Posts by Oengus 1113 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2012
The pair cited concern that Huawei would be subject to Chinese government influence, which would put Australia's national security at risk.
So we will only have hardware from manufacturers that we can assert influence over through the five eyes partnership so we can invisibly control and track our population and put their personal freedoms at risk.
If you jump into the world of electric cars (I'm on my 2nd and let's face it, they are coming for all of you) you're kind of forced into the entire connected world.
That is only because someone chose to design it that way. There are alternatives but those don't give the manufacturer "valuable" personal information that can be on sold. Devices can connect to the car to control those features without the need for connectivity to the outside world.
I doubt that Google/Alphabet will be too happy with this concept
What do you want to bet that he has come up with an idea that allows the tracking that he hasn't published. An idea that mere mortals will find hard to implement but the likes of Alphabet and FB with their mega resources will be able to implement so they can keep tracking...
TLS is tightening security at the same time as the Australian Government is mandating "not backdoors" (as seen on The Reg). What could possibly go wrong? Will this mean that Australian sites will need to implement weaker security and leave us exposed or do we run the risk of invoking the ire of the Australian security agencies?
"the government wants to apprehend terrorists, paedophiles and organised crime"
Ah, the Holy Trinity of the security agencies. Why is that every privacy invading idea from the governments and security agencies across the globe have the same target but the legislation is always so broad that it encompasses everyone?
How can I get it through to these megacorps that I don't want "more personalized experiences". I want my data to remain MY data and not be tracked every second.
I would rather scroll through 2 or 3 (or more) pages of raw results rather than get their "sanitized and personalized" results because their algorithm really doesn't know what I am looking for by my past searches.
Jag modify the contract customers sign on taking on a vehicle: Customer consents to Jag letting selected third-parties such as subsequent owners of the vehicle have access to vehicle data;
Isn't the actual issue that the subsequent owners don't have access to the data. The new owner has no contract with Jag and has no access to any data without the original owner performing an action. The original owner has all of the access, regardless of the number of times the vehicle changes hands, until the original owner relinquishes their rights.
Can you get them to come down under and offer that kind of service in Australia. I'd sign up tomorrow. I am still waiting for the NBN to be available is an upmarket Sydney suburb and it looks like I will be waiting for months yet. Even when the NBN finally arrives it won't be fibre to the premises and they definitely won't offer 1Gb...
We had a new IBM AS/400 that had 16 Fax cards installed to receive faxes with Credit card applications and file them automatically for processing. All of our branches had Xerox fax machines installed. We had issues with faxes not receiving correctly. IBM assured that they had tested the system with the particular model of Fax machine we used and it worked fine so the problem must be with the setup of the Fax machines.
We had an Xerox engineer come on site and I watched as he whistled down the line to get he fax machines and fax cards to negotiate the connection. He was even able to listen and tell if the machines were responding correctly.
In the end we determined that the issue was that IBM had tested with US homologated fax machines and we were using Australian model fax machines. There was a difference in the levels output by the Australian fax machines so the IBM engineer bought in a jury-rigged attenuator to reduce the levels on the line and the fax machines worked properly.
So from first hand experience I can assure you that some people could indeed whistle down the phone line to get fax machines and modems to respond.
I have a 1995 BMW 740IL that has a GPS navigation system built in and is fully integrated with the vehicle entertainment system. The interface is a bit "clunky" compared to more modern GPS systems and it is a bit slow finding routes but it is fully functional and still can be updated to the latest maps. So GPS systems were definitely available prior to 2000.
I would have thought this is a more likely scenario for the display of government documents...
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
You can't make them too available. Someone might read them.
At the computer centre I was working in during the 80's in the days of 1/2" reel tapes. We had 2 halon systems; a small system protecting the tape library and a much larger system protecting the remainder of the centre.
The tape library was only "manned" during the day shift with the tape librarian preparing the trolleys of tapes for the overnight processing and filling the "Off-Site" storage boxes.
One day (without notice or reason) the Halon in the tape library triggered. This was in the middle of the day when the Shift Supervisor was in the library working with the librarian checking the boxes to be sent "Off-Site". When the Halon went off the librarian and Shift Supervisor raced out of the room. To this day I swear that the librarian had the Shift Supervisor's foot prints up the middle of her back. I have never seen "Big Al" (the Shift Supervisor) move so fast.
Britain's place in global mobile broadband speed rankings has slipped four places to 35th, according to a survey.
Be glad for your position although you have slipped... I had a look at our position and while we have moved up 3 places we are still well down in 52nd place and I still can't connect to the new NBN despite the fact that I live in an affluent suburb of Sydney. I am lucky to get half of the "Mean Download speed" even during off-peak times.
Back in the early 80's I was working for a major bank. We had 2 identical IBM System 370/145s. Our production system ran the on-line system for every branch in the state (the second system was always powered up and usually running dev workloads). Fortunately we swapped systems each day to ensure that both were fully operational and capable of running the production system.
We had a IBM customer engineer (CE) on site most of the time. One day the usual engineer bought in a new trainee to introduce to the staff. When the normal CE went on holidays the newbie was to take over for a couple of weeks.
