Posts by Plest 1039 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2020
Peronsally I like going in 2 days a week, my kids have left home and it's just me and the missus at home now so it does us both good to have "5 mins" apart. My company is still WFH, we have 500 employees with one office with 120 hotdesks, and I reckon most days I go in you'll be lucky to get double digit figures for attendance!
As my manager's manager said, "If we have to spy on people or keep tabs on grown adults, then we're failing as managers.".
You're making excuses for convinience. That's where we're going wrong. There are plenty of ways to secure systems and data to the Nth degree and they will always get in the way, to quote "Eternal vigilence is the price we pay for freedom.". You have come down hard but politely on people to educate them that the days of 1990s easy-IT and open PCs are long gone. If I have to lock up all your USB ports , put in AV software on PC, gateways and firewalls, then install multi IDS boxes, firewalls, 2FA, hardware sec tags for access to everything, website scanning and active blocking, then I bloody well will 'cos I know that the scum are kept at bay and you can keep your job as a user, making money for the business or keeping your charity running.
If you can't send a cat picture to Aunty Doris from your work account 'cos I blocked "webmail.com" then put it simply "Tough titties 'cos I don't care I'm afraid!". I care about keeping users safe and the business running 'cos the scuzz that inhabit the internet wont' stop, don't care about anyone but themselves and who will fleece for every penny you as soon as look at you. No excuses.
While I agree with you, these scum should be dealt with, messed up insecure IT kit is still someone's responsibility. These scuzzbags got in 'cos someone shortchanged this hospital on their IT setup. They need to look there for responsibility.
Criminals will always look to exploit, we as adults need to do our best to not make it easy, hopefully impossible, to be exploited by scum.
Of course it's disgusting that a bunch of scum would target a hospital but they're not normal, they live on the other side of the law where morals are already bent and so they have not issue with discarding them completely.
Howvever this is where we end up when technology is simply thrown into situations and is not properly set up or maintained. You wouldn't let your neighbour service your car's engine and MCU, so why do people insist of installing IT kit and letting "the friend of a mate's brother who did some Windows installs" set up entire IT kit?
IT is no longer just putting a few computers on a few desks, shoving a Novell Netware server in and everything's funky! That was 35 years ago now, gazillions of bytes of data have been processed and stored and it's all worth something to someone, this is what these sickos know all too well.
Your data is basically worthless to anyone other than you as data, but as a exploitable it's priceless. About time people started to take IT and their data way more seriously, chucking a copy of Bitdefender on your work PCs will not stop these scum, installing IT kit properly and doing the proper job, and that I'm afraid means paying ( in "beer" or money ) for professional IT people to do it right. You'd pay a plumber or a mechanic a proper wage and expect a proper job, don't shortchange on your IT kit.
Having said that I hope the hospital has some way to recover and hopefully gets some help to secure their kit, as this is not fair on anyone.
Ballcocks!
Sometimes a quick 20 second slanging match is needed to clear the air. Then immediately do what they both did, calm down, sit down and talk through what caused things to get so bad, work the problem over and then everyone moves on. That's how frustrated adults often clear things up and form stronger bonds. If you have something to say then just come out and say it, have it out and then we have something to work on. That's how stuff sometimes has to be solved when you mix egos and testerone.
"VM are shit!" and in other news large brown furry creatures observed defecating in densely packed leafy areas.
To be honest been a VM customer since they took over from C&W. never had a single problem with their support desk, probably 'cos I've never had the misfortune to ever had to call it thank god.
My father on the other hand has been waiting 3 years now for them to sort out an email account problem, he calls them once a month ( mostly for fun as he's retired and bored! ) just to check and never any update, still broken!
Tell me, in the name of that's holy and blessed, why the fricking hell a shop that sellls fricking soap, needs to be storing customer's passport scans?! Employees in the HR DB, fair enough but customers?! I hope they had a damn good reason else GDPR will be ragging their arses once the hackers have finished having their fun.
Bought one in 2010, 10 years of cheap carvan holidays and long weekends away, we paid off our mortgage in 9 years! Sold it and only lost about 20% value and now we're enjoying being mortgage free for the last 5 years. While I'm not longer one of Clarkson's Most Hated I have nothing but praise for caravanning as it allowed us enjoy a very financially secure life from now on.
