Posts by theOtherJT

Re: Fuel

I believe the approach today is to compress the helium to liquid as you go and allow successive compartments fill with atmosphere instead.

That said, I still don't really see this working.

Re: Alternativly

I presume the reason being that you'd have to set up an account that was capable of accepting swipe payments. I don't know how that's done, but I would hope that a certain quantity of personal information would be required (and have to be verified) before the bank would start accepting tap payments flowing into that account.

Possibly you could try and attach it to a legitimate business account as an aside, but to make it worth while you'd have to scam so many people that surely the pattern of customers phoning their bank and saying "I didn't buy this. Why is this charge on my card?" would trace back to you before you made enough money to just close down the business and leave the country.

Re: My nipples implode with despair

To call the result "Unsurprising" seems like an understatement.

Why use a Pi? Because it's like an order of magnitude cheaper than anything x86 and for the vast majority of people it'll be the only non x86 board they've ever heard of. Bit of a no brainer it seems to me, that.

Re: Looking for a problem to solve...

It might work for us here - Instead of buying expensive servers full of expensive SAS RAID controllers which you have to keep populating with expensive SAS disks, and even more expensive flash caches, you could buy a cheap ethernet enclosure - basically a glorified switch with integrated drive caddies - and run something like CEPH where you just keep adding more disks as required.

The magic only works if the kinetic enclosure + disks is cheaper than the dedicated SAN server machine of course.

I'd really like to see them build these things with POE RJ45 sockets on the back so they could just be slapped straight onto an existing switch - but that's probably not actually all that useful once you're outside of a testing environment because the cable management would get annoying :/

Re: How do I order a new keyboard online if this one is broken?

I like to play this game with our Telecoms department. "Please call us on $NUMBER to report any problems" - um... how? My phone hasn't worked since you switched it to the NEW (not the old new, or even the old, or god forbid the analogue one we had before that) VOIP system.

...actually, I'm fine with them not fixing it. It means users have to use the ticketing system because they can't call me.

Re: Is this news?

Not sure either. I thought that high mach speeds were pretty much what rockets did - orbital velocity being somewhere around mach 20 IIRC. I guess if we had more details on what they were testing there might be something interesting or special in there?

Re: "Microsoft could solve these problems 'easily'"

I'm sort of with you. I have a work laptop that runs windows 10 and it's fine. It's just a Windows PC. It does everything I want of it. The control panel/system settings split is a massive step backwards, but everything else - meh, it's fine.

I'm still never installing Win10 at home because I don't trust Microsoft to be responsible with the data they'll gather from it, or trust them not to break my machine with some future update that I'm not allowed to opt out of.

I don't control the work machine, so I don't care about the loss of control. That's someone else's department. I'm not prepared to tolerate it on a machine that I manage personally.

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

I have tried bloody everything :/

It's a well defined problem at least. The nfs-kernel-server process owns the lock on the file. Since nfs-kernel-server isn't kind enough to proved a human parsable entry in /proc to let you know which instance of nfsd is actually holding a given file (and since each nfsd process doesn't map 1:1 to a particular nfs export that wouldn't help even if they did) there's no way to know which instance you can kill to get your lock back.

The only thing to do is shut down all of nfs-kernel-server and kick the 99% of your users who aren't causing problems.

Possibly we'd be better served with a user space NFS server, but they all seem to have their own problems.

Re: Why....

Stupid bloody "Web apps" that use it for the UI in my case. I'd love to get rid, but there's no way I can retire it as long as these things exist and we have to use them.

Ah, I was looking for this one. Do you know what those requirements are as they pertain to this case? I was curious why they tried to do something this obviously legally questionable when they already had a clear standing in law to get what they wanted.

Re: HEAR HEAR!

Amusingly mine applied this last night. Got down this morning to find that it had failed and wanted to try again. Fortunately for me I'd found out what it did in the intervening time and promptly blocked it, but I remain curious as to why it didn't install in the first place.

Re: one-way foreplay

It's like they've never heard the term "Road Head"...

Re: Aversion control

Honestly, the number of places I know within a mile of me (I might occasionally spend Friday lunchtimes in the nearest pub with other distressed IT staff) that don't have version control is seriously frightening.

I've asked why before, and the answer is always the same: We don't have time to implement it because we're too busy putting out the fires caused by not having it.

I don't really know how you get out of that one.

Re: Format C:

My personal take on that is dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc and then realizing that the disk I wanted to copy FROM was at sdc and I'd just written a load of nonsense over it from and unformatted drive :/

Re: Ubuntu's legal advice process

Well, yes, but to be fair that is largely how legal advice works.

Ultimately whether or not this is legal will have to be decided by a court, at which point if lawyer N can convince the court that it is, then they were right.

That might be a crazy hard sell, which is why none of the others wanted to try it, but the law isn't some immutable thing like mathematics. If you want to make something legal, you just need to convince a court* that it is.

*or possibly many courts, assuming what you're trying is contentious and is going to result in an appeal.

Re: Not surprised

Are you suggesting that, as is so often the case in the UK, we are in fact protected by from our government by it's own incompetence?

No I'm suggesting that catastrophic failures of the PNC to properly handle sensitive data are not only unsurprising to me, but from my experience with the thing, were inevitable.

Re: £359 retail !

I'm right with you on that one. I loathe Android. The problem is that iOS is actually worse, and god knows how they even managed that.

I've not found a mobile OS I liked since webos went under. WinPho started well, but it's just turned into a complete train wreck the last couple of years.

I'm still holding out some forlorn hope that some form of converged Ubuntu might actually appear and be usable in the near future.

Re: Missing the real point

I'm certainly not going to downvote you because you're at least half right. It's a thing that happens. Sometimes tho, it's not that IT is doing things badly, it's that they're not successfully explaining why they won't do things at all.

Sometimes the reason this happens is that whatever the PHB is trying to get done is stupid and dangerous, IT have said "Not in a million years and here's precisely why", the PHB hasn't understood the "here's precisely why" bit, and then spends ages trying to circumvent the process instead of rethinking the original plan.

Our industry has a bit of a history of promising a pet bear. Sure, it sounds cool, and everyone is going to be impressed if you have one, but sooner or later it's going to bite your face off. Most PHB's don't have the technical understanding to realize that, and most IT staff aren't good at explaining complex problems to people who don't have a technical background.