Posts by regadpellagru 548 posts • joined 31 Jul 2006
"In 1990 the company acquired Peter Norton Computing, taking on the latter's Norton-branded DOS utilities - and, of note, its security and antivirus products, which would eventually become the company's primary focus."
It also acquired that famous P. Norton portrait that was on *every* single Norton security boxes, back then.
No-one knew who that dude was. Weird marketing ....
"It was basically a VT100 with a modem that you connected to a phone line.
Then you dialed the (in)famous 3615 ( or other numbers in case of private servers, like the one we used to have at work ) and entered a code. ( there was also 3616 and 3617 services. 3615 were free the other two were pay services and in some cases quite expensive )"
Yes, and 3615 costed shitloads of money, and was routinely used by crooks. It basically was a scam.
"That's one of the reasons why Internet didn't really appear in France before ADSL showed up."
In fact, the 3615 service was pushing so much money to France Telecom they never wanted to deploy any internet service. At all.
Until the minister realized how late France was into internet and forced them to move on.
"For me, I find all PC gaming increasingly unsatisfying. I find my serious gaming has moved to consoles and my casual gaming to phones and tablets."
Sadly, Linux gaming is dead, mostly due to Apple going to their own CPU platform. No-one will ever make any MacOS/Linux port, now. The work was shared between platforms, like kill 2 birds with one stone.
Now, this is over.
We can even see it now in the steam store ...
"It's my own fault that I receive them as I unpeeled the ugly STOP PUB ("no junk mail") sticker from my letterbox when I moved in. In France you get heaps of printed junk stuffed in there almost every day, which Mme D was not too pleased about at first. However, some of it provides amusement and quite a lot of it comes with generous money-off vouchers to spend at all the highly competitive supermarkets nearby. Over the summer, I must have saved a good 200-300€ on my shopping just using freebies in my junk mail."
Well, Dabsy, that was indeed in the principle a risky move, but fear not, "STOP PUB" only gets you only 50% of junk mail anyway. I take it you, like me, get it in bulk, by 2kg packs, yeah ?
As for the absurd french regulations (even the german have now shockingly discovered humour by calling France "Absurdistan", by now). The priceless part was: ski stations are open. But no ski lifts, bars nor restaurants. Enjoy going up by feet if you're not into cross country skiing or "ski de randonnée", which is 99.8% of skiers. And if you are into cross country, no worries, no-one will prepare tracks, anyway, given the huge costs and no income, so enjoy bogging down in fresh snow ! And eat a wet sandwich by -10C in the wind.
But welcome to Absurdistan, Dabsy !
""This time, we'll be moving large parts of our ERP customer base from on-premise to the cloud, ..."
Wow, so a SW vendor is just gonna be "moving" their customers to cloud, like you move a pawn on a checkboard ??!!!
Like said customer/pawn is just a simple piece of wood/plastic too dumb to even object ?
SAP people need to put their arrogance back in the pandora box, really.
Many years ago, in India, we had mail appliances fail every 2 months.
Yep, mobo burned, replacement was painful, because of customs, and it happened so many times, vs. many other sites where the same *never* happened once.
At one point, I asked the dudes where they plugged the double PSUs setup. Of course, to 2 different power sources like is best practices.
After asking them to plug both PSUs to the same power source, the issue never re-occurred.
Yep, the 2 earth from the 2 power source were very different and it repeatedly killed the mobos *every* single time.
In the same way, I had great flashes when working at one building, years ago, between my hand and the coffee machine, even after touching the other coffee machine 2 meters away. Yep, 2 connected buildings, and the earth was not connected properly, and have 100 V give or take voltage difference.
Earth is a bitch.
"Investigations discovered that the Max contained software features that its pilots hadn’t been sufficiently briefed about, including the infamous MCAS automatic trim system."
"In desperation to compete with Airbus’ market-share-gobbling A320 Neo, a direct competitor of the 737, Boeing assured airlines that pilots who flew previous 737 models could swap to the new Max with minimal training. This turned out to be a lethal cost-saving shortcut that left pilots unaware of how to shut off MCAS when it kicked in and forced their airplanes to point at the ground instead of the sky."
Just saying, the 2 above statements are contradictory. The first hints at some good will mistake, while the second hints at some full good old corporate and lethal FAIL. Of course we all know which one is the right one.
Actually, the MCAS presence was deliberately hidden from pilot's knowledge in the goal of no training and recert.
Lucky you if you're in south !
Geez, sometimes I wish I had taken this doctoral thesis in stellar dynamics, several decades ago ...
Back then, black holes were purely hypothetical. And today, not only do we know there's one more or less in the center of every galaxy, but also one we can observe (not directly of course) without any tooling ! Which is right next door !
As for observation, you could probably pin point the movement of the 2 stars day after day during one month, by taking a pic with a telescope each day and see the rotation around "it".
But you would need to correct it by the rotation of the 2 stars set caused by their elevation vs. the solar plane and the trajectory of earth. Looks like Euler trigonometry is in order :)
Yes, all of this.
