Posts by Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Incredible Boneheaded Move

"That requires some experienced sales teams who can make the TCO argument convincingly."

It's not just the TCO argument that these guys can provide, but the ability to maintain a relationship with the customer for the year or more it takes to close such a large sale.

"So now IBM is throwing out these experienced sales people and replacing them with people who probably only know how to sell you a Xeon running Linux."

And the latter type either don't understand amount of time required to make those high value sales or are not allowed to invest that time in a single customer. If they don't meet their short term (e.g. quarterly) targets they are out of the door long before the above year or more is up.

King's English

"[1] One never knows when Queen's English might become King's English."

Will I have to learn about carbuncles and do my O-level English again?

Re: Production data in test/dev?

"Also, let devs erase or corrupt your backups..."

One that hit the headlines (you would recognise the name) circa 2000.

A copy of production data was used for testing but it wasn't firewalled off, and stale data went into the production system...

I gather it took some unravelling.

Re: re: I think you'll find that's what we do :-)

"anything relying on WebDAV should have been replaced once or twice in that 14+ year period to address existing security issues..."

Not running MS platforms here, but there have been various security patches for WebDAV much more recently than 14 years ago.

Searching for "webdav security issues" brings up quite a few.

E.g. MS Security bulletin for WebDAV, February 2016

This security update resolves a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows. The vulnerability could allow elevation of privilege if an attacker uses the Microsoft Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) client to send specifically crafted input to a serve

Re: Stand aside Plebes. I am on Imperial business...

"Do we even have any troops left after all the cuts?"

Shortly to be outsourced, no doubt.

Idly wondering what a Dad's Army version of la Résistance would look like...

Re: New Win 10 machine stopping clicks....

"And people who write focus grabbing dialogues should be shot."

Yes. With an elephant gun.

"Also, those annoying startup windows which come up on top of everthing else and usually can't be dismissed should be shot too."

I have a particularly bad offender there on my Mac. On startup it insists on displaying a progress bar as it opens a large database. If I refocus on another app to get some work done, the app icon in the Dock starts bouncing like mad.

I know that I've got a large database and it's going to take time to open. I don't want to watch while that happens.

No, you aren't the only app I run; you are not the most important of them either.

Re: I think they genuinely don't see the problem.

"Which will be signalled by "the necessary hashtags" according to Amber Rudd."

I'm no cryptographic expert, but won't that be open to sequential injection attacks?

"I suspect that a RaspberryPi would not be as tough as one of the specialist boards and would have a much shorter lifetime."

You are correct. Mine has developed what seems to be a dry joint in the power connector.

The vibrations present in a washing machine or dishwasher weren't in its design spec.

Re: Stop taking the p***

"My point was that two people being paid the same should be paying the same tax."

The only way to achieve that is by scrapping personal allowances.

No more tax relief for anyone for anything.

Re: Read the terms

"You'll find you agreed to this, many times over the years."

s/agreed/were coerced into/

coercion |kəʊˈəːʃ(ə)n|

noun

the action or practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats.

Checking bank statements

"Because some people don't bother to read and check bank statements that are now often online only?"

That gets tricky when your internet connection is down (yet again).

I suspect that my habit of checking statements against transaction downloads and feeding the lot into a money management package is far from common.

I cut my IT teeth on accounting systems so it's a piece of cake for me, but many folks simply haven't developed that skillset.

The trend towards paying for everything by plastic makes checking bank statements increasingly difficult.

Re: Just maybe

"Let's say someone near the top earns £1M/year. A good infrastructure person will earn say £100k, so we get to save 10 of those thousands for each exec. "

No. A good infrastructure person whose efforts are being put to good use (which kind of implies being managed effectively) is actually generating more income for the company than they are earning.

Re: Doesn't go far enough

"I mean honestly, if I could 3D print a fully working car, you bet your arse I'd download one."

