Re: Bless
Ydw. A oes gennych caws ar dost yn Llundain?
Yes, and they don't call it Welsh Rarebit, either... :)
4260 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
<wanders off, muttering and wondering how this will improve humanity or help space exploration.>
It really is laughable reading some of the commentards on this thread. Their echoes could be traced back through history... listen!
"That Christopher Columbus, who does 'ee fink 'ee is, sailing off all over the place, waste of money, what use is it?"
"And what about that Captain Cook, eh, wasting the Royal Navy's money, can't see the point, we've discovered everything that's worth finding"
"Stupid steam Joyrides, have you seen them rich toffs paying good money to ride around on that circle that Richard Trevithick's built? What's the point of that then?"
"I hear George Stephenson's offering rides on his new steam tramway thing between Stockton and Darlington. I mean, what's the point? Who wants to go to Darlington anyway?"
"I'm glad they've brought in that new Locomotive Act, having someone in front with a red flag will just show those idiots who think horseless carriages will ever amount to anything. What a waste of money!"
"Have you heard about that Wilbur Wright bloke? He's supposed to have invented a flying machine thing, he's showing it off all round Europe. Can't see the point myself, it's not like it's useful for anything"
"They ought to ban those barnstormers, whizzing about everywhere in their airyplanes, why would you pay money to go up in one of them things, it's not like they're any use for anything really"
"What about Harry H. Knight and Harold M. Bixby then, they've put up $18,000 for some crazy stunt to fly across the Atlantic. What a waste of money!"
etc.
But seriously, this is not space, it's not even close. It's just above the Kármán line, a fairly arbitrary distinction, going fairly slowly by satellite standards. Go and do something useful with your money.
But this is exactly how road transport, and later air transport, finally took off (if you'll excuse the pun).
In both cases the rich eccentrics were the ones who started, with small steps, and eventually what they were doing progressed until it became of interest to more staid businesses, at which point some serious money started to be invested and it became more and more commonplace, and more accessible to the general populace.
The trouble with space travel is that it started with a politically driven effort to score points which was very dramatic, but very shortlived, and therefore skewed our perception. What you are seeing now is much more "the norm" it's just we've had our expectations raised by what's gone before.
The successful VTOL, especially the "L" bit, is a major step forwards. Elon must be grumbling to himself today that he didn't get there first, but a bit of healthy competition will benefit everyone.
If that is not a Star Trek reference than I do not know what is. James Doohan would have very happily delivered that line.
I think it's a combination of Star Trek and Doctor Who.
Jon Pertwee once ad-libbed "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" and it became a bit of a catch phrase for the Time Lord, but "tachyon inverter" certainly smells more Trekkie to me, although more TNG than TOS.
They've reversed the polarity on the tachyon inverter and suddenly used the thermostat to overwrite the hidden sectors on the tablet that controls the nuclear reactor. Oh noes!
Trevor, you've done it now mate, releasing closely guarded details like that can only lead to you being picked up for terrist activities.
How can anyone using a third party service guarantee any kind of up time/latency/page loading times etc. to a client?
This, exactly.
One of our sites was responding incredibly slowly some time back, and we traced the problem to the loading of custom fonts - not, as it happens from Fontdeck on that occasion, but a different supplier.
The web team was getting flak from the client, and were a bit snotty about our servers when they passed it to the Sysadmin team, so we took great pleasure in telling them there was bugger all we could do about it, and gave them the support email of the font provider. :)
Our Web team use Fontdeck quite a bit for custom fonts, so this is going to hit them hard.
As with the reported shuttering of Adobe's Photo cloud, this does call into question why you would constrain your business to the point of reliance on a cloud based service, which may disappear at any time.
Granted, Fontdeck have tried to do this in the least disruptive way, instead of abruptly disappearing without trace, but if no-one else provides an exact replica of a particular font they currently supply, then designers, developers and clients will all have to start again picking a replacement, which all costs time and money.
So what incentive is there to use a cloud based service, given you could be left in the lurch at any time?
