* Posts by tip pc

1411 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2018

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Cisco is a fashion retailer now, with a spring collection to prove it

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Perpetual or annual licensing?

Do I need to keep up payments else it stops working?

Turns out cops are super interested in subpoenaing suspects' push notifications

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Makes a change I guess

"In 2022, one of the largest push notification companies in the world, Pushwoosh, was found to secretly be a Russian company that deceived both the CDC and US Army into installing their technology into specific government apps," said Edwards.

Competition in state actors getting things on global citizens devices & nations government entities infrastructure

Cyberattack downs pharmacies across America

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and forced some folks to pay for their medication at full price in cash.

and forced some folks to pay for their medication at full price in cash.

Just goes to show what a messed up regulated industry healthcare is.

They set a stupid price then negotiate some kind of discount per insurance provider thereby locking out competitors to the market & incentivising citizens to get insurance due to horrendous costs that citizens won’t get a discounted price on.

It’s deliberately opaque and funnels money to those already in the club.

Far less blatant but conceptually no different to the Russian oligarchs

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

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Re: US lawyers

Allegedly, their client was 1 shareholder who had 9 shares.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

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Thats ok then

"thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent."

Unless your the one getting your liberty infringed by the state who make it incredibly hard to rectify a fault in their data processing especially when they deliberately hide the data they hold on you from you.

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

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Re: So maybe...

Stating your 200hp engine emits x emissions when a real Toyota 200hp unit emits x+ emissions is under reporting emissions especially when the Toyota is claiming things that aren’t true and conning consumers & competitors.

No idea if Japan charges extra taxes on higher emission cars but customers may have gotten charged less tax on their Toyota than a rivals same hp vehicle because of this when in fact the Toyota engine had less power all along but the actual capable unit was in a higher band.

White House goes to court, not Congress, to renew warrantless spy powers

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Big Brother

I thought it was just the communists & dictators who spied on their citizens & distrusted them

"It's utterly ridiculous for the administration to make such a blatant end-run around Congress to reauthorize this often-abused, unconstitutional warrantless surveillance of Americans," Gilligan told The Register. "Congress must significantly reform the law, or it must sunset — those are the only two options to protect Americans' rights."

Not much to add to that.

Square Kilometre Array precursor looks to filter out satellite interference

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Re: By the time SKA is finished

They should stop spending money on SKA now and start planning for a Moon Farside SKA. Luna makes a fairly decent R/F shield.

why does it need to be on the moon?

can't they launch a number of starlink sized sats actually into space to sit at prescribed locations and act as the radio telescope?

could be beyond the moons orbit with solar panels for power etc.

Chunks of deorbiting ESA satellite are expected to reach the ground

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Alien

Re: If you'd asked me ten minutes ago...

the reentering satellite effect?

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

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Was it Cisco who had an and issue a few years back?

I think it was Cisco or one if it’s Borg who had a certificate issue on their sdn product a few years ago.

Was a painful fix iirc, not the same issue as in this take but close enough

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

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Roll your own

Like in the olden days, councils should add a few more skilled persons to their it departments and roll their own applications built on free or near free databases secured by commercial security appliances.

It’s their citizens data they are securing and they have no clue what goes on inside the current box.

They can’t make as much a mess as they currently have.

As I was leaving my first job in a government department they were rolling out sap as their HR time tracking solution.

I never understood why they wanted to replace the ancient but reliable system with an expensive enterprise solution that was like taking a nuclear bomb to crack a peanut shell.

The answer of course was that once it was in the food they wanted to use it for other things and the time keeping excuse was their leverage.

They lied to themselves to justify an over convoluted complicated mess that no doubt a friend of a director was in the mix and instrumental in getting it in.

Lots of nepotism about in the early to late 2000’s, going hand in hand with the implementation of quangos that duplicated the function of existing government departments.

Telco giants show it's tough selling 5G kit right now

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Holmes

Re: Maybe 5G is actually not so needed?

5G promises savings for operators in the long run so you may not get a choice.

