Posts by GreyWolf

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

You young sproggins don't go back far enough ...

My first networking experience was in 1968 or 1969, with a an IBM stand-alone tape drive with a built-in modem (which Gemini, in its infinite wisdom, denies ever existed. Fuck you, AI dolt).

We the IBM Newman Street London data centre had customers far away who sent in work over the phone line, for the 7094 or the 360. We ran it on the appropriate machine, and then transmitted the results back over the line.

To get the transmission started, we had to talk to the operator at the other end, agree the speed and parity, set the switches on the drive, switch the phone from TALK to DATA, and press start.

Which is where my very first "networking protocol problem" started. One of the customers was Whessoe, in Glasgow. I could not understand one word that the operator at the other end said.

Now that's a PROPER networking problem.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Dear Ofcom, ever heard of "joined up thinking"?

You are simultaneously allowing

- BT to shut off the landlines

- banks to enforce two-factor authentication via text to mobile phones

- electricity suppliers to install "smart" meters where there is no coverage

- while allowing the mobile phone providers to create huge swathes of poor coverage (and claim it's good enough)

None of us can reliably shop online where the coverage is bad, or "outside only". "Smart" meters don't work where there is no mobile coverage.

Please, require that every designer who is implementing some new use of mobile phones has to be familiar with this map.

The evidence so far is that those designers are all townies, fat and happy in their high-speed coverage, with no experience of the countryside.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Re: IR35

Yes, you got treated as any other company until somebody at HMRC noticed that individuals were making money out of it, and got religious about it. HMRC invented IR35 and have been hitting contractors with it ever since.

Even though HMRC's interpretation of the rules has been shown to be false in a number of high-profile cases, the dogmatic nutters at HMRC.insist on applying those rules all the time everywhere. Mpst people do not have the resource to fight it, so cave in.

How's that open source licensing coming along? That well, huh?

Working as Designed?

Attempt to create walled garden causes perpetrator to suffer loss of reputation and efficiency; isn't that what the Founders of Open Source hoped would happen?

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Oops, update failed!

You are on the wrong distro, shipmate.

In 10 years of Mint, I have never had any problem like that.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

Ugly Truth About Copilot

It hallucinates.

I've recently asked three different AIs to write a paragraph about my home village. Copilot claims that our church is St Andrew's. But no, it is All Saints, and has been for 900 years.

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

Suffolk Tip - New Wildlife Reserve

There's a lovely new wildlife area along the banks of Martlesham Creek, recently bought by Suffolk Wildlife Trust for rewilding. The land has been sustainably managed by an organic farmer for decades until he retired and sold the land to SWT, so it is already full of birds, wildflowers, butterflies, stag beetles, and other wildlife.

Park by Martlesham Creek church (Google Maps pin at 52.074492737355925, 1.298411890374119) and take the circular walk along the banks of the creek to the entrance from the River Deben, turn right along the seawall, then at the gate take the path straight uphill back to the car park.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

I am refusing a smart meter on the basis that there is no mobile phone signal here (yes, in the Britain of 2024, 3 miles from a National Highway). I am finding that there are a lot of people who design systems on the assumption that there will be a signal, and then cannot get their heads round the idea that THIS PLACE DOES NOT HAVE URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE.

They haven't tried to force the issue yet, but when they do, you will be able to hear the fighting from wherever you are. We will not be merciful.

Feature phones all the rage as parents try to shield kids from harm

Feature Phone is functionally better, and better value

In my home...

Feature phone gets a signal. Smartphone does not (not even SMS).

Feature phone starts in seconds (useful for banking 2FA). Smartphone - takes long enough to make coffee.

Feature phone sound quality on calls is good enough. Smartphone sound is a constant problem.

Feature phone fits in trouser pocket. Smartphone falls out of pockets (all of them). because it is too big.

Feature phone takes keypresses. Smartphone touch screen almost unusable with adult fingers.

Featurephone purchase £30 at Tesco, sim for 99p.Smartphone - low purchase cost forces a monthly contract at 3x what I want to pay

Feature phone works well with pay-as-you-go. Smartphone requires contract (£20 a month is cheapest I can get)

So I have both because I have to, but the featurephone gets used. The smartypants gets used very rarely, and then as a remote control, not a phone.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Re: At the Weyland Yutani IT Department

I have a Debian that does updates in parallel. On an 8-banger CPU, that means catching up on updates takes less than 60 seconds.

Re: Backup Tuesday

Microsoft#s average time to fix severe bugs is 93 days (public stats).

Microsoft mistake blows up admins' inboxes with fake malware alerts

Microsnot lately? Shambles?

Is it just my impression or has there been much more lately in the way of Microsoft fuckups bad enough to reach public notice?

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Not Ian Fleming ... much older

"As Ian Fleming put it, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action"."

No, friend, this saying occurs in WE Johns, one of the Biggles books about World War I.

Big Tech's eventual response to my LLM-crasher bug report was dire

Kola nuts

We need a "Kola Nut" icon to attach to our divination posts.

Cancer patient forced to make terrible decision after Qilin attack on London hospitals

Pardon my ignorance...

but is Synnovis really the only path lab available?

