Posts by nxnwest

State of Maine orders review of $54.6m Workday project as it alleges delivery failure and threatens cancellation

Legacy Nightmare People

I have always found when creating a new system, several manglement types insist every last piece of data from the legacy system migrate into the new one without regard to the fact the legacy data does not conform to the new business rules and has glaring omissions. No one,I repeat NO ONE wants to be held responsible for or perform the task of curating the legacy data. Indeed, the original creators of the legacy data are long since bead, retired, left or pining for the fjords. What there original intent was can never be known. I've watched several projects collapse because of this. "It's there. It must be considered gospel."

No thanks.

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...

'On the "fly"'..how flattening.

Netflix reveals massive migration to new mix of microservices, asynchronous workflows and serverless functions

Additional Features Services and Innovations

The usual excuses for higher fees.

Paying more for 4K vs HD? Shit is still brown in HD. Shit that is is upscaled is still shit, though one might argue it has smoother motion.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Target Rich Environment

A "screw driver" drives screws. A "dummy bomb" bombs dummies.

Such a bomb would then be a "smart bomb" and lots of forums a target rich environment.

"If she weighs as much as a duck, she's made of wood."

"And therefore?"

Imperva pretty adamant that security analytics aggregator product Sonar is not 'one dashboard to rule them all'

SOAR, SIEM and..

Secure Homogeneous Information Transformation...

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

I WFH - You work in office

WFH was great when I the only one doing so. We've replaced the crowded corridors of co-workers with crowded neighborhoods of aimless people we wish would go to work. I miss being able to take a walk without 30 needless 'Stay Safe' exchanges. Starting to rethink retirement due to the now complete lack of alone time outside.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Infinite Source

Texas has an infinite source of hot air. AKA - Ted Cruz.

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

The Real Point of Football

Is to make the public pay for your stadium through taxes and still collect concession fees at non-football events. The stadium where the Super Bowl took place, Raymond James, actually did this. I mean WHY should admission prices actually pay for the cost of the venue? It's a race to the bottom

One thing I've never ever bought is merch. I'll take your t-shirt if you pay me to wear it. Advertising costs money.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Critical Thinking No Longer Taught

Critical Thinking only counts when everyone is taught to do so. We have Charter Schools and Home Schooling to ensure Critical Thinking is never taught. Critical thinking relies on the parents starting the process. When parents do not want to do so, it is not going to happen.

Same old complexity beneath Windows 10 Cloud Config means it's unlikely to compete with the likes of Chrome OS

Oxymorons

"easy" and "intuitive". Two of my favorite one-word oxymorons.

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

No worry

Just ask the CIA, the FBI or Homeland Security in the US. They still have it all and then some. Unless they were T***p supporters in which case you are SOL. /s

VMware completes first year of Tanzu with Advanced Edition GA, announces magic tool for app modernization

BS Generator

"automate generic solutions"

We have our winner for the corporate bullshit generator result of the day.

Intel wheels out new face authentication product that works a lot like Apple's FaceID

Failure

The bias inherent in facial recognition software regard those of us with darker skin ensures that more will be arrested (too many matches) and fewer allowed to vote (also too many matches). So perfect conservative program. Ban it everywhere.

SolarWinds releases known attack timeline, new data suggests hackers may have done a dummy run last year

Dummy Run

All dummy runs here in the US have a multitude of potential participants.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

Re: Hmm

" but I do remember a huge hoo-hah "

A picture of that huge hoo-hah will definitely cause a brouhaha

Maybe a broouhooha?

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

I'm paying the postage

With snail mail, the advertiser has to pay the postage. With the internet, the users have to pay the postage. The advertiser is not paying for the bandwidth sucked down and billed to your mobile provider, limited by your monthly datacap for your regular ISP or the computing time and electric bill for spinning your CPU. So all this 'targeting' is fully at my expense therefore I have all right to discontinue and block the advertising. Especially if all my business (including government, social services) must now be 'e'...

