* Posts by Lee D

4232 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013

Sysadmin given Licence To Perve shows why you always get it in writing

Lee D Silver badge

Re: "What have you had to get in writing?"

This is the primary reason that I never delete anything from my mailbox.

Keep, store, archive, backup. Because years later you can pull out the email with exactly who "made that stupid decision" written quite clearly and verifiable in court, if necessary.

I just pulled out an email that proves that an order from years ago was never actually executed, and am waiting for someone to discover that they are going to have to pay for that AND the project they want to do because the prep-work was never actually ordered.

Mitsubishi 'fesses up: We lied in fuel tests to make our cars look great

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Only 10%?

"that the testing method was also different from the one required by Japanese law"

Thus, they broke the law.

Presumably not EVERY OTHER manufacturer, as you suggest, broke that law.

Whether or not you can replicate lab conditions on an ideal prototype car straight off the factory floor, with whatever you're driving for however many years, and the MPG it reads out on the OBD, is an entirely different matter.

Same as the Volkswagen stuff. They cheated on the emissions that are legally prescribed to get past the test. The law now changes. And every manufacturer will have to comply. Those that don't can't point fingers at the others that don't as an excuse. Because if EVEN ONE can do it, so can all the rest.

Catastrophic 123-reg VPS cockup deletes Ross County FC website

Lee D Silver badge

67 appears just right for:

- Okay, the script is good?

- Yes, it's good.

- Tested it.

- Er... yeah.

- Okay, press it.

- See, it's fine.

- Okay. I'll leave you to - erm. What's that?

- What's what?

- That machine name that just flicked past, scroll back a bit.

- Where?

- CTRL-C, CTRL-C, STOP IT!

- What?!

- <pushes operator aside, grabs keyboard> You idiot!

- What?!

- Those were live!

- Er... Oh.

- You go and tell the helpdesk to expect calls. I'll see what the damage is.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Oh dear

4000 x the price of a ticket x every fixture over a year.

That's a lot of money to be losing on the risk of having a cheap junky website.

Woz says wearables – even Apple Watch – aren't 'compelling'

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Cars

Like double-declutching, using escape lanes, having to smash a side-window while underwater, and various other scenarios, if I have to wonder about how the hell they happened in the first place, then you're probably not going to put any of your extensive training to use in such a rare, and surprising, scenario.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Cars

Temporary traffic lights.

Everyone thinks that they can just slip through on the tail of other traffic around the blind corner, through the one-lane-due-to-roadworks.

And then that makes the other queue late, so they mostly miss their timing, which means THEY try to jump them too.

Honestly, we just need a camera on the back of every traffic light, temporary or permanent, for those kinds of idiots.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Cars

And like a million and one other excuses I've heard, the rumour of such a situation far outweighs the actual scenarios that it's ever occurred.

"Well, I have to have a car that does 0-60 in X seconds because I might need to accelerate out of trouble..." and so on.

If you're worried about that:

a) there's not much you can do.

b) you likely won't know that's what's happening until far too late.

c) steering out of the way rather than hoping you can out-accelerate it in a straight line through a red light (and I doubt it could ever STOP you going through a red-light, but merely alert like hell in a way you can override).

d) it happens so rarely, it's really not worth worrying about.

e) you cannot account for every other idiot on the road with gadgets.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Matter of personal taste

I find not carrying three gadgets safer when travelling.

Less to lose.

Less to steal.

Less to advertise that you're rolling in it.

Honestly, I would think "Apple Watch" within seconds of seeing someone with a big chunky watch, which needs the iPhone to work. Whether or not you can nick them, you know the guy's got a large hole burning itself in his wallet.

Lee D Silver badge

We have those.

They're called...

Trains.

VMware signals new open source and developer push with FOSS-meister gig

Lee D Silver badge

Comply with the GPL in your already-established court case first, then you can worry about how to manage your other Open Source contributions.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html

Apple pulled 2,204lbs of gold out of old tech gear

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Memorial...

"Plus several round the clock guards, as the statue would be worth around $60 million!"

You could almost buy a new iPhone for that.

Lee D Silver badge

Question:

22m pounds of steel is a lot.

That's an AWFUL lot of iPhones.

So, in the global scheme of things, does this really make ANY difference, especially given the energy used to extract, refine and reuse this stuff, compared to the initial production costs of just buying more steel?

I'm pretty sure I throw away an awful lot of metal. But anything worth anything is taken by those nice blokes in the vans who'll take anything metallic and weighty if they see it. The difference is that saving a pittance at great expense isn't worth the legwork.

Quite how much energy etc. was used to collect, transport, dismantle, refine, heat up, re-mold and get these tiny slithers of metals back to a point where you could try and use them again?

Storage-class memory just got big – 256Mbit big, at least

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Small?

Because putting 32 of these onto a single production chip, when the samples are this size already, is far from impossible.

If we were talking 256 bits (like quantum machines), then you have a LONG way to go. But this is basically viable for practical use and OS development, with a box of them no bigger than a hard drive plugged into a dev hardware system.

