Posts by SteveK

Re: Let me get this straight ...

Going back some years, driving up a narrow windy road in a small Italian town in the dark, being dazzled by oncoming traffic, Tomtom told us to turn left, which turned out to be a zigzagging pedestrian staircase down to the car park we were trying to navigate to. Fortunately we decided not to go that route, and always trust eyes over technology when it comes to following directions.

Another time on the same trip that Tomtom tried to kill us (where we did follow the instructions) was when it directed us off the nice Autostrada we were on, and instead took us for a couple of miles through the heart of the Naples dockland districts, at a time when it really wasn't the sort of place we wanted to see...

Re: Screen savers

It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end.

When my grandfather first got a computer he struggled with this - he'd carefully move the mouse with his right hand to where he wanted it, then let go and move his hand away and whack the button twice with his left hand, and get really frustrated that it never clicked where he wanted, or would end up dragging something. For ages he couldn't grasp that continuing to hold the mouse and clicking delicately would solve all his problems.

Steve.

I might be judged for over-using ls every other command.

I have a tendency to create a new directory, cd into it and immediately 'ls'. Quite what I am expecting to find in a newly created directory, I'm not sure? And when I don't find anything I often 'ls -a' just to be sure. I know I'm doing it, but my fingers just seem to have it as muscle memory.

Re: After spending the day with an LLM yesterday...

Similarly, I was impressed with its apparent understanding and ability to 'follow' a conversation as it twists and turns. Yes, it's just an algorithm and has no true understanding, but it certainly has a very good parser. Last year I was testing it out on fairly pointless trivia and giving it increasingly vague followon questions, avoiding names and facts, although the final sentence of the final answer made it plain that it really isn't aware of context:

Summarise Blade Runner in 10 words

Futuristic detective hunts down rogue androids in dystopian Los Angeles.

Who was the main actor?

The main actor in the original Blade Runner film (1982) is Harrison Ford, who played the character of Rick Deckard.

How old was he when it was made?

Harrison Ford was born on July 13, 1942, and the original Blade Runner film was released on June 25, 1982. Therefore, he was around 39 years old when the film was made.

And what's the name of the other guy?

The other guy in the original Blade Runner film (1982) is Rutger Hauer, who played the character of Roy Batty.

What was the other film he was in?

Rutger Hauer has appeared in many films throughout his career, but one of his most notable roles was as the character of Lothos in the 1992 horror-comedy film "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". However, he is perhaps best known for his role as Roy Batty in the original Blade Runner.

Would I rely on it for anything important? No, it's a toy. I spent a couple of hours playing with it, and asked it to create:

* A pub quiz on a variety of topics (then asked it to create a pub quiz WITH ANSWERS, then also citing sources as I wasn't convinced);

* An initial draft for items to include in a risk assessment on steel toe cap boots that HR want us to wear whenever we carry a box - this sort of thing it is good at, effectively collating and abstracting other similar content that it has indexed although I would check it thoroughly;

* A child's bedtime story about a girl and her cat (which was very sweet, then asked for chapter two which took a much darker turn TLDR: cat died, girl heartbroken and held slightly disturbed funeral)

* A list of song titles with a word replaced by 'camel' (Not sure why I asked that, but my favourite was Hotel Camelfornia) which then went off on a tangent about whether camels could live on the moon? (AI said no), even with a spacesuit? (AI said no, citing a list of reasons such as lack of food and water and high temperatures) and even if wearing some sort of hat? (AI said even though a hat would protect it from sun, there would still be a lack of atmosphere, food and water and extreme temperatures). Later in that conversation it cited Terry Pratchett when considering the existence of space turtles.

At this point I switched it off and went and had a beer.

Re: Nine nines and an explosion

hooray, this is a leap year - our uptime will exceed the baseline.

Re: Boarded by Pirates

it's such a good example of how we all used our imagination to fill in the blanks back in the day.

A few years back a couple of us were talking about how with Elite Dangerous, the graphics had finally caught up with how it looked inside our imaginations when we were playing the original.

Re: Keepers of...

I've known a few "keepers of" in my time.

