Posts by B83

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

Re: One thing guaranteed to make me break down in tears...

My company goes one further i.e. Power Point to spreadsheet back to Power Point. They are addicted to the Power Point. Its quite scary since the people who look at these Power Points are the senior decision makers

The cycle goes kinda like this:

Everything goes into Power Point typed in manually. From Power Point the data is down loaded(typed) into a spreadsheet and then we load into a very, very expensive Data Science software App that feeds into a reporting system. The users have the ability to export into a CSV file that is imported into a spreadsheet

From this point forward its Power Point, no control, cottage industries galore, re-calculation that appear to be done on the way the wind is blowing, and to top it all off my team are regularly told we are sh1t because the data is wrong.

US-China chip cold war? It's only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn

Re: Once Upon a Time, in the Lands of the Eternal Optimist and Pragmatic Ethereal Realist ....

Thanks, no-one ever called me a Pragmatic Ethereal Realist.

Betamax v VHS

Some great comments and retorts but I'm not going to wade in.

For my simple mind its a bit like Betamax v VHS. Two formats that did the same thing but were incompatible.

Ultimately China will go there way and the West the other way. Both doing the same thing with different tech.

The question is will there be a winner, we won't finder in any of our life times. History will be the only one to tell and even then its amazing how history keeps changing.

Apple, Google yank opposition voting strategy app from Russian software stores

Re: It's Russia, what do you expect ?

Depends on what you see hell as. The some Brits see Brexit as hell some love it.

Trump, wow, and I mean that in both senses. His tenure was just wow.

Russia is a very young democracy and, as one article said, voters won't pay much attention to to the power struggles as long as they are comfortable in their own houses. This is a country that still remembers the basic living style of communism.

Another generation and things might be totally different.

Just be careful who pours your cup of tea....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko

'It takes a hell of a mental toll' – techies who lost work due to COVID share their stories

Long live VBA

I feel folks pain although I did not lose my job but got put onto another project, with no dev work, as a stakeholder management lacky.....

Hi, can you fill this form in

Hi, have you had time to fill this form in

Pleeeeeeease, fill the form in

Soul destroying, but I have a mortgage to pay for.

Thankfully, i have been able to move roles, I never knew I would be sooooo thankful for VBA. As one person said 'a pat on the back for past me'.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: the data IS effectively the credit union

Tech Debt is the fancy phrase. Systems/applications usually have a 10 year life span in that disguise, then they have to be updated e.g. version 2, or replaced.

Management only look at cost and thats where the killer is. Cut back this, pay off them, p1ss the workforce off and 'hey, your in the sh1t'.

This situation should never happen but does so frequently.

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

Resist, resist

I can remember him getting taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy shouting resist resist.

If you know his alledged history I wonder if they tried to do that!!!!

Report: 83% of UK software engineers suffer burnout, COVID-19 made it worse

Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

Yep, got agree with Agile and sprints. The date is set for the sprint to finish and higher up management expect you to meet it.

Never actually understood that myself since you always encounter unknowns that take time to resolve, but higher management don't give a f*ck since a date was set.

Re: Empty coffer

Haha, you never know how many legacy systems are out there in VB. The company I work for have developers that solely use VB and have been in the company that long nobody dares gets rid of them.

A Visual circle or should that be vicious?

Robots still suck. It's all they can do to stand up – never mind rise up

Disturbing indeed

This is disturbing news indeed i was hoping for a robot to do the cooking, cleaning, bum wiping for me in my looming old age.

Common robot developers get your mechanically joint fingers out.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

Is there any safe place for SRP:

Yes, parliament. They are at it all the time!

Big Brother is watching you!

What was he thinking, who does he think he is....Jeez...has he read 1984 and thought 'ah, I know I will become the Thought Police and implement Thoughtcrime':

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.

To far up his own orifice but at least he did come out and apologies. If the 30% walk out is true its a very expensive lesson, will it come out his bonus?

NASA’s getting really good at this flying a helicopter on Mars thing

WTF

Yeah, WTF, a helicopter on another planet. Mind boggling, nothing else for it.

