Posts by Pete 2

Too early to say

> jobs as doctors, engineers and lawyers all scored higher than tech entrepreneur

The key is to build options into your career path. Although the listed jobs sound very aspirational (except lawyer: obv. We know a joke about having a lawyer in the family, don't we?), it's equally true that life is what happens while you're busy making plans.

As it turned out, my first job after university didn't even exist when I started. But because I had a good grounding in tech, computing & electronics I was a natural choice. So ISTM the secret to starting life with an exciting, interesting if not well-paid (this is the technology sector) job isn't to aim for one specific job description, but to have flexibility (and a driving licence) and not get bogged down aiming at one solitary specialism.

Going large

A fine of nearly nineteen grand? Amateurs!

In america, their fines are measured in the BEEELION. To such an extent that The Economist has labelled amercia's regulatory system as "the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation" - beating The Kremlin, The Mafia and The Chinese for the world's top spot. (article available online).

A much better question

> make sure you ask the question: "How many developers do you have submitting code ...

Nah! Code is easy, code is "fun". You don't have to pay hobbyists to write code: they do it for free.

Documentation is boring. Documentation is dull. Documentation is hrad 2 get wright.

Testing is even worse.

Project management is next to impossible.

So if companies want to contribute to OSS, the best thing for the community and its users would be to leave the code to the geeks who like doing it and to add far more value by testing the stuff they produce, using it, managing the change control and writing books, articles, man pages, wikis, examples (preferably working examples) and FAQs. Those are the things that are missing from most projects - and are the biggest impediments to the take-up of "free" (free as in no cost: so long as you put zero value on the hours or days it can take to wrangle some of this stuff into working shape - or realise it's irredeemable crap and you've just wasted a week on it).

That's where the biggest contributions will come from. Even though those contributors won't get the recognition and kudos. That's why companies are in the best position to donate those efforts.

Having your assets on the line

I recall a similar situation some 20 <cough> years ago:

The auditors came a-knockin'

"OK, Asset number 78934758934734 Ada compiler. Purchased last year, value £30,000. Show me"

Us:

"It's there, on top of that filing cabinet"

"But that's just a reel of 9-track tape"

"Yup"

"That's not worth £30,000!"

<sigh>

Piles of trials

> I think that there is a strong case for saying that they should be televised: that is merely the modern extension of enabling the public to enter the courts physically

The small amount of stuff I've seen from the Pistorious trial leads me to exactly the opposite conclusion. It all seemed to be grandstanding and playing to the cameras. In the same way that televising Parliament has done nothing to improve its reputation (PMQs has probably eroded the credibility of the Commons more than all the scandals, frauds and fiddles put together) and I can't see how the slow, ponderous, proceedings of a courtroom (I once took myself down to a court, just to see what went on: dull, dull, dull - forget anything like what you see on TV) could ever make "justice" appear more desirable.

I've also seen TV from american courtrooms (I was in Boston during the Harding / Kerrigan skating trial) and can't say it impressed, or interested, me: as an outsider it appeared to just be a platform for a group of self-important individuals to further inflate their egos. As a consequence, I can't see live TV trials being any more significant than the BBC Parliament channel - and probably watched by the same number of people. Though even those numbers of viewers would beat a lot of the digital channels and the vast majority of what comes off the Astra2 satellites.

On the board

So: children still get people trying to tell them how to code.

Trendy IT "charities" still get money from government in the hope it will make them look "modern" and money from corporates in the hope it will make them look as if they're "giving back".

An organisation's director is informed that part of that role is showing solidarity with your benefactors

And someone's blog gets an upswing in the number of hits.

Surely the time to voice an objection, especially for a board member, is when the corporate sponsorship is being discussed. If you realise at that point that you are unable to square what that sponsor stands for with some personal opinions you are incapable of keeping to yourself, that's the time to quit.

Rag tag

> distinguish real news from parody pieces that use ironic exaggeration

While reading this I thought that maybe FB should introduce a [BS] tag, too. Though there would be plenty more "news" sites that wouldn't need it - as their title tells you that by default.

A neat trick if you can do it

> they [ the financial company ] must also "verify key facts that only the customer may know

Hmmm.

"Can you tell us something that only you know? So that we can verify it"

Well, I could. But then you'd know it, too. So it wouldn't be something that only I knew.

"D'oh!"

Sounds like it's a wise idea to keep a stash of cash under the mattress. Just in case your bank suddenly and arbitrarily decides you're a terrrrrist and won't let you make any withdrawls. An oooopsie, sorreeee after the fact just doesn't cut it.

Unnatural bedfellows

> we have to protect our intellectual property.

It's not often your hear "intellectual" being used in an article about football.

But, heigh-ho - I suppose if they can find a way to block stuff that *they* have a right to - but not, say, of little Johnny knocking one into the back of the net at the local park - then good luck to 'em

It's odd though. You'd have hoped there would be more to a football match: 90 minutes and £40 than just a few seconds of a ball moving from a boot (or head, or <ahem> hand) to a net. Makes you wonder whether the entire 39 week soccer season couldn't just be telescoped down into a 5 minute mass-kicking sometime in May. You'd get all the goals and it would save a whole lot of tedious traveling, speculation, punditry and disappointment.

Choosing better heslos

> across corporate America

Where, presumably the passwords are all created on a QWERTY keyboard and use anglicised spellings. (Or should that be anglicized?)

I wonder how much harder these guys would have found it to crack passwords in the other 95% of the world where words have letters not found in american: for example ñ and "password" might translate as senha or contraseña

Maybe the "secret" is to employ multi-lingual systems administrators. Who says off-shoring is always a bad idea?

