Posts by PickledAardvark

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

Re: ...then there's backup stories...

"So then we found out that NONE of the tape backups was readable!"

I've been there too on NetWare/ArcServe.

Write-only backups are secure. You can toss the tape in a bin and nobody can steal your data...

Re: One simple trick...

"Can't you enter a command to abort the wipe?"

Maybe. But you still have to work out what got deleted.

On the first Unix system I used, an admin configured the rm command with a system alias so that rm required a confirmation. Annoying after a while but handy when learning.

When you are reconfiguring a system, delete/rm is not the only option. Move/mv protects you from your errors. If the OS has no move/mv, then copy, verify before delete.

Bug? Feature? Power users baffled as BitLocker update switch-off continues

Re: Really?

We have a problem here.

Hells bells -- Microsoft supports a virtual TPM for virtual OS instances. The point about a TPM was/is that it was a bit of unique silicon wrapped in plastic. Theoretically, you couldn't make up responses from a TPM.

Re: seen it

Hold the power button down and count to ten. That should force a shutdown with a cold-ish reboot. But you already knew that.

Users shouldn't need to jump through hoops. Users should be able to reboot a Windows PC if that is what they want to do.

A Windows PC in a domain should normally take 60 to 120 seconds to boot to a login prompt, and login should take less than 30 seconds until an uninterrupted (non-jittery) desktop. Those are dreadful response times, but common targets.

If there's a stack of updates queued up, boot time will be long, even longer if updates have mutual dependencies. No matter how admins patch Windows, users have to reboot periodically. It is essential that admins provide a relatively painless boot experience when Windows doesn't need patching. Users have to accept that a reboot is good for them -- or acknowledge that they shutdown when they go home.

Queuing up patches create problems. Stacked up patch procedures disable/enable BitLocker and interact with others. A bit of a pickle.

BitLocker Drive Encryption Control Panel

Using the GUI, any Windows user with Administrator privileges (or elevated rights through other mechanisms) can use a standard control panel to Disable BitLocker. It means the volume is encrypted but that at subsequent boots the encryption key can be read from the boot volume without TPM, PIN or USB key device intervention. The facility is provided so that admins can perform maintenance on a PC without being in attendance all of the time.

Any program running as Administrator can access BitLocker APIs to disable/enable BL in the same way as the Control Panel. Windows Update runs as Administrator.

Whatever is going on is a horrible bug. Probably in Windows Update failing to reset flags after a reboot. There's nothing to suggest that there is a backdoor key.

WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until long after the war

Standard German and Dialects?

I'm presuming that formal official messages would have been composed in Standard German (or the equivalent of the time) with the stilted jargon which permeates organisations. Would there have been other messages -- banter between operators -- in dialect or vernacular German?

Tesla undecimates its workforce but Elon insists everything's absolutely fine

Re: Unfortunately necessary

"I believe Tesla Inc. needs to survive."

That's like saying that Charles Duryea made a decent buggy so we don't have to try harder.

Tesla is in a pickle; it doesn't earn cash and investors aren't sure whether Tesla is a long term brand or owns substantial intellectual property.

Two companies who made the first internal combustion engined cars exist today: Daimler and Benz, who merged in the 1920s.

Contradictory to the Musk business model?

I have read many times that Musk's managers pay attention to details. Teslas are designed so that they use the minimum number of types of fastener -- it means that a factory requires fewer tools or employs tools which can be reused. Everything is supposed to be as efficient as possible.

But the firing of 9% of white collar workers suggests that Tesla is inefficient. Or maybe people were employed in the expectation that Tesla would be building more cars? Either way, it doesn't look good.

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

Re: smb 1

"Even if you disable SMBv1 on Windows 10, it will either use SMBv2 or if possible then SMBv3"

As Microsoft note on one of their support pages, disabling a particular version of SMB in an environment with mixed versions of Windows is a right kerfuffle -- and this really is the URL:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2696547/how-to-detect-enable-and-disable-smbv1-smbv2-and-smbv3-in-windows-and

Replacing old NAS devices sounds like a good idea most of the time.

