Posts by JimC 1967 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Which is kinda ironic when you think about the current state of the Outlook client. Sure makes the Notes client look good. My immediate relations all still use Pegasus mail, which still works just as well as it always has, but we have one friend who is addicted to buying new computers and I end up supporting Outlook. What an unbelieveable dogs dinner the new Outlook client is. After an hour of trying the other day I still didn't find a way to give him black text on white, which he wants because he claims white on black is giving him eye trouble.
Another thing to consider is that it would be imposing a top down project that would cause immense disruption on end users who would see no benefit in it. The very best they could hope for would be IT that was no worse than before. So there would be immense end user resentment, no buy in and a huge hit on productivity, all to maybe save a bit on the Microsoft tax. It's pretty much a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Much as I loathe Microsoft and their deeds, and I in my time I worked hard to minimise their reach into my organisation, the brutal truth is that its very hard to imagine an innovative, radical and unconventional 9 billion pound government IT project being anything other than a disaster.
Sometimes I think it would be a good thing if the costing for government projects was based on the net cost to the economy, so including wages taxed in the UK, not overseas, etc etc, rather than the bottom line cost to the commissioning organisation, but I fear it would be just too complicated, and besides would fall at the barrier of executives protecting their own budgets rather than considering the overall national good.
Yep, victim blaming is another aspect of the witch hunt. No doubt there was plenty of "If she hadn't... we wouldn't have thought she was a witch." And there's plenty of that on display here too. Whatever the peccadillos of the individual, the consequences are out of all proportion.
This doesn't in any way invalidate your point, but pedantically there are two bridges over the Menai Strait, and neither were designed by Brunel.
Thomas Telford’s Menai Suspension road bridge opened in 1826 and the Britannia Bridge, once rail only and now road and rail, opened in 1850, a box-girder design by William Fairbairn and Robert Stephenson.
https://www.visitanglesey.co.uk/en-gb/explore/towns/menai-bridge
Brunel of course designed many fine bridges, the Royal Albert over the Tamar and Clifton Suspension bridges being among the best known, and many of them are still in use. Its probable though that most older bridges have been appreciably upgraded over the decades, if for no other reason than loads are far greater than they used to be.
and modifying it for a new job, my PFY looked at the code and said "when you wrote that I was in primary school". He seems to be a significant player in AWS now, but nearly didn't survive that day... And mate, if you're reading this I reckon you're pretty much as old now as I was then. How are your PFYs?
Not at all. When I've put my trivial bits of code out with an NCSA license its as a pay forward in recognition of all the developers who've put sample code out there for me to learn from. I'm not concerned with end user freedom to study, share or modify. Apart from anything else I'm well aware that 99% plus of them neither wish or are able to take advantage of that highly notional freedom. What I am concerned about is the freedom for other developers to take it and use it without having to worry too much about licenses.
The statement is reasonable. GPL places restrictions on how the source code can be taken and modified that are not present in the more open licenses. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on your viewpoint. The people that GPL doesn't want are those who develop software that can not or will not be licensed under GPL.
I used to work on a Novell Directory Services installation with in excess of a hundred servers. If there was a serious problem to fix it was vital not to rush, since the databases needed time to sync up after making changes. So when there was a big fix to do I used to bring in a book, and stop and read a chapter when the directory needed to be left in peace to do its processing. Impatience was always an enemy with NDS, and reading the book took away the psychological pressure to do something when it was better to wait.
And I for one can't remember a code editor I liked better then Wordstar. Especially the ability to move copy and paste blocks rather than lines, which I was particularly fond of. And most of all, of course, never having to take hands off the keyboard to grab the damned mouse.
In my experience its more what happens when people who aren't chosen for independent thinking and initiative (not generally desirable attributes in a security guard) are given totally inadequate briefing and instructions.
I had a fair sized run in with a security guard at a past employer who threatened me with physical violence when I wouldn't leave the building with the job half finished and potentially hundreds unable to work on Monday morning. The company had just abandoned having a 24 hour security presence and his idiot management hadn't given their security guard any clues as to what to do with an emergency. I passed up through my line management that I felt the problem was entirely due to his line management and that I felt no blame attached to the security man. Thereafter we were good mates, which was pretty damn useful at times.
"OK, so here's the situation.You have to write a software system for 317 clients."
- "What 317 different customers? Can I just resign instead?"
"Oh Sorry, that's a bit misleading. There are lot more customers than that, 317 end user departments, 317 IT departments all with different compatibility requirements, 317 finance departments and 317 chief executive's offices."
- "I think I have to go on sick leave..."
Very much so.
And consider it from the point of view of the end user department who considers the IT system a necessary evil that gets in the way of delivering the service:
"OK, let me understand this. You want to take away the system we have, and which pretty much works and whose numerous flaws we know how to deal with. You want to replace it for no good reason (the supplier doesn't want to support it any more is a not a good reason in our book) with a new system. You want to run this system as it comes, which means that we're going to have to adapt all our working practices and so on in order to cope with the things it can't do. We're going to have to retrain all our staff, taking them off actually delivering a service to the public. No doubt the changeover period will be full of bugs and disruption and problems, not to mention all the effort in trying to figure out how to make it do what needs doing. And for all this disruption, loss of productivity, focus, compromised public service etc, the gross benefit to the public is going to be pretty much exactly nothing. You want us to find some enthusiastic people to help you implement this unnecessary change who are going to be taken off the work they like and were employed to do. Do you understand why we might not see this as a good thing?"
