Posts by big_D

Re: Brilliant?

I'm sort of glad that Grand Tour is finished. The first couple of episodes were reasonably good. But they just kept re-hashing the same old jokes - sabotaging each other's vehicles, doing stupid things, where you could see the punchline before they even started with the joke.

The last season was pretty embarrassing. It took me ages to actually get through it, because I'd start with an episode, find it too banal, them come back to it a couple of weeks later, watch another 10 minutes and so on.

The Jim Clark episode was a real highlight. Wheelspinning through a vegetable garden, not so much... The Columbia episode could have been great, but it was just rehashed kindergarten idiocy with some breathtaking scenery.

Re: Fck Google

They are probably looking to see if they can write the fine down as a charitable donation!

Re: Deliberate greed

You are not obliged to pay the monthly lease, if the credentials are stolen... Or if the phone is stolen - AT&T should then put the IMEI on the blocked list, but most carriers ignore this.

Over here, the carrier can lock the phone to their network for the duration of the lease purchase. When that runs out, they either have to automatically unlock it or unlock it for free upon request.

That said, most people I know buy the phone outright from a discounter, like Amazon, Alternate etc. or a local electronics shot, nowadays and just stick their SIM in it. Company phones are about the only ones I know that are still on contract (although I know a couple of companies that now buy phones in bulk and issue them to their employees and get SIM only contracts. The days of heavily subsidised phones are long gone, here.

Re: Oh America

Yeah, I was watching the news last night and there was a report on the Dayton mass shooting, the 250th this frigging year!!!

Looking at the statistics for 1999 to 2016, there were around 13 incidents of mass killings in Germany

Re: Shutting down the wrong server

We do this for every device we send out, servers, SANs, tape drives, NAS, PCs, laptops, monitors, printers, smartphones. They also get the asset tracking number and the Redmine ticket number with the devices configuration information.

Those that have a static IP-address also get a label with that.

Re: Except Google is shite (and getting shiter)

The best are when you are searching for support or documentation on a product. Enter "handbook for <device>" or "<device> error code 123" and the page will be littered with online shops, comparison sites, reviews of the product, you have to dig a long way down to find anything relevant to the search.

I mean, if you are searching for help on a product, especially an error code, chances are that you won't be looking to buy another one!

Re: Ahhh passwords...

Plaintext or encrypted. Hashing, as you rightly surmise wouldn't work.

Re: Ahhh passwords...

I started work at one company, as their first IT Manager. Until that point, they had had external contractors running their IT. This was a company with a couple of hundred employee, working on 3 sites.

When I started, the first thing to do, was to change the administrator password - but the accountant didn't want that, because all the wanna-be admins wouldn't then be able to log on! Then there was the user passwords. The consultant had set everybody's passwords to "12345" and they couldn't change them "for ease of support."

I then checked around the server configurations and the first thing I spotted was, that all of these user accounts with password 12345 also had Exchange mail, with OWA exposed and mobile device access open... So anybody, anywhere in the world, with the email address of an employee of the firm could log onto the web portal and give the password 12345 and they were in...

A hectic morning of going through all accounts and disabling OWA and mobile access and setting the "change password at logon" flag... Followed by wailing and gnashing of teeth and a stern word from the CEO for "disrupting" his business...

Curiously, the company went into receivership shortly thereafter...

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

The point being, Google are arguing that all the stuff around the name, like the https:// and the trailing / are irrelevant and shouldn't be shown to the user, but if the user leaves them out, it breaks.

Re: I reckon the proper term is 'institutional stupidity'

What I really hate with the Omnibox is the way it will ignore DNS and go to the search page if you enter a local server name.

Enter myserver and you get Google.com search myserver.

Enter myserver.mydomain and you get Google.com search myserver.mydomain

Enter http(s)://myserver and you have a good chance it will actually resolve to your server.

If the http(s):// is not relevant, why won't it go to a local website when you enter just the server's name. If that name doesn't resolve, by all means display a search page, but if it resolves to a local website, display that first!

Re: Stop spying on me!

For our smartphones, the policy is no third party apps, no private data on company phones and no company data on private phones.

For email, we are warned that we can use the company account for private emails, but we have to remember that in an emergency a supervisor can be given temporary access to the account to retrieve business critical emails.

That said, the company also tends to set up departmental accounts for important functions, such as purchasing, sales etc.

I was working on one project, doing OLAP with Essbase in the late 90s. I had just bought a new PC at home a Pentium II/400 with 16MB RAM.

At work we had an HP ProLiant server with dual Pentium Pro processors. Recalculating the OLAP cube on that took over 4 hours. In the end, it was quicker to export the bottom row data, save it to a ZIP disk, drive an hour home, load it up on my machine, re-calculate the data, export everything, drive back to the office and re-load the cube!

The Zip disk proved very useful, and I luckily never suffered from the click-of-death with my drives (external parallel and internal IDE)

Re: I remember floppy disks

I had an A500 + A590, with the memory also installed. I used to "borrow" SCSI drives from the Macs at work, just to see how quick they would make things. I kept one at home, until someone new came along and the old Mac Plus was assigned to them and I had to take the drive back.

I then got an A1200 - I wanted a 4000, but just couldn't afford it/justify the price.

Re: I remember floppy disks

Dragon's Lair came on half a dozen or so floppies on the Amiga. At my local computer store, in Southampton, the dealer set up an A500 with 5 external drives daisy-chained together, so you could play "uninterrupted", if you call waiting 10 seconds+ for the next scene to load uninterrupted - but at least you weren't constantly swapping floppies.

Re: I remember floppy disks

I remember installing the Windows 95 beta from a pile of 3.5" floppies!

The combo 5.25"/3.5" drives were useful for their time.

I have to say, I threw away my last couple of floppy disks a few weeks ago, when cleaning out the cupboards. I don't think I've actually used a floppy disk for nearly 20 years.

Re: move to a better deal

When I moved to Germany, I automatically went to Telekom, it was pretty much the only choice back in 2002. I had a standard ISDN with ADSL package, with 2mbps. I stuck with that for about a decade. Then, after moving, I found out my local telco could offer me 50mbps for the same price.

After being a customer for over a decade, I went back to Telekom and asked them what they could offer. The answer was 3mbps + satellite TV!

I had luck, the local telco had run their own cables throughout the town. In the meantime, I could also switch to cable, but they have repeatedly, falsely accused my wife of watching illegal cable TV (she had freeview satellite), so she won't let them anywhere near the house.

Re: Physical Access

I agree with you, in principal. But, if you are looking to sabotage an aircraft, it provides more ways that will be harder to discover - such as nothing to see in pre-flight or even an inspection, but hide a black box that starts working after an hour of flight, above a certain altitude or at specific coordindate and it is much more difficult to spot, until it is too late.

Again, this is only for a very serious case of sabotage, this isn't hi-jinx or fun and normal sabotage will be easier to carry out, although more easily spotted before it is too late.

Re: Physical Access

Given that security at many small airfields is poor to non-existent, I would say this is a relatively easy hack to perform. And judging by reality-TV like the aircraft repo series, getting onto a guarded airfield and flying away isn't all that difficult either.

What the hack allows is for the "easy" fixing of an aircraft to sabotage it. If you mess with the wings, fuel, flaps, fuel in the oil etc. you can cause it problems, but they could be discovered in pre-flight. Hide a small black box attached to the CAN bus that has a 30 minute or hour delay, before it becomes active and you have a much better chance. Make it radio controlled and you can change things on the fly.