A real gentleman
Had the pleasure of chatting with him over coffee at a security conference several years ago. Very knowledgeable and we hit it off, especially discussing security surrounding medical records and issues therein.
56 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2007
Are you nuts?
Try to engineer the climate of our one & only planet without some assurance of pre-testing?
Man-caused climate change may or may not real {regardless of the advocates, the science is NOT finalized} . One messes up on planetary engineering, I think would be much worse than the effects of climate change.
If the designers are not careful (where have we hear THAT phrase before) and through no malicious intent, things can go SNAFU in a hurry.
Why why why connect everything through the internet? What possible benefit can overarch the negatives?
Maybe I'm just a repressed Luddite.......
It would seem the El Reg is DETERMINED to try to FORCE it's readers to change habits.
Pity
Perhaps an appeal to the advertisers might work?
....nope; bloody-minded designers in the way
Perhaps an appeal to the editors would work?
...nope, too emotionally attached and afraid to admit mistakes
I use to enjoy the articles & yes, even pickup a bit of kit from the adverts.
Now I am scoring the Internet for a sane site, to only chance upon these shores from time to time {when I need my vitamin D replenishment}...
My
eyeballs . . . . . have . . . . . settled . . . . . Down a bit.
- - - -
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Maybe . . . . . they . . . . . thought . . . . they . . . . have . . . . a . . . . good . . . . .design?
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Maybe . . . . . it . . . . . .is . . . . . .a . . . . . .caffeine . . . . . .substitute?
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Maybe . . . . .they . . . . .can't . . . . .trust . . . . .their . . . . .readership . . . . .to . . . . .tell . . . . .a . . . . .good . . . . .design . . . . .from . . . . .a . . . . .bad . . . . .one.
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maybe . . . . . the . . . . .editors . . . . . / . . . . .publishers . . . . .will . . . . .come . . . . .to . . . . .their . . . . .senses . . . . .
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There's my morning vent/rant/thoughtful comments
(Note; I had to use periods as spaces since the editor did the {sensible} thing and got rid of my previous attempt to sue extra spaces.
Get RID OF IT!
If you are not paying any attention to your reader's views as so eloquently stated herein, then your adverts will find empty eyesockets and will go away to find a new home. I don't mind a reasonable set of adverts as I understand the economics of some of these websites. Pissing off your reader base accomplishes the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you want to achieve (at least, what I assume you want to achieve). Maybe Dr Evil is messing around with your UA developers.........
The better is the enemy of the good !
Take whichever style artist put the scheme together , tie him(or her or them) down to a seat in front of a monitor and staple their eyes open looking into the monitor tuned to the home page. Then 2 minutes later call the local insane asylum and register those artists as new occupants. Or is that cruel and inhuman punishment?
In a word AAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Please please PLEASE , change it back.
Perhaps in the hardcopy world would your comments have credibility.
Also, target your style for the audience; since the typical loyal el Reg reader is (in all probability) a techie, type fonts and other publishing nuances are lost. Content is king (or queen) ; leave the flashy stuff to the Hollywood tabloids or The Guardian.
On second thought, even The Guardian's website, busy as it is, (unfortunately) outclasses this attempt. I acknowledge that the Reg publishers/editors were maybe looking to improve the website, but IMHO, this change is regressive.
Yuck
Too much white space
make the text denser on the interline spaceing
top article overly massive (why?)
side-bar text box too large
skip the colourful drop-menus on the nav bar & just post links...
bring back the ever-loved shareware - software downloads page(s) :) !!
It's the content !!!!!!!!!!
Hey, if 90% ( and some could argue 100 %) of your standard business applications can run on a thin client/browser type system, why bother with conventional desktop systems apps. ? load it all on the mainframe/server (cheaper to maintain). So what if the OS upgrades? Put in a new thin client/browser on a new OS (if you have to ) and off you go. Visualization can work if the virt box supports some variant of Office (since Office has the lion's share of the market).
Ducking rotten tomatoes, bad fruit and salami on the way out the door.......................
This issue is no different that any other that business' have had to deal within the past ie: personal time on the telephone, extra-long bathroom breaks , inappropriate lunchtimes, etc.
BYOD becomes a business issue when it adversely interferes with the individual's productivity. Reasonable and fairly set workplace productivity standard(s) which have defined & measurable metrics to enforce obviates the need to institute a blackout policy.
The IT security issues are the Gordian knot to deal with and (again) need to be clearly articulated and implemented. They must be SEEN to be fair as well as being actually fair.
My two bits worth at any rate ( as I type this response during my coffee break......)
I have the following which has worked well and reliably over the years:
Everything is hardwired in the household ; I distrust consumer-level wireless for throughput reasons.
