Posts by big_D 7034 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
I was doing something similar in the UK, around 70,000 miles a year business, with my private car. The company offered a leasing offer for employees, starting at 99UKP a month, I phoned up for a quote, they couldn't give me one on the phone. They got back to me, for a 15,000UKP car (mid-range at the time, end of the 90s), they wanted 3,500UKP a month for the lease! Luckily, at the time, they didn't want to know mileage when taking out insurance.
Not monetarily expensive...
I worked for a company that printed money (literally). Governments would get them to design and print their currency, if they didn't have their own mint. They also had a side-line in ID cards and elections.
They were hired to run the elections in for an African country that was having problems with rebels at the time, luckily I didn't have a passport, so I was stuck in head office providing support.
We used Lotus cc:Mail and dial-in modems. Everything was working fine, until the team set-up shop and tried to contact the mail server. They kept complaining that it wasn't working. In the end, I plugged a phone into one of the modems and got them to call in and listened on the line. In the middle of the modem handshake there was a loud click in the line and both modems dropped the connection. The government was attempting to tap the line, but their equipment was so old, it made an audible click on the line as it kicked in. The team had to formally request that the line not be tapped and that it was only used for computer connections, which they couldn't listen in on anyway.
The same operator once caught me away from my terminal. Policy was to log off when you left your desk, I was just running around the corner and in the middle of a big edit, so I left the terminal logged on.
When I came back, he had made some white space in the middle of the file and prominent in the middle of the screen was the sentence "write out 1,000 times, I will log off my terminal, when I leave my desk!"
So, I opened a new file, wrote the sentence and copy and pasted it 1,000 times into the file (macro). I then exited the file and started the VAX Phone utility (a forerunner for ICQ and everything that came after it). The operator answered and I piped the file to his terminal! :-D
I once met a senior manager who was on the receiving end of something similar. A secretary at one of his customers was working on an email to send to the SM, she left her desk to carry out some task quickly, came back and sent the email... Only, while she was away, some joker had written some inappropriate text in the middle of the email, along the lines of a nice rear and wanting some hands on experience with it... The poor woman was mortified, when she found out, but, luckily the senior manager at the supplier thought it was absolutely hilarious and was laughing and telling everyone about the email he had received, so there was no damage done to the relationship between the two companies. I don't know hwat happened to the idiot that typed the message...
But another time, I was working late, along with a couple of other people, when the site manager came in and ordered everybody to leave. I told him I had a deadline, he said, no problem, he'd talk to the customer, leave NOW!
I found out later that a colleague had gone up to the his PA, opened his trousers and plonked the contents on her desk and asked her, what she could do with that... She said she needed a second opnion and called her manager... That was why we were asked to leave, he was marched in, once we had left, to clear out his desk, never to be seen again. I have no idea how he explained his sudden lack of a job and, probably, impending prosecution, to his fiancé once he got home. Again, not me, but that was a very expensive mistake for the colleague, and I would assume devastating the fiancé and traumatic for the PA.
I worked for a large company that made traffic light systems in the UK. We had a bunch of operators on shift and a fleet of VAX minis. We also had a modem pool.
One operator loved playing MUD on the Essex Uni system... He'd dial in from home for short sessions. He sometimes played "on the clock" when he was doing a nightshift. One day, he decided to do a raid, but there wasn't anyone else around to help, so he set up a bunch of terminals to run as the "team" and spent the night going through MUD dungeon... Only it was sticky mud.
The phone bill came in at the end of the month and his little dungeon raid had cost the company couple of grand! Luckily for him, his mate ran the internal billing system and was checking the Telecom invoice. He admitted what he had done and got a slap on the wrist from his mate and, on the promise never to do that again, the bill was spread evenly across all the projects that used the dial-up modems... A lucky escape.
Icon: Whatever you do, there is always someone watching you!
Our local museum still has a working Jacquard loom, the Tuchmacher (cloth maker) Museum in Bramsche. They still run it up regularly, when they do guided tours, likewise the big industrial loom from the lat 19th century still gets fired up, it slides in an out, taking up most of the floor space in the main room.
I think more, typing in commands into the console, you can do a lot of damage there...
I was a on a DEC training course in Reading and we were covering logging out other users... So I wrote a batch job to log everybody else but me out, then re-submit itself to start again, immediately...
