Posts by phuzz

Re: I think the real problem is...

Could that be because most of the dubiously famous people are young (which is not unusual, young people tend to be more photogenic), so those are the ones you notice, and possibly you're generalising all the other young people who are as private as they can be?

(ie selection bias)

Re: Comparison

The big difference is, in the UK if the government's budget wasn't voted through, the government would just keep on going, using the same budget from last year.

US people, why don't you do this rather than shutting down (almost) every federal agency?

Re: Shutdown

But those things only affect poor people, and the US has never given a shit about them before.

Something will be done the instant the corporations are affected, people aren't the important ones.

Re: Tough, he made his choice.

"he decided to contract his services to some people with, erm, questionable ethics"

Did he? Or did someone turn up at his door one day and tell him his options were to work for the boss, or an unmarked grave on the edge of town?

I admit I've only just heard of the system in question, but if they send out SMSs then surely they hold people's phone numbers? I'm not sure how it works in Aus but here in GDPR-land a phone number is considered personal information.

Re: Backups

I had a boss who would delete almost everything, and only leave the most important stuff in his inbox (to be deleted when he'd dealt with it). He was an IT manager and had a strong technical background, and was only dissuaded after I emptied his deleted mails whilst fixing another problem, eventually agreeing that maybe archive folders were what he really needed.

Yeah Malc, you know I'm talking about you mate ;)

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

It's daft, but that is basically what the law currently says. You can (legally) have sex with someone at the age of 16, but you can't take pictures or video of yourself doing it, nor can you buy pictures or videos of other people having sex.

(Of course, this is before we even get into the 'what is porn anyway, and why are statues of nuddy women ok?' argument.)

Re: on a similar note ...

I've got two monitors on my desk here at work, and the one on the left will reset (ie go black for 5s) whenever either, the printer next to it starts up, or the heater behind me turns on. All are plugged into the same power cord (which is daisy-chained round the room in a most unsafe manner).

I'm used to it by now.

Re: Imagine anything as efficient

The Amiga was so powerful because of all it's custom chips, which dealt with graphics, sound, I/O etc. The CPU was only a small part of what made the system great.

And if you meet someone in the their late 30's/early 40's who's named their daughters Agnes, Paula, and Denise, you can take a pretty good guess at what computer they had as a kid ;)

Or to put it more succinctly (and with less CAPITAL LETTER SHOUTING):

You know how hard it is to get your insurance company to pay out for a small dent/fire/theft? Well imagine how hard it is to get an insurance company to pay out for two massive sky-scrapers.

It's not surprising that younger people have never learnt about binary/ocatal etc. as they've never needed to.

Pretty much the entire history of IT over the last thirty something years has been to abstract away the hardware level details, and to just present the user with a higher level view.

Or to put it another way, you can have an entire career in IT without ever needing to understand binary, and personally I don't see that as a bad thing.

Re: @AC "wouldn't be common freakin' sense to not surf dodgy websites at work?"

I've been told the tale of a sysadmin at a particular university, who would take advantage of their JANET connection to download effectively all of the new images on Usenet daily, and would archive to tape to take home.

No points for guessing what sorts of images.

Re: I learnt to test my WHERE clauses on a DELETE with a SELECT first

If i'm typing a particularly long command that will delete or otherwise change a lot of files, I'll either not add the sudo rm at the start, or type zsudo in case I accidentally hit the enter key before I'm ready.

I'm sure we've all deleted a parent directory when we were intending to delete a subdir.

Re: Remember

I'm about ten years too young to have seen any of the Apollo missions, but I do remember sitting in a pub, watching SpaceX stick their first landing of a rocket on their robot-barge, on my phone via 4G.

What I was watching wasn't quite as cool as Apollo, but the technology that allowed me to watch it has definitely advanced.

I tend to disdain anyone who has a PA, but PA's themselves are very useful people to be friends with.

Re: Stolen ?

It would rather depend on how you were caught. If a police car rocks up and the first thing you say is "I found this bike and I was taking it to the police station", and you're on a road leading to the police station, the outcome will be very different to if the police find it in your lockup hidden under a tarp.

UK law tends to take that the circumstances around a crime matter at least as much as the exact wording of the law. How else would a legal system cope with the grey areas that are life?

Out of interest, where was Venus at 7am this morning?

You're missing a state.

There's PC, when the computer is on your desk. Server, when the machine is somewhere in your office, and mainframe, when the machine is in someone else's office and they rent it to you (we call this 'cloud', or 'stuff-as-a-service' this time around).

IT as an industry tends to move between these states, I think we're somewhere near mainframe at the moment.

Re: in the POSIX world...

Sandboxes are there for when a program requires root access (or at least more than a standard guest user), and one can't be bothered to spin up an entire VM.

After all, Windows does have multiple users as well.

Re: Hmm...

So to summarise your position: "I'm ok, fuck everyone else".

Re: Soyuz

Soyuz crews have worn pressure suits since Soyuz 11, when a pressure equalisation valve opened prematurely and all the crew died. So as long as the tiny hole didn't cause any thermal problems, the crew would probably survive.

Re: "the company has been valued at $1.7bn"

"A word of advice to the founders: Cash out now. VCs and their cash are easily parted, but eventually they'll smell a theranos that they've trodden in."

They've only been going for two years, they should be able to rinse the VCs for at least 4-5 years before they realise that the company has no revenue whatsoever. Thernaos made it from 2003 all the way up until 2018. Uber is still going despite losing money hand over fist every year.

You're about a factor of 1024 out there (MB should be GB, and GB should be TB), but otherwise I agree.

Even a basic desktop linux (eg Mint) needs almost 10GB these days.

Re: 'Murica never ceases...

"I also wish that firearms for self protection were allowed in the UK."

Protection from what exactly?

"or the dodgy fibre switch that runs one of the database back ends"

Or in our case the switch which has ended up becoming a core switch just because important things were plugged into it willynilly. Which now has degraded to the point where the only way to connect to it is by manually putting it's MAC into your ARP cache.

Of course the things plugged into it don't have redundant connections and can't possibly be unplugged for any reason, or so I'm told at least.

(I might 'accidentally' depower it at some point just to force the issue)

"you can put a Yubikey USB dongle into an RJ45 port"

With a bit of force you can fit any standard USB (A) connector into a RJ45 port.

As I found out when a user came to me complaining that their laptop dock/port expander wasn't working (well, actually they were complaining that their email wasn't coming through). When I got there my first thought was to check the ethernet cable, which was plugged securely into the dock, and the USB connection for that was also plugged securely into...the RJ45 port in their laptop.

I did congratulate them for managing to do something I had never thought possible, but they didn't seem that enthused.

If you're going to try this, pick an ethernet port you don't care about, it might well damage it a bit.

Re: CCTV

"Imagine that all the CCTV cameras were to be replaced with large watchtowers. [...] How would that make you feel? Safer?"

To be honest, yes, that probably would make me feel safer. You'd get to know your local watchers, their memory would be fallible, they'd fall asleep sometimes, etc.

A real human being in a guard tower would be less scary to me than cctv.

AKA "it's not our fault the shitty company we hired turned out to be shit"

Re: Again, why bother

Why bother adding an extra board when you can just use the built in lights-out management which is built into practically every server?

Re: Rich man poor man

Well ISPs in the US already get a subsidy to pay for them rolling out broadband to less well off areas. This whole article is about how they'd like to reduce the definition of 'broadband' to make it easier (and cheaper) for themselves.

So your society has already deemed that everyone should get internet access, but the ISPs are trying to change the rules so that they don't have to spend as much money.