Posts by Rob Daglish

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

I believe Blackboard Monitor Vimes...

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: Lotus Notes

I attended a number of the Novell BrainShare events - there were many good speakers amongst the Dev team, and in some of the surrounding uni's, who could make the most dull topics interesting, and were great to have a pint with afterwards!

I miss Novell...

Re: been there, done that ...

This led to one of my favourite Netware messages - Synthetic Time is being issued on Partition...

Always felt like I was playing with the laws of time and space when that one came up!

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: There is only one way, has always been only one way, and always will only be one way

I think for cows that may be true, but round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.

The really posh farms have different colour chalk on different rams so you know who’s been where…

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Re: Money for nothing...

I'd rather either of those gltham the hopeless, hapless money out that is my W7, thank you very much

It's been absolutely pants since it was three days old. My BMW, on the other hand, has been a superb motor.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

I joined Demon in 1994, (158.152.202.35 was my IP address; why can I still remember that 30 years later, but I can't tell you what I had for breakfast 10 minutes ago?)

I remember having to have something that accepted mail being pushed to start with, and then later, a rather snazzy piece of software called Tetrix Reader Plug (Demon got you a discount on this!) which was a newsgroup reader as well as being able to pull individual email addresses or everything for the host (each demon user had their own hostname - bobertd.demon.co.uk, in my case - and could have any number of emails at that host.

And it was still more useable that Outlook...

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

I am, but the fricking sharks keep tangling the cables

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Re: Dear Santa...

I look at Lego sets and think "gosh, that's expensive", win reality my kids are using the same sets I had nearly 40 years ago, and it's showing every likelihood they'll be perfectly usable by their kids in the fullness of time. I don't think any other thing from my past has lasted so well, so is it really that bad?*

Also, have you seen the price of model trains lately? Wow...

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

Re: Where does the money go?

Being arms length public sector, wage caps don't really apply at Sellafield. There are tales of people doing fairly low skilled jobs such as laundry workers earning high wages, incredibly poor performance, jobs being pushed into overtime, poor attendance and high rates of work being contracted out to chains of contractors all adding their own cut for doing nothing but sub-contracting yet again...

It's a money pit, we all know it's a money pit, but nobody wants to do anything about it because why kill the golden goose? When it's finished, West Cumbria has nothing else going for it, and simply wont be a viable area to live in.

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

And yet, for many people it's a go-to reason. For example, SWMBO and the housework....

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Without turning into the Yorkshireman sketch, I'm not sure my first 486 was that well stocked - it definitely had 4MB of RAM, and I remember upgrading the hard disk to 127MB... It was definitely pre '93, possibly 90/91 as I seem to recall having it before I started secondary school in 1991.

It eventually got 8MB, with the hard disk growing to 500MB, and at some point I believe 16MB (4*4MB SIMMS, which now live in my Korg Triton keyboard!)

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Re: bits dropping off

I personally know of a motorcycle trailer being fabricated by a welder with materials from a site he was working on which was then driven off site with no questions asked by the security guards*

The same “company” had another occasion where a large (20kwish) diesel generator was ordered, then pretty much straight away trailered offsite to provide power to an employee’s house while waiting for the mains to be connected, again right past the guard house.

*Guards are more interested in who/what goes in, the scans on the way out are more interested in radioactive materials.

Anyway, the answer is obvious. You don’t take any car parts home, you stash them onsite, build it and drive the finished thing away.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: Polling vs Interrupted keyboards.

I've vague memories of having a PS/2 mouse that came with a PS/2 to DB9 converter...

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: Sellafield, where taxpayer monies go to die...!

I suspect you've never had to bid for work at Sillyfield?

The normal rules of business don't apply, and you can expect many, many questions about costs. Like how much do you pay your staff? What does your electric and insurance cost, and who supplies them? Will they be raising their prices? Can we have five years of your accounts, please, so we can audit you?

These are genuine questions from a tender for occasional coach transport. Having seen some of their construction tenders too, it seems like their contract department likes to be busy!

What seems to happen in reality is that there are three or four firms whose work seems to be bidding for work and buying or selling each other and infinitum* - one of my mates has worked in the same office for ~10 years, but has been employed by around 8 different versions of the same company in that time.

Those mega corps then sub work to the same bunch of local subbies, who occasionally go bust, but then start up again with a slightly different name. They, in turn, subcontract all the work out, usually to one bloke** who is quite busy doing the actual work of around 9,999 people who seem to be able to just push bits of paper around.

*This makes Joint Ventures a great game, especially when it comes to IT support

**Hi John! Hope you're keeping well?

Re: How the **** does it cost £1.5bn?

