Posts by jackandhishat

1980s sci-fi movies: The thrill of being not quite terrified on mum's floral sofa

Re: CGI is killing sci-fi

Moon is a cracking film. Can't wait for Mute to be released. ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1464763/ )

HP Ink COO: Sorry not sorry we bricked your otherwise totally fine printer cartridges

I'd buy a spork for camping - they're surprisingly useful - but otherwise I completely agree.

Tay talks back: What made you think you beat me?

Hmph.

Not bad. But you're no SHODAN.

William Hague: Brussels attacks mean we must destroy crypto ASAP

Why can't he do something useful when he opens his mouth, like fill it full of concrete?

Spirit of the Ghost: Taking a Rolls-Royce Wraith around France

At the risk of committing heresy...

... are there any bikers among the Reg staff? Not saying that I want to see writeups of how stupidly fast a H2 goes or anything, just curious.

Mind-blowing secrets of NSA's security exploit stockpile revealed at last

That's... black. Black! BLAAACK!

Oooh, what's for tea, mother? Pin stew?!!!

Veedub flub hubbub stubs car-jack hack flap

May as well set the thing on fire while you're at it!

SDN: It's living the dream – and just using what you've got

Shinies!

This is seriously clever stuff. I'm due to finally buy a house next year and I suspect some room will be set aside for building a lab to try this kind of stuff out. The funny / sad thing is that I don't expect to see it in my working life for quite some time yet due to corporate inertia.

Crazy Canucks heat their lab with muahaha-capable server

Soooooo

Can I borrow it?

Missing in action: The OpenStackers lost from Gartner's quadrant

Re: Need Glassholes !!!

Gartner can be useful for reference, provided good, savvy analysts are available.

Apparently none were this time round?

Happy birthday, Amiga: The 'other' home computer turns 30

My cousin had an A1200 when we were younger. I remember playing Gunship 2000, Pinball Fantasies & Illusions (DICE going on to do Battlefield... yikes), Worms, Alien Breed and TONS of other games. The machine is part of the reason I now do what I do. Wanted to be a game dev, lost my way, ended up doing *NIX...

His sister, being the smackhead she was, decided to pawn it a few years later. That royally hacked me off as I used to borrow it off him in exchange for my SNES - fair trade, I thought!

The story has a happy ending though. One day while at a client's site, rummaging through boxes for parts, I found a complete A1200 with extensive mods and enhancements - the client was an animation studio and they'd seriously tricked it out. Bought it off them for a fiver, hooked up a small HDD to a WinUAE instance, managed to install Amiga In A Box on it with WHDLoad, stacked it full of games and whacked it into the actual unit.

And it worked.

Gave it to him as a birthday present. He still has it to this day. :)

OpenSSH server open to almost unlimited password-guessing bug

Re: Other fail2ban issue...

I always loved the idea of port knocking. Proper secret squirrel kinda stuff.

Are you a Tory-voting IT contractor? Congrats! Osborne is hiking your taxes

Upvote(s) for having a conscience and a realistic perspective!

I'm a contractor too - first time doing it, in fact - but for various reasons I decided not to go the ltd. route and instead go through a reputable umbrella company. As a result I pay a fair whack of tax, but I have no problem with this. I recognise that the NHS and other essential services exist because of taxation, and would rather they stayed around for a long time yet (questions of mismanagement aside.)

I understand that people don't want to pay tax - wouldn't everyone rather have the cash in their pocket? However, if you make the decision to avoid as much tax as you can and then require the services of institutions that would've been partially funded by those taxes... well then you're quite frankly a leech. It's a massive oversimplification but I think most people here will know where I'm coming from.

Smart Meter biz case still there, insists tragically optimistic UK govt

Re: No mention of the Health risks!

Do these websites also mention the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide?

Blurred lines: How cloud computing is reshaping the IT workforce

Re: They're after mah jorbs!

Ehh... I'm still not entirely convinced. I see the theory at work in your argument, and agree with it, but given the quality of some of the devs I've worked with I'd be terrified at seeing them try to administer systems. (Think of all those horror stories you hear about outsourced coding.. how's THAT going to end up? Question for another article maybe?) Maybe it's more a question of practicality.

With that said I do also recognise that a lot of devs are shit hot at what they do and that they're likely to become transcendant mind-boggling cyborg codeslingers. This is a Good Thing, as smartypants points out in his comment - good devs, devs who actually understand optimisation and best practices, they're worth their weight in gold and will be even moreso in a world where Cloud(TM) is everywhere.

They're after mah jorbs!

The article does make some interesting points, but I'm not entirely convinced on the ops & dev convergence. Sure, you can spin up stuff in the cloud for dev, but knowing how to optimise, secure and maintain systems is a whole different kettle of fish be they cloudy or physical. Likewise, knowing how to tune applications to really make them sing is beyond a lot of sysadmins; you can change kernel params or registry settings etc. to help but without real in-depth knowledge you're limited in what you can do.

The SecOps idea on the other hand makes a lot of sense when you consider scenarios such as Heartbleed: how easy is it to kick off a mass Puppet/Chef/Ansible run to update the affected packages on a load of systems? Very easy if you've done your homework. Some testing is needed before massively deploying and there'll be edge cases but the act of updating the systems can be made far less painful than it needs to be.

Migrating from WS2003 to *nix in a month? It ain't happening, folks

Re: Sure, of course

I think the point he's trying to make is that while equivalent-ish software exists for some things (IIS <--> Apache / nginx etc.) the applications on top that were built and designed to run on Windows systems will need research, porting and testing to work successfully and safely on a *nix platform. This is going to take time - a month just won't cut it.

Good points, well made.

If someone asked me to plan a cross-OS migration in 4 weeks I'd laugh, slap them on the back then exit the room very rapidly. It's a nightmare on far too many levels.