Posts by firu toddo 63 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2009
Of course you do.
Yeah. We make two daily backups to DAT. And we change the tapes every day. And we have three sets of tapes. SO that's 21 days.
Do you check the tapes?
Nah, they're digital.
Ever restored from these tapes?
Never! Don't need to.
The backups never worked. If you don't check your backups you don't have any.
A few years ago now, in a job I'm trying to forget,a wondrous bit of kit was installed in a server room. Although it was in the IT server room it was the responsibility of another department.
Part of the wondrous machine was a SAN. There was also a pair of DAT drives for daily backups. The tapes were stored in the same server room, on top of the DAT drives and were on a seven day cycle. Over the first twelve months the tapes weren't changed, ever!
IT techs were deemed to stupid to do the job and the wondrous machine owners couldn't be arsed.
And this was discovered when a restore was requested. 365 data backups tends to wear out the tapes.......
Had SIM only deals from Three for years. My current SIM(s), Unlimited calls/texts and 12 gig data, are now out of contract and roll over each month at 7and a half quid a month. And no stupid compounded price increases. But they took roaming off me after brexit despite promising not to.
You can probably guess I've had this deal for years. Just recently I've been getting mails/emails/calls/texts offering to upgrade me to the same features for more money with guaranteed price rices built in.
Why would I believe either bunch of shysters when they make promises about their future behaviours? The only promises they'll keep are those the benefit their bottom line. You the victim, sorry valued customer, can spit into the wind. It'll be more rewarding!
Not really good comparisons.
Hate it when supermarkets move shit about for no other reason than to force the poor victims wander around and look for the latest hiding places. And hopefully, while searching, they might buy some shit they never wanted anyway. (yes this is a thing!)
The car ting is just silly. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/ might be an urban leg end, but it does illustrate the point......
And for the record, I use MacOS, Linux and use/support Widoze. I only support the last one cos it's pretty profitable ;)
"Steam availability, compatibility"
I'm running Mint on old HP hardware (Elitebook 8570w Jan 2013) and I can say that Steam works OK for me.
In general the box works well, the OS does what it needs to do without getting in the way and the best bit, updates.
I'm in control of the updates, choose the updates and when to install them. When they're installed they work.
Just to clarify: MacOS requries you to use the password after every reboot or and then every 14 days.
Not quite right. MacOS will ask for a password MUCH more frequently. Change of network ssid, (its wifi only!), closing the lid and opening it quickly will do it too. As will opening and closing repeatedly. And then sometimes it doesn't! It's Apple, you don't need to know.......
I sometimes miss the little prompt box asking for a password and wonder why my finger has broken!
It does......but.........I had a custard who insisted on a visit to fix his new, powerless, desktop. I switched it on at the mains.
With the same mains switches he insisted be turned off each night. He forgot computers need power.
That's probably my fault for talking about magic smoke and pixies ;)
Many many moons go a work colleague bought a new Ford in the August buying spree. Promptly went on holiday and to the other end of the country and while away the gearbox failed.
Ford couldn't get a new box so told the local dealer to basically bugger the cost and sort it. Customer was taken to his holiday destination, dealer took a gearbox out of a new stock car, replace the failed one to get the customer on his way. Car was delivered back to the customer. No car for three days of a two week holiday, a tiny price to pay.
Yes, he did stick by Ford, yes, he told everyone how good they were.
So it does work.......
Call me paranoid, but!
This proposed legislation and the crazy technical solutions being proposed has nothing to do with preventing child abuse. ('Protecting the children' is a typical dog whistle that is often applied to proposals to shame opponents into keeping shtum. I mean, only a pervert would argue against any measure to protect kids, right?)
It hasn't got much to do with the 'Prevention of terrorism' either. Using mass surveillance suggests we are all terrorist suspects. Trawling the millions of private messages of tens of millions of UK citizens every day, for say, a thousand terrorist plots is insane. You'd need to know who they were first, and getting an anonymous mobile phone isn't that hard. Or perhaps stopping using a mobile phone for their plotting.....
