Posts by JT_3K

That's ok. There's a comment above talking about how hard councils have it, how tightly controlled budgets are and the woes of being held from growing Council Tax. It suggests woe is the life of a councillor and nobody could achieve given circumstances and lack of funds.

Evidently they didn't have to listen to Barry Sheerman talking about the cable car he wanted to put in at Castle Hill, watch the 20yrs it took for someone to muster the backhander significant enough to build the Kingsgate, endure the dual farces of the old Huddersfield Leisure Centre and the Technical College site, the inability to push brownfield development over the hilarity of the loss of wildlife about to befell Kirkheaton (again, I'm guessing due to brown envelopes), watch as Kirklees went from one of the most progressive and successful at recycling to 20yrs of "unable to recycle Tetrapak" under a short-sighted contract or the time a councillor, on public record, referred to constituents as "dickheads" for complaining about woeful gritting. But no, no, it's not their fault they're continually making poor decisions.

Re: PC world and hard discs

Being that it's now incredibly hard to get real USB HDDs and memory sticks from Amazon* without being scammed, and eBuyer has gone, I expect I'd be headed here for a memory stick if I needed one. That said, I hate going in there, hate being "upsold" repeatedly by someone who just won't take the hint that I'm not falling for their lies and despise giving DSG any money.

* Having been burned with dodgy firmware "upsized" ones and not-from-that-manufacturer clones, I finally stopped trusting Amazon for "official" products when the seemingly official "Oral B shop" sent me counterfeit toothbrush heads that were noisy as hell and shredded bristles.

...and when you get there, you can f*ck off again. And you can keep f*cking off until you get right back here. And then, you can f*ck off again.

Re: Users and printing devices...

We had similar at the end of November. $Department demanded an MFP because they thrashed their on-desk laser with labels as it got too hot, and they knew labels went through the upstairs MFP. A good-used low-throughput one spent three weeks being re-commissioned at the supplier before being delivered. Supplier is great and believes hard that their at-cost parts are cheaper for a full replacement than the engineer time/effort onsite and lost goodwill. Supplier carefully delivered, then took great pains to explain to $Department that labels had to be fed strictly from the side tray as that was a shorter path that didn't expose to heat for long enough melt the glue on the labels before spitting them out.

One proud-semi-technophobe decided as he'd put a sheet through from the drawer before being corrected and it'd worked, he'd just carry on because he thought it was easier than having to understand how to print from a tray. His first tray sheet however had been in a cold printer. His fifth sheet was not. The entire sheet peeled off in turn stuck around the fuser, the transfer belt, every transfer roller/wheel and all the toners. It did a few more before he figured something was wrong.

The printer was with us three days before it needed a full reconditioning.

I love Henry and the culture of support it's gained. You're right though, that lack of a *powered* rotating brush does it in. Anyone who's ever vacuumed a mid-pile+ carpeted property with a Henry or similar, then picked up a mid-range upright (corded) vacuum with a rotating brush and gone over it again knows. We changed a well maintained and supposedly "good" one to a Vax Air Max Pet 3 once and it pulled 3-4 full buckets the first time.

They're brilliant vacuums in an office, carpet-tiled student-digs or workshop though.

That's...yeah. I know this is a thread of people "reminiscing when you could have a joke in the office" but we've got a stores guy with permanent knee damage from kneeling in a freezer ~15yrs ago for too long and the cold damaging his knees irrevocably. The reasons some of these things have faded are written in blood.

Re: My never ending (and barely started ) project

My favourite was the BMW E-series cars. When from ~'95 to '05 they had the head units with the screens that used to speak via CANBUS to the "navigation" unit in the rear. You could read the CANBUS and inject an additional item in to the main menu on their screen. Then you could sniff for the user selecting it and present on screen options. In turn you could sniff the buttons used (forward/reverse track, etc) and get it to drive your media output.

It was however, ultimately a stratospheric amount of effort at a time when iPod radio transmitters were a thing and usually fairly viable. Those with cassette decks would use the cassette adaptor to the same end. If you were bothered enough to spend car-PC money, you'd probably be bothered enough to pay for the Denison ICE link. Those looking to throw more money would spec the "base non-amplifier" variant of the car and install a full setup from scratch with a touch multi-screen or USB input.

Still cool, but very quickly bypassed as the iPhone era and screen mirroring became viable.

Re: Re ..lifetime of storage is the life of the last manufactured or surviving retrieval device.

Dare I ask where you are? I have a suitable machine and can help, but am unsure on the state of the 5.25'' drive. It'd be nice to see some of the collection come to external use?

Re: WhatAbout WhatsApp ForBusiness?

