Posts by RMclan

Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

Re: "AI agents and LLM models [..] can, and almost certainly will, go rogue"

In USA I think the lawmakers are more likely to decide somehow that use of AI is covered by the 2nd Amendment than they are to restrict use of it.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: This is personal

Bedworth and Leamington Spa don't come under the main West Midlands nBus zone, so the prices I quoted don't apply there.

They fall under the National Express NX Outer Zone area, so there a single is £3, a day pass is £6, and a weekly pass £23, so nowhere near the £58 a week she is stating.

Re: This is personal

I'd be interested to see where someone is spending £3k a year on daily buses, I'm presuming it's not in a major UK city.

Here in Birmingham an adult single ticket is £3 and an adult Daysaver ticket is £5.60. Even buying a Daysaver for 365 days is only £2,044.

If you use a debit or credit card to "tap and go", you will either be charged for a single ticket if you only use one bus or a Daysaver if you use more than one bus in a day.

My monthly direct debit bus pass (which also includes trains for zones 1 & 2) is only £105 per month (£1260 per year), and if I changed it to bus only, it would be £67 per month (£804 per year).

A standard 4 week adult bus only pass is £73 (£985.50 per year).

This is personal

This is very bad news for UK science but for me it is personal. My uncle, Professor Ian Morison, devoted most of his life, until about 5 or 6 years ago, to designing and building most of the computer systems that controlled Jodrell Bank and later e-MERLIN. If Jodrell does close, I'm just glad that Ian is no longer around to see it following his death in 2024.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

My MP3s already have that tape hiss

Some of my MP3s files already have that tape hiss because I created them from my collection of over 900 cassette tapes.

I bought a compact cassette unit that fitted into a standard 5.25" drive bay and plugged into its own controller card. The software that came with it could attempt to output files for each track but it was a bit hit and miss so I did one file for each side of the tape (It could do both sides without having to turn the tape over) and then manually split out the individual tracks using an MP3 editor. The unit would convert at double speed as well.

Europe's new import rules are coming for your bargains

Re: Uk is Temu EU

There's a reason the new charge is €3, it's because most EU import duty rates are 2% and the previous €150 de minimis x 2% = €3

€3 is peanuts

Just wait until all the EU countries implement the radiometric testing requirement that Italy implemented in 2022 and everyone else will implement eventually.

From EU Council Directive 2013/59/ EURATOM, Italy has set up the situation where metal products which come under 600 different HS Codes are required to have a Radiometric Testing certificate. The HS Codes include scrap metal, standard forms (ingots, sheets, pipes, cables, etc.) and finished items such as hand tools (saws, hammers, spanners, screwdrivers etc.), ladders, chains, brake discs, brake calipers, etc.

Regardless of the value or size of a shipment, if it contains any items with any of these 600 HS Codes then the shipment needs to be Radiometrically Tested. There is a standard fee for the testing, of €149

We've had shipments of car parts and other items going to Italy worth as little as €20 returned to UK (at our expense) because the customer has refused the €149 inspection fee. This fee applies to both B2B and B2C shipments.

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

We had a Windows 7 machine where the system drive was SCSI-2 connected to a controller card and it had 2 SATA drives plugged directly into the motherboard for data storage. The BIOS on the motherboard was a bit strange though. If you left a USB drive plugged in at boot time it would automatically try booting from that even thought the SCSI drive was set with boot priority.

Even worse though, if it failed to boot from the USB drive it would reassign boot priority in the BIOS and set one of the SATA drives first, then the second, then the USB and finally the SCSI at the bottom of the list. This would of course result in a "No boot sector found" boot failure. Every time a USB drive was left in by accident, I had to go into the BIOS and manually reset the boot order.

The first time it happened had me totally panicking until I worked out what was going on.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Re: Vanity

One of the major ideas behind HS2 was actually to turn Birmingham into a dormitory city for people working in London because house prices in London have become so expensive.

There have already been a large number of developments of rentable apartments within close proximity to Curzon Street Station and more are planned.

There is a new development recently completed next door to where I live and only 15 minutes walk or 4 minutes by bus from Curzon Street. It has 484 apartments (132 x 1 bed, 344 x 2 bed and 8 x 3 bed) , so accommodation for 1000+ people but only 56 car park spaces and 112 bicycle spaces.

