Posts by Martin an gof

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

There's a payphone in town still. Walked past the other day, slightly surprised to see someone in the booth making a phone call...

...until I looked a little closer and saw he was on his mobile!

M.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

And plenty of other routers have similar functions though the Fritz!box does go over the top with options! The bog-standard BT device has a BT-style telephone socket on the back (all the other routers I've looked at have RJ11) so you don't even need an adapter and I'm told it can support 4 REN so you can even connect wired analogue extensions.

No idea if these devices will respond to pulse dialling though; it's difficult to tell without trying (we're still on PoTS, though fibre has now arrived so it's only a matter of time before I shift over). Some specifications say they respond to timed-break recall so the capability is there, but even if you can't dial out you will still be able to receive calls and often the bell of our red GPO phone in the hallway is audible when the warbly-sounders on the DECT phones scattered around the house aren't (say, if you're in the garden), so that's useful.

M.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets (NTSC/PAL)

Is this AMFM mark III?

My NASes (one main, one backup) are currently built around 2½" drives. At the time I built them I assumed the capacity of 2½" drives would increase in line with 3½" drives so with space for six or eight drives (RAID Z2) I should be fine for many years. Instead what I see is that 2½" capacity has stuck at 1TB if you don't want shingles and 2 or 3TB if you don't mind. I totally failed to realise that once SSDs were available at >256GB at "reasonable" prices the market for 2½" spinning rust would nigh-on disappear outside the datacentre.

Our NAS usage isn't particularly heavy, except when dumping memory cards from a week away or something, so I can get away with shingles even though FreeNAS / ZFS isn't particularly keen. Does vastly increase rebuild times though.

The NASes are in small(ish) form factor cases and there is little space for 3½" drives so I'd have to rebuild in new cases if I move to 3½". There are all sorts of calculations to undertake on costs and complexity because these systems have "evolved" over many years, not least of which is whether I'd actually want to stick with FreeNAS (TrueNAS). Maybe now is the time to start from scratch and build something a bit more future-proof, but the car needs servicing, the bathroom needs rebuilding, the kitchen fund keeps getting tapped for "emergencies" and... ... ...

M.

Re: Car thing

The German company Formac made a SCSI card that fitted to a socket on the mezzanine.

Yes, but that wasn't available at the outset. Some of these things came fairly quickly (better mice, for example), but as launched the iMac was a bit of an island all to itself.

M.

Thanks for that - I have a Foxsat which is retired and having recently installed a new satellite system (complete with wideband LNB and new receiver) I was contemplating having to whip the hard drive out again and lose the HD stuff.

Then again, it seems that direct broadcasting to homes, in Europe at least, is not much longer for this world. Astra haven't launched any new satellites in ages, and the ones at 28E are coming to the ends of their service lives. I think one has about six years left? You'd think Sky, as one of their biggest customers, would be up in arms but of course not - they are quietly converting everyone to video over IP. Once Sky has gone the business case for 28E will be marginal I reckon, so Freesat must also be making plans to leave.

Soon the only reliable way to get TV which doesn't rely on a solid, fast internet connection will be a pointy stick on the roof sucking in the signal from the nearest 3-mux terrestrial transmitter which - remember this folks - is only there because of the licence fee.

M.

No, actually, I haven't - except for one or two DVDs which have some physical damage. Perusing the shelves and digging out an actual physical disc is part of the fun of watching a movie (much like travelling to the cinema, queueing up and buying expensive popcorn) and the way things are set up at home it's also more convenient, and it's certainly more convenient with regards the "extras". The CDs are "backed up" because cars these days don't have CD players but they do have USB sockets.

Backing up the DVDs is something I might consider one day, but it doesn't half involve upgrading the network storage. Currently I'm in the middle of expanding to 4TB online; the current 2TB is about 80% full of home movies, photographs and documents (10% "other" and 10% free). I'd probably need to double it three or four times again if I were to rip the library byte-for-byte*, or even re-coded at a reasonable quality - and then double-double-double-double the NAS backup capacity to match. And I can't rip BluRays (never looked in to it, don't even have a computer-attached BluRay drive) and some DVDs are an absolute pain; I've met Disney DVDs where a naïve rip results in a totally jumbled-up film where short (under a minute) segments are played in a seemingly random order.

M.