Players
1 - Geexbox on a number of older PC's with a composite (read yellow connector) output to older TV's. Wireless keyboard for controls
2 - Patriot media players HDMI connected in all of the other rooms - these play virtually anything I have thrown at them excepting the occasional .MOV format
3 - VLC on the work and other laptop computers in the house
4 - A Playbook tablet (yes , I know but it DOES work) on a wireless connection
NAS's
1 - 5X Dlink DNS-323's configured as a JBOD ; offline image backups of each disk in the NAS
2 - 2X NAS4FREE (FreeNAS fork) ASUS P5GD1 -based computers
Note:
- the NAS"s has sufficient ACL's to keep the kids from erasing the collection
- I use multiple NAS's as the throughput on consumer level units like the Dlink (or Buffalo or etc.) tends to max out if the whole house is trying to view files from a single box, so I spread the theme category files around.
- I back EVERYthing up as I had a "hiccup " and needed to reformat the drive; fortunately only happened once and probably because of a power spike, which brings me to ...
- all of the NAS's and routers/switches are on UPS's
- File formats are either ISO or mpeg2
- 100 baseT is more than sufficient for networking
Have fun!
I have the following which has worked well and reliably over the years:
Everything is hardwired in the household ; I distrust consumer-level wireless for throughput reasons.
Players
1 - Geexbox on a number of older PC's with a composite (read yellow connector) output to older TV's. Wireless keyboard for controls
2 - Patriot media players HDMI connected in all of the other rooms - these play virtually anything I have thrown at them excepting the occasional .MOV format
3 - VLC on the work and other laptop computers in the house
4 - A Playbook tablet (yes , I know but it DOES work) on a wireless connection
NAS's
1 - 5X Dlink DNS-323's configured as a JOBD ; offline image backups of each disk in the NAS
2 - 2X NAS4FREE (FreeNAS fork) ASUS P5GD1 -based computers
Note:
- the NAS"s has sufficient ACL's to keep the kids from erasing the collection
- I use multiple NAS's as the throughput on consumer level units like the Dlink (or Buffalo or etc.) tends to max out if the whole house is trying to view files from a single box, so I spread the theme category files around.
- I back EVERYthing up as I had a "hiccup " and needed to reformat the drive; fortunately only happened once and probably because of a power spike, which brings me to ...
- all of the NAS's and routers/switches are on UPS's
- File formats are either ISO or mpeg2
- 100 baseT is more than sufficient for networking
Have fun!
More nonsense. Research into DDT's safety and effectiveness has a long, extensive history. It is so safe, people can eat it; in fact people did that for a two year study [ Hayes, W. J. (1969), PESTICIDES AND HUMAN TOXICITY. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 160: 40–54. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1969.tb15822.x ].
It is truly unfortunate that the populace at large has been misinformed about the effects of the various chemicals, both good & bad, that surround us in modern society. I for one don't harken to the bad old days of inexact food science or to eliminate vaccines that dealt with mass killer diseases (polio, rubella, etc.) which plagued us.
As for edible foods, there has been found to be a larger taste variance between home grown food of a given crop than of any particular method of agronomy & cultivation.
In their haste to migrate their users off XP (W7 then, horrors, W8) MS may have made a significant strategic blunder.
I have "numerous" clients for whom XP was more than sufficient. There was NOTHING in 7 or 8 that added to the functionality that already existed in the workplace environment which was worth the expense in an SMB setting. Perhaps if MS included a "lite" version of Office in 7/8, the migration MIGHT make sense. But if you evaluate the needs of a typical office drone, using word, excel and a browser, migrating made no financial/business sense.
As Trevor Potts pointed out in an earlier article, MS could save face by offering a subscription service for XP upgrades. But then again, I don't recall MS ever eating crow....
This is bang on; it's not the technical complexity of the systems but the governance, regulatory requirements and compliance monitoring that elude the techies but can seriously impact a company's risk and liability profile.
Cue blank look on your local cloud vendor's face.....
One important aspect that was lost (or did I miss something?) is the availability of high-speed broadband internet, without which the Cloud make no economic sense whatsoever to SMEs. Trevor Pott wrote an excellent piece on that issue.
Even now, where one has facilities "off the beaten track", ie: away from the well-served urban areas, broadband is non-existent or very expen$ive.
Our family has all three ; I have a BB Bold & Playbook, my wife/daughter Iphone 5's and my older boy has a Samsung GS4 whilst my youngest guy has an (ancient - non-smart) LG ??
I prefer the BB as it is rugged and I saw the tethering to the Playbook as feature (security-wise really important for me) not an obstacle. Also, try dropping an ipad 2.2 meters (a hazard in my line of work): the playbook survived while I lost a $600 ipad "investment". I use my phone for calls and the very occasional text. The playbook doubles as a email viewport and repository of various reference files & documents. The BB (Bold) even survived a brief dunking in water while my wife's iPhone 4 fall in the snow(!!) precipitated a replacement of the current 5.
I haven't seen a phone-based camera that I consider to have any real image quality (forget the pixels, I mean colour rendition and dynamic range). Mine is used only for emergency or just in the moment shots.
I don't text since that means (for me) I have to put on glasses (sometimes very inconvenient) and NONE of the smartphones I've been exposed to offer a decent text sizing option on their applications. The first smartphone with a DECENT text sizing option will get my attention. I get by on the BB since I have speed dialing, voice dialing and don't use caller ID as a screening mechanism; either I'm available for a call or I let it go to voicemail. I guess I'm an old fogee that thinks it RUDE to not answer a person's call.
