iam-TJ

In a former business I had several 'customer advocates' who were tasked with representing customers to internal teams. Difficult/complex/delayed issues could be escalated to the advocates by customer support.

I view customer support as a marketing opportunity via goodwill and word of mouth.

Accounting for customer support as a debit against the marketing budget is an incentive to prevent incidents.

In another comment I asked the OP if it could have helped if they were able to notify ahead of time of expected spikes in turnover (due to marketing initiatives, etc.) that could be factored into the risk management equation.

1. Were you expecting or able to forecast a likely spike due to marketing activities?

2. Could it have helped if Stripe/random payment processor had a way for you to indicate you expect a sales spike and a specific contact route?

Possibly only available to accounts with a cyclic transaction history (multi-year).

One use-case I hit recently is when having multiple Private Windows. Assuming visiting a site, B, and wanting to use two different username+password combinations.

If Window A->Site A needs to remain open but Window B->Site B is closed, and a new Private Window (opened using File > New Private Window) that we'll call Window C visits Site B the expectation is this is a 'clean' session.

But Window C->Site B then presents the same auto-generated password as was created in Window B->Site B even when using a different username.

ALL Private Windows have to be closed for the 'session' to be removed so that new passwords are generated.

Isn't WHIP used as the signalling channel for set-up? So initial signalling over HTTP(S) for Offer(), Answer() and ICE candidates ?

Help in coping post-Pratchett:

Jasper FForde [0] - first 6 of 7 "Thursday Next" stories (starting with Eyre Affair), Nursery Crime books, Early Riser (possibly)

The audio books of these are as good as the Discworld stories in terms of narrator-fit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde

Seems like it'd be simple to deal with that:

Allow people to pre-pay (deposit) an amount of their choice and set an account flag "Do NOT exceed account balance".

You remind me of a Windows CE PDA I had in the late 90s through early 00s [0] that had a pen stylus and consistently amazed me that it could flawlessly interpret my scrawly scribbles perfectly - I'm hard to please but it always amazed me and I felt in awe.

My experience with every hand-writing recognition facility since has been it has got worse, more opinionated, and is probably tied too tightly to grammar and spell checking - rather like what I call "destructive texting" when predictive typing on mobile devices constantly auto-replaces words after I've typed them without me noticing until a message is sent!

[0] I still have it although not powered up in a couple of years!

That's already been adopted in Python with its "Truthy" or "Falsy" values!

The 'remote' aspect is the complicating factor but the basis of this is no different to other services.

At the shop cash tills I noticed recently a sign that said "if you're purchasing alcohol and are fortunate enough to look under 25 we will need to age check you" (or some very similar words).

Same goes for anyone buying solvents and glues, or knives and blades, vapes, etc.

The aim is good - the challenge is the implementation.

Only feasible way seems to be prove you're older than the minimum (which feels like persecuting those that are old enough) rather than prove you're too young!

Internet Suite - that'd be rather like going full circle to the 1990s and Netscape Communicator Suite [0] !

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator

<humour>Well, did you ever see sight of IPv5 ?</humour>

Yes, I agree having revisited it! I'm almost sure it was much more wordy when it was first published which was why I used the shorter headline.

I've changed the submission title to the article title "Mystery of BBC radio's first broadcasts revealed 100 years on".

The title came from the BBC News front-page link to the article that I copy-pasted since the article's own title is so vague!

See the current (2022-11-15) Features and Analysis sub-section at

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment_and_arts

Being as the article is on the BBC I suppose they expect the context to be understood :)

Interesting little-known fact:

"The BBC that began broadcasting at 6pm on 14 November 1922 was not the British Broadcasting Corporation of today. It was in fact the British Broadcasting Company and was made up of separate stations around the country operated by different companies."

I've no irons in the fire here but it seems to me Elon sees the 'factory & cattle' model of business as preferred over other arrangements - that in software development doesn't necessarily hold.