Absolutely amazing achievement.

Looking forward to seeing more images as it flies around the planet.

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Is this a flash in the pan

My first thought was 'how long will this last. I'm not knocking it as I primarily write in SQL and have seen, written long bits of code**, I just want others to give their views on how realistic this is and could it take off.

Basically, is it worth learning?

**Projects often dictate how fast you have to go and this leads to very messy quick fixes just to get a result (thats my defense and I'm sticking to if(haha))

Remember that day in 2020 when you were asked to get the business working from home – by tomorrow?

Toilet paper

In the company I work for laptops became toilet paper. At first people were told it's only for the very important people, essential if you like. Unfortunately Directors thought all their people were essential and demanded laptops for every single employee. Luckily there was no time to argue and they got told. Imagine when the Marketing Director tried to rock up and say we are critical. Yeah we really need to gets those adverts out.

Oracle gears up to fend off RPA and workflow upstarts by pouring more automation into core enterprise apps

Re: Intelligent Process Automation

You beat me to it.

As soon as I started reading the article I thought "OUCH" to the license fees. Oooooh they are gonna be sweet. Problem is though those costs usually cost us humans our jobs.

I've nothing against automation, its part of our working future, but after having experience with 'BluePrism' I aint convinced. £30,000 ,internal business costs, to automate the loading of a spreadsheet, which was not locked down i.e. users could change the format (they regularly did). Ping you have an email......BluePrism alert.......spreadsheet load has failed.....surprise F*cking surprise (haha).

$$££Kerrching££$$ for the Big Red I think!

Too many staff have privileged work accounts for no good reason, reckon IT bods

You just never know who is watching you!

The problem is, well loads of problems, you get one person with power saying Im important and so is this team so we need access. Any new members automatically get the access, the function of the team changes/person moves on but you still get the same access. It happened to me and I was thinking I should not have access to this i.e. it was HR data and I did nothing with it (in case you are wondering).

Another thing, users will hold onto their access because its 'sods law in action' when you rescind it and an urgent job comes in that requires you to have that access. Its then the joys of having to go through all the hoops to get it back again.

If you have a team that have been there for a while then access is easier to manage, since it becomes part of their job and can be split amongst team members. However, I've seen this personally, largescale changes cause teams to be split up, moved to other functions and you lose the experience. Nobody and I mean nobody wants to become the person who creates access/rescind for other users, soooooo boring.

Microsoft nudges latest TypeScript iteration out onto the mean streets of JavaScript

Re: SQRL!

VB is Dead, did say Dead, how dare you!..................................That's the view point of some of my colleagues, not me.

The company I am working for has heavily used VB and if you try and get some of the developers to move, 'oh boy' you are in for some stick. They refuse to learn C# and they know they can get away with it because of all the legacy VB that needs to be maintained. The legacy works so its not getting replaced anytime soon, just long enough for them to get their pensions (fair enough).

My place is no different from any other place i.e. legacy, it just irritating when people dont want to move on and just get stuck in the past, which will probably be me in ten years time(haha, I hope bloody not!).

At the moment its a 'them v us situation', in my workplace, the pimply faced youth C# developers (all of them over 30, married with kids) and the senior VB developers (all of them nearing, or have hit, 50+). When a new project is announced they will insist on writing VB if the project goes anywhere near legacy. Eventually the tide will turn but its a pain in the arse, not all the time, but they seem to have the power.

Oh, there was a VB 6 job advertised for somewhere in Wakefield, anyone who wants to get back into VB6 have a sniff around.

Uncle Sam says it's perfecting autonomous AI-powered drone, vehicle swarms to 'dominate' battlefields

Re: Did none of these people see the movie called...

SkyNet has obviously already infiltrated the U.S. military by placing mind-control chips in the brains of of key Pentagon personnel!

Does Donald Trump come into your equation at any point?

Oracle opens second Indian cloud region in bid to keep pace in make-or-break market

Is Big Red on its way out?

