Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
He actually said "I dont need to know what you do here, I'm here to manage"
As was pointed out in a previous thread this can work out providing he really is a manager, takes care to appoint the best people he can who actually know the engineering or whatever it is, listens to what they say and makes it possible for them to get on with it. But these are rare beasts.
“Blackadder, here’s a map of the known world (hands over blank parchment)… fill it in as you go along”
This extends all the way down to small software houses. Having just arrived in one I was given the job of looking after a system they'd put together for one client which they were now trying to sell to a few more. For two of the customers it was something new, for the third they'd been told it would drop in in place of what they already had. I already had problems such as trying to pick it apart and reassemble it in such a way that users in one part of the business didn't have access to every other users' part of the database. I quickly found out I had another: that it was in no way going to be a drop in replacement - the data model was too different.
So I asked management what the spec was for what I was to produce. I was told that whatever I produced would be the spec.
Fortunately, shortly after as I was leaving Embankment station I bumped into someone from my previous employer's customer and more or less offered a job there and then (the ensuing interview was one question "Are you still interested?").
""We found in large scale programmes that, before things start for real, [there is] insufficient thinking, analysis, architecture and design. Often this is actually skipped over,"
But why expect governments to do IT differently to the way they do everything else?
It might be argued that when governments have to face unexpected events - pandemics, wars or the like they have to make decisions on the fly. But even in those cases the decisions would be easier and more effective if there had been some preparation made to deal with such events.
"At least there's an argument that Ukraine being part of NATO threatens Russian security. It is on their border."
Is there? If had to explain this once in another thread. Perhaps you didn't understand it.
NATO was set up as a mutual defence pact to deter war by making invasion of a NATO country counter-productive.
Putin has demonstrated what can happen to a country that's not a member of NATO.
In consequence it looks like Finland which has a long border with Russia but currently isn't a member will become one.
I don't recall NATO being involved in Iraq. I do remember Iraq invading Kuwait.
"This is a dangerous vuln that's out in the wild on millions of devices. The fact there's a new kernel doesn't mean Android devices will get updated to it."
That will be the kernel update that arrived last night on my laptop.
As to Android - I'd like to know a bit more about how to exploit it. I might be able to wrest control of my phone from Google.
"It seems Russia's aim is to keep the international community busy and distracted negotiating a new cybercrime convention as a way to stall practical global cybercrime cooperation just at the time it's needed most,"
Exactly the conclusion I'd come to by the time I got half way down the page. It looks as if they've been taking the UK's iterations on investigative powers as a model.
"For example, the did not understand the difference between 'delegation of authority' and 'abrogation of responsibility'."
They probably did.
"Under no circumstances should I ... become a 'self-employed consultant' as I am just not that sort of person."
Actually this works out quite well. You'd find that as a manager you took due note of your staff and as staff you had a manager who had your best interests at heart. You'd also find decisions being made rapidly. You might have had to slap yourself on the wrist for not carrying out annual reviews.
Seriously, a lot of the crap just disappears.
"there were no toilets in his design. He passed."
In that case where did he pass it?
As to miss-placed pillars, we had a lab designed by a crayon wielder architect who wanted the trendy look of windows extending right to the corners so it looked as if the roof was being held up by magic. My boss's corner office windows were largely blocked by the internal pillar just inside them. They were on the original plans. No amount of complaining would get them changed.
"The CEO, who is ultimately responsible for employing all these people and overseeing their work but didn't bother to learn about any of this until he happened to encounter a former employee outside the office."
The article says "president". I'm not sure I grok all these top titles which seem to work such as a company can have a president and a chairman and maybe a few others but I'm pretty sure a resident and a CEO are different beasts.
I'll believe they've got this right if they can produce a deep-fake of my grandmother (d1960) which can explain the family story of her being sent to New York to try to break up her courtship with my grandfather: what ship she sailed on and who she stayed with. I won't be holding my breath.
More likely the other 2,000 people in the queue before you are there because they have also found the website to be useless for their query. The only people who don't know this are managing customer disservice. They think their website does everything the customer should need. They think the reason the telephone queues are so long is that people don't know about the website. If they actually cared they might analyse the queries coming in through the phone to find out whether they could be answered by the site as it stands, what needs to be done to improve in and how to then staff their phones at a level which doesn't result in them claiming they're dealing with the same unusual level of enquires they've had for the last several years.
The purpose of NATO was to deter war by providing a sufficiently strong defence as to make invading a member counter-productive. Putin has demonstrated very effectively what can happen to a country that does not have that protection. He seems to be prompting Finland to seek it.
They own Github so why wouldn't they treat it as their publishing arm? It probably has the effect of drawing its existence to the attention of some managerial types who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it. You can just imagine some CFO telling his IT bods "I've just come across this Github thing. Maybe you should look into it."
"Of these aspects, the lack of leadership is the most pressing. That's not the sector's fault: effective embargoes need coherent and unambiguous governmental and regulatory guidance, neither of which are visible."
Formally that second sentence might be true. In reality, however, the industry could, and arguabley should, be telling the government and regulatory bodies of what's needed. The lack of leadership isn't as implied, all on the governmental side.
True up to a point but you would realise it if you tried to make an online purchase from outside the EU. At the moment, however, the average Russian might not be making onlne purchases from outside Russia.
The effect of all these impositions which are being decried on the grounds that they only affect ordinary Russians is to contradict the Russian government's efforts to pretend to its people that nothing out of the way is happening.
people who think the actual purpose of their car is to provide noise for the mile diameter circle their car is the center of
If I could work out how to switch to it instantly I'd have the climax of The Great Gate of Kiev (orch Ravel) on the car sound system to deal with such occasions.
And to demonstrate that just loud isn't necessarily impressive.
Ouch. You just brought back the days when part of my job was to assist she who at that stage had not yet become SWMBO on field work. As it was in winter it involved driving back after dark on the tractor infested and hence mud covered roads of north Antrim in the Botany Dept Mini whose headlights, even when clean, looked as if they were powered by a couple of candles.
Then it's not easy to fix because 'backwards compatibility'
Backwards compatibility is being dealt with by messages saying "Your browser is too old for this site". It isn't necessarily old, it's just one that the designer couldn't be arsed to support because they want to produce the flashiest, least secure thing possible so that means concentrating on just one engine - and quite possibly dropping functionality.
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