Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
I worked in a big project installing big data handling project for Big Gov. It was tested using sanitised data. Needless to say, it crashed on first exposure to real data. Alternatively, at a small statutory authority, software was built using test data, but final prerelease test was on yesterdays live data. Yes, all offline with no PHB easy dialin or unsecured network connection. I never heard of a problem in a production go live there. So the thought of using fake test data in M$ products should make even java coders look competent.
<offtopic> Maybe it is age, but the screaming rage induced by so much current software is beginning to look like a deliberate policy to kill off older people in fits of apoplexy </offtopic>.
so the top end of what passes for politics and business these days can be a board member at multiple companies concurrently and thats fine ? Not to mention a few pollies in Oz and Not So Great Britain doing same. As for Oz ideas, same old, same old. When in doubt, appoint another bunch of clueless clerks to tell others how to run their business. A simple approach would be to modify company law as well as PHB class contracts. Any human caused IT stuffup is their personal liability. Remove the incentive for the stockholders to pay for cleanup and recovery. Instead have a strong incentive for manglement to really ensure beancounters and bonuses are not top of mind when planning cost minimisation. Abolishing the bribes bonuses so a top managers just salary like everyone else may help too.
to the results predicted by the coal face techies when outsourcery became instant bonus scheme de jeur for the PHB classes. The cynic may note the outsourcerers were so efficient there was a cannibal feast with one left standing, sort of. Not an ideal demonstration of competence
was true. In 1970s NT pubs one could start a brawl over Toyota vs LandRover. Now most vehicles are Toyota Hilux or landcruisers with Isuzu catching up fast. Western NSW has a mix of Isuzu, Colorados and Toyotas precisely because you can get parts easily, they just work and are OK on fuel burn. Other 4WDs are usually grey nomads or posers positing a perish along some muddy closed back track. LandRovers are for city dwellers.
Offtopic: I note an increasing number of collectors or enthusiasts acquiring vehicles of 1970s, 1990s to early 2000 vehicles because they can be repaired. A small industry of replacement parts makers seems to have sprung up around the world because it is easy to have a world wide market. Nationally a small market but the international size allows economies of scale. Yes, 1980s vehicles are ignored due to long memories of crap carbies unless unusual vehicles.
Have you tried to cold install Win10 lately ? Same thing. Name address, phone number. Only thing missing from demands is Identity Card, which, no doubt, is coming. Not found any way to have only local account, unlike initial installs.
sources inside industry told me after Air France event that airlines were running their pilots thru circuits in fully manually flown planes and discovering some of them were so dependent on computers they could not fly an ordinary plane. OTOH, some commercial pilots do the ultimate in handrolic flying, aerobatics.
Martin,
that might be your experience in startups, but in mature IT companies I have survived in, the top PHBs like their BS hot, served with chilled champers and a side of snark and caviar. Telling them anything they dont want to know is a career terminating mood. Mind you, I was told before my last severance that I was protected a bit by middle manglement because as a mild aspie, I asked the obvious questions that no-one dared ask, being impervious to social not niceties. However in this incident, it does sound like the techies are telling their employer that he is mis-informed. I did think better of Musk until now. Being a SpaceX star is bad for his stability methinks
mere side benefits. I await the Oz version of the poms "give all our health data to Palantir" . Oh wait, they already tried it. Now I wonder when the data auction is happening. To get best return on assets, naturally. Security is handled by those contractual terms with no penalty attached. See any Gov outsourcery contract for examples
plonkers will demand/commit lawfare to ensure citizens must use snoopware authorised software defences when using electronic devices. In mean time, to allow checking your identity and ensuring proper passwords, record all passwords, user Ids stored in text format for for rapid searching on your MyGov website account.
when the 3G is shutdown 2024 or earlier, outside of the 10 biggest cities, all phones will stop working. Every time I get an SMS from the ruins of national telco about 5G upgrades, signal strength drops, more connections drop halfway thru dialing and so on.
Bring on his Muskiness satellite phone and Starlink. As for the other two wannabes, they are immune mostly because they dont have coverage out side big cities in my experience
All opinions are equally valid only if it fits one thing most people can't see. The culture they live in. Real dissent is mocked as it always has been. < Irony tag here. > IMHO, The growth of conspiracy theorists is a reflection of general disbelief of any statement.</Irony> They have always existed due to the hunger some have for allegedly "secret knowledge".
