* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

Cisco network kit warning: Watch out for malware in the firmware

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Re: Paywall downside

This is my personal opinion, formed from my experiences. I realise other people's experience may differ.

If Cisco didn't have the maintenance agreement scenario from hell, then perhaps more of the small-mid level people looking after their kit might be able to decide what they actually need to buy, in which case paywalls might make a little sense, though I disagree in principal with paywall for support services - if you need an ongoing maintenance contract to fix bugs present at the time of purchase, it encourages people to download support software from unofficial sources.

As for their complexity... For example, if you buy a Cisco telepresence system, then you don't get a lifetime's upgrades thrown in; you don't even get 1 year's worth of upgrades thrown in. You get nada. I bought one and discovered a bug in the firmware that prevented us from using it as we wished on our network. It was fixed in a firmware released about a month after I bought the kit.

"Did you buy the software maintenance package *insert long string of serial numbers*?"

"No, I bought the maintenance package *insert different long string of serial numbers*."

"Ah. That's for SX units with a different add-on package option. That'll be £460 please."

"How about 'sold fit for purpose'?"

"Hmmm... Well, we'll let you download it this time, but that'll be it!"

If you want Webex, they make it look simple - 3 prices, 3 choices. But look closely - there's Webex training centre, Webex Meeting Centre, Webex Support Centre, Collaboration Meeting Rooms... and then if you've invested in a room system they want you to pay £1ks more for a Touch screen that integrates Outlook and Webex, plus a subscription to this add-on and...

So on and so forth.

They are a diverse company, and have a lot of products; they buy up companies that catch their eye and turn THEM into complex beasts. They have products that differ by the order of words in the title each having its own pricing and support structure. The products themselves are generally great, but the whole sales and support is an utter nightmare.

Samsung's little black box will hot-wire your car to the internet. Eek!

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until some hacker opens the doors whilst I'm on the motorway withe the kids in the back.

Redback sinks fangs into Oz builder's todger

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Re: but what was the IT angle?

The IT angle? Something to do with "the web"?

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I guess that's one fellow who's going to be more than a little ...

*removes sunglasses*

...sore down under.

*Frreeeoooowwww! Guitar chords*

NASA saves Kepler space 'scope by turning it off and on again

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Re: Hoover

Sorry. Hoover Constellation. Best vac I ever used. Not the best at cleaning, but the most fun.

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Re: Hoover

All that interstellar dust has to be cleaned up by someone you know. I used to have a Hoover Galay - looked like a cross between BB8, Thunderbird 2 and Luke's speeder.

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Hack = journalist.

China's Dalek-like robots fear only one terrifying nemesis: Stairs

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There's already one in London...

At 30 St Mary Axe.

Germans stick traffic lights in pavements for addicts who can't take their eyes off phones

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Re: Darwin award??

I would not like to be the person who has to hose down the front and underside of the trams, TYVM.

US government tells Apple it has security problems that Apple fixed last year

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Re: Old trick

You scratch our back, we'll scratch yours.

Shares down?! But, but, but ... Apple just made $50bn – that's the way the Cookie grumbles

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Macroeconomic headwinds...???

Well, I had some macrobiotic bottomwinds once; I know what that's like. Not pleasant. For anyone.

How IT are you? Find out now in our HILARIOUS quiz!

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Re: How IT are you?

I thought the Hurt was the unit of measure of distress caused by an alien life-form bursting out of your abdomen.

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Re: I went to university down in Brighton...

@Peter. Brighton University was still a poly in my day too; I was at Sussex.

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I went to university down in Brighton...

where there was a big Scientology thing going on. And they hook you in with personality quizzes which invariably are designed to show you that you are a good person but you need to spend £4000 on a course which will teach you to correct x, y or z personality defect which is holding you back and stopping you from becoming a millionaire like Tom Cruise.

Being a psychology undergraduate, much like Dabbsy's victim, I went to their in depth feedback assessment and promptly took apart their questionnaire, scoring each question for positive/negative bias, control question loading etc etc and left their interviewer (a very attractive young lady, what a surprise) as a nervous wreck. My girlfriend who had been given the hard sell by an attractive young man (again, what a surprise), told me she'd signed up for two years of courses and did I think we could live the rest of the year on just my grant money - which sent me into a meltdown. She was, of course, joking; which meant she won that one.

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Re: Cockney Quiz

Cockney or Essex? In two questions.

(1) Were you born within the sound of Bow Bells?

(2) Were you born within the sound of Bow Legs?

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Last question should have been...

How do you feel?

Repeated several times when you don't answer. Because we all know that answering 12 question internet quizzes is what Spock was really doing at the start of Voyage Home.

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

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Re: "A bigger hammer was employed" [...]

We called them "variable pressure applicators" or "impulse generators"

Dutch students serve up world's first 'drone café'

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Is the control code...

written in java?

Microsoft's Azure and Office 365 growth slows

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Office 365 stinks.

It's an awful product. Talk about alienating your established user base... they could write a book on it. Provided they can get their word processor to do the stuff that word processors used to do and millions of power users know exactly how to get to in the menus, like footnotes, indexing, keep-with-next, chaptering, style-based numbering, bibliographies, sections, column control, gutters, drop caps etc etc.

It's still perfectly fine for the mindset who, say, like to centre a front piece title on the page by using paragraph marks, or who number all the figure captions by hand.

RIP Prince: You were the soundtrack of my youth

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Re: The Mike Tyson one...

All right, all right. No need to chew my ear off about it.

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The Mike Tyson one...

That's an internet joke, right? Please, tell me it's a fake account.

Kent Police handed domestic abuse victim's data to alleged abuser – a Kent cop

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FAIL

Ouch!

