* Posts by Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

206 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2011

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UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

over an hoour

Over the last couple of months my business partner and I have needed to call HMRC about half a dozen time, mostly because they have messed things up with VAT and tax codes and company registrations. On several occasions we have each had to wait on hold for over an hour, and reckon the quickest response was around 50 minutes. All the time you are bombarded by claptrap messages about using their website and going online. Does it not occur to these f*ckwits, that if I could do it online I would not be wasted an hour of my precious time on hold, waiting for them to answer. I still need to find out how I can bill them £100 p/h for the lost time and income I have had to lose, just to get them to fix their own mistake......

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: 54 year old DC power supply

Ah, proper H(ewlett) P(ackard) engineering. Note Hewlett-Packard, not consumer HP.

Wait until it nags you to update it's drivers, bricks itself, insists on a subscription to keep running, then declares itself obsolete and in need of replacement.

There's a reason why HP gained a worldwide reputation for quality, and it had nothing to do with inkjet printers.

Your PSU will still be working fine when everything that leaves HP's warehouses today is decomposing landfill.

Look after it. It was around when men walked on the moon.

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

The questions we all want to ask....

Can it now explain why it goes round sniffing the butt of other dogs?

Or why it licks its bollocks in front of everyone when you have visitors round? (other than "because it can")

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

> if Earth gets ejected, we're all on a timer to the deepest freeze we will ever know.

But, on a positive note, that will mitigate global warming.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Pint

Re: It's an impressive sight

Same if you drive up the M3 or M4 in the morning - if they are landing in the East-West direction, you can often see 4 or 5 stacked up behind each other with their landing lights on, all coming down one after the other. As soon as the bottom one goes out of view, another appears at the top.

A beer to those who manage and handle these things on a daily basis, and a beer to whoever was "on call" on a holiday monday. Looks like you had a bad day.

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: A network by another name would be as lucrative

My preference would be Automatic Routing Protocol for Army. It could be the start of great things.

Shall we share the £89 mil ?

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

In the dock?

If a couple of 16 years olds can access BT/EE servers alongside other multinational tech companies, and help themselves to secure data, then surely someone else should be in the dock?

Exactly who is in charge of security at those organisations?

The article does not mention whether these kids did it alone, or whether they were just mules for some more sophisticated masterminds, though.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Real Sanitizers

Back around the time of the incident of this article (aka mid 80's) I worked in a large office block - about 700 folks, and had our own PBX.

One monday morning we got about 50 folks calling to say their phones were all muzzled and no-one could hear them talk. Took our building maintenance man all day to go round with new phones to fix them, and almost depleted the stores of new phones.,

Next Monday morning, same again, dozens more complaints of fuzzy phones. Cue more replacements and urgent order for new stocks.

And again next Monday.

Cue heated manglement discussions about failure rates, etc, as all the handsets had been replaced when the PBX had been upgraded a couple of years earlier. Conversations started with PBX supplier as they had supplied the handsets......

Turns out....... Cleaning contract company had been given new contract. Every Friday night, after hours, c. 8 pm or something, cleaning staff were going round with some telephone sanitizer spray, and vigourously squirting it into the mouthpiece and earpiece of each handset and giving it a good wipe, all ready for the workforce to return on Monday morning to a nice hygienically clean phone with suitably bunged up and and wet mouthpiece.

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Pint

Flashes of light.....

Every time i look at (not into!) a fibre optic, I cannot but wonder at all those pulses/flashes of light.

Not 1,000,0000 pulses per second, not 1000,000,000 pulses, but 40,000,000,000 or even 100,000,000,000 pulses per second. And every single one one of those pulses counts. It means something to someone. Something completely and utterly different than the previous or subsequent pulse. They have all been assembled in a precise order, and at the far end of the glass strand, all get dis-assembled and added into new streams of hundreds of thousands of millions of pulses per second all precisely ordered and going in multiple different directions. And in an instant, that happens multiple times, and those flashes get propagated around the planet and end up exactly where they were intended to be,

And then the pulses get precisely disassembled from that fibre, reconstructed into a binary sequence, which in turns gets reconstructed into words, or a picture, a song or a video or details of a medical procedure or drug that saves someones life.......

