Posts by Don Bannister 63 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2008
"performance obligation (RPO) on its books – that’s stuff customers have committed to pay for, but which Oracle hasn’t yet delivered".
I wonder if this includes the sort of Oracle deployment that has spectacularly failed for UK's Birmingham City Council, who have consequently been unable to file audited accounts for a year or more ...
Microsoft say "Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to _open or edit_ Publisher files in Publisher".
You'd think they'd at least be able to manage a viewer. If you are a organisation with a lot of Publisher documents, basically you are f***ed. Definitely the "Extinguish" phase of Microsoft's MO :-(
I live in NI, and this doesn't give me a good feeling. Can't help wondering if it'll follow a common path of runs very late, runs massively over-budget, end customer pays for it all.
More complex than expected, lack of clarity about requirements, inadequate project management, lessons will be learnt, etc, etc ...
"crystallographic calculations and was designing one in a barn in Fenny Compton, Warwickshire".
That's rather a coincidence. That was where the former Post Office post-masters & post-mistresses gathered in 2009 to start their actions against the Post Office's now discredited ICL/Fujitsu Horizon IT system.
"Instead companies (especially banks) create a proliferation of .com addresses so no-one has any idea which ones are genuine and which are scams".
Case in point in UK: logging in to halifax.co.uk moves to halifax-online.co.uk - just the sort of domain trick a scammer would use.
Why not online.halifax.co.uk or halifax.co.uk/online ?
Maybe marketroids got involved ...
Geofencing would only cover "fixed" airspace, so probably not any temporary zones established during firefighting operations.
I understand that DJI have now degraded geofencing to "operator warning" status. It may not be safer, but it'll certainly place any blame clearly on the drone pilot !
or does this not show the delightful contradiction with government mandated security weaknesses/backdoors/wiretaps ? "Of course the bad people would never be able to access our spying systems".
One the one hand you've got:
"FBI and CISA officials briefed reporters on the massive cyber-espionage campaign, during which China-affiliated snoops successfully broke into several US telecom companies' networks, compromised wiretapping systems used by law enforcement, and used that access to steal customers' call records and metadata."
And on the other:
"Encryption is your friend – whether it is on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communications," CISA's Greene said. "Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible, if not really hard, for them to detect it. So, our advice is to try to avoid using plain text."
For several months I've been trying, without success, to update a credit card on the contactless bit of their website.
If they can't do that, it makes me wonder how the real time card charging part of their system is still working. No information - just the usual "sorry for the inconvenience", "working to get back soon", etc ....
As others have said, it did work like that. Etiquette was that if you heard a conversation, you hung up and tried later.
One aspect was that the exchange equipment had to know which of the two made the call.
The line equipment was configured differently, and you had to press a button which I believe put an earth on one leg, and allocated the call to the relevant subscriber. I think the ring current may have been applied similarly.
If you reversed your line pair, well you can imagine ....
Btw, this was UK in 1960s
"The urgency for switching customers onto digital services grows by the day because the 40-year-old analogue landline technology is increasingly fragile".
Rather a different view now, contrasting with their earlier wish to "sweat the copper assets" with ADSL, ADSL Max, ADSL 2+, V-Fast, etc.
If they'd gone for the full fibre earlier, methinks today's urgency wouldn't be quite so bad ....
I was wondering about "traditional" INS too. Were you referring to mechanical gyros, or the somewhat fancier laser gyros ? I'd also be a bit worried by the "low temperature" requirement for the quantum version. Hardly trivial or light in weight.
There is a trend towards using GNSS based approaches at airports. Given the vulnerability of such systems, this strikes me as less than ideal.
I know ILS and other ground-based systems are costly to install and run, but surely they will be rather more resilient.
And don't get me going on the reliance of cellular phones, DAB radio, etc on satellite sourced precision timing ....
I used to work in the broadcast world, and came across a couple of such stories where the big boss wanted to know what was going on ....
1. In person. "What are you doing to get this fixed ?" Reply: "Talking to you"
2. On the phone, after rather tetchy reply from the fixer. "Do you know who I am ?" Reply: "Yes - do you know who I am ?" "No" Reply: "Good !"
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