Re: EU/Ofcom could make itself useful?
Remember the most frightening sentence in the English language? "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
33111 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Phone OEMs seem to be in the same situation with Google that PC OEMs have been with MS. They are entirely subject to the S/W maker's diktats and are vulnerable to the S/W makers moving into H/W any time they choose.
Back in the mists of time computer makers provided their own OS. It was an additional cost for them and an additional cost for customers who had to maintain the required expertise for each platform they had in the business. Commodity OSs solved that. CP/M in particular allowed a lot of startups to offer H/W. Eventually MSDOS & then Windows did the same but gave MS power to do as they liked.
Maybe the H/W manufacturers need to look at setting up a consortium to deliver OSs for both PCs and phones that they can shape to what they perceive to be the market's needs.
"If you have ever gone to manufacturer's websites to get data on products before making a considered purchase you have responded to advertising. If ten or twenty years ago you ever picked up a copy of e.g. Computer Shopper and waded through hundreds of pages of ads to find the best deal on X you have responded to advertising."
There's a huge difference between this and the usual crap being forced into people's faces. In the latter case the customer is actually looking for something. In the former the potential customer is simply being annoyed. And if that potential customer is anything like me they're not going to turn into real customers for that advertiser's product; they're going to buy from somebody who didn't annoy them.
All the other guff is just BS being fed by the advertising industry to their clients - the one group you can guarantee the advertising industry is successfully selling to.
"Management and sales are two sides of the same valueless coin."
Management can contrive to be two sides of the same valueless coin without the assistance of sales.
I had a client where two directors had been given overlapping areas of responsibility. I can only assume that when the business was set up both had to be given titles to satisfy their egos but nobody could think of sufficiently separated roles for them. This lead to frequent shouting matches in the open office. Essentially these were territorial disputes and I think the only reason they didn't go peeing against desks & machinery to mark their territories was that they didn't think of it.
One of these disputes was how the job batching was to work on a new system. Each was insisting on their pet criteria. We ignored them and built a batching system in which every parameter we could think of could be selected and thresholds set. Neither of them could complain they hadn't got what they wanted which ended that particular dispute. We included a screen for adjusting all this in the shop floor user interface on the basis that the guys doing the work would have a better idea of what was needed in reality and installed it with some reasonable looking initial settings. I don't think it was ever touched again.
"70% of the time passes before any development is even planned."
OTOH any developer worth his salt should be able to work out what they need fairly quickly and get on with that. The last 30% of the time can then be spent on working out how to persuade them that that's what they said they wanted.
"Honestly, a couple of weeks of setup and testing, and then 20-minute rebuild times across any number of devices you like."
The sad thing is that these instructions are passed on as a recommended SOP without any sense that this should not be an acceptable state of affairs.
By the time most readers get round to reading this article the article reporting the fact that the HoC has passed the snooper's charter will have slid off the end of News Bytes where it was posted. I don't know why this stupid appendage was added to el Reg. I suppose it might be a useful means of keeping PR companies happy by posting their press releases without interfering with the main work of the site but better judgement is needed to ensure real news doesn't go down this fast track to oblivion.
"it has the potential to be a bit of a local envoriomental disaster area"
You didn't bother to quote what you were referring to but your "it" seems to be the Severn barrage. You're wrong, it wouldn't be just a local environmental disaster. The role of the Severn estuary in feeding migrating birds would make it a disaster on a continental scale..
"Personally, I thought it was the looms they destroyed, and I suspect most other people do too. If the author had said "cropping frames" instead of "looms", I would have been lost and possibly even forced to read in to the link..."
It's a significant difference.
Textile production in the West Riding had been based on the domestic system where spinning and weaving had been carried out by what were essentially family businesses with finishing processes carried out by specialists (one of these processes, fulling, had long been mechanised). Spinning seems to have been the choke point in this process.
In the late C18th new water powered machinery became available for spinning which in turn allowed weaving to become a full-time occupation. There was a gradual move to the factory system. Productivity and employment were rising. Manual cloth dressing would have become the choke point had this not been mechanised by cropping frames.
Without updating this step in the whole production system then at best the industry and the consequent employment would have had its growth limited; at worst, an more probably, it would have gone elsewhere. In short the few Luddites, who had been an elite, were endangering the employment of the many.
I'm not sure that this accords with what the rant opinion piece was getting at because AFAICS the "scold in San Fransisco" is closer to the cloth dresser than those who object.
"it's off to the House of Lords next"
Then, assuming it gets Royal Assent, it'll be off the ECHR which also can't be scheduled yet. After that, in the absence of an unlikely outbreak of sanity in Whitehall, we go for another iteration of the loop.
Or, in event of a Brexit, the City will start screaming and lobbying as they realise that they can't meet EU requirements about personal data transfer.