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User: niks42

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  1. Re:We cant even get a patching window on Deferred IT Maintenance Is a Ticking Time Bomb · · Score: 1

    Our service management team haven't applied a single patch to antivirus in over two years. Firmware on storage silos is pre 2007 level. OS levels and middleware are all out of support, and the application software will probably fall out of support in March unless someone has the balls to sign an extension before the end of the financial year. I won't bore you with the details on ancient client computers, which can't be upgraded to supported levels of software. When I point out the obvious, rising risks and real-world examples of catastrophic failures caused by neglect at all levels, I am told I am guilty of scare-mongery and to STFU, if I want to keep my job. wat do, /.? Well, I tell you what I do. I keep myself employed, run around with the duct tape, make sure I capture every bit of documentation from any old fart who is leaving to go fishing instead, and generally have fun keeping this mangled, messed up thing going as long as I can. Oh, and I constantly advocate open source solutions that could be maintained without incremental licence costs that scare the CIO, and continue to run well on the old, crappy junk hardware around here.

  2. I sometimes use a PLAYLIST .. on Pink Floyd Give In To Digital Downloads · · Score: 1

    that means I get to select tunes from all kinds of albums, from all kinds of artists ... and I play them in any order that I feel like. I sometimes play a SINGLE SONG from an album. I wouldn't imagine for one minute that any of the artists involved thought I was not treating their artistic output with appropriate respect.

  3. The hand of a famous smart card hacker behind this on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I notice with interest that the Ph.D paper has the acknowledgement "I thank my supervisor, Markus Kuhn, for extensive guidance and valuable advice on rigorous design and research"

    Not THE Markus Kuhn for whom many of us have to thank for Season 7, the Sky smartcard emulator and a kickstart into the world of hardware hacking? (in the nicest sense of the word).

    We are not worthy. Omar, you walk in the footprints of a giant.

  4. Howl like a Stuka on Electric Cars May Be Made Noisier By Law · · Score: 1

    How about one of those wailing sirens like a Stuka used to use on a dive? Operated by the wind blowing through them .. faster they go, the more noise they make. Mind you if the wind were in the right direction, a car park would sound like a herd of dying animals.

  5. Re:Welcome to my world on America's Cubicles Are Shrinking · · Score: 1

    Oh I was way ahead of you. Difficulty is we have a lot of visitors, people delivering lunch, post people, cleaners and others. Should I divide up the floor area between them as well? Do we therefore provide 20 square inches of office space to the sandwich girl?

  6. Re:Bunk desks! on America's Cubicles Are Shrinking · · Score: 1

    Isn't that what a 'mezzanine' floor is? Seen lots of those for hot desk areas in a number of companies.

  7. Welcome to my world on America's Cubicles Are Shrinking · · Score: 2

    My personal office space is 36 square feet; I am lucky enough to have a window along one edge. I spend most of my working life with a headset on to shut out the interference to my concentration from my near neighbours, four of whom I could hit with a baseball bat (quite cheerfully, as it happens) without leaving my chair. Welcome to the world of being an IT Architect.

  8. Re:I'd like to use a more IT related version... on Firesheep Author Reflects On Wild Week · · Score: 1

    When analog cellphones were all the rage, and we were performing EMC testing on computers, we found our scanners - intended for the automated collection of emissions from computers - were dang good at intercepting and listening in on conversations. You could sometimes hang on to a conversation for a minute at a time before a frequency hop happened. Wives telling their husbands they would smell their breath (and worse) when they got home, lots of 'where are you?' and so on. Now what I was doing was illegal in my country. There would be no way of knowing that I was doing it though, nor was the tool I was using intended for that purpose. However, the fact that it was so easy to do further accelerated the digital standards and encrypted communication. I wouldn't for a minute consider banning the scanner.

  9. pullease, not BT on UK Goverment IT Chief Backs Open Source Suppliers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As long as they don't engage BT to deliver the g-Cloud. More than 40% of all of the funding for the NHS national program is sinking down that particular black hole, and wouldn't want to see any more KBEs being created on the back of providing overpriced services very slowly, and very, very poorly supported.

  10. Re:Eerie on Apple's Developer Tools Turnaround 'Great News' For Adobe · · Score: 1

    We won't mention Apple TV .. oh drat.

  11. Re:Still it's weird on They Finally Found Out We Like Our Computers · · Score: 1

    IBM refused to refer to 'memory' in relation to computers; rather they called it storage, to help prevent people from fearing computers and over-anthropomorphising. Mayhap we need to remind people that like Johnny 5, they just run programs.

  12. Re:Ugh. on 4chan Gives 90-Year-Old Vet a Great Birthday · · Score: 0, Troll

    Shouldn't that be 'pull the sharpie out of your ass?'

  13. Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell on Windows 95 Turns 15 · · Score: 1

    btw the guys from AIX land in Austin were in the habit of visiting the CPDOS developers in Boca in 1986, to tell them that they already had a 32-bit OS that ran on i386, that could run multiple DOS windows and all that, and asking why were we spending enough money to launch the Hubble telescope (AND go repair it, as it happened) to develop something that we already could do with a Unix variant.

    They must be saying 'We told you so ...' now.

