Posts by GreyWolf 134 posts • joined 29 Jan 2007
You have made a hidden assumption, namely that they still have the source code for their COBOL. Not necessarily the case. I know of a major international business running vital UK infrastructure has only 25% of the source code for the management application. They cannot go anywhere. They are quite literally dumping the infrastructure in order to get out of running the software.
We're all doomed, I tell you.
I learned a little Hindi specifically for the purpose of telling "Jack from Mumbai" to go forth and multiply himself. I found the novel Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra to be useful (lots of police slang). Here's what I have:
Chubbarao = Shut Up (say it with force)
I am a burra Sahib = I am a great lord
You are a chota-wallah = You are a small person of no value (if the caller is female, chota-wallee)
And the killer "Are your mother and father proud of how you earn your money?". I got one of them to scream and hang up.
Current favourite: I say "You have reached the BT Business Support Helpdesk. All calls to this number cost £25. Please have your credit card ready. Read out the long number across the front". They hang up before I have finished saying that. And if they don't, I repeat it.
I've done some contract work for Co-op Insurance (admittedly not recently).
It was then (and probably still is) a hotbed of politics with zero business or technical realism (like every other insurance company). Also, they hate contractors like poison. IBM ought to have known that signing a software development contract with them would be a nightmare of Co-op Insurance trying to screw them.
Moral of the tale: don't contract with insurance companies. If you absolutely have to contract with an insurance company, add Asshole Tax to your daily rate.
In a building society long, long ago, and far, far away, the Movers and Shakers wanted to expand to be a full portfolio business, as big as they could be without becoming a bank (and all the regulation that would mean).
So they looked at the idea that they had a captive audience to sell to, namely all the people who had mortgages with them. All those people need insurance for their houses, cars, and holidays, they said. Probably medical insurance, broadband, electricity, home security. And there was much licking of lips in the directors' corridor.
And soon, in that land, there came a great cry, saying "How the hell do we talk to these people to sell them more stuff, yet not piss them off by sending the same flyer 6 times, incidentally that wastes money?"
Thus was born the idea of a Customer Engagement System (very popular in those days), which would theoretically connection all the accounts of a single person together, so the sales droids could see exactly which of the Society's products a particular individual had, and which were missing and therefore to be sold to the poor mug.
And they set to work, to design this beast. For beast it was. What's the meaning of an address in the mortgage system? Is it a mortgaged building (maybe not)? What is it in the insurance system? Is it an insured object (maybe not)? Why is the insured value different from the mortgage value? Are those two things the same for the same customer? Oh, and by the way, how do you know it's the same building, the same John or Jane Smith? The existing systems contained NONE of the data necessary to connect the concepts together.
The Directors threw money, hardware and software at this.Yeah verily, it availed them nothing.
That Building Society, once one of the best, is now no more than a brand name in somebody else's portfolio.
shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software
"the corporate world isn't slow to put a bullet in its products, but - with the exception of google - at least they give you plenty of advanced warning."
Twenty-four hours is good enough for you, then? That's the typical warning time for anything run by a US corporate.
"did you think some chancers were going to be able to trouser a million quid for slapping a paint job on a DJI Phantom?"
And is that unrealistic, considering some of the tricks that have been pulled over the years? The MCA is not the sharpest knife in the government's drawer.
This proposal shows once again that the MCA do not know what they are doing, spending scarce money they do not know how to use wisely, on ideas from desk jockeys who have never been to sea.
When do you have to carry out sea search and rescue? When the weather is shit. How long does a drone last in shit weather? I'll be generous - less than 60 seconds. 10 seconds is more likely.
I started worrying about safety at sea when the f**king MCA closed all the local Coastguard stations, destroying all the local knowledge. Now you phone some f**king call centre on the other side of the country and say "There's a boat sinking in Pennyhole Bay" and they have no fucking clue where that is, don't know whether to send a helicopter or scratch their arses.
The so-called management at BT have hired a bunch of American consultants who believe in co-locating people for greater efficiency. This for a company that has been using remote working really effectively for decades. When did you say the Americans are going to catch up with the rest of the world?