Think console programmers, Linux, and the guys making Windows 11 (who had SSDs and things when they were making Vista / 7, and had portable Windows tablets back before the Windows XP For Tablets days - that's how long it takes to bring stuff like this to market).

IT suppliers: Amazon is starting to pay its debts. Some of them, anyway

Lee D Silver badge

Re: UK Companies???

And it doesn't matter what it says on paper.

Contracts are NOT the be-all-and-end-all of law.

If you're supplying a good and not being paid for it, you are perfectly in your right to just take it to court, which is perfectly in its right to order you to have your goods forcibly taken back and returned to you.

I can make you sign, consensually, a contract which says that you'll never, ever, ever do X. It doesn't mean ANYTHING if that X is given to me by the law anyway. Do you not recognise the line "This does not affect your statutory rights"? They don't even need to say it. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights.

And not being paid for goods/services rendered is breach of contract (possibly even implied contract) and/or theft.

Graphene solar panels harvest energy from rain

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Rain water into Hydrogen

I stopped reading at:

"One of the things he has installed is a rainwater collection system that converts into Hydrogen which in turn powers a fuel cell."

The energy (electrical, chemical or otherwise) to convert even the purest water into hydrogen is at best precisely equal (but probably, with losses, much more) than that which you can generate from a hydrogen fuel cell based on that hydrogen. And will give you a ton of oxygen too which he's presumably wasting as that isn't used in fuel cells. Even with the oxygen, the total energy from using the hydrogen and oxygen will be limited to precisely the energy used to separate them in the first place from the water.

At best, it's an inefficient energy STORAGE mechanism. We have pretty good batteries already.

Precisely the same problem as all the other "green" methods - sounds great, fails to completely describe the system and/or understand that a closed system like that it still ultimately dependent on the same energy inputs and outputs.

Solar panels? Only valid in certain parts of the world, with subsidies, en-masse, using rare materials, with a lot of storage and infrastructure to use them.

Wind turbines? Only valid in certain parts of the world, with subsidies, en-masses, using large structures (usually built with plastics that "could be built with other biomaterials" but never are), with a lot of storage and infrastructure to make them viable.

Sure, you can "profit". In dribs and drabs, here and there. Or you could just stop building primary school projects and getting those kinds of energy returns and build one big huge nuclear station out in the middle of nowhere and operate it for several thousand years without having to do very much at all (in comparison to several thousand years of solar cell and wind turbine maintenance in bright sun / high winds).

Spinning rust fans reckon we'll have 18TB disk drives in two years

Lee D Silver badge

No good if the speeds don't increase to match. All you've done is increase the backup times by 18 x that of a 1Tb drive.

And with SSDs fast catching up (inconcievable 5-10 years ago, and now they are being offered as options on ordinary mail-order Dell machines, etc.) HDD is going to struggle to compete as ONLY size is their winning stat at the moment. Heat, power, vibration,speed, etc. they all lose at and reliability is about even.

I'd much rather we forgot about all this fast-spinning helium stuff and bought more SSD to bring the cost of their parts down and their reliability up (even if that's only by playing the numbers).

Microsoft drives an Edge between Adobe and the web: Flash ads blocked

Lee D Silver badge

Opera had the option for a decade.

Sad that it's now just a Chrome-clone.

I'm so used to click-to-play that I honestly can't use other browsers still.

Vivaldi Jon: Mobile – yes. Feeds and an ad blocker… probably not

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Until they find a way to approve exceptions to cert errors

"Power users" put proper certs into their internal services (rather than connect over https:// when they aren't bothering to even use a cert to do so).

You've no excuse with LetsEncrypt. They are actually free nowadays, and accepted by all known browsers.

Contactless payments come to in-flight entertainment units

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Food & Drink

The problem with eating on a plane is that it will never taste the same.

The pressure is different, the air is recycled, there are many more people in much more proximity to you, your ears will pop, your throat is drier, the lighting is imperfect, and so on. You could eat a restaurant-fresh Gordon Ramsey special up there and it wouldn't taste the same, and would quite likely smell overwhelmingly offensive to all those around you eating something different.

Hence, it's just much easier to pack a cheap sandwich in hand-luggage and buy a drink past security and have done with it.

We bet your firm doesn't stick to half of these 10 top IT admin tips

Lee D Silver badge

I have:

- Told a headteacher of a school "Sorry, you're not allowed access to that information" (They wanted free-reign of the webfilter log but were unable to describe to me why, who, what they were after, did not want records or oversight of THEIR access to the logs, and my policy doesn't allow that. Even if they had demanded it, a list of computer AD accounts, DHCP lease allocations and webfilter logs based on IP would have kept them correlating numbers for weeks. Shockingly, after explaining why and the proper process for such inquiries, they gave up and never asked again.).

- Disabled a staff user account because they shared their access with a colleague (The reason you have access and they don't is because you're allowed to see it and they are not. If that's hindering them in their job, have them ask for more access, don't just grant it to them via your account as a proxy measure).

- Refused to issue new staff members details until I see a signed AUP. Yes, it's petty but I'm not going to have you claim that you didn't know you couldn't just copy all our data onto your USB stick.

