Posts by IT Hack

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Can't help wondering

That's a pretty interesting read.

Thanks for the link!

Re: Wonder who the sole downote was from (ahem!)

The two down votes? Not from me.

But I'm glad to see you're still triggered.

Re: Can't help wondering

Wow.

Thus A. Coward speaks.

Gibberish.

Re: Can't help wondering

@Gene Cash

I didn't know that (mascons) they could affect orbits to such an extent.

Thanks!

Re: Can't help wondering

It seems that the bigger issue is the fragility.

Easy answers to easy questions, son.

Re: Can't help wondering

@Pete2

I guess you did not read the article.

"The aerospace agency announced the deal on Wednesday, and that it will see SpaceX "develop and deliver" a vehicle "that will provide the capability to deorbit the space station and ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas.""

Re: Can't help wondering

@John Robson

A valid point but

- No need to sustain life so time is not of the essence

- Cost of the vehicle to de-orbit 400,000 kg is most likely more expensive

Certainly makes more sense to recycle it into something useable in the future than tear it to bits.

Also no risk to Florida home owners.

Re: Can't help wondering

Maybe put in orbit around the Moon or Mars as a resource for when we start looking at building habitats there.

Atos in chaos as bailout talks unravel faster than you can say 'restructuring'

All these IT service (laughable) behemoths like ATOS, IBM, InfoSys, TCS, Capita etc have done more to destroy professionalism in our industry than any amount of government legislation.

Every time I engage with these organisations I end up with some middle management talking head who's idea of customer centric is how much can I bill while my consultants fill out their billing sheets or visibly blanch when you ask about ensuring quality in delivery of services.

The worse is that often the workers get very bad work practices ingrained in their daily routine.

Frankly MSP's and these 'digital transformation' companies are so crap at delivering...but then that is also on the people looking to engage with these flimflammers...all in the name of reducing cost. We see the costly impact of that kind of thinking daily.

Mozilla is trying to push me out because I have cancer, CPO says in bombshell lawsuit

Discredited

LybsterRoy

You do realise that Objectivism is bullshit? Stop wanking over copies of The Fountainhead.

Options

Guess I'll be looking for a new browser then.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

Bricking It

Can't help but think the guys are seriously rethinking their career choice. Boeing, safety and MBA's make for pretty bad bedfellows.

Additional hatch operations on a Boeing vehicle – but this time it's Starliner

Hit or Miss?

How nervous are the astronauts to head back in that thing? Can help but think the MBA bozo's at Boeing used a laminated heat shield.

Joke coz well...laminates innit

Now NetApp sued by its own veep over claims of broken sales commission promises

My Takeaway

@AC

Support was my gig there. Manager. Every time bonus time rolled around I'd submit my numbers which were then 'adjusted' by a director.

It's not the first time NetApp pulled a stunt like that.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/gsa-contractor-netapp-agrees-pay-us-128-million-resolve-contract-fraud-allegations <-- 2009

Sysadmin and IT ops jobs to slump, says IDC

Re: Old Fart

Yeah ;pretty much spot on. On the other hand avant-garde satire is dying. Dada push'n up the mango's.

Old Fart

Hi Everybody! I'm Dr N...I mean Old Fart!

Notwithstanding the complete overuse of corpspeak this is just FUD written by some bored AI with illusions of competence and perhaps significance. Probably someone confused about day to day IT Ops and Service Delivery in the real non-FAAAAAAAAANG world of users and production. Sure massively refined sorting algorithms have their place in todays applications, much like the iron those 'serverless' run on. Back in the day before servers and ....ahhh fuck it. Can't be bothered with this bollocks. Basically shit evolves and there will always be a need for some one to fix it and the user.

Major decision on GDPR compensation rights expected soon

Re: GDPR is a joke without enforcement

Dunno who downvoted but I guess you can't teach stupid.

Re: GDPR is a joke without enforcement

Any GDPR violations need to be reported to the ICO - Information Commissioners Office

https://ico.org.uk

Re: Word

Linklaters run out of London and have done since 1838.

Arca Noae is modernizing OS/2 Warp for 21st century PCs

Did they ever fix the ctrl alt del reboot thing?

That was annoying as hell.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

Re: United

Bugger.

United

This must happen.

A Leeds fan.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Cost

Just want to mention the Munich Linux thing. Before Munich committed to the tech refresh Microsoft sent all sorts of execs until Steve 'Monkey Boi' Blamer got involved and undoubtedly greased the sales funnel (did they have such a thing back then?) but the recalcitrant government client decided to go ahead with the Linux deployment. As someone mentioned in their post that the roll out failed as the workers could not access resources for them to perform their function. So moved they canned it all and MS was back in the game. I wonder how much was spent by MS when really all they needed to do (as was predicted by many at the time) was wait until the entire thing fell to bits and the customer came in from the cold.

Cost is the crux of the issue. It will be, as usual, the big corps that would have the ability to make Linux a viable business tool outside of 'just being a server'. If you can move an entire compute infrastructure off MS and onto Linux and not loose availability, integrity and confidentiality along side not loosing service management abilities and not impact negatively on performance of (user) role you could be a pioneer. Thing is though that this is all predicated on infrastructure that is usually a mix of on prem and cloud. So really in this situation the back end is not a driver but the desktop side absolutely is.

So how much does that cost?

That is what is not going to make Linux a globally ubiquitous business tool. It would be horrifically expensive and what are the benefits exactly?

From an IT ops view it would be a horror show of trying to manage an OS that changes far too often to test applications. Then there are the issues around managing the devices and user accounts.

