Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: So what was actually wrong?

Simple answer is incompetence.

Followed by by rabid attempts to cover up the incompetence in order to "preserve to brand image".

How's that working out then?

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

How did anyone at the post office believe that there was theft going on at 30% of their sub-post offices?

It's easy for a morally-corrupt person to convince themselves that black is white if their job/gong/bonus depends on it.

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

Well, suddenly it's important that we don't drag out the suffering of those poor people, isn't it?

And gives them a perfect opportunity to promulgate a law establishing the precedent of Parliament overturning the independance of the judicary..

Scum - the lot of them.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

Re: She called it "a concern"

I would always prefer it not to be 45,000 ft in the air.

Or stuck in a concrete tube 100m under the sea..

SpaceX snaps back at US labor board's complaint, calling it 'unconstitutional'

Maybe we need AmanfromMars to confirm?

Said nobody sane ever..

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: Test on the slowest box

Citrix should do that

Likewise Microsoft with the Vista & Windows 8 debacles.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Re: Bread and butter

Which way up would a cat land if you put butter in it's back?

Generally on your face, all 20 claws out..

Hell hath no fury like a cat disrespected. Especially a female [1] one

[1] In my (fairly extensive) cat experience, the cats most likely to attack randomly are (1) Intact tom cats [2] (2) breeding females (3) Black cat females.. (for some reason, our youngest black cat acts in a random tortie-cattitude manner, most unlike our *aqctual* tortie who is pretty laid back.

[2] Think Greebo.. Fortunately, I've never actually shared a house with one. They are somewhat smelly and prone to attacking other cats without warning.

Re: Terminal velocity

You know how boring some IT jobs are right?

I once thought that doing a techie job would be days of endless technical delight. Then I met the users.

It was many, many years ago.

Re: Terminal velocity

variable terminal velocity than a person or a brick

Even if it's a gold brick and wrapped in a nice slice of lemon?

Mines the one with the brain-melting cocktail in the pocket.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Re: 7,000 lbs?

would only be 318kg available for people and cargo before into getting to C classes

I have C1 on my drivers license - I think that, when I took my test (1982, passed first time..) it was something that got added automatically.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

as unthinkable as a Sumo wrestler without their mawashi

Nice to see a mention of my 2nd-favourite sport [1] on El Reg..

Mind you, Takakeisho nearly made me rage-quit when he blatantly cheated his way to victory in the September (he probably would have won anyway - Atamifuji doesn't really have the skills yet to get to the very top but Takakeisho not bothering to put his hands onto the Doyjo like the rules require (and the gyoji *not* calling a mata) slightly soured me. I notice that in the November Basho he was more careful to obey the rules so I assume that his oyakata probably Had Words along the lines of "the Japan Sumo association *will* take action if you keep on doing it"..).

Fortunately, my wife also enjoys it - she remembers watching wrestling on the TV with her gran in the 70's and sumo has a similar feel (but without the blatant scripting and match fixing!)

[1] First is the NFL. Mind you, we have some Japanese Roku gin that I'm only allowed to use during the 15 days of the Basho but there's no special drink for the NFL - unless the 49ers win the Superbowl - in which case I have a bottle of nice champagne at the back of the cupboard.. (BTW - the Superbowl is vary rarely the best game of the season - the divisional chamipionships are usually a lot better.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Re: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Although it's been a good 2 decades since I was regularly in the monastery

Likewise. I think I was a network manager when I last patronised the place.

Re: NEW_SMTP

By this, they have made it hard to run your own one-guy SMTP server

Nonsense. Even if you can't handle the nuts and bolts yourself, there are plenty of open-source mainserver-in-a-box setups. All they need is a linux machine and internet connectivity.. (best not to do it from a home IP address or you'll be blocked by default by a lot of servers - one of the reasons why I pay for a commercial-grade fibre connection).

I'm admittedly an outlier (been running mail servers for decades at home starting with the dial-up Demon Internet days with early linux, dial-on-demand, qmail and fetchmail to todays gigbit FTTP, a mail appliance from proxmox to do all the anti-spam stuff and a Devuan box running postfix as the mail store) but for anyone vaguely technically competent it's not that hard.