All went well, people kept getting kicked off the machine, it was funny... Then I accidentally logged myself out.
Now, the "funny" thing about VMS was, as you are logging in, the username is displayed as <LOGIN> and, well, you guessed it, the batch job kept terminating my login attempts, so I couldn't stop the job.
The lecturer couldn't even log onto the main console in the datacenter. In the end, he had to manually power down the VAX and reboot it. Important lesson learnt, although, because we had our own VAX for the course, it didn't have any further repercussions.
Exactly what I thought, when I read the headline.
nVidia's cores aren't as efficient as "proper" NPU cores, but they are, currently, more scalable, they just use way too much electricity to carry out the tasks. My thought was that they get OpenAI to continue investing in nVidia hardware, which in turn can be funnelled back into R&D to make more efficient chips in the long run. It keeps the stock pot on the boil, whilst they look at a long(er)term solution.
At a time most other countries have realised that using foreign countries to run their infrastructure is a bad idea and a looking to replace Big Tech with home grown alternatives that aren't beholden to the whims of a foreign power, the UK doubles down... This can only go well.
The jamming was just before final approach, so, no they didn't know beforehand.
There have been many instances of jamming over the last few weeks in different locations, but nothing on that day, until they were close to the destination. This has happened on other flights with the President as well, her plane has been targeted several times, probably because she is visiting several nations bordering on Russia at the moment.
Neither Podestà nor Itkonen described the exact nature of this jamming incident, or how the presidential plane addressed it.
German news services did report the information. The pilots switched to manual navigation, using maps, when they realised their GPS signals were being blocked/spoofed, the flight took around 90 minutes longer as they did a double loop around the areas to line up for a manual landing.
The German news services also showed a map showing where jamming has been recorded in the last few weeks, a large part of the Easter flank, down through the Balkans to the Med showed strong blocking attempty, with weaker attempts up north towards the Nordic countries.
I always went for elegant, simple and efficient.
On several projects, I got the code working then realised there was a simpler way of doing it and re-coded to be simpler.
One project was running really slowly, when multiple users visited the website and the DBA would be busy restarting the database every minute or so during the rush. Looking at the SQL queries, they were written to be understandable to a human, with no thought given to how the SQL server would deal with it. The devs had no idea about writing efficient queries, they had been throwing new indexes at the tables to try and get more performance. I just rearranged the WHERE clause to work from smallest to largest, in effect, whereas they had started at the logical place for a human (the data they wanted to retrieve) and then paired away at it until they had whittled the dataset down from a few hundred thousand records to the 20 or 30 they needed, I started at the other end and the query time dropped from over 1 minute, under load, to under 500ms. The same was true for a lot of their code as well.
I am not some brilliant programmer, but I came from the old school of looking at saving processor cycles and cramming as much as possible into a 64KB memory block that I concentrate on those sorts of efficiencies, whereas the devs in this instance were trained to write Java and PHP code that looked elegant, with no regard for how well the code would run, just that it would run...
The company was unbelievable. The IT Manager left a few months later, they gave the position to his newly qualified apprentice. The wife of the CEO moved into his old office and threw out all of the folders in the office...
A few weeks later, the software supplier rang the old IT Manager privately, because the apprentice had contacted them to buy Windows licenses. He said, I thought you had purchased Datacenter licenses? Yes, he had, but the CEO's wife had thrown out all the software licenses for all products, because they were taking up space in her new office!
You had aircon? When I started at one job, the computer room was on the top floor, south facing and no aircon. In summer, the first person in the office opened the windows in the server room and at the other end of the building in order to get some cooler air flowing into the server room!
My first week, I told them we needed AC, they said no, no money (they went out and put AC in the CEO's office instead). I bought a thermometer with remote censor. It read a peak of over 60°C in the rack! Not the CPU temperature, the ambient temperature between the devices in the rack! Surprisingly, despite my dire warnings, the whole lot survived the summer, apart from one old server, which crashed.
Compressed air to remove 12 years worth of dust from the server brought it back to life again, somehow.
I left pretty soon after that.
I installed a new Firewall at one employer. The IT Manager wanted it set up so that only the DC could talk to outside DNS servers, so I set it up that way. 2 months later senior management decided not to renew my contract, despite the IT manager fighting my corner.
