Posts by sedregj

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Re: See Icon

Let's drop the AI moniker (divisive and bollocks) and look at "LLMs" instead.

Please bear with me because I'm going to whitter on as an engineer and I think you are more humanities focused.

I use them as a tool, just as I do a hack saw or a slide rule (I have two) or some of my "make it smaller, deeper or more broken" devices: percussion tools - fencing maul, sledge hammer, lump hammer ... you get the idea.

I bought a second hand Nvidia A2000 with 16GB of RAM and popped it into a box at work (Dell server) that generally acts as a fancy NAS for customer backups over night, so its bored during the day.

With llama.cpp I can run a small LLM - 20B parameters or so locally. It is quite surprising how much general knowledge even a small model can have. I'm actually interested mainly in programming but I do get them to do english to latin and vv or eng to german and vv. I've also asked it to explain physics ("tell me about the bernouiilllii equations" - with deliberate mucking about with spelling) and get a reasonable answer. Questions about small towns in Somerset get reasonable but rather generic answers.

Bear in mind this is in a dataset that is around 16GB in size or around three DVDs - ie a pretty big encyclopedia that works quite fast and can sort of reason too.

ChatGPT, Claude and co have much bigger data sets and their models run to something like 100s of billions and even trillions. They also have a lot of other machinery tacked on too. At that scale of data, you might question the quality and even the provenance of the data inputs. Let's put it this way - they ain't 100% encyclopedia Britannica. That said, neither am I.

So, you can rail against the machine or not. Your last para did rather anthropomorphisise (how the blazes does anyone spell Greeklish correctly!) the beasties. For me they are a handy tool but they do need some care to use effectively.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: How time changes things...

My first car was a Ford Fiesta MK 1 (UK). It was tiny but there was nearly as much space around the engine as my current EV has under the bonnet.

In the end there was nearly as much wire mesh and body putty as sheet steel and there was a nasty draught up your right trouser leg. Its second engine costed £100 including fitting in a tiny garage near Plymouth Central. It finally passed away just off J30 of the M5 (Exeter Services). It was sounding a bit rough whizzing up the A38 and it turned out I had basically blown two cylinders out of four. Well I got a good year out of that engine. The AA recovered it for me back to Plymouth and I got £25 from the scrappers for it in 1994.

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Mirror, mirror in the app

Your parent quite literally gave an example.

Arabic as a whole is largely written R2L You note that numbers are written L2R in Arabic.

Mr Harston notes that quoting foreign phrases within Arabic is written according to the preferred direction of the quoted language. English is a habitual L2R language, so english quotes will be L2R.

VMware isn’t budging in its pursuit of Siemens for alleged unpaid licenses

Analysts rate VCF as the best product in its class

Not for me it isn't, says (nearly) ex VMware consultant with roughly 20 years experience.

Over those years I've been on the receiving end of so many MVP efforts that I basically had enough and bailed when Broadcom.

Windows vcentres being required and then deprecated, vcentre being a shit appliance, then the transition from Flash to the current effort. Ooh lets run two Tomcats - one to monitor and manage the other one, which is running on the same system, rather than doing a proper job in the first place. vcentres have 15 odd volumes nowadays - WTF! They are monstrous efforts.

OK so vcentre is wank, buggy and slow as fuck. But it isn't even a proper orchestration jobbie - you'll need another VM for that. Again, another sodding monster and you'll want to cluster that for scale. Oooh what about SDN? That will be twenty trillion squid, and yet more VMs and more shite to manage.

I can't be arsed with it anymore.

I'm going all in on KVM and I sort out the orchestration and management myself using off the peg open source stuff. I always go for offerings where there are two options to avoid enshitification.

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Re: Explorer

" still love that, in 2025, explorer just freezes/hangs if you have a network path that's unavailable ANYWHERE on your drive list."

If it helps, it seems that Dolphin does too (Linux box with KDE n that).

Obviously the notion of a "drive" is Windows wankery - one mounts one's remote file systems. I have to live in a Windows world at work - I use pam mount to connect up a series of shares under a single directory. If my VPN is down and I access that folder, things lock up for a while. To be honest it is actually quite quick to recover and does seem to just work most of the time.

