Posts by storner 173 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2011
I was thinking the same - to reach 30 kWh per day I would need two electrical cars and permanent WfH. My normal use for cooking, laundry, lights etc is 10 kWh per day, and my electric car adds 6 kWh per day (on average). This includes one person permanently at home, and a 5-disk NAS running 24/7 in the basement.
Thanks for contributing to our current CO2-apocalypse.
"The CEO was fast asleep with his phone on silent and they couldn't raise him. Why someone wasn't dispatched to wake him up, who knows... Which meant it fell to the Operations Director to handle the incident"
As it should.
In the old days when I worked in IT operations, any major incident would inevitably lead to multiple C-level nitwits huddling around the one poor sysadmin tasked with getting things up and running. The first thing our new Operations Director did was to throw them all out. I think he would have liked to revoke their door passes for the IT department as well.
After that, the number of "high business impact" incidents has plummeted.
A friend of mine - aged 76, but still going strong - received a mail from his local Pensioners Association. "If you run Windows 10, we will help you install Linux Mint instead". All 20 seats were booked in a day!
So of course I did the install for him, on a new disk so he could try if it would work for him. Thats is 5 weeks ago, and he is quite happy with it. The biggest challenge was to find a photo editor with enough features to do what he needed, but not so big as to be targeted at professionals. GIMP and DarkTable are not really intuitive, unless you have worked a lot with digital photo editing before.
Problem is my 88-year old mum insists on printing all of the emails, she receives. Guess who gets to fix it when the printer does not work?
I actually bought a new printer for her - well, an old model since it has to work with her Windows 7 laptop - which worked flawlessly for 10 days, but now refuses to connect to her wifi.
So ... printers. Spawn of the devil.
I routinely use 'top' (and might have used 'atop' had I known about it) to diagnose what is causing systems to slow down. And I might do so while being root. I know - shouldn't do that, but it is convenient to be able to kill the offending process right from the top-display.
So lacing 'atop' with a security hole ... Potential security issue + running as root = bad things happen.
Thanks to some family I got a part-time job with DEC in Denmark in 1983. I was only in my first year at Comp.Sci. at the university. Worked on a VAX 11/780 and a 11/750, with a network (ha! dialup) connection via DECnet to the rest of the world. Was hired to do some programming using the FMS ("Forms Management System") library for an internal asset management system.
Good times, then...
Just as "security" had begun sneaking into the minds of IT people - 1998 - I was working for a very young start-up doing security testing. We had a bunch of tools to perform various tests trying to wriggle information from systems, send mails via systems that shouldn't, work around firewall rules (if there were any) etc.
And a few tools to perform destructive tests like shutting down systems. We didn't use those unless the client specifically asked us to do so and authorized it - in writing.
One day I was working on-site at a customer with a large dinosaur of an IBM system, trying to make my way in. The sysadmins were quite smug about this "security test", and I was supposed to run the full set of tests - including the potentially destructive ones. So late in the afternoon I dig into that section of the toolbox and begin poking around the network interfaces using SNMP. The server joyfully provides all sorts of interesting info - the configuration, IP-adresses of systems it is connected to etc. Okay, let's see what else is possible - we had been authorized to try the potentially destructive tests, so I fired off the SNMP "write" command with the default password to switch off the primary network interface.
Which it did.
Quite a bit of frantic activity followed to get the system back online. I just leaned back and pulled out the (virtual) popcorn.
Another big-iron experience - mid 1990's - was when connecting one of those newfangled "unix" systems at a branch office to the REAL mainframe computer via an X.25 connection. All went well until we should try sending some data: The mainframe crashed hard enough that a full IPL (reboot) was needed. Turned out there was a bug in the mainframe X.25 comms stack which the unix system accidentally triggered.
Nonsense. They are perfect for reading newspapers, viewing photos when travelling, doing my home banking etc. All of the stuff I do where a computer/laptop is too big and clunky, and the phone screen is too small.
And they are very low maintenance devices, which is a good thing when used by the IT-indifferent folks in the family.
Nostalgia, indeed.
Brought back memories of me implementing a filedistribution system for the Royal Greenland trading company based on exchanging files via Kermit - over some very dodgy and unstable phone connections with fairly high latency (often satellite-based). Back in the 1980's.
Gawd I am getting old ...
I have ALWAYS kept my personal phone number secret from employers, colleagues (except very trusted ones), and all other sorts of insensitive twats.
