Posts by MGJ 206 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
For every case that churns, there is less chance that those witnesses will turn up next time. The defence system is based on this; never plead until the last minute and only if you've checked the witnesses are there. There is astonishing waste in the justice system
If this is his level of understanding of government after 7 years, then we are well shot of him. For central government, there is only one Home Office, or DWP/HMRC. They have pretty unique requirements, that are not the same as any other organisation, so they have bespoke systems. Leveraging in COTS products creates the sort of nightmares that the CSA faced when using a system from Florida that couldnt handle such arcane concepts as VAT. Yes, where a service is generic (postcode checking, input validation etc) then a cloud service is usable, but not for most caseworkers and policy makers/knowledge workers, who will really love that application latency as their screen redraws as data comes back from India, Iceland and Indiana, rather than the empty datacentre in the basement.
If only IE didnt have problems too; some controls in Flash no longer work. For example, in War Commander (surely the only reason anyone goes on Facebook these days), the 'Full Screen' control no longer does anything. Advice in forums is to go back to 11.2, so it looks like some feature was deprecated in this release. Testing, anyone?
Becuase when I was last buying a large SOA stack we looked really closely at Red Hat but it was no cheaper than Oracle once you put in 4 years of support and IBM and Oracle's hardware discounts were added, and it had none of the security ticks in the box required to run it on CJX. Apart from that, we'd have loved to use it, if we could have made sense of all the various options required; neither Oracle or IBM needed to offer any freebies (not that we are allowed to take them anyway - nothing over £5 value at our level) to beat that.
I was in a meeting with MS yesterday, and one of their staff was taking notes and using OneNote with Windows 8 Alpha. From the demo, it works perfectly. Battery life, weight and cost have stuff to work on for consumers, but for corporates, they are getting close.
They were also victims of the tsunami; lots of niche launches got put back when certain components had shortagges.
Two out of the three phones in the photos were ones I actually bought. I loved my Z5, and I had the full car kit for it in my company Golf. Sold it when I got my P800, which was a bit big, and didnt survive an encounter with a stone floor; large screen crack and not economic to repair. Still have it though; keep thinking I should recycle it.
Went to a Moto after that (Z3), then a Nokia N95, before settling on an iPhone 3GS, which has lasted longer than any of them, although the case is starting to crack on the back.
Personally, I watch 3D in cinema because I dont have it at home, so for good films which I'll watch on DVD or Blu-Ray later, at least I'll see them once in 3D. Only decent films to use 3D recently have been kids ones (Despicable Me in particular) but there's not many that dont make sense without 3D (How To Train Your Dragon maybe). Last Harry Potter was a waste of time in 3D; it added nothing.
I went on a visit there in 2004; they were making eGovernment actually work, but when you have the concept of the notary in public life already, making PKI work is a bit of a no-brainer. They were doing digital signing of smart cards containing methadone prescriptions and medical case notes for access only in A&E. The NEC technology they used was very interesting.
Until there is a proper support structure in place, why would I choose a product with limited or no support if it goes wrong, versus one that has support but may cost slightly more? A recent piece of work I was involved in looked at JBOSS as an option compared to the Oracle stack. At the time, (and I'm not sure if it is yet) RedHat had not got its products cleared to use/process GMPS protected material.
The problem with SCRA is that they barely employ anyone anymore; among admin staff they have a 50% vacancy plan and are in the middle of a significant reorganisation. They dont use the GMPS markings for their material and most of it goes by Royal Mail, albeit in sealed bags that the posties must know contains all sorts.
Good luck with that one Sky News. That would be the Supreme Court as the only British court; Scotland has a separate legal system including different criminal and civil courts. You'd think that a major news organisation might know that, especially since one of their former staff is being considered for perjury proceedings in that jurisidiction at present.
Perhaps you should do a 'sort' on signature, and you'll see that the most support is for the petition calling for the retention of the ban on capital punishment.
If you want to check out any real knuckle dragging, do a search for 'Sharia'; lots of loonies opposed to something that isnt happening.
