Cortina can be going with only 50 feet run-up, especially when about 20 of it is me doing a 90 degree right turn?". She also claimed for a whole front-end rebuild when the collision speed was about 5mph. Not my fault.

5. Our first car that we bought together after we got married (a Peugeot 309). Was driving on Wootten Bassett in the rain. Saw a bunch of stopped vehicles and hazard lights ahead so put my foot on the brake. Then noticed the big deisel slick that I was currently sliding though. Ended up hitting the pile and then having two cars behind joining us. Not my fault. The woman behind tried to claim that she'd stopped and I bounced back into her. Physics doesn't work like that..

6. Last one, on the Honda Fireblade 900. Deep winter, very icy. Had been go-karting out in a place in the country. Afterwards, got onto the bike thinking "take it easy, adrenalin is still flowing". Took it easy and cautious, right up until I rode over some black ice just after a bend. Bike went sliding off down the road with me sliding along after it. My main thought was "this is going to get expensive.." Fortunately, other than a scuffed right-hand engine cover and a destroyed hand grip, the bike was fine.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: WTF

ride my machine firmly convinced, at all times, that there is someone out there trying to kill me

My philosophy (when I was physically capable of riding a motorbike) was that *everyone* was trying to kill me. I grew up riding bikes in London..

To mangle a quote "There are old bikers and there are bold bikers. There are no old, bold bikers".

I still (as much as is possible) take the bike line round bends and roundabouts, much to my wife's displeasure as we skim close to the kerbs or centre-line.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: There is no possible fix

you link with the central scrutinizer and enter the controlled roadway.

That might work in some cities in the US but out in the rural areas? Forget it. Some Good Ol' Boy will insist on driving his unfeasably-large truck (with attendant gun rack natch) into the controlled roadway "because of muh freedumbs".

Chaos will ensue.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: There is no possible fix

For non-UK readers, housing developments are often "managed" by the developer for a some time

I'm very, very glad that the section of town that I live in was formerly-council land and, when they sold it to the developers, they mandated the maximum housing density and stuff like the width of the kerbs and how much green space had to remain.

The result is that it's actually quite pleasant and there are at least 3 parks within dog-walking distance. We have a reasonable sized garden (for a modern development - helped by the fact that we are a corner plot.

The developments in the rest of the town that were privaely owned are miserable rabbit warrens of houses, crammed in and carefully-designed to have maximum occupancy at the expense of privacy and parking space.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Risk tolerance

It brakes smoothly but far, far later than I would

The opposite is true in my C-HR - it starts braking at about 50m and slows itself down to the same speed fairly quickly.

Driving with adaptive cruise control is very definately different from traditional cruise control. You have to think a lot further ahead (not a problem for me since I do that anyway - legacy of my motorbike days..). I've had a terrifying drive with an ex-colleague who would zoom up to slow-moving traffic, swear when he realised that the lane to the right was occupied than pull out (at a much lower speed than the lane to the right, having wasted the opportunity to gain speed when he had plenty of clearance) and cause the traffic in that lane to brake sharply in order to not run into him.

I'm convinced that motorway/dual carriageway driving is a skill in itself and newly-qualified drivers shouldn't be allowed drive on the motorways until they have done a course.

I never let myself be a passenger in his car again. He (at that point) drove an Audi.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

they've copied BMW and made indicator lights optional too

Do keep up - that crowd have switched over to Audi now. Especially the 'cheap' option of the A3. I'm somewhat glad the my cycle-route to work in 90% cycle-path..

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: HP simply do not care

Not sure that private pensions are really fit for purpose

In the early 90's, I spent 5 (ish) years as a programmer then switching to support. I was paid a really good wage and we had a good pension scheme (we paid in 5% and the employer paid in 10%). When I left, it was worth (in adjusted terms) about £15k p/a.

