Posts by Joe 6 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007
Some of our Branches up north were affected by this. Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester all went down at 1pm. Spoke to our provider (who is provided by GC) several times and was told they had to repair 200m of fibre cable!!! From the email I got this morning from our provider it took 12 hours and came up at 3.30am!!
I agree with the general idea that collecting DNA from innocents to stop crime before it happens is a bad idea. The thing I don't get is WHY things are so cushy for the scumbags who commit crime? TV's, Playstations, Pool Tables.....If you are convicted and sentenced for a crime, you have to pay a punishment, not chill out in a cell like it was your bedroom at home! I have a 'friend' who told me the other day why he doesn't fear prison anymore, because you get to watch TV, Exercise and drugs are easier to come by in prison than on the street....If you make people fear prison, surely this would have more of an effect! 23 Hour lock down and an empty cell so you can sit there bored out of your mind and think what a fucking asshole you have been!!!!! Maybe that would get better results! Oh and before anyone jumps in with Human Rights, sorry but if you kidnap, rape, murder etc someone, you sign away your human rights like you did to the victim when you committed your crime!
After noticing a real problem with bandwidth 2 months ago, i embarked on the ''lock them down' bandwaggon, and it has made a huge difference. I put everyone through the proxy then banned pretty much everything apart from the bbc news and weather page, i believe we have gained back about 70% of bandwidth. Just to give you an idea, we have a 10mb up and down stream leased line with 7mb assigned to web, and i was noticing a real slowdown!! Users were not happy, people ignored me for about a week, my answer was 'hey, fuck you guys, STOP STREAMING VIDEO'S'!!!!! Used an open source firefox plugin to stop them changing the proxy settings, and because we are mostly on Mac's i locked down the network pref's in System Preferences.....the hot girl in accounts can sitonmyfacebook anytime!
Read this article yesterday, finished work and phoned the 02 customer service. Told them I had 2 contracts affected by this and was going to cancel them both unless they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. The guy said I was about the 30th customer he had spoken to regarding this that day. I am now paying £20 a month instead of £45 and they gave me an extra 300 anytime minutes and 200 extra texts. Not bad for 20 minutes work!
Moral of the story : If you don't ask, you don't get.
Microsoft have always been bashed with this "anti competitive monopoly" talk, now we understand how they got there - patents. If MS had not been granted so many patents then surely the open source community would not now be facing possible legal action for infringement! In the article it stated most of these infringements occur in the linux kernel - which to my understanding is the basic principals and laws of the OS, so does that mean that they cannot write and operating system without infringing MS's patents??
I think we will hear more of this in the future.....
I work for a Mac Only company, and when I joined I realised how easy it was to literally take all our client data to then possibly pass it on to competitors etc. We found a "hack" that could enable us to disable USB and Firewire ports.
Its already proving useful as a disgruntled member of staff tried it and came to me saying that he could copy stuff to his usb flash drive.
Nice.
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