Posts by Our Lord and Savior Rahl

Lenovo puts the 'cloud' in cloud computing, proposes mid-air datacenters

The last one in the disused tunnels...

That's already a thing, some of the no longer used tunnels in the Rock of Gib are used as a datacenter.

UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy

Re: OXCAM

Certainly not at current technology levels - the VX4 has almost exactly the same speed as the H145 commonly used for the air ambo, but a quarter of the range and a longer refuel cycle.

As a city to city taxi I'd agree it makes more sense, it's quieter for one and the range isn't really important. But for something like Air Ambulance - you'll have longer flight times, shorter ranges, and a longer off-duty cycle as well as a much more restrictive payload.

I'm sure it'll get there, but it's a long way from "there" yet.

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Re: So no phones on planes then?

It also says he was charged following a search of his home under a warrant - which means that there may well have been enough corroborating evidence to support that theory.

At the end of the day, the burden of suspicion to make a charging decision is lower than the burden of a conviction - to charge someone needs sufficient level of suspicion to think that it's a strong possibility an offence was likely and that it needs to be proved out in court. To convict someone requires the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt to the court that an offence took place by that person.

I guess when it actually goes to court we'll find out won't we? At the moment all that's happened is that the Magistrate agreed that there's enough evidence to send him before the courts - if there's enough evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was planning on using it for nefarious ends, then he'll be found guilty.

Charged + Released on Bail =/= Found Guilty and Convicted.

Re: "on condition he restrict his use of the internet"

At the moment he's been tried rather than convicted - he's bailed till his hearing not sentenced ;)

Though given the circumstances, I'd have also thought a complete ban would probably have made more sense

Uber ex-CSO Joe Sullivan: We need security leaders running to work, not giving up

As someone who is a safe distance from the C Suite but has worked with many and varied over the years, I would much rather have somebody at that level who lacks some of the technical skills but has justified trust in the people who he puts beneath him, but knows how to handle the rest of the board and manage people. Those have been the ones I've considered good.

I've worked with plenty of C level guys who are far better at the technical roles than I am, and they get mired in the weeds, lose the big picture, and fail to bat away all the BS coming from the board and foster a hideous work culture while standing over your shoulder saying "Do this thing this way, actually just let me do it".

The good ones are hardly ever there, because they're constantly pushing your agenda at the board, dealing with the many and varied HR issues that plague most good IT departments (because lets be honest, we're not typically the best "people-people", and making sure everything we suggest as important is put forward as their view and a redline so it gets through even when it's difficult.

Technical Skills / Leadership Skills / Management Skills are not one and the same.

So with respect, I disagree. As a humble lead engineer ;)

Well, I partially disagree, I definitely agree that there's a place where they should at least understand what it is their team is trying to do and be willing to put the time in to learn where it is relevant.

It's like a ship, the captain knows how the engines work, the rules of the sea, and how to navigate. But he doesn't steer the ship, fix the engines, and empty the toilets, he's busy making sure all those teams work together and don't step on each others toes. Or he should be.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Just maybe?

I've worked on projects with bad project managers, and it was chaos. I've worked on projects with no project management at all and it was just as bad.

I also worked on a project with no management that part way through hired a really good project manager and it made a huge difference.

I can only speak for myself, but I have a tendency to get drawn into the weeds if I'm actively working something and lose the big picture, I've worked with a lot of really good people who are the same. Having the grown up to make sure that we're all walking in the right direction and not about to wander into the road can pay absolute dividends.

But... there seems to be a lot of people with PM qualifications who have no idea what they're doing - or have ONLY project managed but have no concept of engineering principles or the like. Or even worse people skills than the engineering team.

Pretty much all the headaches at MSPs stem from cybersecurity

Re: Obvious question:

Because many people use the same passwords for everything and post about where they work on social media, it's not hard to join the dots

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: "best in the US"

When I lived in Devon and worked in London, I looked into getting the train as my Land Rover cost roughly £70 in diesel there and back (those were the days) and meant 4am out the door and around 9pm return.

My options were drive to Exeter and get the express, which took about the same amount of time but was £240 a day. Or take the slow train which cost the same, but left at 11pm the night before and would get me back about 3am.

And so I carried on putting miles on the car, in which I could enjoy being on my own and listening to podcasts while I slowly crawled down the M4 with everyone else.

