Posts by Gouk

Virgin Media scraps wholesale network rival to Openreach

Overhead versus undrground cable.

The houses in our area are in two types; (1) council owned & private owned on estates served by overhead cables and poles. (2) "POSH" estate where to remove unsightliness of poles and cables , the telephone wires were sunk into ground under pavements. Now the (1) houses are upgraded and get good internet and speeds; the (2) area are stuck with what can be transmitted over their very old cables, as no one is prepared to pay for the high cost of digging up roads, pavements, re-cabling and back filling , and making good to surfaces. The era of internet has bypassed the "POSH" houses. Most have gone to satellite services.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Server naming need intelligence, not just a pattern

I mandate Black on Yellow for all text messages, as many monitors are faintly lit.

Taxman picks up $140M tab after Cadence fined for China export violations

Balancing the books. In = out.

Expenses are equal to income improvement. Neat financial book balancing..

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Only person on flight. To Dubai

Two days after Gulf War started I was booked to fly to Dubai.

I was only person on inbound to Dubai flight. Magnificent service.

8 cabin crew with only me as passenger. Remember it well.

Cloud brute-force attack cracks Google users' phone numbers in minutes

These were land lines. No bank account or payment systems attached, paper bills were issued by phone company.

No fraud possible just by telephone number unless fraudster issued a 'good looking paper bill', and accepted cash at

a known account at a bank using phone company's name.

Most were paid by direct debit bank to bank automatically.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Re: Aquarium offices.... Window seat

Ah! The 'promotion' to a 'window seat' with a view to the outside was always a 'death to useful work' sentence in any big Japanese Office.

The 'windows view person' had an outside view and could stay until death. I learned this when a proposal by my firm to a Japanese company got me an interview with a window person with a large expense account to get me out of their hair {Unbeknownst to me they already were signed to a rival company.} It was always much better to be sent to discuss with a person in the basement who had actual authority to buy or dismiss me, and had knowledge to actually understand our proposals and question intelligently, if our proposals would help his company or not. I learned when interested, the meeting would go on all day and night, so that on following day a 'formal session' could occur with all questions and their answers known but recorded as a meeting without any 'incidents'.