Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Kitty nicknamed "Mac killer"

.. who has accounted for two retirements of Macbook Pro units:

No 1 - one of the ones with the dodgy butterfly-switch keyboards. Not improved by the whole glass of orange juice that she knocked over onto the keyboard.. (unit still works, but the keyboard is somewhat random. At £700 for a replacement keyboard [replacing the keyboard means replacing the whole of the top section including the battery] it's not worth it. Replaced by a shiny new M2 MBP

No. 2 - Having learnt from no.1, I made sure that no liquids are near the shiny new MBP. I neglected to ensure that they were not on the same *table*. Had a glass of white wine at one end of the table and my new MBP at the other. Came back into the room and said cat was sat at the wine end of the table with a knocked over glass next to her. At the other end, sitting in a puddle of wine, was a very dead MBP (apparently, wine likes the cooling slots on the side/underside of the case and actively wicks in..). Home insurance paid for a replacement (recondidtioned, from Apple, M3 Pro, cost the same but was more powerful, had more RAM, same 1TB HD)

Said current Mac now sits on a stand to put it up above wine-level. On a small table with no room for putting liquid-containing glasses. She [1] often goes to sit on it (regardless of whether the lid is up) so I'm expecting a cat pee-related MBP death next.

[1] Small black cat, rescued from a friends shed at ~ 3 months old. She's 7 now and I'm pretty certain that she's just an over developed tortie because she acts more like one than our original tortie.. She's sitting on my lap as I type this and, if I don't give her attention to the level she expects, I get a small bite on the arm..

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H₂O to make it a water world

We are talking about millions of tons of payload here

[Elon Musk mode=On]

Or lots of peons labouring in near-darkness, eating the bodies of the ones that die on the job

[/EMM]

Attackers pwn charter airline helping Trump's deportation campaign

For the hard of thinking: Switzerland has pretty open borders with France, Germany and Italy...

A group of us got denied access into Switzerland from Germany once. Something about "non-standard exhaust pipes on your motorbikes"..

Apparently, the Swiss don't like to hear a 900cc motorbike engine hitting 15k RPM with a non-standard exhaust pipe that's a bit louder than stock.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

Re: Bare wire

some of our best aligned roads remain those built in about AD50-180 when certain Italian types had colonised Britain

Quote from a previous (Italian, from Rome) colleague:

"You know you are in trouble when you stop acting like Romans and act like Italians.."

Trump tariffs thwart TikTok takeover as China digs in heels

Re: " I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

They do this with a bunch of laws that never get enforced unless you fall out of favor with them

Like the cops stopping cars - they won't stop you for having an offensively loud exhaust or blue-ish headlamps but, if they do stop you for driving like an excitable toddler, they will *carefully* go round the car and notes down all con+use failures and add them to the charge sheet.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

El Reg..

*Please* introduce a killfile or ignore feature. These forums are becoming a fedit pile of dingoes kidneys much like slashdot did (and for the same reasons).

Re: I bet

Is this post available in English?

Looks like someone has trained a LLM on amanfrommars posts.

Re: " Wow, you dont anything about me and how I vote."

I guess in Putin's Russia it's a living. And that beats an all-expenses-paid trip to Ukraine, rifle included

So he gets extra equipment then? Most of then just get given a pointy stick. Especially the mine-rats (sorry - pioneer punishment battalions)

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Tape is here for a long time

Just remove the little plastic tab

And put it on top of the scavenged hard drive parts :-)

(Or in a wooden cupboard next to the honking great line belt motor that puts out enough EMF to power London..)

Re: Minor correction

I mean, try plugging in your ESDI or ST506 drives!

There is, somewhere in these sceptered isles [1], an ancient 330M ESDI drive-powered linux box. Or, at least, there was 3 months ago [2]. It was my first linux box (heated up the spare room nicely and we had to keep the door shut because it was *loud*. I brought it at a computer fair - 2nd hand and it came with its own ESDI interface card (ISA bus).). Once i'd got my next computer, the old one went to a friend and he's run it ever since.

I suspect you can probably get ESDI drive interface card but finding an ISA-bus computer to put them in might be more challenging nowadays.

[1] What an odd saying..

[2] Haven't spoken in a while..

Ubuntu 25.04 beta takes flight – but this Plucky Puffin is still molting

Re: Interesting

Slackware in the early days, then Suse, finally Debian

I went from Slackware to Mandrake. Then to Ubuntu when Mandrake went doo-lally.