But illegal speech? Now that's more like it! Well not illegal speech, more like speech that's of interest to someone. Political opponents, trade unionists, whistle blowers, or anyone whose speech might be said to be illegal by some future politician.
Again, I might be paranoid,but that doesn't mean the buggers aren't out to get us!
Where's a black helicopter when I need it?
Mine's the one with the tracker in the pocket!
I run Linux GUI apps daily. Not gonna get a new and expensive Win11 box to do that when my 7 year old ThinkPad does it faster and better without Win11 and a copy of my go to Linux distro........
My other daily driver is an even older HP EliteBook portable workstation. Came with Win10, won't go to Win11. And again, I'll not be replacing this second user clunker just for Win11.
I replace my (generally) second user hardware when it no longer lights up. Not when M$ says.
I managed a factory back in the day. When our new MRP/MPS boxes went in the installer left a huge coil of cable in the corner of the warehouse for a yet to be commissioned office on the other side of the wall.
Super, until the entire warehouse fell off the network. Seems the terminator had failed.
But that will happen if you drop a 800kg pallet of stuff on it. Took half a day to figure out where the terminator was.
Learning points from this were, one tell someone what you've done and two, don't put the coil of cable and terminator on the warehouse floor.
Spillages, I've seen a few!
One was a desktop with a failed PSU, a not uncommon problem but, nothing to do with the spillage. No the spillage problem was the full sugar coke that had been left under the machine to dry and glued it to the desk! Both desk and computer bore the scars of that incident.
Another was a desktop that failed because of a spillage. The call said something had gone wrong with the electrickery bits and the magic smoke escaped. Cue yours truly to examine diagnose and fix said box. The number one suspect was a paper cup someone had stood on the system box and forgot about, which then leaked a mysterious liquid.
The mystery liquid was a patients urine.
The hows whys and wherefores of the cup/urine combination were never explained to me. But the various tests and jabs after were truly memorable and served as a reminder to use liquid resistant PPE for ward visits.
Just to be clear, the NHS didn't run the track and trace system. That was an outsourced shit show overseen by that master of data security Dido Harding.
She oversaw the spending of billions of your quids and then simply stuck an NHS flag in the resulting turd and washed her hands of it all.
Automatically opting people in is NOT informed consent. The UK government tried this before. Just forgot to tell us what they were doing. I for one wouldn’t trust them not to try the same again. Those actions call into question the motives behind data sharing. For sure it seems as if the data isn’t really seen as the patients, more like a resource that the medical profession thinks they should control Doing ‘informed consent’ this way is just a way to take something away from the uninformed or those who never get round to it opting out.
Wanting to share our data with everyone is dangerous. Individual patients have no idea who will end up with their data. As for randomising data, HA! At best it’s pseudo random and can be backtracked in the UK. And there’s always the mission creep factor. It’s for medical trials now. But just imagine, that Colostomy you’ve got, how neat would it be if we could offer the patient cheaper stoma care products?
Singapore has many reasons for having better Covid outcomes than other place’s besides data sharing, so comparing Covid outcomes between authoritarian regimes and more liberal regimes isn’t an argument that would persuade me. In fact it strikes me as almost emotional blackmail being used to support a pretty weak proposition.
But can you? MX keys keyboards need some software to do all the fancy stuff. Like actually do any of the stuff Logi advertise.meaningful . Just not on a Linux box where the software isn’t available.
So, Media keys? Nope! All the fancy key assignments? Nope. The fancy keyboard and mouse stuff? Nope.
Logi advertise the full size MX as being compatible with iOS, Windows and Linux, even says so on the box.
But compatibility is a movable feast in many marketing departments.
As a little aside I have a couple of old Apple 2009 ish, wired keyboards that work perfectly, media keys and everything.
Not having the latest kernel doesn't make much difference to me. I tend to use secondhand laptops. On an 8 year old T430s this just flies. OK it's got 8gig ram and an ssd and I turned off the bells and whistles compositor settings, can't spare the battery juice (it only has 80% original capacity ;-) ) and it's a workhorse not a pretty pony. I ran the updater this morning and now I have a shiny 20.1 Xfce install. New features are OK, Snap is no loss, and the whole thing feels snappier.