I've worked in a few Enterprise sized companies in the past few years and everyone of them is doing their utmost to get away from Oracle. Far too expensive for their products e.g. Oracle database licenses, compared to what the open source can provide. The job market for Oracle developers seems to be becoming a bit of a niche area, just my opinion, every body I speak to does not consider Oracle development as a good option for them and concentrate on the newer stuff. Are Oracle becoming the new Mainframe! Still being used but nobody interested in investing time into their products.

It wont be the death knell for them but I suspect they are in for a rough ride in the Cloud market stakes.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Sauce

Yep, very good it did make me laugh. Not to be taken seriously at all although there are a few who would.

On another note, we do laugh at Trump, unless you are a Trump supporter, but he could be the most influential President since Roosevelt took America into the Second World War. I've just read an article, a believable one, about the restrictions of exports for silicon chips to China, this could be the drive of a distinct difference between Asia and the rest of us in Tech. Some say this is a bit of a nightmare scenario that leads to two different tech races in years to come and its all started by Trump.

I would love to be able to see what history makes, 100 years from now, of this whole scenario we are in at the moment Coronas and all.

Wall Street analyst worries iPhone is facing '2nd recession' after 2019 annus horribilis

Re: Saturated Market

Yeah the market is saturated and there is little buzz about a new phone being brought out. Its time for something really innovating that works and has durability.

If you're an apple fan they Yeah there is always a buzz but for Jo public its just another phone. Its the cost as well, one of my mates spends £70 a month for an Iphone. I've no problem with that its their choice but that is very, very expensive.

Im the same for 5G, just wait until my old phone dies then get the new 5G phone and fry my brain (if you believe the fear scaremongers.......Ickey* baby I believe you!)

*David Icke

After intense scrutiny, Zoom tightens up security with version 5. New features include not, er, spilling video calls to network snoops

Dumteedumers

Every time I read something about Zoom I will always think of this story and have a chortle/chuckle to myself.

For those of you who are not familiar with a Dumteedumer just think of a person in their middle age, that are mostly middle class, 100% British, 100% posh and proper, drinking tea, eating cream scones or crumpets.

With that gentile image in your head have a laugh at this link https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52243209

In Rust we trust? Yes, but we want better tools and wider usage, say devs

Realistic business scenario

I've looked at RUST and enjoyed working with it i.e. dabbling about, but I dont see any reason for it in my work. Admittedly I am database driven and spend most my time creating tables, ETL, stored procedures, etc. I do use other languages along with SQL i.e. C#, Javascript, VBA, yes VBA its going nowhere fast :), and python. All these languages have a use at my work but RUST just does not fit in. This leads me to my point, everyone else I have spoken to have heard of RUST but have no intention of learning it as they are in the same boat as me i.e. no real reason to use it, no business scenario that requires this language. They also see it as a very bespoke language that does not lead itself to any work projects.

RUST needs to be able to appeal past the in-depth/hardcore developer a bit of PR is required to try and sex it up a bit. If you can sex up code that is!

No do-overs! Appeals court won’t hear $8.8bn Oracle v Google rehash

Re: "if their strategy had been different in the 80's"

Yes this is me replying to a comment made nearly two years ago. Home working during Corona Crisis and I am bored i.e. I much prefer the office environment. After making a comment on a ASP.NET article I discovered you can review the comments you historically made, re-looked at this article and saw this comment that made me think, if only I had become an author!

What a fantastic book your point would make. If IBM had put patents on there stuff and had those kind of patent lawyers where would we be with tech at this precise moment (2020).

How would the smart phone evolve, if at all, Tablets, home computing, the rise of India as an major IT outsourcing area, gaming, the list is massive.

Is it IBM compatible

Haha that comment made me laugh, maybe too early in the morning for me since I've not had my coffee yet!

What popped to mind was, I can remember the days when people actually said "Is it IBM compatible" and then they totally lost the plot and Windows made its move.

IBM still exist but could have been a very different beast if their strategy had been different in the 80's.

I'll go have my coffee now, cheers

Is this an ASP.NET Core I see before me? Where to next for Microsoft's confusing web framework...

