Posts by ps2os2

Who will Dr Who chew in 50th TV do before Matt Smith bids adieu?

I am not amused by the current Mr Smith. I can only hope the next Dr Who will be more interesting.

Big Blue cedes software and systems training biz to partners

IBM has been changing its mind very few years on education.

The IBM ED centers have generally been top notched until the tried video (remote training). That fell on its face (I walked out of a class and so did others). AFter that they retrenched and went back to face to face teaching. Then IBM started sinking and now very few want to attend the classes.

MasterCard stings PayPal with payment fee hike

Re: Coming to a wallet near you...

Why do you think that the big CC card companies are set up in Delaware or North Dakota (and other places).

The state laws are extremely friendly towards companies over consumers. .. I think AMEX moved to UTAH at least for their IT although some of it is in FLorida. UT and other states are notoriously anti consumer. That is why you would never want to move there. About 30 years ago AMEX moved their IT to Utah and there was a flood in market place of IT pros who knew better than to move there.

Lenovo: Windows 8 is so good, everyone wants Windows 7

Windows 8

I have had three friend buy computers in the last month. 2 came windows 8 and 1 with windows 7. The windows 8 people just plain hate windows 8 and want to know how they can go back, FAST!.

MS just simply blew it face it.

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

Re: Windows XP Upgrade

MS doesn't really support their OS's anyway.

The big issue is OEM and if they are going to continue offering software that runs on XP.

Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m

Re: Free Is Good

And you think MS is any better?

I think you have misplaced 20 or years of MS exposure.

Commentards Ahoy! How about a Petabyte of storage?

Weight is one thing how about power consumption won't you need you own nuclear power plant to power it?

YES! It's the TARDIS PC!

Dr Who PC?

Well if it was really the TARDIS it certainly wouldn't run windows.

Business sues for $750,000 over bad Yelp review

jobs not paid for

I do not know about the UK but in the states we have courts just for these types of cases. Each state has a maximum (usually 5,000 US) and lawyers (unless one of the parties is one) aren't permitted just the two litigants. Very informal. and the parties get to do a show and tell about their positions and a judge decides it. Small filling fee and in case you win the other party has to pay. Works reasonably well.

Disney plans three Lucasfilm flicks EVERY YEAR

Re: Watered down?

Worse?? How about Thelma and Louise do Darth ... (or Chubaka?)

Judge denies move to ban ad-skipping DVR

Skipping ads

I have a DVR and I never watch a show "live". When I watch a show and an comes on I have developed a fast forward flick of the finger.

I still get stuck occaisionally watching the last 5 seconds of a commercial. You know I feel BETTER!

Mighty quake shook ENTIRE PLANET, broke tectonic plate

Re: Broken plates

Only if its new China:)

Ballmer: Win8 'certainly surpasses' Win95 in importance

Win/lose

The main issue is that the consumer will be sold a bill of goods (screwed) and from little I have heard the lose2012 version will be available as landfill.

CRACK made by quakes FOUND ON MOON

Moon Quakes

OHOH... since we may have people on the mood permanently if Gingrich wins we better get AID money set aside for the soon to happen moon quakes. Maybe it would be cheaper to charge it to his Tiffany account?

Will Apple set up shop in Walmart warehouses?

Apple in Sams?

Who knows maybe Apple will force these huge discount places to pay their employee's at least minimum wage. In case you didn't know WALMART (and other) sub contract out these place huge place to companies to get around the minimum wages . Bah humbug Avoid these places.

ALIEN ARTIFACTS can best be FOUND ON MOON

Lunar Desk?

Is that similar to a cloud desk only really far out (near the mens room)?

EFF appeal win reopens NSA dragnet spying case

The more interesting aspect is that now the courts have acknowledged that telco companies have immunity in this. I knew FISA was bad and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I suspect that NSA (amongst others) have their finger print (now blank) all over the telco systems in America, perhaps in foreign lands as well (England perhaps). The Brits (if it ever found out) will have their undies in a bunch.

Anonymous shuts down hidden child abuse hub

Shutting down child porn sites

This is one of those stories about whether the glass is half full or half empty and both sides have their points. Maybe the best option would have to sent the information gathered to INTERPOL and let them sort out where to bust the ring. Perhaps a country whose laws could accommodate the irregularities of the evidence, I don't know.

Maybe it would be called shopping of place to file criminal charges so that the most "damage" could be done. I do not know I am not a lawyer but I believe there are countries that do not put well lets say to fine a point of how evidence is gotten.