The BOFH missed a trick here. Bearing in mind a conference room filled with top of the range gear none of the users are capable of using, then isn't the correct response is to accept a large budget, and spend none of it (except perhaps a can of spray polish) in the conference room? Shuffle a few bits of kit about and remove the dust, and noone is going to know the difference.
When I worked for a local authority, although all internal stuff had boring but meaningful code names, we decided we wanted something more obscure for external facing devices, so everything on the DMZ was named after villages in our territory. The particular advantage was so many unique names, although we avoided anything long and hyphenated.
Grief, that reminds me of a boss I had who'd ambush his staff in a team meeting with unexpected questions and if he didn't like the answer would ask exactly the same question again. Whilst I like to think I have pretty good tolerance for ignorance and well meaning fools, I am not so great with deliberate idiocy, and in those days I had only been in IT and offices for a very few years, having spent the beginning of my working life in, shall we say, much more robust environments. Consequently this particular form of idiocy rather lit a fuse that was a lot shorter in those days, and I fear I tended to respond to the same question repeated with the same answer, but much louder. Apparently, for the few months this doomed working relationship lasted, our team meetings were rather legendary in the organisation!
When your old system is running on antique hardware that's no longer maintained, the software version is no longer supported, and the whole system is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, begrudgingly and minimally assisted by vendors who are only really interested in having you replace it, and you really don't have any choice but to spend a damn fortune you'd much rather spend on education or social care or something else that actually helps people.
Yes its appalling practice. But in the days before widespread remote management it was also mightily convenient, especially as its also appalling practice for first and second line IT support to have admin access. The temptation was always there, and less IT aware management would often approve doing it, no matter how much the likes of people like me objected on principle. I'm moderately surprised it still happens though because now there are alternatives.
It was complicated... I was confident all the systems I was responsible for stored dates in suitable fields, and the worst I was going to run into were display problems, but there's always the niggling concern: suppose I tell the management there's absolutely nothing to worry about and something comes out of left field. So we did a lot of what turned out to be unnecessary stuff. But you know, it was insurance, and that's the nature of insurance. You pay a lot of premiums and seem to get nothing in return.
Might be to consider an attack on critical infrastructure a national emergency, and have government level resources to help for organisations to recover. Given sufficient resources recovery from ransomware attacks in a reasonable space of time ought not be too difficult, but of course your average hospital, power company, whatever hasn't got any such capability, nor the money to buy iit in. Maybe there should be recovery capability at national level. We consider police and defence to be national priorities to be funded out of taxation, is it time to consider whether ransomware recovery should be similarly funded?
In far off days before a good number of you were born, payroll for a large organisation (and this was a very large payroll, one of the biggest in SE England) was done by running a batch program which took some hours and generated a computer tape (yes, one of those big reels beloved of old school SF films). The tape was then couriered off to the bank, and the bank would process the tape which would make all the payments to the right accounts. Usually.
This was not to be a good day. There was a problem with the output, which was thought resolved by editing the tape. Tape went off to the bank. There was a further problem and more editing, but eventually the tape was run. And it made all the payments. Into a single building society account. This was spotted, and the building society stopped the money actually appearing in the lucky person's account. However they refused to actually return the money until all the i's and t's had been dotted and crossed, which I suppose is not unreasonable with the sums involved.
Trouble was everyone needed to be paid on time, so my late employer had to borrow the money for the entire payroll until they got the original money back. The interest payments on such a large sum were appreciable, and it was reckoned to have been the most expensive ICT cockup in the organisation's history. There was a big post mortem, but it allegedly failed to find out where the fault lay. I always believed that the technical staff on both sides very deliberately failed to find out where to pin the blame in case it was their side!
Think you've got your CIX muddled up. CIX - Compulink information Exchange UK with Ameol etc (which still exists) was then a vague equivaent to Compuserve, but UK based. originally one would sign onto CIX with a modem,
CIX - Commercial Internet exchange AIUI was a US initiative to bypass US state control of the nascent Internet.
Well maybe, but, especially in this context let's note how useful 'crypto experts' discussing the finer points of digital currency have been, or for that matter how much use the majority of financial experts were in the lead up to the banking crash.
No-one can be expert in everything, and in our political system politicians move around between utterly different roles so often that most probably they can't be expert in anything. My own argument is that the key skill a politician needs is the ability to spot bull***t and know which people to listen to. To what extent they have that ability is of course debatable. One thing's for certain though, there's no shortage of self appointed 'experts' queueing up in front of them, not to mention the dangerous phenomenon of activists who claim to be experts, but who are always going to, quite possibly unknowingly, present dogma as fact..
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