There are many extremely successful software development companies - often free/libre open-source software based - where remote working is almost 100% and those people are engaged, self-motivated, and probably better contributors as a result (not least due to a self-defined work-life-family balance).

It is based on the higher performance of "Starlink Business" [0] that has more performant hardware, increased throughput, priority, and support and which, in the U.K., is billed at "... £400/mo for service and £2,410 for hardware." It presumably also has to be a hybrid with the roaming services such as RV and Marine which may imply having to dynamically adjust satellite and ground-link paths. With the number of terminals in operation inside UA it is also possible there is a dedicated ground station in, or close to, Ukraine which would also assure very low latencies.

As others have said, the demands of military use probably require 24/7 dedicated support and monitoring with real-time threat detection and evasion from skilled engineers at SpaceX/Starlink and actively monitoring the satellites passing over Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

[0] https://www.starlink.com/business

It is NOT possible to have the UEFI access the RAID device so that if one of the mirrors is broken it can continue to boot in degraded mode.

It requires manual intervention of a knowledgable person to boot a UEFI system into the default OS if the ESP is broken or missing.

"don't set up MDRAID array for ESP, just have the ESP mirrored on all disks. "

Isn't that the entire point of utilising MD RAID-1 in the first place?

I've done as you suggest in years gone by with either metadata v0.9 or v1.0 (not v1.1 or v1.2) where the metadata is not at the start of the block device and therefore does not confuse a non-MDRAID-aware firmware or other OS.

Changing ownership of /etc/ and directories under it like that sounds fine in theory but in practice breaks in many ways.

I did some extensive testing of this some years ago (on Debian/Ubuntu) and many system services and tools expect/require these directories to have specific ownership and permissions.

In the context I was experimenting with it was pretty simple too - renaming the UID 0 'root' account to some other name. That revealed that many tools actually test for "root" (the string) not uid == 0.

As I dug into the code of those tools I found many would also check and insist on particular ownership and modes on the directories and files.

I forget which one really annoyed me, but 'all' I wanted to do was allow members of group 'adm' to read/write into a particular sub-directory of /etc/ but the service would bail out if the directory wasn't owned by "root":"root" (or 0:0) and had 0700 permissions which is a pain when wanting to run services unprivileged and using 'setcap' to enable capabilities without starting as UID 0 and dropping privileges.

Sounds like a 'reason' for a RasPi project!

Pi, camera, small screen, and some image recognition ?

To para-phrase a famous BBC journalist embedded on a U.K. aircraft carrier during the Falklands war and restricted on what he was allowed to say:

"... I counted them all out, and I counted them all back." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hanrahan#Falklands_War

Assuming the reference is to an upright fridge/freezer with the fridge compartment above the freezer compartment, one reason for less efficiency might be that the freezer has to contain a fan to push the cold air up to the top of the fridge compartment where it falls to the bottom of that compartment.

If the freezer compartment were above the fridge I'd assume it could mostly rely on gravity.

There is also sometimes a stepper-motor controlled baffle to open/close the link between the two - closed when the freezer is cooling - it usually opens around -18C when freezer temperature is heading lower.

That baffle will also close in frost-free freezers whilst the heater element is melting the ice on the evaporator - it usually reaches +20C and happens several times a week.

Your experience made me wonder how that blocking stands up against accessibility legal requirements in various countries.

One downside to storing these images on the (FAT) EFI System Partition is it is not possible to make it part of a software RAID device, so if the device the ESP is on dies suddenly, the boot fails AND it can take quite some time and effort to recover even if you're technically familiar with the boot process since there are no standardised procedures for duplicating the ESP or its content.

A second issue is that since FAT doesn't have permissions any user ID on the system can potentially mount, read, and possibly write to the ESP.

A separate (possibly encrypted) /boot/ file-system can be hosted on a RAID device or even loaded over the network.

