* Posts by Anonymous Cowherd

7 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2009

McKinsey: Adopt the cloud, lose money

Anonymous Cowherd

I'm torn between my skepticism about the benefits of cloud computing

and my skepticism about the quality of Mckinsey's data analysis.

It's hard to believe that providing redundancy in the cloud costs more than providing it in your own physical hardware (if they'd said that the cloud created single points of failure which just can't be solved full stop I'd be much less surprised at their results).

Amazon cloud offers protection from falling meteors

Anonymous Cowherd

They claim they will reserve capacity that you're not paying for?

Something doesn't work there. If enough people pay a one-off upfront fee for 'reserved instances' that tie up Amazon resources with no revenue coming in then it's hard to see how that works financially.

Which makes you think that they're being economical with the truth somewhere. It has the ring of a 'something for nothing' argument.

Failed probation system 'masterclass in sloppy management'

Anonymous Cowherd

The only surprise here

Is that the blame is being laid where it belongs.

Normally the headline is 'EDS/Cap Gemini/Whoever screw up big public sector project'.

The idea of actually blaming the people who ordered and scoped (and rescoped and rescoped and rescoped) the project is shocking.

Optimistically this could be another sign of a government in decline because anytime before now they'd have much more control over the way the story was presented.

Kremlin-backed youths launched Estonian cyberwar, says Russian official

Anonymous Cowherd

What would actually be lost

What would actually be lost by a combined decision to switch Russia off the internet? I'm woefully unfamiliar with the practicalities but it seems like something that would be doable by automatically denying any traffic with a Russian IP.

They could use their infrastructure to fire spam email and viruses amongst themselves while everyone else got on with actually doing stuff (or, in my case, slacking off).

Fake plane death businessman cuffed in Florida

Anonymous Cowherd

This only reinforces

my determination to get that pilot's license.

Asus' angular laptop-of-the-future designs spied

Anonymous Cowherd

No matter how resilient it really is

It just looks too fragile. I'd permanently worry about breaking it.

Revenue pledges data security...by 2011

Anonymous Cowherd

Tag this in a long list of stories

Starting out with heroic optimism, drifting through delays 'which will shortly be rectified', through to eventual, inevitable waving of the white flag.

If this project can do what for the Revenue what prior projects have done for the Child Support Agency then I'm delighted to support this one-off waste of my tax money to cripple their ability to take anymore.