Posts by Lazlo Woodbine

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

I remember our vicar had a QL, he also had a long string of Psions.

The QL was great because it had Microdrives and decent business software (for the time), such a shame the Microdrives were utter shite and prone to chewing up.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Last time I flew from Karachi airport all the x-ray machines were broke, so they just swept everyone through and onto the plane.

Fortunately someone must have mentioned this to the security at Muscat where we had a stop-over, so they marched everyone off the plane and tossed all the bags from the hold onto the runway.

Each bag was checked before being thrown back into the hold, all except one, which was marched away with the owner, presumably to some CIA black site in the desert somewhere.

Unfortunately I'd bought my sister a box of very intricate glass bangles, which were now in about a million pieces...

SerenityOS: Remarkable project with its own JS-capable web browser

Re: "Just for fun"

With regards to pointless, "just for fun" projects, I'm writing a novel, it's about 350,000 worlds long at the moment, with perhaps another 40k to go.

No-one but me will ever read it, because not a single publisher would look twice at a book this length from an unknown author, but I'm having a ball living my characters' lives.

So yeah, pointless and fun can coexist on the same plane...

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Downvoted for your lack of understanding of how life works.

Why was I the only one who'd noticed the password was on a post-it on top of the server, it wasn't even hidden.

My goodwill only goes so far, if someone other than the manager who'd let me go had phoned I'd have told them straight away...

I left a company once because the new management decided I was no longer needed

A couple of months later the manager tracked my down by phone at my new job, "err you wouldn't happen to know the admin password would you, we've lost it."

I did remember it, and I remembered where it was written on a post-it, but I let them squirm for a few days whilst I "tired to remember"

HP finance manager went on $5m personal spending spree with company card

One place I worked, the cashier stole about £3k, we took her to court and she was ordered to repay the money - at £1 per week.

Yep, pay back £3,000 at £1 per week, for 60 years.

We got one single £1 cheque from the court, which the manager pinned to his wall, we never saw another penny...

The jewelry, watches & bags can be sold on at near retail.

The cars will have depreciated somewhat.

Hooking up to Starlink might be pricier than you thought

This is very true

We wanted to run a fibre from one site to another, the most sensible run has to cut across an unused part of someone's land.

It took two years of court action to get him to give permission for us to dig a trench across his land.

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: Why?

My Mac Mini daily driver was a file & print server for the first 8 years of its life.

i7, 16GB & a new 500gb SSD and it's stll a very capable computer running Big Sur even though it's not supported on a 2012 machine

Google introduces new Cloud infrastructure pricing

Re: Very high barriers to entry in cloud computing.

It's only cartel behaviour if they colluded from the outset to match prices.

One vendor copying another vendor's prices after they've been announced is not collusion, it's just smart business to grab a few extra dollars...

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Many years ago I worked in a large department store that had a frozen food concession on the ground floor with a huge walk-in freezer in the basement,

The shopping centre gave us advanced notice that they were cutting the power in a week for essential work, so I was sent up to the roof to check the big Cummins generator.

It fired up OK, but upon dipping the tank I found it was all but empty, so we ordered a barrel of diesel which was duly delivered the next day and connected to the pipe in the loading bay to be pumped 4 floors up to the roof, except it's that long since we'd used the pump it had seized up.

We put the barrel in the goods lift, took it up to the top floor, then had to carefully drag the very heavy (about 200 kilos) up the last flight of stairs to the roof, where yours truly had the wonderful task of siphoning the fuel from barrel to tank.

Genny tested again, all good.

A week later, the shopping centre gives us the good news that they could carry out the work without cutting our power...

Ukraine invasion: We should consider internet sanctions, says ICANN ex-CEO

Re: It's over

The Daily Mail comments page is in another tab, I think you got lost somewhere...

Just two die for: Apple reveals M1 Ultra chip in Mac Studio

Re: 27" iMac is DEAD

I'm actually liking the spec of the monitor, especially with the webcam, high-end speakers and USB/Thunderbolt hub.

£1500 is probably a stretch, but for the money it seems OK

Re: Mac Studio

My home daily computer is a 2012 Mac Mini Server, it runs Big Sur just fine.

Prior to me it was running 24/7 providing file server duties to a fleet of iMacs.