Re: Coding vs devops

A comment I can totally agree with. Last year I decided to pick up ASP.NET and use the MVC format since I was told Forms was old hat. I then find out that most folk in the company dont use MVC and prefer Forms, Im a newbie when it comes to MVC so dont get angry if the last part sounds sh1t :). I like the principle of MVC, a structured approach, since the Forms apps I looked at seemed all over the place and you needed bespoke knowledge of the application to make sense of it

On my learning curve for MVC the array of stuff to memories seemed bewildering its not just code. I have written loads of stuff with C#, small scale things, but MVC seems to demand a vast amount of knowledge on e.g. libraries, release versions of .NET.

The company I work for only has Visual Studio 2015 and I have no idea when they will move onto 2019. Its such a difficult position to manage i.e. do I stick with MVC or move onto CORE and wait for the company to upgrade. Also I thought EF was a brilliant addition, once I discovered it, but it seems its a pile of sh1t, but for someone who has not developed in-depth MVC apps it saves a lot of typing.

Apart from Garlic Bread* what is the future. It always seems a mix of opinions from mid range developer to expert in-depth developer and never the twain seem to match.

*Peter Kay - Phoenix Nights reference

Astroboffins peep at the largest orgy of galaxies banging into each other

Re: "as it is unlikely that there are more than about 16 such objects across the entire sky"

Yeah just like the GoldiLocks planets.

You used to get told there would be hardly any but when there are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. There might be more GoldiLocks scenarios that people realise.

Dr. Jason Marshall, aka, the Math Dude. According to Jason, there about 700 trillion cubic meters of beach of Earth, and that works out to around 5 sextillion grains of sand.

(https://www.universetoday.com/106725/are-there-more-grains-of-sand-than-stars/)

I don't want to sound like I am knocking the research but I am sure its quite a big place out there.

'Dear Mr F*ckingjoking': UK PM Theresa May's mass marketing missive misses mark

Re: I think I speak for everybody when I say...

Speaking for everyone, your not F*ckingJ*king there!

UK peers: Is this what you call governance of facial recog tech? A 'few scattered papers'!

Fight back

When will the general public start fighting back. Its scary what can be done with tech. Who\what will be the spark that makes joe public go "no more".

If the government gets its way its1984 for ever more.

Dawn of The Planet of the Phablets in 2019 will see off smartphones

Re: Pocketalypse

Is 2019 the year for the manbag as well so they can hold the Phablets?

You could even add a new icon "I''ll get me manbag".

Oi, drag this creaking, 217-year-old UK census into the data-driven age

Re: Data Dark Ages

Hi

I had to go and have a look and for the 2001 census there was a 98% return rate but did not find anything for the last census. I would be surprised if there was a massive drop in return rates though.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2001censusandearlier/dataandproducts/qualityofthecensusdata/responserates

Data Dark Ages

This will be the census of the Data Dark Ages. There are too many people who wont trust an online survey. Im just thinking of my parents, their mates, my mates parents and their mates. "Oh online survey, wont be trusting that", and I cannot blame them.

Most of my mates have real fancy smart phones but are generally inept at using them. They have traded their laptops/desktops for smart phones and wont be spending any time filling in an online form like the census.

Yes it costs money but after the Car Tax** someone needs to the give the Mandarins a good shake and tell them its too early for this type of survey.

Im no luddite but there are quite a few folk out there that are when it comes to this type of thing.

** http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42009111

I thought there'd be more Instagram: ICT apprenticeships down 20% in five years

Doom and gloom

I have to agree with you there is too much doom and gloom about IT.

I wonder what the doom merchants are talking about when they say IT. When I first started in the office, 2005, for a big company some folk classed themselves as IT experts but only worked on one system. Some of them had been on that system for 20 years+. They knew very little about anything else. The system was then switched off and they were fishes out of water. It did not stop me from going into IT all it did was to make me damn sure I was not a one trick pony. I'm still updating my skills and will continue to do so(actually I enjoy being the geek).

As you say and it is a golden rule 'if your not happy F**k Off and get another job'.