A couple of months later, they had a lightning strike which took out the VMware cluster, but the firewall was merrily chugging away...
So, no VMware = no DC = no DNS.
I got a call from the IT manager and had to talk him through going through the Firewall settings and finding the rule that blocked anything other than the DC talking to an external DNS service...
I had that the other way round with terminals, they had to be able to withstand radiation. The supplier was supposed to deliver shielded VT220 terminals, which cost a pretty penny more than the standard unshielded variety, he thought he could save a few quid, so he delivered unshielded one.
Everything went swimmingly, until a US Navy ship in the harbour turned on his radar for tests (he was supposed to do that first in open waters), dozens of suddenly dead terminals scattered around the dockyard. It cost the supplier a lot more than he had planned to save, when he had to replace all of the terminals.
At another site, we had a lightning strike and we lost a couple of hundred VT100 terminals. They were classed as valuable tech that couldn't be exported to the East Block under Cocom regulations. We had to arrange for them to be destroyed, for the destruction to be observed by an authorised civil servant and once they were crushed (luckily the place next door was a scrapyard with a metal compactor), we got a certificate we had to hold onto, to prove the terminals had been properly disposed of!
A couple of years later, I simply took an old VT100 home with me, to plug into my Commodore Amiga to use it to run a shell over the serial port... Things changed quickly back then.
It is similar at one of the Chemparks, where we have a site. Getting stuff out is even worse. Last year I was there to help sort out old kit that could be disposed of and ended up with around 150 old HDDs that needed to be destroyed, so I was bringing them back to add to our collection. I had to get a chit that listed the drives.
Last time, we were there over a weekend and staying in a hotel, so I had my private iPad with me, when I got to the gate, I had to check-in my laptop, work iPad and personal iPad separately, plus the 2 firewalls that we were bringing to replace the old ones. Luckily I wrote all the serial numbers down in a list, before I drove down there, so I only had to grab my personal iPad from the car and show the serial number.
Interestingly, a colleague got a sodding great big sticker with a serial number on it stuck to the lid of his Dell laptop, but they didn't do that for my MacBook Air...
I did a project for GPT (GEC Plessey Telecommunications) in Coventry. The site had its own golf club, complete with silver service restaurant.The managers used to get a free 3-course lunch if they brought a business guest to the club. I was there on assignment for a couple of months, working on their reporting system, which they had taken over from Plessey, when the Telecoms divisions merged. I "had" to go the golf club every lunch time.
On one day, I had to go into town to the bank to pay off my credit card, so that I could pay the hotel bill at the end of the week(*). They were miffed about missing their lunch, so I was sent into town early on company time, just so I was back in time to go to the golf club for lunch.
Another time, I was working a the Devonport Royal Dockyard, helping install a new personnel system. I was rushed onto the project at the last minute (I had only been at the company for about 3 months and it was my first major assignment). To get into DRD, you needed a positive vetting, which took a minimum of 6 weeks. I was given the paperwork on the Friday night, before I headed down with the team the following Monday and handed in the papers. Visitors got 3 day passes, before they needed a full pass, no ifs, no buts. So I went in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday without too many hassles, on Thursday, the guard looked at my papers and said, "you've had your 3 passes, you will have to wait for the vetting to complete, before you can come back on site."
That was an issue, so I simply asked him, if he had heard, that the personnel system was being swapped out? He replied in the affirmative. I then told him, that I was responsible for converting the payroll data from the old system to the new system, and if I couldn't come on site, he and his colleagues wouldn't be paid at the end of the month... 10 minutes later, I was marching towards our office with a 3 month temporary pass.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
(*) Back then, I had problems with my credit card, the limit was so low (250 quid the first year) that I had extreme problems, when working away from home. My first assignment was in Plymouth woking at the Navy dockyard (see above). We were staying in the Copthorne hotel and the weekly bill was 250UKP, so the exact limit of my card. So I had to pay the bill Friday morning, we worked until lunch bombed up the M4 back to our base, between Southampton and Portsmouth, where I would have to rush through my expenses sheet, rush to the cashier on site and get it cashed, then on Saturday go to the bank and pay off my credit card, so that I could pay the hotel bill the next week. After a month of that, The company wouldn't give me an advance and when I asked the bank, if they could increase my limit, they refused. I got a different credit card a few weeks later, which eased the problem, but some months still pushed it to its limit.