The correct name for the GB electroal system is plurality not FPTP, since there is no post in plurality (but there is in AV). If you want a shorthand form, why not 'MVW'; most votes wins.
AV is the wrong answer to the wrong question. Modernising electoral systems is about more than changing how you elect your Isle of Wight sized area's representative. Weirdly, since Scotland spent a couple of years agreeing what it would use in 1999, there has been not a peep out of anyone that the system should be changed. We've had 2 coalitions and a minority, and its all gone pretty well.
What part of "the documents appear to consist of pretrial discovery material that Swedish prosecutors provided to one of Assange's attorneys" is it that you are struggling with? Assange demands to know what he is charged with and why. In order to have a fair trial, the defence has equal access to the evidence gathered by the prosecution. That is then leaked; what is that to do with the US, UK or Swedish state? If he hadnt had access to the material, no doubt he'd be whining that he didnt know the basis for the case against himself, and couldn't prepare a defence.
Given your use of the phrase 'rat's ass', I'm guessing you are from the other side of the pond. The Queen is our head of state, a role which has several remaining powers attached to it, not least the power to invite someone to form a government, or agree to dissolve parliament. In her other job, as head of the commonwealth (where she is head of state for a number of other countries) she may have advice and guidance to offer to her government of the day.
It might not be perfect, but its the UK system.
Hmmm, well they have no signal penetration where I live, (ie in my house) but would not allow me to leave before my contract was up. When I asked for a PAC at the end of 18 months, I was told it would come by SMS as that was the only way they were allowed to do it; strangely when I phoned to complain that the PAC hadnt arrived 65 hours later, they gave me it over the phone. Quite happy to send me the customer survey questions by txt before they actually carried out the work too.
Twonks.
Go try doing a search on the No 10 website for it, and then try to find out what it actually means. In particular, what is the plan to get from the current infrastructure to G-Cloud, and why is that important for knowledge workers who work at the same desk every day, processing stuff on re-purposed green screens?
(I understand that lib dem ministers are causing havoc in Whitehall at the moment by refusing to use PCs and insisting that apps are made to run on their Macs. At the same time, civil servants are being asked to lock down networks ever tighter after the latest Wikileaks)
Please someone tell government IT heads in the UK that; despite a complete absence of cash or business case, they are pressing on with the creation of a government cloud. Civil servants sit in offices with LAN connections, they are knowledge workers, their security staff wont let them have WIFI access, so how the hell is this where they might go?
And how exactly are you supposed to get the service status update if your ADSL is down. Cant even get to the BT webpage to check the phone number. and since my phone is on o2, I have to walk into the garden to get a data feed and pull the web page up in circa 5 minutes.
Section 29 of the DPA exempts from certain provisons of the Act personal data processed for the prevention or detection of crimer, the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. Section 33 (2) of the DPA provides that for the purposes of the second DP principle, the further processing personal data only for research purposes is not to be regarded as incompatible with the purposes for which they were obtained, but not to support measures of decisions with respect to individuals or cause susbstantial damage or distress to any data subject.
They need a proper lawyer and a set of balls, rather than a CLAS consultant.
that juvenile's criminal records are wiped at age 18? In Scotland the earliest age at which an offence can come off your record is 40. This may change under the Childrens Hearings bill, but the only records that weed before 40 at present are where there is no proceedings by the Reporter.
What percentage of any of the big disaster projects was the software license? 1% maybe. FOSS makes sense for greenfield sites or where you have lots of technical skills available cheaply. In government which pays buttons for licensed software it makes absloutley no financial sense unless you hide all the training and migration costs for end users, and the money just isnt there for that. What gvt pays for services and change is where the costs are.
Its a different approach to say that since you are now no longer entitled to any services from Government, we dont need to identify you. Nice out of the box thinking, but unlikely to be popular when the cost of every government service rises as it has to provide identity services. Where does it leave the CIOs Standards and Architecture Framework, which I think was predicated on there being a strong cross-Government digital identity service? Direct.gov?
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