Within 20 minutes walk of Curzon Street I know of over 1500 apartments built in the past 4-5 years and they all have two things in common, firstly an almost complete lack of car park spaces and secondly ease of access to Curzon Street by bus, tram or walking.

They haven't even really started on the redevelopment of the Digbeth area of Birmingham city centre, just to the South and South East of Curzon Street, but there are thousands more apartments being planned for that area which is to be rebranded as Eastside.

Re: Are they actually building anything?

> China does have the advantage that it just jails or shoots people who dare to protest about government steamrollering over their property, though.

The land for Curzon Street was cleared in 2018, it was previously the site for a large ParcelForce depot and a few student housing blocks. They spent over 2 years doing archeological surveys on the site and then didn't start construction until 2021.

The surveys found 6500 skeletons which had to be excavated and the remains of the worlds oldest locomotive turntable/roundhouse. I don't know what's happening with the roundhouse/turntable remains, but the skeletons are being moved to a nearby cemetery for reburial.

Are they actually building anything?

I pass by the site of the new Curzon Street station in Birmingham every day to and from work and progress appears to be almost non-existent

They started construction there in 2021. They finished the installation of the 2000+ vertical piles in March this year.

A few days ago they started the installation of the 550+ cross beams.

The station is new set to be opened to passengers some time between 2036 and 2039, 15-18 years after they started it.

On the other hand, China built the Chongqing East station (the largest station in the world) in 6 years and 7 months (started November 2018, opened to passengers June 2025) .

Curzon Street will have 7 platforms and 2 tracks, Chongqing East had 15 platforms and 27 tracks.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: "Shipping Damage"

> Kicked/slid off the truck. Gives a 90deg rotation and crushed end. A friend worked for a shipping company.

You would think they'd be a bit more careful with a box that size and weighing nearly 350kg, it could quite easily kill someone if it fell off a truck.

Re: "Shipping Damage"

We have quad ply cardboard boxes (12mm thick walls with 4 flat sheets and 3 layers of corrugation) we use for shipping worldwide. The boxes are 167cm long, 85cm wide and 90cm high when strapped to a pallet.

We sent a shipment to a customer in France last year and before it got half way the carrier decided they were returning it to us.

I still have no idea what happened to the box but when it left us it was 167cm long and when it was returned it was only 142cm long and one end was totally crushed in. It looked like someone had somehow lifted it up, rotated it by 90 degrees and then dropped it on its end.

A pair of layshafts packed at the crushed end of the box had been pushed through the walls of the internal boxes they were packed in, then through another internal box wall, a layer of bubblewrap and finally into a pair of 5L plastic bottles of hydrolastic fluid which had been at the opposite end of the box. The hydrolastic fluid had then leaked into the rest of the box prompting the carrier to return it to us.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

Re: Physical Comparisons

Even the software for more modern cars can a bit of a problem. XPart used to sell a diagnostic system which MG Rover registered garages and dealers could use to "tune" the vehicles. It was even required for things as simple as adjusting the height the electric windows went to if you swapped the cabriolet hood with a hardtop on an MGF or MGTF.

The problem was this diagnostic system had its own operating system which it booted into from Windows 95, and the OS would only run on one specific model of Dell laptop, because hardcoded into the software was the driver for the specific network and USB chip in this one model of laptop. We had a company that used to source second hand models of this laptop and recycle them to create these diagnostic systems. We bought the last one they sold about 6 years ago.

There were a number of custom cables which went with the system, the company that manufactured them sold us the last of their stock again about 5 years ago and we now have none left.

Land Rover had a similar diagnostic system and their software would run on the MG Rover laptops, unfortunately for some reason the MG Rover software wouldn't run on the Land Rover laptops.

Re: Physical Comparisons

As someone who works in the classic car parts industry, I can safely say that even there it comes to a point where some marques and models of vehicles become obsolete because of unavailability of parts.

Before MG Rover went bust in 2005, they had an aftermarket spares company called XPart. XPart continued without MG Rover, buying in parts from original equipment manufacturers. They became part of Caterpilar Logistics, then the company I work for took them over in 2017. Whilst we are still able to supply many parts for the cars, there is almost total unavailability of new body panels for any of the MG Rover vehicles (Rover 25, 45, 75, MG ZR, ZS, ZT, MGF, MGTF) and so lots are being totally written off if they are involved in accidents. Most of the body panel tooling was scrapped, apart from the MGTF tooling which was transferred to Nanjing in China, but even they aren't making replacement parts.

