Posts by R Soul 348 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2020
Branson told the Financial Times: "We don't have the deepest pockets"
What's this "we" shit? Why can't Beardie simply tell the truth, ie him and his companies aren't putting any more money in?
Beardie is always using the pronoun we to refer to himself to give the impression it was someone else (and not) him who has quit or failed. "We've taken the stellar success of Vigin Music/Cola/Brides/Trains/Media/etc as far as we can, so now we're bailing out".
The business plan was simple and followed the same old and predictable Beardie routine. Do a few PR stunts. Get the all too gullible media to hype the latest scam. Sell out to some gullible mug(s) before the shit hits the fan. Make off with all the loot to his tax haven in the Caribbean. Rinse and repeat ad finitum.
Have a word with that nice Mr. Farage. He promised us the UK would be a land of milk and honey when it left the EU and told its pesky bureaucrats to fuck off. I'm sure he'll be delighted to help everyone break free of M$'s shackles. And bring back the days when Britannia^Wthe Amstrad e-mailer ruled the world.
He's a delightfully good chap: an old Etonian who owns half of Herfordshire*.
Us proles simply must learn our place and not ask unseemly questions of our lords and masters.
My guess is Viscount Whatever is keeping quiet about his F in O-level woodwork because the rest of the government would be horrified to find out they had such an intellectual in their midst.
* Or some other county "up north".
"Lights come on when you discover that Caudwell was a used car salesman before he was in the mobile phone business."
Which means the next steps in his career are likely to be estate agent and then Tory MP.
IMO there's little difference between the used car trade and the mobile phone business. They're both full of sleazy salesdroids who'd say or do anything to shift over priced, dodgy and knackered tat. All sold with a worthless extended warranty of course.
The operators should be in control
No they fucking shouldn't. Do you really think the likes of BT, TalkTalk and Beardienet should be in control? WTF?
they're the ones delivering the service.
Depends on the definition of "service". ISPs mostly deliver packets. Their service is therefore providing bandwidth and connectivity. Or should be. When these work, people don't notice or care about that service. Instead, they care about the services from content providers. Who are not ISPs.
CDNs install cache nodes *inside* eyeball networks and generally pay for their traffic to reach those nodes. From there, it's a "last mile" issue to get that content delivered to end users over the ISP's network. That essentially costs the ISP nothing - provided they have invested in a decent network. Which most don't. In the net neutrality debate, ISPs expect to get free upgrades to the infrastructure that's their core responsibility.
Not quite. Any Ryanair "flight" would be far noisier. And AFAIK nobody ever sold scratchcards or dodgy sandwiches on Concorde. I'm fairly sure Concorde didn't operate from the shit-hole sheds Ryanair uses for its glorified buses either.
the next IETF meeting is in Prague. The following one is in Brisbane.
So what? It's not necessary to attend them. The IETF makes decisions about protocol standards on its mailing lists, not at its meetings.
Taking part in IETF meetings can be done on-line and about 35% of the participants do that. In fact almost all interim WG meetings are done on-line.
Oh and one of the most significant pieces of work done recently by the IETF is DoH: DNS over HTTPS. A new WG was created and published RFC8484 in under a year. Other stuff can and does take longer. Which is understandable. A conservative approach is needed when it comes to making changes to core protocols and/or the Internet architecture: backwards compatibility, impact of new stuff on the installed base, security/privacy issues.
Four things.
Sunak will be out on his arse because he's a useless tosser.
There are lots of far more important reasons for voting out the Tories than their Horizon programme fuckups.
It typically takes decades of research to win a Nobel prize in the sciences - longer than Horizon and its predecessors have existed.
Counting Nobel prizes is a remarkably stupid metric for assessing the impact of research.
1) The uptime of Beardienet
2) An extended warranty from Dixons
3) The Liz Truss administration
4) A money back guarantee from Ryanair
5) Man Utd's hope of winning the Premier League
6) The career of anyone winning X Factor/Britain's Got Talent/Bake Off/etc
7) The interval between two Donald Trump lies
8) A free pint in a Glasgow pub
9) A Britney Spears marriage
10) Any Microsoft patch install
Similarly, what does "only were technically feasible" actually mean? Is breaking into the end-to-end encryption chain not "technically feasible"?
It means precisely what it says. Snooping will begin once it becomes technically feasible to break properly implemented end-to-end crypto: ie never. Well, OK - not until quantum computers eventually form Skynet to enslave humanity and take over the world. However for the "won't someone think of the children?" dimwits "only where technically feasible" suggests snooping won't be far away because the boffins are just about to make it happen.
