Posts by Mike Smith252 posts • joined Thursday 12th April 2007 10:40 GMT
"Over-whelming stupidity married to eye-bulging irresponsibility."
HP / Compaq has a bit of previous in that area. Compaq gobbled up DEC, more-or-less "integrated" (how I hate that word) the two and then asset-stripped the result before flogging off the rump to HP.
I was there at the time and still have the emails archived somewhere. They're a textbook case in how to polish a turd. And the manager who stood up and front of all of us and said, utterly straight-faced that, "it's all about synergy" had phenomenal levels of self-control; you could actually feel the vibe going through the cynical crowd of grunts facing him and he never batted an eyelid. Maybe he was an early adopter of Botox.
Commiserations to the poor buggers facing the axe.
" Is it really safe to let the World Police set the laws? Is that not a conflict of interest?"
No it isn't and yes it is.
What's really interesting about this is that a fairly powerful politician is now at loggerheads with the vested interests of the American cartels. And it's not inconceivable that in this case, Uncle Sam could be the loser.
If, as I hope, the European Parliament reduces ACTA to small squares of paper and banishes it to the smallest room, the MPAA and its cohorts will be faced with a big raspberry from the biggest economic bloc on the planet. The EU is bigger demographically (500 million people as opposed to 313 million Americans) and economically ($17.5 trillion as opposed to $15 trillion), and it's also a major trading partner with the US. Granted, we don't have the huge military machine that soaks up so much American money, but we have learned that high explosives aren't the automatic answer to life's little problems.
What I'm getting at is that America's time as the world bully-boy is drawing to a close. The end won't necessarily be dramatic, unless Washington decides to start a war with someone who does have the capacity to hit back. Rather, it'll be a small drip-feed of little issues that may look like battles won but which will still lead to their losing the war.
Look, for example, at the end of the British empire. Back in 1912, Britain still looked mighty and impregnable, but behind the jingoism and adulation for the Royal Navy lay some serious problems that only surfaced a bit further down the line. Most people might see the end of empire as occurring in 1947 when India became independent, when in fact the first nail was hammered into the Imperial coffin on 12th January 1906, with the election of the last Liberal government. Forty years between the first event and its major public manifestation.
When you look at the bigger picture, things don't look that rosy for Washington. American manufacturing is rapidly disappearing over the pond to China. Innovation - genuine innovation - seems to have all but dried up. The legal spats over patents that feature frequently in El Reg are a case in point - when companies concentrate on fighting each other rather than outdoing each other, you know something's seriously wrong,. Unless you're a patent troll or American lawyer, that is. The gulf between rich and poor is widening. Companies are run not by innovators but by beancounters, who are generally unable to see beyond the next quarter's results and have a strange sense of entitlement which leads them to believe that giving their customers a hard time is a Good Thing. The fact that senior people in the EU are making noises about putting them back in their boxes should be a warning note; but I doubt if they'll be capable of taking heed.
I don't know what the world will look like in 2052, but I'll be very surprised indeed - assuming I'm still around to see it - if America is still a big noise on the world stage.
You've nailed it. I'd go for the former; I think IT pros do lose sight of the fact that they're in a minority.
The cloud does sound seductive to the technically clueless, and even more so to characters who think they're technically switched on because they can write a macro in Excel and animate a PowerPoint slide.
On that basis, Gartner are correctly predicting the latest manifestation of human stupidity.
Some excellent input there. I'm thrilled to be working with you all.
The answer, er, Kane, is that although it comes with a dice, it's not 24-sided - it's infinitely-sided! Our new SphereDice (tm) has ben designed for seamless integration with our value-added services. It's shaped to reflect the nature of the cloud itself, where all sides are the same and however you look at it, you're presented with the same unified holisitic user experience. And it comes preloaded!
A great start there, thank you Cane. Right then, shall we proceed to look at the optimum resource model?
"your business had sod all access to your company data for hours or even days"
Which means that disaster recovery from cloud failures are going to become Big Busine$$ for slimy consultants in the next few years. Fools and their money, y'know.
"Hi, I'm Gavin, your personally assigned sector specialist for cloud disaster recovery. I'd like to present our strike team. Please say hello to Cipher, Droid, Pus-ball and Chancer. We're here today to workshop you through our Cloud Replication Assurance Program which will introduce the bleeding-edge approach to maintaining copies of your Intellectual Property on cloud infrastructure under your direct control..."
I must practise saying that with a straight face. I smell a business opportunity.
