Posts by yeah, right.

Reality check.

Let me see. People purchase something from Dell, then expect good customer service? That MIGHT (arguably) have been the case many years ago, but Dell hasn't had anything resembling decent or competent customer service for many, many years now. What the heck kind of research do these people actually do before they purchase these systems?

As for the subject of the article: it was worse than a bot. It was an employee of a lowest-cost telemarketing firm. A person who is trained to sit in a 4'x4' box (if they're lucky) and strictly follow a script. Deviation is punished. Questions are punished. initiative is punished. Actually helping the customer is punished. These places have lockers at the front where employees leave their brains as they get to work.

UK sold them some swampland?

This sounds remarkably like the UK ID scheme (or fiasco-in-the-making). I wonder which wunderkind managed to sell the Americans on this particular fools errand?

aha, open season.

As I was going to comment on your previous article before you locked out comments (wisely, perhaps), I just had this to say about it:

You wrote: "This is Web 2.0 in all its glory - everyone an expert, everyone indignant, every two-bit hustler a pundit ready to expound and proselytize."

Yes Lester, you're quite right in that. More right than you know.

not just encryption

Not just encryption, although it's a damn good start, it is still too easy to get access to encrypted data via various social engineering methods. How about not allowing private data to be stored on easily lost or stolen items like CDs or laptops?

Only allow access to the data through secured, encrypted links, and provide a layer of physical security around the data storage as well. That might slow down the haemorrhage. Maybe.

Of course, given the way the UK gov (and USA, and Canada, and every other one for that matter) is stripping "privacy" from us every chance they get, perhaps

it's a moot point.

meanwhile...

Meanwhile, back at the Cattlefarm, FSE has fined companies several million pounds for doing exactly the same thing as the government. I wonder if they'll be able to claim that they're just following standard government practice in losing unencrypted information?

So, is anything actually going to happen to these departments, or are they going to continue being allowed to play cowboy with our private information?

I'm guessing the latter.

Bring on the revolution!

but wait...

Does that mean that "klaatu barada nikto" really means "all your base belong to us"?

Given the propagation time of said signal, we're far more likely to either (a) wipe ourselves out as a species or (b) beat said signal to its possible destination than we are likely to actually contact anything that gives a shit.

To be powerful enough, the signal would need to be directional. Which direction then? Or is it going to be fired multiple times towards different stars? There's only what, several million to choose from after all. Then signal would have to be captured by the aliens, which assumes they are at a stage in their development that they actually have and use radio. Then they would need to recognize it as something more than background noise. Then ....

Screw that. Seems to me to be a waste of money on a very long distance phone call where we're not sure the recipient is home.

obvious really.

The security standards were kept in the basement, in a locked cabinet, in a room marked "Beware of Tiger".

Meanwhile, the actual work instructions are stored in an office on Betelgeuse. Which is only fair as it's obvious the people in charge aren't really on this planet at all.

privacy?

What the hell is UK private data doing in the US, which doesn't have privacy laws (well, none worth mentioning)? Of course, the UK ones are quietly being dismantled too, so it sort of makes sense I guess. Or is this part of that "Safe Harbour" crap that the USA forced Europe to accept under threat of economic retaliation?

marketing

Looks like the marketing department is getting more and more power at Apple. It used to be that they were a little more honest. But the more the marketing folks get their toxic claws into it, the less they seem to be able to actually tell the difference between their lies and fucking over the users.

Very unimpressed with Apple right now from that perspective.

@ Vivadas

Just tried their sydneyfood.tv feed, seems to work fine under MacOSX with Firefox. It looks like it's some sort of Java app, but I could be wrong.

Only issue is it abusing the CPU when you close it. Closing the calling website tab seemed to fix that.

So thumbs up to Vivadas for creating what seems to be a useful multiplatform app. Now if only larger companies with larger budgets (like the BBC) could follow their lead.

Sweet scam!

Wow. All these people calling the premium number to get back into their accounts, and look - Farcehosts is doing it again! I guess their accountants figured they needed the end-of-year financial boost to make up for the drop in clients in the new year.

I'd love to see how much their profits went up every time they cocked up, because it's starting to look like making mistakes is actually profitable for them!

alternatively

They could just have random letters and numbers, thus ensuring that no real words could be spelled. Of course, then they would probably forget to omit 1/i, 0/O and other similar ones, resulting in far more people being labelled as bots.

Would this be a bad thing though?

On the other hand...

If I'm playing games, I'm not destroying the world by driving to my favourite hiking spot, or flying to my favourite eco-tourism destination, or hunting whales, or logging old growth forests, or any number of potentially harmful things I could be doing. Also, the electricity is does use is being converted to heat, which means that my furnace runs 0.002% less.

Still, would be nice to know that what I'm doing isn't contributing to the poisoning of the environment around the factories that produce the consoles. Amazing how the reporting of certain facts can be so obviously slanted one way or another by the person writing the article.

Well, what did you expect?

Maybe they had a wikipedian edit her CV? Sounds like their hiring standards match their information standards.

Best managers

The all-time best manager I've ever had died of a heart attack several years ago. Probably brought on by utterly incompetent senior management. I've lost touch with the second best manager.

Both were Canadian, and were exemplary at motivating people as individuals, and not trying to get everyone to fit into a one-size-fits-all mold.