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

I started out using tin (and pine for email) on a Unix shell

Likewise. And ran my own news server and periodically grabbed stuff from the groups I was interested in (uk.rec.motorcycles mostly). I could ssh in from anywhere and read the news..

Eventually got bored with it all and found other stuff to spend my time on.

Missing tomatoes ketchup with ISS crew after almost a year lost in space

Re: Musical Memories

Pah. Your feral tomatoes would be hogweed-haired to death by my Giant Hogweed.

Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge

Royal beast did not forget

Soon they escaped, spreading their seed

Preparing for an onslaught, threatening the human race

Mighty Hogweed is avenged

Human bodies soon will know our anger

Kill them with your Hogweed hairs

Heracleum mantegazziani!

Re: Ketchup in Space

pigs in a blanket or toad in the hole

I have a recipe for a pigs-in-blankets toad in the hole.. Best of both worlds! With sriracha ketchup.

Google Pixel gets privacy mode to keep your selfies safe from prying repair techs

phones of good-looking female customers always seem to develop strange faults which require knowledge of the unlock code

If they did that to my wifes' phone all they would get is pictures of cats and dogs. Or interesting plant/bug/fungi.. (and the odd carpet sample - going through the "we really must replace the 26-year old hall and stairs carpet) dance)

We are both firmly of the "don't take a photo that you wouldn't want a stranger to see" persuasion.. probably because, when we were growing up, getting photos involved giving the film over to strangers to develop..

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: "Actually, this is precisely the service you paid for"

Strict application has kept my tail-feathers out of the soup many times

I too maintain a CYA file..

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Microsoft has "borrowed" quite a lot of things

But sadly not the concept of morals or ethics (and no - I don't mean the county to the north-east of London)

Re: Have they tried

Especially something like a C50 Honda

My first bike was a Honda C70 step-through. Comprehensively pre-disastered by my 3 older brothers. Riging at night was interesting as it was a choice of "charge the battery" or "have the headlight on"..

Re: Have they tried

IPL

#cp IPL 430

(sad that I can remember how to start a TPF test machine from my short and inglorious mainframe programming career 30 years ago.. Can't remember the command to mount a (virtual) tape library though)

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

Re: In Other News

traditional Christmas cake or a Dundee cake, is a work of art

Especially when fed properly. I prefer golden rum in mine..

Re: "recall"

I'd go for BogoDrive

More like BongDrive..

Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired

Re: "Brody worked as a cloud engineer for First Republic Bank"

He'll never work in a bank again, that's for sure, and there's a good change he'll never be in an IT position ever again

Many, many years ago, in the days when RAM/HD prices were in the extortionate range, we noticed that were were missing some RAM clips and several hard drives. The management were pretty sure that they knew what was happening (unusually for that place) and so bought replacements and marked them (and the rest of the stock) with Smartwater.

Sure enough, a few more things go missing and the police are directed to search the suspected contractors houses. Oh look - there's some RAM clips and hard drives with smartwater on them - matching the stuff that we'd used.

Said contractors get taken to court and end up with a criminal record (though no time in jail for a first offense). The sad thing was that neither of then would be likely to get a contract again - and they were both very well paid contractors. The ringleader was utterly unrepentant (he was doing other fiddles like claiming VAT using a made up number and living in a council house because his visible earnings made it look like he was on the poverty line) but the other guy is the one I feel sorry for.

The money they must have made would have been barely a weeks wages for them.

Re: Amazing!

It turned out that one had lost his previous job for the same thing

Many years ago we were asked (quietly) by the Police to check the activities of one of our staff who they suspected of dealing in child porn. We did so, and he was. From his official desktop, in the office (he used to "work late" a lot).

One day the police turned up and arrested him and took with them every computer that he had used (3 of them, from memory). We were quite happy for the Police to destroy them once they were not needed for evidence purposes.

