Posts by Dal90 83 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2016
"Hey, our Sorry Page when a site is down is pretty long in the tooth (like copyright date at the bottom is 2005)...could our Web Developers make us a new static page to serve up using our current corporate branding?"
"No problem."
They give me back a static page that replaces the previous self-contained page (we hosted all its fonts/images/dependencies/etc) with one that has external dependencies to a dozen different providers.
*sigh in enterprise bureaucracy*
Exactly.
Sears failed first, LBO was just a way to extract as much milk and blood as possible before the cow died.
Yes, big companies swimming in profits can have some creative spinoffs -- Discover Card was a sucess, Prodigy was cool for it's time. Both of those threatened no entrenched bureaucracies.
But I don't think anyone who has worked in a large enterprise would expect for a moment they could have transformed their catalog business into Amazon. Amazon needed to be built from the ground up, not against the inertia of either the catalog (killed off in '93) or the retail division that would have furiously opposed the idea.
It might be a tipping point.
Starting this week business groups at my employer are having some of their workers being to WFH for more than a day a time; I think this is to work out any sort of kinks like "Ok, I can work at home, but when I'm in the office tomorrow this paperwork needs to get signed by X and then delivered to Y who'll fax it to Z" stuff still around.
My 2000 person relatively IT independent division of a multi-national can and has had all the office / tech staff WFH for a day due to snowstorms (only a skeleton maintenance / security / old iron operations crew on site at HQ).
After a trial test telling most of the business to WFH one day, and actual "campus is closed except for skeleton staff" snow days since then, followed by adopting WFH policies allowing ~1 day a week for many folks.
What we had for WFH already made executives comfortable enough to close a 100 person call center in another section of the country and pull that work back to the home office knowing we wouldn't be shut down by bad weather.
There are 72 comments here, and according to a quick search for the word "star", I'm the first marginally qualified junior level Grey Beard to comment on this???
"It consisted of a long cable, configured as a ring, to which PCs would be hooked up via clunky connectors."
Token Ring was a physical star with logical ring. Individual cables ran from the wiring closet where the MAU was located to each desktop individually.
Kept a MAU around in my garage until about 6 years ago when I purged it during a cleanup.
We're not talking that Thicknet Ethernet with vampire taps or Thinnet Ethernet with BNC connectors!
>And contrary to popular belief even in advanced civilised societies, truth is NOT an absolute defence against defamation. ... being two obvious examples upheld in UK and USA courts
I can't speak for the home country of George Orwell, but in the U.S.A. truth is an absolute defense. Hard stop.
See first paragraph, and the subsequent examples where even statements that are not absolutely true but only substantially true receive the same protection absent of malice.
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/substantial-truth
>Original was 'cheap',
It was an $11MM budget in 1977. Other top-10 films that year had budgets of $3MM to $25MM.
Wasn't "big budget" like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or A Bridge Too Far. Wasn't small budget like Smokey & The Bandit or Saturday Night Fever.
Lots of $5MM movies are being made today. For Netflix.
Silly people think these things will go through a hub. Or your own router for connectivity...
5G folks.
The internet of things will have their own connections, unless you either live in remote location or build a Faraday cage around your house.
We can't have the peons we're gathering data on do things like block our TVs from sending us back data on what they're watching and how often they have sex.
> "right to work" state. This delightful bit of Doublespeak says that you don't have to give an employer any notice
Complete bollocks.
You've confused at-will and right-to-work.
At will employment predominates in the U.S. with narrow exceptions. You can fire anyone, anytime, without notice, for any reason other than membership in certain legally protected classes and situations. Those classes and situations can vary a bit from state to state.
One state (Montana) nominally has a just-cause law that one can only be fired for just cause following a six month probationary period (during which employment is at-will). However, one of the "just causes" to fire someone is "legitimate business reasons." Loophole, meet truck. Truck, drive through loophole.
Right-to-Work is used to describe legislation that eliminates Union & Agency shops.
Closed shops require you be a member of the union to gain or continue employment; those were outlawed by Taft-Hartley act. Union shops require a person join the union after being hired, and Agency requires a person pay union fees for contract negotiations even if not a member. Taft-Hartley gave states the authority to outlaw Union & Agency shops.
