Posts by Rob Daglish 435 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2007
well... not exactly trust as such, but... it seems like Google want to sell information about you to their advertisers so they can target you with ever more specific stuff. Apple are more interested in selling _you_ stuff. Everyone gets a choice over which they prefer, or neither.
I once went on a stag do in Pagan Geordieland in the middle of winter, and believe me, there is nothing rugged enough to stand up to that... except some of the lasses who were wearing slightly less fabric than you need to make a handkerchief in weather that even polar bears were describing as "a bit parky"!
Yeah, definitely not just Govt. sites that have this issue. I wanted (correction, swmbo wanted) some stuff from Ikea. Give it my postcode, and it will not let me choose the nearest store, which is Gateshead, because Belfast is closer to me. Apart from the two and a half hour drive to Stranraer to catch a ferry, then the two and a half hour ferry crossing...
It's also not unknown to be told the nearest place is Dumfries (yes, if you can swim across the Solway) or the Isle of Man (again, you need to swim across the Irish Sea). Always used to catch the Romanian call centre out when they were looking for the closest engineer to a site. I've even had to have international roaming switched off as I keep ending up on Manx Telecom!
Nobody is saying you should. But a quick glance at a map might tell you which junction you want. Carlisle, for example, is referred to on at least three motorway junctions, Kendal on at least two. If I was going north, for example, I'd be checking whether I was coming off at J36 and going straight in or spending the next hour driving to J39 and coming back...
I nearly did something similar... I was working on a Panasonic Digital PBX for a client sometime in the early 2000s. The phone socket I was rewiring had screw terminals rather than being punch down, and as it was late and I couldn't be bothered going to the car, I decided to strip the wires using my teeth. First one was fine. The second one, the wire turned as I pulled the insulation off with my teeth, causing the first wire to make contact with my nose while the second was still in my mouth... Not the most pleasant of feelings, and I was certainly more careful about doing it in future!
20 odd years ago I had the dubious pleasure of installing a thinnet connected photocopier in a fish processing factory. Guy who sold them it was patting himself on the back as he’d got them one with a stapler in it for the same price as the base model. Nobody had the heart to tell him they weren’t allowed to use it as no metal was allowed in the production area... I also seem to remember they took pity on me and let me wear the white suit, hair net and wellies rather than the canary yellow ones most visitors got!
Part of the problem is there isn’t a single NHS, there are lots of little NHSs that do different things, and what tends to happen is political types like to reorganise these on a frequent basis- centralise some stuff, push other stuff apart, wait a few years, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. IT staff are then pushed back and forth between various trusts who can’t give them answers on how long they have a job as they don’t know if they’ll employ them, outsource them or just bring in a contractor. What happens is, lthis goes on until it happens once too often for the long suffering IT staff who go off and find a job in the real world. In my experience, it meant I got to leave the equipment store of the local hospital which was also my office...
I got a call to a school one day as the scanner "had black marks over all of our scans that aren't on the paper". I turned up to a freezing cold computer room, and a scanner with a melted front end letting loads of light in. A small investigation on my part found that the first thing the scanner did was put a message on screen to say "Lamp Warming Up - Please Wait" which could be on for anything up to a few minutes (this was 20+ years ago). Once it did that, it started to scan fine. In an effort to reduce the time taken to warm up the lamp, an enterprising teacher had placed a fan heater right next to the scanner where the lamp was. There was, of course, no mention of this, or the hole in the case it had caused in the phone call, just an expectation that I'd change the scanner under warranty...
I've known this happen to someone. When I was younger, a friend of a friend was left home alone for the first time around age 16. She was a nice girl, but a bit isolated from the realities of housework by her Mam. First night Mam and Dad go away, she fancied a nice hot chocolate, and of course you heat water in the kettle, so why not milk? I'm told it makes a real mess...
Not IT related, but at my last employer, we were a tiny outpost hidden away in a shared office building in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't a particularly busy job, so I did some odd jobs for the building management company, who had a mad-as-a-box-of-frogs building manager who ran the place. One day, He managed to snap the keys to the boiler room in the door, so he asked if we could break the door down for him. You know that bit you see on TV where the hero gives the door a swift kick and it slams open? Yeah, well, it turns out real life isn't like that - what happens is that you end up pulling a muscle in your leg because the lock is too high for you to reach easily, and do no more than leave a foot print on the door...
