* Posts by collinsl

405 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2011

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Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

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Personally I always put my date of birth as old as possible - if the system has an unrestricted birth date then I'll happily pretend I'm from 07/03/1792 to share my birthdate with John Herschel

UK health department republishes £330M Palantir contract with fewer ██████

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Re: Circular Reasoning

Well of course the way this will be handled is ███ ████ █████ ██ ████ ██ ███ ███ ██████ ██ ███ ████████ with plenty of ████████ and we'll use ██████ broomstick up their ████ .

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: I am completly reassured.

> "Only authorised users will be granted access to data for approved purposes..."

Just like Fujitsu with Post Office branch account data...

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

collinsl Bronze badge

I think the point of that line in the article was that the British Library doesn't work with nuclear materials or massive vats of boiling metals or highly toxic chemicals etc.

It also didn't start blaming it's staff and prosecuting them for tens of years as a result of the breach so I fail to see how it's comparable to the Horizon Scandal.

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Reason #854637

Yes but you're looking at contracting rates there so out of that £120k you have to find:

* Tax at the appropriate rates for however you're paying yourself (so say goodbye to about 40-50% of that)

* Holiday pay

* Sick pay

* Pension payments

* Paying an accountant or accountancy firm or contracting firm if you work as a "consultant" to them and they take a cut of your wage.

* Business expenses if you have to equip yourself to do the job

* Training (since your employer won't spend money on training contractors most likely) plus time spent not working in order to train

* Business rates (if you self-incorporate)

etc etc.

So you'll probably only personally end up with about £45-50K per year of that as "take-home" pay.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

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Re: glueing thin clients

You mount the monitor to the back of the VESA case for the PC, then mount the VESA case for the PC to the arm.

My work has them for Dell's MicroPC line, they're quite effective enclosures. Support the usual VESA weights, have a thumbscrew to retain the PC, can be used with the PC's existing locking solution to prevent theft etc.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Laminate everything

So how did laminating the screens make them work better? Was it so poking them did less damage?

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

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Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

When is a good time to upgrade supermarket software given their daily opening times?

Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

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So should Aus, their legal system is quite similar to ours.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

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Re: Thank you!

so far

collinsl Bronze badge

Use them too, very highly recommended.

collinsl Bronze badge

> Yep, powering off the copper and ripping it out for recycling.

Well, except for the bit where POTS infrastructure will still be used for broadband signals to the majority of properties (since most places don't have FTTH)

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Just unhook them and let them fall where they may.

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Half these subcontractors probably also bet that they won't be the subcontractor doing the repair when it inevitably breaks and some other sucker will have to foot the bill.

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: the caching services zfs requires

Disclosure: I run a ZFS on Linux based system at home as my primary server and as my server hosting my backups

ZFS does indeed use a lot of RAM, but it's for performance rather than as a requirement (unless you turn on deduplication which needs tons of RAM on any system, regardless of filesystem).

The ZFS cache is used both for selective read-ahead (predicting which files are to be accessed) and for caching the rest of a file currently being accessed (until the cache is needed again by non-ZFS processes or the file is replaced by a new file in the cache).

ZFS can be run on systems with very little RAM however the performance will be much closer to that of the hard drives themselves rather than anything faster.

If you want you can add ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) SSD drives to improve write performance however read performance will always rely on RAM to cache into. You can set how much cache you want ZFS to use (right now on my main server I have this set to about 50% of 128G so I have some VM space and on the backups server it's at 85% or so of 32G)

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

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Re: "They have that kind of money"

Depends how many trucks carrying computers have crashed over the years ;-)

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

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Re: And another one today

As long as they're not full right up inside

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

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Re: iOS App stores should not be under Apple control

> Apple's private key..

What, you mean 123456?

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Nothing on one...

I stick that on my FIuke testers. Note the name is F-capital I-uke. Fiuke in other words.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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> ever since signing up with BT for IP telephony (no idea what persuaded her to do that)

Probably because they're turning off the landline network and she still wanted a working phone, and some devious salesdroid convinced her to sign on with BT "as it would all be in one bill" or similar.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

collinsl Bronze badge

You must have had it set in "efficiency" mode then - there are configuration options with the C7000 enclosure which allow you to choose how power is spread out. The "efficiency" option (I can't remember the actual names now, been years since I touched an enclosure) used as few PSUs as possible to bear the load so that they operated with as little efficiency loss as possible, whereas there were some other options to balance load across X PSUs or all PSUs (can't remember exactly) in order to maintain as much redundancy as possible.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

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> I do not believe Elon intentionally ... endangers his employees

Oh he does, just look at SpaceX

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

You mean this scumble: https://wiki.lspace.org/Scumble?

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: ZFS subsumes and replaces partitioning and so on.