And, eventually, once the systemd malware fully infested Ubuntu, I went to FreeBSD and Devuan.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

But half a bottle of whiskey in, he forgets this basic fact

He'd be better off on a half bottle of whisky. Especially the good single-malt stuff. Less toxins y'see.

*Hic*

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: Surface Hub reboot?

It reminds me of something. Ah, yes, I remember. A modem

Or a 3270 terminal. At least those (mostly) had good connectivity to the mainframe on-site and were not subject to the vagaries of an internet connection..

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Re: The Moral of the Story.. but almost all real world BASIC's were interpreters

In the 1980s Pascal did quite well, and did it into the 1990s

In the mid-80s I was at Polytechnic (US readers - think community college) doing an HND in IT (1/3 programming, one 1/3 comms, 1/3 analogue electronic [1]). In one of our programming modules, we had to write a simple stock control system. I, being the posessor of a BBC Micro with plenty of (cough) sideways ROM images I could load into sideways RAM, wanted to use the Pascal ROM I had.

"Sure" said the lecturer. "Pascal good."

It wasn't until I started coding it that I realised the BBC Pascal had a number of limitations, the worst of which was that it had no random read/write. So, to update record 120, you had to read the whole previous 119 records, write them to a new (temporary) database, amend the 120th record, append it and the rest of the records to the temporary file then replace the live file with the new one.

It (kind of) worked but, being entirely floppy-drive based, was extremely slow. Slower than treacle at midwinter.

So I junked it and just wrote a convincing demo instead. And got a pass grade because I'd shown "inititive and the ability to code, even if I didn't actually deliver the requirement".

Which taught be a lot about the IT industry.

[1] I *hated* analogue electronics and it's why I, eventually, dropped out of the course, despite getting really high marks in the other two sections.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: isolate them

Whiskey, well as Canada is no longer buying US product, there is a new market if US consumers no longer feel able to afford the wee dram

Plus, Canada has a lot of ex-Scots (especially in the east) who would welcome the taste of home-country whisky (note the spelling. Whiskey is the awful US stuff and the nice Irish stuff)

At what point can a sensible adult step in, question his soundness of mind and have him removed from office?

It's a bit of a stretch to find one of those in the current US administration - Trump made sure of that when he made sure that everyone was a sycophant or toady with zero ability of independent thought.

Re: Liberals

It's more that you come across as rather parochial in your views with a child-like understanding of Political and Economic basics. Combined with a position of unwarranted and unevidenced superiority

In short, a typical US Republican.

Re: What would a "reciprocal" tax on arms do?

Include services, which the Trump administration conviently excluded. That would target the US movie, music, software and cloud industry.

This.

The rest of the world needs to be weaned off dependence on the US tech industry. Our data isn't safe in US hands and certainly I don't trust Microsoft/Oracle/AWS to keeps things going smoothly. Alternatives exist for all of them.

Stop using them, cut off their money (or put tariffs on it to make them squeal) and the cloud bubble will start to deflate [1]. And not a moment too soon.

[1] Lets be clear here - all on-prem isn't the solution, just like all-cloud isn't a solution. There's a happy place in the middle with a hybrid of the two - stuff that needs scalable response (web services and the like) - fine in the cloud, preferrably serverless. Stuff with fixed loads, keep on-prem. Storage in the cloud costs multiple of what local storage does *and* puts your data security in someone elses' hands. Etc etc etc. Location should be determined by function, not by ideology

Re: I feel liberated already...

It wasn’t just our company. Everyone involved in heavy or precision manufacturing was doing the same thing. It didn’t take long before the offshore assignments became the focus and stateside technical expertise was bought out and/or terminated.

History repeats - that's exactly what happened in the 19th and early 20th century between the UK and the US - lots of dollars washing around, buying up anything and everyone that wasn't nailed down (and outright stealing of materials, machines and IP). The UK declined and the US boomed.

Just substitute US for UK and China for the US and you have todays situation.

Re: I feel liberated already...

if you tried running your business like that you will be broke in a few years

Which explains why Trump is a serially-failing bankrupt.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: once upon a time at the pub

I remember the first time I saw the tapes fail, it was beyond horrible..

I loathe backup tapes with a passion. They can always pass a random restore test but, when you *actually* need to do a live restore, they always manage to give read errors.

We've migrated off them entirely now to a live online backup service. I did point out that this was a major weakness in that it requires a valid internet link but got ignored..