Windows 3.11 on the other hand was to me at least a notoriously buggy interim release, quickly replaced by Windows 95 (and my company skipped Windows 3.11 entirely; so I view 3.11 as the first _Vista_ type release - the one to ignore until the right one came along).
This is completely at odds with my remembrances, my experience was that Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the first edition that gained any traction in a business environment, allied with the TCP stack add-on, and is certainly the first Windows edition I remember dealing with in any numbers. Prior to that we used to run MS-DOS and various custom front ends like XTree Gold.
I think you must have been lucky.
I had personal experience of installing ME on a large number of machines, due to a misguided PHB insisting, and a more god-forsaken unstable piece of crap has yet to be found (yes, even Vista and Win8 were better!).
Without any exaggeration I think we left it a month before uninstalling it and going back to 98SE - no small undertaking in itself.
This was on a range of hardware from different manufacturers, so it wasn't just a single model of PC.
Firstly, you really should have included Windows 2000 in the "Good", to my mind it was the most reliable, bomb-proof OS they produced, especially with SP4 plus.
Secondly, although Vista was unmistakeably awful in it's own right, one of the big reasons for it's failure was Microsoft's then policy of not releasing details of the new OS to hardware manufacturers until the last minute - on the grounds of secrecy - which meant that when the OS was released almost nobody had got round to writing Vista compatible drivers for most common hardware, including graphics cards, sound cards, network cards etc. so you were bloody lucky if your chosen hardware would work properly.
Amongst the exhibits on display you will find the following:
A machine capable of travelling submersed in a marine environment, the "Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device"
A device invented to encrypt and decrypt messages, the "Engine for the Neutralizing of Information by the Generation of Miasmic Alphabets"
A machine to make coffee really quickly "The-Very-Fast-Coffee-Machine"
A device to propel a small projectile accurately and quickly, "The Gonne".
A spokesperson from Sheffield City Council said: “... We noticed immediately and recalled the email and alerted data protection officers."
The very first lesson in school ICT, and in all these IT literacy courses should be "YOU CAN'T RECALL AN EXTERNAL EMAIL!"
I bet they feel so proud they recalled it immediately...
Shame...
Hands up if...
...You've been the one to have to do a long drive to switch a box back on after you got confused between "Restart" and "Shutdown"
Never sure if it's more embarrassing explaining to the boss why you suddenly have to drive to the other side of the country (UK only), or explaining to an onsite technician that you fucked up, and please can he wander along and restart it...
We run some monitoring software on a VM instance in Amazon's EU-West cloud, which we use to keep a check on our servers which are in various datacentres around the UK. Yesterday at about 14:00 GMT we started getting buried in alert emails, as the AWS instance couldn't see any of our stuff in Union Solutions, 6Degrees, Node4 and various other providers. We ended up turning the monitoring off, and weren't able to start it again until past 19:00 GMT last night, and it's still a bit flaky today.
A newish developer with our company, who was working on some bulk mail software, decided to create his own test email addresses by running his fingers up and down his keyboard, and then inserting a dot before the last two or three letters. He did this for about 1,000 addresses, and then sent them all a test email.
He was successful in creating quite a few real domains using that method and we ended up fielding a lot of bounces, including some from an obscure military establishment in the US...
I wasn't best pleased, especially since we have our own test email server with a specified domain set up for sending to.
@dan1980
Before the ubiquitous availability of Internet access and use of mobile devices, there was very little opportunity for families (or friends) to communicate with each other through the day and this, naturally puts a large focus on those times when it is possible to have a conversation.
But that was then. Now, families have the ability to communicate very nearly whenever they want. Through social media and mobile phones, I would suspect that many parent know more about their where there children are and who they are friends with and what music and activities they like than they ever did before.
The thing is though, Dan, that communication is all very well, and you are correct that it is easier and more available now, but the ability to communicate is notthe same as proper social interaction, and in particular the close family interaction which you get from regularly eating together or gathering together.
There is strong evidence to suggest that the children of families who set aside time to get together regularly are more confident socially, and in particular young children's language acquisition and literacy development are much better in families who regularly eat together than in children from families who rarely spend time together.
