Posts by John Malaney

Visiting America? US border agents want your Twitter, Facebook URLs

Re: I'll have whatever you're smoking.

Our stationary is held in a filing cabinet in a rolling stack, It still amuses me when I watch the labelled stationary cupboard glide effortlessly backwards and forwards along its track

Lester Haines: RIP

Lesters Wake

We seem to be building up a groundswell of readers who will raise a glass to Lester individually this weekend but do we want to get together to give him a proper send off

RIP Lester

Condolences to Lester' s family, friends and all at El Reg.

As others have mentioned Lester's articles have kept me coming back to the Register for many years. What no one has mentioned is his overall impact on GDP.

Even whilst reading the comments in this article I got side tracked into an reading an article on haggis pakora and sent a colleague a link to the April fools sysadmins colouring book.

No doubt he'll pass that on and half the team will lose another half-hour to Lester's incredible talent.

He will be sadly missed.

I too will be raising a glass to Lester this evening. RIP Old Chap though we never met I too feel I have lost a friend.

Coroner suggests cars should block mobile phones

Re: Anyone remember

The vast majority of people injured using presses etc were caused by poorly designed & unsafe equipment. Moden equipment is deliberately designed with safety guards interlocks etc. to prevent these accidents. Underplaying the value of these systems is playing into the hands of the 'health and safety gone mad' brigade. People are being injured every day at present using ill maintained equipment or equipment with safety features removed to 'increase productivity'. The contunual attack on sensible approaches to workplace safety is playing into the hands of the people who would oike a completely de-regulated workplace, and would like to see the HSE abolished but where do you think they would be when you experience an injury?

FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Microsoft faces prising XP from Big Biz

What about statutary / regulatory compliance?

If your organization is part of or interacts with credit card agencies, financial services companies /regulators, or connects to government networks your next audit will include a requirement to remain on a supported version of all operating systems( windows and non-windows!). Failure to have plans to mitigate this could be disastrous either to the organizations reputation or financially. Sanctions could include,inability to connect to government networks (including PSN & GCSX in the UK, removal of authority to process credit card payments or refusal to allow connections to customer networks to provide remote support.

Moving from Win XP to Win 7 isn't a trivial job in itself for our estate of 4000+ pc's and 200 windows servers, Moving to win8 or a non windows OS for these services would be a complete none starter. Like many other organizations we in IT were unable to get this project to the top of the corporate priority list until there were none other options.

If you genuinely have no government/ public sector financial services customers and never want any and don't process debit or credit card payments then maybe you can stay with XP but for most of us in corporate IT departments there really are no other options.