The real fix is SMB over https (oh yes!) There is a Kerberos proxy over https too and I have deployed it at work and it does just work for both Windows and Linux. One day I'll look into SMB over https.

Refs wrt Kerberos proxy:

https://syfuhs.net/kdc-proxy-for-remote-access - MS Blog on KDC Proxy

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/779228/the-parameter-is-incorrect-error-using-netsh-http-add-sslcert - SO discussion about http add sslcert

https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/mitK5features.html - MIT Kerberos v1.21 features

https://k5wiki.kerberos.org/wiki/Projects/KDC_Discovery - KDC Discovery via DNS

https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/admin/https.html - MIT Kerberos documentation on using a proxy

Lifetime access to AI-for-evil WormGPT 4 costs just $220

Inevitable

Oh well Jihadi-GPT can't be far behind.

Unfortunately it will turn out that the training set will have accidentally included Deuteronomy and Numbers and be way too hard core.

Veeam bets on more VMware alternatives, including Red Hat and China’s Sangfor

Re: Like Proxmox but…

"it's impossible to convert the old hardware to the new use".

Not always. You can whip the SSDs out of a Dell and put it into the hosts. I did this for a customer last year. They now have a three node ceph cluster and an empty chassis.

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

Re: Does it also work on Vapes ?

"Teledildonics" is a search term ...

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

"Actually, LLMs are completely deterministic"

No they are not. I have a box at work that is used for backups - it mostly works at night. I slapped a second hand Nvidia GPU in it and a slack handful of llama.cpp, ollama, MCPs and a couple of webby front ends.

There are a lot more parameters than temperature and you also have to consider the front end(s) which might fiddle with a prompt before it is delivered.

800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics a little more expensive

Two people died and five are missing. Should that not be the actual headline with a strap line about the effect on copper?

FFS some sense of perspective would be nice.

LockBit's new variant is 'most dangerous yet,' hitting Windows, Linux and VMware ESXi

Re: What is more expensive ?

There are at least two ways of dealing with ransomware for DR purposes. You will have to accept that you will be losing some data and how much is up to you.

Option 1 is air gapped backups and this is the gold standard. The classic method is tape and you must remove the tapes from the robotics/drive and store them away from the production system.

Option 2 is something like Veeam's "Hardened Linux repo" and using immutability - This is a silver gilt standard method and you have to be very careful with this. A hardened repo uses a one shot admin account to setup a service for the repo - the username and password are not kept on the Veeam backup box after setup. Veeam will ask the service to set the immutable flag on backup files and only remove them after a set time. However, if the backup server has another way to get at the box housing the repos, then the flags can be removed.

Prevention is the best bet but is not infallible (its hard to prevent all future threats)! Air-gapped backups are the gold standard and a suitable LTO drive or two or a full robotics unit and a slack handful of tapes don't cost the earth.

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Re: Surely the bigger question...

When I somehow managed to decide to give up fags, 2 Apr 2018, after 30 odd years, my plan was to hit a vape to take the edge off. That lasted a few days when I realised I would be swapping one habit for another and I wanted shot of the whole thing.

So I did and I'm glad I did not go the vape route and I can't say it was easy.

What worked for me, was two strategies. Firstly: time period doubling (attaining goals) - one day, two days, half a week, a week a fortnight, a month, two months etc; secondly: I had a couple of "mantras" that I would repeat mentally whenever the cravings hit. They were "I don't want to die" and "I don't want to smell" - two classic symptoms of smoking, one likely in the future and one that is guaranteed permanently. It worked for me but I had to "say" those mantras a lot to start with but it did work.

I did try the conventional methods many years ago. However, to my mind, if nicotine is the addictive ingredient in fags, why don't patches/gum etc work 100% ? I don't think that the "habit" thing holds much water either - I had no problem with that side of things (*). Quite simply, there are other ingredients that are addictive in fags and they are worse than nicotine and there is no other way to ingest them without a burning fag.

