Posts by keithpeter

Re: Agent Provocateur

"Except we don't know that now - the cops had control of the site's database."

I was thinking that - did they run checksums with external witnesses every now and again to be able to demonstrate continuity of evidence &c?

Re: Mess

@ J. R. Hartley and all

"It really is an utter UTTER mess. I dread the day I am forced to leave Windows 7. "

Is ReactOS likely to be able to run your required applications by 2020 Win7 cut off?

https://www.reactos.org/

Just wondering, not being sarky.

I find an old laptop running linux meets my personal needs fine. At work I use what employer gives me to use. Usually a managed Windows PC logged into a network.

Re: Can I just leave this thought with you?

@Andy A

Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y next, then Ctrl-F [keyword] in a window displaying a long document?

Re: Sounds great

"Personally, I think that tool sounds great. If they could open source it, would make a lot of desktop and security ppl's jobs quite a bit easier..."

My agreement with your sentiment is cancelled out by my reaction to your use of 'ppl', hence no up-vote.

Coat: personally one hails taxis unless attending a social event in which case 'carriages at Midnight' is the rule.

Re: Eh?

"Have you been to the slackware website? It's 1991 in there."

But you can run -current with a mainline kernel quite easily. And compile development versions of applications should you wish to.

Coat: Well, this page is actually about Mint so I'm off.

Re: Cyril L. Baker

"In 1914 the sea-going equipment was still simple, but the system was practical, reliable, trusted and would soon be battle tested. Most of the equipment was still based around spark transmitters and crystal sets using the Low frequency and Medium frequency bands, but the Royal Navy already had 15 years experience and had developed tactics and operations based around it use."

Quote from

http://marconiheritage.org/ww1-sea.html

Spark transmitter = pulse of em energy with a wide frequency spread & so hard to coordinate among a fleet of ships (basically turns taking) or did they have tuned circuits in the antenna to filter out some of the energy? Raining tomorrow so I'll be researching.

Re: If you want Ubuntu laptops there is System 76.

@ Tinslave_the_Barelegged

"In the UK, there is Entroware who sell Linux, especially, Ubuntu-based, laptops."

Thanks for the signposting.

What does herself think of the keyboard? Does it bend when typing?

I, too, will be thinking about a newer lighter machine in the new year.

Icon: toss up between the pint in thanks and the coat in regard to bare legs in December.

Boats

I used to commute on the Mersey ferry(*) some score of years ago.

They would tie one 4 inch thick rope round a bollard and then swing the ferry boat against the motors to align the stern with the Seacombe landing stage. The ropes complained loudly when the tide was running. I tended to stay back a little until the drawbridge went down.

(*) 1200 tonnes, four engines.

Re: I'm not out to defend Oracle but...

"I had an Auditor in Oracle tell me I was a bastard and it was low down tricks I'd pulled after his "sale" fell through and I got the same licenses for half the price from another region."

@Hans Blick

Ever thought of doing a bit of consultancy/trouble-shooting on the side? Might get a few customers by the sound of it.

Re: Not just credit scores...

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-break

Human judges can have their foibles as well apparently.

I take the larger point and I am in favour of a simplification of things if possible. Remove some of the turtle layers.

Coat: Battered copies of Naomi Klein's books and a couple of Ruskoff's in the pocket

Re: Heating / Aircon

"I don't know what the solution is to prevent air con wars in offices, but dismissing people who genuinely can't cope with the air temperature being cold is not it."

This might sound daft but it is not meant to be: some form of localised heating?

Other countries may have this sorted a bit... but not for hands...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsi

Gamers...

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/this-infrared-heat-lamp-keeps-your-hands-warm-as-you-type.html

Coat: I always have a fleece in my bag in case of aggressive aircon

@Anonymous South African Coward

"Even more fun if it encrypts the financial database on-the-fly and hundreds of users lose a day's work*..."

At least no delay then - didn't get into the backups.

Re: Looks tempting

"About that... let me describe some of my experiences with low-level X11 coding..."

Any code out there at all Bombastic Bob? Sounds interesting.

(I could imagine a live iso demo of your work - would need a loud hailer icon. And a *really* loud welcome sound...)

