Posts by fixit_f

How spreadsheets (nearly) conquered and killed the financial industry

Couldn't agree more with this article - spot on

This article is bang on the money and I see these problems everyday. Change management, while well intentioned, can be built around ill conceived processes and go completely out of control, to the point where change is virtually impossible. The parallels between the signoff process you describe and the signof process at my current employer is uncanny. So, as well as stopping people changing things for the worse, these processes additionally stop people being able to change things for the better! At this point, almost invariably, people decide that if they're not permitted by change management to do the job properly to a timescale that's acceptable they'll have to fudge something else in under the radar. Cue another spreadsheet based approach, which nobody will know about, nobody will formally support and nobody will even understand once the trader who cobbled it together leaves the desk.

Subjects bestow Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 on Queen

Nice

They could load it up with 30 years worth of tabloid revelations and pictures of Fergie's tits for the fuckwitted old bag to enjoy.

Sorority girls gone wild: '1 to 3' casual sex 'hookups' every month

This is not news

I was far worse than this at uni

Slideshow: A History of Intel x86 in 20 CPUs

Re: Mid-80's

It wasn't that it "overclocked" them per se. The "turbo" was their standard clock speed, when disabled it slowed the processor down a bit. If I remember rightly this was so that old games designed for slower processors remained playble!

Like Pokemon - I've pretty much caught them all. And I'm only 33!

The early ones were hand me downs from my Dad. I still had my 286 at uni though in 1998, and it was a perfectly adequate word processor.

8086 8mhz (Amstrad 1512)

286 12mhz (Tandon)

386-SX25mhz (Tandy own brand)

486 DX2-66 (Viglen)

Pentium 2 133mhz (beige box inherited from work)

Pentium 2 333mhz (beige box inherited from work)

Pentium 3 900 mhz (home built, overclocked to a bit more if I remember rightly)

Core 2 duo 2160 mhz (HP Pavilion notebook)

Core i5 650 no idea of clock speed, irrelevant these days it's all about the cores (Acer predator)

There's probably a few I missed as well.

20 years of GSM digital mobile phones

Battery life

I genuinely get 2 days from my Galaxy S2 with the odd phone call, text and web browsing on the train. It's the first smart phone (apart from an old Blackberry, which wasn't really "smart" anyway) I've had that's managed this feat though..

Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's tax dodge profit shift? Totally legit

Fair play to them

If I had the option of not paying a load of tax, I'd definitely take it. Sick of having the government PISS MY OWN MONEY INTO MY FACE. It's not like they can even be arsed to empty my bin half of the time and that's one of the few things I'm supposed to actually see from it.

EDF: We'll raise bills 11% - but only 2% is due to energy costs!

Re: Energy price rises

It's not just about electricity - most people use more gas than leccy.

There's a flip side to this potentially. I predict a glut of people recommissioning old fireplaces and/or installing woodburners, as I have done. My local telephone exchange supply me with a supply of wooden pallets, or I can raid random skips I see in the street. I chop up this free supply of energy in the back garden and burn it all winter. Good for me as it massively reduces my gas bill, as an incidental side effect having a woodburner is a lovely thing and the missis and cat love it. On the downside, despite it being clear act compliant I can't imagine it being as clean per unit of energy produced as burning relatively clean gas. So if more people like me start doing this, pollution and carbon emissions will perversely start climbing.

Thus - renewables could lead to an actual INCREASE in pollution by people heating their houses by alternative means.

Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!

Re: Bloat

Surely anyone with any sense will have known from the outset that a large commercial organisation pumping money into a free OS wasn't perhaps doing it completely altruistically? Just as with facebook, what initially was a freebie now has to make a return as a business proposition.

The beauty of LINUX is that this isn't a problem - simply hop distros, even a newboe should be able to work out how to do that these days if they got as far as installing ubuntu in the first place. I think Canonical have done a lot to raise the profile of LINUX, this isn't a massive intrusion and it can be disabled. I'm not going to get too het up about it, that's the joy of choice. Personally I'm platform agnostic, I run Win7 on my desktop, mint on my 17 inch laptop, ubuntu on my netbook - I'll upgrade the netbook to latest when it's released, turn the search feature off, and if I still don't like it I can install another debian based distro without any significant hassle.

I can see where the privacy advocates are coming from, but given the options available from my perspective there's not much unexpected to see here, and to make out there is is simply slinging unwarranted mud at LINUX as a whole, isn't it? What am I missing?

O2 kicks out Ericsson server for breaking its network

Re: Funny that...

My other half has massive problems with three as well - they probably have the worst reputation of all the networks I'd say.