"So says Gartner, a market watcher, reckons what you might call 'PC 2.0' will be ushered in by legions to gullible eejits who fancy themselves as tech-savvy punters because they can find the power switch nine times out of ten and who already used to operating online"
There, fixed it for 'em.
They don't speak plain English because if they did, they'd give away the fact that they're clueless to the core, and know deep down that their value to the company in real terms is somewhat lower than the recent graduate coders.
That's all management speak is; pretentious terminology, idiotic analogies, verbing [1] nouns ('spend' as a noun is something I'd like to see punished with a summary clip round the ear) and frequent use of acronyms and soundbites all in an attempt to make themselves seem more important than they really are.
[1] Oops.
Gentlemen, the lovely Samantha has been known to reanimate the dead with the flicker of an eyelash. It's no good losing the will to live; you don't escape from the Northern line that easily.
I'm unsure whether Jake's move to Turnham Green is a compliment, a threat or just an attempt to make me envious.
So I'll redouble on escalators, take a PlusBus and go where I can see for miles:
High Barnet.
Or so the Bill of Rights says.
So a reversed wrong-road at South Kensington (allowed under the Museum Amendments 1976, ratified by the Stovald Committee's Fourth Article on 26th August 1977) even though the Tulip Rules originally mandated go-around at Heathrow takes me straight to:
Arsenal.
A brave move, Mr !Spartacus. I can either lose a pilot engine and reverse in the loop, or continue knowing that you'll overtake at the next junction. Should have spotted that before... thinks, thinks...
Ah, of course. This is a risky move, and far be it from me to risk the wrath of the lovely Samantha at this stage in the game, but I appear to have no other option. Time to play the Ecologist's Conversion:
Turnham Green.
So I'll just go back to school:
Grange Hill.
Never mind the 'red lorry, yellow lorry' nonsense - just remember to say 'teething troubles' when you really mean 'bone-headed design flaws in half-tested systems that were signed off by the people who wouldn't have to use them'. But 'teething troubles' sounds so much snappier, doesn't it?
Having had some very modest exposure to live entertainment in the distant past, I can't ofhand think of ANY producer / director / stage manager who wouldn't go absolutely apeshit at not being able to control what went out right up until the last minute.
Nicely done, sir. The alcohol-free zone covers the whole of the sub-surface lines though, which means that according to the latest pricing structure for off-peak travel, there's no penalty for stopping at Zone 2 with the DLA on hold.
Which gives me a choice here. I could possibly call a Thameslink Divide and come back in on the Metropolitan line, which would seem to force a follow-on at Angel, but that means I stop at the end of the block and risk being in Nidd.
So instead I think I'll go for Rafferty's gambit:
Baker Street.
... was getting caught.
And they wonder why people turn to piracy. That sort of behaviour makes it less of a crime and more of a moral obligation.
She certainly seems to enjoy that gum.
Except that's on the wrong side of the one-way system, which means a Contra-Bifurcation to draw level.
So I'll invoke a Double Kubrick and pass on four:
Bushey.
"the shape of things to come."
Fnarr, fnarr!
A very cunning move! I don't think that's been done in middle game since the Jubilee Line was opened. Looks like you're on a roll though, so:
Swiss Cottage.
Ha!
for a superb idea.
I just hope that the email field can cope with my_mate@');ALTER USER SYS IDENTIFIED BY lkljkljkl;
Oh, I beat Mr Bung in the end. Managed to invoke a Take-Away Return and left him on the Dollis Hill loop stuck behind an engineering train with adverse possession. That'll learn 'im.
It counts as a simple river crossing if you don't reverse direction until you reach the end of the line OR change platforms at a junction. I was going to over-double at Stockwell, but would have risked being in nip to our friend waiting at the Elephant & Castle (Stovald, 3.11.25.16. para 2 if memory serves).
So let's pull a Stuart Retreat:
Royal Oak.
A brave move indeed! I once got caught up the Elephant & Castle by the Chinese master Dung Bung. Never again.
Instead, a simple river crossing:
Morden.
A bridge amendment, eh?
OK, I'll invoke a Nomenclature Recovery and pass through to:
London Bridge.
OK, I now have to overdouble on a crossing. Lose one carriage to put you in swing:
Perivale.
Can't he just step back one block and wait at the calling-on signal? Would have the same effect (two changes of direction when moving between zones on a green).
Err, I think. Is there an adjudicator here?
Indeed, very well played sir. A classic auto-triangulation.
Except that <gentle cough> you're now facing the wrong way.
And because the previous move reached the end of the Circle line, I can claim one additional platform, make an occulting turn at Holborn and jump over to
Goodge Street.
