Posts by onefang

Re: Remember the 2016 Census

"election promise to drive technology development and industry in Australia...."

...over a cliff.

"How tiny is Australia?"

Depends on what you are measuring. The physical size of Australia is roughly about the same as USA. The population size is roughly on par with a few of the larger USA cities put together. The IQ of our politicians as on par with USA politicians, but that's a low bar to clear. We have waaaay less states, but since we fit them into the same area USA squeezes it's into, ours are much larger. We have cattle ranches that are bigger than Texas, USA. We have a small country town called Texas, which if I recall correctly is near a small country town called Paris. Oddly enough, each of our three biggest cities individually has a bigger area than almost any USA city. We have way more species of deadly animal than just about anywhere else. Our mountains are kinda short. We have the biggest rock in the world, but no natural holes in the ground as big as the Grand Canyon, though I can't comment on the size of our man made holes. One of our cities has the largest Greek population outside of Athens, and that city has a Malaka* Street to celebrate that fact (I used to live near it, oddly in an area with a large Jewish population).

Our dollar is often smaller than the USA dollar, but has been known to be bigger.

It's entirely possible that our politicians are cheaper to buy than USA politicians, I've never compared them. While it is true that anything imported tends to be more expensive than it is in the country we import it from (known locally as the Australia Tax, they do it coz they can get away with it), we recently purged our politicians of any with dual nationality, or potential dual nationality, or even rumoured dual nationality, so none of the remaining lot are imports.

Some of the above may be inaccurate, I've not looked things up recently, and my memory may be wrong on some of the details.

* I'm not Greek, nor do I know any Greek, but until just now when I bothered to look it up, I was under the impression "Malaka" is Greek for "shit". My quick web search tells me it has a variety of meanings, most of them not good. This maybe why the area around it is largely Jewish, the Greeks didn't want to go near it. I have no idea if "Malaka" is a Hebrew word, I don't speak that language either.

Re: Oh dear

"I'd keep an eye out for news (in the next 12 months) about a new Australian-born addition to IBM board."

That sounds about right for being after the next federal election, would not surprise me if that's an exit strategy for one of our current crop of leaders. Would not surprise a lot of people if the result of that election is a change of government, or even a hung parliament.

Re: Microsoft and AWS are already going hard for cloud business in Canberra

"I'm not sure the business of Government is sitting around playing Xbox all day or even conversing with Alexa, but then again I'm not Austrailian, so I could be mistaken?"

I am Australian, and if that's what they do all day, it might explain a lot of things.

Re: “significant savings"

"Bet they won't be saying that in 5 years time."

In five years time the current government might very well be the Opposition, so it wont be their problem. Then they can blame Labour as usual.

Re: Shared Hosting

"Let's Encrypt don't work on shared hosting."

Entirely untrue, I've done exactly that. Works for other certificate authorities to.

Re: It's not "browsing" anymore..

"Can you do https to a 192. address?"

"Yes, provided whatever equipment is on that address supports https, but to the best of my knowledge you can't buy a certificate for it from any legitimate certificate provider,"

Certificates are for domain names, not IP addresses. You could for example, hang a web server off an external IP, and a free domain name from afraid.org, for long enough to get a valid free Lets Encrypt certificate, then stick that domain name in your internal hosts file/s, pointing to your internal 192. address. Done, dusted, accepted by all browsers. Probably pointless getting a paid certificate for this sort of thing, but you could do that to.

Re: This could be solved by...

"We are determinedly, and sometimes amusingly, anti-social here."

But at least we are socially anti-social, if we where unsocial, we would not be talking past one another like we do, we would simply not be talking.

Re: While the software that has been removed is bad, I have issues...

"Your virus checker provider is a commercial organization that determines what you can and can't run on your device,"

No, my virus checkers advise me about what they think I should or should not run on my device. The two I run on my Android complain about a different open source app each. I've double checked those two apps, and I'm happy to ignore the advice and run them anyway. False positives and false negatives are a thing, which is why I run two virus checkers in the first place, and check their results.

Re: Generations...

"Boomers are 1945 - 64

"Gen X are 1964-79

"It's kinda dumb since anyone close to a transition point gets classified weirdly."

Case in point, myself. I was born in '61, and I always thought I was between Boomer and Gen X, leaning more towards Gen X, not Boomer as you state.

Re: Departure Lounge 9

"ssshhh, noone likes to hear that much truth."

Ah, that explains the downvote, someone didn't want to hear it.

"Age discrimination is not just the only discrimination that's PC, or SJW-approved or whatever this month's vocabulary has it, it's actually mandatory amongst these folks."

This is bound to happen with the world no longer being allowed to discriminate against the various large "minority" groups, the bigots of the world have to find other groups to discriminate against. Smaller, less vocal groups. Eventually a new equilibrium is reached, where the groups being discriminated against are too small and not vocal enough, that they are the current poor suckers that get all the shit. And everyone is fine with that, coz who cares about the few males with long fingernails and meter long dreadlocks, or red heads with long noses, not big enough groups for anyone to worry about.

