Posts by Is it me? 414 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jan 2010
I suspect users of Crackberry's could be tarred with the same brush, of even people who are using their PC's to read the register.
To be meaningful you would actually have to do a multi-channel, mutli-device survey.
Where's the waste paper basket icon when you need it.
Although it looks a bit naff in the wooden case, it does prompt the question, why can't we have more computers that look like part of the furniture, rather than an ugly utilitarian lump in the corner.
Let's have roll top desks with computers built in, must be possible to make them reliable & cool enough not to need much servicing, and modular enough to make replacement easy.
Just think how much nicer a data centre would look in polished mahogany.....
LCD screens in Victorian picture frames.....
Come on Apple, HP and the rest, design something nice and natural to look at.
If you look at a wide range of materials and Products in the UK and other Markets you'll find that China has a monopoly on supply, in fact, as we know in the computer industry, regardless of the badge on the front of the computer, it will have come out of the same manufacturer in China, thus the only competitive edge companies have is on volume, and distribution.
Our continual obsession with lowering or minimising the cost of a product, means that the producers will always go to the cheapest source of supply for any service they want, regardless of their competitors also using that source, because if their competitor is cheaper, they will loose market share, and go out of business.
Ultimately, all you land up buying, is a brand, the product may well be identical to another brand in all but appearance, thus all that is significant is the brand marketing.
You can't even use price as a differentiator, as Apple prove, you minimise your costs, and maximise your price against what the market will bare.
Politicians, only see brand competition, not supply chain competition, and how would you legislate for that anyway.
A sane company would ensure full diversity of supply, but will still be driven by what there competitors do, and if diversity is too expensive they won't do it, because they will be driven out by lower cost suppliers.
our only reasonable salvation at present is the cost of transporting products from A to B, as energy costs rise, that will increase, moving production closer to home, maybe.
Oh the other thing is that you have to convince banks to invest in manufacturing, high capital cost, long payback period, hmm don't think so.
/* RANT
The grads we employ tend to be one trick ponies, they have a capability that it is up to the employer to exploit, however quite often they want to stay in the Java or .Net or Ruby camp because they have a tribal loyalty to it, and will turn down opportunities to work in other technologies.
Grads, learn as much as you can about IT, and welcome it, don't runaway just because you need to learn something else. IT does not begin and end with one technology, there's one hell of a lot of difference in performance between updating a database on your PC, and entering a transaction on the web which then passes through a security gateway and SOA bus or two befor hitting an application server that actually stores the data on the database.
Learn just what those interim systems actually do as your transactions pass by, what happens when it all goes wrong, oh and by the way, learn Basic, Java, C anything, PL/SQL, COBOL, not hard Learnt them all in the first 8 years of my IT career, (Well not JAVA), alongside PowerBuilder, the Last one, PL/M, Fortran five dialects of Basic, Neat/3, DCL, Unix Shell (3 Dialects, three vendors each), oh I also learnt Business Analysis, Database Design, Systems Design, god I could go on.
Oh and Mr IT Director, train your graduates, rather than bitch about what they can't do.
*/ RANT
With 16% graduate unemployment for IT (the worst) we need the work in the industry. If UK Government wants to throw money at IT, I for one am only too happy to take it.
Oh, and picking one or two features of eBorders you don't like, doesn't make the whole thing a waste of time. I look forward to your replies once you have seen the PQQ and RFS documentation, read it and understood it.
Not sure where you have been for the past century.
1.) The assumption that a vendor knows more about their own products is only marginally true, collectively i'd say they actually know less than their customer base. If they knew more then they would find all the bugs, and back doors to their products.
2). Once you select a supplier in the cloud, how easy do you think it will be to move.....Really....baring in mind our industries history of locking in customers whilst paying lip service to open standards.
3). Realistically how safe do you think your data will be from accidental exposure, hacking, requests from the DoJ for disclosure to the hosting organisation. A hosting provider will represent a massive target for hackers, why go after a single company when you can get 10.
4). Yes the telephone network is a cloud, and not very secure, why do you think governments use separate networks, or overlay their own security on top of the channel.
5). Banks are not clouds they are store and forward messaging services (Think about it) that overlay their own security on top of public networks, who have a vested interest in keeping data secure, and they aren't too successful at that.
6). As UK Gov. has just found out some of the IT companies are so big, they can dictate to you the terms of business, and don't really care about you as a customer, even when you spend billions with them, you still only represent a fraction of a % of their business, so once they have you why should they care about your service, baring in mind the costs of reversion, or migration to another supplier, who will by the way be offering "industry standard competitive" solutions, or lowest common denominator.
