Re: Aliases are fun
This reminds me of Jim Naughtie's slip up on pronouncing his name when referring to him as the Culture Secretary (as he was at the time) - and a couple of hours later Andrew Marr made exactly the same mistake.
556 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Aug 2007
> my Samsung phones are the only ones I've ever had that have received any updates at all.
Not in my experience. My HTC Wildfire, Huawei G300 and Y300, and my current phone, the Moto G5, have all received updates (okay, only the Moto has had any in the past year).
My Samsung Galaxy S5 and Tab Pro have never so much as received a single update. Thankfully most apps still run on KitKat, as that tablet is, in itself, quite a nice bit of kit
Where I work, all the Windows and VMware servers have generic names, but the Linux servers all have names which, if you think sideways, are connected with what they are or what they do. Calamari - squid server. Postbox - internal SMTP relay. Termite - log reducer. Pigsty - has a lot of grunt. Stirfry is at our site referred to as WOK.
I did similar just last weekend. Hard disc in a ziplock bag, with USB adapter and power connector, in a chest freezer with the cables coming out. I was able to 'dd' the entire disc without any errors, suitable for writing out to a SD card, which via a suitable IDE adapter, became the machine's replacement hard disc. The machine in question is an Acorn StrongARM RISC PC, and in all other respects it is working perfectly despite its age.
> I can vouch for Lenovo/Moto being the same... good enought for me.
Not my experience - My Moto G5 has not received any updates at all, apparently being on the January 2017 security patch level means my phone is up to date. Shame, because otherwise it is a very nice phone. Twin SIM and SD card, 3GB RAM, octa core CPU.
Having a local shop got me out of a hole last Sunday - my desktop PSU went bang on Saturday night, and Maplin was the only local outfit to have a suitable PSU in stock (PC World had the same item, same price, but no stock). If not for them it would have been a 40-mile round trip.
Icon: What my PSU did.
> You'll be doing Stansted to Newark in a no-frills plastic seat before you know it.
For some reason that is giving me the mental image of the airline equivalent of a Pacer. (For those not unfortunate enough to have experienced them, those were those cheap railway carriages based on the body of a Leyland bus.)
At my old university, back in 1994 everyone was expected to use 'elm' for email on the Unix boxes. Now that was awful. Later on, an unofficial Pine binary became available, and it was eventually installed properly and supported as just about every Unix user used it in preference to elm. Round about the same time, Simeon was introduced for the Windows users too scared of the command line, but one look at that I decided to stick with Pine.
systemd
with faint praise
If the caller is Indian (or that neck of the woods), I sometimes do...
"May your gods smile upon you and bless you with many children. All of them girls."
....and if their accent is so thick you can barely make out what they're saying...
"I'm very sorry, I don't speak Urdu".
[Yes, I know, Urdu is spoken in Pakistan, not India]
I got someone on to Linux, who has less technical knowledge than a teaspoon. After their WinXP system collapsed irreparably (and the manufacturer restore DVD loaded an image that bluescreened on boot) I gave them CentOS 6 with LibreOffice (which they were already using on WinXP).
They have needed far less help with their system, indeed the only time they needed help was wgen the hardware died. One replacement box and hard drive transplant they were up and running. A very painless experience for all involved!
I decided I hated Unity after trying it. Did I post everywhere badmouthing the developers? No. I just installed MATE and got on with my life.
That flexibility is one of the things I like about Linux. Don't like one way of something being done? There are alternatives out there (though some are easier to get going than others) to choose from.
I've made a variant of that - a 4-way connected to an IEC male attachment. (Only intended for powering things like laptops and phone chargers). From server deliveries where I work I've collected a few local plugs to IEC "kettle-lead" cables, including USA, France/Germany (plug that works with either configuration) and China. Works great.
I'm probably going to sound like a communist here, but it would probably be the best for the country as a whole for Openreach to go into 100% public ownership, owned by the government but operated as a separate commercial entity (a bit like Channel 4 is owned by the government).