The soundbite a nicely crafted bit of Whitehall ambiguity. We'll snoop once it becomes possible has the obvious meaning for the clueful who know this isn't going to be happen without earth-shattering breakthroughs in crypto and/or computing. Which are unlikely. For the morons, it means snooping will happen around the time the next version of an iPhone comes out. Which the clueful realise is not going break E2E crypto. And the clueless don't. Because they lack clue.
Result: everybody's happy because both sides think they've won. But only one of them has actually won.
Several reasons.
1) There's no such thing as a government IT system that works well - and no hope of ever having one.
2) All the organisations (and the rest) have different requirements and priorities, sometimes mutually exclusive - both internally and with each other.
3) Such a database would be prone to abuse. Why should some PFY at the council (say) get to see or change your passport data?
4) A database like that would be a remarkably bad SPoF.
5) The database would be an Orwellian nightmare far beyond anything in Blunkett, Bliar and New Liebour's wettest wet dreams.
6) A future government will surely extend and misuse that database: "your car doesn't have an MOT:: no heart transplant for you", "let's sell off the data to that nice Mr Musk/Thiel/Bezos/Beardie/Zuckerberg", "would you like to try our new ad platform google?", etc?
7) The consequences for the individual of a false positive/negative would be devastating.
8) Crapita would get the contract to run it all.
There are bound to be more. These are just the ones that popped up after thinking about it for a second or two.
"He also said no data had been stolen."
Pullinger is trying to mislead and dissemble. Taking unauthorised copies of the EC's data doesn't mean the data were stolen.
He also needs to have a word with his CEO who was quoted in the URL below.
Chief executive officer Shaun McNally said the commission ... could not "conclusively" identify which files may have been accessed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66441010
Pullinger's career until recently has been in statistics. His wikipedia entry says he was at Harvard Business School, which probably means he has an MBA. I'll bet - see what I did there? - those qualifications mean he can't be expected to know anything about IT or information security. I'll bet he won't resign either. And nobody on the Electoral Commission gets the sack for this data breach.
Maybe he's another one of Michael "we've had enough of experts" Gove's appointments to the top jobs in the public sector.
I'm reminded of an epic fail in the early 80s. An insurance company (Scottish Amicable?) wanted to install a shiny new mainfame on the 6th/7th floor of its office in Glasgow city centre. It was far too big and heavy for the building's lifts. So the plan was to remove one of the big plate glass windows on that floor, close off the street and get a huge telescopic crane to lift the mainframe and ease it through the removed window. Things didn't go to plan. When the mainframe reached the window ~20m above street level, something slipped or broke and a few million quid's worth of IBM iron ended up as a pile of scrap metal on the pavement.
Nobody was hurt - apart from the reputation of a bunch of IT staff, PMs, account managers, etc.
I don't know which company's insurers paid for this or if anyone got sacked.
Calling these Piles of Shit (tm) "productivity" tools is more than stretching the truth. I've never found they've improved the productivity of anyone who's had the misfortune to use them, the very opposite in fact.
You ask why M$ isn't allowed to iterate and modernise their crapware. The answer to that is M$ are obnoxious monopolistic bastards who will stop at nothing to lock world+dog into their Evil Empire and crush anything that might resemble a threat to that.
Exactly. He's been an utter failure: fibre targets unmet, profits and share price down, workforce demoralised and shafted, etc. Yet somehow that justified a 30% raise on his 7 figure salary. Could anyone be worth that sort of pay package for fucking up so badly?
Just piss off Jansen. Hope the door hits you on the arse on the way out.
Bollocks!
A commitment to adopt the Euro is not the same thing as actually adopting the Euro. It's not mandatory to adopt the Euro either. Stop lying.
Quite a few EU member states don't use the Euro: Poland and the Czech Republic for example. They didn't get an opt-out either - as Sweden, Denmark and the UK did. Some of those countries joined the EU after the Eurozone had been created and the commitment to adopt the Euro was in place.
Nope. A commitment to sign up to the Euro is a requirement for wannabe EU member states. It's only a commitment.
Joining the Eurozone is another matter entirely. A nation has to be in the ERM for at least two years before it's eligible to adopt the Euro. This is to ensure the prospective member has a stable economy that has been aligned with the Eurozone for a while on things like inflation, national debt and defiict, exchange rates and so on. Entry to the ERM is voluntary. The EU can't make a country do that. And after the shit-show with Greece - who should never have been in the ERM or Eurozone - EU members that have a basket case economy will not be welcome in the ERM even if they want to join it.