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

The indigenous Americans Thank You

For sending the Puritans to this side of the pond.

NOT...

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

Embedded

There should be a special circle in hell for those who embed acronyms in acronyms. ARM almost forms an oxymoron when spelled out ,"Advanced Reduced"...

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

I hear Bluto in 'Animal House' after smashing the guitar...

You like Jira that much? Atlassian goes full Service Management with platform, promises Service Desk is fine

Second PC Revolution

The PC revolution started as a way to get away from the hegemony of the mainframe/terminal. To give people freedom to use their technology as they saw fit. I believe there should be a second revolution away from the cloud and service model because it is the same thing only (groan) 'rebranded'. I do shudder when I here about 'personal brand'.

Nice for some: ServiceNow margins swell 83% as post-COVID market wolfs down subscriptions

Pegs Don't Fit

ServiceNow involves forcing the square pegs of our organization into the round holes the they provide. Customization involves detailed customer written instructions such as identifying routing in the first sentence of 'request' ticket and where to route said ticket, because the one size fits all business organization is not 'quite' the way ours is organized. An amazing feat when you can force your customers to adapt to your product rather than offering a product that can be tailored. And get them to pay via subscription too! Heck you don't even have to provide instructions, user guide or help desk, because it IS the held desk..

IBM: Our AI correctly predicts onset of Alzheimer’s 71% of the time, better than standard clinical tests

Re: Testing, testing...

American or European?

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

Internet Explorer? Chrome? Same sh*t different decade. It's not just search that is the problem.

Internet explorer became ubiquitous and many organizations layed out the capital for the first time and seeing the expense, could never get the beancounters to perform an upgrade to their tech when it became outdated.

I see the exact same thing as chrome has become dominant, and many things only work with chrome, AND you have to keep up. I watched one dead man walking project collapse as it was nearing completion as the consultant had not been paid to change versions of angular. Then google dropped it.

So we did not learn the lesson it appears.

I'm waiting for the day when I go into the big box home center and get forced to subscribe to a hammer.

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Underenthusiastic

I consider myself an under-enthusiastic manager with more than enough IT skills to call bullsh*t on a lot of overly optimistic and over enthusiastic Devops/DB and IT people who never deliver.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

I'm paying the postage

As long as I am paying the transport cost in full and the advertiser is paying nothing, I must be allowed to block them. Especially with the inevitable datacaps that the ISP are lobbying so hard for. Even with conventional postage, there is first class and bulk rate. Samsung flung ads (and other web ads) put this in reverse as the bits are seen as the same and the consumers have to pay far more for the bits they don't want (forced video) than the bits they do (thinks text and static pictures) by volume.

I should actually say I should be able to opt in if I want the ads. I should NOT have to block them at all if I'm paying for their transport.

I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

Savings Simply Not Possible

Have we in the States thanked you for National Greed yet? Thanks to their de-coupling of rates it is simply impossible to save any money when electricity or gas prices decrease because they immediately spike the delivery charges to more than compensate. So an app monitoring our real-time energy usage is somewhat useless as the cost will remain constant. Our bills never decrease. Not to mention the utilities are guaranteed an ever increasing percentage of profit. It's similar to excluding gas (petrol) prices from inflation indexes. Inconvenient? Offload it!

Too many staff have privileged work accounts for no good reason, reckon IT bods

"I'm concerned"

With so much "concern" for computer viruses, securtiy and the wrong people seeing data, natural visruses take a back seat.

Put another way, when you prioritize computer visrus, biological visrus will kill you.

Empire Building and the takeover of MetaData

Who, when why records are altered are not far more important that the actual data the records contain. Metadata rules.

