Not creepy. At all!
I am sure The Saj here in Blighty will love the idea of these so he can sack all the GPs.
It is a bit ROTM hence icon
Posts by Roger Kynaston
713 posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Tencent Cloud slaps googly eyes on a monitor, says it can care for oldies
Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made
NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe
Friday 1st July 2022 09:09 GMT 
carbon
A university I worked at had a multi part carbon registration form. Every student got one. Every year they redesigned it and every year I had a nightmare trying to get the bloody thing to print from the huge dot matrix printer they spent a fortune maintaining. At a meeting I suggested that it might be better to have a standard A4 and perhaps distribute the form electronically to the relevant parts (registry, exams, teaching department and student). The head a registry exploded on the spot and came close to shouting at me in (the lowly sysadmin) a large meeting. I was even prepared to configure a posh laser printer with multiple trays if they wanted to have different colours.
Other than that, it was a great gig and I became friends with the head of Registry.
Whatever hit the Moon in March, it left this weird double crater
Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...
Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years
Micron aims 1.5TB microSD card at video surveillance market
SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk
Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop
Monday 20th June 2022 11:41 GMT 
tar(macadam) joy
I needed to copy some config files from one machine to another.
Source machine: tar cvf /tmp/roger.tar /etc/some/dir
scp roger.tar to dest machine
Destination machine: tar xvf /tmp/roger.tar
"Ooh why does /etc not contain any files now?
This was when I found that the backups hadn't been working.
Four days later and I had sort of bodged the machine back into a working state and I learnt the lesson to extract a tarball into a different directory
Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada
Woman accused of killing boyfriend after tracking him down with Apple AirTag
Tuesday 14th June 2022 16:13 GMT
Re: Ban cars?
Which rather brings us round to the story (away from gun control and colonialism anyway). The Lady in the story appeas to have decided that the gentleman was her property and that if she couldn't own him, no one could. I am sure that the court will go into the ins and outs of that possible assumption fully.
Majority of Axon's AI ethics board resigns over CEO's taser drones
Next six months could set a new pace for work-life balance
Tuesday 7th June 2022 20:38 GMT 
Interesting idea
I have a feeling that it is an idea whose time has come. After all, the unions fought for Saturday off and (then) 48 hour weeks in the early years of the last century. So instead of 'that Friday feeling' you will have that Thursday vibe!
Here is another idea, back when pension schemes were more valuable than they are now one I knew of had a facility where you could start winding down your working week a few years before normal pension age. A colleague I knew went from 5 to 4 and then 3 days a week till he finally chucked it in. Perhaps that is something that could be widened out.
I am still a few years off being able to hang up my work email.
Azure Active Directory logs are lagging, alerts may be wrong or missing
VMware customers have watched Broadcom's acquisitions and don't like what they see
Amazon investors nuke proposed ethics overhaul and say yes to $212m CEO pay
Friday 27th May 2022 13:29 GMT
Re: Don't rock the boat
At one level, remuneration in a private company (as opposed to a public, taxpayer funded organisation) is not in the public domain. The trouble is that large companies are large employers and have a huge impact on society as a whole. Studies have shown that excessive disparities between the highest and lowest wages are not good for society. So, what C-level people are paid in relation to their employees is of public concern.
Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes
Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’
Oracle really does owe HPE $3b after Supreme Court snub
Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved
Thursday 12th May 2022 09:13 GMT
rude maintainers
For a while I worked to migrate off sendmail to another mta and subscribed to the mailing lists. It was staggeringly rude and contemptuous of newbies. I understand the need to look through the archives first and to post all relevant information but even then you asked a question at your peril. I really hope that these practises do die.
Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell
Tuesday 10th May 2022 12:41 GMT 
powershell command missing
When on earth will they come up with an equivalent of du?
full file system and you want to find the culprit in *nix
ls /some/dir | while read line
do
du -sh $line
done
I once found the code in powershell but it was so ugly I couldn't deal with it. It is good to have powercli on linux though so I can take snapshots etc. So, on balance I suppose it is a good thing.
Uber, Meta to reduce hiring as stocks slide
Elon Musk wants to take Twitter public again 'within 3 years'
Wednesday 4th May 2022 13:35 GMT
Re: It’s been fun
My sympathies are very much with your views. The problem is that anyone who has to promote anything is forced to sup with these devils with quite short spoons. An example, any indie author has to have a presence on all the antisocials to promote their wares.
Politicians, in particular have to be on them even if they are diametrically opposed to most political anti social types.
It seems that Linkedout is now becoming important for when you are looking for a job in our august profession.
I do wish that people would be less interested in the narcissistic rantings of the Musk Ox and where he indulges in his shopping habits.
