Posts by ckm5

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

Re: I disagree

Last time we had a true global pandemic, this is what the result was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties

From Gmail to Gfail: Google's G-Suite topples over for unlucky netizens, rights itself

Re: Clouds sometime rain

These days, it pretty much doesn't matter if your PC is ultra reliable but the internets go offline... Still mostly useless, at least for my work...

Re: Clouds sometime rain

Works great until you have a fire, flood or theft. I prefer to have local and 3x cloud backups with different providers.

3 hour hangout this AM

Had a 3-hour Hangout Meet this AM EST with 22 people on it, didn't notice any issues. Also, mail, calendar & docs was working fine here in SF...

Outage? What outage?

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

It's not how to use a hammer....

It's not how to use a hammer, it's knowing where to hit.

E.g. What you are paying for is the knowledge & experience to get it fixed in 10 minutes, not the actual ten minutes. That's why most mechanics charge "book rate" not actual time.

Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth

It depends on the geographic location. Where I am, anyone staying in a job for more than 2 years is viewed with suspicion....

The current scam is to ask when you graduated from college. I always put that I'm expecting my masters some time in the future.... Which is totally true as I ran out of money doing my Masters in the mid-'90s and I may go back to it sometime in the future....

Depends on the sport. Some do have people over forty like billiards, long distance sailing, shooting, etc.

The winners of the Volvo Ocean Race are pretty much all over 40...

Pair charged with murder, manslaughter after IBM Aspera boffin killed in New Year's Eve laptop theft struggle

More incorrect & misleading propaganda

California re-defined Grand Theft (and only Grand Theft) as being anything over $950 (Prop 47), which is exactly in-line with most other states where it is at least $1000, incl. Texas where its $1500 or more. So California theft laws, while made more lenient recently, are still harsher than Texas.....

Burglary and robbery are still felonies and snatching someones laptop is robbery.

But thanks for the propaganda post - seems like the hate on California is spreading to El Reg along with deep misinformation....

Re: WHY DON'T I HAVE BAIL!?!?

The value of a work laptop far exceeds $950.....

Besides, all prop 47 does is align California laws with most states where it's not grand theft if it's under $1000 anyway. Burglary and robbery are still felonies and snatching someones laptop is robbery.

But thanks for the propaganda post - seems like the hate on California is spreading to El Reg along with deep misinformation....

FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

Re: I understand where the dev is coming from but ....

Not necessarily - if he owned the copyright, he can relicense it any way he wants. The true source of control in open source is copyright, not the license....

Also, open source is about free speech, not free beer. Seems most everyone has forgotten that.

Oracle leaves its heart in San Francisco – or it would do if, you know, Oracle had a heart

Good riddance

This and Dreamforce disrupt the city for a week, blocking a major thoroughfare. Never mind the tons of clueless drunk people fumbling from bar to party to bar.

There are already way to many tourists in San Francisco, cutting down on the hoards is a good thing.

Amazon fails to stop ex-sales staffer winging it to Google Cloud

Re: In California, U.S.A....

I was gonna say, all he needs to do is move to California and all this is irrelevant.

Fed up of playing Whac-A-Mole with network of SoftBank-owned patent holders, Intel hits court

Re: Not an Intel fan...

#3 is not true - large corps sign NDAs all the time, even with small players - we have several NDAs with F10 (yes ten) companies, no issues.

Now, whether we can enforce these or not is another question, although we have gone to court in the past to get contracts enforced....

Huygens if true: Dutch police break up bulletproof hosting outfit and kill Mirai botnet

Apparently only 5 servers

Five servers is all it takes to:

- Be bulletproof

- Run a bot net doing 'millions' of attacks per day

- Profit?

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Re: Its about time....

Depends on what the liability is of a failing coffee machine and if you can present a cogent argument about the ROI of testing.

There are plenty of scenarios where testing labs charge the equivalent of more than $20,000/hr. I'm quite sure UL would likely charge you more than $25k/hr equivalent.

I remember putting something through a certification (not UL, this was for software) and it cost $1 million. It took 3 weeks and, if you just count straight hours, it was about $9k/hour. Thing is, I've very sure they spent around 40/hrs of actual work on it, which is about $25k/hr. Most of the cost was just getting their stamp of approval....

Re: Here, have it for free...

The issue is NOT the technology but the existing customer base. It's like Facebook, the value is in the 'social graph', e.g. all the known and identified users, not the actual technology platform.

Replicating Uber AND getting the user base they have would likely cost much dollars.

Re: Its about time....

If you were in California, the solution is that all of your 'friends' either need to be partners (as someone suggested, the law firm model or something similar like a coop) or have their own companies that are contracting to you.

At least that's what several lawyers, including one that counsels employees, have advised us.

Then again, IANAL, and you should ask yours about this if it is an issue. That said, if you are in a place where this might become an issue, I would try to get ahead of it....

