Posts by wabbit347

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: No desks

The book? In that case, have an upvote. :)

The future of software? Imagine a bot, stamping on a human face – forever

RFC 1925, 6a

If AI becomes a thing, then clearly a new generation of people will need to generate careful and specific prompts to ensure the desired result, and thus will be born a structured prompting language. It'll be called COBOOL: Carefully Optimizing Best Outputs Of LLMs.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

<<Regardless of what its made from, I bet it still hurts like hell if you tread on one.>>

-- Luckily in space, no one can hear you scream.

Millimetre-sized masses: Physics boffins measure smallest known gravitational field (so far)

A tiny magnet can hold a paperclip off the ground, so the entire mass of the earth doesn't exert enough gravitational force to overcome the force that the magnet is exerting on the paperclip. That's how weak gravity is compared with the electromagnetic force.

EDIT: Boffin icon in honour of clever people doing science.

Sex and drugs and auto-tune: What motivates a millennial perp?

Mandatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/598/

Red squirrels! Adorable, right? Wrong – they're riddled with leprosy

Blech

Presumably these are the same adorable creatures bouncing up and down on a trampoline along with the TB ridden badger, and the rabid foxes? (The coat from Victorian Scrooge Era - bah, Humbug)

CSC grabs pistol, plays employment paintball with P45s

Re: Leaving CSC was the best thing I did

There's always the Dilbert approach to travel food...

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-08-24

UK universities unveil £28m hub for Internet of Things

HTTP/1.1 418 I'm a teapot

RFC 2324 springs to mind for some reason.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt

The gear I use in my test lab: A look at three Trident+ switches

If it was me, I'd be going with the Nexus 3000s.

If you want single point of management, perhaps it might be worth looking at the Cisco 5548s or 56xx range of switches combined with a pair of 2248 FEXes. This would give you 10G and 100M/1G ports with a single management console, although the FEXes don't appear to have PoE so may not be suitable for end users needing VoIP phones for example.

If you can get refurbed Cisco gear, you can get some considerable savings even on relatively new Cisco kit (hence me mentioning the Nexus 5000s). I guess it depends if Smartnet is critical or whether you can use a third party support company.

AFAIK the Catalyst switches are still going, so a venerable 4900 or something 4500-ish would give you 10G ports (and VSS with 2 of them for hardware resiliency) Can't comment on costs though.

For vendors other than Cisco, I'd be giving whiteboxes running Cumulus a serious look. If you're familiar with Linux, then these might be a viable option, I'd have thought with a bit of puppet/chef/ansible that management overheads could be reduced. They also now have a VM for download so you can at least evaluate/test at a minimal cost.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

I believe the burn rate of allocation for the registries was something like one /8s worth of addresses a month. Even if everyone returned their space, it's only delaying the inevitable by maybe a year or two at most.

Re: Let the bidding begin!

The problem following on from bidding for tiny subnets will be the increased size of the IPv4 routing tables as what was previously a /20 gets returned and re-allocated as 16 /24s. Multiply that by a few thousand times and the 512k router-pocalypse of a couple of months ago will be a daily occurrence.

Hopefully an actual milestone that even a finance person can understand might be enough to get IPv6 takeup moving a bit more...

Icon: Beer (BeerV6 in 128 pint barrels of course)

What would BOFH-friendly cloud service look like?

CPaaS?

A BOFH Friendly cloud? Would it offer Cattle Prod as a Service?

If you absolutely must do a ‘private cloud’ thing, here's how

Re: Business Critical Data out there in the cloud

Surely in this brave new cloudy world all your employees are scattered across the hipstersphere. They should all be in various coffee shops sipping skinny lattes and spaffing confidential data across the wi-fi on their BYODs. So unless a JCB goes through the whole of Shoreditch simultaneously, it's not a problem. Plus Finance will moan about the costs of second lines so you won't get one.

Bitter? Moi?

For just $400 you can have this Raspberry Pi – and mine bitcoin

Re: Why the fan?

Unless I've misunderstood, they've attached a daughterboard to the RasPi with a bitcoin processor on it. I assume that the fan is to keep the bitcoin processor cool, not the Pi itself.

TfL to splash £400m on networking deal, despite GDS opposition

Towers sound suspiciously like those 'silos' that everyone rails against in the name of cloudy agilification with leveraged buzzwords. This won't end well.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

Re: Reminds me at Uni ...

A very cool project.

Reminds me a bit of "The Elements of Computing Systems" , although the book used software emulators so you don't need so much physical space. Enough to get started on the principles of CPU design though.

(not associated in any way with this, just an interested reader that bought the book)

IoT DANGERS: BYOD’s trashier cousin becoming a right tearaway

Re: Suggestion

Funnily enough, I was at Infosec yesterday and watched a demo involving an internet enabled kettle. The demonstrators setup a rogue Wireless network with same SSID as the one the kettle's connected to, but at a much higher gain. They sent a spoof packet to force the kettle to disassociate itself from the good network, it then reconnected to the rogue network with the higher broadcast power (which is unencrypted). Telnet to kettle, issue some Hayes modem style AT commands and voila! WPA2 key available, stored on kettle in plain text...

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

Re: the mantra...

RFC1925, Section 7

(7) It is always something

(7a) (corollary). Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't

have all three).

Govt spaffs £170k to develop the INTERNET OF SHEEP

IANA Reservation

Wonder if it's possible to get BAAA::/16 reserved for this?

Google kills CAPTCHAs: Are we human or are we spammer?

Re: Hmmmm...

http://xkcd.com/810/

Hire and hold IT staff in 2015: The Reg's how-to guide

Re: How to retain your staff

Bring your own Desk.... Luxury. In my day, had to type on keyboard made of cold gravel in middle of t'road, and our boss would chop us in 'alf and send us to fix things in the marketing department.