Re: When meeting MS people...
That won't work - it will just convince them that you really must have masses of money to piss away.
1241 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Given that most of the devices on which "apps" appear to be essential have many times the amount of processing power available even five years ago it does seem that people are willing to pay to be boxed in by apps which do next to nothing and suffer from a complete lack of imagination - most of them are just poor copies of stuff that has been around for years.
The amount of stupid in the world just keeps on growing.
Once you get path the frothing of the extremists it shows that some people in government are actually thinking about the dynamics of this problem rather than just soundbiting the hell out of the other side.
I like some of the Spanish initiatives - particularly a challenge to the attitude that you can just throw accusations around and hope that some of them stick.
By and large the ISPs are going to have to be involved in any succesful system. Dealing with it only at the individual user level is going to end up with something that either seriously impacts on our shrinking civil liberties or is completely ineffective (and probably both).
Hadopi is obsolete before it has really come into play and although it's not the most oppressive piece of legislation ever passed by a supposedly enlightened liberal state it is poorly focussed and fails to understand the environment it seeks to modify - the comments by Marais about Wifi go to show both her own ignorance of what the problem is and the stupidity of introducing a law aimed at the general public which the she herself admits they cannot comply with because they cannot understand it.
The ISPs should really be looking at this now - I know they don't want to (largely down to cost rather than protecting their customers liberties) but the danger for us all is that if the industry and those who know it don't acknowledge this issue and address it we will continue to suffer from poor laws written by bureacratically inclined civil servants or Media Industry sponsored politicians.
Journo's (good ones anyway) have to make judgement calls just like the rest of us and they also have to recognise that there can be a downside to getting it wrong. Journalists have often broken the law in order to reveal more serious criminal acts. Defiance of courts to name sources, publishing material known to be leaked from government departments etc.
Most courts would accept that it is in the public interest to breach an individual's privacy in order to detect and punish a more serious crime - in fact controlled invasion of privacy is a key part of the whole criminal justice system. Murdoch has probably done more damage to proper journalism than anyone else with his arbitrary extension of "public interest" to mean anything he wants to print - it is selfish actions like his that end us up with tyrannical absolute liability laws replacing proper consideration of actions, intent and outcome.
What a larf - someone owes the country a fuck of a lot of money for mentioning the phrase "economies of scale" to some dickwad pol who interpreted it as "big = good".
Anyone who knows anything about selling into the public sector would tell you that big just means an even faster extraction of taxpayers moolah to the middlemen.
Until real cost reduction is incentivised procurement bureaucracies in the public sector will continue to swill cash down the drain lining up their pencils and making their spreadsheets neat.
Well - to be fair to Bakunin it never really got tested anywhere - except maybe some bits of Barcelona - and it's failure there wasn't really down to systemic failure of the theory. On the realistic hand - it was complete bonkers.
It seems to me that the idea of copyrighting a language or any of its derivatives is also bonkers - what is the point of a language where the use of expressive techniques is controlled? And APIs and libraries cannot surely be considered as anything more than expresive techniques - not processes in their own right? I can see that patenting a language might be a valid route in the current legal frameworks but I doubt that anyone would ever use it.
Yep - you get what you pay for. With everyone seeing short term cost (aka price) as the only business imperative it's no wonder supply companies get the message and act accordingly. If people didn't demand cheap shit then cheap shit wouldn't exist - it's not like anyone would ever believe the sales blurb and think that they were getting anything other than a price within their budget line.
".....denied Dotcom a chance to mount a defense, the judge said"
So - denying an individual their basic rights under any judicial system worth the name is now "a procedural error"? Perhaps they thought that NZ had adopted the Saudi justice system for a while - maybe the bloke should think himself lucky he hasn't had any bits chopped off.
> the inability to monitor key incidents
> slow communication with commanders on the ground
> the lack of capability to hand over command to the oncoming team
> the inability to log key decisions and rationales for future review
Where's the IT angle - monitoring of key incidents and effective communication (NB not necessarily fast communication) is a matter of good organisation and delegation on the ground and senior managers avoiding overmanaging.
The last two complaints suggest a lack of understanding of their own functions by command officers.
Shiny stuff is not a substitute for proper management and delegation
20 year old (and older systems) often won't be changed for a very simple business principle
They just work and there is 20 plus years of empirical evidence to support that.
