Posts by shub-internet

User rats out IT team for playing games at work, gets them all fired

I got called in once to a company where they'd fired half the (small) IT department , and then the other two left. No payroll, no EDI going to/from customers, and the minicomputer hadn't been taken through the Y2K preparations and was out of support. And the main drive had gone down. And the backups were encrypted ... somehow...

A previous contract had been to help the new DPM of a multi-national subsidiary gain control over his department. He'd been brought in to try to stop the period-end work (every 4 weeks) requiring a full weekend of overtime by the two developers at double-time, along with sundry other abuses of privilege. Contract project management is basically an aggressive form of marriage counselling where it's permissible to bury at least one body at midnight at the crossroads.

This all happens because someone, somewhere, is taking the piss. Management, minions, someone will have a 'bright' idea on how to do less work for more money. Piss-takers should get buried.

Gordon has the right of it.

Don't worry about Privacy Shield, it's fine. Really. I promise, says US trade watchdog head

The simple answer for US corporations has been to use the model contract clauses with all their subsidiaries/clients, and that's the bit that may die with the current Schrems case. At that point, the GDPR says 'No' to cross-border flows and then we wonder what to do...

HPE CEO Whitman says everything's 'on the right track' as sales are literally decimated

SCROTUS won't like Meg...

For what was an American icon, moving all its employees to 'low-cost' countries seems hardly the way of SCROTUS. After all, he's outsourced governance to Goldman Sachs, a proud US company, and certainly not 'low-cost'...

Kneel before Zod! OpenText claims mighty Documentum from Dell

What it really does is bring a huge amount of support money from customer's enterprise infrastructure systems to OpenText. They'll not sell much, as these things are one-off sales to big cusotmers; once they're embedded, all you get is slow, organic growth of licenses and a stream of support income until the customer business changes enough to warrant a rethink. That way of working killed Vignette (along with management's failure to notice that the world had changed), and it killed Documentum. OpenText will do nicely from the support fees.

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

Re: Next stop for Fioroni

" Arguably Compaq once was..."

Nope, had a contract for Compaq HQ in Germany, trying to sort out their invoice program. They'd bought the source to their MRP system (ManMan in Fortran), customised it by country and then lost the source to the customisations. The Italian one would, on random occasions, spray updates through the payments dataset rather than puting them into a particular record. Dreadful to work for as they had a Dickensian attitude to contractors speaking to each other in the office during work hours. They had the least compatible PC HW ever, they started screwing around with the 'standard' way of connecting stuff long before Dell thought of it, and their 'quality' was a sticker applied to dents and scratches to hide the crash evidence.

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Unable to find his Piz Buin sun lotion, Maurice assumed that Elliman's Embrocation would work with his new sun-lamp just fine!

Rise up against Oracle class stupidity and join the infosec strike

Sue the directors

Target's failure in the USA has shown the rich that they, personally, are now vulnerable as they can be sued for being inadequate directors (effectively). As a result, one organisation that is a mesh of small & medium networks is having a serious onslaught at the network architecture to make penetration actually difficult, as opposed to a script-kiddy job. The only thing that motivates directors to do something about this is to sue them personally. I can see this up close & personal as the local network crew are on 7x12 hour days at the moment, rebuilding and reworking.

Today's bugs have BRANDS? Be still my bleeding heart [logo]

Re: Once again

The key phrase here is "But everyone has had time to learn how to program..." and they haven't done so. All the bugs ranted about (and Ms. Stob, I've enjoyed your work since .EXE) are clearly mistakes/crap programming. The language used doesn't matter if one's thinking is clear; recall that the structure/Bohm-Jacopini theorem suggests that only three control structures are actually needed to program. C++ and all the rest are simply personal expressions by someone as to how *they* think this should be accomplished.

Open source bods magic up Qualcomm tech to unlock Internet of Things

Sounds like MAP all over again; perhaps they should revive TOP and stop re-inventing the wheel?

Mystery of Guardian mobos and graphics cards which 'held Snowden files'

They've got form....

Perhaps Adam Curtis's words are useful to consider....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER