Re: Slimming the government
*AKA "the minister for the position we had to create so he couldn't f*ck anything else up"
15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
You've got it in one. It was pretty obvious to a lot of people that he's a "stalking horse" - a convenient idiot to distract from the people behind the curtain and a convenient scapegoat for them later on
He's far too egotistical to even realise he's being played like a fiddle. His refusal to leave is as much a distraction from the mechanations as what's been happening up until how
Imagine scheming, pandering and planning to be leader your whole life, only to find you're utterly crap at it like everyone was telling you all along
On the other hand, everyone having degrees in engineering, etc is just as dangerous
The problem is an UNBALANCED government and the bigger problem isn't the mix of people in the chambers but the non-democratic aspects of what's happening behind the scenes
Mad Nad said the quiet bits out loud on TV, boiling down to: "Only the rich donors matter. They call the tune and what anyone else wants doesn't come into it"
Unfortunately the other political parties in Britain are similarly captured and the USA became a lost cause many years ago
Of course. "news" is reporting the unusual
This is WHY shootings and kiddy fiddlers get more coverage, despite us (and our children) being statistically safer than ever before
It's a good thing car-crash IT projects are reported. I would be more worried if they were not and it was regarded as "normal"
> But the critical phrase in what you point out is "well-defined requirements".
I've seen a politically appointed leader create a requirement which wouldn't work and then shop it around vendors until one of them was actually brave enough to say "yes we'll do it" (the others had said it was broken by design and were fired before they started)
They built it as designed, under budget - and of course it didn't work. Fixing it resulted in costs ballooning out to 25 times the original contract price. Fingers were pointed, harsh wrods exchanged and the idiot in question sued the people who called him an idiot, because they'd hurt his feelings
After he was removed, the system was audited, found not to work and replaced in 6 weeks with an opensource solution that cost 20% of the price of the original contract
But somehow those who called the fiasco out for what it was were the evil people....
Johnson isn't the cause of the problems at Westminster. He's merely a symptom that's resulted in catastrophic positive feedback. One of the more positive aspects of his tenure is that it resulted in many of the corrupt operators feeling secure enough to cast off the blankets, step out of the shadows and operate where the corruption could be fairly easily documented for future action.
If you go all-out, 'renewables' can slightly outproduce carbon-emitting electricity sources, whilst still requiring substantial carbon emitting backing capacity for the occasions when they can't.
More importantly, electrical generation has historically only accounted for 30% of human carbon emissions, meaning there's a substantial gap between what renewables can produce and the electrical generation requirements for actually going carbon-free
The first sentence of the first paragraph above is the part that the snake-oil brigade latch onto to sell windmills and solar as the one-size-fits-all solution to everything
Nuclear isn't a luxury, it's a REQUIREMENT.
Water-moderated nuclear power was only ever intended by the guy who developed it to be proof of concept (a laboratory glassware proof-of-concept prototype built to power the Nautilus, using uranium not because it's the best fuel but in his words "because it was what was available") and 1950s nuclear scientists would be gobsmacked to see we're still using them.
The guy who developed that first nuclear reactor? He went on to develop a "walk-away-safe" version which was hot enough to be a drop-in-replacement for coal-burning technology (water-moderated nukes are not) and produced less than 1% of the waste of the first design. The US government killed it in 1972 because it would have divorced the civil nuclear program from its dependency on the waste products of weapons-making systems and therefore exposed uranium-producing plants to arms limitation treaties that dual-purpose plants are exempt from
One of El Reg's own columnists was a pretty passionate pusher of the tech (RIP Lester). As a nice side effect of picking up the "better mouse trap" (which is currently being assessed in China at Wuwei), the molten-salt thorium technology removes the single biggest barrier to economic viability of rare earth mining in most parts of the world (by making thorium a saleable product instead of "dangerous radioactive waste") and would remove the effective stranglehold on supply that exists (hello cheaper magnets and other items)
Amen
I've learned to live with systemd, that doesn't mean I like it - and I'm adamantly opposed to it stepping outside the boundaries of process management
Unix philosophy is "small simple units". Systemd is neither - and it cannot justify the added complexity in the way that (say) PostgreSQL can trivially do so over MySQL (My Cow Orkers refuse to migrate to Postgres for large setups, resulting in man-years of scripting tweaks being needed which are simply not needed for Psql - they refuse to even TRY it)
The problem is that there are many _MANY_ more like him at Redhat
This is a particular problem the further up the food chain you go.