That right there is the single point of failure.

Pretty feeble of the NHS to not have a second path lab available, and the hospital to not have a backup contract in place ready to roll.

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: I hear you loud and clear

The time difference thing is fixable. Sorry, I have forgotten what the fix is. Might be firmware in your BIOS.

"Linux conversion when I'll have the time to deal with it"

Dual boot is your friend.

In the day, the machine runs Windows. After hours, whatever I feel like.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

The stink of corruption

There is more to this scandal than meets the eye. Why was there such a drive to deny fault in Horizon, to blame the victims, to cover up what had happened?

I smell a corrupt procurement - just how exactly did ICL Pathway/Fujitsu get selected? Who paid whom off?

Vennells is just the patsy/sacrificial lamb - there is someone else in the shadows.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Re: If you're talking about buying new........

What openly-defined community hardware is there, and where can we buy it?

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

Quoting "So the downvotes represent comfort with the idea that -any- educational concept should be wrapped around gendered stereotypes (let alone STEM), segregated similarly, and that a teacher who tends to think that girls alone would be drawn to a dollhouse (etc.) is well prepared to welcome and meet a diverse group of learners where their interests intersect with the course material.

Nice. I really had no idea that Reg Readers were such an ignorant and out of touch bunch of idiots."

My dear https://forums.theregister.com/user/74046/, I bow before your superior wisdom, not to mention your superior attitude.

Let's hear your explanation of why girls who enjoy programming and tech at age 7 to 9-ish suddenly lose interest at around 10-11. And do tell us what your actual experience in the matter actually is?

I am describing a known problem in the Coder Dojo movement, that the Raspberry Pi Foundation that sponsors Coder Dojo is very concerned about. At our most recent conference, no-one had a solution.

So, dear Code for Broke, we are all waiting fo you to come down from your mountain and hand us your solution on tablets of stone.

I will not be waiting for you - I will be getting on with trying to do something about it.

Re: I do like fantasy fiction.

50 million Raspberry Pis say "Government control? Off Fuck".

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

Happy to help - do you have a Makerspace/Hackspace/FermiLab/Coder Dojo near you? There you will find people who help you take the next step. And you may enjoy the usual eccentricity of steampunkers, LARPers, stop motion addicts, robot builders, mainframe restorers, and other entertaining loonies.

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

Oh yes - because the girls will be doing the "blokey bit" - namely, designing and installing lighting.

Re-purposing Already Happening

I mentor at a Coder Dojo. I have spent this year collecting old laptops (remarkably easy to get free donations; remarkably easy to uplift the memory and an SSD).

Out of a dozen machines donated, maybe half were Chromebooks. We put Mint on them and they were immediately useful.

We love the R-Pi, but they take a lot more volunteer time to set up and test before each session, and pack away afterwards. We will probably delay introducing them until the kids are experienced enough to do the setup and test themselves.

Latest acquisition: a doll's house, for teaching girls about electricity and how to install lighting (LEDS; don't panic).

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

This is not new

In the 1990s, I had a girlfriend who was a nurse. The health unit that employed her made all the nurses buy their own stethoscopes (not cheap, on a nurse's pay).

When I asked why, she said it was because they kept on being stolen, and management had decided to refuse to pay for replacements.

[DOGMA ALERT] Nor would management arrange proper security for the hospital, because "we have to be open to everybody".

And it wasn't just stethoscopes, lab equipment, emergency oxygen, absolutely everything, all costing hundreds or thousands to replace; it was ALL getting stolen. And the management were doing NOTHING about it.

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

Bring back the Aunt Sally!

There used to be an Aunt Sally (alley? course? track? lane?) in the back garden, the only only Aunt Sally I have ever seen (this was 1960s).

[In an Aunt Sally, there are painted heads perched on top of posts, and you throw hard balls the size of tennis balls at the heads to knock them off. I have no idea how scoring worked].

Some owner since vandalised the back garden, tiling it, and putting tables put there, in order to cram in more drinkers.

I would like to see heads painted as current politicians, for us to throw rocks at.

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Correct me if I'm wrong ...

but wasn't the AS/400 a hot-pluggable system?

Or am I confusing it with the RS/6000, where you would find out about a fault by a spare part arriving in the post? It used to "phone home".

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

This is something I am definitely worried about...

We live near "civilisation" (only 3 miles from BT Adastral Park and a major A-road), but we have little or no mobile phone signal in this village. We are totally dependent on landlines for emergency calls.

We also have regular power cuts.

VOIP is NOT a viable alternative.

Does someone have to die before BT gets a clue?

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

My experience of Vodafone

1. Can't find their arses with both hands and a map.

2. More than three months away? That's long-term planning, we don't do that.

3. Ready, willing and able to break the law (because don't know, don't care)

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

WRONG WRONG WRONG

"Wake up people, it's a business-to-business company"

Wake up yourself. It's NOT a commercial company; it is a Foundation.

The clue is in the name.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

"terrible environmental impact of the manufacture and replacement of the batteries"

EV batteries are 95% recyclable (the other 5% is plastic), and are already being recycled widely. In the future, old batteries will be a better source for the minerals than mining, thus cheaper than mining.