My last Thinkpad was a chunky old beast and only died when I dropped it, something I did more than once. So four years for 200 quid was pretty good. This one cost 250 quid, I've had for going on four years and it's still like new. But I have stopped balancing laptops on car bonnets!
So it's horses for courses.
Or not! Still having issues with new 8th gen iPads. They can't contact the iCloud login servers.
Apples status page (www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/) is all full of green goodness including iCloud sign in. (A note helpfully boasts Issues have been resolved!)
Apples support drones have no idea whats going on and can only offer the less than helpful advice 'try it again in a few days'. It is possible to get into your new shiny without using an iCloud login. But no new App store toys or cloud storage (or anything cloudy from Apple) till they fix it.
Mice, the bane of techies lives! When we still had mice with balls the calls were never ending. Pulling hair, crumbs and general crud off of the rollers was routine. Cos the poor dears couldn't do it themselves. Some of these people replaced hips and heart valves, but cleaning mice balls, nah too hard. And when optical mice came along hundred of older mice got lost, fell off desks and exploded, lost their balls and, even had buttons pulled off.
Then there were the real oddballs. My mouse doesn't work...well if you hadn't cut the cable with a hole punch it probably would.
'I want a mouse with fish in it like Brenda's got'. And the promo mouse really did have fish in it, floating in a liquid inside a plastic bag on the back of the mouse. When it was pointed out the IT bods didn't keep them, she complained to our manager who then asked if we could find one! (variations included flashing LEDs, mice shaped like pills and, small mice for cluttered desks)
A request for a new mouse cos a medico took the orginal mouse from the office computer away with him to prevent cross infection. (Same lunatic who disassembled a live laser printer with forceps!)
The lady who brought her wireless mouse from home and complained it didn't work. Forgot the receiver dongle!
There's a lot to be said for dumb speakers. I've got a 12 year old pair of Bose bookshelf units that have been hooked up to a laptop/tablet/mp3 player/iPod/phone over their lifetime. Now got that Echo Dot dangling of the input.
And fwiw, my office speakers are 30 years old and 15 years old. (old hifi units and bi-amped surround sound tweeters) I had to use my 20 year old Cambridge amp to drive em though ;)
And yup I can stream music all around the house, I just plug in my network device and away I go. Not as elegant as Sonos kit, a whole lot cheaper and sustainable.
You're spot on. Wife's G7 power replaced her old G4, no more updates and a dying battery. For 139GBP it really is an excellent bit of kit.
My 3T is losing battery performance now and when I replace it a MOTO G series will defo be in the frame.The 7T at 550GBP looks a bit pricey by comparison. Despite the great OS support from OnePlus (I've gone all the way to Android 9) I still cringe at the 350 quid premium over a MOTO G.
I know the 7T has a better spec/memory/camera etc but in real life does it make that much difference?
First day of a new contract at an NHS hospital, arrived in the office and the first thing I saw was a tech stood behind his desk holding a 21" CRT monitor in his hands and using it to hit the system box and screaming at Windows.
The explanation really was 'don't worry, that's normal....'
Almost as normal as a doctor who threw a Dell laser across the office.
So true, the 'integration' has already begun. Argos stores are already closing and moving into the local Sainburys. Going from a shop front with a logistics operation behind it to a desk in a supermarket might seem a good idea from a short term rent point of view. But it has the potential to cripple the Argos business. Slapping an order collection desk in every supermarket branch isn't enhancing the customer experience in the age of eBay and Amazon.
I work in the town where Argos was within 5 minutes walk from my office. (And only 10 minutes from my house), where I could get most stuff I needed in my lunch break. So why will I drive to an out of town supermarket (that I never use) to pick up a cheap phone that they can have in stock within half a day? Or not, depending on the order cutoff time
Answer, I won't. Amazon had it at my door the following day after I ordered it at six in the evening. (Or at my chosen pick up point near my office!)
A clickbait headline and a story with more spin than a whip and top!
In truth this story is about how a company calculates an enviromental impact for different classes of products.
The years they use to calculate this are simply an arbitary number, they could use 2 or 5 years and it would change nothing apart from the enviromental impact score.