*I mean, just the Bond 50 collection on BluRay (122 hours on 22 discs) would probably take getting on for a TB at on-disc bitrates

Re: Squeezebox

even 5 would be reasoable

Since buying my first house nearly 30 years ago I have had precisely three "main" TVs*, and the first of those was second hand and already 10+ years old. The next TV was a widescreen Trinitron and lasted 17 years if I remember correctly** and the current one (which does have a fault which needs repair but is otherwise perfectly functional) is coming up for eight I think. Five years for a TV is not acceptable. A five year warranty perhaps, and then at least another five years of expected life. My S-VHS player is 25 years old and still works reasonably well, though it isn't used as often as it used to be.

And as for Raspberry Pis, I am just about to retire 14 Pis, 12 of which have been running almost continuously, playing videos, since 2012 (they are first batch Sony model Bs). That's twelve years (well over 100,000 hours) for a computer which cost thirty quid. Yes, I had to replace some early (cheap) SD cards, and they became a lot more stable with various OS updates, but if I had another use for them (they're not being chucked - I might well have a use for them at some point) I would expect them to carry on working for a good time to come.

M.

*and moved house five times!

**the Trinitron died suddenly one day when the other half was watching a work-related DVD. The children, to this day, claim the thing was bored to death.

More expensive at the outset perhaps, but our vast library of DVDs and BluRays (and CDs) will remain available for watching at any time of the day or night, and even when the internet connection goes down, so long as it's possible to buy a suitable player, and they don't disappear if you decide to stop paying the subscription.

I have a (much smaller) collection of Laserdiscs too. That player was built like a tank and aside from cleaning the dust away from the lens now and then it works as well now as the day I bought it (circa 1996, in a "remainders" sale for £70 just as DVD was being launched with players costing £500+). There is something to be said for physical meda.

M.

Re: Car thing

Apple users go "meh"

While there are some ways in which Apple has gone out of its way to ensure compatibility - for example the translation layers between PPC Macs, Intel Macs and Arm Macs - the "dump the users" attitude has been around for a very long time. Remember the iMac? Ditched the Apple Desktop Bus (which admittedly was getting a bit long-in-the-tooth) in favour of USB1, an interface which (IIRC) hadn't even been properly standardised at the time the iMac came out. Keyboards, mice, modems, printers and some other bits of kit which could have transferred to the new machine all had to be replaced, and as you said, Apple users [went] "meh" - and put up with the one and only mouse available. The iMac didn't come with a floppy disc drive and that, coupled with the lack of ADB in an era when (home) computers were rarely networked and mostly didn't have CD writers, made it needlessly difficult (and/or expensive) to transfer your files from an older machine to a newer one. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I remember it, the iMac didn't even have an external SCSI bus, so you couldn't even take your Syquest drive across, should you have had one. Or SCSI scanner.

Now, there's a good argument that in the long term USB was by far the better bet for things like keyboards and mice but at the time it was a bit of a wrench.

M.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

You might be thinking of Band III converters, which allowed Band I-only sets to receive the higher frequencies allocated to ITV stations

Band III also being VHF, but a set of frequencies which wasn't previously used for TV. I could have sworn I had seen a UHF converter in the early 1970s - but then I was still in short trousers, so perhaps I misunderstood what it was doing. Amazing how early memories are formed, and my family didn't have a TV at all until my grandfather brought his (4-button, 625 line Pye set) with him when he moved to live with us c1973.

M.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

405 line sets of the 1950s and 1960s were often provided with UHF 625 line converter boxes for when the 405 transmissions on VHF were switched off. I think the last was some time in the 1980s? Many TVs sold in the 1960s were dual standard and anything capable of tuning to 625 line UHF (whether mochrome or PAL colour) would have continued to work right up until the last analogue transmitters were turned off in 2012.

You can revive these if needed with a suitable DVB-T or DVB-S receiver although you might need to convert its output. Some receivers from the 1990s - 2010s had RF output which would have worked perfectly well with any 625 line TV. Some had composite video output which would work with a 625 line TV which has a composite input (maybe a separate input or maybe on a SCART socket) and some receivers had RGB outputs via SCART which would work perfectly well with any TV from about the mid 1980s onwards which had an RGB input. In fact this is what I used to do with my Trinitron widescreen up until it died about 8 or 9 years ago.

And for modern receivers with only HDMI output, there are plenty of HDMI to SCART (some don't do RGB but some do) or HDMI to composite converters and there are even a few HDMI to UHF analogue for those old TVs with only an aerial socket, though it might be easier and cheaper to do HDMI to composite and then composite to UHF. I've done the latter quite recently at work to convert the composite output from a Raspberry Pi to RF for a TV from the 1960s which was being used in a display.

M.

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

Of course, you can get such devices. They are called "professional" displays, sold by the likes of Panasonic or NEC and cost three or four times as much as a cheap TV of nominally equivalent spec. I say nominally because cheap TVs don't usually come with guarantees about 24 hour operation and such.