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

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Big Brother

scary

I'm surprised it took him to go into the shop before they decided to incarcerate him.

won't be long before the police will just routinely run cctv through their stores of information from passports and licenses and just apprehend people

this story is why uk police accessing passport databases for scanning & matching photos is a wrong idea

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67004576

Travel app Kayak offers Boeing 737 Max 9 filter after that door plug drama

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Re: When a company

this was the incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390

this was the episode

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0644754/

vid may be on youtube

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

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UPS on rails?

not everything goes on rails in a rack.

Why was a 65KG UPS sold with a rail kit?

i've installed a number of cisco 6506's mid rack back in the day solo.

helps when there is something to rest it on like a blanking plate or other switches. it would never occur to me to put it at the top of the rack as it is so heavy & obvious heavy things go at the bottom.

yes i did ask questions before installing mid rack.

at 65kg's even with a hoist its a 2 person job.

i guess if it had rails and you where told it was a solo job & there was other stuff in the rack like fibre and copper in the middle or bottom & there wasn't enough room at the bottom & the jerk asking you to do it thought you where not capable then sticking it at the top would be the obvious choice.

The next obvious choice is to go back and say where in the rack do you want this.

Having seen it at the top of the rack, why did the experienced people help in removing it if the reason to relocate it was that the rack would be top heavy.

The story teller should have lost their job.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

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Perhaps ITV could look into making a TV program about the PPE scandal around Baroness (Michelle) Mone?

probably already on one of the other *hubs

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Re: Let's set things straight

The enquiry has already heard evidence from a Fujitsu SW engineer that they were getting duplicate entries in back-office spreadsheets at the time of Postmasters being prosecuted and their main thrust wasn't to find and fix the cause of these errors, but to find and delete the duplicates quickly in case the spreadsheets were used in evidence against postamasters and the duplicate entries weakened the cases by allowing doubt to creep in.

do you have any more detail on this like who the person was and date the evidence given,

i'd love to watch that tale on the enquiry youtube channel.

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Re: Fushitesu

don't stop there, plenty of others to go after too, in no particular order

Police

NHS

Social Services

Armed services

Labour/Conservatives/SNP/Green/Liberal Democrats/Welsh Labour/DUP Parties

Government regulators

Train companies

Councils

religious entities

I'm sure others can add to the list the many entities who have wronged citizens and then double downed on them to cover their lies.

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why I is it nothing happens till its on TV or in the press?

so many scandals and yet nothing happens until way after the event.

these post people have had their lives ruined for more than 20 years and yet only now is something being seen to be done.

I read this story about Greater Manchester Police intimidating citizens

https://news.sky.com/story/i-was-forced-to-strip-naked-in-police-cell-and-threatened-to-drop-complaints-against-officers-says-mother-13050816

truly despicable,

there are many other examples of injustice that is being swept under the carpet & of course these are the ones we hear about.

we need a just and fair system., it is currently the complete opposite!!

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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Re: Fushitesu

Are you saying Labour, Lib dems and Tories all have their hands in the trough?

YES

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Re: Compensation?

However, they decided not to tell the PO because that could impact the income from the PO contract(thus affecting their own bonuses)

The PO (in all good faith at this point) used horizons data to prosecute the postmasters.

Have you reference for that detail as it’s jokey to the timeline.

My impression was that PO always knew and Fujitsu horizon support remotely logging in was a documented support function.

I assume Fujitsu was billing PO to run the horizon support line including the remote support & remediation.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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Joke

But, no heat pump is going to be 400% efficient when it is sub-zero outside. The 400% figure is useless marketing blather, because it's the max efficiency and only applies when the temperatures inside and outside are the same.

what? you obviously lying as everyone knows heat pumps are more than 100% efficient all the time, they wouldn't say 400% if it wasn't always true, etc etc etc

/s

obviously sarcasm if I hadn't made it clear

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keep your car in a heated garage at night

so I f we all transition to EV's & heat pumps, some will need to waste more energy keeping there garage warm to keep the car working.

There is so much to this transition that people haven't even scratched the surface of.

we are far better using petrol/diesel for road transport, yes some ICE cars in extreme climates may need electric to keep the engine warm, but it won't take as much electric as keeping an electric cars vitals warm.