Slideshow: A History of the Smartphone in 20 Handsets

I started with the Orange SPV

This was the first Windows Mobile phone, and the first handset from HTC. Bloody awful thing, but quite a few people bought them, would have been worthy of inclusion I think. The Palm / Handspring Treo 600 to this day is one of the best phones I ever had, fantastic thing, so sad that Palm dropped the ball.

Miniature Baumgartner jumps from 128,000ft

Awesome

Hope you didn't break the Go Pro!!

McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob

Re: Why?

You see that (spits) that's your swimming pool, that is. Oooh look there's your mum.

'Programming on Windows 8 just like playing bingo' - Microsoft VP

Every time somebody uses the word "churn" in this context.....

...... I want to punch them full in the face.

Office to propel Windows tablets past Android in 2015

@Richard Re: You do realize...

It's normally the recruitment people that insist on Word format - otherwise I'd cheerfully send as PDF. I've tried it before and they've made me re-send it as a .Doc.

It's the world of lock in and stupid corporates with arcane, proprietary systems. Common sense means nothing here.

Re: You do realize...

Agree completely. In the corporate world Microsoft still have so much lock in, and will do until open document formats are more widely used. Let's face it, the average sales tw@t is unlikely to use VBA, and hopefully that will drop off the face of the planet soon where it belongs - but they will want word docs and powerpoints. Other products are fine for CONSUMING word/excel/whatever but can't be trusted yet to PRODUCE them. Even as a completely platform agnostic user, I wouldn't dream of making changes to something like my CV in a product such as open office and sending it anywhere without having first reviewed it in Microsoft Office on a Windows machine. Sad, stupid, shouldn't be this way but that's how things stand I'm afraid - you can't rely on "office emulators" to produce you a document that you'd trust to appear correctly formatted when opened in MS Office.

Got a BMW? Thicko thieves can EASILY NICK IT with $30 box

This sort of stuff isn't new though. Back in the day cars used to use infra red LED's to unlock them, and you could get a "learning" universal TV remote to unlock them (once you'd pointed the real key fob LED at it while it was in learning mode, of course)

Apple: Thanks for the iPhone 5s, China, now get to the BACK of the queue

That really is quite rude when you think about it. Way to alienate and annoy a massive market Apple!!

So, just what is the ultimate bacon sarnie?

Re: I disagree

I disagree with your disagreement. A bacon sandwich in anything other than crappy white bread just tastes wrong! And forget the ketchup and brown sauce, mustard all the way!

Apple now most valuable company OF ALL TIME

Re: As an Apple fan I'd just like to say.....

"Being a fan of a corporation is bizarre"

YES!!! ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON. It's such an odd thing to do.

Anonymous takes down UK government websites in Assange attack

DDOS

Well fuck me, how sophisticated of them. Twats.

Apple 'offered Samsung $30-per-mobe' patent licence truce

Re: Delenda est Pupillam

Romanus eunt domus

Yes, yes, the Olympics are near. But what'll happen to its IT afterwards?

Re: I smell some sport!

ODFO. You'll find that the overwhelming majority of us Londoners (well I commute in every day anyway) don't want it either, it's going to make getting around a real pain in the arse for three weeks.

How to fix the broken internet economy: START HERE

Re: Its a Minefield

There are many reasons touted, not sure all are completely accurate but there is still a grain of truth to them... the three biggies I can think of are:

a) With amateur production kit and limited production experience you can't get the sort of recording results that you could release. Unless you're a deliberately "Lo Fi" kind of outfit this will generally be a problem for you, and limit your potential audience. This means that you'll need to spend time in a proper recording studio and hire professional people, which costs a good chunk of money. Fine if you're Radiohead and you can front it, but a big problem if you're starting out.

b) Record labels do have amazing publicity machines. Whether they tend to use them to good effect is subjective given some of the old shit they keep trying to pump to people, but still, if they want something to sell they generally can make it happen - using billboards, TV advertising, pulling strings to get support slots and so on.

c) Distribution. Not many people buy in shops anymore, but an awful lot of people still want a physical copy such as a CD. This is for various reasons such as snobbiness about sound quality (FLAC isn't quite established in the mainstream yet) to people who just like the album art and cover notes. This media costs money to master and press (this kind of follows on from the first point really)

Hope that helps, there are plenty of other reasons trotted out. Hopefully they will all disappear at some point as record companies are an extra layer between musicians and music lovers that ideally we'd be able to do without.

Panasonic Eluga DL1 waterproof Android

As a watersports fanatic (no not the urine sort) .....

