Thank you for your service. Without folks like you I would never have learned to code. But more importantly, I would never had learned how to debug.
Posts by Ryan D
48 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2018
After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership
Thank gods
“I learned computing with PEEKs and POKEs on the Commodore C64. We had printed magazines with listings of games that we entered by hand : one guy reading and the other entering the text.”
Thanks gods someone else remembers this. For me it was a Vic20, but damn was that the way to go back in the day. Pick up the magazine when it hit the newsstands and would be hitting the keyboard right quickly thereafter.
Sigh. Yes I’m that old.
Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs
Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course
Google offered millions to ally itself with trade body fighting Microsoft
Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China
Canadian thoughts by Johnny Canuck.
Can Canada begin to charge an annual monster sized fine for all gun manufacturers in the grand old US of A for all the illegal guns crossing the border?
I’m thinking an annual fee of a few billion. Or maybr withholding electricity and fuel distribution. But we won’t call it a tariff.
AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else
Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week
"The firings/floggings/beatings will continue until morale improves”
It seems to me that these companies are oblivious to their workforces and have distanced themselves so far from reality that they no longer see the employees as a source of their continued profitability.
At some point, losing their high performers will end up with them having a mixed bag of middling management and deadwood/ deadweight to run the show. That can only end well /S
Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?
Back in the early days
I was working for a large telco with a team of support folks who oversaw the local servers in each department.
We had a horrible habit of using Telnet to jump on to boxes to do remote work and patching, as well as messing with each other’s kit. It would happen on a rather frequent basis that we would jump to one of our peer’s boxes and reboot it while they were up to something. This was our little in joke to get a person’s attention when it was time to head out for coffee , or more often than not, the pub.
Ah, the good old days.
Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns
If I recall correctly
One of the challenges faced by some countries was not the printing of a complete weapon which could suffer from tolerance issues in printing, but that component such as the upper receiver and frames while buying easily accessible components which are not controlled or are loosely controlled such as trigger blocks, bolts, barrels etc. This means that you can print a solid and relatively reliable short term use firearm and recycle parts as needed.
Nasty business.
Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years
Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off
Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project
Patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job
And get it done by yesterday
From the front lines, true story.
I constantly hear the demand to patch faster and to get it done is as short a cycle / cadence as possible. Why give us 7 days when they can demand 5 instead.
I mean, what could go wrong with rushed, under tested patches?
Oh, and do that in our two production environments which are mirrored and need to stay live 99.999999% of the time and , and , and. Yeah, 2500 servers (mostly RHEL, but yes there are Windows boxes in the mix) with varying support from the LOB app owners. Who need to sign off on every damn one before we can do final packaging and predeployment. What could go wrong?
Oh, and for bonus points, do this while being audited for PCI compliance.
Brit council gives Oracle another £10M for professional services amid ERP fallout
Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

I was expecting the upsell
Seriously MS, missing the opportunity to upsell a client?
Member: "what are we paying you for?!"
Smith: "Hosted email services."
Member: "So why aren't they being managed?!!!"
Smith:" I guarantee they are indeed managed. Your people can login and receive send email just fine."
Member: "WTF!?"
Smith: "Now, let me tell you about Defender for Outlook online and what it could have done for you in this case..."
Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects
One practice to rule them all!
Agile, for when failure is an / the option.
After watching several agile implementations and subsequent projects collapse, I have yet to experience the wonders and miracles of a successful one. I have also not yet seen a unicorn, but I am certain they both exist /s
Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push
Europol op shutters 12 scam call centers and cuffs 21 suspected fraudsters
Random thought
Is it just me or would it be absolutely killer if Europol sicced those strange evangelical call center types who ring you up at random and ask if you have found Jebus as your saviour while at you are trying to have supper,
On these fiends. Ring them up very five minutes trying to get them to subscribe to watchtower magazine. If that doesn’t kill off these call centres I don’t know what will.
Tech industry sheds some light on the planet's situation via LinkedIn
IBM to acquire Hashi for $6.4B, hopes it will boost software biz and Red Hat
Pack it in already.
Once big blue balls gets hold of this, it will signal the migration away from terrorform and packer. And then what? I hear opentofu is rather good now. Only the biggest players with massive investments and are use to being abused by IBM will stick around. <Sarcasm>This can only end well </Sarcasm>
Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room
Years ago
I had a grand splurge on the company’s dime some years back. We were in the process of building out an office for one of our core ops groups. This required building out new offices and cubes, new cabling and networking etc. During the week long slog, just as we were coming up to critical time, we got hit by a once in a century snowstorm. The PTBs decided they didn’t want my team to get caught up by traffic and transit snarls so put us up in the highest end hotel in the city.
