Posts by stungebag

Re: It's an easy go to

This is a great post of you're playing nut-job bingo. Soros, grooming gangs, Assange, it has the lot.

He was targetted as an individual. Either the scammers got lucky or they'd done some research because he gave away his church's and bank's money once his own had all gone. Pig butchering scams are common and happen to ordinary people in the USA and outside it.

Drupal has got harder and harder to manage over the years, with the need for Composer etc, whereas Wordpress is always pretty easy. But you'd write off Wordpress because they've fallen out with one hosting company? I don't know WP Engine but the name suggests they have built their entire business around Wordpress. It looks as if they give nothing back. Just choose a general-purpose host or use generic cloud resources.

We don't know where this stuff was stored, do we? How do you know it's the cloud?

Re: From bitter experience, MS hates admins.

Don't think I've ever seen an ad where a backgrounf could be in Teams.

True. Line printers neither buzzed nor made any sort of noise that could ever be described as comforting.

Yes, they were easier times. I used to work for a major US-based company that sold an early 4GL that required you to describe screen layouts in text. A colleague wrote a screen painter that would generate the right text for you. It worked so well that the UK saleforce routinely used it when demonstrating the system. On startup it displayed a nice ASCII-art logo that was an acronym: Direct Input of L*** Definitions Online, or DILDO.

No prospective customer ever found it anything other than funny.

Re: The very point at issue?

It's all very well saying that the doctor/relationship record should be confidential, but the problem is there are a great number of doctors in the NHS and you may be being treated by several at any one time. As a recent and unwilling heavy user of two NHS trusts and several hospitals I know very well that trusts don't talk to each other and trusts and GPs don't effectively comunicate. Even different departments within a trust fail to pass on important information about patients to each other.

Example 1. I was declared ready to go home by my medical team, but they referred me to the respiratory team due to my low oxygen level. I occupied my NHS bed for two days longer than I should because the respiratory team never told anyone they were happy for me to be discharged.

Example 2: I was told I needed an urgent assessment by the respiratory team and was sent an appointment. When I turned up I was sent away: they couldn't perform the tests on me because of my recent operation.

Bettter comms, including better record keeping, could have prevcented both, each of which cost the NHS quite a bit of money. There must be a better way and that has to include a single place where all of my data from across the NHS sits. It need not be sitting in the same place as your data, but it should sit somewhere where any clinician that needs it can get at it.

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

Don't know about where you live but I grew up in a place and time where every house had a supply of coal gas, which contains plenty of hydrogen. There were explosions from time to time, but safety systems such as closing the valve when the flame was out were almost non-existent. The biggest problem with col gas was the non-hydrogen part, carbon monoxide, which was used for suicide.

So the problems of a grid delivering hydrogen should be far from insuperable.

Not that I'm in favour. Why use electricity to create hydrogen when it's more efficient to just use the electricity directly?

Re: Spam calls

One of the callers in the article called my TPS-listed landline just this morning to discuss the warranties on my appliances. They don't know what appliances I own and I very much doubt that they'd be of any use if an appliance broke down and I tried to book a service call with them. So they may appear to be offering a real service I'm not sure that they are.

Re: Silly Mistakes

I never got a sensible reading when I (accidentally) tried to measure the resistance between live and neutral of my mains supply. The end result was similar to that of a University colleague who had the bright idea of getting a ~500v supply by putting two adjacent 240v sockets in series.

Re: Hypocritical

I'm astonished at the constant claims on here that Windows (only children say Micro$oft, Window$ and so on) keeps feeding ads. I've never seen one - where do they appear?

If I looked at the Bing homepage I'm sure I'd see plenty of ads, and most sites I visit show ads that ultimately lead back to Google, Facebook and I dare say Microsoft, but where does Windows ever display an ad outside of a browser?

Re: Rate your skill level

Oh dear, the memories. I know exactly what you mean. We had to take an annual skills inventory. This was reviewed by my line manager and normally came back with an instruction to raise my reported skill level for most of the categories. It was exactly what you're referring to. I knew quite a lot but was aware that there were others who knew much more than I did.

"The trick is to phase it in slowly, one direction at a time."

They've already started at Liverpool St. Underground station. One of the corridors has a Keep Right sign at one end and Keep Left at the other.

Re: Union

The reason that drivers' wages are quite high is all down to the traiin operating companies. They ask drivers to work on rest days and Sundays (when some of the companies have ZERO rostered drivers) because it's cheaper than training new drivers and increasing the headcount. A further reason is the habit of poaching staff from other operators, which again tends to increased wages.

Re: Hmm, 'Incident'?

Horizon was Post Office which has long divorced from Royal Mail. Quite possible that RM use Fujitsu, thought.

