Posts by jollyboyspecial

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

"https://www.motor1.com/news/499366/2021-ford-escort-facelift-reveal/"

The original escort was from about 1967 to 1980 (if you don't count the short lived 100E Escort)

Then there was the completely different FWD variant from 1980 to 2002 (although the the 2002 variant looked very different to the 1980 variant they were still largely the same car)

Then there was the US variant which throughout the 80s was broadly the same as the european car. But in 1990 was replaced with a Mazda derived car

Following on from the Escort there was the Focus again a totally different car with nothing really in common with the earlier Escorts. In some markets however ford have continued to use the Escort name on what is pretty much a Focus - which is what you linked.

This is pretty much how the use of names in the car world goes. The badge gets applied to whatever. The same car might have totally different names in different territories and two completely different cars may carry the same name in different territories.

The aviation world does not work like that at all. This final 747 is very much an evolution of the original. It may have totally new avionics, different engines, etc but it's still a very similar airframe

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Agreed

Apple (and their fanbois and fangoirls) keep on telling us that usb c is inferior but can't actually tell us in what way

My favourite reason I heard from a fanboi was that usb c doesn't support wired headphones. Not only does it support such a thing, but Apple are completely against the idea of wired headphones.

Re: by 2024?

When you say usb-b do you really mean usb-b?

Most laptops have usb-c ports and usb-b compatible ports. But while those ports will connect to good old usb 2 and even usb 1 they also tend to be usb 3 (SS) ports. This is pretty much identical to usb c but just using a different physical connector.

My laptop isn't new, but will charge either through a traditional charger or one of its usb ports

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

Dyson had a very good idea years ago. Since then he doesn't seem to have had another, so he employs people to have good ideas on his behalf. They don't seem to have had any good ideas recently either.

The trouble is that if you set yourself up as a company that sells revolutionary products then you have to keep coming up with revolutionary products in order to keep the brand in the public eye. I can imagine brainstorming meetings where people run ideas up the flagpole (and all that shite) where people throw out increasingly desperate ideas for new products. It makes me wonder what utter tripe got rejected if this was the one that made it through to production.

Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

Re: "banned from the sites for being dishonest."

It actually caused the irony centres of my brain to shut down completely

San Francisco terminates explosive killer cop bots

I was wondering what had happened to the first law

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

Common Problem

Musk seems to have made the same mistake made by a lot of new owners and managers. They looks at a business and make a couple of assumptions:

1. This business would make a profit if only we could carve chunks out of the expenditure

2. This business would make a profit if we charged more (or in this case just charged) for services

The problems with these assumptions are many but they usually boil down to one for each of those two assumptions

1. Sometimes the expenditure you have is what it takes to run the company. You can't halve your headcount and then maintain service by expecting your staff to work twice as hard or for twice as long, that would cost money.

2. Sometimes your customers are already paying as much as they are willing to do for the services you offer. Increase your prices (or start charging) and customers will find they can do just fine without your services

Add to this that any change to services is always going to cost you customers at least in the short term. The trick to offsetting that is to find new customers.

In the case of twitter the revenue up to now has come from advertisers. In other words the advertisers are the customers, the users are part of the product. Musk's idea of increasing revenue by charging for verification ticks shows that he fundamentally misunderstood this aspect of the business. In an ad funded business what you are doing is selling the user's attention to the advertisers. Charging the users to use the service as well isn't impossible (subscription based TV which also has advertising is a thing) but changing from a previously free model to a paid model is the challenge.

The old fashioned way to make your business profitable in this case would be more ad revenue, but Musk seems to have almost uniquely embarked on a course of action which is alienating existing advertisers without attracting new ones.

Tech contractor who uses an umbrella company? UK tax is coming after them

Re: Victim blaming

"It is especially interesting that HMRC seems to be always going after a contractor and not after the umbrella. Wonder why?"

It states clearly in the article that VATman is going after the umbrellas

Startup raises $30 million for wireless power delivery system

Re: Pigs might fly.......