I recall working with a £x00,000 NAS device which had been written according to the CIFS/SMB standards of the time. We were dumping files generated on Windows XP systems for an OS upgrade. The official spec for SMB 2.0 -- as interpreted by the NAS vendor -- was that some extended file attributes were optional, so the vendor did not support them for SMB 2.0 file transfers. If a file with certain extended attributes was transferred to the NAS from a Windows 2008 R2 server, the file was rejected. However the file was deemed valid when transferred by SMB 1.0.

The NAS vendor suggested a very long timescale for a fix. So we turned off SMB 2.x on the intermediary Windows servers and progressed at a s-l-o-w-e-r pace.

No doubt that bug/misunderstanding is fixed, but there'll be different bugs or the need to go back in time which require SMB 1.0.

Don’t talk to the ATM, young man, it’s just a machine and there’s nobody inside

Re: Staff don’t care about access to the computers

"Staff never used to and in most cases still don’t care about who has physical access to computing systems."

I have a similar sad experience. I turned up at a hospital to set up some student teaching PCs. I found the IT support office quite easily -- behind a rather thick locked door. Helpfully, there was a notice on the door providing a phone number for anyone wishing to speak to IT support staff. In search of a phone, I opened an adjacent door to find myself in the machine room housing some generic servers and Sun boxes.

Perhaps the management were ahead of their time, avoiding social engineering attacks by locking up staff who would have been more vulnerable than a physical attack on servers ;-)

Sysadmin's PC-scrub script gave machines a virus, not a wash

Just how many disks can you infect?

I popped in one day to see former colleagues at a market research company I'd left a few years previously. After I'd left the company had deployed new computer aided interview software which ran on PCs -- blooming expensive Toshiba T1000s or similar. A floppy disk could record dozens of interviews but interviews were expensive to collect. After a disk had been used 10 times at most, it was duplicated twice and one copy was sent off for processing.

A former colleague showed me a cabinet containing thousands of floppy disks infected with ONE boot sector virus. There were two cabinets at different sites containing backups of the infected disks. Ouch.

The virus had little or no impact on a laptop used to conduct interviews, or on the PC used transfer files to a minicomputer. It was only spotted when a PC used for number crunching became infected.

File size weirdness on a 486

My problem was reported by an alert Chemistry lab technician looking after a handful of student PCs (386 PCs from one manufacturer and 486s from another) all running MS-DOS 5. He'd experienced usual glitches and subsequently observed that the reported file size for some COM files was different depending on the PC; some of the 486s reported differently from ostensibly identical models and from all of the 386s. Naturally he suspected a virus but all of the PCs were running the same AV product, VIS Utilities which had been updated at the same time. And he'd nailed it down to some of the 486s.

I struggled to diagnose the problem before observing that some COM files changed size when copied to a floppy disk and examined on "good" and "bad" PCs. Then I turned off the AV software, VIS Utilities. And the problem went away. The "virus problem" was anti-virus software.

My guess at the time was that the identical 486s had a motherboard revision or cache/RAM from different manufacturers.

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

Re: Sooo.... wait...

"I don't really see what the problem would be if the systems have entirely separate functions anyway. You have Uber's system doing the actual driving part, plus an emergency override that only comes into play to stop the car if the main system screws up."

I think you misunderstand the concept of "testing". Uber's cars are on the road to test their AV functionality. One test of Uber's AV functionality is to avoid an accident. Not Volvo's.

Separate functions? The Volvo emergency braking system might have used its sensors to detect a potential collision and used modulated braking in a straight-ish line to stop. An AV system might detect a hazard and move right or left to a different lane, perhaps braking earlier and approaching a hazard at lower speed. Let's try both at once, with two systems on the brake pedal and steering wheel -- or three if the human operator gets involved.

Re: would a human have seen the pedestrian in time and stopped?

"I hope i would have stopped but the linked video shows impact at 8 seconds but you don't see a hint of something might be there till 5 seconds..."

