Posts by Halfmad

The NHS sort of does this in my area, the trust has managers who are on a grade below some of the staff they manage as those staff are specialists in their area. Sadly this isn't the case in IT departments though.

Re: Not to worry

Generally less stressful for the card than the hot/cold of gaming. Buy card, reapply fresh thermal paste and a new cooler and it'll be fine.

I've still got a couple of 7950s in Crossfire on a PC which ran for 3 years overclocked at a friends house.

Re: Is it just me...

Those local IT staff don't need to understand it, they need to have a process in place and training to say "look guys, you use your admin account when you need to do admin work, at all other times you use a standard account". Nice and simple, also don't give access to network shares etc from the admin accounts to stop them wanting to use their personal shares etc. Typically these accounts require local admin rights and very little rights on the network.

Hell I can monitor admin account usage due to the way our transparent proxy picks up anyone launching a browser or windows looking for updates.

Re: A digital watch?

80085

Had to be done.

Re: Value for money?

We get semi-decent PCs at work, although an SSD would be a massive help when juggling a VM and a large unwieldy spreadsheet people demand I use.

The biggest problem without a doubt though is the f*cking monitors. They're all widescreens, it's like looking through a letterbox compared to the 4K monitor I have at home. The one I'm using just now is 1600x900

900! I'd rather have a 1080P monitor than this sh!t.

Re: Easy fix

Or sown it into the cuff of a jacket he regularly wears etc.

Clothing in general with little zip pockets near the cuffs would be ideal for this sort of thing.

#gonnagointoretail

Re: Terminal servers?

We use to do this, problem is reliance on boardband connections, even with failover circuits when it happens you can have many hours or even days of outages.

That's frankly unacceptable but no amount of stamping of feet and pointing at an SLA helps in that situation.

Re: Actually not terrible

As long as you're selective you can get what you want with just a little numpty-surcharge over internet sites.

It's things like whole systems, cables and audio stuff that's usually insanely price and of course those warranties!

Re: Why not just say NO?

You require a politician to say no to the media? are you mad?

He'll get enough stick for referring this to the competition regulator.

Re: Won't work

That's why this is part of a layered defence, although I doubt Cisco and McAfee will call it that.

Can't rely on any one vendor to save you, especially McAfee IMHO it's an odd teaming up.

Re: Voter registration data is not confidential

That's fine but they started tagging things onto it, some true, some not and now that's public.

Whether it can be considered sensitive is another matter but it's certainly embarrassing for the firms involved.

Re: I think we need to know...

Don't investigate yet, wait until GDPR kicks in..

Re: Again

It'll be sold as a brand and used in future years to flog products made by others. Wait? erm, I'll get back to you.

As it's almost entirely dependent on self-reporting I'm willing to bet a lot of it is down to companies just not owning up. The UK public sector is particularly good at reporting itself to the ICO quickly, within hours usually, knowing that if it does so there's far less chance of a monetary penalty at the end of it.

Re: Named council employees?

As the guy who works in public sector at the moment and who reports my organisation to the ICO when there's a breach I'd love for staff to face disciplinary when it happens. I rarely see that though.

Mistakes happen, genuine "shit I sent that to the wrong person" mistakes, should people lose their job over it? Well personally I think that should always be an option when they've caused actual harm by their actions. However I have yet to see it happen.

Staff names are typically removed from reports the ICO get, I'd love them to demand those and public those involved. My name will be on the ICO multiple times - as the person reporting it and the contact for the organisation, but others should be up there for having been held responsible for the breach.

This shouldn't just be the chief execs though, it has to include those who have direct line management responsibility if training was permitted to slip, if policies were not up to date and staff not aware of them etc. Putting a single name up won't be enough, it has to be the "chain of command" from top to bottom that could have prevented it.

There are also typically prosecutions that could be brought but again never are. Section 55 of the DPA is one such area but there are many others - we simply done' hold people accountable, but then again we don't for virus infections either even when it's personal USB sticks brought in from home - because the organisation should simply have tools to block those working right?

But surely if that sort of thing isn't permitted by policy (rules of your employment essentially) then you should be sacked for doing it?