I'm sure transmitting power over a metre is a goer. But whether that can be done safely is another question altogether...

Re: Pigs might fly.......

That's a nice power delivery system you have there. Would be a shame if it didn't get regulatory approval and you lost all your investors money.

Twitter tries to lure brands back with spend-matching scheme

"UK perspective: examples of left wing media welcome"

In the UK you are now "lefty" (to use the approved Tory party vernacular) if you disagree with anything the government says. This is even the case after the government has (inevitably) performed a screeching U-turn and is now disagreeing with itself

The only thing that can't be "lefty" is any Tory MP. Right up to the point when they whip is withdrawn that is, at which point they automatically become lefty.

Unless of course the whip is restored.

Sirius XM flaw unlocks so-called smart cars thanks to code flaw

I notice a number of Japanese companies on that list.

Back in the eighties we were looking at how easy cars were to steal (for research purposes) and at the time certain brands were notoriously easy to TDA. Ford and Vauxhall were particularly well known for their lack of resistance to theft. We found some Austin Rover vehicles were a cake walk too. We found Saabs were probably the most secure of the European brands. And then we got to the Japanese cars.

Japanese cars were at the time generally a cut above most European brands for both their ingenuity and their build quality so we were expecting their theft resistance to be top of the pile. We were disappointed. Several were very easy to get into without breaking anything - not unusual, this was the eighties after all. But lots of them were very easy to start and drive away.

Speaking to an expert on things Japanese revealed that theft was is not really part of the Japanese psyche. Since they found it hard to understand why somebody would steal a car they didn't really have the thought processes to make a car secure. After all you need to be able to think of the methods somebody might use to steal a car in order to thief proof a car.

Maybe little has changed in that respect so they just trusted the vendor.

UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

"But worries persist around the world that the mere presence of Chinese products creates the chance to map networks, which is very useful intelligence, or that workers at Chinese vendors could be members of the Communist Party. The potential for Chinese equipment to be crippled by faulty software updates or even bricked at Beijing's command is also a concern."

Except that if the network in which the camera is installed is secure then those pesky commies wouldn't be able to connect to the cameras and the cameras would not be able to call home.

OK so it's not ideal putting suspect kit on any important network, but it's far from ideal having supposedly secure network where stuff like that can communicate with anything and anybody in the outside world.

I recall an old employer buying some devices (not cameras and not IIRC Chinese) that wouldn't install and configure without a connection to the internet. There was absolutely no reason for them to need internet access, but you couldn't configure them without that access. The vendor tried to argue that the devices only needed to call home once to access the licence server, but I wasn't convinced so I tried one on a DIA test line and configured it. As soon as I moved it back to the sandbox network for testing it ceased to function. The vendor then told me that the device needed to call home to the licence server at every boot. Needless to say the devices went back to the vendor with only one box opened.

I can sort of understand why a device may need to check in with a licence server if there were different levels of functionality in software that needed verification, but these didn't have any functionality like that. And firmware could (according to the documentation) be updraded from a local TFTP server so I don't see why any connectivity out to the internet was needed.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

One place I worked had what was called the "data hall". I think that was a hangover from when the previous occupants housed a bloody big old mainframe in there. We moved in and apart from some legacy Motorola "mini-computers" (remember that nomenclature?) all was 19" rack cabinets loaded with most windows NT4 servers and Cisco routers and switches (the "data hall" was became the main POP for our WAN). Because of the shape of the room, the legacy kit and the room's history the layout was a bit awkward. Basically the cabinets were located to match the a/c and power rather than the other was arouny. It wasn't the simple rows of cabinets you would normally expect in a DC.

When we moved it the room should really have been completely cleared out and rewired and the a/c redesigned. But management were (a) tight and (b) in a hurry, so it wasn't done right. They never understood that any job could be done any two of these three ways quick, cheap and right.

One of the legacies of this room was that along with the mainframe it had also housed big old line printers and tape drives which were considered to be heavy machinery and as such the mains feeds to that kit had a couple of big red emergency stop buttons wired in. One of these buttons sat by the entrance door a few inches above a couple of electrical dis boards. The dis boards were nicely flusht to the wall, but somebody had at some time decided they were ugly and needed to be hidden so some cladding was built aound them leaving a shelf a few inches deep below the emergency stop button.