Are you sure you're not getting confused with Michaelsoft Binbows?

Re: A similar thing happened with Supermicro in 2018

I see your downvotes, and am not sure those doing it remember the raft of unfounded reports going around at the time. The allegation was a tiny chip on Supermicro boards (the size of a broken off pencil lead) which provided full remote control, logging and visibility of the server, and had supposedly appeared as a post-design addition by the manufacturing plant in China. The allegations were *very* noisily made and very quietly, almost silently, retracted in the global press, barring el-Reg. Bloomberg (the original source IIRC) then proceeded to pivot in some modern post-truth to ignore their original chip claim and start pushing a line on custom BIOS variants.

I don't disagree there's a large push (from all sides) for backdoors and compromise, but the Supermicro stories stood out as particularly egregious when it was seemingly unfounded.

There was a great comment at the time on a Reg article about the potential reasons the story might exist. https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_spying/#c_4204731 Feasibly, yours is only part of the potential viewpoints.

Re: Insame

I was all set to spark off about how much spinning disks love to be jolted, especially with the kind of forces for rack mounting or the weird angles whilst being carried. Then I remembered that it's Linux and right at the back of my head something glowed - HDPARM allows you to park the heads of a disk. *Arguably* you could keep the uptime counter running with the OS in memory by parking the disks and pausing/stopping a load of services. Still not sure I'd do it mind.

The former is attributed to suppliers bending over backwards so hard to accommodate M&S new offline processes that their head actually ended up in front of their stomach. The article covers the main point which is in-store, all their processes (rotation, etc) failed so they've had tremendous losses. They've also ordered what they guessed, not what they'd really needed so they've over ordered in lots of places leading to more local loss.

The Morrisons one is easy to explain, although it took me a long time to find out (I've been raging about our local store for years). Their store managers are bonussed almost exclusively on waste/loss. Because of this, they'd prefer not to order replenishment stock until such a point that they're certain they need it and for slower moving lines, that can be a real challenge. My example is that I need to go as they're the only ones that stock the jalapenos I like (or were for a while) and when I'd emptied the shelf, it stayed empty for over a week. I had a similar experience when I drank considerable amounts of Ramune for a while. Because of that idiotic directoral decision, the stores always feel somewhat post-apocalyptic with us fighting over the last box of bran flakes.

Re: "telling customers to leave if they don't like it"

"There is no sector as loosely and ineffectually regulated as communications"

[Water industry has entered the chat]

Re: I've been poisoning Linkedin profile for years

Jeez, you really know how to roast. Don't press him too hard.

Re: Time for some maths...

The problem here is that the "investment capital" mindset has people looking for the laziest way to show growth and cut resourcing/cost. For nearly 50 years we've been told that the right approach is Lean, a methodology whereby you put a significant ongoing effort in to reduction of wasteful processes and hyper-reorganisation of your core business to make yourself more flexible and do more with less. At some point the needle shifted on this, likely because of a combo of VC culture and human nature, away from perfection in flexibility and the tie-in to quality, and towards raw expenditure reduction at any cost. The latter half of these people now see AI as the next iteration - with almost no effort they can install a magic genie in a lamp that means Brenda on the front desk can now do four people's jobs and that's three salaries saved. That's more money for the shareholders in the short term, and more money for them, and they'll be gone before the issues arise.

As someone recently put, "An LLM tells you what a coherent response *should sound/look like*." It's not telling you facts or infallible, it doesn't understand the output, it's just mashing word-soup around until it seems like it's a viable response.

Re: Nasty tactic

I don't at face value disagree with the sentiment of this. Once investigated though, the numbers in *our* village (YMMV) painted a different story. An additional ~400 houses to be added (on green belt when the brownfield remains, but that's a different argument/story) raised ire from the villagers, specifically around school places. It transpired with an ageing population and declining birth rate that the projected school capacity had been declining by some rate and placing the school at risk. Similarly, *our* local roads can easily withstand the extra traffic. This is the same for another two similar-scale nearby developments, although one has been allowed a concerning conversion of a sleepy low-suitability cul-de-sac in to a main throughfare that will be difficult at school times due to the proximity of a T-junction.

The doctor/dentist capacity is a concern, but I'm not convinced that's one for planning or the builders to address? The dental provision in our local area isn't sufficient already but similarly all operates from "plentiful" ex-residential locations, and the doctors surgeries have physical space, but without the staffing. Local dental is hard-limited by the number of NHS patients the dentist is willing to accept, and the quantity of dentists choosing to operate in the area. The local GP surgery is paid per patient on the books being (supposedly) held accountable by outcomes/queues, and chooses their staffing level with an attempt to maximise returns for minimal staffing. Should the government deem fit to (source of funding and approaches to running the NHS en-masse aside) sufficiently "fix" the profitability model to incentivise more to become dentists, more dentists to take on NHS clients, and manage GP surgeries to improve matters of *actual* capacity against queues, this should largely be a self-sorting problem?