I didn't used to be a fan of Macs until I realised just how long they last

Re: Mac Studio

Not sure even that is possible with the M1 chips, the RAM is a fundamental part of the M1 chip package

Deere & Co won't give out software and data needed for repairs, watchdog told

Re: Set a precedent.

It's the United States we're talking about here, you start doing that and the good ol' boys will just storm the Capitol again...

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: Atari ST ?

I know at least one person who still has an Atari ST in their recording studio, it had a nice clean MIDI controller

Nokia Bell Labs gets funding to cool down data centres

For a gaming rig where it's the only device attached to the water-cooler then yeah, it's not practical to build in the filtration needed to make grey water suitable.

When you're cooling 20,000 servers though, a big filtration unit suddenly becomes cost-effective, as it means you're reusing water, so reducing your water bill, and if you filter it well enough, as Google manage to, then the water is actually cleaner on the way out of the building than it was on the way in, so you can work up a deal with the local water company to cut your bills further...

I remember seeing a video of a Google datacentre that uses grey water for cooling.

It's filtered and cleaned to such an extent that it's allowed to flow straight into the local water system.

China details relocation plan for up to five million datacenter racks

Re: Surely a typo?

These will mostly be Government data centres, so there won't be a huge need to find customers.

Also, as the article states, low-latency data will still be local, these centres will mostly be cold storage.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

How is someone allowed to drive if they understand a logo more than text?

It's really not a good idea to have a distraction whilst driving.

It's now illegal to even touch your phone whilst driving in the UK...

When driving it's probably best not to look at the radio, so why does the signal need a picture attachment in the first place...

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Interesting.

Insta is forever removing a few of my friends holiday photos because apparently an entirely normally shaped female in beachwear us too sexual for them...

This isn't about pron, as Facebook & Instagram actively block it anyway.

This is about logging user behaviour and releasing it to Pritti Patel...

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

Re: Can't they remove the masts, simply?

Surely it's like a ship in a bottle and there's a piece of string you pull to collapse the masts...

Breath of fresh air: v7.3 of LibreOffice boasts improved file importing and rendering

Word count inconsistencies

I imagine this could be important for people who have to write to a strict word count, for me its a minor niggle.

I'm writing a book, it's currently over 300k words long, but exactly how much over 300k is a mystery, as Word, LibreOffice 7.2, LibreOffice 7.3 and Google Docs all disagree by over 1,000 words.

I'm guessing they differ in whether they count acronyms and stuff as words...

Lost your mouse cursor? Microsoft's PowerToys 0.55 has you covered – with a massive crosshair

Re: Can't find it

There's a link in the article that sends you to GitHub, from there you can bounce to the Microsoft stone

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

10 years ago I worked for a small UK arm of a US megacorp.

Their expenses system was seemingly designed to make you wonder whether it was worth the effort claiming, but when you put the effort in it was worth it.

You had to file every line of your expenses online, so 1 coffee, 15 miles etc. making sure all items from a single receipt were grouped together.

For each receipt a sheet was printed with a barcode. the receipt was taped to the sheet then faxed, yes in 2012 we still used a fax, to a processing centre in India.

The sheet and receipts were also sent by post to another processing centre in High Wycombe.

If the people in India were happy, and they usually were, the money would hit your bank in 30 minutes.

If the people in High Wycombe were unhappy, and they sometimes were, the excess expenses were whipped out of your next pay packer. Something a colleague found out when he tried to claim 6 months worth of coffee in one go, India paid out, High Wycombe disagreed and his next pay packet was almost empty to cover the over-payment...

Lots of new toys, caps lock still stuck on: ONLYOFFICE hits version 7

To quote the website, which is a tad annoying, with it jumping to the bottom of the page randomly whilst I was reading it - "ONLYOFFICE Document Editor supports all popular formats: DOC, DOCX, ODT, TXT, PDF, HTML."

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

Re: Bait

It's not really bait & switch, they closed the service to new accounts 10 years ago.

International police shut down 15 server infrastructures as part of VPNLab.net's takedown

Re: Yes, shutting one VPN network down definitely will end all criminal activity

So what you're saying is that if a police action doesn't wipe out that type of crime entirely they should just not bother at all...

