* Posts by Thunderpants

27 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2018

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Thunderpants

I was always facinated by the Gannet as a kid, probably because of the prop arrangement up front. I never had a concept though of how big they are though until I stood next to one at an air museum recently. Massive things!

Openreach needs to snap that BT umbilical cord, warns Ofcom

Thunderpants
Mushroom

Fibre?

Still annoys me that they are allowed to brand FTTC as fibre.

Driving Xtreme Cuts: DXC Technology waves bye bye to 45% of Americas Security divison

Thunderpants

My last place offshored once and we lost about a third of the UK based department. Training was a nightmare and it took about two years to get the guys over there to a position where we were confident enough to unleash them on the customer as there was large staff turnover with the Indian company we partnered with. Things just settled down when a major customer announced they were leaving us after our botched renewal bid so the Indian operation got scrapped. Fast forward five years and they are doing it all again under new owners. Guess they'll never learn. :(

Akamai CEO: Playing games from the cloud? Seems too expensive to be viable right now

Thunderpants

Re: Consumers want cloud gaming, heard of Fortnite?

I'm speculating obviously but I imagine Google have far more financial clout than OnLive ever did. They would be able to heavily subsidise Stadia until it either stands on its own two feet or they figure there is no demand.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Thunderpants
Mushroom

I remember back in the early days of my career, I worked for a small (now defuct) fledgling ISP. Being small, money was tight and everything was done by the seat of the pants but there was demand for our hosting service - more than we could have predicted. I remember my boss buying a "new" UPS to power our rapidly filling server racks. The boss decided to get the father of our of our engineers, who was a qualified commerical electrician, to fit it.

A few weeks later, one of the junior engineers was in the server room and came back to the main office complaining the room smelled of fish. A few moments later, the building went dark. We went over to the server room to investigate and were greeted with clouds of smoke.

When everything calmed down, one of the battery packs attached to the UPS was heavily blistered and it looked like that was the root cause. Being child like of course, we never let the unfortunate engineer who's father had connected the UPS for us at mates rates, live it down!

Wow, talk about a Maine-wave: US state says ISPs need permission to flog netizens' personal data

Thunderpants

Re: Why?

I think of it like Europe with member countries being the equivalent of States.

Nvidia keeping mum on outlook for year as data centre slows, channel chokes on crypto crap

Thunderpants

The PC gaming market seems to be in general decline anyway. Activision Blizzard for one said they were looking to the mobile market going forward and I can see this being reflected by the other major game development houses as time goes on. There will always be PC die-hards (I am one) but even I baulk at cost fo the RTX cards and if my view is similar to others, there won't be enough people willing to spend on high-end cards to make them viable.

Come friendly bit barns and fall on Slough: Equinix opens £90m data centre in London rust belt

Thunderpants

Re: Short-sighted IMHO

Manchester yes. Runcorn ... no :)

Apple iPhone sales down by double digits, Mac sales knifed by Intel CPU 'constraints'

Thunderpants
Coat

Re: Frankly, I'm going to downvote myself

I think this thought process can be applied to a lot of cases. I know Cisco CCIE's that use a BT Homehub or other ISP supplied trash router at home just because they don't want to bring their work home with them.

My personal preference is Android and has been for many years but I'm not going to bash people for using Apple if that's what works for them.

Huawei P30: New No-Pro's cameras are flash ... but there are some curious bits

Thunderpants
Joke

I wonder if anyone was using one of these at a recent meeting of the National Security Council?

Mystery of the Chinese woman who allegedly tried to sneak into Trump's Mar-a-Lago with a USB stick of malware

Thunderpants
Joke

Probably the same person that substituted the nuke bag for the fake one with the toy big red button given to Trump when he won the election.

Easy-to-hack combat systems, years-old flaws and a massive bill – yup, that's America's F-35

Thunderpants
Joke

I take it they won't be installing Kaspersky AV/anti-Malware software to protect the F35 then? ;-)

Google takes a page from Microsoft of old and revives browser ballot on Android

Thunderpants

Re: Dog in the manger

Install Nova Launcher and kiss the search bar goodbye :-)

I recommend Nova simply because it has allowed me to provide a consistent looking UI on the wife's phone over a few Android revisions now where the standard UI has changed over time. Without that consistency, I think she'd be demanding an iPhone.

