* Posts by Giles C

794 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2015

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UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

Giles C Silver badge

Re: I had the opposite problem...

Nope £32 inc vat well it was when I signed up, and if the price moves a lot when I come to renew I will look at the options available

Giles C Silver badge

I had the opposite problem...

Finally getting my new City Fibre link on Monday after a months delay. Here Cityfibre is in the paths unfortunately they have stuck the termination boxes at random points in front of the houses.

So instead of installing it in front of a gravel path which runs up to the front door (nice and easy), they put it in front of the lawn. The lawn is reinforced to allow a car to park on it and not sink, and in front of the house is a 1M wide section of concrete. It has taken a few weeks for them to move the box 6' to the left which they could have done when they did the installation.

My brother has also gone this route but they put his box next to the fence so had a nice short run to do the work..... Still worth it as Zen are charging £32 for 300Mb whereas EE want £38 for 60Mb

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Giles C Silver badge

They needed a proper potato pc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWBzsBaU-Os

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Giles C Silver badge

Re: The first one is free

Ok I am strange then, but I have fixed numerous problems using wireshark, including being able to spot a failed ssl connection on a live capture (it is actually quite easy)

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Giles C Silver badge

Re: A fool and his money

Are the 5si basically armoured, years ago we had one wreck itself, the internals broke down might had had fuser burn out and it wasn’t viable to repair one, someone had the idea to get rid of it a skip crusher, the crusher gave up and the shell of that machine just had a crack in the plastic panel (I think the crusher was rated to 20 tonnes)…

That was a well built printer

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Giles C Silver badge

Slightly different

I was called by one of the maintenance engineers after leaving a company (I don’t do electrics as I am a networking person). The conversation went something like this.

Do you remember where the cabling runs for a gps antenna in building X.

Me: er why do you need to know

Someone has been in and cut the unused cables as they didn’t think it was needed.

Me: after laughing for a few minutes, well I think it went under the floor out of the window on the car park side but I have no idea which window it was - I did leave 3 years ago…..

I don.t know if they found it or not….

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Biscuits

There’re are only two acceptable options for biscuits.

Mcvities plain chocolate digestives

Or

Bourbons

Opinion may vary but these are the best ones (says the person who just munched 6 of the above digestives for a snack….)

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Giles C Silver badge

Re: If they *really* want to improve the experience....

Password application system….. either that is a typo or government control is getting very weird…..

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Safeguards

Well I wouldn’t say IT was entirely blameless, the guest WiFi could obviously connect to internal resources, and must have used static credentials otherwise how would they have gained access.

Neither of these seems to be good practice.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Which one to bin

There won't be any more Grand Tour, there is one out tomorrow (Friday 16th) and another later in the year but Clarkson, Hammond and May have decided not to make any more - they are getting too old and have been everywhere (their words not mine).

That will leave Clarkson's Farm and Good Omens as the only things I am interested in watching on Prime.....

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Flip Side

My local ‘news’ paper site has a subscription option pay £x per month and you will get 50% fewer adds.

Not ad free but just half the number of adverts you saw before.

Giles C Silver badge

Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

I usually think Waterstones and buy books in person in preference to going online as nothing beats a good bookshop for browsing. Unfortunately in Peterborough where I live we only have a single branch of Waterstones, whereas years ago we had them, Dillon’s, Hammicks, Sherratt and Hughes (not sure about the name) and a few more.

Mostly gone due to the push of Amazon…

Amazon overcharges shoppers with Buy Box algorithm, fresh lawsuit claims

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Amazon

Just make up a number 01234567890 is valid in the uk and appears to be used by scammers so you could give it that to find other valid landlines

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Nine nines and an explosion

I had a manager once who stated he wanted 24x7 uptime as a minimum.

We used to calculate uptime by excluding planned maintenance. Ie if we took something down for an upgrade or other planned upgrade work it didn’t reduce the uptime.

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Karma

That is probably the internal flash but after 3 years it would go read only as it needed an updated image to reset the bug.

Affects nxos switches and the big 4100 series firewalls that I have seen myself - the patches have been around for a few years.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Giles C Silver badge

The puns are reaching new heights today

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Giles C Silver badge

Paper not steel

A few years ago we had the same problem but got round in a different way, this was also an as400.

We picked the space between the concrete sub floor and the tiles with teams of a4 paper. Under compression it is very strong and packed in tightly it should have been fireproof as well (that didn’t get tested when I was there)

Was working like that for a few years before I left the company

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Giles C Silver badge

I run a slightly newer 4300 only about 18 years old, bought second hand about 8 years ago and turns out 400 pages a month every month since then (printing a club newsletter)

Only costs are original toner carts which you can pick up from Amazon for about £100 (a lot of companies but a printer and a lot of carts then the printer breaks and you can pick them up cheap)

New printers are a different matter

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Its always DNS except when its configured with an IP address :)

I used to work for one of the biggest insurance comparison sites in the country running the network.