It's just amazing. Gobsmacking. Imagine trying to explain how it works it to your grandmother, or great-great grandmother.

And humanity has achieved this in just 60 years. Unbelievable. Thank you to the visionaries who thought it out and made it possible. Humanity owes you more than you will ever know. And i and fellow commentards owe you our entire careers.

And everyone else takes it for granted, whinges when it doesn't work, and owes you Facebook. Oh well.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Unique keys

And there is Dumbarton, the principal town of Dunbartonshire. Either or both frequently mispooled.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Don't know what you've lost till it's gone.....

I find cheques are still one of the best and easiest ways to exchange money with people. Call me an old fart, but the less people I have to give my bank details to in order for them to transfer money to me, the more secure I feel. Similar if I owe money to people - I don't want to be the custodian and responsible for safekeeping their sortcode and account details.

I certainly will not give any humongous corporate entity (gas, 'leccy, etc) the ability to direct debit from my account any amount the want whenever they want. Those companies could not care less about accuracy or what they do. I have friends who have erroneously had thousands of pounds direct debit from their account and then spent months trying to get it back, evenm after they have got companies to admit it was an error.

The only reason why cheques are being dropped is because the banks and big companies cannot be arsed doing something that takes effort - in a similar way to having real branches. They must save millions per year by closing a branch, yet none of that money comes back to customers.

Software rollout failure led to Devon & Cornwall cops recording zero crime for 3 months

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Unable to Upload data/stats?

Have they never heard of Excel? It's very good for passing data and statistics between non-communicating systems.

Might need a human at each end, but I'm sure the civil service have plenty of those.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: A 'bang' or a 'whimper'?

A blinding light. As predicted many times before, but particularly well back in 1980. It will happen on the 8th Day.

Never thought I would see it in my lifetime though.....

http://www.songlyrics.com/hazel-o-connor/eighth-day-lyrics/

Microsoft offers electrical engineers a lifeline as it pursues custom cloud silicon

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

WTF?

What the heck does an electrical engineer have to do with chip and processor design? Other than a few electrons?

It's hard to think of two engineering disciplines that are further removed from each other.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

DB9-to-SCART

Not that unusual.

DB9 was used on the original IBM CGA graphics adaptor for the monitor interface.

A long time ago now, but I think the RGB were 0-5V digital signals, and the H and V sync on separate pins, but with a few resistors and maybe a couple of diodes (plenty of room inside a SCART plug) I connected my first PC (Tandy (Radio Shack) SX1000) from it's CGA port to the SCART input of my TV, and had a 21inch monitor years before anyone else on a PC. Only 240 x 480 resolution IIRC, with all of 16 colours, but heck, it was 1988 (?). I seem to recall there was a setting in the bios to switch the CGA from 525 line to 625 line mode (480/60 to 576/50) too.

The PC is still in the bottom of a wardrobe, but I think the TV is long gone.......

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: The existing ones don't even meet the spec

Even on the hard shoulder you are supposed to leave the car and get behind the barrier. No one suggests anyone should stay in the car when it is broken down on a motorway. I have no idea what you are supposed to do if you are disabled, limited mobility, etc.

And does anyone in the UK other than a few lorries ever use the left lane anyway? It seems to be an inbuilt psyche of almost everyone that you are supposed to drive in the middle lane utterly unaware of anything going on around or behind you.. I even know of some people who passed their test and their instructor told them to "just get in the middle lane and stay there until you need to turn off". If you ever drive somewhere like Holland, Belgium or Germany, where folks seem to know how to overtake and pull back in (even BMW's!) it's quite eye opening to come back to the UK and see just how lazy and sloppy folks are. If you are in any of the above countries, within 100 miles or so of one of the ports, and you see a car ahead sitting in the middle or third lane it is almost a always a UK registered car.