Re: And theres

While in uni I recovered a dead hard-drive by buying an exact same model (and version and revision) and moving the actual disc from the dead drive to the good one. All that done in my room (it was clean, 'guv)

Several jobs ago, we moved into a shiny new office and I was responsible for moving all the Sun kit, including a very elderly SparcArray (hadn't been turned off in years.. it held the various user home directories). In prep, I arranged a space SparcArray chassis to be sent to me and got a small stock of replacement drives.

The commercial movers delivered the array without any extra dents of drop-marks so, after hooking up the various Sun boxen and making sure that they worked, I connected the array and powered it up.

About 50% of the (fairly small) drives failed to power up. Enough to kill the whole thing, overwhelmed the data protection aspects of RAID5.

In a panic I phoned our Sun engineering contact to see if there was anything I could do.

His advice? Take the failing drives out, knock them edge-on against a solid object and put them back in. Eventually (after a lot of "are you sure" and "it's not April 1st" questions) I tried it - after all, I wouldn't be losing anything by trying.

Enough of them span back up that the RAID array could re-establish itself and I could replace the really-failed-drives with some of the spares I'd got. Some of which also failed but I had enough to get things up and working.

And promptly wrote a business case for replacing the whole damn thing with something more modern (and higher capacity) - which I got 3 months later (can't remember what it was, probably a late generation Sparc Storage array

Re: 'reviewed ... by hand'?

At one point, we hired a DR/BC service from HP where they would supply a lorry, already loaded with hardware like ours and all cabled up so that we would just need to provide power, backup tapes and a network attachment.

Eventually, we decided to pay for a test of the setup. It failed, miserably. The hardware wasn't remotely like what we had, the SAN was different so we couldn't import the config from the old one and the network connection was incredibly slow, even though it theoretically was identical to our live connection.

Given the eye-watering cost of the service, we asked them to fix the issues and re-test.

They wanted to charge us for the changes. We pointed out that, not only had it failed but that they'd directly breached the terms of the contract.

We cancelled the contract the next month.

Re: 'reviewed ... by hand'?

I used to work atan airline reservation CRS based in Wiltshire.. (the one that had a name starting with 'G').

The stated goal was that we could act as a DR cenre for our US partner so we had up-to-date copies of their code and data snapshots. So, in the event of a 747 landing in the wrong place (their data centre was/is [1] next to one of the runways at Denver airport) we could at least run a basic service.

Then they decided to close the European site (us - although I'd left by then, my wife still worked there) [2] and offered relocation to Denver, fully expecting a majority of the dev and ops staff take them up on their offer. They got a lot less than 10%..

Said event happened after we got a new CEO - a US guy who just happened to be from the US partners.

One of their main competitors then opened a dev centre in the town and a *lot* of the devs joined them.

The irony is that they then opened a 2nd data centre as DR - that was right next to the main one. So any disater affecting one would almost certainly affect the other too. How to *not* do BC/DR

[1] Dunno whether they still exist and can't be bothered to check.

[2] She got good redundancy pay so we basically had all one summer off (I was EKS so had plenty of money in the company account).

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: "as well as those from socially or economically disadvantaged backgrounds"

Being poor doesn't make you dishonest, any more than being Rich makes you honest.

It's a holdover from the Victorian days where being poor meant that you were lazy/shifless/a crook/subhuman rather than being a victim of a system that ensured all the money went to the "right people". And treated everyone else as disposible garbage.

Oh hi the US.. Sounding familiar?

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Outlook

WEll, there's eMClient (Windows)

It also craps the bed when you try and add a 2nd email account with the same email address but a different IMAP/SMTP server..

(Migrating my domains from a home server to an online provider - wanted to test that it was working *before* I pressed the mass-import function on the new provider - yes, I'd have no email on the new provider but at least I could tell that the IMAP login worked before I changed the MX records... I use eMClient (Mac) and every attempt to add the new provider lead to a crash (or simply failed to work). So I had to delete my on-prem account (despite wanting to use it for reference) before eMClient would let me add the new server location. I raised a case, nothing ever happened - or at least, if it did they never bothered to tell me)

Re: There once was a time...

That was even true in the DOS days when applications started to adopt CUA rules instead of creating their own different UI

Ah yes - the IBM-sponsered CUA rules. That their own product (Lotus Notes [1]) *utterly* failed to follow. Not even a hint of a switch to "enable CUA mode".

