Posts by Steve Medway 160 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2007
This is what happens when 'customisation' occurs. Why is it ever done...
It's done because some stupid bozos decided their way of working is better than everyone else's.
99.9% of the time the organisation needs to change their crappy processes which necessitated customisation in the first place.
As for the 11m, that would be my fee for touching such a god awful mess. However that doesn't leave a lot of wriggle room for the actual cost of the software.
Am I an old over the hill Linux specialist because I hate Wayland & SystemD?
I still fail to see their benefits and to me it still feels like Alpha code trying to solve problems in the wrong way.
I also hate DevOps because it simply equals forcing your customers to beta test software without actually telling them.
Should I retire?
No we're NOT evading TAX. Sure we avoid it where we can as any sane person would do.
We don't get any of the benefits of 'real' employees. Holidays, sick pay, maternity / paternity job pay, job security, etc etc etc.
You would you avoid tax if the PAYE system let you, but you're clearly just jealous due to a headline rate that seems steep but in reality isn't.
Still that's the ignorance of a standard employee for you.
rm -rf in the wrong dir, during an application upgrade... It dawned on me when the delete took longer than expected.
Thank the lord I had multiple backups made after safely shutting down the app before the upgrade. So in actuality the customer got two upgrades for the price of one, they never knew but I fessed up to my boss immediately who's reply was got a backup? I replied yep and got a 'no problem then' in return :)
To Err is human; To really foul things up requires an Autonomous Operating System...
"It is the first and the only autonomous OS in the world," Ellison said. That means automated provisioning, scaling, tuning, patching, upgrading, security monitoring and remediation, he explained".
The above statement is patently untrue - Microsoft has been automatically breaking Windows 10 via updates for some time now - so much so the automatic 'feature' has been rolled back to a certain extent... Best of luck Larry - you'll need it.
"Consequently whether I win the appeal or not [== October] I am still owed a considerable amount of money from DWP"
Sorry to disappoint but even with the ruling regarding stopping DLA during an appeal process they are still perfectly entitled to get that money back should you loose in court.
It's only if you win that you would be entitled to the back-dated sum, and even then you would have to take them to court again to get it.
I was loving being a tsb customer with all that lovely compensation they were giving for their constant ****ups.
But in the end after phoning them to warn of a dodgy attempted transactions they still let my a/c get rinsed of 2k and then took 32 days to send me a new debit card... (after multiple phone calls and false promises) their time was up.
Sure the 450 quid+ compo I got was useful but I'd have forgone all of it to have an account which reported its figures correctly and provided a card so I could actually spend money from my current a/c .
Improved West Coast Mainline coverage, you're having a laugh. When improved means from going from super shit to just shit it's still crap that isn't actually usable.
Just DON'T get me started on those tinted Virgin Train Windows that were deliberately designed to reflect mobile signals to force you to buy the pitiful (now free) WiFi (not even youtube-able at 240p) from 10 years ago either...
Hint to Virgin Trains, take that crap off your windows and you might actually have some happier customers (well apart from those annoyed by businessmen tossers who think how loud they can talk about their next 'Blue Sky' meeting is a measure of their dick size).
The only 'truthful' answer I've ever been able to come up with why the BT/EE merger was allowed and the O2/Three merger was rejected was the lining of pockets.
It certainly wasn't down to European 'competitive landscape' reasons, EE/BT + Vodafone + O2/Three with equal spectrum would have been great for competition because the playing field would have been level.
That is unless that is Ofcom were convinced they would collude to jack up prices in step with each other... which might be a second 'truthful' answer, but as you say we'll never know.
There is no such thing as 4G+, The original UK LTE networks ≠ 4G. Only LTE-A = 4G
Later revisions of HSDPA were officially 3.75G, bog standard LTE was more like 3.85G - according to official 3GPP standards it never was 'real' 4G.
We missed the boat on real 3G network deployments in the UK and then jumped on LTE too early so got shafted the other way round because the kit & backhaul wasn't ready.
t's just a bloddy good job a lot of the LTE kit deployed could be upgraded to LTE-A instead of being thrown away, but it would still have been more economical for the networks (and better for consumers) to upgrade 3G to the max 3GPP release and skip of standard LTE altogether.
We should have gone straight to LTE-A/4G networks when the software for the radio hardware was actually ready (and the back-haul networks upgraded) which was about three years ago.
So in actuality we ended up being late to the 4G party in the same way as we were late to the 3G party. Those marketers are great at covering up crap like this.
Lets have a bit of honesty when it comes to discussing level 5 automation.
Level 5 doesn't even come close to cutting it in the real world. It's not five or even ten years away but literally decades before any car can drive itself around Cairo or the arc de triomphe.
