Posts by Kevin Johnston 1542 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2007
I think people are missing some of the details in my original post here...
The manager may have given his permission to his PA but under the COMPANY regulations he had no authority to do that. A lot of the documents/emails the manager is sent will be private and encrypted and the sender is under the impression that only the manager is reading them.
In common with many of the dear readers of this website I have worked at many a company where senior managers and the like have given their logins and passwords to their PA to enable them to handle all the stuff which is encrypted to save them the effort. Since each of those companies very clearly stated that such activity was forbidden and a disciplinary offence, I presume those managers/Execs in the US offices will now go to jail?
This is why such decisions need to be carefully phrased (rather than the Facebook style examples) since these PAs could be accessing data which is regulated under various laws while using another person's identity.
Have to agree about the lack of USP since the (albeit brief) review to suggest the author struggled to find enough to write an article. I have made use of BB devices for quite some time as I struggle with a virtual keyboard on phones and I currently have a KeyONE which has a physical keyboard.
This may be a niche but it is one which BB/RIM have good background in filling so why fight the full glass slab battle with umpty seven other companies?
A contract I was on some time ago (OS/2 Warp had just come out) was to move from dumb terminals to PCs. Finance department went first and got IBM PS/2 Model 56 (55?) with Intel 486 CPUs and we could only buy kit for two weeks of installs at a time. By the time we got everyone done, all the new staff were getting Pentium machines so you have the Finance Director trying to steal the PC from his new office Junior because he demanded he was in the first group to get 'new PCs'
So, a single roll-out project had one brand of PC but 4 radically different models...the supplier loved us as each batch was bought with no discount as there were no guarantees we would be buying any more.
I suspect the extra time to read is because they are so different. It was easy to settle into the previous discworld books because they had a simple rhythm to them but Raising Steam went out on it's own rails scattering previous assumptions like confetti while Dodger was differently different as it was not Discworld. Even Carpet People and the Bromiliad at least had Gnomish characters and so were in a similar vein.
I think the issue is not so much the creation of the ID and how it is secured but the aggregation of the data from the different locations in which it is used.
To be a valid form of ID it just needs to be possible to do a lookup to check against the master record and this is very simple to secure and set up audit trails for. What every Governments tries to do as soon as a digital ID is discussed is try to link every element of government, plus open doors to large corporations, for data sharing to 'improve the quality of the data'. This is where it all goes wrong amazingly enough
I have now worn out my copy of 'Pipeline to Battle' which tells the tale of getting water to the troops in North Africa. One of those books you truly can't put down and as an engineer you get an appreciation of just how bad it must have been by some of the struggles to achieve what should be simple things.
Amazingly it was first published in 1943
I was working on a contract when the agency wanted to change the contract details. I read the new one carefully and challenged several clauses. The agency repeatedly failed to amend it as I requested and eventually they sent me a copy in Word for me to edit instead. It included the scanned signature for their senior manager so I completely re-wrote it making all the terms in my favour, printed it and signed it then sent it through to them. They made no comment so since there was only one copy with both parties had 'signed' then clearly that was the contract in force :)
No no no, you have missed the preferred option. Wear a mask of your 'favourite' politician or celebrity to cause maximum confusion.
There will be a small number of people who can go one better if they are part of a set of identical twins/triplets etc....Just think how much fun they could be having with this
My relatives are very grumpy about me not using Facebook to keep in touch and doubly grumpy when they wish me Happy Birthday when they should know full well it is not my birthday. When I set up my Facebook account I accidentally put a lot of incorrect data in there which causes confusion to everyone except me.
Really sad thing is I can't get back in to fix it as I have forgotten what DoB I entered which it wants to validate that I am me...so sad, never mind, must stop laughing
My preference would be a web browser that doesn't get updates pushed at it daily needing it to spend an age downloading/deploying the update and then checking add-ons etc when all I wanted to do was quickly check when low tide was to walk the dogs on the beach.
How about a lightweight browser aimed at desktops rather than mobiles, too much to ask?
Please feel free to list all the ones I have managed to not discover :)
Not sure why the downvote but the only PC/Server I ever kept current in my stack was the gaming PC. The others ran very happily on older hardware/OS and as they were never going to be stressed I was still running my email on a Compaq Proliant 530G1 until a year or so ago...Was sad to see it go but the replacement stepped it up a couple of generations.
Sadly this is the norm for almost all legislation. It is is response to a situation which is not well understood in a changing landscape and even well-meaning laws never achieve the desired effect because they are mis-used or poorly worded or just too late to fix a problem which is no longer there.
My custard never set but I needed sugar
He may be Bombastic but there is a perfectly valid point here. The default state for ports should be disabled with the minimum possible exceptions in order to get the box up and running. This may include core network ports but why would HTTP be enabled by default? That should get enabled as part of configuring the HTTP security rather than as soon as the server starts.
I am not going to claim I know which should or shouldn't be in that minimal set but wide-open is a poor choice for a starting point
The thing to remember here is that EVERYTHING other than the core OS is an add-on in the eyes of MS and can be dropped at any time, this may be a result of the browser wars thing but more probably just the way the company split it out - 'you guys make the OS work and you other guys write the other bits' kind of thing . That includes backups, security, screen management etc whereas most other OS look beyond 'in a perfect world' to include some features for managing the device and recovery as part of the core. They don't have to be used but if you do they are fully integrated and...just work.
Sounds more to me like the customer recognised this was someone who actually put in the effort to find the cause rather than just following the script and wanted to keep him onside in case there were future issues.
Sadly, that level of thoroughness is often discouraged because it takes longer than a Helpdesk reset which makes the problem go away...Time is money you know and to hell with giving the curtomer a real solution
My old mahoosive 17" Dell laptop which I bought in 2001 still runs fine except for a minor problem with the hinges which suffered a little through user incompetence (OK, it was me..I dropped the bag it was in which landed on a corner where the foam was a little thin).
Currently on Mint but who knows what tomorrow brings...
If I remember correctly there has been more than one airport ban the Auto-land function of the autopilot system because it is just too damn good and had everything landing on the same 10 foot stretch of tarmac causing it to break up.
All these systems are well thought out but need assistance in the boundary areas which for aircraft is Air to Ground/Water/Mountains (plus some oddities like other aircraft). For cars it is more complicated as you don't get to maintain speed/direction for very long before some interaction is required.
I would have thought the answer was obvious from the huge cheer bursting forth from said forest as the team bites the loam. People near the scene may spot a glimpse of the BOFH and PFY strolling away pints in hand smiling at a job well done.
To paraphrase Garry Trudeau introducing Calvin and Hobbes...
The utterance an Adult may know to be a lie may well reflect a child's deepest conviction at the moment it pops out...Fantasy is so accessible that the people lied to assume they are being manipulated when the truth is more frightening; they don't exist.
You make your own assumptions about how many politicians/lawyers/CEOs could be the child this applies to
Just require them to define their services based on the non-fibre bit which will be measured and rounded up in miles so:-
Fibre into the house=Fibre
Fibre to a cabinet just round the corner =1CopperMile/1CableMile
Fibre to the exchange=20CopperMiles/20CableMiles
Of course this is all pointless until OFCOM/ASA grow a set of balls
The failings of the programme mirror those of the CAP system in England and Wales.
So they took the plans for the England/Wales system and proved that if you keep doing things the same way you keep getting the same results. Surely there must be something which just needs values, rules and reports added and doesn't require them to keep re-inventing the wheel each time with continually changing numbers of spokes/sides/axles?
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