Posts by Chz 345 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2010
Almost everyone I know who did Warhammer was into Lore and Miniatures. Not so much the game. Problem was, if you were into Lore there was a sizeable cognitive dissonance between that and the game itself. For example, Lore paints a bog standard Space Marine as basically a Demigod, and they're slightly tougher than average cannon fodder on the tabletop.
I usually get an initial response out of Citrix quickly, but any follow up can take forever. I had a message that my ticket had been escalated noon Friday and I would receive a call or contact in 90 minutes. That was the last I heard from them and it's now Wednesday next week.
Unfortunately, last week's patch introduced some sort of instability in a SAML auth piece that the Netscaler only fronts for (no AAA involved). Still going on, affecting thousands. No response from support. My favourite is that the last email included a "or call us!" link that just feeds into the loathsome AI chatbot. All numbers have been wiped from their site, and I've heard from resellers that there is no local support in the UK at all now.
LG's EU firmware is not quite as obnoxious, but you do have to be aware enough to not just tick the "approve everything" box and go about your life.
If you only allow the minimum, there are no ads, no spyware, etc. I've been told that you don't get to opt out of such things in other regions.
The main downside is that you do need an LG account to download any apps, should you want to, and that shares whatever details are in the account with them. If you're using a Fire TV or ATV+, you can skip even that.
Like most old, DC-motored EMU stock, they're very reliable right up until they aren't. The Bakerloo stock is *so* old that it's well up the wall of the far end of the bathtub curve and they're running out of old parts and trains to cannibalise. The more heavily used, and only one year newer Piccadilly stock is in even worse shape. A lot of this has to do not with daily maintenance, but the need for occasional deep rebuilds. The Central Line stock is 20 years newer, but just as unreliable because it hasn't had the major rebuild that the 72/73 stock had many years back. (Though it was an experiment in many ways and always a bit tetchy) The 2008 Victoria Line stock is rock solid now after a shaky start.
The old Southern Rail 455s that have only just been retired are probably the record setters. Though built in the 80s, they re-used DC motors from the 40s and were the most reliable trains in the country for a good 10 years. But even they got to be pretty shaky towards the end.
Which is a long winded way of saying that the bathtub curve is real and older stuff always looks more reliable until it gets *really* old.
There's a commonly held opinion on the petrol-head forums that up to around the mid-teens is the last "golden era" of automobiles. They have just enough tech to help out, but not to get in your way. Most of them are not reliant in a way that causes the car to be undriveable if they fail. And it predates the race to the bottom of tiny little turbocharged engines to try and squeak around the EU carbon taxes. No one really expects a 1.2L 3 cylinder turbo powering a 1500+kg car to still be running well after 15 years (though I'm sure some will). Added bonus of course is that they're all now 10+ years old and affordable. There are still high end cars with tech that gets in your way, and smaller cars with explosive turbochargers (google "Ford Ecoboom") so buyer beware, but a lot of great automobiles fit into the category.
I suppose the question here is if Apple have done something to fix the issues with the original 8GB M1 Airs swapping all the time (which wasn't terribly noticeable with a fast SSD) and absolutely hammering the lifespan of the disk. There are quite a lot of 8GB M1s out there with failed disks. The calculus is that so long as you're a light user, you're not going to make the disk fail before the rest of the laptop is junk. But heavy users saw how responsive the 8GB units could be and tried to get away with saving a bit of cash. That tended to end poorly.
Surely you mean they save £1750 on naturalisation, plus whatever incidental costs, plus the £100 for a passport.
I have ILR myself, and I swear the Home Office has done everything possible to make it such that it's better for me to remain so than become a British Subject. Despite whatever complete piffle Reform is spouting this week. As a Commonwealther, ILR is almost *better* than citizenship. We get the vote, but can't be drafted. (Though I may be a wee bit grey at the temples for that now)
I think you need to add "in an airliner" to all of those for it to be true.
Most of that was old hat to the USAF at the time.
That doesn't discount how impressive Concorde was. Using these things in the civilian realm for the first time was a Big Deal. Some still not in common use today, though that would be because they're unnecessary for subsonic flight.
"Actually, everyone born in the UK has an NI number. It's harder to not have one than it is to have one. It's pretty easy to lose it if you're clumsy though."
First statement provably false, as a quick check of past newspaper articles will show. I'd agree with the second though - it is hard.
I suppose the 16% of the population not born here don't count? I didn't have a problem getting an NI number, but I was young, educated, and quite employable.