We're not blaming the housing developers and increase of population for the police's statistical decline? We're not raising issue that council services don't seem to improve despite the increase of Council Tax revenues against the new housing?

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

You are right, it was around 2009. Things have undoubtedly improved and it sounds like to a much more usable point. At the time it was a generic few-years-old box and a fight just to get it off the ground. Times I've had to come in to contact since haven't improved the opinion but it's been a long time since I've tried properly from scratch.

I still feel there's a battle to be overcome in terms of accessibility and a confidence barrier (yes it's "safe" today, but will that sub-package be safe/maintained in 18mths). There's also the continued challenge in the community, but I recognise there are a lot of "formal" resources that make this better than it used to be rather than relying on chunks of the web that are fighting each other.

I'm also highly aware that intrinsically having deep knowledge of Windows (back through 3.1, and DOS prior) adds a comfort level I need to address if I want to switch. Maybe it's time I set some time aside and tried again.

The PYE is a great point because you need to understand you need a set top box and the ability to connect it to the TV in question, plus you may have to sort an external aerial, noting it has to be DVB compliant. Analogous to this your Bose "smart speaker" may soon (hopefully if someone is sufficiently motivated) be revived by a community RasPi type offering in which you create your own service. Complexity may be too high as a barrier for entry to most however, or hassle (do I really want to compile a RasPi image and get it off the ground, or mount an aerial on my home and run coax).

As to the Rabbit, I know of one set still operational in the Algarve with a handful of handsets, although I can't expect them to either venture to the Underground, or expect to function there if they did...

Re: Thanks

In the grand scheme of "bUt tHEyRe gOInG tO BaN OUr VpNs" uproar of late, I had a lot of contempt for the idea that the government were somehow going to blanket ban any use of VPN. That said, I see a likely route in taking the same approach with the Online Safety Act and pushing it across the mainstream commercial VPN providers. That'd leave a cohort of smaller providers that went unregistered (as with adult sites), with the understanding that these were so sketchy there'd be a high quotient that were credential harvesting or session hijacking any throughput. Anyone using one would be likely subject to greater risk of bank accounts being drained or losing an email account, and teaching kids the importance of this sort of safety (as with the historical lesson "don't go looking at adult content" expanding to "...if you do you'll see disproportionate and less safe content") leading to longer more complex discussions where children have to "grow up" younger and younger as a result.

Crux is, it's not unusual for a curious early-teen to go looking for pictures of the opposite sex without clothes, blocking the lighter end when no controls can be placed for the heavier less-safe content will funnel them at it with the duality that discussions/explanations about how grim the world can be have to be had at an earlier age, or worse still, they'll experience it directly. Same goes for dodgy VPN issues.

Re: As per the OP's story

Not "ducking out" but CFOs that see fit to push the limits of credit agreements in order to make their metrics look better. The "it's earning interest for me in my account" and to hell with the morals approach. Recently had a CFO who eschewed NET30 for EOM90 (meaning an invoice dated 2nd Jan wouldn't be paid until the end of April and wouldn't clear in their account until early May. As I left he was shoving out to NET120. More often, he'd decide a payment run was "too large" and shove stuff to the following week to "apologise for the oversight" if contacted about it, and sometimes this would be for several weeks past. Didn't matter that the company was sat on the cash reserves to clear it all, didn't matter that we'd frequently have to fight for ceased services or being on-block.

He and I didn't see eye to eye. I don't complain with him playing games like that with Dell or Amazon, but I took great issue with him applying that to the small sole-trader that did network cabling and alarms, or the sole-trader that fitted our self-sourced boardroom equipment. The thought of the impact of his antics on our smaller suppliers and their families (particularly in the run up to Christmas) made me feel physically sick. He on the other hand seemingly slept well regardless. I'm not a religious man, but I'd love for him to have to face the consequences of his actions.

Having moved jobs, I now have a CFO who holds NET30 as an absolute and a CEO that actually shouted at me when I couldn't bring the expenses system back online quickly enough in early December because he couldn't approve new staff expenses. I love this - he was upset he couldn't pay his people and absolutely had the right attitude. Didn't matter that the fix wasn't (quite) me, I rank the calibre of the man for that being the most upset I've seen him.

Re: Funnily enough....