- Shut down an entire school's use of a service after it was found with school data on it that we hadn't authorised the dissemination of (someone had typed in all the kids names etc. manually into a third-party website), and which wasn't hosted in the EU. This generated instant and immediate cessation of usage upon discovery, a warning to ALL staff (including cleaners), a review of all services and a staff "amnesty" so they could admit to anything similar they may have done elsewhere. And NONE of that came from me, but from the Data Controller of the school.

Data protection has PERSONAL LIABILITY now. That means if I - or you - allow things, we can go to jail or be fined, besides what happens to the company or our jobs. I ain't going to risk that for your convenience. You want something, you document it. You don't do it properly and / or try to bypass me, I'll just drop you in it. Because then *I'm* covered and have done what I need to do and it's down to you. And even that doesn't excuse what happened to data which is supposed to be in my care and the loss of business reputation because of that.

You think we're being petty, we're not. It's a pain in the butt to do all this stuff and causes nothing but arguments and hassle. We don't do it for fun (maybe some do, but the majority not), we do it because we don't want to end up in court or being fined to oblivion, like DOZENS OF DOCUMENTED CASES.

Waiting for your Oculus to arrive? Yeah, it's going to be some time

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Oculus Grift

Never touch version 1.0 of anything.

French mobe repair shop chaps trash customer's phone

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Another reason...

Another reason that you use companies that recognise that you "being an ass" is actually because they're doing something wrong.

Either not dealing with previous requests properly (note: This does not mean saying Yes to everything), or by not dealing with an unreasonably irate customer in the correct manner.

Refuse his custom, or take it on. Don't take on his custom and then cause criminal damage because you don't like him.

I guarantee you in this case that he has a rather shiny new phone, that the cost to him will be zero, that two people he didn't like were sacked, and that next time he goes in there his customer service experience will be impeccable. Who "won" there?

Just because your customer's an ass, doesn't mean you can break the law and damage his property. If you don't want to help him, refuse his custom. Literally "Sorry, sir, but I'm refusing to deal with you if you're going to speak to me like that." It's not hard. And that's 99% of dealing with customers direct, maintaining politeness no matter what they do. You're the professional, you deal with it.

This does not mean "bend over", it doesn't mean do things you're not supposed to do, it doesn't mean treat them like a king, it doesn't mean kowtow to them. But it REALLY doesn't mean "cause criminal damage and both lose your jobs over a stroppy customer" either.

Call the Cable Guy: Wireless just won't cut it

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Kill that rogue DHCP server!

I was thinking the same.

Who the hell doesn't have DHCP server blocking on their managed switches nowadays?

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Direct wiring

I don't think I have a single port on a wall or in a floor that's not fully patched in or hasn't been every day since it's install.

What's the point of putting them in if you don't have the switch port the other end, and if you're that full up that you're fully occupying EVERY switch then you're slagging the backbone and backend capacity of your switches anyway, which is far from ideal.

Honestly, run doubles to everything, and patch them in at purchase. If you want to disable them, do it in the switch management. Because the day you want that port back and you have to cable-chase, you'll have to buy the switch anyway. And that will be an unbudgeted shock dependency on some other project that never realised it would need it.

Double-wall socket.

Cable.

Patch.

Switch.

Then you have some wiggle-room when it comes to spares, failovers, new devices (everything is PoE nowadays), bandwidth, etc. and the backend bandwidth to support it all.

Hell, just PoE phone deployment should teach you this. And if not, then the existence of things like LACP, so you can cable all those spare ports in the IT office to add yet-another-Gb to your server's capacity.

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Lee D Silver badge

Why would anyone produce a coin-testing device that can't be updated with a quick module change when there's new coinage?

It's not like it hasn't happened before, and I imagine for most "big" installs it's nothing more than a software update.

Zombie SCO rises from the grave again

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Why can't IBM finish them?

I think IBM want to send a message.

Not just "we will fight you".

We will fight you. And run you into the ground. And cost every penny that you have, and more. And force you out of the industry. And destroy the remnants. And invalidate your patents. And prove your copyrights mean nothing. And make you disgrace yourself in court trying to chase it. And then bleed the money from your lawyers (fixed price deal in this case!). Until they're taken down too. And take you so far out that you won't even see your customers ever again. And then go after your directors. And so on.

It's not just a case of "we want our money", IBM can't care about that now. They care about not having a repeat. If someone buys up the remnants of SCO and they ever claim against IBM again, you will have to fight against lawful precedents that they've deliberately established to prove what you hold is worthless. It's not just a case of "we'll just settle for a few thousand". They'll spend ten times that making sure that you're holding no power over them whatsoever.

Plus, it's training for their lawyers, and a warning to their competitors, and basis for chasing individuals (not just the company) later if they feel like it.

If SCO hadn't been greedy and gone straight-to-press on their IBM-bashing, they could probably have got a quick, easy settlement and still be in business. But they didn't and now they're dust with a reputation for being dust and only heard of for trying to throw mud at IBM and coming a cropper. I think that's a win in IBM's favour and if you have a few billion lying around, the costs of handing that off to your legal department and the occasional expensive fancy lawyer are just a pittance.

