Posts by Nick 6
99 posts • joined Wednesday 17th June 2009 05:45 GMT
Appeals process a sham, sherlock
As any fule kno, the parking operators' appeals process is a tactic to get to to engage, admit who you are, that you drove the car, you parked there, and that they have valid contact details for you.
Typical advice from Pepipoo, Money Saving Expert etc is to ignore them completely. This was successful for me a couple of years ago when I got a ticket despite having parked properly. Sequence of threatening and finally desperate letters, followed by them giving up. Not sure if introduction of POOPLA has made any difference to this, IANAL etc.
I'm not in favour of people parking where they like, but private parking co's have killed the golden goose by pursuing the money rather than acting reasonably or fairly.
Silly valuations don't come from them
Its the vampire squid and other banktards who, in a coke-fuelled haze, over rate these companies and pump up the valuations. All fees, all the time.
Of course the bubble bursts when they move to another target. Its not that the CEO has destroyed the real value/utility of their company - it was never there to start with.
Re: GATACA
Sounds like appraisal time around here....
Re: How simple does it need to be?
Assume you want the 'Joke' icon. For nothing if not the 'if you are working you are in the tax system' line, that was a killer...
Keep an eye on him
He might have been turned and be attempting to get elected as vice president of the BCS...
Waste of energy
Burning gas to make electricity is an appalling waste, squandering a clean primary source which can be used much more effectively for direct heating of house and factories.
But then the private energy companies couldn't ream, sorry, reap the rewards of offering emergency power at extortionate spot prices. Much more lucrative and lower risk than building plant which takes 10 years to start turning a profit.
Meh
The Lincolnshire Poacher never had these problems....
Queue up here to dance
on the grave of the Government Gateway.
No its all secure actually.
No they are all wrong, my bank's website tells me:-
"Chip and PIN increases card payment security to help prevent fraud. Card fraud at the point of sale is reduced significantly by ensuring the card is genuine and that the user is the authorised owner of the card"
so the card must be genuine and used by the authorised owner. It ensures it !
Nice try though
At least they made some attempt at graceful degradation of their service, rather than throwing the hands up in the air if it can't reach 20 different "nice to have" systems, and reporting some cutesy or hipster "ooops come back later" message.
Now for a bit of testing and rework to get the fallback barebones service working properly...
Mistakes happen
Anyone who thinks mistakes don't happen probably doesn't work in IT, and anyone who can't empathize with those involved has probably never worked on the sharp end.
The key elements are communication and speed/effectiveness of recovery. Comms have been fairly good so far and it sounds like recovery is well on the way.
Re: Linux
The multitude of VBA and other abominations which teams and departments rely upon means quite a bit of lock-in.
Re: no backup of the schedule?
More likely they did take some routine backup which included the database but had never exercised a full recovery back to service of the application given this failure mode, followed by successful completion of the batch schedule.
Investment in the backbone?
Backbone? Guess they don't mean "having the guts to admit to making mistakes and having not properly understood the risks involved with outsourcing".
This situation really does sound like someone pretty high up in the executive chain responsible for operations needs to be fired. And I mean "fired" rather than helped into a taxi holding a massive payoff cheque.
Posted in Huawei Ascend G300 budget Android
low volume...
a lot of low volume probs were sorted by an OTA update about 4-6 weeks ago - worth going through the menus to find and apply it.
i have one and its great as my first smartphone, glad i didn't spend 3-4 times more,
Single logical system
Typically there is redundant hardware, sometime OS and other system software too. But above that there is a single logical version of the application and data. You can have as much tin as you, but as many copies of the data as you liked are all the same. You screw up one, you screw up them all. Payment comes in from BACS or FP into the payments engine and is replicated at disk or app level.
Redundant systems developed and deployed in isolation to a common set of requirements is an extremely expensive option only available to mission critical systems - which excludes our retail banks apparently.
Re: Hardware failure?
