Posts by Dr Who

Do you mean like a throwing star, machine gun or light sabre? Now you can vibrate your enemies to death!

Re: What do you mean by 'utterly naive'?

I ran a company years ago whose primary market was dying. What we should have done is made most of our staff redundant and changed the focus of the business to the bits which were making money (email systems and browser based software development).

Instead, we (the directors) took pay cuts and kept the staff on hoping against hope we could revive the loss making core business. This was the wrong thing to do. Our staff were talented and when we did eventually have to let them go they all very quickly found great jobs on better pay. It would have been much better for everyone involved, staff, management and shareholders to make the redundnancies early instead of hanging on. That's a lesson I never forgot.

There is an assumption that anybody who runs a business is a ruthless psychpath who treats people like meat. In the vast majority of cases the exact opposite is true, and it was because of our loyalty to our staff that we eventually had to wind the company up. As I say, it's a lesson I learned the hard way.

Re: Pen and paper?

Eh??

I don't think they were writing the call details on a piece of paper and then having a bloke on a bike deliver it to the ambulance. I think that in the absence of their job recording and routing system, they had to do that bit on paper, and then look at a map, possibly even one hanging on the wall, and contact the nearest ambulance by phone, text, radio or whatever to assign the job.

To me this sounds like a very acceptable fallback. And, as an emergency measure, it appears to have worked.

Still, with the money that's been thrown at that system, a five hour outage is pretty unacceptable. 99.30% uptime on a monthly basis.

Agreed. Smacks of an article written by someone who has no understanding whatsoever of the technology in question but at least has had a go at reassembling the PR blurb in order to justify their fee. The result is unfortunately gobbledegook.

Re: Amateurs

Totally agree - utter amateurs. These amounts are loose change compared with the shenanigans involved in awarding NHS wide contracts to the big consultancies. How many ex-politicians are now non-execs on a big business board somewhere?

And then we get to defence contracts, but that's a whole nother story.

Re: The abuse of "military grade"...

"yeah baby, I'm totally cool and a spy and dangerous and have a massive willy, want to come back to mine?"

Why ask the question when you already know the correct, and perfectly sensible, answer.

PS I have a military grade lawn mower. The exact same model is used by the army to mow their lawns - I kid you not!

You've totally hit the nail on the head. I'd upvote multiple times if I could. This failure has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with system administration practices.

And yes RAID is not backup. Nor is cross-site synchronisation.

Re: Space hats!

Never mind 50s sci-fi. If the uniforms look anything like this http://bit.ly/2dWu9MK, I'm signing up. (biddi-biddi)

Normally, I groan when faced with yet another "cloud computing strikes again" type comment, but in this case I'm absolutely in agreement. A todo list is fine on a piece of paper, stuffed in my back pocket. We're not talking project scheduling here, it's just a list. I've just checked and there are dozens of shopping list apps out there too which is unbelievable. Paper, back pocket, HB pencil, job done.

Re: There is no security issue

We are all blinded by dogma and nostalgia. The health service in the UK needs more money - a lot more money. We need more doctors and nurses and we need to pay them more. We will need a lot more geriatric and other age related facilities.

What Tony Blair proved is that chucking loads of money at the NHS as it stands is tantamount to chucking it into a black hole. It disappears and nothing improves. Something has to change and an urgent and honest national debate is needed about how to dismantle the current dysfunctional system and build one that can handle the epic healthcare challenges facing us over the next few decades.

One thing is absolutely certain, the NHS as it stands is an outdated, inadequate and inappropriate vehicle for delivering health services in the UK for the 21st century. Let's get over our ideological hangups and have a serious attempt at tackling the problem. If we don't, chaos and disaster in our healthcare system are guaranteed.

Re: Saw this coming and recently decamped to Zen

Zen. I use them for home and work broadband and landline. Cannot rate them highly enough. You pay a bit more, but it's worth every penny..

Re: Yup you're old

@Ragarth. Totally agree. I just get frustrated with the large contingent on El Reg who are anti-cloud full stop. They base their entire opinion on services such as Office 360 or SalesForce where in effect you lose control. There are many shades of grey between in house and the Office 360 / SalesForce type scenario. Horses for courses and all that.

Re: Electrical Smoke Event?

Exactly! Why does everything have to be an event these days?

Severe weather event = big storm

Seismic event = earthquake

Unanticipated landing event = plane crash

Morning ablution event = shit/shower/shave

It's the bloody yanks again I tell you. They started it.

Re: Actually...

The ch is the hardest sound for a non-native to get right, hence the time honoured test of asking someone to say "chuchi chaeschtli" which simply means kitchen cupboard but is damn hard to day if you didn't grow up saying it. When a Swiss says the ch it sounds OK. When a foreigner tries it, it normally sounds like they're about to deposit an enormous flob at your feet.

Not mentioned in the article but must be part of Google's thinking is that on their door step in Zurich they will have the ETH - probably the best technical university in Europe.

Re: The Cloud...

In this case, the customers should be OK. Outsourcery, inspite of its misleading name, is just another reseller of MS cloud services and as such it is likely that service will continue. Now, whether being on the MS cloud is a good thing is an altogether other discussion.

Re: Surely there's a marketing made in heaven here

With the greatest of respect and to your great credit, your post is an excellent demonstration of why you are a techie and not a marketer.

Re: Keep your e-mail seperate

Sounds like BT have taken swift action. "I have supported 28 million ..... And now? I am sitting at home polishing my LinkedIn profile".

This hits the nail on the head. You need to spot the moment the encryption happens by seeing the change between two incremental backups. Even if all your backups are WORM and even if they're on tape, there's still the scenario where the encryption is done but the malware keeps serving up data normally with a software shim for say a month before cutting everything off and demanding its ransom. This means you've got a month's worth of useless backups. Even if your archive goes back more than a month, the data will be completely obsolete. There is malware out there that does precisely this.

As AC says, the only solution is to make log checking your religion and spot the problem as it's happening.

PS this one wakes me up in the middle of the night too!

Re: What about redundancy and DR ?

Many SMEs do indeed blindly trust in one platform provider, but in Spotify's case I suspect it's a calculated business risk. Google is less likely to go bankrupt than Spotify, so they probably won't disappear overnight. The cost of downtime is a known factor as is the cost of using multiple providers. Given the dependence on proprietary Google tools, having a second provider would involve a complete port of the system to another set of tools. I imagine the cost of this massively outweighs the cost of projected downtime.

Downtime in itself is not necessarily an evil. The cost of five nines often outweighs the business advantages of doing it.

Exactly

Which is why I'm always amazed when someone spends weeks pitching their product and writing, honing and perfecting their proposal, ping it off in an email to the client and don't bother to make the phone call to be sure it's reached its target. Email delivery is unbelievably unreliable and should not be used as a mission critical business tool.

Bring back X.400 that's what I say.

Re: Re-locating all that computing hardware

Spot on! However we arrange our infrastructure we are all unavoidably dependant on a host of third party services from the power grid to communications networks to payment processors et cetera. If we forget the word cloud and replace it with internet, we are of necessity all using it. Having a bunch of servers in your own data centre is only the tiniest piece of the jigsaw.

Re: Fixed headline

"BRIAIN-BOGGLINGLY" even

Re: Clarification ?

Good point. My understanding is the same as yours, but this article appears to suggest the opposite i.e. that you cannot idependently collect and distribute the same data as Football DataCo. If anyone from Outlaw is reading it would be interesting to know the answer.