Similarly, we are the largest distributors of TVR parts, and there are almost no body panels available for them either.

On the other hand, we can supply almost every panel needed for an MGB or MG Midget from the 1960s to1980s or a classic Austin/Leyland Mini.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Primary case of injelititis, it seems

How many union workers does it take to change a light bulb?

When I was at BAe, I asked for a blown flourescent tube to be replaced in an office It took 3 electricians from facilities management to do it, one to change the tube, one to hold the step ladder and one to guard the door to prevent it being opened into the step ladder.

If they needed to replace a light bulb higher than 10ft off the ground for example in the production shed, it took 4 of them, one to change the bulb, one to operate and drive the scissor lift and 2 to make sure no-one entered the coned off area around the scissor lift.

Nearly caused a union walkout

As an undergraduate apprentice at BAe Hatfield in the late 1980s, during one of my university summer holiday placements, I was given a project to get rid of all the redundant machine tools and scrap metal from the factory.

They started me off small, disposing of a free standing pillar drill from the machine shop. I got a handful of dealers to come in and inspect the drill before making an offer on it. We eventually agreed a sale "as seen" but the machine couldn't leave the site until the contacts were signed and accounts confirmed the payment had been received (about 2 weeks back then).

The machine shop were told the drill had been sold and so they decided upon themselves to move it outside into the car park where it promptly got rained on. I went to see the head of facilities and got some polythene sheeting and some tape and went out and covered the drill to keep it dry until it was collected. The millwrights found out I had done what was supposed to be their job and they put in a formal complaint that a non-union employee had done a union job. Luckily after a little discussion it was a greed I would never do anything like it again and the complaint was withdrawn.

In the 14 weeks I was in that department I managed to dispose of 2 pillar drills, a 40 ton, 25ft long Cincinatti flat bed surface grinder, a couple of capstan lathes and an entire yard containing 180 tons of scrap including metal shelving, more machine tools and parts of an aircraft tug.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: Mouse working in reverse mode

I had a user who due to carpal tunnel insisted on using her mouse with the buttons towards so she could use both buttons and the scroll wheel with her thumb. This was with both wired and wireless mice. She was also left handed which meant that the buttons were actually set up for a right hand user, which was useful for me if I needed to work on her machine. We did try her out with a trackball with buttons for her thumb, but she didn't like it.

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

Re: Ignorance is bliss

I used to go and watch the A-10s do live firing exercises at RAF Holbeach Range on the SW coast of The Wash. You can understand why they call the GAU-8 gun "the buzzsaw" when you hear them firing.

It's been a while since I've been to Holbeach so I'm not sure how active it is now, but I remember occasionally seeing Harrier, Tornado, Jaguar, A-10, F15 and F16 all doing either gun or bomb runs or both all on the same day.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Re: I encountered one of these agents today

I tried signing up for a Bolt account a couple of years ago because they were doing a signup bonus and I needed a taxi (which I do about once a year). I couldn't complete the signup because it kept telling me my email address on my personal .UK (not .CO.UK) domain was invalid.

I also had a similar to Steve above with my postcode which is only 5 digits (A1 1AA format). A website required the postcode to be entered with no spaces and then tried using the first 3 characters to find my area instead of the first 2.

Postcode format validation in UK is pretty hard unless you actually use a lookup table because there are at least 6 different formats of letters and numbers I know of (A1 1AA, A11 1AA, AA1 1AA, AA11 1AA, A1A 1AA and AA1A 1AA), the only consistent bit being the last 3 characters (after the space) always follow the format 1AA

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

Re: A dozen tubes of KY lube

At university back in the 1980s our hall of residence decided to hold a "fetish party" event while at the same time promoting safe sex. The hall events manager framed the credit card receipt he got for a purchase of 1000 packets of condoms on the hall credit card.

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

Dumb printers asre better

About 10 years ago we decided to replace an HP Laserjet 5 and an HP Laserjet 4si with multiple Samsung Xpress M2825MD desktop printers.