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

Thanks for the word from great granma. Nothing better than testimony from someone who was there.

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

Didn't go through France then. French charging stations are notorious for being out of action.

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

"sell them into the second-hand market"

What second-hand market? As soon as EVs become available at sensible prices and sensible volumes (hint: the Chinese, this year 2023; see also MG4 at half the price of a Tesla), loads of ICE cars will hit the second-hand market, the bottom will fall out. And will affect all the way up to "nearly new" - no-one will buy a new ICE car when the depreciation is much steeper than today's.

End game: "classic" ICE cars will survive. Boring mass-market cars will get crushed.

Re: Interesting EV conversions

Is that "interesting" in the British usage? Usually translated "completely crazy".

Openreach offers more wholesale fiber discounts, rivals call foul

Whimpering

City Fibre clearly think they have a right to a guaranteed profit, and want OfCom to make the arrangements. City Fibre, if you are not prepared to do the work to compete, don't expect the profit. [Nota bene: if Openreach and BT are so incompetent, how come it is so hard for City Fibre to beat them easily?]

In other news, City Fibre can't find their arse with both hands. They have laid fibre in our county town, but only in the centre. Half a mile from the Central Square, we have heard nothing but promises (and no action) for three years now. There's a golden harvest just waiting for someone who simply gets on with the job.

Furthermore, they are only interested in the part of UK where the population is densest. Beyond the edge of town, you'll be dead before anyone other than Openreach installs anything.

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Pre-owned Pits

...may still have "someone" living in them ...

...and the floor carpeted with "bones" ...

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

"government is doing everything it can to kill off small business"

Exactly.

This is what IR35 is doing - making it impossible to start a company through consulting.

Nothing wrong with HMRC that wouldn't be fixed by nuking it and starting again.

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

False claims in the frigging article

Quote: "Electric cars create battery waste"

Not true.

Car batteries are 95% recyclable, and recovering the minerals from old batteries is much cheaper than mining them in the first place.

Both Tesla and VW already have recycling factories, and more are on the way.

Also: there are at least two other potential uses for car batteries. They will definitely have a second-hand value, so will not be dumped.

Re: No choice

When can we all come round for a tasting?

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: Manual page numbering

Master documents + sub-documents is still there in LibreOffice https://help.libreoffice.org/4.1/Writer/Working_with_Master_Documents_and_Subdocuments

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

Re: "In an attempt to break the stalemate, Twitter has agreed to share ever more"

Oh no, not "golden payday".

The Twitter board is desperate to avoid jail time for lying to the SEC all these many years. Because that is an obvious move for Musk, if the Twitter board don't get their house in order.

Moreover, if the advertisers agree that Twitter is not 95% real people, they will start demanding cuts in the advertising rates. And Twitter's (already dismal) income vanishes.

So either they release the data, or go to jail while Twitter itself dries up and blows away, leaving Mush free to build whatever he wants instead. [and maybe he has already built something .... ]

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Wrong

IBM pensions do not come from the company, and there fore do not affect the pay of present employees. They come from prior contributions to the IBM Pension Fund(s) which is a completely separate entity.

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale

Your very sensible suggestion has one major flaw.

It assumes that there is anyone at the government department that understands the basics of IT.

No. They got rid of all those more than 20 years ago. And have been spreading their legs and dropping their knickers for the suppliers ever since.

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

Re: I joined IBM as an experienced hire in 2000 and left in 2013

I left in a much earlier clear out.

I had been telling my favourite customer what I expected my daily rate to be - about one-third of what IBM had been billing for me.

He replied "How the hell does IBM think they will be able to do business in future?".

Only 29% of techies truly want to stay in current job

Re: I'm thinking about a lot more than this

In my experience, becoming a self-employed consultant transformed the experience to the point where I no longer needed to leave the industry.

1. I earned much more

2. That gave me a six-month money buffer, so I could just walk if it got intolerable. That made it all easier to bear. And there ARE good customers out there; no need to tolerate the crappy ones.

3. I had a built-in excuse for not tolerating bullshit ("it's costing you £X per day, are you sure it's value for money?". Nobody expected me at team meetings (unless there were doughnuts).

4. I'm in charge. I chose how many days a year I worked. I could and did take a lot more time off for fun stuff.

Yes, I realise that HMRC has completely changed the deal since my time (I retired when it got oppressive). But I suspect there are cracks to wriggle through, if you and your customer are creative.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

Rorke's Drift, friend, that's where you are.

Meanwhile, up on the ridge overlooking your position, Windows has ten thousand warriors with spears, just longing for a chance to wipe you out.

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

"but I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out."

Oh yes it is.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Can you say outsourcing?

Perhaps written by new graduates from a non-Western university where the teaching materials have not been updated in two decades.

Plus: I have to mention my personal hobby horse. Usability.

Too many developers think usability is a matter of taste and style, which only they can possibly comprehend.

Nope; usability can be measured (time to complete a task; number of errors/restarts over a series of tasks).

Beware the big bang in the network room

Re: Maintenence window, gosh how quaint

Public executions of the staff who sold it with lies also work quite well.