It's not the """surveillance""" that concerns me, it's a potential backdoor/toehold in to my local network to use as a springboard if a situation deteriorated that does.

Oh oh! Story time! I know it's an older thread, but you'll love this.

Apparently the Metro production line was two long straight buildings with a gap between the short ends (like one long line with a gap in the middle). However, cars would start production in the middle, working outward. They'd be made to run before being driven from the end of building one, outside, on factory roads around to building two to finish production which constituted a mechanical test.

Building 2 was a critical part of paint and they'd paint without washing the car down. In the height of summer, this was fine. In rain, less so. In winter, the internal factory roads were gritted. Hence some Metros were seemingly fine where others rotted away in just a few years.

Re: Elephant...

DIRAC is pretty cool to be honest. It's primarily talked about in terms of room correction and calibration for big AV setups but could be used to correct smaller setups. It uses a calibrated microphone to hear the impact of various chirps and waves from each speaker and how they behave in the setting given the listening position of someone's head, then records this and corrects the audio coming out of that speaker in real time (EQ & delay) to make sure it sounds as intended.

FWIW, there are a lot of snake-oil audio things out there, this isn't one of them.

Re: But the empire he has no clothes

I notice a pattern. Wonder what the bubble of 2230 will be.

A cautionary tale

I don't disagree in theory. I was however in the last four years, the (technical) owner of a platform for a B2B2C manufacturer of a commodity product in a specific industry in the UK. I'd hazard almost all here own ~10-15 of the items in question and they're reasonably painfully expensive. It's a small industry so I don't want to clarify too much but I'd guess there are ~10 manufacturers of that scale in the UK with countless resellers.

It's easy to state you need to "develop your in-house skills" but the industry in question had two viable UK providers of what can reasonably be approximated to be an ERP. In order to operate either of these (particularly in the weird incestuous way this industry operates) you need a skilled person in your specific ""ERP"". You could arguably convert someone from one to another but I'd estimate you'd need at least an intensive year to get to the point the specialist could stand on their own two feet, in which time you'd (as a company) be running without safety net or ability to move direction. Given the amount of industry knowledge you'd need as well as an understanding of IT (the two don't really go together) just to *start* the process of becoming an expert, you'd need to find a unicorn who was sufficiently motivated to box themselves in to a single role for the rest of their working lives, and then spend ~3yrs to get them to start to figure it out themselves.

We found the best way was to find a really, really competent and young order processing bod with an IT interest and try to convince them that this was a long-term career choice.

Simple fact was, if you lost "yours", there really were only ~20 or so people in the UK that were capable of being that person at any given time, and most of them were spoken for and/or elsewhere geographically. The value in them having the depth of knowledge having done it for years was immeasurable. Comedically and counter-intuitively, the salaries they brought were (as expected in the industry) pitiful versus the value they brought to the business.

It's not always as simple as just "growing your own"!

Re: Who?

About 14 months. *Just* long enough to be seen to have "held" the post, just short enough not to have been able to do more than get up to speed, attend some lunches and be moved on.

CHANGE PLACES!

I'm not saying I've got a fix for it but I'm struggling to find blame for the supermarkets here. The arrest/summons (not conviction) rate for reported crime dropped from 15% in 2019 (terrifyingly low) to 5.2% in early 2024. Last I heard (although I'm struggling to find a source) it was under 2% for the previous 12mths. The sheer volume of people just walking in to retail stores, picking what they want and walking out unchallenged is anecdotally skyrocketing as the police won't attend/investigate and simply issue a Crime Number so insurance carries the weight. Not necessarily saying I've fix for the police either.

Bearing in mind the legal impact of tackling the thieves (security, staff members or to the thieves themselves) and any lawsuit that might arise, and the lack of police support when it happens, and the lack of ramifications when it happens, are we really blaming the supermarkets from trying to at least do some basic policing and banning?

Nope. 15c. Weirdest sensation. It was clammy and damp and cold, like some sort of theme park pre-ride immersive queue experience.

Re: How did you get in here?

You remind me of time I spent working for a Financial Services company in Sheffield, notable in memory for having to individually badge through every door in both directions (regardless if you were coming through with someone else). One weekend, having led my team to tackle a "cab tidy" we'd powered the lot at 5pm to find a network look in-play. As that evening was the annual company "event" and it was a 9-5 M-F org, I elected to send the team home and re-group at 10am the next day, heading to the event myself.

At ~02:30AM with my team a little worse for wear I had the bright idea to head back in and fix the loop so they could sleep in on Sunday. This I duly did within around 90 minutes...before letting the door shut to the server room with my pass still in it. As a FS company, I'd need it to badge out of the floor and also to leave the building. A sheepish call to my #2 had him come rescue me...

