Posts by gryphon

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: print car number plates on takeaway bags to discourage customers from littering

I think they'd have been better introducing an if you've got a public general waste bin you need to have a recycling one as well.

And if you have a recycling one then have a general too.

Reason for the latter is it would reduce the "I've got a food wrapper, where's a bin, there's one, oh, it's recycling only, where's another bin, 20 metres away, sod that, in it goes'.

And thus all the recycling stuff gets contaminated.

My local Sainsbury's have a big recycling machine in their car park which pays something like 5p per item as a voucher, think it does glass and plastic. Between Christmas and now it's been open maybe 2 days.

They also have smaller machines in store which only take plastic bottles, cans etc. Also not working most of the time AND refuses to take their own brand squash bottles.

So what's the point.

Re: print car number plates on takeaway bags to discourage customers from littering

Many of them have that already for the parking leeches.

Sorry, the valued companies making up the parking management community.

Apple emits emergency patch for older iPhones after snoops pounce on WebKit hole

Re: Say what you want about Apple

Indeed. Just upgraded an old 6+ which must be getting on for at least 8 years old.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Re: I just had to do it...

It would still skew the political system though since Wyoming would get however many new congressional districts to cover that population. If Amish don't vote then more likely that they will all end up Republican.

Although this would also remove some congressional districts in other states since the maximum number is fixed at 435.

I believe this has happened recently, CA lost a couple, TX gained a couple or similar.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

I think I read somewhere that if you have a Samsung smart washing machine and Samsung smart dryer that the first could communicate weight etc. of laundry to the latter and adjust program accordingly.

Seemed pretty pointless to me though since your not necessarily taking everything from washing machine and putting in dryer.

Agreed.

Enforcement by govt. not held by govt.

e.g. NCC Group for instance offers software escrow and has for many years.

HPE to face lawsuit for allegedly misleading DXC investors

Prisoner Lawrie would be better but unfortunately this is a civil case. :-(

Even if they find against him he'll probably only need to sell 1 or 2 of his many properties.

Can't remember if he had the traditional CEO yacht or not.

Heata offers free hot water by mounting servers on people's water tanks

Re: Ridiculous

Would it not currently be cheaper to run these in a home since that would be on a domestic (capped) electricity tariff if they paid back the householder for the energy consumed compared to business tariffs which are currently much, much higher?

Not saying this concept is a good idea, just an interesting thought exercise.

As to dust which someone mentioned you'd only get dust with active cooling via fans, I thought the whole point of this was that it was a sealed black box so all the heat could be transferred to the tank?

Re: Just how hot do these servers get?

Max operating temperature for an E5-1600 (which is pretty old) is 64C, that's presumably where it will instruct server to shut down rather than what it runs at normally though.

But the TDP for that is 130W which isn't exactly chickenfeed for 1 CPU.

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Never found them too noisy once the management agents kicked in to reduce the fan speed.

Startup until that point, ear defenders needed indeed in a small area.

Blade chassis are even worse since they have so many fans.

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

Re: RIP - thanks for the memories!

I think I actually got mine in a package with Wing Commander and a joystick.

Then probably spent far, far too much time playing it.

Does bring back some nasty memories of trying to find free IRQ's etc. though back in the day for all these add on cards.

Tesla fails to push racial discrimination lawsuit into arbitration

Hmm.

So if someone signed a contract to sell their child as a slave then changed their mind after they'd handed it over they'd have to go to binding arbitration to get them back even though it was an illegal act in the first place?

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Can't be monetized?

I always figured they were swallowing it under the Prime costs to allow playing of their basic music service.

Which they’ve managed to screw up big time with the change to only allowing so many shuffles per hour etc.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

Re: TV Licence future

Indeed. Private Eye are always very fond of quoting BBC management salaries.

Head of programming BBC - £350K

Head of programming BBC1 - £320K

Assistant deputy head of programming Radio 4 - £250K

Deputy assistant assistant head of programming Radio 4 - £200K

Laura Kuensberg i.e. actual “talent” - £150K

Obviously I’m pulling from vague recollections here but probably not too far off.

OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

Re: Puzzled...