7) Clouds make sense for small business, Amazon & eBay work well. For more serious users, the bigger you are, the less sense it makes, better to operate your own cloud.
I think writing of Microsoft and the PC is going a bit far, I suspect that the PC will now live on as just that, a personal computer, as a back-up and docking device for mobile devices, and a domestic general purpose computer.
There will also always be a need for isolated computer systems where security, or processing demands make distributed computing nonsensical. The various computing paradigms all have their place in IT, and Microsoft provide some good tools, for which there will be a continued demand, well basically forever.
Where Microsoft, like many businesses in many industries are going wrong, is that they are still trying to be all things to all men and dominate all markets, partially I suspect because their workforce believes in them, and partly because of the continued financial drive to grow revenue, margin and profit. Intellectually, they have never really changed the game since Windows first appeared, sure they have commoditized a lot of technology, but it's always been the same technology, embracing a new paradigm by extending their existing one. If Microsoft really want to stay fresh, then they need new products to compete with and then replace their old ones, so that the industry can realize the full potential of new chip architectures and processing capabilities, rather than lose any hardware performance gains in compatibility bloat.
Mostly us techies wot wrote the software tend to get caught up in the fashion of the day, and we tend to be highly tribal for our favoured technologies, very few of us really think about what our applications really do from tapping on the keyboard to putting a byte on the disk, we gloss over the detail, and we ignore the complex, so take the cloud, do you really want your private data held in a cloud, by Google, or Amazon, subject to the whims of the DoJ and others on disclosure, or would you rather have it on a computer that you control, that you know who has access to it, and that gentle reader is why we'll see Microsoft, Apple and others in the PC market for a long, long time to come. That's why there will continue to be Secure Private Clouds, and Mainframes as well. If any major technology company fails to continue to re-invent and innovate, it will fail, unless it just buys its market share, which is to a great extent where Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP and others are.
Plane spotters look down on train spotters, and they on bus spotters and so on to Eddie Spotters.
One suspects he got carried away with being a big wheel, and wanted to be the first to report ownership changes to Bus magazine, yes there is one, rather than just take it for granted that the ownership details written on the side of the bus tell you all you need to know.
How do I know, ah well when I was 14 it seemed a better past time than sniffing glue and hanging around the precinct abusing old age pensioners, then I discovered beer and sex.
Oh and we all anorak for England in something, dear reader, remember that when you are munching your pizza during a 24 hour Call of Duty session.
Lord West was asked on Radio 4 this morning why some Airports considered an iPad a Laptop, and others did not, and what was the difference.
As the last governments "Security & Counter terrorism Adviser" you might think he would know the answer, however he ducked the question, pity, it would be nice to know that such an august person at least had some grasp of the technical details.
A bit of a non-story really, we all know the checks are silly, but no one in their right mind will remove one until they are 1000% certain there won't be any comeback on them if the next terrorist through London uses a method that would have detected by a now redundant check. Oh, and we have to Kowtow to the Yanks do as we say not as we do attitude.
Well said Martin.
Every human being deserves a degree of respect, and that degree of respect should be based on who they are, not what they are.
The example of a Muslim and a Church, or any inter-faith combination is perhaps an example of how misunderstood mainstream religion actually is. The vast majority of us aren't at each others throats, and we would make provision for other faiths, churches often change use between religions, there are examples of churches that have become temples and synagogues, mosques with the blessing of the previous faith. Yes, there are people who don't like other faiths, or aspects of them, even hate, but not that many, but they are news, being nice and considerate isn't.
Where we have to be careful is that we don't put ourselves in the position of making respect for some a reason to stop the enjoyment of others. the promotion of rights for one group, curtailing the rights of another. A question that a lot of minority campaigners should ask themselves before they act, if I do this what will I take away from everybody.
What will happen when the new legislation comes into force is that minority campaigners will look for some high profile targets to attack, with the aim of promoting their cause, raise more support and money, and making life "better" for their group, and probably worse for the rest of use, in other minorities. What they won't do is say, well that's unreasonable to do just now and we'll help that organisation to comply over time, manly because campaigners don't see other peoples point of view, and don't values the opinions, belief, pastimes etc. of others, and who is going to expose themselves to the vitriol levelled if they dare to say, no that's not reasonable.
So is it reasonable not to do something because you can't do it for everybody, and remember can't is different to won't.
Come on within, Come on without, you'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.
Government systems overlap, well stack me, I thought that one came out in the Modernizing Government paper, which suggested that there's a whole raft of interactions with the government that need only be done once, and that all the systems should be joined up to enable that.
