Posts by FuzzyWuzzys 702 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2016
You've obviously not worked in IT for long! That sort of moronic data flow is a lot more common than you think. Financial companies I've been in often take in data in a raw format from some agency, combine it with their own data, pump it back out to a third party for more processing and finally get it back again for reporting.
Oracle has always been about sales and nothing else. It's a wonder Larry is still alive, the number of death threats he received due to the utter pile of cack that Oracle v5 was!
Read the biography of Larry, he only ever cared about revenue from the second him and Bob Miner started the company in 1977. Bob Miner was the Wozniak to Larry's Steve Jobs, Miner worked his nuts off to try to make a rock solid product but Larry only ever cared about bullshit and getting contracts signed, increasing year on year on-paper revenue numbers to the point of burning out sales reps like so many cheap matches. Miner, I believe at the behest of his family, eventually left to run a vineyard and sadly died of cancer some years ago. Larry is still very much alive and still very much obsessed by the on-paper revenue numbers.
X? Putting X in the name?
Why are publicity depts so useless and lazy with product names these days? X sounded futuristic in 1975, kids toys have X on them 'cos kids are a bit dopey, not bloody expensive gadgets for grown adults. Canon's flagship camera the 1DX, latest incarnation...the 1DX Mk II! *clap* *clap* *clap*, special kind of genius at work there in the naming dept!
What about photographers, artists and musicians? We all upload our creative output to dozens of websites for sharing, sometimes for profit as a business, someones simply for the fun of it. False positives would kill creative freedom.
I can see where this is heading in the not too distant future...
"Sorry the signature that music track/picture we monitored you working on for the last 2 weeks working is the same as "Track X" owned by Sony International. Please remain where you are and a lawyer from Sony will be with you shortly to discuss payments they will require made to them. Do not attempt to leave your current location or the law enforcement officers, now in the pay of the media corps, will be summoned."
Absolutely! I buy a car, don't maintain it and the brake shoes don't stop me in time before I smack into someone. The insurance and company and car manufacturer would tell me where to get off double quick time! Just 'cos someone else made something, there is still an owness on you as an operator of a product to play your part in using it safely and properly.
Equifax got the software and used it, they should have done due diligence and testing and at the level they are at and the incredible burden of looking after such sensitive information, they should continuously be testing and inviting pen-testers to check their kit is up to spec for the job.
I always had a soft spot for PSION kit, especially the Psion3 I had, built in programming language in your pocket in the early 90's? Mindblowing! Times have changed and the pocket computing market is absolutely stuff with players, that's a tough gig to play and I wish them all the best against the cheap and cheerful imports that are two-a-penny from the Far East.
"No homophobia here please."
What's "anal play" got to do with being gay? You're missing out, it's a bloody good fun and I say that as a happily married man in a loving hetro relationship where both myself and the missus enjoy it! When you have the time I suggest you take a good look at the items on Lovehoney, plus the wonderful sales ladies who do the videos with dead serious faces while talking about anal lube and other assorted toys! Ha ha!
If you can find any 18-24 year olds still using Facebook, I'll be bloody surprised! I thought most kids had abandoned Facebook to we old foggies? My 14 year old daughter has no interest in Facebook or Twitter whatsoever, she prefers Snapchat, post it, laugh with her mates. 5 mins later ask them what the post was about and they've probably forgotten and don't care.
"The USA is just another oppressive regime and should be added to the do not travel list."
The second they put the strict regs in post 9/11 and started treating all non-US nationals as criminals I vowed to never set foot there again. I would love to see some of the sights again. a wander in Central Park on a sunny Sunday morning. New England in the Autumn. The wonderfully hospitable people of the south and midwest. Such a shame, beautiful country, wonderful people, diabolical government that simply doesn't want anyone to visit ever again.
"What can one conclude about a company that behaves like that about employees who care?"
