Posts by Jonathon Green 483 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
I actually have some sympathy for “solved it now guy”.
Nobody wants to go on a technical forum and admit that they made totally unrelated changes to address an unrelated problem on a system which didn’t interface with the problematical one in any obvious way, and which wasn’t even in the same time zone, the original problem went away, and that they’ve now change freezed their entire corporate infrastructure across four continents in the forlorn hope that it doesn’t recur…
I’m sitting in my home office at a very nice, very large Herman Miller Abak desk to type this during a brief tea and biscuit break from my now entirely home based job.
I’m quite delighted with it, and even more delighted that having bought it at a bargain price from an office clearance specialist absolutely none of my money will have gone to the delightful Ms Owen…
I can’t believe it either.
A report commissioned, paid for, published by, and with its terms of reference set by a company who’s principal business is on-site power generation reaching conclusions suggesting that on-site power generation might be a handy thing to have…
I’m shocked I tell you, I imagine whoever at Aggreko signed off on it was on tenterhooks waiting for it to be delivered and then couldn’t put it down until the shocking, final page denouement…
“ How about a big circuit between a gas giant and the sun (angled off the ecliptic so we don't accidentally bomb ourselves).”
Big expensive (in delta-V terms) plane change[1] required to put the interceptor into an out of the ecliptic orbit and then another one to intercept an incoming threat which is most likely to be in (or close to) the ecliptic
[1] I don’t know much about orbital mechanics, but I *do* know that plane change is about the most energy intensive manoeuvre (short of actually putting something into orbit in the first place) you can do with a satellite…
…or will does it require corporations baking FOSS components into commercial products to be a bit more grown up about it and put some investment into making sure it’s properly configured and (where appropriate) regularly updated?
On the face of it I have to say this looks more like the latter than the former. And not before time.
I’ve generally found that when demons are invoked (along with witchcraft, devil worship, etc, etc) it’s generally by the right, more specifically the religious right. The left generally have difficulty *actually* demonising anybody because we tend to have no truck with such superstitious nonsense… :-)
“The sticker price is of course inflated by many EV's being covered in (un-necessary) electronics and processors whose primary role is to make the car "less reliable" and therefore require servicing.”
Have you actually bought a new(ish) car recently?
Unless you’re looking at specialist stuff or very near the bottom of the range(s) it’s actually quite hard to find something which doesn’t carry a similar level of electronic trickery (cruise control, immobiliser, ABS, stability & traction control, autonomous emergency braking, etc, etc) in the form of driver “aids”[1] and comfort features (electronically controlled climate control, remote locking, entertainment etc) to what’s in my Leaf, and the stuff required to get an ICE emissions compliant probably adds at least as much to that as you’ll find in an EV drive train…
As it goes in the [counts on fingers] 8 years since I bought my first Nissan Leaf I’ve never been to the dealer for anything other than regular “”count the wheels and make sure nothing’s fallen off” level annual servicing and one recall for a mechanical component which was nothing to do with either the drive train or the electronics, and the same is true of my wife’s (now my youngest son’s) Micra which carries a broadly similar level of electronic bells and whistles…
[1] Which, to be quite honest I’m not entirely sold on either…
“ I'm in favour of them having the benefits of their criminal activity removed (Ill gotten gains) - a financial arrangement that removes padded pension schemes, bonuses, inflated salaries etc, and furthermore being saddled with a debt that is undischargeable by bankruptcy, but which can be paid of by a reasonable attachment/garnishment on their subsequent income until the debt (to society) is paid off. I don't think it'll happen though. Being forced to live on an income that is below median ought to be the minimum.”
If this was your regular corporate fraud or theft I might be inclined to go along with that, but what the PO and Fujitsu have done goes way beyond that. Their actions (or inactions) have deprived their victims of not just their livelihoods but their actual lives and their liberty. There is no conceivable financial penalty or recompense which can come close to being appropriate for that. It calls for more, and deprivation of liberty for an extended period for a significant period, even with the associated costs to society seems like an absolute minimum.
“And, it's not ACTUALLY MS that are wringing their hands. Guess what? It's the press! (Sorry Reg).”
I imagine the hardware vendors, distributors, and retailers who were hoping to ship a ton of boxes on the back of an unquenchable hunger for that sweet, sweet, W11 experience are probably quite disappointed too…
…OK, so pressing The Big Red Button is not something to be taken lightly, or to be done without consideration of the consequences, but, given, that this is supposed to have been a resilient process if Bob doesn’t like the idea and can’t come up with a better reason than “the manual says not to do it, and there’s nothing in our procedures about it…” then someone ought to be giving him Hard Stares and asking him Awkward Questions, and other people ought to be answering Awkward questions about why Awkward Questions weren’t asked before Bob’s employer got the deal.
I guess the trick here is that if you disagree with something but either lack the time or can’t come up with a new counterpoint of your own you upvote the rebuttals rather than downvoting the original post.
Personally I generally do both just to be on the safe side though… :-)
Were we talking about actual human beings you might have a point, however this is an alien from the planet C-Suite and ascribing human emotions and/or motivations to them constitutes a category error.
As a wise woman once said “ I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.”
“…employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line 'chat' platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis."
I’m assuming those “personalised emojis” are actually NFTs which are correctly recorded as company assets so that they can be sold off and the value realised used to compensate creditors… :-)
“ Hope that the unnamed company in question learned to place contracts with suppliers that have professional approaches to working with large enterprises…”
Or better still one which takes an equally professional approach to customer support whether you’re a small business (or end user) buying one widget or a large corporate taking 20,000 a year…
Maybe they should just interpret the title of the article literally.
Instead of developing a portable muon making machine they could just develop a machine which makes portable muons. That way you can stick with Fermilab/CERN sized facilities and just send boxes of muons through the post to wherever they’re needed, or maybe order them through Amazon or do the drop shipping thing through AliExpress … :-)
[checks smart meter and car charger dashboard app] My home is currently exporting a couple of hundred watts of electricity from solar PV while my car charges at 8 amps (which is plenty for my current usage pattern). If there’s coal being burnt to run electric vehicles it’s not generally on my account…
Incidentally I think there’s a strong case for “right of review” even in the case of a nominally positive decision…
Imagine a situation where somebody is looking to make a major purchase, like, say, a new home which is close to the edge of affordability. They make a series of finance applications, a number of mainstream, big name lenders decline the application while one less well known lenders makes an offer, albeit possibly at a higher rate of interest. A curious potential customer might wonder about this press the “why was I approved for this loan?” button, and the answer which comes back might be something along the lines of…
“Our algorithmic decision support system reports that there’s a 50% chance of you defaulting on this loan within the next 5 years but we can still make money by packaging your loan up with a bunch of others and selling it on at a discount to a company you’ve never heard of based in a country you’ve never heard of, who have a considerably more robust position on default collections than you’d expect from a high street name, and who are not bound by industry codes of practice which high street names subscribe to. Furthermore there are conditions attached which make it prohibitively expensive, if not downright impossible to refinance the loan elsewhere at more competitive rates as and when your circumstances improve”.
That sort of response might make people think again about stretching a little for (say) a nicer house sooner. It might even lead to people taking more of an interest in boring things like financial industry regulation come election time…
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