Posts by Springsmith

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

Never grow by acquisition

As the old saying goes "Never grow by acquisition".

Acquisition is a risky strategy, all too often companies end up with a pig in a poke.

Companies think when they are buying customers they are buying profit... they're not.

They think that buying a profitable company it will make them profitable... it won't.

They think the customers will be pleased to switch product line ... they won't be, and they'll blame the supplier.

They is an argument for a "synergy" to integrate with other offerings and getting into the market rapidly.... integration is tough and slow

They think the big company will provide the level of investment necessary to expand - it won't.

EBITDA isn't in the GAAP - for a good reason.

How much is a loss making company worth? Are you blitz scaling? are you? are you really?

"Really its a merger"... Check out the illustration for The Economist article "The Trouble with Mergers"

Asking the seller questions is not "due diligence".

Do a better job than your competitors at a price your customers find sustainable, at a profit and then like Sun Tzu settle down by the river... "If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by."

Crooks stole AWS credentials from misconfigured sites then kept them in open S3 bucket

That said...

"That said, a GUI should be conceptually-organised. Being perfectly-organised for workflow A means it will be dis-organised for workflow B."

That said, the GUI could be task oriented and have two work-flows. (household plumbing has a bunch of totally different interfaces for mixing hot and cold water). Not that there is anything wrong with an additional generic interface in addition; but most people have the same one or two use-cases and (even with something as simple as mixing hot and cold water) they prefer simpler different interfaces for each.

Fanboi icon? because Mr Jobs explained this to us.

The only thing worse than being fired is scammers fooling you into thinking you're fired

Re: You have to wonder

"the project managers, market researchers and developers are all doing a pretty effective job"

This is like saying someone who goes around stabbing people and taking their money is being a pretty effective surgeon. You wouldn't give them a job as a soldier or working in an abattoir either.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: I wish …

Brain the size of a planet, and you ask him that.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

"Patent trolls" are more akin to fraudsters who send out fake invoices to companies in the hope of being paid. Companies with portfolios of useful patents are vital in the world of tech (granting non-exclusive licenses industry-wide, paying a lump sum to inventors, insuring against legal costs, guaranteeing value of IP used as collateral against loans, ensuring enforcement etc).

Sable Networks seems to have fallen into the random fraudster category.Cloudfare called Sable Networks bluff. Sable Networks doubled down.

How much ready cashflow do you think Cloudflare had commit at some point to see this through?

Sable Networks is bankrupt so Cloudflare won't be getting their money back. Meanwhile the people who owned it will be back next week with another batch of BS patents and "remember how much it cost you last time (with that totally unrelated company) - and you won that one."

159 Automattic staff take severance offer and walk out over WP Engine feud

People have many conflicting loyalties in life.

Mullenweg's lawyers need to get Mullenweg off the postcast circuit.

I see where Mullenweg is coming from, but in recent interviews he has come over as more than a little rash, impetuous and ignorant of the law (I'm no lawyer, but it is like watching Sidney Powell in clown shoes running across a legal minefield). To steal a turn of phase on behalf of the departing staff "and for that reason alone, I'm out". Sometimes as I watched I was literally covering my eyes and saying "don't say that", "oh, you didn't, did you?" and "could even an expensive lawyer get you out of this".

Could anyone look the departing staff at "Automattic" in the eye say that things will turn around for the better? It may seem disloyal to leave but people have many confllicting loyalties in their lives.

I am sure many of the departing staff see themselves as the first in the lifeboats, by which I mean the first to throw their CVs in the ring. There are undoutedly opportunities in the world for Wordpress people, but a limited number of jobs for top people.

"WP Engine" seem pretty mercenary, but if they meet the GPL they meet the GPL, and they are ultimately a business.

Using trademark law to act a some sort of IP proxy for code contribution will not work, for the simple reason that Trademark law and Copyright law are in no way proxies. Trademarks must be defended and WP was explicitly not defended (i.e. permission was given in the license to use it willy-nilly) for many years. This is therefore incredibly unlikely to stand. Retrospecively modifying the license conditions on the website won't fix that. In fact it almost undoubtedly makes matters worse; much much worse. If the argument that WP is synonymous with "Wordpress" is won, then that trademark might (unlikely, but might) fall too.

Trademark law, extortion accusations, defamation, IP - wow! that is an impressive set of specialist (i.e. unintuitive and expensive) legal fields (why not add family, international trade and human rights to complete the set?). I do hope they manage to sort something out, but it seems to have gone way beyond private, informal chats - and into "my lawyers will be in touch with your lawyers".

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

Re: Other problems

That is a measured opinion.

To "...if this was a green-field project, fantastic. Unfortunately there are existing personnel, skill-sets, processes, legacy code-bases etc that the shiny new has to fit into nicely." I would add, that if it is a re-write it has to reach something approaching feature parity to start attracting widespread adoption. For this Linux kernel that is a lot of features.

The whole "C vs Rust in the kernel" debate reminds me a bit of the "monolith vs the microkernel" debate. "Sure, it sounds better; We are where we are though; We genuinely wish you luck but we can't do both."

Crooks threaten to leak 3B personal records 'stolen from background check firm'

3B records on people who have lived in the US - not records on 3B people

3B records on people who have lived in the US - not records on 3B people

Social security number + address + dates is one record; and considerably less than 300 bytes.

Social security number + Medicare id is another record.

Social security number plus name and date of birth, yet another.

For "record" think "row in database" or possibly "row and column" and you'll be closer.

(3B people would about 2/5 of the population of the Earth - given it is over the last 30 years)

Google to appeal against €7m fine from Swedish watchdog for failing to remove search results under GDPR

For Viewers Listening in Scotland

"The law has no spirit other than the intent expressed by the words as written."

No...

"The jurisdiction of the Court of Session extends beyond statutory and common law powers, with the Court having an equitable and inherent jurisdiction called the nobile officium, unique among British courts. The nobile officium enables the court to provide a legal remedy where statute or the common law are silent, and prevent mistakes in procedure or practice that would lead to injustice. The exercise of this power is limited by adherence to precedent, and when legislation or the common law DO NOT already specify the relevant remedy. Thus, the court cannot set aside a statutory power, but can deal with situations where the law is silent, or where there is an omission in statute. Such an omission is sometimes termed a casus improvisus."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Session#Nobile_officium

(This was why some of the rushed Brexit legislation ended up being heard in Scotland)

Feel like a little kid in the container world? Welcome to the club

Enterprise does the best it can to deliver for its customers

Even as an enthusiast for new technologies I would struggle to bring myself to even try to persuade my "Enterprise" employers that containers with bare metal Node.js and MongoDB would be a suitable replacement for JBoss, Java, and Oracle.

However for small integrated devops style teams I think it would be a different story.

I'm a reasonably experienced Linux/Unix admin and an experienced developer - and I'd have to say my experience of k8s, and fabric8 is that none of it is as easy as it looks for a one-man-band to get it all set up. That is why we have teams! (it is a lot more doable than a RedHat Oracle setup, though!).

So for my money there is probably a sweet spot for Container adoption - certainly at the moment. That sweet-spot might apply to modest teams within SMEs or startups.

An analogy of an "enterprise" as an aircraft carrier, SMEs as destroyers, startups as MTBs and one-man-bands as a kamikaze pilots seem appropriate.

Enterprises do as the best and the brightest within them deem appropriate, and they are usually correct.