Then regulatory issues could get in the way as well. In this I mean the issue of admin accounts. Users never get admin accounts these days. So when the shit hits the fan and you've been breached through a compromised user account the powers that be would question why a user has an admin account.

All these issues can be dealt with, of that I have no doubt. The question for businesses is if it justifies an exorbitant cost. I cannot see it happening, not over night anyway.

There might be MSPs out there that can provide a linux desktop service and perhaps the 'change' will be coming from that side? I am not really sure about that either. A question would be where the sweet spot is in terms of users, cost and profit (for both client and MSP).

So yeah. Cost.

COST!

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Downloaded the latest version of Firefox.

SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter

Re: Shut up and do your job!

Really Triggered.

Re: Who FORCED you to work for Elon?

Triggered.

Re: Dear Employees,

Musk cannot run for President. He was not born in the US nor are his parents American citizens when he was born in South Africa.

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

Re: Flim Flammery

Nice post!

I just find it hard to fathom how selling off British innovation & technology to non UK companies secures a strategic advantage for the UK. I can see the 40 billion price tag is too rich for us but I can't help think that this is more shortsightedness than securing a technologically beneficial resource.

It does rather piss me off that we went from being a preeminent computing superpower to where we are now.

Re: Flim Flammery -> Hunger Games

I have to admit my first reaction was 'I would pay to see that'.

Flim Flammery

1 - Why is there no UK interest in ARM?

2 - How hard are the board hoping no execs need to exit the business?

3 - Flexpot (and schemes like it) requires the OK of management to use. Yet it is part of their compensation. Any employment lawyers here?

4 - I would be hugely amused if, after the sale, and most employees realize they've been shafted, again, the majority of the workforce resigns.

What happens when your massive text-generating neural net starts spitting out people's phone numbers? If you're OpenAI, you create a filter

Security In Depth

Good to see that as a part of coding fundamentals management are taking information security seriously.

£30m in contracts awarded in Post Office's £357m ATM overhaul

Prison

I wonder how many innocent people will wind up in prison.

To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

Several years ago I was approached by RH as they were looking for a service delivery manager based in Brno. Eventually got to interview.

What a complete shambles. From the hiring manager excusing himself from the interview because he 'had something important to do' to being asked what I would to support the companies charitable work and gave as an example how I would deal with someone on my team who did not want to be involved.

Needless to say I didn't get involved in what was clearly a toxic environment. I don't know if its changed or not but after that experience and some of the quite rankly bizarre tech choices they've made I am glad I didn't get involved.

Oh yeah my answers - to the guy that left I said that was not making a good impression on me but he still fucked off and the charity one....frankly I really do not think it is a sign of leadership to tell people which charities they need to support and that the suggestion was pretty bad and that whoever thought this was a good idea was an idiot. Clearly by that time I had no interest in them.

That they are now with IBM and getting seriously reamed is not a surprise.

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

Re: Microsoft and its rings

Rings? Sounds a b it goatse-ey to me...

What's worse than an annoying internet filter? How about one with a pre-auth remote-command execution hole and there's no patch?

Show it works

Upvoted.

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

A good pun is by nature bad.

Lets not get hung up on the manager thing. Even though I brought it up.

Dammit.

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

Sir Spoon.

Bad punning is what I do. I am manager.

Re: Huh

The issue is that vendors don't really do much in the way of securing code or coding securely. Is it the fault of the devs? Perhaps but certainly the vendor should be ensuring devs get the correct guidance. On the flip side are customers who will take any s/w willy nilly with no concept of acceptance testing and indeed the security posture of the software is absolutely part of that acceptance.

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

Ha yeah you're ...not your. I didn't even catch that.

I note my critic has removed they're post!

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

Hide into nowhere

No...hiding to nowhere (also hiding to nothing) is correct. Hide into nowhere isn't even a phrase.

Re: It wouldn't make the slightest difference.

First you audit the software before implementing it. Not only what resources it requires but also how it 'does' security. So in terms of authentication ....network layer authentication to be the way to go coupled with MFA. Of course if your MFA is compromised then your on a hiding to nowhere.

No multi factor authentication? Pretty standard these days and if your system does not support these kinds of authentication you need to ask yourself how secure is this.

Normally I would add the beer icon and make a quip. However it's about 07:30 and I refuse to let the lockdown turn me into a booze hound.

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: What's Really Behind This?

RNLI...from its foundation to now is just incredible. The people who do the job are even more incredible. I hear some of them say that the day job is what lets them be able to do the rescue.

I'm not a seafarer by stretch but I do go to the beach often and when I do and there is a RNLI station I tend to slip them a twenty.

It isn't the heroics that makes me do that but rather the dedication they have that enables them to do the heroics.

Good: IT admins scrambled to patch 80 per cent of public-facing Citrix boxes to close nightmare hijack hole

Nice.

By that I mean what the fuck.

Patching and keeping track of patch releases is a daily house keeping task that every sys admin must do to be worthy of the title.

UK Home Office opens AWS cash firehose even wider with £100m public cloud services deal

Maxwell

The man who once compared government IT to twitter and therefore easy to do.

I kid thee not.

Beer coz its Firday.

Another senior Gov.UK bod makes a dash from public sector, falls into AWS's arms

Maxwell

Ahh Good old Liam...on the gravy train.

Amusing that the reason he joined the Cabinet Office was through his highly qualified tech career as an on line estate agent.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

GDPR

Interesting to see how they will meet GDPR requirements.

Dough! Jobs microsite for UK's data watchdog set hundreds of cookies without visitors' consent

Hays?

Really? Who the fuck uses Hays for a tech project?