Posts by IHateWearingATie

Hmmmm

1. Central gov employs hundreds of thousands of people, and deals with sensitive information all day every day. The likelyhood of a complete muppet doing this is pretty high. That does not mean that everyone in Gov is an idiot.

2. From my experience, private sector organisations are just as bad. Came across an example recently that made my mind boggle, but you'll never read about it in the paper as the company will never tell anyone and it wasn't personal data or anything covered by the data protection act so it is not obligated to tell. Stupid things government does ALWAYS ends up in the paper

3. Don't have enough information from the story, but posting a disk encrypted with very strong encryption may be appropriate given the outcome of the risk assessment. The headline might be fun, but actually it could be a non-story (but that doesn't sell papers or get unique vistors). Use the right encryption software and the disks will be nothing but coasters to anyone who doesn't have the NSA's encryption munching capabilities (maybe not even them depending on what they used to encrypt it).

A special place in hell...

... is already reserved for the OneDrive sync designers.

This improvement will mearly make their eternal punishment slightly less agonising.

(It has got better, but still catches me out sometimes)

The only camera test that matters for this phone...

... will be can it take a decent detailed snap of a fair sized whiteboard with much squiqqling on it in a single picture.

Important for the vast majority of users of this I suspect. My old Blackberry Bold sucked at taking pictures of my squiggles on whiteboards.

I'll be happy...

If it makes using Outlook Web access and share point less painful in IE then I'll be happy. I use chrome or Firefox to access OWA and the company's share point as IE 11 is so flaky with it.

I can only assume the engineers who developed OWA and share point were as fed up with IE being crap as the rest of us and coded it for decent browsers.

The good old days

This used to be the usual practice for government procurement. Tender released on 19th Dec (as the procurement team goes on Christmas break), with the response due back on 5th Jan so they can get stuck in when they're back. One member of the team then occasionally checks emails (i.e once a week) in case anyone has asked any questions.

Good to see CCS is keeping it old skool

Worst excuse for reading porn at work.

Ever.

It should ALWAYS be called the God Particle...

... as it really annoys particle physicists :)

Just as you should always tell chemists they are glorified cooks, biologists that its all just plumbing in the end, and management consultants like me that we are all overpaid, know-it-all, useless bastards :)

New estates and urban fill in...

... are some of the most difficult to sort out. There are patches of 80 & 90s builds in East London on Exchange Only lines that are longer than you might think and the Cable Co ignored them when they were doing their 90s build out. Really the only option is 4G, WiMax of some kind or FTTP. FTTP install in London to domestic premises is so expensive whoever put it in would never get their money back.

New builds on the edge of towns like Cheltenham are a nightmare as well. The copper line topology for the town will have been designed ages ago, so it is a case of just finding where it may be possible to run the copper bundles given whatever duct space and spare cables you have to run a telephone service to the new build. I remember seeing a map of one where the best route ended up adding several K to the distance on the wire run, while the exchange was less than 1 K away.

Huge story really. ..

Organising spends money on end user IT kit.

Shocking. Awful. They should use quills and their own blood for ink.

For fcuks sake - some commentards seem to think the public sector should run on good will and fairy dust with nothing spent on anything ever.

"We pay these people wages ? How dare they waste tax payers money - they should do it for free out of their own good will"

Meh

Always thought that Banksy's stuff was fun, but nothing more profound that you get in the political cartoons of the broadsheets. Just with much much better marketing and more 'right on' celebs loving it.

buggy Android app

The Android app on a Samsung galaxy s4 (Android 4.4.2 currently) had two very annoying bugs.

It fails opening stories that have any embedded video - the whole article, not just the video itself. It gives a page not loaded error in the frame where the text should be

Second, it randomly fails to load the comments page for some articles- can't see any pattern to it, probably 25 % of the time. It gives a connectivity error as though there is no Internet access, but it happens on wifi as well as on cellular data and when I switch to the browser I have no problem getting to the article on the Web site.

I barely use the Android app any more as it is so buggy. Sorry!

That's all very well...

... but what's the jitter like? Can't play Call of Duty with teenagers on Ritalin with messy packet latency

Shiny......

I wonder if our IT guys will mind getting me a Z3 as a replacement should my Galaxy S4 come to an unfortunate end on the train platform this week.

Don't worry, I;m sure they don't read El Reg

I don't pay anything for twitter...

... so I am the product.

I just can't get worked up about stuff like this - they need to make money to keep the servers running and I don't want to pay. It it gets too annoying I'll leave and probably do something more useful that read live tweets from Formula 1 races (which is all I use Twitter for really).

More to come...

My mate works for the E(D)S part of HP and it seems things are looking very bad, with them failing to win anywhere near enough work to replace their legacy contracts as they expire. Coupled with truly mad travel and expenses policies that are seriously getting in the way of service delivery it seems the only way is down :(

2 years for my Nexus 7...