IBM fails to keep Oz harassment case under wraps

OZ harassment case against IBM

The only material question is if IBM did fire the guy and why.

If it was for harassment then its important to the accuser.

To be fair to IBM (at least in the US) the people are really protected well from these types of people who shouldn't ever have gotten promoted to a supervisory position in the first place.

One word to the correct people the guy would have been either gone the same day or soon their after. If its a close call then the guy (or woman) would have been moved out of the direct line of supervision quickly.

Man charged in nude celebrity hacking case

Number of Years

Prosecutors in the US like to trot out the numbers like 121 as a bargaining chip.

Even if convicted he will probably do less than 5 and more like 2 or 3 years.

The big numbers is pure bluff and is rarely if ever charged (and received). Its a scare tactic to the defendant so that they will plead to a lesser charge. Although it really comes down if its a federal case and the crime involved. There (depending on the crime) are mandatory sentencing numbers. Even then its up to the judge (in most case but not always). Of course if the judge is up for election and he wants to appear law and order type he will hand out the stiffest sentences he can possibly allowed to.

Its a flaw in the US system that some judges have to run for election. and have to prove they are "tough on crime" (usually in Texas or Arizona & Oklahoma) You know the type of states that can't wait to execute the criminals like the governor of texas who is proud that he sent over 160 men to death.

Teradata adds hardware compression to data warehouses

Compressed data on drives

This is an area where companies have to be extremely careful as if the company that is compressing the data goes bankrupt the data could be gone forever and the government would not be very happy about that. The various government agencies that have rules could put the company that is an innocent bystander out of business over a dispute or financial or any other type of mis-management. To me this is a big red flag say stay away from such an situation.

EMC exec flames El Reg

Can He Behoove his hooves?

He might want to go to a professional behoover and have the illness looked after.

Microsoft cloud evaporated by one busted file

re Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!

Well Its partially human.... The so called file should have a parser to catch errors before they sent out to various other servers no?

That should eliminate any human issue. No whether there is a check at each server to check for validation issues is another possibility. Its called check and recheck and then do a checksum.

Blue Screen of Death gets makeover for Windows 8

BSOD

Other OS's have something similar and indeed its not nice.

IBM (mainframes) at least when this it happens it tells you why and where to find (which manual) is the the wait state code and usually a smallish paragraph on what to do. At least with IBM you need to take a memory dump and restart the system (most often). What is different in most cases from MS is at least 90+ percent of the time IBM will at a later time help you diagnose the problem and most of the time supply either a fix so it won't happen again or with at least enough information that you can figure out why it happened (and it great detail). MS is just Tough S**** reboot and cross your fingers it doesn't happen again. No Problem determination aids no nothing. SO much for MS having reliable systems. In other words you are on your own, go scratch.

Can clouds ever be fully secure?

clouds and Security

Security is an OXYMORON when it comes to any Windows OS.

Who the hell cares about five nines anymore?

5 9's

Well what can you do when you can't meet the 5 9's ?

Say it really isn't needed.

Like a lot of non IT people they do not have a slightist idea why they pay a night staff for. Where I work we come close at 4 9's . Night time is when all the batch work is done and there is a lot of it. One key thing that everyone forgets are backups. If you don't backup your data you are going to be in a lot of legal hassles the kind that the justice department (amoungst others) will shut your company down in record time. Do not ever try and argue with a FBI or SEC investigator they will have you in handcuffs faster than you can dial a lawyer. Oh yes and you must service your equipment and that is done usually at night when it has the least impact. Can you shut down a system while someone replaces say a disk drive or say a motherboard? Can you all say NO?

Mystery railway buys 80 terabytes of Flash

80 TB Flash

Well you know the Swiss would never buy something that has holes in it ...

Really sounds like the brits to me.

Apple rumor mill predicts 'all new Mac'

Yawn, Wake me up next year

Who cares what Apple may or may not announce. I am not an Apple fan boy like the other hordes.

Apple is on a downward spiral after they decided to go INTEL.

I did not follow that nor will I follow anything new put out by Apple.

They had a solid product and they deserted their base so now who cares anymore?

New DVD discs claim 1,000 year life

Punch Cards

I hate to disappoint a lot of you but the larger the data center the more likely it is to have a card reader. Grant you not 1000 cards per minute but a respectable 250 cards a minute.

Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation

Ahh Happy Days??