That in turn reminds me of fighting the man-traps in Telehouse North, where the toilet was outside the secured entry and server inside. For this one, you scanned something (retina? 3d finger? fingerprint?) and then went in the man-trap, a Star Trek transporter looking thing with a door at front and back, and scales in the base. The door behind closed (painfully slowly), and only then did it consider whether your biometric and weight married something it expected: if it did, the front door opened; if not, the door behind you opened and you started again, with no indication as to why. Often with these projects there's the thought of "it's a 30 min build, so I'll get it going and *then* go out to the toilet". At one point, having drunk rather a lot of water and the prep taken a little longer than hoped, I finally ran off. I fought the thing fourteen times before it let me out. I learned my lesson.

Re: "too many parents don’t want to parent their children"

I don't disagree that many have to work multiple jobs or long hours in one job. That said, whilst regularly bursting to ~80-100hrs per week from 2017-2021 (occasional 130hrs but that's a different story), having bought our 3yo first an Amazon Kids tablet and then later an iPad, I was perfectly able (and insistent) to set up parental controls. Her Switch has parental controls. The iPad has become easier with revisions to do so, but plenty of spoon-fed guides exist for the layman or newcomer.

Websites exist that support child protection approaches. Yes, few "regular" parents would be able to set a time-bound secondary SSID to route through a Pi-type gateway and custom DNS, but you bet your ass they're capable of locking down their old iPhone with Family controls (~1hr), using parental controls on a Switch (~minutes) or visiting their ISP's page on that safety control (~20 seconds). None are perfect but the WoNT sOmeONe ThINk OF mY cHIldrEN brigade who can't be bothered with a cursory search on protecting their children shouldn't take priority over the basic freedoms of the general public. I extrapolate to children on unregistered dirt bikes, those that aren't potty trained when they get to primary school or ones seemingly out after midnight without curfew, all similar levels of parenting.

"Lack of time because of multiple jobs" is not an excuse for "I gave my child unfettered access to the internet"

Re: My irony meter went SPROING!

I've talked about this at length before. The biggest issue is lack of drive from top management to front line staff to change working processes and align. Scope creep is endless because "Dave's always collected this information at Radiology in trust A, but trust B collects at admit" so there needs to be an option to have the boxes in both forms and the subsequent processes to support. Until we recognise that an X-Ray in Cardiff is the same as one in Hull and tell Janet that she can't have her triplicate paper print of the admittance form on a green sheet provided in to the box on the wall outside her office as part of the Outpatient team's onboarding because she's had it like that since she started in 1993, we're going to continue to have to build all-things-to-all-people massively configurable systems. I cite an annecdote of a single team in one of 20 "identical" country wide sites that on the day of go live of a phone system once announced a "critical" feature that cost us a £5.5k hardware interface card, two engineering days and a suite of wireless handsets - and a management stack (to directors) that cited that "the team is under too much workload to consider changing their processes to match everyone else" - that process for everyone else being to take a phone call in one of two offices (rather than in the 10 metre corridor between them or kitchen opposite) during an evening and take paper notes to add to their system later, or enter them directly (rather than relying on a voice recording).

Yes, different workflows and employee responsibilities do exist. It's a hospital and should be standardised.

Re: Great "Who, Me?"

Been meaning to buy a slide rule to teach my 9yo and hopefully buy her the same loophole I had at the end of the 90s about "no calculators in exams". I've ordered *that* one. Thanks for the model check.

Re: MS is the new IBM

I've been saying for ages that AI smacks of the dotcom boom and bust. That said, if we didn't learn the lessons with the advent of trains in the first half of c19th, we've got no hope.

Re: Reminders.txt

[MS AI]: Yes, I've checked and it's "3". Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

Noting I'm not vegan, having been at the coal-face for a (relatively) short lived meat-alternative firm, I can offer the other side of this coin.

The original purpose was a meat-alternative that was both environmentally friendly and didn't need to be endured. We ran a proof-of-concept that was initially global, and would have been regionalised in growth. Note that we: grew a crop locally in Canada; locally harvested and trucked to a near-ish big city; reprocessed the crop; air-freighted it to the European mainland; ground shipped it to a facility in that country; processed it in to various meals; ground shipped it to a storage facility in that country; ground-freighted it to a UK storage facility; sea-freighted it to New York; ground shipped it to test market in Seattle; and sold it there. With all that, it was still demonstrably lower carbon footprint than rearing an animal locally in Seattle and selling it through "normal" approach.

Shame about the company and internal issues. Some of the products you genuinely would struggle to tell the difference. (Some were a dumpster fire mind).