Many times, some security bloke would tell mgmt: OK, quick and diry like this, only if for internal use.
Then, same incompetent mgmt would go to network, to link this to da net. Network of course had no idea of the content.
Et voila, nice scandal. But yes, for a security company, this is extremely worrying !
Seriously, would games today on a MAC, given the policy of 5 years old low spec gear on current models at insane prices.
There was a surge of MAC ports for even FPS years ago, and it's now dead. There are more Linux ports than MAC ports. Devs have stopped bothering.
And frankly, even if Parallels' effort are commendable, they could have waited 2025 for DX11. DX10 games are probable the only runnable on today's MACs.
"The firearms issue is a bit of a mess in the US but even I no longer feel banning them will help. It won't. "
It definitely won't. Too late. If firearms were banned today, it would take 200 years for them to disappear.
And like has been said in this thread, the issue in the US is financial/living conditions.
"What we don't have though, is the clip on the pump handle that allows you to walk away whilst the fuel flows."
Same in France. This has been removed in the whole country some 25 years ago, I think. It was available back then, but not any longer, specifically to avoid the issue the OP pointed out.
Another very good example is Switzerland. Surrounded by EU countries but NOT in the EU.
I've moved a DC from France to Switzerland (actually, 2).
It worked like this:
- you need the actual value and descr of all systems, on a proformat invoice sheet
- you hand over this to a export company
- your lorry with systems passes customs, is checked
- if cleared, it passes
- I think, not sure, there is also a re-invoicing of VAT difference (in case of Switzerland, WAAAY less than in France)
So, end of the day:
- more expensive post Brexit (export provider)
- a hell of a paperwork to do for people that never had to do that in the EU
- the country with the highest standards (Switzerland, here) needs to maintain a quite sizeable customs force. Switzerland does.
"OpenBSD supremo Theo de Raadt today reiterated his plea to people to disable Intel's hyper-threading for security reasons. "DISABLE HYPERTHREADING ON ALL YOUR INTEL MACHINES IN THE BIOS," he carefully suggested in a mailing post post to OpenBSD developers and users."
I'm glad my latest build is based on an i5-4690K vs. an I7-4790K !
The only difference between both (apart from price) is ... HT :)
"In a no-deal scenario, Defra is currently looking at introducing manual processes if IT systems are not ready."
The cunning plan was to hire brits to do manually all of what was automatised before !
Cameron was right, it will bring more jobs for brits !
"We just had a great one - a security company sent us a box of chocolates in a locked box and said we can get the key if we have a sales meeting with them. A colleague simply smashed the box to pieces :)"
Loot boxes ? Freaking cancer. I'm speaking for video gaming ... Didn't know it ever existed in IT sales !
"Sadly, the module will need a tiny fan to keep things cool."
Oh no, not worth it vs. the previous completely passive model. This needs to be industrial stuff. I use it as a home automation POC ...
Also, for those worried with bluetooth, don't be. It never works correctly, any time I tried to use it ...
"Telnetted into various Unix machines, wanted to restart the one in the server room. Whoops - I forgot which machine I was logged into and typed 'reboot' to a machine on the other side of the planet. It did not come up, had to wait until teatime for the guys there to come in and push a button :-("
Who hasn't done this one, I wonder. Happened to me as well: wanted to reboot my SUN workstation, so typed "reboot", then I had "end connection" on that very window ...
Got me quite pale for a moment: I didn't know which system I so rebooted and I was logged to quite a lot !
Then colleagues told me every workstation had frozen: I was logged to the NIS server, which, fortunately came back 30 s after ...
""Protecting customer information is critically important to Hyatt, and we take the security of customer data very seriously,"
I read that and realize, there are no commitments or promises in that statement. And that is their message, right?"
Where have you been in the last 5 years ? This is the usual blanket statement every company (IOT, router, hotels, what not) has been using at every security blunder that costed money to their customers.
And it's just here to hide the fact they don't get a fuck and won't spend a penny on it, even reusing previous web pages. Therefore no commitment. Sounds logical to me.
""Crates" and other prize boxes drop in the game, given to players. But these need "keys" to unlock. To get the keys you spend real money, for one use. Boxes are "random" and thus you are entirely at the mercy of random results, presuming you trust the company to even be "fair" in that regard."
This is what I found the most annoying in Team Fortress 2 (which is free BTW). I once went into unlocking a couple of the (many) chests I had discovered, only to find out, after 10 bucks spent, I hadn't found anything worth it !
It's actually better to purchase objects directly ...
Good luck anyway, in any 2000+ employees company, with detecting an 8 hours period DNS lookup, amongst all the shit going to DNS, due to wrong configurations/design of all products/OSes used by everyone ...
Dunno whether TXT loockups are common way, but this is actually quite stealth method of remote activation ...
"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. Isn't it a bug bounty worth paying (even secretly) to avoid the negative PR of another global ransomware attack."
Why would MS do that ? They want to sell more security products, so surely welcome any security issues with their bloat-everywhere OS ! The Shadows Brokers are doing marketing for MS, here ...