Unless I've misunderstood the story, Salesforce owned the code and therefore no employee is allowed disclose or distribute the company's property without permission. Almost all companies have that in place, I know that everything I write for my company is owned by them and I'm not allowed to use it. Obviously no one ever does stick to the rule of law, we all backup our code and take it from job to job we simply rework bits of it rather than the entire product.
I think this could have been handled better, the CEO should have spoken to the researchers directly and warned them not to go ahead. It sounds like a text message was used to ensure they wouldn't see it in time and ensure they could be fired, all sounds like a set up to me.
"Disks die as well, but generally you have a bit of warning..."
I'd have to disagree with that. The last couple of rusty-spinners I've lost have gone down without so much as a "So long, thanks for all the data.". Tried to fire them up and they make a pitiful, weak clicking noise and just refuse to wake up.
No storage, be it disk, ssd or tape is infallible. Always backup without fail and if you can afford it, mirror your disks or at the very least RAID5 them. So when I'm cleaning up old crap I always ask myself, if the data is worth losing is there any point in me keeping it? If need to keep it, then I buy bigger pairs of disks and mirror up. My really precious stuff is triple mirrored and double cloud backed up, just to be sure, like the photos I've shot over the last 10 years. My wife's family photo archive of 150 years worth of images, she has 6 individual duplicated copies 4 in house and 2 out on cloud storage. I lost it once many moons ago, let's say she would be collecting a widow's pension right now if I hadn't recovered it and put mirroring and backups in place!
I'd love to but as a semi-pro photographer I need Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom with the now unsupported Nik filters. When you get those running perfectly on Linux Mint, I'm all ears. And no, don't even mention GIMP. Yes, it's bloody good but it won't cut it with what I need to do. So Windows or Mac is my only choice for that stuff. My dayjob, I'm more than happy to use my Linux Mint box.
As I said a year ago I think most smartwatches are the ugliest things imaginable. They look cheap and tacky, like those cheap and nasty CASIO knock-offs you used to see at the seaside in the late 1980's "2 for £10 digital watches".
My Missus loves her Fitbit, it catches all the alerts off her iPhone, the weather and all that malarky but it still looks like it came from a Xmas cracker. Personally when I wear a watch I wear a piece of jewellry that tells me the time and nothing else, I have a nice Thomas Earnshaw that I bought myself as present, it's superb to look at, winds itself and just sits there silently on my wrist waiting to be used to do what watches do best.
Don't get me wrong, I love the technology of the smartwatch but I don't think it's day is here yet. Much like the Apple Newton ( which I still have in the spare room! ) it's day is just not here yet but one day, maybe, if they can get them to look much nicer.
Which is why I would never wish to work for a cretin like you who does not appreciate staff and their multitude talents.
I couldn't agree more, when there's work to be done I don't want to turn around and see you looking up sofas on the DFS website but if it's a quiet Friday afternoon and you've fired up a VM on your PC to learn something about some new technology that I know will benefit the knowledge pool in our team I'd gladly see if I can get your a beefier machine for testing and might even ask if you'd like to do a small presentation on what you've learned to see if we can use the new tech.
People have a ton of talent hidden that they rarely share, there are artists, organisers, etc. I know quite a few people who run youth groups in their spare time, that talent for organising kids is very useful. I know people who are musicians and photographers, very talented ones, they're very good are taking basic ideas and turning them into something blindingly useful. If you cut these people some slack for an hour at lunchtime while they organise their outside interests, they feel better, they're less stresses and their ready to plow back into the work during the afternoon with a much better frame of mind.
You stamp all over that sort of thing and you will end up with a load of simple minded drones who will slowly drive you mad, they will either be too stupid or too afraid to step outside the requirements, either way you can kiss your management bonus goodbye at the end of the year as your team wallows in the doldums of obscurity.
"I think the point is that if you buy in shops with cash and don't use loyalty cards then tracking your purchases is impossible. "
As the data sets get bigger and bigger it's not so hard to use various algorithms to spot spending trends even when items are bought with cash. We're creatures of habit and tracking our movements is not as complex as you might imagine. We tend to like buying the same sort of things and in the same set of shops.