The funny thing about all of this was that this was an entertainment company so while they limited our expenses for things like taxis etc, they gave each manager $2500 per diem for entertainment purposes. For every staff member a a manger had with them we could apply an additional $500 per. I had 3 team members with me and we were also joined by two other managers. So between the six of us we had access to a rather sizeable expense account. With the weather impacting access, we had the rooftop bar and restaurant to ourselves. That was fun.
Sadly events like this tend to be once in a career. If you find yourself walking into one, enjoy it to the limit.
Chrome Enterprise Premium promises extra security – for a fee
Oracle Cerner system implementation risks future patient deaths, coroner warns
Why Cerner?
Because, as my old catholic nan would say, we all need to suffer to show our penance.
Cerner is a blight on EMRs globally. Not that Epic is bullet proof (and possibly a cult, IYKYK) mind you, but you must have a serious hate on for yourself and your patients if you sign on with the red devil (big red).
Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden
Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs
A recent review from Canada
Saw this the other day and it does give an interesting view of what we deal with temperature wise in our neck of the woods. Currently -25 without the wind so I’m told. I’m not crazy enough to head out and check.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ev-cold-northern-bc-1.7082896
Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater
Britain proposes 'super-complaints' to help keep the internet safe
Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support
Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software
Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change
Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

That first paragraph brought me back
Ah, that paragraph reads like something cooked up by the vultures at the Strategy Boutique.
Innovative e-solutions to the sound of whalesong. (I miss my old Strategy Boutique shirt).
Mine is the one moving forward in pushing back the envelop of corporate paradigm
Don't turn it off and on again: Expired Cisco cert cripples vEdge SD-WAN kit
News Corp outfoxed by IT intruders for years
Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved
City council cans ERP project, keeps details of replacement supplier secret
Netflix changes CEO-sharing arrangement, teases paid password-sharing
It wouldn’t hurt if they offered better plans
It would certainly help if they offered better plans.
Want 4K UHD content? Great! Your only option is $23 per month BUT you get to watch on four screens at once and or four devices. Where are the 4K plans for folks with one screen and or device on the hunt for UHD content?
Not to mention, why the huge bump in cost just to get the aforementioned UHD content? I believe they are the only streaming service to charge extra for it.
Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss
Oh for the love of kittens
This presupposes that people don’t have the ability to self regulate and make informed decisions. What total bunk. Comparing this to something like passive smoking (which in my part of f the world is rather easy to avoid with all the prohibitions in place)is simply a joke.
Let’s be honest, there are a good many number folks who simply don’t care for the majority of sweets and the like and shy away from them. There are other who will only indulge in the office as they don’t buy them outside / for home, and there are those who just eat anything they get their paws on.
People will be people.
'Multiple security breaches' shut down trucker protest
There are moments like these
That I seriously wonder about my neighbors out west. Sigh, like we needed more of this crap to deal with.
For the record, many people around these parts have termed these folks as “freedumies”. Mostly because they are protesting for nothing. There are no mandates or restrictions anymore, they have nothing to protest about.
But if you must make a nuisance of yourselves, could you please keep it civil?
All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing
Mormon Church IT ransacked, data stolen by 'state-sponsored' cyber-thieves
The Metaverse is the internet no one wants
Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of
Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s
Re: Wrong!!
@zack mollusc,
This is so very true. I recall some earlier years I my career where we received 1 percent if we were lucky. By the time I quit some years later, I was making less than when I first started when cost of living / inflation factored in. This is the world we live in when we slog in the trenches.
Source: IBM disguised Watson Health layoffs as a 'redeployment initiative'
What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs
At last: Magic Leap reveals its revolutionary techno-goggles – but wait, there's a catch
Re: How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
"Given how long this has been going on does it have competitors?"
Not sure if there are any other's out there that are as much smoke and mirrors as these grade school graduates, but there are a few REAL competitors shipping product.
Included in that list would be:
Microsoft - Hololens
Meta - Models 1 and 2 (I actually have the original dev version)
DreamWorld - Dreamglass (Have actually seen them demo the gear) and it ships this month
Magic Leap should just take a leap into the great beyond and call it a day.