Coat: off out now

Re: +1 for X220 mention

"I have a very similar X220, except with Xubuntu, and I swear that it boots in well under 45 seconds"

Probably does. Slackware does an old school boot and for some reason the 'kernel test' takes 10 seconds. But I mostly suspend and reboot once a week or so or when kernel updates arrive.

Coat: mine's the one with the Slackware DVD in the pocket

Re: Symptom of bullshit job

@AC

"teaching is a a notoriously sexist profession"

I'd accept that there is an institutional gender bias. Teaching in primary schools offers mandatory hours and a calendar that fits well with having children, so attractive to people who are the main carers in a family, and that I accept is still predominantly women. I accept the point about the scarcity of men in primary sector - but teacher gender ratios closer (but not equal to) parity in secondary, the figures I can find are in the 60% to 65% women range. College sector (where I teach) is in my experience closer to parity.

"This certainly was my experience at school with a number of women teachers being quite openly sexist and making disparaging comments about boys in general."

I used to hear that kind of stuff in 90s/00s but not so much recently at College level. There is an awareness that boys/men are underperforming and there are attempts to counter that.

My team/group whatever is 5 chaps and 4 chapesses

Opinions vary. Most Colleges and adult education settings will welcome volunteers subject to dbs if you have time to spare. Many have found the experience illuminating.

Redundo within averaging period

"As long as I don't have to worry about putting food on the table, and can take the occasional trip somewhere in the country to enjoy a bit of a change of four walls, watch a film in the cinema, etc. I'm happy."

@msknight: Likewise. My aspirations are not excessive. I'd add a bit of engagement with people - family, volunteering and in my case some part time adult education teaching.

Teaching pension for my age cohort had a 10 year averaging period before retirement. The highest three years contiguous salary was taken as the 'final salary'. This was to stop people getting shoved up grades to boost the pension.

It was financially beneficial to me to take my pension a year early so as to gain the maximum benefit of my highest salary years having been made redundo in the dying days of the Gordon Brown government. You may remember they sort of lost track of how much they were spending on new Further Education colleges, coupled with the prime mortgages meltdown. This lead to a sudden unplanned budget reduction in already agreed funding for FE Colleges, hence my departure along with many colleagues.

I've been working (from choice by the way) fractional posts since then, so huge salary drop, hence taking a 4% actuarial reduction for one year as opposed to a ~20% cut.

I'm a Maths teacher. There is an artificially produced chronic shortage of Maths teachers in FE Colleges. I could have worked a couple of more years easily. Tough Bananas Bub.

Actionable content: get pensions advice early on. Make some kind of plan to preserve basics as well said by msknight.

Political thought: what happened to the social contract? Work hard for 30 to 40 years then we will sort you out with the basics? Not hard is it. Thatcher and her dodgy economists really screwed things up. Younger ones finally waking up to that... interesting times ahead

Coat: Das Capital in left pocket and Der Weg zur Knechtschaft in the right pocket thus covering all bases.

Good luck to the floggers-of-computers in original article.

Epidiascope - Re: Ah, memories.

Whenever I come across an epidiascope in the dusty cupboard in the room where they keep the broken things, I get it out, clean it off and see if it works.

You can display student work (with appropriate warning before hand of course) to the whole group - worth their weight (considerable) in projectors those things. Art departments will often have one squirreled away if you ask nicely.

I did see a quite snazzy fold-up portable one with a quartz bulb in an art shop in Liverpool a couple of years ago but didn't have the readies then.

Coat: I'm a teacher - so I have bluetak, marker pens, index cards, postITs, squared paper and mini-drywipe boards stashed in various pockets.

What are the rest doing?

" The first thing they always ask it to start TeamViewer. It usually takes the support tech at least 15 minutes before they accept that they won't get remote access to the device and have to use good old telephone diagnosis."

@big_D: One wonders what the other companies with CNC machines of similar vintage are doing if the default assumption is that the controller PCs are accessible via the Internet.

Pint: for one company at least making a sensible short term compromise by isolating their machines.

Re: Deserves the best

Just ordered a (paper) copy.

About time that I upgraded my modest programming skills.

Python seems like a good language to learn (I teach basic Maths and often need to produce graphs, diagrams, charts &c) and the subject matter looks interesting.