You can probably see where this is going...

One day somebody brought in a delivery of some new servers. The double doors needed to be opened to get the delivery in. And once the trolley had been wheeled in the driver went to close the doors and bolt one half. At some point he decided he needed both hands for this task, so he put his clipboard down. You'd think he'd have put it on his trolley of server boxes. But nope. He put it on the "shelf" by the door. The shelf wasn't deep enough to lay it flat so he put it more or less upright, leaning on the wall. OK not the wall. Leaning on the emergency stop button. Having locked the door he turned and reached out for the clipboard. Caught his foot on his trolley, stumbled, reached out a hand to steady himself and yep. A lot of servers lost power.

Even though the room was protected by a big old UPS some of us decided we didn't trust that antique and when we moved in we brought our UPSs with us. One UPS per cabinet was only a few minutes of run time, but it was enough that it was longer than the time it took to find the key needed to reset the emergency stop button, insert it and turn it. Those teams who had decided to trust the room UPS weren't so lucky.

After that management were convinced that the room needed rewiring to suit it's current use. Properly done with dual feeds to each cab and no silly easily accessible stop buttons. But while that project was being scoped and planned and costed and all the rest that takes so long I carefully explained to management that this is why they should have had the work done before we moved in and I also made a couple of boxes to mount over the emergency stop buttons to prevent a repeat.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

The simple problem with voice shopping is it's difficult. It's not the buying that's difficult, it's browsing for the products in the first place that's difficult. It's much, much easier to browse for something on your phone or laptop than to try to do it via a voice assistant. And it's blindingly obvious that would be the case, which makes me wonder who thought of it in the first place.

It reminds me of the idea a few years ago that we should control our TVs and other devices by gesture rather than using a remote. Douglas Adams had already pointed out decades earlier what the obvious shortcoming of this would be - that you would have to sit infuriatingly still while watching TV (or in Adams' original, listening to the radio). And that's not to mention how many complicated gestures you would need to control a modern TV. But there were still folk in the industry who invented time and money in the concept.

Meta links US military to fake social media influence campaigns

"Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,"

That doesn't actually state clearly that it was the US military that was behind the campaigns does it? People "associated with the US military" is a pretty vague term (and I can't stand the use of the word individuals like this). What do they mean by "associated with"? People employed by? And even if they are employed by the US military does this mean they were doing so under the instructions of or with the knowledge of the brass?

It's getting on for the sort of vague news that Mark and Lard used to report. Somebody associated with somebody else did something.

Waiting for speedy broadband? UK's Openreach prioritizing existing work over fiber expansion

The expansion of "full" fibre to meet government targets was always a joke. Openreach were only picking the low hanging fruit so that they could say a certain percentage of properties had full fibre available by a certain date. So they would hit an area and ignore streets where the properties were not fed overhead. Running fibre to a property is easy when that property is fed from a pole. All they need to do is take off the copper from the pole and replace it with fibre. On the other hand where a property his fed underground it's possible that they could blow fibre through the existing duct, but it's also possible the duct may be blocked or it might have corners in it that are below the minimum bend radius for the fibre they use. Openreach didn't bother to find out and simply skipped all exisiting properties that were fed underground.

This wasn't actually a very good plan. UK.gov still have a target for all properties to have full fibre available by 2030 (that got quietly put back from 2025). Openreach are still going to have to hit that target. There are those in the industry who expect that target to be scrapped entirely before 2030. The reasons given for this are various - one is that Openreach simply won't do it (for reasons of cost and difficulty) and the government will be forced to scrap the target long before the deadline in order to avoid losing face. The other is that we'll have gigabit plus radio coverage in one form or another before 2030. However this is unlikely. The roll out of 5G and 4G before it were just like the Openreach full fibre rollout.

