Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: re: Though for no obvious reason.

Nazi germany, make sure that your are blond, blue eyed and healthy

None of which, ironically, applied to the glorious leader..

Chip firm accused of IP theft bites back, claims Apple's contracts are rotten

Re: The aforementioned IPAs

but ales well that ends well

As long as you have a stout defense and operate in a mild manner.

MOVEit breach delivers bundle of 3.4 million baby records

It's as if FTP never existed - nor SCP, SFTP...

But, but, but.. it's 'da cloud' where everything is safe!

(Safe for datamining, criminals, advertisers[1] and similar ne'er-do-wells)

[1] Yes, yes, I know that criminals and advertisers share a similar venn space..

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

Re: "Comprised of"

Is that another part of the former El Reg's Americanisationness?

It's a perfectly good phrase in British (proper) English too..

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

I only ever use my own router providing my own wifi.

Likewise - sort of.

Internet -> router [1] -> firewall -> internal network [2].

[1] Some sort of Draytek acting purely as a router - not the FritzBox Zen supplied. DHCP/NAT/FW all turned off. All it does is make the PPPOE connection and then hand everything off to the firewall [3]

[2] Including 2 Unifi APs and two Unifi mesh APs with the management running on a VM on one of my virtualisation (Proxmox - yay!) servers.

[3] Had several tries at getting the firewall to do the PPPOE and, for some reason, it's never worked. Maybe I'll give it another go when the OPNSense F/W goes in.

Re: Marketing....

You were sold double glazing as a child

Except that double glazing has clear and quantifiable benefits..

(I have to say that since my wife worked for a double-glazing supplier when I met her 35 years ago. They sold to the install companies, not the public. She's now plumbing the depths as a Sharepoint admin..)

You mean like Zen internet?

I did get a slight ticking off about using their SMTP servers as smarthosts - apparently that's not how you are supposed to do it. But that's the extent of it..

(Some domains really don't like traffic coming from me even though it's a commercial line and I have a proper SPF setup.. so emails for those domains get relayed via Zen)

Re: You forgot "politicians" ...

Surely that should be spelt : "outliar" ?

You missed the "Tony" prefix..

Re: Too pessimistic - Not always

Then again, many things builders do makes no sense

Indeed. Like our en-suite bathroom handbasion - turn on the cold tap at the same time as the cold tap in the main bathroom and it sucks in air so that, pretty quickly, it forms an airlock and no cold water comes out.

The solution is to hold your hand over the mixer exit grille and turn both taps on. The hot water pushes the air up until you can hear it bubble out the header tank - at which point the cold water works again. The house was built in 1997.

But at least we don't have odd patterns in our exterior brickwork where it clear that a brickie made a mistake in laying and, rather than undoing it, they just bodged it to be approximately right and they could lay the next course.

Re: Too pessimistic

My house is a typical 30s built suburban semi, with all internal walls being brick. In some cases, definitely some sort of Friday afternoon brick with neutron star density

Current orkplace, we support a bunch of old buildings, including castles. Many years ago, one of them wanted me to do a survey about fitting wifi into the office spaces within the castle and guest wifi everywhere else.

They looked at my plan and BOM and had a minor shrieking/fainting fit - one AP per room!

I gently explained that 3 foot of flint and mortar walls *really* don't let wifi through - even at 2.4Ghz. They eventually went for the guest wifi only since that was mostly outdoor spaces and the new-build cafe etc.

I don't think they have office wifi even now.

Re: Interest, expertise and time

All of us limited to ADSL are sending you good feelings that you aren't suffering too much

I'm having to replace my old firewall as the old HP Microserver with a Celeron in it (running Astaro Sophos UTM) can't keep up with my gigabit (nearly) FTTP...

Trouble is I've got used to it and it's little foibles and, at my age and state of alcohol-soakedness, adjusting to the OPNSense way of doing things is taking me time..

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Re: Digital Town Square

More like a digital biker bar methinks

I think you mis-spelt 'Nazi'..