I'm fairly sure we can easily increase the capacity and throughput of UK motorways if we actually taught/encouraged people to use them properly.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

>Calls cost more per minute then than they do now, even before adjusting for inflation.

Calls cost more per minute then, than they cost per hour or more now.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Ouch

Cats......

I've never tried it personally, but apparently the cure is to go to the local zoo and get a bucket of lion (or tiger) dung and spread that around your garden.

It pongs for a bit, but the smell is apparently enough to give all the neighbourhood cats a serious fright and they assume that Mr F Big Cat owns that territory and they avoid the place like no tomorrow.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Microwave...

Bought mine when I bought my first flat, age 21. That was August 1989.

Still works fine 33 1/3 years later.

My other half has had 3, maybe 4, in the 14 years I've known her.

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Facepalm

Re: Loss of an eye is not a joke

A thumbs up for the above comment. Not because I enjoyed reading your sufference, but because it is a cautionary and poignant tale.

A thumbs up can have two meanings. Just like when a family death was posted on Facebook and received multiple thumbs-up. Not because people were happy to read about the death, but there is no button for "thank you for letting us know".

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

" Even though I have enough spare parts, I realise that I will eventually not be able to use my Blackberry 9320 3G so I may have no choice to eventually get one unless the market provides a reasonable alternative.

eg: a 4G flip-phone with great battery range, signal strength, no camera and a good way to sync the address book to it's own application, preferably compatible with Linux."

If you come across one, make sure you let us all know here on Reg Central, and make sure you post a review of it too !!

Victims of IT scandal in UK postal service will get fresh compensation

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
FAIL

Why BEIS ?

So, is this money for compensation coming from BEIS (ie public purse) or somewhere else?

The only place it should be from is the upper echelons of the post office and Fujitsu. The entire senior management and legal team of the PO and Fujitsu knowingly involved in this should be in court - have their assets seized, nice houses and cars impounded, etc,. and made to pay compensation and publically disgraced, like the sub-PM's were. Then they should be jailed where due, barred from holding any senior public body figure again, and Fujitsu barred from undertaking any public sector work. Ever. The only ones who should be spared should be a few whistle blowers who may have stood up and said "hang on, instead of all our employees being crooks, maybe there is something wrong with the system?"

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Bathroom vent fan

I've seen a few of those over the years, trying to cool equipment......

One - they are not designed for 24/7 operation and may have a short life.

Two - in order to suck hot air out, there has to be an inlet to allow cooler air in. Something that "designers" or builders do not seem to understand.

FCC taps 13 providers to manage 6GHz band access for new Wi-Fi standards

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Facepalm

Seriously?

Seriously, someone in the FCC thought that AFC was a good TLA to use for Automatic Frequency Co-ordination ?

Presumably they have no idea of radio technology, or even looked up the most basic of tech dictionaries to see if the term had already been in use for the past 100 odd years.

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
WTF?

Sacking is not enough

Another clueless dipshit idiot in charge of the country. As if hashtags Rudd was not bad enough. What was she thinking? All that training, signing the OSA (I presume she must have done that to become home secretary), constant briefings on cyber terrorism, knowledge of auditing and traceability, and she still does something like this 6 times? And on a gmail account of all things. Now big brother google knows more about our government policies than the government.

Surely when you become a senior government minster, someone from somewhere tells you to close all your personal "publicly hosted" free email accounts, and only use a personal email account that is hosted in a suitably secure environment.? Aside from anything else, the ability to get malware through a public account like that is just not worth any risk. No doubt Liz trusses hacked phone suffered similar.

In any commercial organisation distributing internal classified information would be a sackable offence. It needs to be in this case too. And properly sacked. Not just removed from the cabinet, but sacked as an MP for misconduct in public office and a by-election called. Then people (and her cronies) would actually start to question and understand what she has done.

