Posts by Rob Daglish

I dont really understand why you're letting yourself get so worked up over this.

If it's a hobby, great - let them get on with it and do whatever they want. If you can verify the claim it runs as DRDOS did, does it matter what the source code looks like?

It's much less antisocial than the wallies who go out hiking in the middle of winter armed with a pacamac, flip-flops and a bag of pork scratchings then expect the mountain rescue to get them down from Skiddaw/Ben Nevis/Snowdon when they run out of bravado...

I studied Psychology, and "ethics" (apart from being next door to Kent) seems to be the stuff that stops you doing things that you need to do to get fair and reliable results...

Re: Basic Rule.

In a previous (IT) life, I used to drive coaches to top up my wages as I was paid so poorly...

I was quite happy driving for stag dos, but hen parties were awful enough that none of us wanted to cover that work.

Re: In the old days, we said welcome aboard

I did wonder. I no longer do, sometimes you have to do something to gain knowledge. In this case, the knowledge was of pain and what swearing sounds like when your tongue doesn't work properly. It's good knowledge, but I probably won't do it again...

Re: Newbie

Apparently, right here!

Still not sure how changing the hostname totally tanked a brand new Debian 13 install on my VPS, or why it's network has been configured 3 different ways each time I re-installed it. Although to be fair, I've only been trying to get my head round Linux since 1994, and haven't really settled on a distro yet!

Re: "Xerox bought the tech from someone else"

I've had chance to think - I believe the "oil reservoir" is referring to the "drum maintenance kit" - service manual for a Xerox example here:

https://laserpros.com/img/manuals/xerox-manuals/phaser-8860-8860mfp-service.pdf

It's basically a roller full of some kind of oil/lubricant which is pressed onto the drum at the bottom of the rotation, and then a small wiper that spreads it thinly. The idea is that the oil stops the wax sticking to the drum. I seem to remember we were told not to transport the printers with the maintenance kit installed as well as ensuring they were cold before moving them. Always good for a coffee when the customer ignored your call to say you were 20 minutes out, please shut it down: "Oh, you didn't shut it down? Well now I'll just have to stop and have a brew while it cools..."

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

I did once manage to cause a police presence at a bank i was working in. I'd been asked by their help desk to hoover the PCs out as the staff were complaining they were running slowly and very noisy - the thinking from the helldesk was that they were clogged up with fluff and dirt, whereas in reality, they were just not very good PCs...

Anyways, one had a little walkie-talkie style box on top, which i moved to open the lids of the PC. I dutifully started hoovering, and fairly shortly my escort said there were a lot of police sirens going past today. I jokingly replied that it cant have been for me, my bail conditions have been lifted. About 2 minutes later, the biggest hulk of a man I've seen pops his head round the door to see if everything is OK, because it turns out that walkie-talkie was a panic alarm trigger that was faulty and waiting for repair as it's firing whenever its moved.

Ooops.

They were very good about it, and although there were threats to invoice my employer for the wasted time, I dont think we ever got a bill for it, and the staff were incredibly reassured how quickly Plod could get there when needed!

Re: Opinionated and badly spelt.

Sorry, no.

Regardless of what keyboard I'm using, be it phone/tablet touchscreen, my mechanical marvel, any of my laptops or the bluetooth behemoths that I travel around with, I manage to find time to check that my spelling, punctuation and grammar are as I was taught.

Even if I'm in a hurry, I make time to check my own work - anything else detracts from the quality of the message that I want to impart to other people, and quite frankly poor spelling like that shown in the snippets quoted in the article makes me question the ability of the person writing it. Especially in such a detail-orientated field such as coding.

Re: Access security 101

I once worked on a very high security site, where leaving your machine unlocked would always lead to a quick email to the first aider to say you'd got a Wotsit stuck in your nostril.

First aider would pop round, laugh, deliver a missive on locking your device, and collect a bag of Haribo for his troubles. I miss that job...

I had a tower like that, i think they were all the same.

For some reason, when I upgraded from a P75 to (I think) a P133, it would overheat if you put the lid on. Sadly it was too sharp to leave the lid off, so it had to go...

Re: Meh, cut the other garbage out

But surely every bed needs to send 200gb a year of data to the mothership?

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

Yeah. We looked after a series of devices in libraries in the early 2000s that had either a 24 or 27 inch touchscreen Iiyama. They were absolutely immense monitors, in both senses of the word...

My personal favourite though was a 32" Philips CRT which was very, very nice. It had been bought for a Novell Netware 4 server. I never officially liberated it for my own PC, I just worked in the server room a lot. (I was 17, I didn't know any better!)

OK, it's not fibre, but... its been a welcome boost here!

My village has been split in twain by BDUK: we've all had endless roadworks, road closures and chaos caused by Fibrus connecting one half of the village. As for the rest of us? December 2027 "at the earliest".

Meanwhile, I've got a "good" connection at ~70Mbps, except it isn't, because its very lossy and keeps dropping out because the infrastructure is awful, but BT won't change it. Nobody wants to put fibre in for the 10 houses Fibrus missed as it isnt commercially viable, and B4RN? Well, not this far north, and im still and hour feom the scottish border! 4G is OK until you try and do things like VC, so what's a boy to do?

I'm consistently getting 300+ down and 50+ up, so until 2028... looks like I'm stuck with it.

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

I believe Blackboard Monitor Vimes...

Re: Lotus Notes

I attended a number of the Novell BrainShare events - there were many good speakers amongst the Dev team, and in some of the surrounding uni's, who could make the most dull topics interesting, and were great to have a pint with afterwards!

I miss Novell...

Re: There is only one way, has always been only one way, and always will only be one way

I think for cows that may be true, but round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.

