Posts by Colin Bull 1 167 posts • joined 15 Apr 2010
Back in the day when 4GB memory was about £4k, we would raid 10 our data on live services because a good controller would allow writing to one of the pair while reading the other and because reads do not need use any locks would be extremely fast. This was more expensive than RAID5 or 3 or 4 but much more resilient, allowed for different batches of disks in a mirror pair and was a magnitude faster at replacing a failed disk.
I had a support call yesterday from a friend who could not access his webmail because he was getting a message that his computer might be compromised. He sent me a screenshot of the error and it was a cert error for xx.btmail.bt.com. When I followed through with Firefox it stated cert expired at midnight Friday. OK today though. Downdetector did not show any particular problem.
Not only does our monopoly suppler for most of the country BT use hyper inflationary mid contact price rises, they are advertising it as super fast fibre when it is not fibre at all - it is hybrid fibre/copper. And meanwhile Ofcom sit and watch without a murmur.
Luckily for me I have just had the pavement dug up by Wildanet so it is full fibre in a week or two :-)
I have a friend who had a tree very large tree fall on the corner of their house in France which had the Orange phone line connection attached. The phone line was coiied on the ground. Faults can ONLY be reported on an Orange land line. Catch 22. After driving to a friends house and reporting the problem they were told the diagnostics were showing the line was NOT faulty, it must be the internal equipment. 3 week later an engineer confirmed the cable on the ground was in fact not connected to the house.
Calibre along with whatever version of Linux I am using are the primary destinations for my occaisional donations.
I do not use it as an ereader, I use it to create a library of books I have read and my rating of the author to steer future purchases and prevent duplicate purchases. ( senility has its downsides). And to remove DRM so I can share books with her indoors.
Dedrm (for me ) requires an Adobe ADE cert or some such to work, but MANY MANY thanks to Apprentice Alf and his sidekicks for its existence and ongoing support.
BTW to download books from Amazon you have to prove purchase of a Kindle by supplying its serial number.
I have an Epson multifuction printer that generally works OK with Ubuntu. But recently I could not get it to print (when I was in a hurry of course) .
I copied the file to the old womens Win10 box and attempted to print. A message box popped up stating non Epson cartridge was I sure I wanted to risk printing with it. Printed OK and since has printed from Ubuntu.
I would like to get my hands on some LF testing kits which HMG say or in plentiful supply. LIARS
If you go on the web sit to order some it will NOT allow you to pre order just states no stock available. It does give you a link to your local pharmacies who have no stock, no way of pre ordering, only pay a visit and being told last batch received ran out in 20 minutes.
Surely they can bring us out of the 19th century by having a web site that can take pre orders and /or link it to local pharmacies.
I predict we will not have an honest government IT system until we are all robots in the 22nd century.
8 million testing kits are being delivered on New Years Eve. If there are 7 in a pack that is just over one million packs. With over 20 million households that is one for every 20 households or 5% of the country. That is without some supply going to hospitals, workplaces etc. Plenty of supply my arse.
Sainsburys / Argos have got no idea about IT.
Sainsburys Bank for car insurance. Password must be entered twice but cannot copy and paste. MORONS
Argos - ordered item of furniture. Only one date option for delivery. Would not accept . Eventually crashed out but order was placed. Attempt to contact them to confirm date. No way to do this, but pleasantly surprised to receive phone call confirming date so they are obviously aware of problem.
Received email - Please review your item. Was pleased with product so thought will do review. Fill in positive review. Receive banner screen - "You have ad blocker switched on. Please turn off to submit review". Why are thy tracking me for a review - MORONS.
Find a link to contact them. "You have ad blocker. Turn off to continue" - TRIPLE MORONS
'somebody other than BT
Well it looks like FTTP is coming to Torpoint in darkest Cornwall in February courtesy of Widanet. I am happy to pay an extra £5 to £10 a month to BT's competitor for the sake of choice. Every day we have to scramble round the trenches all over town.
For the first 6 months of lockdown I was renting a 3rd floor flat in Torpoint which looked down towards Staddon heights. Watching the larger ships come in they would go from left to right and vice versa 5 times. Lots of photo opportunities. The best pics were of the large auxillaries ( such as Tide Force ) as they passed The Edgcumbe Arms, towering over it.