(Spivey's Adjudication, October 1973, Berlin All-Comers, I believe)
Because I can just wrong-road on the avoiding line and put you well and truly in huff:
Embankment.
"Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told the Associated Press that at least 50 million users had stored data with the company, including family photos and personal documents. Users weren't able to access the data throughout this month while the prosecutors held the servers."
Unless I've misread that, it appears that a lot of innocent people were caught in the trawl. I don't think there are many companies who would happily accept losing access to their data for a month while the prosecutors went rifling through the servers.
You may be right regarding the warrants - I certainly hope you are - but the end result for Joe Customer in this case has been a month's outage. And ti's the end result that's important; if I'm paying someone for a cloud service, I couldn't care less who their sub-sub-sub-contracted value-added partners are. What I would see, as a paying customer, is a loss of service that I'd no control over. The American prosecutors wouldn't give a monkey's about my business, unless it was a big US corporation with sufficient financial clout to buy some influence in the government.
Mushroom cloud, because sooner or later, some sizeable companies are going to see that happen to their cloudy solutions just because some vindictive American IP troll's going after a few illicit MP3s.
... which Steven Roper's beaten me to is don't use the cloud. Nick the cloud sales droid's laptop and phone, fill him to overflowing with supermarket own-brand whisky and dump him on a train to Inverness with his ticket stapled to his jacket.
If you absolutely must use the flipping cloud - perhaps because some senior management eejit's just committed you to a five-year contract - or you already do use it, the thing to to is make sure you've got copies of your data somewhere you can keep an eye on it. It might be on a few thousand tapes or discs, and will take a while to recover, but you'll at least have the peace of mind to know that the next Judge Dreddful from Deliverance County who decides to bring down a cloud provider for a month won't take your business down with it.
Then of course, the lesson should be driven home by taking as long as you can to restore the data, accompanied by a heavily-inflated bill for hardware and overtime.
Megaphone, for shouting 'don't use the cloud! Don't use the cloud!"
The link at the bottom of this article says :"Create, deploy and manage web apps in the cloud with Windows Azure - 3 Month free trial".
The trial will probably take at least that long.
This would seem to be a good case for avoiding Azure, and all other cloud services with servers based in the US or countries run by its lickspittles.
"Rothken said the company was working with prosecutors to try to ensure the data wasn't erased."
Oh goody. If I had important stuff stored on Megaupload's system I'd feel so glad that they were going to TRY to ensure the data wasn't erased. How kind and thoughtful of them.
"the US prosecutors reckon they have a case based on the fact that some of its leased servers were in Virginia."
Allow me an ignorant animal-skin-wearing foreigner's perspective for a moment:
Let us assume that I'm the IT Director for a successful and rapidly-growing business. We're generating tens of gigabytes of data a day. Data that is crucial to our business - it might be sales data, customer intelligence, financial data, picture or document archives, or whatever.
One day, along comes a sales droid offering me the benefits of the cloud. Cut down your expensive data centre space, stop wasting money on SAN storage, sack a few PFYs, online 24/7 data access, seamless integration, resilient distributed storage around the globe, global load balancing, service level agreements, cut total cost of ownrship, reduce headcount and decrease resource costs, integrated outsourced right-shored value proposition, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
If I were an IT Director, I'd be seduced by the meaningless babble and would sign on the line, possibly even without needing the alcofluence of incohol. But I'm not, thankfully.
Just because some snivelling little lawyer//MPAA nobody/patent troll in the US believes that cloud company has some boxes that MIGHT contain some pirated Hollywood crap, a judge in another jurisdiction pulls the plug and shows that clouds really are made of vapour. Sod your business, we're gonna bust a cap in those goddam pirates' asses, boy.
And I'm going to sign up for that, am I?
Like fuck I am.
"If people only knew of the number of terrorist pltos that are stopped but never publicised they'd be calling for more stricter security and willing offering up more in taxes to fund it."
And that would be how many, exactly?
.
"Stop changing your mind. Changes to your signed off FRS have untold consequences."
Stop changing our mind? This is the Civil Service, I'll have you know, young man, and we do things according to Standard Operating Procedure. We need to be reactive, flexible and alert to the changing global markeplace and plugged in to the political requirements of the day. Or so our consultant chappie tells us. Sorry, you can't see him today, so perhaps you'd like to put the bat back where you got it. Think he's out on the golf course somewhere.
Well, if it's really so important to you... Monica, any idea where the chap from Churnham and Fleece is today? On holiday? Any idea when he's due back? Not til the end of next month? No, no, it's just some technical fellow wanting a word. I'm sure it'll keep.