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Flame

buyer beware

ev's can be great in summer, & great when plenty of GREEN wind & solar.

hugely wasteful and expensive in winter when its not windy and no solar.

I'm happy to stick with my ICE cars & await the self driving electric taxis of the future.

Vodafone signs a 10-year, $1.5B deal with Microsoft that sheds European DCs

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FAIL

no thanks

ai has its use cases but I don't really want to be involved as much as possible

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

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Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

what law

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Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

Yes I must have misunderstood all the top officials across the globe when they said we’d not catch covid or spread it if we were all vaccinated.

A compilation (not by me) of the messages I heard and understood.

https://x.com/0rf/status/1660067082220838916

Would love to know what everyone who says I misunderstood or didn’t understand, understood from the constant and widely distributed official messaging as they were all very clear.

Another compilation

https://youtu.be/cMaHKykfdcQ

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Why did everyone get vaccinated?

They said it was safe, effective & would stop you catching or spreading Covid.

Everyone I know has had at least 2 jabs plus boosters so why is Covid so prevalent now?

Either they got it wrong or lied.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

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Re: No Justice

It looked to me like Fujitsu was open with the po about remotely logging in as the postmasters.

It also looked like the po deliberately mislead and withheld that detail.

Not saying Fujitsu is innocent but it was po that persecuted the postmasters

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it disappeared into PO profits

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Re: Hot air

"Exactly. Which is why, just before he was due to appear before the inquiry in July 2023 the Fujitsu "expert" (expert in what exactly? Certainly not in being able to recognise an appalling piece of software when he sees it, or at least to be honest about it when questioned) "

they had the Fujitsu Architect responsible for Horizon as the expert.

apparently PO lawyers changed some context of his responses and rehashed his responses from 1 case through many subsequent cases which convinced judges and jury's of the defendants guilt.

Public inquiries are oxymoronic in that the purposes isn't to be public or inquire but to run as long as possible to ensure massive fees are obtained by the lawyers and that the report is delayed for a sufficient amount of time to ensure that any recommendations are ignored and that the guilty parties are safely ensconced in the world's most expensive daily care home aka the House of Lords.

certainly a true statement.

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Re: No Justice

is she?

depends how many skeletons are still rattling about.

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Re: No Justice

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-scandal-explained-everything-you-need-to-know

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Re: No Justice

Vennels has lost her gong

https://news.sky.com/story/former-post-office-boss-paula-vennells-to-hand-back-her-cbe-13044576

SpaceX sends first direct-to-cell Starlinks to orbit

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Re: You may SHOUT at will

I wish someone would start selling "no phone" phones that have no cell connectivity but come bundled with WhatsApp et al, maybe using a Skype number as a unique ID, connect that to your wifi and reduce the cell bunch to e-plumbers.

just put your phone in airplane mode or take the sim out and use face time (can use an email address instead of a number) / whatsapp / google chat / zoom / likely telegram / likely signal.

they used to sell a wifi enabled skype phone and some dect phones had skype functionality too.

my daughter uses my old ipad to make audio & video calls with family just fine & that ipad has no sim.

living out of mobile / cell range does sound idyllic though.

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

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Re: What could go wrong...

aircraft of the past used bleed valves in the engines to provide compressed air for various systems & cabin pressurisation.

Newer aircraft designs don't use bleed air, which is what was being remarked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_air

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_air#Bleedless_aircraft

National Grid latest UK org to zap Chinese kit from critical infrastructure

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Won’t be long before China & Russia have starlink clones

Like GPS clones, Russia and China will have starlink like clones meaning they will have space based comms direct to devices as small as a phone across nations foreign to them.

VPN’s, firewalls, traffic scanners etc etc will be useless against satellite communications that bypasses them.

Case in point, if you had grid monitoring systems installed on high voltage transmission pylons would you connect them together via copper, fibre or radio.

I’d be using radio as would still work if something broke the copper or fibre cables.

Using radio means an antenna with likely clear line of sight to the sky meaning it could receive satellite communications & likely transmit to satellites too providing a back door into your secure grid.