After that, the 12lb hammer came out, and a couple of blows later the door was open again...
You haven't bought much from CPC then :P
Joking aside, their prices can be a bit steep, but for that odd bit of something you can't buy anywhere else...
I used to do some work in an office just round the corner from CPCs building, and popped in for bits and bobs occasionally. Lines of poor workers being scanned by security on their way to the butty van to make sure they weren't nicking anything, looked like hell on earth.
This has been my experience too, on a number of occasions.
I was going to the Apple store for something or other, and a friend had booked a £79 replacement of an iPod his daughter had dropped down the loo, but being a three hour drive each way, he asked if I'd take it for him, and stuffed the iPod (thankfully in a bag!) and some cash into my grubby little paws. At the shop, I made myself known to the staff, and they turned up with a big red "BIOHAZARD" bag (!) into which the iPod was placed, and handed me a shiny new replacement, for the grand total of nowt, zilch, zip, nada.
Second example, my 15" MBP needed a keyboard replacement at around 18 months old. I took it in, and ended up with new keyboard, battery, mouse pad and a piece of case replaced as it was scuffed, again for a grand total of none of our finest british pounds.
Another example - the Mrs had an iPhone 4 which was doing something daft like showing missed calls that it hadn't rang for. Vodafone were their usual incompetent self, but we happened to be on holiday in Belfast and walking past the apple shop, so popped in for a quick chat. Half an hour later, out we came with a replacement phone and all her data copied over, no questions, no fees.
It seems that they can be pretty good about keeping the customer happy, but it always helps to be nice!
Yeah - I know what you're saying - but I suspect that if you found an issue in APC's UPS Firmware, you'd be SOL getting a fix out of them at all... If amazon are talking about a year to get a fix from their vendors with the scale of purchase they make, the rest of us can probably wait until hell freezes over before anything gets done about it from our vendors - the argument isn't about cloud vs on prem - it's about how good vendor support is, and we all know how variable that can be!
More years ago than I care to admit to, I was a bright and shiny newbie on a Novell Network Troubleshooting course. We'd had a week of playing with and examining various types of hardware of all sorts, and over lunch on the last day, our trainer set up a few "issues" for us to solve. Well, I managed to get through most of them fairly quickly, but there was an issue with a PCI SCSI card that I couldn't get to the bottom of easily: the card was detected by the PC, but wouldn't detect any SCSI devices. I'd very carefully checked all the IDs, cable directions, connector pins (they occasionally got bent if someone wasn't careful swapping the cables out) and termination, and even a different PCI slot, but still nothing. I was fairly convinced at this point that it must have been a duff SCSI card kept for just such situations...
My instructor, however, was trying his best not to laugh at this point, and other people on the course were starting to get interested... the pressure was on, not least because a quick fix meant the early train home. After being assured that it was a perfectly functioning SCSI card with a simply remedied fault, I set about it again, rechecking my work. I pulled the card from the chassis one last time, and looked closely at the contacts - to find that some sellotape over some of the contacts. Somehow, the instructor had found that strategically sized sellotape would mean that the PC detected the card, but the card wouldn't detect any drives. One small piece of sellotape removed later, card reinstalled, and bingo! A fully working server once again, and an early train home. Or it would have been, if it hadn't been cancelled by the pitiful excuse for a railway we suffer from in Northern England...
You mean like the guy who during lock down had to put his wife on the phone so I could explain to her how he needs to use one password to decrypt and a second one to login to windows? The one designing the automated plant to process nuclear waste? I’m not worried about it. Much...
Schools by any chance Lee? Used to do a similar thing with ours - Every year, budget to replace 25% of your kit with new stuff that has a three year warranty on it, and plan on doing that every year so you always have decent kit. Worked well until budgets tightened, and then the false economy of not replacing stuff kicked in and looked like a genius money saving plan until the fifth year of the cycle when stuff failed and you had to start charging for replacement parts/hardware on an ad-hoc basis and maintenance costs started going up... at which point, they start complaining that the kit you sold them 5+ years ago is no good and you're charging too much for maintenance compared to previous years.