The company (more or less) left the UK and left the pension in the hands of a private pension company. That company grossly mis-managed the pension (and passed it around their group of companies, each move attracting 'fees') to such an extent that now, having been finally moved to a company that is actually good at pensions, the pension is worth about £1k p/a. When it was passed to them, it was worth about £500 p/a.. By the time I retire (9 more years!) it might get to the giddy heights of £2k p/a. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have that £2k (it'll keep me in rum if nothing else :-) ) but compared to what it might have been, it's a pittance.

The company? Since they were no longer were incorporated in the UK (the tentacle that they left behind was an entirely separate company) they basically shrugged and said "not our problem".

Red Hat redeploys one of its main desktop developers

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: countdown to Wayland bashing

> Wayland is a complete waste of developer energy and effort.

Nope. It is another systemd: it's a legit answer to real issues that real Linux buyers/users/developers have. I will return to this point in a moment.

The entire original premise of systemd was to "make it boot faster" [1] and do away with init scripts. It's since grown to an obscene tentacled monster, trying to pervade every facet of linux [2]. There's a reason why on all my server VMs, the only one running a distro that uses systemd (Ubuntu LTS) was because I needed to spin up Mastodon and none of the systemd-free distribution had it in their package lists.

So, mostly, I run FreeBSD or Devuan.

[1] How often do you need to boot your server? Or even a laptop - just close the lid and let it sleep. It's not Windows dammit!

[2] Binary logs requiring a viewer to read them? *Really* Which idiot thought that was a good idea? What happens when the VM goes badly wrong and you need to read the logs but the binary no longer works?

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

guns had an effective fire rate of about 1 shot per 5-10 minutes

They must have been *really* bad at gunnery.. The British soldiers at Waterloo (and previously, in the Peninsular War) were expected to fire 3 rounds per minute (and did so because they spent a lot of time training to do it). The French expected two per minute - the experienced regiments could manage it but not the conscripts.

That's one of the many reasons why Napoleon was defeated (plus the whole "starting a war on two fronts thing - and the tactic that determined that the French attack in a column, not a line so only the front short line could fire..)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: always on about absolute free speech

is because guillotines need gravity to work

Springs - all you need is springs..

(Blade gets pulled upwards, stretching the spring. Ratchet is released, spring does its thing..)

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Shovels, food, and clothing

You know what product later made him famous...

Pickaxes?

:-)

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

invade Poland and stick the economy on a war footing

Except they didn't (put the country on a war footing that is) - right up until more-or-less the end of the war they kept stuff at a normal level. Unlike us and the USSR..

The US didn't go onto a war footing really either - they had enough capacity to make all the stuff they needed without having to.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Captain paranoid

Most of our FOIA requests are salespeople fishing for information

Yup. We get that a lot too - especially as, for stuff bought through the Government Gateway, contract dates and awards are matters of public record. And bidding losers are *even* more likely to file lots of spurious FOI requests in order to try to make us reconsider. Likewise, suing us for rejecting their bid on the basis that 'we were prejudiced against them for x reason'.

Fortunately, the team handling the contracts is very scrupulous about record keeping, in a form that makes responding to FOI relatively easy.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

East Anglia is obviously to the East of West Anglia!!

And we are very definately not at war with them, despite what you might have heard last month.

And why does Google Translate not include a 'Saxon' option eh?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

Northumberland is in The North

Yes...and Manchester isn't.

From the perspective of my wife (Plymouth-born, father was Cornish) pretty much *everything* is in the North. Even Brizzle. Let alone my birthplace (Birmingham) - they are all 'up the line'.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

that someone knows where East Anglia is

Simple - it's the territory of the East Angles. As opposed to the West Saxons or northern Norse.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The true test will

And then pardons himself for anything he (and his cohorts) have done

He can't pardon himself for the Georgia stuff - firstly, the Georgia constitution doesn't allow it and, secondly, they are State charges and, as far as I know, beyond the remit of the POTUS' remit. Not that that fact would stop the GOP trying it, even though nominally they are the party of "States Rights"

As to the other stuff - there's a lot of legal debate at the moment as to whether the president can pardon himself - if they could then, surely, old Tricky Dickie would have done it and not waited for his successor to do it.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Election Integrity

Technically the people can elect representatives

The whole US Electoral Colleage thing baffles me - the state votes for a party but the representative electors are *not* bound by the decision that their state made at the ballot box.