You can easily set a ZFS parameter to set it's maximum RAM consumption - on my home NAS/hypervisor I have it set to 50% of the 128G installed and on my backups server it's set to 80% of the 32G installed (IIRC)

As for the cache situation, for ZFS on Linux it can't use the system cache because it's licensed differently from the kernel (ZFS uses a CDDL license instead of GPL so the kernel devs won't let it in to the cache). Also the way the cache operates is very different from the system cache so it's best to keep them separate. ZFS will quickly relinquish cache though if the OS requests it to reduce RAM usage (at the expense of performance) so it shouldn't pose a massive problem.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

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Brimingham has already been authorised to raise theirs 9.99% for the next 2 years.

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

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Re: Failure is an option

Personally I think they should all carry a clone of Razer since it seemed to be almost indestructible and the crushing power would be useful to deal with clangers

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Fire in haste, regret at leisure

> Right now, www.nissan.com is dead.

I think that's due to the person who owned it dying due to Covid complications - it was up until a few years ago.

The court cases let him keep the domain but they effectively bankrupted him. Sad really.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Vaguely familar.

Looks AI generated

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

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Re: Data brokers

Or just copy GDPR or similar so that companies collecting it have to collect it and hold it for valid reasons and must give you access to it and delete it upon request.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

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Re: Broadcom, where software goes to die

Hardware manufacturers who need their chips. That's it.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

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Only in areas where it doesn't rain often

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: It's 301 stainless apparently

They're broken by some vegetable, animal, and mineral

They know the cause of spotting and they quote them in the manual

From Elon Musk to spotty rust to resolve them is not possible!

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They had an image they wanted to maintain though so probably chose to eat the cost to preserve their branding since their look was unique

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Stainless?

At least they didn't have sheep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILaLb6lsZ0

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Stainless?

Wrong - it was invented by a Brit who spelled it Aluminum first but then changed it himself to Aluminium to more closely match other elements in the periodic table.

Ukraine claims Russian military is using Starlink

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Re: Pickups from the battlefield ?

And if they're used close to the frontline how do you tell which side the terminals are on? You don't want to stop them working if Ukrainian troops suddenly break through somewhere, and if you get the border wrong if the Ukrainians fall back then you've caused other problems.

Also you don't want to block them entirely from the front line area because then neither side can use them.

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Pickups from the battlefield ?

The Ukrainian constitution bans elections during times of martial law. Therefore Zelensky couldn't hold an election whether or not he wants to.

As an American you should hold constitutions dearly and understand that ignoring them is a very bad idea.

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

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Was thinking this could be part of a video game where the robots get programmed to attack humans using some sort of lasers or drillbits or something, reprogrammed by said evil aliens.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

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Re: I've been saying

Or like the EU antitrust cases around browser choice screens in Windows 7.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: A wasted trip

The original story:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Well now I know....

> koutaliakleptics

Currently you're the only google result for this word so it looks like it isn't.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

collinsl Bronze badge

> There was also the matter of "no taxation without representation"

1. Most people in the UK didn't have any representation in parliament at the time. Manchester had no MPs for example but there was a sheep field somewhere in the south that had two, because there used to be a village there. Parliamentary reform was necessary to give representation as the boundaries hadn't been redrawn for hundreds of years.

2. This was a line made up by a bunch of smugglers to justify their rebellion in order to be able to trade in the open by getting their own government. It just so happened that it turned into a major (for the time) rebellion which got turned into an international war when the French got involved and won the war for the Americans.

collinsl Bronze badge

> but having your own gravitational field

Anyone who doesn't is a physical impossibility and would also almost instantly cease being someone because their atoms would fly apart. Probably would be the end of the universe at the same time too.

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Pointless if potless

> *helps if most of the population don't own firearms and aren't trying to kill you.

Like the UK?

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Pointless if potless

As in "the current can transit through both "legs" of the ring to the socket so you're effectively putting in two cables to each socket. Therefore the thickness of the cable is "almost" doubled.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: I use....

But who would care about the Beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law?

Macy's and Sunglass Hut sued for $10M over face-recog arrest and 'sexual assault'

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Re: "you will automatically be jailed until you can prove your innocence"

Makes me wonder what would happen if you gave a "no comment" interview like you can in the UK where the officers questioning have basically a "script" of questions they want to ask regardless of what you answer.

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: scary

The Victorians were doing that, it's called Phrenology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

In fact Terry Pratchett invented for his book series Discworld the idea of retrophrenology - where by the preceise and measured delivery of blows to the head you can give people the traits they desire by reshaping their skull/brain:

https://wiki.lspace.org/Retrophrenology

There's also a linked area of pseudoscience called Craniometry where the size and shape of the skull predicts temprament and traits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniometry

All hogwash of the highest order.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

collinsl Bronze badge

Re: Subaru diff lockers?

Subarus are excellent cars for vets needing to attend to animals in a muddy field or down a farm track.

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