I've worked at one retail bank in this country who does maintenance during a weekday afternoon-evening slot.
Re: Eh?
Well they launched some new payments facility on mobile, and those payments go might go share some infrastructure as the batch or other payments, they could have a knock-on effect.
For example perhaps there is a much higher volume than predicted. Or those mobile payments result in a much higher CPU cost or transaction time through the shared payments processing engine. Or connections to external interfaces e.g. for faster payments.
Don't have an inside information though, these are just guesses.
My money on
My guess.....Batch screw up, big back log of transactions to post, have some data remediation to get them to post correctly (don't know if they run a batch or real time banking system). Processing capacity requirement to do this is competing with online processing hence flaky online bank (plus peak load due to people checking if they are OK). Faster payments single immediate payments probably ok as not batch interfaces unlike BACS and internal transfers...
Anyone care to comment ? Via an anon posting from those in the know would be interesting, once you get out of the office of course....
Re: Sooo.....
Meh, mere statutes and acts of parliament, they can be safely ignored by the free.
Sounds like my experience with SAP.....
Buying a box with a promising picture on the side, but opening it to find it just a kit of parts and some vague instructions.
Still at least with Lego you have fun building something which actually works in the end.
Dear Fund Manager
Please don't plough my precious pension fund into this crud. You screwed up last time with that internet bubble in 1999-2002 - remember ? Stick it all in tobacco and guns instead...
thanks,
Nick
[this open letter does not constitute general investment advice]
Posted in Australia OKs iOS for classified comms
Re: Protected ?
Ah true enough I wasn't thinking about civilian public data which needs to be protected. Mind you, I would worry about the impact of aggregation if you start storing a lot of data on the phone, in the UK this can mean the protective marking gets bumped up a level.
Another concern is the ability to access and modify the data in a secure manner, that is to say the context in which you use a smartphone is often public or semi-public. Casual shoulder surfing of mobile devices seems to be fairly common.
Posted in Australia OKs iOS for classified comms
Protected ?
Woop dee doo, "Protected" just means keep your voice down a bit whilst talking about it at the pub.
Posted in SAP flashes cash to pump up HANA biz
Performance tip before you do this.
Possibly cheaper to emove the cruft and tune the code and queries before you rip out your infrastructure and buy new tin.
Still, its impressive to say they are funding consultants to do this work for free - that sounds like an awful lot of cash assuming they do the whole job. I wonder how they recoup that.....every year....
I don't see the 18 month warranty being that popular though - offering a move from a mature Oracle or DB2 database, to HANA, and then off to Sybase or whatever SAP have got on a shelf in the back room. Where are my organisation's skills in that 3rd backend database going to come from.
Make him look like a perv
Smear his reputation to provide plausible background to a bizarre death. Use his network connections to visit some dodgy sites online in the period before his death, and then stage his demise in the same manner.
Public interest/concern weakened, easier to sweep away the death of someone serving his country without too many questions being asked.
Can we have figures after a suitably long soak test, i.e. not fresh-from-the-box ?
They can do it as soon they want
With their profit margins, they can start being 'nice' to people as soon as they want. Its a matter of will and determination versus greed and shareholder value. They don't need another $10 extra from the shiny-shiny brigade.
Early Xara FTW
I remember using the early x86 ports of Xara: jaw-droppingly fast, small, and better quality compared to my experience of CorelDraw.
Wordwise, meh, not interesting to me as a 10 year old kid but the sideways expansion board and disc doctor are still happy memories.
Missing some detail...
Range ? Charge time ? Effective MPG ?
Range of colours ?
Meh
Do I really have to write my own VM in javascript ?
Posted in Ten... colour laser printers
Draw me a graph !
What would be really useful would be an indication of total cost versus pages printed. e.g. Assume you keep the device for 5 years, it comes with an X page cartridge included, and additional cartridges cost Y and Z (colour/B&W). What is the most economical assuming 10,100,500,1000 pages per month ?
yours lazily....
