Posts by Scott 29

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

NUTS! - Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. (I’ve been waiting to use this.)

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Been there, lost that battle

It never was an open decision. It is MS telling you how vital Exchange is to running their other product X is and how bad it’ll perform unless you adopt Exchange. Then, after you convert, their product X is still a decade behind what Google offers and has a crap UI, and you can’t convert back because you’ve exhausted all your resources to migrate onto their platform and everyone is struggling to keep it from dying every weekend.

Cornwall councillor suggests authority paid £2m for Oracle licences that no one used on contract originally worth £4m

Byzantine Oracle licensing

Trying to figure out exactly what licenses you need to buy is a good way to give yourself a headache, when it comes to Oracle licensing.

Migrating an Exchange Server to the Cloud? What could possibly go wrong?

Backups need write access

Backups need write access - they write to metadata, for a few reasons. Read-only to data though.

NASA's JPL may be able to reprogram a probe at the arse end of the solar system, but its security practices are a bit crap

Hi Corbin

Just wanted to say hope you're holding up there. You were great to work with.

Regards, Scott

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

Rhymes with Niagara

There's a little blue pill that will work for his spousal support.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

The old days

Reminds me of a cartoon in a punk zine back in the day:

“We’re corporate”

“We’re desperate”

“We’re out of it”

With crowds of similar-looking people.

“Wear doggy shit”

With one punk, and some logs on his shoulders

Careful with this latest Microsoft release – tug too hard on the threads and it tends to unravel

You'll receive a photo of a sweater

They only have one copy.

You'll get photos of a sweater with a Right To Use, which will disallow use in climates colder than 60F.

Photos will be of models in locations you will never have time or money to visit.

Peak tech! Bacon vending machine signals apex of human invention

Canadian

Don’t the Canadians have an iron in this fire? Canadian bacon, eh?

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb)

Re: "Because MS was just blindly trusting them all, they have to take some of the blame."

> Implementing a complex standard is hard --> expensive.

Agree.

Also, implementing it to a required level of securedness requires reading, both the how-to's and the academic papers showing weaknesses.

Samsung was more forthcoming to the researchers than they were to me.

Junior dev decides to clear space for brewing boss, doesn't know what 'LDF' is, sooo...

PSA

The system adminisrator, by default, knows nothing about databases.

If you assume otherwise you make an ass of yourself, not of the sysadmin.

That is all.

Can your rival fix it as fast? turns out to be ten-million-dollar question for plucky support guy

Re: recompense?

> So, wanting to minimize expenses and maximize earnings, you pay a standard salary to technicians and a percentage to salesmen.

Not really Richard Trumka's take on things.

“We’re demanding nothing more—and certainly nothing less—than our fair share of the immense wealth we create every day,” says Mr. Trumka.

Californian chap sets his folks' home on fire by successfully taking out spiders with blowtorch

halloween

These guys overwhelmingly weave their webs at most 2 feet off the ground. I see a lot of them while walking; have to look at your feet all the time as they weave between a wall and the sidewalk in the San Gabriel valley. There are many (dozens) now, but, after Halloween, they'll all be wiped out. The kids and parents trample them.

DXC axes Americas boss amid latest deck chair musical

The answer to any workstation problem is ‘reimage’.

I don’t engage them for servers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is worth 154 median minions

This conflates compensation with individual employee value.

Cloud-slingers get 3-week extension to pitch for Pentagon's JEDI contract

Wanna bet MS wins it?

I'll take bets that MS wins the competition.

Then, collective moans.

Amazon, ditch us? But they can't do without us – Oracle

> Just 2 per cent of 154 execs surveyed said Oracle was their most integral vendor for cloud computing, while 12 per cent chose Amazon – meanwhile, some 27 per cent named Microsoft, emphasising that cloud isn’t a two horse rase.

I guess 110% of execs just say "Microsoft" whenever asked any question.

How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

Re: PDF is clunky.

I have to mention ABBYY finereader. Seems nobody else does. It used to be bundled with Fujitsu SnapScan.

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

Re: If you get a bit twitchy ....

That one flew way over my head.

Tsk-tsk, fat cat Softcat: Milk-slurping reseller taken to court

Crying over milk not spilled

Could have been your headline, instead of that tortured one you ran with.

Confessions of an ebook eater

Re: Ms. Stob, you've been lucky you had not to cope with translated books...

One of my favorite mumblesomethings from a difficult professor was about DEC and their manual for BASIC:

"From looking at it you'd think they took printouts of code and ran them on their machine, but no, it must have cost someone a fortune to buy a typewriter ball that looks like it was a printout from their machine.

Sadly, there's on average 1 mistake per page."

