Posts by Paul 87 231 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Is this some kind of price tag designed to further the "old boys" network approach to IT?
Sure, dedicated training sessions might top £1000, but we're looking at an event that is an opportunity to go and pay even more money, to get that dedicated training.
I think I'll spend that money on a few training sessions and exams
This is where there's a huge difference between equality and equity, on paper Uber pays men and women the same hourly rate, for the same journey. Great.
However, as their analysis shows, there's factors that cause a gender pay gap to be present, which include time spent driving (likely due to domestic demands), trips picked up (men doing more to game the system) and it wouldn't surprise me if mem worked more unsocialable hours than women too.
All of this combines to factors which if you want true equity between the genders, meaning women need to get paid more per trip.
Every software vendor is going to have these cockups, where Malwarebytes let me down was there was no obvious place to get information, and no communication via the account email or the patching mechanism to acknowledge the problem or that it'd been fixed
So yeah, fuck ups happen, but lack of proactive communication is what costs you customers
For all the people wondering what went wrong, they've probably never implemented a core process piece of business software using an "off the shelf" product. It gets even more complicated when dealing with large organisations because often the points of contact tend to be the lighrer process users rather than the day to day people, and even if you do talk to the right people, humans tend to miss details out like Active / Reservist distinctions
Always argued that all a password manager does is shift the risks of a single account being breached into the risk that *all* of your accounts being breached.
The root and branch password methodology is still the best option to memorising longer passwords, and failing that, write them down on a piece of paper that's not kept near your PC and doesn't reference the services the passwords link to.
It's terrifying that we've gone from a network designed to survive nuclear attack without loss of communication, to a situation whereby a single company's IT failures affects tens of millions of people.
Whilst you can argue that the majority of the disruption is, in the scheme of things, minor, the IoT is pointing towards a lot more serious issues further down the line. Imagine what could happen if say, self driving trucks relied on AWS for back end updates of road closures, and due to a crash, couldn't be notified of temporary road closures, nor updated to signal that they should park up.
As much as I loathe adverts on the internet, any network level blocking is a bad thing, it's censorship plain and simple, whether it's blocking advertising, or blocking access to the news, no network provider should be making this kind of decision.
Just because they can, doesn't mean they should.
Also, why do they have the right to experiment on us as customers, we pay for a service, and suddenly they're removing a portion of it, without our consent. What's to stop them doing this again in the future with say, Netflix?
It's an absolutely horrific thought, that may well be the death of PC gaming if it comes to pass. Either developers will be making games for UWP, or they won't be selling enough copies to justify the development of the top rated titles.
We can only hope that this gets crushed in it's infancy, either by an anti-trust lawsuit for an abuse of monopoly, or by the game studios themselves chosing to support the PS4 and normal PC instead.
Users don't necessarily want unlimited because it's unlimited, they want unlimited because they want a standard bill each month that doesn't vary, thus making it easier to budget for.
For example, as a home user who doesn't torrent, but does make use of both Steam and Netflix, it's not impossible for our monthly home usage, over 5 devices, to hit 300G/bit a month. If we had to pay per G/bit downloaded, it'd be impossible to track our household budget, especially at the rate most providers consider reasonable.
Microsoft is already making money from Windows 10 thanks to the sheer volume of data that they're able to harvest from users machines, and the direct tie-in to Bing as an advertising platform. You're an idiot to believe that you'll ever be able to fully prevent Windows 10 from phoning home unless you use the machine totally offline or cripple the functionality by blocking the network access.
The maths isn't too hard to verify, your combinations of pin numbers should be 10 x 9 x 9 x 9 (since you can start with 10 digits but then cannot pick the same number as the one before it) giving 7290
For more characters then, you do increase your number of permutations to be 44 x 43 x 43 x 43 = 3498308
So they claim that their method increases the numberofpermutations by a factor of 480 (not 480 more as that implies 7770 permutations)
Life without the possibilry of parole is a cruel punishment and undermines the entire concept of a liberal justice system centred on reforming criminals into useful members of society. It's also a complete waste of taxpayers money, you're spending a few hundred thousand dollars a year for 40+ years on someone who will never be able to repay their debt to society.
They made a mistake in the press statement. It should have read
"GOV.Verify is an exciting new way to get you to voluntarily input all your personal details into a central database, which replacements the ID card scheme that got rejected out of hand. We're keen to ensure that every member of the British public is registered so that when we lose the data through Ministerial cock-ups, everyone will be equally disadvantaged
We hope that you embrace the exciting future where soon, your entire digital lives will be collated in a central location at our secure facility in Cheltenham"
This is why we're better off with the current approach, increase the tax free allowance for everyone, so that instead of being given money for nothing, you instead get to keep more of the money that you earn in the first place. It also greatly reduces any associated administration costs with redistributing the money.
The flip side is that social security should be just that, a safety net for when your life goes to hell in all sorts of unexpected ways, of course there's corruption, people who play the system for their own benefit (pun intended!) but despite media reports they're a minority.
Judging from the number of texts and calls you get from different companies around contract renewal time, it wouldn't surprise me if all mobile opperators sell the commercial data to "trusted" third parties. Said "trusted" third parties then sell it on to other companies and eventually it reaches the hands of someone willing to sell it to scammers.
