* Posts by spireite

584 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2015

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Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

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OS/2 Star Trek Edition

I remember right at the beginning of my career that we had several licensed copies of OS/2 Warp.

Frankly, it was an excellent OS, and made Windows look silly.

I was coding in C++ for that in Supply Chain related businesses, and it was head and shoulders above.

We practically wept when we saw it was Windows taking hold of the market. Very much a Betamax moment when you questioned the sense of companies backing the poorer horse.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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'arguing' with an interviewer

Not exactly an argument, but 25 years ago now, I was given a 40 question quiz about a language I and they used.

Inevitably, there are many ways to skin a cat, and the chief dev decided to claim that my some answer code was invalid, and that the other way (his) was better.

I proceeded to dismantle the argument there and then.. Considering the CTO was sat in the interview, strangely I wasn't concerned.

I was hired two days later, and the first thing the CTO said on arrival on my first day was 'Thank you for knocking him down a couple of pegs'.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

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DietPi

Does it count as another distribution?

My Pi4 seems happier on it.

JetBrains TeamCity under attack by ransomware thugs after disclosure mess

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Coat

Failing to apply patches is commonplace

Not specific to TeamCity but It's almost like admins are Jet for Brains

You have to question why you'd expose TC to the internet *without* insisting on a VPN or .similar to get at it.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

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Inspection Legality

Genuine question.......

In the UK, does the Licensor have a legal right to enter a Licensee premises to check this stuff out?

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

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Pretty obvious who's cabling it

... Because it's Virgin territory

Ellison-backed med tech startup Project Ronin closes doors

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20min to 5min ?

I would assume that wasn't the only selling point of the project to prospective customers.

If it was, I'm not surprised. Medical professionals have enough stuff to do, so waiting 20m is hardly a hardship - is it?

Equally, if that time reduction is the only 'shout from the rooftop' achievement from Oracle, then it sounds like a money-pit.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

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..but, but....

cloud is cheap and it's bottomless........

...a bit like your corporate wallet...

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

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Black Helicopters

Be nice if they concentrated on making the websites work properly.

If there was ever a demonstration that good UX designers are worth it, any GOV.UK hosted site demostrates why you should hire them.

Without exception, the current lot is unwieldy, amateur, buggy....

The logo ius a VERY long way down the implementation list - or it should be.

Dell staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work

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Re: Saying you'll quit isn't the same as quitting

In fairness to Musk, he appears to have excelled at SpaceX though.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

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Joke

Re: DSL 2024 is not as svelte as it used to be – but who is?

If only the main person involved was called Jason

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

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Holmes

Chatbot vs Human

Amazed they tried to get out of it....

On the other hand, anybody who has called any of the following in the UK with questions.........

Border Agency

HMRC

Benefits

will probably conclude they'd get more accurate and sense out of a chatbot!!

YMMV.

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

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Coat

Updates due...

.....sometime in the awning.

If they want to attract business going forward, it'll need one hell of a pitch.

Have they pegged the access and damage?

How they address this will determine the Calor of their P&L line

Hopefully a Swift resolution.

Finding the perpetrators will be like trying to find Elddis.

Jet engine dealer to major airlines discloses 'unauthorized activity'

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Joke

Scary.....

The more often I see these kind of things, and the data been stolen... it gets worse.

....you could see it gives me the Willis

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

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Joke

Bolt count.....

Maybe the engineers read the Aircraft Type & Variant and mistook that for the potential number of bolts required...

Max - 9

.

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Apparently, Boeing are doing a Safety Torque at the company today...

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Re: I hope they also covered

If it was at cruising altitude rather than 16K or so - believe me - somebody would have died.

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Re: A gross understatement?

That's the least of Boeings problems, a little bit of plastic.

Previously, they've left tubes of sealant, and a ladder for gods sake....

I'm waiting for someone to find the body of a Boeing Engineer behind the bulkhead!

NIST: If someone's trying to sell you some secure AI, it's snake oil

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This entire GPT/Bard/whatever is snake oil

I've been round the block numerous times in my career.

Never have I seen so many intelligent people fall into a new-tech (GPT) trap, making it something it clearly isn't.

It doesn't take much to prove it's mostly show and nowsubstance.

Back in the dim-distanxe, the first thing I was tough in the early 80s was 'Garbage In, Garbage Out'. GPT et al are still proving it exists.

Microsoft prepares Visual Studio 2013 for retirement

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Pirate

Re: So Much 32-Bit Code Still On Windows

To be honest, it probably wasn't the most likely platform to benefit from 64bit that much. In my usage I haven't appeared to gain much benefit at all!

The other thing is that it probably is the buggiest/slowest POS whether it is 32bit or 64bit

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

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Boeing....

Raises the question at what point did Boeing start putting binned components in the 737MAX ?

They ceratily binned their foibles there.

NASA Juno probe to produce 'firehose of data' during close flyby of Jupiter moon

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Coat

But...

It's not a dwarf planet

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

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Mushroom

Scruffy people about....

Back in the early 2000s, the IT department of which I was part regularly had to replace the keyboard of someone I'll call Terry.

Terry had a devastating habit of eating French stick chicken salad and sweetcorn at his desk. This contributed far too regularly to keys not registering and this was sometimes down to

1. Mayo gumming up the mechanisms

2. Crust getting between keycap and keyboard plate

3. Sweetcorn getting UNDER and inside the keycap.

For some time the keyboards were being replace at 3 month intervals.

Eventually. we stopped doing it. because....

