Posts by Roq D. Kasba 642 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2015
Yep - in fact this week I was looking for a "serverless" cloud DB service with small data requirements for a few months for a prototype system I would want to scale. A free month isn't enough to develop against it in my spare time, but being able to have a free forever tier means I have the time to do a full development and I'm in the right place to upgrade to a paid account if the project works out
All driven by an entitlement to risk free profit. If instead of spunking $200M on a film and the same again on marketing, how about making them at the (still excessive) $20-50M mark, then a fuckload at $5M so you have fresh ideas and fresh blood coming through?
I make movies that get real distribution, you can make a perfectly servicable movie for a million money's, and if you want to scatter in some extra chrome, $5M gets you quite a lot. That's a whole street of houses worth, so of course it gets quite a lot. Instead there's a lot of highly dubious accounting, insane paydays above the line, bringing the director's mates in for unnecessary "main character" cameos, and treating the audience with contempt. Arguably they deserve it for still going to support this tosh.
There are some very noteworthy high street brands who
1) Unilaterally discount invoices by 3-5% in return for paying them within their contracted period and.or
2) Unilaterally decide that 105 days to pay to small suppliers is better value to them as a line of free credit than trading honourably.
Maybe whilst that case is under appeal (and it has extremely good reason to be appealed TBH, the jury potentially made judgement under the wrong variant of whatever the local defamation standard was - calling someone a child rapist is defamitive per se - in and of itself) he's learnt his lesson and is keeping schtum?
If you outsource your production, you outsource your reputation. You don't get to cut corners then blame the other guy.
And this is on top of only having a single point of failure with a software patch to avoid having to recertify the airframe. And their cuntyness with Bombardier recently. Frankly Boeing deserve a good kicking right now so the shareholders wake the fuck up and hold the board to account.
Pathetic weaseling out itself tells you the culture is completely fucked up that they're not taking responsibility or accountability for software they designed, ordered, bought, tested, installed and resold.
The attitude tells you the company is not to be trusted with responsibility.
Ticket sales aren't just "open the floodgates and first come first served", they're released in tranches - a rush on the initial release is great for stimulating demand and news, but that initial tranche might just be 10% of seats. The ticketing agencies then release some/what they can of tickets through the "secondary" market sites. Promoters own the ticketing companies. And don't imagine the acts aren't complicit - their slice of secondary sales is contractual if the management company have any savvy at all. Freelance scalpers are a good bogeyman to point at and go "oooooh they're evil" when it's institutional scalping.
A friend wouldn't listen to sense about the *amazing opportunity* he was being offered to get in on an Initial Coin Offering for (yetanothergenericstringofnumbers). I pointed out that he didn't understand the investment or the product or blockchains or trading or even the people punting the opportunity... and he *still* went ahead.
You can't save people from themselves sometimes.
£75 with an ePaper screen, just take my money! I wanted a YotaPhone for the epaper screen, but not for the rest of the phone. It would be ideal to compliment my snazzy top-end awesome flagship, somewhat limited video abilities, rudimentary framing etc for the camera, tiny pocket convenience, 4 weeks battery, bloody awesome.
I thought that for a couple of iterations, but suddenly spotted a great carrier subsidy-based deal where the flagship phone was bundled. The SIM-only contract for the same data/calls/texts was £27/month, the package just £30, so it made a heap of sense to pay 24months x £3 for the device.
But at the contract end I'll be quite open to going SIM only again...
Big company had an outsourced payroll system which required a server on the corporate network to have a very special (poorly locked down) configuration, and for the outsourced payroll company to use a shared login to access it monthly. Terrible topography, unforgivably bad, but that's what happens when you let HR manager their own IT and bring in their own contractors.
Anyway, this thing was badly out of date, a massive security risk, and the company (a very, very big computer company) main IT security branch were on the warpath having a tidy up after a lot of lines of core product code were stolen. The hardware was on expensive extended warranty, the server took loads of rack space and needed attention. Turned out this "critical" system was just to allow a few thousand people electronic access to their payslips. Many would anyway print a copy on the company's printers.
For less than the price of the warranty, security violation special monitoring, rack space and power let alone license fee and development time, I worked out that we could print and post all the payslips directly to everybody's homes each month. This was turned down for appearances sake for a tech company!! They would rather pour money into a shit old system breaching all security guidelines, create extra policy work for everyone, all sorts out of embarrassment.
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