Unfortunately there's fuck all you can do about it other than refuse to use the services and not provide the information in the first place. Companies are required by law in most places to maximise profits, and thus are compelled to sell your data if the opportunity arises.
Makes me wonder if we shouldn't start organising a campaign to poison these data pools with false information and drive the value down. Register loads of changes of name, address details etc.
I don't understand thw rush to put this technology in a phone. Do people really want to hold their £100+ device, and risk it being knocked or snatched from their hand as they do so, or dropped and being damaged.
At least with a card it's not the end of the world if it gets stolen, a phone represents infinitely more hassle to replace.
That said, don't trust NFC personally, the lack of contact means you cannot control which card is used and the range can easily be boosted to a couple of metres or more.
Don't know what's worse, that you had to put up with people acting like jerks, or that none of their colleagues slapped them down for acting that way. There's a world of difference between crude jokes and innuendo to shoving a picture of your anatomy in someone's face.
Working in a gender balanced IT team, sure, we all have a laugh and at times, there's sexual humour, but on the rare occasions where someone makes another person feel uncomfortable, the rest of the team makes sure that it's put a stop to.
To me, that's where you draw the line, if you make someone else feel uncomfortable, upset or hurt their feelings, then it's stopped being a joke.
Shame more people don't know that really...
Do we need to know every little thing that the "government" choses to do in our name? I don't think that's the case, there are things which happen which quite frankly, I don't want to know the details about because I don't want to worry about the things which are stopped from happening.
Do I think that we also need more transparency on the subject, yes, but also bearing in mind that only a fool believes that the Internet, a tool designed to share, gather and collate information is private. If I want to keep something a secret, I don't publish it online, and heck, if I can avoid it, I don't put it on a computer at all, because that's just basic uncommon sense.
In fact, I'd go as far to say as that we have more to fear from what is undertaken by private companies than government agencies, precisely because they do have a greater level of oversight and morals which are stronger than "Well can we get sued for this and if we do get sued, do we make more money than we're likely to lose"
Qualifying this as an IT story because it took place on a software package (hey, it's a less tenuous link than some of the articles on here!)
Client: Ok, so we've invoiced the same shipment three times and given them to the customer
Support: Since you've given them to the customer, they're a legal document, you'll need to issue a credit note for two of the invoices
Client: I can't do that, only one's been paid, I can't issue a credit note if the invoices are unpaid
Support: No, you'll be issuing the credit note's to pay off the two invoices
Client: No, I'm telling you, I can't issue a credit note if the invoice isn't paid.
Support: Why not?
Client: Well every time I issue a credit note, it asks if I want to generate a refund, I can't refund him if he hasn't paid.
Support: Sir, why don't you click no when asked if you want to refund him?
Client: I can do that?
Support: Yes, why do you think it asks Yes or No
Client: oh... bye!
Wonder what the percentage of malware on a per capita basis is instead, rather than a nebulous "99% of malware in the mobile sector is for Android"
However one telling statistic there is the number of users which get an upgraded OS, Android manufacturers are lagging behind on getting updates deployed, a fact I'm sure not assisted by the sheer number of different devices on the market.
Definitely sounds like a strong candidate for project management or a buisness analyst. Being able to take your general knowledge and understanding helps ensure that your specialists will be working on the right goals. To strengthen your CV you need supervisory and managerial experience, alongside project planning and implimentation skills.
There's also opportunities out there to move towards the Cxx level instead, particularly in smaller companies which can't afford hordes of specialists, but can invest in an individual who can handle or oversee most of the IT needs for the company. Consider looking at a software development company, they often have diverse roles, particularly those engaged in B2B software sales.
Maybe it's worth considering a combination solution? For Windows PC's, Microsoft Security Essentials plus regular scans from Malwarebytes will usually put paid to the most common threats, and for the phones there are several options available.
In combination with this, a secure router (e.g. http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/zonealarm-secure-wireless-router.htm) offers additional protection for the devices at home.
I agree with part of the petition's sentiment, allow console owners the same market that Steam provides, with both the direct delivery and deep discounts that digital distribution allow, at the expense of not having a physical disc to trade or sell on.
The major flaw was that this was seen as mutually exclusive, so they could only support one or the other and not both. I suspect that many publishers would be happy to keep the funds flowing long after it becomes viable to produce more discs, and if you set it up so that the physical disc represented "first dibs", you can keep the bricks and mortar retails somewhere content to allow speedy gamers the ability to trade in when needed.
The biggest flaw I can see with the scheme from Microsoft's perspective, is with games tied so closely to accounts, and with a product aimed at security unaware teenagers and young adults, there's going to be a vast rise in account "theft" between mates. Without some form of lending library mechanism built in, this will end up costing Microsoft a lot more in man-hours dealing with the complaints, or if they don't, from lost sales from bad press
Not to mention the jailbreakers are going to have a field day getting around the DRM restrictions and selling on their hacks.
A far more realistic answer is that they're admiting to retaining a tape archive of the data. Data older than 6 months is moved off the main storage array, and onto a pile of tapes, which after 2 years, are re-used.
When any organisation offers a "delete" function, they'll never consider going through archives and disaster recovery media to also remove the data, it just removes it from the "live" system.