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's personal MiG-29 fighter jet goes under the hammer

I hope they are not selling off the whole collection

That would be a shame, it's an incredible collection. I was under the impression that it was fully funded, but who knows.

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

Re: Place files in cloud - surprise - can't reach'em anymore

Cloud systems are no better or worse than in-house systems - probably better than most in-house systems I have seen, actually, and def. way more secure.

You still have the responsibility to make sure everything is correctly setup and have recovery procedures for emergencies, it is not the responsibility of the cloud provider. If the story was "in-house IT system crashes, deletes all data with no backups" it would be a non-story as that is SOP for most small businesses.

In this case, it's just a PEBKAC.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

By definition, you are pretty much always trusting your codebase to other people. Other people write the filesystem, OS & VCS. It would be more appropriate to describe it as cloud, offsite, etc. Even then, most hosted services are likely more reliable that most people's desktops....

Re: Command/Control channel flag?

Tons of companies follow this exact pattern for devops - if GitHub starts flagging accounts because people are pulling from them, 1/2 the internet would be taken offline....

Re: Backup - ever heard of it?

Not really - because git is designed to be distributed, there isn't really a 'master' and 'copy'. Also, that doesn't really apply if you have more than one person working on a repo....

Re: Backup - ever heard of it?

There are plenty of ways to backup GitHub without syncing the repo to your local machine - sync it to Google or another git hosting service or use something like BackHub which is a service that backsup GitHub repos....

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: airport security

I used to travel with a round, analog quartz alarm clock - boy did that get them excited - most just laughed.

Not after 9/11 however.

Re: airport security

I posted this upthread https://tacticalkeychains.com/collections/frontpage/products/wtf-wrench-that-fits similar idea but far, far less conspicuous.

Re: airport security

I have one of these on my keychain https://tacticalkeychains.com/collections/frontpage/products/wtf-wrench-that-fits Very useful as it has two screwdrivers, a hex bit holder and the ability to undo bolts upto about 13mm and because it's titanium, it makes a surprisingly good prybar. No one has ever even glanced at it...

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

The article specifically says "Brad was on his way to Blighty"

A2 Hosting finds 'restore' the hardest word as Windows outage slips into May

From their "About" page

August 2009 – We release our awesome Server Rewind backup tool for free on all our web hosting accounts. We know how important your data is, and you shouldn't have to pay a ransom on it.

https://www.a2hosting.com/about

You just can't make it up....

Re: i've said it before .....

SLAs are not worth the paper they are printed on unless you are $ billion company with lawyers on staff to enforce said SLA.....

Like others have said, the only insurance is to make sure you can recover from any terminal outage at your provider.

Re: i've said it before .....

You can easily host on Google Cloud for $3.88/month (f1-micro) according to https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

I'm sure AWS has similarly cheap offerings, but in my experience GCP is significantly cheaper eg. faster systems for the same price. Not sure why you'd use anything else.

Nice People Matter? NPM may stand for Not Politely Managed – job cuts leave staff sore

Yup`

WhatsApp had 50 people and 450 million users. Obviously there is something wrong with the way this is being managed.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Re: mast sharing

It also helps that CDMA was a favored technology in the US. CDMA requires 1/4 of the cell density versus GSM....

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

As someone else pointed out, they probably switched from gold plated to unplated switches as they were $0.00001 cents cheaper.

That's simply not true, switches inside cars are almost never sealed. I have been working on cars for 30+ years and I don't think I've ever seen a car with fully sealed switches.

As far as 'self-cleaning', that sounds like a bunch of marketing hype. Yeah, terminals probably scrap of the gunk, but that's hardly a design feature.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

Re: What possible delay?

No, it's going to part it's cheeks and accept whatever painful deal the US forces on it. Look into Liam Fox's background, and you can see that's his wet dream. The UK as the 51st state, though one without any representation or power, blindly following US rules.

Well, the US has already said there would be no quick trade deal https://www.kitv.com/story/40053335/britains-hopes-of-a-trade-deal-with-america-just-suffered-a-big-blow and https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/us-uk-trade-deal-brexit-deal-theresa-may-trump-ambassador-woody-johnson-a8705056.html

I'm sure China & Russia will be happy to do a quick deal, however.

Re: What possible delay?

Also no economic bollocks from the Treasury and BoE, gov, propaganda paid by taxpayers from the gov, etc. As if they could manage that.

You mean other than two major employers (Honda and Nissan) announcing they are pulling out of the UK with loss of up to 50k jobs? And Dyson relocating HQ to Singapore? Or Jim Ratcliffe pulling the Brexit parachute over Monaco?

Let's face it, the UK is, at best, a second rate economy - it's not even as large as California - and without the EU would struggle in the face of raw global competition. And it will take decades to replace all the trade agreements the EU already has with the rest of the world. And your famous 'special relationship' partner has already said 'no deal' to a trade deal, so there goes that.