When Samsung stopped making them in 2020, we bought what I think were the last batch in UK. Argos who were the only place showing stock said they had 8, we ordered all 8 and they only delivered 6 and said they couldn't get any more..

At one point we had 10 in operation and 3 spare but over time some have died off and we are now down to just 7 of them. With page counts ranging from about 80K to over 190K we haven't exactly hammered the machines (12k per month is maximum recommended usage) but we haven't treated them with kid gloves either.

We have never upgraded the firmware on any of the machines, they currently range from early 2015 to mid 2017 date wise. They quite happily print with both compatible toner cartridges (about £10 for 2000 pages) and compatible imaging units (about £28 for 9000 pages).

When we first installed them we were running Windows 7 and Windows 2000 workstations, now we're on Windows 11 and never had a driver problem. Our printers have never needed to connect to any website to work. Not bad for printers that cost us about £100 each.

Google Chrome lacks protection against one of the most basic and common ways to track users online

Re: The privacy dilemma

Ignoring that with me using Firefox it gives a Similarity Ratio of 1.6%, the fact I have some company specific fonts installed on my computer gives me a Similarity Ratio of 0.00% on that metric That means the website says I am unique amongst over 5 million fingerprints in their dataset and therefore easily tracked. Lesson to be learned, don't have custom or very rare fonts for your company letterheads, etc. if you don't want to be tracked online.

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

Re: Sinclair ZX81 controlling a nuclear power station

Back in the late 90s I was an apprentice at BAe Hatfield. The Technical Development department had a testing rig for the BAe 146 hydraulic systems on a vaguely aircraft shaped steel frame known locally as the Iron Chicken. The entire system was run from a ZX81 with a 16K RAM pack.

Re: Real fun

[Hand partly raised]

I didn't write my own but I remember having a Lunar Lander program on my ZX Spectrum which I typed in from one of the various magazines.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: During COVID

Back in the mid 1990s we had an HP Laserjet 4si MX. Once a year I'd spend a week printing off 13,000 mailmerged invoices and 30,000+ pages of translations (14 different languages). Jams were almost unheard of, I just kept the beast fed with paper (2 x 500 sheet trays) & toner and it would quite happily rumble away for hours on end.

Re: Users and printing devices...

Speaking of heavy printers, back in the late 90's we had an HP Color Laserjet 4500DN printer that weighed something like 75kg. It came boxed on a pallet (that we had to keep in case the printer needed to be sent back any time in the 3 year warranty). The printer had 4 toner cartridges (CYMK), an imaging unit and a drum unit and you only had to look at it wrong for even basic 80gsm white A4 paper to jam it up. I wouldn't have dared try to feed anything exotic through that beast.

Re: Users and printing devices...

How about the FD who didn't understand there was a differenc between inkjet labels and laser labels? Bought 500 sheets of inkjet labels because they were cheaper and managed to destroy the developer unit in our colour photocopier/printer/scanner when the labels got stuck to the fuser roller, about £140 for a new unit. We ended up binning all the rest of the labels as well as we didn't actually have any inkjet printers anywhere in the company.

Back in the day when overhead projectors were a thing, I've seen musltiple cases where people bought the wrong transparencies because they were cheaper, and melt them inside laser printers while trying to print on them.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Unusual route

Concorde used to fly a completely different route going transatlantic than most other airliners. Whilst most airliners heading across the pond follow a great circle route which takes them up over Scotland and out over the North Atlantic from there, Concorde needed to get over the sea as soon as possible after take off so it could go supersonic. From Heathrow they followed a route almost directly over Bristol and out over the Bristol Channel where they could go supersonic off the South Wales coast. They would then route out over the Atlantic south of Ireland a long way further south than even those routes which go via Shannon.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Timpsons, the company with shoe repair and key cutting shops all over the UK now have automated key cutting machines in some supermarkets. You place your key in a slot under a camera and if they have the right blanks in the machine you have a duplicated key less than 5 minutes later. I got a slightly worn front door Yale type key copied in one machine and the copy actually works better than the original because there's no wear on the 'teeth'.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Muck inside

Holiday resort on the south coast of Tenerife back in the 1990s. We had our large Dell network server in an office with no windows and a door which was locked most of the time at the back of the resort reception which was open 24 hours. Every 6 months we had to get our local IT support to come and vacuum about 1/2 inch of really fine sand from the bottom of the machine. The sandstorms that came across from Africa were so bad we had to repaint the outside of the resort every 3-4 years because the sandstorms would strip the masonary paint off the concrete.

Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over

As an undergraduate apprentice at BAe Hatfield in 1989 I spent 6 weeks in Flight Development and one of my projects was to write a program in Fortran to help calibrate a new radio altimeter for the BAe 146 at low altitudes.

The Flight Development aircraft kitted out with multiple data recording systems would make low altitude passes (between 50ft and 250ft) along the centreline of the runway recording the measured output from the radio altimeter system every tenth of a second.

At the same time a 50fps camera would track the aircraft from a datum point on the airfield recording the pan angle of the camera and a high precision time record onto the images.

We then manually measured the distance on enlarged photos between 2 targets on the side of the aircraft and the distance of the targets from the top and bottom of the photograph. Using this data along with the pan angle and the known position of the datum point compared to the runway centreline, my program used trig to calculate the height of the aircraft above the runway in a particular photo. This data along with the time stamp was then used to compare the altitude from the photograph to the recorded altitude from the radio altimeter.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Access security 101

The other good one was to set the taskbar to autohide and then move it from the bottom of the screen to the top or one of the sides.

Re: TSR

Back in th old MS-DOS days I found a small TSR on a bulletin board that you could install silently through AUTOEXEC.BAT and set it to intercept the parallel port on a machine. Any text sent to print through the selected port would come out on the printer reversed. I used that to prank a number of my users. It became redundant once we moved to Wordperfect fo DOS because it could only reverse text, not graphics

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Re: Boom vs aeroderivative vs industrial turbines

You would need to completely redesign the front end and outside of a turbofan engine to use it as a power generator. The fans at the front are designed to optimize airflow into both the combustion core and the bypass. The bypass air in many cases can provide up to 70-80% of the thrust of a turbofan engine, so the core of a turbofan isn't anywhere near as powerful as that of a turbojet. The bypass air is also used to help manage the temperature of the combustion core, so without the bypass you would need to look at alternative cooling. So just omitting the turbofan part and replacing it with an alternator shaft isn't really going to work. This is the same reason why turbo prop and turbine helicopter engines are based on turbojets and not turbofans.

Re: Boom vs aeroderivative vs industrial turbines

High bypass turbofan engines of the type used on most modern airliners while excellent for aircraft aren't really suitable for power generation.

The Rolls Royce Olympus turbojet engine used in the Vulcan and Concorde was very successfuly developed as a power generation engine. The Marine Olympus was used to power ships for many navies including the Royal Navy (Invincible class carriers, Type 42 destroyers and Type 21 & 22 frigates).

Containerised Olympus engines were used for various power generation scenarios and could produce up to 21MW. I read back in the day (although I can't find proof now) that for a couple of years the Donington Monsters of Rock festivals were powered by 2 or 3 containerised Olympus engines.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Pretty sure I've posted this before. Working as IT Manager for some holiday resorts in Spain. I was in Tenerife and due to visit a resort near Malaga at the weekend.

Got a call to say nobody at the mainland resort could access anything on the network (Novell 3.12 server, 10base2 cabling). I asked the nearest person I had to an on-site assitant if anything had changed, computers moved, etc.and was reliably informed nothing had.

I arrived on the Friday evening and after a bit of troubleshooting moving terminators around I isolated the problem to the locked accounts office. I wa sable to bypass the office and get the rest of the network working with some spare cables I had.

Monday morning one of the 2 sisters who worked in accounts turned up and unlocked the office. The other sister's computer was missing, and so was the T-piece which connected it to the network. Apparently the one sister had gone off on maternity leave and taken her computer with her so she could do some work from home.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Another OzWin user here. Even after 30+ years I can still remember my Compuserve account number.

I can remember signing up for the original BT Friends & Family discount scheme back in the 80s where you could register I think it was 9 UK numbers and 1 overseas number to get a discounted rate in the evenings and weekends. I managed to get the Compuserve dial up number registered as one of of my F&F numbers.

