Posts by Fatman 2400 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2008
<quote>I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in the US aren't mobiles charged for receiving calls as well as making them?</quote>
One word answer - YES!
And $DEITY help you if you are on a plan that provides X minutes per month because you do not need an """unlimited""" plan. Overages are a BITCH!
<quote>Over the 8 years I have had complete hell of updates and failures on some other Windows machines I unfortunately took responsibility for...</quote>
You should never take responsibility for any Windows machines, because you do not """own""" the operating system. Microsoft does. You only get to use it as Microsoft sees fit.
And Microsoft does not give a shit if you encounter 'problems'.
At my former employer - it was mandated that desktop machines be shut down at the end of the day.
If it isn't powered up, then it can not be pwned during the overnight/weekend hours.
This policy arose from an incident where an executive left his machine on, and it was infected with malware. Those behind the attack had the whole weekend to surf out or internal network. Cleaning up the mess was one of the reasons why we ditched Windows, and went to Linux. The other being a nastygram from the BSA that was quite costly.
I point to incidents like this one as reasons why you should not go to the cloud.
But penny pinching manglers never learn.
One mangler I once worked for bought that hype, hook line and sinker. So that company went off to the cloud against my advice. Cue one cloud failure, and people were sitting there unable to do their jobs, and said mangler starts screaming: "Do something!!!!!" I did. I handed him my letter of immediate resignation, packed up and walked out. A few days later he calls me up sheepishly wanting to know if I would 'come back'.
The answer was a terse: "FUCK YOU!!!" and I hung up. 'Fix it your own goddam self' was my attitude.
<quote>It's also possible that he's fighting a very private health battle with an uncertain foreboding prognosis.</quote>
He might be facing a situation where he has been told that you have X amount of time left; and he plans to step aside to enable his team to continue forward, and he can make the best of the time left.
In any regard, I hope I am wrong on that one.
<quote>There is actually no practical excuse for not patching personal computers and servers. Most of our machines are windows based and for the most part patches have gone without issues.</quote>
You seem to possess a selective memory. I (painfully) recall a day at the office when, after Windows had updated itself, everything broke.
Manglement was screaming about lost productivity, and placing the blame at my foot. After two frantic days, I was able to get their systems back on line. What didn't help was the constant carping of "When are we getting back to work?"
I learned two valuable lessons that day
1) FUCK Microsoft and Windows and in general, and
2) Get a new job.
As a result, I embraced the penguin (and very rarely regretted it), and I went to work for a company where the soon to be CIO actually knew about IT, and wasn't a transplanted MBA (Mainly Brainless Asshole).
<quote> It can get pretty nasty if two Cabinet departments become at odds, especially if one of them is Defense. I would think a counter to the threat of rubber gloves would be a threat to have a serious talk at the Pentagon a secluded Cuban resort about how TSA handles its people.</quote>
There
FTFY
<quote>Mindless following orders is not always a good thing - look at history and the atrocities that leads to.</quote>
Don't forget some of the punishments handed out at Nuremberg for those convicted at the tribunal.
For the yoou who didn't study History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=nurewmberg+tribunal&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=Search
<quote>... your system is going to download them without the owner's permission to store it in cache and so potentially could be considered copyright infringement.</quote>
A very good reason to clear the cache on exit.
<quote>... so they can refuse to settle until offered sufficiently juicy "go away" money.</quote>
Do you mean like these scumbags???
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/20/prenda_lawyer_guilty/
And look what has happened to them. (I hope that son of a bitch gets a lot of jail time.)
<quote>Which is a pain on the one hand - always carrying 2 phones around at work. But on the other hand, it is great, I can turn off the company phone when I leave the office and still be contacted by family and friends on my private phone.</quote>
You forgot the most important part of that practice: IF you leave the company, you leave their phone behind, and they do not have access to your personal information.
My former employer was like this over a decade ago. We knew better than to jump on the BYOD1 fad.
1 Bring Your Own Device, or Bring Your Own Disaster, as you care to see fit.
<quote>As longs as the final run is short enough</quote>
Maybe not for you, but with anything but a fiber connection at your premises, you are stuck with the realities of copper. And that is throughput, both to yourself, and anyone else sharing your "connection"
With phone lines there are the limitations of DSL and its variants; your connection usually ends up at a DSLAM along with anyone else served by the cabinet. And you have to deal with the telco's backhaul.
With coax, DOCSIS has limitations on the number of upload and download channels. Subscribers on a single cable run share the available upload and download frequencies. Somewhere, those data channels get pulled out, and routed in a functional equivalent to a DSLAM. Where that is done is up to the cable operator. If you are on a strictly cale plant, then it is most likely done at the cable operator's head end. If you have a HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) network, then it is out at some cabinet, and at the end of a fiber line coming from the operators head.
Even with satellite there are speed limitations.
The beauty of FTTP (fiber to the premises) is that those limitations are much higher, and in the right circumstances, your link may go all of the way back to the operator's head. How many home users have the traffic to saturate a 1Gps link?
<quote>Just curious what kind of company needs an email group for all the women and for all the men?
I've never heard of such a thing before.</quote>
One such possible use is to direct appropriate messages about sexual harassment in the workplace to the appropriate audience.
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