I could show you loads of properties that can scarcely get a mobile signal of any kind, while properties not so far away can get a strong 5G signal. Not so long ago that statement would have been exactly the same except you could swap that 5 for a 4. A few years earlier you could have swapped the 4 for a 3. Mobile network providers just like BT and Openreach state that they are going to roll out their latest and greatest to everybody, but what they mean is that they are going to go for the low hanging fruit. Upgrading existing 4G masts to 5G was always going to take priority over installing 5G masts in areas where there was little or no signal simply because that would cost more for less financial benefit.

The only way to address the widening gap between those with increasingly fast connectivity and those with slow to now connectivity is through legislation. But while you would think that a Tory government would be more interested in sorting this out given it's potential to impact house prices, in reality they don't even seem to think this is a problem. And don't expect Labour to be any different Starmer (who he?) has spent the last week or so saying that his concerns are exactly those of the current Tory government, but that he would do a better job of them. A strange approach for an oposition leader.

So if you currently have a crap connection don't expect Openreach or any of the mobile networks to do anything about it any time soon. While there is no pressure from government to address the issue they will always go for the highest return for the lowest outlay.

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

SPOF

Sounds like a good idea if you don't consider the consequences of failure. Sure in theory you could even automate a plane so that it could take off, fly to it's destination and land without the pilot doing much at all, but is it a good idea? With a single pilot on board what happens if systems fail? Could you rely on a single pilot to sort it all out figure out what to disable in order to take manual control and safely fly and land the plane?

Let's not even consider what happened with certain automation in the 737-MAX. Given the role played by a certain regulator in that debacle I'm not sure any of this sounds particularly reassuring.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

I always thought there were two possibilities here:

The charitable one: That she had a what if moment. What if we could come up with a technology that would allow us to diagnose a huge number of diseases from a tiny sample of blood. Now there are plenty of doctors and scientists who could tell you a whole number of reasons why this would be hard, but being charitable maybe she thought it might be possible. Maybe it came from a misunderstanding of how this shit actually works, who knows? But the pressed ahead anyway. Until the investors money ran out and the project was no further forward. And then naively she decided to get more investment because surely the quantum leap was right around the corner. Repeat until the investors have had enough and they call the cops.

The uncharitable one: She's a con artist.

Microsoft warns Direct Access on Windows 10 and 11 could be anything but

What's wrong with a VPN anyway?

DA is a horrible product. Not because it's leaky, but because it's not a real solution. It only really works if your entire organization is pure Microsoft end to end. As soon as your end users want access to something that's not MS then either you have to implement some horrible clunky work around or you need to have a split solution where you're using DA to access MS stuff and a "traditional VPN" (as MS like to call it) for anything else.

I don't even understand what's wrong with a traditional VPN anyway.

Re: Direct Access

I've never liked DA as a solution to the problem, but I don't see why VMs would make a difference.

Looking for a holiday DIY project? Build your own pen-plotter, for under $15

Would be great if there was any prospect of anybody having an Pi Zero in stock any time soon. Or indeed at all.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

This is support on the same basis as the Monty Python no pay insurance policy. It's a warranty that's only valid as long as you don't claim on it.

Back when I was in a huge organization with massive buying power we used to tender for our hardware contracts. We were very thorough when it came to checking out tender submissions. We came across quite a few vendors who were big names but had virtually no presence in the UK. Basically a sales office. Sometimes these were overseas companies who had set up a UK branch office and the hardware was shipped in direct from the factory. In other cases we had what was a pretty well known name that was in reality just a rebadging operation.

In either case the "support" function was usually just one person answering calls and fobbing people off. These companies didn't have the facilities to repair the stuff they sold. As such if they wanted to repair something they would have to send it off to a third party. Or more usually the only option was to replace the whole thing. Neither option fitted in with their business model as the model was to cut margins to the absolute minimum and as such fulfilling warranty claims ate into the sales staff's commission and as they only really employed sales staff warranty claims simply weren't happening.

