Re: Tinfoil hat time?
"perhaps I'm just paranoid?"
Nope, just very, very realistic!
702 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2016
Don't know about you but my mother never had to tell me to not harass women!
It never occurred to my mum, rest her soul, that I would touch anyone inappropriately, she knew all the hard work she'd put in to bring me up properly meant that it would most likely never occur to me to behave such a way. Out of respect to everyone, I adhere without thinking to the required norms of respect for society and try to go beyond that by showing respect to all people irrespective of race, creed, gender and sexual orientation.
"I advise against using any new features or products, for example SQL server, all features available in all versions, but never know those feature could be moved back to the enterprise edition at any time."
Good job you don't work with Oracle products! It's worse, they simply enable components, bury the "requires license to use" in the docs and wait for you to have used it by accident, then suddenly come in, audit you and dump a £50k bill on the CFO's desk!
"But all I can say in us Yanks' defense is that you Brits"
No, no, no!
Don't start a sentence with "But".
Don't use "us" when you should have used "we".
Oh, an please spell "defence" correctly.
"All I can say in defence of we Yanks is that the Brits must have created ITIL..."
"If you have kids you will realize that kids don't plan. So you have your credit card couriered to them and tell them the PIN so they can withdraw cash to pay the bill. By your reckoning this is obvious breach of rules is punishable."
Jesus, you're a fecking eejit! So you want a new car, you see it on eBay, you make contact and agree to buy it from the seller. You then post the seller your card telling them to take the money off the card and post the card back when they're done?!
Only one person can use your CC, that's you. Don't like it? Tough! The CC company owns the card, the account, it's a private company and you made an agreement with them, their rules.
Simple, let the US do it and then when they world and their dog get access to everything the US publishes in digital format, then perhaps we'll finally start to get some sense from the fecking idiot politicians. The second their entire lives are splashed all over the media because it was a piece of cake to open up their private online datastores, then I'm sure things will change double quick!
Funny you say that, I was doing some work over lunchtime, looked over and a colleague had the preview full screen with headphones and that's exactly what I thought. "Oh, another light sabre fight! Oh another view of an open battlefield with x-wings and tie fighters. Oh another battle in space. Oh another dramatic close up on faces in dark spaces while they talk about the various aspects of the Jedi religion.".
This from someone who saw the original back in the '70s and the 2 sequels in the '80s. When #7 came out on DVD my wife and daughter bought me the DVD and I've never seen it! It's not that I don't want to, I just can't be bothered to make the time these days. I'll make time for the original trilogy and have done just 2 months ago but I just can't be arsed to make time for 1,2,3,7,8,9 they do nothing for me. 4,5,6 sum up my childhood I suppose. The films for 1,2,3,7,8,9 are for a different generation, they're not for me or mine, they mean very little to me and I cannot make the connection in the same way as I can for 4,5,6.
Even my wife and daughter whom have no interest in the franchise, have never played with the toys, have no SW collectables, have seen 1,2,3 and 7 at the cinema and I haven't!
"It will then automatically patch itself, rather than waiting for a human to schedule downtime."
I know Larry hates Bill Gates with a passion but he should pay attention to what happens when Windows happily installs patches automatically. When the apps crash or simply won't start we'll all start switching off the autonomous crud and performing the updates manually as we can't trust it to behave itself!
"Hello? Yeah is that John Davis, yeah bought this Swedish thing and I can't get it up! It's tall and stiff and won't stay up long enough for me to screw hard. Can you help me? Hello?"
An hour later, open the door...
"Hello there, I'm PC Smith. We've had a report that disturbing and obscene calls can been made from this address to a local old-job worker."
No, people ( irrespective of gender, race, culture or creed ) enjoy different things.
I, like 90% of the IT people I've met, couldn't give a flying monkey's toss what gender you are, what god you pray to, if you like making models of the Cutty Sark out of lolly sticks, going to S&M clubs on a Tuesday night, whatever, so long as you muck in when there's a problem, help get it sorted before we all get our arse chewed by upper management for being useless and ultimately outsourced to cloud management services!
Anyone remember 10 years ago how we all laughed at poor old Dr Kev, "Captain Cyborg" himself and his obsession with having tech around him, his house, work and about his person constantly?
Hmmm, maybe he wasn't so funny after all judging by the number of people on this thread handing over their lives to Bezos in return for....erm, wel I'm sure there's some positives to all this on-demand tech!
"I’ve a very good friend since childhood who habitually goes into serious arguments while soundly asleep."
My wife informs me that I talk continuously at what she reckons is about 3-4 times my normal speaking rate and apparently I can rabbit for about 2-3 hours at time! I also have a habit of laughing in my sleep, some nights I have to be woken up to stop me with the longest she was able to tolerate me being around 45 mins of continuous non-stop laughing and giggling. No wonder I wake up with a sore throat and aching face!
Larry has a well earned reputation for spouting utter bollocks that his sales droids have to repeat and the dev techies have to deliver, it's no great surprise Larry was best mates with Steve Jobs, another seriously psychotic bullshitter.
Oracle cloud will be cheaper, hmm, sure Larry! The second you realise that guy down the road ( Azure, Goolge, CouchDB, MongoDB, Hadoop, etc ) is making more money, you'll put the prices up faster than a whippet with a bum full of dynamite. You're the same as Virgin and Sky, get through the door on a short-term, cut-price contract, and just like the classic drug-dealer once they're hooked, jack up the prices 'cos you know you're the only game in town for them.
We weren't born yesterday Larry mate!
"...they love it because it keeps them on the gravy train."