US orders safety recall of Tesla Cyberquad-for-kids ATV

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Seriously?

" it's either disable the vehicle for a refund – or don't, honestly."

I clicked that link out of curiosity..... Are they serious?

Why do I suddenly detect a load of RPi's and/or Arduinos and some big MOSFETS becoming popular....

And if you did return the controller for a refund, what the heck are you supposed to do with and dispose of the rest of the bike and it's battery?

How to watch NASA Jupiter probe's flyby of Earth

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Pint

Astounding...

A beer to all those who measure and calculate all the influences on a mission like this - slinging it into orbit around the sun a few times, letting fly back towards earth, missing by a few hairs width, then back to the sun and finally arrive at Jupiter, exactly where it is. Not arrive a day or two early or late, to find the planet has moved in its orbit and the probe goes hurtling past into the blackness. Considering that barely 100 years ago we could hardly cross an ocean or fly a plane over land and arrive within a few miles of our expected landing, we have come a long way in a very short time.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Quite Impressive

I set up a Starlink terminal for client on a remote site in the UK a month or so back.

Took it out of the box, sat it on a patio using the included stand, plugged it all in, connected my computer, then sat to think about how to get it working (ie. use 4G to connect to find some instructions as there were none included in the box - I should point out the unit had previously been used elsewhere by the same client).

Before I had a chance to think too much, the thing started moving and tilting itself much to my surprise. I had only just got the 4G connected and had not downloaded any instructions, so I connected to the Starlinks wi-fi instead to see if I could find it's own web status page or something, and as I fired up the browser, it promptly loaded all my previous pages. I double checked the 4G was disconnected (it was) so did a bit of surfing and fired up a speed test page. It confirmed I had a Starlink Ip address, and indicated I had around 120mb/s down and 10mb/s up. Amazing. Less than 5 minutes from opening the box.

You get a local/CGNAT (10.x.y.z) network address rather than a proper address, so it's a bit like a 4G connection in that respect. However I plugged a Draytek router into the ethernet port of the Starlink and the Draytek happily established it's VPN connection back to main office and all devices on the remote site were then as visible from HQ as we expected.

It ran quite happily and without a glitch for 2 -3 weeks until we finally got the gigabit fibre installed.

9.5 out of 10. I never thought I could say anything like that about a Musk product.

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Err because MS...

Caix? Do you mean cakes? Yes, I accept cakes as part payment on account. Bottles of beer also.

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: 240 volts?

I don't have a Hoover.

I have a Vax.

Still trying to figure out how to boot it to VMS.

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: MAAS

Actually very useful.

On the beach, on a nice sunny day and the tide is coming in and the beach quickly disappearing....

NASA's Psyche mission: 2022 launch is off after software arrives late

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Trollface

Beta Launch

Can they not launch with a Beta version, and just do a few updates and patches en-route to fix the bugs that become apparent?

Seems to be the norm for almost all software projects these days.

Newport Wafer Fab could be sold to US consortium – report

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Tunnocks

Ye gods I hope not. The thought of a caramel wafer or snowball filled with Cadburys slime is disgusting.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: WordPerfect

Windows 10 still creaks......

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: I used to have a 6.6 lb laptop

Presumably a CRT monitor, up and down the fire escape?

Youngsters today.....

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

The one thing I remember is that it had plenty of comprehensive manuals. By the shelffull, or even the roomful. Documentation galore. There must have been a impressive team churning out and updating all that documentation.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Firefox 100 also detects if your OS is set to a different language

I think the "bitter sarcasm" tag was unrecognised by your browser too.

Worried about being replaced by a robot? Become a physicist

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Politician?

Tractors? pah!

I think robot politicians need some real hard core stuff like Steam Traction Engines. Fred Dibnah style.

Makes my universal joint tremble, just thinking about it.

Could a leaky capacitor be at fault on ESA's Sentinel-1B?