The video is misleading according to local people. The stretch of road is well lit and a human would see it as much brighter than in the video. A local person might have slowed in anticipation of pedestrians crossing at the stretch of the road. Alert non-locals would have braked.

"I'm assuming the car raises a huge amount of false positives which is why they turned that feature off, and warning chimes constantly going off would be soon ignored..."

Reducing false positives is one reason for testing AVs in real world environments.

Re: "emergency braking switched off by design"

"Uber could have designed its software to work with Volvo's emergency system, but it didn't."

Without source code and design specs, I do not see how Uber could have integrated their AV system with Volvo's safety system. Volvo's system had to be turned off in order for Uber's to drive the car. Otherwise there would be three systems potentially trying to operate the brakes and throttle -- Uber, Volvo and car operator.

* Uber emergency braking system did not appear to exist.

* Volvo emergency braking was disabled.

* Car operator was distracted and the AV did not have an alert system.

Uber's fault but for different reasons.

Re: Sooo.... wait...

When I first read The Reg's report, I thought there had been some misunderstanding or that the NTSB had fumbled the wording. I read a few other reports which clarify the NTSB report slightly but confirm that the Uber had no automatic emergency braking system.

I can understand why Uber disabled the manufacturer's safety systems in the Volvo XC90. It wouldn't have been a good idea for the car to have two independent systems driving the car; it's not comparable to multiple linked systems which are used to fly aircraft. Everything else is inexplicable to me.

Police block roads to stop tech support chap 'robbing a bank'

Emergency Red Buttons deserve a label

An Emergency Red Button may be placed conveniently close to the door so that staff can press it before running out of the building. Don't put it right next to the (unlabelled) release button for the magnetic door lock.

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

Re: just receive an IP stream, buffer as necessary.

"Nothing important ever happens quickly enough that you can't afford even 20 seconds of delay..."

Maybe Big Ben can be tweaked during its current refurbishment to deliver buffered bongs.

Re: Wait

I always think of it as BBC6 in spite of its official name.

And I'm delighted that the silly price DAB radio I bought 15 years ago still works with current broadcasting standards. It works best in one particular location -- inches make a difference. It has outlasted a gorgeous looking Roberts analogue radio which functions only as an ornament. Maybe I could hack it and put something useful inside. I'll buy a new DAB radio when my old one conks out, ideally one with push buttons to select my preferred channels rather than a "tuning" knob.

OP: "A lot of others aren't even available in stereo, which seems pretty bonkers in the 21st century." My radio is mono and 7" wide; it is enough for casual radio listening whilst cooking. If I want to listen to music -- to bury myself -- I tweak the knobs on my hifi for Robert Johnson, Louis Jordan, early Stones and Beatles but it still sounds like mono...

You've been Zucked: Facebook boss refuses to face-off with Brit MPs

Four year data retention?

"For instance, Facebook said that "due to system changes" it didn't have any records on enforcement action taken against apps between 2011 and 2014..."

What? They expect us to believe that they didn't keep the names of organisations who were unwelcome on their platform? That when Facebook introduced a new system in 2014, they forgot about previous offenders?

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

Hmm, 300 left

Unless your car shares components with a more popular model or is popular in another country, you're going to commission someone to make track rod ends sooner or later?

Musk versus Chesterton's Fence

'Warburton added: "The narrative around Tesla has been that it is having difficulty ramping 'because producing cars is difficult'. But we think a more accurate portrayal is that Tesla is having difficultly ramping because it has attempted to reinvent totally the production line. This is too ambitious and risky in our view."'

The problem is that "producing cars is more difficult than Musk imagined". Musk doesn't understand that production engineers and suppliers have developed ways of doing things for good reasons. And slagging off sub-contractors as “worse than a drunken sloth" doesn't make things better for Tesla.

The principle loosely known as Chesterton's Fence:

'In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."'

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

Re: Not an FB user. Can I delete my personal data?

It's more complicated than that -- naturally.

If my uncle identifies me in a photo, should the photo and his comments be deleted? It's his photo and his right to say "that's my nephew".

For the moment, I'll stick with my belief that "shadow profiles" should be deleted from Facebook and Google etc.