The worst manager I ever had was... British. Big brutish authoritarian man who loved to yell at his employees and never had a word of praise for anyone. Left there in a hurry!

get yer slops!

So basically it's a subsidy to Boeing, using the towers as an excuse. This is the same country that bitches high and low about other governments subsidising their industries? The US government never ceases to amaze me at the sheer level of hypocrisy it can churn out per month.

When are they putting the wireless lightning gun on these to automatically fire at anything it locates?

encryption?

Ah yes. The "protected by three levels of security". What they don't say is that they had saved the passwords so that the information could be automatically decrypted. So all they have to do, maybe, is break into the MS Windows account. Oooh, that's so difficult.

patent?

He should go the USA and apply for a patent on his method. After all, he's just programming his brain, so it's software, so it's probably patentable in the USA.

Alternatively, it would be nice if he developed a method for teaching his mental mechanism to others, rather than keeping it secret. These kind of things might be useful in helping people improve their minds. Who knows where such mental gymnastics could lead?

ooh! I've got one!

I've got the perfect terror plot here!

How about pretending that there is this major threat, then while people are really scared the politicians can pass more and more laws to make the place into a police state? Those in charge could even implement ludicrous things like arbitrary detention, make torture legal again, and every so often make sure the police shoots someone and spins it as having saved us from another terrorist!

Pretty soon the public is either clamouring for more police protection and more intrusive laws, which of course those in charge are all too willing to supply.

In the final phase, you spread a rumour that voting ballots have been contaminated with anthrax and that polling stations and ballot boxes have been booby trapped. This allows those in charge to cancel elections completely.

I realise the story starts out pretty unrealistically, but the ending sort of fits in.

yeah. right.

lost it.

Looks like Western Digital has completely lost the plot then.

...because of course those file types never have the copyright owned by the person who actually purchased the hard drive. I mean, it's not like anyone creates their own sound or video files. No, of course not. Everyone gets all such files from elsewhere, and never EVER actually has permission to use these files...

Fuck me, talk about a totally asinine, yet completely predictable product.

clean sweep.

Perhaps it's time to fire the whole lot of them and replace them with... anything competent.

Of course, it's not just the UK. In Canada they're giving away passport application information just by changing the URL (so complete technical incompetence).

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3yksq7

Government departments. Can't trust them. Can't shoot them.

Five Nines

Five nines (99.999%) uptime (or 5 minutes per year) is really the best anyone can hope for. I did a fair amount of work in high availability clusters and stuff, and although it's theoretically possible to get better, in practice you still have application restart or failover time of a few seconds for each server or application crash. Those seconds will add up over a year.

Hardware fails. Software sucks. Power is unreliable. Murphy is alive and well and living in YOUR computer room. Good luck getting better than "five nines".

Ron Paul?

Outside the US I'm guessing this guy doesn't really exist. As I understand it, he's a far-right creationist (so completely divorced from reality) who has managed to somehow gain some sort of cult following.

The one thing he seems to stand for is something called "States rights", where individual states in the USA can tell their federal government to stuff it and run things their own way. However, it seems to me that the USA had a civil war over this issue, with the "southern" states representing the concept of "states rights", mainly over the issues of taxation and slavery. Last I checked, the bigoted rednecks LOST that particular war, so I'm curious as to why people think the winners, who are still in charge, are going to allow that sort of bullshit to proliferate yet again?

backers?

Be interesting to see who is actually backing Frontline and others?

Fraud

Wikipedia is a fucking fraud. All hype, no substance. Anyone using their stuff for "research" deserved to be laughed at. No rigour. No actual peer review.

Now this? Fuck 'em. It's a nice scam, but why oh why have so many people fallen for it?

@ Gardner

Because most governments are nothing more than organized crime made "legal" by assertion, and no matter who loses, they always win?

lies?

There are no lies. Everything Microsoft says is "The Truth". Right?

Certainly the US government seems to think so, as well as all the large company droids that keep pushing their crap into the server rooms, then wonder why their IT costs have doubled.

For me, it's a simple equation:

Microsoft = I.P theft + marketing = lies = bad for business.

Removing Microsoft from my client's businesses (where possible, obviously) has significantly reduced their I.T. costs and their downtime. The clients that insisted they stay with Microsoft when non-Microsoft alternatives were available require much more of my time. So much so that I don't offer them the "fixed monthly rate" I.T. management service that I offer companies who take my advice, and I actively try to pawn them off to other consultants. All my clients are small businesses.

That's my experience. Microsoft can just go suck rotten eggs.

Peer review anyone?

Now, what was that about the need for peer review of security protocols: both their design and their implementation? Although it doesn't guarantee perfection, it does at least weed out obvious crap.

But of course Microsoft (and others, probably) can't possibly need any of that. They are, after all, infallible and complet... [snirk]... completely sec... [chortle].... completely secure...[HAHAHAHA]. Nope, I really couldn't say that with a straight face.

profit centre

I can just see it now:

Fasthost Accounting: oh look, our quarter looks like it might be a bit slow this year, we need to boost income before the end of the year...

Fasthost Manager: Let's chop off access to our customers and force them to call a pay-per-minute phone line to get things fixed. That should boost profits a bit.

I'm betting Fasthost has a really good quarter ending in December, probably thanks to a sudden increase in support phone calls and people willing to wait hours in order to stay in business.

Lovely company. I'm so glad I'm not their customer. Nor will I ever be.