Posts by Snar 185 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jan 2012
What's wrong with running Orifice under OSX? Works perfectly here.
With a mix of Linux Mint with Oracle Virtualbox for some non-Linux comms software and OSX I've pretty much weaned myself away from any reliance on Windows.
My Linux box can dual boot into Win11 but typically only gets used when I feel like tormenting myself for an hour plus updating and then fixing the update.
About 8 years or so ago my Partner bought a new Win 10 machine and didn't like it and asked me to put Mint on it. I'd been running Mint for a few years prior to that and waxed lyrical about it so duly did so.
In that time I've had pretty much no sysadmin tasks to perform and she loves its stability.
I Mint on all of my machines and servers in my home office / lab and up until last week my main office machine was on Mint 20.3. I'd been planning on updating because the OS was very old and I couldn't get support for a few devices I wanted to use (Picoscope and an SDR receiver). I was going to do it last Christmas but was expecting a lot of problems. My old Mellanox 10G card had gone titsup, had a new card on order so decided to bite the bullet. It took about an hour go go through the different previous Mint OS versions to get to 22.2 but it just worked. No pain at all. The machine had a new OS and my Win 10 VM worked, all of my comms related programmes worked, the Picoscope and the SDR worked. Really, really easy.
The machine runs from the Linux partition 99% of the time but does also have a WIndows 11 partition because I had a spare license and it is useful just in case. It took over an hour to download and install the 2H25 Win 11 "update" and it broke the Intel 1G NIC so had to use a USB to 1G board to get back on-line and download the Intel driver and then it worked again. About an hour and a half faffing about.
The 10G Intel card arrived and after swapping out the Mellanox, booted back up into Mint and got link and worked. For shits and giggles I booted into Windows and of course, it didn't work without going back to Intel to get the driver. These are Intel NICs and not some Chinese Yingong devices - Why did the update break my NICs?
I've used MS since DOS5 and seen if just get progressively worse after Win7 (slow boot got me to try Ubuntu Linux). Where is the SQA testing? I guess it's the punters that are doing it. Apparently they pushed an update out that then knew would bork 11% of users. I think it's the pain of updating Microsoft OS' that preventing me updating Mint.
In my setup I use Mint as the main daily driver with a Win10 VM for comms related Windows only s/w and a Macbook Pro for Orifice and music related things as well as a Roon endpoint and that works for me. I can easily swap between the main machine or the Mac by powering one machine down and the other up and my monitors, network, audio all work regardless of the machine in use.
I can understand why people are sick to the back teeth with Win11 - it sucks.
The Orange Jesus is just holding off to give Musk time to create a new Swastika shaped charging plug and make the Merkin EV chargers only compatible with those. The whole idea is protectionism to stop German auto imports. The plug is to be specified in "Freedom Units" which is ironically what the Republican Merkins call the Imperial British weights and measures units.
Although people say that Musk is a Nazi, he can't be because they made good cars.
We have finally got to a point where the value of convenience features is now more than human life.
I don't want to rely on sensors and software written by a commercial company with a budget to demonstrably put my life and the life of others at risk so that I can go "ooh...look....no hands!"
I had a PA complaining that she couldn't print. I told her that the font was too big for the cable and that she needed to disconnect the cable and shake the characters out, which she promptly did.
Then there was a drinks machine that had been configured so that you could order a "strong" water - so I had a few people trying to tell the difference.
Then fairly recently a friend had a standalone recirculating water feature as a present so set it up but thought it was too loud. So I suggested that the water was too hard and that it needed soft water to reduce the noise.
I've also got a squint where one eye goes off on a wander - I tell people that it's good because I can see around corners.
I hate advertising. I don't expect it baked into an OS that I pay for.
This crap really makes me angry. Get to a point where you have a product that is worthy of buying and then start pan-handling from advertisers and give an option to either get a free version of Windows with ads or paid with no crap baked in.
I met my partner in the early days of the Internet boom - I think it was 1988/9. She was working for a Quango and had this thing called email. I'd just started a new job and managed to negotiate a Compaq DX2/66 luggable PC.
The whole idea of the Internet was to me at the time fascinating so subscribed to Demon using dial up with a Sportster 14,000 modem. I think the DOS package was Demon DIS? - then I got Trumpet Winsock running (pre-TCPIP stack in WIndows) and Mosaic 1.0 and an email client that can't remember. Had a lot of fun playing Doom on-line and thanks to Demon I introduced the company I was working with to the Internet and ran two lunch sessions and EVERYONE in the company (40+ people) came to see what it was about.
I owe Demon a lot - I'm not directly involved in the IT industry - I work for a semiconductor manufacturer but do support our Ethernet switches and supporting software. I cut my teeth with Demon and will always have fond memories of the days of DIS and dial up.
Demon was a brilliant company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IagZIM9MtLo
So if France wasn't a sovereign state, why could it close the border to the UK?
