Posts by spireite

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Obligatory one word question?

Why?

I mean its cool in many ways, but much like the Rad BASIC article.... Why?

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Re: Ahhh ...

I remember receiving a letter from HMRC stating I owed them £1.50, this was back in 96.

Even then I thought what are they doing - it'll have cost them more to chase it rather than write it off.

Starlink's Portability mode lets you take your sat broadband dish anywhere*

Re: Why

OOh, that's quite interesting.

When you initially look at, you think there are loads of Starlink Sats up there...

What is clear thought is that when zooming in, there really aren't. Looking at the UK now, there are perhaps 3 or 4 over the UK in reality.

Where I am currently in Croatia.... not even that much.

Is one 'dot' one Satellite, or does it represent a small cluster?

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

Surely people then just asked, when looking for him....

Have you seen mick hunt?

Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code

Is an Amiga still considered modern?

I loved that kit, having had an A500... but modern now might be stretching it these days,

That said the OS was way ahead of its time....

F5, Cisco admins: Stop what you're doing and check if you need to install these patches

Re: "abandoned IT assets"

Classic response, and works every time.

I use this methodology every time I find a server being used for prod, that isn't actually prod.... or when someone insists on using a server that actually isn't for that use... like a temporary box that's been superceded.

If I've asked them for several months (really) to change their code, I reserve the right to bork the connection. They've had long enough to sort it...

Apple to bin apps that go three years without updates

What's the exact criteria then?

.... or to put it another way......

"What's the de-cider?'

Rocket Lab successfully catches falling rocket booster with a helicopter

I guess their general success with this is something of a ...boost.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

Systemd-hate

I don't get the reason for the dislike.

I assume there are a few purists out there, but really - does anyone normal actually care that much?

What's an actual valid reason for the hate? (please, i'm genuinely interested)

Microsoft fixes Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes

Unexpected delay in bagging area.

Unbelievable frankly....

Unbelievable that the bug existed.,,,,

Even more unbelievable that ANYONE thought that W11 was remotely needed for a till!

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: You were lucky

If you can't find them, are they black holes?

Cloud spending to scrape $500 billion this year – Gartner

Re: Do People...

Have companies ever listened? (generally)

20 years ago, I worked for a company that took Gartners Magic Quadrant BS as 'the bible' to roadmap the company future....

I saw it then as it was - total utter bollocks

Gartners Euro headquarters are a mile from me. Never been tempted to sully my CV

Space Launch System dress rehearsal canceled for repairs

Re: Artemis foul?

I always wonder what Armstrong would make of the situation today, when SpaceX are lobbing kit up on a regular basis.

I've no doubt he'd have changed his tune on the SpaceX.

Re: might... you forgot the word might.

You have a point technically that the SpaceX booster hasn't got off the pad yet.

I do however, as many others, have full confidence that Musk-produced kit will get off the pad successfully way quicker than the SLS kit even if the his tuff has an aberration or two beforehand.

Re: "If at first you don't succeed... you're probably NASA"

It seems to me that all new Rovers are going to exceed life expectation by living most of it here on traditional terra firma!

By the time that the SLS actually works properly, we'll have all had a visit from the genuine 'Vulcans' and 'Klingons'.

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

Re: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"

A former company of mine would never countenance them being involved in any projects, akin to screwing yourself over.

From that point they were referred to as 'I Bum Myself'

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

The reason I don't put into crypto.....

I don't know what I'm doing......

I know "jack-shit"....

And that protects me...... this whole crypto thing is the scam of all scams. It makes Charles Ponzi look like he invented something of little risk in comparison.

Creator of SSLPing, a free service to check SSL certs, downs tools

You contacted them?

Surely, you'd send them a ping and wait for the response.

Evidently the TTL is now 0

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Extra credit

Thing with this is that it's such a waste of time.

A former employer suddenly had to get certification, because a major worldwide supplier demanded it.

Cue months of wasted time.

Then every year or so, a BSI bod would come in an 'audit' us against the said document.

One week before.... "can someone update the documentation".

Cue 10 people spending the entire week doing their respective departments updates.

The auditor was an anal retentive, but there was never a big list of issues.

As far as the supplier was concerned, it was proof of the company being properly run etc.

I can tell you now.... it proves nothing, but earn some people big bucks, for very little real use.

AlmaLinux comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Serves a roll

Agreed. I use it all the time as I spend half my time in Linux.

It's the best way rather than faff with dual boot.

Used in combination with Windows Terminal.......

Emma Sleep Company admits checkout cyber attack

Well, someone somewhere with this data will be linen their pockets.

Obviously, the police will be opening a pillowcase. Once they've solved it and arrested the suspects, I have no doubt they'll be saying to them on arrest "Bedspread em", and load them into Divan.

Okta acknowledges 'mistake' in handling of Lapsus$ attack

Okta, trusted

Yet another oxymoron breaks out in to the public eye....

I always get nervous when everyone higher up seems to think that cloud vendors of anything can do the job ALWAYS better than the inhouse team.

Yet again, this is an example of 'outsourcing by another name' and 'this action shifts all responsibility from our company'...... no it doesn't.

Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all

Re: Experience

One of the fundamental issues of the milennials right there when it comes to practicality.

Unable to think for themselves, do research etc. Blind to commonsense, blind to knowledge of the 'elders'

We'll be in caves again in the next few hundred years if we allow them.....

Sealed documents, NDAs etc....