"Allow me to help you. The last thee years have given us Watch Dogs 2 and Saints row 4 if you're into stupid but fun. On the lines of more serious games we have The last of us and Spec ops: the line. The indy scene is going from strength to strength with amazing stuff like The Sexy Brutale and Undertale. Even Doom made a resurgence into the PC shooter we've been waiting for since the turn of the century.
Gaming is doing just fine, thanks."
Yep, and depending on taste, there are many others like, Stellaris, Hitman (burnt so many hours in it, and I'm not even done), Tales from the Borderlands, Prey etc ...
I think this is the golden age of video gaming ...
"Leave them in the past, along with your happy memories and move on."
I'm on the same page. Even though some games genres disappeared entirely (not entirely true as kickstarter revived some), the look and music feels very old now.
And there are such current immensely good games that it's pointless to loose on those for so old games ...
"Davis will likely have no problem with the advice on attire and lights - the UK seems to be heading blindly into the negotiations anyway. But as for asking us to lay off the booze... ®"
That'll probably be too much asking for this poor guy, given what he has to go through ...
He's going alone, in a place where absolutely no-one has any sympathy for him or his country, facing shitloads of civil servants on so many treaties ...
Some people really deserve their wages ...
"While playing elaborate pranks on the scammers may be fun, you are wasting your own time as well as theirs -- and your time is probably much more valuable, to you at least.
So when I get a call from someone claiming to be from the Microsoft Tech Support Centre or some such, I just say "No, you're not" and hang up."
Well, yes, exactly that. I don't really have scammers' calls but a never ending stream of People calling "on behalf of " my electricity Company to sell me solar Panels ...
I'm doing this way:
- get the phone set open
- wait to make sure I detect a Sound detection algorythm
- say hello
- get the noise of phone set on from their side
- put the phone off
Done, quickly, without the usual bullshit.
"Same here. While I'm quite a fan of virtualisation (the computer industry have been virtualising different layers for decades) when it come to life critical systems these should be physically separated from anything else. This is standard practice in industrial safety systems."
Agree, but it won't happen before many People have died due to security issue on the cars' Systems, and it has been proved, and some regulations has happened.
Cars manufacturors, those days, are after 10 E worth of costs cuts per car, which is incompatible with anything dedicated.
"Why is Oracle acting now, six years into owning Java through the Sun acquisition?
It is believed to have taken that long for LMS to devise audit methodologies and to build a detailed knowledge of customers’ Java estates on which to proceed."
This is called drug vendor business model: get your customer addicted for free, then force them to pay the bills ....
Everyone should have learnt to RMS rants about licences. He warned everyone about this ...
As for Java, sorry, but this has always been a retarded language, that never coud decide if it was compiled or interpreted, bearing the cons of both worlds ...
C and many other languages (Ada, yes !) have always been a lot better. I never could fathom the hype on Java ...
"Lets hope that new generation of games engines are tied into something platform neutral like Vulkan, not chained to the dysfunctional bag of shite that is DirectX + Win10. "
There's a lot of hope, here, and I see it a future success. Doom with Vulkan runs like no other FPS has ever run on my gaming rig. It flat out beats DX11. So, I think the day of DX are counted. Devs are not stupid, and between good propriatory and good open, the choice is easy.
"Why on earth did I abandon M$ all these years ago? What was I smoking back then? Think of all the fun I could have had sorting out borked machines..... Ah well, it is too late to go back now......."
Yes, you and me, both having done the same terrible mistake, I feel for ya. All the fun, the hours of fun missed at determining which of the sneaky updates would put you back in "W10 is coming" state, and excluding them, edit registry, all of that. All before, the next week, doing it again, just to stay in business, because Windows is clearly a rapidly decaying OS: bad but nonetheless mandatory patches, disk fragmentation etc ...
And then, the usual bugs, re-install fun, SP, patches, dozens of hours missed actually.
/Sigh
Now, we only use the same OS, which stays the same unless we choose to update it, and its behaviour is exactly the same as yesterday. Boring, really.
Only thing is: we are 2 times more productive.
"Windows 10 has been a free upgrade for Home and Pro users, and it may be that accepting a modest amount of promotion is in this case the price of free."
Well, this was long ago predicted in those forums every time something was discovered in W10. It's just coming progressively as it should. More to come ...
"To my, admittedly incomplete, knowledge, NVidia never made any claims about render outputs and other internal architecture details."
They lied by omission, stating speeds, 4 GB VRAM etc ...
And forgetting to state: "Oh by the way, any VRAM usage, past 3.5 GB is gonna see a performance hit of approx X20", therefore reducing the effective use of the car's VRAM to 3.5 GB vs. 4 GB.
Sure, not a big deal, but a lie anyway.
"Microsoft has announced that the free all-you-can-eat Windows 10 upgrade buffet will close forever on July 29, and that after that you'll have to pay for all the fun of its latest operating system."
So, now the malware vector has been quite effective (300 millions), we're now to see the payload this summer.
/get pop-corn ...
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