Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre 2719 posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
My presence seems to have a soothing effect in that kind of situations. Perhaps due to my natural ability to interrupt the shouting match with a well-placed "OK, we've heard everyone's problems, what do we do to reach a solution ?". Silence usually ensues, which is my time to shine because at that point I usually have a few technical options I can tout :D .
Unfortunately Teams has this useful "invite a participant" which means you start a friendly chat with one person and before you know it there are 25 angry manglement people involved. Who are rightfully angry to be forcibly pulled in a technical chat on a subject they don't know anything about, and who will then escalate to top management just to make the thing disappear. You can't pull that trick around the coffee machine.
I'm happy you raised the "Escort" argument. I am an ESB developper / tech lead for a pretty large financial institution (Top management speil is that we are either first or second, worldwide, in our domain). I identify as a Dev, not a coder. I can code, but that's only part of my work (almost secondary, as it happens). My work consists largely in architecture definition etc. In generic Teams meetings With 18+ people (Top management, clients, Financial managers, the whole lot) I can't raise tech issues without looking like a Grouch because all these people only think in terms of share value and there is an overwhelming auto-reinforcement bias towards the "Google does it, we want the same. Now" train of thought.
When I meet the same people around the coffee machine, ideas seem to flow much more naturally.
Am I an Escort ?
My thought exactly. It's a Linux issue because Windows doesn't allow you to do much so you can't exploit this Microsoft bug from Windows...
- Embrace : Check, Linux on Azure
- Extend : not an issue in a Cloud, it's more like "Empower" there (still an "E" so in-spec)
- Extinguish : Let's artificially create security bugs on our platform that are only exploitable from the competition's guest, then claim it's the guest's fault.
When I was a student, a few decades ago, I was able to buy an old car to carry me occasionnaly from / to "home" (aka the old folks). It cost me the equivalent of 150 € (200 USD, 100 pounds). In today's money that would be about 5 times that, but still I had to team up with my sister to gather the funds. The vehicle was able to cover the 450+ kilometers (one way) on a single tank. Its dry weight was about 450 kg. It had very litterally zero electronics, I routinely fixed it with a basic set of tools (think of the set of tools available to a student 30 years ago). It was over 15 years old and over 250 000 km when I got it, we brought it well over 350 000 km and was over 25 years old when mutual relocation forced us to part with it and in the meantime it cost us exactly zilch to maintain. I was doing the maintenance. It was still running according to spec when we were forced to part with it.
Newsflash : a lot of students and low-pay workers are in the same situation as I was in 1998, if not worse.
Now name an EV that is even remotely close to that kind of affordability / durability. EVs are OK for rich people who don't really need a car, but that's pretty much it.
Of course now that I am considerably better off, I understand your argument, but the 1998 me seriously winces and thinks "this guy has clearly much more money than sense"
Perhaps IBM should just buy the tech from China and call it a day. Ah, no can do ?
On a more serious note this is exactly the kind of problems that were entirely predictable, and that arise from a "solution" looking for a problem.
Surface ships are notoriosly hard to keep running unnattended, and even though most shipping companies now run ships that are almost entirely autonomous, a minimal crew is always included.
But there is little (if any) need for a reseach vessel to be a surface ship : underwater siblings are faring pretty well, thank you, as are airborne ones.
In addition to that, the project suffers from what I will happily name "the Elon syndrome", after Tesla's famous attemps at autopilot : why would you try to emulate a human operator when more efficient technical solutions are widely available and well tested ? Surely cameras and image recognition should be at the very most a last-resort help rather than in the core design? A bit like how human crews have been in most commercial carriers for quite a while now ?
Speaking as someone who's been in in this game for quite some time now, and who actually runs a MVS emulator on my own hardware (open to the world, too, for the education of the masses), I must say that IBM is trying very hard to become a subsidiary of Red Hat, instead of the contrary. The typical out-of-school software engineer knows Angular, Springboot, basic Java if you're lucky.Perhaps some Python for the most adventurous but only the flashy "AI" frameworks. Big Iron (or real programming for that matter -gerrof mah lawn yodan ngood kids-) is kinda out of fashion, and for a reason (note that I didnt write "for a GOOD reason").
As I see it, Windows13 will run on IBM mainframes in no time at all, and THAT will be either the end or the rebirth of International Business Machines. DOOM !
It all depends on how it's implemented. My assumption was that the use of dedicated "kiosks" is so that the kit can be properly locked down (and, hopefully, bolted down too). I don't think the plods want cases to be thrown out of court because of doubts about evidence massaging ...
The kiosks are probably read-only, with the devices sent to a proper lab with proper procedures if anything suspicious iis discovered. As for returning the "clean" devices to their owners, though, there is probably little hope.