Who really gives two hoots about a leafy Oxfordshire simulator?
What is this software... Does it scan a fingerprint? No not technically, the API for that is from the finger print scanner attached to said device. Is it comparing the fingerprint? Probably not, its more likely to be transmitted to a server already running the matching comparison software.
Some bright spark in the met thought, we can do this better, cheaper and faster than the alternatives - the beancounters agreed.
The Met would never be allowed to employ a software company directly without great difficulty, a services company must be involved! It's good for you, we promise say the gov. of the time.
If you seriously want to outsource something as trivial as this to Crapita et al. you should hang your head in shame.
Actually no, not true on the extended warranty. Replacement goods must be like-for-like or better from DSG or whatever they're called now.
My old CRT TV (which coped with NTSC as well as PAL) got replaced by a 720p LCD TV which was three times the price. Why you ask? Because NTSC was needed for my Jap Gamecube and the cheapest telly they had at replacement time which did NTSC was the 720p I got.
The same is true for items damaged on delivery - if no identical item is available they must give you an upgrade to something equivalent or better (they will obviously offer you your money back first though). This is why I have a Dell 4K monitor that was three times the price of the Acer 4K screen I actually bought.
PCW / Currys / Dixons additional warranties can be an absolute bargain - but only on 'End of Line' or hardware with unusual specs. Don't take what a shop grunt says, read the fine print and hold them to it (which isn't difficult, rules is rules in call centres ya know :) ).
Yes I did do a stint at PCServiceCall for my sins (many years ago), but once you know the policies on returns and warranty they really are damn good if bought on the right item.
Oh and one final thing, most people don't haggle in the UK, which is just bloddy stupid... If you sign up for additional warranty the sales person is FAR more flexible on a discount from the sticker price -
simply cancel after leaving the shop.
This is a well known VM issue. I had their 70mb service, dropped to BT's 52mb and can now stream 4K youtube without buffering. On VM it was unuseable.
Plus my pings are sub 15ms instead of being 30ms+
VM's 'headline' speeds are BS. You do get the headline rate in some areas but the QOS is rubbish.
My freshly installed BT fibre line syncs at about 55mb, so no point in me getting a faster BT connection but the QOS is awesome in comparison to VM and at less than half the price I was paying.
The FX!32 process is exactly how CEMU emulates the Wii U (GPU shader instructions instead of CPU instructions, the PPC > Intel bit is 'pure' emulation).
Nintendo are very, very into litigation, CEMU is big enough for the Big N to go after it should it decide to. It hasn't because it knows it would lose (not to CEMU dev's but to the IFF which would back it to the hilt).
Intel is just huffing and puffing, I don't think the PC manufacturers will listen this time, Intel's pockets aren't THAT deep. Intel Inside worked by throwing money at the problem (illegally), not a threat of litigation.
Once upon a time in the square mile all the traders were all given blackberrys to make them work while out of the office as well as in, and at home, and on the train... but there was a slight issue....
The trouble was they could still use the 'no signal' excuse while in the pub (although they're trying to ban lunchtime drinkypoo's these days too).
After this 'wonderful' development they won't have beer (or more likely champagne) at lunch and have no connectivity excuses.
I would feel sorry for them but they're all bastards earning a squillion times more than most of us Reg. readers even in well paid I.T. jobs.
CoKinetic wanted to just write a replacement seatback GUI (hilariously called 'AirPlay') and sync it to Panasonic's FOSS based middleware layer. They were bloody stupid to enter into an exclusive licence with Panasonic to sell their 'Airplay' GUI. After this deal was done they couldn't go to any more airlines independently... BLOODY IDIOTS.
In addition CoKinetic are seriously pissed about back-handers and 'gifts' paid/given to airline techs to advise dumping CoKinetic's 'GUI'. My god they must be green to believe this wouldn't happen!
Panasonic were pissed about a little upstart taking a slice of their software pie. They obviously thought 'fuck you we've done all the hard work (OS / Middleware / Seatback GUI) and making 'Airplay' work with our middle-ware really ain't our problem' (damn little pest muscling in on 'our' hard work).
I kinda see their point, it's only a GUI they were selling. The trouble is Panasonic's 'middle-ware' is FOSS based with undocumented changes and no access to it's source code.
Panasonic appear completely guilty but I can't help feel CoKinetic are guilty of complete and utter ineptitude in business.
"Apple bought in an existing expert ARM licence SoC design company"
Being a bit of a pedant they actually bought an expert PowerPC SoC design company. A change in instruction set didn't faze them at all though, Apple's ARM designs are probably the best in the industry.
Apple licenced Samsung's ARM design until the iPhone4 was released with their bespoke 'A4' chip.
