Posts by Pete 2

A working definition of hell?

> four days of motivational speeches

Apart from being stuck in an enclosed space with 10,000 (other) geeks.

Which would be worse: if the sanitation failed, or if the internet connectivity failed?

and which would be noticed first?

Non technical alternative

One place I was employed was going through the risk-assessment process. The finance guys were (as usual) baulking at the cost of it all and suggested that it would be cheaper to insure against the loss, rather than prevent it through technical / architectural means.

This view gained a lot of traction and would have been a hell of a lot simpler to implement: just sign a larger cheque to the corporate insurance people, than any of the proposed IT solutions (which in truth, nobody really understood - least of all the technical architects who were proposing it). However, that plan fell apart when someone from tthe legal dept. piped up that there was a statutory reqiurement to have archives, backups, DR, plans and provisions in place that could be audited.

It does make you wonder whether this particular phone compmany could / would / did claim any of those losses back off their fire insurance? If so, was it really their loss, at all?

Named as it does

Detachable

Radio

Operated

Personnel

Safety

Yanker

or:

Special

Purpose

Long-range

Altitude

Termination

P.S. <gift horse>Does the winner have to pay the £8+VAT/month line rental, or is this thrown in for free?</gift horse>

The report sounds as confused as the existing IT

> tech it believes the police should be using but isn't – such as mobile apps, social media and the cloud. ... national rollout of 41,000 devices between 2008 and 2011 sucked up £71m while achieving very little.

So which is it? The Met should spend a ton of hard-paid community charge and taxes on tens of thousands of hand-held devices, or not do it because they've been shown to be ineffective?

It does appear that there's a total leadership vacuum at the top of the Met, so far as IT is concerned. No ordinary business could ever justify having 70% of it's (obsolete) IT kit as redundant. Assuming their meaning of "redundant" is the same as everybody else's and this isn't just a political football being kicked resolutely towards one's own goal.

As with a lot of these things, the blame lies firmly with the top echelons. The IT management for not spending their budget wisely, and the Met's top brass for keeping them on and allowing this situation to arise. Maybe the time has come to outsource the whole mess to a foreign call centre. Then they'll really learn a thing or two about "having to re-enter the same information in ten different systems"

Honking your horn

> If you don’t toot your own horn, who is going to do it for you

And there we have it! The secret to success: not just in IT, but in any career in any country, for anyone of any gender.

If you want a pay rise, you have to ask for it. If you want a promotion you need to go out and GET IT. Sitting at your desk waiting for muggin's turn to finally favour you gets you nowhere. However, grabbing the bull by the balls is a trait that is more often seen in a certain type of (usually, but not exclusively) man - generally the ones who make a lot of noise, attract (management) attention, are a pain on the arse around the office and let people know (loudly and often) about their successes. If you think that demurely saying "yes, maybe I would be willing to take on a little more responsibility" or "I do think I've grown into the job" at your annual appraisal is all it takes, think again - everyone. It may not appear "seemly" or "feminine" but - if you don't ask, you don't get.

You need to take the initiative (and not as an ex-subordinate did when I gave him his review: [Me] "You don't use your initiative" [Him] "you never asked me to") and be one step ahead. Tell you boss that you think "X" is going to be an opportunity and you'd like to try making it work - don't wait for the honour to be bestowed on someone else.

I have to say that this seems to me, in large lart at least, to explain why women so often get paid less than men and/or don't rise so fast and so high. Simply because they don't ask for pay rises or promotions; they take what is offered. Similarly when applying for a new job, the tendency is to not rock the boat and accept the salary being offered, rather than haggling for an extra grand or two.

So get that horn and start honkin'

LED strips

If you want some serious LED flashing, have a look at the WS2812 based RGB LED strips.

Like this product, they are controllable from a serial bus and can be got either as strips up to 4m long (at 60 LEDs per metre, each one RGB with a built in controller chip) or the more interesting-looking 16x16 squares.

Though given the Amperage these could suck, you'll need a much better power supply to drive them.

I'm up here

It doesn't sound as if this will stop (presumably bottle-fed as babies) adolescents from staring at the cleavage of women they are skyping with. It just means the other parties won't see it.

Online Power of Attorney

> allows someone to log on and nominate someone to make decisions on their behalf.

Presumably most people where phoning in to ask why the gummint was wasting so much money, when simply giving the "someone" your password would achieve the same result.

Add another one to the pile

I'm sure I've heard this rhetoric, wrapped around different "developments" every few year for the last few decades.

Whether it was said about high-level languages, application generators, 3G and 4G languages, Object-Orientated, Agile, Multi-threading or whatever fad is getting taught in tertiary education these days.

The point is, that adding more layers just hides the underlying stuff. It's still there: in all it's flawed implementations, assumptions and incompatibilities.

Programming is hard. Mainly because people who do it don't have complete familiarity with the tools they are using, place showing off their intelligence above writing clear code, only have a vague idea of what the final goal should look like, haven't been given the time to do a proper job of keep getting new and conflicting changes added to whatever specifications they started with. None of these problems is helped by having a new programming fashion, toolset or language foisted on them every few year (or university generation: the time between a new intake and them graduating).