Even the head of the Carlyle Group - vulture capitalists par excellance - thinks it's a terrible idea - https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/carlyles-david-rubenstein-wants-second-brexit-vote-as-uk-pe-deals-dwindle

Thing is, delusions of empire don't really count in the real world. Leaving the worlds largest trading block because Polish people are doing the work no British person wants to do is a great way to turn your 2nd rate economy into a 3rd rate economy.

Maybe you can sell off your new aircraft carriers to fund the NHS for another six months. I'm sure Brazil, India or Thailand would offer you a good price. Maybe even the Russians, who are bound to be your new BFF. After all, they did engineer this brilliant political coup call Brexit.

Germany tells America to verpissen off over Huawei 5G cyber-Sicherheitsbedenken

Re: "with US-only standards [...] being dropped in favour of LTE, because it was cheaper to buy."

"You know that US for a long time lagged behind Europe and Japan in mobile, because telcos were much more worried about customer lock-in than improving the network? "

This is a common misunderstanding.

The reason why the US never warmed to GSM is because the cell radius is 1/4 that of CDMA. In a large, lightly populated country like the US, GSM require 4 to 6 times more infrastructure to build out.

So the largest carriers chose CDMA instead. The fact that it was incompatible with the rest of the world was not that much of an issue since most Americans don't really travel internationally.

And, in reality, CDMA was better than GSM in many ways, so much so that it became the basis for LTE.....

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Re: Did a spell at Lockheed

It was in satellite assembly at Moffett field circa 2009, so, yes, space rated.

That's why I said "sat RF" - woosh -

PS - not sure what you 'other info' is other than the LSD mentioned in another post.... There is nothing particularly secret about Lockheed sat assembly facility - https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Where-science-takes-flight-Lockheed-marks-50-2469631.php

Re: thiefses

Reminds me of a friend that had a cast iron engine head stolen from his van, probably $10 of scrap value. The thing was, there was $3000 of machining in the that head and it had the magic max power set of machining for a race car.... The iron of this is that he had put $100 in cash in the glove box specifically to discourage anyone from stealing the head!

Did a spell at Lockheed

and the sat RF guys often machined cases out of solid gold. I was told they had 2.5 tons of the stuff onsite. No wonder security looked like the SWAT team.....

Bad news for WannaCry slayer Marcus Hutchins: Judge rules being young, hungover, and in a strange land doesn't obviate evidence

Re: Don't care what country it is

If saying anything might cause you harm, it is reasonable to keep quiet even if the law (unreasonably) punishes you for it. The basic rule of thumb anywhere on the planet (and I've lived in 7 different countries) is not to say a thing.

If they wind up beating the crap out of you, they you should tell them whatever they want to here, even if it is false. That's what they taught us in the kidnapping training I had years ago when I was an overseas gov't official.

Google's stunning plan to avoid apps slurping Gmail inboxes: Charge devs for security audits

Re: What about IMAP?

The only real difference is credentials by proxy (Oauth) or directly via an 'application password'.

The level of information you access AFAIK is the same.

Just use IMAP

Seem pretty obvious but this in no way affects the IMAP interface AFAIK, only Oauth-authenticated APIs.

Edit: Ninja'd above by Doug S.

OK, it's early 2019. Has Leeds Hospital finally managed to 'axe the fax'? Um, yes and no

Re: paper records

Almost all prescriptions require signed paper documents. Most pharmacies expect to get these faxed to them by doctors for confirmation.

That is the *default* way things happen. Do you really want to screw around with a system that your life might depend on?

Red Hat gets heebie-jeebies over MongoDB's T&Cs squeeze: NoSQL database dropped from RHEL 8B over license

That is very true

In the last several companies I've worked with, I've actively discouraged people from using software not supported by their cloud provider.

Why? Because the whole idea of using cloud based infrastructure is about offloading large chunks of maintenance to someone else. Rolling your own just defeats the purpose.

Amazon takes aim at MongoDB with launch of Mongo-compatible DocumentDB

Re: So a US tax-dodging megacorp can patent 'rounded corners'...

Please explain how using a piece of open source software in accordance to it's license is 'ripping off free software built by others' - which, as a sentence, seems to be contradictory - how can you rip off something that is free?

Failure to find a viable business model is not the fault of the users....

And, before you lecture me about licenses, I've actually co-authored 2 OSI approved licenses, so.....

If it's open source, no one is ripping it off...

Love how El Reg's shill bought into MongoDBs PR blitz about people using their open source software were somehow 'ripping them off' by following the licensing terms....

MongoDB's failure to figure out a viable business model is not the fault of users. It is not the responsibility of users of open source to fund venture backed startups.

If they wanted to monetize their software, they should have released it under a commercial license, but then they would have had to pay for market acquisition instead of getting it for free from the open source community.....

Mainframe brains-slurper sues IBM for 'age discrim', calls Ginny and biz 'morally bankrupt'

Sound like a business opportunity...

Start a company that only hires people with 15+ years of experience and rent them back to their old companies for 100x the price. Take 20% give the rest to your staff... Rinse, repeat.