Absolutely nothing as I understand it, except the iOS app isn't allowed to say there is another option or link directly to it.

Re: Apple users can afford it

Not just Apple much as I hate to defend them, extra storage is definitely a rip off.

Amazon - Samsung S22 Ultra

256GB = £939

512GB = £1149

I always figure Apple are selling extremely expensive storage which just happens to come inside an iPhone or iPad to actually make use of it.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Re: my Brother laser printer still working since 2007

Similar. I had a 6 or 7 year old HP OfficeJet 8000 series until a couple of weeks ago.

Barely stretched it's capabilities and had it on Instant Ink once the original cartridges neared empty, which took a while, so I wasn't faffing about.

Died 2 weeks ago when I got 'printhead not found' messages, separate head and ink tanks in this model.

Cost for new head £120 and no guarantee it actually is the head itself.

Cost of the printer originally £30, was reduced and HP were doing a £100 trade-in against any old printer.

Cost of new more basic HP 4000 series inkjet still with an ADF but no proper paper input tray and 2 year warranty, £49 including 9 months instant ink. Has triple colour cartridge so I certainly wouldn't have bought it without that.

Such a shame to shove the old one out to the electronics section at the dump. Sorry, civic amenity site. :-(

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Re: Parody

Given that they let people go in the first go round that they then called on the Monday morning with an "oops, could you come back pretty please because we've just worked out we can't run the company without you" how would one know?

Although no doubt access is hived out to a 3rd party security company.

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Re: Static wouldn't have been the only problem

Try PC's in the weighbridge of a coal distribution yard.

Surprisingly they were still working when completely full of coal dust.

Took one outside, opened case and tipped the dust out, what a mess, thankfully the wind was blowing away from me at the time.

No wonder the operators were complaining the PSU fan was running at full pelt all the time.

Those were being updated manually by operator reading the scale and typing the value in but eventually we ripped those out and put new PC's in connected directly to the weighbridge to read the weight directly.

Avery charged £1000 a go for the license for the API / driver for that which was a 2Kb file if I remember correctly, and that was when £1000 was a lot of money.

Happy days.

Re: protective film? That was a privacy screen

I've been given a touch screen laptop for a particular piece of work.

Ugh. Like you I abhor anyone touching my screen ever. I've ever so politely 'bumped' people when they were going to do so many times to stop them since simply slapping their hand away might be misinterpreted. :-)

World Cup apps pose a data security and privacy nightmare

I've been reading Star Wars as written by Shakespeare recently.

Somehow it just fits, especially for C3PO.

Boffins find COVID changed the way sysadmins work – probably for the worse

Re: Example

Problem nowadays is that many of the remaining Exchange environments that haven't been moved to cloud, apart from those using them for managing O365 mailboxes, tend to be for more secure environments that either don't allow or don't have a way to do screen sharing.

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

Re: Out of date?

Pedant alert

I think that was actually Bernard Woolley rather than Sir Humphrey

Watchdog urged to sniff out any collusion, deception in rent-setting algorithms

Re: Let's think out side the algorithm....

I think that already happens in the US

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Faxing is often better

Some members of my family get monthly and 2 monthly repeat prescriptions.

All was working very well when GP surgery would fax the things to Boots branch, Boots would then text us to say prescription was ready.

GP (I believe) then stopped using fax following a directive from NHS Scotland and started posting the repeats to Boots.

At least 1 in 3 of these are now getting lost in the post, delivered late etc.

Why this stuff can't be sent electronically between GP and pharmacist even as a scanned doc say which is all the fax is really doing I have no idea, even following up with the scrip by post.

Very annoying situation and these are for pretty innocuous meds not the likes of Opioids scrips which presumably you really don't want to go missing in the post.

Have to chase Boots to see if they received the thing, then the GP when they haven't to see that they've actually remembered to send it.

Then Boots will get permission from the GP over the phone to part fill the scrip and wait on the post for the rest which means we have to make 2 trips to them.

Public cloud prices to surge in US and Europe next year

Re: Gotcha

BBC Scotland in Glasgow have done this with their car park.

No idea of their payback period but must have satisfied some bean counters somewhere since it’s a big installation.

