Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"All desks had to be clear of everything at the end of the working day ... Security would check overnight and anything not in a secure cabinet was taken away and a note left in its place - the note saying to report to security to explain why you had breached rules"
Did you ever find out what Security was doing with all the PCs they'd collected?
"For this to have gone through would have been against the advice of every commercial and legal person in HMG .... the blond buffoon would have overruled his advisors to push this through."
Always assuming commercial, legal and advisors even got to see it before it was signed up.
"A senior British politician has openly voiced the business poison which is proprietary licensing."
I'm not sure to whom you are referring. Most of the quotes come from Wrigley who is not part of the government. Ahmed is a junior minister but in any case neither will be putting their hand in their own pocket as it's our money which I'm sure we will want to see spent better.
In fact proprietary licensing is not being criticised, just the fact that the supplier retains the software and not the client. In the past I've written S/W as a freelance which was then owned by my client. If ownership of the Palantir written S/W had been passed to the NHS this particular bit of criticism could not have been made but it would not have become free unless the NHS had made it so.
There's no point in the minister's talking about evaluating at the time of the break clause. If the clause is to be used the preparation needs to be started in time for alternatives to be in place. The evaluation needs to be now and then, assuming the break is to be taken, start work on the replacement. Given that several trusts have their own solutions which are better the obvious line of approach is to roll out one or more of these to other trusts, running one infrastructure which provide the required sovereign data guarantees. Do that ASAP so that the trusts which haven't signed up to Palantir can take advantage of it along with those who have signed up but find it useless. If, by the time the break point arrives, the NHS has been paying for some months when everyone had moved to something that works well then that's better than paying to get a bad service.
"This decision enables us to focus our resources on product categories where we can deliver the greatest customer value and drive long-term innovation."
Customer value requires long-term availability. Even if HP stops long-term innovation on a particular product it doesn't matter if the product itself remains available.
Customers have to trust a vendor in order to commit to depending on its products.
Customers will have trusted HP when they started using these products. HP has now betrayed that trust. Will those customers trust HP enough to buy products from them in the future? Probably not.
"Simple, you just don't implement a customs boarder and accept that a small amount of goods will get driven across the boarder. Now if the ROI decided they want one then they can implement their own but that would put them in breach of the GFA."
You expect the RoI to breach the GFA to oblige your political views?
Such a customs border would not simply be an RoI customs border, it would be an EU customs border. Do you think this would have been agreed in the Brexit negotiations.
Just more woolly thinking, ignoring realities.
"A real Brexit has not been allowed to happen yet. Maybot and her oven ready deal kept us chained to the EU via northern island"
I'll try to make this easy. It may still be too hard for you but here goes.
1. The Good Friday Agreement which brought an end to the Northern Ireland* troubles required no customs posts at the border.
2. That was possible because both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic were both in the EU so customs posts had already gone.
3. Brexit required one of two things:
3a. A customs border between GB and NI in order to satisfy 1.
3b. Tear up the Good Friday Agreement because 1 could not be satisfied.
This was explained many times as were all the other issues. As with all the other details it was ignored by the blinkered Brexiteers. And you, like all the other, then come along and whine because "It wasn't the Brexit I voted for". The reason it wasn't the Brexit you voted for was because the Brexit you voted for couldn't possibly exist.
You were told that.
You were told that over and over.
You were told that over and over again.
But you didn't listen.
You voted for Brexit. You got the Brexit that was possible. So shut up and suffer the consequences along with those of us who voted against it who are the only ones who have alegitimate basis for complaint. We're all in the same boat. Your boat.
"Maybe once a real government gets in with the balls to do what required"
If you're as smart as you think you are you tell us what you think is required and explain how you think it's is possible in the real world including satisfying 1 above.
* Note the capital initials.
What Brexiters ignored, despite being told many times, was that Brexit would cut British business's home market from 28 countries to less than one (allowing for the frontier they created in the Irish Sea) and that for many of them that would mean their future job prospects would be on the line. And they're still ignoring it.
And before you point out that many of them would be retired many of them would also, like me, have working age children and grandchildren who would become working age if they weren't there already.
"Admittedly, they tried that with Brexit, but I guess they decided to pull out of that economic nose dive before everything went North Korean."
Far too many of the Brexiters haven't. I doubt there's any depths to which the post-Brexit economy will plunge before they accept it was their fault. When your heads stuck in the sand you can't see what's happening around you.
Do any of us know who we are?
Are we the person named on our birth certificate? The child whose birth is recorded there was present but in no fit state to take notes. We rely entirely on what we've been told by those who told us they were our parents.
And that's before we consider those who are fraudulently using a birth certificate or other documents.
"Thus, if $BIG_COMPANY can outsource compliance to a third-party solution"
At a first glance it has doubled the attack surface. In reality the 3rd party might be outsourcing to more companies so it may have done more than double its attack surface. In practice such outsourcers, by performing the same role for more end-user facing companies, are a juicier target than any single end-user facing company and will attract more determined attempts to crack them. When the least well defended of those goes down the blame, lawsuits and general opprobrium will inevitably fall on the end-user facing company with added blame for not being capable of looking after its own affairs itself.
"What was also ignored is that Civil Servants are still one of the only groups to have gold plated final salary pensions"
I get fed up with pointing out that IME the Civil Service scheme was not gold-plated. I had a far better deal moving into the private sector. The Civil Service pension scheme had less value per year served in terms of final salary and the non-contributory aspect was a salary sacrifice scheme and a bit of a con trick because it lowered the final salary on which the pension was calculated. More pinchbeck than gold-plate,
It's worth bearing in mind that it's the bollocks being made of that very CS pension scheme that's the focus of this thread.
And apart from that, a pox on your casual ageism.
"This leaves governments filled with the same Etonian based connected mates in Politics and civil service"
We had a generation of politicians, starting from Wilson, through Heath & Thatcher who came up through the grammar school system. It was Wilson & his cronies who pulled up that ladder behind them. The next generation were largely headed by public schoolboys again.