Even a "smart" TV can be dumbed down a bit if you don't connect the network cable and refuse to give it the credentials to your WiFi, but it isn't ideal, and different TVs react in different ways to being deprived of a connection to the mothership.

For some reason the thing isn't working for me right now so I can't give you a direct link, but try business.panasonic.co.uk (or .com outside the uk)

M.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

VMS

At the polytechnic in the 1980s we used VT220s connected to various VAXen. A classmate worked out that the "chat" function (similar to that used in the story) had no sanity checking on its input, so as well as annoying other users by sending them "BELL" characters, you could also send "STOP" (not sure of the terminology), which had the effect of freezing the display on the receiving terminal. I have no idea what happened to him in the long term, but he did fall foul of the local BOFHs several times and had his computer login suspended at least once.

Shout out to "Sir Kit Breaker" if you're out there...

M.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

Santander doesn't have unusually awful ATMs in my experience, most ATMs have "issues". I've not seen a reboot at Santander but I have been in the middle of doing banking for an elderly relative only for the thing to give up and spit the card out, necessitating a visit to the counter, more than once. Fortunately I tend to visit during working hours so not a major issue. Nat West machine refused to eat the money I tried to feed it the other day, and Nationwide machine regularly runs out of cash or paying-in envelopes. In-branch staff always very apologetic, but the machines are maintained by an off-site company / service team. In the case of Santander, normally two out of two tellers open, ditto Nationwide, but in both cases one of them is often also being duty manager. Nat West has two teller positions, usually only one open plus a duty manager elsewhere. Co-Op doesn't even have an ATM, which is a bit awkward out of hours, but they always* have two tellers open, and often three plus a duty manager at a separate desk, who can do most things which don't involve cash.

We are in the very fortunate position of having branches of most major banks in our small town (I don't use HSBC or Lloyds, Barclays closed about six months ago, Halifax ten years ago) and having the counter service has proved extremely handy over the years.

M.

*recent short-staffing (Summer holidays I guess) mean that hasn't been the case the last couple of months, but it's usually fine.

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

Re: no Real-Time Clock

Would ultimately cause the same problem depending on when certificates expire.

Well I suppose so, yes, but this is likely to be of the order of many years for a never-connected device, and as you would probably want to connect the thing sometimes for simple things like updating it, the clock will periodically be corrected.

The system guards against a system update reading an obviously invalid time and I (as a complete amateur) reckon it should be trivial to update Fedora to do something similar. It's not a bug in the Pi 4 (no Pi has ever had an RTC as standard - the Pi 5 has the chip, but the required battery is not supplied), it's an unfounded assumption by the OS writers that the hardware will always have a near-correct real time clock. Presumably the same happens on commodity x86 hardware when the CMOS battery dies.

M.

Re: no Real-Time Clock

In RaspberryPiOS (or whatever it's called today) the Pis I run seem to write the current time to disc every now and then. This value is loaded at boot precisely to avoid the 01/01/1970 reset-type of problem. If the clock cannot be updated for whatever reason (lack of internet mostly) then the thing carries on believing it to be anything from a few seconds (after a simple reboot) to a few weeks (after being stuck in a drawer for a bit) behind real time.

M.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Re: Paddington/Brighton

Last time I left Paddington on the GWR I noticed that at Reading the on-platform signs not only listed the names of the called-at stations (as is quite common these days) but also the expected arrival times at those stops. Never seen that before.

Of course, what those of us travelling to stations West of Swindon are really waiting for is the Grand Union service to start up which will not be stopoing at RDG or SWI at all thus avoiding the bane of our escape from the smoke - commuters hogging all the seats.

M.

Re: slide into luddite-hood

Once watched a fly walk across such an electric hob and switch the thing on. Not a ring, just the general "on" button. Nevertheless, for the rest of the time we lived with that hob it was switched off at the Big Red Switch as soon as it was finished with (and to heck with the "watch out I'm still hot" lamps) and the keys were locked when in use, particularly if simmering.

And then #2 offspring met his first induction hob and being used to gas was utterly frustrated by some of its features - such as shutting down a ring if you moved a pan a little too much off centre or - shock, horror - lifted it off for any reason (say to pour something out) and then refusing to re-enable said ring for several minutes. Safe to say, not a fan.

M.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Micro Men

Thanks for that. I had previously found all the demo software and in-browser emulator but I'm sure the programmes weren't there last time I looked!