The rest of the post is spot on. The numbers make no sense at all. Especially when adding in Samsung processors in old iPhones.
"Praising Ofcom may seem incongruous. Wasn’t the UK one of Europe’s 4G laggards because of regulatory dithering?"
Well you could easily argue that the delay to UK 4G was an improvement over the race to 3G.
When 3G networks were first introduced to the UK it was 1st Gen equipment with no upgrade path apart from rip and replace. Compare that to the UK's 4G networks which were 2nd/3rd Gen and easily upgraded via firmware updates to LTE-Adanced.
That's the reason 3G was always pants in this country regardless of what network you were using compared to the 3G 'laggard' countries of the world which were almost as fast as bog standard LTE.
These practices are illegal in the UK and have been for some time.
Any provider would epically fail in court due to the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008.
The beauty for customers taking this route is that you get to claim compensation as well a refund. You can also charge interest at up to an APR of 8%
Essentially they tried to **ck people over, but people can easily **ck em' back several times over. It's cheap, pretty quick and easy to do.
"That has the potential to make us more efficient – rather than arresting a vulnerable person and having to take them into the station. It's not about taking away anyone's liberty, all their rights and entitlements would be exactly the same."
No change in rights? On Street questioning? How many people walk around with their solicitor 24x7?
Not convinced by the article, Not convinced by intel either. 2nd Gen X-Point in a DIMM slot format would be around x1000 faster than current storage.
Does the author not realise that X-Point on all current storage busses don't have the bandwidth or low enough latency for it to perform to it's promise? Attach it directly to the memory bus and things could be golden.
That's marketing BS for you. Intel engineers no doubt hate the Marketers, they're probably using numbers for a product still under NDA.
heheh, you're not doing it right then.... :p
Tell that to all old school Dev's who came out of retirement to work on Y2K. The clever ones earned more in three years than Young Padowans earn in twenty.
If I'm still alive ~2038 I know how I'll be topping up my pension.
I got one to replace my day 1 white iPhone 4 (yes I hold onto usable tech for a long time).
After installing and uninstalling a lot of apps and receiving a few OTA updates my Oneplus X battery life was totally miserable (~14 hrs normal usage). Reset to stock, did the latest OTA, let Google Play do it's thing and only install the apps I wanted = battery life is triple what it was at purchase date. I can now get a day and half's normal usage out of it.
Awesome phone for the price, the 1080p screen is truly beautiful, nothing else near 200 quid renders virtually Stock Android so nicely. Oxygen OS is so vanilla it's refreshing, I've never turned on the 'shelf feature' I like close to stock. Much nicer than any others manufacturer skins / custom launchers.
Buy a case with the phone though, it slips off of anything that isn't dead level, I really mean absolutely anything, think butter in a hot pan, thats how slippery it is. The free cover is ok but the kevlar one is an excellent design (especially at the corners where it grips the phone and also where you need the most protection).
The camera quality was terrible before the latest OTA now its a lot better + battery life is miles better. Roll on the marshmallow update for even better battery life and proper SD card storage merging.
Totally agree that its the perception of availability (or lack of) that really cheeses off clients.
A one off indicates a problem where things are not standard, where as frequent downtime indicates stability issues, that is what annoys clients far more than big one-off's.
Constant small amounts of downtime usually result in a different supplier being found at the end of the contract, one (or ever a few over a long period) generally have much less impact when it comes to contract renewals.
That's just from my experience in Telecoms, but YMMV dependant upon your field of work.
DevOps is corporate bullsh*t for layoffs.
It's main use is to lower staff headcount and err reduce the headcount some more.
A developer will never see things the way operations do. Good Op's are the customers voice (Oy! Dev's sort ya crap out, this issue will piss off my customer, and hence me cos' I'll get it in the neck).
Put a dev in front of a customer and they'll more than likely tell them to f*ck off 'My codes great, you're the one doing it wrong'. It may well be true but that's not the point, 'the customer is always right' sigh.
What Op's do is throw away the crap customer 'issues' and forward on the real issues. Op's staff are basically the bs filter, without them most Dev's I've worked with would no doubt turn into gun toting mass customer murderers.
As for the uptime bit of this article, I call BS. One big downtime per year is much preferred to many small outages. Just look at SLA's, most companies are hit with punitive damages based on the total number of outages not their length.
Yeah sure Pascal because no Linux machines have ever suffered from something called heartbleed.
Linux isn't any more or less secure than Windows, it's the numptys that badly configure both OS's that are to blame for 99% of attack vectors.
You can on the other hand say Linux is more secure by default than Windows, but that still doesn't stop numptys configuring it badly from a security point of view.
It was once famously said "Only real men have fabs"...