Probably helps keep the cars cooler on the 1 or 2 days a year that Glasgow gets above 25C

Er, Musk's trial hasn't stopped, no matter what he told Twitter, says judge

Re: Is the financing problem really going to get Musk off the hook?

The $1 billion is only an option in certain very constrained circumstances.

e.g. Material adverse event, regulatory non-compliance etc.

There is some mention of not being able to meet financing obligations as well but I think that ship has sailed.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Always hated installing CPUs in the days before ZIF sockets or BGA, usually felt the motherboard was about to break in two before the thing snicked home.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

Acetate sheets wrapped around the fuses roller were always fun. Usually necessitated swapping the fuses unit out then sending off for repair or replacing the Teflon coated roller.

Occasionally though one could very gingerly slice through the acetate and peel it off.

Some clients it would happen once and you’d never get another call from them for the same thing. Others it would be a regular occurrence. Pretty much depended whether it was pay as you go or a support contract, you can guess which would be which.

Let’s think, this would have been back in 97 or 98 so a refurb fuser for an

LJ4 was about £35. New one about £120 maybe. Or £5 for a new roller and 30 minutes of effort when I wasn’t busy and bob’s your uncle.

I haven’t checked lately but no doubt fusers now even for big printers are sealed units, return to manufacturer and so on.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

I remember the accountants at a previous firm back in Excel 97 using very large spreadsheets filling up pretty much every cell plus macros and so on.

I think the line then was that you could assume 1 error for every 20 lines in Excel so they probably had hundreds of errors in something that was basically driving the company. <Shiver>

Plus they kept breaking it because it was so large, average spread sheet back in the day was a couple of hundred Kb if memory serves, these were Mb's.

Thankfully they didn't understand Access or that would have been the next thing they would have pounced on.

On the other hand if you want to actually understand Excel and use it to it's fullest extent it's always best to talk to an accountant.

Xcel smart thermostat users lose their cool after power company locks them out

Re: Control issues

My thought as well.

Power companies don't help themselves either though in pushing the benefits.

I regularly get e-mails from Octopus saying why not get s Smart Meter so you can sign up for our 'Smart' tariffs.

Umm, no. You know my monthly usage from the readings I diligently give you, why not give me even a ballpark estimate of how much my savings would be in the email itself and then I might have a think about it.

Only way I can really save on power usage is convincing the wife that bath towels can be used more than one time which would cut down on one washing and one drying load per day. :-(

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

Very similar to restaurants.

Have a look at the menu for The Ivy for instance.

Teeny, tiny text at the bottom

"A discretionary optional service charge of 12.5% will be added to your bill."

For one thing discretionary and optional are a tautology. For another if it's automatically added in my opinion it's neither since most people will be too embarrassed to ask for it to be taken off.

Not me of course. :-) Obviously I left a direct equal tip in cash since I believe the Ivy like many others impose an 'admin' charge on their own stuff if done within the whole bill.

Wasn't my choice of restaurant in case of course.

Just noticed they've also started adding a cover charge of £2 as well when I looked at a menu online.

For heavens sake.

This would be like adding an 'every time you switch the engine on there's a charge' in the auto industry to get back to the real topic.

Microsoft thinks there are people on 2G networks who want to use Outlook

Re: "the best Outlook experience"

Well Outlook on my Corp laptop takes about 200MB currently.

Teams on the other hand, nearly 900MB between all the different processes.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

These are also nice

https://addc.com/product/biodigitalpc-12x/

Earlier generation of Core i7 and require a dock for desktop use or can do a cluster in a modified peli case.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

Re: Surveillance

There was a book or story written about that but I can't remember by whom.

Basically it was illegal to be out of view or hearing of a govt. owned camera or microphone whether at home, in the street or in a vehicle.

Even the brothels had them.

Re: Quite apart from online...

If memory serves that was Douglas Adams theory from the foreword to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

No idea if it was original or not but certainly makes sense. :-)

He also had the idea that about voting to make sure that the wrong lizard didn't get into office. I'm sure he wasn't thinking about any of our honourable members there.

Other alternative is 'The Voter' I think it was called by Isaac Asimov.

One person per electoral cycle talks to a computer which then decides every single elected official.