He went to jail for a fairly long time - he was not only distributing it but organising the making of it. I suspect his time in jail would *not* have been pleasant.

Re: Amazing!

have the network refuse to communicate with his laptop

Our MDM allows me to remote-wipe/activation-lock a Mac (which will happen as soon as it connects to an internet-facing network). And, if a device gets reported as stolen, that's the first thing I do..

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

Though I can imagine the carnage if a bunch of unsuspecting techies were presented with in a Windows CLI..

Our server techies use it all the time at work - a lot of the more arcane stuff (like Exchange back end stuff) can only be done using Powershell. So they do a fair bit of training on using CLI tools.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: Quote from Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

if you have the reading stamina for 30+ books

AKA "my normal monthly reading rate" (sometimes it's higher - like when I'm on annual leave. Because of multitudes of pets, we don't actually go away..)

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Latte: Chewed

Sadly not wine-proof

My current personal Mac has survived a wine attack (youngest cat is quite adept at knocking over a wine glass in the exact direction needed to cause it to cover the keyboard). Fortunately, dry red wine isn't particularly sticky so the keybaord still works.

Said cat was responsible for the demise of the previous Mac that NewMac was bought to replace. In OldMacs case, her chosen weapon was a full glass of clementine juice. I did turn the Mac off ASAP and try to use damp cloths to clean the keyboard (it was one of the dodgy butterfly switch keyboards so was semi-knackered already) but the keys kept either not registering or sticking down. And a non-warranty repaclement was quoted to me as £700 - on a Mac that was worth (at best) £500.

OldMac is currently languising in the box of old crap in the server room upstairs at home along with EvenOlderMac (AKA 'emergency Proxmox server') and a whole drawer full of "past IT tat I've had" (including an Apple Newton Messagepad in prime condition).

Re: Bizarre printer failure

it was simply considered to be too old to remain on the inventory. :-(

I'm getting to that stage too.. (not quickly enough for my liking!)

Re: We were not gentle, and each RM03 had a rough journey

was when she was a data-input/credit control clerk on some ancient minicomputer at a double-glazing manufacturer

I am reliably informed by said long-term spouse that it was a Systime 5000 that she looked after.. There are *very* few pictures of one on t'internet

Routine was to do a final backup the weeks transactions to the disk pack, eject it (cross fingers that it worked), put in next disk pack (son/father/grandfather method) and leave it there for the daily backups.

Quite heavy apparently (she's 5'2" and not heavily built!)

Re: We were not gentle, and each RM03 had a rough journey

but I think all of the "washing machine" stye drives were from OEMs.

First IT-related job my wife had (well before I met her - she did a NCC computer course rather than doing 6th form in the early 1980s) was when she was a data-input/credit control clerk on some ancient minicomputer at a double-glazing manufacturer. She was also responsible for swapping out the removable drive pack that was used for backups (press spin-down button, wait for light to go green, open top, swap waiting drive pack with the one for that week, label and store the one you just took out).

Generally the process worked fine but, just occasionally the drive wouldn't spin down and they'd have to call in an engineer to force it before the pack could be swapped.

Dunno how big the capacity of the drives - this was in the mid 1980s so I don't imagine it was terribly big...

Re: Two sides of a coin (aka Someone wanted a new printer)

It fell 'accidentally' several times until the chassis was so bent the case wouldn't align enough for it to close, and had to be replaced.

I had that happen to a Cisco Catalyst switch that managlement insisted that we move to a new-build office (despite the fact that it was *really* obsolete). I've never seen a Catalyst with a 120 degree angle where there should be a 90 degree angle..

The power supply was OK - the rest of it was thoroughly US. So we ended up getting a newer (ie less obsolete) switch out of storage.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Re: Be fair.

Well my mate's Teslas have been about the closest in reliability to my Dad's 1972 Morris Marina

Our 1966 Morris Minor is pretty reliable. After lockdown 1 my Toyota C-HR had two flat batteries (engine battery and hybrid battery), required 12 hours of charging to even start then had to go to the Toyota garage to have the controller reset because the hybrid system wouldn't come online..