Sorry old boy, but you'll have to pop back. Was there anything else? Design freeze? Yes, it is a bit chilly today, what what? Turn the radiator on, there's a good chap.
Well, I did have to be very careful of the can's sharp edges! And I was glad to find my bladder capacity didn't exceed 500 ml.
GTW = Got The Girlfriend.
Back in 1996, I was trying to get a young lady to go out with me. She was strangely reticent about answering her phone, so when she did pick up, I'd keep chatting for as long as I could.
Anyway, one night I'd had a coupla cans, and was on the phone to her. An overflow warning came through from down below in the middle of our conversation.
Now, I knew from experience if I left to visit the little geeks room, she wouldn't answer if I rang her back afterwards. There was only one thing to do - out with the pocket knife, cut the top off a beer can and piddle in that. While we were chatting on the phone.
She never sussed.
"If the feedback from your team is *always* positive, then you can take that as a practical certainty that you really are hell to work for and nobody dares say."
Damn, you beat me to it.
And @Clare (web specialist), before you start posturing again, take a deep breath and just remember that the Reg readers include a fair number of folks who have forgotten more about a given technology than you (or I) have yet learned. Thinking you know more than everyone else is a classic sign of aggressive weakness.
Rule one of holes: when you're in one, stop digging. Have a pint and chill :-)
That is all.
I've just done a find and replace, changing China to Russia. Quite took me back; I felt like it was 1981 again, CND were on the march and Reagan was up for bombing Brezhenev.
Plus ca change...
I suppose A55 OLE is on the list. I wanted to buy it for my last boss.
Pity I'm not black. I'd luuurrve RA55 MAN.
There was me thinking it was a different sort of TV.
"ICO renamed itself Pendrell and acquired Ovidian - "a leading partner in providing corporate IP and litigation", with a view to "establish a new ‘gold standard’ in IP for the world’s leading technology companies"
Now that Sun's gone down, it looks like SCO's pushing the lid off the box. Anyone got a hammer and stake?
...to buy that man a pint. Hopefully one of the many he deserves.
Pure class sir, pure class.
As for Cox Communications - well, they should just be glad of the brand recognition.
that the switches in question are managed by some MegaMouth Consulting business improvement partnership, who add value to the proposition by putting in PHBs all over the place to provide business continuity assurance within a integrated world-class best-of-breed process governance framework.
What will have happened is that PHB1 will have asked PHB2 to apply a scheduled upgrade, wiht a backout strategy in place.
PHB2 knows a bit about backing things out and in turn asks PHB3 to apply the upgrade and backout if necessary.
PHB3's knowledge of backing out is running for the pub toilet when he finds the gorgeous bird he's been chatting up is actually a transvestite. So it's something he prefers not to talk about in case his wife finds out.
So PHB3 tasks PHB4 with the upgrade, who in turns tells some downtrodden, overworked and untrained PFY to apply the upgrade. Do the core and redundant systems at the same time - delivery achieved quicker, time is money, young man.
So the PFY does his best, it all goes horribly wrong and it's taking days to fix. Guess who'll be fired for the disaster, though?
Would like to upvote this more than once, but el Reg won't let me.
Well said, mate. It's only a bloody phone.
"Hopefully in five or ten years we'll be able to say that Steve's greatest achievement was building a 'system' at Apple that was able to continue to lead and innovate after his death."
I'd like to think you're right, but it's far more likely that Apple will end its days by the Death of a Thousand Committees. The company was very close to going tits-up before he came back to lead it, and they don't seem to have anyone with his charisma and ability who could replace him.
A firm of Apple's size - according to Wikipedia they employ 50,000 people - will have a fair number of second-rate drones, career politicians and talentless gobshites who will try to float to the top of the toilet bowl. While doing so, there's a better then even chance that they'll stifle whatever creative ability Apple still has. Genuine innovation is a very different beastie from just adding more bells and whistles to an established product line; and professional management drones tend to suffer from chronic Not Invented Here syndrome.
Unless Apple has someone with Jobs' charisma and vision waiting in the wings, they may not be around in ten years time.
Pint, because although I don't like Apple's products or business model, I have the utmost respect for what Steve Jobs achieved. Rest in peace, mate.
“We're not against technology; we're against using it to promote what God hates.”
Well, they do say that the worst homophobes are still in the closet...
Come on, come on, they can't do that. How on earth are the Rio Ferdinands and Ryan Giggses of this world going to afford their new Ferraris? Poor buggers are on the breadline as it is.
"Shoot me again."
Pleasure. Over to this wall, please.
.
