Posts by Soruk

Re: "SmartTV's are fine, as long as you do not give them access to a network"

Register the MAC address of your telly in your DHCP configuration, with an out-of-range static allocation, so even if it does get connected it can't communicate.

(Test it with your phone first)

Re: you could just leave the damn buttons alone.

If you're a bloke, BEWARE the automatic tampon replacement function.

Re: Genuine Question

For the Pacific, the longer they delay the installation, the shorter the cable has to be.

As for the Atlantic, just ensure there is enough slack in the cable, especially at the fault line.

Mine's the one with the 10,000 mile RS-232 cable in the pocket.

Re: So many holes, it could be cheese.

When I was in Paris in 2014, it was very hard to find free WiFi of any description, McDonald's was about all there was.

Insanely, it was easier to find working, usable free WiFi in, of all places, the People's Republic of China.

Re: Here come the groundhogs

How about a name that describes what it does, and is?

Cellnet.

Re: If one compared companies to countries

In Soviet Russia, Apple reviews you!

Re: One thing is for sure

Where I live (not exactly the middle of nowhere), O2 is the only network that is usable in the house. Orange used to work, but when EE decided to switch off the 234-33 network they're left with the much poorer T-Mobile (234-30) signal. Vodafone is hopeless (and just my luck, my work mobile was moved from Vodafone to EE - though EE is better than VF). My MiFi which uses the Three signal does work, but it's a weak signal.

I made the right choice of using giffgaff (O2 signal) for my and my wife's own mobiles.

Re: I don't understand why people are running ad-signs on Windows

Where I work we have a screen showing a slideshow on a screen in our reception area.

The slideshow started life as a Powerpoint, 1920x1080 screengrabs were taken and the resulting PNGs loaded on to an old 256MB Raspberry Pi 1 running Kodi (and vampiring its power off the TV's USB port). An autoexec.py script ensures the slideshow starts automatically on system startup.

To make life easier for those who have to update it, the content is supplied on a USB memory stick (VFAT), as if they tried to update the SD card they'd be met with a warning that the card isn't formatted (and would likely nuke the setup).

It works. It has never crashed. It uses far less power than a dedicated PC sitting there just scrolling through a powerpoint file.

Re: New weaponry

Now trying to make a social media buzz.

Re: @a_yank_lurker

"Software as a Service" works, for agricultural values of "service".

(As in, the way the bull services a cow.)

Re: 2040

For some use cases, this can already be here. A RasPi3 running Linux gives you email, web browsing and an office suite!

Yes, it's not going to be blisteringly fast, but it'll do the job, and can be powered from a phone charger - or even a USB battery pack, which can in turn be connected to a solar panel.

Re: I dunno...

Darwin FTW.

Re: Domestic?

Easy. Dial-up.

Note: This suggestion makes no attempt to determine whether the above solution is economically viable.

Re: If anyone knows of any recommended method

It can even depend on the paper.

My wife's Canon printer can't print photos convincingly on Kodak-branded paper - and yet it's absolutely brilliant on the Polaroid paper picked up from Poundland.

In a past life I was dealing with software delivered as tar files on a DAT tape for Sun boxen and after the updater unpacked the tar file, it installed / upgraded the software delivered as Sun packages. Quite sensibly, it had a check for the version being newer than what was already installed. Not so sensibly, this was a string in the format VER_X.Y.Z. So when VER_9.2.0 was on the system, guess what happened when I got the packages of VER_10.0.0 to deploy on the test system? Yup, you guessed it, it complained it was older than the previously installed system. Taking a closer look at the installer script, yes, as I had suspected, it was doing a basic string comparison with no attempt to parse the version string for its constituent parts, and it fell over as 1 < 9.

We had two choices: 1) Own up to the customer organisation that we'd ballsed this up (and due to the nature of this customer, it would have been safer and less career-limiting to walk across the M25 at night naked and blindfolded live on TV), or 2) Kludge it with a really dirty hack and keep dead quiet.

Option 2 it was. As the deployment was initially in the form of a tar file, I kludged the tarball with a copy of the script with the version check removed, stored with an absolute path and inserted the original version of the script in one of the packages being deployed, scheduled to be the last package installed. This being Sun's tar, it quite happily overwrote the script with the version stored in the tarball, and when deployment was run, it quite happily installed the new packages, and when it had finished, the original script was reinistated quietly. This should be fine now until they get to VER_100.0.0 - and from what I hear from that place, it's never going to get anywhere near that far.

Re: Power

> Large datacenter-sized UPS battery banks are replaced on a rolling maintenance basis by the support company. I was there once when that went horribly wrong.

Argh. You can't just post that without giving out the juicy details!