Posts by J.G.Harston

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Yearly tasks....

I was a school governor and there was a yearly site check that was done in late July, which was simple because you've got the school year that imposes its schedule on you and prevents you forgetting.

Similarly, I check all my smoke detectors when the gas appliances are checked annually. The plumbers know when their certificate runs out and pesters reminds me, so again a schedule that doesn't get forgotten.

When I do my tax return I have a bunch of stuff I do at the same time - and while I may put it off for months, there is a hard deadline each year so over the long term the yearly tasks get done.

I check my car tyres every time I get petrol. I check various other things at the annual MOT. External prompting ensures it gets done.

But if it is something that is independent of anything prodding you to do, it will get forgotten about because that's how the human brain works. If the DVLA didn't tell me my car tax was about to expire, or the insurance company tell me the insurance was about to expire, I'd never remember to pay it.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Multi-select? We had that in StrongEd 30 years ago.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: Wrong problem targeted

That will be too much hassle, the parents will just buy an ordinary phone.

a) to use this phone you have to pay X and do A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H and I

b) to use this phone you have to pay X

Which option do you think 99% of the population will go for?

Re: Just stop being so anal about this!!

Yes, my great-grandmother only waited until she was 21 to get married because there was a war on, otherwise yes, she'd have got married at 19.

It took my grandmother until she was 28 because there was another war on, and she was busy ####### and #### ## behind ##### #### ### France #### listening post ### #######.

Re: How to teach people the wrong thing

Things like Zoom bypass all the local computer's security to run in %USERDIR% specifically so the user isn't confronted by the inconvenience of having to actually get the Admin user to allow them to install the software. So it will be a matter of milliseconds for VPNs to do the same by default.

Re: Re:Photo ID - DVLA

That's another oddity. I thought that if you had to wear glasses to drive, your photo license must show you wearing glasses - to demonstrate to plod that the holder must be wearing glasses to be driving. However, the passport photo requires you to be not wearing glasses. So how do that match up with them using my glasses-less passport photo for my glasses-requred driving licence?

All these proposals fail to account of one vital human characteristic: people lie.

Every single proposal is built on the requirement that the person being checked does not lie to the checker.

UK immigration rules hit science just as it rejoins €100B Horizon program

Re: We are overdue an adult conversation about immigration

If you're really that stressed for money, you don't need to use toothpaste, just brushing is enough for basic dental hygeine.

Re: We are overdue an adult conversation about immigration

It's not that UK workers don't want to work for peanuts, they CAN'T AFFORD to work for peanuts. There's no "want" in it at all.

Re: We are overdue an adult conversation about immigration

Plus, the Conservative government has imported more people since 2016 (about 2.8 million) than before (about 1.2 million).

Re: Inflation.

The Conservatives have imported four million people in the last 13 years - 3/4m in the last 12 months alone! - the Blair/Brown government only managed to import one million in the same time. If fixing the economy requires importing ever more and more people, then only the Conservatives have the proven record of doing so.

Re: My twopenn'orth (if inflation hasn't already increased it to thruppence)

"the Keynesian idea of governments saving during the boom so that they can spend during the inevitable bust, but Cameron showed us in 2010 just how anathema that idea is to modern Conservatism"

But Cameron didn't have a boom to do any saving during. The boom happened under Blair, and they didn't do any saving. Probably 'cos the people spending the savings would be the next government - can't be saving up money to hand over to your enemies.

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

Re: dafuq

Ooo, wow, I'm drooling just from the pictures.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: hammer

link

Re: speaking of usb

And not any use if they'd been out of their box for more than a week and had picked up dirt, or the lighting was anything other than perfect, or you were completely flummuxed trying to work out a mnemonic to remember which ****er was which.

Exam question: What colour is the mouse socket?

Sane answer: Whichever fucker is the same colour as the fucking plug on the fucking mouse. You don't REMEMBER, you just plug the fucker in.

Re: Every single time

Thing is, everybody is used to all power outlets being power outlets, so there is a natural expectation that all network outlets are network outlets. The TV keeps working if I plug it into a different power outlet, why should the network outlets be any different?

All this is down to the odd consolidation on radials instead of buses.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

And everybody will be above average.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

When they do that, how the hell do they press the buttons - or not scream out in pain as they do so?

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: I AM clicking on the screen!

I had something in the region of that.

I had a new DVD player. I plugged it into the TV, and tried a couple of Hong Kong DVDs. "Wrong Region" it complained. I asked the advice line:

* Oh yes, you can change the region. Just click on the menu on the DVD drive

$ err... how?

* Point at the DVD drive and click on it to open it.

$ How do I do that with a DVD player? It's got six buttons across the front, Stop, Play, Skip, Back, Eject, Power. None of them say Menu.

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

No, the other white phone.

To pay or not to pay for AI's creative 'borrowing' – that is the question

"if a company uses copyrighted material to build an LLM for profit, the copyright owner should be reimbursed."

Isn't the copyright holder reimbursed when the trainer buys the book in the first place?

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

Re: Why

String. Everything can be solved with string.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

This is why you have pockets. Remove plug from socket, take it with you to the repair. Similarly, remove fuse from distribution board, put in pocket.