Ahh first of all there is no "JCL to IPL a os/360"

IPLING is at first a microcode function then readinging a bootstrap off a drive then reading the drive for a specific dataset then reading the dataset and then loading the OS(at least for OS/360, 3/70 and OS/390 and z/os) . JCL doesn't really exist in the OS till you start an initiator (OS 360 days not now) for Z/os Master is started with dummy JCL (it doesn't exist).

Ahh as for second either your timing is off or your narative is wrong NETVIEW did not exist for OS/360 and the first OS that support NETVIEW wasn't unti the 70's and then it was called NCCF. Netview came as a follow on the NCCF perhaps in the late 70's or 80's . SO you are off at least 10 years on the netview.

Christmas tree

I do not believe it was a REXX exec that brought down the system(s) rather it was an VM exec that was the villian.

REXX didn't come out got maybe 10 or so years after the culprit had been identified. I suppose the valid question was the exec a worm or virus or malware. If push came to shove I would call it malware.

Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling

Global Warming (or lack there of)

There is just too much data and what we have is incomplete as there are 1000's of volcanos that are at best accounted for loosely. The scientists have a pretty good handle on the global warming do not get hung up on the small stuff as they say.

The data suggests X. The scientists are paid to come up with what X is. They have a reasonably solid foundation to suggest what is going to happen. Do not expect exactness with a subject like global warming. There are just too many variables and with variables comes a little exactness.

DO you get upset when the boss calls you up and says to you your expense report is bad fix it. Now is it because its to high or to low? You pretty much have to follow the bosses lead. If you saw him out at 1 dinner its a safe bet he went out another 4 times. Then of course you have toi figure out what the tab was at 3 other restaurants you have no idea what he went to. So you make a best guess based on what you know his habits are. Global warming is more of an exact science than tabs but then you get the idea.

Spot-the-fake site launched

Brands

This may be good advice on a lot of items however as an example you have a recommendation by Consumer Reports as being a best deal. I see the need to shop by manufacture that made it.

Ignoring reports that are reputable is asking for trouble.

On the "pro" side a manufacturer that has a 50+ year reputation as best of the best you can hardly go wrong.

HP refuses to resurrect global partner piss-up conference

Paid Holiday

Or in this case maybe YOUTUBE would be faster and more fun.

'Upgraded' Apple iMacs lock out hard drive replacement

IMACS & Drive Upgrading

This somehow doesn't surprise me on the IMACS. If they carry this forward to the other lines they are going to be in a real uproar.

I have added am internal drive to mine but for all intense purposes I use fire wire for all external drives. Apple has dropped fire wire from its "air" computers. They are also putting too much emphasis on USB2 for my taste. If they drop firewire then I am dropping Apple simple as that. USB2 does not give me the speed that I need PERIOD.

I suppose its windows sigh, and nobody from APPLE gives a flying as they think they have the fanboys to squalk and put everyone down that doesn't agree.

Feds indict poker sites, seize domains

Online Gambling

Several others have written about the hypocrisy of ONLINE gambling.

As has been reported several sites have perpertrated fraud on its players. Not sure of the names but one or two were up in Canada (if memory serves me).

i generally do not gamble so I can't have an independent opinion. The only time I gamble is if the lotto jack ot goes above $100 Million (US). That being siad I sure would not trust any only web site at least with Vegas you are reasonably assured you are gambling with a unrigged system.

IBM accused of bribery in China, South Korea

IBM or Nothing?

As far as IBM being the only game in town is true. However a threat to get rid of IBM is usually done with the eye to convert to INTEL. There are long lines of failed conversions. Some of the better stories are at reboothill.com (IIRC) I haven't looked at it in a while and it has probably not been updated in forever.

People who do the conversion (or try) are in for a shocker. No one have come in under budget (that I have heard of) and if the press is to believed more that a few have dropped back. What usually happens any person who proposed the conversion is vanished into India or some really backwater place.

People just do not have clue what is involved the convresion. Amother piece that seems to be forgotten is how systems feed offf of each other. Documenation is lacking and the people that built the system are long gone. Which goes to the company being penny foolish they do not see the need to document anything. Leave for the next fool.

Google patches Flash bug before Adobe

Vendors not fixing code

I had a similar issue with CA about 20 years. I needed to be able to run one of CA's product's in a certain way and could not because they hadn't updated their software.

It was at the time one of the few CA products that still shipped with source. I asked CA and they said in the best case 4-6 months. I was on deadline and couldn't wait for them so I went in and patched CA code to allow running their product (it was *LEGAL*). It took me say 3 days and the code was in one specific area so that made it extra easy. I tested it over the weekend and it worked. SO I called CA monday AM and told them I figured out the fix (they were getting a lot of pressure from other users). I told them to go to hell. It works and if you want to pay me I will have to have a contract made up. They figured i would give them it for free, HAHA!!