Here, someone had the additional job title 'Keeper of the Scientific Books' which I think is a good one. She's retired now, not sure who has taken on that title (it is an official title rather than a 'known as').

They'd also jealously guard the purchasing budgets. I once placed a requisition for ordering 10 RJ-45 plugs, only to be asked, "Do you really need 10, won't 5 be sufficient?" I did point out the pack size and MOQ were both 10!

Back in the days when online ordering was not quite so common, and procedure meant that ordering stuff for the stationery cupboard rather than for my own department had to be sent to a PA who would ask accounts to raise an order, I had requested N boxes of high density floppy disks.

The accountant proudly gloated after it had gone through that he'd saved us more than £20 by changing the order to standard density floppy disks and that I really should be more observant when looking through the catalogue. A week later I repeated the order and made it clear who was responsible for having bought a stock of floppy disks that were half the capacity and of virtually no use to anyone.

Re: I'd quite like an X-term

I do have, squirrelled away, an old NCD X-terminal. Square form factor, 1024x1024. Only 15" I think, and mono, but so crisp and clear compared to VGA PC monitors of the era. Sadly only runs X11R4 in ROM, no idea whether there was ever any way to upgrade it or network boot it to a newer version.

Re: Botched Aircon

I came in just after New Year last year and similarly found the server room to be a wall of heat, 40+ degrees. Thought the AC had failed at first, but on investigation found that some vagrants had climbed over the fence and down to the sheltered area outside our basement server room and turned the power breaker off for the AC. Apparently the master switch had to be located there rather than internally. It is now protected with a lock to prevent unauthorised switching, and better temperature monitoring...

Re: "it was customary to Hasselhoff unlocked PCs"

For a time at my workplace we would use the screen rotation hotkeys on people who left their machines unlocked

I did once encounter someone who had done this to himself with inadvertent key pressing. He hadn't said anything or asked for help but I couldn't help noticing as I passed by that he'd turned his CRT monitor upside down to keep working.

Re: And we also want EV's?

Last month I used the grand total of 12kWh of grid power to run my home.

Shame that you still have to pay the daily standing charge to the power company even when you're not using any power.

Re: Still no answer...

Isn't Dulwich where the Elder Gods stalk their prey?

Teams does that sometimes, leaving the background in perfect clarity but blurring the meeting participant...

Re: How happy I am

A strange game. The only winning move is not to browse.

How about a nice game of chess?

Re: On Call

I foresee a future episode of On Call, where our IT hero has to debug the cause of some degraded web app performance, only to find that the whole rack is overheating due to a large brown lump stuck in the inlet hose.

Many years ago, we had the opposite problem. I work in old Victorian buildings, with walls up to a couple of feet thick, with plumbing frequently contained within.

One room was frequently getting toilet blockages and unexplained leaks. On investigation, it turned out that the cabling contractors, who had some years previously installed Ethernet throughout, had managed to drill through and then run Ethernet cabling across the waste pipe from the toilet which was running inside the wall between two rooms. This was causing an obstruction, and resulted in many jokes about log messages and so on.

Re: Don't you have to go into space in order to be an astronaut?

Really? According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (admittedly from a 2019 report):

To be in the top 1% of income tax payers in the UK (i.e. to be among the 310,000 individuals with the highest income), a taxable income of at least £160,000 is required. £236,000 is required to be in the top 0.5% and nearly £650,000 to be in the top 0.1%. 43% of adults pay no income tax and to be in the top 1% of all adults (or the top 540,000 people), a pre-tax income of at least £120,000 is required.

Re: It's probably gas...

Ah, so it wasn't really 'rogue thruster burns from the Soyuz module' that changed the station's altitude a couple of times recently, but overuse of the space toilet..

Just remembered the graphpaper with the colour grid copied onto it using 1,2,3 and 4 to represent the colours.

My dad did it. Will have to mention it next time I see him

My mum did ours.. She used the 1,2,3,4 model on graphpaper too. Clearly the way to do it!

Surely using western transliteration of Russian, Japanese names etc is the sort of thing they'd be trying to prevent with their 'decolonization', and all names must be in their original language?

