Posts by cat_mara 107 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2015
Another issue I’ve encountered with ERP rollouts is because of the complexity of the endeavour, the temptation is to start training the users early on, because training is about the only task that can be scheduled with any certainty at the beginning of the project. This means there could be months, or even years, between users getting trained on the new system and actually using it in earnest, by which time they’ve probably forgotten most of what they were taught.
Oh Gawd, you're causing serious flashbacks here. For my sins I worked for Corel after I graduated uni, mid 90s. The Tech Support people were forever having to explain to customers that just because you got 1,000 fonts in the box, you didn't have to install them all, especially not without installing the free font manager you also got in the box. IIRC, Windows 3 and 95 used to get decidedly ill if you installed more than 500 fonts at a time...
Fonts are a weird business. I can't think of anything that's more labour-intensive and yet as undervalued as creating a good font-- because if you're doing it right, most people won't even notice a well-made one. Yet it will have taken a significant amount of effort-- designing the glyphs, tweaking the kerning pairs, hinting-- all that work that most people won't appreciate, and which can be swiped in seconds by any fecker copying a .ttf or .otf file. You can't even copyright a design (presumably because back in the day copying a font meant actually making your own metal type, in which case good luck to you), hence like you say the number of bootleg almost-but-not-quite-the-same Helveticas knocking about.
XPS was a typical Microsoft play: an open standard equivalent already existed (XSL:FO) but, no, they had to roll their own... and having done so, let it languish. You know, guys, there's no shame in leaving figurative money on the table, or a pie unfingered¹-- especially if you're going to stand there with your finger in the pie and a gormless expression on your face like you're expecting some kind of prize just for turning up.
One of these days, I'll print a document to the XPS driver that exists on just about every Windows box, just for giggles...
¹ Cough. I'll get me coat...
Microsoft did attempt their own version of PostScript at one point, in cahoots with Apple of all people, in an attempt to take Adobe down a peg or two (or at least to provide a bargaining chip they could use when negotiating the licences for Adobe's technology). It was called TrueImage, being the complement to TrueType which Apple contributed to the endeavour. It seems to have sunk without a trace; IIRC, what Microsoft delivered was such a streaming jobbie that Apple went back to Adobe tall between legs. Still, at least we got TrueType fonts out of the mess, which were infinitely preferable to arsing about with Adobe Type Manager... (trails off into greybeard muttering about Ye Elder Dayes)
I dunno if CSS is Turing-complete but the latest versions have grown so many bells & whistles that some maniac was able to build a chat client with it
... as he was the one who demanded against all reason that Windows CE had to have all the trappings of its desktop big brother, right down to the Start button, on devices with screens where this made absolutely no sense¹, all in the name of "preserving the Windows franchise". Apple may be overly precious about their user interface but even they realised that the user interface for a phone or tablet has to be different from that for a desktop computer. IIRC, the later versions of Windows Mobile started to fix this lossage but I think the damage has been done by then: Windows on portable devices just never felt right and the continuous chopping and changing made it clear that Microsoft themselves never considered it a priority.
(¹ We'll gloss over how Microsoft then went and did the same thing arse-backwards for Windows 8, demanding against all reason that the desktop UI had to resemble that of a tablet)
... but having been involved in one of these big tendering wheezes, I've seen a mindset that can only be described as conspiracy thinking between the client's managers and the consultants. It goes something like this: "You guys have done loads of these jobs, right? You're men of the world-- if we tell the sodding beancounters how much this thing is really going to cost, they're going to walk away right now. So you scratch our backs and we'll scratch yours: you go low on your estimate and take an, ahem, flexible stance on any change requests we lob your way, and we'll be likewise flexible on signing off on any overtime requests you need to get the thing over the line. How does that sound?" Except not said in so many words, of course. Certainly not in any way that could be taken down and used against any of the parties involved, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
Of course, doing business this way basically means the company's IT department is in a conspiracy with an outside consultancy against its own management and finance department, and all those estimates, requirements documents, lists of "deliverables", timelines, and other precious artefacts of the tendering process are so much junk from the get-go. The project is off the rails from the start because the project scope is a fiction concocted to get sign-off and nothing more. And so it ploughs on, burning money, until the political embarrassment becomes too much and the managers call a halt going, "it was the filthy consultants! They made us do it!" It's a win-win for the IT managers, see: if the gamble pays off, you collect the ass-pats due to one who successfully delivered a critical infrastructure project; if it doesn't, well, it was only someone else's money anyway and you have a handy scapegoat to blame. "It was the consultants!" Yeah, that wouldn't ring so hollow if the exact same consultants weren't back six months later working on the next white elephant...