Professionals act professionally

"Whatsapp is used extensively by the police and medical professions."

I suppose that police officers and doctors and nurses might use WhatsApp in their jobs. When talking about processes, it would be an all right way to communicate. Just not about individuals. Communication never works that way.

I can imagine a face to face group with police officers and doctors and nurses where the majority of people would spot that it is wrong to gossip online. Whilst tweeting that a bloke in front has a body odour problem. The whole purpose of social media is to gossip. You have to make it safe or safer to gossip, because you cannot change human nature. Create a space for people at work to talk about the things that piss them off.

Or eliminate human beings.

Not an FB user. Can I delete my personal data?

I read about Facebook when it was launched in the UK and declined to join. I have never given FB any of my personal data by participation with the Facebook platform. Owing to the way that FB sucks up data about my family and friends, however, FB possesses a "shadow profile" of me.

Can I delete that "shadow profile"? It seems a Schrodinger's Cat problem to me. I don't want FB to possess data about me, but the only way to request its deletion is to contact FB, thus exposing my personal information and validating inferred data. Can I delete my data without giving FB better data than they already possess?

If my "shadow profile" is deleted (let's say that somebody accidentally erases me), will Facebook create a new "shadow profile" of me?

I'm puzzled. Perhaps Facebook will have to act according to basic personal privacy laws and cease collecting data about people who are not their users.

UK watchdog finally gets search warrant for Cambridge Analytica's totally not empty offices

Re: Given the time it's take to get the warrant...

Having used a small office paper shredder last week to delete accumulated financial statements, I wouldn't try to shred many documents in-house. It didn't work well for the STASI in 1990 either. You have to use an industrial shredder* which makes it interesting to consider why CA allegedly removed boxes of material...

* I once watched a DEC RL02 disk pack being fed into a shredder.

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

"The Triumph Herald "S" was a cut-down version with rubber mats instead of carpets and no heater."

Given the hefty horse hair insulation and carpets on a standard Herald, it would have been pretty noisy inside.

"Any sensible OEM will want to pre-switch out of their PCs, and MS no doubt knows this-- yet they claim that new PCs sold will be in S mode."

Agreed. The economics of PC selling mean that manufacturers pre-install a bunch of crapware on consumer PCs and some equally lousy "added value" applications on business PCs. They are all Win32 applications which won't run in S Mode.

Your mouse can't reach that Excel cell? Buy a 'desk extender' said help desk bluffer

Windows 2.1x

I recall a colleague demonstrating Windows 286 or 386 back in the day. He managed to move a window to the side of the screen so far that it was impossible to drag it back again. Presumably there was a keyboard shortcut or menu option to restore the window but that may have been beyond many novice users. It certainly wouldn't have happened with Mac System 6!

Accused Brit hacker Lauri Love will NOT be extradited to America

Re: Good

It's about lots of things.

UK government has decided that the judicial process in the USA meets the standard in the UK. The UK and USA have a bizarre extradition treaty, which the UK should end.

UK government knows how USA prisons work, and still thinks that it is reasonable to send "anybody" to a USA prison?

We cannot send anyone from the UK to a USA prison.

Google Chrome vows to carpet bomb meddling Windows antivirus tools

No accessibility software?

No third party screen enlargers? No text to speech readers and navigators? Unless Google provide these features, a lot of organisations will walk away from Chrome.

Connected and self-driving cars are being sent to Coventry

Pardon me for asking...

...but why is a trial for driverless cars being announced by the Chancellor in a pre-budget leak? What has it to do with tax on beer, national insurance and government department spending?

Apparently, "up to £1 billion" will be available for hi-tech projects "including £75m for research on artificial intelligence, £400m for electric car charging points and £100m to boost clean car sales" according to the Guardian. So he is not really spending anything on AVs.

The UK's super duper 1,000mph car is being tested in Cornwall

Re: 40 lires/sec of HTP?