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

squirty can

A can of squirty freezer spray and a soldering iron tip in close proximity will quickly locate the failed part. Oh hang on, that might not be so easy.

Japan's earthquake disrupts already fragile tech sector

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Wednesday's 7.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Fukushima

The next earthquake arrives just after the last one is forgotten.

.

.

.

A bit like labour governments.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

resilience

If your life is so critically important to be online at all times, then maybe you need to be responsible for yourself and have some backup. Just a 4G connection would get you up and running in 99% of circumstances that causes a fixed line to fail.

Mains electricity fails from time to time. That's why we all have a battery powered torch at home, Or some candles, maybe four of them. I have no sympathy for someone who does not have the forethought to think ahead for blindingly obvious scenarios...

As for having devices and software that do not work when it cannot phone home? Well that is your own fault. Smart device. Dumb user.

Intel to spend €17bn on chip mega-factory in Germany

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Uk Efforts...

Had to think about it for a while, but eventually I remembered that the UK was once a world leader in electronics, chips and silicon type stuff.....

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

https://www.effectrode.com/news/effectrode-investigates-happened-mullard/

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: "it's too small for your cat to sit on"

I prefer to wall-mount the cats......

Routers should have free run of the house. Anything else is cruel.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Database?

They need to get Dido in to manage it. Or is this small and lowly project below her status?

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Way, way, way too much hassle

And finally - pictures of bicycles or busses? Indistinguishable squished letters and numbers? Sorry, I just walk away.

If I am trying to make a one off purchase from a website, and they do not let me "checkout as guest" but insist I create an account, I just walk away and spend my money elsewhere.

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward
Pint

My first connection too

I'd had a dial-up modem from around 1993, but apart from a few private bulletin boards and the like had not used it as much as I should, A job and house move in 1994 put hobbies on the back burner for a while, but come 1995 I was ready for the internet and Demon was the place that everybody went to.

A lot to learn in those days of Win 3.11 , trumpet, KA9Q, winsock and all that as others have mentioned. No one has mentioned Turnpike yet? The turnpike dialler even had a clock-set routine which set your PC to the correct time each time you connected. Quite revolutionary back them.

And as for - "Many of those who worked at Demon Internet have gone on to be very senior in telcos, infrastructure, and web giants today". Well,, many of those early-ish customer have also gone on to fairly high places and have had a good career. Hard to believe it is close on 30 years ago now.

Thanks Cliff - you helped launch 10,000 careers.

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Re: Bought a shed

No - once clean, keep the dishes in the dishwasher until you need them. As you use them and they get dirty, just pile them up on the worktop. Once the pile on the worktop is spilling over and taking up all available space, you will notice the dishwasher is now almost empty. That's the correct time to move from the worktop back into the dishwasher to run the washing cycle again.

Prince of Packaging HP Inc snaps up zero-plastic bottle maker

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Cisco packaging

I've always thought Cisco to be one of the big offenders of packing.

20 different sized screws, all in different plastic bags or boxes, within the main box. Only about 3 of which are actually required or fit your device. Surely, they could use one screw size for everything? Mind you they can;t even have standard fit rack ears across the range of boxes. Then all those separate handbooks, safety sheets. addendums, whatever. All individually wrapped. Oh, and a couple of Cat 5's - not that someone installing a cisco would have any of their own cat 5's to hand..... And of course, a selection of UK, EU and US mains cables, just in case. Then some random plastic bits that look like they came from a christmas cracker. No idea what they do.

And if you order 20 or 30 routers, you get 20 or 30 times the fluff and packing - not a bulk box/palletload of just routers and rack ear brackets.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Never underestimate the ability of Plod to bend facts/truths/events to make things "easier"....

Hive View security camera customers left in the dark as some gear gives up the ghost

Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

More tat ?

More shoddy IoT tat with sweet fa real support......

And this is new(ish) kit. Wait till it is 5 or 10 years old and suitable for nothing but landfill because no-one can be arsed or afford to support it.

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