Posts by Brian 39

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

On call now....

I am a British ex-pat and have lived in the USA for 21 years and am now in the last six weeks before I retire from being on Technical Support/System Admin at a medium size American University.

It's 9pm Xmas eve here and I cannot confess to have diverted the redirect from our MS-Teams phone line support system to a porn line, but the prospect does intrigue me. Note I said I cannot confess to such a prank. Tee Hee.

And yes, despite today being a holiday and nobody is at work, today we had a db server run out of space (db team took care of it, but we had several email exchanges) and one of our senior staff has asked for the umpteenth time if our Zabbix monitoring server system was going to be hit by a Java Log4j Vuln. It won't as it doesn't use Java but we are not sending him the link from the product web site about this, as we want him to grow another ulcer.

Suggestions for last day pranks of this nature are more than welcome... Come on guys... Tell me what might be a fun thing to do...

Microsoft promises twice-yearly Windows 10, O365 updates – with just 18 months' support

Re: Dear gods...

Cynic mode always on.... If you are not Windows, you are jack shit,

You want to DISRUPT my TECH? How about I DISRUPT your FACE?

>Depending upon whether your boss hires Steve-the-TNT,

An ex-CIO I know lasted two years and then retired, all due to "disruption".

Coward!

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is dead. Woah, contain yourselves

Re: Or Cisco UCS customer for that matter

Wish we'd have gone down that route too.

Our newly installed EMC Isolon is (mostly) a pile of poop.

We had a working NetApp PoC but the (then) CIO voted not to buy it, so.....

Oh well.

BOFH.

Re: Or Cisco UCS customer for that matter

I thought UCS had no market either, and was rather ticked off when we purchased a 34 node Vblock from VCE (includes Cisco blades with FCoE) and a bunch of EMC storage.

We discovered two of our local big school districts ($300 million dollar operations), a local hospital organization (just built a $1.3 billion complex), several locally based multi-nationals, blah, blah, blah were also UCS owners/customers.

Oh well, It'll at least allow us to finally retire a bunch of Dell and Compellent servers and storage we purchased 5 years ago to replace a bunch of old Sun gear that we finally got to retire last year.

Perhaps someone writing for El'Reg needs to get out of the office a bit more?

Oh my! What a shock.

You must have at least 8 inches for Windows 10 to go all the way

"Long term, though, if Windows is to have any future on tablets, the desktop has to go"

Huh?

Five years of Sun software under Oracle: Were the critics right?

Solaris is long gone.....

We used to have over 200 Solaris servers in our (University) business environment. We now have zero.

Everything is now Windows (SPIT) or RHEL Linux. It's all way less of a problem to administer and much cheaper CPU for CPU than anything out of Oracle, no matter what the Larry fanbois on the dedicated we love Larry side of the line might claim.

We are even going with a Cisco/ENC VBlock for our production systems this spring. Did I say it's LESS THAN HALF the cost of an Exa-whatsit set up? RHEL and Virtual disks along with VMWare does it for us. No need for Larry-Lock-In.

Sun screwed the pooch and lost it all to Larry. As a paying customer, we prefer other vendors now. Oracle is indeed a toxic environment. Never again.

LIFELESS BEAGLE on MARS: A British TRIUMPH!

ALIENS!!!!!

Mars is the only place in our solar system which appears to be populated entirely by robots... It's a robot planet...

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Oh no....

This is TERRIBLE. Much less information per page, poor color palette and for gods sake, it's so cluttered now. Lower in value as a result. Bad reg, Bad.

Go back to how it was before - don't employ 12 year olds to do your web site design, as Microsoft have for Office 2013.

Dell explores wearable computing as PC base crumbles

Indeed so. Five or more years ago was the peak for Dell and now as the consumer need has moved on but Dell have not. They are stuck 18 months to 2 years ago with self consuming junk Sino-made products.

We have Dell desktop/laptops for staff use (4,000 employees) and many people go to meetings with BYOD gear as it simply meets the needs people have but is not organization supplied.

Where will we all be in a few years time?

'Leccy-starved Reg hack: 'How I survive on 1.5kW'

Spain?

Pah!

Don't you know that you have to bribe the local electrician with a few bottles of (good) wine? It also helps to buy the local Mayor a couple of lunches (lots of wine too), for signing planning applications and permits and such.

You'd also do better to pop up a solar cell or three and power your lights from that too.

Had a friend who bought a farm house for restoration in rural Spain a few years ago - he was of the view that wine and lunch has magical (bribe) abilities to get things done. If your morals and ethics prevent you from doing that, move back to the first world, as Spain isn't there yet.

Copyright trolls, biz scum, freetards - it's NOT black and white

Not ideal ... but better than the rest?

The existing situation is far from good, and this bunch while not an idea solution, appear to be better than most of the rest. As "The Register" implied, we all forget or ignore that when we "buy" an item of media, we are actually only buying the paper/blank CD/DVD/whatever and just renting a license to use the performance in some very particular and restricted ways.

The existing situation is loaded against consumers and anyone who advocates for consumers and seeks to add to the very limited legal rights of consumers is to be applauded, even if they are less than perfect.

Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

BBC Networking club?

HAHAHAHAHA .... It was a decade late Shopping at Maplins .... Geez!

Apple iPhone 5 review

Fanboi review.....

Utter twaddle.