  14. I still have one machine running Win95 on Windows 95 Turns 15 · · Score: 1

    A legacy bit of device programming kit I have only runs on Windows and needs a serial port, and I have an old Toshiba satellite laptop with not enough memory to boot XP .. Win95 works fine. I bought the world's oldest PCMCIA (non-32 bit) network adapter off a certain Internet Auction Site; I just drop Intel Hex files into a shared folder and off it goes. AND it doesn't insist on my downloading multiple updates for Windows security fixes every time I boot it. I did have to take the hard disk out, put a DOS boot image and all of the Win95 diskette images on to it to bootstrap the install, cuz I couldn't find enough 3.5 inch diskettes ..

  15. Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell on Windows 95 Turns 15 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Oh, trust me we did work hard with OS/2 preloads to try to convince people that it was a good platform, but ultimately we lost out to a better, meaner, more willing to do the unethical and probably illegal, marketing machine.

  16. Far more likely to be related to power and ground on Calling Shenanigans On Super SATA's Claimed Audio Qualities · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you have audio interference from system activity, it is far more likely to be cross-coupled down the power supplies than it is by radiation. Most really good audio cards have on-board regulators and decoupling, with in-line inductors in the power supplies as well as the usual shielding.

    Hum can be caused by currents flowing in the cable grounds as well. Back in the good ol', we would make sure that the audio system components were grounded at one point (a 'star' earthing point) to avoid ground loops where audible signal currents could be induced. Not wishing to try to do the same with my PC and attached stuff, I isolate the PC from the amp by using a digital output (dirt cheap bit of old coax and a couple of phono connectors). Ta-da!

  17. The world is not enough .. on Rupert Murdoch Claims To Own the 'Sky' In 'Skype' · · Score: 1

    Can someone please get a grip of this man and remind him he is just a media mogul from Down Under, and isn't that dang important, or newsworthy. Somehow it smacks of self-perpetuating motion for a media baron to attract so much media attention.

  18. HP Agilent on Oscilloscopes For Modern Engineers? · · Score: 1

    I've used many, but my favorite scope right now is an HP 54502A that I bought off eBay and repaired. (bootstrapping repair using another HP scope whose tube is reaching end of life and had to be used in a very dark room!) It took a little while to get used to digital scopes from analog, but I find it very hard to go back now. I have an open source Logic Analyser as well, which cost me all of $50; the combination of the two is terrific - especially now I have sync out from the LA to the scope ..

  19. Overtaken By Events on After a Decade, Digital Radio Still an Also-Ran In UK · · Score: 2, Informative

    I agree with posters above that non-interactivity is good - it reduces cognitive loading, as Bruce Sterling would say. You just want something to tune into, that respects your style of music, stretches your boundaries slightly and gets on with the job in the background. DAB could have been good; however, they failed to move quickly enough to get the receivers out there at prices competitive with FM. It would have to be pretty dang competitive for me, since I have two excellent Home Cinema receivers with FM, a kitchen radio with FM, a bedside alarm clock with FM, a a Hacker Black Knight in the shed, one for when I do DIY and don't mind it getting paint-spattered, several vintage receivers including a bakelite Ecko, one for when I am out flying kites, one in each car ... so anyway before I digress, DAB took too long, so it itself is obsolete against Internet radio, iTunes podcast downloads Sky radio stations and a myriad of other more modern solutions. The Germans are letting it die on the vine also. Why do we not do the Capitalist thing, and let the consumers determine its fate. Oh wait, we already did. LET IT DIE.

  20. Obviousness Test FAIL on USPTO Grants Bezos Patent On '60s-Era Chargebacks · · Score: 1

    I thought we were meant only to call ideas inventions when they were ideas that are not obvious, and would challenge someone practiced in whatever discipline to come up with by themselves?

  21. Re:Nothing beats a good CV (resume) on British Computer Society Is Officially At Civil War · · Score: 1

    I totally agree. I was mithering about the arbitrary division of the world into 'Technicians' and 'Engineers', wondering where architects (seemingly like me, from the job title) come from.

  22. Re:Nothing beats a good CV (resume) on British Computer Society Is Officially At Civil War · · Score: 1

    What about architects? Are they engineers?

  23. Re:Nothing beats a good CV (resume) on British Computer Society Is Officially At Civil War · · Score: 1

    Thanks for that, Mr Ballmer.

    Of course I exaggerate to make a point, but the point is well made; when you have had the opportunity like I have to grow, and pursue ones career while the IT industry took shape, a membership of a society is not overly important. Early in my career I would have gone for the IEEE, or the IERE anyhow as I started as an electronics engineer. How much relevance would that have now, though my skills at end-end troubleshooting are doubtless almost entirely due to that upbringing.

  24. Re:The BCS is an irrelevance on British Computer Society Is Officially At Civil War · · Score: 1

    Hah! you're so right .. like the MG Owners Club trying to tell Toyota how to design the next-gen Prius .. oh, wait ..

  25. Re:Nothing beats a good CV (resume) on British Computer Society Is Officially At Civil War · · Score: 1

    An exception that proves the rule ;-)

    Having applied for over 200 jobs in the last 18 months, been turned down for the other guy because they had slightly more experience of Government Security standards, or were slightly younger, or had more sexual appeal to the (non-technical) Technical Director, landed a great job with a CV that just demonstrated experience, and the cuts and bruises of encounters with hostile customers, a willingness to be flexible, and the wisdom to know when not to be. Cut out all of the technical stuff, except the statement that ! was a pro-Unix and Open Source, and anti-MS Bigot.

    Result!