I would say that for me it took about two weeks to know I was definitely on track but about 18 months to be able to feel I could (nearly) totally let my guard down. I had some bloody weird dreams at times!

(*) When the pandemic hit, I stopped biting my nails - a habit of over 50 years.

Proxmox delivers datacenter manager beta that makes it a more viable VMware contender

Re: All very well. But I have Proxmox on my cv

Well you are anon - how the hell does anyone call you?

I've migrated the vast majority of my VMware customers to Proxmox and all is fine.

Do bear in mind that Proxmox is just a distro on top of Linux and Debian. Its KVM and Qemmu on the virty side and that runs way, way, way more workloads than VMware could possibly dream of.

If you are holding it wrong then that is your problem.

Bye bye VMware

I was a VMware fanboi for a good 20 years. I even have a VCP 4 from when it has ESX - RedHat n stuff or ESXi (basically Linux but less RH branding and a few bits n bobs chucked out)

vCentre has been an abomination for ever. Windows service first with a fairly rapid phat client, then a Flash thing, then rewritten when Flash died out. Oh who can't recall the thrill of two web GUIs that were both rather wank for a good five plus years. Oh, the laughs we had with certificates and password expiration policies suddenly appearing after an update and I read release notes. I could go on.

In the meantime ESXi lurches from horror to horror. I wrote a wiki page on how to avoid multiple PSODs (its purple, baby) when passing a GPU through to a VM. Dell's mildly integrated Intel (or was it Broadcom) NICs around 2015 vanished every now and then. Recently ... oh who cares.

VMware was always about being a MVP. Fuck that.

Qemu/KVM runs so many VMs in the real world that VMware is a rounding error in comparison and a very expensive one at that.

Defense Dept didn't protect social media accounts, left stream keys out in public

It is now the Department of War by Orange Decree.

Obviously the US War Dept will be far more secure than the old namby pamby Defense Dept.

Whether is is slightly less crap than before will require some serious spending.

Matrix.org homeserver grinds to a halt after RAID meltdown

Workls well

Notice how all that happens to messages is that they will be delayed - not lost! This is a catastrophic fail for a node in a matrix but it seems to be failing safe very nicely.

I remember a time when a bluey used to take a week to cross the world. My grandparents remembered a time when comms were impossible in many cases. I could go on ...

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: Dot Dumb

... mmm green crayons

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

"lossless"

Even CDs are "only" recorded with samples at around 30,000 per minute.

Tesla bid to become a UK electricity supplier gets politically 'charged'

The same Bluesky that has just banned an entire US state coz errrm "We can't think of the children" or something.

BS is not decentralized and can be fiddled with at the whim of a central authority.

electric buggy-maker

buggy electric-maker

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

"My great-grandfather's set square is certainly old, but it still nails a right-angle every time."

I have a flat bladed screwdriver that belonged to one of my G^2 fathers. He may have inherited it. It is capable of delivering a massive amount of torque and the properties of the steel at tip and on the shaft may well violate everything I learned about metallurgy!

I can put a stilson on the handle and tap with a rubber mallet and old school screws generally oblige me. A quick squirt of WD40 often helps too. You have to push down on the screw hard enough to remain engaged but not so hard that you lock the (rusted) thread even worse. The tapping needs to deliver enough torque but without snapping off the end of the blade. Obviously you have to consider that the screw might be rusted right through and will leave some behind. The tip is work hardened to just the right point and the shaft is mild enough to absorb shock.

Now that's a skill you don't see taught in school. If it all goes wrong, get the angle grinder and the other modern stuff out 8)

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

ZFS is marvelous.

I use it on pfSense (FreeBSD) and Proxmox (Linux). Anecdotally, it beats the crap out of UFS for pfSense. I have a cluster of Dell servers and many ACPU based boxes and many Netgate hardware jobbies to worry about. Since ZFS became the default, I have not lost a filesystem, on mostly single disc setups. Those should have an equal chance of data loss when power fails but ZFS seems to fail safer.

Lots of lovely Proxmox (ex VMware) boxes. The ones without Ceph have ZFS, including my home systems. Lovely.