Karpeles walks, Google and Microsoft board up Windows hole, and Android AV still sucks

Thunderpants
Pint

Re: Au contraire

"Hair monster"

Have an upvote for causing me to chuckle sir or madam.

Carphone Warehouse fined £29m for mis-selling mobile insurance to punters who didn't need it

Thunderpants
Pint

Re: Persistent buggers

"unless you are a clumsy bugger and keep breaking and losing stuff."

... when your insurance premiums probably get so high that it's worth just replacing the thing yourself anyway :)

At least Sony offered a t-shirt, says macOS flaw finder: Bug bounties now for Macs if you want this 0-day, Apple

Thunderpants

I guess all Apple has to do is include macOS in the bug bounty process and he can then submit the details through that program subject to its existing terms and conditions?

Freedom! Diodes Inc saves Scottish fab from closure in £50m buyout

Thunderpants

Some good news for once. Nice one Diodes!

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Thunderpants

I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode - King Size Homer ...

https://giphy.com/gifs/simpsons-dippy-bird-drinking-l41lUJ1YoZB1lHVPG

If I could turn back time, I'd tell you to keep that old Radarange at home

Thunderpants
Joke

Re: Pesky microwaves

We had something similar where a radio link became unusable in the months following its installation. It turned out there was a tree inbetween the line of site that impacted the link during the summer months.

We classified the issue as a .... spanning .... tree problem ....

Sorry.

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

Thunderpants

No, I don't think those companies are any better but in most cases, you generally fire up the app/page concerned after you've logged into the OS. Microsoft appear to be slurping data the moment you login to Windows.

Amazon Alexa is a concern for different reasons, obviously.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

Thunderpants

Re: Just go Linux "Take my Linux ... please!"

"I dunno, so many people pay over $100 for MS Windows, and pay hundreds of dollars in premium hardware costs to run MacOS, Linux fanbois can't give their pet OS away for free, and those same fanbois are convinced their pet OS is the best for the wider public."

Gaming unfortunately. The only reason I don't run Linux. The stuff I play only works on Windows and experimentation into emulation with Wine or alternatives hasn't been a great success :(

Day two – and Windows 10 October 2018 Update trips over Intel audio

Thunderpants

Re: Edge?

"thats not quite as much spyware by design"

It might not have as much spyware by design (dunno, I've not really looked into it) but I can say having installed it on a VM yesterday, it's on a par with Google for shoving advertising down your throat.

Congratulations - you've installed the upgrade successfully - by the way, here's MSN spam spam.

Supermicro wraps crypto-blanket around server firmware to hide it from malware injectors

Thunderpants
Joke

Re: No BMC jokes ?

"Morris Marina"

Shirley the "quartic" steering wheel of the Allegro was even funnier?

Prenda lawyer pleads guilty to moneyshot honeypot scheme

Thunderpants
Thumb Up

Re: The Prisoner of Prenda?

"toilet-plumber boys club"

Brilliant.

We've Amber heard a NASty rumour: Marvell man touts private cloud box

Thunderpants

"The product is said to perform better if it is installed in front of a home router, rather than behind it."

As old fashioned as I probably sound, I think I'll keep my own NAS behind my firewall thanks! :)

Prank 'Give me a raise!' email nearly lands sysadmin with dismissal

Thunderpants
Thumb Up

Re: Mailing list fail

Mailing Lists can be great fun.

We used to get announcements from our upstream service provider via an "updates" mailing list which unfortunately (for them) they had failed to secure. Someone replied to an announcement requesting to be unsubscribed from this list. This was subsequently broadcast to everyone on said list. Before they secured it, all sorts of stuff was going on - I think the last message I saw was someone offering to sell a pair of skis ....

It's a phone with a peel, but you'll have to wait a bit more for retro Nokia

Thunderpants

Thanks for the review! I was thinking about getting one of these but I might sit tight for a bit until it settles down.