Full of "Beauty" and "Amazing" remarks - after all this time and revisions to the original = pap.

From the pictures in the article, it looks out of proportion with the 4.

Emperors new clothes.

RIM restyles next-generation BlackBerry

would have been good....

About 3 years ago...

Oracle's Sparc T4 chip: Will you pay Larry's premium?

Oracle fail.

It's already way too late for Oracle in my organization.

We migrated to RHEL Linux on Dell H/W and went from 60% CPU utilization to 4% running the same code (PeopleSoft).

Cost? About half that of Oracle hardware...

and Dell were happy to offer a 3 year H/W maintenance contract... Oracle only one year at a time.

'A SHARK attacked my ROBOT', gasps ex-Sun exec

Shark?

Nahhh... It's a buy out attempt from Oracle.

Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

Oracle know how to profit (screw-up).

OTN is a terrible place to find anything you need. Oracle = fail.

We have given up and are migrating about 80% of our Sun infrastructure at work (about 60 servers) to RHEL on Dell and the rest will move to it once existing maintenance contracts are up.

The RHEL/Dell combo s about 40% of the price and has the features we need, so goodbye and good riddance to ORACLE.

Oracle and IBM carve up open-source Java leadership

Time to move on....

I hear the gong sounding the kiss of software death by clogged up arteries.

Nothing ever going to happen here ... Time to move on and find another cross platform language.

Oracle spurns Ruby devs for Java love

Uh oh....

Don't give Larry and co any ideas... ;-)

Or the other way round?

One could also suggest that so few people are bothering with Sun ^H^H^H Oracle software environments now and are using something else... but no. Lets not rain on Big Larry's parade.

Cold call scareware scammers aim to bring Mac fans into the fold

Scareware for Macs?

This means they'll be banned from the apps store... Oh dear me!

Paris... because... well... It's an Apple story, after all!

Nokia, HTC, Sony attacked by hidden megatroll

I know where these sharks are!

They are just outside Pizza Hut Park, which is a sports stadium. Used by F.C. Dallas (a soccer club) and a half decent team they are too (well, better than most American footie clubs anyway).

Red Hat revenues bulge 20%

Why?

Why the rise?

Because there are so many ex-Sun (now Oracle) SPARC customers who are migrating to RHEL on x86/x64 H/W.

We are doing exactly that and reducing our 3-year TCO by at least 30% .... Game over Oracle. Hello RH.

Blighty's carriers to field Windows Phone 7

Work or not?

Let me just say that my wife got a iPhone4 because her son has one <SIGH> ... The voice quality is terrible. Voice is subject to break-ups and when it is understandable, it sounds like she is speaking from inside a tin bucket.

As my Blackberry curve contract is up in a couple of months, I will NOT be getting an iPhone... My options are Android or Win7 phone...

Cashpoint mugger flashes distractionary chesticles

NUDGE-NUDGE....

According to Babel fish:

"One d' she discovers her chest and puts her hand on l' crotch of the man while the second benefits from it to withdraw 300 euros."

SAY NO MORE!!!!!!!

All-in-One Inkjet Printers

Seiko'd.....

>>All I will say is II'm heartily siek'o that manufacturer.

LOL!!!!!

I'm with you all so far...

I have several Epson (oops) printers and scanners that run for years!

This week, an Epson CX4800 AIO has finally given up due to heads finally being blocked and after over 50 quid of ink to try and clear it AND using head cleaner cartridges it is still blocked, so it's "going away" after good service for three times the design life of the thing.

Apart from my Windowz PC's, we have a Linux (Ubuntu 8.04) netbook and it has always been a problem getting anything Epson to work properly with it.

Funny that, as a really old HP PSC1200 printer and yesterday, I just plugged it in and CUPS recognised it, auto installed the driver and it just worked!

Kaspersky blocks BBC News over false phishing fears

Interface design - - part fail!

Usual disclaimer... all IMHO etc....

Two issues:

#1. The new Beeb site design:

Shame there isn't a "part fail" tag for the Beeb's re-design. I like the way they have moved the masthead, menus etc to the top (I'm viewing on a 15" laptop screen), but if I had a cellphone or a Netbook size screen, I'd probably be ticked off at having to scroll down (perhaps a couple of times?) before I actually get to read anything of value (news!!!!!) to me....

The main content area does not have enough contrast between the background, text and border area .... actually IS there even a border area or is it just the same color as the main background?

El-Reg has two gray/blue bars down each side (helps to keep eyes on the main part of the screen) and uses lines and spaces between entries very well. This all helps to keep your eyes working in a natural (easy to use) way. Shame the Beeb ignored this need.

The "new" site design is very "2003", when most people were moving towards using larger screens and could accommodate the "longer/taller" design as all the "widgets" like maps etc are now further down the screen, rather than in side bars than in the older more 3 column oriented design. Now in 2010, while it's not perfect - and did need work - I think the design they just moved away from is possibly better suited to an era where more and more smaller/mobile devices are in use.

#2 Kaspersky...

They once billed me for a product I never purchased, and were terrible to deal with trying to get the issue sorted out. I have been very cautious about anything that comes from them ever since and this kind of false alarm should have been identified before they released the update. It's almost like the Russians were trying to punish the west in a very cold war manner... oh wait! We just did a very "cold-war" spy swap... Nah... couldn't be, could it?