Both my partner and a friend were due to be in the Yard of Ale when it was blown up. About 15 years ago I bumped into a chap whose brother had been in there and lost his life. It was the first time he had been in Birmingham since that day. We went there and raised a glass to his brother.
Anyone who thinks the GFA is a political negotiating too for their xenophobic, nationalistic agenda is not right in the head. People died.
So the benefits (apart from job creation from Brexshit bureaucracy) are a reduction in tampon tax and glorious crowns on our pint glasses. What a win!
Fcuking idiots.
I would also have expected decent bandpass filtering on the input of an altimeter RX. If this was to be an issue then why wasn't it raised before $80Bn was taken from the sale of the spectrum? I would have thought that the FAA would have screamed loudly when the spectrum was up for sale?
I remember years ago hearing that the CAA had a massive issue with PLT power line comms in the UK but failed to do anything about it.
You can't allow companies to bid and legitimately purchase spectrum and then whinge that it may be an issue once the deal is done. I don't know how spectrum sale operates in the US, but there must be a due process to allow other spectrum stakeholders to raise concerns.
I was of the impression that getting flight approval was one of the hardest to achieve - maybe I'm wrong. I would have expected a good level of bandpass filtering if the altimeters are critical for fight approval. Maybe someone more knowledgeable of the regulations can put me right.
And that's from another greybeard :)
My late uncle worked for ICL.
When I was a kid he brought me bits and pieces such as core stores, magnets from printers and all sorts of stuff. He fired my imagination and a desire to work in electronics / communications. When I was at school he gave me dead boards and I learned my soldering skills desoldering 7400 series chips off the boards and more than anything else he gave me the confidence to go into engineering. When I went to college and poly he was there for me and gave me lots of encouragement and kit to play with.
He was my mentor and whilst he was a cantankerous old git sometimes, he was a real shining light in my life. Great bloke, hence the pint.
Yup - We lost the HF spectrum to non EMC compliant switched mode power supplies, xDSL and Fuckwit Powerline junk. I fought against it and Ofcom took it up the arse like good little puppies.
Nothing is protected from not putting barriers up to innovation / business. Just junk whatever so someone else can make a fucking fortune.
I quite liked dbx back in the day - seemed to be a much better system than crappy Dolby C. It was a PITA that you couldn't play back dbx tapes on a non-dbx casette deck but apart from that I quite liked it.
I've still got my circa 1984 Akai HXA3x tape deck and it's still running after all of these years. But I did succumb to a Revox B77 half track high speed which delights to this day :)
When you have companies that are selling devices at almost no margin and trashing global pricing, the money suddenly goes out of the business and profits start to go south. So what do you do? Cut back on high capital investments. Investors need to see a return on their investments - if they don't you don't have cash to run your business.
Couple that with the commodification of even microcontrollers and aggressive PICOS supplier antics and you end up with where we are today.
Said companies leadtimes go out to over 12 months and then suddenly you start having conversations with their disgruntled clients to help them design your stuff in. And the stupid thing is that when we come out of this partly client generated clusterf**k they will switch back to their previous slightly cheaper suppliers because beancounters told engineering to do so.
Problem is that when the next dip comes along (as it will) there will be a lot more pain after such a large amount of investment in capital and the cuts will likely be deeper.
Yes - very aggressive PICOS techniques adopted by auto makers have cut down the margins that semiconductor manufacturers can expect to make from these huge accounts and partly lead to the streamlining of semiconductor production.
What do automotive manufacturers expect? They are partly to blame for the problems they are facing. Now they are reaping the rewards. If I've got 100k pcs of a part and I can sell them to one account for $1 and another for $1.30 it's not a difficult decision as to who gets the priority when there are supply constraints.
What really irks me is the cost of electronic car components when they go tits-up knowing that the manufacturer will have paid bottom dollar for the parts inside it.
Yes. I had an issue when I upgraded to 1Gbps where the s/n ratio wasn't sufficient for DOCSIS3 and a new cable was pulled to my home. But I think the real mark of a good provider is not having the problems that need to be put right in the first place.
We've had a few issues with power outages which have been outside VM's ken, but the network seemed to come back up as soon as power was restored.
There have been outages when they have worked on the network, but in the 2 decades that I've been with them, I'd be surprised if I've seen 5 days down-time.
I don't mind having a pop at a service provider that doesn't, but in my experience I've consistently been very pleased with what VM have provided me. I don't have any connections (apart from cable) with the company and if I thought they were shit I wouldn't be with them.
But the alternative of crappy xDSL fills me with dread.
Another +1 from me for pfsense.
I had a Netgate SG-3100 for about 4 years which ran out of puff when I upgraded the broadband service to 1Gbps/50Mbps and is now running on a Dell R210 Mk2 with an Intel i340 NIC and a 120GB SSD and it cost me £100 to put together. Faultless. Machine is pretty much silent and lives in my home office next to my desk although Mk1's are more noisy AFAIK.