I'm reminded of an expression I came across in a history book that was supposedly popular in medieval Italy to describe husbands whose wives the Pope had taken a shine to: "blind in one eye, and knows when to wink the other". Back then it was a simple matter of self-preservation, as any fellow objecting to His Holiness getting his hole was likely to end up in the Tiber; nowadays it's the self-serving act of the rich and well-connected.
Many moons ago, I worked for Ireland's state electricity company who used Husky handhelds for their network technicians to patrol the distribution network looking for faults. As these were the days before widespread use of GPS, this involved starting at a substation and following the lines out from it, regardless of any rivers, boggy terrain, angry livestock, etc. you might encounter on the way. My job was to keep the network technicians supplied with spares like batteries, charging cradles and replacement units for when they finally succumbed to the Irish climate (one of the features of the software running on the things was to do moment-of-inertia calculations on a pole to determine whether it had rotted to a depth where it was at risk of collapse which tells you all you need to know about that) as well as the occasional feature enhancement, all in Turbo Pascal for DOS. They were extremely robust though their LCD screens were something of an Achilles heel-- if anything was likely to go, it was usually that, sometimes even an overnight in a cold truck cab would do for them. IIRC, Husky ended up being bought up by a US outfit (Itronix?) I was given an evaluation unit of one of their Win CE devices to play with (which will tell you how long ago this was) but it was crap.
ISTR Husky doing a publicity stunt where they buried one of their devices in the riverbed of the Thames for a month and when they dug it out, it still worked!
Yup, I've said it before, with CEOs it's always, "the buck stops with me, that's why I'm paid lots!" and then "waaah! I didn't know anything how can a mere mortal like me be expected to know everything that goes on around here?" when the buck actually does stop with them. But they at least can comfort themselves in the soft billowy folds of their golden parachutes... always.
Another factor might be that Leo Apotheker-- a software guy brought in specifically to transition HP to a pure "services" outfit and looking to reduce HP's dependence on hardware sales-- simply saw what he wanted to see in Autonomy's figures and disregarded how much of their money was coming from hardware sales. None so blind etc.
They pretty much made the 80s microcomputer industry in the UK possible with their ULA technology, then bought a CIA front company in their attempt to expand into the US market. From ye Pffft of All Knowledge:
'Unknown to Ferranti, ISC's business primarily consisted of illegal arms sales started at the behest of various US clandestine organizations. On paper the company looked to be extremely profitable on sales of high-priced "above board" items, but these profits were essentially non-existent. With the sale to Ferranti all illegal sales ended immediately, leaving the company with no obvious cash flow... The financial and legal difficulties that resulted forced Ferranti into bankruptcy in December 1993.'
So much for that "special relationship".
It's eye-wateringly expensive because they know you're not going to cancel your subscription
Very much so. My sister complains bitterly about this because she knows my football-addicted nephews would go bananas if she chucked out the Sky box, even though Sky Sports is about the last thing they're subscribed to at this point (though they're getting to an age now where she may be like, "you want it, you pay for it")
It's not just Sky either, mind, who are gouging pricks. I remember back in the days of the Celtic Tiger, the base cable package offered by NTL came with a sports channel (EuroSports, maybe? I am a sports-ignorant) that showed footy matches from one of the African leagues, presumably because they could pick them up on the cheap. Once people realised the standard of football was quite high, they became quite popular-- and that you were getting them anyway at no extra cost didn't hurt either. Also, there were lots of African families working in Ireland at the time because of the Celtic Tiger... anyway, once NTL realised they were actually popular, they vanished of the base package in short order and you had to pay extra for them. Miserable hoors.
I saw an article recently on this-- specifically, it seeks to answer whether "rockstar CEOs" with a string of corroborated successes to their names exist, and if the industry dogma that an MBA is necessary to a CEO's effectiveness holds. TL;DR The answer seems to be, "um, no" to both questions...
Just being able to say "we tried that and it didn't work" can justify someone's salary.
In the case of an Oracle exec, it's more like, "we tried that and it worked like a charm right up until the marks, er, customers realised how much we were ripping them off. So just do it for six months less than that."