Could BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery) offer a solution for charging electric vehicles? Microlino seems to think so

Re: Hits the sweetspot for me

I think it's because the Mini E weighs about the same as a small building. When I checked it's about 150kg heavier than my Cooper SD.

I have no way to install a fast charger at home, so a Mini E would take a whole weekend to charge.

Living rurally there's not a whole heap of charging points available either...

Hits the sweetspot for me

I love the idea of the Microlino, it's right in the sweetspot of price and range for me, I could drive to work and back for a whole week, then leave it to charge over the weekend.

The Mini E would be fine except the 120 mile range isn't quite a week's worth of commuting, and it's astonishingly expensive

Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

Yep, The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation helped substantially in the effort to wipe out polio.

Warren Buffet is at No 10 in the list and he's pumped a lot of his money into the foundation, the other 8 on the list appear to be more interested in feathering their own nests, or islands in the case of Larry...

Microsoft tweaks Teams and Viva to help bridge gap between frontline workers and their managers, among other things

I've still no clue what Viva is.

All I know is the email I used to delete daily from Cortana is now from Viva...

Ransomware puts New Mexico prison in lockdown: Cameras, doors go offline

Re: "The attack took automatic security doors offline"

Electronic locks generally offer Fail Safe or Fail Secure

With Fail Safe if the power is removed the lock is open

With Fail Secure when the power is removed the lock stays locked

One would hope a prison would have fail secure locks...

Software engineer jailed for 2 years after using RATs and crypters to steal underage victims' intimate pics

That Sexual Harm Prevention Order will seriously impact him for the rest of his life, as there's so many jobs that require a DBS check and that Sexual Harm Prevention Order will be a massive red flag.

I can't see him getting any worthwhile employment for decades.

So yeah, only 9 or 10 months in the big house, but many years of being messed around by The Man in his future.

" but tend to be in their 20s "

According to the article he's 32 and had been doing this for more 10 years, so solidly in his 20's for the majority of his criminal career...

Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

Re: Tried Avira...

It's only recently been subsumed into Norton, so in all likelihood it was independent when you tried it.

To be fair, it was pretty decent years back when I tried it for a year or two.

Nowadays I use Sophos, but I'm seriously tempted to boot that too and just use Defender on my Windows machines

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Since you mention software, I was appalled to find out the software to setup the multi-device buttons on my K780 was a 278mb download.

Why? It's a frigging keyboard, why does the driver software have to be so bloated...

UK government tool to monitor its legacy application estate is… LATE

Re: Words Fail Me

Look at your workplace:

Does each department know what kit they use?

Does the senior management know what each department uses?

Now multiply that by every division in every department within every ministry of Government.

I'd be surprised if a competent Government even knew how many Windows licences they hold, never mind the shower of shit in charge at the moment...

Re: Late?

Loath as I am to defend the Government, but based on my attempts to log make / model / OS version & software installed on the ~500 PCs across the couple of dozen buildings at my last employer, I can imagine how much of a nightmare it must be across the whole UK Gov estate...

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Anyone remember the BBC Micro software pages?

You could get a decoder for BBC Micro that read the software off CEEFAX, I think it was page 800

We had one in school, it also read Prestel although that needed a phone line, which cost money, so we rarely used it

Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs

Re: So. many. legs.

There can't be a huge number of predators 60m underground, apart from huge drill-bits obviously

Confirmed: James Webb Space Telescope team plans launch for this Xmas Eve after data cable fix

Will be get to watch the launch on NORAD's Santa Tracker feed?

https://www.noradsanta.org/

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

Re: Copper

"Using a mobile in an extended power cut - assuming the base stations are working - is likely to mean starting the car to recharge it."

Or having sufficient USB power packs to recharge the phone for a few days

Re: Copper

Not so good when the storm also takes out the only available cell tower.

Or as happened during Storm Desmond, the power outage is so prolonged (4 days in our case) the battery backup on the tower died and generators ran out of fuel.

We were forced to drive 10 miles to Morecambe and use the feeble signal coming across the bay from Grange to phone family to tell them we were safe.

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

Re: At least with paper currencies...

The current Bank of England polymer notes are less useful in that task, being somewhat like Izal toilet roll...