Posts by shouldbworking

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

Appropriate investment

During my early career days I worked briefly at a startup. Their product could best be described as 'like ebay, but requires you to have large client software installed on your PC' - this in the days where 56k was the norm for a home user and a business might have splashed out on ISDN. This is just background to give an idea of how stupid the place was.

Anyway, they were absolute skinflints - student placement developers mentored by fresh graduates, old equipment etc. One of the machines had an ailing PSU where the fan would not start spinning unless you poked through the grill to get it moving, after which it would be fine. You can see where this is going right? one day the usual stick for this task had fallen off the desk so a hapless employee grabbed the nearest thing to hand and gave it a jab. He used a teaspoon... one *POW * later he was sat on the other side of the room and the PSU was at last in peaceful, smoking retirement.

Boss was incredibly angry that he'd have to spent £25 on a new PSU...

Raytheon to build low-orbit, disposable satellites for DARPA

Apples and oranges..

Even with $36m only buying 9 predators, I'm pretty sure those can be used more than once.

I'm hoping I'm missing the point and that this is for something infinitely harder to obtain than aerial imagery - maybe dealing with somewhere that air supremacy isn't a given (hah! doubt the politicians will go for that one), or perhaps providing a temporary boost in satellite data capacity to allow a boatload more uavs to operate...

BT in ad slapdown after 'misleading' punters on fibre deployment dates

March 2012

March 2012 was what it told me, back in August 2011. I hit the magic 'notify me about updates' box. Didnt get any. Checked every so often, and apparently the local exchange has now been enabled, at least a year later than expected. woo?

How spreadsheets (nearly) conquered and killed the financial industry

Been there, done that

At a previous job in the finance sector, the developers were asked to fix a small portion of the spreadsheet hell that existed. Made our fix, got out of their as quick as possible.

A month after that our company hit the news headlines as projecting 70% of a certain kind of business would go bust within the next 12-18 months. Clients in that industry bailed as rapidly as possibly, regulators jumped all over it and cost the company tens of thousands in fines.

Turns out the spreadsheet authors didnt like the fixed version as it didnt provide them good stories for the news, so they 'tweaked' it, and came up with the figures for the above story. Source control was able to save the developers jobs by proving they didn't do it.

I'd rather programming was left to programmers. There are some talented excel types out there, but for every 1 theres 100 frankensteins waiting to unleash their creations on the world.