Seems odd that they are only on Rewind and not in the normal iPlayer archive but maybe it's a different set of servers or connected to a different CDN for cost reasons.

There is quite a lot of local news from the ages on Rewind too but sadly not (yet, as far as I know, though it's been a while since I looked) a couple of stories from the early 1980s I am interested in seeing again.

M.

Plus of course noting that while the 16k of the Spectrum and the 20k of the C64 led to "limited" BASICs, this was partly because on those machines the BASIC was also the OS. The BASIC on the Beeb was also "only" 16k, but there was a totally separate 16k operating system. The paged ROM system could replace BASIC with some other program of your choosing (under OS control so you could get it back at any time) but crucially it left the OS intact, meaning that when you did so you didn't have to "reinvent the wheel" for simple things like character plotting, screen access, keyboard access etc...

M.

Re: Micro Men

And IMSMC one by Chris Curry buying a magazine in Smiths. I have it recorded somewhere, long time since I watched it. Really liked the genuine-footage inserts, things like The Computer Programme. Why has the Beeb only put a very few episodes on iPlayer? Similarly Horizon, QED, Tomorrow's World?

Making the Most of the Micro

Micro Live

M.

Re: Huge gaps in this history

The Laserdisc players Acorn used for the (Master-based) Domesday system had something akin to SCSI interfaces and could seek frame-accurately and, of course, recover digital data.

Come to that (I'll dig out the manual and check later) the cheap Pioneer Laserdisc player I still have connected to my TV (now via an HDMI converter) has a serial port and I'm sure you could issue "seek to frame <n>" type commands via that. Not particularly useful for most movie discs which were recorded in "CLV" mode (constant linear velocity - disc speed varies so that several more video frames fit on an outer track than an inner track, maximising run time) where pausing at a frame blanked the screen (except on very expensive players with framestores), but on a "CAV" disc (constant angular velocity, one frame = two fields per revolution) could be used to store and acces tens of thousands of "still" images.

M.

Re: Huge gaps in this history

And of course in all those ways a direct ancestor of the BBC Micro ("Proton"). I only ever met one Atom. It was in an obscure lab at polytechnic, connected up via some Heath-Robinson student project to a camera (IIRC) and very slowly printing out ASCII art on an FX80 IMSMC.

It was getting on for 40 years ago but my hazy memory has a couple of minutes of silence then a loud BZZZZZZZRRRRRTTT as the printer committed a single line of characters to paper.

M.

Re: Huge gaps in this history

the only way to access >64kB on a 6502 is bank switching and I think Acorn's good taste meant that they didn't want to do that.

But of course they went all-in for bank-switched ROM (4x 16kB as standard but OS support for 16x 16kB), and IIRC it was the B+ models that introduced bank-switched RAM (ignoring third-party add-ons) a year or so before the Master. It was only 20k for screen memory (and 12kB of RAM in a ROM slot) but it made a huge difference if c5½k RAM (on a BBC Micro with DFS) was a bit restrictive for your program in MODEs 0, 1, 2. Yes, too late and yes, far too expensive. I had a BBC Micro, fairly heavily expanded, and a B+ was not worth the money. Dithered about the Master (a friend's dad could get employee discounts at the factory) but in the end glad I held out and saved up for an Archimedes.

Just been reading up about the ZX Interface 2 having read this article and although I did fancy one when I was (briefly) a Spectrum owner I'm glad I didn't splash out. Typical Sinclair minimal-viable-product and a few inexplicable choices, such as the incomplete through-connector and the lack of any bank switching; a ROM cartridge simply replaced BASIC in the memory map when inserted.

M.

Feds, US states sue RealPage for building rent-hiking software for landlords

Re: landlords are colluding to raise prices by using software developed by RealPage

how does a seller "know" the buyer is 1st time?

A more complex scheme which involves loan guarantees, and related schemes by housing developers such as part-ownership certainly seem to have increased prices rather than easing the process of getting on the housing ladder in the UK, see for example this Financial Times article from 2022 which quotes a House of Lords report which suggests that investing the money used for the scheme in to actually building houses - increased supply leading to less inflation pressure - would have had a much greater effect. For the UK scheme I believe the seller has to be involved in the process of getting the subsidy so there is full knowledge.

A slightly different scheme in the UK is the so-called "Lifetime" ISA. For those not from these parts, an Independent Savings Account is a tax-free savings vehicle into which a taxpayer can invest up to £20,000 per year. The "Lifetime" ISA is slightly different in that it is specifically aimed at first time buyers between 18 and 40 years old saving for a deposit. It has a lower investment limit of £4,000 per year but includes an additional bonus from the government of 25% per year (capped at £1,000 so it isn't as generous as it sounds) so if you save £4,000 for three years at 3% (just as an example) you should get somewhere around £16,000 out which could provide a >10% deposit in some of the lower-priced areas of the country.

