Posts by Forty Two

Config file wipe blunder caused deadly Airbus A400M crash – claim

Sad and Avoidable.

First, my sympathy and condolences to the families of those lost. Very sad.

I agree with several above, this should not have happened or happened on a simulator.

I call them dependencies. Every function, subroutine, class, whatever I write checks that anything needed external to the code block is both available and as much as possible valid. Input parameters/dependencies are checked for existence and sanity. Only then is processing allow to continue on to the primary function of the code block. Output/results, as much as possible, are checked for sanity as well. Much of this "overhead" can be kept in its own routine and knowing what is needed to be checked should already be in the initial design documentation before you write the first line. Perhaps too much bloat and time for systems that need to be super responsive but with todays CPU speeds, multiple cores, huge amounts of memory available dirt cheap I cannot imagine something managed by humans not having the spare 100mS needed to make sure of avoiding, wait for it old-timers.... Garbage in, Garbage out.

But I don't write code for airplanes. However I have often told a project manager they will get the code when it is ready and not before. This wins me few promotions or friends in management.

Undetectable NSA-linked hybrid malware hits Intel Security radar

If it was truly firmware?

SSD's been around for a while, HDs even longer. One would think the risk of using write once chips for the devices "firmware" would not be large especially if some R&D money was spent to re-verify the code. A clever suppler could even market it as a feature and charge extra.

High-flying LOHAN fan raises ale-filled tankard

Bah!

Any fool knows to properly enjoy a beer of any kind it must be lapped from the belly button of a nubile member of ones sexual preference. Only in the unfortunate circumstance of an "outie" should any other vessel be considered.

Unite: CSC using staffers' profitability to shape the future

ahh but...

Productivity is, simplified, output / cost per unit time. There are only so many hours in a week you can bill to projects and cost is your salary. Sooo, one guess as to what happens to experienced long term employees that are in the upper part of their pay band with that formula. However, putting my intense hatred of CSC aside it should come as a shock to no one that almost any company will replace older experienced high-paid people with cheap newbies if they think they can get away with it. The fun bit is that if you want your severance package you have to train the replacement regardless if you can understand him through the accent or not.

Human Resources is NOT your friend.

Disclosure Statement: Outsourced from an "Employee's are Our Greatest Asset" company after 18 years to CSC doing my previous job and the jobs of two others not so fortunate and immediately "laid off" in favor of a person "not from around here" as soon as the initial employment contract expired. Experiences in the UK may vary slightly due to dialect and labor laws but the end result is inevitable. You bet your ass I am bitter.

Attack of the possibly-Nazi clone parakeet invaders

A Final Solution?

I wouldn't worry. Unleash Lester for a pluck and fry. A Parrot Post-pub nosh, if it proves tasty, would solve the problem.

You say you want a musical revolution. Actually, have three

"based on an analysis of more than 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100."

Having lived and listened through the entire period I recall several "upheavals". "Dead Skunks in the Middle of the Road", "My Ding-a-Ling", "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" ... Bit like determining the eating trends of a city by looking at the fast food wrappers in a landfill.

'Rombertik' malware kills host computers if you attempt a cure

So...

Disabling machines in the domain from running any .scr screen saver other than a defined selection in Group Policy (there is a setting for client machine screen saver selection and the users ability to change/modify it) should do the trick ?

Tape thrives at the margin as shipped capacity breaks record

Best of Luck to you.

Entrusting business critical information on a consumer grade drive. Price a 2Tb sas enterprise quality drive certified for HP/Dell servers or any good storage array. Bit more than $100ish. At 58TB a weeknight for incrementals and over 140TB of weekly fulls, and a 7 year storage requirement, backup to dedupe with short retention times and constantly cloning a full to a 5 drive tape library is the only way I can go. That is unless they suddenly build me a new datacenter where I would need 2 aisles of disk sitting there, mostly doing nothing and most assuredly not meeting my Disaster Recovery requirements. So while watching the leds flash on my Data Domains is entertaining, watching the tape library robot run and cycle tapes beats it hands down. Especially when if I need more capacity its $50 for a tape and the library will even automatically spit out the ones I need to box up for Iron Mountain. Small operations, fine, put it on disk. Fortune 100 companies with more money than sense and a datacenter the size of a warehouse, fine put it on disk. Heck you do what you want. Its your data. Tape is not dead in my neck of the woods, not by a long shot. Thank God no one mentioned cloud backup or I would have had a stroke.

Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about – a pundit speaks

Holy Puck

Someone check in on this fellow and make sure he has not locked the cabin door. He is publishing unvarnished truth again. Something must be awfully amiss Buck up mate, none of us really have the crystal ball our users and directors expect.

You made my day.

Want to deploy virtual machines in a hurry? PowerShell is your friend

Re: Some Questions

Short answer - jail time.

I may be doing it wrong as I am fairly new to VM's or perhaps there is a better way but you will need volume license key or whatever they call it this year for office and windows. I activate the "golden image" and the deployed machines are good to go. No good answer for updates other than to deploy the image, do updates and immediately make a new image. Even if not completely up to date it is still a timesaver as deploying a 2008R2 machine ( /shame, yes we still do ) from the original .iso is at least an hour of updating so having an image that is only a month or 3 behind is a real help. But yes, keeping images up to date with updates is a chore.

Be aware that having the volume key and an activated machine vs. the actual number of machines legally licensed to use are two different things. At least for us in .edu

Eagerly await better answers from people more clever than myself.

Really ?

Good and informative article.

However, regarding "Once you have got it going, you will wonder why you ever did it any other way.".

I believe I will stick to Vcenter's "deploy VM from template" /click /click {machinename} /click /click /click /smoke break while it builds. (done).

That license fee does not seem so expensive now.

That Azure destination command may be the longest cli command I have seen. Good info for scripting as I would not wish to try that manually twice in a row on a Monday.

Win! The Ultimate Cash 'n' Carrion Survival Kit

Re: 500ml water bottle

Not even nearly large enough.

vSphere 6.0 is BADASS. Not that I've played with it or anything. Ahem

whew, thought it was just me.

At the bottom of page 3 I was thinking, /yawn. I must be missing something here as I do not see anything to make my job easier and my datacenter will have gold plated frames before I get 40GB/s to the top of the racks much less the HBA's for the hosts. Guess the Fortune 50 guys will be chuffed. Me not so much. So it was nice to read the other comments and realize I am not delusional.

Veritas is home. Symantec’s storage split-off adopts old name

Logo

It seems they selected the proper logo color/colour. "Lipstick for a Pig Red" seems entirely suitable.

How do you solve a problem like Willowra?

+1 for WSUS- if windows updates are what you want. Learning Center - hopefully nice discount from MS for educational use if you don't have a copy of 2008R2 or 2012 laying about.

Had never messed with it until last week needing to retire old server 2003 machine. Spun up a 2012vm, installed the WSUS role/feature, fired up the management snap-in and in 30 minutes flat had it configured. Very easy and intuitive interface. Checked on it 2 hours later and it had found all the machines on the subnet I had specified along with their update status and was happily waiting for 6:30pm to synchronize with Windows update to download the files to local disk for distribution. You don't have to touch the client machines. Next morning - 3am updates all done on over 700 PCs with one or two that I do need to have one of the techs go look at, the point being the reporting and status features are more than sufficient. All in all easier than smelling the stink of a four day dead dingo at five paces.

Would not use Windows to update *nix nor use *nix to update Windows. Just begging for admin headache and I hear its a very long drive.

LOHAN slips into tight rubber outfit

Likely too late in the design cycle but as I cannot find details of the Vulture 2 design I am left wondering if the cavity for the rocket motor could be enlarged slightly in diameter to accommodate a cylinder of insulation material and perhaps a mm or two in additional depth for an insulation hat for the non-functional end of the motor.