By the time this becomes reality you'll probably find that the 3D printer needs HP ink and one printed car will cost about the same as 1,000 real ones.

Careful with that Raspberry Pi example

"Use your raspberry Pi as a DNS cache to speed up your internet"

Careful with the instructions at that link, for they contain the lines:

server=8.8.8.8

server=8.8.4.4

which are Google's DNS servers.

P.S. In the past few years I've come across a lot of people who should know better recommending Google's DNS servers. Even in the workplace.

Re: Algorithms that sit behind closed doors

"I sincerely hope your algorithms don't discriminate against people who can't spell correctly,"

By the form he shows here, I sincerely hope that his algorithms don't discriminate against people who can spell correctly,"

Re: Second, it's impossible to foresee the next big use case or form factor for mobile devices.

"After battery life, the next challenge is a smartphone that can *easily* be used with poorer eyesight and co-ordination.:

This.

The physical keyboard on my Blackberry Passport is a big help, not just for typing but for its ability to swipe left/right and up/down without selecting something by mistake.

A bit more work on selective magnification and I reckon it'd be getting close.

But they stopped making them :-(

Re: Top Tips For Barristers...

"To me this incident highlights the fact that material handled by barristers (and almost certainly solicitors as well) is not being as closely controlled as it really ought to be"

This area is a prime candidate for a proper training course which would cover the risks and present workable solutions.

A nice little business idea for one of you.

Re: The UK Tax system is no longer fit for purpose.

"VAT is of course, an EU mandated tax."

It's also an audit trail.

Re: Sledgehammer meet nut

"still cant be arsed to do shift for commentards though...:

That's just plain rude.

How do you explain a "Cabinet Reshuffle" then?

That's politics, where the aim is to maintain the leader's advantage over the others.

Re: @kain

I do consider it a bit odd to read that someone wouldn't even test their own stuff

You have never seen the results of outsourcing a large piece of software which was until that point well engineered.

I claim my 5 pounds.

Re: AI Really?

Is this the same recommendation engine that recommends that I watch videos I've already watched

Or more recently, seems to think that when I fancy watching something in a specific genre, I suddenly want to leap off and watch something about Trump or Obama.

Re: Buyer beware

Why I think I need a Psion-style device, but won’t be buying the Gemini PDA

The embedded video there offers a clue as to why a modern Psion might be lacking:

What’s going on here?

Some of your technology may be out of date, which means this video won’t play properly. Please upgrade your browser or install Flash.

Oh Dear.

"Not so fond of IPv6. Maybe if it wasn't drafted by, and subsequently lorded over by, a bunch of elitist fuckbaloons that don't give a rat's ass about anyone who can't stump up a few million a year in internet connectivity I might care ...

Nice rant there, Trevor.

Perhaps OSI wasn't so bad after all. :-)

Back in the day I cussed quite a bit about OSI, but it was more to do with the lack of documentation and a cumbersome admin interface, and the bit of it I used did actually work once you'd sussed out the arcane commands.

It wasn't really a surprise that IPv4 won that battle.

Re: thoughts just occurred...

"Not if they have a registered UK residence - they must change it to a UK license within a certain amount of time.

But a valid driving licence from many countries can be converted to a UK one without taking a test again.

Re: Once again, the open-source Keepass is being ignored

But the research only looked at Android:

In order to answer these questions, we performed a security analysis on the most popular Android password manager applications from the Google Play Store based on download count.

and if we wander over to the Keepass download page we see various "Contributed/unofficial" ports for Android. Dunno which of those are present on the Google Play Store (don't have an Android device here).

Re: "Any critical service like that should be built with multi-region availability. "

"Should have. But let's take a peek inside a dev's mind after it happened. Something like this...."

Another common failure with various applications is the assumption that if an internet connection is available at the beginning of a session, then it's there forever.

Broadband is a lot more reliable than dial-up was, but things still go wrong at the client side, and as more and more work moves to mobile devices, this is a problem which won't go away any time soon.