With a 'regular' boot process (UEFI > ESP boot-loader core > LUKS unlock > /boot/ boot-loader 2nd stage > /boot/ kernel+initrd > root-fs) the only thing lost is the boot-loader core, which can quickly be switched for a USB boot, set options appropriately to find and use /boot/, and for the boot process to use alternate RAID device(s) and continue with a degraded boot.

On UEFI most distros now do not use os-prober to populate GRUB's own menu with other bootable OSes (GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=yes) since it expects those OSes to have added themselves to the UEFI boot menu.

As for replacing the default boot entry, this is caused by efibootmgr not GRUB. GRUB calls efibootmgr with "--create|-c" which adds a new BOOTNUM and puts it at the head of the list.

GRUB could be taught a new option that then does several efibootmgr operations: parsing text output of "efibootmgr" to get current boot order, --delete-bootorder then --bootorder A,B,C,OS to ensure OS is added last.

That is obviously fragile so best approach would be to teach efibootmgr a new option --create-append|-C that adds the new entry to the end of BootOrder and then simply teach GRUB a new variable GRUB_UEFI_BOOTORDER_FIRST=yes|no to use efibootmgr --create-append.

In the interest of balance this ncc-services-wg message by Max Tulyev appears to provide some background and seems to imply a possible power-play by Ukraine parliament/government people and for which no evidence of actual 'rogue' transfers are provided [0].

Although as people may have guns at their heads it would be difficult to know if a block transfer were under duress or not. It would seem possible to analyse transfers since 2014 affecting Crimea and the Donbas regions, and transfers since February 2022 affecting occupied territory.

[0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

There are many discussion threads at the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) Services Working Group (ncc-services-wg) mailing list with a lot of direct and ancillary information [0].

There is also a detailed factual exposition of the technical changes forced by Russia since 2014 in Crimea and later Kherson "Rerouting of Kherson follows familiar gameplan" [1].

In [3] below Viktoriia Opanasiuk writes:

"responding on «As this only affects LIRs, I doubt there will be significant participation by non-LIRs» I must say that it affects all internet service providers that use IP resources. In Ukraine there are more than 5 000 registered ISPs, but not all of them are LIRs.

The situation that we have now is that when russian troops withdraw from our territory, they dismantle and take with them not only washing machines, but also telecom equipment, TV- and radio-transmitters, leaving people who live there without any information channels and means of communication. We have to re-build telecom and internet infrastructure, and yes, we could bring new equipment there, but if the IP addresses of local Internet Providers will be transferred to other parties, we will not be able to restore even our critical infrastructure there, and there is no place to get new IPv4 addresses.

Therefore any solutions that involve allowing transfers now and somehow reverting them later are not solving this immediate problem that we have."

The threads with most focus seem to be:

"Protecting Resource Holders in Distressed Areas" [2]

"IP adress transferring in Ukraine" [3]

"UA IP transfer" [4]

"UA IP transfers situation" [5]

[0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

[1] https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-fam...

[1] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

[2] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

[3] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

[4] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

I join you in these sentiments - born-n-bred on the farm, still there, and hacking software since 1981!

My most regular outburst of swearing is about 'dev-ops' and lack of engineering discipline and occurs almost daily :)

Has your organisation tried sending a letter from your General Counsel to the General Counsel of LinkedIn?

There's a strong case for arguing the content negatively affects the brand value, etc., of your organisation and in some circumstances could be considered libel.

Wet Lettuce, Damp Squib, any more!?

I always thought Truss was more like an Android than anyone I've ever encountered. Lack of emotive expressions, eyes that seemed to stare rather than scan, and so on.

Maybe later we'll find it was a failed A.I. experiment by Cambridge Analytica/Facebook !

I thought it was a Cabbage! - since 'cabbage' has a double-meaning in colloquial English meaning 'incapable' :D

I think the journalists(!?) missed a trick there.

The CMA did object [0]; in fact it made an order preventing Meta/Facebook from continuing but the order was ignored. Meta/Facebook was fined as a result [1].

[0] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-inc-giphy-inc-merger-i...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/facebook-inc-giphy-inc-merger-i...