Posts by William Boyle

Ah, Jags!

My cousin, an SCCA national champion race driver, taught me competition driving in his XKE back in the 1960's. His only complaint was the fragility of the rear wheel needle bearings! Some teens of years later, I was a master mechanic with my own garage, and I would service and repair exotic vehicles such as Jag XJ12Ls, 300SL Mercedes, Morgans, and such. I even got to work on a Citroen SM (Maserati running gear in a Citroen), which an instance of such my cousin seems to have acquired in the future! He arrived at my fathers wake in a 250LM Ferrari...

BT in GB and AT&T in the US

Neither of these giants of the telecom industry have any interest in providing better service. They want to suck out every penny they can from existing infrastructure and accounts. The only way to force the issue is to remove their lucrative subsidies from the government and penalize them when they don't work on improving the infrastructure and speed of service to the premises.

Right!

"When pressed, she said her agency was trying to ensure there are "no secret legal interpretations," and how the agency shouldn't rely on "cute legal interpretations" to extend its reach over the planet's inhabitants."

Right! That and about 3 quid (5 USD) will get you a nice latte at Starbucks...

And so do his grandchildren!

Lord King: "I am not a tweeter. We have Facebook and Twitter. Somebody tried to explain WhatsApp to me; somebody else tried to explain Snapchat. I do not know about them, but it is absolutely clear that the terrorists and jihadists do."

I have news for you LK, so do your grandchildren! Does that make them terrorists? Stop being an idiot and do your job to protect the British people from the overreach of the government that no longer represents them. :-(

Irregular verbs

The bane of all non-native speaking French students! I took 4 years of French from 9th-12th grade, spent time in France, and after becoming fluent in Spanish later, I can say without reservation that French is NOT easy to learn to speak properly, let alone fluently! I was having problems with French irregular verbs (which most of them seem to be), so my mother who was pretty good with French put together a set of flash cards and started drilling me daily (10th grade as I recall). After a couple of weeks of this, I woke up one night in a sweat, having a nightmare - conjugating irregular French verbs in my sleep! Shudder...

At last!

At last, an honest IT job description! Sorry folks, but I am not that much of a glutton for punishment - I get enough in my current position!

Curry for MREs?

So, it seems that for all of our soldiers in harm's way, we should make sure that all MRE's have curry? Neat! and nummy!

Cuomo should encourage municipal broadband

The telcos and other cable/internet providers will steal that $500M if he doesn't funnel it to municipalities to roll out local community-owned broadband! The only way to get AT&T, Verizon, Comcrap to work to give people good internet for reasonable prices is if they have to compete with the communities themselves. May the best/cheapest service win!

This is what happens

This is what happens when those who can don't consider why they shouldn't! The NSA and GCHQ have no ethics at all. If they can, they will. It is as simple as that! And we are all damned...

This is why

This is why we need fiber to the premises for phone/internet/cable.

Cement shoes most likely

Hopefully not, but after the "suicide" of the whistle-blower in South America this week, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to "resurface"... :-(

So, if I don't have hands to gesture with?

A stylus attached to a prosthetic arm would allow someone without hands the ability to use these devices. Good for Apple! Jobs was brilliant, but short sighted in many ways. I knew him back in the early 80's. I always liked Woz better. At least he had/has a sense of humor!

Not a chance

If my insurance company wanted me to install one of these things in my car, I would tell them to go fark themselves! If they insisted, I would take them to court, after I switched to an insurance company who wasn't so stupid!

Turkeys and other such stupid birds

The government of Turkey is not much more "liberal" than Syria or Iran. Their only redeeming point is that they are a member of the EU. Frankly, I think that is an affront to the human rights and freedom of expression that the EU is supposed to stand for.

Cameron is an idiot!

Cameron is an idiot and obviously has no understanding of the law of unintended consequences. I can't wait until someone hacks all of his email and personal data and splashes it all over the web! Oh yeah. He'll love that!

Dad would have been thrilled!