I ended up doing a detailed explanation of how dns worked. As the highly paid programmers couldn’t understand that they needed to allow a drain timer before flipping the application from one set of servers to the second set.

They found it hard to understand the TTL on the dns cache records. It took about an hour before they usnderstood the reasoning and why setting the ttl on a customer facing website dns entry to 5 seconds was not going to work properly,…

This was before Anycast addresses were widely supported.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Supermarionation

Is that a bad thing….

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Slower Version

A few years ago (about 7) I am sure that the IBM system-I that my employer ran used the same system at a performance tier, if you wanted more power then they would install a license allowing you to use extra cpu cores. I think you could do it on a time limited basis I.e. need more power for job x buy a license for two weeks and then go back to the slower level

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Automated meeting times!

Surely then you book a meeting for the actual meeting and another one over the top of the first which is your travel time.

Or at least that is what I used to do when having to go between offices for various things…

Giles C Silver badge

Why would an AI need chocolate?

Calculating Pi in the sky: Axiom Space plans to launch 'orbital datacenter'

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Don't forget the important stuff

Seen most of those, I would also add the random sized cage nuts so you end up with M5 M6 and whatever size America use. Fine when they go in but an absolute pain when kit is swapped over as you don’t realise and pull the screws out before spending ages searching for the one that fits.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Making Lookout the default mail client

Apple mail does support office355 accounts.

I did this on my work MacBook, all you need is the email address userid and password (as far as I remember), certainly if I click on Apple mail I see all my mail in outlook without any problems.

Beijing demands government apps must shed their bureaucratic skins

Giles C Silver badge

Re: This won't be easy

Does anyone think that Ford would actually save money by shipping you a truck load of car parts to put together yourself, with helpline assistance? Does anyone think we would get a better car, quicker and cheaper?

No but having built a kit car myself and got it road legal. It isn’t faster or cheaper but it is a great experience and fun to do and drive after it is on the road,,,,

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

Giles C Silver badge

Yep

Even for a small car club that I run we use Mailchimp (it is free for the amount we send) to ensure exactly that doesn’t happen. Before gdpr we didn’t really have a policy but now apart from three people nobody can mass mail the club members.

Datacenters feeling the heat to turn hot air into cool solutions

Giles C Silver badge

Re: We do it

I remember years ago ibm did a rack door with radiators in it which could be plumbed into a buildings hvac system. A quick search and the systems are still around but not that commonly used.

Perhaps this needs to be more widely adopted?

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Giles C Silver badge

Re: radio ntp

Ah I remember it had moved but couldn’t remember where to.

Giles C Silver badge

Re: radio ntp

I used to manage a network with a couple of those (Galleon Ntp servers) one was fine but the unit at one office had problems.

The first antenna used the time signal from rugby which worked until they moved it to Birmingham (I think) at which point a large row of trees blocked the antenna completely.

After this we swapped to a gps unit mounted on the roof which worked until the enclosure sprung a leak and fried the electronics.

The final time I heard about it was about 2 years after I left the company when some builders cut through the cable as it snakes under the floor and they called me to ask where the thing was routed to….

When nobody was trying to sabotage it they were brilliant at their job and ran for about 15 years - they may still be working away…

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Musk / Zuckerberg cage fight takes place

Daily newspaper version of Facebook

I thought that was the daily sport???

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

Giles C Silver badge

Ps2 was a pain, two identical (almost) sockets for different devices, yes they were colour coded but trying to refit them behind a typical installed base unit was an absolute pain.

As to printers I had a citizen dot matrix years ago which you could swap the interface from a serial to a parallel as the interface was on a self contained card. It might had had all the printer processing on the card as well…

South Korea opens the door for robots to roam among pedestrians

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Sudden Impact

True but a starship robot in Milton Keynes can carry up to three bags of groceries, assuming your groceries do not consist of blocks of granite then the load can’t weigh in at more much than 30kg which would mean the machine has an all up weight of say 70kgs, a lot less than 500kg.

As a comparison I own a Tiger kit car which is a full road legal 2 seat kit car has a weight of 500kg and that can do some serious damage just coming off a ramp at less than walking place. If it was rolling at 15km/hour or 4m/s I would be hard pressed to grab onto it and bring it to halt.

I think sharing a path with a robot this large and heavy is not a good idea.

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

Giles C Silver badge

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Not in the UK

The rails and infrastructure are owned by one company currently Network Rail.