Amazon WorkSpaces two years on: Are we ready for cloud-hosted Windows desktops?

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I presume...

You could rent an ordinary Windows Server and get desktop access to it cheaper than that.

All the other costs you mention are therefore not necessary or not included in the Amazon deal either.

Honestly, OVH's sister company Kimsufi et al (cheap end, no doubt, let's not get into "I wouldn't use them" etc.) will rent you a fully dedicated Windows server in a datacenter for less than that:

https://www.kimsufi.com/uk/servers.xml

I know. I've been using one for the past few years rather than go down the VPS route. And technically, that server could run 8-10 of these kinds of systems with the resources it has available.

All you would need to know is how to convert Server Core to Server GUI, and install desktop experience. Any tech guy charged with such a project would do one Google and they're done.

X-ray scanners, CCTV cams, hefty machinery ... let's play: VNC Roulette!

Lee D Silver badge

I work in schools. In one of them, we had VNC-like vision of every client PC.

We had a wall of displays, and four-to-a-screen sessions of every machine on campus. We never "watched" it - people are even more boring when they are on a computer than in real life - but it was interesting how quickly your brain picked up on something "wrong" just by glancing at it. Because it was a really rough school, the kids played games like "Who can print out porn before IT stop it" and things like that.

And the number of systems online is scary - one school I worked for had boilers controlled by app that included things like pump duty cycle and pressure, and could have caused all kinds of mischief. Access control. CCTV. Digital signage. There's no amount of things that are connected these days.

Even at a (infinitely better) school, there are any number of systems that I remote into all the time. We do put passwords on EVERYTHING though, but you can see how things can be overlooked, but how they become remote-accessible? That's just laziness.

One of the first things I did at my current place was knock off every port-forward except mail and Remote Desktop (because our users use it for everything). I was amazed how much there was. Straight port-forwards to servers, to clients (in the finance office no less!), to the phone system, to the web filter, to lots of internal web services, etc. etc. etc. I replaced it with a Smoothwall that reverse-proxies all the web content, and performs IDS/IPS on all the exposed services (mail, Remote Desktop, etc.). The amount of login attempts and other things it detected in the first week was enough to tell me that I'd done the right thing.

I'd quite like to do something that I've seen online, though. Given that we have a compulsory webfilter already, I think it would be a good idea to have a "wall of images" that go through the filter. As we specifically say the system is for school-use only (staff and pupil), I'm not that concerned about the odd Facebook or whatever popping through but I am concerned about quite what the kids are seeing and looking for, and I think a semi-public (i.e. well-known and visible but able to be turned off) display of every image that is being requested from the filter might reinforce correct use of it. It would wake people up a bit, because I do tell them that "in theory" I can see everything they do even if takes a lot of reconstruction, but they don't seem to care what they go looking for.

People... make sure your gateway is secure. Nothing should be accessible remotely. If you want to do that, use VPN and open ONLY the VPN ports and make sure you log and monitor access to it. And then start realising that even your users can do a port-scan / Bonjour discovery and hit quite a lot of things that you don't want them to. And start passwording and IP-limiting those things.

Hell, even printers. The system where I work, we have NO NEED to ever access a printer by any other protocol than SMB or by any other system than the print server. But those options are all open to everyone by default. Switch them off and use ACL's on your printer shares to control access. Especially if you have billed printing!

Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

Lee D Silver badge

I have one of those broadband measurement devices. Look up "SamKnows".

It's pretty accurate, I have to say. But the main reason for having it? It's probably quite easy to test who's got one on your network and ensure their speeds are... "consistent".

According to that box's stats, though, when I was on VM 30Mbps, I got 30Mbps and now it's a 75Mbps package, I get 75Mbps. To the byte, almost. And real-world use sees little to disagree with that.

Bristol boffins blast 1.59 Gbps down ONE 20 MHz channel

Lee D Silver badge

A thought occurs:

As this is quite obviously one of the best ways to use radio frequencies efficiently, and that it relies on there being many small antennae, and also that there be a wide range of paths, interference, distance, obstacles, etc. between the sender and receiver...

Is this not something we should expect an alien civilisation to use when communicating between systems?

As the receiver needs "only a single antenna" and a lot of processing, and the sender can send from 128 different antennae, surely that's perfect for a communication system from one star system to another, with antenna on different planets (or different points of the same planet), and any amount of space-stuff in between (even space warped by gravity of other planets etc.)?

Not saying we have any clue how to listen for that, or how to determine how it's arranged, but it would seem to be the no-brainer application of something like MIMO to form the basis of a deep space network from a single original star system

BT: We're killing the dabs brand. Oh and can customers re-register to buy on our site?

Lee D Silver badge

Haven't used them since they were sold, then.

Not "because they are BT"... yeah, I do do that but not in this instance.

Just that anything I've had them quote for, or anything I go looking to buy, I've obviously been able to find cheaper or better elsewhere.

Quite liked them "back in the day", but honestly haven't used them in years and stopped even bothering to compare after a while. A bit like Novatech. At one point I kitted out an entire school with Novatech gear from the servers to the clients. Last few years, they just aren't even close to companies that I use regularly.