So there was the first line of defence - simply fob off the customer and try to discourage them from making a claim. Then the second line - "inspect" the hardware and tell the customer they had actually caused the damage and therefore the repair would be chargeable. Only in cases where legal action was threatened would these cowboys consider repair or replacement.

I never came across shouting at the customer as a line of defence. However I suspect that this company fit into the above description.

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

The simple problem is one of affordability.

Yes it's only 8 bucks. But the blue tick is about verification not monetization. There are people out that such as campaigners for whom this is a lot of money and something they would have to seriously consider, especially in the current economic climate. But these are perhaps the people who need the verification check the most. Without it they are much more vulnerable to being impersonated particularly by opponents and detractors. Right at the other end of the scale are billionaires who could be damaged by impersonators, but for whom eight dollars is literally nothing. A thousand times more would still be loose change for them.

And that's where Musk's model for twitter dies on its arse. It has always been a great leveler, but as soon as you start making folks pay for the service you bias it towards people with money. And at that point I think that even fewer people will take it seriously. Over the last few years - particularly the Trump years - more and more people have stopped trusting twitter. Even the belated banning for Trump did very little to restore that Trust. The takeover by Musk has eroded that trust still further. And the direction he is taking the platform is eroding it further still. There will be a tipping point where a gradual loss of users turns into a freefall decline.

FWIW I have used twitter less and less over the years and a while ago I deactivated my account.

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

Out of date?

""We are reviewing every major project – including Sizewell C," a government official told the Beeb."

And then shortly afterwards a different government source denied that this was the case

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Cache

The thing that seems to slow down Teams the most is the cache. Like so many applications Teams just keeps right on filling up it's cache and things like jumping from one chat to another just get slower and slower. Gawd knows why developers don't actually think about how long something needs to be in cache for to keep the cache size down.

And the problem with Teams is that there's no simple "clear cache" button. You have to shut down teams and then manually clear out the cache folder in explorer.

It's a mess.

Boeing's Starliner launch pushed back again... to April 2023

NASA's safety panel has expressed concerns too

737-MAX

Wouldn't you be concerned too?

NASA wheels SLS rocket out to the launchpad for another attempt to get off the ground

You'd think they'd have built the hangar a bit nearer the launch pad. Or maybe the launchpad a bit nearer the hangar.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

Except of course that the evidence of a long history of ad supported services would tend to disagree with that.

Advertising works. I'm not sure why this is the case. Advertising has seldom had any effect on me. If I want to buy something I go and look for it.

A lot of people dislike advertisements but put up with them. There are a three main reasons for this. Firstly because often there is no alternative. Secondly people will tolerate ads if the alternative is to pay to make them go away. And finally people become desensitised to advertising. The latter seems to be what has happened with YT. When ads first arrived on the platform people would do everything they could (except pay money) to avoid them, but most folks seem desensitized now.

Lets see what the uptake is for the ad supported version of Netflix. When it was first announced most people who commented said it would never fly. It will be interesting to see if those predictions were correct.

Every time somebody suggests any service or product could be ad supported (either in terms of discount or being absolutely free) there are always people who say it will never work or that people will never put up with it. Except of course the available evidence proves otherwise.

While there are people who wouldn't put up with it there are others who will. I remember when ads started on youtube, so many people predicted that the service would be consigned to the history books within weeks. Not only did it not happened, but the incidence of advertising on youtube is getting higher and higher. Of course you can pay to get rid of the ads but very few people do. The same applies to many apps and services. Sure you can pay to make the ads go away, but who does?

Most social media is littered with ads and people put up with it.

And of course TV in most territories has always been ad supported. Even in the UK when people were used to ad free TV there were plenty of people who said that "commercial" TV would never catch on, but it did.

Yes there are plenty of people who would balk at the idea of an ad supported PC, but if the discount is big enough I'm sure there will be plenty of takers.

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the NHS still send a high volume of faxes. After all they kept using pagers long after everybody else stopped.

Linux Lite 6.2: Latest release from distro with a misleading name

Yes it's a dumb name that stands to alienate two groups of people.

Firstly those who expect it to be a lightweight installation when it very much is not.

