Posts by big_D

Re: Trump's Base

Isn't that what Darwin would have called a win-win-situation?

Re: Stupid millennials

I had a case of "but its elegant and readable". Yes, it was elegant and human readable. Unfortunately it was a complete pigs-ear, when it came to actually being executable.

Under moderate server load (250 guests over 4 load-balanced front end servers), the script to get the menu structure for the site would keel over and timeout at 2 minutes!

Re-structuring the query to be (still) human readable, but actually optimized for what the computer had to do, the query time was reduced to < 500ms when all 4 load balancers were handling 250 sessions each.

It isn't just a "millenial" problem, it has affected poor programmers ever since I have worked in IT, going back to the early 80s. There are programmers who understand how the underlying hardware, operating system and application stack work and those that can just churn out "pretty" code. Oh, and those that just shouldn't be let near a computer in the first place!

Re: Are you sure it's not the US?

I live in Europe, but I've been watching his channel for a couple of years.

I miss his Friday Nut Fest, with the cock of the week winning the Big King Dick... He is very funny, very irreverent but also very informative and quite a clever chap.

Re: Waiting For Tal-Talk

Start up Age of Empires... By the time you get a reply, you'll have already taken over the world with water powered nuclear generators.

They'll probably reply just as you are about to go for a leak, so make sure the PFY's briefcase is within easy reach...

Yes, I'm going through the BOFH chronicles. That was 2003 episode 23.

Re: Proper lash up

The town where one of my nieces lives in Germany has "Old Newtown" and "Newtown" as suburbs... (Alte Neustadt and Neustatd).

Re: And?

And not just UK and US. Most countries suffer.

Here in Germany there are many communities that still have no broadband at all or are limited to 1mbps.

At work, we have a reasonable internet connection, but mobile coverage sucks. And average speedtest here get around 0.05mbps down and 0.02 up - most of the time, the Vodafone speedtest app states that there is no internet connection at all (it times out), although Signal and Telegram still deliver messages (if with several minutes or hours delay as the data trickles in).

Who's zoomin' who?*

Yes, it isn't like you need just a computer and access to the source repository...

Google has been trying to sell us products for years to make home working easier, because you don't need to be on premises to use it, because it is all in the cloud. And collaboration software, like all those products they keep cancelling.

Seriously though, there are possibly some parts of the process that had to happen "on-site" for security reasons until now and they possibly need to organize a way of keeping that security, whilst giving the leads the ability to release (as opposed to just work) from home.

Re: The social media companies don't help enough

Not every country has free speech.

And in the case of the USA, it only says that the Government can't curtail free speech. It says nothing about platforms banning complete nutters from posting dangerous nonsense; they are allowed to do that, they aren't the government and it is their private platform, they don't have to put up with it. they could ban it, but then they'd lose ad revenue on the posts.

Re: Only took Apple 2 years...

It is good news for us. We are supposed to use iPhones for company phones, but with T-Mobile no longer selling the 8 (officially), we were stuck with no iPhone that fell within the allowance limit. This will change things around.

Re: Anti-mortar system?

That brings back memories, sneaking my father's copy of Modesty Blaze out of his bookshelf...

Re: Alternatives

I'd rather they spend the money on security than the coloured crayons department looking for a catchy name, but that is just me.

Re: I'd love to see a law...

A lot of people in my family tend to keep their smartphones for around 6 - 8 years, before they replace them, and they are generally things like Samsung Galaxy S4 Lite/S5 Lite, which got replaced last summer, when WhatsApp stopped working properly.

My local DNS server uses DNSSEC and when a domain I visit doesn't have DNSSEC, I report that their site doesn't work.

Of the sites I regularly visit, only one had a problem and they corrected their DNSSEC entry within a couple of hours.

There's an app for that...

And in Germany, the Robert Koch Institut has released an app that will collect the data from your sports tracker and send it back to RKI, so they can analyse the data. They are hoping to notice changes in pulse etc. that can be used as early indicators of COVID-19.

Yes, Zero Day effectively means that the flaw exists and is being actively exploited (or is in the public domain, having been irresponsibly disclosed) and no patch has yet been forthcoming (often because the maintainers of the software found out about it at the same time as everybody else.

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

Yes, oh and the typo, should be "unless the code was properly documented." :-D

Where I worked, we had development teams and support teams. The development teams were usually large and went from customer project to customer project, whereas the support teams for the customers were smaller and looked after dozens of supported systems. Therefore good documentation was critical to being able to support the system.

E.g. a project team with a project manager, consultants, analysts, designers, infrastructure specialists, programmers, testers etc. could easily run to 100 persons and the support staff were a manager and half a dozen programmers, who looked after everything the customer had in production.

Re: Licenses...

I know, I thought of WireGuard, but OpenVPN gives the "free" in the name, WireGuard would probably still have raised too many "huh?"s

Re: April Fool

German TV can be very good.

A lot of what is shown on the commercial channels is absolute tripe (licensed versions of US reality TV tripe), but there are a lot of good programs as well, especially on the BBC equivalents (ARD, ZDF etc.).

I probably watch more original German programming than I do imported US or UK shows.

Re: This is why we have analysts

Except that it was the semi-conductor, not the CPU business. AMD sold off Global Foundries years ago.

Re: Help me out here

Yes, they have B-Arked the mainframe staff. Just be thankful that the telephone sanitisers didn't go with them. ;-)

Re: Error or malicious act

Exactly, I feel sorry for the employees, but I have to agree with the Court in this case. They did everything they reasonably could - the data was put on an encrypted USB stick for the transfer to KPMG, it wasn't spaffed over an unencrypted FTP link or per email, they took "all reasonable precaution", with the possible exception of not realising Skelton held a grudge.

That he held a grudge for his own stupidity and decided to take revenge by publishing the information entrusted to him in no way falls under what his expected duties were. If he had lost the stick when taking it to KPMG and it wasn't encrypted, that would be part of his expected duties, but extra-curricular activities outside of his job role (he was not expected, as part of his role to publish the information anywhere online) cannot reasonably be covered by Morrison's liability.

They haven't. They gone all colour-pencils department and are using JavaScript/TypeScript and Electron...

Re: Got away with it!

It is needlessly complicated and needlessly expensive, for what it is. The basic functionality doesn't do enough and everything is additional modules with additional costs, like VPN, threat protection, host stand-by etc. and if you take hot stand-by, you used to need to buy all the licenses twice!

pfSense includes everything it has in the basic install, no hidden costs. Setting up hot-stand-by was a doddle. 50 VPN users? 100? 200? Costs the same as 1 VPN user and the client software is free for all platforms.

The actual ASA configuration is a pain, for a real threat protection system, Palo Alto is much better and is much more friendly and modern to configure, although the low-end units are slow to apply the configuration - their UI and configuration processor is a little under powered, but the high-end provider kit screams (but costs well into 5 figures).

I currently use a mixture of Zyxel Zywall USGs and Unifi USGs. The Zyxel suffers from similar problems to the ASA series, overly complicated and every feature seems to require additional licenses.