Nice. I personally love being a DBA because there's never dull moment, there's always something being demanded of the system that wasn't anticipated. Sure I get paid good money but I only get paid what the market will stand. You could say the same for Javascript, it's probably got less keywords than ZX Spectrum BASIC or even bog standard C but make it "sing and dance" is still a skill that people learn how to do and the better they do it the more they should be paid. There will always be cowboys in any line of work, those who simply coast along and apply no real thought to what they do, they have no passion and they take the money and damage the reputation of others but not everyone is like that, some of us still believe passionately about IT and enjoy the daily challenge of problem solving.
Sure Oracle software CAN be complicated but it's not really any more complicated than SQL Server or MySQL. I would say, through bitter experience, that install Sharepoint and Exchange are far more hideous than anything Oracle sells, SP and EX are a minefield of patch requirements, anyone who looks after those deserves damn good pay! With Oracle tou run an install script like any other software and out of the box it works, just like any other software. Like Windows, like SQL Server, like OSX, like iOS, like MySQL...note I said works, I never said works well. At that point you pay someone who knows how to make it work properly. Every product works out of the box, very few don't these days and if you weren't that demanding about it you could just leave it as is and just use it. The issue comes when people demand a huge bang for their buck, that's when you need someone to tune it and tweak it.
"We are going to go aggressively, with the value of SQL Server and the price point compared to, for example, Oracle.”
Yeah, I think SQL Server on Linux is great, it works OK and the base product is as usable as it's Windows cousin, minus the features already mentioned in the article. However when it comes to Linux you're going to have to compete at the price point of PostresSQL, MySQL and obviously with the big data NoSQL boys like Hive, Mongo and CouchDB!
It's a like a hackers wet dream, the right searches will yield lots of useful system passwords, even more so as we all move to cloud services. It's great fun seeing how many developers out there have a total lack of common sense when it comes to security, not all them just the really stupid ones!
"The process of leaving was painful, with quite probably the rudest call centre handler in history, who was shouting and refusing to listen, intent on going through her script of bribes to keep us with them."
Yep, I remember leaving Sky about 3 years and the call centre person said ( this no lie ) , "So you're going to Virgin? You do know all their kit is second hand and fails after 3 months? Virgin are not very good at support either, I would strongly advise you to avoid them and stay with Sky."
"Virgin are offering me 30mb/s for the same price I'm paying Sky. Can you get my ADSL above the rubbish 2mb/s I've been complaining about for the last 12 months?"
"Sorry, that's not our problem, that's BTs problem."
"Thank you very much for summing up in one short sentence, exactly why I'm leaving Sky, You don't care about a service and your diabolical attitude to customers just reeks."
"Users said slow speeds, frequent connection drop-outs and poor customer service as their biggest bugbears with the provider."
Sadly as Virgin pushes their monster speeds up and up, they're going the same way. My service used to be brilliant but lately it's just falling apart, drop outs at least 3-4 times a day for 2-3 mins.
The ad men abused the privilege of having a captive audience, we moaned and complained, blocked them. Now a huge company, whether you like Apple or not they have a knack of parting the public from their spondoolics, has decided it has nothing to lose by kicking the admen too in order to make it look like some sort of "freedom fighter". I'm happy with anything anyone does that puts the tracking and admen under control.
If you can graph it, then you can get fund it!
That's my experience of 35 years of IT, if you can sling enough bullshit figures together to make enough confusing graphs ( it seems to be pie mostly as pie seems to hide all details! ) then you can almost without fail, convince enough management above your current level to fund your latest jolly to software developer HQ 300 miles away and subsequent software toy purchase request. Once you're bored with it, pass it to some minion, who in turn will use it 5 times and then leave to slowly drain support contract money from said company for 3 years until the bean-counters start whinging about belt tightening!
"If I know the tweets and news and other texts you consume, and I cluster them, then I can very quickly determine your set of interests / sentiments / whatever clustering regime is applied,"
Yes, and that's the point. They're not allowed to gather info directly from you unless you grant them the privilege. However they no longer need to get direct access to you, they can work out who you are and what you like simply by piecing your life back together from the trail you leave behind. Why do think big corps like Google and Facebook aren't fussed about your granting them access to directly collect info about you? They simply have so much reach and so much data about you they know all about you already!
"I genuinely thought that this might have been a tragic accident, where the gentlemans gentleman had somehow become trapped between the flats of two weights, perhaps while stacking them with sweaty, post-workout hands."
I've actually done that but with my index finger, it was the most intense pain I've ever felt. 2 x 25Kg weights slamming together and my finger tip in between. I've never seen so much blood come of me from small place! It cost me finger nail too which to this day, 25 years later, still never grew back properly.
"Don't fret. The corporations will be happy."
That's it precisely, it's just for them and their bottom line. This will be of no use for part time artists and musicians like me, we'll not be allowed to use this sort of protection for our works, we'll still have our work ripped off 'cos we don't have the clout of the big corps, to be able to protect our works.
While I like the idea of DRM, it's only in the interest of big corps who don't give a monkey's about the little guys, so it'll be a waste of time and it'll be bypassed quicker than you can download a movie off a torrent site on a Virgin 300MB home connection!
"To be surveyed and tracked on the off-chance that you might do something wrong in the future, is to not be free.
And that's where we're heading."
Too late, we're there already. ANPR, the highest number of CCTV cameras per capita anywhere in the world, we've a lot of to be proud of in the UK, NOT!
Bought £150 Android thing from TESCO, it makes calls, takes messages, gets weather via an app and plays music ( and no doubt will run Twatter and Facepalm apps too ) , which covers 90% of what most people want from a modern phone! Cheers TESCO you saved me 850 Sovs else I might have bought this Apple thing instead, doh!