Posts by sandman 653 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
"BlackShades was said to be insecure and a tool of inexperienced hackers, leading some users to question whether police resources would be better spent chasing more damaging crime."
OK, by that logic we should't arrest Mafia members until they reach at least Capo status, terrorists until they've graduated to efficient mass killing, etc. It makes a lot more sense to arrest people when they're beginning their career and perhaps (only perhaps) deterring them.
Ah, yes - similar to the way their internal structures change from flat to pyramid and back again. This sort of change is often done to create the appearance of progress, appeasing the analysts and hence, hopefully, upping the share price. To be fair (although I'm not sure why) a mature company with decent profitability but little chance of further growth can do little to excite the investment community any other way (except for cutting costs - usually by laying off staff, this is viagra to many investors, no matter how short-termist it may be).
In the DOS days I had a friend who produced and sold a very specific type of database. At his request I also added a copy of Wordstar (v3 if I remember correctly) to the single floppy disk that was the entire install to act as an editor. The customers loved his product, but eventually the world went Windows and he felt forced to produce a Windows DB.
Cue revolt from customers - none wanted to upgrade, both the DB and Wordstar did exactly what they wanted - tiny footprint, no extraneous garbage, etc. He kept updating the DOS version until really quite recently, but kept the old version of Wordstar, everybody was familiar with it and didn't see any reason to change.
We got my significant-other-in-law an earlier model when she was 92. She rapidly became a fiendish texter. This is the ideal type of phone for someone with slightly dodgy vision and hearing, they're usually a bit BLOODY LOUD too. Now 95 she's still using it all the time. She loves our smart phones, but says they're too complex and fiddly. It may be a niche market, but with an expanding very elderly population, not a bad niche to be in.
Many, many years ago I switched from being an archaeologist to working in the wonderful world of technology - because the pay was much better ;-) Now I'm thinking I should have moved to the States and become a lawyer - great pay and permanent employment. I mean, you could get involved in any of the Apple/Google/Samsung cases and have a well paid job for life! It looks like an easy life, just turn up and rehash the same old arguments, post your appeal, rinse and repeat ;-)
Since when did it become the obligation of society as a whole to pay for corporate training? One of the biggest con jobs in recent years is the way corporations have convinced governments that the necessity to train staff should be a taxpayer burden. Brilliant for the shareholders, not so good for the rest. If there is a skills shortage, train your own bloody staff.
If we could actually produce literate, numerate and sensible school leavers and graduates who had a good general (or specific, I'm not fussy) knowledge of their chosen subject area, then surely it is the responsibility of the employer to fine-tune their knowledge?
Since this isn't going to happen I'll just stop ranting now...
Go to virtually any software/services company website and you'll get to read plenty about innovation and change and how the product/services will solve all your company's problems/create world peace and cure cancer. What you won't find is actually what they do or wan to sell to you. I know, I've worked for a few of them and in some cases even I couldn't figure out what we did from the website
I visited there a few times when working with one of their Virtual Reality guys back in the 90s - very cutting edge at the time. Mostly of course down in a basement. What is it with IT and basements?
The VR itself was amazing - try an "escaping from a burning oil rig" simulation. I seem to remember the sweary, Scottish voice of the forman yelling instructions and actually forgetting that I was in a nice room in a posh mansion with a fat pair of goggles on.
Hoxton is probably fine for a media orientated startup, but bugger all use when you try and scale. If you want to grow a company (rather than just try and flog some IP to Google) you need space, reasonable rates and parking. You'll find successful British IT companies in all sorts of odd places - often on edge of town business parks in places like Guildford, Ealing, etc, etc. There are usually roundabouts involved, particularly if you're based near Basingstoke...
Couldn't agree more with most of the comments so far. One of the reasons for the success of the iPhone was that it didn't look like it was designed by a committee. Small, focused and well lead teams are the way to go. We're very lucky where I work, we do have a small team, a VP who sees his role as setting us tasks and tough but achievable deadlines and then making sure nobody else interferes with our progress - almost work bliss ;-)
As a contractor you know you have little or no protection against rate cuts, etc. If you feel strongly about it you just find a better contract (this works best when times are good obviously). The problem for the company is that the more experienced contractors (those in most demand) leave and are replaced by less experienced ones. This causes delays and other problems while the new guys get up to speed. It's not a great way to ensure critical projects are finished on time and to a high enough quality or that the infrastructure continues working smoothly.
This kind of myopic short-termism isn't a great incentive to go and work for Barclays.
As Chris says, it would most likely involve building from the ground up. Many of these systems are more patched than Frankenstein. Over the years (most likely decades) functionality has been added to the basic systems, often programmed in different languages by people who left long ago.
It is a genuine nightmare for many of the larger institutions.
Oh good lord yes, we introduced change control to a company that had never used it before and requests went down from around 200 (seriously) to about 3 a week. Suddenly projects got completed on time and to budget. The company eventually went bust when they put a director in charge of the company's biggest and most critical project who refused to use any form of change control. After calling endless meetings (one a day, minimum) to discuss why the project wasn't up to date and micro managing every single detail, the project foundered, as did the company.
Yep, it is bleeding obvious to anyone who walks down the street. So was the "fact" that the sun went round the earth every 24 hours. Then some bright spark decided that the opposite was true (despite being persecuted by Popes and possibly sylvan dwelling/defacating ursines). Once proven everyone went "oh yeah, that was obvious, dunno why that Galileo bloke wasted his time".
