* Posts by EscapedTheInsanity

11 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Sep 2018

Tonight on Tales from the Crypto: It lives! GPU flinger Nvidia bouncing back after miner affair

EscapedTheInsanity

RTX Minecraft......

......is not released yet and no announced date so should not be classed as a "Ray Traced" game.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: progress has a direction, away from ignorance and towards understanding

But you can't engage with them from the position you have taken (effectively brand them all stupid - dehumanisation of a group that doesn't share your world view).

Its a slippery slope.

Next you'll be saying that these people are not worth convincing that they may be wrong and should be purged from existence (genocide is the word for the record).

I wonder where we got this idea of removing counter ideologies from?

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: @Bronek Flaming idiot, social justice warrior and political hack

When the backlog for even LEGAL asylum claims is 10 years+ then you kinda have to worry about the possibility of getting a route in at all.

If the options are getting locked up (sans kids) versus a 10+ year wait for an infinitesimally small chance of legal refuge then its easier to understand why people choose this route.

If the process for legal immigration was more expedient and realistic then you wouldn't have the massive problem of people illegally crossing, having to spend billions of dollars on futile gestures (a wall and militaristic patrols) and the ham-fisted response of caging both the asylum seekers and their progeny.

'Transformation' at Capita: Profits? Down. Revenue? Down. Order book? You guessed it

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: 1.85Bn revenue to return 31.2m

They have no incentive to be better. When I was there we KNEW that there were cheaper suppliers but the director level bods had bought Capita shares and were more interested in padding the Capita bottom line in order to fluff their own nests which meant that rather than ditch the poorest performing arm of Capita they persisted with them and told us to "make them do better".

That went as well as you can imagine.

If there were proper investigations done into conflict of interests at the various Capita owned/licencee businesses they run on behalf of the government the public would be shocked at the kinds of decisions they make to fleece the taxpayer.

The two towers: Met Police to consolidate £500m worth of tech outsourcing deals

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: I still don't understand

They actually get a very poor return on their investment in reality. They get left on legacy desktop OS's (I'm betting they are still on Win 7 across their estate - no doubt because someone saw how much CrapGemini were charging for licences and the DoI Director kicked the can down the road for the next person to deal), use legacy servers, have legacy systems (no-one in their right mind is going to re-write PNC) and essentially the support of this legacy estate becomes more and more expensive over time as the resources become tied in and the expertise harder to come by.

It's just dumb - if they actually decided to innovate their IT systems and throw a massive effort at trying to move to future platforms and start using off the shelf platforms to perform tasks they need they'd actually need less money to run it long term.

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: ALL my calls from shouty men

Oooof - flashbacks to when my mum found out I was smoking regularly.

Police ICT Company kills £500m procurement, no longer wants one box shifter to rule them all

EscapedTheInsanity

Ah a new and innovative idea to get coppers what they need.....

.....not.

A fair few moons ago when I worked at a police force I had the pleasure of working under the Sprint II procurement rules.

You weren't allowed to say exactly what you wanted, you had to give a high level description of a functionality you wanted and then SCC would go and find a solution for you and implement it.

It never worked that way.

My observation was that SCC would go direct to a vendor of their preference (whoever was paying most for beer tokens and corporate hospitality) and then tell you that you needed to buy their solution for amounts that would make your member recede back into your body.

When my account manager got fed up of touting things that we never went for came to me wondering why we never put anything through him I gave him a radical solution. Let me go off and talk to vendors and I'll do the dog work putting together POC's and technical evaluations and they can come to you pricing. Much better. I got what we wanted/needed at the price we were willing to pay (as I was negotiating the budget) and the vendors know what price point we can do a deal on and the SCC guy got his commission. Everyone walks away happy.

Why not empower the teams to have ownership of the solution......

'Unjustifiably excessive': Not even London cops can follow law with their rubbish gang database

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: The Ms-Access Gangs Violence Matrix

Methinks you are giving Commissioners more credit than is due - usually its some "hobby IT" copper who thinks they are the Met's answer to Jeff Bezos who makes a shitty app when they are off duty and brings it in on a USB stick, taking it home to work on. Without encryption of course.

At some point it gets the attention of some inspector who pushes DoI to adopt it formally in order to get it into wider use. At that point some smart arse will point out that the whole thing is crap and needs work. Hobby Bobby gets seconded to DoI and servers get built.

Surface: Tested to withstand the NFL. Microsoft firmware updates? Not so much

EscapedTheInsanity

Playbooks.....

Now there's a ghost from the past - Vodaphone had a ton of them ready to throw (excuse the pun) at one of my previous employers, who in a rare moment of reasoned consideration told them to keep them.

Makes my blood turn cold even thinking about them and what would have happened {shudder}....

Capita seeks new networking chief: Up for it?

EscapedTheInsanity

Re: Outgoing head congratulated for role in division's transformation

Because they gobble up other companies without aligning them.

In short they foster the bad habits within each company and actively encourage them to play "them vs us" games between the factions so Capita can claim the problems are with a sub-department after the ink drys.

Capita onshores IBM transformer man as chief growth officer

EscapedTheInsanity

Fewer things better.....

From the inside (and bear in mind I only recently freed myself from their clutches)....

.....that could be taken to mean doing less projects at a higher quality or (more aligned with my experience of them) do the same stuff but reduce the quality.

They routinely overcharge for everything (not a surprise) and then hide behind contracts (or gaps in them) to justify gouging the end client.

Everything is a project with huge man effort and once you've signed the PO you can expect all the excuses that can be trotted out to explain why they have no available resource.