Posts by Andy A

It seems that nearly all websites have this "legitimate interests" bit tucked away, with EXACTLY the same headings as the ones we have just declined. How on earth is "Personalised ads" a legitimate use FFS ?

I've just visited a site to get a sample. The "Evening Standard" (a newspaper in London, England). Their "Legitimate Interest" tab doesn't even have a scrollbar so that you can see the things they are assuming you want to opt in to. They do however have a Cancel button, which takes you back to the place where you have implicitly agreed to all the shenanigans, and a Save button, which tell them that you have EXPLICITLY agreed to all the shenanigans.

Re: They love cables.

Non-rodents have also taken a liking to automotive wiring. A couple of months back the news had a report of a street where urban foxes regularly attacked the cabling under parked vehicles.

It seems that the insulation used these days is not the plastic most of us would expect, but something made from soy beans. Tasty!

Re: Remove, Throw, Call

In the days when I wrote cheques regularly, I was in the habit of checking the little window on my watch face to ensure I got the date right.

Even on my birthday.

Re: Work bomb scare

My first job as in the offices over a paint warehouse. If the alarm went, you got out. Never worry about whether it was a drill or not.

There was hell to pay when we found a fire exit padlocked.

An office I used to frequent in Hemel Hempstead had signs on the exits claiming "THIS DOOR IS ARMED". Luckily my visits never coincided with any fire drills.

Re: Water and IT

It's possible if there were 10 processor cores still working!

Re: Didn't Happen of the Tear Award

It might not be your area of expertise, but you are "available" (i.e. cheaper than the real expert).

You just reach the point when you feel you are making progress on the problem and...

Somebody in Manglement insists that you spend an hour on a Conference Call to discuss what progress is being made. You might get another 15 minutes getting back to the pre-call state, and....

Somebody in Manglement insists that you spend an hour on a Conference Call to discuss what progress is being made, and why the Service Level Agreement has been breached.

Re: Ah, time management systems

We had a system where everything had to be booked to various 6-digit codes, in units of 10ths of an hour.

Accuracy was obviously rubbish, since manglement demanded that the sheet for the week be completed by noon on Friday - to include Friday afternoon.

Codes randomly changed, or were expired, without anybody informing the people who used them.

True gold dust was a code for "Admin", to which we allocated the time spent filling in the timesheets - at least an hour per person each week. Once, on finding it expired, we received instruction that the time had to be booked to the Support code for the customer's account. We quietly showed the customer the email. An admin code was sent to us the following Monday morning.

Re: Botched Aircon

Once had a fault report of machines losing network connection at random. "Just reboot the switch" was the expected fix.

Travelled to site and signed out the key to the server room, which was a corner of the 5th floor office with metal and glass walls.

As I approached, I could feel the heat. Both of the aircon units had failed over the weekend.

It took about an hour with desk fans shifting cooler air through the door before normal service was resumed. The Compaq servers stayed up the whole time. The logs showed that the temperature had hit 55C before I arrived.

Luckily the aircon was the customer's responsibility.

Re: Back to the Future

Nobody else seems to have noticed the OTHER figure mentioned in the article.

The existing installed 530MW is more than a third of the "potential" figure of 1.41GW.

Not such a big step once you mention that, is it?

Re: Other way round

In the early days of home computing, I would pick up computer mags while in France on hols.

That way I learned the "official" French jargon, because it was being explained to the locals.

Surprisingly, physical sizes of screens and disks were NOT in centimetres, because there is a French word for an inch.

Which leads the common floppy of the time being a "disque souple de trois pouces at demi".

The joke's on them. 3.5" is the rough Imperial equivalent of EXACTLY 9cm.

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

My local auction house recently had about 40 boxes of 3.5" floppies - DSDD ones.

I wonder how long it has been since new ones were to be had?

Zap!

The place where I first started had metal partitions with windows above the 4-foot mark.

The new carpet was a disaster. I reckoned that each step increased your charge by about 40V per step. It was 25 steps to the exit door, which was, of course, mostly metal.

I took to carrying a pencil, and doors acquired numerous silvery marks.

I always referred to them as TFCAs (Three & Four Character Acronyms) once digits started to be involved - PS/2, Y2K...

These days I'm more interested in the U3A.

Re: MS Alzheimers

Various "anti-virus" programs disable the start menu until they have completed their "calling home" sequence at startup. At the end of this you normally see a huge box claiming "We have updated your free....Click here to spend money on the paid version". Closing this gets another box claiming "Your box is at risk! Click here to spend money on the paid version".

Only after that point is the start menu re-enabled. Try to sneak through by right-clicking Start and using one of the shortcuts there? They kill off anything you launch that way too.

Sometimes the AV thing doesn't find any update, but it still spends the same amount of time calling home.

Re: Semi-working software

In the last week my newsfeed had a mention of a new version of their software having 200+ bug fixes.

I'll stick with the watch containing zero software but many cogwheels.

Re: almost whoops

I was once officially tasked with tidying up such a floor void. It took a whole week between normal tasks.

Naturally I had to also officially remove the offending cabling from site. I had an appropriate "chitty" as I left early one Friday.

The Recyclers handed me a cheque (shows you how long ago this was) which filled the car up for a month, and a few of the icons too. =====>

The following week, more cabling was installed, but at least we could see where to fit it.

When they were installing a DVD player on the ISS, Region Encoding was a killer. Which region are we in now? Which will we be in 4 minutes from now?

In the rest of the world, "chipping" a player to ignore the region code was ordinary, but the US has laws meaning that possession of such a device results in automatic incarceration. The RIAA paid for that law, so it MUST be upheld!

So a player was supplied from the UK, and delivered to the Shuttle launch pad in a Diplomatic Bag.