The wife & daughter like the iphones as they suit their "gadget" texting and some of the apps that are offered (my daughter is the tech support around here for the iphone).
My oldest like the size of his Samsung GS4 and uses it as a pseudo-tablet & gaming unit as well as a phone. He only wants one gadget in his pocket/rupsack/binder.
The youngest couldn't care less about apps or texting (?surprise for a younger generation?) and just wants to do the odd phone call.
IMHO, BB is the only serious contender for any comprehensive business use, although I have friends that swear by their iPhone capabilities. The key is to find a phone that works FOR YOU and ignore/take with large salt tablet/be skeptical of anybody's marketing claims of usability.
As far as the corporate survivability of BB, they'll be around for a while, although the company might/should get bought out. Support will still be there for BB as there is far too large and established a customer base for someone not to address it (including the carriers).
Somehow I am reminded of a saying that my grandfather conveyed to me (in the form of a joke):
What is the difference between Capitalism and Socialism?
In Capitalism, man exploits man and in Socialism, it's the other way around.....
Hydrogen gas has been used in large electrical generators for cooling, etc. Don't know why hydrogen wouldn't be considered unless the spinning rust is susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement. I image the safety hazards of use of hydrogen in consumer-level equipment could also be a consideration.
Helium in an HD enclosure interesting twist, however, the big issue is that eventually the helium seeps out. A typical life cycle for a completely sealed glass-enclosed He-Ne laser tube is about 5 years and unless there is a fundamentally new way of sealing the HD enclosure, the He seepage may limit the life of those high-performance drives.
Unless there is something that I haven;'t considered..........
Wouldn't mind some global warming up here ; coldest December for a looong time.
Even if us human are responsible for a significant portion of climate change (something up for debate), being able to adapt probably makes the most sense. Pollution, however, we definitely should be addressing.
CO2 hardly qualifies as pollution (ask neighborhood crop of trees).
Mine is the frozen car under the show drift........
Actually, this has already been done by the US Navy in the 70's.
A specially designed submarine (USS Halibut) attached a tapping device on Russian military seabed telephone cables under Operation "Ivy Bells".
Operated for months on stretch, recording military signals traffic for later analysis by the NSA.
Make the Spooks plot somewhat more plausible.
Lester, you really have wayyyy to much time on your hands, er hand..........
No discernible IT angle
Minimal Paris angle
non-existent meat angle
Please stay with the "Serbian Shepherder discovers Bliss from divining the universe through hearing Paris Hilton monologues" and you'll stay safe for stories worthy of El Reg.
vomit bags discretely placed in pocket under monitor stand..........................
It is interesting to note that there are some studies that link cloud formation to cosmic ray activity.
This effect is apparently impossible to predict/ model with any degree of certainty.
Wherever you are on the anthropogenic climate factors, this issue of external effects swamping man-made effects cannot help but give pause to those who would contend that man is the primary and dominating factor.
I personally think that those who assert discernible man-made influences on climate are arrogant in their belief about man's importance.
Someone who state the "obvious".
Tattoos on a beauty queen is an oxymoron.
Why any lass, who spends endless hours on trying to keep attractive, would deliberately disfigure herself is beyond my comprehension.
Or maybe it's just that I'm an old fart and can't stand the darn things (tattos that is).
This is a standard ploy for IT (well, not only IT) firms who don't want the specific contact but still want to get future pork, er, contracts from an existing customer.
You give a ridiculously high figure to undertake the project to effectively tell the customer that it's an expen$ive favour .
If you get the contract, well, you're in the money (unless you are totally incompetent). If you don't get the contract, then you at least "showed interest".
So far, El Reg has cheerfully regaled us with the follies (or is it foibles) of a select group of humans.
I say it is high time to deport them all to safe zone, say Pluto. Oops, can't be Pluto as it's no longer a planet.
Any better suggestions from your noble readers?
Paris, since she would gleeeeeeeefuly advise a fellow blond................
If one looks at the history of major health-care IT projects world-wide, there is a depressing pattern that emerges:
1 - announcement & high hopes by the participants
2 - awarding of contract(s) to big-name IT firms
3 - delay , delays and more delays
4 - sacking of prominent figures
5 - delay , delays and more delays
6 - reorganisation and/or new blood (contractors)
7 - delay , delays and more delays
8 - disillusionment by participants on the same scale as the original announcement's hopes
9 - out comes the knives
Healthcare IT is a black hole for any aspiring senior IT manager.
Mostly what happens is that the government ends up in a series of perpetual battles with the regional health bodies and hospitals over the vision vs practical aspects of implementation. Add to the mix that the irrepressible urge to play IT professional by physicians (who should know better) and you are left in a no-win scenario.
Happens in Canada
Happens in Germany
Happens in FInland
Don't get me started on the Yanks......
Why should you folks be left out of the fun? (just kidding)
Heaven forbid if a competent and capable manager be brought on and left to do his job without egregious interference.
that's my take anyways...................................