Surely it won't be long before someone says "Only real businesses have Data Centres"
Shame that neither saying is true, 'Cloud' my arse it's just shiny wording for old idea, we'll get back to the real world when one of the Clouds goes REALLY tits up, but not until then.
"A kitchen so small I needed to pay double to get a table top D/W because there's no slot for a floor standing one, even a half-width. I'd rather look out of the window when doing prep or eating my cereal, instead of having a breakfast bar facing the wall and a sink facing the window. I also have a fridge in the hall because the flipping kitchen is too small. And the sensible place for the fridge has got a bloody washing machine in it."
So your too lazy to wash up manually and your kitchen is super small too. Here's some ideas for ya:-
1. Swap the fridge and the washing machine locations, you can buy long washing hoses no problem.
2. Stop being lazy, wasting 'leccy and do your own washing up, dishwashers ruin decent kitchen wear, plates, glasses etc, you've got one so you know it's true!
3. If you live in a terraced house whilst doing the washing up try waving at your neighbour and maybe open your kitchen window and have a chat whilst getting on with it, does wonders for neighbourly friendships :)
I'm guessing your a Yank, they still allow plug points in bathrooms. Tis bloddy stupid mixing leccy & water in bathroom, but since your probably a Yank you'll never believe that.
Err sinks under Windows are a good idea. You get to look out the window whilst doing the washing up. I mean seriously, have you seen how small a two bedroomed terraced house's kitchen is? Plenty can't even fit a fridge in theirs (that's circa 1900's housing stock for you, small kitchens and no original bathroom).
It's embarrassing that many new builds are actually smaller in footage than tiny old terraced houses. Barrat type development houses are nick-named 'rabbit hutches' for a reason!
As for no UK house needing central heating... my god you've obviously never lived by the sea or in Scotland (or the UK for that matter)!
Next you'll be telling us how banning guns in UK has caused a major uplift in shootings.
To sum up..... Muppet!
Simples...
Don't buy a new house with no decent broadband available (pre or post purchase). Builders would soon add Broadband to Gas, Electric and Water.
While we're about it force builders to NOT build on floodplains.... They're called floodplains for a reason! Mass flooding isn't a global warming thing, it's fuckwit planning thing.
Or put another way.... force builders to lay more than one of their usual cables (the Portaloo kind).
I sense a worm hole... Enron is a prime example of collusive fraud, Maybe the Juniper does proper internal code audits.... but who audits the auditors before the brown stuff hits the spinny thing?
Sarbanes-Oxley didn't really change anything, just create one massive clusterf*uk of paperwork and use it to place blame after the fact. It would be highly amusing if it wasn't such a pain in the ass.
It's a critical to have a test strategy that has a solid methodology and every potential input into the system is tested.
However off-piste testing is fun, it really pisses of Dev's off because it can expose laziness or incompetence (e.g. playing the game of doing just enough to pass the Company QA 'suite of tests' despite what the company mantra is on product security).
Off-piste pen testing is the job of a hacker who wants to do it for fun. The reality is that a company 'friendly' towards these people can save a lot of money. That is where the independence bit of bug bounties pays off. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper than keeping them on the pay roll 'full-time' but there's nothing the matter with a retainer for a good 'bug hunter'.
I think everybody commenting so far has missed an important point regarding QA.
QA's purpose is to ensure that a product's features works as intended. If some rogue employee puts in a hidden backdoor that allows additional 'functionality' it's not the QA's Dept's job to spot it. FFS They don't even get to see the code usually.
It was up to his line manager or teammates to ask the question of why something so nefarious (or boneheaded) was inserted into the code. This is a 'Pre-QA' issue and points to dev team not performing 2nd person code validation (or the second person was not as clever as the backdoor writer).
'Negative Testing' is a valid test methodology but it's virtually impossible to say it has EVER been completed because the reality is that it NEVER will be (there's always someone more cunning than you out there folks)!
Deep 'Negative Testing' would have caught this kind of stuff-up but how far do you go with it? For someone like Juniper I'd have an army of independent penetration testers + bug / hack bounties. Seems likely that they have neither.....
Google killing Chrome OS? Nope, Google killing Android? Nope.
Google replacing the underpinnings of Android with Chrome OS so they share a common OS platform and kernel, yup highly likely (lets face it both already run a linux kernel and GNU code so its not that big a change).
Technically Android isn't an OS, It's a runtime environment on top of an OS. It's more akin to Flash running on Windows except it's really ripped off Java running on Linux (simplistically put, but close enough to get the point across).
The story should have read as Android is being merged into ChromeOS.... Hasn't anyone commenting on this story heard of ARC (Android Runtime for Chrome)?
In essence this is Google play at a converged OS in the same way as Windows 10 & Ubuntu Mobile imho
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