Posts by TheBadja

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

It's the people, stupid

I've worked in larger organisations my whole career, and Linux on the desktop is dead in large organisations, not because of the technology but because of the people.

Repeat after me - LINUX IS NOT FREE.

When you hire a new worker, the most important thing is to get them productive ASAP. 95% of new office workers already know Windows, some sort of email, Word, Excel and perhaps PowerPoint. So you don't need to train them in these office fundamental tools. Probably they know O365, but if not, anyone in the office can sit down with them and in a couple of hours cross-train them over to O365.

Give them Linux and they are already starting to worry that they have made a mistake in taking on this job. How do you do this, how do you do that? For the first couple of weeks they are struggling - call that $2000 of lost productivity, plus the support costs (as much again?). That's assuming they haven't decided they don't want to be here.

Even if Linux and the associated tools were BETTER than Microsoft, they are unfamiliar to new starters so person+Microsoft is productive FASTER than person+Linux. And Managers want productive staff NOW. Any everyone knows that when they go to their next job, they'll be back on Microsoft anyway, so why bother learning these new tools.

I've worked in one larger organisation who tried standardising on Google Tools. But every time they exchanged a document with an external vendor, they had to convert it onm the way in, and then back to Microsoft on the way out. And the format wasn't always right, or that formula didn't carry across. Dangerous and risking when we were talking multi-million dollar contracts.

This is why Microsoft owns larger businesses, and any business who wants to do business with larger businesses.

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

File under “What could possibly go wrong?”

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/15/air_canada_chatbot_fine/

It's a preview party at Microsoft, but do you really want an invite?

Re: Google Workspace vs Office is a problem for them

I’m an IT contractor so I’ve moved between a significant number of (Australian) businesses. I know of only one large organisation that uses Google rather than Microsoft for its productivity suite. If you have new professional or office staff, you can assume they will already know Microsoft, but will need training in Google if that’s what you want to use as your corporate standard. That’s why Microsoft is embedded in larger businesses and government agencies. Total cost, not just platform cost.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Wrong

Replace AI with “trains” and 2020’s with 1820’s and exactly the same argument holds. Revolutionary new technology starts as unregulated and dangerous, but eventually transforms the world. Without the railways, we’d all still be stick in our little villages growing our own food. Who knows where AI will take us, but it is most probably to remove more drudgery of work.

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

The more things change

I’ve been in IT for almost five decades. What strikes me most is the number of times new tech is introduced without considering what has already been developed. Developers love developing, so they re-invent the wheel time and time again rather than tweaking current technology.

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Azure AD

Why do marketing types play silly buggers with product names. As a practitioner, many hours of confusion occur because technical meetings at cross purposes as people don’t know if they are talking about the same thing or something different. Not only Microsoft, every vendor does the same.

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Emergency App in Australia

The emergency services in Australia worked together to create an emergency app which connects to emergency services, including supplying what3words location.

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Re: It's such a North American viewpoint...

I’m not rich enough to live 7 minutes from work.

Pay for work in office

Travelling to work is unpaid work time. If employers had to pay for this time employers would be great supporters of WFH.

Experts scoff at UK Lords' suggestion that AI could one day make battlefield decisions

Of course it is technically possible

If a vehicle can tell if that is a pedestrian crossing the road, then a vehicle can tell if it is a pedestrian it should shoot.

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

Re: They could have saved millions...

The contract will be based on generic requirements. Implementation depends on meeting specific requirements - i.e. what really works. The specific requirements can only be discovered by implementing something that highlights what it doesn’t do. Every every time. There is no such thing as a fixed cost contract that results in a successful implementation.

Amazon a prime target of warehouse law protecting bathroom breaks

Re: "employee injury rate at least 30 percent above the average"

Doesn’t the local fire board have the right to inspect premises to see if they are conforming to standards? Or do they have to wait until people die in a fire? I’m genuinely interested if that is the law in the US. In Australia, the work safety regulator has the right to enter premises to see that everyone on site is safe, including safe materials handling practices, shift lengths, work demands etc. are safe and will not cause injury or harm. It is a condition of the company holding a license to run a business.

Australia gives made-in-China CCTV cams the boot

Re: Sure

The Chinese hypocrisy of denying any but Chinese equipment on their security networks, but complaining when others do the same.

James Webb Space Telescope suffers another hitch: Instrument down

In Australian, it is not offensive, but definitely negative connotations of less than professional, slightly amateur. Like “academic” means without real life implications, moot.

