Posts by kmac499 930 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2013
A non techy admin friend in the airport business had to meet up at Heathrow by the '23cm radar'.
(You know the big red one in the middle that's always on the TV and does the ground scanning stuff,)
When they eventually turned up; the explanation was;; yup they thought 23cm was the sizel.....
HMG and all other G's always quote their first duty is the protection of the people and state.
If the public is attacked either physically, cyber or whatever then the government is shown to be the Emperor with no clothes, and once trust is gone....
Personally I'm grown up enough to realise no Gov't can protect it's citizens from every threat going. So stop obsessing about survellance and concentrate on real long term threats.
I feed my Black Labrador on Kibble. If a Lab got into the lab and saw a huge piece of Kibble, no wonder the balance is missing a few decimal places. it's a well known fact that all Labradors are surrounded by a food event horizon. Once anything even vaguely resembling food gets close it's gone.. .
Comparing IT people and Brickies,
Brickies tend to be better at delivering because, They are doing the same damn thing repeatedly within a fairly limited set of designs and paradigm ( lay brick, put next brick on top, repeat) with a small set of standardised components. A brickie will know that a wall 10m* 3m will need so many thousand bricks and take so many days plus-minus a fairly standard percentage
IT continually reinvents the designs the paradigm and the components. The IT bods, given a sketch of a 30 form system, will have no idea how many tables or how many thousand lines of code, but will be asked for a precise budget estimate within 15 minutes of being given the 'specification'
What I've never seen is an honest analysis of any common reason why IT projects fail. Is it over ambitious goals, overblown promises by sales staff, ambiguous specifications, amateur developers, crap hardware or what?
Answers on a punched card please....
I've said this before in a similar thread
Dear HMG
Considering the success of the Raspberry Pi foundation at training trainers.
Give them a cheque for a few million and walk away,
Don't interfere, Don't ask for KPI's (or whatever the latest buzz phrase is) just fund competent people.
Exasparated of Tonbridge
"It's a bit like saying 'all jobs need people to be able to drive', 'Let's teach everyone to be a mechanic'."
A well educated\trained mechanic is a skilled and honourable post, actually I think this is more like 'well all jobs need people to be able to drive let's teach car engine design with metallurgy, thermodynamics etc etc. '
Dumping the ICT in favour of CompSci is the typically elitist British attitude of the more academic the better and the oiks will appear by magic.
Yes we need 'pure' Computer scientists, but we need a damn site more skilled and flexible computer tradesmen and women. People who do know that processors are built out of transistors wired as logic gates, but are more concerned and capable at getting the network working and the website published today.
That's what IDE add-ins are for .
Every time I takeover a new chunk of code, I run it through my favourite formatter.. and all of a sudden the code is visible, even if not readable and understandable.
Now we've nailed this one down and peace reigns, can we discuss variable naming and camel case ...
The collation unit spat them out in reverse order..
Seriously can you imagine what would happen if engineers decided; Ok Let's just ignore the rules of arithmetic while we design this nuclear power station and we'll catch up with reality later.
To paraphrase
"A well regulated Internet, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear encryption, shall not be infringed."
Silly maybe, as I'm in the UK and our fluid constitution is scribbled on dead goats. But the logical alternative to a right to digital privacy will be to treat encryption as a weapon and regulate it in the same way as firearms are in the UK. The big difference being firearms have one very simple use, to go bang and hit targets,
Encryption however; well I don't think we need to relist encryptions uses yet again. A deliberately broken encryption system potentially puts a very large gun in a very large public rock and then
"Whomsoever can pull this gun from the stone... "
" they were voting for May or Corbyn when they are actually voting for their own local MP."
Quite so, Another minor niggle. The number of times we hear usually the Brexiterrs moaning about the unelected EU commissioners (they are elected of course.) or any MPs moaning about the unelected judiciary, House of Lords etc. frustrating their mandate.
When the biggest bunch of unelected 'civil servants' are ministers (cabinet and junior) and the Fisrt Lord of the Treasury aka the PM. All appointed by patronage and or horse trading. At least the select committees feign a form of democracy even though the candidate list is a carve up between parties.
Following on from injecting statistical honesty, can we please stop calling our system First Past the Post. There is no Post.
A true FPtP system would set the same finishing point for all constituencies, and the winners would be the first ones to cross that line.
What we actually have is a Furthest From the Start system, i.e. when all the votes are counted the winner is the one with the biggest pile in that election. There is no concept of a quorum of voters or a minimum percentage of available votes. So in theory a constituency could be decided by one single vote, e.g, Jon Bercow being unnopposed as the speaker.
Calling our system FPtP adds an air legitimacy to the winner even though they may be elected on a sizeable minority of votes cast,
Renaming the system would focus attention on the actual electoral support the winners have.
I know this argument begs the question for a transferable vote or french primary system but surely the whole point of a voting system is to elect representatives who genuinely represent their electorate.
As of this morning very often....
Yet again when everyones eyes were on Scotland and Nicola Sturgeon the UK gov't is about to be underpinned by Ulster Unionists who in this case owe their power to Sinn Fein absenting themselves from Westminster. While at the same time NI is currently under the prospect of direct rule by a gov't that will rely on the DUPs support.
Anyone opened a book yet on the date of the next general election
How dumb can some of these mega-CEOs get.
You're trying to run a tech company, where the vast majority of the true asset value of the company is in the heads of the staff. You're job is to encourage and enthuse them not piss them off,
I also agree with the earlier comment, that pointed out, if you need to make decisions in short almost instant timeframes, then you are in serious shit or just planning to make reckless choices.