Microsoft is a long way behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) market but makes up for that to some extent by a huge SaaS (Software as a Service) presence with Office 365,
Whilst this is undoubtedly true, Azure does have one distinct advantage, and that is the cost of Database storage if you need to use Microsoft SQL.
Unsurprisingly, to bring up a Windows Server 2012 VM with SQL Server 2014 on it requires software licensing, however Microsoft deliberately undercut their normal SQL pricing to make it a no-brainer to choose Azure over AWS.
But you'd have thought a company with the vast resources of Apple could assign someone to keep an eye on such things.
Umm, I would argue that in a company of Apple's size, (or Google, or Microsoft, or Facebook) then it's likely to always be someone else's job, whereas in a small company it will definitely be assigned to a single individual.
And even then, it's possible to miss one... ask me how I know...
Yes, for those based in Britain.
So, as someone who currently hosts a load of websites for friends, when am I going to be instructed as to how long I need to hold web log data from my servers?
And. as a Sys Admin for a company that hosts thousands of web sites in the UK (but is not an ISP by current definition) when are we going to be formally informed as to our obligations regarding log data? At present there doesn't seem to be a clearly defined period for which we have to hold logs, nor is there much information about when we should destroy log data.
Landis pleaded guilty to felony counts of computer trespass, tampering with public records, and unlawful use of a computer.
Why?
He didn't do any of that, in fact nobody did, he just tried (unsuccessfully) to hire someone else to do it?
He could be convicted of intent, but surely that's a different charge?
Exactly, no-one should be using Google translate for official documents (or websites), it just isn't clever enough yet to deal with the myriad of variations in human language.
And people misuse it without checking what it is the algorithms think they are translating, too.
Al
believe PCI-DSS should be much more restrictive than it currently is and not allow masked details to be included in the same detail as the encrypted card number as you are basically making breaking the encryption easier.
I think you are misunderstanding.
The encryption is applied to the stored data, which is only the first 6 and last 4 digits. There (should be) no circumstance where the full card number is stored in any format.
Whether Talk Talk followed this is, of course, open for discussion.
Few people have a legitimate need for encryption so it's a lot of noise over nothing.
A-Huh. So only a few people use credit cards, or have confidential data? So you'd be quite happy for anyone to be able to access all your bank details and personal information?
These providers will not be able to block or throttle traffic in their networks or give priority to some particular content or services in exchange for payment.
To be fair, the telling phrase is that one in bold, and shouldn't have any impact on government imposed filtering, which (should) not be driven by commercial interests.
@ Graham Marsden, Yep, having waited so long for the sequel to appear, I was very disappointed with the eventual release, far too much psychobabble and soap opera. When you think of the classic hard sci-fi that Clarke had previously produced, the follow-up to Rama could have been so good :-(
Osgood got killed off by Missy last season, so why is she back now?
I mean, I always liked Osgood and was disappointed when she was killed, but you can't just blatantly ignore it and shove her back on next time you want to do a UNIT episode.
I'm guessing that they will retcon it so that the Osgood who Missy killed was the Zygon one, and not the human one.
Journalists reporting on this and other recent cases seem to think that the PCI-DSS is a set of strict Regulations, all of which must be met to gain PCI compliance,
This is not actually the case, PCI-DSS is a collection of recommendations for best practice, but they are not "laws", and in fact so long as a valid reason can be given and noted in the risk register, most of these recommendations can be set aside.
The classic case is in the matter of SSL cypher suites. If you follow PCI-DSS to the letter, and turn off all the cypher suites that are considered insecure, then a large percentage of the internet would be unable to browse your website, only those with the newest browsers and operating systems which support the newest cypher suites would be able to make a secure connection.
Curiously, one PCI audit we had, the QA wanted to fail the us because the firewall rules allowed https connections to the load balancer from any IP - this is a public facing website!!
None of this excuses how TalkTalk have handled this, though, just thought it worth setting the record straight.