Posts by MGJ 215 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
So, the portal now doesnt even show my length of service and there were rumours before christmas that existing pensioners might not be paid in December. As a suggestion, when anything doesnt work and someone loses out, the compensation should come from the DG in the Cabinet Office that signed this contract off. From his salary, and later his pension. Might focus the mind somewhat.
Nonsense. I was responsible for software choice/evaluation in a government department in the 90's and we were choosing between Notes, Exchange and ICL TeamWare, after the Novell suite was sifted out early on. Ministers were absolutely not involved in any of that decision making.
No, they dont. Because most people in government wfh at least part of the week.
Focussing on the cost of something without examining what you get for that (the value/benefits) is a very odd approach, to anything, not just software licenses. If you disagree I have a set of rusty old Lada's to sell you
What genocide? Compare casualty rates in the civilian population in the 1944 Normandy campaign with those in Gaza, despite the use of human shields and Hamas fighters closely embedded with the civilian population. If it is genocide, they really arent very good at it. Hyperbole more like.
Personal lockers, bloody luxury. Post covid attempts to coax us back in to the office have involved 'day lockers' and the removal of personal desks and storage, and they wonder why the offices remain stubbornly empty. Its almost like they are trying to have an excuse to get rid of our large listed buildings that cant ever be made energy efficient and would be much better as hotels or yet more student accomodation.
UK parliament has elections every five years under the Fixed Term Parliament Act; last year was pretty unusual. Point remains; you dont create something incredibly expensive and unsecure, with a whole new host of problems to sort an issue of rare surge demand. Different systems for different types of elections just makes that worse.
The electoral system used for British general elections is not FPTP, it is plurality. The candidate in the constituency with the most votes wins. No post to be first past. That is the French system, where the candidate with 50%+1 of votes cast is elected, with a second round, normally between the top two candidates, where no one got past the post in the first round. The system used in Scotland, with a mix of constituencies and regional seats balances the need to have a local MSP with broad proportionality. It was designed to prevent/make very unlikely any government being from a single party but has delivered a majority once (and on current polling will do so again next year).
Electronic voting is a solution to a problem that doesnt really exist. Building a complicated system used once in four or five years isnt worth it. These issues were covered very well in The Stainless Steel Rat for President.
Better than the NT4 first cluster, along with Exchange 5.5. Wolfpack it was called. We called it Wolf Pair given the limits to it. All the service passwords on our Compaq cluster were clusterfuck though. Rebuilding at 3 in the morning a configuration designed by compaq and MS that had shared fibre storage that the German support team admitted was never likely to work as shared fibre storage wasnt supported, and how had we ever got it working in the first place?
Indeed. On my Surface Book 2 there is just no way of switching between tablet and desktop (ie removing the screen and turning it around) without shutting down. Too many processes need killed off. And logging on in tablet mode is tricky since it is difficult to get the on screen keyboard up. Great when you are logged in though, and still the best laptop I've ever had. Sound, graphics, keyboard, trackpad. USB ports on the wrong side though.
One person doing it; not a problem.
Thousands, as seen last weekend, big problem. Not just opportunity to spread virus, but to tie up emergency services dealing with everything from sprains to major road accidents. There will be plenty of time to get out in the country later.
Rubbish. To implement a full lockdown like that you'd have to suspend democracy. Listen to the experts; they didn't ask people to isolate in January because a) it was pointless, as no one at that point had the virus to pass on and b) because in the middle of the crisis folk will go stir crazy and ignore the rules so any self-isolation has to be for the minimum time possible; if you add two months on at the start it means its less likely that a three month quarantine period will work. Not everyone has a nice house and resources to hole up in.
Are these mortality figures normalised for the amount of pollution in China, or indeed for the higher levels of tobacco smoking? Italy has the oldest population in Europe, so if the disease kills the old, then it will affect Italy the most. But why is Japan fine (relatively) so far, given its population is even older?
I've only ever had good experience with Bose kit; maybe I'm just lucky. Try getting a Denon Receiver (ie 23-07 amplifier) to work with Dolby, HDMI and a multi speaker system for Blu-Ray, X-Box etc. It knows it has a centre speaker and left/right and sub connected but will not accept that it can use the same outputs for a different HDMI input, and the manual is completely incomprehensible.
Trump tax law changes have effectively made new enormous SUVs free to those with significant tax bills, since they can be classified as agricultural machinery and 100% written off as a tax break. My brother got a plug-in Volvo XC90 on this basis and his neighbours are picking up similar vehicles.
Have you been in some of the court buildings involved? Listed buildings, with huge thick walls, that are constantly in use. But try closing one and moving to a new purpose built building, and all you'll hear are complaints.
Interesting to hear that HMCTS are still having issues with digital working. I wrote them a Scoping Study 18 years ago on case management but EDS stomped on it.
You would think that Windows updates would work well and be tested properly on their own hardware, but Surface Book 2 owners got this update very late and then it managed to add yet another service that needs shutting down before the screen can be undocked or moved. Given the time it takes, it is easier to switch off, change screen orientation and then restart than find all the various services that need killed before the red button turns green. Of course then it doesn't detect that it is folded back on itself and you cannot use the keyboard and have to try and re-enable the on-screen keyboard, which doesn't work until you select accessibility at which point it tells you audibly that you've chosen to use that. Does anyone at MS actually use their own equipment?
Late 90's, about to do our disaster recovery testing one weekend. Scenario involved a power cut to the server room, which I simulated by switching off the power to the room going into the UPS, to check that it did indeed initiate safe shutdown of all the Sun, Fujitsu and HP kit in the room. It was only at that point that it became clear that the electricians had run the electrical supply in parallel to the UPS rather than in series... It all went very quiet. Except for the UPS.
For the real view of the British civil service/Government of Chinese telecoms companies, perhaps do an FOI for instructions on what to do with IT equipment that has been used in China outside of the secure room in the Embassy. It's always hacked into in minutes and cannot be used again for connection to a government network. Private Offices used to have piles of Blackberry's and laptops that had been in China for staff to take away with them at their own risk. The vast majority of hacking threats to the UK (used to) come from those at least pretending to be the Chinese military.
You've clearly never eaten food in the US; tasteless tomatoes etc. Its no wonder so much salt and sugar gets added to it. Relatives who live there dont eat whole swathes of produce because of how it (doesnt) taste and how safe it is to eat. The US is obsessed with removing 'red tape' so preventative legislation/supervision is repealed but consumers are not stupid once they have the facts. That's why Boeings are falling out of the sky, and Airbus are selling to United Airlines.
That is actually what happens on admission to prison (in Scotland at least). Prisoners have a whole body scan, and anything found is either confiscated or returned to the inmate as appropriate. To facilitate that, each prison has a safe to hold confiscated items (known as the shitty safe for obvious reasons). They are kept in a holding area with special toilets until they hand it over, one way or another.
If you doubt the ability to hide contrabrand about the person, a female prisoner was put in a temporary area to be searched, and afterwards had her clothing removed to be checked, leaving her naked. The room was empty. Five minutes later, officers found her drinking a can of coke and smoking a cigarette.
All our meeting rooms and shared spaces have Kensington USB hubs attached to them, so any laptop can just connect using USB, so no problems for even our Surface Pros. Unfortunately, they do not have the same Displaylink drivers/settings as those on our desks to drive our multiple screens, so Windows gets confused and refuses to recognise the previously working desktop setup on return. Cue hours of fiddling to get screen 3 to come back to life again. Desks have at least four 13A sockets plus two 2A USB A.
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