I knew that I was right when I went to a new employer and their accounts department didn't even have credit accounts with Novatech, Dabs, Systemax (ah, Simply Computers!), or any of the others that I've used in the past. Not even historical ones. It seems all the old mail-order PC companies are dead or dying nowadays, and can't compete against pure box-shifters.

And, let's be honest, my specification for client computers has barely changed in the last five years. It's actually just easier to over-order at the start and then use "still in plastic" stock to convince people it's new. I've bought end-of-line products dirt cheap because they were still shrink-wrapped and met or exceeded our specifications.

Sad to see the last trace of the name going, but I can't say I'm surprised.

Ofcom wants to crack down on pisspoor BT Openreach biz lines

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Getting VM to do anything is a PITA

Leased lines are a very different kettle of fish.

Generally you can pay £500-£1000 a month for a guaranteed (with SLA) 100Mbps or 1000Mbps leased line.

Totally different ball game to strapping onto the local coax DOCSIS runs (even if they are backed by fibre cabinets) to a house that wants to pay £30 a month and get free TV and phone line for that price.

Hell, our install cost was over £10,000 alone - but that was the same whether we went Virgin or BT.

Lee D Silver badge

I work for a private school.

Before I arrrived, they had waited TWO YEARS for a leased line.

Nothing was even put on site.

I made enormous fusses, because it was becoming critical to business operation, and BT started some works.

SIX MONTHS later, we have an empty fibre tube, in three disparate sections, run through our existing ducting and carried over the existing telegraph cables back to the street. Nothing was joined. Nothing was ever blown down it. Nothing. Just an empty plastic tube in three sections.

Obviously, we were still complaining all the time. It was at that point, TWO AND A HALF YEARS after the initial order, that we were then told there was "no room at the exchange" and it would be "another six months" (for the sixth time!). I cancelled the order there and then.

Phoned up Virgin Media. They surveyed within the week. We had an order within the month. They sink underground fibre (much more legal hassle and digging up roads), but we wanted to get things moving so we offered to dig trenches etc. on the property ourselves to help speedinstallation as much as possible. There was hassle with the council and permissions to do so but we pushed and pushed and got the line within six months. Been problem-free ever since.

BT / OpenReach are a damn shower when it comes to actual provision. In fact, they tried to enter site weeks AFTER we cancelled contract to "finish the installation". We refused them entry.

All I wanted was something better than the 11Mbps we got from the TWO existing ADSL2+ lines coming into the property, combined. And we're inside the M25. In the end, all they could do was VDSL one of those lines which gave us about 20-30Mbps total, but highly variable. We use it as a backup line and nothing more and have never had to failover to it.

You'd think that if a large, private school, with obvious need for a leased line can't get anything near provision when a competitor just walks up and does a more difficult install delayed only by minor legal works, they'd want to do something about it earlier than the time you cancel the contract. Apparently not.

I honestly think they didn't know that Virgin could deliver (because nobody had bothered to ask and the online checker didn't work for our postcode), so they just strung us along for so long because they thought we had no alternative.

Swede builds steam-powered Raspberry Pi. Nowhere to plug in micro-USB, then?

Lee D Silver badge
Happy

Call me when he gets it working from a clockwork mechanism..

Flying Scotsman attacked by drone

Lee D Silver badge

Re: As a former train driver....

Please then explain how "leaves on the line" stops these things working as designed (i.e. to be a public transport system).

And, no, I still don't buy the "it leaves gunk on the rails that makes them slippy", as even the Scandi-wegian countries have trains that run on rails throughout their winters.

Data-thirsty mobile owners burn through 5GB a month

Lee D Silver badge

Yep.

So when are mobile operators going to start knocking stupidly low limits on the head, account for proper growth of data usage, and start deploying 4G to its full extent?

New iOS malware targets stock iPhones, spreads via App Store

Lee D Silver badge

Re: attack vector

I think the main news is this:

This competently highlights what a waste of time the code review process is (and how it has nothing to do with security, only competition with Apple products, etc.) and how reliance on someone "spotting malicious behaviour" in app code is still the primary - and most useless - method of securing software.

This really demonstrates quite how useless things like Antivirus, etc. are. Even when they GO LOOKING for malware, on a limited number of apps, submitted over the course of months, their review process is totally unable to determine if an app is, or could be under certain circumstances, malicious.

It kind of knocks all of the "you cannot bundle a scripting language", etc. junk that Apple enforce under the guise of security into the waste-of-time bin.

Maybe if they had a permission model, like Android, it might be a bit better - but then as a user you're still able to install stuff that "can access your files" and "can go on the Internet" and not realise that means they could send out every byte of data you have stored on your device.

The solution here is not "let's check apps to see if they are dodgy", it's to lock down permissions to fine-grained and complete control. People who press OK will still press OK, but at least then people "in the know" will only "grant the app HTTPS access to domain.com, and r/w access to the virtual folder Data which is actually limited only to files specifically shared with the app by user-initiated file-association." Which helps immensely when working out quite what an app can or can't do, whether it can be blocked easily, and quite why those permissions are listed.