Re: Departure Lounge 9

"As a ticket-holding member of the Boomer Departure Lounge set, I say; thank the FSM I will be retiring soon.

"The young are welcome to screw things up."

Though as you got older, your body and mind will be slowly falling apart, you'll have to rely on the young more and more to look after you. You don't want them to be screwing THAT up.

Re: Killer App

"We live in a *nix world now - the Lions share of the market belongs to Android, iOS, ChromeOS, macOS and Linux."

When the Macintosh operating system became Unix based, I said that the OS wars are over, Unix won, but no one told Microsoft. Though now that they are adding bits of Ubuntu to Windows, I guess they are catching up to the rest of the world.

Re: Boffin

All of those non-boffin words are longer, and some of them are even hard to spell. Boffin is short, easy to spell, and fits into a headline. You yourself used "gonna" instead of "going to", you should appreciate the use of short easy to spell words. Perhaps in the future it'll be "bofin" and "gona", just coz.

Re: Boffins say most Android apps can slurp your screen

"Define most...

"Otherwise it's little more than clickbait"

The article did include some numbers, perhaps you should read it, instead of clicking the bait just to comment? There was even a table with lots of numbers in it.

Re: Is it likely

"I am fairly sure that if I want security and privacy the only good device is one that is switched off."

And in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Which if I remember correctly, is how Windows NT got it's high security certificate.

Re: What's the battery life like?

And any colour you like, so long as it's black.

Re: Delta T

Sounds like my PS3, I used to joke that it'll make a great room heater.

Re: Hope they More Reliable Than The Old Model...

"While the specs have always been on the impressive side, the weight..."

...has also been on the impressive side, leaving quite an impression on what ever body part you are using to carry the thing.

Re: What does it run?

"Indeed, you could set up a small network of servers in your backpack."

When I was secretary of a local Unix users group, it was often my job to carry the proxy server and all the networking gear to and from the big regular meetings. I'd also be carrying my own desktop system. So that was two medium sized desktop boxen, one WiFi AP, two or three 24 way hubs / switches, a few hundred meters of network cable, one monitor, keyboard, mouse, power cables, and assorted power bricks. In my backpacks (one of those hybrid packs where the day pack can clip to the main pack, and bounce on your tummy as you walk), either walking for two hours, or on the bus.

And people kept wondering why I was always pushing to get the proxy server replaced by something physically smaller.

None of this was battery powered though.

Re: Label, Label Label

In the place where I volunteer my IT services to seniors, about a month and a half ago, I was contemplating ways of getting better WiFi in the other end of the building. Inside a small room with a sign saying "STORAGE ROOM" on the door, was a network socket, which would have been the perfect place to plug in an old Cisco AP I had found in a cupboard. So I updated and configured the AP while it was plugged into my laptop, then plugged it in to that room, no joy. The network socket had a label saying "PROJECT ROOM", all the staff that had been there way longer than I had never heard of a project room. After some searching, in the main office, laying on the ground, hidden behind a rather heavy desk, was an unplugged network cable, also labelled "PROJECT ROOM". I plugged it into a spare port on one of the switches, ran back to to storage room, and the AP had lit up. Much testing later, and I declared the WiFi issues in that end of the building as solved. The new AP was working perfectly, instead of dropping out all the time at that end of the building like the existing AP would, coz the existing AP was too far away at the other end.

Over the last three weeks, the place had been closed while they replaced the old floor. Prior to that, we packed everything away in labelled boxes, so the construction crew could shift everything to one end of the building, replace the floor in the cleared area, move everything to the other end, and replace the rest of the floor. On Monday we got to move everything back, including plugging all the computers and phones back in. Luckily the network and phone gear had been mostly left in place, being bolted, nailed, glued, or embedded in the walls. Very lucky, that PROJECT ROOM label was the only label. No labels on anything else, would have had no idea what to plug in where. We got everything working again except for one phone, though it turned out the plug on one end of it's cable had been cut off. I don't happen to have any RJ11s, but the IT guy they pay to look after the half of the computers that I don't look after said he has some back at his office, and promised to fix that on Tuesday. I usually only work there on Mondays.

After the dust had settled, I gave a little "Label, label, label" type speech. I'm guessing they'll ask me to do that next week.

P.S. For those wondering, the computers used by the office staff where paid for by the organisation itself, and they have been paying a computer business to look after those computers. The other computers where donated by a government scheme called "Broadband For Seniors", for the purpose of educating seniors, and letting them use these computers. Educating seniors, and helping them with their computers / smartphones is my volunteer job, so I get to look after these freebies. Oddly enough, one of those freebies is the most powerful computer in the entire building.

There are archeological layers of "old" computer equipment in that place. I've learned that it sometimes pays to go digging, which is how I found that Cisco AP. They had asked me to advise them about a new scanner they wanted to buy. They told me their requirements, and my reply was "Hang on, I think I saw one of those in that cupboard over there." Came back a minute later, "Here, will this do?". They've been very happy with that scanner.