Privacy pathology: It's time for the users to gather a little data – evidence
Autonomous Mayflower to attempt Atlantic crossing, again
IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse
Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist
The Register gets up close and personal with ESA's JUICE spacecraft
Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless
Friday 8th April 2022 09:47 GMT
two quite different scenarios
My Father was a photographer and loathed doing weddings. One of the things he always did when doing a wedding was to stamp proof all over the initial set of prints (25 years ago CMOS was a glint in someone's eye or only on Voyager). They always created about this and said that cousin 'Dave' would do it for £50.
I am known as the street geek on our road and regularly get asked questions about spinning up Wordpress sites even though I am a systems admin and not good at design. I haven't the heart to charge them an hour's consultancy to say I don't know anything about that but can spin up an AWS instance for them but they will have to design and maintain the site.
South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes
Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter, sends share price to the Moon
Tuesday 5th April 2022 14:00 GMT
Re: Trump vs Musk
Ooh Palin. That would be good for the popcorn market.
On the idea of the demented musk ox buying an antisocial media platform. So what? I don't have an antsocial media account (not personal just for my wife's pen name) and I doubt I will be in the market for a Tesla or be able to afford a seat on his penis extension.
---> because he should have a couple.
Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants
IT outage at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University enters second week
C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language
Linux 5.17 debuts after 'very calm' extra week of work
The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?
Heaps of tweaks and improvements incoming with GNOME 42
Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows
Wednesday 16th March 2022 14:09 GMT
The onsite/off site binary is stupid here
There seems to be this perception that an organisation has to adopt a single model. All off site, all in the office, all doing some combination (e.g. 60/40).
Why? Some roles can be done entirely remotely, some need you in the office/shop/factory all the time. The same with people. some love the office. Some love being at home in their jim jams. Why would an employer feel that they can impose a single model on everyone and expect everyone to be happy.
I know where I sit on this continuum though I don't wear pyjamas at my desk and I am lucky to be in a role that can be done remotely. Any future job will bear this in mind. I've already turned down a job after initial enquiries found that most of the time would have to be on site in central London
Cow-counting app abused by China 'to spy on US states'
Ukraine invasion: This may be the quiet before the cyber-storm, IT staff warned
Saving a loved one from a document disaster
Friday 4th March 2022 09:43 GMT 
old kit and wp software
This is more of a who-me but ...
Come my final year and dissertation time had come round. I was one of the few with a computer - an Atari ST for the nostalgic. I had completed my dissertation and the lady with whom I was in lust with needed to type hers up so I lent her my shiny tech toy.
All went well till she was just about to finish and I get a visit to say that it won't save. I got annoyed and guessed that her floppy had got corrupted. I snatched the next floppy and saved dissert.doc. as it was saving I realised with horror that I was just in the process of overwriting my own dissertation with hers. Lots of swearing and panicked bowel lossening pondering on how long an extension I could get till I remembered that the WP software saved a .bak on each disk as well. Sure enough, I opened up the .bak file and mine was there. I hastily saved it to another disk and we plugged in my dot matrix printer to have our eardrums bored out with ages of screaming.
The lust bit never came to anything though which might be just was well.
Google blocks FOSS Android tool – for asking for donations
Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies
Monday 28th February 2022 14:28 GMT
Re: Crazy Idea
It would be great to do this. Facefail and the rest need to die - at least in their current form.
The problem is that if you want to promote anything you have to sup with the devil.
My Wife has an indie published book out and the only tools for promoting it are the above mentioned evil corps.
This creates a problem as the accounts are in the name of her pen name rather than her actual name. How do you allow such promotional work while requiring people not to 'hide' behind fake IDs?
Typical stupidity of our benighted government!
Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems
Monday 28th February 2022 14:05 GMT
Fujitsu ICL
During my stint at a London Borough they had an ICL mainframe. That wasn't my problem but I did have a couple of horrible Team Servers. Come the time when the application was finally replaced I caused a bit of a stir in CAB when I asked to throw them off the roof as part of the decommission process.
Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400
Desktop-deprived Linus Torvalds releases first release candidate of ‘not huge’ kernel 5.17
Red Cross forced to shutter family reunion service following cyberattack and data leak
Friday 21st January 2022 12:49 GMT
Re: Quote
My you are angry! In the narrow sense of the word you are right in that the ICRC has allowed an attack to work - likely through inaction. It was still a criminal act though - breaking into an unlocked house is still breaking and entering.
However, in the quote from the spokesperson I don't see them trying to shift blame - rather they are appealing to whoever did steal the information not to make use of what they have stolen. Can you condemn them for that?