Forestry

Sounds like it's not a good idea to ask how to sell any spare woodland you might find yourself owning:

Siri, how do I dispose of a copse?"

The SUN never sets

> multiple apps under a single OS inside a containing structure

Isn't this what Solaris had about 10 years ago? Containers or zones (I forget - it's been a while)

> Snarky old IT folks might sarcastically recall multi-tasking under one OS and sniff in sorrow

Yup, pass the snifters. I'll have an Armagnac.

Strangelove

> the US (says PwC) is the laggard

Sounds like we have an IoT gap.

Certifiable training

> Cisco says the new certification is needed ...

... to make money. And as the IoT hasn't been either defined or developed yet, whatever is taught in this year's course will be completely irrelevant next year or next month. So the same gullible bosses who let their staff go on the jolly valuable learning experience, combined with time off work, will just have to shell-out again for another course (presumably with the word "advanced" in the title) at a later date - whenever someone fancies a paid break in whichever desirable location takes their fancy.

I mean, you'd be mad not to.

Never mind the bandwith

> its 152Mb broadband service

I wonder how many customers on this service are completely unaware that no matter how often they upgrade, their internet speed will still be limited by their so-much-slower Wifi connection?

Careful what you wish for

> ever greater incentives for customers to adopt solar, thus leaving utilities with the potential long-term issue of losing a significant portion of their customer base

But this is precisely what governments (at least, those in western europe) are doing. We get offers for free or highly subsidised home insulation, we get green surcharges tacked onto our energy bills, we get (OK: got) subsidised PV feed-in tariffs.

All in order to reduce national CO2 outputs to meet a target - a target that most other countries seem to be ignoring, never signed up to in the first place or that they'll miss by miles / decades.

The impossible tax

> the fees that UK mobile networks pay

in other words, a government tax.

One that won't hit the operators, as they will all have been taxed equally, so when they pass it on to the subscribers (shocker!) they will all raise their tariffs equally and therefore the "competitiveness" won't change. Sure, there may be some jostling, so one supplier will raise the cost per minute, while another will raise the cost per megabyte (and no doubt, surreptitiously slip in a little extra for themselves) but if their costs go up, there's only one outcome - and that's another dip into our wallets.

So, all this does is take money from the public (and businesses) and transfer it, via the mobile operators who will simply be acting as tax-collectors, to the government. They will then congratulate themselves on keeping income tax low - even though it's generally considered a "progressive" tax: that takes more from those who can afford it - and raising indirect taxes which affect the rich and the poor alike - unless the poor stop using their phones and thereby avoid (oooh, there's a nasty term) paying the freshly raised tax on talking.

A fine idea

I don't think the USA wants to dip its toe into who "owns" TLDs. And it really doesn't want to enable their seizure as compensation. Especially as the US embassy in London owes £7 Mil in unpaid fines.

That sound you can hear? Boris rubbing his hands

ref: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23266149

Just to make it interesting

What we need now is a race.

If yachts can mount round the world races, there should be scope for HAB-ers (?) to do the same. Hopefully at much lower cost.

Cut or compress

There are two ways to reduce the quality of TV.

You can either fill up the airspace with cheap, crap programmes that nobody watches and repeats that are repeatedly repeated -- or -- you can compress the crap out of the signals until you are left with blocky, distorted pictures and sound that nobody watches, but for different reasons.

At present we are still in the infancy of digital TV and are only just starting to realise that "choice" is not all it's cracked up to be. It appears that "choice" means watching this prime-time soap, or that one - or watching the Commonwealth games on either BBC1 or BBC3, or a celebrity quiz or a celebrity reality show. The quantity has increased, but the breadth has not.

If there is to be a "crunch" where the frequencies available for TV is greatly reduced, we may well find that viewers are not willing to put up with both bad programmes and poor picture quality. At that point, it might just happen that broadcasters start to offer a greater variety of programmes that are low-bandwidth friendly - such as without the fast scene-changes or lots of action that programme makers edit in to programmes to give the impression of quality, dynamism and attractiveness.

Though I can't ever see them axing all the repeats.

Amortise

> Rocket Lab's low-cost launcher ... will cost less than $5m

So if a single launcher can be built for $5 Mil, how much are the development costs going to be - and what happens to the cost-of-launch if the project can't fling 100 units a year into the sky?

I haven't a clue what it would cost to develop a new, commercial launcher from scratch - but lets make a WAG¹ at about $1Bn (which sounds incredibly low - you'd think NASA would have new launchers coming out of it's ... if they were that cheap to design and develop). then over 10 years his repayments will be about $10 M per month at 5%. So at 100 launches a year, that's a smidge over $1M per launch in finance costs. And then there's all the overheads, on top.

Personally, I'm skeptical.

[1] Wild Assed Guess - the foundation of all government, economic and commercial proposals

MMXIV or 11111011110

Don't forget to add the date so when the future archaeologists dig up the bits that went missing, they'll at least know when little plastic people first tried to invade colonise the stratosphere

Footnote: Oh look. Next year (2015) is a mirror image year 11111011111

Expect nothing less

... when you have policing by keyword detection.

The basic problem is that there is such a hair-trigger approach and such a complete over-reaction. No doubt this will tick the counter for "the police service foiled X computer related terror plots". And since there is no such thing as a trivial cyber-crime incident, that this will be filed in the reports along with other "mastermind" and "criminal genius" (compared to the skills of yer avrige detective) records.

Though I suppose that in the land of the plod, the one-fingered typist is king.

Not what the plan said

> It is 25 July, and that means it's Systems Administrators Appreciation Day

It was scheduled to be March 31st, but somehow it kept getting delayed.