Posts by TeeCee

Re: Logistics software?

Whoever's running it, there's one thing we can be sure of. They've outsourced the IT side to Capita.

Correct. There's no such thing as a service that never goes titsup.com.

The only important thing is to work out the likely frequency and duration of outages and based on this, whether it's worth the cost of having a fully redundant system using A N Other service.

Given the length and frequency of outages in this case, short of using it as a deadman switch on the nuclear arsenal I can't think of any service where this would be worthwhile rather than just accepting a manual workaround for brief and rare periods.

There's also another matter to consider. In my experience, redundant systems are prone to failure modes due to the automated redundancy paying silly Bs and thus going titsup.com even though the primary services are all running perfectly well. Adding unnecessary complexity in case of the sky falling in is almost always a bad idea.

Re: Non-Techy tries too hard

....he had all of his home network devices set to static addresses....

Given his A+ grade in "Fucking up DNS 101", this is hardly surprising.

Re: It's time to kill the dragon!

Hmm. This IT department he was assigned to sounds awfully familiar.

If I'm right, if he ever does get those login credentials and does indeed start to make them look bad, there's a roll of carpet somewhere with his name on it.

Re: Something's not right here

Also worth considering here is that if someone out there did indeed have some "secret sauce" brute forcing method, that's not the whole story.

How many incorrect attempts are allowed before the account gets locked, captcha'd or at least naughty stepped for a period?

If anything like that is in place, brute forcing timescales start making geological change look rapid.

Re: subsidies/tax-breaks

The elephant in the room is that Putin is only kept in power by his wealthy oligarchical cronies.

A significant and sustained drop in the value of their shit will see him out on his ear and he knows this. Hence the ever more insane and outlandish posturing and blamestorming from Mad Vlad as the situation wears on.

You mean someone who's read the same books then?

I remember when one of the management team kept posting little aphorisms from his favourite business guru on the intranet.

One of these was along the lines of how, while the bumblebee couldn't fly, it didn't know that and just did it anyway.

I pointed out that anyone who's basing their business advice on a pre-war French botanist's piss-poor knowledge of aerodynamics probably wasn't worth listening to. Particularly when they didn't at least cross-check their homespun wisdom with the Wikipedia "List of common misconceptions".

Also there's the not insignificant risk of Chinese buyers being suddenly deprived of both sets of product lines, should their government decide to escalate their Taiwanese posture from willy waving to dicking about.

Re: A few more pedantic details

Actually, you missed the two "big ticket" items.

1) When OS/2 came out, what you paid for was the CLI. If you wanted the GUI (Presentation Manager) that cost as much again. If you wanted it to talk to anything else you had to purchase Communications Manager on top of that. So, when OS/2 had the market to itself and could have owned it, nobody who gave a rat's arse about cost bought it. A prize cockup that doomed it from the word go.

2) Until OS/2 and its successors came out, there'd been no such things as drivers for the various bits of hardware with associated APIs. Many, if not most, DOS applications had their greasy paws deep into the hardware to make things work. When Windows came out, it sat on DOS and a quick button press would provide a reboot into "real" DOS, should one of your applications not run in a DOS box under Windows. If your application wouldn't run under OS/2 (and most DOS applications of any complexity wouldn't), you were screwed.

So, back when IBM and MS were best buddies and Windows wasn't even in the design phase, IBM shot its redheaded stepchild in the head due to sheer corporate greed. I always assumed that MS were so disgusted with IBM's pricing and marketing that they fucked off to do Windows. The alternative was a market where this new Apple stuff was the cheaper option...

Re: New wine in old bottles

You're probably thinking of the three core Athlons.

The original plan was to take four core dies with a duff core and repackage them as a three core.

It turned out that picking out single core failures and feeding them back into production was more expensive than just running one, four core process line and fiddling it at the end.

It becomes contempt of court when Judge Lucy Fangrrl and a jury of iSheep rule against them in California.

Until then, it's just meaningless foreigners being petty.

Apple: It just works - unless we don't want it to, then it doesn't.