Cosworth designed Formula Junior, F3 and F2 engines for a period before the DFV engine which became the heart of 3 litre Formula One in the 1970s. USA independents, VPJ, suggested to Cosworth that a 2.8 litre turbocharged DFV might work. Cosworth responded that the engine required fuel at a rate greater than an English bath tap. The DFX worked.

Tories spared fine after being told off by ICO for election telemarketing

Re: the ICO has "warned the Conservative Party to get it right next time".

Wrong. It means that no party will try it again. Imagine the kerfuffle if a party was caught out eight days before polling.

In the past, we had silly expenses limits for parliamentary by-elections and silly expenses submissions by political parties, on the basis that I won't challenge you if you don't challenge me. That is more or less over.

The Tory battle bus of student activists in 2015? Owing to the early election, a few court cases were curtailed. It was noted, however, that election agents have to record a realistic expense for imported canvassers. If they turned up at the last general election, it was recorded.

Hmm. The worrying thing is national campaigning, which we think about as billboards and broadcasts. In reality, national campaigning is about personal letters, using personal data left on social media fora. How do we stop the people with the most money from winning elections?

Didn't install a safety-critical driverless car patch? Bye, insurance!

It's a Bill

It's a Bill and nobody really expects it to become an Act of Parliament.

It's a rubbish Bill. It isn't the result of green and white paper flyers suggesting how and why it might work.

It's a rubbish Bill like the one which became the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991.

So it might become law like how the dogs act fouled up.

BYOD might be a hipster honeypot but it's rarely worth the extra hassle

Re: No hassle here.

"This isn't a BYOD solution. It doesnt solve the issues discussed (laptops, desktops, macbooks etc)."

Universities have operated a policy of Connect Your Crap (CYC) for donkeys years. UK ISPs grew up around 1992/1993 when universities recognised that TCP/IP rather than Coloured Books was the future. If we ignore dial up connections, universities have operated CYC for 25 years using different filtering methods. It has been great for staff and students to control experiments or to check the state of a batch job or find out the day of the week.

Universities don't intentionally allow any fool employee to plug into an ethernet socket but IT departments recognise their imperfections. There are idiot managed devices on university networks -- mostly on the public side away from anything that matters. University IT staff punch huge security holes to make it easy to work from home.

Understanding that suspect devices will turn up inside a network is part of the defence. You can't assume to keep all out -- most, perhaps. The concept of Demilitarised Zones (DMZs) gets silly if the most valuable targets in your organisation walk around with laptops which they use with hotel wi-fi and then plug into your network.

Mobile Device Management software may help -- unless it becomes a bigger target.

Your choices are to act like a nuclear power station and to own 100% the relationship with computer devices. Or to understand that mobile devices are threats and opportunities, and there's naff all you can do about it other than to do a good job.

Re: Millennials

"I would (and did) take the job that's going to be spending £3-4k outfitting me with the gear I need to do my job effectively..."

If you weren't doing the job already, what made you qualified to pick the necessary kit? Surely somebody who knows what the job entails should make the first choice? How are you going to feel if your choice is sub-optimal for your work software? Why presume that employers dump junk kit on new starters?

"The good bits of BYOD should be taken to form a choose-your-own-device approach."

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. New starters should be allowed to to pick a configuration from a list of supported devices. If they want to argue about the list, they should tell me about it whilst working unpaid in my test cave as a skivvy, regression testing applications and evaluating shoddy driver packages -- the source of problems which I sort out for special employees and ordinary employees without discrimination.

Re: Just four years ago, Gartner reckoned by 2017....

A former boss took out a corporate subscription to Gartner. I quickly learned that there are six reports advocating any particular policy and another six telling you why it is bad. If you search hard enough, there's probably a report suggesting that you write a CRM platform in COBOL.

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

Re: Solve this at the source

"However, given that car exhaust in the USA has been cleaned up pretty well, it's much less of a problem than it used to be. And we don't allow tetra-ethyl-lead in the fuel any more."

50 odd years ago, professionals in public health, meteorology and transportation noticed how cars were creating smog in California. California was a good place to analyse the problem because it has a variety of warm climates and geography. CO and CO2 were observed to be problem vehicle emissions but nitrous oxide was viewed as the biggest one. If you burn a pure hydrocarbon perfectly, the result is CO2 and water. In the imperfect environment of an internal combustion engine, you produce NOx as well.

