MP's cojones

A good move by the Oz government. All we need now is for some of the UK MPs to also develop some cojones and to stand up to Adobe et al for the British public.

Google Docs

I've found Google Docs does just fine for me. As a personal user the cost is zero including a reasonable amount of on-line storage. I just don't need the MS Office Bloatware with its hundreds of unwanted bells and whistles.

digging deeper

Skype was a stella purchase by one of the cast members.

I'm just reading http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/ it is a bit long, but quite an expose of the Dark Princes on the HP Board. Does the term necrophilia apply to this situation?

They've got previous...

EDS, Palm, Compaq, DEC, Tandem, Skype

Undertaker Project Manager

An amusing typo on LinkedIn job advert from Sagepay.

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=4158847

They're looking for a person who knows about: "Undertaker Post Implementation reviews and ensure each lesson learned has an action and action owner" - Is this a case of failure not tolerated?

How would the vulture react

... if the Government launched a major technology project without seeking any expert advice?

When you are in a hole stop digging

But Apple's PR team seem to have placed an order for a large tunnel boring machine to ensure they go really deep.

Elvens Afety

While I realise the young lady needs to protect her modesty, allowing a Burmese Python to totally encircle her neck is a bit risqué. Fortunately though there is a coffin conveniently placed in the room.

Refuse to apologise...

..and get fired! Surely with the maps fiasco Apple would know it is better to apologise properly and let the issue die down. With their demonstrated contempt of the British courts they have guaranteed their reputation will be further damaged. It is about time Tim Cook earned his mega bucks by SMACKING a few heads in his management team to get their attention.

Expensive

The Adobe Acrobat XI is still price 25% higher (allowing for VAT and exchange rates) in the UK over the equivalent USA price, even for download software. I wonder who are the real pirates here! Not that it affects me, I've switched to Nitro PDF which is a third of the price for full functionality.

Same old, same old...

Ho hum - the now classic adage comes to mind.

"Never buy an even numbered version of the Windows operating system"

The VP speaks pure marketing.

New Minister

A new Minister in a plush office bounced into making a dumb decision by "Sir Humphrey" on her first day at the big "school".

Just wait for the fuss when these poorly designed and ugly boxes start littering planning conservation areas. In our locality BT installed telegraph poles across the local recreation ground where the kids play football in order to supply one building. They put up notices on the poles describing the "appeals process" as an afterthought (essentially no hope of appeal).

It's not what you know but who...

Of course people really in the know about professional networks don't use LinkedIn. They use the other genuinely influential network ...

I was on the phone...

"I was on the phone chatting to a friend about the war in the South China Seas. He was worried in case the Royal Navy became involved when suddenly the UK's BT 21CN telephone and broadband total failure suddenly interrupted the call..."

An impossible scenario with all the PLA backed HUAWEI equipment at the heart of our telecoms infrastructure?

Arrgh!! No! don't do that to me.

"...Perhaps you could use some different-coloured pens...." That phrase sent a cold shiver down my spine. I've heard the exact same phrase used by the Consultant Project Manager on a major project for a large City money broking firm. The project was a horrendous failure. The charm of BOFH is a bit like Dilbert, it is so close to real life! Unfortunately in real life we're not allowed to use Semtex as a motivational tool.

Not just USA spooks

Or even the Russian Intelligence getting access to Skype http://oaksys.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/russia-to-get-access-to-skype.html

Never buy an even numbered version of Windows...

I've always found it helpful to bypass even numbered releases of Microsoft operating systems. Version 8 is just the same, they produced a good release with Windows 7 then kind of lost their way. History repeats itself.

Time for flash mob?

60 cyborg look-alikes descend and order poule-balls avec frites in the branch of a well known fast food chain in Paris.

Buy power meters?

I can visualize the bean counter or spreadsheet manager.: "Install power monitoring equipment and software to keep track of the energy budget? That sounds expensive... why on earth would we need that? Surely what we have now works just fine."

National Service

All these young scallywags need is a six month spell as conscripts to the Army. A spell of cold showers at 6a.m. and parade square bashing under a Drill Sergeant Major will soon buck up their ideas. IT not a good career? Harrumph, they just want life on easy street.

Somewhere in RBS there is a list of names of the people who decided to offshore the daily batch control work to the cheapest operations staff. These people didn't ensure these cheap offshore operators were properly trained and had proper controls in place.

These people should be fired including the senior managers at the top of the chain who insisted on unsafe cost cutting.

The cost to the bank in terms of reputation loss and recovery will be enormous, far exceeding any savings made by going cheap. Has RBS properly evaluated the real cost impact of laying waste to its technology human capital in the UK?

Has its managers changed the support teams from people who care about their work to those who just regard it as a job to earn low wages while working awful hours? That might be okay at the counter of a fast food store but not in a key business team.

How to comment bank program code

Hey Boss how can I help it?

Drop */

is almost the same as:

Drop *

Never thought I'd say this

Thank God for LINUX. Just imagine how bad Micro$oft's greed would be if there was no strong competitor. It is bad enough now.

Bypass the paper system

Just go out and buy some physical gold. It is much more difficult for the Banking establishment to tinker with the value by devaluation or quantitative easing (printing money).

Unintended consequences

I was head hunted to work as an IT Manager for competitors in the City of London financial markets. My resignation was on the whole a good natured thing, but they required me to work my 3 months notice period as "gardening leave" with the twist that had to be on their premises, but not my own office. The rational was that they didn't want me to have access to confidential information during my notice period and didn't want me to do any work for my new employers during gardening leave. The process entailed turning up on the Director's floor each morning, finding a seat somewhere and reading a book all day. It was very boring but a good natured process.

