Posts by Trixr

Re: Saddo!

So what's your point?

I have a Dell XPS I bought in 2008, recently upgraded with SSD + 8GB ram and it's still running Win 7 fine.

Macs don't last any better than Wintel machines of similar spec.

Re: America

Isn't it funny that certain Americans are all about their Second Amendment "rights" based on a shonky interpretation of what a "militia" means, but those same Americans somehow forget the Jeffersonian principle of the separation of church and state, embodied in the First Amendment.

Re: Laying cable across an ocean

Still love this article in Wired in the mid-90s by Neal Stephenson, describing the FLAG submarine cable. (Leaving aside cute wee words like "meatspace").

http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

And in little old NZ, they're doing FTTP in the cities, which are even less dense than Australia's. Even my tradie brother has been hooked up. So, you know, the conclusion of the "conversation" isn't as cut-and-dried as you make out.

"Senior IT person"? What, the senior Mac desktop support person?

Also, if it was actually Active Directory (and not NT domains), there ain't such a thing as an "AD primary server" (yes, PDC Emulator, but that's not the same).

As for making him a manager, well, safest place, I suppose.

Re: MS Orifice - so aptly named

MS has the powershell Output-CSV cmdlet output all fields with the data surrounded by quotes*. I had to look it up, but the use of quotes in this way to force interpretation as strings is in fact *legitimate* for CSV.

* Amusing they have to build in the workaround to their own stupid product.

Re: Jeesh!

Let's not talk about Certain Hardware Vendors who have written their consoles in this crapware. I'm almost nostalgic for Java.

Re: Faith in Humanity

Not a point at all. A few hours of his "hourly rate" to learn how to review the emails and dictate responses to his secretary would have saved a lot of time in the long run.

I lost all patience with that excuse when I worked at a major law firm in the late 90s that placed PCs on every desk, including those of the senior partners. Once such gentleman (he would have been in his late 60s/early 70s, very aristocratic) phoned the helpdesk to get assistance with sending his first email (his secretary was away). I walked him through using the space bar to insert spaces between the words, and the return key to put spaces between paragraphs. He was delighted.

I imagine he still dictated 99% of his email responses, but he could now do emailing himself in a pinch. He told me he no longer required his emails to be printed out - it was quicker for him (as it was, naturally), to read them himself. Of course, his secretary triaged them in advance, but it was an excellent hybrid solution.

Re: Tailes from the support desk

Regarding the Sendmail snafu, all I can say is thank god for Postfix. Everytime I see a Sendmail config, I say it again. Over and over.

What's even worse is when you work for an organisation that hasn't implemented ITIL, and yet has a "Service Desk" with very few of the supposed ITIL processes and functions to even get the job routed the right way. Sometimes we don't see jobs till 6 months after they were originally logged.

To be fair, ITIL does specify the escalation path if the first level support can't solve the problem. I doubt there is an escalation path for "fails to correctly understand and log the issue". Then again, just because people aren't doing so these days, there's no reason in ITIL you can't hire reasonably skilled triage staff to log or properly categorise inbound calls.

Re: The WANG that would not die

Ugh, I had to run some kind of maintenance procedure on one of those things every month when I worked for an insurance company, even though I was the "Windows admin". The Wang guy was paid three times more than I was, but it apparently wasn't in his job description to get out of bed to do the job.

Here's me very nervously typing hieroglyphics for at least 15 minutes into the console at 9pm on a Thursday night in the lonely datacentre, hoping like hell I don't typo some weird crap and make the thing completely die. This was in the late 90s, and so I really feel your pain if one of those buggers was still running a year ago!

Re: Separate work from private life!

Yes, but any employer in NZ - and in fact also in the UK and Australia - would take it to a formal warning if the behaviour wasn't modified.

Also, if your contract said that you were not allowed to browse porn at anytime and it would be grounds for instant dismissal if found, the "friendly warning" doesn't really matter in that instance.

No need to reinvent the wheel

GWX Control Panel is great, well documented and does the biz. Much quicker than manually uninstalling patches and farting around in the registry.

Re: Blimey

I travel all the time, and use local SIMs, and if have a single SIM phone and I'm expecting something from home - or I feel a compelling need to logon to My Gov (hah) or other services using 2FA - I can spend the 2 minutes putting in my home SIM and waiting for the text.

In reality, because I do travel so much, I have a dual SIM phone. Problem solved.

It's not rocket science, and I can't believe this money was spent - cute illustrations aren't free - on something that is bad advice, hardly a common use-case, and one that can be worked-around easily.

Re: How low can it go?