That's a big FAIL.

Official: EU goes after Google, alleges it uses Android to kill competition

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Re: Surely the AFA prevents companies...

Ah, right. So Android contains a lot of derived code then?

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Re: Others?

I believe Apple are making their own apps "removable" in the next iOS, but have stated that they have difficulty doing that because of the need to provide the API in the OS for data passing up and down consistently between the silo'ed applications. There's no guarantee that replacing, say, mail with snazzymail will allow safe and complete passage of data into the iOS layer and back out again.

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Re: Surely the AFA prevents companies...

Yep. Thanks for the intelligent discussion. If I'm misunderstanding, as I said, please let me know.

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Surely the AFA prevents companies...

Correct me if I'm wrong here... but doesn't the AFA effectively prevent companies from taking something that someone else has done and using that as a base to fork out their own proprietary version which may or may not work with the Google Play, thus denying Google the revenue stream used to recoup their investment in developing Android in the first place? I can't see much unfairness in the system as it stands. Do mobe makers have to license Android and, if so, does that licensing fee really reflect the development and maintenance costs if one were to lock out any future revenue stream as a result of people using the licensed software?

123-reg still hasn't restored customers' websites after mass deletion VPS snafu

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Re: Cowboys Ted. They're A Bunch Of Cowboys.

Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy.

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Or...

Couldn't you say you'd been on safari?

Or been in the Merchant Navy?

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I'm sure that they can remove that part of their work history. They're good at deleting things.

NASA injects cash into solar electric motor

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... will help send large amounts of cargo, habitats and propellant to Mars in advance of a human...

Yeah, I watched that film too. Best send 200 tonnes of poo up as well, just in case.

Video folk, you'll love the 96TB, 2.6GB/sec LaCie 12big HDD

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Re: Pricing is unlikely to be cheap.

You find this too? As far back as 1992 I've been having to replace LaCie PSUs. Dreadful quality on the old electrics.

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Re: TWO SECONDS to transfer a DVD?

I can do that for you in 0.5 seconds. Ready? CATCH.

EU: We're splashing out €6.7bn on a giant scientific cloud

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Re: What could possibly go wrong?

You can see little bits of grant money spent on paying for commercial hosting services, or one big thump of money on something people might actually use. Of course data structures are so massively varied that there can be no standardisation of even meta-data storage and indexing, so I expect it will end up as just a simple file store. We had a collaborative system that scoured meta-data and stored it in a searchable index. You could search by, for example, instrument manufacturer, objective, fluorescence filter & magnification for microscopes, column type for chromatography, run-time, voltage & current for blots etc, reagents, antibodies (provided someone entered those data) - loads of stuff. Did it ever get used? No. Just got used as one big file store, and now it's gathering dust at the top of a server rack.

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So long as they use units, it'll be fine. None of this lbs thrust vs kg thrust business.

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"It will then be expanded to the public sector and to industry."

Yeah, right. I'd like to see that happen. Patient data is one thing when it comes to security - anything else Big Pharma has, like potential drug structures, they want wrapped up and buried twice as deep at least.

In principle, not a bad idea. In practice... we'll have to see.

NZ Pastafarians joined in noodly wedlock

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Re: Bunch of tosspots

Jeebus anointed with olive oil. And then there was the last supper - did he "eat of the body" with ravioli? And what wine goes with fish and pasta?

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Re: Bunch of tosspots

Jummah. Just saying...

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Re: Bunch of tosspots

Even Cloisterism (or Clisterism) had to find ways of dividing amongst themselves so they could war against each other. Red or blue hats. It was supposed to be green.

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Re: Bunch of tosspots

The take-away message is that people need something to believe in. I guess Pastafarianism, being somewhat new, lets people choose rather than follow the path their parents have durumed into them since birth.

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Re: Bunch of tosspots

*cough* Jedi...

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The reception began with...

Pea and parmesan noodles in a thin, clarified saffron soup.

In other words, their union was consomméated soon after the ceremony.

Cambridge Uni spins up green and beefy supercomputer project

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Absolute zero is easy peasey

Just try it on with my ex wife. Way below ice cold.

Obama to admit Moon landing was faked?

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Re: Spot on

I've got the Banker on the line now...

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Thumb Up

Re: ?

Worth The Fiver? I'll say it was.

Academic network Janet clobbered with DDoS attacks – again

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Re: Joint Academic NETwork ?

Dammit, JANET, we love you...

Belgian boffins breed 'digital canaries' to test your random numbers

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Re: I won't even begin...

You lost me at numbers having entropy. And then confused me by talking about thermal noise which I know *is* something to do with entropy.

UK authorities probe 'drone hitting plane at Heathrow'

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Re: ...by our most thick-fingered security inspector.

"By Abu Hamza who has come back to carry out his community service sentence."

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Re: uninsured birds?

"Your honour, regarding the photograph of the brown smears along the nose cone of the aircraft, which subsequent forensic analysis showed to be, in fact, breadcrumbs accompanied by a secret spice mix, the prosecution would like to enter into evidence a receipt found on the accused's person, said receipt detailing the purchase of a 'Bargain Bucket' from the branch of KFC located at 9 Bath Road, Hounslow, and another receipt from the Yeading Branch of B&Q for a tube of 'Gorilla Glue', also found about the defendant's person upon their arrest..."

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Re: "a really stupid thing to do, as not only does it endanger passengers, it is punishable by law"

Other way around? Endangers the law and is punishable by passengers? Yes, I can see that working. "Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to Heathrow. Just to inform you that during our landing approach we did come within 40m of a drone. The operator of the drone has been restrained and will be available in the secluded spot just underneath gate 12, where we've parked a luggage truck in front of the CCTV camera for you."