Posts by Do Not Fold Spindle Mutilate

MS sets Windows' Edge to auto start.

If you are currently using Windows then right click on the taskbar. Select Task Manager. Select the Startup tab and look to see if Microsoft Edge is there and enabled. It has been put there without my permission and turned on. I have disabled it. Select the Edge and click the button in the lower right to disable auto start. You do not need this program using memory and cpu. Now click on processes and click on the name column scroll down to look for existing Edge processes. Select them and right click on 'end processes.'

I am a long time firefox user and do not wank this Edge crap running on my machine.

Will Russian criminals turn this into a protection racket?

Could a criminal demand money for not burning your game business to the ground? "Pay us money or we will use the millions of machines that we have control over to download and install your game causing you to owe millions to Unity." Instead of ransomware having to screw around with a users' files, the hack downloads and installs games as required by the command and control site. I'm not going to do it but an existing ransomware asshole might easily switch to this. If you don't have a million machines at your finger tips would a bluff still work?

I worked at a firm which integrated the cooling system with the city water supply. The cold water, in Canada, is cold so that means less air conditioning expenses. That was fine until the city had to shut off the water supply for a few hours to do some sort of repair and there was not enough air con to compensate. So the data centre had to shut down for a while.

As an owner of a copy of the physical book, the book says:

On the cover of the book "Visual Research for Artists, Architects and Designers". "

On the frontmatter "All rights reserved".

At the back "About the CD-ROM", ... "The CD images can be used by artists and designer is developing concepts, preparing presentations for clients, and communicating visual information to others. "

The readme.txt on the cd also says "All images copyright (c)1996 by Judy A. Juracek"

If the exact image is used then there a copyright problem. I looked at this exact phrase a couple of years ago to see if the images could be used in non-commercial manner but decided the keyword and intention of the book is research. Look at the pictures get inspired but create your own work.

Oracle did not (does not?) have software to SUM() the number of licences needed.

Some of Oracle's licences are by named person, that is a specific user and not their non-sick replacement which would require another license. Other licences are based on ever changing Oracle based voodoo estimate of cpu chip power with multicpu costing more. Other licences depend on who might use the results so if the public uses the results then 8 billion licenses. Oh yea, since you feel that the software is not perfect and need a development, test, and acceptance test databases all of those must be paid for separately.

Computer Associates used to be very very bad for licenses. They met Ross Perot of EDS and so on.

It makes MicroSloth method of counting licences / seats like paying a gas bill.

British Columbia (Canada) high heels cannot legally be required.

Was the meeting to be in Vancouver, BC, Canada or Vancouver, Washington State USA? The BC Workers Compensation Act prohibits the mandatory wearing of high heels. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2017PREM0047-001151

I also thought the employer could not force women to wear a dress. The women are allowed to wear pants. This was a ruling because a restaurant required the women servers to wear high heels and a black dress. (I have not heard of any discrimination law suits about guys being fired for wearing a dress.)

Chromebooks have an expiry date

Gosh, Gevil corporation makes there chromebook os expire in six years. After that no security fixes so the owner becomes a magnet for ransomware.

The real reason the expiry is a problem is that most companies expect that software should be completely free. Companies are not willing to pay now and not willing to pay later. To get a budget for an upgrade (not python) I told the CFO that auditors would not approve the financial statements because the software was out of date and could not be relied upon. Only when the CFO realized his job was "on the line" did he authorize a minimal amount of money to do minimal upgrades.

If a hacker spilled data onto the world wide ocean would it look like this?

https://s270.photobucket.com/user/ltattrie/media/DeepWater_data_spill.jpg.html?sort=4&o=3

IBM Canada to get additional $6 million to do system work outside office hours

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/cost-to-fix-payroll-system-could-hit-50-million-ottawa-reveals/article31755962/

" For instance, the government will pay to ensure that system maintenance takes place during evenings, overnights and weekends to improve capacity during the day" Gosh, was there someone actually signing contracts which allowed disruptive system maintenance to occur during the day?

What is "Lowerer" in the green box in the purple box?

Parser and Interpreter are words that I understand but what is a Lowerer in the context of JIT? I've done some searches but cannot find anything that is related.

Will Dell put the large dollars into R&D?

Dell may be able to reduce costs by replacing specialized sales people with online orders. But if the money is not put toward products that work well together then the whole company will fail. I would hate to see Dell become another Computer Associates which bought companies and then soaked the customers for maintenance but provided no improved products.

If Dell can make the commodity hardware work smoothly together in an enterprise cloud then Dell will be bigger and better than HP, and Amazon. VM is an engine that could drive many changes if given directions and money.

Your health is more important than the company.