Re: 6 to 8

The Burroughs Large Systems, dating back to about 1970 but still in use today as the Unisys Clearpath range, were interesting in this respect. Originally character data was 6-bit. 7-bit ASCII support was added and 8-bit EBCDIC which became the normal way of handling character data. Eventually 6-bit was retired in the hardware. The word on these machines was 48 bits so the character size indicated the packing: a word could hold 8 6-bit characters, 6 ASCII or EBCDIC characters (ASCII being padded) or 12 Hexadecimal characters. A word could also contain a real, integer, boolean, complex (over two words) and so on.

Things used in string manipulation, such as Algol SCAN and REPLACE, used character pointers with a length expressed in the appropriate unit for the character size of that string. E.g. you could declare EBCDIC POINTER P then perform operations on it that knew that it was 8-bit units encoded in EBCDIC. Other data structures such as arrays could be SIMILARLY typed.

EBCDIC ARRAY EA[0:79;

HEX ARRAY HA[0:11];

ASCII ARRAY AA[0:131];

An efficient TRANSLATE was supplied.

REPLACE EA[0] BY AA[0] WITH ASCIITOEBCDIC.

Fascinating machines.

Re: changeme

When I worked in schools' IT about ten years ago most people had systems provided by RM. Most still had the default admin pasword of changeme.

Re: Cop Out

There is, but the word is too long to write in the margin.

Re: Facts?

You don't need a printer to use the service. There's the option to have Royal Mail print the labels for you upon collection or drop-off.

Re: Progress of car security

I had a company Sierra a while back. It needed a thin physical key with a round cross-section to unlock the central locking. Some oiks tried to steal it one day but the police were on hand and stopped them, leaving me with a dangling ignition switch and nice full-beam-only headlights for my commute home on the M25, the scrotes having broken the stalk.

The policeman told me that to unlock the doors all you need is half a tennis ball. You place it over the keyhole and strike it sharply. The air pressure then unlocks the car.

Re: FTFY

I don't think cookies are the consents being referred to here.

Re: 17 yrs FFS

Maybe Blair and Brown did think about it but assumed that when the situation changed the Government of the day would be competent enough to change the rules?

Re: Our Ethical default? !Ethical

It's also the place where most villages, clubs etc. communicate. The only thing comparable is nextdoor.com which many trust less than FB.

Re: Beauty or beast

With a software update a window safety system can be broken. As can the brakes on a Model 3.

The complexity of all this software makes a constant stream of problems inevitable, not all of them trivial.

Yes, a big IT angle, but not as pretty as you paint it.

Re: I'd pay

You do realise that Office has never lost the ability to keep your stuff local?

I got one, too. I hope BOFH isn't next.

I got on the list because I was using Demon Internet. An early and clued-up ISP. The idea that it's your fault for using a dodgy ISP is plain stupid.

Re: I assume a continuation of their efforts to anex NI

That's the first dab on my cliche bingo card!

Re: That $2000 job

Appointed by the insurers?

Re: Phone bills

You mostly got used to the phone bills, especially if your POP was local rate. I was able to access Chelmsford, about 30 miles away, as local. But Chelmsford went down for a few weeks so I had to use a London POP, also about 30 miles away but A rate. My monthly bills shot up well into three figures.

Another notable feature of Demon was its quirky customer support. Knowledgable, yes, but sometimes very rude. The name Richard springs to mind.

Re: Macros are the only real differentiator left between MSOffice and LibreOffice, bar one.

Cash cow? Does anybody, apart from criminals and a few heavy-duty Excel warriors, use macros?

Would anyone even notice if they were quietly removed from Word?

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

Eh? Amost all US states can bin you for any or no reason, within (sometimes) very loose limits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

I don't understand why the area being large should affect the wifi. Universities have campus-wide networks as do many towns and cities. Not providing comprehensive, free, wifi is just the usual mean attitude we've come to expect from the state.

I bet the officers' mess has decent wifi.

It's odd how the server editions of Windows manage so well without a UI, isnt it?

Re: how about "Cryptography means Cryptography"?

By his own logic he isn't NickHolland but, perhaps, Mr. Nicholas Holland.

But I think we're in danger of turning into a community of cryptofascists.

Re: VISA will be just the first

Yes, you're correct. I've seen a suggestion that this is due to the UK no longer being subject to EU regulations. While I'd like to believe it I really don't know.

What I do know is that two of my cards, from seperate banks, have recently been replaced before their expiry date. Both were Visa and have been replaced by MasterCard.

Er, no. Large cloud providers rely on statistics. They hope that your sudden need for 100 times your usual computing resource does not happen at the same time that everybody else needs 100 times their usual resource.