End of workday, the company SIM gets switched off. Same procedure when on holidays.
As for Teams, disabling the "update in the background" and/or turning off notifications works wonderfully.
Show me an operating system that doesn't get 100+ updates in a year, and I am sure it is no longer supported.
Ubuntu 22.04 has published about 500 security notices in 2024 for their LTS 22.04 version. https://ubuntu.com/security/notices?release=jammy&offset=500
Software is crap. Patching is tedious. Automate it and move on.
Nope, the choice of browser is entirely in the hands of the user. Who couldn't care less and therefore uses whatever browser comes with the device, which will be Chrome, Edge (aka Chrome), or Safari.
Making your website unavailable to +90% of your customers because of sysadmin complaints is unacceptable to your business.
Oh yes - the "cast-off" is often better than the new and shiny stuff.
Only this week my company dumped a large number of excellent Logitech keyboards in the bin labelled "take one if you like it". These were nice keyboards, backlit keys, not a lot of use. In other words much better than the keyboard I was provided with recently, which has a new shiny "knob" in the top left corner. A knob which I constantly hit due to my being left-handed with the mouse, so spontaneously windows got rearranged, new email windows popped up etc. And the battery life is crap.
The cast-off keyboard is now my primary keyboard. At least until the Internal IT police comes banging on the door and confiscates it.
Fast-charging stations use cables that are firmly bolted onto the charging station, so nicking those means robbing the entire charger. Good luck with that, given the power it is connected to.
Low-power cables (your typical 11k-22kW or less cable) are usually locked to the car. You can probably (given enough force) rip them from the connector of the car, but it is not something that you just pick up when passing by.
Before boarding a flight from Boston to Marthas Vineyard, I was asked how much I weighed. That was in my younger days when I was quite fit and normal weight.
The reason was that they needed to distribute tthe weight evenly. The Marthas Vineyard airport had such a short runway that the flight was operated with a 1950's DC-3, so balancing the weight was important. Rumor has it that the local oligarks refused to extend the runway, because it worked very well with their private jets, and they preferred not to have too many tourists.
It is the oldest plane I have ever flown.
Indeed.
The number of working hours here in Denmark has decreased from 60 hours/six days per week around 1900 to 37 hours/5 days per week in 1992. Mandatory (by law) required holidays has gone from 1 week to 5 weeks per year, and 99% has an extra week as part of their contract.
Need I say that productivity and wealth has increased immensely over the past 125 years? Or just over the past 25 years?
Requiring that you are physically present in the office when working is just plain dumb. But I guess that is a fine description of lots of middle-layer management, and a fair share of C-level as well.
Danish schools have been using Google Chromebooks and Google tools for several years. Then the Danish Data Protection Agency (which is definitely not very eager to tread on anyones toes) came up with a ruling saying "you cannot use Google in schools" after a parent complained that their kids' personal data ended up in the US.
It's just the same as the german Office 365 decision.
And of course all of the schools and local governments are up in arms about it.
So the Aussies have a bullet-proof way of determining who is behind an attack, and are completely ready to go after the evil-doers in Russia, China and North Korea. Sounds like a plan ...
May I suggest that the government sanctions the companies who have such lax protection of their citizens' highly sensitive data? Eg fine them so hard that it actually pays off to really protect data instead of merely doing checkbox-compliance meaningless "audits".
Cyberinsurance doesn't work. 1) it will never cover the actual cost; 2) it gives companies an incentive to just pay up instead of fixing their rotten security; and 3) it simply tells the criminals to increase their demands because someone else is paying.
Adding state funds to the pot just makes the whole thing worse (except for the insurance companies, obviously).
I know from personal experience that you can get a *lot* of real security for the cost of cyberinsurance. So drop the insurance, and use the funds for something better.
"warm office"?? Dream on - here in Denmark, there is a government mandated max of 19 C at all offices during the winter.
Officially, it only applies to government and municipality offices. But of course every penny-pinching beancounter will jump on it.
So the only place I have a warm office is when working from home. Which is what I plan to do as much as possible.
"SmartTub, like other IoT products, lets users control their appliance from outside the home using an app."
Why oh why would it be useful to control my Jacuzzi *from outside my home*??? I mean, it's not like I can teleport into the hottub from 200 km/miles away, after setting it to a comfortable temperature.
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