You are completely correct Trevor. My recommendation is to try to save as much of your own money so that you can retire as soon as possible. The companies are only going to cut IT spending even more. The stress can or will take a toll on you physically and / or mentally. Eating junk food or sugar to keep going and alcohol to wind down in moderation is fine but the stress can push the body too far. Watch out for depression and see a medical doctor if needed. The people here and many others do care about you.

I almost got fired because I kept on complaining that the expensive off site recovery process didn't work. It took three long years before things were corrected. Every lightening storm still makes me jumpy.

Let me tell you about CIPS then sign it because it is meaningless.

CIPS wants to portray itself as Medical Doctors, Engineers and Chartered Accountants but they are not. As a CIPS member for more than a decade let me tell you that CIPS is an organization for consultants to meet for drinks. Salespeople and managers are CIPS members. There are very few people who do anything more than sit in meetings, talk and send emails. CIPS talks big but that is because the regular jobs of the members is to talk big. If signing the form means that you can get another consulting job then sign the form because that is the purpose of CIPS which is to show that the members are better than the people behind the counter at Best Buy. There will be many CIPS members that have been in similar situations where the formal education does not match up with the check boxes on the cross border forms. It might be worthwhile to hire someone to get the specifics about the requirements for cross border working.

My understanding is the standards for other "professional" jobs such as hair cutting and fixing car brakes have more requirements because they are considered to have a direct consequence on the health of the public than the IT jobs. That is the context of the professionalism. It is wonderful that you take your professionalism seriously and I encourage you on that because it distinguishes you from all the others who don't give a damn.

Your knowledge, experience, and that you care about the quality of the product given to the customer says much more about you than a formal degree from a self serving group such as CIPS or a self serving institution such as a university. I also hate calculus and have never used it outside of a calculus course so I feel it does not need to be taught to 99% of the people who are required to learn it. A practical course on statistics would have been much much more worthwhile.

If you cannot decide what to do, do what I did: buy a sports car. You can see the Miata being driven around in the snow even in the middle of winter.

Is this a hardware+software company having trouble moving to software only company?

As the price of commodity hardware drops the buyers have a harder time to justify the higher price of custom hardware. Is EMC having trouble moving from a hardware + software company to mainly software company? Other companies have had big internal political problems when the people who controlled the hardware side of the company were losing political power to the software side. Is the price of commodity SSDs going to drop so low that traditional spinning rust manufacturers go out of business? In some sense the part of the disk controller software has moved to the ssd controller and is included in the commodity price.

Oracle does not innovate or create new products that customers want. EMC does try to be better. I could see EMC / VM trying to create a software defined "lights out" infrastructure but it will take much internal pushing aside the hardware team. In contrast Oracle would do a lot marketing with a rebranded snake oil Java vm and only achieve huff and puff.

Author says 'Twitter psychosis is not real.'

An interesting review by someone who studies neurology:

http://neurocritic.blogspot.ca/2014/07/twitter-psychosis-as-cultural-artifact.html

Forcast for the next 10 days: cold

-70 C and that is not considering the wind chill. The wind is at least 135,000 km/h but it is likely a dry cold.

Or perhaps ...

1) The user's requirements of the servers is very skewed with very important transactions on one server and non-important stuff on all others. Thus the people budget do not share the money for overall benefit but choose products which have direct benefit to their specific server.

2) The very important transactions are very time sensitive and there cannot be delays that might happen if other servers were doing heavy i/o such as being completely refreshed. If a server is being used for real time trading of stocks then the user might have a fear of unknown caused delays which rumor might be virtualization.

3) The CSA is relatively newish so there is heavy advertising to tell potential buyers about the product. I wonder if the purpose is actually to postpone upgrading the server. If the cost of a new server is very significant and requires much management justification, planning, reporting, budgeting then the CSA might increase transaction throughput enough to postpone the managers paperwork.

An easy to use backup to a different geographic area would be good.

Many backups are either on site or to a near by site. But serious weather problems and electrical blackouts can happen over a larger area so an easy cloud backup to a different geographic area would be good.

Disaster recovery? What do you do if you have outsourced your call center to the Philippines and a hurricane hits? What is the average wait time?

I do not believe that a single backup application is the best because it does not not know the specific gritty application details however a general purpose backup application is great for all of those miscellaneous applications. Use an OS specific backup app to backup the OS because there seems to be hidden files and files with extra "this file cannot be read". Database have to have their own backup software to ensure transactionally correct backups.

Oh yea, also make a separate small "in case of emergency" backup which can be used to create a minimal system to start the recovery process.

A multiapp method is way more work but the single applications do not seem to have the documentation that I would like see and understand that the application provider has thoroughly tested the app. For example try to get a list of files which the backup application does not backup.