... cause the battery is knackered.

While I always welcome an excuse to waste my money on some more shiny shiny, I am a little annoyed I didn't get 3 years out of it.

About matches my experience

Currently commuting from Watford to Kingston (sometime round the outside via richmond, sometimes through central London) and reception is pretty good using my EE mobile.

Only on 4G though - if I have it switched to 3G (as I do at home to get a signal for voice calls) the mobile connectivity sucks on both routes.

I wonder why the change of hinge...

... I have a Yoga 2 as my main work machine and it is really very good. The hinge seems to work fine and the laptop is pretty thin already - can't imagine this gives many extra benefits.

People still buy HP desktops?

I imagine the PC and Printers part being cast off in a lifeboat from a larger Enterprise yatch, with the sharks (Lenovo, Dell etc) slowly starting to circle.

The outcome is inevitable...

A defence of DVLA

- You are the DVLA CIO...

- You are pretty sure about the normal loads that your car tax website will get in normal periods throughout the year, as you have been running the old website for a while.

- You have a fixed budget.

- Your 'customers' HAVE to use your service to tax their car on pain of fines etc.

- You have a change to the service which in theory means the only difference for the average punter is they don't get to change the paper disc displayed in their window. However, you expect this is going to mean a rush on 1st October - but you don't really know how bad its going to be.

- You have a fixed budget.

- Building temporary load balancing capacity in for the beginning of the month will cost extra. You don't know how much extra you will need and for how long, as this is well outside normal operations.

- You have a fixed budget.

Given this, trading a bit of 'customer' pain and a brief moment of bad publicity for a cash saving on the load balancing and temporary capacity doesn't seem that bad an approach from their point of view.

pointless

These hearings are unfortunately pointless as the parliament only have the power to reject the whole set, not individual commissioners. However bad he is, it won't be enough to move the parliament to reject the commissioners.

Surprised at the lack of progress in this sector...

... as I remember working for a short while (in one of my brief departures from Public Sector work at the time) with a system that seemed to work pretty well in 2004/5.

The system had video cameras in each room for image recognition to track the movements of the person within the home. I saw it tested and it was pretty good at recognising when someone had fallen over and wasn't getting up or was moving much slower than usual, or hadn't visited the kitchen for the day (comparing with normal patterns, you could assume the person hadn't eaten yet).

Given that was 10 years ago, and the cameras and processing power was pretty crappy compared to today's capabilities I'm surprised that something like this hasn't been commercialised so far.

Paging Steve Bong...

... this man is a threat to your catapult

He must be eliminated. Paging มาลัย (which means "Garland of Flowers" in Thai)

You've got to look at the share price...

... and wonder how the CEO keeps her job.

The market is basically saying that they think the company is going to be so bad at using the cash that they may as well put it all on a large barge, set fire to it and let it float across San Francisco bay.

That's a hell of an indictment , yet I bet she doesn't get kicked out at the next AGM.

I read the guardian article stephen fry wrote...

... and this is hardly even a parody!

Refreshing?

This looks like a pretty refreshing approach - instead of muddling along trying to ignore the writing on the wall and then failing suddenly and spectacularly, they are pulling the plug early while there is still enough cash to pay the employees and creditors, and wind up the business in an orderly manner.

Proof of the gateway theory

Much like some people think cannabis is a gateway to harder drugs, this proves that Celine Dion is a gateway to the furthest reaches of human depravity. I always knew she was trouble.

Nuke Her From Orbit

It's the only way to be sure.

More like accessories market...

It's hard to see how smart watches at the moment aren't more like the accessories market, given the two big players (Apple Watch and Android Wear) are exclusive to their respective phone OSes. Completely tied to the phone, just because Apple create a great watch / phone case / other accessory doesn't mean that suddenly Android users will buy that watch / phone case / other accessory.

If Pebble or other generic makers had made a huge splash I could see their market share being eaten, but there is nothing in any smart watch that I have seen so far that could convince me that phone users will migrate one way or another because of the watches on offer. That would suggest that LG, Samsung etc have little to fear for the moment on the watch front from Apple - if they are unable to sell watches it will be because their offerings are not good enough to get consumers to choose to buy a smart watch, rather than buying an Apple one instead of a Samsung or LG or Motorola one.

MAYBE a few higher end consumers may switch, but I suspect the larger screen of the 6 and 6 plus will be the driver of that, and not the Apple Watch.

Am I the only one looking forward to this?

If the rumours are true with a larger iPhone and a really well implemented watch, I may be tempted back from Android.

Or, as has happened before, Apple take what other people have been doing for ages and work out a better way to package and present it. Then others like Samsung can go 'ahhhh, that's a much better approach to a smartwatch' and improve their current crappy offering.

Either way, I think I win.