How is that democracy? It's more akin to the system that elected emperors of the Holy Roman Empire [1] - rife with corruption, backstabbing and, sometimes, outright murder.

[1] As Gibbon (?) remarked - neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Election Integrity

Having them rather than competent people implement the decisions is madness

I always thought that the US habit of electing sherrifs was a recipe for corruption and nepotism.. Would you trust a politician to be fair and evenhanded in the application of the law?

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

most gifted, best educated nations in the world

I assume he's not talking about the US - very, very far from being the 'best educated' and have been for quite a while.

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Maintaining a positive team environment

Always a Musk priority.

Here's a positive terminal. Please grasp and fill yourself with positivity!

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc

The fact is most performers never owned their music

In this country, Marillion got dropped by their music company (the deal came to an end and they were not trendy or edgy enough for the music company to renew). So they instead turned to fan-power - they created a fan-subscription service to provide the money to make their next few album.

They were massively oversubscribed. The list of names in the included CD booklet is huge - with my name in there too :-)

They did that for a few albums until they had enough of a fund to make sure that they didn't have to go cap in hand to any of the music companies. They do use one - but only as a distribution agreement where the mucis company gets a proportion of the cost of each sale but nothing else.

And they did it long before that sort of thing became popular on t'internet.

Veilid: A secure peer-to-peer network for apps that flips off the surveillance economy

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

So is posting someone a 3.5 inch floppy

I remember (in my first IT job) getting a bunch of 5.25 inch floppies with some hardware drivers on (network stuff I seem to remember). We only had one or two PCs with that size drive (most of ours were 3.5" PS/2's so we had to copy the drivers over to fresh floppies.

The supplied floppies also had the Form.A virus. Which was fun - as the concept of an anti-virus was largely not registered at that point. Fortunately, I seem to remember that it couldn't successfully infect the hard drives so just discarding the infected floppies (and any others that had been infected) cured the infection. And delayed the hardware rollout by several weeks until we could get the drivers on clean floppies.

The supplier got called into the IT directors office and got given a thorough reaming and left, promising a big discount on our next order.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Hounds biting his ass...

I wouldn't let my dogs near him, let alone potentially injesting the blood of someone with an interesting relationship with illegal recreational drug use.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Musk would only stand a chance of winning ..

He should have learnt Ecky Thump

Instead of concentrating on "Easy Trump"..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Never go full twit.

And then everybody just walks away leaving the door locked

.. and forgetting to mention that the room is hermitically sealed..

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: The first commercial enterprise on the moon

.. will be NPR setting up a parking lot.

It's a hard sell trying to describe the moon as paradise..

Hacktivists attack Japanese government over Fukushima wastewater release

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: half of bugger-all

Steel not having this can only be recovered by mining seafloor shipwrecks

Many of which are designated as either protected wrecks or War graves. And mined illegally by scum.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge
Devil

Re: Hmm

see a subsequent huge drop in our energy bills?

Won't someone think of the shareholders? And those poor people in the C-suite - they *need* their bonuses!

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: I suppose you're one of those nuts

will give you prostate cancer

F-I-L (stone mason, around granite most of his life) died of stomach cancer..

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Spreadsheet imports

cover on Day 1 of Being A Man 101!

I think I must have been too busy reading a book to attend that class. Or sleeping..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: At a large energy supplier

At a previous job I if you worked beyond 11pm

One of my contracts (deploying new OS/2 [1] machines) had to be done overnight so as to not disturb the busy department where we were doing it. Rather than have a permie have to associate themselves with us contract scum for 10 hours a night, they decided to pay us for 10 hours, regardless of how long things took.

As it was, we developed a smooth workflow between us that usually let us finish by 11pm (starting at 5pm) - at which point we would adjourn to one of the many fine curry houses in the locale.