Then most of the train operating companies lease there rolling stock from other investment group.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Giles C Silver badge

Where I used to work we had 3 sites triangulated using 1Gb BT LES circuits this was about 10 years ago,

All was well for a couple of years until the company got bigger and we started running the links at 90% or more all the time.

Eventually we got the budget to go to 10Gb links instead.

So we got them delivered and one long weekend set about turning them on.

A few hours later we were finished and headed home, the next week the previously 1Gb link running at 95% has transformed into a 10Gb link running at 50%

We found that a lot of replication and batch jobs suddenly had there run time reduced dramatically- wonder why….

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

Giles C Silver badge

Re: You think it was just another isolated incident....?

Have you ever stood near one of the rolling bed type x-y plotters at full speed?

They have to be fenced off as paper moving at several meters per second is very dangerous. I used to work with them and nobody went near when they started working

This video shows one printing in A3 I used to use one with A0 that was quiet a bit faster especially on straight or diagonal lines (it was safer when doing complex stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8N747C-z9w

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Giles C Silver badge

Enabling spanning-tree will bring down the entire network, and "it never works".

Er no doing the opposite will do that, spanning tree works wonderfully. Although just before I left a company I was on a remote site doing a network upgrade, and got a call from a colleague.

the call went something like this

We have a problem

Really what is wrong

I turned spanning tree off on a port and now nothing in the building is working (the port linked two switches together)

(They did what?) Oh well in that case you need to go and tell the management that we need to shut down the building and restart the network

What?

Yes turn off one of the core switches and if you are lucky the network might stabilise in 10-15 minutes but I would probably reboot them both to make sure (the switches were nexus 7000 series and need 10-15 minutes to restart from cold - and console to the switch you disabled spanning tree on and turn the port off.

Oh how long before you are back in the office

At least 3 hours so get it fixed….

Giles C Silver badge

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

Golden rules for out of hours working

Make friends with security and cleaners - because if you need to get into locked areas or lock yourself out then the pay are the best people to know.

I used to be on first name terms at a previous job with all the security guards across the sites, made things a lot easier, as I was often working late in the evenings when everyone sensible had gone home. This was planned maintenance not being stupid and working 20 hour days.

Where do people feel most at risk of being pwned? The pub

Giles C Silver badge

If they do the pub quiz at a nearby establishment (where I am to the quiz tonight) they need to be able to last at least 90 minutes without or you get chucked out the quiz and the room it is held in…

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Good use

The first generation Audi TT you need to dismantle the front of the car to change any of the light bulbs.

Mind you a VW Passat from the early 2000s (don’t know about the later ones had a process in the manual that for certain engine maintenance the whole front end was pulled out on a few long bolts.

Gas supplier blames 'rogue' code for Channel Island outage

Giles C Silver badge

Re: still wondering

You mean to rebuild all the gas cylinders everyone has been ripping out over the last 30 or so years.

They probably weren’t seen as modern enough as they worked on gravity, there used to be one outside where my grandparents lived and depending on the time of year was anything from 20 to 100 feet tall

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Ahhhh the

Moral high ground or physical high ground.

If the latter don’t do it from the top of a ladder or on a mezzanine. You might find some strategic weakening if she gets an idea of where it is going to happen.

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Giles C Silver badge

A book recommendation

Read starter villain by John Scalzii . It features a criminal organisation who spying department is staffed with intelligent cats - who can’t talk but communicate by walking on keyboards

Very good read - I wonder where the idea came from?

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Giles C Silver badge

Seen too many of these

Comms cabinets under toilet blocks - yes with a leak in the large pipe….

Misc kit under floors to extend circuits - yes

But the best was a non IT one builders knocking down some heavy duty partition walls to find someone had mounted a 40 gallon water tank on top of the false ceiling. The walls came down , the ceiling started moving and they found the tank help up by the copper pipes connecting it to the rest of the plumbing and nothing else….

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Giles C Silver badge

All 65000 columns? that is a big monitor if the cells were used for numbers and set to 2cm wide then you need a 130000cm or 1.3km wide screen.

Strange people

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Giles C Silver badge

Re: Too pessimistic

My mums house is like that, the external walls are east to drill into, round some of the windows on the internal side the seem to have used fire bricks (well you almost set the drill bits on fire)

It is a 1960s house.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Giles C Silver badge

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

I thought that was pigeons, not sure if canaries are as reliable….

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Giles C Silver badge

Re: I don't understand...

A couple of years ago Morrisons in the uk did a Yorkshire pudding pizza, basically a large Yorkshire filled with sauce, cheese, pepperoni etc

I bought one out of curiosity and it was surprisingly edible…..

Giles C Silver badge

Re: I don't understand...

I would add to that black pepper, really brings out the flavour

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