I worked on many COBOL systems in the late 80s and early 90s, it was just the "PICTUREs" that needed adjusting (and a program to change the database value, before the new code with the new PICTUREs came online.
The problem wasn't necessarily the system calls, it was the lack of storage or the cost of the storage, when these systems were written, back in the 1970s, those extra 2 digits for years, across a whole database, would have been very expensive. As space increased and prices came down, it became viable to use 4-digit years.
30 was often used for personnel systems (you couldn't have people of working age being born after they retire), for example. Although even that was a little high, as someone born in the 1930s could still be working in the 1980s...
We were working on Y2K problems in 1987. Financial and personnel systems were some of the first that were affected, using 2 digit dates calculating retirement age, for example, had people retiring before they were born or mortgages/loans that would mature before they had started!
When I started work in 1987, one of the first things I worked on was a DEC VMS based accounting system and converting it from 2 digit years to 4 digit years on COBOL, which was a lot of work! You couldn't just change one module, every module that read from or wrote to a specific date in the database had to be changed at the same time, so there was a lot of testing to find out every last screen, report, batch job etc. that interacted with each date.
Everything I worked on after 1987 was designed from the get-go to work with 4-digit years, but older programs (the accounting suite came from the 1970s) needed a lot of work. Luckily, by the time we were working on it, drive sizes had increased and the drive prices had decreased enough that it was financially sound to switch them over. I remember some other, older hardware systems, where the storage couldn't be expanded were switched to "sliding windows", where there was a cut-off date, years before a certain value (E.g. 30) were considered to be 20nn and those after the value were considered to be 19nn years.
I would have expected it to reset to 1970, as that is what computers have always done, when the battery backed RTC fails, or on older PCs, where there was no battery backed RTC and you had to enter the date and time every time you started the computer.
I would expect unpatched Y2K programs to loop back to 1901, but UNIX time was always anchored in 1970.
They never stopped allowing local notebooks, as long as you used the full version that came with Office. The free UWP version was feature castrated and it is this version that is going away, people should switch from the diet version back to the full-fat version.
OneNote will still exist, as it has always done, it is only the "OneNote for Windows 10", the castrated UWP version, that is going away.
When the UWP version came out, it was hailed as the new way for OneNote (i.e. you can no longer open OneNote files stored on your PC or on your network, it only works with Microsoft 365/OneDrive) and the original OneNote was deprecated as a "legacy" product... Fast forward a couple of years and UWP was being treated like it had the plague and the original OneNote was once again the one true OneNote... </shrug)
Yes, but it also sums up the article nicely, these people are stuck with Microsoft at the moment, and the easiest thing to do is more Microsoft, so they do more Microsoft, because it is quicker, easier and cheaper than the alternatives.
If you go away from Microsoft, you have to find you own mail server, calendar server, DMS, CMS, ERP and chat and video conferencing solutions, these all have to be integrated with each other, so that they seamlessly work together, because that is what users have come to expect. If they have a contact in their email, they can click on the address and start a Teams call and can call up the documents stored in SharePoint and seamlessly share them in Teams.
Getting that working on a disparate set of open source tools is a huge challenge, they might be able to achieve it, in time, but they will have user screaming at them every minute of the day, because it no longer "just works". That is the power of the lock-in.
I have almost completely removed Microsoft from my private IT usage (although with Apple in the mix, am I really better off? I suppose it could be worse, I could have Google in the mix), with a mix of Linux and Apple products. But at work, our staff rely on the features of Exchange, such as shared folders and multiple accounts linked to their primary account, plus Teams for meetings and chat, plus the odd video call. Weening them off of that on to Jitsi and Kopano or OX, for example, is a major project, one most IT departments just don't have the time and resources for, let alone the skills.
But not very often... 516 requests in total from over 30 different forces? That doesn't sound like much of a problem, or is each access a bulk download of all updated images or something?
They still shouldn't be doing a single request, without a court order; but given the numbers we usually deal with, it seems like an incredibly small, on average 0.045 requests per day per police force.
Each VLAN has a separate colour assigned to it. Each cable running from a switch or server to a wall port has the appropriate coloured tape wrapped around it (uplinks are a rainbow of fun). Any cable without coloured tape is automatically removed from the switch and patch panel. All non-active switch ports are deactivated and all non-active wall ports are not patched.