IT breaches in general are seen as trivial when it comes to disciplinary action, I've seen people hit far harder for mistakes on their time sheets or breaking a window by accident..

Re: True Image?

Confusing?

I think you mean "feature rich" !

Yeah but they don't want to have to put that money into the pension scheme they've been managing for years do they? Let's just reduce the payments to those who have been paying into this scheme the company agreed to manage.

Cos that's fair, right? :-/

Thing is with these companies that although they may include agreeing to have failover sites etc when sh!t happens and those don't work they just say "hey sorry, won't happen until the next time it happens" and as the NHS is f*cking awful at contract law they have no monetary clause to hammer them with.

Seen this so often in the past 10 years.

Re: More to the point

Well tells them an IP, might not tell them where the people actually were though.

Re: Pointless fines

I've been saying this for years but it also has to apply to public sector organisations, as right now they get fined - they go to government ask for a loan for that amount (since it's the government who essentially fined them anyway) and they are back to square one.

Public sector are great at reporting themselves compared to private companies but they also have nothing personally to lose, we need to change that for directors and chief execs.

Re: 'worker' status to the drivers

Autonomous vehicles will need R&D and more frequently - maintenance. You can also bet your behind that the government will come up with new ways to extract money from them in new taxes etc.

Re: This is where the lack of training and head hunting ethos has got companies.

You could say the same for any department which is generally not "front of house" such as information security, information governance, cleaning, estates/facilities management, HR, occupational health etc.

They are all being outsourced where possible to "save money" but in reality I doubt any money at all is saved and the service is usually poorer and less flexible as a result.

Re: My work Windows 7

If they have sites that only work on older browsers go to IE11 and use Browsium.

Re: Flying cars? Pft.

Why the f*ck would I want them flying above my house? Not like they'll be restricted to specific routes and of course the governance for it will take years and start happening properly AFTER it's started and AFTER several high profile crashes no doubt.

Re: Brexit or not...

It's not cretinous to not know about computers especially since many of those buying them for grand children didn't have access to them until they were well into adulthood. I'm sure a few of them could teach our millennials a few things about how even modern car engines worked as they are far more likely to have had to get their hands dirty maintaining their own car.

Using the wrong terminology is one thing, fact is they knew what they meant - storage space as that's typically what's marketed as good as it holds all the kids "college work", it's not as if other goods aren't marketed as equally daft at times, cars for example are typically done on fuel efficiency none of us ever see and on glamour when it's a tool most of us don't think twice about until it breaks.

Re: "at odds"?

Quite impressed that the Police had a contract sewn up like that, good on them - now if only whitehall could start doing that.

Re: Success!

Not security, training and likely not following policy.

You'd at least think they'd want to stifle the competition for it..

Re: Make use of...

Personally I have nothing against cyclists, I do however hate this them v us attitude from both sides. I live in a fairly rural community and what really grinds my gears (insert Peter Griffin here) is that planning it done almost entirely focused on cities when cycling clubs won't go out in the city for fun, they'll head to rural roads, as will family groups. Those are generally very poorly catered for, yeah you can get to cycling routes, if you shove your bikes on a car first.

There's shit cyclists, there's shit drivers and there's shit pedestrians. The sooner we tackle the main problem - namely many of us having to commute for a job we could likely do at home the sooner we'd all be a little happier. productive and fatter.. I mean less stressed.

Re: Yet again...

I also find I'm increasingly being asked to build PCs for people, they may not have the confidence to do it themselves so just want me to hang out and double check things for them. I've no problem doing this as I'm the sort these days who says "I'm not private IT support" and I stick to that. But I'm happy to help give them confidence to tackle their build.

I've recently helped my 71 year old dad build his first gaming PC, he was bored after my mother died last year and he's gotten right into Skyrim and the Total War series since (with a bit of rocket league thrown in).

He was able to build the PC he wanted, with the monitor he wanted etc and without software he didn't want or pressure to buy "tech support" etc during the after sales pitch.

Company wise we still replace PCs in a cycle, which I think is increasingly mad and even our directors are starting to see it that way, PC slow? shove in another gig of RAM if it's a 64bit OS and an SSD, job done 99% of the time.

I'm disappointed that El'Reg didn't jump on that one to be honest.