Re: "a system was placed last winter"

I think it pushes you down the 'finish setting up your device' thing when you next login after it (automatically) installs W10 feature upgrades, in the hope you'll accidentally not turn off the various 'let me send your info back home' options.

Whether they should have full internet access (in order to fetch the updates) or just limited to being able to show updated content from corporate servers, or not be set to only install approved updates are other questions though.

Re: Why?

If you have print servers elsewhere in the organisation, the DC runs a periodical job of cleaning up old jobs, allegedly.

I read that too (although think it was more about cleaning up old print queues rather than print jobs), don't understand why it's the domain controller's job to clean up after the print spooler running on another server - let that server do it rather than run unnecessary services that do more than is even needed on a domain controller. At the very least separate the housekeeping functions to another service.

I have a bunch of SPARC desktops and servers that have been gathering dust in a basement (along with my collection of acquired SGIs, all waiting for a time that I never had to bring them to life) which I'd been thinking to scrap. Maybe I'll try eBay instead...

I reserve a special part of hell for the people (and I'm not just talking one or two) who over the years, when asked to provide a photo of something for a website or whatever, have taken or obtained a suitable photo in digital form, inserted it into Word and sent me the resulting document.

Re: What is the point ?

Having its arm twisted you mean?

Re: Kids Toys

A few years back we went to Christmas markets in Aachen. Every time they needed to interrupt the music coming over the PA system with a message, it was preceded with 'Achtung achtung'. We all were expecting to be warned of raiding Spitfires each time..,

Re: Turn it round

Actually it could be quite useful for golf. Many's the time (well, once or twice anyway, ahem) that I've wished there was a tracking device fitted to the ball.

They appear to exist (whether they have yet come to market is another thing):

https://chip-ing.com/

https://www.golfpunkhq.com/equipment/article/the-genius-ball--golfers-dreams-come-true

There was another one on Amazon, but that turned out not to use GPS but a direction finder, and had to buy a dedicated handheld device to track it.

Re: Selective deafness

I agree on the obsession with thinner/lighter. Now, on a laptop that does make some degree of sense and I can see that many people appreciate that when travelling (with the trade-off of having to carry a pile of adapters and accessories - or more likely in my experience turning up at their destination without any chargers, adapters etc and expecting that we have a full set of all of these things for them to borrow. But that's a different rant)

But it doesn't make sense on desktop machines. Going on about how the iMac is a couple of mm thinner after removing the optical drive etc. It's a desktop, it's not intended to be carried around, so does it really matter? I'd prefer it to have the functionality, expandability and repairability than be thankful that it's 100g lighter on the one occasion that it needed to be moved across the room.

Re: Not sure, but...

What is this Bing of which you speak?

A small black rabbit of toddler age, who lives in a strange and undefined relationship with what appears to be a knitted 'carer' 1/3 his size, in a town filled with similar pairings of knitted creatures and their oversized wards.

At least, that's what I've gleaned from watching with my 3 year old in the mornings.

More info

Re: Ring mains surely?

But I didn't see any power sockets?

Re: But

OneDrive also. Even though it (like Teams) is installed to 'the PC', On first login for every user, it copies itself into APPDATA in the users' profiles and runs from there. I guess it means that MS can get it to update itself without having to wait for pesky administrators to do so. It also means that (for OneDrive, not looked at Teams) the user profile is about 100Mb larger than it needed to be.

And that's why W10 spends so long on first logon 'getting things ready', it's installing stuff like that and the various store apps.

And that made the experience poor on shared student computer labs, hence I removed all but the useful apps, and removed the OneDrive installer from the All Users 'run at login', and both disk usage and login times much improved.

Re: Leap Out And Let It Burn

I was recently told that the fire extinguishers were purely to aid getting out of the building, not attempting to put the fire out. And in most cases they were of more use as a tool for smashing windows to get through than to actually use.

(I love it when you uncheck an option to see "relevant ads", only to be told, "You'll still see ads, but they won't be relevant".)

"We'll still monitor your every move and send it all back to HQ so that we ensure you don't see any relevant advertising."

I just think of Rastamouse as a kids version of Death in Paradise..