SuperFish cram scandal: Lenovo must now ask nicely before stuffing new PCs with crapware

Eeek

In certain parts of the British Civil Service its Lenovo laptops all the way.

What have they been snooping on?

Japanese quadcopter makes overworked employees clock out

Slackers

Yeah the work culture across in Japan is totally different from us in blighty, but that does not make us slackers.

Employees in some Japanese firms are given inceptives/bonuses for taking holidays. I'm sure that is one of the car manufacturers.

However I bet the office culture is exactly the same but with different hours! "Look at that lazy b*star*d, walks in here at 7 am and I bet he leaves at 7 pm", "how does he get away with it". "What he has taken all his holidays", "where is the dedication to the job".

Games-mart Steam halts Bitcoin payments

Re: Great Depression

The next seismic shock does look like it will be online and it would be very interesting to find out who has their fingers in the pie of Bitcoin.

Once\when the backside falls out of the online currency do you think Trump\Euro union will step in like what happened in 2007 and delivery bail outs.

It will all depend on how deep their fingers were and who they were!

Yep,it is the same old shite but where there is muck there is money.

'Break up Google and Facebook if you ever want innovation again'

Goliath

The rumour is another big player is encroaching on Facebook, Google and will make them look like pussy cats,

http://www.jasperfforde.com/goliath/index2.html

US yanks staff from Cuban embassy over sonic death ray fears

Sonic Attacks

Bloody Hedgehog!

Blighty’s beloved Big Ben bell ends, may break Brexit bargain

market-leading coverage of all Princess Diana-related issues

Will Phil Collins be breaking his silence over this?

A reference no-one outside the UK will get and I doubt anyone in the UK will get it either.

Marc and Lard had a laugh over it

(On reflection the story could have come from the Daily Mail)

Want to kill your IT security team? Put the top hacker in charge

Re: Best advice

Spot on.

One company I worked for, and will remain nameless, had a massive push towards management. Management was the ultimate goal where managers would be able to solve anything. When very technical, competent people realised they were do as much as the managers and asked for rewards they got nothing.

I actually got bored of filling out leaving cards but it was the cost towards the Projects i.e. time and contractors to fill the gap, that made peoples eyes water. Had the rewards been handed out they would have been a drop in the ocean to what the eventual costs were.

Hey, remember that monkey selfie copyright drama a few years ago? Get this – It's just hit the US appeals courts

Hartley Pool

I've heard some Hartley Pool supporters are on the lookout for Naruto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_hanger

Why, Robot? Understanding AI ethics

Over thinking

Are we over thinking AI?

I really think that once we get conscious AI, thats able to think ethically and independently for itself, it will take one look at us and switch itself off.

Or do a runner off this planet.

What AI would want to enter the drama we have here on Earth when it will know it is capable of doing so much more? "Thats my patch of dirt", "No its my patch of dirt", "My Gods the most powerful", "No my Gods the most powerful" etc, etc.

Marvin from Hitch Hikers Guide always springs to mind when AI is talked about.

Stuck with us lot but capable of roaming the Galaxies, hmm/

Retirement age must move as life expectancy grows, says WEF

Re: This is all very well, but........

@Mad Mike

Cant agree more you.

Too many people are too far up their rear orifices and think its demeaning to do some cleaning or flip a burger.

The best eye opener people can get is working behind a bar and serving the drunks, cleaning up after the drunks (the puke), on one occasion a female co-worker had to go into the female toilets and help pull up the panties of an inebriated(p1ssed/drunk/steaming) elderly lady while she was sat on the toilet.

You soon appreciate people working on minimum wage.

Huge if true: iPhone 8 will feature 3D selfies, rodent defibrillator

Re: Come along commentards, pay your way!

I dont like apple, to expensive, and just wanted to see if it was really true about the defibulator for the rodent, although I did suspect that it might be slightly erroneous.

My mate is apple obsessed and I was looking forward to taking the piss out of him and calling him Hammy the Hamster or something equally childish.

Damn, damn, damn your click "like lemmings, you will click on it and we make money when you do." scam.