Oracle at Europe's largest council didn't foresee bankruptcy

Re: I feel for them

turn a company completely upside down, leave them in a barely functional state, and laugh all the way to the bank

You've just described a vulture venture capitalist..

(Lets not insult vultures. They perform a useful role in removing decaying corpses. So, El Reg - there TWIX over there - do your stuff!)

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: Bolted Horses

What keeps people using the Sky+ box is, I think, a combination of ignorance (not realising there's an alternaitve) and apathy

Or (in my case) living in a house that, even with a masthead amplifier, had effectively zero TV signal. And Freesat et. al. don't have the channels I want to watch (Sky Sports NFL for one - yes, you can get at it via a streaming subscription but that costs more than subscribing to the two sports channels I get). We minimise the packages we get - we certainly don't go for the "we want everything" approach.

So your mischaracterisation is a tad off. Some of us have choice of Sky or not watching the stuff we want to see.

At least you could fix a 2CV with a screwdriver, a wrench and a hammer

Much like a Morris Minor. I refer to it as 'old-fashioned agricultural engineering'

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Sadly I think you underestimate the stupidity of HM Government..

To sum it up in two words:

"Liz Truss"

She managed to lose a huge chunk of money out of the economy (£45 bn?) and is still insisting that she was right, albeit a tad hasty..

Re: CEO contempt of users ends badly as predicted

The very idea of charging per install is lunacy

And also strongly implies that Unity is gathering data from your PC and sending it back to HQ. Else, how would they know whether it's a fresh install on a new device or a re-install?

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: Regrets? I've had a few...

Was given a 21 inch, high res (1600x1200) CRT monitor from work, many years ago

I still have a 21" Sun CRT upstairs in the computer room. Until this Saturday when I'll be tidying up all the cruft, recabling with the new KVM and, potentially, switching to the new OPNSense firewall from my old Sophos UTM running on an old HP Microserver..

I'd hoped that my shiny new (well reconditioned) storage server would also be going in but the supplier had forgotten to test the drive backplane - which didn't work. So they are building me a replacement.

Re: A first?

masochists enjoy Windows

"Hurt me" says the masochist.

"No" says the sadist as he gives them a linux box instead..

iPhone 12 deemed too hot to handle for France's radiation standards

Re: Eh?

There are other sorts of watts?

No - but power is also measured in "Where's" and "why's".. As in "where the hell is the power going" or "why the hell is it drawing so much power?"

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: "Google Privacy Sandbox"

"War Is Peace."

Bah. You beat me to it.

One more:

Military intelligence

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: They can both go away.

Sinister, Dexter

Ob FlandersAndSwann..

You obviously twine to the left *and* to the right. Careful you don't fall flat on your face..

Re: They can both go away.

Christian Nationalists

Another oxymoron..

Tesla knew Autopilot weakness killed a driver – and didn't fix it, engineers claim

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

The nature of Tesla driving was all fierce acceleration and braking rather than smooth anticipation of traffic flow

When we got the C-HR, we were given info on how to most efficiently drive it (apparently Toyota had done a fair amount of research). The answer - accellerate hard up to destination speed, then maintain speed. Up to a certain speed, most of the 'maintain speed' phase will be mostly EV mode. Then brake hard as this maximises regenerative braking.

Under certain circumstances (ie open road with little traffic) the accellerate/cruise suits my driving style. The 'brake late and hard' really, really does not.

You also have several driving modes - economy, normal and sport - which affect the accelleration profile, how much it goes into EV mode and (I think) the suspension stiffness. Most of the time mine is in econ mode.

Re: Its probably not the cross traffic.

Most cars are difficult to get to accelerate rapidly

This amuses me - a car driver breathlessly recounting how his car can do 0-60 in 6 seconds!

Most of the bikes I've had would easily do that with the Fireblade 900 taking less than that to get to 100mph.. (that's the value of an 18,000 RPM red-line and a set of well-selected gear ratios - only 3 gear changes to get to there and, because you are going up the gears, you can do clutchless gear changes..)

