[Dave Rice]

I was waiting for the EU to be blamed. Oh, you managed to get a swipe in at Labour too. What about all the responsible politicians since then too?

It doesn’t seem to have stopped the French “In France, in the high-rise towers like Grenfell, we can only use non-flammable materials – they don’t burn, they don’t catch fire.” and they’re now reducing that to 28 metres and expecting to do that within weeks.  http://news.sky.com/story/france-plans-new-cladding-law-after-grenfell-fire-disaster-10930623

“Following the fire, French housing association LMH removed the flammable cladding from other towers despite not being compelled by law at the time to do so.  Damien Guth, the group’s technical director, said: “What we noticed, as well as experts, is that the plastic core inside the cladding was responsible for the rapid spread of fire. “This is what prompted us to replace the cladding on our tower blocks to avoid risk.” The company said it was a matter of ethics.”

Why is France capable of spotting the bloody obvious and doing something about it, yet all we do is call for another inquiry that will take years?

When we get to the bottom of this, if we ever do, it will be a home grown disaster of our own making. I may not have Drezha’s training but it seems obvious to me that cladding a building in flammable material cannot be a good idea.

[Dave Rice]

“In other words, I should keep silent when it comes to stuff I know very little about!”

I was involved in making sure the Millennium Bug had as little impact as possible and got so sick of journalists whipping this up, plus the so called “expert” you can always find to back up any position no matter how ludicrous.

We all knew that planes were not going to fall out of the sky or bank accounts cease to work etc. but of course that doesn’t sell stories. Then when nothing happened the people who had made it up blamed the people who had done as lot of work to make sure it didn’t for crying wolf.

With Grenfell I have smelt a classic politicians cover up in the offing since day one and you can see the scapegoats being lined up.

Based on Grenfell the French will be amending their rules & regs within a month. How long will we take? The usual excuses are already being trotted out. Can’t preempt an inquiry or prejudice a criminal investigation blah, blah, waffle. Promises made are being broken, the people are already back to being cattle.

[Dave Rice]

I use Apps2Fire to side load onto my Fire TV.

[Dave Rice]

Kodi works the same way on everything, the only difference is what you use to control it. Use the smartphone app all the time and that’s that sorted.

[Dave Rice]

Bloody Huguenots, coming over here and nicking our transubstantiation.

I was reading somewhere that they reckon 1 in 6 of us has some Huguenot in our ancestry.

[Dave Rice]

My Fire TV with Kodi will do most of what you want.

The biggest PITA with the Fire remote is when you need to input text, but if you’re using Kodi you can use a smartphone as a remote (which I do) and that solves that problem.

With Amazon Prime you can just talk to it (I still hate doing that). Don’t use Netflix so can’t comment on that.

[Dave Rice]

What do you need to sort out the WiFi?

Coming to Manchester on Monday, may have something in the spares cupboard.

[Dave Rice]

18 / 20 Can’t see how that makes me a citizen.

[Dave Rice]

Could well be the Intel mobo.

At launch, the Brix had UEFI issues if you didn’t want to install W8 (I was using Ubuntu on them at that time). One model had to be upgraded to the latest UEFI, the other downgraded. To do that you had to get W8 on them first and run the Gigabyte @BIOS utility.

The initial CSM boot tussles you get with everything when using legacy is now gone as they are all UEFI / GPT / W10.

With an SSD they are fine for Office work. The one I’ve just re-purposed has a 5400 rpm spinner and once it gets going it’s OK, but not wonderful. It’s going to be basically an internet kiosk so it’ll be fine for that.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve had four of these Celeron Brixs in everyday office use (Office 2016 Pro) for at least 2 years, in fact I’m off today to install one I’ve re purposed.

I have never had to intervene with any updates. I can understand that MS may be a driver behind the curve but I’ve not seen any issues.

Of course if the CPU was an i5 or i7 with better graphics I could see that may be different, but at this end MS seem to get it right enough.