Re: Have they been hacked?

From who the holy discharges springeth forth. May the unity of the sacred charges power the immortal reason that hath created the spark.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

NATO Standard for me.

Microsofties still digesting pay freeze upset by Nadella's 'landmark year' memo

Re: inhumanity

CEO Worship is 2 words...

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

Re: You have to wonder

I mean I have no association with Microsoft and I would - how would I know that they hadn't been left by the forerunners to elevate one of us to global dominion - all you have to be is brave enough to try.

Playing jigsaw on my roof: They can ID you from your hygiene habits

Re: Jigsaw identification

Quantum Nanopulse

Lack shame? Fancy some festive Windows knitwear? We've got your back

Really I think that all they need to do to recapture past glories and kick start record sales to displace these other upstarts from the trillionaires club is to remind people of the glory that was the Microsoft Zune.

You're Welcome Satya, of course I'll be your EVP of Corporate Strategy!

Academics horrified that administration of Turing student exchange scheme outsourced to Capita

Re: Why Turing?

With a bit of luck they may have at least fixed the hot water in the showers by now though - I counted myself lucky if I could get 5 seconds of hot in every 25 seconds of cold for my allotted 2 minutes :(

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Re: So,...

Whilst I agree that would be a discouragement - VM and it's board/CEO are legally separate people, it's fairly essential to how all business work really.

There's circumstances where that line gets blurred, but generally that requires deliberate malfeasance on the part of the people concerned which would be almost impossible to ascertain in this case unless there's an email floating around from the CEO saying "I'm Commander Shepherd and this is my favourite spam email campaign on the Citadel"*.

Which is fairly unlikely.

*Incriminating email could take a different form to the example.

Apple wins Epic court ruling: Devs will pay up for now as legal case churns on

Re: Epically wrong.

Am I thinking of the wrong Epic?

The one I was thinking of is the ones who created Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and the Unreal Engine that powers oh so many games. With the Unreal Engine definitely predating the App Store by a considerable margin...

Though to be fair, I don't give two hoots who wins this court battle, it's so far down the list of things I really care about - Epic hasn't remade UT99 in the latest engine because they've inflicted Fortnite on the world and realised that's their cash cow so I hate them both.

But I do take odds with the "Without Apple, Epic would still be shipping “you are in a twisty maze and your lamp is dim” text adventures for the C64. Although it often seems like it, Apple is not a charity."

Hell even the spectacularly commercially successful Gears of War predates the App Store by 2 years.

An ideal ruling for me would be to ban the sale or release of any games on a mobile device ever. Because I'm old and I don't like them and I prefer my shooters with a keyboard and mouse thankyou very much.

Co-Operative Bank today 'terminated' Capita's outsourcing contract years before it was due to expire

Because they're levelling up to build back better and leverage world aspirations as part of Global Britain to turbocharge their UX.

Re: So

Different Co-Op - confusingly they're unrelated.

Re: Ex Mutual?

I had to write a whole assignment on the different forms of this for my degree - shareholder returns is often the one that's focused on because it's easy and tangible and you can say "look, I did the best by the business because I made eleventy bajillion quid profit for the shareholders" whereas it's much more difficult to quantify things like reputation, minimizing environmental impact etc.

But just because everyone does something a specific way doesn't mean that's the only (or even correct) way to do it.

What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul

Re: Anyone who thinks standing on Lego bricks is bad

Or a d4 :(

Nextcloud and cloud chums fire off competition complaint to the EU over Microsoft bundling OneDrive with Windows

I gave up with LibreOffice - I wanted to be cool and love it and avoid Word/Excel etc but honestly, it was just a bit shit. Maybe it's because I've used Office for the last xx many years, but most of the time it felt like I was fighting with it.

I don't use Office because I want to - if I'm writing documents / sending emails and the like it's because I have to before I can get back to whatever I was doing that was actually useful, so anything that gets in the way of that normally annoys me pretty quickly.

Some software I hugely prefer the alternatives for (anyone who's successfully wrangled Dynamics/Navision etc I salute you) and some I don't. It's not because it's MS, I just kinda like Office as for me, it works better than the alternatives and that's the bit I care about. I run a business to make money, not for ideological purity unfortunately and so I'll take the path of least resistance every time.