The Morris Minor? Battery still had charge so we turned the engine over. After about 5 seconds, it coughed into life and ran perfectly normally [1].

It gets an annual fettle from a bloke wot does (he's a retired car mechanic and the Morris is modern compared to his collection of cars) and, other than doing the tyres once in a while, needs no other stuff done. My wife uses it 2-3 times a week - it does about 4K miles a year (it's currently on 124K miles - still got the original engine although we've had the crankshaft and head replaced when the old crankshaft broke about 25 years ago - during which some of the valves got manged so we replaced the head as well. )

Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

Speaking as someone who was alive when the UK car industry died - the management was as much to blame as the unions.

Decades of non-investment, refusal to innovate and then hard politics from both sides is what killed the native mass car market. We were making poor cars really badly and trying to sell them at inflated prices with minimal fit, finish and options.

The same thing happened to the motorbike manufacturers - although I'm glad that Triumph was resurrected (I had a Tiger 900cc for a while - very nice bike).

Then the Japanese decided to beat us at our own game and started selling well-designed, well-built cars with a high level of fit and finish and loads of options as standard. The first car I ever had with aircon was a Honda - British cars (in most cases) didn't even have it as an option and, if they did (mostly the executive cars) it was an *expensive* option that required constant maintenance.

You could always (until the 90's anyway) go for an well built expensive German car - but again, the base spec was.. base and everything else was an cost option. During the 90s the MBAs started taking over at BMW/Audi and the quality went down the pan and they came very close to losing their way completely.

So no - it wasn't "the unions" that were solely responsible for killing British industry in general and the car makers specifically - it was decades of minimal investment and innovation, coupled with decades of shoddy employee relations that created the vacuum that lead to militant unions. Who then went too far and ended the already rotting corpse of an industry that had been outcompeted and out innovated by the Japanese (and later the Koreans).

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

Say something

Maybe acting like a RWNJ *might* have something to do with it..

Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

overwhelmingly libertarian right: loads of global warming deniers and a general belief that women have no place in IT

Speak for yourself. Most of the IT people I know (or have worked with) certainly do not comply with your stereotype.

Mirror-projection maybe?

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Re: Artificial pancreas?

However, as that's reached a point where they think Type 2 can be put into remission

Colour me sceptical - my GP (conveniently) is a diabetic specialist and he hasn't heard of it..

(T2 diabetic (non-overweight - just bad genetics inherited from my mother) for 30 years. )

Re: 2024 will be a good year ... for some.

In between confusion and coma, also likely to encounter sweating, rapid heart rate, and eventually seizures which don't respond to conventional treatment.

I've had a lot of mild hypos recently (I'm T2 diabetic, GP put me on gliclazide which increases insulin production and, initially, I was taking one in the morning and one in the evening. Trouble is that, unless I ate more food than I wanted to, I'd get hypos during the night.

I use Freestyle Libre 2 monitoring patches and the app will generate an alarm if blood glucose drops too low.

I now take both gliclazide in the morning so, mostly, the overnight hypos have gone. And my sleep quality has improved!

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Re: "we understand there are circumstances that could prevent you from ..."

At work we have a couple of machines where I work that still run Windows 7

Previous Orkplace we had a cupboard full of old Compaq 386 desktops. One of our older machines had a custom-made control card (ISA bus) that would lock up solid if you put it in anything faster. The person who had designed the card had long since left (and taken the design docs with him) and we only had two of the cards (both much-repaired) so we didn't want to send one away for analysis and redesigning in case the live one failed (which they were prone to do at random intervals) and we had to put in the spare while the other one was fixed.

Every so often, we'd take some out, give them a good clean, boot them up to make sure they were working, fix any dodgy solder joints (which is where they usually failed) and put them back in the cupboard.

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Re: nuke strike packages

Why would you want coffee ?

They don't - that's why they specified Starbucks..

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

Wasn't it Peter Gabriel who was the first digitised pop star ?