No duct tape and bubble gum - these things are much more likely to be belt and braces systems than a lot of the crap being pumped out by modern software houses where "responsive to business needs" means "we'll be wanting some more money from you next year to fix this pile of steaming shite that we just sold you".
The biggest problem with trains is capacity.
You couldn't shift a half of one percent of road traffic to rail without swamping the system. On the most popular routes/times they are already used to capacity. For typical UK distances it would probably never be worthwhile putting cars on trains - the capacity would be far better used for other purposes.
I'd have some sympathy if we were talking about some fly-by-night one-horse wonder - you take a chance on the quality of what you might end up with.
But Apple have deliberately cultivated their image of "it just works". They sell themselves at the top of the market as being a quality company providing quality products that add cool to their users. That strategy is undermined when "it just fails".
Of course another part of the strategy works really well - that of getting their users so invested in the image of being cool, hip and right that every time we see a problem like this the fanbase feels the need to come out and defend their ludicrous decisions to buy expensive shiny things that may keep them on the cutting edge of cool but keeps them well behind the curve in actual technological advances. Apple's biggest success comes not from being technically competent but from a thorough understanding that Edward Bernays was spot on.
But the real point comes when you extend that to the next stage.
Do the action/reward thing enough times and the subjects continue with the action long after the reward has stopped being provided.
A bit of conditioned response plus some Bernay's PR sauce and what do you get?
PROFIT!!!!
Enterprise apps are not new either.
Parcel tracking and leave management? Really? You think there is a company out there that doesn't already have these things? Thye just probably don't call them "apps" - maybe "interactivity" or "tools"
Apps is just a new bit of shiny - it is an interface - not functionality. The real focus needs to be on properly developing the functionality in management tools for mobile devices. Sure, wrap it up in an "app" but develop it properly in the first place.
"Should the £180m prove insufficient to the task then the government will top it up, by as much as is needed "
They really need to stop doing stuff like this - when companies see a blank check they tend to milk it for all that they can - is it only Whitehall types that fail to recognise this simplest of all business facts.
Risk assessment with a proper commercial transfer of rights and risks - "could cost a bit to do the mitigation maybe we better assess the mitigation as accurately as possible and price this properly"
Risk assessmennt under Ofcoms plan - "woohoo! We have absolute knowledge of the maximum amount this can cost us no matter what the real size of the problem - full steam ahead and never mind the seahorses - government pays if it all goes bad - now think of a big number and then double it"
You need to read it again - it was a survey of social networking and twitter users so your conclusion should be that 93% of SNS/Twitter users used FB.
Latest estimates for US penetration for FB is still around 40-50% of population.
And the actual report (which needs to be read cos the article is not a good summary) indicates that people are becoming more aware of the issues and taking more steps to control their information.
Yeah - but
It's a Ford so not going to be cheap and people may expect some 3 year resale value. 3 years of family MPV use is probably going to pretty much kill such a tiny engine.
Still - it seems to be the modern way to build cars that will be dead in five years max. I guess there isn't a scarcity of resources or money as we keep getting told.
Modern cars are much more forgiving of running dry - high end sports cars may be a bit touchy but that's what you pay the extra for. I don't know where all this "bubble in the fuel line" stuff comes from but it certainly wouldn't put a car in the garage. The problem you appear to be describing is the ECU reset cost - there is no reason why the ECU cannot be reset - its just that the manufacturers like to build in that extra cost for no good reason. The not run dry scare appears to hark back to the old days of silt in the bottom of the tank.
As for Renault - they are famous for inventing "take me back to the dealer" scenarios - like headlight bulbs that need a ramp for changing.
Yes - the reason is obvious - you want to be able to post snide remarks without a shred of supporting argument or evidence. Behaviour which you know to be chavvy but you can indulge your weakness so long as no one can identify you.
Pretty much you are just like the vast majority of internet commentards - you want to shout but you don't want to think too hard.
This is nothing to do with how to do things better (or even different) - it's about how to sell the same old crap with new added shiny. Two resellers quoted at vast length? Where's the IT angle? Or did I miss the bit where it said "advertising feature".
I have been listening to/reading about redefinings of saas, paas and cloud for a decade or more and I still read the same thing between the lines - about the same absolute amount of useful as ever within an ever growing sea of poorly designed, pointless, tits-up tomorrow crap.
Run your business according to your business needs and not because it looks like the one you have at home.