I'm thinking that story has been lost in translation. None of the catering stuff is in active areas, so nothing should be contaminated, and there was never a problem with taking vans of kit on and off provided they hadn't been in active areas.

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue.

Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions - one friend has gone from a highly stressful Senior Management role in a school, to basically delivering lessons that are already planned, and got doesn't have to deal with angsty teenagers, parents or Ofsted, has for a significant salary bump and still regards a 40 hour week as part time!

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

This is very true, but simply being good at something doesn't mean you can teach it. Some of the worst people I've seen at explaining things are those who know a product inside and out - simply because they don't understand how little other people know about the product!

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Ah. In education, there's a slightly different version: those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who can't teach become Ofsted inspectors.

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

Re: better directions

To be fair, my tenants managed to turn to drugs without any help from me, so I'm not sure what your point is here...

Not all landlords and devils, and not all tenants are saints.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Over promised and under delivered

Well, 3G didn't really live up to the hype, despite its improvement over 2G.

4G was definitely hyped too far for what it (eventually) delivered, and 5G was so over hyped it's unreal*.

Sorry Prof, but I don't think the MNOs are learning anything here.

*E.g. Keswick - now, instead of not working, my phone doesn't work really quickly, so that's nice

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Re: The slow TV trend

Sorry, I can't do anything about toucans at the moment, I'm too busy trying to deal with the giraffes that appear to have caught fire...

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

This is the way the world ends...

Presumably, Linus now has to send himself a sweary email castigating himself, which he'll reply to, a flame war will commence, and then he'll resign from the project in disgust at the way he's treated himself...

Seriously though, fair play to him for being so honest about it. He *could* have blamed anything or anyone, but didn't. Definitely earns him a beer

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Really...?

Really? I thought there was a planet going to crash into us. Or were we going to crash into it? Something like that anyways...

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

I'm with cyberdemon on this one. You could have significantly more delay on MS365, or Google, or any one of a host of other data centre hosted stuff and never notice the delay. I can confidently say that as they are as slow and crumbly whether I'm in that London or at home in the frozen North... No, the real north. Beyond Manchester, but before Scotland. What do you mean, you didn't realise that was part of England?

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after donations drive becomes dash to disaster

Re: Imagine if...

If he's maintaining it, I have no objection to him earning a bob or two from it, even if it wasn't originally his work or idea.

Remind me, do journalists not get paid when they regurgitate press releases?

Medusa ransomware affiliate tried triple extortion scam – up from the usual double demand

Re: i never get tired if saying it

Did you read TFA or just decide to get on your high horse about cloud on every comment section?

I think your ire would be better directed at the bad actors who are extorting money from people (no, not Oracle on this occasion;) )than at cloud in general, especially as the gang involved are going after on prem stuff, mainly...

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

Re: Boring

Were there ever such creatures? I assumed they were entirely mythical!

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: FORMATS

I don't know about German radio procedure, but "Zwo" is an older german word, which I think is used more commonly in southern Germany and Austria. I've certainly used it a lot, and I prefer it to zwei, but as my son is now learning at school I'd better not get him into trouble by using the wrong one... err... two?

Voda-Three name post-merger top team, keep schtum on layoffs

I think that's pretty standard for any mobile operator. All the best deals are for "new customers only" until you say Ok, I'm going elsewhere, and then they'll fall over themselves to give you stuff. See also: Sky TV, Insurance Companies.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

I'm not sure you couldn't just go to a different station though - there's still an element of discretion involved. I've seen two testers at the same station have different opinions on the same component, in which case it would be down to who tested it whether it was pass or fail.

A friend of mine works at a test station, and there is quite a list of things they aren't allowed to do when testing - like they aren't allowed to poke and prod at corrosion to see whether it's surface or all the way through, for example.

Legacy systems running UK's collector are taxing – in more ways than one

Yeah, nobody is selling anything to HMRC on eBay after their latest cash grab - sell more than 20 items in a year now and you're "a trader" and need to register to pay tax on your earnings. So now there's eBay, payment processor and HMRC grabbing your cash - hardly worth bothering with selling stuff there!

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Indeed. I'm surprised nobody has called in an Epyc fail yet, though.

South Carolina's abandoned nuclear reactors positioned to fuel the AI datacenter boom

Re: Best case scenario

That's certainly one way to describe nuclear fission reactions...

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

I always feel that if you've gone as far as looking for other work, then your heart isn' in your current employment, and no bigger, better desk, pay rise, inducement, is likely to fix the reason you started looking, so isn't it better to just go for the new thing? No law says you have to stay there if you don't like it...

Miscreants 'mass exploited' Fortinet firewalls, 'highly probable' zero-day used

Re: Question

Not sure, would have thought VoIP would be too lossy with chopping the frequency off at the top and bottom.