Transportation engineers worked with engine designers to create lower compression engines (and associated fuel) and exhaust catalysts. Internal combustion engine NOx was reduced but the CO and CO2 went up a bit. But lower compression engines are less efficient and the environmental consideration switched to CO2 emissions, so why not bump up the compression ratio (and combustion chamber temperature) and fuel efficiency whilst fiddling the NOx results?

It's a target culture problem. To meet one target, manufacturers cheat on the ones which nobody is monitoring. It is a changing dilemma and there is no quick solution.

Smart people may be asking why NOx has become a UK problem in recent years: it's how we design our cities. NOx will break down harmlessly in the UK countryside but not in sweaty cities. Where we build narrow streets surrounded by tall buildings, NOx isn't taken away in the breeze. Underground electricity sub-stations and air conditioning units mean that street temperature is artificially high. We don't see smog but humid street air becomes a bit nasty.

How to fix things? Not a clue, but it won't be fixed by focusing one one aspect of the problems. And we need to be seriously distrustful of efficiency and performance claims.

Re: Popcorn

It's worth noting that the wiring loom in a 2017 conventional petrol or diesel car is one of the most expensive components. When you add in the switches, displays, control systems etc for gadgets (ignoring ECUs and suspension/steering controls), there's more electrical and electronic design than in any existing Dyson product.

'Driverless' lorry platoons will soon be on a motorway near you

Re: Who gets the fuel savings?

The aerodynamic drag on the first vehicle in a chain is reduced but not as much as for the second one. It is better to be followed than not followed -- unless you are in a racing car approaching the finishing line.

Rested drivers and the new Pony Express

John Robson: "Getting from the major road is even easier than now - you use a driver who is rested..."

In the UK, a lorry driver is "at rest" when s/he isn't at work. S/he can nap in the bunk with a second driver taking control, but it doesn't count as rest. The lorry has to be parked for the nap to become driver rest.

One way around this limitation is for the lorry platoon to pull off the motorway, plonk a transfer driver from awaiting minibus to the cab of the lorry performing the local delivery, send another minibus to pick up the transfer driver from the goods depot for the next job, send minibus number three with another transfer driver when the lorry has been unloaded to take the lorry to a depot to be reloaded or to join a platoon unladen. It's a bit like horse drawn transport where the power unit has to be changed every 30 miles, but with less hay. I suspect that the algorithms used by train operators to put drivers in the right place may be applicable.

All you need to worry about is the cost/environmental impact of minibuses and lost time taking platoons off the motorway. Don't fret about wage cost or availability of transfer drivers -- somebody will have a app for that. The economics of this system will become clear when high tech investors have operated it for a few years with huge losses and slowly withdraw subsidies after they have killed off the competition. Government will make their logistics easier too.

Platoons are a bad option for HGV manufacturers. If there are fewer small hauliers and bigger big ones, profit per lorry sold falls.

Bombastic boss gave insane instructions to sensible sysadmin, with client on speakerphone

Re: I don't get it.

"Can registry changes make any difference to the loss of data in a PST file?"

Hmm. Mostly I suspect that the team leader believed that messing about in the registry performed some chicken bone ritual. It had worked for him before so try it again... There are so many implementations of Outlook and so many app versions that there might be a bug which prevents correct reading of a PST file.

If running an enterprise Outlook/Exchange environment, wiping out HKCU settings and anything in %AppData% for Outlook would be relatively harmless. The user would lose a few preference settings but the mailbox would be auto configured to work again.

Wiping out HKCU etc in a non-enterprise environment would probably screw up Outlook and require tech intervention.

Wiping out HKLM entries for Outlook is bad advice. You cannot be sure that Outlook will apply sensible defaults when it finds them missing.

Sofa-jockeys given crack at virtual Formula 1 world championship

Re: I'd pay good money ...