We no mobile signal here. It's the shape of the land, and the fact that the nearest mast is a little short-arse (perhaps somebody wanted to "avoid harming the rural aspect" - fuck off, you townie). We are only two miles from an A-road, so this is not the Lake District or the Pennines.
Thus we will have no way to make a 999 call and have the location automagically identified when they pull our copper cable out.
There must be thousands of small pockets all over UK just like us.
We had a machine gun post at the crossroads during WW2. May have to re-instate it.
"It's fair to say that Sweden is not known as a culinary world superpower". Yes it is - only the late great Escoffier (him what did the cookbook and reformed French cooking) said "Gravad lax is sublime, and is the Swedish contribution to world cuisine".
On the other hand, as I have lived in Sweden for many years, I agree entirely that pytt i panna is a real delight.
Söderhavet (the Southern Ocean) is clearly thus named because that's where the "creatives" who own the company want to retire to, in order to live on a nice tropical beach while necking Mai Tais. I mean, that's why you take government contracts, innit? Huge pile of wonga, f*ck off before the ink's dry....
@svv.
"This is one thing I would never entrust to "the cloud" - ever."
I see you got two downvotes immediately. That'll be one from the NSA, and one from GCHQ. Both of those love it when people put important stuff "in the cloud".
If you are ever in the same shower as an NSA or GCHQ person, don't drop the soap.
Here's the definition, encapsulated in a Czech riddle, given to me by my very good friend who grew up behind the Iron Curtain:
Q: Why do policement in Czechoslavkia go around in threes?
A: One can read, one can write, and the other is there to watch those two dangerous intellectuals.
...that all those wonderful Communist jokes would disappear, and in only a few years, no-one would understand them...
Now I see that our beloved Government is working to make them all relevant again...and a new generation of stroppy kids will be ridiculing our masters...
...client companies go out of business because company data gets destroyed, hacked, stolen, held for ransom much more often...where service providers screw up the service for days at a time with no explanation or apology, or shut down their business with no notice, or lock you out of your data over a minor billing dispute. Just in the last few weeks Amazon Web Services, BT. No-IP have all screwed you over.
For almost any company, putting your trust in the "Cloud" is a suicide move.
... We are a website in a rural village in Suffolk where those who compost their own food and green waste keep a record of what weights they have recycled. We hope to demonstrate that doing your own food and green waste recycling is worth the (minor) effort. This is of course exactly what cybercriminals need to know, and Microsoft wish to hush up.
Our site is unreachable because Microsnot are NOT doing what they said they would - they are not allowing innocent traffic through (or they are too incompetent to do the filtering fast enough, before the timeouts).
Callam, sorry lad, you don't know how this stuff works. The cable owner does not "make a massive public fuss", he/she/it contacts the Powers-That-Be and says "My knighthood seems to have got mislaid. It will be arriving tomorrow first post, will it?". No "massive public fuss" required, just a word in the right ear.
I work for marmalade. I live in a village full of retired people, some of whom make killer marmalade. I ALWAYS respond to those people's requests for assistance. I also work for whisky - the composting group wanted a website, and gave me a bottle of Old Pulteney (if you haven't tried it, you've missed something special). The other guy, who can't keep his email working for more than 2 weeks at a time, takes me for days out on his yacht.
Works for me.
If you really think that in Essex, females are now or ever have been unable to dominate, or are as oppressed as elsewhere in the world, I challenge you to say that out loud in Basildon on a Saturday night. I promise to give your remains a decent burial.
If you are not up for being the object of a blood sport, read about Boudicca (whose influence extended over most of East Angular).
26 years at IBM, so I've seen this before. When you the product manager go to Legal before launch, to get the licensing decided, your project can end up being assigned to the nasty paranoid tight-ass, and you end up with an unworkable propositon in the market place. Even at behemoth companies like IBM, it oftens comes down to the attitudes of individuals.
In my day, it was not unusual to have to have a very large number of Go/NoGo signoffs before being permitted to launch. In one case, 57 signoffs, any one of whom could kiil the product after hundreds of thousands had been spent on developing it.