Which leaves Right-To-Work states with the Open shops were employees may be a member of a union, but can not fired for not being a member of the union (as in Closed & Union shops) and can not be fired for refusing to pay agency fees to the union (Agency shops).
> They're just (non-illegal) photos.
In the U.S. it would fall under sexual harassment to store them on your company owned devices and expose yourself to IT staffers. It was inadvertent as he knew the photos were there as evidenced by his later request. They weren't his medical records...which still would haven't been on the company's device.
Just because he's the head of the company doesn't mean it would be appropriate for him to walk around in a robe and let his penis hang out when IT staffers came into his office.
Not complicated, don't go posting nudes of yourself around your workplace.
Minor-ish clarification -- Hap Arnold was named Chief of Army Air Forces in June, 1941 (thus prior to U.S. overt participation in WWII) under whom fell the various Air Corps. The Air Force name dated back to the mid-30s as the highest level of planning but with weaker operational control than the mid-1941 form.
After Pearl Harbor Day, Roosevelt gained power to make additional reforms without Congressional approval, which allowed Arnold to start shaping the independent Air Force that controlled planning / logistics / operations.
>For that matter, my job title at the moment is "software engineer"
If you're stamping plans for, oh say...flight controls on a 787Max then yes there probably should be requirements for licensing.
For most purposes, no.
This same nomenclature issue (pushed by Texas IIRC 20 years ago) is why you don't see IT certifications using the word Engineer today like Certified NetWare Engineer or Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer anymore.
That's a statistic that is being extraordinarily obfuscated for a long time.
Latest of any sort I could find:
2018: The U.S. requested 160 and received 57 extradition requests for *violent* crimes, which represented 18.4% of all extradition requests made (in both directions). So there is a lot of room in that math, but that makes for 1,200 annual requests 2/3rd made by the U.S. and 1/3rd made to the U.S.
https://www.justice.gov/doj/page/file/1148176/download
The last year I could find good, detailed statistics was 2002. The U.S. was running between 670 and 950 combined requests annually during the 90s. Figure we've had 20% population growth since the mid-90s, 950 + 20% is in line with the current level of extraditions (assuming both are "high" years and the 2018 figure of 1,200 wasn't a "low" year).
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/OBD/e0208/extradition.pdf
...not that I'm sure it makes them care, or perhaps on the other side it makes them more interested because it involves corporate intelligence gathering instead of consumer surveillance...
Most of the folks affected by this would tend be large, risk-adverse corporations with hundreds and usually thousands of users impacted simultaneously.
InfoSec policy that machines lock after five minutes inactivity? Every time someone in Citrix chatted with a co-worker, everyone sharing that server in a virtual desktop environment got white screened.
Tiered deployments that roll out new versions of software over six weeks or more from the first alpha tests until the last production group gets it to catch issues and minimize impacts...and make sure at least part of the company can still do their basic work? Google laughs at you and remotely enables a feature.
Chrome got their nose under the tent because (a) some non-trivial number of modern apps work better on it than IE and/or Edge; (b) it's easier to manage for shops already managing IE because it sucks in settings for internet browsing from Windows instead of an independent store like Firefox does.
>With no insurance and medical bills to pay they sued - the makers of the kid's jeans for not being visible
Who are you kidding?
This is America -- their insurance company sued the makers of the kid's jeans. Subrogation baby!
(And sarcasm aside, many if not most of the "you've got to be kidding me" lawsuits you hear about in the name of John Doe v. ______ are not filed by John Doe, but by his auto|health|homeowners insurance company which holds the subrogation rights to sue on his behalf and compel his co-operation in said lawsuit.)
Tesla if programmed with decent logic:
Oh my God, there's another car coming into my lane...um, er, um...I'll hit this inanimate object over there and the frame and airbags will protect my occupant better than hitting another car.
Oh my God, there's another car coming into my lane...um, er, um...well crap there's a person in my only escape lane so instead of almost assuredly killing him I'll take the hit with the other car on since our crumple zones and air bags should at mean everyone at least survives in the cars.
...developed over decades in a time with much fewer regulations.
We couldn't rebuild a couple buildings in Manhattan in 10 years.
When I hear the "Green New Deal" and "We only have 10 years to do this to prevent catastrophic consequences" the only rational answer is, "Better start planning the infrastructure to deal with those consequences."