The really posh farms have different colour chalk on different rams so you know who’s been where…

Re: Money for nothing...

I'd rather either of those gltham the hopeless, hapless money out that is my W7, thank you very much

It's been absolutely pants since it was three days old. My BMW, on the other hand, has been a superb motor.

I joined Demon in 1994, (158.152.202.35 was my IP address; why can I still remember that 30 years later, but I can't tell you what I had for breakfast 10 minutes ago?)

I remember having to have something that accepted mail being pushed to start with, and then later, a rather snazzy piece of software called Tetrix Reader Plug (Demon got you a discount on this!) which was a newsgroup reader as well as being able to pull individual email addresses or everything for the host (each demon user had their own hostname - bobertd.demon.co.uk, in my case - and could have any number of emails at that host.

And it was still more useable that Outlook...

Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

I am, but the fricking sharks keep tangling the cables

Re: Dear Santa...

I look at Lego sets and think "gosh, that's expensive", win reality my kids are using the same sets I had nearly 40 years ago, and it's showing every likelihood they'll be perfectly usable by their kids in the fullness of time. I don't think any other thing from my past has lasted so well, so is it really that bad?*

Also, have you seen the price of model trains lately? Wow...

Re: Where does the money go?

Being arms length public sector, wage caps don't really apply at Sellafield. There are tales of people doing fairly low skilled jobs such as laundry workers earning high wages, incredibly poor performance, jobs being pushed into overtime, poor attendance and high rates of work being contracted out to chains of contractors all adding their own cut for doing nothing but sub-contracting yet again...

It's a money pit, we all know it's a money pit, but nobody wants to do anything about it because why kill the golden goose? When it's finished, West Cumbria has nothing else going for it, and simply wont be a viable area to live in.

And yet, for many people it's a go-to reason. For example, SWMBO and the housework....

Without turning into the Yorkshireman sketch, I'm not sure my first 486 was that well stocked - it definitely had 4MB of RAM, and I remember upgrading the hard disk to 127MB... It was definitely pre '93, possibly 90/91 as I seem to recall having it before I started secondary school in 1991.

It eventually got 8MB, with the hard disk growing to 500MB, and at some point I believe 16MB (4*4MB SIMMS, which now live in my Korg Triton keyboard!)

Re: bits dropping off

I personally know of a motorcycle trailer being fabricated by a welder with materials from a site he was working on which was then driven off site with no questions asked by the security guards*

The same “company” had another occasion where a large (20kwish) diesel generator was ordered, then pretty much straight away trailered offsite to provide power to an employee’s house while waiting for the mains to be connected, again right past the guard house.

*Guards are more interested in who/what goes in, the scans on the way out are more interested in radioactive materials.

Anyway, the answer is obvious. You don’t take any car parts home, you stash them onsite, build it and drive the finished thing away.

Re: Polling vs Interrupted keyboards.

I've vague memories of having a PS/2 mouse that came with a PS/2 to DB9 converter...

Re: Sellafield, where taxpayer monies go to die...!

I suspect you've never had to bid for work at Sillyfield?

The normal rules of business don't apply, and you can expect many, many questions about costs. Like how much do you pay your staff? What does your electric and insurance cost, and who supplies them? Will they be raising their prices? Can we have five years of your accounts, please, so we can audit you?

These are genuine questions from a tender for occasional coach transport. Having seen some of their construction tenders too, it seems like their contract department likes to be busy!

What seems to happen in reality is that there are three or four firms whose work seems to be bidding for work and buying or selling each other and infinitum* - one of my mates has worked in the same office for ~10 years, but has been employed by around 8 different versions of the same company in that time.

Those mega corps then sub work to the same bunch of local subbies, who occasionally go bust, but then start up again with a slightly different name. They, in turn, subcontract all the work out, usually to one bloke** who is quite busy doing the actual work of around 9,999 people who seem to be able to just push bits of paper around.

*This makes Joint Ventures a great game, especially when it comes to IT support

**Hi John! Hope you're keeping well?

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Yes, this is very true. The company I work for produce a lot of training to teach our products to people, but looked at from a professional teaching point of view, they're terrible and not really fit for purpose. I've suggested on more than one occasion that we employ a qualified teacher to develop and deliver the courses, but nobody seems to understand the issue.

Interestingly, $largeNuclearSite down the road has started doing just this, and is causing a drain of teachers from the area as they're offering much higher salaries and better working conditions - one friend has gone from a highly stressful Senior Management role in a school, to basically delivering lessons that are already planned, and got doesn't have to deal with angsty teenagers, parents or Ofsted, has for a significant salary bump and still regards a 40 hour week as part time!

Re: better directions

To be fair, my tenants managed to turn to drugs without any help from me, so I'm not sure what your point is here...

Not all landlords and devils, and not all tenants are saints.

Re: The slow TV trend

Sorry, I can't do anything about toucans at the moment, I'm too busy trying to deal with the giraffes that appear to have caught fire...

Re: Really...?

Really? I thought there was a planet going to crash into us. Or were we going to crash into it? Something like that anyways...

Re: Imagine if...

If he's maintaining it, I have no objection to him earning a bob or two from it, even if it wasn't originally his work or idea.

Remind me, do journalists not get paid when they regurgitate press releases?

Re: i never get tired if saying it

Did you read TFA or just decide to get on your high horse about cloud on every comment section?

I think your ire would be better directed at the bad actors who are extorting money from people (no, not Oracle on this occasion;) )than at cloud in general, especially as the gang involved are going after on prem stuff, mainly...

Re: Boring

Were there ever such creatures? I assumed they were entirely mythical!