Obwhich, this is why I don't like modern wired MCB boards. You can't physically isolate the circuit by removing the protection device, you have to switch it off and either hope nobody switches it back on because they're annoyed the kettle's not working, or finagle some way of preventing it being switched back on and hope nobody hacks off the finagle.

Plastered....

It's not just electricians. Some years ago I was having my kitchen replastered. Beforehand I rewired it, proper horizontals and verticals, as a proper, sane, electrician (taking the opportunity to put the kitchen on its own circuit). One day I came home from work and the plasterer said: oh, I cut through a wire and popped a fuse, so I've replaced it. In poking around the damp plaster I found he'd cut a length halfway, and to rewire it he'd pulled it as tight as possible across a diagonal. Not only a diagonal, but being so tight it was straining to pop out of the sockets. I sighed, knocked off his plaster,and replaced the cable properly, proper horizontal and vertical. If he hadn't told me, than when I was fitting the cupboards I'd likely have drilled right through the cable being no longer in the defined safe zones.

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

When economists stop predicting a recession, you know one's just around the corner.

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Yes, the UK model is "public highway". The running route (road, rail) is owned and maintained by the state, anybody can have access to it by paying the required access fee (vehicle excise duty, rail access charge). Those people accessing the running route can be anybody (privately-owned National Express, publically owned LNER, privately owned Virgin, publically owned Ipswich Buses, privately owned Fred Bloggs in his car, etc.)

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

Re: 1985

It's good to be alive

In 1985!

Re: only the driver – be it the vehicle or person – is accountable

I've just checked the manual, and my car is 940kg. Though, 1040kg when the driver is added. ;)

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

This has gone to the Inspectorate, and they upheld the refusal.

They also seems to be describing Palmer Moor Lane as their road access. Which is a LILO on to ****ing MOTORWAY!!!! Though checking streetview it is police access only and gated off, but any general purpose use would require major works to make it acceptable.

But this *is* a brown field site, it just happens to be in the green belt. "green belt" != not("brown field"). Belt. Field. Different things.

And planning law does *not* forbid develoment in the green belt, is imposes a *presumption* of no development in the green belt. If a development in the green belt can be shown to comply with green belt development policies, then it complies with green belt development polices and is a compliant development.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: Fun with tie-wearers

All the agencies I've worked through send me timesheets where you have to manually add everything up. I create a template from them with the correct formulas in the relevant boxes, down to Monday=manualentry, Tuesday=Monday+1, Wednesday=Tuesday+1, etc., hoursworked=end-start, etc.

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Yes, we've recently had a housing development in the fields surrounding the local sewage farm because it's a brown field development.

Ignoring the specifics of this site, brown field != not(green belt).

Brown field is not green field

Green belt is not not-green belt.

You can have brown field sites in the green belt and brown field sites not in the green belt.

You can have green field sites in the green belt, and green field sites not in the green belt.

Is this the same government that has just upheld a denial of planning permission for a datacentre by the M25, resulting in it likely being built in Spain?

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Was it a long queue?

Re: When checking voltages...

Argh! What about a software engineer working as a hardware field engineer?

Exactly. You need to test working systems to know what the working state looks like so that when you test a non-working system you have a base dataset to compare against. If you have never tested a working system you have no idea what the tests should give.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: CS students are interesting

Also, computer science isn't what I and my peers in our teens and all the adults around us called what we were doing "computing" - designing and building computer hardware and software, actually *creating* stuff. I spent several years on a "Computing Science" course at university wondering bemusedly when we'd actually get to do some actual "computing" as I'd been doing for six years before, not realising that we actually *were* doing "computing", but that was the wrong term for what I thought I was doing.

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

It's the Cluster! aaaaarrrrgghhhhhhh!!!!! Get me off this rock!

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

I think I've seen a documentary about that.

Lockdown was the practice run. People were actually DEMANDING that they be locked up. And the only opposition from politicians was that the government wasn't doing it hard or fast enough.

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

I would LOVE to be able to walk to work. I've just done a 136-mile round trip today to install an IT suite. Now, if you could move the Europort container terminal to the end of my road, I'd be grateful, but I don't think my neighbours would be. Plus, once I've done that one day's work, which other site are you going to move to my road so I can walk there?

Re: It's ok, there are non car options..

And to think the government did such a wonderful job rolling out petrol stations in the 1920s and 1930s. Oh wait, THEY DIDN'T. The suppliers did.

King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause

Re: Poor, deprived Americans

People of where?

Re: Safe

If workers want a share of the profits, they are perfectly free to buy a share of the company.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Gardening? It's been raining so much my garden shed has literally dissolved, and the lawn is a swamp.

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Like almost all politicians, he completely fails to understand that the *worker* does not have the agency here, it's the *EMPLOYER* that has the control over how many hours the worker works. If an employer employs you for one hour, absolutely NOTHING you do to the benefits system will change what the EMPLOYER does. You could electricute the worker, that won't change the action of the employer, because you're targetting the wrong party. You have to impose control on the party with the agency in the transaction, which is the employers, *NOT* the workers.

The 70-hour work week plan has another problem: it's illegal.

Another problem: Who TF is going to actually EMPLOY them for 70 hours? India is modernising, that means employers will adopt modern practices of only employing people for the bare minimum time possible. "We need three people to do six hours work on Friday. Yerwot? You want us to pay you to do nothing on Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu? FO."

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Re: four decades on ...

Tasword2. :)