Posts by hmmm

All your eggs in one basket

We back up because:

1. What do we do if Amazon ever flick a switch and delete or block our account?

2. Rogue Admin threat. The Admins with access to Amazon don't have access to our backup provider (Security hold the Admin credentials).

Backing up internally doesn't make much sense to me, but then I am the paranoid type.

This should have greater prominence

CVSS score of 10, unauthenticated, remote exploit for a feature typically used Enterprise customers with slow change management cycles - this is one of the worst corporate security bugs I've seen in years, particularly as the finders have published a very detailed description of their findings complete with shellcode.

Ridiculous

They've invented their own authentication scheme. This can only end well.

Obvious strategy is obviously missing

Come on VMWare. Build the service that will allow us move VMs seamlessly between private ESX clouds and a scalable public cloud. Or, allow us to offload processing capability to a public cloud that will give businesses scalability at times of high demand. Put in place an encryption layer underneath the VMs to protect our sensitive data.

This is such an obvious next step for a company that has massive penetration within corporate networks, yet they persist in mucking around with their existing stupid solutions that are no better than existing public cloud providers. If we wanted public cloud functionality and only public cloud functionality, we'd go with AWS. And we probably will if VMWare don't get their act together.

Some idiot with an iPhone and Dropbox thinks he can run a business off it? Let him off.

Plan A has failed

I'd buy a Nokia Android. It would at least keep the company alive while they indulged Elop's fantasy about the MS ecosystem. Nokia should then look at Amazon for inspiration, and create their own Android ecosystem until such time as the MS-ites are forced out.

MS on the verge

For the first time our organisation (a fairly old school financial services firm of about 500 people) have given serious thought to moving people away from MS on their desktop. We've toyed with the idea of Linux (and a Java Desktop) in the past, but it hasn't been more than a pipedream. Recently with the price of MS software increasing, the hassle of getting virtual "anything" working with MS licensing, plus our users becoming more familiar with alternatives, leaving MS becomes a real option for a subset of our users.

The problem is still application compatibility, plus the mighty MS office, so we're not going to get there quickly - but every year becomes easier.

Security questions are hard

I know it's easy to laugh at Apple, but setting these sort of questions is difficult. I've worked in security, and I've had to set similar questions - particularly now in the era of Facebook and LinkedIn, it's harder and harder to find questions that are

i) Memorable

ii) Not available online or known to your friends

iii) Unique

iv) Won't change in the near future

Give the security guys a break - they don't want to be asking you where your first kiss was, but if people insist on putting the details of their life online what else can they do ;)

"but you'll get used to it"

Most of the reviews of Windows 8 seem to follow a standard format

1. Describe some key feature that has been removed/destroyed/made inaccessible

2. Talk about how "you'll get used to it".

3. Give some sermon about how change is good, even if it makes your life harder

Sorry, that's a fail.

1 minute mark

and a masters degree in......COMMUNICATION!!!!

Beautifully done sir.

Facebook status update: Being mugged LOL WTF OMG

As a matter of interest, what is the collective noun for a group of gobshites?

Encrypted laptops

How long do they need to encrypt all their laptops? At this stage they are still only 70% encrypted?

FLUORIDATION KILLS CHILDREN!!!

Our public representatives are inundated with cranks obsessively emailing about their latest religious, social or medical obsession. In the ideal world he should be able to filter this stuff, but that takes a degree of technical nous that not everyone will have.

Where's the vision thing

There's no sense of vision there. Everything is seen through the prism of the opposition, it's like Liverpool fans celebrating when they beat Man Utd but lose the league.

I don't much like Jobs but he has a vision and has his company working towards that vision. Microsoft products have some integration, but the only goal seems to be some corporate gobbledygook "we want to enable multifaceted synergistic enhancements to disparate information repositories". They're adrift at the moment.

Dances with Smurfs

Avatar was memorably described to me as "Dances with Smurfs". Hurt Locker was awful, the storyline and characters made no sense.

A potential solution

We could light a fire in the fuel tank which would melt the ice. Problem solved.

It was good while it lasted

The slow demise of every good search engine can be traced back to the point at which they felt a need to clutter up their search interface. Some people just can't leave well enough alone.

No internet connectivity?

Cloud based demo doesn't work because vendor couldn't connect to the cloud? That's an ooops. I for one welcome Microsoft storing all my personal and business data, what could possibly go wrong.

Super security??

He's having a laugh. "Give us all your private customer information, give us all your hardware and applications, sure what's the worst that could go wrong?"

We already have these devices

They're called the smartphone. Why would I want to carry another device?