Two problems. Firstly, none of the "big" ISA providers are selling Lifetime ISAs any more and secondly it's entirely possible the new Labour government will make changes (or even scrap) this Conservative initiative at the next budget.

There is a strong argument in the UK that the thing which really rocket-boosted house prices (both rental and purchase) was the "right to buy" scheme of the Thatcher government. Up until then a lot of rental accommodation was built and operated by local authorities which had no incentive to price-gouge. RTB gave long-term tenants the right to buy their homes at vast discounts over what would be "market value" (and determining market value was exceptionally difficult for housing stock which had never previously come on the open market). Many of these people sold at market value within a few years (and there's a whole other story about the poor folk who bought ex council houses without full knowledge) but the thing which really made the difference was that the councils were forbidden from using the proceeds of the sales to build more council housing for rent - and that's leaving aside the fact that the discounts were so huge that they would not have been able to afford 1:1 replacements anyway.

In comparison a simplistic $25k to put towards your first house is definitely a recipe for disaster - after the first batch of people have got on to the scheme early anyway.

M.

LEGO's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

Re: What is the max skin temperature?

No idea how authoritative, but according to this, Ryanair's fleet is currently not only all Boeing, but it's all 737, with the vast majority of those being 737-800 and the rest 737 Max 8.

M.

Re: What is the max skin temperature?

At the time I remember hearing that all Concorde flight engineers placed their caps in the expansion gap between an instrument panel and a bulkhead during the final flight of each aircraft. The best reference I can find is here, about half way down the page.

M.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: it's just that new equipment always brings new problems

I'm not talkng half a dozen APs in the same room, I'm talking about "adjacent" (in the radio sense) APs. Coming from a radio background and looking at the specs, even 1, 5, 9, 13 are effectively non-interfering (5MHz channels, 20MHz bandwidth) and ideal for use where the "wanted" AP is closer than the "unwanted" one and it's much easier to mesh four channels than three (c.f. cartographer's map-colouring problem), even in 3D.

All that 1, 6, 11 adds is an unnecessary 5MHz guard band. Might have been useful for "b" standard but not needed for "g".

Note how at 5GHz the channels are (mostly) 20MHz apart, not 25. 2.4GHz channels 1, 6, 11 are 25MHz apart.

The only trouble it would cause is where one of mine on (say) channel 5 is "near" someone else's on 6.

And for APs which are even further apart, it's possible to get away with 1, 4, 7, 10, 13.

M.

Re: So true to life

We have a lot of projectors which need to start and stop automatically. All the "pro" ones use PJLink and in my experience (there are over 30) it "just works". All the "small business" ones also have PJLink (because I can't buy a projector without) but they mostly also have Crestron Connected. Their inbuilt web interfaces are slow and clunky and their PJLink implementations must be slightly out of whack because my PJ utility (which admittedly was pretty poorly written by me) keeps moaning of "unexpected response from projector" even though startup and shutdown seems to work well.

First met Crestron at Magna back in 2001. Touch panels in each control room, timers which kept losing time and the only way to get changes made was to call the consultants back. Morning startup was tedious.

M.

Re: it's just that new equipment always brings new problems

And the fact that with VGA you could use almost any length of cable, daisy-chained if you liked, and you might get a slightly wonky or grainy picture but at least it would work - or would work if you lowered the resolution a notch. With HDMI you're into using boosted cables or inline amplifiers if you need anything longer than about 10m to be safe, 15m absolute tops. Then again, at least those are more reasonable in price these days. When I first needed a 40m HDMI cable it was a fibre-optic thing and cost about £200. Many of the built-in systems here run DVI (basically the same as HDMI) over two fibre pairs plus a cat.5! The tx/rx unit pairs for those cost something like £350 nearly 20 years ago but when they fail these days they can usually (but not always) be replaced by devices which ignore the fibres and just use the cat.5.

Oh, and the fact that some computers don't like our boosted cables. I have Lenovo and HP laptops with onboard HDMI which happily drive that 40m cable, while Surfaces and MacBooks (usually with external adapters) often baulk at the prospect. One regular visitor is so aware of this problem at various venues that not only do they bring a selection of USBC - HDMI adapters for their Mac; if one doesn't work, another might; they also bring an older Mac with inbuilt HDMI just in case. I had one person with a Dell laptop a few months ago who brought their own USBC - HDMI adapter which wouldn't work, but when I tried an identical unit from my own stock, it was fine!