And secondly those who consider themselves "power users" (whatever the fuck that means) who will assume from the name that it's not up to their demanding (ahem) standards and therefore won't bother installing it

Re: Longevity

It is a laudable ambition in many a new Linux distro to be familiar and easy to use for new users. Obviously most users new to Linux are coming from years of using windows so making things familiar to them can only be a good thing.

Some of the established distros make a claim to be easy for refugees from Redmond, but a significant number of them are not. If people get confused by the installer they probably aren't going to bother to finish up and use the system. Some supposedly newbie friendly distros have over the years assumed as technical knowledge way beyond the average home user's. Remember the laptop or PC is to a lot of home users an appliance just like the TV or microwave. Installing your new microwave is a simple case of taking it out of the box, removing the packing and plugging it in. Installing a new OS shouldn't be much harder, but usually is. With a lot of newbie friendly distros even if the new user completes the installation they will find that the developers seem to set out to hide things from Windows users. I had one friend call me up to ask me how ro change the resolution of their display (their eyesight isn't the best and they prefer a lower resolution) trying to talk her through this unfamiliar distro over the phone proved difficult so I popped rounds and it took me a couple of minutes to track it down three layers deep. I know a lot of others are much better. But consider how easy most users find the transition between Microsoft and Apple desktops. It should be just as easy when moving to Linux.

Some of the other established distros couldn't give a damn about Windows users. They're for Linux users dammit! And that's fine, some folks are much more familiar with Linux than Windows, but that's not going to swell the Linux userbase.

So there's very definitely a place for a distro like Linux Lite since it makes a much better stab at making life easier for MS converts.

Qualcomm: Arm threatens to end CPU licensing, charge device makers instead

Re: Non-transferable license ?

If one business buys another business outright then the licence isn't transferring at all. The licence would not transfer to another owner, because the owner would still exist as a subsidiary of the larger company.

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

I thought the word of the year was supposed to be a word that had entered common usage in the previous 12 month. I have never seen or heard the word permacrisis used once until I saw this story.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

I recall a day when we had an email server with a similar problem. One morning a perfect storm of a power outage and a failed UPS battery meant that power was lost to the corporate DC before the genny could kick in. The sound of UPS alarms was accompanied by the descending drone of fans and hard disks spinning down and joined seconds later by the usually reassuring sound of the genny firing up. On that particular morning that sound came too late to reassure anyone.

Controlled restarts of servers were carried out with disk arrays carefully checked before full boots and all was well. This was while we were actually in the middle of a project to duplicate all servers to a second DC with real time data replication for the most important servers and out of hours replication for those deemed less critical. For some reason the MS Exchange server was well down the list for this work and hadn't been actioned yet.

The storm for the exchange server became even more perfect. Firstly when we came to carry out the controlled restart we found somebody had left it set so it would boot with the restoration of power rather than waiting for a manual startup. And secondly the main RAID 5 array was corrupt. A well meaning technician noted that there was a flashing light indicating that one of the hot swappable disks was poorly. So without consulting anybody he decided to swap it hot. The problem for him was that while this disk was poorly it hadn't failed completely. If I recall correctly the light sequence was flashing amber=poorly, solid amber=falling, red=fucked. And obviously no light meant that a disk want even getting power. Maybe the unit was some dead or maybe it just needed reseating. This light was flashing amber. What the technician hadn't noticed was that the lights were completely out on another disk in the array. When he pulled the poorly disk that was it. The array was shagged. Had he swapped the dead disk first it's possible that the array may have been able to rebuild itself but not now. A RAID 5 array with two disks out is useless.

This is where the storm got really bad. The backup procedure for that server was supposed to be weekly full backups to tape with nightly differential backups. The problem was that the last few full backups had failed. Operations hasn't bothered raising a trouble ticket for the backup failures. And operations were the people who had swapped the wrong disk. Operations were not popular. We needed to firstly build a blank RAID array, restore from a four week old backup and then then apply about twenty differential backups on top. So here was my plan. Take the server off the network to start restoring it. Spin up a replacement server so people could send and receive emails. And then when the original server was back figure out how the hell we were supposed to consolidate the two.

