Posts by zedenne 27 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2008
There also seems to be a perverse pleasure some otherwise smart people take in not knowing things.
Have had this with my elder sister for years. She seems to pride herself on not knowing how computers work, i think because it ranks alongside knowing how plumbing works and that's the sort of thing lesser people have to worry about. Needless to say a number of years ago I told her to buy macs and call apple not me.
I'm sorry, I've worked in startups and large corporates but I just can't understand how they could have possibly come up with such a large number for software development.
How can it possibly have cost $1.5B to build some patient record mgt. apps for some NHS trusts (i.e. not all of them)?
Up until the beginning of 2011 (pre the latest big cash injection from goldman sachs) facebook had a total investment of $800M. Now obviously at some point FB started generating actual operating income to offset cost but it's the largest social network in the world with something like 14x the number of users as there are people in the UK.
"With over £1 billion to invest over 3 years we have the opportunity to start to make a difference in changing the innovation environment in the UK."
splutter splutter splutter...
£1Billion?
is it me or do government types simply not understand how much £1B pounds is?
the last 4 startups i've been involved with had combined initial funding of about £4M. one of them went on to be sold for $1B. the current one has run quite happily for 3 years on an initial investment of 1.3M and now makes a profit.
biotech may need this sort of help. please stay away from the internet startup scene.
the people on their website look so professional and prosperous and even sexy!
oh, they're stock image you say? really the bcs is all about trying to emulate lawyers and doctors in creating a closed system of patronage?
maybe i'll carry on being a startup monkey then and help create entirely new businesses no certified professional thought would exist rather than taxing existing businesses for my "professional services".
(disclaimer: 15 years in IT and still no formal qualifications other than a couple of old MCP passes in the 90's)
been saying this for years now. why can't politicians/bureaucrats/organisations take the good stuff from the net (i.e. distributed interoperability) instead of the merely trendy (twitter).
i had an interview for a health organisation as a data architect a few years ago and the first thing i asked was how they managed standards in the health space (assuming the spine would be based on some sort of standard) and was told there was no such thing. anyone know if it's improved?
We live in a basement with patchy reception (currently on o2)
Here are some requirements for you.
**Me**
- I run a tech dev and ops team that has a support requirement outside hours
- Things go wrong that require my attention outside hours
- Would rather my home phone number is never used so I have the option of being out of touch
**Wife**
- Is a freelancer and often gets calls about prospective jobs
- Her mobile number is the one everybody has
- If someone can't get hold of her they will likely move on to the next person on their list.
- No work = no money
when i do buy dell it's for convenience only.
in my head i'm still buying a mainboard, case, drives, ram etc.
some of the servers in our office rack have cobbled components going back 10 years but are still humming along running network apps.
i guess it's true only the raid controller is effected but still annoying to make we think twice about buying dell in the future.
I think the argument that search has to be closed for SPAM reasons is a very seductive one, but still rather misguided.
As an operator of a number of websites I am in complete thrall to google. They have 95%+ of the search market. Lots of people are employing SEO methods to increase rankings and as such I have no choice but to follow. If our sites are not on page 1 then we don't get customers. We don't get customers we don't eat. etc.
However these services are for the most part snake oil. Complete BS. This exists because nobody really knows the rules.
If you look at the way email operates (still bigger than HTTP traffic I think) there are a number of providers of ANTI-SPAM software (from small to large) which operate on understood rules. Why could there not be an equivalent set of software available to me to help filter out SPAM sites?
Surely it would be better if the "army of good guys" (myself included) could be in a position to help improve the rules that govern spam. To act as a community to help remove bad sites?
Maybe this is pie-in-the-sky but in my experience solutions worked out collectively tend to last longer and have less negatives than closed-door solutions.
And i second the call for both Holy and Evil google icons. I want one.
personally i'm more of an osx and debian person these days but i an responsible for the work network which includes about 12 pc's under daily use.
we bought some new shuttle kit a month or so ago for a few users and have been running Win7 on it without any problems. all of the users involved had been using Vista previously and have been pretty effusive over the upgrade. from a support perspective we've had no issues (other than incompatability of xp profiles, which we had with vista as well).
in addition this week we've been experimenting with upgrading our legacy desktops (Dell Pentium 4 GX260s running at around 2Ghz with 1Gb RAM) to Win7 to see if we could get rid of XP. This wasn't even remotely possible with Vista but has worked flawlessly so far with Win7 (after some hackery to get it to use old Win2K graphics drivers). It's still a little early to tell but the Users in the test group have made plenty of positive noises.
The predominant use of Java in the enterprise these days is running web services, middleware integration, messaging etc. These are then for the most part powering browser based interfaces.
In general the use of Java as a fat client technology hasn't been very successful (with the possible
exception of Eclipse).
So you're probably using Java powered applications a lot more than you realise.
Air/Flex is picking up the desktop applications baton and doing a better job from what I've seen so far.
Hmm. Interesting that you seem to not understand Agile at all.
Are you recommending that instead we use waterfall models with full Engineering type timescales?
Wouldn't this mean that the system you eventually deploy is based on a design which in itself is based on the security needs of an internet landscape already out of date?
Just curious.
i totally agree. I had the misfortune to end up in a large US corporate for a while (unfortunate buyout) and simply couldn't get across to them that their banning of access to pretty harmless sites inspired me to work around all sorts of security.
As a card carrying atheist (or would be if the bha issued cards, damn them!) I wouldn't be surprised if the default u.s. list blocked access to atheist sites. they really don't like us.
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