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: Password rules make for weaker passwords

or

Ll4nf41rpwllgwyngyllg0g3rychwyrndr0bwllll4ntys1l10g0g0g0ch

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: Not smashing..

The file server was one of 4 VMs we had on 1 physical server.

We backed up the VMs from the hypervisor each night to a NAS which was on a separate network address space to the one the VMs ran in.

We just restored the previous night's VM backup into the hypervisor.

The user that the attack came in via had no way of accessing the hypervisor or the NAS.

Re: Not smashing..

We got hit by a ransomware attack, one of my users actually spotted files being renamed so I was able to kill the server while the ransomware was working its way through all our PDFs and JPGs on our file share, before it got near anything of real value.

As we spotted the attack only about 1 hour into the working day we decided to just roll the fileserver back to the previous night's backup while all workstations were being scanned for viruses/malware/ransomware.

We were back up and running by about 3pm

As the only member of the IT department I was very busy that day but thankfully I had the very patient support of management, one of the directors kept me supplied with cups of tea and the MD went and bought me lunch from Tesco to save me having to go out.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Took your time

A colleague complained he had to actually go round his house and physically turn off lights when he left for work today instead of Alexa doing it as he went out of the door.

He didn't get much sympathy, another colleague asked if he needed a plaster for his overworked finger.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Early On-Line Shopping

Our colur photocopier won't copy £5, 10 or £20 notes (not tried a £50 note) if you lay them horizontally on the screen, but rotate them 90 degrees and they will copy just fine. JUst have to set the paper source to the A4R tray instead of of the A4.one.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: My advice for some time now

For a long while, Lloyds Bank were the opposite.

I would regularly get marketing calls from someone at my Lloyds Bank branch where they would phone me from a mobile number (which I didn't recognise so didn't answer), leave a message saying "This is <forename> from Lloyds Bank, please call me back on <mobile number>".

I never called back on the mobile number, occasionally I would call the branch (using a number I found on the website), ask if they had a <forename> working there and then blast them for such poor security practices.

Then they removed the local branch telephone numbers and they just have a single contact number for all branches now.

Thankfully I haven't had a marketing phonecall from Lloyds for a number of years.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

ID required to rent a property

Through my own stupidity with an improperly extinguished cigarette, last year I managed to set fire to the flat I own.

The buildings insurance put me up in temporary accomodation while my flat was being repaired.

Despite the insurance paying, the rental agreement had to be in my name.

My driving licence, and details of a mortgage I had been paying on the flat I had lived in for 32 years wasn't deemed sufficient to prove I ws entitled to rent a property in UK.

As all other forms of ID had been destroyed in the fire, I had to contact the records office where I was born an obtain a copy of my birth certificate to use with my driving licence.

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

Re: You did 'What !!!???'' with a spreadsheet !!!!

No mention of Quattro Pro?? While I would happily go back to Wordperfect instead of Word any day, Quattro Pro in PerfectOffice was nowhere near as good as Excel.

Curious connections: Voyager probes and Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Re: Special Delivery

Evri: You weren't at home so we left your package behind Titania

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

Almost virgin installation here (machine used as thin client), 38.3Gb. More scary is it's 183,361 files and 74,417 folders!!!!!!

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

There used to be a Greggs Surplus shop in Birmingham (near Perry Barr station) which sold Greggs sausage rolls, slices, pizzas and cakes that had been cooked the day before in the local proper Greggs. I used to be able to get a pack of 4 sausage rolls for £0.50 instead of £1.80 for the fresh ones in the main shop. Put the day old ones in the microwave for 30 seconds and you couldn't spot the difference.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Re: Why would you ever delete patient data?

"In the Netherlands, in the 1930s, they kept extremely good records of everyone's identity, including address, ethnicity, and religious background. When Germany invaded, they used this information to systematically track down and murder specific groups of people on an industrial scale."

In USA the IRS keeps records of all federal tax payments everyone makes alongside address and contact details. DHS sent the IRS a list of 400,000 suspected "illegal immigrants" with jobs who were supposedly paying tax. The IRS only matched against about 3% of them. DHS demanded the details of the 3%. The recently appointed (2 months ago) controller of the IRS refused. Trump fired the controller of the IRS and will now appoint someone who will illegally hand those details over to DHS so they can round up a specific group of people on an industrial scale.