Posts by Cpt Blue Bear

"It's arrogance"

No, its fear.

I've been involved in writing a few postmortem disaster reports (on a much smaller scale and fuck load less public, mind) and this looks like a classic case where the underlying problem is fear. The people making the decisions are terrified because they know they can't do the job. They make bad decisions because they want to believe someone else will dig them out of their hole. They bluster and repeat the official line when questioned while knowing full well is BS because that's all they can do. They hide the truth, dissemble and lie outright. And they panic.

Every one of your bullet points can be explained by an underlying culture of fear.

Re: Gadget influenced by waving something in front of it?

Mother !@#$er!

My uncle is complaining of this exact problem with his Galaxy something. It started yesterday. Wanna guess what he got for Christmas? Go on - take a wild shot in the dark...

Re: Telstra doesnt own the copper

"Maybe you should be asking the question why would we spending 11 billion dollars on copper lines that havent been maintained and are in need of replacing? Most people dont know this deal went through."

The short answer is to get the rights-of-way. We didn't buy just the contents, we also bought the ducts. Which also turned out to be unmaintained and in need of replacing. And occasionally full of asbestos.

In Telstra's defence (Christ! I'm going to have to take a shower after writing this) the lines weren't maintained because they were going to be replaced by shiny new fibre. Why spend money on something that's going to be replaced in five years?

Most people are completely unaware they bought the network. Doubly so that much of what we bought was already paid for by their parents back when Telsta was Telecom Aust and government owned.

"The ddos was too small to even register on global attack map yet overwhelmed their configuration."

That's because it didn't happen.

The system failed under load and the work experience lad running it panicked. IBM have admitted as much in their submission (well OK, the panic bit rather than who was in charge). The DDOS story came out because that's what they thought they were dealing with at the time and now they can't take it back without looking like muppets. This is a classic management face-saving situation.

Re: Upon rereading the article...

"The backup generator wouldn't have been necessary if off-line generator capacity had been fired up ahead of the storm."

But in reality it was necessary. If you are running critical services in a responsible manner you don't work on the assumption that everyone downstream of you is perfect.

Thanks for the anecdote but all it does is confirm my prejudice that hospital administrators don't do their jobs very well. Amusing but not really relevant. I have lived and worked in places where the power goes off on a regular basis so we developed strategies and procedures to cope. I'm including summers in Adelaide a short time ago in that* when the interconnector to Victoria would apparently overheat and shut down.

Either way, we are talking about a once-in-fifty-years storm. I was here for it and media panic aside we coped fine. I note that nobody mentions that SA has had major blackouts after much less violent storms (meaning 8 hours+) several times in the last decade. The only reason this event was more than a one day news story is the current political situation in the country.

* My own amusing anecdote: The GF was working in emergency services at the time and would regularly ring to let us know that there was a rolling blackout scheduled ando we would lose power that afternoon so how about I knock off early and head over to her place. Strangest booty calls I've ever received...

Re: Windows Schrodinger Edition

"...for some bizarre reason, set your own network as a public one."

Or had it reset for you. Since last Patch Tuesday I've been been seeing problems caused by the network type being mysteriously reset from work to public on Home Prem installs (but not on Pro). Anyone else seeing this?

Re: Cabbage

"...London has an air of FOAD that I loathe. Maybe it is me..."

Its not just you. London may very well be a great city but its inhabitants are, in the words of client and born and bred West Londoner, "a pack of miserable bastards". I got by playing the big dumb cheerful Aussie and just riding rough shod over their collective tough-guy act.

From the comments below, it sounds like they haven't got any better since the mid-90s.

Re: Blockchain! It's blockchain! Blockchain!!! Use blockchain!...

I've spotted it turning up recently in buzzword bingo type presentations. It's become the latest special sauce to apply to the rotting carcass of your product to cover the stench of fail. If I'm feeling malicious I ask the presenter to explain it.

Re: We'll see.....

"..the arrogant t*ats in the Tory/Labour Remain teams gave the victory to the lying scum in the Leave campaign..."

They could hardly do otherwise given that they (that's both "sides") have been blaming the EU for anything unpalatable for the last 40 years. The alternative was to get up an say "er, no that wasn't the EU, that was us that screwed you over, sorry". Hence the (from this side of the world anyway) very strange remain campaign.

Re: Spikes easily explained ?

Yup. That was my first thought when I saw the ABC's timeline: morning tea, lunch and after the reminder on the evening news.

I didn't, however, think of the VPN thing. I only know a few people who use commercial services so the figure of 16% surprises me. But it would explain the "foreign" traffic without resorting to conspiracy theories.

I suspect they mistook traffic spikes for attacks and panicked.

Re: Limits

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, etc. I used to do this sort of BS consulting work between, or even alongside, real jobs.