What isn't lovely is swapping out a failed disc in a zpool. Many of these systems have RAID controllers that I have converted to non-RAID so that ZFS can do its stuff properly. In RAID mode the controllers will do their periodic patrol reads and cast out discs that have been deemed to have failed. An amber light comes on and you swap it out - job done.

Its not exactly the end of the world doing the ZFS equivalent but working out which device is which can be a right old laugh. I can't help but feel that ZFS could notice a swap out of a similar disc as a failed one on the same bus/slot and ask if it should be used when you next run zpool. You would be prompted by an email from zed.

DEF CON hackers plug security holes in US water systems amid tsunami of threats

Re: KISS principle as applied to municipal water systems

"tell your local $TELCO that your lawyer's FAX machine absolutely hates what VOIP does to FAXes"

DTMF isn't hard to get right.

Viennese virtualization veteran releases Proxmox VE 9 and Backup Server 4

S3

S3 object storage can also be provided on-prem with Minio. Ideal for the second data centre where you don't want to use "the cloud"

Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often

"Holly" was pretty dry, rather than depressed

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

Re: If this is aimed at the UK market

... and a Daughter of Boudicca

will quite an elderly bird nowadays. Probably 1960+ years old and probably not too bothered with IT.

Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems

Re: Stupid does...

"As they say, Good, Cheap, Fast, pick two, you can't have all three."

... and even that statement has an off by one error in it!

Microsoft: SharePoint attacks now officially include ransomware infections

Re: Phew it's on-prem

"so was mostly avoided by my clients"

Somewhat smug and very stupid.

EU cloud gang challenges Broadcom's $61B VMWare buy in court

Re: That ship has sailed

"Broadcom has its hooks too deeply into VMware "

Bollocks. What on earth does that mean?

A business or business unit with or without a clearly defined "edge" can be flogged off or divested or whatever.

"Granted, no other product is as mature as VMware"

Oh gods.

I was a VMware fanboi for roughly 20 years. No more thank you very much. I remember when ESX was RedHat n that and GSX was frankly weird. ESXi has repeatedly "appropriated" from Linux and *BSD. A vCenter is or was SLES with a couple of Tomcats and a horrendous number of virty discs and massive overkill for a control freak system.

You can have CDP on what was the small business version or LLDP on the eye wateringly expensive effort that seems to have pinched rather a lot of Openvswitch. You only get storage vMotion and DRS on the expensive effort.

The product line has lurched from MVP to MVP with bugs that are laughable, over the years. Product quality has improved over the bad old days (say <2020) but you have absolutely no flexibility - an ESXi is a "black box". You can't even open port 123/UDP to monitor NTP - you can fiddle with PowerCLI but that is not independent.

I could go on at some length.

"Mature": LOL! Its MVP all the way ... baby.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Re: www., mail, imap,ntp...

Back in the old days, you had your domain and it contained hostnames. The domain itself should not have had an IP address, otherwise how do you know where the dividing lines lie?

I think it was www.slashdot.org that pioneered this "bending" of the DNS standards and the standard was changed! Nowadays we even have *.example.co.uk (the horror) and .microsoft which is the tail wagging the dog.

FCC dives in to sink Chinese grip on undersea internet cables

"The USA is not our friend."

I've got loads of mates in the USofA, I've tried to stop them from apologizing for Trump. There is no need, its just a phase.

If T2 does manage to become T3 (or something similar) then things will become very worrying indeed - that's when you know that everything, including the Constitution has been thrown out of the window.

So, for now, we hunker down and wait for that particular bit of the world to settle down.

One Big Brutal Bill: Ex-NASA brass decry Trump's proposed budget cuts

Re: Heathens

"Jesus believed in the right to bear arms."

Naked bingo wings. Lovely.

Broadcom's answer to VMware pricing outrage: You're using it wrong

I'll just drop this here ...

This is the final paragraph of a comment made by Gostev off of Veeam, in response to a request for another hypervisor being supported by Veeam. I've not included the rest of his comment because it is on a semi-private forum and is mostly opinion rather than factual.