Or a 70CM band radio... One friend stayed in a hotel, and when she fired up her handheld amateur radio, found that it set off the fire alarm of the hotel due to some very poor shielding on the fire alarm control panel which was in the next room...
And there's always the endless fun to be had with a car park and the appropriately timed use of the transmit key to block everyone's remote unlocking of their car...
I had a long wheelbase Transit a few months ago as a (sadly temporary) replacement while my vivaro was being repaired for about the 100th time.
I'd assumed watching reruns of "The Professionals" and "The Sweeney" that all that going round corners in a Transit with the back wheels leaving the ground was stunt driving. Turns out it wasn't... they really do corner like that when they're empty!
I've seen BT (British Tack-it-on...) do this in a council office in a (big) converted terrace house. It was an educational experience being assigned to trail them that day...
They were due to install an ISDN2e line sometime in the late 90s. We wanted it moved from the back office to the front due to a re-org, but for some reason wouldn't do a move but would do a cease/reprovide. 1st engineer turns up, decides he needs assistance. Two more engineers turn up in a 3.5 tonne box wagon to help. They then ran the wire from the existing NTE, stapling it to the existing 100x50 trunking. This meant they had to drill new holes in walls around 50CM thick, rather than use the ones that the network cablers had already made to run the network cabling inside the trunking through...
At this point, it transpires none of them actually have a new NTE to terminate into, so there is a small discussion between them and their control room. The obvious solution (put a joint where the existing NTE is and reuse the original) is rejected, as the customer might interpret that as a "move" rather than a "cease and reprovide" so might object to the outrageous amount being charged. Eventually, 3 engineers ended up driving for 2 hours to meet another engineer who had an NTE, then two hours back to fit it in the new location.
I told one of my colleagues this, and he scoffed, not believing that they would do such a thing, until the day they fitted a new line in his house - he'd cleared a route in the cellar (drill through wooden floor board, run cable to back of house, drill up, fit socket). He proudly showed it to the BT guy, who nodded, then proceeded to staple his cable along the top of the skirting board instead.
I've seen this done with a small terrier type dog before. "Dave" tied the pull cord to the dogs collar, shoved it into the attic space above the corridor, while "Rick" stuck his head in from the other side and called his dog back. A surprisingly useful trio...
Windscale was the name given to the original nuclear piles, one of which has almost completely disappeared now, the other (the one which had the fire) is still around the level of the Cockroft Folly.
Calder Hall was the Magnox reactors and associated turbine halls and generation kit.
In my experience, "Sellafield" tends to be used to refer to the entire site - north and south of the river.
I'm still angling for someone to let me explore the AGR there, it's one of the bits I've not been to yet, and it always makes me think of Thunderbirds...
I know of a few large installs in UK government agencies where RPis have been used - I used to work for the company doing the hardware support. They seem to have built/bought some kind of management portal for them, but I'm not sure what it is as I only ever spoke to people that used it, I never got to see it in action.
Incidentally, for a multi-national company with lots of employees at all levels of IT, the company I worked for knew F-all about RPi. I had to explain very carefully to my colleagues what to do/expect/change with them if they went out to one...
I had a similar situation with a user who complained I'd deleted his "Favorites" when I replaced his PC, despite copying the folder from one PC to the other. Turns out what he referred to as "Favourites" was the Internet Explorer Autosuggest list. Which I found could be copied from one machine to another - and then explained to him how to use the real "Favorites" folder. I'm not sure he ever changed though!
>For apple to have taken the demand seriously and spend 10s to 100s of K on this matter you cannot >help to think that there is something fishy in the iCloud
Yeah, but to play Devil's advocate, having had issues previously, isn't it better to have an investigation and get a third party (NCA) involved and say "we've found no issues on this occasion" rather than just cover up and go "nothing to see here guv"? What they spend on marketing would make this a drop in the ocean, and it would be better for them to be seen to doing something rather than ignoring a potential issue. Or maybe I'm just holding it wrong.
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