And FWIW, the Eurozone and its macroeconomic policies are doing rather better than those coming out of Downing Street. Inasmuchas the UK has had any sense of a coherent economic policy in the last 20-25 years. That's because they're managed by experts rather than fuckwit politicians.
"Such "punishments" including not getting the full benefits of being a member of the club it had chosen to leave."
It;s all the fault of those evil EU officials who expected the UK to uphold the agrreements it willingly and voluntarily signed - like being out of the Horizon programme and ESA to pick just two.
"What would be lovely is if we could have a slimmed down version where they just focus on trade,"
That's the bit that a competent government would have negotiated in between the referendum result and invoking article 49. However we had the double whammy of Theresa May followed by the Johnson clown parade.
1. This is an agreement about weaponry. It isn't a trade deal. These are when nation states reduce or eliminate tariffs between them, simplify customs arrangements, agree common standards for goods and services, etc. Which is a world away from "cooperation on advanced cyber mechanisms" and a long list of vague or meaningless buzzwords.
2. Snatching a sub contract from the French is all very well. However it'll have a minimal impact on our economy or the balance of payments. We're not going to reboot our economy or fix our horrific and structural balance of payments deficit by flogging a handful of subs to the Aussies.
3. Your references to "the potential to reduce the cost of our Astute replacement" is a desperate, flailing attempt to clutch at straws. Every MoD procurement turns out to be vastly over budget and years/decades late. The Astute replacement - now there's an oxymoron! - will be no different. BTW I'm a middle aged, unfit fat bastard who has the potential to win Olympic gold in the 100 metres. That doesn't mean it's going to happen.
You're just about wrong on everything here.
The cost of living has almost nothing to do with the size of the population or its growth rate. The rises in interest rates (and therefore mortgages) is a direct consequence of government policy. The madness of Trussonomics (that mercifully short-lived government's policy) made the cost of living crisis worse. We're still dealing with the legacy of that macroeconomic lunacy. Energy prices have rocketed, partly because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but also because government policy pegs the price of electricity to wholesale gas price on international markets. Housing costs are going through the roof (excuse the pun) because it's government policy to build fewer houses than meets demand. Food prices have gone up because of increased energy costs, worse exchange rates, higher transport/import duties as well as Brexit. These factors are largely a result of government policy failures too.
Inflation is not the same as the cost of living. Inflation is caused by having too much money in the economy chasing after too few goods or services. In the UK, that was turbo-charged by the government printing and borrowing staggering amounts of money during the pandemic. And Trusstime. Inflation's got fuck all to do with "indexing to the price of energy". Whatever that means.
Reducing the cost of living has nothing to do with inflation either. The cost of living doesn't necessarily go down when inflation is under control. If you don't have enough money to pay your bills (food. energy, housing, etc) it simply doesn't matter what the inflation rate is. The cost of living is simply too high.
No matter. Just blame all of this shit-show on immigrants. It's much easier than facing up to reality. Or accepting the consequences of self-inflicted wounds of 20+ years of stunningly incompetent government and economic mismanagement.
"We were promised easier/more visa for Indians"...
The Brexiteers knowingly promised all sorts of things that were utter bollocks. Too many gullible/stupid people believed those lies.
As for your complaint about visas for Indians, get in the queue. I'm still waiting for the extra billions the Brexiteers promised for the NHS. IIRC that one was even on the side of a bus. Then there was "the easiest trade deal in history" that hasn't happened yet. Or the promises of pain-free travel between the UK and EU/EEA. Or...
Last year's House of Commons* report on this subject shows this dire lobbying is just pointless bullshit.
Here are just a few of the report's standout quotes:
1. The UK accounts for only 0.5% of sales of semiconductors across the world.
2. No fabs in the UK can produce the most advanced silicon semiconductors, with a node of below 28 nm; and there is little immediate prospect of such facilities being constructed in the UK, given the very high costs involved.
3. Setting up a high end fab plant would "not get much change out of $20B".
So who are these British chip company execs and where are their factories (assuming they actually have any)? And what do these execs do all day?
* https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmbeis/291/report.html
Our government is well known for spunking away vast sums on hugely overpriced and defective products from dodgy suppliers: PPE, aircraft carriers with no aircraft, Rwandan holiday homes, Bojo's lawyers, ferry companies with no ships, etc. This M$ deal is just another in that long list.
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