Posts by Flak 164 posts • joined 11 Jan 2013
Phil Zimmerman felt the heat of the US government when it conducted a criminal investigation into his (alleged) 'munitions export without a license', i.e. PGP being made available globally. Thankfully this was dropped.
(All) governments have this lovely double standard - they want to keep their own communications secure and private, but be able to read everyone else's.
Definitely the right direction of travel.
I am sure there will be some teething problems and it will be interesting to see how tight OpenRAN specifications are for true, cross-vendor interoperability.
Remember 'standards' like DPNSS which offered basic baseline features, but much of the meaningful stuff was still vendor specific? Or in the early days of VoIP you had two competing standards for DTMF transport - in band and out of band - and good luck to you if you connected two systems with different implementations that needed to 'talk' DTMF across them...
The devil is in the detail here:
The PSTN is getting switched off (which includes many of the services most people are familiar with such as analogue exchange lines and other services that rely on the WLR product from Openreach such as ISDN2 and ISDN30, lift alarm lights, traffic light connections, etc).
The copper remains in the ground and will provide services for a while longer...
Many will still use FTTC (the connection from the cabinet to the end location is still copper) and ultimately then migrate to the follow on product SOGEA (i.e. no underlying phone line anymore). Even at that time the copper is still in use.
It will take much longer to connect every home with fibre all the way.
The marketing machines selling FTTC as a fibre service have a lot to answer for!
Salespeople are largely coin operated and will find ways of maximising their income based on the incentive plans put to them - there is nothing wrong with that. Commission plans need to be designed to incentivise behaviour (and deals) which are in line with company objectives.
I have no issue with salespeople earning large commission payments. Their total pay has a significant risk element to it (often lower basic salary, but higher total earnings potential through commission, easier to fire through 'performance management' as few others have as stark a performance measurement as "% of target achieved").
Moving the goalposts after the fact is wrong, but I have seen it many times - the money 'saved' is offset by higher staff turnover and high achievers probably leaving in disgust at a time of their choosing.
In this case HP got the benefit of the deal(s). Commission should be treated as a cost of sale and paid according to plan.
Disclaimer - I do not work in Sales...
There are other market examples where artificial scarcity is used:
Diamonds - De Beers is holding and releasing diamonds at a rate that keeps prices high - and has done so for decades.
Oil - OPEC has exactly the same purpose, with production quotas adjusted to keep prices high (the start of the COVID pandemic was a notable exception)
Time - that is a really interesting one - we are all allotted 24 hours in a day, with more spare time than at any point in the history of the world, but we think we have no time at all - we create our own scarcity in the market of our time allowance.
A couple of years ago I spoke to a group of people from a university who had been sold on the idea of fibre to the desktop. There were about a dozen of us in the meeting room. I asked how many were connected to a wired port - the answer was zero!
I accept that for specialist applications and devices, a wired connection is preferable. That may be high end fixed workstations with high bandwidth, low latency or high availability requirements. In terms of proportion of connected devices, my guess would be that this applies to <10% for most organisations. In some, it may be zero.
The same plays out in the home. I have been working on the WiFi on my work laptop with countless videoconferencing meetings over the last 10 months as many others have, too. I don't need a wired connection for my use case, and most devices quite happily connect and perform adequately that way, including UHD streaming for the TV. The exception would be the X-Box (or gaming PC) where a wired connection is preferable - primarily to reduce latency so you avoid being dead, but you just don't know it yet!
Adding to your Gordon Moore and Bill Gates a certain Thomas Watson, president of IBM who declared in 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Then again, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Thankfully there are alternatives to FAT32 which overcome the limitation.
Not true.
This smacks of procurement incompetency.
You will find (and should only select) solutions where there is a reasonable field of competition. This starts well before a tender is issued, speaking to a variety of prospective providers about their solutions, speak to peers in other public sector about their solutions, finding out about the good, the bad and the ugly. Seek references from the supplier, but also do your own homework.
Then you let all the prospective providers know you will be coming out to tender. Give them plenty of time, give them an indication of scope - even get suppliers' feedback, keeping an open mind (you never know...).
Don't issue a tender until you know that at least 5 organisations plan to respond. You may well get some unexpected responses, but the ones who engaged early with you will know you (and you will know them) - a clear advantage.
Have a firm idea and a tested methodology to evaluate price and quality. Ask for reasonable and realistic things, be clear. Give scope for value adds. Don't try and devolve all the risk to the supplier, because less risk for you means higher prices.
By that time you will hopefully already know who you might want to work with and a tender formalises that process. Yes, there may still be surprises, but then the surprise may be a lower price or an innovative value add.
A bit of time and effort prior to the process starting will well be worth it.
(I have been a poacher and a gamekeeper in public sector procurement and know that it CAN be done well - with good outcomes)
Definitely a coup for HP.
Migrations can be a headache and difficult, but with the right migration strategy, planning and execution are entirely do-able.
Having been involved in many large scale, mission critical migrations of live networks and services over the years, I am sure this migration can be pulled off without major disruption.
Given the options available today for rural Internet access, Starlink will offer a great additional choice.
It is not everyone, but clearly addresses a need and has a sufficiently large target customer base to become economically viable.
If Starlink's low orbit satellite service makes other rural solutions providers up their game - then great!
Very soon the UK will see the real impact of Brexit.