The Fireblade cost me £5k second-hand.

Re: WTF

had just 3 minor accidents

Total of :

1. On the 125cc bike - following a woman away from a roundabout and she decided to slam her brakes on as she suddenly wanted to turn right. My fault, I was too close.

2. In the pre-disastered Cortina, pulled out onto a roundabout only to discover that the van that had been indicating that it was turning off had decided not to. My fault and the last time I trusted anyone elses' indicators.

3. Again in the Cortina - rear-ended my dads car as he was towing me - to be fair, not my fault. He'd got his hazards on while towing me (at about 20 MPH). Woman was wating to pull out of the station, saw his indicators were on and assumed that he was turning into the station so pulled out in front of him. He hit her, I hit him.. (the Cortina brakes were, at the best of times, pretty ineffective and even more so with no servo assist due to a dead engine).

4. Again the Cortina - after fixing the dead engine issue in (3) above (distributor shaft split pin had sheared so no drive to the rotor..), pulled out of my parents driveway only to find that a woman was pulling out of the driveway about 50 feet down the road on the opposite side. I *almost* managed to stop in time. She claimed that "I was speeding and hit her". My response was "how fast do you think a 1.6l Cortina can be going with only 50 feet run-up, especially when about 20 of it is me doing a 90 degree right turn?". She also claimed for a whole front-end rebuild when the collision speed was about 5mph. Not my fault.

5. Our first car that we bought together after we got married (a Peugeot 309). Was driving on Wootten Bassett in the rain. Saw a bunch of stopped vehicles and hazard lights ahead so put my foot on the brake. Then noticed the big deisel slick that I was currently sliding though. Ended up hitting the pile and then having two cars behind joining us. Not my fault. The woman behind tried to claim that she'd stopped and I bounced back into her. Physics doesn't work like that..

6. Last one, on the Honda Fireblade 900. Deep winter, very icy. Had been go-karting out in a place in the country. Afterwards, got onto the bike thinking "take it easy, adrenalin is still flowing". Took it easy and cautious, right up until I rode over some black ice just after a bend. Bike went sliding off down the road with me sliding along after it. My main thought was "this is going to get expensive.." Fortunately, other than a scuffed right-hand engine cover and a destroyed hand grip, the bike was fine.

Re: WTF

ride my machine firmly convinced, at all times, that there is someone out there trying to kill me

My philosophy (when I was physically capable of riding a motorbike) was that *everyone* was trying to kill me. I grew up riding bikes in London..

To mangle a quote "There are old bikers and there are bold bikers. There are no old, bold bikers".

I still (as much as is possible) take the bike line round bends and roundabouts, much to my wife's displeasure as we skim close to the kerbs or centre-line.

Re: There is no possible fix

you link with the central scrutinizer and enter the controlled roadway.

That might work in some cities in the US but out in the rural areas? Forget it. Some Good Ol' Boy will insist on driving his unfeasably-large truck (with attendant gun rack natch) into the controlled roadway "because of muh freedumbs".

Chaos will ensue.

Re: There is no possible fix

For non-UK readers, housing developments are often "managed" by the developer for a some time

I'm very, very glad that the section of town that I live in was formerly-council land and, when they sold it to the developers, they mandated the maximum housing density and stuff like the width of the kerbs and how much green space had to remain.

The result is that it's actually quite pleasant and there are at least 3 parks within dog-walking distance. We have a reasonable sized garden (for a modern development - helped by the fact that we are a corner plot.

The developments in the rest of the town that were privaely owned are miserable rabbit warrens of houses, crammed in and carefully-designed to have maximum occupancy at the expense of privacy and parking space.

Re: Risk tolerance

It brakes smoothly but far, far later than I would

The opposite is true in my C-HR - it starts braking at about 50m and slows itself down to the same speed fairly quickly.

