Posts by fred_flinstone

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Donny’s fine with this so long as you pay the Tariff

Given how many of the laptop farms are in the USA, you have to wonder what the point is in reporting suspicions to the FBI given Emperor Donald will only care if the tariffs are not paid.

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

Just a thought

DO NOT TRUST AMERICANS

Ignoring Emperor T and his henchMusk, this is just scare tactics by a bunch of greedy americans who really like their profits. So, if your board like feeding beeelions to the greedy untrustworthy yanks, feel free to keep the status quo.

However if you actually value your data and systems, and want to keep more of the profits, why not hire some genuinelty decent developers, sysadmins etc. and (oh the horror) pay them what they are worth, and keep them current with relevant timely training. Long term, it will be money well spent.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

Nothing new here except the brazen actions of Trump & co

The reality is that the US gov has for decades regarded the content of any server owned by any American entity anywhere in the world as fair game.

The only thing that has changed is the current administration has been so blatant that even the most blinkered of decision makers are taking note.

Factor in a strong anti-America sentiment in the customer base and you have the motivation to jump ship.

And for anyone calculating whether their business can withstand the fallout until the next US election, bear in mind Trump was quite clear on the election trail ‘vote for him now and you never need to vote again’ which is as clear a signal as you need that Emperor Trump has no intention of ever giving up the throne. He has hinted at this in interviews in recent weeks as well. You have been warned…

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Trust matters

Trump wants to make yada yada yada.

Thing is, he is acting like the schoolyard bully and as well as pulling military support for Ukraine, his chief henchmusk has threatened to block Starlink while Maxar has been leant on to stop providing commercial grade satellite imagery to Ukraine. And NATO will soon be toast. And then there are the tariffs.

All this sends a clear message - trumpville is not a trustworthy partner. So while corporations are announcing how many billions they will invest to keep the emperor happy, you can bet that globally many are now looking at how to decouple from usa.

So give it a year or three and you will start to see a reduction in companies using US based cloud services or manufacturing. Defense contracts will go elsewhere and gradually trumpville will see a reduction in trade, with a lot of countries establishing or strengthening ties elsewhere.

Oh, and those big investment announcements? You can bet they will hit delays, regrettable changes in priorities etc. once the companies have moved sufficient resources out of trumpville.

MAGA? Making America Go Away.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

A story as old as time itself

Tis very simple.

To keep to the budget you have to use the software AS SUPPLIED.

If however you think your <insert organisation type> is ‘special’ and you absolutely ‘must’ have that function (and that function, oh and that function) modified to your specific requirement (because it is completely inconceivable that you would provide the same services as every other council in the country), then watch out, coz now Oracle (or to be fair, any one of a million other vendors) has you on the hook, like a dealer hooks a junkie.

And, like that junkie, you will keep changing and changing and changing the software.

And now, you are not on the hook for 2.6 mil, but 40 mil, and counting, and you are selling the family jewels, and the community football pitch is now a housing estate, and the bins are being collected every 6 months.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

It's not just Councils

iirc, El Reg reported a while back on Surrey Police who thought they knew best and developed their own (disasterous) IT system... and then bought the same off the shelf system as the neighbouring forces, with the unintended consequence of interoperability and improved intgelligence (aka data) sharing leading to more offenders being caught.

Shame they had to waste tens of millions before they saw the (flashing blue) light.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

There is a better way

Two words: Home Assistant

This open source system has made my home far easier to handle. It can talk to just about everything, and while it can be fully local even its cloud approach is better - no data scraping, nothing ‘free’ just a reasonable £5 per month.

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

Dinorwig is offline for (iirc) life extending works, including a load of new underground cables. Due back online in a year or three. Hopefully they will restart the guided tours at that time.

Cold comfort to teachers who got paid late, but ERP software rollout had 'unrealistic' timeline

Re: Did any teachers sue?

The detail that was missing in July/August (and to an extent June) was available staff to work with the support team, because they were either 100% on exams or 100% on holiday. And no, they cannot delay exams or holidays 'cause they have to fit around the pesky school year.

So the point was a lack of foresight. Which to be fair exists in the commercial world - I found myself regularly prodding PM's along the lines of 'you know that release is scheduled for Christmas/Summer Hols/Easter/whenever when parents etc. will be wanting to spend time with family'.

Fortunately in this more modern age, most of the companies I work for have outsourced a lot of their development etc. to far flung parts that have different holiday patterns, so all but the worst planning can now be fudged.

UK Labour Party promises end to datacenter planning 'barriers'

Re: Also

Re the £1bn for a solar panel plant. History shows that Labour are worse than the tories for pigs in the trough. So this will magically morph into £100bn and be rather late.

So wind the clock forward an election or two and we will be back to the tories being hated for implementing massive austerity cuts to fix the planet sized hole labour made in our finances again.

What this country needs is a change of attitude - there are many very capable people but as a country we have a ‘can’t do, rights not responsibilities’ attitude which holds us back.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Training and experience matter

I have worked in a team full agile on a very complex requirement. We delivered a working product.

I have also worked on plenty of ‘agile’ projects that…. May not have gone so well.

