Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"If you're the owner of a web domain I'd expect you to be using an email account for that domain or paying for your own separate hosted domain with email"
If a free gmail account is good enough for all those professional SEO "companies" that keep spamming me...
"deserve to be hired when in Actuality Linus is the kind of boss Linux needs and people should be hired for skills"
You clearly don't realise that Linus hires nobody. What he does is act as a gatekeeper for code submissions. Some of those submissions may come from people who have been hired, at least in part, to work on Linux. Some may come from people who are paid to work on other things. Search for "who writes Linux" to learn more.
If you're able to get code accepted it means you're good enough whoever or whatever you are.
"that 'once in a career' real DR event such as a data centre fire or flood."
One of the things about having had your place of work burn down is that you realise such things can actually happen and potentially more than once in a career. Those who haven't experienced one tend to put them in the "won't ever happen" category.
"If the beancounters can get something done by a certain date, why can't the IT monkeys?"
One of the things that the beancounters get done by a certain date is to outsource the IT monkeys who had their calendars sorted. And when the IT monkeys get outsourced are they really going to tell the beancounters "by the way, you need to keep an eye on this."? At some point beancounters get to discover that the IT people they outsourced weren't monkeys but there's a distinct possibility the outsourcers were - or maybe they were snake-oil salesman.
"For a variety of 'things' and a variety of customers, from ESN to businesses to my own personal usage."
Who or what receives the alerts from the monitoring? For your personal stuff, presumably you. But if those from your customers are handled by the customers themselves do you know if there's still anyone looking out for them? If they all come through to you then you become a single point of failure for the customers and what happens then if you retire or fall under a bus?
It's not the setting up of something to raise alerts that's the problem. Monitoring is an on-going process and these days on-going processes are apt to be interrupted by system failures reorganisation by management, especially those processes that deal with rare events on demand.
"If it is REALLY essential, and you have not taken precautions, I find myself very short on sympathy."
Remember the people at the sharp end are not usually those taking the decisions. The OP of this particular thread was someone whose employers had done so. There will be others whose employers hadn't and even a few where an original dual provision had been cut to save money.
"thats if someone has actually configured it to send out emails...."
And if the recipient of the emails is still there.
It's easy enough to set up a warning system. Protecting that warning system against the ravages of management changes is a different matter and almost certainly outside the powers of whoever set it up. If you were the one who was the designated recipient of the email and you've just been booted out of the job are you going to be in a mood to warn whoever did the booting that that particular mail box needs to be monitored? Is the booter even going to listen if you did? And will the booter get booted out in the next bout of changes?
There needs to be personal responsibility on those making such changes to ensure that everything like this gets covered under the new organisation. HMG has woken up to the fact that national infrastructure needs to be protected even when it's in private hands. Maybe that protection should extend to personal sanctions on those involved, even up to CEOs and board members. Make them sweat a little. After a few big personal fines or gaol sentences businesses would become a little less cavalier about reorganisations and outsourcing.
"Unless you were urging MS only outfits to decay and atrophy and shrink. Which I suppose works, too."
It's a very good interpretation, especially as they were his former former employer. It would be a good reason to move them from current to former status and get out ahead of the crowd.
"users do matter and will either not stay, complain or hate a design if they can't get what they want easily and fast."
The thing that most effectively causes me to not stay is a page that displays nothing at all or a list of URLs it wants Javascript from. If it doesn't work reasonably with NoScript in action then as far as I'm concerned it's a dead loss.
Step 1. Start rumours that the govt is spying on the public's $stuff, e.g. turning on everyone's Echoes etc.
Step 2. Govt starts taking serious public heat and discovered it's been courageous (as in Yes Minister).
Step 3. Govt appeals to telecoms companies to deny the existence of such TCNs
Step 4. Telecoms companies point out they have to keep shtum about TCNs and can't possibly confirm or deny they exist.
Step 5. What was that about an election?
"May can then tell ERG that look all your talking about amazing deals with Europe - well this is best you can get and shut up for a generation now."
Their view will be that they weren't in charge. Nothing other than utter failure with nobody else to hang the blame on will persuade them. Probably not even that; they'd just start finger pointing amongst themselves.
"confined to a European theatre of war"
I hate to break this shocking news to you but satellites go round the world*. Members of a constellation should be available at any longitude although the inclination of the orbit will determine the range of latitudes between which they're above the horizon.
* A Brexit satellite will be different. It will go round in ever-decreasing circles over the UK until it disappears up its own thruster.
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