I had a friend with a 464 who later upgraded to a 6128. Locomotive did a good job on the CPC BASIC-- no way I was telling him that back then, though ;-) IIRC, Locomotive went on to design the operating environment for the PCW series of word processors for Amstrad which got a lot of tech journo careers off the ground, including some around here, I believe.
Part of the reason for the lethargic BASIC was that Clive, cheap sod that he was¹, refused to give Nine Tiles the time to properly optimise the Spectrum's ROM routines for speed-- given the time & financial constraints, they basically took the ZX-81 ROM & hacked in the colour, sound, hi-res graphics, new tape loading code, etc. on top of what was already there. No mean feat on John Grant's part given the time he was given to do it in, and no disrespect to him, but no wonder the thing runs like a 3-legged dog. It was something I realised years later when I used interpreted BASICs on CP/M machines of similar vintage to the Spectrum and they were much snappier... I'd love to see what could have been done do the BASIC's performance with a bit of tweaking of the ROM code but maintaining the entry points would be tricky.
¹ Then he had the cheek to whine about how his computers weren't taken seriously as business machines, how they were only used for games, after it was his own relentless penny-pinching and nothing else that made them unattractive to the business market! Fucking hypocrite.
... I bet "my left shoe won't even reboot" was a phrase you never expected to see outside of an Onion article, right?
Sure, 99 times out of 100 the contents of that menu are going to be the same because they are all the same basic top-level actions that most applications support on their associated files¹-- creating a new one, opening an existing one, saving changes, printing, etc. But if you look at the original spec for the CUA (you used to be able to download it from IBM's site though good luck finding it now) the name of the menu was supposed be different depending on the kind of file being edited in that window. It was a minor thing, possibly intended to differentiate the CUA from the Mac HIG which always used "File" as its first menu (though of course the Mac always only had that one shared menu bar at the top), but I don't think it ever got traction. IIRC, even OS/2's Workplace Shell didn't follow it and it kept to the CUA better than most.
¹ Using "file" in the loosest possible sense here, given that CUA and GUIs generally were coming about in the 80s and the height of the object orientation craze when "everything is a file" was fast being superseded by "everything is an object".
Right now I'm looking at a browser that has the classic CUA menus. If I were to click on File I know what to expect because, give or take application-related variations File menus do similar things.
To be nit-picky, a 100% CUA-compliant browser ought not call its first menu item "File" but something like "Page" instead. Because, well, a Web page isn't a file, is it? Originally, AFAIK, all CUA apps were intended to have different top level menus to give you a clue to the kind of object the app manipulated: "Document", "Sheet", etc. But it goes to show how quickly foolish consistencies and cargo-culting creep into these things.
Was bloody awful, wasn't it. I had a Sony laptop with a swap-able drive, one of which was a mini disc drive, which was great and in theory made making new discs a lot easier, but the software was atrocious.
It was, wasn't it? I didn't have one but my brother did. The late 90s/ early 00s skin-tastic abortion of a user interface was vomit-inducing enough as it was but I'm surprised it didn't actually have a "Clippy" style avatar of a Sony lawyer in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen going "it looks like you're trying to infringe our intellectual property! Are you? Are you really? Go on then! We dare you!" I swear the room used to fill with the odour of sulphur when he used it as it was. Never have I seen a piece of hardware and software so ruthlessly compromised by its own manufacturer as MiniDisc.
The day the "actually makes stuff" part of Sony goes "right, that's it" and rises up against the "intellectual property" arm that's hamstrung them for decades and guillotines every last rent-seeking parasitical one of them can't co-- oops, wrong forum, sorry.
Second the recommendation for Techmoan. Someone actually asked him on Twitter once what obscure audio format he'd like to see resurrected and he half-jokingly replied, "a commercial release on Elcaset"... and some nutter went and did it!
The original data came from Reddit and you are surprised at this?
"But we trained it on r/iamverysmart! Stands to reason it's very smart now, don't it?"
In fairness to systemd (and that's not something you'll hear from me very often), AFAICT this bug is solely in snapd's code and would have been exploitable even if using an old-school System V style init script to start it. The root cause of the bug was in the way snapd determined the privileges of the process calling the service it exposed on the socket which it did by parsing various bits of information passed to it. As Daniel J. Bernstein (§3.3) has pointed out, one needs to be very careful when parsing anything.
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