"However, I must say that your perception of Proxmox market share and opportunity for Veeam is simply not correct. It is actually the fastest growing hypervisor workload right now based on the license usage statistics. Its V1 grew a few times faster than Nutanix AHV V1, and in absolute numbers it's already a few times ahead of our oVirt KVM integration that includes support for not just one but two hypervisors (RHV and OLVM) and was released over 4 years ago."

Bear in mind that you already have a built in backup system with Proxmox, which is pretty decent, those extra workloads are likely ex-VMware jockies (like me).

You don't even have to pay for Proxmox to get the full toy box. Today I patched a new three node HA n Ceph cluster, whilst it was in use. The VMs were migrated from ESXi to local ZFS and then the equivalent of storage vMotion was used to put the VMs on the Ceph. Unfortunately the little partitions that are created for EFI and TPM were left behind on the ZFS. Those are the same things that fuck up on Hyper V clusters randomly and lock VMs to hosts but I digress. When you put a Proxmox HA node into maintenance mode, it evacuates itself and even moves those little partitions from local to local storage (ZFS here). Remember all those whinges about CDROM/DVD drives on your VMware VM's when patching?

Ceph is similar to vSAN except you get it out of the box for free on Proxmox as in speech. To be honest I never bothered with vSAN. I always had real iSCSI/FC SANs which are not so good with Proxmox. However it turns out that you can strip the disks out of some Dell SANs and put them into the hosts's slots and then set the controller into HBA mode and off you trot.

Oooh and you get proper networking. Go with stock Linux and/or deploy Open vSwitch. You don't have to deal with the bloody nonsense of the cheap networking only supporting CDP whilst your cheap switches only support LLDP. lldpd speaks both languages and more.

Ever tried to monitor ntp on a VMware ESXi - it gradually got harder and harder over the years as they locked it down more and more. I watched ESX (RedHat with a twist) turn into ESXi (yay - migration) and then keep on becoming less and less my system and basically a black box. VUM or Lifecycle Manager as it is now known is wankery in the first degree and who knew it was possible to make vCentre so awful and bloated to the point that it is actually two Tomcats.

I was a VMware fanboi for 25 years ... and now I am not. Proxmox is not perfect but frankly I've seen all the warts on VMware over more than two decades and I took the exit.

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

Re: Alarming gaps

"...probably their BMI "

Oh Lord Him a'commin'

Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data

Re: Cyber Attack

Define: "reporable"

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Re: He forgot to add...

"the application of a Mk I boot"

Jungle tape is the universal panacea. Keep your boots to yourself.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

"Everything in the UK is “fabulously expensive” because you have to factor in all the corruption costs."

Come on, trolling needs to be marginally insightful. Back under the bridge me old fruit.

Coinbase extorted for $20M. Support staff bribed. Customers scammed. One hell of a SNAFU

Conibase

Could we have a little less Grauniad please?

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: I have this Debian server at home...

Gentoo:

Birth: 2013-08-07

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

It fails at the first line

"The complex pathology of this condition" does not simplify to: "This complex condition"

The pathology is complex, not necessarily the condition.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Re: Hold on

"Why are (presumed) sexual abuse counselling services using LLMs in the first place"

A machine is clearly indicated to ... no it isn't: its utter madness even considering using one for this purpose.

One day some firm of Civils is going to throw a LLM at a bridge design which will get built and it will be fine. Many more will get built and yea, bridges will be automatically designed. Then the models will be trusted and running the whole thing through a proper analysis will be dropped. Then something like the Millennium Bridge will be created but it wont just wobble with a spot of resonance and be fixed with some hydraulic ram damping.

It will be Tacoma Narrows. Again.

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

My first 80486 based PC had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk, which was absolute luxury compared to the 80286 I had before it, let alone my C64, Speccie, or ZX81.

The 6.11 kernel on this PC is 15MB with a 75MB initrd.

If you need to maintain hardware from the '90s then you will be familiar with "make config" already and you wont be using the current kernel either.