Now we know that our anecdotal evidence is correct and why, so we're straight into the "oh yeah, that was bleeding obvious" stage ;-)
Quite a few of us stumbled into IT by accident. My first degree is in archaeology as was my career, but as technology developed I found myself learning CAD, then 3D CAD, then web design/editing and eLearning. Since I could use one of those new-fangled Babbage engines, I involuntarily ended up doing unofficial support, network design, etc, etc. Then I found out that the salaries in IT were double what I was earning as a senior(ish) archaeologist, so switched careers so fast I left scorch marks on the exit .
I've since met a whole bunch of folk in various roles and positions in IT with degrees in everything else but computing - most learned on the job or as a hobby. I did later do an MSc in It, but it wasn't sufficiently advanced to really bother with, it was hard to create curricula to keep up with the advances being made in the 90s.
Too right, as I sit here with two high end laptops and three screens, creating interactive lessons, editing audio and video, I wonder how easy it would be to do on a slab. No, really, I don't :-) I've been knocking out stuff for people to consume for a couple of decades (or so). It doesn't really matter what on, dead trees, no problem, big screens, got that covered, slabs and phones, hell yes.
I'm not sure that it will be possible in the near future to do all this via a slab using cloud/server-based software and storage, there's a little too much latency and unreliability involved for my taste. I believe (so will probably be wrong given my prognostication record) that there will still be a market for desktops/laptops, just a much smaller and more professional one.
Basically, consumers and many professions don't need the traditional computer, as they don't actually "compute" - we still do.
If I didn't like my phone so much (and I couldn't do without Here Maps and their downloadable maps) I'd definitely give this a whirl, sounds great for the price. My favourite dumb phone was the tiny Motorola Pebble, so only have good memories of the company - missed out on the "bad" phones ;-)
"We're definitely in an incremental increase phase for mobile phones at the moment." Agreed, I made the same comment in another discussion a week or two ago. I really can't see where the next major development in phones is coming from. I like what Nokia are doing with their cameras and Sony with waterproofing, but nothing else recently has got my interest genes twitching.
It seems that phones are very much like PCs/Laptops now, a mature form factor where the differentiators boil down to a matter of favoured OS, build quality, price and taste (colour, size, etc).
True, but there are a lot of specialist requirements out there. One use I can see is making obsolete components. Say for example your company still has a use for a dot matrix printer (true case). One tiny but vital part breaks and you can't get it fixed because nobody makes that little thing anymore. That's a trivial example, but there is a whole world of difficult to fix machinery out there.
Absolutely true - the effects of stress on both the speed of transmission of venom around the body and of the mental state of the patient have been known for a long time. Even if bitten by a pretty venomous snake you are advised to keep calm (very, very difficult) and relax while help is (hopefully) on the way. You can get pretty near to frightening yourself to death. Oh, and knocking back the booze won't help much either :-(
There's this lump of stainless steel on my wrist - tells the time and date. It's waterproof, doesn't mind being dropped and doesn't even have a battery. I find each one lasts a decade or more before getting lost/nicked or suffering some sort of major catastrophe.
Why in the name of Satan and all his little imps would anyone actually want something less functional, aesthetically pleasing, durable and reliable?
It does seem if phones have now reached some sort of plateau of maturity. Most have a similar form factor, run for a reasonable (if not great) amount of time, have fairly mature OSs (and yes, I'm including Win and even Blackberry here) and are operated in roughly the same way.
There are plenty of incremental improvements that can be made, thumbs up to Sony for waterproofing for example and Nokia for trying something new in the camera department.
It's going to be more and more difficult for any company to claim that you must buy their phone because it has made a great leap forward, so attempts to differentiate with curves, tassels and bells are something we'll be putting up with for a while.
If you're ever in Wilmington, take a boat trip up the river - it is a bit spooky, increased salinity in the river has caused many of the trees along the banks to die, so there are all these bleached skeletal trees there… (lots of them have nesting Ospreys, very cool, but distracts from the spookiness).
iPads and iPhones should be regarded as niche products, not mass market. People buy what they can afford, or what they aspire to owning, and it's Apple's true genius to market their products as aspirational ones.
As the market for tablets grows Apple's market share should diminish, while numbers sold should carry on increasing, although more slowly. As long as they are perceived to be "the best", they will continue to be able to make a disproportionate profit. Not a bad position to be in.
Even the most experienced of us (that really doesn't mean me) are users to some other sysadmin/help desk jockey, etc, unless you know everything about every bit of technology/software that you use at work or at home.
So, be nice to your clients/customers/colleagues/whatever, or the wheel of karma will come full circle when you need support ;-)
"Apple still has no need for a Patch Tuesday to ensure people get any work done in between the rebooting."
Bloody well does this time, several bits of our software that worked perfectly happily until Mavericks was installed just died.
Not proprietary software either, things like the corporate-wide VPN software and Adobe Captivate. Waiting for patch Tuesday now ;-)
Make a ball of parcel tape (requires a considerable amount). Any straight thing will do as a bat. Use one or two handed depending on length of straight thing. Devise rough rules and a rougher boundary. Play. Under no circumstances use a real cricket ball - unless company bust and you've all been laid off.
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