Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Opt-in --- Opt-out.. it's all BS from here....

'if you answer "yes" that ticked into the "the sucker will take calls" box and the phone rings more.'

I have an alternative. How long will the sucker hold the line "a moment"?

Re: Time locked up

"And his alternative may be a lifetime in a US Supermax"

His alternative may be a lifetime of the ego damage of being totally ignored by the US.

"They can show ... but they will not reveal how they obtained the evidence"

If they will not reveal how they obtained the evidence then we don't know that they didn't simply invent it. If they invented it then it isn't evidence. If they don;t have evidence then they can't show anything.

Revealing how they obtained the evidence is a link in the chain of proof every bit as essential as the evidence itself. No chain, no proof.

Re: MS Windows is finished

" A decade from now, Windows devs may be getting over £1000/hour from the truly desperate. We are not there yet."

I doubt it. There are too many of them. Add a few more decades & you might be right.

"We have an army of really expensive laywers who can tie this up in knots until it goes away."

Apart from the fact that DPC has gone straight to the top there comes a point where it's cheaper to do things right than pay lawyers to avoid it.

Re: It reminds me of a friend of mine....

I knew someone who was made redundant from two different companies by the same director.

Re: Talking about this at CyberUK Practice yesterday/today

"Between the fire, house and car insurance issues and cyber crime, there is certainly one chasm of difference and that is one of intent. If someone intends to attack you in a targeted attack, then it is very difficult to draw a parallel with fire insurance except in the case of arson."

OK, you spotted the arson aspect. But houses and cars are also subject to targeted attack. Even shipping is subject to piracy. The insurance industry has been dealing with insurance against crime for a long time.

Although cyber attacks might in some cases be down to nation state organisations they can also be perpetrated by teen-age skiddies.

Re: Always interesting

"when we were kids we used sugar and weed killer or black powder from fireworks to blow up all kinds of stuff"

We had a method of inflating balloons from the gas supply. We constructed fuses from a length of paper impregnated with sodium chlorate (weed killer) with a few matches taped to one end and then taped to the balloon. Lit the fuse (NOT with a match) and released. A hundred foot or so in the air the balloon burst, the gas exploded and burning matches scattered across the sky. Being in a narrow valley echoed the bang.

Lovely, but nowadays you'd probably be put into care.

@Alister. Beat me to it by about a minute. I can only conclude the journo didn't know & had to look it up.

Re: Same problem as any helpdesk.

"I can't understand why people keep paying for these fecking things though, you'd think someone would have a clue by now."

They keep paying for these things because they're easy to measure - the call centre equipment will do the measuring for you. Even excluding test calls, assuming the equipment can differentiate, won't help because the consequence would be hanging up live calls to take new ones.

Time to answer is probably a good measure if used sensibly. If you get towards the failure limit it tells you you're getting to the point where you need to add resources but, of course, this is going to be resisted by whatever management entity is going to have to pay. Turning into a target makes it useless as a measure (Goodhart's law rather than the Cobra effect).

Setting targets based on outcomes, which is what should be done, creates a very much more difficult measuring task.

Re: Am I the only one

"You could cram the racks closer together if you didn't need to fit humans in between them to replace faulty hardware."

Now there's an idea. Ever seen document archive shelving like the stuff in the picture at http://www.mobileshelving.org.uk/ ? The racks of shelves run along a track which is a bit longer than the space the shelves need when they're closed up. You just roll them apart when you need to access a given shelf. To do this with servers you'd need to be able to provide enough wiggle room in the cabling. I don't know if anybody's tried this with servers - posted here as prior art just in case there's an attempt to patent it later.

Re: Explainer?

"My guess is the author is aiming it at the level of his students at Preston Poly."

My knowledge of the graduates of that institution is limited to a sample of one but it would have been well beyond his comprehension.

"@Martin - English may not be their first language"

A handle of patrick_bateman might be a clue about that.

"Ah but the real purpose of the facility is as a weapon for zapping satellites."

Or incoming asteroids? There should be scope for a Bruce Willis movie in there.

"all hail the successor to the great IKABAI-SITAL"

IKNAI-SO

"A lot of UK business has been donating old computing equipment for almost a decade to organisations like UNICEF and Save the Children. What has happened to that equipment?"

Given that this is old equipment before it gets shipped one wonders how much longer it survives. In fact, how much survives the rigours of shipment. Having said that, any trip to the local skip site shows a selection of old PCs and monitors in the electronics cage. What happens to those? And how many of those PCs have been wiped?