So you want to greatly expand the capacity of the electrical grid? Great. Electricians and linemen take about five years from the time they enter school until they reach the level of Journeyman where they are considered to be experienced enough to exercise independent judgement and work without immediate supervision.
Can it be done? Yes. Can it be done quickly? No.
He was given the accurate amount of fuel by volume in gallons.
They did the conversion from gallons to imperial pounds and punched that number into the flight computer which, like potato chip bags, goes by weight not volume.
Computer was metric.
HOWEVER...the real screw up is bigger than the flight crew -- they took off knowing they had a defective fuel gauge and would rely on the computer to calculate their fuel remaining.
It's one thing if you're in the air and lose a sensor to go, "Well shoot, that's OK we have a backup...says we have enough fuel, no need to declare an emergency, let's just complete the flight." It's another to take off knowing you're down to the backup system.
Fires up the Google machine..."The UK has a road network totalling about 262,300 miles (422,100 km) of paved roads"
Where has BT installed 121 million kilometers of cable?
Cables are made up of multiple wires. As I recall the "standard" American telephone cable running down the road was 640 pairs, or 1200 individual wires. Smaller of course for the isolated farm house and running down alleys where they didn't anticipate future growth. And I think folks can figure out from there the discrepancy in the figures.
>you can set up your own internal self-signed private CA and ignore these policies used by public CAs.
This proposal is by the CA/Browser forum.
They don't write standards that bind any CA public or private.
They write standards that the Browsers will throw warnings when a cert issued by any CA doesn't meet their standards.
Have fun with the InfoSec training explaining when end users should accept the security risk and when they shouldn't.
===============
Hey, I'm all over ADCS Autoenrollment (oh wait, our InfoSec group doesn't allow that and require manual requests (which I have scripted) followed by an email (scripted) for them to manually release (which once they do scripts complete the process...))
And I'm all over Let's Encrypt (same InfoSec group basically blew milk out their nose and scrambled trying to explain how it doesn't meet corporate standards for being a well-reputed commercial CA).
But even with that automation, I'm still left with situations such as:
-- Devs who claim their applications can't Intermediate / Root certs to validate and have to pin the public the certs;
-- Admins who claim likewise (really your six-figure Application Gateways can't possibly deal with certificate chains and need to pin a public cert?)
-- Federated organizations which don't check for SAML metadata updates and need to manually coordinate updating SAML signing certificates
Any claim of an insanity defense went out the window with her writing, "Ive basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, f***ing dropping capital ones dox and admitting it"
She was aware of her actions, aware they were wrong, and aware they came with negative consequences for her.
Whether she's competent to stand trial is more questionable, in which case treatment would only delay a trial.
>They had an experienced IT tech (but apparently dumb criminal) and a lot of guns and assorted household stuff in a house with a man known for playing a little fast-and-loose with the law where firearms and explosives were concerned.
They (probably) didn't know about the guns -- they likely did know one of the occupants had a history with explosives, which probably did justify the actions.
>*With hindsight*, the police went in with more force than necessary this time.
I'll say it was appropriate assuming they knew the records of the other occupants.
Because of the nature of this crime, if at all possible they want to get to the computers ASAP to prevent any dead man switch type events occurring -- precluding trying something less intrusive like a traffic stop or snagging the target walking into a coffee shop that could be followed up by a search for physical evidence later (the drugs aren't going to flush themselves).
=============
1) Folks who think this type of militarization is "new"...can just go take a look at the Wikipedia page for Elián González for circa 2000;
2) Folks who think this is how it always goes down this way can google the 2007(?) arrest of Ed & Elaine Brown in New Hampshire -- which simply took restraint, patience, planning, and a wheelbarrow to haul around the balls of the U.S. Marshal who ran point on the arrest.
>Most other methods take considerably more effort.
And are far less humane.
As a fundamental factor of personal autonomy, one should be allowed -- but not required as their only option -- to beg a doctor for poison. Why should the state have any more authority to require someone to live against their consent than they do to execute someone?
Commons are not always -- or necessarily often -- tragic.
"in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad."
The Maine lobster fishery for a modern example; centuries of mountain side farming in the Alps and South America for older ones.
But it does take adults agreeing on and enforcing rules. No one is going to make U.S. healthcare -- or education -- any cheaper by making it single payer because the most of the adults long left it and the rest are overwhelmed by complexity. The systems need to be freed from most bureaucracy and broken down to smaller units that can be reformed.