On a practical note, the consequences are threatening for any cohesive political system that does not involve lawfare and oppression. If a political entity cannot reasonably trust, it can only disintegrate. All spin doctors are doctors of cultural death.
nonsense. It's always Open Season on creationists by everyone. They actually believe in a real reality, unaffected by opinions of observer. It's one subject authorities and wannbe experts agree on. Perhaps this indicates something about disinformation campaigns run over centuries ?
nearly enough capacity for the interwebs to carry all the POS insecure IOT, spammers, snoops and of course, javascript. Browsers will be unable to be used for information as all the snoopware code, logging, monitoring, malvertising, advertising code runs and reports. A few pointless, rehashed, badly acted, sermonising repeats of some 60 year old cartoon or movie will add to the toxic mess. Sort of makes me wish the snoopers demanding backdoors get their wish. Petabytes of watchers watching each other, badly. And DOS storms, Buy spinning rust purveyors shares, I see a new internet gold rush coming.
left and right ? Relic terms from ancient frog parliaments. meaningless really. Both "left" and "right" extremes are indistinguishable IMHO. Both hate Israel or Jews, individuality, plurality of views. The choice is between variously labelled totalitarians and a few attempts at participatory politics. Given the polarisation and dumbing down of the remains of old and newer medias, motto of "Believe nothing until officially denied" seems workable. As for any user of the antisocial platforms outside of very local buy/sell/swap and information pages, has to be of dubious quality. Even ElReg is showing this disease. Bring back Tim, Dabsy and some new iconoclasts.
Women in IT, public or private in my last 25 years in workforce told me they never never felt discriminated against. Same pay, same exploitation by the PHBs. Most of them were good at confronting peer idiots who were rare. However I notice a difference in volunteer organisations. Older women seem to be better managers of people. As one grandmother running an effective state Emergency Services unit put it, "We spent our lives managing people, from children to adult grandchildren". However, its mostly the blokes who pickup the chainsaws or are in the flood boats. The women prefer to carry the debris away or do situation updates on stroppy software.
Where local unit differences show gender role differences is the relative isolation unit locations. Usually the smaller country units that do messy jobs (vehicle accident cleanups, body retreival or bush fires) tend to be blokey, excluding males also if they are not in some kind of boys network. These were sometimes usually run by a dominating male with ego issues. The country units that do storm or flood jobs mostly have an even distribution of members,sometimes female dominated. The bigger city units are more evenly distributed in age and gender usually.
I suspect small sample size, random chance and perhaps the effects of personality differences between rural and urban dwellers would affect unit participation rates and roles between genders. There were always exceptions to every general case. During the 2019 bushfires I noted that women did a huge amount of unreported spontaneous volunteer support work out side of any organisations that would have logged the hours which would have more than equaled the reported long hours of the volunteer fire fighters.
In short, equal access to education and oportunities is needed, but dont expect uniform outcomes.
the few document servers/stores/servers I have been forced to use were useless at classifying, let alone search, though one on a very recent M$ platform looks like it may work. All required server farms to not work very well and with user interfaces designed by neuro-atypical types. Yet, small intrusionware can do it to find items of interest while hiding in an existing system.
But, this also looks like a misguided attempt that will document where and whom to target when doing mass land grabs specialising valuable commodities. Local rice and cassava growers not so much, but small holder coffee, cocoa should be wary. Governments and their bureaucrats can know too much. As for standardising APIs and units of measurement, good idea, but isn't that already done. Its called the metric system.
An IBM AIX box that had served in a car park basement in Bejing as worst I have seen. After unit replaced and freighted back to Oz, I took it outside after I took a quick look under top cover. How it worked under the cm+ of black dust/grit/dirt speaks volumes of the hardiness of old kit.
Shook out dirt, brushed it before it was safe to bring inside.
Cleaned an early IBM keyboard in South Asia somewhere that was erratic due to peanuts and paperclips somehow jammed in it. It worked flawlessly after cleaning and vaccuuming. Those old keyboards were tough.
we are effectively a republic as the remote nominal head of state has nothing more to do than appoint the Governor General, aka president. Get best of both worlds. As for an Oz head of state, altho I have been republican minded since early teens, the models suggested by the Canberra/Sydney bubble suggest a status quo is by far preferably.
As it is, the Queen did her role competently for decades. That sort of person I respect. RIP Your Majesty.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