The unintended consequence was the secretaries of the Directors used to ask me to visit their desks to help sort out spreadsheet and word processing problems on documents they were preparing for their bosses. I learned a lot more confidential information about the company and its plans in those three months than I'd ever seen in the previous five years of employment. The City of London is a small place though, so I never breached that unintended confidence.

Supremely confident

Tsk, Tsk Anonymous Coward #1. I've always found the WD consumer disks to be extremely relia...

Al Shabaab Submarine

Maybe those pesky Somali's have obtained a wire cutter attached submarine?

Eggs in one basket?

The large manufacturers should not be blaming the floods for the disk shortage. Rather they should be blaming themselves for sourcing their just-in-time suppliers in one location on a flood plain to boot. Management by spreadsheet seems so appealing until things go wrong.

Oh no, I won't buy a ticket.

I'd best not buy a lottery ticket on the day when the failed craft plunges to the earth's surface. Knowing my luck I'll be holding the jackpot winning ticket in my hand just as a chunk of the satellite takes me out.

So they've fixed....

So they've fixed the reliability issues for the 365 service?

Management Speak

Whenever I read of a spokesman announcing that they are "working hard to..." I dump the statement in the same bin that I would use for "lessons will be learned..."

"Working hard" is a meaningless annoying statement. I'm sure the technicians dealing with the problem have decided to go home, put their feet up and deal with it on Monday - NOT.

Prior Art

Its already been invented so it is Prior Art. Wanna see my man cannon mister?

Lean Management soaked by floods

Ah good ole Justin Thyme strikes again. When Justin catches a cold we all suffer. Didn't Acer learn any lessons from Toyota and the last big Earthquake/Tsunami.

Justin Thyme is a cheap efficient employee until things go worng.

Backdoor

I wonder if the Kremlin/FSB will get its set of the Skype encryption master keys as part of the deal. Wasn't that something the local Microsoft russian bigwig mention a few months ago?

I was hanging on every word

He is sooo credible, just like the 16 y/o son of a failed property developer. Ed was fortunate that technology took pity on him.

Old Timer

I moved into the Financial Markets in an IT role in 1985. Even then it was obvious that arbitrage was not investment. The Tobin Tax would have little impact on genuine investment banking which generally involves investing large sums of money infrequently for long term results. The bulk of the high frequency trading and arbitrage is not investment merely speculation/gambling, i.e. only the traders/brokers gain at a cost to the greater public. Taxing on a per transaction basis will help to restore some order.

I moved my savings into physical gold to protect them when I realised that the "wizards" couldn't play with its value. When Gordon Brown decided selling the gold was a sensible idea I knew it was time to act.

Is deperimeterisation a word?

If you remove the outer security perimeters for a Data Centre you will have a nasty surprise when rioters decide to visit your site. No, as the normans discovered with their castles, you need multiple layers of physical security as well as detection systems to deal with intruders and malcontent insiders.

I've been setting up physical IT security on IT sites for years now. The first essential, of many, is to design physical security into your building from scratch. The cost of failure can be far greater than the cost of prevention.

Really a problem?

It might be that lots of people were trying to make cell phone calls at the same time. Surely the solution that is to have smaller cell zones and more cell phone masts? This coupled with more backhaul bandwidth from the masts would deal with the problem.

Ah a snag I see - it might cost the operators some money to fix the weakness in their infrastructure? Far easier to blame the federal government.

Could be a pyrrhic victory

If Samsung turn aound and says. "Apple, we will no longer manufacture your parts."

Heating effect?

Oh dear I wonder what the heating effect would be of driving 7KW through 120 narrow conductor UTP cables all bundled together in a cable tray?

Never use even numbered MS software

Over the years I've worked by the idiom of "never use an even numbered release of Microsoft software".

Having just got Win 7 bedded in and reasonably reliable there isn't much point of thinking about Win 8.

It seems to me that the berst coders/designers in Microsoft work on the development of odd numbered versions. After the big release they drift away or get promoted away from usefulness. Then mediocre/less experienced coders take their place to work on the next (even numbered) version. Inevitably there are administrators keen to show their cost cutting skill in Microsoft by not paying for the best. You then get a poor even numbered release, Microsoft panics and recruits good coders and sharpens up their act and so the cycle goes on ....

They just need

...'arry's cloak.

Not really cloud but...

The way the installation is described it is not really Cloud, but if your servers are hosted or virtually hosted at a third party data center it might be worth finding out who your "neighbours" are in the racking. Impossible I know, but it could be an embarrassing question to ask your hosting company.

"Excuse me, but are any .xxx websites hosted in the same rack as my mega corp server?"

CEOP puff?

I've just turned down a request for me to provide voluntary support to investigate the slow running PCs and network at a local health charity. The reason? I had to undergo CRB checking before I can come into contact with the PCs. The job would involve no access to the patients. The secondary reason was the inclusion of a questionnaire about my ethnic origins, again mandatory. What the fell does my skin colour have to do with my ability to resolve computer problems?

Ironically I have a perfectly clean sheet in respect of CRB and have a high level security clearance in several countries including this one.

It is sad to say that Quangos like CEOP with their scatter gun approach and poor statistics, little better than SWAG techniques are the reason why many perfectly respectable people refuse to volunteer.

Why does CEOP make such an announcement about "on-street" grooming when it doesn't even have reasonably accurate figures? If I were a cynical person I might think it was self-promotion by an agency bidding for extra funding and autonomy.