Posts by Denarius

So cameras for sefie in HD ?

Back to film now Polaroid packs are available

A really bad week ?

My commiserations on what must have been a truly awful week. Being a lowly tech in the trenches means the PHB and sales weasel class rarely go near us, sparing the IT staff the ungentle shower of lies and misrepresentation. Well done on a classy rant.

well done sir !

ever thought of consulting for Tony Budgie Smuggler ? You would wow him and Brandflakes. Even the USSA should consider your services

so long as its

merely extend, not embrace. One would not want a SCO vs the universe legal show to start in about 5 years as to who owns what in source code trees. If genuine it may keep Microsoft very relevant to software for a long time. That would be tectonic as it looked until recently it was joining IBM in decline IMHO.

One hopes that Cloud first is not the security disaster of the year

What's the betting some-one unknowledgeable, therefore an expert, will insist data of value to identity thieves will go into a cloud solution for a big department to save 20c. Since access will be hard for the experts, there will be little security, thus enabling most of the country to be Pawned. This will be used as the excuse for more ineffective holding of irrelevant emails and conversations in the unholy name of security. I can think of a prime candidate with a shiny new headkicker minister but since this is a police state I cant say which in case an arbitrary set of rulez is borken.

That picture

shouldn't it be on a Sony article ?

Well done headline

Good to see history remembered and punned on. Even better choice of image.

this could be good to watch

deckchair and popcorn please !

I like that phrase

"portable idiot lanterns" is new to me. Very apt without the Debian. Synonym for fondleslab. Something for next years Oxford English ?

Wonderful, just great

some-one else shares my loathing of Xmas and its tedious, irritating cultural relics. Well done Simon. Most enjoyable, especially "truffle wombles". What is the origin of that pejorative ? I think I have met a few. Enough truffles grown locally, rhapsodised about by wannabe food critics/snobs.

Phone makers too ?

Colour me unsurprised. Aren't we all product or suspected crims now, instead of customers and citizens ?

Oh I dunno

Had fun with a recent insurance survey on my experience with their latest cold call, which was dropped on me despite being on Do Not Call register. When I responded "no" to the obligatory "Tell the staff if you do not want this called recorded" question sales droid hung up. Apparently the script says drop call. It will make no difference, but it was fun to tell them their cold call script writers logic needs work, aside from their history of not paying claims. Except for the occasional opportunity for messing with sales weasels heads, agree surveys are a waste of time, especially political party/pressure group ones.

Odd

After 15 years of being told we techs were a high expense, had too expensive conditions, wanted costly training to do work with new kit and software etc it became easy to think IT techs were unwanted while the number of managers, release managers, change control and finance refusers continued to grow. So suddenly there is a place for local staff that actually do IT? No wonder I discourage kids from IT. The bulldust causes breathing difficulties. While the managerial classes continue to think of themselves as minor deities and depreciate technical skills it will only get worse in the IT coalface.

A digression: The way admin timewasting rules are invented to micromanage staff suggests to me the PHB group don't have enough to do and feel inadequate. So Northcote Parkinsons famous dictum comes into play. "Work expands to fill time available"

I hope this does not mean

more bot army C&C domains appearing quickly. More spam sources likewise. Have I missed other appropriate fears ? Or, are deckchairs and popcorn appropriate if one is in cloud and hosting businesses ?

not unexpected

The same people own the US gov as all the other private companies spying. So they are just sharing the code to improve their intrusion on us all. And doing it very cleverly by making it look like niceness. But the code is still used to analyse, track and spy, as if search companies do not do enough of that already.

until it is approved by the NSA

the local OZ glove puppets and their equally supine tools, the assorted spook agencies will recommend against using either companies products until approved by their owners, the powers that rule Merkin Land. In the meantime, watching the feeble brains of the pollies warbling about how great free trade agreements are while simultaneously spouting FUD about Chinese made telco kit will be briefly entertaining. Especially if TalkBull continues his "No problems with offshore data storage" spiel. I am sure the PLA tiger teams will love to help analyse Oz metadata for terrorists. All for free except our pollies will insist we pay again for being spied on.

I used to think this talk was tin hat stuff, but now I feel reality has copied paranoid conspiracy fantasies.

so the point of cloud is ?

I thought that was one of the marketing weasels main selling points, how the Cloud is robust and fault tolerant. CEO must be yank trained; he customer is always wrong.

nerd nirvana

real coffee at last. I wonder what roast and origin? Might need peruvian and dark roast as I believe low gravity tend to cause taste insensitivity.

usual traditional pollies and bureacrats

Only try ideas been tested anywhere else that have failed. Make sure they don't work by trying it in Oz. We do better stuffups with a straight face than any other western "democracy" About time to remove all foreign born or educated pollies and clerks with big salaries and give some jobs to Australians, not colonial crawlers from Sydney and Toorak.

so where is the cheap optical NIC

Intel announced it was working on 3 years ago ? Not that those of us out of CBDs would ever need one. Big Swamps wet string suffices.

SOP

whenever any Oz pollie says < insert name> is priority, expect cuts next month. Continuing the destruction of Oz secondary and tertiary industries so we revert to the corporate agribusiness with remote landlords and mining pit of the past is, for some reason (do not mention treason), an unspoken goal of federal governments since Fraser got thrown out. Perhaps we should just outsource our pollies. Might be cheaper and more competent. Might remove the burden of political party funding bodies as social parasites.

waiting, waiting

for some self loathing human hating clod to whine about leaving junk lying around in the pristine cosmos like they have about Moon relics from Apollo, or is only Oz that has this kind of compulsive whiners ? Meanwhile, well done to ESA boffins of all skills.

worth planning orbiters?

time for orbiter and maybe atmospheric probes if something worth seeing can happen. Neptune also looks very different to other gas giants. A close look at Tirton might be instructive too. Nitrogen geysers spraying into space so material sampling is possible. Hang on, another couple of self created wars to blow debt on first.

a definite maybe

if one is not well or in heavy training. Tried a pulse and oxygen saturation monitoring kit for a high altitude flight a couple of years back. Any take off is always a bit stressful. Even experienced competition pilots feel it. The frequent squeals from heart rate monitor made me tear it off and once I am aviating, I do not play with cockpit distractions that should just work. Again, where does data go and how is that verified ? At home the firewall and proxy logs can tell me heaps but on a phone ? Now there is an app waiting to be coded. Traffic analyser and firewall for smart phone so you can see who is snooping.

has the ITU

hired some copper PHBs lately ? Or do its lowerarchy attend the same country clubs as the PHBs from the spook TLAs ? IOT was always about snooping, just for different reasons. How much longer before not being an obedient consumer becomes a crime ? See ElReg a year ago for Frog simple lifestyle citizens who were suspicious for not having mobiles. That the hamlet they lurked in had no coverage was not something the plods considered.

good luck to them

if you trust your telco performance, local and not so local backhoes and can afford a big pipe. Oh, and class of data might matter too. OTOH, Oracle are a trifle expensive. My recent work experience suggested Oracle DBAs were not impressed by support services and pricing to say the least. Always wondered why the Oracle compatibilty mode of Postgress was not used more to break the lock-in. Is Postgress performance too slow, because my limited experience suggests it performs very well. Regardless, Amazon are providing an alternative for some market segments which is A Good Thing.