I have a taste for Bovril, Toblerone and pastrami in crusty rolls, to name just three random products. I'll buy those items a couple of times a month, some with cash and sometimes with card and usually from the same half dozen supermarkets at home and work, tracking me would be tricky but most certainly not impossible.
"Are you saying that the don't do a broadband only service?"
VM are seriously doing my nut in and I'm getting close to dumping them.
Signed up with all three ( TV, BB and phone ). After a year of no one in our house having watched any TV for at least 6 months, I had to fight for 10 mins on the phone with VM to have them cut the TV and take their box back. I wanted to drop the landline phone but they won't let you do it, if you want BB, you have to have the phone too. So we have a unused landline doing nothing 99% of the time simply to get BB! Just recently the VM BB service in my area has been turning to crud. A real shame as VM BB service used to be the dog's wotnots but in the last 6 months it's been steadily worse, drop-outs that can last up to 2-3 mins at least 4-5 times a day. Replaced the modem at least twice, cables checked, etc.
Much as I'd lose the speed from VM, what's the point of having paid for all that speed when you can only use it at 2 am on a Sunday morning for 30 mins! Might as well go back to Sky and their shonky 2mbs dial up crap!
Personally I think this guy got what was coming to him, you mess about with bad stuff like this, with nasty people and let's face it drug dealers and gun runners aren't known primarily for their skills in the tact dept, add to this that you're too stupid to make sure these sort of people can't find you if any bad stuff happens on your website, it doesn't take a genius to work out that sooner or later you're going to be found swinging on the end of a rope in a prison cell or found floating face down in the nearest river!
I remember in the early 90s when VR was doing the rounds yet again as the next-best-thing-that-will-never-happen and teledildonics was constantly being discussed on trendy late-night US teen shows. We'd all be jacked in, jacked off, plugged in and plugged up to various crap VR apps on 486sx PCs to experience having a very, very non-sexy virtual wank in something akin to the "Money for Nothing" video by Dire Straits!
Fixed a customer's server kit and installed some new stuff, about 2 days work. The customer asked me to come back on the 3rd day but make sure I was wearing my best suit, wouldn't say why. I duly arrived and was ushered into a cab and promptly found myself taking a very expensive Elevenses at the Savoy by way of a thanks for all my hard work.
If you look at the 1Password forums they're getting questions about "Can I do XYZ like the app could?" and the replies are always, "Not yet but in a future release of the online version.".
1Password seem happy to beta test their online cloud offering to any mugs they can get to sign up to it, then they'll bodge it into shape as they go, pathetic. One reason I refused to to carry on using it and went off and used a FOSS password offering. Shame, as I liked the 1Password apps.
One reason I stopped using 1Password having used it quite happily for several years. I paid for the prog 3 years ago and now they want people on subs based services AND holding your private password stash on a cloud service. I checked it out and if you upload your local password stack you can't delete it!
Sorry, I want it locally where I know who is doing what to it. Did a bit of poking about and there's plenty of FOSS password stores on offer for free and which work across multiple platforms with the same DB.
Personally I think all religions are a crock of lies however as a decent human bring and assuming the moral high ground I choose to respect people who do wish to have faith in their various deities, even if they choose not to respect my peace and quiet on a Sunday morning by banging on my door and trying to thrust copies of Watchtower in my hand!
Just 2 months ago, being well into my death metal I was out on my drive washing my car in my favourite Decapitated band shirt when a sweet old dear comes wandering up to me.
"May I speak to you about the Lord....oh....erm.....". I point at my shirt and console her with, "I'm sorry love, much as I respect your right to practice your faith I personally have absolutely no interest in religion. I take the Humanist line on such matters.".
"Oh, I see. Thank you very much for your time."
"The vast majority of MCSE's I've met are totally brainless clods."
That's because you only need to take a look around some of the certification forums to see that half the people gaining certs in MS, Oracle, CISCO, etc are simply performing verbatim regurgitation of test questions you can buy or simply rip off torrent sites.
