Posts by Buzzword 1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
How are investors supposed to treat the new company? Either I'm a play-it-safe investor who wants a stable blue-chip advertising company shares, or I'm a reckless risk-taking investor chasing moonshot projects. There really ought to be separate classes of share for the two distinct parts of the business.
G) You're an American, and you want a job that includes good healthcare provision, paid sick leave, and a decent amount of paid vacation.
H) You want a defined-benefit pension (even if the sums on offer aren't great, you value the security).
I) You're a young woman, and you want an employer that won't screw you over when you go on maternity leave.
Last year many companies had only just finished migrating away from Windows XP. For large enterprises which are heavily tied in to Microsoft systems (Windows, Active Directory, Exchange/Outlook, Office, etc.) what's the next step? We'll be clinging on to Windows 7 for dear life, but if Microsoft doesn't get its act together then we'll need something new. Any suggestions?
I find it much faster and easier to cast content from smartphone to TV, rather than navigate through the TV's laborious submenus and unintuitive button sequences to reach e.g. the YouTube app. All the TV needs to do is display anything cast to it. And if that's too hard, a £30 Chromecast or Amazon Fire dongle will fix the problem.
More importantly, a TV should last a decade or more. Any "smart" TV will be poorly supported within three years, let alone ten. (Just look at how few Android phones get OS upgrades.) So let's hear it for dumb TVs controlled via smartphone instead.
Faster JacaScript just means faster ads pumped into our faces. Browsing a 1990s-era website is instant; but browsing any modern site is an exercise in frustration, waiting for a shed-load of external dependencies to kick in. On mobile devices it's even worse: you start reading the content, then the paragraph jumps out of view as a dynamically-loaded ad fills the space you were reading.
So thanks, Google, for making the browsing experience slightly faster with Chrome; but no thanks for making it such a horrible experience with all your ads.
Haven't the governments shot themselves in the foot here? If they restricted the amount of bandwidth for sale (leasehold), they would limit the supply and thus push up prices. As it stands they're flooding the market with 4G frequencies. No wonder they aren't reaching the lofty heights of the 2000-era auctions.
@jason 7,
Sure, the Apple costs a bit more to buy; such that you might well end up at the same financial position after three years, including the resale value. But during those three years you'd have all the enjoyment that comes with owning an Apple product; whereas your Dell will afford you no such joy.
If you genuinely prefer the Dell then that's fine; but if you were hoping for a cheaper Apple equivalent, it's a false economy.
I see lots of green flag-waving but no mention of specifics. He could demand global cap & trade legislation to limit CO2 emissions; he could demand anti-pesticide laws or anti-pollution laws in those countries which have a problem with environmental pollution (clue: not the west). He could even say that people who switch on their air-conditioners when the outdoor temperature is less than 30 degrees will burn in hell (oh the irony!). But no, it's just a wishy-washy motherhood & apple pie statement. Nothing to see here.
>"does make me wonder whether they made any effort to resolve their individual cases themselves before spamming the internet with their rants"
Companies seem to react faster to bad news posted on social media than to bad news communicated directly to them. Last month I tried to tell a major company that its website had a broken FAQ link. I used the "send a message" functionality on their website; they emailed back failing to understand the problem, so I phoned them and got the standard script: "What is your account number?" "I don't have a bloody account, I was trying to research whether to open one!"; and after three follow-up emails I gave up.
"If you don’t have a Wiki-style document repository where people can add designs, hints, tips and known issues, you really are missing a trick."
Maybe it's just the places I've worked, but I've never seen a decent internal Wiki. In my experience documents get strewn across multiple locations: network drives, source control, Readme.txt files buried alongside source code, Sharepoint documents, Sharepoint Wikis, other Wikis, etc. The idea of having one Wiki to unify them all reminds me of https://xkcd.com/927/ - just replace "standards" with "document repositories".
"a recession, when there's spare capacity"
Nothing like today then, with our 5% unemployment rate. Nor do we have factories lying idle, nor airports half-empty, nor any other possible indicator of spare capacity.
So whatever the lessons of this article, they aren't relevant to the present situation.
Maybe IT could be billed directly to departments that use them, rather than funded centrally. Following the money tends to concentrate minds wonderfully, and departments may be pleasantly surprised to see how much cheaper it is to use internal resources rather than engaging external consultancies.
You'd still need some central IT oversight to make sure they follow common standards, coding conventions, security policy, etc., so you'd end up billing only half their time to projects / departments and the rest to central office. It'd still be an improvement though.
Yes they exist - some people like to watch their baby while they're at work.
What's the worst-case scenario? Let's imagine somebody wants to kidnap your baby, so they'd like to hack into your baby monitor to find out when the parents aren't in the room. (Let's assume it's a hot country and baby's window is wide open.) If the kidnapper is outside your house waiting for the parents to leave the bedroom, it's just as easy to sniff a DECT wireless baby monitor as to hack a wifi-connected one. Maybe even easier.
Of course, all this is ridiculously hypothetical. Your security flaw is leaving the window wide open, not leaving your baby monitor's firmware unpatched. Most babies are stolen from public places: hospitals and nurseries in the main, but also e.g. snatched from the back seat of the car while mum goes into the petrol station to pay. Let's stop pretending that cybersecurity matters for baby monitors.
"if you're paying that interest out to foreigners then that's money that leaves the domestic economy"
That's true for Greek euro payments to Germany; but when Britain repays its debts to a foreign creditor, those are pounds sterling; and they can only be spent in Britain. So it never really leaves the British economy.
The result is that printing money has the same effect as printing debt: it's inflationary.
A twenty-five year old system must surely be incredibly basic - the state of the art desktop computer back then was the Intel 486DX. Replicating that functionality with modern tools will be quite straightforward.
Of course then some idiot will come along and add tons of superfluous features, and ten years down the line they'll be tendering for the replacement of a thirty-five year old system.
Most cars reach 30mph on urban commutes, even if their average speed over the whole journey is just 10mph. City driving is largely start-stop: bursts of 30mph when the light turns green, followed by 0mph when the next light is red.
Cyclists often make the same mistake: assuming that because they can hit 12mph, they'll be faster than car drivers averaging 10mph. But cyclists are also doing 0mph at red lights, so their average journey speed is just 4mph.
"The tax system really does get its slice, eventually"
That's not good enough. Our beloved leaders want their slice now, up front, so that they can deliver on their wild promises to the electorate. If they don't get their hands on the money, or at least show that they're making an effort, they won't be re-elected.
Thanks Trevor. I was very much of the same opinion as you before working with Azure. Old-school IT folk are scared of it partly because it threatens to make their specialist skills redundant - you no longer need to know about that obscure IIS machine.config file setting, or whatever your particular angle is.
I can see the value in an app store for cloud-based services, but as a consumer I have mixed feelings about white-labelling services.
For example look at PC World's cloud-based backup service KnowHow, actually provided by LiveDrive. If you buy it direct from LiveDrive you only run the risk of one company going tits-up; whereas if you buy it from PC World then you're exposed to twice the risk. Obviously it's a good synergy for both LiveDrive and PC World, but the poor consumer often gets passed from pillar to post trying to resolve any issues.
For many use cases, a cheap home-based Raspberry Pi is enough. Sure, the hardware is basic and your domestic broadband is slow; but the sheer quantity of other users means there's a hell of lot of support out there. For those just dabbling and not sure if they want to go further, a Pi is a great place to start.
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