There's always upsides and downsides to everything, but granting some faceless shopping corporation selling plastic shit a 24/7 live view of my live is certainly not on the upsides list. Bezos can keep his spy doorbells thanks, I'll make do with my CCTV cams where the first "C" actually means the most to me thanks.
Classic MS all over again, the company rammed computers into everyone's hands back in the 1990s whether they actually needed one or not are at it again. They're ramming AI up people's noses, have to be the first have it on desktops as a usable product, sadly all I can hear in my mind is "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!". Sorry but most AI seems to be a half baked solution looking for problems to solve, or at worst creating them so it can solve them.
How about some "reductio ad absurdum"...
If I take a meal to my aged neighbour I'm depriving a council worker of a job delivering meals on wheels.
If I take photos of trees for fun, I'm depriving a local forest ranger of a job cataloging trees.
If I make a sandwich, I'm depriving a cafe owner of making a living.
If I teach my 2 year kid not to shit their pants, I'm depriving a nursery teacher of a job!
I can keep going but no matter what you do there is always someone going to be paid to do that same thing, at some point in some place. Oddly enough as a professional IT person i don't get the urge to be a prat just 'cos someone I know is learning to write some basic code, if anything I'm willing to double-down on giving my time freely in order to help them take a step up, that applies to anything I can do!
Shut up and get off your soap box, you're just making an arse of yourself.
Not familiar with the phrase "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."?
- Come clean privately, you get sued for coming clean pirvately!
- Broadcast it, you get sued for broadcasting it!
- Do nothing, you get sued for doing nothing and saying nothing!
You can't win 'cos the game is rigged by those with something to hide, usually their embarassment if anyone finds out about how bloody incompetant they are.
Jeez, missing a sense of humour more like, bet you're a good laugh down the pub on Friday lunchtimes! Lighten up FFS!
NOTN is a comedy prog, satrical parody sometimes requires that you suspend your disbelief and just accept the comedy for what it is, basically stop overthinking it and just enjoy something funny, god knows we could all do with more laughs given the state of the world right now.
Back some point in the 1990s we used to use Lotus Notes as a browser, simply as it was able to do it and it allowed us to track what people were doing. Once IE got off the ground properly, we set up proxies, firewalls and standardised on IE but for aout 6-9 months Notes on desktop functioned as a basic internet browser for about 50 people in our place.
I wasn't the Notes admin but I believe Notes was rendering the HTML as a proxy as it wasn't as fast a Netscape off one of our Sun boxes at the time but it was just about usable.
As I have said many times, W11 is alright but I can't really see any reason to upgrade unless you're forced to. I only use it 'cos I get it through my work MSDN and we're about to roll out in the next 6 months so we need to get some practice in finding where MS have hidden everything useful!
I tell a lie, you get tabbed version of Notepad! Whoop-de-effing-do! ha ha!!
Where's the profit in that?!
Come on, we don't buy products these days to benefit us, get real! Manufaturers are no better than drug dealers, first hit's free and once you're hooked then they've got you for life on a permanent subscription for their product. Just try working with cloud microservices for more than 6 months, then you start to have a some small idea what heroine junkies go through!
I rememeber when Amstrad took over Sinclair and you could pick up so much old Sinclair kit of "pennies" I bought about 10 Sinclair machines of various types for about £600, drives and disks. I'd just started my first job, living at home and had money to burn!
My parents refused to buy Sinclair micros when i was a kid they'd both bought the original Sinclair odds and sods electronic kits and hated them, so we had to have a "Proper home computer, not that cheap Sinclair shit!", so we had two Dragon computers, then various Amstrads, Amstrad PCs and then Tandem XTs before me and my dad started building our own PCs. My Dad is now 82 and still build his own PCs and does stuff with Arduino, and he still hates Sinclair with a passion! LOL!
Don't even have to rip anything off, there's a million and one copycat code samples on how to write almost any AI enabled apps you like on practicallly every dev site you frequent. "Last Days of Rome" thing seems to spring to mind as the AI coding mass orgy is in full swing but pretty soon dawn will break and a million hungover headaches will commence accompanied by lots of genital itching!
People hoarding junk like garbage raking racoons! Ha ha!!
