* Posts by phuzz

6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "Get used to the modern"

In the UK a typical socket set will come with half imperial, half metric, tools. Similarly, tape measures and rulers have inches down one side, cm down the other.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "Get used to the modern"

Have you ever been learning a new language or something, and then you come across one command or instruction which works in a completely different way to every other command in that language?

That's why they're changing this. It was the equivalent of a car with imperial sized lug nuts when every other fastener was metric.

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

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Facepalm

A few weeks back, one of my friends was explaining to her kid the importance of washing their hands, and how soap would kill the virus.

"In that case mummy, why don't we just eat soap to kill the disease?"

Only three years old, and already plenty qualified to lead the dumbest nation on Earth.

(PS, I'm assuming the QAnon loons are trumpeting it as a sign of how close he is to washing the deep state or some such bollocks?)

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

phuzz Silver badge

See, you're just not thinking military.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

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Re: Another elevator anecdote.

"the lift rarely went into the basement"

I wonder what the connection with the lift was then, because the motors for the lifts are stationary, and usually at the top of the shaft. Even if the motors were in the basement, you'd expect them to be causing the same amount of interference no matter where the lift is moving in the shaft.

Perhaps it was the small motor that opens the doors?

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Cars of the day... with good old steel bumpers and side panels

A friend of mine had a very minor argument with a bus in his Tesla, just a small scrape and dent in the front wing.

The bus company were reasonably happy to accept responsibility, up until they got the £20,000(!) repair bill.

(That's more than all the cars I've ever bought put together. Hell, it's close to the brand new price of all the cars I've ever owned, put together)

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Elevator interface

They're not called "diggers", they're "hydraulically operated cable-finders".

Ned to find where a cable is buried? Just let one loose nearby and soon it'll have found the cable, and pulled half of it up.

Want to put a satellite into orbit for US comms? Whoa, says Uncle Sam: Where's your space crash risk assessment?

phuzz Silver badge
Joke

Re: The big question

I'm sure all the big aerospace manufacturers (Boeing/Lockheed/Northrup etc.) have various expensive projects to deal with debris, which they'd love to get funded. Ideally on a Cost Plus basis.

This is just a guess, but on one hand you have an industry that likes bribes totally legitimate lobbying, and on the other, an FCC chairman who used to be a lobbyist and by all accounts is still very friendly with the people he used to work for.

Seems like a match made in, if not heaven, at least somewhere sunny like the Camen islands, (or Belize, or Andorra, or Panama etc. etc.)

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

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Gimp

The shift to PowerPC was a lot better received, because Apple were already using a Motorola CPU, so using one developed by Motorola and Apple (and IBM) was seen as an upgrade. (And of course, it could emulate 68k code faster than any real 68k CPU could run it, so it was a big upgrade).

In contrast, when it was first announced that OSX would be running on Intel's x86 CPUs there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and lo, they did begin to doubt the word of the prophet Jobs and curse the name of Intel.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

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Re: How about a poll?

At Exeter Uni there's plenty of buildings where you can enter on the ground floor, climb multiple flights of stairs only to walk along a corridor into the basement of another building.

I did used to live in a house where the front door was three floors above the backdoor, which was still above a single storey garage.

Geoboffins reckon extreme rainfall might help some volcanoes pop off

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Re: "We are only just beginning to understand these interactions"

Now I think about it, Pompeii was a terrible example, because of course it was famously never re built. Though of course, many people continue to live near Vesuvius, just not in that particular spot.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "We are only just beginning to understand these interactions"

Venice was founded in 421 (AD), ie, while the Roman Empire was still about, it's always been pretty soggy around there. And going back to the subject of volcanoes, how about Pompeii?

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

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Re: "the lockdown may encourage more workplaces to embrace remote working"

"Basically, if your job is to deal with the public, you're not working from home."

Broadly true, but the significant exception is call centre workers. A couple of our clients are finding ways to allow their call centre staff to work from home via VoIP over a VPN.

I don't think we've worked out a way to make it PCI compliant yet, so they'll still have to have a skeleton staff actually in the office.

As to whether this will continue past lockdown, for our customers I think they'll probably prefer to have people in the office. However, the call centre industry in general seems to be pretty cut-throat, so if there's money to be saved from having your workforce at home I bet they'll try it.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Wired every time

Proverbally speaking, that'll never happen again.

Capita to place bit less sauce in outsourcing execs' share awards packets

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Bright side

At least this whole Covid thing should be helping out manufacturers of tiny, tiny, violins.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: How do they manage to lose money?

What's the point of a "long term incentive plan" If it's long term incentivization of buffoons?

Well, the buffoons are the ones setting up the incentives.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

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Re: Ha Ha Ha...

I can understand average users complaining about an interface changing, but as a sysadmin I've always held it as a point of pride that I can pick up any new bit of software within a short amount of time.