Good contract that one - unfortunately, they went seriously over budget [2] and drastically reduced the contractor headcount. Including me :-(

[1] Remember that? I still have my OS/2 Warp t-shirt, blagged off the IBM stand at one of the computer fairs where they were doing release events (if you bought a copy, you got a free SB16 sound card - and I managed to get them to throw in a t-shirt as well). T-shirt is looking a bit tatty but it's in better condition than the OS/2 market nowadays.

[2] For a finance company their project management accounting style was distinctly slapdash.

FTX crypto-clown Sam Bankman-Fried couldn't even do house arrest. Now he's in jail

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Does this mean he now has to change his name to Sam Bankman-Jailed?

where are the people that pushed Brexit now

Some of them are still in Parliament, sitting happy in their Rotten Boroughs..

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Does this mean he now has to change his name to Sam Bankman-Jailed?

so I must be really clever

As ever, I remark on the difference between intelligence and wisdon:

Intelligence is knowing *how* to do something. Wisdom is knowing why it's a bad idea.

SBF obviously has a fairly high INT and a remarkably low WIS.

Amazon's latest directive: Report to the office 'cos we're watching you

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

They just want numbers down

All to pander to stock-market short-term thinking: "we must improve/retain our stock price, even if it harms us in a years time!"

At least the C-suite will get their annual bonuses and everyone else gets shafted.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: "desk occupancy rates need to improve."

"we want to see you chained to the desk"

It's the whole MBA-led management power-trip. Like the 'I must be first into the office and last to leave' nonsense - I'd rather work less hours and get all my tasks done than spend 18 hours in the office and *still* not get everything done because I'm too tired/stressed out/medicated to get everything done.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

1) Amazon has really, really bad HR people, or 2) no one consulted HR before sending out these emails

Or both. No real incentive for them to have either good HR or to talk to them. Staff turnover is so high (particularly among the lower grades) that HR seems to be relagated to just a 'hire and fire' team.

Besides which, we all know that HR purely exists to protect the company from the staff.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: PTSD

what's left must increasingly be a sediment layer of sociopathy

Looks like they have learnt all the wrong lessons from how Motorola used to do it (don't know if they still do). One of the loathed features - if you manager was bad at politics or arguing your case in the rankings and rating meetings, you were never, ever, ever going to get promoted, no matter how well you did your job.

And the whole 'internal competition' thing where you were encouraged to 'compete' with all your peers - which lead to mistrust, backstabbing and outright sabotage of other peoples projects.

I lasted almost 2 years there before I'd had enough of the lies, lack of career and outright corruption of the place and went to be a contractor.

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Writings on the wall for these companies

insinuating everybody had already gone back..

My place (and where my wife orks) have sold off chunks of the building [1] so it wouldn't be possible for us all to be in the office. And both remain fully committed [2] to maintaining the hybrid working. Some times (like last week) I go into the office several days a week (or all week) but it's increasingly rare. Normally, it's just one day a week where the whole team is in.

[1] Or, in our case, sublet portions to other organisations.

[2] And not in a losing-football-team-board-statement-about-the-manager way. Or a politician talking about a ministerial colleague.

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

So no hello on chat

I requre an EHLO before getting to the DATA part..

(Although my wife is prone to suddenly restarting a conversation we had 2-3 days ago and then wondering why I can't automatically context-switch[1].. Dunno whether that's just a 'her' thing but she's done it all of our 34-year marriage..)

[1] Yes. Humans can't multi-task [2]. But we can context-switch fairly rapidly [3] when required. And no - there's no inherent gender bias as to which one is better - it depends on childhood training and raw intelligence fo rthe most part.

[2] Unless you count of the background of the autonomous nervous system and stuff like breathing.

[3] Getting less good as I get older. Less braincells than I used to have! Still the whisky is nice :-)

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

Re: Almost got locked in

but one does wonder why he didn't knock on the door first just to be sure

Because it wasn't in the Procedure Manual and, most likely not being blessed with higher-level brains, if it's not in The Manual, it doesn't get done.