I'm still waiting for Android "list of permissions" to allow two options for every possible permission. "Allow" and "Emulate". When Emulate is selected for a permission, it pretends the app can do that (e.g. even hiding files the app wants "Deleted" from its view), but just ignores the actual request otherwise (i.e. doesn't actually delete anything). In this way, apps can't know whether or not their actions succeeded or were even monitored, and users can say "Free GPS app wants to send texts? Er... No." and carry on using the rest of the functionality as expected.

IEEE delivers Ethernet-for-cars standard

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Ethernet-for-cars

Same joke.

Routing.

Lee D Silver badge

I would think that a standard for a car would actually include some kind of shared-bus, similar to token ring or similar. Would that not be more practical in terms of weight? Rather than 50 cables all trying to come back to one point, you could just tap into the nearest cable for it and piggyback from it.

I can't believe that a car is going to want to have a full, uncontended 100Mbps to every single sensor or whatever it's wired to, so surely a shared bus or ring architecture is a much better idea in terms of wiring than a star kind of topology? Even if you made it a 1Gigabit shared bus, with proper QoS for those devices that need to take up more urgent data?

'Just give me any old date and I'll make it work' ... said the VB script to the coder

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Sound Problem

Like the old Start menu, when you wanted to stop the PC.

Or when you get a message like "Cancel the print job? OK. Cancel." - er... what do I press?

Human interface designers never solve these things, they just introduce ten thousand tons of junk instead that make them the least of your worries.

I once spent 20 minutes, with my boss and I trying to work out how to close a full-screen Metro app on a fresh Windows 8 test install, on a touchscreen computer (i.e. designed for Windows 8). We deliberately refused to read the manual (like our user's would have) and honestly never got there (even when we tried all the swipes, because apparently you have to start at the VERY TOP of the screen for it to work).

In the end, we just installed Classic Shell and set the default to go to the desktop and Windows key to open a Start Menu instead of Metro.

Lee D Silver badge

One of the reasons that I hate loose-typed languages like VB.

If something's an int, or a string, and you need to make it a long - YOU NEED TO DO IT. Don't just rely on the computer to perform magic guesswork as to what the string intended and interpret it how it sees fit.

Dates in strings are a classic source of such problems, for exactly the reasons described in the article and comments.

Yet, even the oldest of languages (C) won't let you arbitrarily convert from some string to some date. It has a highly-specified date structure, and plenty of functions for getting strings OUT of that but nothing for putting strings back INTO it because of the nightmare of various interpretations.

Sure, when I was younger and toying with VB 1/2/3, it was cool to just throw things at VB and let it convert them to what you intended, But it's the one time that it matters that it won't understand what you intended correctly.

How many people really turn on Strict typing in VB? And even that's not perfect.

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

Lee D Silver badge

The consultant that come in to rescue them in between this guy going, and me being able to come and start full-time:

- Didn't know what virtualisation was

- Didn't know what WDS / SCCM was

- Didn't use GPO at all (everything was copy-pasted batch file in NETLOGON)

- Didn't know you could failover things like DHCP.

- Didn't know what DFS was.

- Didn't know what spanning-tree was. (He thought that turning on spanning-tree and having multiple routes was going to bring the network down).

- Had never heard of LACP, let alone used it.

- Was unable to replicate all the above (because obviously he knew he could sell it to other clients) at his other main customer's sites - in some cases for up to 6-9 months each, even WITH my documentation.

- Oh, had no documentation except for a password list.

- Had licensed thousands of copies of iPad apps illicitly which - with iOS 8 - all fell over and stopped working.

So, no, it's not that surprising at all. Even the guy-brought-in-to-clean-up-after-the-previous-guy had the same kinds of problems but at least understood that backups were necessary.

Lee D Silver badge

I can only imagine that the guy whose job I now have (after he didn't take backups, or care about THE - yes, the - server RAID failing) used to spend his days running around looking busy.

Because there was no computer imaging. Every machine was manually built and/or cloned from the one next to it. It caused no end of problems (not least that the clones were hundreds of Gbs because of cache local profiles, etc. but also things like one bit of software slowly propogating around the entire network by this method, not to mention that they didn't even take them off the domain in between or sysprep or anything!). Every patch cable was cut to length, and manually crimped. Every piece of software was installed from scratch if it went wrong. Every PC got its own Windows Updates when it felt like it. And so on. The guy wasn't "managing a network", he was just running around 100 almost-identical PC's, effectively.

One of the first things I did was put in a proper imaging system. Boot up, press F12 to PXE boot, select the image. Wait ten minutes and you had a working, domain-joined, licensed, clean computer with all the software you need. The number of tickets dropped like a stone (and the first thing I did was put in a proper helpdesk system and forced the users to use it for everything!). Even today - 2 years later - if something goes wrong, it's often quicker to pull out the hard drive, image onto a blank one, and then work out what went wrong with whatever's on the old disk. But because of the cleanliness, because ONE image has had 2 years x 100 machines x 500 users worth of testing, the problems that arise are so much less.