At the same time eGIF and GITS stated that people should have the ability to contact the government through the channel of their choice and not be forced to use any particular technology, so you can use the browser of your choice, the language of your choice for some things, the channel (Phone, Post, eMail, on-line, face-to-face) of your choice. All of which is expensive, but necessary, not everybody has, or can use a computer, nor do those who can, actually always want to use one. The UK population is surprisingly diverse in its capabilities, and its disabilities.
The main reasons that we haven't seen these systems merged are:
- Public dislike of large government databases
- Data Protection Issues
- Data Aggregation Issues
- DWP won't share with HMRC who won't share with and so on because they, unsurprisingly, don't trust each other with their data.
- Security
- Governance ( Who owns and has the right to change data, who is responsible for ensuring its safety )
- Commercial dependency, just how much of the UK government's IT do you really want in the hands of large IT providers, who probably aren't British, and for whom UK Government is 0.01% of their worldwide revenue, so they don't really give a toss.
- Centralization, the fewer systems you have, the easier it is to bring it all down, or for that matter find it, if you're not entitled too.
I could now go on about digital divides, inflexible workflow driven process management, lets just finish by saying Democracy is expensive, and citizens are unpredictable, if you want cheap and efficient government IT, there's a despot to the east I can recommend, very hi-tech, very modern, very nasty.
A total tit this guy is, sadly I doubt he reads The Register. Thankfully neither do Daily Mail and Daily Excess readers, otherwise they would probably panic about all the other transport locational information out there on the web.
What was that saying, "A person who gives up an ounce of freedom for an ounce of security....."
As you say this information is freely available for the benefit of passengers and their families so that they know where the planes are, and indeed plane spotters, such information is available about trains and buses as well, probably even some HGVs.
It wouldn't be that difficult to work out what plane will be where in our skys, just based on the airlines timetables and the big sign on the tail, certainly, not that much time compared to the effort required to get an air to air missile into the UK, but then I doubt this guy thinks that much. Says a lot about the people who elected him.
If there's an IT spending freeze, who is going to do the IT work needed to implement this.
And it won't always just be a change in the file format you save output in either, it all has to be records managed through an ERDMS and content Management System, and a myriad of reporting tools for the numbers.
Government documents are often released as Locked PDFs to stop people doctoring the output, and making false claims about what they were sent. You can imagine what the Daily Frights would do with government spreadsheets they could massage.
Oyster will reduce its charges to TfL to less than that of Credit/Debit transactions. The other thing is how will the system recognise multiple journeys and ensure the correct charge is applied.
Then there's the what happens if the ticket barriers are open an the exit station, or not working.
I'm not sure what the real consumer benefit here is, ok it'll mean you don't need an Oyster card, but it will mean you need a contactless credit card. Fine if the processing system notes your card and then notes your usage over a period and charges you at the end of a period, but charging and refunding just sounds bonkers to me, I'd have thought the credit card companies will be laughing if they can charge for both transactions.
One can also bet that it's the consumer who will pay, not TfL and the banks, if councils are charging back card transactions to the consumer, why wouldn't TfL. When a organisations talk about reducing costs, they quite often mean transferring those costs to someone else.
Will it integrate into a back-end document management service. I can use this product within our private cloud and eliminate a whole load of PCs, but only if I can link it into the document management service, which just so happens to be OUCM. Event better if I can integrate with S**tpoint.
The cost of actually testing applications to any reasonable level usually exceeds the budgets available, thus protection is applied at server or network level, how ever in a cloud that's a bit more difficult. A long time ago when OO was just becoming mainstream Powersoft (Now Sybase) used to state that all object tests must cover all possible triggers on the object, regardless of weather they are coded or not, because you can never be sure what will happen if you fire a trigger, or that a coder hasn't put a back door on CTRL/Alt/Shift/click.
I'll bet most of the wholes are a whole lot simpler than that. And are scripting languages designed to be bomb proof, probably not.
We are a statistically driven society, before we do anything, politicians, business leaders and indeed charities like to know the statistics. In order to do that you have to gather information and process it. So if you want to target action positively or negatively against a group of individuals you need to know where they are.
The information ARCH are complaining about could let you identify an individual, but not always, if you are the only boy in an area with a criminal record, the Gender and Postcode is enough. But in some areas there may be several. The exact postcode is too much, but for statistics you need at least AANN N to have any value.
Also I wonder if ARCH have actually seen the contents of the upload, which may not go to street level, even if it does it is doubtful that it reports at that level. I suspect ARCH believe that no information should ever be reported on, but you can bet that this information also affects budgets for the offender management process., and amenity investment.