The dinosaur in charge of the IT department decided that this would take too long.Yes it would take a while, here we were in the late afternoon and I estimated that the full restore would probably take into the following morning and then feeding it the tapes for the differential backups would take into the following night. But that would mean that we had the email server back by the time people returned to the office on the third morning. A Friday as it happens. We would be operational by the weekend. What, you may ask, about local ost files for users histories? Unfortunately most users were on Citrix so they didn't have local ost files.

The dinosaur had already called out hardware and software vendors and he decided that they could fix it without resorting to backups. I explained that this was almost certainly impossible, but his response was that he paid a fortune for support so he was going to use it. Support engineers duly arrived and sat down to formulate a plan. The dinosaur went home before they'd all arrived. We hung around till about 10pm and as there was nothing we could do, off we fucked as well. I arrived at 7am the next day to find that the engineers were finalizing their plan. That's right they'd achieved nothing overnight. The plan arrived at 7:30, it was a hefty document. We sat through a presentation from the assembled support engineers. The first half of which was an explanation of exactly what damage had been done and how. The second half was how the engineers proposed to repair the damage. It was about 30 seconds into this second part of the presentation that I realised that the plan was almost exactly the same as there plan I'd hastily cobbled together the previous afternoon. The only difference being that they knew how to consolidate the two servers at the end. I could see the dinosaur looked distinctly uncomfortable. However his discomfort increased exponentially when one is the engineers days that we should have implemented a replacement email server before they even arrived.

Dinosaur barked out orders as to who was going to do what, but you could see he was panicking. He had a meeting with the board at nine. He're we were almost 24 hours after the initial failure and email was still down. Email of course being just about the only system the board actually used. Not only that but dino now had to tell them that it wouldn't be back until Friday evening. It was likely that quite a lot of people would have to work the weekend. And that would be at time be and a half.

Dino wanted to take a delegation to the board meeting as backup. The trouble is that anybody from engineering would be likely to explain that Dino had delayed things by over 12 hours by bringing in external engineers who had come to the same conclusion as his own engineers. He decided to take the operations manager and the facilities manager. Not as backup, but as scapegoats. He could blame operations for the failed backups and swapping the wrong disk. And he could blame facilities for the failed battery. But blame is a dangerous game. Of course ops and FM had some difficult questions to answer, but when you're being blamed the normal tactic is to deflect some of that blame. So it wasn't long before the operations manager dumped all over Dino and explained the delay of well over twelve hours. Not to be out done FM jumped in and pointed out that their monthly genny and UPS tests had been cut to size monthly by Dino because he didn't like paying the bills.

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Re: Aye aye Jimlad!

Microsoft are dead against licence resales. However the EU ruled that they are legal. With the UK no longer v being part of the EU I don't think the legal position has been tested in the UK at least.

However these days it seems that installing without a licence continues to work forever

Re: DisplayPort in 2003?

Other way around. Plenty of devices used to have display port, but it's mostly been replaced with HDMI ports on more modern devices. We used to have quite a lot of requests for DP to HDMI adaptors. Particularly for people needing to connect their laptops to our monitors - we have monitors with a mixture of VGA, HDMI and DVI but not a one with DP. These days we get virtually no requests and this we have a drawer full of DP-HDMI adaptors.

If you don't have the cash for a decent laptop then these devices are a good choice. But a laptop of similar performance is so much better. I have KVM (well two Ms actually) in the office and at home. So I can just move the same device between the two. Yes you could do exactly the same with a NUC, but what you can't do with a NUC is whip it out of your bag where ever you may be and get down to some work (or play). After all a NUC can be thought of as a laptop without the built in KVM. Yes it's cheaper than the equivalent laptop, but without a lot of the advantages.

Another issue I've had with NUC devices from various manufacturers is a lack of longevity. We've had a failure rate of around 40% in the last three or four years. The biggest problem being that the powers that be decided that we didn't need any form of hardware cover on something so small - really it wasn't based on cost just on "oh that's a little tiny thing". So every one that has failed has needed to be replaced with new.