Mediocre programmers end up being pushed into management to keep them out of the way, where they end up causing even more damage as they end up with more free time to throw bad ideas around and more power to make them happen
The good guys are either too busy coding, firefighting or hating having been promoted into management and away from the work they loved
"Red Hat's focus is on servers."
No, Red Hat's focus is on a half dozen very large customers who generate 80-90% of its income and a large part of what THEY want boils down to "modernised Xterms"
This is why academic users have been increasingly jumping ship to distros which accomodate their needs
Having interacted extensively over the years with Redhat: Yes, you're right
Under IBM: Yes, you're right
There's good reason scientific linux users are jumping ship to Debianesque distros
WRT Systemd: sysvinit definitely needed replacing with something capable of parallelising process startups, but dropping an elephant on a peanut is not the way to do it
At the same time as building up the competitor, they've also been building up DOMESTIC groups whose dominating political systems and culture are antithetical to the West
Part of the problem is that unlike most of the rest of the world the USA didn't actively seek to denazify its locals after WW2 and just before it entered the war it actually had more members of its Nazi party than Germany did (complete with swastika flags and Nuremberg-style rallies at Madison Square Gardens)
American fascists simply rebranded as "anticommunists" after WW2 and Dwight Eisenhower's 1963 warning that America was on the verge of letting the military-industrial tail wag the civilian dog was ignored. Today that tail is very large and sweeps a lot before it
"Look at Jira as an example..."
Microsoft did the same to the existing market. It was "good enough" - and cheap. Only when it had established itself as THE dominant entity did it start strangling the market
This is one of the reasons Linux terrified them in the late 90s/early 00s
For that matter, copyright was intended to give the same limited protection for creativity and has been abused out of all recognition from the original grants to become a serious impediment on creativity and the arts rather than an encouragement
The influence that music and movie industries have had on lawmaking is wildly out of all proportion to their actual value and economic turnover
in addition, the rule of thumb for crypto is:
"when you start using crypto, you encrypt EVERYTHING, including your laundry list, otherwise whatever's incrypted is obviously valuable and therefore worth targetting"
(the corollary of this is to ONLY encrypt your laundry lists, causing much wasted effort to find your dirty socks)
wrt the PS: Nadine Doris said the quiet bit out loud - "Only the big donors matter"
And they're coming to the view that the one with the bird-nest hairdo is now a liability. He's being moved from convenient idiot to convenient scapegoat but is refusing to go quietly
"Boxed ticked, parents can sleep whilst the children surf the web."
Problem #1: over 1/3 of detected sexual offenders are under the age of 18 and equally distributed between genders
Yes, really
Let's not forget Jamie Bolger. For all the outcry, the case type isn't _particularly_ unusual when you look at history, only becoming rarer more recently
The best response to "Think of the children!" is "Jimmy Saville always did!"
The worst predators tend to operate in plain sight, usually posing as stalwart pillars of the community.
After all, you're NOT going to entrust your kids to the dirty raincoat brigade or a bunch of heavily tattooed gangbangers - but you probably won't think twice about letting them hang out at a church social group, etc
(Ironically, the heavily tattooed harley-riding gangbangers are likely to be extremely protective of kids, etc - as are almost all "screaming queens" I've known in my life)
"what do you do if they decide to just jack up the price?"
Which is exactly what a lot of UK universities are now belatedly discovering about the "Free" services offered by Microsoft and Google...
Virtually none of them formulated policies for migrating elsewhere or backing out in such an event
"Oven ready deals" aplenty
"I do appreciate that Wayland is cleaner from an aesthetic standpoint and jettisons numerous amounts of X11 functionality that were already irrelevant in a modern system 20 years ago yet alone now."