It certainly wouldn't change the life expectation of a device or my refresh cycle.
Interesting that The Register bangs on about privacy and security but make it as difficult as possible for privacy freaks like me to connect to the site without effectively registering for tracking with Crudflair. And doesn’t use HTTPS for the connection.
There also seems to be an assumption the tor=bad guy. So tor nodes are forced to Crudflair for crapcha verification, and the crapchas are getting more aggressive. Two six character images twisted in to colour contrasting pasta bow shapes at a low resolution.
Crudflair suggest that the targets of this hassle and levels of hassle are under the control of the customer. In this case our beloved Vultures. Any chance of sorting this mess out guys?
Pah! I spit on your two cards. Right now, for one organisation, I have a magswipe card for the outer office door, two different pins for inner electronic locks. An RFID card for some other doors, another RFID token for some other doors, a mechanical lock code for some other doors and a pin for the other RFID token the get into another building.
The staff canteen is cash only.
$73m in profit before tax on $658m from a $6m loss on $966m in the same period last year. Looks like the results of cost cutting rather than an expanding business. But when you look at the current offerings you begin to understand why.
The massive (and confusing) cost of running on site BES12 against the costs of an on site BES5 (and they just went up again!) do suggest RIM are trying to milk the Enterprise market for all they can get. In reality the high costs are driving people to AirWatch and others.
BES12, the multi-platform management tool has no real attraction when other tools can manage the same devices, using the same activesync technology for less cash. The reality is that the more expensive RIM licensing and handset costs mean that I will probably just manage iOS, WIndows and Android phones via activesync using a different management tool.
All in all it is becoming very difficult to recommend RIM/BES/Blackberry as the goto Enterprise platform any more.
"forced to release a rushed patch that may potentially take down a few million customers."
Wow! You think rushing patches might cause problems?
I work in enterprise land. We are very cautious when handling M$ patches. They do have a nasty habit of exploding in your face. Just have a search for 'withdrawn microsoft patches'. (Google not required)
Imagine how happy our 12000 mail users would be if we broke Exchange? Or if we patched our desktops and all the Win7 boxes started to blue screen? And the sheer volume of work to sort out 10 withdrawn and reissued patches in a month makes me cringe.
But at least the users would be secure!
;o)
The gods have nothing to do with it. Stuff disappearing is down to mini wormholes that jump about in your house. They connect random places and normally go unnoticed.
Until they suddenly open up! And it's not just socks, the car keys you put in the bowl by the door will end up down the sofa with your change and that little screwdriver you left in the garage. And that bottle opener you used on the sofa is now in the drawer underneath the cutlery. Your sock is now somewhere else, back in the washbasket or under the chair or in the garden.
The mini wormholes open when there is sufficient mass of similar items. This explains why your shirt disappears from the hotel laundry but only socks from your washing machine, the more mass the bigger the item that can pass through the wormhole. So most of that change you got in the pub last night has vanished and is in the kid's pockets or the wife's purse or the change bottle thanks to the mini wormhole and the sheer mass of change. Also why my drill, lawnmower and spade is in the neighbours shed!
Of course this is only a theory. I might be able to prove it if anyone fancies funding my beer habit research.
Just had the misfortune to read El Reg without my usual browser.
Without any adblocking, popup blocking, script control, cookie control and all the rest I never realisedsee what a mess the unfiltered site is.
And El Reg is 'one of the better' sites.
How the hell do people browse the internet tubes without protection?
"erm... The article says that they've increased the number of customers they have and that the drop in revenue is down to regulation. How does your comment have any bearing on the article?"
Really?
Even if the customer numbers are up the extra customers have not generated enough extra cash to offset the lost revenue from call termination charges being limited.
No one knows how many customers are on 4G. But as EE are not boasting about the 4G uptake it is a safe bet that the uptake is not all of the new customers.
So it could follow the reason might be the massive cost of the contract and the low data allowance on a system that is designed to maximise data flow.
So yeah there was some relevance there.
I know I won't be paying EE prices for 4G. But that is just my opinion (Anecdote).
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