Culture comes first in cybersecurity. That puts cybersecurity on the front line in the culture wars

Define nation!

"It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm."

Which nation am I from?

I physically live in a town called Yeovil, which is situated within a county called Somerset. County is a modern term. Yeovil used to be situated within a political division called South Somerset District Council. Yeovil also has various other older situations and around 60 odd spellings going back 1800 odd years. It is still older than that too.

Now, Yeovil is obviously English so hence the nation is England. ... but England does not seem to be devolved ... Well we have a King of England (int al) and a treaty between Scotland and England from the C17. So Yeovil is British. Not so fast. There is that UK thing - Northern Ireland. OK so Yeovil is UKish?

Nope, Yeovil is within Wessex - my water bill says so. WTF? Wessex hasn't been a thing since King Alfred.

OK, I'm a Brit and English and from the UK. Hope that clears that up.

I'm a fifth generation German immigrant (paternal direct line) and a fifteenth generation Cornish bastard descendent (Padstow), via quite a route. I also have lots more antecedents. My family tree has roughly 160,000 entries and will continue to expand as we research.

So what exactly is a nation and what exactly is a citizen? OK, I am defined as a British Citizen from the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland, so that clears that up a bit.

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

to support up to 1 MW per rack.

I suggest investing in fire brigade services too.

Currently, fire suppression systems in DCs generally focus on removing oxygen. However the old school triad of oxygen, combustible material and a source of ignition looks a bit out of date.

If you are pumping 1MW (whatever that means but I imagine it will be a lot of energy) per rack you need to really rethink things as a proper engineer. This has all the hallmarks of the shit show that railway was at back in the day when massively explosive kettles started hurtling along the lines at >100mph and raced each other for prestige and profit.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

"If I attempt to share an ODF I get "stop that weird shit you idiot!" type responses."

How do they even notice? Apart from a few desultory "just click on OK/next/whatevs - its pretty obvious" style conversations, is it really an issue?

The biggest issue with ODF is attempting to share with people for whom a phone is the computer.

A relo. of mine once ran quite a lot of Civil Service IT and apparently the user base aren't too daft, once you wake them up.

Redis 'returns' to open source with AGPL license

Re: AGPL

"Problem with AGPL"

Why not use GPLv2 instead? That Linux kernel seems to have spread across the world quite happily and somehow people still manage to scrape a living out of supporting it and stuff built on it.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

4GB? bloody 'ell! Word 2.0 installed in a couple of meg and was a perfectly decent word processor.

The State of Open Source in 2025? Honestly, it's a mess but you knew that already

Enterprise Linux

We can all ava laff about Linux on the Desktop

For my little firm, I have settled on Kubuntu LTS as a distro but if you fancy it why not try the intermediates? I've run Gentoo and Arch as a daily driver for well over a decade (wifey still has Arch on her Facebook device)

That gets me Secure Boot, AV via ESET, and encrypted at rest - ticks the Cyber Essentials plus and ISO27000000001 boxes. I also run up auditd with a PCI-DSS profile and easily ship to aggregation and analysis.

Samba and SSSSSSSSD does the Windows integration. I used to use winbind but it isn't the best these days.

Evolution is phenomenally quick compared to all the Outlook variants and is able to log intelligibly (or at all) and it isn't artificially hamstrung for ... reasons.

LibreOffice does the office job for me. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, WP and the rest for a living. If you are going to try to tell me that Excel and co are better than LO, you had better have a really good argument. I will also point out that I once wrote a Finite (yes finite) Capacity Model in Excel for a food factory (think make/bake/wrap). I also deal with massive docs, indices and so on.

So, I suggest that LO is quite happy doing the Office job.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

"cretin?"

Mr Boots, with your nick I would expect something a little more robust.

Perhaps "cock gobbling thunder cunt" might be more appropriate or is that a little wordy?

UK bans game controller exports to Russia in bid to ground drone attacks

Re: Bit bloody late

"admire our architecture."

Mmm Salisbury Cathedral.

Does anyone know how tall it is in metres. Us silly old Brits only understand feet and inches and they don't work in Russia.