Demo disk, big whoop
Interesting article and well written and original. But one gripe...
Yet again the 'Apple did this' line gets mismorphed into "Apple invented this and all credit to Steve Jobs' genius'.
Actually any mass-market computer worth its salt in those days had a demo disk, and one which the sales people used. The fact IBM didn't is merely a marker of how little they understood of how retail customers bought machine, not that Apple had the unique insight and mastery which is somehow projected 25 years hence to their retail outlets (which *are* pretty good but who couldn't support those storefronts on *those* profit margins?).
Its bizarreness is the challenge
Toronto isn't the correct solution.
And yes the Jeopardy format means some of the 'questions' which the contestants have to get end up being very clunky. I'm not a fan of the show at all.
But when you watch Jeopardy you can understand why its a very difficult challenge to meet with a computer compared to the ease which humans can do it. There are some youtube videos which explain this well and make you realise how impressive the whole thing is.
Posted in Fasthosts downed by dicky Dell switch
dicky dell switch ?
didn't he present "world of sport" in the 70s and 80s ?
Sharepoint - a running joke
Around here there is a running joke answer to someone asking you where the document/whatever you created is: on Sharepoint. Much hilarity, because the metadata is rubbish, and the search slow and inflexible.
Mind you, it was worse when there was no search index available.
Yeah, yeah, it can do everything under the sun and its just the crap way we've implemented it, but still....
Posted in Apple Store down for Lion tweakage
Yep certainly shifting product
No doubt they are doing well and creating and shifting products a plenty - good luck to them if they can get people to pay the premium prices...
I suspect your view on the publicity angle is spot-on though, I wouldn't expect anything different.
Posted in Apple Store down for Lion tweakage
Be Back Soon ?
Amazing that such a big cap company doesn't provide continuous availability through their online sales channel...
Don't tell me, its to build the excitement etc etc, but to me it just looks like even their web site is consumer grade....
argh
Incompetence, meet Evil.
Posted in 3D printer produces working house keys
Only key cutting ?
If you can't also repair shoes with this device, it'll never catch on...
No Eric....
You are part of the elites, and you are screwing us, the common people.
I'm sure you could...
I'm sure you could care less about that, but I wonder if you could *not *care less about bootlegging ?
Pedantic minds want to know.
Posted in Protect online retail, says eBay
mee tytle
A+++++++++ lobbying, would use again. Cash arrived well packed.
Posted in EMC blows benchmark away - again
Silly configuration
Silly: Not a like for like on comparison, and no real world equivalent.
Soylent Green
In Facebook, you are not the customer, you are the product. You are milked for data which are sold to the refiners and buyers.
The benefits the cow obtains from the farmer are marginal.
Release the documents already
He needs to get on with publishing these (starting to at least, understand there is a lot to go through). Otherwise it seems more and more like self-enrichment and self-promotion rather than the mythical free information campaign he's on. Or perhaps he's waiting for the pay-off from our financial overlords.
Posted in Apple plotting point-of-sale putsch?
So much wrong with this
iPad - stupid size to take out shopping with you. Except I guess there'll be a mini sized one for the morons who have got an iPhone and a fondle slab but who still have money to be parted with.
And the apple one probably won't let you buy anything unless its approved by the Jobsian puppet machine. Oranges ? No sir, I'm afraid you can't buy those. Just lemons.
Posted in Coalition failing on UK economy
You what ?
"action-oriented growth champion" ?
Guards, take him to the dungeons !
Already paid....
Far be it from me to apologies for the self-destruction of the once-great company and its reverse take over by the vacuous powerpointers of the consultant profession. But IBM has already paid its employees for their work. Whether or not its doing the right thing for its long term shareholders is another thing, but then we've learned just how little respect Big Blue has for the idea of pensions.
Its all good though, as long as Fat Sam keeps pumping the EPS and shareprice, ready for the big pop when he announces his departure.