My father, an astro-geo-physicist, was a director of NOAA before he passed away in the early 1990's. He would have loved this new gear! I remember how happy he was to get his first 10MB drum drive for the computer in the department he was chairman of back in the early 1960s. It really enhanced his research into sub-atomic particles - mesons in his case. 10MB - wow! :-) Now, I have 32GB micro SD cards that are no bigger than my little fingernail and that would out-perform that drum drive by many orders of magnitude.

Dr. Doom?

So, European net neutrality is now under the control of Doctor Doom? Oh, sorry. He was from Latveria...

This is why

This is why you don't leave the house keys under the door mat!

And consider

And consider moving to a country that has a clue! I think iceland or Finland are good options for IT workers who don't want to be farked by their government...

Digital consulates

Consulates enjoy the privilege of being "foreign soil" where the hosting country has no rights to access or interfere without explicit permission of the country involved. We need digital consulates where multi-national companies can host foreign data in sandboxed domains that are inviolate by the country where the data is stored. IE, Google or MS could store EU citizen data in "digital consulate" systems (with proper security/encryption) in the US, and the US or other governments could not access such information without proper permissions from the source governments. I don't know if this would work, but technologically, it would be feasible and simplify a lot of current concerns.

Drought, floods...

What's next? Hurracanes? Tornadoes? Earthquakes? Volcano erruptions? IT'S THE APOCOLYPSE! Time to bury our heads in the sand and kiss our sorry butts goodbye! :rolleyes:

Good for Ford

I have been a QNX user/developer since 1982 (proud owner of serial number 007). Best real-time OS that I have worked with, and I have been a QNX OEM and develooper since 1982... I was even one of the developers of TCP/IP support for QNX 2.x back around 1990.

Inadequate planning

Sites like this are seriously remiss if they don't plan and design for "worst-case" senarios. I used to design seriously big systems that had to run 24x365. Six-sigma was not good enough! How? Redundancy in all aspects of the system (networks, servers, applications, w/ automatic re-routing around failure areas). I called this "failure resiliance". It was NOT fault tolerance. It was truly resiliant to failure of any single or multiple service - within limits. Failure was still a possibility (provided that WW3 occurred and all the data centers were nuked), but VERY unlikely. AWS has data center failures, but you can provide for automatic fail-over to other data centers and/or servers/services. My experience with Amazon was very positive in these regards, but again, pre-planning and design for such occurances is required. It doesn't happen auto-magically...

Gah!

IT knowledge? Not even close! More like a test for iPhone users on popular / current social (mis)information.

See Target

The Target exploit used the same approach by hacking through the HVAC systems that had used an unmodified admin password. Once in the HVAC system, they pretty much were able to get into the rest of the network.

Right!

From this: "A company spokeswoman told Advertising Age earlier this year that the UIDH was "privacy safe" and that it had done "everything and more" in "communicating often and clearly" about the program. "So there are never any surprises," she said."

Add $5 and you can get a nice latte from Starbucks!

Why you shouldn't use Windoze for critical systems

When will people learn? There are secure operating systems that won't be easily corrupted or compromised, but big biz seems to be intent in taking the easy way out, and screw all of the rest of us!

I used to be a U2 fan

I like their music, but this behavior on Bono's part will force me to boycott all their product, at least until he/they come to his/their senses.

iMmortality?

So, if you get the iMmortality package, are you committed to purchasing all medical needs from the iMedicine store? I can see the disclaimer now - "Purchase of medical products and services from providers other than iMedicine will invalidate your iMmortality warranty and may have undesirable interactions with the iMmortality products in your body."

Blowing nose

Blowing your nose in a spider silk hanky and then tossing it away after one use?

Gah!

I guess HP never heard the term "caveat emptor" - buyer beware!

A small number of customers

A small number of customers to MS is probably on the order of 10 million people... As in "just a small amount of $$ was stolen from the Federal Reserve Bank - just $10 million or so".