This would be a killer feature for me, and a useful safety feature as I'd be able to have it with me out at sea in case I got in trouble. However, the pint test isn't sufficient, can someone test it for four hours inside a wetsuit?

O2, GiffGaff network goes titsup for unlucky punters

Re: Thanks for your random rant that has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

Leave the poor OP alone guys, he was only making the point that he had a terrible experience with a company. I started with O2 in 2005 ish when they had what appeared to be the best mobile data network out there, but once they got the exclusive rights to the iPhone it seemed to get overloaded. After a while I gave up and went elsewhere.

There's nothing wrong with making the point that you've had a bad experience with a company - after all they're perfectly free to push advertising into your face, if they don't deliver it's your right and duty to warn people. O2 just aren't a very good network at the moment I'm afraid, end of.

'Inexperienced' RBS tech operative's blunder led to banking meltdown

Re: no backup of the schedule?

It's not about "Management Controls" in fact this kind of wooly headed high level thinking is the reason why many investment banks are filled with "service delivery" departments while lacking the sort of teams that can actually deal on a technical level with this sort of crisis. Where I work we have a "service delivery" department and their sole function appears to be obstructive whenever we have an overnight problem. The end result is people who know what they're doing hacking the sh!t out of stuff to make it work, while the "management" tier do their best to make it look like they had any contribution to this process - and then they take credit. Vendor or in house, at 3 in the morning you need people available (IT and BA's and Devs) who understand the systems and can just make it process the OVN, This RBS situation is the perfect example - technical people within RBS probably knew exactly what needed to be done, but a load of managers probably demanded "process" and spent at least 12 hours relying on scheduler ops teams. For this reason several thousand "payday" customers (people who need their payday money) were skint for several days. All because of crap managers who talk more about "service delivery" and "process" I hate these wooly c***s what exactly do they do? As a senior member of a team who runs a front office system that shifts literally billions per day with base and precious metals I expect freedom where something needs fixing, and I've done nothing to demonstrate that I'm not capable of running that capacity. If you run with outdated systems, give the poor sods who keep it running absolute authority. I'm not Jerome Kerviel, nor are any of my hard-pressed colleagues, the bank I work for pay me to run these systems, and I will to the utmost of my ability - moreover if processing fails my bosses have my mobile number and at weekends I'll be the first to pitch in, on call or not. RBS didn't seem to have this escalation process from what I've seen.

Re: no backup of the schedule?

I work in a large investment bank and am very au fait with scheduling of overnight processes, although we use control-m.

We did have an instance where a global upgrade to control-m failed and brought the whole tool down. The trouble is, best practice is now that all batches are scheduled by many disparate systems, and the batches need to be "granular" i.e. each part of the batch runs to completion and is sanity checked by automated checkers before the next stage can run. Because of the insistence that this is done by schedulers, many teams struggle to run their overnight processes without knowing the scripts that are run, or the order they are run in. In the event that the whole system is down, this information may not be readily available. There are some right numpties on particular teams in any large institution, and they're often trying to unravel things designed a decade ago.

I bet something like this happened here - the scheduler fell over, overnight batches were interrupted (potentially mid process where that process isn't rerunnable, requiring a database restore) and the teams with the knowledge to run these overnight processes manually may not necessarily have been on call or available.

May 2012 was second warmest on record. The warmest? 2010

I agree with town crier

Just because something doesn't fit with the collective sensibilities that we've been brought up with doesn't mean that it shouldn't at least be examined rationally before being found wanting. No I wouldn't want my wife picked for me either, but that's because I've been brought up with the expectation that I should find my own.

With regard to China's 1 child policy - yes, obviously it's led to some awful things happening in China, because it's been implemented badly. However, unless we start colonising space PDQ it seems fairly obvious that we're running out of ways to engineer around a fundamental lack of resources for even the population that we have now. World population has apparently pretty much doubled since the late 70's, and it doesn't seem likely that people (either in the West or emerging economies) are going to voluntarily start using less resources to compensate for this anytime soon. Controlled population reduction policies in the future would seem to be likely I'd say, distasteful though the idea may be to many.

Study fingers humans for ocean heat rise

As an outdoorsy kind of nerd......

I have a particular take on global warming. In the 1990's I was young and silly and a bloody good kayaker/climber, and I knew a load of Welsh kayaking/climbing instructors well who were very matter of fact that the climate was changing. People who had worked in the industry for 40 years were suddenly getting sunburnt. This is obviously more about the UV side of it, but I think it's relevant as an indicator of change.