F5 to refresh you say? Hell no, in Notes it means "throw away your auth session and force a re-auth"

[1] Yes, I know it was originally not an IBM product but they had it long enough to actually make it CUA-conformant.

Re: Hand

but as it won't open shared mailboxes it's completely unsuitable for our office needs and isn't even worth starting to look at until it does

Well, since MS are making them go away completely in Exchange server, good luck with that.

Re: Hand

Isn't this simply a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?

Like our air source heat pump..

It got fitted and, periodically, would give a low-flow error that turns everything off and requires a hard power off reboot. Apparently, the cause was that the pump is designed to manage the water flow according to need and the controller [1] parameter at the low end was low enough to trigger the (entirely separate) low-flow sensor which, quite rightly brings stuff to a halt to stop damage to the pump..

Separate teams doing the design apparently.

They replaced the controller with one with the latest firmware (i.e tweaked settings to avoid setting off the low-flow sensor) and then, a week later, the water pump turns up it's diodes and died completely. In late November when I was fairly cold..

Since the water pump has been replaced, it's really been reliable and kept the house nice and warm. One downside - it can't heat the hot water *and* the house at the same time.

[1] Essentially, a non-socketed EEPROM and a bunch of control electrics for the pump. When I asked why they couldn't just update the EEPROM I got a blank look and a "nah, we just replce the board and send it back to the manufacturer"

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Back at the death-knell of the Y2K projects I needed a job (contract rates fell like a stone and I realised that I'd be better off as a permie than chasing a contract in an ever-decreasing market).

So, I applied for a unix and networking job - never having done either commercially (I'd been using linux for a few years by that point so could sort-of drive a unix box). The networking was a bit different (Cisco boxes, packet-switched networks - neither of which I'd ever used).

Much reading and internet searches (back when it was useful) before the interview ensued. I blagged my way through with liberal use of "I'm not sure but I know where to find out" and, much to my surprise, got the job.

It was a good job while it lasted [1] - travel to the various European offices, visits to Paris where my manager was every quarter and, largely, freedom to do the job my own way. I learnt a lot from my manager (all good) about how to be a good manager and a lot from the company about how not to operate an international IT department..

[1] I made it through several of the dot-com-bust rounds of redundancies but then got caught in the end on the premise that "we already have someone in your role in the US so they can cover your tasks". Several months after I got ejected [2], he left as well because they were expecting him to (essentially) work 18 hour days and, even for a US employee, that was too much. Oh, how I laughed.

[2] Our HR manager was away so one of her minions handled it and just gave the minimum package. She came back from leave, threw her toys out the pram and gave me the package I *should* have had originally. One of the few good HR managers I've ever worked with. I ended up with about double the money that the original package gave me. Walked straight out of there into another job.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

"Currently, the new Outlook is at the opt-in stage and is off by default'

Not if you are on a Mac and using Outlook 365. Sure, it's "optional" but, if you don't use it, you don't get email. Or calendar updates. Or anything else that's the Outlook core funtionality.

Which (kind of) makes it mandatory.

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Re: Is Washington losing its grip...?

Perhaps Canada will offer states the chance to become Canadian provinces

I was joking last night about Washington State becoming the newest province of Canada..

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

At least they don't sell Tesla models in vomit yellow, various shades of poo brown or vile orange.

I think Trump has a patent on the latter colour.

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Re: Stop dreaming

How about Apple? I keep seeing people with Apple corporate laptops so it must be feasible for someone

Speaking as someone who does Mac support (amongst other things) - they mostly use the MS Office stuff as local clients, not the webbified stuff (which is only used as a backup if their machine is down for some reason..)

Trump fires Democrat FTC commissioners, presaging big tech policy shifts

Re: Defending Bad Businesses

As soon as most of them are trained up to be more gain than pain

Most places I've worked will charge you a pro-rata amount for any training courses you've taken in the previous two years. Soo, say you've been on a course that costs £1000 then, if you leave straight after, they charge you full cost. After 1 year, they'll charge 30-50%, after two years they don't charge anything.

Anooying but I can understand why they do it.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

Re: Clearance?

Would be interesting to know just how much of a background check was actually done

I suspect it was along the lines of: "Mad King Trump wants him to have sooper sekret acceSS"..

After all, they are only following orders from above.

Director of National Intelligence

Ah National Intelligence. Nowadays sitting at about an average IQ of 65..