This is why

This is why I only run Winows in a virtual machine on my Linux box. I will NEVER submit to installing ANY Microsoft OS on any of my personal gear. At least if an update bricks the VM, I can restore it to the last snapshot and continue on my merry way. Also, NEVER enable auto-updates for ANY system, Windows or other!

Bribery anyone?

A look into the finances of the legislators and state governor might be "interesting". I hope they didn't sell out to big media too cheaply... :-(

Open front doors

This is akin to leaving your front door unlocked and open - basically an invitation to all and sundry that the contents of your fridge is fair game, even the Guinness... Enjoy!

What a terrible to ruin an otherwise great bit of embedded gear! Gah! Shoot me now, please!

My philosophy about secrets

There are no secrets unless only 1 person knows it. There are only "less well-known information". If you want truly secure communication with someone, find a deep, dark hole, both jump in, and then use a "cone of silence"...

Time to hack

From deployment to fully pwnd devices - less than 1 week. More likely less than a day... Maroons! Can you spell "instant gridlock"?

And the banks that launder money?

How many of their senior managers will end up in durrance vile for their nefarious activities? The number zero comes to mind...

What Microsoft refuses to understand

If you are providing critical infrastructure services to the public, you need to plan for failure and redundancy in order to provide 365x24 service. If you don't, you are remiss and should lose your business. I was responsible for the design of an application development framework (in C++) for semiconductor, disc drive, and flat panel display manufacturing systems that had to support very large installations, thousands of users, and process terabytes of data per day, where 1 hour of down time would cost the customer over $10M USD per hour in lost profits - failure was not an option. We had to design the systems to be failure-resiliant with no single point of failure at the network, system, database, or other system components. This is not easy, but it is possible - if your system has a chip, disc drive, or LCD display, then that software most likely built it...

I left Microsoft shortly after they closed their purchase of Nokia Mobile Phones (where I was working), because they still refuse to understand this. My position was Senior Performance Engineer handling 5000+ servers worldwide, and the software I designed and wrote collected 10 billion data points of performance data per day so we could apply mathematical and engineering algorithms to monitor system behavior and predict when systems, networks, and databases might fail. Unfortunately, most of the people I worked with at Nokia will be looking for new jobs soon... :-(

In my opinion, this failure of Microsoft is inexcusible. I hate to see what will happen to Azure users in the future.

The birth of Sky Net

To quote the Terminator - "I'll be back!"....

Prior art?

Can you spell "prior art"? This "invention": “System and method of interfacing co-processors and input/output devices via a main memory system” is what all current computers implement to move data around the system. Applying to flash memory is neither novel, nor original. Of course, the idiots as the USPTO probably don't understand the tech so they allowed the patent. I hope it is challenged PDQ.

Conspicuous by its absence

There is no mention that while this makes intrusion detection and such more difficult, it also most likely makes spying of the type the NSA and GCHQ do more difficult as well...

100M records? 75M photos

In my work experience, this is a medium size Oracle Enterprise DB. Somebody screwed the pooch, and I don't think it was Oracle.

Who reads that cruft anyway?

"Last year, a US judge threw out a similar data privacy lawsuit, after ruling the plaintiffs had failed to show any evidence that they had bothered to read Apple's privacy policies before they bought their iPhones."

Assuming the judge in question has a phone (any, not just an iPhone), ask if he/she read the privacy policy...

Douglas is laughing

I think Douglas Adams is laughing at your pun... :-) And yes, I don't expect to hit my 2^7 b'day either! I hit my 2^6 a couple of years ago, but still feel like I can make a contribution to the computer software industry, although Microsoft apparently thought not since they let me go from my Nokia Mobile Phones position (senior systems engineer) 2 weeks after their purchase of Nokia was closed. Interesting that all the other grey haired folks in the division have also disappeared, except those in management positions...

It's time!

It looks like time for the NHS to start migrating their systems to open source software! If MS wants to play hardball (a US baseball term - hardball is what the big kids play, softball is for the girls - sorry, but I mean no disparagement to the more attractive half of the species, and I love playing both), then let them consider what it will cost them if there was zero income from the NHS at all!