I find Win 10 just as easy to use as any other version (back to 3.0, I was Workbench only before that), or OSX, or any of the variety of Linux window managers that I've used come to that. None of them are perfect, but all of them work. I guess the choice is to learn how they work, or complain on the internet.

Just because we're letting Zoom into Parliament doesn't mean you can have fun, House of Commons warns Brit MPs

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[Teams] only works with Chrome

Not sure where you got that from mate, I've just tested it in Firefox and even in IE11.

There's a Linux client as well, although I've not tried that yet.

Adobe’s Flash fade may force vCenter upgrades unless you run dodgy browsers

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Re: This is why

Also handy for old APC devices which force you to choose between plain HTTP and HTTPS but only SSLv2, which won't work on most browsers these days.

Are you fixing that switch? Or setting it up as a Minecraft server?

phuzz Silver badge

Re: OK, so can run a game server on a switch

In a home environment we'd call it a 'router', even though they usually do a lot more than route packets (eg DNS, DHCP, wifi etc.)

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

phuzz Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Common use machines should always use pigtail extension leads for USB

To be fair, Microsoft have produced some pretty good hardware over the years. The intellimouse has gone through various versions over the years, and all the ones I've tried have been as good as the first ones. Their ergonomic keyboards seem to be well liked by people who are in to that sort of thing. They've invented a design for a battery holder for AA batteries which allows them to be inserted either way around. And at the end of the day, most of their hardware is relatively inexpensive.

If they never made software they'd probably be a well regarded company.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Thanks for reminding me...

"Cisco router using an RJ-45 for the console interface which was wired differently to the Epson till printers RJ-45 connector"

Which was different again from the one APC used on their UPS's, which they'd usually position so that it was right next to the RJ45 connector for ethernet, and leave you to guess whether plugging the wrong cable in was going to brick your UPS.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Truely

A few years back I was working at a company that had an SDSL installed.

One day it stopped working. After escalating through our ISP, we eventually found out that we were one of only three SDSL connections in the southwest, and that a 'helpful' BT engineer had been working nearby, seen the wiring for our circuit and though to themselves "that ADSL is wrongly wired, I will be helpful and fix it", which of course utterly banjaxed it.

It took several days to find an engineer that understood SDSL to re-wire us.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Common use machines should always use pigtail extension leads for USB

Should have bought a Microsoft Intellimouse back in the early 2000's, those things last forever. I still have one at work that gets hauled out when I need a spare (they came with a USB-PS2 adaptor in the box, but I don't remember seeing a computer with a PS2 port for years).

CFAA latest: Supremes to tackle old chestnut of what 'authorized use' of a computer really means in America

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Re: Charges?

I think the OP was asking a rhetorical question and meant "why is there no specific law against a police officer abusing their position for financial gain?". He was charged with two types of fraud, one of which was overturned, neither of which seemed to take his job as a police officer in to account. It's not like corrupt cops are a new thing, how come he wasn't charged with something along those lines?

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

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Re: How ESA keeps Cluster flying ... the original VAX VMS hardware

Alas no:

"Sousa explained that the original VAX VMS hardware was long gone"

Coronavirus lockdown forces UK retailers to shut 382 million square feet of floor space

phuzz Silver badge

That's easy enough if you live next to a farmer (as most of my family do), but not really an option for people living in towns and cities (ie, most people).

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Sales

for those of us who learned to use a computer

Ctrl+V works in Powershell, but that's relatively recent. Up arrow (for your command history) has been there since DOS.

This hurts a ton-80: British darts champ knocked out of home tourney by lousy internet connection

phuzz Silver badge

Re: here's something to do :

I'd assumed that (eg) connections to the US would go out via Cornwall, without detouring to London first. However, five minutes of tracerting seems to show international connections being routed through London (I'm in Bristol, on Virgin).

Hopefully an actual network engineer will be along to tell my why I'm worng.

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

phuzz Silver badge

Plural of 'spacecraft'?

two commercial spacecrafts

I thought the plural of 'spacecraft' is 'spacecraft' (like sheep).

Is this a UK/US English thing?

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Not Fair!

I can't tell if it's a bot, or a genuinely stupid human. Does that mean it passes the Turing test?

NASA dons red and blue cardboard 3D glasses to drive Curiosity rover because its GPUs are stuck in the office

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Sounds like they are using old GeForce 3D Vision kit

You could probably run this mode on even something like a mid range laptop.

Or alternatively it should work ok in a remote desktop environment.

AMD takes another crack at Intel's server stronghold with more Epyc silicon

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Re: Sorry AMD fans...

My Ryzen 3700 is helping me WFH by munching through F@H tasks, whilst still remaining perfectly responsive for work tasks. Turns out 16 threads can get a lot of shit done simultaneously...