It's also about creating permanent billable professionally credentialed positions at this point. We're finding one or two administrative assistants with data entry instructions thicker than a phone book rather than applications tailored to help them complete their jobs because the developers and business analysts are all about security, using the latest developer tools and creating more and more roles that will constantly need ever increasing granularity. Then the developing bods create uet another 'administrative' role management 'tool' and force it back on the customer (user) because IT bods don't do data entry. I've so many conflicting 'role management tools that do not talk to one another, IT is aware of the issue so the policy becomes 'it's the customers responsibility'. All to prevent one or two people from seeing something they "should not" in an organization. I just turned down a request to create a read only role in one of our projects when I realized the development and implementation cost exceeded the project itself by a factor or around 2. IT was all in for all that sweet billing time. Four IT pros watching 1 to 2 end users doing actual work at the end.

Oh, and each apps role management tool is the most important one on the planet and should be intuitively obvious to everyone. I've at least 16 to maintain at the moment. Good luck when a password expires. The end user cannot differentiate between their portal password going belly up and calls the application support to reset passwords. We spend more time solving portal security issues and training than how to use our app on that portal!

IT ends up blaming the admin assistant with not reading the instructions or following procedures (not written by IT either, also offloaded) so their apps and portals are blameless.

Google Chrome calculates your autoplay settings so you don't have to - others disagree

You pay the postage

"sometimes users want content to autoplay... " is actually a euphemism for "WE want to force advertisement filled content to autoplay"

No one ever wants ads to autoplay. At least with junk-snail-mail, the advertiser has to bear the cost of delivery (postage). With autoplayed content, the user is forced to pay the delivery cost of the unwanted ads, especially on mobile. And that, dear audience, is why I do not support any broad band datacaps. At least there, cost does not factor in. Yet.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

A century of backup

I have glass negatives and prints taken by my great-grandfather from over a century ago. No complicated technological solution needed to destroy them though. A fire or flood perhaps, but no offsite corporation or developers would be involved in their casual destruction. I don't even need a floppy drive or tape reader and the tech to reuse them is easily repeatable. I don't have to pay monthly rent to keep them.

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

TikTay, TikTeams

TikTay or TikTeams or maybe TikTayTeams. Some Rebranding Required...

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

"decorative figurine." Yep. Had an manager who would plop down laptop, ipad, work assigned iphone and personal iphone at every meeting. I'm the tech guru and I insist on attending all in person meetings sans any device.

Re: Cola and orange juice

Had a touch typist with beer spilled in them at lunch return to keyboard and typed the entire afternoon with their fingers shifted off the marks by just one key. Never looked at screen once as they were typing paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Balk Mail

Junk snail mail had its advantages I used to take the unsolicited credit card application from one company and stuff it in the postage paid envelope of another credit card company. I thought they would appreciate the credit offer if I did not and they were paying for it to get mailed.

Also while waiting in airports filling out the postcards that would fall out of the magazines with bogus addresses and stuffing them in the mailbox..

Ah the good old days of getting even.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Just Not Possible

Like when the cast of "American Pickers" came to do a local show with a "blooper" reel for the audience. How can you have "mistakes" on a "reality" show? Everything is real, right? A real "reality" show will only have single takes. Or it is not reality. Maybe we should call them alternate reality shows.

Western Digital shingled out in lawsuit for sneaking RAID-unfriendly tech into drives for RAID arrays

Forcing us to the Cloud 'Solution' and Subscription Hell?

Over a decade ago I lost nearly all my data to a WD Drive. My fault actually. That back up that was two weeks old, was not really. The 6 month old one was viable.

Then there's the disabling of SMBv1 by Microsoft. Ok, it's insecure, but the NAS manufacturers did not update there firmware, and Amazon et al still sell the old ones, and the Router manufacturers also do the same thing. Yes you can build one (NAS), but buying things off the shelf is no longer really an option. My rescue of the WD data though old was from DVDs I had burned and I have the sense to keep a usb DVD writer around for the truly important stuff with multiple copies made.

Best I can figure is all manufacturers have lost interest and are persuing the sweet subscription stream that is the 'cloud' and making home kit more and more cost prohibitive and offering kit that is no longer reliable.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: Simple Response.

He would topple over from the lift shoes. He's already 'leaning in'. Might resemble a watermelon at terminal velocity meeting the ground.