This is just a dead O/S that's had it's day, I know as I coded lots of REXX back in the day and I enjoyed using OS2 a lot but you have to move on, let things go. 18 months ago I literally recycled 700 DVDs and 150 VHS casettes. Yes it was painful for a few weeks but junking old crap is a very cathartic exercise. It's like when a HD blows out and you had no backup, you can sit and cry or just let it go, console yourself with the fact that if it was important you would have backed it up so it could never have been that important.
The older I get the more often I raid the spare room, bin the junk and always feel so much better once the skip is collected and removes my worries. Keep the important stuff of course, but most of the crap we buy and hoard is worthless.
Learn to let go and move on.
As a semi-pro photographer I wished I was the one who shot that famous background XP image. I seem to recall the snapper in question saying, "I can't tell you how much I got paid but safe to say that I won't ever have to worry so much about finding work for the rest of my life, all from that one shot."
1. All that extra draw off the NatGrid both locally in streets and on public charge points.
2. Home breaker boards to be upgraded due to the bigger draw required.
3. Charge spots, there's just 4 in my 60,000 pop size town about 10 miles outside London!
4. Fast forward to 2045 when all those batteries will need replacing, you mean we don't have plans to set up huge plants to handle recycling millions of batteries a year?
5. Average new EV cost today is around £50k and average 2nd hand petrol car is around £5k, inflation and people's budgets's stretch already.
6. Fuelling a petrol/diesel can be done in 5 mins, EV charging is around 3-4 hours min.
7. Are the RAC, AA, GreenFlag, etc all ready to head out and repair EVs? I assume they're already doing some of the work on the road. More spares in vans needed during the final 5 year countdown.
Just the few I could think of while I'm on lunch break.
Back in '94 two devs did that in our place, 4 hours later they were escorted out of the building for a) playing games on work kit and b) DOOM had the worst network code imaginable and it would flood ethernet with a torrent of packets and cause entire rigs to slow down!
We used to play it overnight in the work training rooms, we had to isolate the training room net from the rest of the company as we saw the overnight backups slow down by around 75% when we played DOOM!
It's often too late to convince women to enter STEM fields by the time they graduate, you want more diversity in STEM then start teaching it properly in junior schools and even introduce simple tech and ideas around mechanics to kindergartners, make STEM subjects as mundane and run-of-the-mill as maths and English and then you'll get more diversity automatically.
Forcing diversity quotas and such like does not work as all you get are mediocre applicants who have no passion for the fields. If you're going to work in tough, well paid careers you need to have a passion for those careers, that goes for any career path, if you don't have people with passion then you will not get the results from those working in it.
Dunno about that but Rust.org recenly had a very childish spat in their governing board. If the steering comittee of a language can't behave like adults, says a lot about the people using the product, as an old fart I'm certainly not trusting some upstart language made by children who haven't learn to work together properly! Ha ha!
Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.
"Sanctions played a big part in this given the collective punishment inflicted on the Russian people has strengthened support for Putin's government. Russian citizens view this as an attack on them..."
That's the mark of a dictatorship, the people are born, bred and beaten into fear from cradle to grave. They're told that you behave and say the right things then you get the prizes, step out of line, say or think the 'wrong things' and we're going to have to fetch the wheelchair after you fall down the stairs at the local Police station. Everyone knows it, knows someone who's been through it and even they don't enough fear is instilled to make people behave for the most part and wave flags when they're told, sing for the leaderrs when told, all done simply for normal people to get by in their day-to-day lives.
Smiling, happy people doesn't always tell the truth. I bet if I hop on a plane and stand in Red Square asking average Russians if they're happy with Putin 99% will say yes and hurry on, automatic response, shut up and you get to keep your knee-caps.
Sorry but Altman looks like a sociopath, one of those people for whom you walk round the other side of the office to avoid. You might get unlucky and they corner you in the kitchen at work and tell you how they spent the weekend doing taxedermy or sewing their new BDSM outfit, you just know that's the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of how unihinged they are in their spare time. The only reason they have a job is 'cos they're so focused and smart and the company HR dept kepts a close eye on them!
Why the heck would AI corps want any sort of guardrails? AI is a battle ground, if you deliberately hobble your kit you're an idiot 'cos no one else is going to. All this BS about "AI ethics" is just that, a load of hot air 'cos the AI space is such a hot topic right now that no one is going to dare handicap themselves for the war to get hearts and minds of consumers, if anything I expect more suspicious abilities to be allowed, maybe not publicly but a lot of "blind eyes will be turned", mark my words!
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