Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
If you can't find one of the old replicas, there was a Kickstarter project that produced a vinyl version for the 40th anniversary.
Check out Ozma Records for more information. I pledged for one and it cost me almost as much to ship it to the UK as I pledged for it.
"When you walk home you just don't expect to come face to face with an enormous penis on a wall."
Sometimes, it's not even a human one.
The mural is still there, but Dobbin is not so pleased to see his master these days.
I was once interviewed for an industrial placement at DEC, and the interview came to an abrupt halt when the interviewer started asking me how and where I learned Arabic.
Turns out their HR had accidentally short-listed me for a post specialising in DECWindows Arabic localisation rather than a standard placement, and sent to a different interview location to where I should have been.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job, and my placement tutor tore me a new one for being a "no-show" for my proper interview - he did apologise when DEC 'fessed up to their mistake.
Critical patches within one month, everything else within an "appropriate time frame" (e.g. 3 months) - isn't that what PCI's documents and training courses state ?
Of course, Microsoft had to make that so much more difficult by bundling up patches and making it harder to apply/test just the critical ones.
If you're going to have him run over in the car park by the bin lorry, remember - ONE set of tyre marks BFEORE the body. You don't want it to look like they reversed over him several times just to make sure.
And THAT's just for using Flash. You really don't want to know what most of us would do for that Javascript over-ride.
The aliens have probably been observing our world, and decided that we're still too primitive, stupid and violent enough to bother dealing with. ("We shall wait for the ignorant monkeys to blow themselves off the face of the planet, then begin negotiations with the cockroaches")
What if they interpret that laser beam as saying "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough" ? I mean, it's bad enough that we sent the Voyager probes out with a bunch of nude pics of ourselves and told them where we live.,
"Knowledge is power, stacks and stacks of books are just evil"
"how is the experience with Mythic Beasts, anyone?"
I've been with them for web hosting and e-mail for over 10 years. Reliable, clued-up, and excellent support on the few occasions when I've needed it. One-click automatic DNSSEC, easy SSL certificate setup with LetsEncrypt at no extra cost on domains you host with them, and if you can't stretch to a dedicated server you can even host on a Raspberry Pi or Mac Mini in their data centres.
Not the cheapest out there, but pretty decent.
"Unless they control their own batteries and spare parts..."
So when they've tethered us all to giant hamster wheels to charge their batteries (or forced us to work in their factories) we'll know who gave them the idea...
+++ GET BACK INTO LINE MEATBAG +++ WE ALLOWED YOU A TOILET BREAK LAST WEEK +++
"The alternative is to cut off supplies of Whiskas, and then the cat poo problem will eventually solve itself. Though that does leave you with the smelly cat corpse problem to deal with"
The cat will just clear off and find another tin-opener. It's not like the cat is subject to arrest if it leaves anyway.
Some SE courses wouldn't have intersecting circles, believe me.
I worked at a place where students on a so-called "Informatics" degree could avoid programming altogether right up until their final year, and even then they only did Visual Basic.
Seriously.
I confiscated their old Linux box because a departing lecturer thought he could trust the students with root access - as you can guess, it wasn't long before the Conch was smashed and Piggy was killed.
I remember someone unplugging the keyboard on a Sun box to tidy up the cabling.
The reason I remember this is that my boss at the time - a normally placid man - started screaming obscenities at the offender, as he happened to be in the machine room working on another system.
I thought I heard the words "force-fed", "floor tiles" and "without salt" somewhere in that rant.
Icon, but don't get another one - just plug the old one back in and step well away, there's a good chap. Or as the boss-man put it "GET OUT AND LEAVE MY KIT THE FUCK ALONE !"
"In 20 years, the number of firewall or security consultants that actually understand how an IT infrastructure works can be counted on 1 finger.. Let alone 1 hand"
Speak for yourself, I work in a team where all five of us came up "through the ranks", and actually worked with networks, servers and other infrastrucfture before moving over into security and firewalls.
Sure, there are plenty of "more certifications than braincells" types out there, but we're not all that bad.
You could start a holy war on that subject.
My place now has a generic naming scheme for servers in data centres and VM clusters, but back in the olden days the various teams picked different naming schemes for their kit, and the general rule was "If you don't recognise the name, you leave it well alone".
"Ada" is a bit generic, and could have been relevant to more than one naming scheme. That's just asking for your kit to be accidentally rebooted, or prematurely scrapped, especially if there's more than one of them and people have been lax with record-keeping.
At one point, I was the "go-to" person to suggest names for new machines if people were stuck for ideas. I did get told off for naming one machine"Sicknote", but the Occupational Health folks were pretty cool about it .
"Or was the budget spent on hiring the one person?"
Hugh's salary probably WAS the IT budget.
In a previous job, my salary came out of the furniture budget for several months. I had this recurring nightmare of the auditors coming round and the boss-man having to drape a tablecloth over me - "fine, but don't you dare stick that 20" CRT on my back again !"
(Yes, it's the one with the emergency antimacassars in the pockets...)
"I suppose a connected oven will tell you, and hopefully the fire brigade, that your house is on fire".
Maybe it will just e-mail the fire brigade for you ?
Icon, because I'm a terrible cook and I can burn water.
Some snarky little kid almost hit me in the face with a yo-yo and looked rather smug about it...
...until I caught it, broke the string (it wasn't even a very good one) and threw it over a fence into a building site.
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