UK gives Openreach £289M for 4 rural broadband contracts in 'gigabit by 2030' push

Without wishing to continue the four Yorkshiremen of the apocalypse... Maybe power cuts are "insignificant" where you live, the village I'm in has an unusually large representation of analogue phones for when the power goes off, usually with a torch beside it so we can ring ENWL to see how long it's going to be this time. There is some form of backup power to the local mobile site, but it appears to consist of the run down time of whatever capacitors are in the kit, so that's gone within 5-10 minutes usually. We also have a strong representation of gas hobs or Aga type cookers, because they will run on Mains/LPG/oil while the power is out so we can still cook, as well as open fires so there's some heat. Don't get me wrong, I love living here, but it really doesn't take much wind to take out the local power lines!

Re: Spot on

Fibrus will provide Static IP on "business" connections, which seem to be around the same price as "home" connections, but come with the ability to get a static IP, use your own router and a VoIP connection, or at least, they did when a friend of mine got his connection. It's been much more reliable than the previous OR copper connection.

Brother in law has their "home" service, and he is CGNAT'd, but seems very happy with the service (apart from targeted ads thinking he's in NI these days!)

Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer

Re: Aion FX are they really tracing ?

Yes, the people naming guitar pedals appear to be teenage boys. "Big Muff" barely raises an eyebrow, to be honest!

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Settings

I believe that useful feature was courtesy of Intel - part of their onboard graphics drivers, if memory serves. Or at least I only ever saw it on machines with an intel graphics card,.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

Re: I remember reading Letwin's post

"Why the hell was dragging only done with the right mouse button? What conceivable benefit did that have?"

I don't remember this one - I only came to OS/2 Warp, but I _like_ this idea. The amount of users I've seen click and drag things by mistake, I'd be really grateful if things were only dragged with the right mouse button. It would certainly save a lot of "and then all my files disappeared" type calls!

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

Re: At the sound of the chime, truncheon says bedtime

XP had something similar, but I think it was 2024 that was the cut off. It's finally broken a friend's DOS based practice management system, which has pushed him towards retirement as it's simply too expensive to replace (which is why it's never been done before now)

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: BASIC+2 was the cool kid on the block

Oh god, I remember trying to learn ReXX on my (dual boot with Win3.11) OS/2 running 486/25, then on to Delphi, but I did love BBC Basic!

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

Chuffed is, in my experience at least, always positive, although you can be dischuffed at something.

Re: English is one of the easiest human languages

A problem not confined to the French... My (English) mother in law once acted as a translator in Germany between a Glaswegian coach driver, and the cockney mechanic who came to repair the coach when it broke down.

Having been in the control room of a nuclear reactor... Nothing that advanced was in use. A well known facility near me was controlled and monitored by some very clever pneumatic, hydraulic and electromechanical systems, and as a side effect pretty much immune to EMP, a side effect of being designed in the 1950s when computer control wasn't really a thing!

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: The 50mph roadworks are the worst

Or not. The tachograph fitted in a lorry is much more accurate than your car (+/- 0.1% Vs not showing more than 110%+6MPH). Also, the lorry Speedo is calibrated every two years to ensure it's accurate, and has a more full inspection every 6. When was your car Speedo last checked out?

I used to drive coaches, which were fitted with the same tachograph, subject to the same inspection, and my satnav would indicate the same speed as the tacho - ie if the tacho says 50, the satnav did. Put it in the car, and it was way out - car says 50, satnav says 45, car says 70, satnav says 62... Those numbers haven't got any closer together since then either, so possibly that wagon is sat at 50 in the roadworks and your Speedo is over indicating, and believe me, it's no fun getting something like that back up to speed when someone in front is going that little bit slower!

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Unlocked PCs are an open invite to send a mail to the company first aider saying the user has a wotsit stuck in their nose. This works best if you clue your first aider in beforehand...

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

Those chartered architects, would they be the ones so designed a hospital without checking that the corridors were wide enough for two beds to pass each other in?

Or the ones who designed a new school music room with no space for a piano, on the end of a corridor of open plan classrooms?

Being chartered doesn’t stop you from being an idiot, it just means people have less comeback when you do stuff it up!

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

AKA The Dilbert Principle. Promote idiots to management where they can’t get in the way of those doing real work.

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Re: "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave"

More to the point, suggest stupid things for the NHS such as 12 hours of paid shift, bookended by another hour of unpaid time…

I’m fairly certain an 8 hour shift would be better for the employees and the patients, and I figure it’s going to be cost neutral, but any time you talk to anybody about it you get “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way”.

I can’t help but think if we’d only invented anaesthesia last year, the NHS would still be pouring rum into patients and gagging them while they chopped limbs off, screaming “we’ve always done it this way!”