Done right, digital identity would mean sharing less information, not more. Think about proving your age as an example. Your passport or driving license does this with your date of birth, but that's a key piece of personal information. If I was buying a knife or some pornography online, then an "over 18" check through your digital identity provider would only give a yes or no. It would limit the information you share.
You'd almost think there aren't birth certificates, though they're rubbish as ID for historical reasons. Changing that wouldn't affect everyone who's already been born, so not a useful exercise.
You're not a Freeman, are you? Your average child has been added to at least a dozen different official databases by the time they reach majority. That ship has sailed. The problem is that they don't get any benefit from that, and it's useless as ID. ID, as identification, is bloody useful for everyone. It's what successive governments keep trying to tie it to that's the problem.
Uh yes, there are plenty of places that took covid as a chance to deny entry to anyone without an e-ticket. You may not go to gigs or nightclubs much, but you will be barred from entry without the ID of their choice - which is a very limited selection - and often an e-ticket that you must have a smartphone to use. Your dystopia already exists, and it's spreading.
Ah, the arrogance of someone who's always worked for a living.
No, everyone does not have an NI number. And I'm not talking about the homeless, either. I think you'll find the number of adults who have no driving licence, no passport, and no NI number and still have a (semi) permanent address to be surprisingly large. It's not a huge percentage of the population, but even single digit percentages of 70 million adds up. There is also a reasonable need for children to have some form of ID in the 21st century, and that adds several million to the list.
That doesn't mean that *this* scheme is the answer, but a blanket statement of "We have NI, and that's good enough" doesn't fly.
They don't have to make it a requirement to make it a requirement, if you know what I mean.
98% of people will end up with one within ten years because it will be a giant pain in the backside to not have one. It's not required to own a computer (even the one in your phone counts), but it's a massive ballache if you don't.
I do wonder what the driver issues were. I used Win2k as my primary desktop from shortly after launch until well after WinXP showed up. To about 2006 or so, I think. I'm both a techie and a gamer, and the only driver issues were some lack of availability at the launch date. It all cleared up within a few months and was sorted out before WinXP launched. MS could have easily pushed Win2k as an end user solution, but someone wanted to play with the crayons and produce XP instead. When I did move to XP, I used a theme to make it more Win2k-like.
The newest machines that can't (or rather, won't) run Windows 11 are 8 years old. I don't think it's going to affect the Commercial sector all that much; any given company rarely has anything that old. That being said, converting the users over to 11 is still an ongoing headache where I am. Home users are unlikely to give a damn whether or not they still get updates, to our detriment more than theirs.
Our security team forbids labelling servers, should any ne'er-do-wells get in and head straight to the backup server or domain controller.
Process is to look things up in the rack elevation tables, which are kept *pretty* well up to date and have someone flash a light on the thing to be doubly sure. Which sounds ridiculous, but I never trusted labels in the first place so it really just eliminates step one of three in identification with the other two steps above now being canon.
It's got ages of support, and any commonly failing bits can be replaced by the user. It's not bad for the money, especially since it's not pretty much obsolete at release like previous Fairphones were. This is the first time I can say it's a decent spec, albeit on the pricey side for said spec.
The last three phones to go out of use went like this:
Huawei V20 - Destroyed when the Missus used it for a Pokemon Go "baby" account and dropped it while trying to play on both hands at once. Well, not "destroyed", but a new screen worth more than the phone was needed. Processed at the local Recycling Centre.
Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro - Donated to the Child, who was now old enough for a smart phone. It does not receive updates any more, but he's 14 and it doesn't matter. The Missus got a Note 12 Pro out of the deal. Which will probably eventually go to the Child when she gets a Note 16 Pro or something. Pokemon is rough on the battery and Xiaomis aren't any awful lot more new than a battery replacement is. Note 9 Pro will probably go in a drawer, being far too old to usefully trade in. My mum can use it when visiting from Canada.
Google Pixel 7 - Ah, here's the one. Google offered a Trade-in Bonus and a sale price on the Pixel 9 at the same time. I didn't *need* a new phone, but swapping a 7 for a 9 for £180 after trade in was too tempting to leave on the table. So hopefully someone is using my old Pixel 7 somewhere. Barring another deal like that, I expect to keep the Pixel 9 for 6-ish years.
So to get a useful trade-in, one must offer a useful trade-in deal. I felt slight guilt at swapping out a 2 year-old phone, but it does pretty much ensure it actually gets used, and paying £90/year to stay updated to the latest seems a decent value.