He (and Genesis) pioneered a lot of the now-standard video/live techniques. They were progressive in more than their music.

Re: Better than real

My experience with concerts is that they always fail to capture the energy of the original studio recording

You haven't been going to the right concerts then.. seeing a bunch of talented, skillful musicians [1] plying their craft is often better than a studio recording - especially when the crowd gets caught up in it as well.

Doesn't really work in larger venues though.

[1] Which, obviously, excludes a great deal of the successful chart acts. Especially those that rely on autotune or lipsync.

Nope, market the much known (and cheap due to recycling!) product that doesn't ripple, sells well, and can be labeled as the family experience. Oh, that Brave New World...

[Applause]

While *real* musicians operate on a day-to-day basis, making money from being session musicians because their primary passion (jazz/prog/folk/blues) is trendy enough to get them noticed by the record companies.

Either that or capitalising on past glory (like Steve Hackett - although he's very much an outlier because, as well as doing the Genesis Revisited stuff, he also still produces copious amounts of new material. So, if you go to one of his shows, you get the Genesis stuff, liberally sprinkled with his own stuff. He's the musician that lead my wife to coin the description of "too many notes and all in the wrong place")

I am, by nature, a fan of complex music be it Classical, Prog Rock, Jazz (old and new, big band and modern). Much of the pap that's output by the music companies is, frankly, elevator music - designed to occupy a slot in the charts for a week or two and very little else. Generally tied to MOTAS eye-candy.

There are good musicians doing exciting stuff on Bandcamp/YouTube et. al. but they are by far outweighed by the mass-produced, made to formula junk.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: I'm sure that measured IQ values are not worth anything

But you come up with a solution in days that saves years of man-hours in the long run :-)

Whenever I've had a new job, I spend the first 6 months frantically making my life easier and working out better ways of doing the job. Then the rest of the time in the job enjoying a peaceful life :-)

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

The only time IQ testing is a problem is when amateurs make it a problem. It's supposed to be *part* of a comprehensive examination of mental abilities, not a start and finish line. There's emotional testing, empathy assessment, etc.

Which is why they coined the phrase "emotional intelligence". As I said ^ - my 'skill' seems to be entirely information-related - and I *have* to be intertested in what I was learning for it to kick in. Techie stuff? Works fine. Maths? [insert blank look].

I'd never have been able to make a living as a physicist.. But I do enjoy doing presentations - especially teaching non-techies about techie stuff in a way that (I hope) they understand.

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

fit in quite well, we're talking the 145+ crowd

[Waves].

I did join Mensa (briefly) but found it was full of the most boring people imaginable, all high on their own IQ scores.

My main personality quirk is a deep love of prog rock (listening to it now while in a nice dark room because migraine - the music actually helps because it gives my brain something to do other than go 'ow ow ow'). My IQ mainly seems to be in information gathering - and IT. Which is fortunate since I herd IT for a living..

Mind you, my IQ test was when I was 18 - which was 40 years ago. I'd imagine (like a 57-year old Morris Minor engine) that a lot of the horses have left for pastures new..

I like to think I'm relatively normal. And so does my imaginary friend..

Re: Delusional narcissist

The Murder Chickens do need seeing to and that's a fact.

The swans on our local lake do a pretty good job at that, especially when the cygnets are young.

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

Re: only 15 years ?

I remember trialling Wyse kit.... way back in the day.

Ahh.. the mysteries of bootp and WHY THE HELL WON'T IT BOOT!..

(My memories are fuzzy but I seem to remember that the bootp docs were good but Wyse wanted things set up in a very specific manner, not covered by the various docs that I had. This was when the internet was very much a fledging thing and gopher/WAIS were not really much help. And even 'techie' companies like Wyse had websites that were very little more than a glorified sales brochure.

And, of course, once we finally got everything working, manglement wanted to go a different direction and never actually used Wyse terminals.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Re: But then

shouldn't have been abled to be engaged

I hear the sound of millions of grammar teachers crying out in horror then becoming forever silent..