A decade or so ago I got a call from a friend of a friend who's brother in law (yeah, referrals can be weird like this) ran a manufacturing business employing a dozen or so who's accounting / ordering / process control (HA!) system had shat and could I go have a look. I found an aging HP running SCO and an ancient version of Pronto. Or rather, not running it 'cause a power surge had killed it along with the lunchroom fridge and a small industrial CNC cutter. It hadn't killed the backup tape because that had been dead for years due to ingested saw dust.

I thought about how to resurrect the beast for about thirty seconds before deciding that a better course of action was a meeting with the owners to tell them it was fucked beyond recovery and they should be looking for another solution. I got a bad cup of coffee, a "thanks for being honest with us" and $100 cash for my trouble. I have no idea if they survived that set back, but one of the owners used to call me every now and again when he thought someone was trying to screw him over (about a third of the time they were).

The important lesson was: even if you can fix something, fixing may not be the best solution for the customer.

Re: Cheap at half the price.

Leaving aside that this goes counter to the British military policy of having an elite army, exactly who are these enemies you want to have greater numbers than?

Re: Bah!

I've done some of my best problem solving while seated on the bog. Serious thinking frequently needs some form of displacement activity. It keeps the reptile brain occupied stopping it from interrupting with the neurological equivalent of "are we there yet?"

I hear you about the coffee machine. WTF is wrong with people? Sadly the solution is to throw the bloody thing out and replace it with a far more expensive and complex capsule machine. Just remember to hide the milk heater thing 'cause the feckers won't rinse it. Or just drink your coffee black.

Re: Democracy, in and of itself, is neither a good nor bad thing

Absolutely not. If you abstain you are simply abdicating your part in the collective decision.

You do not have to vote in Australia. You have to turn up and get your name marked off to demonstrate you were part of the process. What you do then is your business. You could add a "none of the above" box (which I think should be on the ballot, by the way) or draw a cock and balls or just walk straight out again. The requirement is that you are part of the process, not that you cast a vote.

Not voting is not a protest. Its just letting other people make the decision.

Further, by not voting you are increasing the value of the votes of those who do. Essentially, you leave the decision up to motivated partisan interests. You see this in local council elections all the time. True story: a mate got himself elected mayor just by getting his old school mates and their parents to vote for him. It only took about 50 votes to tip it his way because so few people usually vote. This was in an affluent city fringe suburb, not a virtual slum on the fringe of town.

Compulsory voting at worst creates noise in the system that drowns out the really loony end of the spectrum. That's why we don't have the spectacle of governments elected by 30% of the population.

If you are citizen of a country you are complicit with the actions of the government. Just ask the IMF, government creditors or anyone who ever supported economic sanctions against another country.

Re: Heathens!!

"A proper Cornish pasty is sealed along the top, not around one side. The ones I've bought in Cornwall1 always have been, anyway."

Indeed all those I have been sold as such in Australia, Portugal and some no-where town in the Rocky Mountains were made thus. Ironically the only place I have been offered to side-sealed forgery masquerading as the real thing was in England.

Re: Dear Andrew

"All economists are nearly always wrong because they have learnt the theories of Marx and Keynes."

Where is the button so I can vote this for the funniest thing I've read all week? Its even funnier than our fat, white, male, protestant, conservative Australian treasurer complaining about how much he's been discriminated against.

Re: I'll never get the marketing people's valuations...

"I have absolutely no idea what real world metrics marketing people use to value the personal data for an individual. I'm a good example of an edge case in their world; I'm 100% unaffected (in a positive way) by any advertising. I have never bought a product or service based solely on an ad. Yet, there are apparently billions of drooling idiots out there who will buy whatever the advertisers tell them to."

You have misunderstood the purpose of advertising. Its not to sell products but to convince the ad buyer that their ad agency is doing something important and valuable for them. Ad agencies get their income from selling their services not from selling their customers' products. This insight should explain about 90% of advertising. The remainder is, I suspect, mostly vanity driven.

Re: oh man oh man oh man

I've watched this happen.

Many, many years ago I worked a temp job that involved loading trucks. We would load the pallets then the fork operator would load them onto the truck. Then we would tie them down with ratchet straps. The drill was to check no one was on the other side (in practice by yelling "heads!") and throw the two inch wide strap with a half kilo steel hook over the load. You had to really hoof it to make sure it went over, otherwise you had to climb the load and retrieve the bugger.

For three days we had one of those people who can do nothing right. Nice bloke, but everything he touched went wrong, sometimes with bloody results but fortunately only for himself. The final "incident" was him throwing the hook over while standing on the strap. It up went, snapped tight and came back down. He was looking up and it hit him right between the eyes. Funny in retrospect, not so much at the time.

Re: Careful what you wish for

I'm flattered to have anything I wrote read aloud by Paul Eddington - even if its only in someone's head. If it had been Nigel Hawthorne I'd also be slightly worried.

Re: It's the price of freedom!!