About 20 miles of the M6 in Staffs in both directions is currently under speed restrictions because of on going work until 2022. But there is no work going on. It appears to have been fully upgraded to "smart motorway".
What is the delay
Why 20 0r MORE MILES AT A TIME. Why not do it in a rolling 2 mile stretch.
The interest on the cones used in this stretch would probably pay for a few hundred nurses.
Any roadworks increase the likleyhood of accidents, especially in such long stretches. Can the HA/HE/whatever justify these extra accidents.
Here in the vicinity to Devonport we have the nuclear all clear every week.
And it has been pointed out that if the tragic shootings in Plymouth had happened in Torpoint, no one would have noticed because we have firing practice most days of the week including weekends. And it is usual if you are are on the road in the small hours to see several dark shapes emerging from the hedgerows with pointy things in their hands.
C'est la vie.
The company I worked for had a customer that only used IBM. But there were not enough slots for all the cards they needed ( until IBM released their extender box for approx £2k). So we supplied the PCs and made a fortune on the RAM upgrade.They wanted HD,FD, 640k memory , clock, parallel, serial. So we ended up suppling XT with AST 6 pack and learning about the wonderful world of sidekick. That was a groundbreaking package and it was free with the 6 pack.
The best employer I ever had 50 years ago embraced the unions and encourage all workers to join. They had a profit share scheme which encouraged everyone to work for the benefit of the organisation. They had a suggestion scheme where someone won a car and thousands of pounds as a proportion of the savings made. The managers and unions worked together.
The owner was an asylum seeker called Mr Schreiber. Oh for the days. There is no reason this cannot be done now if the owners are not too greedy.
I had a spam telephone call today from a company promoting covid business claims. As I am on TPS I have registered a complaint with TPS.
But interestingly the company is a trading arm of a company of solicitors. As calling numbers registered on TPS is illegal I have also registered a complaint with the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Wait with interest what their action wiil be.
As an aside, anyone any idea if a small claims court action will be worthwhile for the time take to record a TPS complaint, as they would also have to pay the court fee which is a worthwhile penalty.
"encourage individuals to take out civil action each time and then see what happens to UK originated spam"
I am thinking of doing this for spam calls. Butr will I be able to claim a worthwhile amount in the small claims court, or will the court fees be enough to put them off.
If its any consolation Trustpilot are just as bad as ICO and are a waste of space.
"GIMP is that the name is offensive to many people"
When I first started in IT we had a colleague who was named Gay. At that time it did not have any other meaning. Times and preconceptions change. Nowadays that name would be offensive, the not at all.
Gimp was no more offensive than grep.
This might have been deliberate. Perhaps they want all these changes checked by a pair of eyes for security reasons. And it is not only government.
I have been frustrated recently by private orgs that required phone calls for mundane tasks.
AA Insurance - sorry because of covid you will have to sit in this phone queue for an hour to change your address - which could be done online in 10 seconds but we would not be able to try to upsell you. Tossers
Nationwide - I want to pay credit card automatically every month - easy peasy, just waste 20 mins of a help desk ops time to do something quite straightforward and make everyone wait longer for no other reason than we are incompetent.
I feel better now ...
"I can imagine there being a lot of protest at mining anything in Cornwall nowadays."
I think not. Cornwall has been mining for thousands of years. It is still seen here as a future source of jobs. We even had Rick Stein euologising about the china clay slag heaps a few weeks ago on TV. St Austell employs enough people in china clay for the local population to work with it. It will be the same with lithium.
Cornwall, Nr England
My current complaint through TPS received the following reply
It would appear that **** are misrepresented by a company using the same or similar trading name and/or spoofed their telephone number. However, we have not been able to positively identify the offending company. Please note that TPS does not have the facility to track or trace telephone calls that you have received.
I have replied with email received from them with headers that clearly show the company involved.
But to do this I had to convince them to send me an email.
Most of the Indian call centres used spoofed numbers and TPS are powerless to follow up. I get 1 to 2 calls every day, I string them out to waste their time and try to get them to send an email to get some evidence.
The government need to force carriers to use technology that can verify or track back numbers. This would also stop a high percentage of fraud carried out by telephone.
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