Procurement can move at the speed of light
if the supplier is mates with a Tory minister and the goods are shonky.
3152 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
There are quite a few little oddities on my 10 mile commute in Brum. The main one being a 20mph zone that Google Maps still shows as 30. Which means you need to be aware of the moron brigade who switch their brains off when they turn the sat nav on.
There was also a 40mph stretch that is still showing as 50 - 10 years after it was changed.
Having worked in mapping and logistics software, I do wonder what the fuck Google are doing that makes it so hard. It's almost as if their obsession with consumer data means they can't do projects properly anymore.
Generally I have fuck all sympathy for the sad-face-sat-nav stories. But this does seem to be quite unique. RIP and condolences to the family.
Since it's fashionable to double down these days, I will.
We do not have class action lawsuits in the UK. We do have Group Litigation orders as the link I provided explains.
However if Class Actions lawsuits in the US are a cat, then Group litigation orders in the UK are an orange. That is different.
Especially on a site infested with people whose livelihoods rely on the precise use of language I expect better.
when "offshoring " was all the rage. Right up until (UK) companies pissed away their in house resources and suddenly had to pay YoY increases of 10-15%. Which not only wiped out any "savings" made by the sackings, but made IT twice as expensive as before.
Now it's "cloud". Yeah, Lets hive off business critical functions to a bunch of folk who (if they stay solvent and interested*) will eventually be able to jack the subscription up every month if they like.
Recently I have pulled a series of eye-watering cloudy services back into on-prem/hosted servers where we run them. Currently savings are £11.000 a year.
Our CEO occasionally mingles at events. Some outfits are quietly regretting losing that resource.
I'm thinking the next few years will be good for people who can spin up a LAMP/Docker server, and plumb it into a company to replace ever-rising cloud costs. A job which can be done 100% remotely.
I hope so, it may just be my retirement plan.
*Not quite in this vein, but Stackpath deciding this ain't for them is another risk you have with cloud. Or things like Amazon retiring MWS with little notice.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0601655/characters/nm0552633
J.D. LaRue : [Farnsworth is trying to sell better protection for the flame on Belker's father's grave but J.D. grabs him by the lapels] Now you take your all-weather wind break, your copper delivery system and you three quarter inch wick and you cram it, Farnsworth! Now, he ain't springing for dime one. Now I've got a perfect view of this cut-rate boneyard of yours from the 36th street overpass every day on my way to work. Alright, now I don't care it's four O'clock in the morning, there's a hurricane blowing out here. I catch the flame on my partner's dad's grave out for one second, and you're gonna be perpetually eternally dead. Not perpetually, not eternally, but perpetually eternally dead! Now you got it?
Depends what they thought they were buying, really.
It's not unfair to want to offload the work and expertise required to to backups to a 3rd party, in exchange for a fee.
Indeed, almost all cloudy storage outfits make this a selling point.
In many jurisdictions there is a legal requirement to ensure equal access to services for those with accessibility needs.
(In UK) While true in theory, unless you have a few hundred thousand £££ lying around, such laws are of academic interest only.
Rights you can't enforce aren't rights at all.
2FA isn't perfect by any means. Especially when you have to 2FA into a myriad of accounts every day, like I do.
However it's better than no 2FA. In much the same way a locked car is better protected than an unlocked on. If bad guys have singled you out, then no security in the world will stop them either just towing your car away, or making you open it with a gun at you - or your lived ones - head.
Yes, losing your phone can be a PITA. But with Google now clouding up it's authenticator, recovery is as easy as signing in on another device.
Anyway, folk who have a problem with 2FA - please carry on giving it a swerve and shielding me one step from the bad guys
Can't AI already generate faces from a collection.
I believe that only delivers faces that look like they have been created by AI.
Real nature has an element of randomness in it that our perception is somehow able to react to.
The whole "us/not-us" paradigm really needs to be better understood before we go any further with AI. Because already it's starting to irritate the "not us" mechanism that eventually leads to full-scale "we need to eliminate that other tribe" decision.
Much as I agree that certain chemical processes are highly indicative of life, I do wonder if our quest for extra terrestrial life is limited by our own ideas of what "life" really is. Since it's impossible to define without quickly making a circle.
Same goes for intelligence.
However all of that can be put aside for a great story of real science. Here's something that makes life a lot nicer -->
I like to apply some critical thinking when numbers are thrown around. I advise everyone to do the same. That way you work out that if politicians or newspapers are to be believed there are 10 paedophiles per bush for them to jump out of in the UK and other such nonsense.
2 million affected sites sounds a lot. I might just believe 2 million installs of Wordpress. But then we have about 8 installs over various dev, staging and test environments.
Certainly in the UK redtops, "news" is already an algorithmic process. Generally based on reflecting the views of the readership back to them with words like "EXPLODE", "FURY", "UNLEASH" as separators.
Anyone who has the MS Start feature enabled will know this - and endless parade of clickbaity stories that all push an agenda.
Admittedly it would just be a pork barrel roll. But how else can we create money from nothing ?
On a serious note, if you can be barred from working with children, why can't you be barred from working with data about children.
#justthinkin'
That's pretty much everything these days.
I have had every single wireless shiny fuck up at some point. To the extent I wouldn't trust it with anything ?
If it isn't the physical mount failing, and the phone crashing into your 'nads at 70 on the M4, it's whatever-google-maps-is-called-today* freezing and leaving you to guess the last 100 miles of your journey.
Remember in the UK once it's mounted you can't touch your device without breaking the law.
And that's before you factor in the Chocolate Factories fascination with breaking perfectly good apps with no warning.
The only upside is I would like to see Elon Musk on the way to Mars when his navigation device just stops working and nobody at Google, or Apple or Microsoft gives a shit. Then he'll be one of us :)
not sure how it will pan out in the long run, but in my neck of the woods (SW Brum) , you can't get a drive through or sit-in meal at any of the McDonalds as the queue of Uber/Deliveroo vehicles spills out onto the road.
2 weeks ago we tried 3 different McDs and couldn't get into any. In the end we came home and made toast.
And our local chippy has a stream of collection orders that they prioritise over in-shop purchases. Well they did last time I went. Which is the last time I went.