Driving with adaptive cruise control is very definately different from traditional cruise control. You have to think a lot further ahead (not a problem for me since I do that anyway - legacy of my motorbike days..). I've had a terrifying drive with an ex-colleague who would zoom up to slow-moving traffic, swear when he realised that the lane to the right was occupied than pull out (at a much lower speed than the lane to the right, having wasted the opportunity to gain speed when he had plenty of clearance) and cause the traffic in that lane to brake sharply in order to not run into him.

I'm convinced that motorway/dual carriageway driving is a skill in itself and newly-qualified drivers shouldn't be allowed drive on the motorways until they have done a course.

I never let myself be a passenger in his car again. He (at that point) drove an Audi.

they've copied BMW and made indicator lights optional too

Do keep up - that crowd have switched over to Audi now. Especially the 'cheap' option of the A3. I'm somewhat glad the my cycle-route to work in 90% cycle-path..

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

Re: HP simply do not care

Not sure that private pensions are really fit for purpose

In the early 90's, I spent 5 (ish) years as a programmer then switching to support. I was paid a really good wage and we had a good pension scheme (we paid in 5% and the employer paid in 10%). When I left, it was worth (in adjusted terms) about £15k p/a.

The company (more or less) left the UK and left the pension in the hands of a private pension company. That company grossly mis-managed the pension (and passed it around their group of companies, each move attracting 'fees') to such an extent that now, having been finally moved to a company that is actually good at pensions, the pension is worth about £1k p/a. When it was passed to them, it was worth about £500 p/a.. By the time I retire (9 more years!) it might get to the giddy heights of £2k p/a. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have that £2k (it'll keep me in rum if nothing else :-) ) but compared to what it might have been, it's a pittance.

The company? Since they were no longer were incorporated in the UK (the tentacle that they left behind was an entirely separate company) they basically shrugged and said "not our problem".

Red Hat redeploys one of its main desktop developers

Re: countdown to Wayland bashing

> Wayland is a complete waste of developer energy and effort.

Nope. It is another systemd: it's a legit answer to real issues that real Linux buyers/users/developers have. I will return to this point in a moment.

The entire original premise of systemd was to "make it boot faster" [1] and do away with init scripts. It's since grown to an obscene tentacled monster, trying to pervade every facet of linux [2]. There's a reason why on all my server VMs, the only one running a distro that uses systemd (Ubuntu LTS) was because I needed to spin up Mastodon and none of the systemd-free distribution had it in their package lists.

So, mostly, I run FreeBSD or Devuan.

[1] How often do you need to boot your server? Or even a laptop - just close the lid and let it sleep. It's not Windows dammit!

[2] Binary logs requiring a viewer to read them? *Really* Which idiot thought that was a good idea? What happens when the VM goes badly wrong and you need to read the logs but the binary no longer works?

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

guns had an effective fire rate of about 1 shot per 5-10 minutes

They must have been *really* bad at gunnery.. The British soldiers at Waterloo (and previously, in the Peninsular War) were expected to fire 3 rounds per minute (and did so because they spent a lot of time training to do it). The French expected two per minute - the experienced regiments could manage it but not the conscripts.

That's one of the many reasons why Napoleon was defeated (plus the whole "starting a war on two fronts thing - and the tactic that determined that the French attack in a column, not a line so only the front short line could fire..)

Re: always on about absolute free speech

is because guillotines need gravity to work

Springs - all you need is springs..

(Blade gets pulled upwards, stretching the spring. Ratchet is released, spring does its thing..)

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: Shovels, food, and clothing

You know what product later made him famous...

Pickaxes?

:-)

invade Poland and stick the economy on a war footing

Except they didn't (put the country on a war footing that is) - right up until more-or-less the end of the war they kept stuff at a normal level. Unlike us and the USSR..

The US didn't go onto a war footing really either - they had enough capacity to make all the stuff they needed without having to.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: Captain paranoid

Most of our FOIA requests are salespeople fishing for information

Yup. We get that a lot too - especially as, for stuff bought through the Government Gateway, contract dates and awards are matters of public record. And bidding losers are *even* more likely to file lots of spurious FOI requests in order to try to make us reconsider. Likewise, suing us for rejecting their bid on the basis that 'we were prejudiced against them for x reason'.