Don't you love it when the URL reads jann-ardenborough-racing-games when the bloke's name is Jann Mardenborough.

Jann is talented and he may be an exception or statistical outlier. To evaluate real world skills of games racers, I'd rent a grid of 30 Austin A30/35 saloons from the UK series organisers and participants. No advance training, just know how to drive a road car and turn up on the day.

Pull the knob to start the engine. The twist lever on the right of the steering wheel operates the headlights and sidelights (what?) not the radio. Err, yes, it is supposed to sound like that when you change into first gear.

Survivors qualify for an assessment in a full blooded Clubmans sports racers with the engine in front (OK, next to the driver's legs). A Clubmans car is a Lotus 7 after 20 years on steroids and bad attitude.

Google and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in full

You're fired

When I was at university in the 1980s a first year student was identified for spraying swastikas and anti-semitic slogans on campus. He was a privileged idiot who did not understand the meaning of his offence and was rightly thrown out. He didn't realise that you can be smarter than average and plain ignorant at the same time.

A few years later he was re-admitted under a different name and after most who had known him previously had graduated. He'd used his privileged background to learn about the world and he apologised honestly for his actions. He was a changed person.

James Damore sounds rather like the offensive idiot I briefly knew. Damore has been thrown to the wolves by Google management who had the opportunity to talk to him about his manifesto or to suspend publication temporarily whilst he considered further. Google seem to be operating open discussion forums internally and Damore believed his contribution was acceptable.

Damore's manifesto -- or as much as I can cope with -- is ingenuous. It's the sort of stuff people write when they don't check the veracity or intent of references.

I know that it seems controversial to extend generosity to the privileged. But surely Google is such a big organisation that it collectively knows that people who have been fast tracked through education and who have always been told that they are special, well, they can be really dumb. They need to be supported like everyone else.

Re: Does this firing thing only work one way?

Good articles in the Telegraph? The obituaries are still pretty good and you learn about some really weird posh people.

Brit uni builds its own supercomputer from secondhand parts

Re: @PickledAardvark Ghetto but good

Fair comment. I have enough years on my CV to make me an expert on university IT practices too...

Your words on finance systems remind me how badly universities handled things in 1999. At the time, many universities had legacy payroll and accounting systems which needed to be replaced to work on Y2K. Enough institutions were affected for them to negotiate a collective deal with Oracle or SAP -- the sort of deal that UCISA exists to organise. Instead, universities went their separate ways and paid even more money for third party developers to write modules to make systems work. Clueless.

I heard on the grapevine that one institution was so busy transferring data from the old to new system that they stopped paying bills and damaged their credit rating.

Re: Ghetto but good

"Old gear can get you through it" is one of the reasons *how* university IT services departments keep stuff going on small budgets. It doesn't mean that they like it that way.

Management practices kill off the ability for IT departments *everywhere* to invent stuff for themselves. Don't write code, buy a product. Adopt standard procedures. Stop thinking.

Acknowledge that every bright idea has already been spotted -- for now.

Re: Ghetto but good

I never laid a finger on one of the HPCs mentioned in the original piece but I was around at the time and met the people when one was built. The particular one was a complete new build -- there was an existing data room but it was taken apart. The new build contracts were for a data centre building, computing, and environmental services -- cooling and power. The deals were to build something that would accommodate HPC for >10 years -- apply sceptic hat when considering that most data centres operate for yonks longer.

That data centre is refreshed regularly -- the computer supplier knows how it works. The HPC gets faster -- and some junk is created. You won't find a useful purpose for it in your typical 19" rack.

Durham University were just lucky. They were lucky that somebody was selling an old HPC. They were lucky that they had a vacant data centre with the right power and cooling capacity. They were lucky to have a power contract at the right price.

CMD.EXE gets first makeover in 20 years in new Windows 10 build

Re: On the positive side

I have a print industry tattoo (rubber based ink) on one finger from when it got caught. Don't use your fingers to adjust the delivery feed wheels on an offset.

When the offset abruptly stopped, my mate upstairs shouted "I think you need a cup of tea" whilst I switched off to pull my bruised finger out.