* Posts by Carolyn Clarke

6 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2008

Grissom bows out of CSI

Carolyn Clarke

he will be missed

I liked the character because he was geeky -- he was brainy and well-read and had strange passions for interesting things. Grissom was not like any other crime show hero. He demonstrated, albeit with fantasy science, that a dedication to facts, not feelings, was important. It's what made the original CSI stand out for me, and why I watched it. Once it got into the personal lives of the team, I became less interested, because the Grissom character was made a little more touchy-feely and, to me, less true. It's not that I don't like shows about personal lives, but just once it was fun to have a show based to pursuing hard evidence and finding out what chemistry could tell you. Another sorrow was that they had to make up things, like those national databases of car floor carpet fabrics, or the international database of toothpick wood -- that sort of thing.

Homer Simpson's email address hacked

Carolyn Clarke

an email address is for life...

...not just for a brief bit of fun in the wake of an episode. Register one with care, my children, lest it come back as the sock-puppet of an evil regime!

Trousers Brown Counterpoint: Is Gordon right?

Carolyn Clarke

blimps

The air-ship kind, not the old fogey colonels. I am reading information on a Canadian initiative, underwritten by Boeing, about stable, controllable air-ships aiming mostly, I believe, for winching up and down and short-distance transport (Skyhook is the name of the company), but helium-aided movement of goods also seems like a good idea for global shipment of food. Cheap to run, could be reasonably fast, given that they can fly 'direct' rather than have to worth through straits and pinch-points such as Panama, and cheap to build, too, I think.

We can't close off part of the world from another. We're all in it together. We need to think globally purely for selfish reasons, if for no other. Lewis Page talked about the hungry hordes that could be at our gate. I would rather think of an equitable way to share energy, wealth, and food than to have it taken from me at the end of an AK. In a lifeboat, it doesn't matter how much money you have.

Levi's suffers profit meltdown in midst of SAP embrace

Carolyn Clarke

SAP for the saps

I've worked for two companies that implemented SAP. The first spent £4m and had the courage to take the hit and scrap the lot 8 months after delivery, as they weren't going to suffer any longer while SAP kept tinkering to see if they could get the thing to work. The second company spent a lot more and then was caught in the 'we've spent so much we can't go back now; let's keep forging on and hope we get some value out of this thing', which is bad thinking in any situation.

I have worked with smaller, non-'enterprise' level systems and they have pretty much always have worked, were easily customisable, and were run by companies who were hungry for our business and who were therefore dedicated to solving problems. I find this in almost every case: second-tier suppliers have better (or at least the same quality) product at a cheaper price with better implementation and on-going support.

Of course, at this level the actual managers and tech people in the company are the ones making the buying decisions, not senior execs who fall for the sales video and the blow job, so what is bought tends to be evaluated with other parts of the body than the ego and the dick.

Senate approves FISA makeover and telco wiretap immunity

Carolyn Clarke

the nice thing about bullying...

...is that the victims soon learn to cringe and capitulate even when you don't threaten them. Clearly, the Republicans now need only sneeze and the Democrats will cave in.

IPS finds no nuggets in ID checking goldmine

Carolyn Clarke

If they were any good at business

...they wouldn't be in Government. I always enjoy the fantasyland that is Government ministers counting the golden eggs their latest goose will lay. They don't know how to analyse an offering for its business gains, and over-estimate the width of that path business is going to beat to their door. All too many of them, including our dear PM, have been lifelong politicians, and wouldn't know a hard business fact if it hit them in the chops. It's part of the piquant charm of politicians declaiming on how government should base itself (eg NHS) on business models. How could they possibly know if this is a good idea, will work, is sensible? And yet, poor dears, they persist.