It would still make far more sense to have a coordinated effort to cleanup X than to continue trying to bang the square peg of remote windowing into the Wayland triangular hole
I've tried very hard to like Wayland, but it just breaks too much stuff and the "we know better than you" attitude from the people behind it means it won't ever be sorted out
If you're dealing with Germans it's got a name - "The Teutonic blind spot" - you can explain why you want cupholders until you are blue in the face, but they simply will NEVER understand why you want cupholders, as it is forbidden to drink liquids in a vehicle, so there is simply no requirement for them to ever be there"
This also explains the computing equivalent of Volkswagon putting ECUs in car footwells where water can pool if windows are left down or broken, on the basis that "users are told not to do this, therefore we don't need to worry about it happening" (vs most Japanese engineers taking the point of view "Users WILL do it, we MUST ensure the hardware can handle it")
It's even worse when you deal with "certain germanic companies" who respond to poor reviews by threatening legal action (yes really) unless the reviews are removed....
"Vinyl, which accounted for more than half of music purchases, only accounts for 4.7 percent when including streaming."
Or in other words, physical sales are miniscule (but they'd been in free fall since the 1970s anyway), essentially filling a "novelty" or "nostalgia" category - which is exactly what the Ikea "turntable" is
"it seems to be easier to steal it than protect it"
So are high quality gemstones or other "small high value negotiable items"
The Dilinger misquote applies here: People rob banks because that's where the money is. The added incentive is that nobody's shooting back (at the moment) and you don't need a stocking over your head
"but it takes 2/3 of the states to bring a proposal forward and 3/4 to pass it."
It's a good idea to read "It can't happen here" - and reflect upon the thought that it very nearly DID both in the late 1930s and in the late 2010s
When the novel was turned into a teleplay in the 1970s, the producers felt that audiences would find the idea of a fascist takeover eagerly assisted by wide swathes of the American public to be so outlandish that they turned the sedtionists into flesh-eating lizard alien invaders. In reality the USA Nazi party was _larger_ than the German one and had Nuremburg-style rallies (complete with swastika flags) at Madison Square gardens as late as 1940.
American fascists didn't go away after WW2 and the USA didn't actively denazify like other countries did. Instead the people involved rebranded themselves as anticommunists and carried on. What we're seeing is 80 years of failure to deal with a problem that's resulted in a resurgence of an old problem (Nazis loved the American south, Hitler raved about Jim Crow policies and Eugenics in Mein Kampf). The gun issue is merely a symptom of much deeper problems that need dealing with
A well regulated militia would be better than the current crop of chaos monkeys currently flinging shit in all directions whilst screaming something about freedums
The NRA used to teach gun safety and sensible behaviour. It got turned into a political pressure group a long time ago. There are other firearms groups which have stepped into the shoes it used to occupy and most of them have little tolerance for the kind of twat who thinks you need a semi-auto carbine with huge magazine to go target or varmit shooting
"only to find the cleaner had unplugged something important."
Rule #1 of IT: Get friendly with the cleaning staff. They can be your greatest allies or foes
Once they understand that unplugging computer equipment is a "really bad idea" they won't do it (especially if they have the idea that it can lead to them looking for another job and you have ways of knowing who unplugged what and when)
write up exactly what's discovered and what actions were taken
The fastest way for lessons to be learned is for it to hit the customer financially. Everything else is "water off a duck's back"
I'm quite serious about this. The moment we started charging hourly fees for callout issues which turned out to be "not our fault" was the moment a number of repeat offenders suddenly had their "come to jesus" revelations (They got one warning first, most ignored it)
One case which springs to mind is a customer who insisted on a callout (2 hour drive) for our staff to un-minimise the icon for the program she was using, claiming that we must be causing it to shrink remotely. Her husband eventually admitted he was doing it to play solitaire whilst she was out.
"Because if not they not only claw it back, but reduce the following year's budge too."
This can be solved by finding out who the responsible beaqncounter is and introducing their face to their desk. Repeatedly
Failing that, ensuring said beancounter's department gets shafted in the IT stakes has an eye openeing effect on their outlook