Internode support has gone downhill in recent years as well. My partner has an ongoing issue with the telecom pit outside her house. Every time there's a rainstorm, speeds go to about 12kbps. Every time we ring up and do the dance of "please test with another modem". Why we need to do this when it's the same issue every time - at least half a dozen times - is beyond me.

They used to send out their own pre-configured modems to test with, complete with a pre-paid box to send it back, but no longer do so. . Since most people don't keep spare ADSL modems in their back pockets, it takes days to track down one we can "test" with - many people in this town are on cable.

When I enquired as to why they no longer offer test modems, it's because "we kept losing them". Well, if the replacement cost ended up on the next bill for the people who kept "losing" them, they'd probably find more of the modems finding their way back.

Also, I don't know why there's all this about "if Internode goes the same way..." They got bought out by iiNet years ago, and I presume we're all in the TPG happy family now.

Re: Makes me sad

So you think the executives who made this hairbrained decision are millennials? Please.

Re: Bah!

I have no idea what you mean by "SJW bullying", but yeah, I don't see FB shutting down accounts made for pets. I have at least half a dozen of them in my feed.

Re: Well, Ain't that dandy!

From the MIT site:

Kerberos is a network authentication protocol

So what, exactly, is it supposed to be, in your world? Or are you quibbling about the semantics of "service" vs "protocol"?

>How about the govt hires some devs

For this govt, anything third party or outsourced is better than what you can come up with in house. For 99% of things, I actually agree with using third party if it's an established product. For counting the nation's votes, nope, it should be written in house, with the Aussie govt's IP and no third parties getting in the way. And no excuses for releasing the code.

I have to say the Aussie preferences system is a pretty crappy kind of proportional representation, and the "resellability" of such code would be limited anyway.

> 67% of worldwide transactions flow through some SAP platform.

Of WHAT transactions? Absolute bullpuckey.

What is very rarely stated is why it is important for women to achieve parity in particular subjects...

Why is important for people of different races not to be

Re: bugger

Just set up a bullsh*t Gmail account - h4ndsoffmyd4t4@gmail.com - if you want to go the Android route. Done.

Which was essentially my point. :-)

Re: "he would also like more improvement's to the scheme's scalability."

Here's hoping these additional workers don't insert random apostrophes into plurals.

(Yes, "improvement's" is wrong in the article as well.)

Re: It's the Viking thing

Why would the "Sarah Sharp sympathisers" (it ain't just Sarah Sharp, come on) be "up in arms" about this.

For once, Linus isn't being personally abusive. Very few people care about the actual swearing - no-one likes being sworn AT. If someone tells me what I've done is f***king stupid, I get the message, actually. Telling me that I'm f***king stupid makes me instantly think "f**k off, I'm not, I made a mistake" and not exactly keen to bother with their "critique" in future. I think it's a marked improvement, frankly.

Re: What a hero

Our very professional and quasi-govt organisation had a security assessment done recently, and no less than 5 of the 6 USBs that were left randomly around and outside the premises were plugged into networked computers. Yes, professional adults earning (in the main) high-5 to 6 figures.

Re: I still can't get my head round this one

Sorry, that's an IT fail as well. Assuming you're in a Windows/AD environment, why don't you have SSO enabled in your SharePoint? Why are you using different credentials for just SharePoint?

Ignore me if you're the only educational institution I've ever heard of that doesn't run on Windows.

I have to agree. I still really like my HK-sourced LG G3, but have I received one OTA update since I've owned the thing? No.

I would stick something like Cyanogen on it, but the process looks more convoluted than usual for this model.

Re: How do you cook a backdoor?

There's a separation between Exchange and domain admins only in the larger enterprises. I've worked for many SMEs, public and private, and in all, I was both a domain and Exchange admin. I personally think it's the most common scenario.

However, SMEs are probably not the most broad attack surface in terms of number of potentially-compromised accounts per environment. Then again, there are more of them than large enterprises.

Re: @ Ben Liddicott It's not real

Well, it turned out to be pretty much all bots, and the few actual females often seemed to be "professionals".

Oh, and the "spike" in female membership from the journalists who joined up when the excrement hit the turbine.

Actually, effect and affect are both nouns and verbs. Your explanation is incorrect.

You can "create an effect" (noun). You can "effect a change" (verb).

"x affects y" (verb). "A flat affect" (noun).

Note that the last use of "affect" is not the same as "effect". If you said "a flat effect" you might be saying that the paintwork on a 3D object makes it look flat. "A flat affect" means an observed expression of emotion (used by psychologists).

Re: Paving Slab Construction

The best one I encountered along those lines was the guy who smoked heavily and had a Persian cat. Yes, mate, your computer was overheating within 5 minutes of boot because of all the FELTED cat fur bonded with the cigarette tar. I literally peeled it out in layers (it came away nice and clean).