None of this is a problem if you can’t consider our friends may not be friends at some point in the near future.

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Will we develop our own kit making capabilities?

In Huawei's case, the decision to remove its kit was made largely out of fears that Beijing can legally compel companies to share data with it, which could in theory include data collected from operations in other countries.

Other nations also legally require companies to share data collected in operations in foreign nations.

I was employed by a foreign country operating in the uk and received some shares, I have to fill out a form for the foreign finance company declaring I’m not of that nation and I have to declare my nin. There is a part on the form to explain if I’m withholding my foreign tax details & an option for ‘it’s illegal to declare my info to a foreign government” (words to that effect) which iirc applies to Australians.

Not hard to find examples of foreign companies gathering data in uk citizens and sending back to the home nation

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/data-collection-eu-troubled-waters-us-companies-2022-02-25/#:~:text=U.S.%20and%20EU%20regulators%20had,a%20series%20of%20privacy%20principles.

While that example isn’t the foreign state requesting the information, once it’s on foreign shores their domestic laws may not require your permission for your data stored or processed there to be examined by that state.

Also some nations collaborate to share info and use their partners to sift through their own citizens data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#:~:text=In%20recent%20years%2C%20documents%20of,law%20of%20the%20respective%20nations.

https://www.fivecast.com/blog/intelligence-sharing-for-partner-nations/

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Facepalm

this is what happens when the grid has had its readybrek.

for the youth

https://youtu.be/QoiYfsKgVG8?feature=shared

for the oldies

https://youtu.be/LfRvrHixpMc?feature=shared

SpaceX cleared to test satellite phone service via Starlink

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Re: Africa

I'm surprised as even if a whole town is sharing one unit, it's still a vast sum of money compared to annual incomes for something that likely does not have much of an ROI for them.

So just because you can’t see it (the reasons for having it) no one else can have it?

Also

There's been a couple of articles recently about people in Africa getting internet via Starlink where the country actively denies people connectivity. What the article seemed to gloss over is that those people are likely near a border since there would need to be a line-of-sight ground station

Not sure what you mean by ground station but those starlink satellites can relay information between themselves it’s not inconceivable that a ground station in a friendly nation is used.

Many cruise liners use starlink in the middle of the ocean with no ground stations for hundreds of miles.

Starlink are now testing satellite to normal phone communications.

Soon people in nations hostile to starlink will just need to stand outside with their phone, to get voice and data access, no dish required.

Don’t be surprised when Russia and china have the same capability over the US.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

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Re: Which Led Zep Album?

Selective quoting

A heat pump can have an average COP of 3.1 in UK weather. That bit of data comes from the very link you provided, btw. Let's be a bit pessimistic and call it 3.

From my link

A heat pump will use more energy to produce heat when the ambient temperature is low (say -4°) than when it is moderate (say 10°). So a pump that has a COP of 4/1 at 10° may only have a COP of 2/1 at -4° and so use twice as much energy to run it when the weather is below freezing.

It’s currently autumn heading into winter

Temperatures will soon be negative with still winds across much of the land.

Those heat pumps will soon be running at a cop of just 2, and likely less than that.

Gas will still be ~200g kWh.

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/air-source-heat-pump/performance

Efficiency Performance

The efficiency of a heat pump is measured by their Coefficient of Performance (COP). That is the ratio of heat produced per unit of electricity consumed when pumping the heat. Efficiency performance tends to decrease during periods of severe cold.

For comparison, in mild weather COP can be about 4.0, but when the temperature drops to 0°C, the COP can also decline to 2.5. On average, the COP of typical heat pumps has a seasonal variation of about 2.5-2.8. However, there are heat pump models having higher performance in mild climates.

When selecting a heat pump, keep in mind that the higher the ratio, the more efficient the unit and the more efficient the heat delivery. A COP value of 3 means that you get 3kWh of heat output for every 1kWh of electricity used to run the pump. Higher COP values represent a heat delivery that is relatively more efficient.

For example, a COP value of 4 means that you get 4kWh of heat output for every 1kWh of electricity used to run the pump. Keep in mind, that the COP mentioned by manufacturers is measured under test conditions and you should treat it with caution.