Thought I'd found a way around the problem with the Panasonic PressIT device*. Bought a couple of units to try, and yes it does work, but for some reason it needs a tremendous amount of peer-to-peer WiFi to work well without judder and lag. With the number of competing APs in our building** it's always going to struggle to find clear space, so judder and lag are the order of the day. Not really a problem for a few PPT slides but not at all acceptable for video.

M.

*yes, the PressIT does have the disadvantage of another dongle for some idiot to take away with them, but at least it's fairly large and not a teensy little one for the "clicker" we lent out

**why can't I set my HP Instant-On APs to use channels 12 and 13 at 2.4GHz, or in fact anything except 1, 6 and 11? They're set to the right domain (UK/EU), but even on "manual" I'm not offered the option to juggle things about, just 1, 6, 11 - it would be far easier to find clear space if they could use 1, 5, 9, 13***. Corporate's Cisco APs seem similarly disadvantaged, and the numerous SOHO / domestic APs in close proximity just add to the problem.

***because I can, 2.4GHz is actually turned off on the HPs, but this isn't often an option, for compatibility reasons

(sorry, I could rant all day about this stuff)

Re: So true to life

The number of times we've been called to rooms because someone has played with the cable is ridiculous

And not just USB and HDMI - one of our rooms has a nice audio desk with quite a lot of cables plugged in, but only a few things in use at any one time. I went in there the other day to swap some cables back - because someone had owned up to swapping them when I wasn't there - to find that six or seven other cables were in totally the wrong holes; cables from the radio microphone receivers plugged into the insert points instead of line in, cables from the CD player plugged into auxiliary outputs, the cable which was supposed to be in the aux-out plugged into a different aux-return. Loads of little things.

I find this sort of thing is down to one of two causes. Either the person using the room is so impatient that they can't be bothered to call for technical help when something doesn't work first time, struggle through their meeting (or whatever) with the laptop camera instead of the nice Logitech Meetup camera and then moan to us afterward, or they're the sort of person who likes to think they "know stuff" and cannot admit when they get it wrong.

I'm pretty certain it was the latter case with the audio mixer and I have two prime suspects, but neither of them is going to admit anything.

Oh, and the number of times I've gone into a room and found (for example) two kettles plugged into a single 4-way strip; even the one I've put extremely sticky gaffa over three of the sockets.*

On the other hand we have managed to train one or two people. Upside is that they don't (often) just mess about. Downside is that we have to be there for the start of every one of their meetings because despite having done the same thing every month for the last three years, "it's better for you to do it, that way I know it will work".

M.

*yes, I do have some extensions with just single sockets on the end but someone will always be able to find another 4-way to plug into my extension. And don't lecture me about never plugging kettles into extension leads. I know my stuff and if you saw how stupidly sockets were arranged in our rooms (well, the whole building really), you'd understand. Without an extension lead, in one room you'd have to put an urn on a table more-or-less in the middle of the room, plugged into a floor socket. Yes, I have seen that done, with no barrier around the table and toddlers haring about while their mums chat...

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Sandy, Beds

Always caused a chuckle by primary-school-me when receiving info from the RSPB.

M.

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

BASIC I and II (BBC Micro) definitely had REPEAT... UNTIL. WHILE... ENDWHILE was introduced with BASIC IV on the Master I think and was certainly there by BASIC V on the Archimedes, along with CASE... OF... ENDCASE.

M.

Digital wallets can allow purchases with stolen credit cards

Re: Someone is lying

In the UK I don't think banks will "allow recurring payments on locked cards" mine certainly won't.

It's some six or seven years ago now, but mine did. Had my card skimmed somehow and the bank spotted a large payment ~£300 which they blocked and reported to me. Once we'd sorted out what was going on they cancelled the card and sent me a new one. I discovered on receiving my next statement that there was a monthly payment going out to Netflix which I hadn't set up. At the time I didn't have any continuous card authorisations on the account, so argued that surely that (along with its start date) was suspicious too. The bank initially argued but eventually refunded the payments "as an act of goodwill".

Fortunately not had it happen since so couldn't say if that's still the policy.

M.

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: Reading between the lines

Per the announcement, the silicon removed was

...functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use...

I would be extremely surprised if "permanently disabled" didn't mean "fuses blown in the power lines", which might possibly be confirmed by calling it "dark silicon". So I'd say you're right; there won't be much (if any) difference to the power used and the cost saving is pretty much entirely due to fitting more on a wafer. $10 saved for just two changes - a different SoC and half-sizing the memory - is quite a lot as I see it!