Simply coming up with a new set of buzzwords and more hoopla won't fix the underlying difficulties. It certainly won't help inexperienced and time-pressured programmers make better applications.

Programs and programmes

The same inability to spot the turkey in the BBC's IT is also apparent in it's broadcast choices.

It takes a brave (or foolhardy, or someone on the verge of retirement) to casually mention that the database has no clothes, or that the new production starring every luvvie under the sun is a total stinker.

Even when they do: whether as a TV critic, programmer who's unable to control the laughter (having seen the design docuemt) - or the tears, or simply an interested outsider who has seen a few disasters (both televisual and computerised) - nobody at a decision making level is prepared to listen.

It's this arrogance within the Beeb that is the basic problem, compounded by the BBC Trust being either purposely toothless, professionally indolent or far too close to the "establishment" (and probably all three) to crack the whip.

What the corporation needs is both transparentcy and a root and branch purge. Decisions should have named individuals identified (no more committee decisions and meetings - which is the usual way of muddying the water so it becomes impossible to discren who decided what) as being responsible and those decisions should be out in the open were we; their employers can scrutinise them.

Flocking to join

> Google thinks Helpouts could be handy for “teachers, counselors, doctors, home repair experts, personal trainers, hobby enthusiasts and more.”

So if the "more" does refer to all the sex workers who will be the first to populate an online service where money changes hands, that might be just what Google+ needs to kick it into high gear.

I bet Youtube wish they'd thought of that!

Daytime use only?

> it can record any crimes that do take place

So long as the baddie in question is obliging enough to turn on the lights in the room and not just shine a torch around.

(Plus, isn't a movement activated wifi camera a perv's dream come true?)

Jammin'

> prison officials confiscated 7,000 phones and SIM cards from prisoners

What's so hard about installing electronic jamming equipment to make whatever phones do find their way in, useless?

We know from the prevalence of drugs in chokey that it's impossible to stop people (whether vistors, guards or other workers) from bringing in illicit goods, or even tossing them over the walls. So surely a better solution - assuming the authorities want one that works, rather than one which merely placates the whiners - would be to remove the service that the phones rely on.

A tech woman's worst enemy? Other women.

> Mayer does not look so much passive as she does rigid and brittle,... and a set of straps on her Yves Saint Laurent stiletto shoes

IT is a creative industry. As such people within it will judge their peers (and betters) by their achievements and what they have produced. That's what wins respect.

However as soon as an IT woman gets publicity, it seems that all that the women columnists care about are her looks. her colour scheme and what she's wearing. Whether it's Mayer, Whitman or Rometty (HP and IBM) there are more column inches written about their clothes than about their skills.

It's alive!

So Google has finally achieved sentience.

I guess we all just sit back and wait for it to take over the wor !*(£^&"~~

NO CARRIER

One man's survey is another man's flaw

> offering participants a link to an online survey

It sounds like the results were only drawn from the self-selected participants who then chose to fill in the survey. What about the moods of those who didn't? (and doesn't getting continuously harangued to fill in surveys tend to be depressing, too?)

Although this was only about FB - presumably to grab the attention of FB users and those in the media, I would hazard a guess that the same effect - if there actually is one - would be seen with all social media and forums.

Though you do have to ask: why would people continue to do something they didn't have to, if it made them unhappy?

They *all* sound like ideal candidates

> go to Mars and never, ever come back

The sorts of people who are willing to demean themselves on reality TV are just the sort of individuals this planet would be better off without. Either we could start a global lottery to fund sending them all, or we could persuade them to sell all their assets (since they wouldn't need them on Mars) to pay for the trip themselves.

I'm sure D.A. would approve if we called their spaceship the B Ark.

It was never about tax

All this talk about paying "fair" tax is merely a sop to the sound-bite addicted millions of people in the country who can't do sums.

Even if all the companies involved in "scams" coughed at the same level that the average wage-earner does, it would still make bugger all difference to the government's expenditure plans. Raising a few billion, or a few tens of billions by grabbing these companies nuts and squeezing "until the pips squeak" is a drop in the pot compared to the half a TRILLION or more of revenue the government rakes in - and duly spends again - every year.

Sure, an extra bil or two would allow someone to employ another 50,000 nurses, or policemen or paperclip benders(!), but unless that can be shown to have a tangible effect on anything except the paperclips it would not benefit the country as a whole. Specifically: would it do more good than the damage caused by having a bunch of multinationals pulling out and causing probably the same number of redundancies, as they leave the UK and go elsewhere?

It does however, make an exceedingly good headline (provided the readers don't immediately go: Hmmm, and reach for their calculators - which, lets face it, the sorts of rabble who are so easily roused are hardly likely to do). And that's really all it was intended to do.