User: "Can you give me access to <some random network resource>?"
Me: "Sure, no problem, send an email to IT support and cc your manager, if they confirm it, I can provide access."
(Me is Head of IT and I also drum that into each of my admins, no changes to running systems without written confirmation.)
Sorry, in this case, Tencent are correct, FreeWeChat would break trademark laws in most countries. I would say the provider had little choice.
If they had been posting it at another domain (fwc.greatfire.org or something) that would be another matter, but using a trademarked name is a bit silly. I hope they get ti sorted out, it sounds like they are doing an important and good job, but this sounds like a bit of a Karen response on their part.
To combat this type of vulnerability, AI systems must have stronger contextual awareness and multi-layered validation systems, according to Figueroa.
No, the training sets should be stripped of this sort of information and user prompts that include sensitive information should automatically not be added to the training sets.
So far, this generation of AI has been all about cutting corners and damn the consequences. Don't get me wrong, I think they can be useful, but the training sets need to properly curated.
And don't get me started on the "we need the information to train our AIs, so we shouldn't have to pay for the information" trope that most of these AI companies spew out.
We need megawatts of electricity and the raw materials to run our production facilities, but the electricity companies and out suppliers get rightly miffed if we steal the energy or the raw material from them without paying. These AI companies need the raw data and get offended when the owners of the data tell them to stop or to pay up...
We still have a few XP machines kicking around the labs. The lab equipment they are connected to only works with XP, nothing newer, not even Windows 7 XP Mode, but they are all air-gapped, have local printers and the results are then filed in folders.
I know an admin at another company that has a CNC machine that only runs on XP. When they need support, the supplier asks for the TeamViewer number to do remote support. They are told, that as soon as they deliver a version of the software that runs on a supported version of Windows, they can get a TV number, otherwise they will have to "remote control" the operator in order to sort out the problem.
I have a 2016 HP laptop and a 2017 Ryzen 1700 desktop both running Windows 11 for over a year... Both get updates fine.
Microsoft "could" decide to turn off support at any point, that is the risk you have to run. That said, by the time MS probably get around cutting off updates for unsupported hardware, that hardware will probably be at least 10 years old, so will have had a good run for its money. The HP laptop (Core i5) is so slow under Windows 10 these days, I'm seriously thinking of swapping it to Linux, where it will replace my 2010 Sony Vaio laptop, which runs SUSE Tumbleweed.
That said, these days, I tend to hardly power them up, I do most things on my MacBook Pro with Parallels and Windows 11 and Ubuntu VMs... It saves the hassle of swapping back and forth between physical machines, I mainly ssh into the Sony these days, along with my Raspis.
I've had a few managers who took the blame for the department over the years and several that tried to push the blame further down the tree...
I've tried to become one of the former over the years.
When I was working on a job for a finance department at a customer, we had to recalculate Essbase hypercubes twice a days... Process:
1. Backup bottom row data
2. Delete all data from the hypercube
3. Load bottom row data from backup
4. Recalculate
The delete data and reload was standard OP for Essbase back then. A clean calculation from an empty cube took around an hour, a re-calculation of a full cube took around 8 hours...
I went through the process a couple of times, then the next time through, I somehow got distracted and started at 2... And, oh, no current data to load! I asked the junior dev who had been responsible for the database what we do now? He said, load the previous backup and blame it on the users. I was horrified, so I went to the Finance Director and my stomach was really rebelling, but I told him exactly what had happened, that the database had a transaction log and we would load the previous backup, replay the transaction log and the users should double check the data, once the cube had re-calculated, and that it would take around 2 hours, instead of 1 hour.
I loaded the backup, played the transaction log and recalculated. It turned out it worked and we lost a total of 2 transactions.
My honesty gained me the trust of the finance director and we had a very good working relaitonship after that.
Key word there, learned... I learnt sitting on my fathers lap, driving his car when I was 8 or so, driving up the 2 mile long private road to the farm where my uncle worked.
But, I learnt to drive, my dad didn't just give me the keys, I had to learn how the steering worked and later, how the pedals worked and how to shift gear. I was taught cadence braking, how to handle a slide etc. long before I was old enough to drive on the road and take my test.
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