Oracle (proven to exist beyond a reasonnable doubt)
Trump (proven to exist beyond a reasonnable doubt)
Amazon Not Paying Taxes (proven to be somewhat untrue, although they DO cheat a whole lot)
Assassination (proven to have happened beyond a reasonnable doubt)
There, fixed that for you.
Recently I went to a print shop to get a photo printed as a gift for an old lady. The snap had been shot by my wife on her smartphone (Ugh) so it was in 3:2 format (re-ugh). I took care to re-frame it properly and change it to the proper 4:3 format for photographs, only to have the millenial shopkeeper tell me that she'd have to crop it as it was not in a standard format.
Now what if I had come with a round pic !
They have a built-in circuit breaker set (remotely) to the value you pay for ; this breaker is quite a bit more sensitive to peak consumption than electromechanical ones, and they do trip, IRL, way before the main breaker downstream does.
As it's distantly adjustable, all it takes to restore power stability is a quick call to your provider -and of course a quick increase in your monthly bill.
No, as far as they are concerned, the electricity companies are actively SELLING customer energy usage records to the DEVIL HIMSELF.
The meters do change the way power consumption is calculated, so if you were close to the upper limit of your power rating, chances are that the new meter will cut pretty often, forcing you to upgrade your contract. That is quite evil if you ask me !
Pretty much like a real ticket; for single fare*, activation performed by external hardware containing the private key. Of course there's an associated cost, however small, so First had to try and dispense with the hardware.
*for anything else, there's no real issue - besides the pervasive tracking of users, which companies insist is for our own good - because daily / monthly etc can be controlled by other means, for example a calendar.
I call bullshit. Xi Jinping would certainly not do such a thing. Or were you thinking about Putin? Doesn't sound like something he'd do either. Oh, Trump? So, that'd be "the head of one of the world's 20 most powerful countries, on some metrics", then.
A previous update to our password policy automatically expired passwords every month, directing you to create a new password. It was so secure that users weren't given the rights to generate their own password, so for about a month the whole company had the same password, Beach234, helpfully set up by the helpdesk one support call at a time.
Agreed, going from "accused of conspiring to keep vulns undisclosed" to "working with the CIA" is a bit of a stretch, but I think most people can understand the link (if not agree with the reasonning). Compared to "just ban them chinks or else" from Carrot Top, it is even rather soft.
Also, little known fact*: Slovenia and Slovakia are actually different countries, and while I'm not a rabid political correctness knight (quite the opposite in fact), what was your "mail order bride" comment supposed to bring to the discussion?
*OK, not really
However, there's the need for that data to be passed from the freight co to one of the infra controllers (DB Netze, ProRail, InfraBel etc.) and from them to the next, in a standard format, as well as to regional and municipal authorities
Currently, I work on the team that develop precisely that for one of the top 10 logistics company in the world, and while it's sometimes non-trivial, it's certaily not rocket science. Also, every company -and almost every route within that company- has its own very specific needs, so stealing info about how company A does it would be of little to no use for company B. At most you could get some business advantage if you could point the competion's weaknesses to the client, but in the present case neither the goods nor the geographical reach of the companies overlap, so stealing "software blueprints" would bring exactly fuck all benefit to the chinese company.
Probably a "serial hoarder" who happened to be fired on completely unrelated grounds and who happened to find a new job, because that's what laid-off staff tend to do.
if they took weeks to inform a paying customer their data was deleted
Well they didn't. The customer terminated the account, and thus became a non-customer. While Google gives you a grace period when you accidentally delete a document, they may not extend the courtesy to the accidental deletion of a paying account.
If Ubuntu drops this support, does that mean that Mint Linux and Debian are also affected?
There is no reason why a downstream decision would affect the upstream distro. Debian is notorious for its tendency to keep backward compat for as long as possible in order to bring maximum stability (recent decision about init systems notwithstanding).
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Found it !
By any chance do you still have the reject message from that? That would be very interesting to see.
No, I don't. I tend not not collect trash for the fun of it. I have no doubt that you would be very interested in a free audit of your broken model. I -and many here, I suspect- can provide test cases, logs and stats from a variety of systems both senders and receivers. At a price.
Anyway, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the matter might tell you, the "reject message" would be of no interest at all since it's configured by the receiver. Unless you're trying to pinpoint which of your clients let slip that you are the cause of an abusive block, with potentially disastrous consequences. I understand that it would be damaging for your extortion-based business model. In my case the message was something about my IP being listed in some SpamHaus blocklist. It wasn't even in any of the many, many, many languages easily understood by "worldwide" SH operatives, like US English, US Ingrish or US English_Indian -optionnally US English_Boston_Litterary, US English_Southern_States or US English_Midwest but these may carry a surcharge. (none of them a problem for me, but still a concern).
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