Frontier: Yes, yes, we've filed for bankruptcy protection, but that's not stopping us giving key staff $38m in bonuses

Re: Verizon sold wire line knowing this outcome

FIOS

IBM cuts deep into workforce – even its Watson and AI teams – as it 'pivots' to cloud

Re: Wow, that's cold

Apparently Number 2. (Maybe Number 6).

AT&T slapped down for its '5GE' ads: You don’t have a proper 5G network, so stop saying so, says watchdog

Re: they'll be back in a few months

Since the days of 2G, I've gotten in the habit of thinking of any version as (n-1)G. That almost reflects true performance and that's being generous.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

The Best method

The best method I've found is "Post-It"... (sarcasm)...

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Ultraviolet

Putting the "U"ltraviolet in "sUppository".

"Ask your Doctor about..."

Icon cos it may burn..

Started from the bottom, now we're near: 16 years on, open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape draws close to v1.0

Re: 275 GTB vs Midget

I'm still running Micrografx Draw from the Win 95 days on Windows 10 64 bit. It still does everything I want and need. It is 32 bit, but the installer was 16 bit. Changed the installer and everything works. I do have Corel Draw loaded and it actually (still) imports the Micrografx format as they bought out Micrografx drawing apps decades ago. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

Re: Follow

Shock the Monkey!

(Sh*tgibbon in this case.)

Forget toilet roll, bandwidth is the new ration: Amazon, YouTube also degrade video in Europe to keep 'net running amid coronavirus crunch

Bandwidth like Bank Reserves?

Banks only have to hold a certain amount of cash on hand versus what's in deposits. Perhaps ISPs do the same. "100Mbps? We only have 10 on hand." They must count on only a percentage actually using it all at one time. My movies/music are stored locally and consumed on non-windows devices as SMB became a security risk and microsoft wants you to pay up 'Cos Cloud is better.' How's that work with this degradation? I will not be finding out. Not sure it's the people working from home causing the issues. It's the people 'not' working from home but still home. Overall a non-issue. Degraded video vs respirator. I'll take the video.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

Premium indeed

In our shop, management hogs all the VPN RDC licenses when OWA, and Teams would do. "Their impotent!" Meanwhile the line workers/admin assistants are denied them, sent home and futily use VMWare and not allowed to use RDC even from those sessions. Those are the ones that actually need to access the DBs, do the record maintenance/updates and keep the whole operation running. It was a battle to get them the dual displays first as they have the actual need for screen real estate. Exec's have only one schedule to maintain, their assistants? All of them.

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

End of Days

'Lower resolution Netflix! Dogs and cats living together!'

Hmmm. Sudden urge to watch 'Ghostbusters.' No pixels. It's not on Netflix. Definitely a reduction in video quality.

Microsoft Teams usage jumps to 32, no, 44 million as Windows-slinger platform slides onto home workers' PCs

Teams vs Collaboration

I've told management several times to effectively use Teams, their employees must actually collaborate on tasks. Teams won't magically make them collaborate, and being in Government, it is against their nature to do so.

Now, working on projects with ITS or anyone under say 35 (mental not physical age)? Different story. Anyone who says 'Sharepoint is great!! Make a Sharepoint site!!'? RUN. Groups/Channels? Those get as confusing as the file/directory trees created/named by engineers using naming conventions as a pseudo DBMS.

Judge snubs IT outsourcers' plea to Alt-F4 tougher H-1B visa rules: Bosses told to fill out the extra paperwork

This happens all the time in the US at the State level, through contractors. The vast majority of IT workers are H1Bs directly sourced to State IT projects due to the push to decrease the State workforce. Each H1B contracted is not another employee, thus it appears the workforce is being reduced. Good PR. Costs go up tremendously, the Contractor makes a ton and every two years or less we see a complete turnover of project teams and have to start over. It takes over two years to master our existing systems and learn what is expected, and IT is contracted o replace it with a more modern one. The contractors never learn the existing one and completely switch out just before utter failure. I've watched the cycle several times.