What? You mean all that second amendment bravado isn't real? Say it aint so! [/sarcasm]

+1 for the GTA reference, I think I'll dig out Vice City when I get home

Its definitely the wrong thread

But I'll answer in the spirit of being helpful and having nothing better to do while I wait for a meeting that has been postponed.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is whenever you want it. That's the beauty of meaningless marketing guff. For me it was about twenty years ago when I first installed Slackware. You may have missed it from your ringside seat because you were looking the wrong way and for the wrong thing.

I'm sure there are any number of people here who can answer your question about the internet. Some may even give sensible and correct answers. I will take a punt and suggest the answer is no, or at least not really.

...it's crazy. No its cheap.

Sigh.

Political parties in this country, for all the massive donations they receive, are loath to spend money on real stuff. You can judge this by the quality of the photos used on election posters (which are cable tied to every vertical object right now) - clearly taken by friends, family or if by a professional one who's just found out the sitter expects not to pay for it as a contribution to the cause. I've experienced it first hand from our state conservative party (self styled as the party of small business to add surrealism to the experience) and can well imaging the feelings of a small developer who thought he'd landed a lucrative job for an influential client.

Re: Welly

Small planes? Like 747s...

I remember standing on the "observation deck" trying to smoke a cigarette as an Air New Zealand (I think) jumbo came in with its nose at what looked like 30 degrees into the crosswind...

Re: Zip code for non-US cards

"Or carry cash and use that."

That's the best advice. When in the USA I rapidly learnt to keep my foreign credit cards (including the company Amex) for big hotels and the like where they were used to such exotic things.

Re: How Corrupt Can It Get

Actually its worse than that: we bought a shitty broken down network for billions that our parents paid to build before the current owner was privatised.

Re: All me self-centered...

"Worked in one as well. I wouldn't be too sure about tenure of IT."

Here in Oz IT turnover seems to be about 12 months. That's because the IT staff generally have an escape route and the job is seen as either stop gap or resume filler. Mind you, more than 2 years working at a call centre is seen as a red flag on a CV in many HR departments - like still working at Mcdonalds after you are 25.

Re: Yes, but HOW exactly?

"I would hate to visit the new Apple Campus, only to be greeted by a talking shrub."

Have you been into an Apple Store (tm)? Talking shrub is a pretty good description.

Re: "giant aquarium"

"The kind of meeting I hated most, is the one they fly you out there for."

I have developed a simple defense against this this form of time wasting: if you want me in to attend a meeting on the other side of the country you will fly me business class. Meeting is at 9:30? Fine, you can fly me in the afternoon before, stick me in a convenient hotel and organise some form of transport to have me there on time.

Don't want to do those things? Then you don't need me in that meeting enough.

It may make me sound like a cunt but better that is a small price to pay. An unexpected upside is you get treated with a strange level of respect by people who would treat you like dirt if you showed up in cab fresh off the redeye.

Re: Planes taking off

You found the key that got the idea across. I had a receptionist who's written instructions for scanning visitor IDs had the first line:

1. click on the big red bear

She was far too sweet to see the Ifanview icon as squashed cat...

I've come across this twice. Its the result of using an off-the-shelf solution and being too cheap to customise it.

The second case was slightly more complex: they picked the cheapest quote and then got upset when the vendor submited an extra bill for "variations" that weren't explicitly part of the original quote. The vendor put them on the bottom of their priority list, I presume on the basis that paying customers come first and this job wasn't profitable. In the end they got sued by the supplier for non-payment. The vendor made a loss and they ended up with a shitty system that only partially did what they needed.

But I digress, the result was a number of mandatory fields that are inappropriate or pointless. The solution we suggested was to fill them in with standard but nonsense data. If it got "lost" or "stolen" at least it would raise an instant red flag when someone tried to use it.

Re: Firefox 44.0 upgrade kills adblocker and Google

Hmmm, just checked and I'm running FF44.0 with ABP. My existing plug-ins are unmolested and Google is still my default search engine.

I think you may have bigger issues than Firefox, mate.

Re: There's more to it than that (in my experience)

"Certainly I have never heard of such a thing before"

I'm guessing your experience is purely with existing individual domestic sites then. The OP is talking about fibre-to-the-block / basement / some other word starting with B and meaning the site rather than premises.

@Joe User

Let me guess: you buy the cheapest? I worked hard to keep my system builders on the straight and narrow, make sure they know what I expect and shouldn't have to ask for and that there will be hell to pay if they mess me around. I really don't miss that end of this business.

You seem to expect more than brain-dead monkeys when you pay peanuts. Anyway, you shouldn't be fixing a brand-new computer, you just warranty the bastard.

Re: I feel left out (@heyrick)

They don't "double" the price "because they are local", their costs are higher because they lack the leverage to beat down their suppliers, landlords and tax authorities. They also lack alternative revenue streams such as selling shelf space and position*

* It was a badly kept secret that Coles (one of Oz's two big chains) made more money selling shelf space to the local Coca Cola licensee than selling their product.

Re: Conservative = stupid

No, I have to disagree: Conservative = frightened.

I have yet to work out if people are frightened because they are conservative or conservative because they are frightened. Like much of life, I suspect its both.