On the first day the new CE was running solo he was walking past the production system, looked at the "Big Red Switch" (actually white with red lettering) that was at the top right hand corner of the main console labelled "Emergency Pull", commented "what's that doing in?" and, before anyone could stop him, he reached up and pulled the switch. The role of the "Emergency Pull" was to cut all power to the system immediately. It did this by tripping every circuit breaker in the system. The room went into "panic mode". We knew we had 15 minutes before the phones would start ringing off the hook (the branches had instructions to wait 15 minutes before calling the computer centre in case of an outage). All jobs on the back up system were cancelled and job queues flushed. The "on-line" system was bought up on the back up system as fast as we could and service restored just before the 15 minute deadline.
The CE was marched out the door and told to never return. Our IBM rep was called to reinforce the order. Another CE who had experience with our site was called in and spent the next 2 days cursing his colleague as he worked to get the system back up.
I remember one job I was in where one manager (not my manager) berated me for failing to follow the company's clean desk policy. I ask him what on my desk violated the policy (it was piled high with reference manuals and program specs that I working on). He was unable to tell me so I quoted the clean desk policy word for word and pointed out that nothing on my desk violated the policy and if he had an issue he should take it up with my manager. My manager was in his office laughing his head off...
I remember spec'ing a brand new PC.
Cost an absolute fortune back in the day. It came with Win 98 SE loaded. I was very happy with that PC for a lot of years (and still fire it up occasionally to run some classic games. It was extremely stable and very rare to have a BSOD.
Ahhh. the memories.
I had a similar thing happen to me. I was a contractor employed on a fixed term contract. The manager set the contract to expire at the end of the financial year. Automated e-mails were sent to the manager 30 days, 14 days and 7 days before the end of the contract with the option of extending. My manager verbally confirmed to me that I would be working on the End of year processes for payroll. He, however, didn't respond to the e-mails. (I didn't even know about the "end of contract date" in the system as it was purely an admin thing that was required for all contractors).
I come in on the first day of the new financial year and login, all Okay. Around 10:00am (Midnight GMT) I start getting messages that I don't have access to shared folders, my e-mail stops receiving e-mails and other "strange" events start happening. I log a call with the helpdesk and they come back with the message that I have been terminated in the system. My manager starts frantically trying to get me back on the system as I am critical to the End of Financial year process and need access for the company to be able to meet some legislative deadlines. We were advised that we couldn't stop the process once it had started. All we could do was wait for the next issue and have my access manually restored. Fortunately I could have my access reinstated once the process had moved on to the "next step".
We spent the next 3 weeks fixing my access as different issues came up. That manager never again ignored the "End of Contract" e-mails...
In other words, dealing with managerial bullshit and toil drives a great deal of stress.
Truer words were never spoken. We have management by bean counters. If they think there is a way to save a few cents in the short term they will take it. They don't give two hoots about the long term consequences. Because something "works" for senior management they think the same can be applied across the workforce. They then expect the IT team to make it work for everyone regardless of the opinion of the IT staff.
I know the feeling. After 40 years in IT I am about to be pushed out the door because of a reorg and I can't be happier about it. I have watched the IT roles go from fun and rewarding to menial BS. Currently I am working on a project which has all of the coding being done in India. We have a challenge that the India team (internal and outsourced) have been working on for months. I gave them a month head start (because it "wasn't my job") and when I realised they were going nowhere I asked the boss if he wanted me to "have a look". It took me 4 days to come up with a solution that is far more elegant and manageable than the only solution I have seen from the Indian team but management don't want to know about it. It has now been a month since I presented my solution and I await the results that the other team have come up with (should be presented today - if the meeting isn't postponed yet again).
I have made the decision that my next job will be a Traffic controller. Time to get out of IT where unappreciative management don't care and have the mentality that I can be replaced by some teenage just out of high school with no real world knowledge and no original thoughts. I want a job where I am paid for the hours I work and if I work outside "normal" hours or additional hours I get paid penalty rates. I can then make IT a hobby and have it become fun again.
Even small countries like Papua New Guinea are starting to look closely at facebook. They are looking at a one month ban on the site. Maybe there is room for a new social media site that respects people's privacy desires and complies with the laws in the different countries.
The issue here is that the contract is taken out with the carrier/mobile phone provider. Seldom is the contract with the manufacturer. It should be the carrier/provider's responsibility for the updates. If people stopped buying a particular brand from the carriers because of the lack of support maybe the carriers would apply pressure on the manufacturers.
I just worked on a payroll implementation and we had exactly the same issues... management emphasising schedule and budget over function. Management trying to get us to bypass testing for the sake of the schedule and really pushing back when issues were raised. The last thing that the project manager wanted to hear was that something didn't work as expected and the response was always "Can we fix it after we go live?" The big issue still is "retroactive actions". The project manager had us go to senior management to request that they completely ban backdated changes (in this organisation that is never going to happen) because the payroll system couldn't handle it. Even now there are issues with some backdated actions that require manual calculations (when we find out that it has happened) to have people paid correctly.
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