Posts by Andrew Austin

Snowden lawyer PGP email 'crack' flap: What REALLY happened?

Re: Alternately

ADK - look it up...

Cyber-jihadists deface home of teddy bears' picnic

Just wait for the...

Teddy bear execution video to follow this...

"Please My Cameron, my Teddy bear life hangs by a thread, please tell Hamleys not to sell Teddy Bears to Israe..ARGHHHAHHAhuuuurrgrgrg [HACK, SAW, HACK,SAW., HACK...Teddy Bear severed head placed carefully on lifeless teddy body...]".

IBM hands out malware-stuffed USB at security conference

I think we need to contact the SI Unit people...

So they can provide direction on exactly how many (typed) fails equal an EPIC FAIL.

E.G.

10 fails = 1 EPIC FAIL

100 fails = 1 HMRC Data Loss Event.

1000 fails = 1 LHC 'event'

10000 fails = 1 EDS Contract Award

100000 fails = 1 Sun midrange Purchase

1000000 fails = 1 Attempt by me to tabulate this text.

Service management: A million jobs or a job with a million parts?

@Pete 2

Good grief, it's the nightmare that is 'modern' IT management condensed into a few paragraphs.

The horror...the horror....

Snow Leopard - what doesn't work

No upgrade for me until...

PGP release version 10.0 of PGP Desktop / WDE. Hopefully not too soon.

Exposed activist accuses Tiscali of putting life in peril

Maybe Tiscali just waited...

for the (P)IRA to bump her off. End of problem.

Big Blue animates VM control freak

IBM maybe slow to the party...

but if I were HP for example, I would be concerned as IBM have a knack of selling stuff.

Metallica sticksman gloats over Napster downfall

Now for some accuracy...

IIRC, Lars (Metallica's) objection was not the fact that songs / albums were being made available by / via Napster per se (for example, convert recordings), it was that the sound quality of the tracks were such that it was believed that they were copies taken from a master track -the same quality as you would get if you bought a CD from a store. AFAIK they are still fine with people taking / sharing bootlegs from gigs and all that.

Also, I sort of remember them buying back the rights on the songs some time ago, so they do control the rights on the music. Not sure if the still the case.

Demand for IT staff jumps, claims employment agency

And also a good way...

of getting candidates and advertisers to contact YOUR recruitment firm as you are getting such great results...

I hope it's all true by the way. Would be good news for us all.

Carter recommends 'G Cloud' for gov IT

Great but....

not so great when the kit and staff running it are not even in the UK. Will there be any guarantees that the infrastructure and staff required will be based in the UK? If not, we may as well outsource our entire public sector and government and stop beating about the bush.

Police wrong to spy on peace campaigner

All your faces...

are belong to us. Somebody set us up the camera.

IR35 tax is a huge failure

@ Hmmm (AC)

I am a 'contractor'. I make PAYE & NI 'contributions', I pay Corporation tax and tax on any dividends I take from the business. Is there anything else that you would like me to 'contribute' to HM Gov?

I'd wager that HMRC have written off more than the £9.2 million a year when dealing with large corporates who 'estimate' their tax bill.

Europeans go ga-ga over virtual servers

@ Daniel Palmer

The attraction (currently) would also be the ability (depending on your whether your hardware / hypervisor supports it) to have different operating systems and their applications running on one hardware platform. This would allow businesses to have a strategic hardware platform, but some flexibility on the operating systems deployed on LPAR's / VM's / Containers etcetera. You also have the potential of porting applications off older hardware, deploy into a LPAR / VM / Container etcetera, and you can decommission the old kit.

There are limitiations of course - for example, I work with IBM pSeries midrange equipment. The PowerVM Hypervisor (from memory) supports the AIX unix OS and RH / SUSE Enterprise linux OS's (an iSeries kit). No support for other OS's (WIndows 2Kx Server for example).

Although, if you were a masochist, you could have a pSeries server, running PowerVM hypervisor (with HMC for admin), with an LPAR running RH Enterprise LINUX, with that RH LPAR running VMWare, with a WIndows 2003 / 2008 Server 'guest' operating system installed. Goodness knows how that would perform :)