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

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Re: Double ejection

I was an air cadet in the mid 90's and although we watched the safety videos etc. the extent of the parachute landing training was "and when you reach the ground keep your knees bent so you don't break your legs", but no training or testing etc. I think the assumption was that you were almost certainly not going to use the parachute, so a couple of broken legs would be the least of your issues.

phuzz Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Double ejection

All this talk of socialism, and no one has mentioned how most armed forces are much closer to being socialism, than the health services of either the UK or France.

BepiColombo probe swings by Earth on way to Mercury – the Solar System's must-visit coronavirus-free resort

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Re: Brilliant stuff

This paper assumes that General Relativity wasn't taken into account when plotting the course, and predicts that the final pass off Venus could be off by ~8x105km.

No idea if they're correct or not.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Which reminds me of an AI koan ...

The number of times a user has called me over to fix a problem, which then magically fixed itself as soon as I was stood there, is enormous.

Possibly the user is taking things slower and more carefully when I'm watching, but sometimes I think it's just electronic fear.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

holding down the entire SCSI bus until they returned and the damnable machine would finally boot?

This still happens today. Last weekend my computer started hanging for minutes at a time, and after a bit of troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to any attempt to read or write to a particular SSD*.

So, a few days later, replacement SSD in hand, I power off my machine to install it (it had been powered off several times in between). It was at this point that the bad SSD decided to fail completely, and the machine refused to boot until I'd removed it.

I suspect that if I'd been more patient it would have eventually booted after timing out.

* I'm using StorageSpaces with tiering on Windows 10, which is completely unsupported, and I only have myself to blame

Something something DANE cook: Microsoft pledges to wrap its email systems in secure anti-snooping protocol

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Re: Let me see if I understand this...

It's just as likely that the US TLA's have told Microsoft that they require DNSSEC for email, so MS are adding it to try and get a big, juicy, DoD contract for Office 365.

Plus they don't need to crack the encryption on the emails in transit when they can just grab them at rest.

Minister slams 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories as 'dangerous nonsense' after phone towers torched in UK

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Trollface

"However the moon landings were fake because they didn't bring back any cheese."

Clearly you've not watched the documentary "A Grand Day Out".

Watch: Rare Second World War footage of Bletchley Park-linked MI6 intelligence heroes emerges, shared online

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Re: Fortunes and Silent Fame in the Novel Era with Back Room Bods and AI Boffinry ...

It's always fun to watch someone argue with a bot :)

Where's the best place to add Mentos to Diet Coke for the most foam? How big are the individual bubbles? Has science gone too far?

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I suppose....

None of that is an assumption.

Dissolved CO2 in water makes it more acidic (in the case of the sea, it's making it less alkali, the average is around pH 8.1, rather than making it acidic per se).

There is an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, from burning fossil fuels.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

phuzz Silver badge

JANET still exists, and is one of the largest networks in Europe.

NASA reveals the new wavy Martian wheels it thinks can crush the red planet

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Alien

Re: Robot planet

There's also amanfrommars1, who may, or may not be a robot.

phuzz Silver badge

What they're referring to as a 'tyre' is a solid aluminium wheel (with titanium spokes). There's no rubber involved.

JPL have built the last three rovers on Mars, so I'd say they're the leading experts on driving there.

Motorola casually trots out third UK release in as many months: This time it's a 'Lite' take on the Moto G8 Power

phuzz Silver badge

Re: That's the worst thing about new phones

Fortunately Motorola allows the end user to unlock the bootloader on most of their phones, even the G8 (use this page). It voids your warranty, but that's the fun part imo.

From what I hear they generally don't stray too far from vanilla Android on their phones, but I'd install a custom ROM just as a matter of course.

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Paris...

One of the people I work with doesn't bother setting the language to en-GB when he installs an OS.

Now, as 99% of the time we're accessing it via SSH so it's not a problem.

But that one time when I had to log into the console, with a UK keyboard, it took me several minutes to work out why my password wasn't working. It was (as I'm sure some of you had guessed) that the OS was expecting an en-US keyboard, with it's keys in the wrong places.

Had a similar problem logging into something via a Mac, when I had a # in my password.

Intel's 10th-gen Core family cracks 5GHz barrier with H-series laptop processors

phuzz Silver badge

I'm sure these will last at least five minutes on battery. Maybe even ten!

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

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Re: Am I surprised?

Well I guess that the silver lining in all of this is that most aircraft are getting grounded and probably switched off at the moment. There's literally only ten aircraft operating at Heathrow right now (as per flightradar).

One of them is a 787 though.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Windows Server 2000

Uptime is just a measure of how long since you last verified that your machine could boot successfully ;)

(Don't forget that a reboot doesn't give anything a chance to really stop. Problems are more likely to crop up after a machine has been powered off for more than a few minutes, and parts of it are cooling down).