bleggett

Sometimes the cheapest option to get NFL games is the local neighbor sports bar. One needs to eat anyway, right? It's becoming more difficult each year to get excited by the minor improvements, missteps, foibles, features, or anything else that Apple or Samsung do with their latest smartphones. Maybe it's time (or almost…

Constitutional may not quite be the right word in this case. Emphasis added below is mine, as I found that quite interesting. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#United_States On the other hand, coins made of gold or silver may not necessarily be legal tender, if they are not fiat money in the jurisdiction…

I just can't even begin to fathom fishcoin. It sounds like it comes from the depths of someone's flooded imagination, a veritable chicken of the sea. As a technology endeavor, it will be swimming against the current from the start, a rip tide threatening to pull it under. How could one truly evaluate this product? When…

Until we have tribbles, I think we're all safe from Star Trek. Unless Q shows up one day soon.

In days of yore, I was asked to drive from one side of the city to another to assist a client with a printer problem. I drove out to the site, opened up the printer, and removed a pair of scissors that was wedged inside between the bar and the tractor feed. Plugged the printer in, worked like a champ, have a nice day.

To be perfectly honest, I found it really hard to think about the database content of this article. I'm still shocked by the turbaconducken and wondering what would happen if you stuffed the chicken with sausage prior to everything else.

I've noticed in a lot of different environments that a reputation for competence, or at least the ability to fix things, tends to spread (sometimes like wildfire) and lead to a self-sustaining system of walk-up, drive-by, email type requests, even when the competent party is often not directly responsible for that area. It…

I agree whole-heartedly with this concept. It's even worse when a manager or leader tries to maintain the Team Me approach. A lone wolf can be challenging enough, but when that lone wolf has organizational/operational responsibility to a team, the challenges increase significantly. One of the most difficult aspects of…

Great story, thanks for sharing. 

Seriously, M$, has no one learned the lesson yet? Or was this some type of publicity stunt on their part? Make it look like a leak, when they had already decided to let the features out? Sorry, I'll put away the tinfoil hat.

GDPR - good for consumers, or onerous compliance burden for business? Probably somewhere in between, but I wonder how long before something like it comes stateside.

How does one become a certified bacon engineer, Microsoft or otherwise?

A treasured classic - Kill -9 'em all, & let root@localhost sort 'em out! In a half-duplex world, I speak first. | $user > /dev/null Unless you are UDP traffic, please wait for ACK before talking to me. Your problem is like phlogiston...burning only in your mind. You're an IPX/SPX client in a TCP/IP world! Don't bother…

Agreed, silverbacksays​, but I'm afraid the whole principle of privacy is already lost. There is already a generation of adults that were raised in an over-connected, over-sharing, anti-private world, and they have little to no expectation of privacy. I don't think that anything, short of massive technological failure,…

Thanks for this week's articles!

Oh! Something's amiss on the LAN! Could it be a faulty cable? Or a poorly calculated subnet mask? "Find it now! Find it fast!" they shout. When did it start? When did it hit the fan? Is there a problem in the routing table? Or could it be user error, you ask? "No, it wasn't us!" returns their whining pout. Ingest caffeine,…

All of these excellent points aside, does anyone know if there is real-world data out there on the reliability of flash-based shared storage? One of the biggest problems with spinning disks has always been that whole mechanical failure issue. Even if flash offered little to no performance gains (and I don't believe that to…

Hmm...how about in limerick form? There once was a user who liked to complain "Hey, the network is slow!" went his tired refrain. I laughed at him and gave a derisive snort, "Quiet, you, or I'll admin down your switch port!" And I never heard from that user again! Or this one, maybe a touch closer to reality... A long time…

The DNA and health profile stuff, coupled with the health information that our 'smart' devices are gathering from us in increasing orders of magnitude, is in all likelihood part of a growing data set. Insurance companies are likely suspects for those who might use that data to discriminate in various ways. I say they're…

The link to questions is going to a page offering to renew or bid upon sgizmo.com.

More great articles. I'm not sure how many IT departments are really trying to take on the shadow IT forces, but my suspicion is that many haven't yet acknowledged their existence. Dear Thwack (and Solarwinds!), can we get some Ministry of NO swag, yesterday?!

Wow. Inadvertently dropping DBs. That is one of the really scary potential downsides of the cloud world. Yikes.

Funny, many of the DBAs I know got there accidentally. I can't think of too many folks who actually set out to be DBAs. While I can write some minimal queries, I never want to call myself a DBA.

Perhaps it's my lack of understanding of something fundamental to millennial culture, but how in the world could meal-kit services ever expect to succeed in the long run? From my (admittedly somewhat narrow) perspective, the choices are simple. If you don't want to cook, you eat at a restaurant or get takeout/delivery. If…

Remember, Fault Tolerance (FT) is not HA. That's an interesting thought. I suspect that many times, we treat the two as the same. I can even think of some network devices that label the active/passive capability of their product as HA. I wonder how many IT organizations make the distinction between FT and HA when building…

Printers? 20 year old vulnerability? Wow. That's hard to imagine. Almost a testament to buggy code, in that it has outlasted numerous versions of Windows. The office rules thing seemed a little 'millenial' in context.

The password security issue continues to rear its ugly head, and with good cause. It seems that no one has found the particular unicorn yet that balances good security practice (not theater) with usability for the mass of users. The other aspect of this is IT users, who often have multiple accounts to wrangle. Keeping…

Good stuff here. Most of these can and should apply to other fields, too. I can think of plenty of cases where these would help. The point about humility cannot be stressed enough. I think for most people it takes a while to learn that there is happiness and success in seeing others succeed, and helping them do so. When…

Seems like a great idea for PoC and maybe smaller environments. In larger environments with multiple pollers, separate database, web server, etc., I'm not sure how effective virtual appliances would be. SonicWall's GMS basically works that way, with defined roles for each server in the deployment. It seems to be very easy…

Some really great ideas here. I would add that one of the pitfalls I've seen is that many efforts to streamline support lend themselves to an impersonal and/or detached experience for the end user. I think that part of what leads to so many walk-up, drive-by, direct contact approaches from end users is the desire for a…