This guy and I probably would have a Venn diagram of voting records that looks like a shocked face O_O but it doesn't mean the critique is that far off:
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
> It sounds like somehow they knew where the shipping point was
Since not that long after 9-11 (especially the anthrax scares a few months later), every piece of mail in the U.S. can be tracked back to where it entered the postal system. Just a matter of cameras at the sorting center, needed for the automated character recognition for mail routing anyways, and keeping track of which bin in the back of a mail truck contains items from which box.
In addition to any video surveillance that might be available, since they're not tossing the mail around like a lottery drawing the mail is usually in the order it was dropped into the box which makes it easy to track down folks who mailed items before and after to see if they may have noticed any clues.
The days of anonymously sending a letter by mailing the postmaster in a far away city and enclosing another properly stamped and addressed piece of mail for him to drop into the outgoing mail for you are long over.
>4 weeks of paid holiday is the legal minimum in most European countries.
2017 Average annual wage, PPP followed by average tax burden of single worker at average wage:
US: $60,558 31.7%
Germany: $47,585 49.7%
France: $43,755 47.6%
UK: $43,732 30.9%
In the 90s I worked for a French owned company (Fortune Global 50 size). One of senior managers on my site was on rotation from France, and while we were both working late one evening he commented while the salaried staff had a lot more vacation days in France, they also worked much longer days on average than their American counterparts in the company and in the end the number of hours were similar.
2017 Average family insurance plan, unsubsidized, in the U.S.: $18,764
I can't say either the numbers or my anecdotal story paint a full picture of the nuances, but when folks state "In Europe they start at four weeks of vacation!" or decry "how expensive insurance is while the NHS is free" it's important to understand there are some really fundamental differences that need to be considered to make comparisons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage
https://taxfoundation.org/comparison-tax-burden-labor-oecd-2018
https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2017-section-1-cost-of-health-insurance/
1) LOL ... employment contract in America?
Most folks are deep into six figures if there is a contract with an individual.
2) LOL ... a signed copy of anything? Last physical employment *offer* I got was 1997. Docusign away by clicking online forms. You have to chose to print it out yourself.
3) Company policies are often (not always) held to be implicit contracts that favor the employee in court -- i.e. you can sue the employer for violating it, all the company can do is fire you for violating the policy; plus ambiguity is read against the party who drafted it. The employer can, of course, sue you for malfeasance that exists outside of the contract -- fraud is fraud, but they have no legal address against the employee if you flip your boss the bird one day, declare you quit, and walk out the door even if the company policy mandated two week notice. OTOH if they policy says you get two weeks severance on termination that would be enforceable by a court (and probably just by the state labor department before it even got to the point of involving a lawyer).
The problem here is the company policy changed, and the party suing (I'm guessing self-represented since I'm not sure many lawyers would take on HP for a 1/3rd share of $10,000 or $20,000) failed to utter the right legal incantation at the right moment to get a court order to force HP to turn over a copy of the original policy.
I wonder how often they rotate it?
I can fully see them keeping it $100,000 increments with a sheet listing all the serial numbers for that bundle. Quick and easy to grab the amount needed without delay.
Then the kidnappers look at their unmarked, non-sequential cash and realize all the notes were printed in 1974.
>Having said that we, in Europe, still generate more than our fair share of pollutants, but we are trying to do something about it.
1997 -- 2017: U.S. CO2 emissions down 7.6%; Europe CO2 emissions down 7.5%
Since Trump took office, U.S. emissions have fallen each year and European emissions have risen.
Yes -- the U.S. uses far more per capita than the Europe, but "trying to do" seems to be more about optics than statistical realities.
Excel spreadsheet at https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html has loads of details if you'd like to dig around on your own.
Ask the Swiss banks how far out of reach of American prosecutors they are.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-14/a-top-swiss-bank-settles-a-decade-after-secrecy-began-to-crumble
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-secrecy/era-of-bank-secrecy-ends-as-swiss-start-sharing-account-data-idUSKCN1MF13O
...and don't forget that financial crime is why Meng Wanzhou is being detained in Canada currently...
https://www.reuters.com/article/newsloop-usa-china-huawei-tech-charges/u-s-unseals-indictments-against-chinas-huawei-and-cfo-meng-wanzhou-idUSKCN1PM2IC
>NOTE: no idea even if conscription took very long, there must have been some administration.