All depends on the algorithm I suppose.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Re: "the increasing urgency to decarbonize transportation"

I believe many Greens have already moved on to decrying all forms of personal transport whether hydrocarbo, BEV or Hydrogen on the grounds that the particulate matter from brake dust and tyre wear is equal or worse than the NOx or Co2.

i.e. They've changed the goal posts

Watch a RAID rebuild or go to a Christmas party? Tough choice

Re: Pre-emptive swap

Or says its rebuilt the mirror but actually hasn't so if disk 1 has been replaced and disk 2 then fails bye, bye array.

Looking at you HP Smart Array.

Thankfully caught that when I joined a new company since one of the first things I looked at was firmware versions on servers, RAID controllers etc.

Listed as a critical issue on release notes but nobody had noticed up to that point.

Re: It's got RAID so it can't fail. . .

Similar issue we found in managing some Exchange servers where HPE's preferred architecture had been followed.

Use single SAS disks per group of replicated databases but make each one a logical array within the Smart Array (SA).

Ok, fine. Whatever.

Problem being that for some reason if Windows starts showing errors on the disk, i.e. unable to read file, bad sector etc. it does NOT get flagged up by the Smart Array as a predictive failure or failed disk.

So if your Wintel guys aren't specifically monitoring for the correct NTFS event log ID's you'll be blissfully unaware of the issue. There is a Smart Array event generated saying couldn't provide the file to Windows but SA doesn't class it as anything it cares about so does nothing.

Back since the IDE days seeing a bad sector on disk means there have already been multiple failures and spare good sectors have been mapped in until they've run out. Replace disk immediately if you see that.

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Did a new motherboard not often need a new HAL?

Don't think changing the HAL was supported without a rebuild.

But then again there wasn't any way to convert a domain controller to a member server either but there was a lovely piece of software called UPromote that could do it.

Completely unsupportable by MS but solved a problem so all good.

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Re: Emergency credit?

Presumably no-one has the manual card entry devices these days as a fallback.

They were fun when I was a petrol cashier with massive queues on a Saturday afternoon. :-(

I think some people damaged the magnetic strip on purpose so it would take a few extra days for payment to be requested from their card each time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

Microsoft delays next Exchange Server release to 2025

Re: Yah! Exchange 2019 is now supported on Server 2022 !

Even now it is supported they are wary of Exchange 2019 on Server 2022.

Re: Yah! Exchange 2019 is now supported on Server 2022 !

Yup.

Only problem is Windows Server 2022 is a bit cutting edge for many clients so they want Exchange 2019 on Server 2019, and will then be confused when an in-place upgrade to vNext can't be done and why are those nasty Exchange people wanting double the storage, again.

How about Server 2019 or Server 2022 core I hear you ask?

Oh, we haven't tried all our security stacks on that and the BAU guys get confused without a GUI so just go with Desktop Experience 'k?

Fact that the BAU guys having to actually RDP to an Exchange server should be a once in a blue moon event cuts no ice.

Indeed.

I'd have thought they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops as a separate article.

We said we would get to it, and it's only 3 years late so not too bad for us. :-)

Do keep up old chap.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/removing-your-last-exchange-server-faq/ba-p/3455411

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Re: Tesla obviously don't use workday

My company uses it for performance review stuff, time off, noting on call, overtime etc.

Certainly not the best system out there but it’s usable. But as noted finding out holiday days left is indeed an exercise in frustration.

We use a separate system for tracking time allocated to particular projects.

Azure Active Directory logs are lagging, alerts may be wrong or missing

Love the CRUD acronym

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: and the sad part

That is not sad in any way. Just prudent.

Re: HP Laserjet 5

There was an oddity with the 8000 series which succeeded the 5Si if memory serves.

Some software’s printouts would just look weird with the 8000 driver so the trick was to use the 5Si driver instead.

Functionally identical really but must have been some slight difference in the PCL coding.

Was in a graphics department so must have been Autocad or Solidworks.

Re: HP Laserjet 5

Always hated working on the Si’s. Not because they were hard to work on but because they’d always be stuck in inaccessible corners and needed to move them to work on. Heavy and unwieldy beasts at the best of times and never anybody else to help you.