Posts by Dominic Thomas 27 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jul 2007
Yes! Very much yes! I'm old enough to remember all the breathless television segments about how technology was going to let us work just one or two days a week, and how the various leisure industries would have to expand to fill our copious extra free time. But somehow forty-odd years later I'm still working at the silicon face five or six days a week, and there is precious little sign of that changing.
I noticed yesterday that the Settings page of our Printix cloud printing dashboard has suddenly grown a "Generative AI" tab. No explanation of what it does, as yet, but my assumption is that it will analyse our users' print jobs and then create new ones automatically, so that they don't have to bother about printing the old-fashioned manual way like the cavemen did. And I, for one, welcome our new AI-printing overlords!
I've been using VMware products since ESX v2.x back around the turn of the Millenium, up to V6.x a few years ago, and have loved them. They're not perfect, and indeed I blame most of my grey hairs on one particular large vSAN farm, but I never thought of recommending that we move away from the system. However, in the last few years I have found myself working on significantly smaller sites, and each and every one of them is using Hyper-V in one form or another. Some of them were single host servers, some were independent servers replicating to each other, and some were medium-sized implementations running on MS Cluster Services. The common factor is that once set up properly, they have all worked pretty well - with the clustered systems, especially, being fairly grown-up solutions. Oddly I have never worked on a site that uses SCVMM, which I gather adds some of the enormous flexibility that I was used to from a proper vCenter etc implementation, but honestly for these small and medium sites I have not missed it. Hyper-V is a very basic product compared to any of VMware’s offerings, but it is even before VMware’s price gouging over the last few years, and although I always looked down on it as a toy hypervisor I have very much reconsidered this attitude now.
I'm still waiting for an answer to that question from Fasthosts, who although claiming to be "undecided" before the EGM, gave every indication that they would be voting against - and I am all ready to move if that does turn out to be the case. My four domains and a web server are hardly making them quake in their boots, but I am more than happy to vote with my feet regardless and I would encourage everyone here to do the same if their own provider supported the previous board.
Just got this from Fasthosts, after a similar enquiry to your own:
"Fasthosts as a member of Nominet are currently carefully considering the points highlighted by publicbenefit.uk. We are conscious that the proposed resolutions risk creating a de-stabilising effect and therefore the continuity of critical infrastructure which is important to our customers, our business and the wider community. We agree that changes for its members and of the focus are definitely required and given the importance of the vote we will be participating, once we have considered all of the key factors. "
While that's actually rather more than I was expecting from them, I think they've already had plenty of time to "consider the key factors", and as they are using the same "de-stabilising" rhetoric as the current board I suspect they will indeed be voting No.
"Yes, that Data General, the one that EMC acquired for US$1.1bn in 1999 so it could make hay with the CLARiiON iSCSI SANs"
The original CLARiiON disk arrays were SCSI, not iSCSI, and had migrated to Fibre Channel by the time EMC acquired them. iSCSI came much later, I think with the AX series.
[Source: I had a bunch of 1st generation EMC DAEs in a 42U cabinet in my kitchen, until a few years ago when my long-suffering partner realised how much electricity they were drinking.]
A quick look at their directory page shows that they have around 250 staff, so I'm impressed that the victim managed to send that number and bulk of tax forms (Word documents? PDF files? - many, many megabytes of email, either way) to the scammer without having to call on their IT department for help.
It should be noted that the "Use it or lose it" page linked at the bottom of the article is hosted by a firm of IP lawyers, who might well have a rather biased viewpoint given that cases like this are their bread and butter... The EFF has a very different opinion on the issue:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not-require-companies-tirelessly-censor-internet
Not PayPal, I'm sure - they have a long history of refusing their services to anything even slightly porn-related.
But the major porn parent companies like MindGeek are already gearing up to offer age verification services to smaller sites (at least, those they don't mind competing with, the others will be left out in the cold) and they are looking at that as a major source of income going forward.
So the likely outcome is a few huge porn companies dominating the market for mainstream porn, in effective collusion with the UK government, and all the smaller companies (especially those providing less mainstream content) driven out of business.
Kaspersky says that MS is "killing off the independent security industry", but that just doesn't seem true. The early suppliers that have been around for decades are still very much in evidence - McAfee/Dr Solomons, Norton/Symantec, Avira, Avast, F-Secure, AVG, Sophos et al are still apparently going strong.
So are all the second-tier companies like Panda, BitDefender, ESET and Trend... Plus the specialists like Webroot, Clearswift and Mimecast, and all the little niche products for enthusiasts like ComboFix, Hitman and VoodooShield.
A quick look at a few "best antivirus 2016" review articles shows at least 30 different vendors, a good few of which are so new that I have never heard of them. And that is not including the various anti-spyware offerings, which arguably are exactly the same thing these days.
This is hardly a dying industry!
Agreed! I was one of the first victims, my home network was broken into via TeamViewer in January, long before the current fuss. I reported it right away, and after the automated acknowledgement it took TWO WEEKS before TeamViewer contacted me to ask for logs - which I provided, and then never heard anything more. I was not impressed.
So a spokesman from the cartel says that it's not a cartel, and there's nothing to worry about? Oh, well, that's Ok then!
But the comparison with the LTO organisation is interesting, it will remain to be seen whether the Alliance lives up to its name, or goes over to the dark side...
T-Mobile's Streetcheck service lies like a rug - I used it to check four key locations (all in major cities) before I switched to T-Mobile last year, and in spite of its firm assurance that they had excellent signal quality, three of the four are poor at best for 3G, and in one I can barely get a 2G signal at all!
I'm sure you're right, Twm - evidently it's just as well that I have a specialist on my team to understand such things better than I do. However, exact details notwithstanding, the net effect is that with self-signed apps enabled Joe Public User can indeed install any old application, utility or game (a 3D version of the classic Snake game seems a particular favourite with our engineers), whatever its provenance, which is exactly what Uncle Steve's letter says can't be done:
"Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer"
Nice to see that the reality distortion field is still hard at work.
I don't mind the outage - problems happen - but I'm annoyed that they didn't post an update on their customer support status page until 8:36pm, more than four hours (by their own admission) after the problems began. That is what the status page is for, after all, and it's a PITA to sit there trying to work out if it's a local issue, a routing problem or, as it turned out to be, a host issue. Thumbs down, there, Fasthosts...