IBM tunes up Java for z196 mainframes

slightly incorrect

Most if not all of the 24 bit programs can still be runing on Z/os. Frankly we have an application(s) that was last compiled in 1968 and still runs unchanged in Z/os.

OF course all 31 bit programs can do so.

There are some minor exceptions to the rule, but if we can keep it at application code level then we can run all programs on Z/os.

24-31-64 bit

Just remember back to when memory was expensize 10K (or more) per megabyte.

To save memory IBM used 24 bit addressing. Come the 70's 24 bit wasn't enough and IBM went 31 bit.

The final push to 64 bit really hasn't happened yet (dispite what IBM says). its real tricky to get in and out of 64 bit execution. Dispite IBM's hullabaloo there are still areas( large) that just do not allow 64 bit addressing to work. One of my favorites (and talk about not getting it right) is IBM's ICF catalog

IBM did not allow for vast (by then standards) of large disks and size of files.

AFAIK IBM's DB2 is being held back because of ICF catalog (and other constraints). This needs to many parts of the OS to be changed to be able to be done easily. Especially with a floating code base (some guess some knowledge for the last statement).

It can be done but it will not be easy as essentially IBM has to rewite a access method. Rewrite is probably a bad term but they have to go over millions of lines of code to find problems before rewrite.

COBOL can't get their act together with 64 bits LONG LONG STORY so do not think that VSAM will be easy.

Can Oz compete in the outsourcing market?

OZ outsource to?

I will not get into the english style diversion.

My biggest issue with Australia is not the people the language (although that may be a small issue). The country has one drawback which I can't get around. That is to say the propagation delay between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and Australia. You just cannot defy physics (at least not yet). The fiber has not been laid in the vast quantities needed and satellite is way to expensive. Even *IF* fiber is layed there is the issue of the south west pacific sesmic activity. The sea floor in the entire area is gelogocally unsound. Even if you could say put half your marbles in the South eastern Pacific are there is (at least as of now no reasonable way on the east coast to get to the other side of the world). There is a highly active geologic dault running up the the coast of South America all the way aour the coastline essentially of the pacfic basin. Laying cable south of South America is something most companies would not want to do.

Russian hacker avoids jail over WorldPay heist

Russian gets off with slap on Hand

Sounds to me like the guy was tried in the US. Judges are infamous (in the US) for giving out verdicts without no punishment for computer crimes. It was explained to me this way : "Judges in the US are for the most part technological idots and do not have the faintest idea what a computer can do. Even if you find one they are still back in the early OPC era".

Australian companies don’t trust their backups

Austrailia doesn't trust backups

I wouldn't trust any backups made by PC's (or any small computer) as they do not have designed into them data integrity. Data integriy is the most important part of backs and PC's cannot offer it.

Apple $10k winner hangs up on 'prank caller'

Hangs up on Apple

Chuckle I would not have answered the phone PERIOD.

I have my system set up to only recognize numbers that are OK to ring through. Everything else is hung up on.

Who will rid me of these obsolete PCs?

What to do with old PC's

I just use them as NAS. Works fine. Never gave it a second thought.

Cell phone search needs no warrant, say Cal Supremes

Phones searchable

This could be an idea option for the phone market and anyone else. An Clear key wipes out everything in a microsec or 2.

IBM super cleared for trivia showdown with humanity

Jeopardy

The personal Q&A is maybe 2-/3 minutes of the show.

Look its the only semi intelligent game show on TV. People (like me) who are trying to get back cognative issues after a stroke, this show is a god send.

Feds raid server farms in bid to root out PayPal DDoS perps

Competent Investigation?

Anyone using the smoking gun as an "authority" is not all that competant.

WikiLeaks re-taunts feds with US Amazon mirrors

government 101

spudoff spoke:

Homeless people dont vote so there handling them by ignoring them or giving them Criminal records for Vagrancy so they stay unable to vote.

-----------

You had better go back to government 101. You have to be a convicted felon to loose your vote,

NOT vagrancy..

Supremes to hear Microsoft's Word appeal

Supreme Court

Well it was clear the Republicans got their insiders onto the Supreme Court as there is no other way that Citizens United got their way.

I will forgive some of the brain dead decisions that the Supreme Court has handed down but this is (like the Dread Scott decision) one for the records. I wonder if it will take a civil war to correct this one?