It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary

Edge is OK

The IT industry uses vocabulary that is more marketing blitz than technical all the time. Fuzzy marketing terms are the norm, not the exception. Edge just means non-centralised. Not putting everything in the same cloud data centre or two. Spread it about. No need to be more specific than that.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

"Those who attend offices may also wish to consider “walking” to a “meeting room”, a facility established with the express purpose of allowing teams of people to interact." and spread COVID.

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

One significant problem is the MP's are now professional politicians, and rarely have any STEM skills at all. They don't understand software beyond using Facebook and Twitter, and even then, they have assistants to do this. One prominent Australian MP was caught out because he didn't own a smartphone to be able to present his vaccination status at a pub for entry.

Re: Career development disguised as science

Someone said that scientific paradigms don't die because new studies disputing the findings, they die because the scientists supporting the paradigm die.

Boomi busts out of Dell with $4bn sale to pair of private equiteers

Re: bomi?

If you want to integrate Salesforce, then Salesforce has an integration tool. If you want to integrate with Workday, or ServiceNow, they also have their own integration tools. But if you have (like many large organisations) a portfolio of hundreds of specialised applications for specific parts of you business, with different API's, file uploaders or even none (database access required), Boomi integration sits in the middle and talks to all of these. It used to be called the middleware layer, and there are advantages in separating it from the applications - particularly when you want to move vendors.

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

No reason to upgrade

I haven't seen a single compelling reason to upgrade. Then again, I hung onto XP as long as I could and then upgraded to 8.1. I only upgraded to Windows 10 when I bought a new main machine with it installed, and liked it enough to upgrade my laptop and spare machine.

Windows 11 looks like Vista or Windows 8 to me - a version to avoid as long as possible.

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

The problem with rating obscenities is that their effect depends very much on context. If my son is playing games on the computer, I'm quite used to hearing "No fucking way" all through the night. I hardly even hear the obscenity. However, if my boss at work replies to my suggestion to a way to improve the workplace "No fucking way." this is grounds for a complaint to HR about their bullying.

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Mythical Man Month, Brooks, 1975

The source may be “The Mythical Man Month” by Fred Brooks, 1975. This could be the original source for the IBM notes, as Brookes worked for IBM. He certainly had a study that showed the true cost of projects was 100%-300% more than the initial budget estimates.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

The correct title is Pedoman Musk. According to Musk, in South Africa Pedoman is a term of endearment.

Excuse me, what just happened? Resilience is tough when your failure is due to a 'sequence of events that was almost impossible to foresee'

There was once a major outage on Sydney Trains because of an intermittent failure on a router in the signal box. The IT network was configured in failover with a pair of routers in load sharing.

One router failed - any the second router took up the load. Should have been fine and the failed router could have been reloaded at leisure.

However, the failed router, now without load, restored itself and took up its part of the IP traffic - and then failed under load. Repeat multiple times per second and packets were being lost everywhere.

This stopped the trains as this disconnected the signal box from centralised rail control.

Trains stopped for hours as the IT network technical staff couldn’t track what was going on, then needed to physically replace the faulty unit. Of course, couldn’t get there by train, so they had to drive there in traffic built up due to no trains.

NASA pulls the plug on InSight's mole after Martian surface bests boffins

Re: Huge failure - No actually it wasnt

If you know what you are doing, it isn't science. NASA rolls the dice and does better than they should, given the unknowns.

Australian state adds AI number plate readers to GPS tracking of corona-quarantine busters

Re: It's not being done for the indigenous people

Cov-SARS-2 is a Coronavirus. Like sheep are mammals. So it is perfectly correct to call this a coronavirus crisis.

Re: It's not being done for the indigenous people

In general, Australian authorities are VERY aware that remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders communities are at risk during this coronavirus crisis. They are being given priority in testing like other high risk groups.

Elon Musk gets thumbs up from jury for use of 'pedo guy' in cave diver defamation lawsuit

Pedo Guy Musk

From now on, he can be known as Pedo Guy Musk - as by his own admission, "pedo guy" is only an insult, not defamatory.

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

Teams is free to corporates

Corporates buy Office 365 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Exchange - must haves in most enterprise sized businesses. Upgrade to premium and you get Teams, SharePoint (which many want anyway) and Skype for business. All done with one signature from the CIO.

Forget about usability or features, corporate IT departments are looking at the dollars and ease of getting it approved. Why would any corporate even consider paying for Slack?

Trio indicted after police SWAT prank call leads to cops killing bloke

Re: Any NRA comment?

What a country. Children go to school expecting to be shot and answering your door to police can be fatal.