We shall see.

Re: As any good medical professional will tell you

"...or the old prank about sending the apprentice to the stores for a 'Long Stand'..."

I still have my Round Tuit somewhere in here.

You forgot the skyhook.

Re: Ubuntu MATE user here

@Allonymous Coward

We face the real prospect of it not being the Year Of The Desktop again for any platform/system/kernel/ecosystem. I've spent a few days working with colleagues advising people coming into various educational centres. Tablets/phones/phablets being used by just about everyone now to find info &c.

I agree that just about any DE on top of just about any maintained distro on hardware that is not totally bleeding edge/released last week will work and work well.

Re: Reactionaries everywhere

@ ChrisBedford

Objectively speaking, I like to think I'm fairly progressive.

Still a strong preference for electronics that can be upgraded and that can be tossed into a rucksack &c. Capitalism being the lowest form of socialism we have to grasp our advantages when they are offered.

Each to his own.

Spares and replacements...

"As a gentle aside, the UK forces are switching to Windows Phone right now"

I thought that Microsoft were not making any more phones. Do you have details?

Single sign on - Re: Train them

"My point about training is that everybody who would access such a database should be aware that if they don't need any authentification to access it, then nobody else does."

@Chris G

I log into a PC that is a network client on my employer's system. I access stuff on Intranet, say a business application. I notice that I can access the application directly, but I'm assuming that is because I have logged into the PC because most of the business applications I use are single sign-on. If I had advanced knowledge, I might notice that the application does not obviously reflect my user name, but, then it may be that the nature of the task does not require my details especially or depend on my 'role'. It would not occur to me normally to access the application from a device outside the organisation because, well, its for work isn't it? I would not therefore realise that the system was wide open.

The system in the OA was found using a search engine query from a random member of the public. It strikes me that the outer portal may have had a username/password challenge but that the files inside/cached pages whatever may have had incorrect file permissions/acls set by the original designer. As others have said, the original designer may have been the employee of a contracting company, possibly as part of a semi-shadow IT project (penumbra-IT?). The lack of a cynical BOFH type poking sticks at the thing just to see what they can see does strike me but perhaps they have been outsourced.

Perhaps certification of some kind for any application (business to business or whatever) that holds confidential information would be the best route? Ensure the ruddy thing doesn't leak round the edges in the first place. What I think I'm saying is that you need a technical remedy for a technical issue of design rather than a social remedy in the form of 'training' and the resultant dumping of accountability onto end users. A technical solution is applied once in the form of robust design. The social solution has to be repeated indefinitely and results in many possible points of failure.

Coat: Mine's the one with completion certificates from 9 (yes 9) mandatory training courses I have had to complete this year - I'm a teacher.

Re: That picture

"Who knows what goes through the minds of the people that pick the pictures?"

It is a bot. Has to be.

Coat: I just use the registration service provided by my hosting company. No big investments.

Re: HR Fail

"I realised rather quickly when I was asked not to mention this in certain other showrooms when training. I had a few nice lunches out of that feature, my waistline suffered a bit though."

Just wondering how many days early the clocks got and if any customer accounts 'time shifted' into a previous month...

"Fine lets replace it with java."

That would be android

Re: As I've said before ...

Redox...

https://github.com/redox-os/redox/releases

https://www.reddit.com/r/Redox/

Looks most interesting. Getting close to self-building, and they have ported gcc so there will be some applications to run on their GUI when it is a bit more stable. My favourite quote: "I am currently struggling with getting autotools based builds to work on Redox (warning: trying to read and understand a ./configure script may cause mental illness)."

Wondering if the focus is a GUI/desktop or server workloads, obviously shiny motivates the younger contributors but a minimal system that can sit somewhere on a network and run an application or two written in the system language could provide a niche that encourages adoption and a show-case implementation.

The more the merrier, but I think Linux has a significant incumbent advantage over the BSDs, Illumos based OSes and new ones like this.

Coat: 9front for the win!

Re: Not really victimless

@cb7

Agreed, but has any news org managed to find one of the fakes and give it a test/strip down?

Can't have IoS or Apple firmware in it I'm presuming or there would be piracy on the charge sheet as well as fraud.