You will get the same kind of nonsense from Banks, Utilities and a whole host of other commodity run process organisations. A call centre operative works to a script, if you deviate from that script they have no authority to act. Not only that they are limited in the amount of time they can spend on the phone to you, as they need to answer a given number of calls in a given time to meet their targets.
The processes are set up to protect he organisation from the effects of random decisions by their employees that might get them sued. If you stick to the process you can't get fired or sued. Trouble is that human beings outside this world don't follow the process rules, and the number of possible variations of action exceeds the capacity of most business analysts to think through, especially as they are usually inexperienced in life.
Our societies continued obsession of pushing costs down mean that you get the service you pay for, and that it is naturally imperfect. Remember that a call centre is built by the lowest bidder, how has put in the lowest effort quote to deliver the minimum solution that meets the customers requirements which were in turn written by business analysts who were brought in from a consultancy who quoted the lowest price for the work. Each of these will seek to maximise their profit by time boxing their efforts to meet timescales and budgets. Step outside that and you get into change control and ching, ching, ching.
Full marks, if you want service go to the service desk and demand satisfaction, the call centre won't help, but the human beings in front of you will, because they can see you, and have to deal with a face, and are far more likely to do what you want, and indeed know how to do it, because they don't work from scripts.
One can see your average airline first class passenger queuing up for a seat that looks to have less space than coach. Where's the steward and trolley go.
Sorry but the seat configuration gives me claustrophobia just looking at it, and I'm not.
Why not refurbish a couple of the shuttles, fill the bay with seats, and then open the bay doors for a great, if terminal view, that rids the world of a few pointless billionaires every trip.
Enforcing the Law is an expensive business, and if the Police decide to investigate a complaint, then it will cost money, they can't always tell if their investigations will result in a prosecution when they start, a team of say five investigators would cost around £350,000 a year, for labour, to run full time, and that's before you add external costs. So even a relatively small investigation will apparently cost a large amount of money, most certainly more than the value of the crime.
The failure of a prosecution also does not always mean that the defendant was not guilty, only that the case was not proved beyond reasonable doubt. You should also remember that prosecutions can also be made purely to clarify the law, which politicians are crap at making, so that precedent can be set, and save time and effort later. Juries are also fickle, they actually don't have to follow the law, and will often find someone not guilty of a crime for perfectly human reasons, like they don't like the law, or that they don't understand the prosecution's case.
So let me ask our commentators, do you really want the Police only to investigate crimes that they know they can solve and prosecute successfully up front? Would we be having this discussion if they had succeeded. Or perhaps you all believe illegal downloading is ok.
Because Swiss vehicle licence plates relate to the individual, and are freely displayed on the car for all to see, I believe at one time you could look up the owner as well, on-line, so I'm not sure why doing IP translation is that contentious in Switzerland.
I suppose parking fines are more important than IP theft.
If only you worked in the public sector, you would realise how stupid that comment is, when applied to IT contracts. It might have applied to some of the contracts let 10 - 15 years ago when both industry and government didn't have much experience in outsourcing, but not today. The people who make the real money are the lawyers and the procurement support consultants.
You should also be aware that bidding for government contracts is far more expensive than commercial work 2 - 5% of contract value, and that long term contracts have margins in the region of 4 - 8%, with a maximum 15% on optional work. Hit rate for contracts is about 1 in 3 for most suppliers. A lot of contracts are also open book with the customer, so they know where all the money goes, and get very upset about excessive profits.
Oh, and you might be blinded by what look to be huge numbers for IT contracts, but actually they aren't for what's required, government can't always use off the shelf packages, and £1,000,000 does not go very far on IT labour, or commodity product licences for that matter, want to guess what the annual support costs are to Microsoft and Oracle for a 5000 user Agency? Nope, more than that.
That any CEO knows any trade secrets about their companies, or for that matter their clients, and for that matter I can't see very many HP customers telling HP stuff that they wouldn't tell Oracle or IBM.
There is also the rather bizarre view that CEO's don't need to know anything about the companies business to be successful, so if that holds for Mr. Hurd then what are HP worried about.
CEO's have very little to do with the normal running of a business, they make fluffy decisions that float down. They certainly don't know anything about the latest technical designs, or product marketing strategies, and when they do, so does the rest of the world.
Mind you he could be that rare beast, the CEO who really does no what's going on, but I doubt it, in a company the size of HP, there just aren't enough hours in the day.
Can I take it that the vast majority of Register readers feel that it's ok for people to drop litter, for dogs to foul the foot path, to dump rubbish where they feel, and that we should just accept it.