Fortunately, the team handling the contracts is very scrupulous about record keeping, in a form that makes responding to FOI relatively easy.

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

East Anglia is obviously to the East of West Anglia!!

And we are very definately not at war with them, despite what you might have heard last month.

And why does Google Translate not include a 'Saxon' option eh?

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

Northumberland is in The North

Yes...and Manchester isn't.

From the perspective of my wife (Plymouth-born, father was Cornish) pretty much *everything* is in the North. Even Brizzle. Let alone my birthplace (Birmingham) - they are all 'up the line'.

Re: Isn't it seeing triple now?

that someone knows where East Anglia is

Simple - it's the territory of the East Angles. As opposed to the West Saxons or northern Norse.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Re: The true test will

And then pardons himself for anything he (and his cohorts) have done

He can't pardon himself for the Georgia stuff - firstly, the Georgia constitution doesn't allow it and, secondly, they are State charges and, as far as I know, beyond the remit of the POTUS' remit. Not that that fact would stop the GOP trying it, even though nominally they are the party of "States Rights"

As to the other stuff - there's a lot of legal debate at the moment as to whether the president can pardon himself - if they could then, surely, old Tricky Dickie would have done it and not waited for his successor to do it.

Re: Election Integrity

Technically the people can elect representatives

The whole US Electoral Colleage thing baffles me - the state votes for a party but the representative electors are *not* bound by the decision that their state made at the ballot box.

How is that democracy? It's more akin to the system that elected emperors of the Holy Roman Empire [1] - rife with corruption, backstabbing and, sometimes, outright murder.

[1] As Gibbon (?) remarked - neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Re: Election Integrity

Having them rather than competent people implement the decisions is madness

I always thought that the US habit of electing sherrifs was a recipe for corruption and nepotism.. Would you trust a politician to be fair and evenhanded in the application of the law?

most gifted, best educated nations in the world

I assume he's not talking about the US - very, very far from being the 'best educated' and have been for quite a while.

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

Re: Maintaining a positive team environment

Always a Musk priority.

Here's a positive terminal. Please grasp and fill yourself with positivity!

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc

The fact is most performers never owned their music

In this country, Marillion got dropped by their music company (the deal came to an end and they were not trendy or edgy enough for the music company to renew). So they instead turned to fan-power - they created a fan-subscription service to provide the money to make their next few album.

They were massively oversubscribed. The list of names in the included CD booklet is huge - with my name in there too :-)

They did that for a few albums until they had enough of a fund to make sure that they didn't have to go cap in hand to any of the music companies. They do use one - but only as a distribution agreement where the mucis company gets a proportion of the cost of each sale but nothing else.

And they did it long before that sort of thing became popular on t'internet.

Veilid: A secure peer-to-peer network for apps that flips off the surveillance economy

So is posting someone a 3.5 inch floppy

I remember (in my first IT job) getting a bunch of 5.25 inch floppies with some hardware drivers on (network stuff I seem to remember). We only had one or two PCs with that size drive (most of ours were 3.5" PS/2's so we had to copy the drivers over to fresh floppies.

The supplied floppies also had the Form.A virus. Which was fun - as the concept of an anti-virus was largely not registered at that point. Fortunately, I seem to remember that it couldn't successfully infect the hard drives so just discarding the infected floppies (and any others that had been infected) cured the infection. And delayed the hardware rollout by several weeks until we could get the drivers on clean floppies.

The supplier got called into the IT directors office and got given a thorough reaming and left, promising a big discount on our next order.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Hounds biting his ass...

I wouldn't let my dogs near him, let alone potentially injesting the blood of someone with an interesting relationship with illegal recreational drug use.

Re: Musk would only stand a chance of winning ..

He should have learnt Ecky Thump

Instead of concentrating on "Easy Trump"..