Just out of interest (I have next to no knowledge in this area) I wonder how big the die actually is (and how much has been saved)? The M0+ core as used in the original RP2040 (Pi Pico) is something stupid like 1/100th of a sqmm at 40nm (and of course there are two of them, the RAM, the PIOs, the GPIO, support circuitry etc); the Pi 5 uses an A76 which is presumably quite a lot bigger, despite a smaller process (16nm), but how much for a whole package?

And the obvious follow-on would be that they could start using this new SoC in the 4GB and 8GB versions and maybe bring the cost down slightly (hmmm... yeah).

M.

Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that

Re: Btrfs

Being a long-ish term OpenSuse user (since 12.1 I think), I can't say I've had a genuine eat-my-files-in-normal-use case of BTRFS corruption but what I have had - and continue to have - is updates failing because of a lack of space on the root partition, leaving the system in an unusable (but always rollback-able, though sometimes more easily than others) state. This is Tumbleweed, by the way, which gets a huge number of updates, rather than Leap, and I've been tight with the root partition due to the need to have disc space for other things. I've stuck with the "old fashioned" partitioning scheme of root on BTRFS and /home on XFS and I'm convinced it's saved me a few bothersome issues over the years.

Usually the root partition is full because I haven't done housekeeping on the snapshots and haven't calculated the free space required properly. Both machines are on slowish connections and I like to be there to "babysit" an update, so I will often do a zypper dup with --download-only first (which I don't have to babysit) and do the actual update later. Both options create snapshots, so a 3GB update seems to spawn 6GB of snapshots. Or something like that, don't really know, not technical in that way. What I have learned to do is delete a couple of snapshots before starting to make sure that there is somewhere north of 3× the download size worth of free space before starting.

M.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

Wordstar on a Amstrad CPC6128 did my degree dissertation

A friend did all his degree and postgrad work on a PCW8256 with dot matrix.

Another friend had a ?286? at home but no printer, so brought me raw PCL5 files I could stream to my Canon LBP4. Very posh.

My sister did all her degree work on a Canon Starwriter.

I did a PGCE on a Psion 5mx and an old HP Inkjet. Saved a lot of space in my room in halls and immune to power cuts.

I still write emails in plain text with a monospaced display font where possible :-)

M.

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

Re: chicken come home to roost

like Mac OS does

Or, indeed, RiscOS...

M.

Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions

Re: Argument against hyperthreading?

Not at all well versed in a subject, but an overall 5% on 24 virtual cores on a machine doing mostly just one thing implies one core at near 100% (100/24 = 4.166) and other cores doing small amounts of stuff. Most system monitors will let you see what individual cores are up to but might report individual usage as 100% per core, or 4% per core when maxed out.

Unlike the early hyperthreading days, OS schedulers are supposedly aware of physical -v- virtual and even big -v- LITTLE and avoid putting two threads on virtual cores which occupy the same physical core if there is another physical core free. I have an app at work which is so poorly written it practically crippled the original Pentium boxes it ran on by hogging the processor - it spends nearly all its time waiting so really, really doesn't need to max out a processor. On a 2-core box, no problem at all. It gets one physical core to itself and everything else shares the other.

As for hyperthreading, the original idea was that most apps will spend some of their time "stalled", waiting for memory or for a lengthy calculation to finish. It's possible to put idle parts of the core to use on another thread, keeping the core busy. Similarly, with the badly-behaved app above, even on a single core processor, if it has hyperthreading, there is much less of an apparent slowdown for other apps. I did try it once, just to see. Can't remembee the processor, possibly an oroginal Intel "Core", or maybe one of those single core Atoms of a similar era?

And with many multicore processors these days, the boost speed available if just one core is running hard is better than if you have lots of cores under high use (thermals), so it should perhaps be faster.

Just my 2p.

M.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: recovery workshops in, uh... Belgium?"

My dad has been very friendly with a local icecream maker since the 1970s. Way back then he was innovating, and the use of Belgian chocolate - rather than chocolate flavour syrups - was just becoming a "thing". He was interested in whether my father's factory could help make moulded chocolates - easter eggs, Father Christmases, that kind of thing - to be filled with icecream, and supplied dad with some moulds and an absolutely massive lump of chocolate to experiment with. Must have been 5kg if not actually a full half badger. Very Wonka. Or at least it seemed that way to me - bearing in mind I was still in short trousers at the time.