All of the above are in the scheme of things relatively trivial to everyone but the people who are affected by it. Do you really like walking down streets covered in excrement and litter, probably not. Are you willing to remonstrate with a dog owner or litterer or fly tipper, absolutely not, bad things might happen. All of these things are stuff we expect others to police for us, and with our reliance on vehicles registration numbers are a good way of identifying people who commit these civil offences which the Police won't investigate. How else would you expect people to be caught and stopped. If the Police are the only people who can use a registration plate to find some one, how do you expect your insurance company to catch the white van man who scrapes the side of you car when you give them the registration number?
I smell a deal of hypocrisy in the air.
Our company hosts servers for clients on just about every current O/S & chip combination possible. Paticularly AIX & Solaris, we use McAfee as standard, because it runs on everything from our PC's up.
So if McAfee now head towards Intel only architectures, that's going to drive our costs up for non-intel, and make a less competative platform. You might also wonder what they could do to the AMD market.
Sorrry not a fashionable view, but I like the choice of Sparc/Solaris, P/AiX, WINTEL, it at least drives competition. Would Intel have bothered with multi-core chips if Sun hadn't.
What will happen to hardware prices and performance if Intel gains an even more dominant position, remember IBM in the 60s.
If speed cameras are a revenue generation engine, why are councils cutting them because funding has been withdrawn. If they made that much money the Tresury wouldn't cut funding, and safety partnerships wouldn't ask for funding.
Also, average speed cameras work over relatively long distances, their use in urban areas isn't really going to be that helpful in many places is it, as traffic is stop , start. You would need an awful lot of cameras to implement this. Most systems allow +10% or +5MPH before registering an offence, so provided that you average < 35MPH between cameras you are going to be ok, nothing to say you can't hit 60 inbetween the lights though.
Much better just to plant empty camera boxes, add the sinage and tell no one. Oxfordshire were silly stating that they were turning the cameras off. Trouble is, that's all CapEx with no revenue to pay for it.
If you only think of ICT being about servers, PCs, Networks and the odd application, then sometimes its hard to see why big sums come up. It's worth looking in more detail, at what an Agency or Quango does, before commenting, but it is quite possible that vehicles and remote sensing devices get included in the ICT budget, so if Rural England runs a fleet of vehicles to monitor the health of the environment, then they will come under the ICT budget, because they are packed full of expensive bits of kit.
So perhaps our valient Reg journo should dig a little deeper, on behalf of those of us who don't have the time, and they could also do a bit of balanced reporting and dig into how much it costs to run a desktop for a year, or a server, against the total budget and size of the organisation. I suspect that £40m is not as much as you think it is.
Those piddling little common sense issues, it's a new toy and all the management will look "'tho cool" waltzing around the hospital with such cool kit"
The likelihood of anyone who actually does the work getting one being zero. Mind you Apple might have a ruggedized one we don't know about.
Will they sue, if they find out it won't work after being scanned or x-rayed.
"The Metropolitan Police Force cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law when it comes to allowing the public their right to take photographs."
Actually, a much more abbreviated statement is also true: "The Police cannot be guaranteed to abide by the law ".
A refreshingly honest statement, as our brave boys in blue are human we can abbreviate it further:
"No one can be guaranteed to abide by the law".
We may expect otherwise, but several thousand years of recorded history beg to differ. And you know what, I'm comfortable with that, so long as I have the right to criticise and demand recompense for wrong doing.
You can't read an iPad in direct sunlight, the man is a genius, I would never have guessed, after all who would have thought that an electronic display device is difficult or impossible to read in direct sunlight, like TVs, CRTs, Digital Camera's, Mobile Phones, Plasma & LED displays.
And the genius goes on, an iPad isn't just like a book, well, $&£^ me, a £500 electronic device isn't the same as a £4.99 paperback, his powers of observation just go on and on don't they. Next thing is he'll complain that he can't dry the iPad over the towel rail when he drops it in the bath, criminal I say.
And a black device in sunlight heats up, well wouldn't of seen that one coming, would you? Oh wait Apple didn't.
Well American's aren't happy unless they are shooting or suing someone, bless.
You could just switch off the camera's and not tell anybody you have done it. Not all cameras are switched on all the time anyway. An acquaintance of mine put a bird box, about the size of the digital cameras, painted bright yellow in a tree outside his house. it works wonderfully in slowing traffic.
That there might be that many levels of seniority. Seven in my multi-national. Mind you it doesn't necessarily make the leadership any better.
The bigger the company, the less leadership, the more a%£e covering. The bigger the company the less control you have over the bottom rungs, and the easier it is to rule by spreadsheet, this is why accountants do so well in big companies, as the only people who can get excited by a spreadsheet.
My advice to Bill, is don't go back, it isn't the same company, and it's too big to change back now.
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