What a chud

Takes me back to Goodness Gracious Me..

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

Re: Not uploading

I just went with "never letting anyone in the house"

Fortunately, we are sprogless and my wife is on the fringes of being a luddite (she herds Sharepoint so it's not surprising) so no "smart speaker" has ever entered the house and any Apple device has Siri (and now Apple 'Intelligence') turned off..

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: Yes but ...

The American revolution really only worked due to the British not actually living there so the two sides didn't have to live with each other after the fact

It also worked because the French saw it as a convenient proxy war with the British to take their minds off the latest war in Europe (The Seven Years War) and put lots of resources onto hitting the British where they were the weakest. The British were relying on native/colonist support that just didn't arrive and Mad King George put a higher priority on fighting the French in Europe - which meant that the armies in the US were permanently starved of men and materials.

Re: The UK should be paying attention

It is amusing that the leader of the Labour party is more of a Thatcherite than any of the recent Tory leaders.

Well - he has modelled what little personality he has after Tory Blur..

Re: les queer studies?

Americans might have a lot of military equipment, but they dont want to admit they have a problem.

And part of the problem (as testified to by squaddies and officers I've been on contracts with) is that the US army is just too specialised.

Want tents put up? [1] There's a MOS for that and a rifleman won't be seen to be doing it. Want other military duties done - that's the responsibility of the relevent MOS, no-one else has the training to do it.

Unlike the British or French armies - outside of a few narrow specialities, everyone does everything and is trained to do so - which is why British military basic training is 14-26 weeks and US army training is 10 weeks. The support/combat troop ratio is also much higher in the US forces than in the British army.

[1] Guy was an Army artillery officer - had several exercises with the US army. One time, they were doing cold-weather training in Scotland in winter. They would do the test firing then move to overnight quarters. The British would arrive, put up the tents and stuff like the kitchens and be ready for the evening. The US guys would turn up and remain in their vehicles until the support company would turn up to pitch the tents, cook the food et. al. One of them would be ready for the evening well before the other and only had half the people..

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: MS AI running out of steam?

not the best thing since sliced bread

Some of us are not impressed with sliced bread - particularly that horrible plastic Chorleywood process stuff that masquerades as bread in most of the shops.

Re: I have a colleague who wants to spend over 40K in AI hardware...

There's a very fine line between laziness and efficiency...

In the past, when moving to a new orkplace, especially one where I was senior or sole techie, I spend the first 6 months analysing the systems then the next month automating stuff as much as possible so that my job only took half the time. The rest I could spend staring at a green-screen terminal, browsing my little corner of Usenet.

I called it "creative laziness"

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

Re: Point of order.

"I'm the president! Anything I say or do is official!"

Ah - the Trump variation on the Tricky Dickie rule..

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: How does that work?

You are supposed to have replaced the certificate with a new one with a new intermediate CA with a new lifetime before the old one expires.

Google *should* have:

Generated a new intermediate certificate with a nice long validity

Worked out how to distribute said cert out to the end-user devices (if they were hard-coded in the devices, tough luck. WEEE disposal time..)

Communicated to end users to say "apply the pending update if you don't want your device bricked"

But, in true Google style [1] they sat on their hands and did nothing. Probably because the employee who knew about it was kicked out in one of the many "rightsizing" exercises and they, despite all their computing power and technology, can't seem to manage to track certificates [2]. Calling google chaotic is an insult to chaos.

[1] "Alleged" style.

[2] Does your new product contain or use a Google certificate? If yes, tick the box and put in the expiry data and product ID. Then some poor muppet gets the weekly "these products are going to be affected by a certificate expiry in 6/3/1 month(s)" report and is required to do something to inform someone that action is needed.

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: I remember when HP was a good company

Can't understand why anyone would buy HP printers nowadays?

Because "computer shops" like Currys sell them and the poor deluded fools think the spotty oik serving them *must* know what they are talking about..

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

Re: So, one question

They can't fire her - she's a Delaware State judge..

Re: In a nod to the past...

That's because we work cheap...

Speak for yourself! I don't lay fingers to keyboard without at least a decent espresso and some nice high-protein snacks!

DOGE helps Veterans Affairs end IT contract run by service-disabled entrepreneurs

Re: Where's the real money

@codejunky

Please go away you pathetic troll. Nobody cares for your RWNJ rants, deviod of fact or rationality. The world is much more complicated than you can conceive of.