Little historical tidbit:
In the U.S. voluntary enlistment halted on 15 December 1942 and all military personnel through 1946 went through the draft. At the same time all civilian hiring for war industries was mandated to go through the U.S. Employment Service -- so that people with critical skills (or simply required manpower) couldn't be hired away from one job to another. Both actions were meant to streamline the process and reduce churn.
The "American Steel" part of British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood depended in no small part to very complex waterfall plans to build up and coordinate supply chains. Organic and lots of agile stuff going on -- it wasn't central planning, but there was central coordination. I've seen some amazingly complex hand-drawn wall size diagrams but my Google-fu is failing me at the moment.
The sum result could be amusing at times -- once the war was won, the system that was built up to deliver troops and material to the front lines was suddenly stressed that they couldn't just reverse it and it became an enormous "System D" to muddle through and figure out how to bring troops home...whilst at the same time *after* VJ day my dad was still inducted, went through basic training, through an abbreviated vocational school...and then discharged after about four months. They didn't need him, but at the same time they weren't able to hard stop the giant machine put in motion to draft/induct/train/deploy folks on dime.
>If they are sat in the airport taxi rank and turn the app off, wait 5 mins then turn it on and immediately collect a fare that's easily traceable evidence.
I go to an auction.
I don't like the prices, I don't raise my paddle.
I like the prices, I raise my paddle.
Yep, it's evidence the price hasn't aligned with the market alright.
Don't want prices to fluctuate with market demand? Regulate it. You know, like the taxi industry you deny that you're a part of.
>so maybe the old system had some advantages...
The old system had many advantages.
At a certain level (which is probably much lower than folks might think initially), you're better off having a secretary who is intercepting communication, answering the easy stuff, organizing the rest so it can be presented a decision maker in an actionable context. The boss can whip off a quick outline of a reply and let the assistant take the time to proofread and fix/improve grammar.
I was at the tail end of having a lot more support staff, including one company that still had an English major on staff just to edit documents for the executives, and things like online calendars and email shifted an awful lot of work from lower-paid to higher-paid employees.
>What stupid mail system would allow you to configure a vacation option that would bounce back indefinitely?
Mid 1990s...more than just Exchange. Novell GroupWise, for example. Was working for 3,000 employee corporation when there was a bad address response meets out-of-office reply loop that took a three day weekend to fill up the mail server.
>by white Caucasians that mistakenly believe that they still live in a mostly-white America.
Regardless of political beliefs about the negative and positive discrimination, facts are facts and not a matter of perspective -- and that statement is factually incorrect.
The United States is still mostly-white.
The flip to majority-minority is not expected for another 25 years.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/
> Everything that happens before they hit play takes place in AWS, but the video content that follows >comes from a separate system: Netflix OpenConnect, the company's proprietary content delivery >network (CDN)
What he said. https://www.computerworlduk.com/cloud-computing/how-netflix-moved-cloud-become-global-internet-tv-network-3683479/
>the Scottish Govt pay less than £2000 per year per student to the Universities, whereas they can charge £9000(+?) for RUK and non-EU students.
Bugger...
Connecticut, USA:
*Community College* which is the lowest cost, usually non-residential (i.e. live at home), tier average tuition is $5200 per student in tuition PLUS $14.000 in taxpayer money.
Our public research university on par with Dundee the tuition and mandatory fees for state residents are $13,000/year on top of the state taxpayer subsidies. Add another $12,000 for room and board if you want to live on campus, thought quick googling Dundee that looks to be about the same for what the list as "living expenses" near the campus.
The year I filled out -- by hand -- three states plus federal taxes, I did appreciate Rhode Island's sense of humor:
https://imgur.com/gallery/VCzAzht
I'm single, small mortgage (2/3rds paid off), low property taxes, no kids, decent salary -- with the new $12,000 standard deductible I should be able to drop back to the 1040A "short form" because I can't add up enough expenses to bother itemizing anymore.
Absolutely silly I have to either transcribe to paper for free or pay a tax prep firm for the privilege of performing data entry for them in order to file online...when the state & federal revenue agencies already have the paperwork covering what I need to report.
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