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

I honestly think that people like Musk don't really believe the real world exists. They seem to think that ordinary folks in the real world are just some sort of toy for them to play with and of course make money out of.

What's up with WhatsApp? Messaging platform suffers outage in the UK

Re: Back to the future

It's not about monopolies. It's about the fact that some many idiot consumers these days think there are monopolies and so plump for those "monopolies" rather than shopping around (if that's the right phrase when you're dealing with free stuff).

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

Are they maybe using different algorithms in different territories?

I ask because I never seem to get "conservative" videos recommended to me

Oil company Castrol slips and slides into immersion cooling

Re: Castrol

Engine oil may have a lower thermal conductivity than water but as a coolant it has a lot of advantages. The main one being that water has a relatively low boiling point.

I'm aware that datacentres don't generally hit over 100 degrees celsius, but if they did....

iPhone 14 car crash detection triggered by roller coasters

Re: Heresy

I attended a facility a while ago where anybody entering a particular area was asked to leave any electronic devices with the guard at reception. The devices were bagged labelled and customers given a receipt before the devices were locked away securely. However they had a problem with people trying to smuggle phones in. Only phones.

People would hand over all sorts of devices but not phones. Even when the guard asked "do you have a mobile phone" visitors would reply no, even thought the signs clears stated that electronic devices could be damaged if taken into the facility even if switched off. After finding contraband the guard told me they had to start sweeping folks with a detector and even found people with phones stuffed inside clothing.

Some people are so addicted to their phones that they would rather risk them being damaged than be without them for half an hour.

Re: Here we go again

The lesson to be learned hear is that few people working in mainstream media know the first thing about the products they "review". They subscribe to the Apple mailing list and reprint Apple press releases as reviews.

Re: Here we go again

@Lis you've heard of Google right?

Here we go again

It's bad enough that Apple copy features from the competition and call them innovative* but why is the Apple version of the feature always worse than the feature they are copying?

*Apple buyers believe that every new iFeature is innovative because Apple buyers think that only Apple exisits

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

So we have a failure of the primary circuit at a network interface on the backup circuit at the same time?

People lose primary and backup connections simultaneously more often than you might think, for a variety of reasons.

You can't blame either the circuit vendor or the network card vendor for this. The real blame for the loss of business operations is the lack of a business continuity plan. Risk assessment is important. Is there a risk of losing the primary and backup connections at the same time? Of course there is, no matter how small. The blame here could be laid at a couple of different doors here. Maybe the project manager or solution designer didn't tell the business there was a risk of losing both connections simultaneously and for an extended period of time, in which case that's the arse that needs a good solid kicking. Or maybe the business was told of the risk and chose to accept it, in which case the particular manager who made that decision needs the kicking.

People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

"70 percent of accidents where driver assist software is a factor"

Maybe if Tesla didn't call their driver assist feature "autopilot" then people wouldn't treat it as full self driving? Just random thoughts really.

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Things to remember about Brexit.

The Tories took us into the EEC. Labour campaigned and voted against it.

The Tories took us into the EU. Labour voted against it.

Brexit was a mess. People in both the major parties campaigned both ways, but a certain section of the Tory party decided that if they campaigned in favour of Brexit that would appeal to nationalists and jingoists which would win them votes. And this seems to have been true. Leaving the EU wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but Johnson's implementation of it is a disaster. The incoming PM had an opportunity to change the government's approach, but instead doubled down on it.

The final thing to remember is that both Johnson and Truss have spoken out in favour of the EU.

I don't believe that this means they were ever in favour of the EU or against it. I don't believe people like them believe in anything other than their own interests and will say whatever they believe will best serve their personal interests at the time. So when Truss says she was wrong to campaign against Brexit, and indeed when she says she was wrong to be a member of the Lib Dems she's lying. It wasn't that she was wrong. It's that she believes saying she was wrong is what will best servie her personal interests right now.