Then I rewired his cabinets with proper patch cables. So much less hassle with disconnections, instantly.

Then I rejigged all the networking so that it was resilient anyway, and enabled RSTP (I know!). No more random disconnections and network loops.

Then I made my bosses run a proper power supply to the server cabinets. No more power cuts because someone plugged in a heater over Christmas.

And this month, my boss asked me if we intend to replace everything like we have in previous years. Er... why? It's working. "But things fail, etc.". Yes. And we're resilient now. So when they do, we'll replace them as necessary and users will not notice in the meantime. "But client upgrades!" Are the clients slow? Are users complaining (more than normal when they try to download 100Gb of files and it doesn't happen in a fraction of a second)? No. So why bother?

All I take away from the article or my own experiences is: Do things properly and all the problems go quiet. Be as wary of a full helpdesk as of one that has nothing on it at all. In 150 machines, over two years, I've had about ten drive failures. Apart from that, almost nothing goes wrong with a bog standard "office" system that you can't compensate for (and, hell, I could put SSDs or RAID into the clients if I really wanted to!). So long as you manage it properly and use the proper tools.

And I don't even do cutting-edge junk. But the second I find myself doing a job twice, that needs to be done properly, or takes a long time, I find a way to automate it. And then my apprentice knows he can just press F12 and - without the potential of losing any client data - get a working system back up in minutes.

This is hardly rocket-science. If your company isn't doing it, they are basically creating work for themselves and you might want to ask why. Hell, even my previous workplace had the same, and I've done similar using Norton Ghost (as was) from a network boot.

And, with or without such a system, you shouldn't be having the same causes / kinds of failures for ever and ever, repeatedly. It means you're not fixing the problem.

Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?

Lee D Silver badge

Why would Windows 10 invigorate PC sales when all your Windows 7/8 machines are being made to upgrade to Windows 10 for free and the system requirements are pretty much identical?

I mean, it's not even like you have to "buy a new machine for the new Windows" as an excuse any more.

If anything Windows 10 should have stopped PC sales dead in the water, because your old clunker is still able to be upgraded to Windows 10 without you having to do anything.

UK plans robo-car tests on motorways in 2017

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Given that they still need drivers on trains and the tube...

"Need" is the problem.

We don't really demonstrate a "need" for humans in the parts we have automated. In fact, almost the opposite. The DLR operates with only token humans on board, basically there to reassure and press the button if something goes wrong. Anyone can do that.

This is precisely the problem. Do we "need" humans to chauffeur us around in taxis? Not really. Do we need human drivers actually ON the train? Rarely, and I'd be happier with no driver but a policeman on board instead (I bet a Tube driver earns more than your average policeman).

We don't "need" these people, but we're being forced to have them by industrial action and unions who are in fear of their members jobs. But a computer doesn't go on strike, even if it only ever goes wrong as much as a human would. As such, we have no "need" for these people, only a "desire" or possibly a "reassurance". That's something entirely different.

And given how my bank, my car insurance company, my telephone or broadband provider, etc. just doesn't want me to speak to a human any more, I can see the way things are going to go eventually.

We don't "need" these people. And that's the biggest part of the problem.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Think of "number of voters"

I'm not unsympathetic, I just don't see why it's surprising, or a major fuss.

There are plenty of industries where "learning" is required - there are few where you can carry on doing the same job forever in the same way. Builders have to cope with new construction techniques, new health and safety regulations, new building codes. Waitresses have to cope with new payment methods, a new menu every night, gluten etc. intolerances and so on.

The human animal is built to learn. Those who don't want to aren't going to be able to stay in the job they like forever. In fact, the inability to learn is going to make you HAVE to learn more often - because you'll be out of a job because you refuse to change to the new ways, and then you'll have to change career because nobody wants you.

If anything, this is always my answer when people blather on about what education actually does, and why a degree in Media Studies or whatever is going to help people "in the real world". It's got NOTHING to do with the subject. It's got everything to do with the ability to learn, and the incentive to learn, and keeping your mind elastic.

For decades people have been told the importance of education, self-development, training, learning, etc. If they choose to ignore it, they will find themselves in the dole queue and being FORCED to do it if they want to earn a proper wage. I don't see why we should feel any particular sympathy towards one category of people compared to, say, those that lose their husband and are unable to cope, those that lose the ability to keep walking, those that have a stroke, etc. Just because you stuck in a career and refused to change when it was obvious that change was coming, why do you deserve more sympathy than someone who was made redundant out of the blue? And if the redundant guy goes and learns how to be a waiter, or a dustman, or stack shelves in B&Q, then he's probably more deserving than the guy who's come from a dead industry with no future and refuses to do anything else.

I come from a skilled profession, yes, but I do not have any IT certifications. I started off many years ago making websites. When those become heavily design-oriented, rather than technical, I moved into another side of IT that was more technical because that's what I could do. I have no vendor qualifications. I have nothing but a) experience and b) an ability to learn. It's a) that gets me work and b) that keeps me in it, even through career changes. There are plenty of professions that that's true of, from electricians to restaurant workers, parcel delivery to warehouse worker.

