* Posts by AbsolutelyBarking

9 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2017

Uber: Hackers stole 57m passengers, drivers' info. We also bribed the thieves $100k to STFU

AbsolutelyBarking
FAIL

Private sector fail

This is a great example of why we don't want monopoly control or private sector domination of any particular market.

We should have an open access transport platform that any provider can tap into. Run for the community rather than the 0.1% mega wealthly owners/shareholders. However HMGov probably won't mandate this because this type of initiative won't pay into their party coffers.

See https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/faircab/ or http://libretaxi.org/

And "unencrypted data". Really? In 2017? Words fail me....

Picture this if you will: Facebook trousers $77,794. Every. Minute.

AbsolutelyBarking

Good work by UK Gov..

...for preventing this cosy advertising duopoly and getting them both to pay a fair share of tax. NOT!!

Here's an idea. Tax digital advertising REVENUE at the point of DELIVERY. Simples!!

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

AbsolutelyBarking

Automatic keyless opening - now that has to have been dreamed up by some marketing twat "Wouldn't it be great if the car opened itself, thus saving the driver a whole second by not having to press a button on the keyfob."

A brilliant idea, slightly negated by the fact your car is now vulnerable to anyone with a laptop in the near vicinity. As evidenced by all the Land Rover Discoverys round us with a crappy krooklock on the steering wheel. Same type that I used to use on my £300 student car, which you could open with any old penknife or coat hanger....

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

AbsolutelyBarking

Classic project management approach of only consulting a very small select band of users who tell you what you want to hear, rather than a representative sample of the user base or SMEs who will provide some actual requirements. As opposed to sh1te features which no one needs. Howver you can still spin that "users have been consulted".

FAIL! (speaking as a PM..). A prime example of the above being the abysmal "choose and book" service developed within the NPFIT programme.

Concorde without the cacophony: NASA thinks it's cracked quiet supersonic flight

AbsolutelyBarking

Had a student house at East Molesey (nr Hampton Court) in late 80s. One morning Concorde flew over much lower than normal directly overhead.

Couldn't hear yourself shout. Whole house shook. Car/house alarms going off everywhere. Total goose bump moment. Fantastic!!

Can see why some people wouldn't want this on a regular basis though....

Toyota's entertaining the idea of Linux in cars

AbsolutelyBarking

I also don't need....

An insecure keyless locking system which means I have to use one of those crappy steering locks that I used on my Metro in the nineties. Really not a problem to press a button on the keyfob!

Another brilliant marketing "feature" that delivers virtually no benefit but introduces a whole load of shite....

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

AbsolutelyBarking

What a SNAFU. Any decent middleware/MQ platform is (or should be...) designed to be fault tolerant and, in particular, work in a distributed environment. One node falls over and it all carries on working, albeit maybe with more queuing latency. Quite good fun seeing this work properly when you go around yanking network cables out (in the dev environment obviously..) and back in. An infrastructure architecture FAIL IMHO.

Senior people typically only interested in reducing short term costs = this year's bonus. Well that worked out well didn't it....

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

AbsolutelyBarking

Re: Cynical Me

Agree totally. Can't believe that there wouldn't be several layers of power redundancy (tested) on critical systems. The 'power supply' line has a strong whiff of horse manure in my view.

Incident report should make interesting reading...

Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly

AbsolutelyBarking

Yes the warplane equivalent of Windows Vista.

Add to that, we can't maintain the engines ourselves, we have to send them to that very stable regime Turkey.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/11/uk_f35s_heavy_overhaul_says_us/