Two key differences on the successful agile project:

- all team members went on the same agile course at the start of the project and therefore had the same understanding of what agile is

- the team was properly resourced with embedded SME’s (who were not also doing bau work), an experienced scrum master, BA’s, tester and devs all sitting together and working as one team.

By comparison, most ‘agile’ projects are the same old same old with a smattering of ‘agile’ words to please the boss.

EU duties might not be enough to hold off flood of Chinese EVs

Re: the problem

Tinfoil not required here.

China slurps data. Lots and lots of data.

And given my german, privacy respecting car negotiates with my power supplier every time I plug it in for a recharge (phev not ev - long distances with patchy ev recharge infrastructure assured that decision), and the connected app knows how many miles I travelled each day including times and from/to, there is a LOT of data. Germany is anal about privacy. China not so much.

Mega city council's Oracle ERP system still not legally safe, compliant... 2 years after rollout

Oh look, another clueless public body thinking it knows best and wasting millions of public funds (aka our hard earned taxes).

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

On the one hand this action needs supporting and pressure applied to the regulators to get on with the appriproate prosecutions/whatever.

On the other hand, while it is true the tracking leads to bigger profits and reduced privacy I suspect we would see a significant bump in software and hardware costs with tracking disabled (anyone remember when you had to actually pay for new versions of Windows...)

And on a related note, what about the tracking and advertising built into many new TV's?

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

What about Starlink?

I know the chief twit has been upsetting most of the world, but why not use Starlink?

Having used it myself in rural Wales (until BT hooked me up to fttp), the download speed is better than 75mb and it is cheap enough they could likely have provided every house with a unit for less than the BT option.

You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie

Aaah the panacea that is FOSS.

However, if you are not paying people to support the code (or ensure it meets even the most basic of security standards) you are on your own when it breaks or gets hacked.

And given many of the FOSS developers do it in their spare time (often when single), you frequently see orphaned packages (when said developer 'gets a life') and inevitably some of these are hijacked by bad actors. And then the whole world is panicking because that useful widget snuck in everywhere. Again.

So if you are happy with the real wild west, fill yer boots with a FOSS OS. But if you have better things to do, go with one of the licensed alternatives where at least the software owners (Apple, Microsoft etc.) want to keep the (ad) revenue flowing and therefore are motivated to fix the biggest issues.

Personally I have a mixture, licensed for the mainstream stuff, FOSS and similar when there is no better alternative, and roll my own when I want something no one else has thought of (or when my employer wants something added/tweaked in their huge code base).

But not everyone can write the stuff and even those who can often have better things to do.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Everyone appears to be focussing on computers. But what about all the other modern tech from washing machines to TV's that have cpu's, wifi/ethernet etc. in? Does this mean Russia has to revert to analogue TV with CRT's?

Lenovo shipped lappies with man-in-the-middle ad/mal/bloatware

Re: Microsoft hardware

Having recently bought one of the junk ridden Lenovo's I can confirm you can re-install the supplied OS - but you have to create a bootable USB using the supplied software and then find exactly the right sub menu in the install to get a clean build (reminds me of a certain planning department in the basement, no light or stairs and a big 'Beware of the Tiger' sign...)

Forget phones, PRISM plan shows internet firms give NSA everything

How Much?

So maybe I've watched too much TV, but I assumed this sort of thing was already 'standard' whether we liked it or not. (And how is this really any different to the data harvested by store cards, or the creepy way that google knows what I searched for at home and then displays relevant adverts on the machine I use at work).

But the thing that stood out (if it is true) is the cost - $20m per year. That is peanuts (think 100 good developers and no hardware costs, but I bet the people on this are paid a lot more). Either the budget figure is a huge typo, or the spooks are having to be very precise in their targeting to keep the cost that low. There are terabytes of data created daily by each of the companies mentioned, so there is no way 'they' can gobble more than a fraction on that budget.

Does that make me happy about it? No, but unless/until the budget goes up exponentially, I would prefer to worry about how google et all are using my data.

Reports: New Xbox could DOOM second-hand games market

Expecting too much?

I think there is a key point that is being missed here - games players (indeed all software users) now expect updates to the software as standard. Gone are the days when you literally bought a shrink-wrapped piece of software and used it bugs and all.

The problem being that all these updates cost money - lots of money, and whle the games industry does make a lot of money, in truth there are probably 10 (or more) mediocre selling titles for each smash hit, and the software publishers rely on the profits from the hits to cover the losses on the less successful products.

So, on the one hand you have the games consumer who not unreasonably sees their shrink wrapped game as an outright purchase in just the same way as a kettle, TV etc. is seen, while at the same time expecting the games provider to supply the sort of after sales support that realistically goes far above and beyond the guarantee provisions on your average kettle (when was the last time you bought a kettle and after a few weeks/months were able to take it back for new features to be added for 'free'?)

So now (unsurprisingly) the games industry is looking for ways to increase revenue to cover the cost of these additional services, while keeping the initial purchase price 'affordable'. Personally, I think for the games industry to go down this road they need to stop selling skrink-wrapped games and move to downloads. If you remove the physical aspect then you get rid of the quite reasonable consumer perception that they have bought something physical. Obviously there are problems with this route (download speed for one) but it does not appear to have hurt iOS and Android sales, and most PC/Mac software has been sold in this manner for quite some time now.