Admission of failure

Outsourcing a part of your business is admitting that someone else can do it cheaper, if not better than you can. Although that's what successful businesses do: focus on their strengths and buy in goods and services from outside (after all, no business makes everything it owns or uses - that would be silly), the question that needs to be asked is whether IT is a core part of your business or simply a necessary evil.

Given how much all modern businesses rely on their IT to survive it seems short-sighted to hand over total day-to-day control of it to the lowest bidder.

More stations than listeners?

> a Raspberry Pi could have filled that role

'cept that the RPi doesn't have an audio input - hence the need to generate the stream elsewhere and pipe it in using IP.

But really? DAB - does anyone care?

Condiments

> What was consistently different was flavour

Which is exactly why we invented hot chilli sauce (and beer). Enough of either of those and you really won't care whether it tastes like meat. As many a burger van owner will attest.

What we need is a confusion filter

Jimbo's right: the software won't work AND it won't deter people who choose to opt in (though it will give the government a nice list of "the usual suspects" to haul in every time someone suspects a single man might be having naughty thoughts.

However, it should also be recognised that this filter was never meant to STOP anything - except the continual whining and muttering by the "I'm against everything" brigade. Since none of them can decide what pornography actually is, they won't ever know when they've succeeded in filtering it - but I suspect the issue is more about wielding power, than making progress. Even recent articles on this site have confused nudity with pornography: not to mention the difference between skimpy clothing and wearing _no_ clothing, which seems to be another area where the tutting busybodies go into overdrive (maybe we should ban swimwear and shorts too - or ban the display of ankles and everything above, just to be "safe"?)

Before anyone starts banning, filtering and marginalising anything, the first thing that should happen is that whoever is pressuring for this added censorship should be asked: "What is it you actually want (as opposed to being against)?" Then, if they can come up with a coherent response, there may be something to base a national debate on.

A modern day laser

In the early 1960's LASERs were touted as a solution looking for a problem. It appears that whoever came up with this advertisement article has created a problem, or a whole set of problems to fit the solution. (And to be fair to 3D printing, maybe in 20 - 30 years it will evolve into something worth doing, too)

There are a few issues however. You don't need to buy this printer to get the tat it produces - you just need someone in the neighbourhood to sell this junk at a car boot sale. Second is that once you've produced your ration of cheap, plasticky garbage you don't need the printer any more - so off it goes to eBay, or FREEGLE if it still works. So the second hand market for these things should be quite bouyant (provided you can wait the few months for these to trickle through).

Finally, if you're producing all these things yourself, what is little Jonny going to bring home from his/her/its woodworking class? Maybe schools need to adapt and move with the times.

Don't drag the bag

> they are fed up with out-of-hours bag searches

... and yet they still insist on taking bags to work with them (or more significantly: trying to take them out, afterwards). Slow learners, or what?

Award to reward

> Other channels also commission UK-created content, but to a much lesser degree

So just award the primo slots to those broadcasters who screen the most hours of original drama, current affairs, sport, light ents and factual programming. If there really is a link between EPG pole position and audience figures, that would incentivise the content creators and reward them with larger audiences and therefore greater advertising revenue. Review every year.

Though I suspect that the "big 5" channels would stay in their current positions, more or less and everyone else would be right down at the bottom.

Going back to basics

> Google simply doesn't have the material today that drives any significant demand

And what is the single biggest driver? Yup, porn.

Maybe that's what Google needs to dip it's dongle into. If they're smart they could spin it as "look: we're taking all the porn off the internet searches and only making it available through our specialised hardware (that only 18+s can buy)"

The best part about that is that apart from satisfying all the prudes in the universe it would make all the other search engines look bad if they didn't follow suit. But without a dongle of their own, they'd be stuffed.

Hit and miss

> "Every object is original and unique,"

Is that just a polite way to say that 3D printers can't reproduce models accurately?

Failure is not an option ... it's a distinct possibility

> For example, businesses will complain about the procurement strategy that public sector body is following if they think that strategy favours their competitor

Remarkable! You'd expect people or companies who felt they were being discriminated against to just sit quietly and let it go.

I wonder if the Cabinet Office, who investigate these complaints could ever come to the conclusion that most of them (In 19 per cent of the cases investigated no serious concerns were found) - the other 81% - DO actually have merit and the fault could simply be that the officials responsible for drafting the bids are a bunch of clueless bureaucrats who have no idea about what they want, how business works or even what is technically possible.

It could also help to explain why so many government projects are so utterly flawed.

Doin' the 2-step

Step 1: you advertise a load of left-over food on a regular basis

Step 2: All the local vagrants start hanging around outside your house

Here's a thought - either BUY LESS or get a refrigerator and some tupperware to store your leftovers until you're feeling hungry again.

Control group

So what needs to happen now if for these "victims" (sheesh!) of being "exposed" to over-aged advertising to be compared with children who haven't seen stuff they weren't supposed to (if there are as many as 24 in the whole country who fall into the category). Then we will be in a position to gauge what "damage" has occurred. However, if it turns out that these children are indistinguishable from the unsullied, there is an obvious question about the effect of adult material on the under-aged.