I know, blah blah, MS shill etc.

Normally I'm with them, but OneDrive came out 3 years before OwnCloud, and 7 years before NextCloud - so the "copying other peoples ideas" argument is a little hypocritical in this case.

And I hate hypocrisy.

Almost as much as Heresy.

Government-favoured child safety app warned it could violate the UK's Investigatory Powers Act with message-scanning tech

I am not certain that it tracks fully, as presumably they'd have the consent of the Childs legal guardian and by definition, that would be sufficient.

I'm fairly sure that would apply right up until the age of majority, which means the only people affected would be at the tail end of sixth form.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: '"how far can I push this before it gets silly". A true engineer'

"A space engineer is a professional practitioner who uses scientific knowledge, mathematics, physics, astronomy, propulsion technology, materials science, structural analysis, manufacturing and ingenuity to solve practical problems in space."

-Wikipedia 2077

Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: Impressively average, which is how corporate buyers like it

Re: Hmm

I think I've worked for 4 companies that didn't have Thinkpads as the default device - 2 of those went for HP, 1 went for Dell, and 1 went for a local PC store that had repair lead times for the simplest of things being somewhere around the decade mark.

Out all of them, I'd take the Lenovos every time (with the HP a close second).

UK health secretary confirms end for NHS Digital, architect of the GP data grab debacle

Re: New Post, Great Opportunity

"We seek to level up the NHS Digital Vision to synergise brand awareness and achieve a fusion of technology and people, turbocharging achievement to achieve our aspirational missions and realise a global Britain as we build back better"

A bit like that?

Xiaomi has developed a mini heat pipe so your smartphone doesn't get too hot to handle

Re: Tesla valves

It's OK, I'm double jabbed

Cisco warns 'unintentional debugging credential' left in some network switches can be abused to hijack equipment

Re: As an aside, I'm puzzled by the terminology

It's Passive Optical Network Switch as in a switch for a Passive Optical Network, not a Passive Switch for an Optical Network.

Basically the fiber and the splitters are unpowered.

Boeing's Starliner capsule corroded due to high humidity levels, NASA explains, and the spaceship won't fly this year

Re: probably a case along the lines ...

Er... The Hornet is Boeing. That flies on carriers all the time.

OK it was originally a McDonnell-Douglas project but still, being anal about facts is important.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

I don't know, I have a proper subscription HP with HP Instant Ink. The printer has worked fine, the ink is cheap enough and I don't have to mix with the peasantry to go and buy cartridges anymore.

TBH I'm happy with it as is. Think I pay £2 a month for the minimal printing I do (mostly Traveller Character sheets and the like) which works out about 4p a page. The same as printing it at my old work.

Horses for courses I guess.

3D printing site Thingiverse suffers breach of 228,000 email addresses amid sluggish disclosure

Certainly from a GDPR perspective the former depends. If it's a personal email address then it would be classed as personal data, and a company one (the usual forename, surname, company domain) includes your full name and place of employment which is definitely within the remit!

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Re: Worrying in the real world

I can't remember the last time i saw an airgapped network with one machine and a single cable...

Or one that sent any network traffic in the clear for that matter.

Or one that wasn't actively monitored.

Or one that wasn't in a secure site.

Any of the above would make this challenging. All of the above make it largely irrelevant. Because if you can overcome all the above you don't need to sniff data one character at time. You've already identified the target machine and are within "10s of meters" of it, you've broken the hardware encryption on the data, sidestepped all the monitoring and broken into the secure site. You may as well just put the PC in the back of your helicopter on your way out.

Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos fraud trial begins: Defense claims all she did was fail – and that's not a crime

Re: "... failure is not a crime"

Without going beyond a brief scout through the legislation, the maximum sentence is 5 years. In specific circumstances (usually connected with Terrorism offences) - and the burden of proof is pretty high. That said I don't think there's been a test case in the UK so I'm not sure how it's applied in practice.

Alibaba fires manager accused of sexually assaulting colleague

Re: The crackdown

OK pull up a chair...

There's this system of government known as "Communism". Whilst it doesn't really work, China is a communist country and the government tries very hard to portray an image that they're all good communists.

In communism, everyone should work for the glory of the country.

You see comrade?