I mean, I mostly wouldn't buy them because they're turning out bad cars now. VW used to make a pretty decent machine, but their massive cost cutting (partly due to overinvestment in China, where the local carmakers have taken back a large part of the market) has resulted in some pretty poor models of late. Add to that the baffling decision a few years back to make every control in the car touch sensitive that they're only slowly rolling back now due to horrendous feedback from owners. I was in an Audi Q4 a few months ago, and the assembly quality and materials were shocking for what's supposedly a premium model. My Mazda is nicer.
Dieselgate ranks second in my reasons for avoiding them, because as others have said nearly everyone was gaming that system. Just not quite so nakedly cheating as VW was.
Celerons have see-sawed back and forth between "junk" and "pretty good deal" a number of times over the years. Mendocino and Tualatin Celerons? Brilliant for the money. Anything Netburst-based? Horrible junk. When they first went dual core back in Sandy Bridge days, they were a good deal again. But became junk as they kept the 2 cores only for 10 years. The very last Alder Lake ones with 1xP and 4xE cores were decent again. I suppose there are also the Atom-based ones, which really depended on usage (for a NAS? Great. For a laptop? Junk).
The security risks in deploying automation and renewing so often are surely greater than the risk of a compromised certificate. As you say, you almost never hear about such things and it would be rather big news for a major site. Even the rare compromise I've heard of has been at the intermediate/CA level where they have to cancel and then re-issue certs anyhow.
I work for a University. It's going to suck. Data Security have decided that an internal CA is not good enough for them, and we need commercial (because they also demand OV certs) certs for every bit of network kit. It's not so much the cost - Universities have a bulk buying power through JISC and GEANT - it's the headache of dozens of appliances that *cannot* have their certs renewed in an automated manner. Eventually everything will get updated to play nice, but I humbly predict that will happen after the certpocalypse these changes will bring. We're already paying extra for some commercial code to make certbot and the Citrix frontend play nice together and it's going to get worse. The contractors will be laughing.
"Do the SE / mini and they'll sell a mountain of them"
It's a common opinion, but the actual fact is that both the SE and the Mini are poor sellers - the discounted previous year's iPhone usually sells much better than them.
You could argue that this has a lot to do with Apple's pricing model rather than the devices, but that's just how Apple is and they're not going to change.
You can still find 3060/4060 Ti cards for not horrifying prices on Ebay, if you're okay with used. Should be well over 100% faster than an RX580. I have a 3060Ti and it's fine for 1440 gaming if you're not too into the whole ray tracing thing. DLSS3/4 is a massive, massive advantage to Nvidia cards because you can run in Performance mode with DLSS4 and still get great visuals and it really ramps the performance up.
It's the same (DNS block only) on Community Fibre, which I imagine is hugely popular with any London-based readers here. Given that setting my DNS to something else is one of the first things I do on an ISP's new router I've never seen any of the pirate sites blocked. I actually set the router to 1.1.1.3 (for the kiddies) and 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8 directly on any devices where I care about such things being blocked. I keep saying I should make a PiHole, but I never get a round tuit.
As aggravating as Nvidia can be at times, I do have a grudging admiration for their ability to execute their plans over the past 10 years or so. Sort of like Intel was 15 year ago. AMD and Intel can't get into the market not because their products are particularly inferior (though you could argue lack of CUDA makes them so), but because Nvidia hasn't put a foot wrong in a very long time in IT years. Even with a *better* product, when the market leader has 90% of the market it's not enough. They have to make a mistake. And I think one thing that Nvidia has and the other two don't that helps them not bugger it up is that they actually know where they're going. CUDA's dominance is the result of a near-20 year campaign to put it where it is. I don't see anything out of AMD that indicates that kind of vision on the GPU front.
I did mention Intel before to point out that it's not inevitable that Nvidia continues to eat all the pies. Hubris is a thing in IT, and Intel was certainly guilty of it. They still dominate the market of course, but they've shown their weak side and AMD continues to nibble away at their marketshare. And this is exactly the sort of boost that the ARM-based companies need to get their foot into the lucrative consumer desktop/laptop world. Maybe finally become a general purpose option in the server room, too. One wrong step out of Nvidia when AMD or Intel are having a good year could cause a seismic shift in the GPU market. Let's see what 2025 brings us.
I manage rolling out Ubuntu with ansible, and one of the first steps in main.yml is uninstalling snap. I still prefer Debian, but there are a few things installed in the past that preferred Ubuntu for various reasons (eg: GitHub) I think most of those will now work on Debian as well, but you know how it is with these things hanging on.