[Dave Rice]

The very thing on E-Buyer http://tinyurl.com/y9omvy7y £204

Gigabyte Brix BXBT-2807 Ultra Compact PC Kit
Intel Celeron N2807 2.17GHz
4GB RAM
120GB SSD
No Operating System so off to E-Bay

Wireless not Bluetooth but I’ve used one: Microsoft All-in-One Media keyboard £33 http://tinyurl.com/y995wssg

 

[Dave Rice]

Just had this email

Dear Customer
Thank you for your recent order with Parcel2Go.
Unfortunately, due to a TNT system error, your TNT delivery may not have been booked or collected as scheduled. TNT cannot confirm when they will be able to fix the issue, so we are switching your delivery to a UPS service.

[Dave Rice]

No, they don’t come and chuck buckets of water at you?

[Dave Rice]

One good by product was we had a couple of embedded MoD bods who were English – French translators. They would be in Paris a couple of times a month at least and always brought back some Tarte aux pommes from the local boulanger-pâtissier.

The farthest away I got was Frimley (north of Farnborough by the M3), but I’ve been in the ship simulator at HMS Collingwood when they were running the Carrier simulation. That was a weird experience. I knew the bridge couldn’t move at all, I’d been around the outside and on the roof when putting the CCTV in, but when they start a rough weather simulation you’d swear the deck was moving.

[Dave Rice]

“the C&C system would need to be air-gapped from any insecure networks such as those providing Internet to the crew or management updates to the Officer’s laptops”.

For Gods sake Ed, these systems are not designed and implemented by 14 yo kids in their bedrooms. Please stop insulting their intelligence. Even the systems used to design the systems are air gapped. BAE and the Navy do not need to be told how to do IT security by The Telegraph.

Bob – ask yourself which country we are distancing ourselves from and which we are sucking up to.

Our relationship with La France has always been a bit strained. My office was known as the French Room as before our team expanded and took it over it was where they put the visiting French (who were then still heavily involved). They gave them that room as it had no central heating or air con and was used as a short cut. Thales are however still part of the Aircraft Carrier Alliance (and involved with other ships).

[Dave Rice]

The latest routers from every ISP I know come with a sticker with a random admin and wireless password. BT have done since at least Hub 3. It’s the third party routers that come with generic ID / passwords but all I’ve dealt with lately either force you to change them or nag you incessantly to.

[Dave Rice]

Trade has never over worried me but I think the “they need us more than we need them” is total bollocks for UK consumption. The Europeans are quite likely to take some pain as the price for their holding their ideals, especially the Germans. I think it very likely there will be a sensible trade deal on offer but the hard line Brexit nutters will reject it.

It’s leaving the customs union that I believe will do for us, but this is still all trade related. What about everything else?

[Dave Rice]

I ran the office desktop IT on this project for a couple of years, but not the onboard systems (although I worked with people who did).

Come on Ed, give them some credit. Do you seriously think that there is no endpoint protection in place that restricts and monitors the use of the USB (and every other) port and shed-loads of similar defenses? You don’t just rock up to a naval ship of the line with a laptop and plug it in somewhere. It’s pretty hard to do that in the design office! This isn’t just a box from PC World plugged into 13 amp and RJ45 sockets on the bridge.

Corporates like BAE have been fighting off cyber attacks for a long, long time. They even sell their services in this area at nation state level.

[Dave Rice]

As I understand it, you can still have the GUI but you must make your mind up on installation.

[Dave Rice]

The whole point is you can do everything you can in the GUI plus a lot more.

About the only thing I’ve done is create a non Microsoft user account on a remote W10 PC whilst someone else was using it.

My son is just about to start a support role for Daisy up at Leeds. You’ve always needed CLI skills once you get to 2nd and 3rd line, he’s going to need Powershell skills for sure, it’s where it’s all at now.

[Author]

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