But, he never told us where the mistakes were. That was left as an exercise to the reader.

Great article

Thanks for writing a well-thought out and entertaining article.

About pdfs - unfortunately when you're at the head of the pack in your ${large_company} you spend a lot of time reading things available in horribly-formatted websites, or pdf. The iPad Pro 12.9" comes close to sqrt(8.5^2x11^2), so reading without scrolling is easy.

(I've tried to learn Python from the Google videos, unfortunately OBE (overcome by events)).

Volterman 'super wallet': The worst crowdsource video pitch of all time?

I have older man again

Watch it with subtitles auto-generated.

Male escort says he gave up IT to do something more meaningful

All considered, I'm better off taking the red pill instead of the blue pill.

Oh my Word... Microsoft Office 365 unlatched after morning lockout

crush the competition

We're going to crush Alphabet, just crush them. Now where did that PowerPoint sleestack go to?

In touching tribute to Samsung Note 7, fidget spinners burst in flames

Hmmm

He put a lithium fire out with water? That is a trick. #journalistsknowall

CompSci boffins find Reddit is ideal source for sarcasm database

Apart from chavs the British have no class

Point your sarcasm detector at that IQ^2 audiocast.

DTMF replay phreaked out the Dallas tornado alarm, say researchers

The earliest phreaking used MF, not DTMF. Two different things.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

I'm the only person you know who saw both Spinal Tap and Office Space in the theater, when they were first released.

Go ahead, try and top that.

FYI: Ticking time-bomb fault will brick Cisco gear after 18 months

Re: Intel perhaps?

I have one C2750 in my freeNAS-mini though. At home.

'Pet Shop Boys CEO' firm quips: We have enough storage people

Cans and string

The girls in the photo - not how you use cans and string to communicate via voice. Unless you are a CEO maybe. And you have PowerPoint.

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Why is it called a PC?

You lot need to stop calling them PCs.

It's not a personal computer if even your username is managed across the organization.

Oh, sugar! Sysadmin accidently deletes production database while fixing a fault

Re: My so-called supervisor killed an alarm processing server

Hm, what's bog?

A bog is a mire that accumulates peat.

Frig. What's a mire?

There are two types of mires: fens and bogs.

No, what is it really?

A stretch of swampy or boggy land.

This Googling is haaarrrdddd.

LastPass got hacked: Change your master password NOW

Re: Yubikey's everyone ?

> whats the risk for me.

Subpoenas.

Major US news organisations to develop ROBOT JOURNALISTS

Bring on the robotic Iraqi Information Minister!

Please, create a robotic Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, of former Iraqi Information Minister fame.

He's at least as accurate as MSNBC, but with a more pleasing look and conviction.

Bonus: I'm sure he won't feel compelled to ask Eric Holder to quack like a duck!

Vietnamese high school kids can pass Google interview

Grade level in Vietnam

Two points:

Grade level and age: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Vietnam#School_grades

picture reference: http://www.business-in-asia.com/vietnam/education_system_in_vietnam.html

More to the point: Secondary education (Vietnamese: trung học phổ thông) consists of grades ten through twelve. The IGE is a prerequisite entrance examination for secondary schooling. The IGE score determines the schools at which students are able to enroll. The higher the score, the more prestigious the school.

So, unlike the U.S. where everyone is passed along until they're 18 years old, in Vietnam they thin the herd as you progress. So, if Google steps into a classroom, it's likely seeing the top of the top, and even all those won't get into public University. Private is expensive for most to attend.

Also, Calculus is taught in grades 11 and 12.

Oracle pops cork as cut-price ZFS array creams NetApp rival

Enjoy your storage. Er, how about a database?

NetApp docs and support are just so much better than Orrible; gawd, I hate support.oracle.com.

They really sell a database, and it's okay by them if storage goes out of business. On the other hand, NetApp sells storage. It's not okay with them if storage goes out of business.

Want to use your appliance with <foo>? Well, here's a best practices paper of how to use it with <foo> when dealing with NetApp, while Oracle is not there at all. They don't write the old Sun Blueprints any more, and they've pulled access to the old ones.

The talent is now at OpenIndiana. Even the hardware isn't what it used to be. It's prettier but not as innovative as their competition; I've had a lot of new hardware failures both with SPARC and x64 that I wouldn't have had years ago.

Bumbling NJ firemen, cops blown up in 'huge fireball'

Get 'er done

You're corrected. It's a light oil. It burns with a very yellow/orange flame and gives off black smoke when burned at standard atmospheric pressure and when soaked into wood. They should have used a blow torch to ignite plain diesel+wood. I thought that part of the country used fuel oil for house heating, thus would know more about how to get 'er lit.