I'd been working as an Oracle DBA for 10 years when I thought I might take my Oracle 10g certs for a laugh. I diligently studied the official cert guides, then I thought I'd find some test questions just to make sure I was ready for test day. Well let's just say that 98% of the test questions I got hold of were word-for-word identical to the actual test questions. I completed my Oracle 10g OCP exam, 80 questions in 9 minutes!! I didn't even read half the questions properly as I knew them off by heart. I'd wasted a month reading the cert guide ( plus £30 for the book! ) when I didn't need to. While I was looking for test questions I checked into a few forums and it was simply full of people just learning the test questions then taking the official tests.
Certs are a waste of time and nothing more than money spinners for the software vendors, Oracle make you take a single official course at £2500 before you can take a pro cert test. I assume MS et al are much the same. The second I'd finished my cert exams I felt cheated, I knew that anyone else who had taken those sort of multiple choice tests by groups like Pearson can't be trusted. While I had them on my CV as they ensured you get your foot in the door, I knew they're worthless as anybody with a good memory for Q&As can pass multiple choice cert exams.
"I'm struggling to find sympathy for this chap tbh."
I have some sympathy, he got pretty beaten up by this whole affair however, it seems like he was blinded by this whole "dream job" bollocks and forgot to deal with the reality. Some people are very adept at drifting through life, they land on their feet more often by luck, the rest of us can't. I never leave anything to chance, especially if it involved more than one person you don't know messing about with your livelihood.
The second you throw in government bureaucracy to anything you're trying to do, you can pretty much guarantee that everyone except you is a complete f**king tool with barely enough common sense to cope with junior school classes! Treat everyone in any government or council like a tool ( at the very least as though come 5pm they couldn't care less if you dropped down dead! ) and then you'll start consider all the aspects required and you might actually manage to get 75% of what it is you're trying to do. I've worked for various UK gov agencies and quite frankly the only reason we haven't just locked and bolted the doors on this country and moved elsewhere is that every government is the same as ours or worse!
I think this guy put too much faith in things being sorted out for him when he should have been nagging everyone in the chain to ensure stuff was happening as and when it should have.
As they used to say in the X-Files, "Trust No One"....'cos most people you meet in companies and organisations are incompetent bell-ends until proven otherwise.
To the best of my knowledge I think my daughter has about 6 tracks saved on her phone, she simply has subscriptions to Spotify or another one and just streams any tracks she wants to listen to from online saved playlists.
She's in her mid teens and has been beaten constantly by the school about not pirating software or media. I've lectured her over and over too, as a serious amateur photographer who makes pocket money from licensing my photos, how would she feel if my hard work was being ripped off and I wasn't being paid for it.
People often see media copyright violation as a victimless crime, those people need to spend time with genuine, hardworking musicians and artists. I don't mean rich megastars or big corps, I mean those at the bottom desperately trying to get a foot on the first rung of a professional career ladder, to really see how we feel about seeing others rip off the work we've spent years and years learning how to produce. Some might change their mind if they met face to face with someone who's seen their work ripped off and sold and not a penny coming back to them.
AC, I'm sorry, I genuinely am.
I would love to visit New England in the Autumn.
I would love to see my brother-in-law and his new wife.
I would love to stand in the Grand Canyon.
I would love to drive down Route 66.
I would love to take my Dad to see where Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings were born.
I would love to eat deli-food in Central Park on sunny Sunday morning....
I won't as, not you, but your government has made it perfectly clear they no longer want visitors in the USA. It's a terrible shame but I'll be taking my money and my "tourist wonder" to Canada for the next few years.
Right so they're politicians, safe to assume they all used their last name, their wife's maiden name, or their dog's name as passwords and they wonder how they got pwned?
Just like most people in their position, the minute the IT lacky said they needed a password with min 10 chars, one upper case, one number and a symbol they boomed, "Do you know who I am?! I haven't got time to remember all that. Now make it simple or else!".
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