In many ways the same thing.

The only thing that should be in 'keep your mouth shut, here a few $k-£k for your trouble' are items that disclose meaningful things to competitors - like your new product, genuine secrets

Outside of those, anything that impacts on the rights of an employee should be allowable, irrespective of prior coercion - sorry - agreement.

Testing for COVID with the sound of a cough? There’s an app for that

So, covid is a dry cough, but to check you probably need to cough several times in the phone to make sure...

That contravenes the rule of DRY...

Oracle's compliance cops now include Java in license audits

Re: Confusing mess

Most lawyers are shi-ite..

Authentication oufit Okta investigating Lapsus$ breach report

Re: any employees who’ve changed their passwords in the last 4 months

My emp gave me a new laptop, and didn't even enforce a change of password on delivery to my house!

Neither do they appear to have a time policy either

MFA?

Surely, if you're using any third-party, and for that matter - if not....

You should always have a decent MFA policy in place?? So it's mitigated then?

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Re: Deleting macOS

Cult?

Most Apple users I meet are more of a cunt...

HCL stands by legality of its bonus clawback scheme

HCL have an office near me in Egham, Surrey.

I was even tempted to see what roles they had being relatively local.

One read of the JDs told me that it wasn't going to be a good place to be.

I can't put my finger on it, but it just didn't 'smell right'

Of course, they'd never get away with this bonus recovery trick over here, but they probably come from the same cloth as the P&O owner.

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

Use the right tool for the right job

I do a lot of Python, and lighter stuff, so VS Code suits me fine for that,

The behemoth that is full-fat Visual studio is complete overkill in that use case IMO

On the other hand, if I'm fully in the MS ecosystem, doing .NET stuff, then there probably is an argument for full-fat first.

YMMV.

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

IZAL?

For years, I thought that was a book in the bible.... true story!

Linus Torvalds ponders limits of automation as kernel release delayed

Re: Automated Testing

Problem is, the vast majority of testing is done by Privates, not Colonel's.... so they are even more likely to miss the 'of the beaten track' tests.

Cow-counting app abused by China 'to spy on US states'

Find in old code

Legacy issue because of a code fresian

Capgemini wins £30m deal to work on UK customs

Capgemini....

An oxymoron if ever there was...

... because their costs are never capped

DBAs massively over-provision Oracle to protect themselves: Microsoft

Re: fair assessment and reasonably accurate recommendation but..

"The difference can be one index away"

Never a truer word spoken.

Increasingly, less and less attention seems to be paid to 'optimisation', purely on the basis of one mantra....

"Upscale the box(es) until the performance meets expectations"

I've seen a system go from 128GB instance to 512GB and higher in vain to get performance. This was based purely on the fact the db could be cached in memory. It doesn't fix locking issues.

Eventually, I was asked to take a look.. took me a morning to identify the central issue of indexing , or lack of it...

Oracle has nothing to do with the headline

Everywhere I have ever been, whatever the tech, on-prem or in cloud...

IT' IS ALWAYS OVERPROVISIONED

And there is a reason for it.....

Nobody does any analysis of future growth in data, or usage.... None. There is no analysis of historical growth/usage to extrapolate from either. Experience tells every tech that if a BA or PM say 'we expect to need capacity for X rows etc' or whatever metric, that it is wildly wrong and you add 50% (seems to be the jist)

I have never known a BA/PM be remotely right. I've known the to be over optimistic, overly pessimistic - mostly the latter.

Ask a question like how has system growth been for the last 12months, nobody has a clue, because that level of gathering has never been done. Why? Because that involves expense to action.

Desperately seeking SaaS: English council to replace Oracle R12

Oracle IBS surely.....

OneWeb drops launches from Russia's Baikonur spaceport

Re: At least we still have Galileo.

They still have to Figaro that out

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

Shame you couldn't, because then your joke would tower above the rest of them.

Of course, if you think that Siebel faulty, you read Manuel.

Re: A spelling question.

Ironic that, because you can now buy that yacht for mere shillings...

Re: "General Motors has also suspended some business in the country."

To be honest, the 737 Max would make a great missile. Doesn't need a pilot either!

And can't afford to buy anything from a Candy Shop

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

Re: Interesting.

I use an Argon Neo case - passive.

Most useful thing ever....

I have mine running PiHole, PiVPN (so I can connect safely into my house)...

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: Atari ST ?

The Oric, a computer before its time in fact.

First mentioned by Shakespeare - the british version of Da Vinci no less

Re: Atari ST ?

It was a knockoff of the Amiga 500... that's no joke,

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Demon memories

Demon were my first ISP, and I stayed faithfully with them...Pricewise they were upper end, but they were bloody good. I moved off them when ADSL became popular and went to NDO.

NDO were also bloody good at the time. But like everything, they were taken over and it went to hell in a handcart..

Good memories!!

USR Robotics modems, and the fact I had to pay my phoneline into my parents (they couldn't stand the time I was online and they couldn't call when I was on!)

Escape from The National Museum of Computing

Re: BBC micro

Do you need to solve the problem by collecting them on Chuckie Egg? Visit a new planet in Elite? Or perhaps collect them in pitstops in Revs?

In which case, I'll happily do it....

Lightweight Linux distribution Slax rides again with v11.2

Why so long?

I guess it's because the devs were a bit lax....

or

the new build was disappointing, I mean cax....

or

There were busy rerunning DS9, watching Dax....