No. Dual-boot with Linux. Mint Cinnamon looks like XP, mostly works like XP, closer to XP than Win 8, easier upgrade path than Win 8, lower rate of support calls from friends and family ...and in my experience, it's lighter and faster and more responsive than XP. So, no, I won't be laying out hundreds of pounds/dollars on a new machine or even more hundreds on replacing all the software that will not work on Win 8.
Go dual-boot with Linux. I went to Mint Cinnamon a while ago. Looks like XP, mostly works like XP, closer to XP than Win 8, easier upgrade path than Win 8, lower rate of support calls from friends and family ...and in my experience, it's lighter and faster and more responsive than XP. So, no, I won't be laying out hundreds of pounds/dollars on a new machine or even more hundreds on replacing all the software that will not work on Win 8.
When I "need" XP (for software I've paid for), I select it at boot time.
BTW, I have an nVidia graphics card - it works smoother and faster under Mint Cinnamon than it did in XP.
...don't hold your breath. I've seen what their software development process looks like from the inside. I know it used to be good, while BT still had its own IT development shop, now long gone. Nowadays everything is outsourced, takes for ever, and costs more and takes longer. And bugs don't get fixed because BT does not manage the contracts.
There's a brain-eating paradigm loose on the streets - the idea that your UI has to be the same on your desktop, your laptop, your tabet, and your phone. So the designers either make the icons big enough for touch (and space-wasteful for mouse use) or too small to touch so they make you move your hands from mouse to keyboard and back (which James Martin condemned 40 years ago). We've seen Windows Metro and Ubuntu Unity.
Now - wait for it - comes Firefox Atlantis Preview and discussion at Daily WTF
One look at this and I've turned off Firefox's auto update on all my computers.
Test question for the alert student: what does the "fairy cake" icon do?
1. Failed to oversee Global Services division while they were busy making a £100 million loss
2. Failed to get the land round Adastral Park sold (worth £300 million (at least) if planning permission is granted for the 2000 houses they want to erect next to an extremely sensitive European Protected Area.
3. Failed to sell Adastral Park itself (very likely that's their end game for AP which they no longer need or use)
4. Failed to see or deal ith the huge operational issues arising out of closing BT's own software development (who knew what they were doing, sort of) and shipping the work offshore to people who have no clue how BT's internal systems quirk (sic).
...in a library...
1. I want to get a copy of secret files out of UK reach
2. I make up up a shiney-shiney, a distraction, a bauble to attract the eye of spooks
3. I "hide" the real files among the shiney-shiney (encrypted differently).
4. I let it fall into the hands of GCHQ/NSA
5. Spooks are satisfied, but they don't know that the real thing has passed them by.
If you are going to Brazil from Germany, there are surely direct flights - if not, you go via Schiphol, not Heathrow. The only reason to go via Heathrow is to wave the shiney-shiney under the noses of the spooks.
1. This time it's your computer that gets the hammer. Next time you publish something, it's your head.
2. This time it's your boyfriend gets done over. Next you publish something, it's you, and it won't be the hammer, it'll be an HIV infection, your home burnt down, and your boyfriend renderd to an American jail.
..on the various database models..he had to get pretty egotistical and dogmatic because of the "misleading" (aka pack of lies) FUD being spread by the Codasyl advocates. Chris came up with a simple and obvious Codasyl design, a simple and obvious program code example - no-one was ever able to debug it - if I remember rightly it was about 20 lines of code and contained at least 18 bugs. The fundamental problem that he was illustrating was that ring structures like Codasyl look nice in the abstract, but it is impossible to validate programs wrtten for them..
You have not understand how these bugs arise.
The process of removing bugs is called debugging. So what is it called, the process of putting bugs into software?
It's called programming.
Every time MS add or change anything in XP, they add bugs. The best news about April 2014? MS will stop screwing around in XP.
or at least, cloud provided by a third party (see recent news about NSA, GCHQ, ISPs and telcos spreading their legs). The Data Protection Act 1998 (and EU legisation) makes it illegal for you put personal data into the care of a cloud provider that is not wholly compliant within the correct jurisdiction.
OTOH, having your own cloud implementation makes sense if (1) you have the problems that cloud solves (2) you have the expertise in-house to design and build it. Few places have (1) and (2).
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