... Terry was spotted in the loo taking a No1 or No2 and exiting WITHOUT washing his hands.

Once you see that, you question every bit of stickiness, and keyboard discolouration. You also give yourself a good scrub down not unlike Chernobyl...

Eventually senior management banned him from having an office supplied keyboard, and also from eating at desk.

Infosys loses ten-year, $1.5 billion contract announced just three months ago

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Infosys - cowboys

I've been involved with some Infosys generated stuff.

Not a fan...

With reference to the previous comment about AI, I'd wager you'd get a more cohesive end product just instructing ChatGPT to do it all.

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

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Coat

Never be done

It'll be on the backlog at the time of the epochalypse

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Re: Don't rush them!

Maybe they don't have enough working hours....

'Return to Office' declared dead

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I call it the Office Titanic Effect.

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5 days a week? Yeah, right

I was contacted last month for a role in Sloane Square area of London.

5 days a week in office.

Post-covid, they'd claimed the IT function was massively less productive in terms of releases WFH, and felt WFO was the way forward. Apparently they've struggled to recruit.

No s*** Sherlock.

If you can't make it work then you are hiring the wrong people anyway irrespective of WFH or WFO and a lot of those are probably management level.

Hybrid is the way to go, and don't even try to convince me the 4 days in office, 1 day out is hybrid...

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Thumb Up

Re: Stick

If I could upvote you 5000 times I would.

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Re: There it is

Trouble is, a lot of them probably pushed our pension pots into them.

Okta data breach dilemma dwarfs earlier estimates

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Mushroom

For the same reason that companies have gone from on-prem to cloud, attracted by the shine green pastures proclaiming.....

1. We're cheaper than on-prem

2. We'll manage all services for you

and the implied special promise....

3. You don't need to hire security admins/DBAs/etc....

and Bullys special prize.... (this seems apt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIOhWbLcVqg)

4. WE ARE SECURE

All of the above were to us whitebeards.... FALSE!!

I haven't seen one place I've worked at where cloud even came close to the on-prem and related costs - it literally has been magnitudes more expensive.

Everywhere I've been got rid of DBAs, Security admins, etc... then within 3 months realised they'd been sold a dummy, but already committed to a 'saver' aka 'reserved' plan of 2 years plus. At this point, they rehired the knowledge they'd lost and practically tripled the annual expense by the end of it.

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Coat

Re: Oktagone

Surely, they have another press releases/breaches to go....

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Trouble is, it'll be a flood...

Trio of major holes in ownCloud expose admin passwords, allow unauthenticated file mods

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Containers that leak....

If I had a quid for every container that exposed creds.

I've seen it too many times, because people assumed that containers were a walled garden. Usually, I see it when creds are hardcoded in some config file/yaml somewhere.

They forgot it needs doors - ports - for most things to work, and thus your boxers are whipped down for some good penetration.

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

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Re: only 15 years ?

I remember trialling Wyse kit.... way back in the day.

As with everyone at that time, that was an attempt to save tons of money to avoid buying much pricier desktops/laptops.

It rapidly became obvious that for the use case my company, it wasn't very..... Wyse... to pursue them

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Joke

Re: Er, is this article 15 years old ?

That technology has already been done too....

It was called a thumb drive.

New Relic warns customers it's experienced a cyber … something

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Seems recently that security is very much a relic for many platforms.

OpenAI pauses ChatGPT Plus sign-ups as it 'hits capacity'

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20 bucks per month

You'd think that that would generate enough to actually pay for the capacity.

In reality, I expect the requirements to run this stuff FAR exceeded any revenue generation.

Ubuntu for Arm64 laptops (plus RISC kit)

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Asahi-flavoured?

Too late, I created that 2 years ago when I knocked to bottle over on my Ubuntu laptop.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

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Re: Not Unusual

Tom Jones has probably drilled a few holes to be fair.

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Did he swear when he did it?

I imagine he said.....

Fuk-Einhell

AWS staffer shows off the workplace that used to be a prison

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Trollface

Re: Gymnastics

In fairness, Amazon keeps getting rid of people so they'll give space back to the locals...

Google, Amazon among big names in tech axing jobs this week

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Mushroom

This is another highlight of the risk joining a FAANG.

You could be dropped more like a hot coal than a hot potato at velocity greater than non-FAANGs would.

Impatient LockBit says it's leaked 50GB of stolen Boeing files after ransom fails to land

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Re: There is such a thing as too much data

Found a use for ChatGPT then

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Nothing here - move along

What will be more interesting is not the tech data and IP, but whether there is stuff in there even more incriminating on the Max debacle etc.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

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Child protection

If a spotty teenager wants to visit the usual dodgy places, he's likely in this day and age to use a VPN anyway since more and more browsers have one built in.

I'm surprised the marketing bunch haven't asked to ban those.

Datacenter would spoil beautiful view ... of former industrial waste dump

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Escape from LA becomes real.

Do we need to send Kurt Russel in to get Khan?

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No DC...

Then they can't state 'Iver big un'

I used to work for DX on the Ridgeway estate. I'd never say Iver was idyllic... It's got plenty of gypsy stes in the area - that's where Big Fat Gypsy was filmed I believe.

Maybe they should build on the gypsy sites. Locals wouldn't complain there I guess.

Bing Chat so hungry for GPUs, Microsoft will rent them from Oracle

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Re: So that ORCL cloud infrastructure is under-utilized, no?

The lack of processing power is Mordor on the response time..

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Re: Up in smoke

Gotta be close surely.

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