Not the image painted by the Brexit campaign, not the prophesied doom from the alleged 'Project Fear', but reality.
This story shows a reality like this:
The engines are not working, we are losing altitude.
We are seeing details on the ground before impact. But we are past the point of no return.
Brace, brace!
It is not just the vendors, but also their investors - businesses with long term recurring revenue streams are far more valuable than businesses that sell devices and have to 'run to stand still'.
The article is a bit too negative, as there are some real benefits for the customer:
- avoidance of capex (and potential debt/difficulty to get loans)
- avoidance of maintenance cost
- avoidance of obsolescence
- elasticity/flexibility up and down and in terms of contract terms
- immediacy of services (for cloud services at least) with no lead times
- outsource of infrastructure expertise
- outsource of hosting and connectivity
For some (types of) hardware I think you are right. Laptops and printers fall into that category.
While the algorithms are programmed, the 'learned' aspect of AI is effectively a black box. And this is both the clever bit and sometimes a problem.
Deliberate or unintentional bias during training may then be ingrained in the system and cannot be removed or changed like some lines of code.
Focusing on women's chests and lighter skinned people - I wonder who has been training the AI...
This is shocking, but not surprising at all.
The original contract was awarded to EE in 2015.
Prioritised communication and 'push to talk' were part of the original tender, with the service pitched to run on EE's 'existing 4G' infrastructure, with coverage being augmented incrementally.
I would like to know what is taking so long.
The incremental roll-out could have led to services deployed much sooner, but it appears that the customer - the Home Office - has moved the goal posts a few times and any good project manager this means more time and more costs - this 'Mindless Reset' being the latest shift.
The Home Office is paying EE for services it is not using and paying Airwave for extension to services it should not be using any longer.
Twice the cost and an out of date service! Genius!
Some skills that certain organisations may find interesting have been displayed here:
Initiative (seeing a situation that they wanted changed and doing something about it)
Efficiency (using minimal effort to maximum effect)
Virtuous Laziness (Bill Gates allegedly once said he'd hire a lazy person to do a hard job as they will find an easy way to do it)
There is room for improvement:
Stealth (avoiding to get caught)
Commercial acumen (this could have been a chargeable service)
Some way to build a resume (for our American cousins)!
I wonder how many 'bad' experiences are down to end user WiFi or even the end device capability, particularly when assessing higher transmission rates.
Having said that, my own direct (and indirect) experience in the UK is that there is a clear line between the connected and unconnected. Averages paint over that dichotomy.
You got your nets vs. grosses mixed up... the whole idea being that you can show much less profit if you allocate more and more costs - often loosely describes as 'fees', resulting in little or no net profit, even if gross profit looked fantastic.
A great place for an incumbent to be - (relatively) short contract extension on a complex, ageing system.
This means the list of potential providers will be short, the cost of change (hard cost and disruption) will be great and the risk high.
Contracts often have extension clauses in them (good ones anyway) which may cover prolonged procurement cycles.
I wonder why they are not going for a replacement system now, however.
Interesting article and experiment.
So, for those who think 5G means low latency, high bandwidth and mobility:
Geostationary 5G is not going to deliver low latency (speed of light constraint given the distance to the satellite).
High bandwidth - perhaps, but not using NB-IoT - the clue is in the NB (narrow bandwidth).
Had a quick look and cannot see any photos of the 'standard NB-IoT device' which has been connected. The cynic in me thinks that while the NB-IoT chip may be standard, there will need to be a parabolic dish of reasonable size to send/receive the signal. Mobility - limited.
Finally, I also have a sneaking suspicion that the power consumption of the overall device will be far greater than what would be practical for a mobile device.
To be clear, I think this is a great achievement and will further standards development and may lead to sensible services over time (but not tomorrow)...
Dual power supply and UPS will only provide so much resilience. Dual (or multiple) bits of equipment in different geographic locations with diversely routed connections and properly configured are essential to achieving high availability levels.
What needs to be understood is that an actual fault or outage at a single site often can't be fixed within the SLA agreement timeframes, particularly if they are measured monthly or quarterly and are at 99.99% or higher.
Those of you who are affected by this - I feel your pain!
Use it to invest in proper diversity and resilience if the pain is too great!
Flames - because there were none...
Crazy - claiming that an ordinary consumer could associate the Prepear logo with Apple.
Not the same fruit, not the same shape, no 'bite', solid vs. outline, fruit (and leaf) at different angles, the threat of confusion or brand dilution is tenuous at best.
Hopefully someone at the patent and trade mark office will see sense.
(judging by the 352 page document the lawyers must be getting paid by the word)
To me, the interesting message is between the lines, i.e. where do people go for video entertainment?
It is clearly NOT broadcast TV anymore, even with DVRs, Freeview recording on USB sticks, etc.
I see it in my own household, where the default is Netflix or Prime and the only thing we still watch at the programmed time on TV is the news. On the odd occasion we want to watch a film or programme on a channel that is not the BBC, we record or time shift it to avoid the ads.
The pandemic has perhaps accelerated or at least highlighted this seismic shift!
not!
On the other hand, landlords may need to decide whether they want a longer term commitment from Apple or face the likely prospect that Apple may terminate leases at the earliest opportunity if landlords don't show flexibility and move elsewhere.
It is a buyer's market for retail space at the moment and landlords will be very aware of that.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021