20 years later I'm now a kitesurfer, and I still know lots of people who instruct in various water based disciplines. Anyone that says nothing has changed is IMHO unaware of the real world testimony of a whole army of people who have spent consistent amounts of time outdoors all of their lives. I personally don't believe the change in sea temperature is as small as this article suggests, the documented fact that certain species of sharks (whether confused or not) are suddenly turning up on our coast occasionally should be proof enough. The air is warming, and the sea is warming. Jury is still out on why, but empirical (as well as anecdotal evidence) is showing us that the increase is more than is perhaps being let on or realised by scientific groups.

Facebook IPO plunge sparks tidal wave of lawsuits

It's not that it executed at a lower price, it's that it executed at all

With equities trading, you generally place an order with a broker/AE and this order will remain open until a trader is able to fill it. Until the trader executes, you can generally cancel the order at any time. His beef (I'd imagine) is that once it became clear the price was tanking, he wasn't able to cancel his order on their electronic platform and it was filled regardless.

Keep out of the Olympics' way, earn a haircut from TfL app

Seriously, you utter utter twats

If all these Olympic tourists are going to be paying TFL top whack for daily travel cards (£8.40 a day if used during peak hours) they'll be raking it in for a network they haven't significantly upgraded for the event. A zone 1 + 2 travelcard is £1168 a year and if they're seriously asking people to work from home/cycle everywhere for 3 weeks then that represents then taking about £67 from the pockets of anyone who buys an annual tube ticket.

I think that if you can show reasonable proof that you've been working from home for the duration, they should be offering to refund that amount. A haircut voucher ain't gonna cut it :-)

Microsoft kills Windows Live brand

Bill Hicks had it right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Shuttle Enterprise comes home to New York

If you're ever in NY....

The USS Intrepid needs to be on your list of things to visit. So many cool aircraft are sat on that deck,

The best April 1 gags … or were they?

GoPro

http://gopro.com/p/livestock-mount/

Zuckerberg flies to Shanghai for Apple Store visit

I've been to that apple store

It's pretty cool actually

London wage slaves face hour of Cloud discharge a day - official

Not sure I see the point

Only works in stations, not on the train itself if I'm reading this article correctly?

Anyone who wants to be connected while on a train will already have a 3G connection. Although admittedly I find mobile data to be pretty patchy on trains, maybe it's because of the high voltages on the tracks or overhead power lines?

Pirate Bay plans sky-high flying proxy servers

How about a kite?

If it's tethered to the land, where would that stand in law? You could generate some energy while you're at it

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/10/71908

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

D.A.R.Y.L

Watched it a few weeks ago, what a pile of shit.

Pair of double-As give you cheap, quick charge

What a waste of batteries

If your phone is important to you, you select one that allows you to carry a spare battery, or alternatively you carry a mains charger. If you're away on business and don't keep your phone topped up, you're an idiot.

No need to waste expensive and polluting batteries on keeping your handheld twit machine topped up. Simply select an appropriate phone (that lasts a couple of days) and put it on charge from time to time.

West Yorkshire Gay Police Association in email list leak FAIL

That's the rumour mill circulating round my work

Thanks for that headline and it's truncation potential - now one of my colleagues (who dropped past my desk) wants to know why the caption on one of my firefox tabs reads "West Yorkshire Gay Police Ass"

Global warming COULD SHRINK THE HUMAN RACE

Re: Re: Re: It's already happened

Rubbish - I'm from the Coventry area and I'm 6'2"

Agree that Coventry is an absolute bloody armpit of a town though.

Daniel Craig like Connery, Skyfall helmsman suggests

Craig is a bloody awful Bond IMHO, it's not that he's a bad actor - he just doesn't fit the role.

And yes, bring back the good old silly implausible Bonds. Explosions, stupid gadgets, cringeworthy one liners, the lot. If I wanted gritty and real I'd go to the Arts cinema.

Smart telly trends make Apple 'iTV' a certainty

Dual core tellies

The way they're slamming silicon into domestic consumer electronics, the time of the Red Dwarf talking toaster cannot be far.

Apple antagonist Proview unveils its own iPad

Re: Re: Re: Optional

It was probably for spelling "eke" incorrectly.

Parliament ponders £400,000 iPads-for-MPs plan

Seriously?????

Why can't they all just FUCK RIGHT OFF.

You already have been supplied with a laptop. If you want a shiny toy you do what the rest of the world has to do and buy it out of your own pocket you horrible, cheating, wheedling little c***s. Even in the big corporates (where iPads are quite common) people don't get away with expensing them.