Few professions stay static - possibly cleaning? But even there, I spent yesterday pressure-washing my own driveway. A few years ago, I would have had to hire someone to bring such equipment. Someone came round the other day offering to clean my gutters. I'm seriously considering just getting up a ladder and pressure-washing the things, it won't take an hour in total and I don't have to pay anyone and can use equipment that cost me £50 to buy. Where's the future in that career for him, too?

Things move on. Those that won't / can't learn shouldn't be protesting for everything to stay static. They should be taken out of the job market and encouraged to come back in some other way. Sympathy has little to do with the practicality. Hell, I'm suggesting we instead pay them to DO NOTHING effectively, but be taught how to learn. It's the practical option, after all. At least then others can progress.

Lee D Silver badge

Not really - one the driving part of the lorry is automated, the rest is quite easy to do. Most delivery drivers just have an electronic gadget nowadays for signature anyway.

And automated unloading from, say, a bunch of side-curtains isn't that hard to imagine. There are mines where almost the entire vehicular process is automated, and their cargo isn't nice things loaded onto straight pallets.

All it has to do is turn up, get authorisation (you can just load the thing with cameras and have a "human" the other end use the video feed to check that there's someone present to sign, resolve arguments, etc.), and then either let the destination unload or start sliding stuff out on standardised rails.

The bigger problem is what happens if there's a problem. International travel presents the problem of stowaways (but I suppose, with human rest stops needed, or human-openable curtains, you can just turn the lorries into a mobile fort-knox), then you have cargo-displacement, ordinary vehicular failures, etc. It could get messy. It'll probably be a long time before that gets close.

But taxis, buses, Amazon delivery vans ("Your parcel is outside. Scan your receipt on the locker panel on the side for your parcel"), even supermarket vans, can be automated one-by-one quite easily. I reckon one of the biggest markets might even be the school run. Why bother having to get your child to school by 8 (but not a second before), and then have to run back at 3:30, when you can just offload them to a school bus, or send them in a personal vehicle that you can WATCH deliver them to the door?

Lee D Silver badge

I never got why everything has to be described by the number of jobs it might impact. If a job is obsolete, it's obsolete. We can't keep lamp-lighters around "just to keep jobs" now that we have electricity. We don't fawn over the loss of blacksmith since the internal combustion engine. And do we really care that "printer" is now more of desktop item than someone pressing lead blocks onto a bit of paper?

I know "it's people's jobs" so it's sensitive, but quite what do you expect? That your job is guaranteed and protected forever even long after it's useless and obsolete? When self-managing IT networks come about, I'll bugger off and retrain, or get a job fixing or making them. Sure, it's an upheaval, a life-changing event, but that's how things work.

I have cousins who are taxi drivers. They are currently protesting about Uber and the like. What they don't get is that protesting that Uber etc. "are stealing our custom" is like a stable owner complaining that cars "do a better job". Either argue with your unions to allow you to compete (to be honest, taxis already have several unfair advantages just to keep taxi jobs alive - and, hell, it took years for a taxi mobile app to appear), or be prepared to look for something else - maybe not today, but soon.

Quite why we should preserve jobs that are being obsoleted just to keep people with out-of-date training in jobs, I can't fathom. It's actually quicker, easier and cheaper to obsolete them, put them on the dole queue and make them retrain rather than subsidise an sub-par service that can no longer compete.

Honestly? I'm still waiting for automated Tube trains. They don't go on strike for the pettiest thing. They don't earn more than me for pushing a lever back and forth. They don't throw you around the carriage because they're running a bit late. And they might be able to make an announcement I can actually understand. I thought the DLR was going to lead the way, but apparently we're subsidising some of the best-paid employees in the world to (sometimes) do a job, a job that it's proven can be automated satisfactorily. The lost time and business because of Tube strikes must be enough to automate the network ten times over by now.

Dear taxi drivers - if your job can be done by a machine in the near future, you might want to think about a new job you could do, and how you could get there. Like, maybe, a job that doesn't rely on a skill that something like 80% of the adult population does for themselves for most of the week.

LG builds a DAB+ digital radio radio into a smartmobe

Lee D Silver badge

Am I the only person who, despite having DAB and FM in my car, just never listens to it?

Three songs per hour interspersed with adverts, talking incessant nonsense and pointless jingles?

I just plug in an SD card and have done with it.

Traffic news? My satnav does 100 times better traffic than any guy reeling off road numbers from a helicopter.

Actual news? There are so many other services that are better to consume from.

General chatter? Please, I try to get away from that kind of nonsense, I don't need it when I'm trapped in my car.

The other day my girlfriend asked what DAB was. That's how much impact that's had. And then we sat and went through from thirty-forty "preset channels" on the car DAB. All of them, we just skipped, then turned it off.

I mean, jeez, if you have a phone you can use (can't do that while driving), why on earth would you want DAB anyway? Just go to the Internet stream (they aren't data-heavy at all), go to the news site, or join some forum of complete nutters giving their racist opinions if that's what you're after.

Microsoft stops accepting Bitcoin in Windows Store

Lee D Silver badge

"What's a Zune?"

"Precisely".