It was the most delicious stuff I had ever tasted; of course the best chocolate available at the time was Dairy Milk* or Fry's (or items from another friend of dad's who worked at the "OP" chocolate factory) and more often than was healthy, well-meaning relatives would buy me "treats" of those awful not-chocolate tools. What was that stuff? It tasted foul.

I have no idea of the brand, obviously it was supplied as a catering ingredient, but it knocked socks off anything available at the corner shop at the time. Shame it never worked out with dad's factory, but Mike Jenkins found another partner and the rest is history, as they say.

M.

*Is it just me, or have they changed the CDM recipe in the last 10 years or so? Have to admit we stopped buying it when Kraft closed that factory near Bristol and moved some production to Poland, but I'm mortified to find that I actually prefer Galaxy to CDM these days, and I used to hate Galaxy as tasting too greasy. Good thing I don't eat as much chocolate as I used to; means I can afford to buy half decent stuff; and by half decent I mean I really quite like the own-brand "Irresistable" chocolate from the Co-Op or the equivalent stuff from other supermarkets, moreso now that Thorntons is both more difficult to find and seems to have stopped selling actual "just chocolate" bars. Partial to Milka too, not a fan of Lindt.

Fresh programmer's editor on Linux lies Zed ahead

Re: Where are we?

Dunno. Maybe it's an overzealous corporate spyware scanning my content, but I haven't noticed it when replying to Register posts in Edge, or in Word or Notepad, though it has to be said that I don't use those apps as often as Outlook.

And before connections are made, no, I'm not someone who spends the whole day in front of the computer firing off emails; my job is mostly "physical" (out there with a screwdriver) and my work-related computer use is largely reading emails asking me to look at something and then replying to said emails with what I've done.

M.

Re: Where are we?

I've noticed that too - recently updated desktop at work (6 core i5, 16GB, NVMe SSD) - Outlook desktop client works reasonably well, but when creating an email, as soon as you fill the first line of text, the second (and subsequent) lines slow right down - I can be typing one or two characters ahead of the display which is disconcerting to say the least, and I'm not a particularly fast typist. Crumbs, even my BBC Micro could keep up with my typing, though in general it wasn't trying to do anything else at the same time. The Archimedes had no problems at all, even when rendering "outline" fonts in Impression - once it had cached the font files which admittedly on a floppy-only system (in those days) did take a couple of seconds.

M.

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

Go on. You can't just downvote without an explanation. Or are you a sore middle-Englander jealous of devolution?

M.

None of this would be required if they had free school meals...

Scotland.

Wales.

M.

always puzzled me why so many GP surgeries have "touch screen" booking in systems

If it's anything like the ones around here, it works perfectly well if you use - say - the middle joint of your middle finger. For all such things (door openers, doorbells, cash machines, whatever. Traditional door handles are a bit more tricky*) I try to use a hip or an elbow or a knuckle. Something I'm not likely to then go on to use to touch something I'll later regret. Been doing it for years before 2020.

M.

*Sounds plausible, but I once heard someone say that hospital transferred infections rose in the 1960s & 70s when new hospitals were built or big refurbishments done and eventually someone put two and three together and realised that as well as a certain indiscipline in terms of handwashing, a lot of bacteria were being transferred via door furniture (handles, push plates). Doors from the 1960s onwards would invariably have stainless steel furniture whereas before that time it was often brass. Brass contains a large amount of Copper which has known antibacterial and antimicrobial properties, so even if not regularly cleaned, bugs wouldn't last anywhere near as long on a brass door handle as on a stainless steel one. Maybe we could go back to brass in hospitals?

.

post-COVID hygiene concerns regarding the contact patch

If it's anything like the fingerprint system at my children's school (which we never allowed them to register for - the school carried on accepting the RFID cards they'd been using for several years), the thing failed half the time. Apparently quite a lot of queueing at dinner was caused by the reader failing to read a fingerprint and the pupil not having alternative means of payment. Eventually most pupils just went back to the cards.

The reason given to swap to fingerprints was along the lines of "bullies can't steal your finger".

M.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Somehow, Wales and Scotland escaped (old but interesting link), so what is probably meant by "UK" is "England and Northern Ireland".

M.

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

Re: Can't help feeling

WTF are they expecting to be powering???

Knowing nothing of this sort of thing the only comment I'd make is that I don't think there is a normal, domestic socket anywhere in the world which is designed to supply over 4kW of power (4kW is - apparently - just the CPU limit set by the m/b, what about the other parts of the system, say the GPU?) so this is obviously a setting which means "take what you want". Seems daft when there obviously must be a physical limit; why not just report it accurately?

M.

Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

Re: Whither AWS?

Upvote for this:

a zillion-dollar clown computing empire

M.