Parking the absolute stupidity of Mays ambition maybe she should spend more time examining the motivation of the people that commit these atrocities
Back in the days of the IRA we knew what their aim was, a re-united Ireland. They were able, initially, to get a toehold in the then massively discriminated against Catholic population. Their method, wage a guerilla war against the 'occupiers' and 'oppressors' until the public and the gov't had had enough and gave them what they wanted. As a purely military campaign it failed as the vast majority of similar situations do. The two sides grind each other down to a stalemate, the original minority community also becomes sick and tired of the violence and talks follow.
What the hell do these guys want? Revenge, Sharia laws, Caliphates
We are constantly told 'Islamic fundamentalists' hate us and our values, which is a very convenient simple mantra. We are also told they have been 'radicalised', a phrase which easily transmutes into made more religious but in a bad way. I prefer the term brainwashed.
The brainwashers are a bunch of older men pushing an extreme version of a religion and they cannot tolerate any serious criticism. Because like Galileos Catholic church once one chink in the 'truth' is disproved the whole edifice may come crashing down. What these guys want is power and their version of truth slavishly adopted by everyone on pain of death.
Sadly like most true believers, these guys are so blinded by 'faith' they cannot be argued with or dissuaded. The best we can hope for is they die off soon taking their poison with them. Meanwhile we do all we can to counter thier propaganda.
In my book anyone who sees other groups of human beings as less than human and calls for their destruction is a fascist. just like Hitler, Pol Pot and countless others with ideologies throughout history. So let's stop calling them religious fundamentalists they are no more religious fundamentalists than an IRA bomber who took communion.
Donalds idea of a fair and level playing field is laughable, a bit like his attitude to running his businesses. He ignores the rules, does what he wants, and then when people say take it down he cries foul and runs to the courts.
It hasn't hit home that trying to bully his peers of fellow heads of government won't work and he will become increasingly isolated.
No doubt when the ocean is lapping on Mar-a-Lagos front step he will run crying to Palm Beach to have someone else pay for the protection of his building.
All Hail El Douché
Well said Alex.
There is nothing wrong with using a proprietary system to execute your idea. There is everything wrong with being so locked in that you cannot migrate to another platform.
A simple one I've got at the moment, an MSSQL database that uses the really cool CTE query function to simplify heirarchies and bills of materials. We can't easily web-ify it cos the current mySQl doesn't do CTE (easily).
Moral beware the shiny shiny stuff.
Cloud a lovely marketing term, White soft fluffy things scudding across a blue sky on a summers day, or maybe a bloody great black thunderhead about to dump a foot of water and a tornado on you.
As many others have posted Cloud software has a nasty habit of removing features that you have found really useful. Occasionally a cloud can evaporate either in the DC or because of a network fault at the users end.
Any solution that doesn't allow me to hold a readable copy of my data in a place of my choosing is a risk.
Property, a string of "hoes" under a pimping business and/or a bit of candid gun-running should suffice for me ;-)
Property !! You Sir are undoubtedly a callous slum landlord...your other schemes sound interesting though.
Meanwhile for those of us with some money to invest but not enough to buy a few slums ( sorry Des Res's) Where are the small investment funds where I can buy shares in a property porfolio that pays me a share of the rental income on a monthly basis. ??
It's looking increasingly likely, that whatever the initial cause of failure; the recovery was hampered by poor or zero maintenance of backup hardware,software and configurations.
Maybe the CIO should take a leaf out of the aircraft maintenance process. Scheduled checks and refurbishments, signed checklists stamped by authorised\certified engineers as dictated by external regulators.
I wonder what BA's public liability insurance quote is going to look like next year?
Yes all horribly familiar,.yet another example of "imbecile with an MBA" or i-WAMBA syndrome.
Senior managers manage the Share Price not the Business. With some of them it's almost a badge of honour that they don't need to understand the underlying technology of the business. As long as the share price (and occasionally the divi rate) matches or outperforms the market sector average, (ugh) they are a success.
The fact that in doing so they have sown the long term seeds of destruction of the business doesn't matter. .
Can we please stop calling our system 'First past the Post' It isn't; there is no post.
The phrase FPTP gives a nice fuzzy feeling of an outright winner adding legitimacy to the winner as if they are all in an evenly matched game, like an Olympic 100m sprint race,
Our system should more accurately be called 'Furthest From The Start' or FFTS. (FFS for short ??) You win as long your pile of votes is one more than the next candidate,irrespective of the absolute size of the piles, and even if the sum total of all other votes massively outnumbers yours.
No quorom, No defined second choice.. grrrr.
“So … uh…what are you wearing?”
Brilliant; beats all of mine for a quick disconnect.
My growng list include..
Which computer? this is a Data Centre
Will this make my pirate copy legal?
I already have antibacterial software, that's right antibacterial it works with things bigger than viruses
etc...
Tis the duty of all IT savvy folk to waste as much of these scums time as possible.. and it's fun.
I have worked for some very good agents in the past, One even told the following about theatrical agents.
Two impressarios were strolling though theatreland when they noticed a famous succesful actor on the other side of the street.
"Isn't he one of yours old boy?"
"Yes he is; and do you know the bastard takes 90% of what I earn"
A great of idea of what by 80's 90's 00's standards is a supercomputer in your pocket, docked into a desk top keyboard and screen allowing some serious work to be done.
I can foresee Cafes, Premier Inns, and Regus meeting rooms offering Dex-dock facilities in your rooms.
But in the light of this weeks ransom attacks how long before some one hacks the Dock and it hijacks your phone.
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