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Re: Which Led Zep Album?

You want to run a process that produces waste (nuclear, chemical, whatever), you have to handle the waste somehow. Except for burning fossil fuels. That waste - just dump it in the atmosphere, free of charge.

That little exception is the only reason it's cheaper. From any reasonable point of view, it makes the comparison so unfair it's pointless.

its currently dark and not windy, where do you think the electric for the heat pumps and electric car charging is coming from at this moment?

its not all nuclear or hydro, the rest of it is mostly gas with some coal and some biomass fuel likely drax which is imported wood from the USA.

those carbon fuels are ejecting combustion waste & heat into the atmosphere so people can run their heatpumps.

when the UK electric grid is emitting 400g+ per kwh a heat pump can be using kwh causing emissions of co2 more than a normal gas boiler so no savings in waste emissions.

https://www.yorkshireenergysystems.co.uk/heat-pump-efficiency/#:~:text=A%20heat%20pump%20will%20use,the%20weather%20is%20below%20freezing.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

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Alien

Voyager mission status page

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

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

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Audio & visual autopilot warnings

There should be audio and visual warnings inside and out of the car that autopilot is engaged.

My amigo sat nag app asks me questions I yes and no to, autopilot should ask the driver to put hands on the wheel and audibly confirm the instruction.

Hopefully it’ll be so annoying that people don’t use it.

I have auto features in my car & it complains if it thinks I’m not holding the wheel, newer cars have Capacitive sensing in addition to what mine has.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

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you could have just made the switch ports 100mbs, clients wouldn't have noticed & you'd have moved the bottleneck closest to the clients.

super simple to do on a cli.

Datacenters feeling the heat to turn hot air into cool solutions

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Flame

i was going to post much the same.

use the waste heat to keep green houses warm, especially in winter and the products being grown will also remove co2 from the air resulting in 2 x actions for the cost of people watching cat videos on facebook.

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

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Re: battery powered network time clock?

People buy what's available for the given budget.

that is very true, but given a time server is meant to be serving requests 24/7 over a network etc, i find it hard to believe a battery operated network time clock can operate for more than a week on 4x aa batteries before needing replacements.

Time clocks are polled frequently and respond often.

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Coat

battery powered network time clock?

Why have a battery powered network time clock when everything that needs that time is dependent on electricity to run?

At worst the batteries could be for backup but you'd use rechargeables

or

just plug the time clock into the UPS and ensure it boots before everything else so its available to do its job the moment a client asks.

lastly, every system i've ever used that uses a network time protocol like ntp has a local battery backup for its time plus employs a mechanism to slowly drift its time to a new time from ntp if its wildly different. i doubt all those systems would be on Jan 1st 1970 by 6am, even if the time source broke 2 days before (yes i know but is an example of how it works).

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

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Re: boot mbr etc

longtime mac user, i learnt early days to have a partition for the OS & another for my data.

i could reinstall OS's etc to my hearts content relatively safe in the knowledge that my data was going to be safe.

Newer MAC os's do this by default now with immutable OS partitions etc to ensure integrity of OS on launch.

i remember Juniper did something similar a long time ago, 2 x boot volumes helped with OS upgrades especially if there was a failure on upgrade

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/junos-install-upgrade/topics/topic-map/how-to-recover-junos-upgraded-freebsd-using-menus.html

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

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Re: Greenwash

It puts into the atmosphere the CO2 that was taken out by the growing vegetables.

and where do you think the carbon in the hydrocarbon "fossil" fuels comes from?

answer is it all came from the atmosphere albeit a very long time ago.

our current understanding of the carbon cycle

photo synthesis removes carbon from the atmosphere and is stored in the plant/tree/vegitations structure

plant falls apart & dies or is eaten etc and the carbon containing bits eventually get deposited on the ground, after a very long time it ends up quite deep as other things go on top.

heat & pressure convert he hydrocarbon containing deposits & forms oil & gas we refine into fuel.

The point being that carbon in "fossil" fuels originated from the atmosphere.

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