Posts by VinceLortho

The Enthusiasm is Troubling

Just as Boris's so adamantly orated Brexit campaign diatribe on the huge amounts Britain was losing to "Europa scum" was exposed as an evil lie for his own amusement, or worse, it seems likely the British public is being setup. I predict two results: 1. NHS will be paying for access to it's own data and lose all rights and controls of it. 2. The Russian GRU will have a detailed medical record of every decision maker, influencer, and person of any significant amount of political, military, or economic power within hours of the data being released into American hands.

Deja Vu

A long while ago I wrote a paper for Intel engineers addressing a similar problem with improper coding regarding speculative instruction caching. Evidently, none of the silly buggers read it.

I was once proud of my career in IT. Now I tell my grandchildren I played piano in a bordello.

My IBM AS400 POS Moment

My over zealous (and unthinking) issue also involved an IBM AS400 point of sale system. I was writing a complete and critical upgrade of the security and one Monday morning a stressed looking admin asked me, as I arrived at my desk, if I had backed up my work off system. I had and he looked very relieved. It seems the admin staff had scheduled a full UNIX update that weekend. They had not mentioned this to anyone outside of their little clique. Nothing in user's space was backed up and the update involved a complete drive wipe. "Well, that takes time we don't have and we are not responsible for the backups of others." I can imagine then self-righteously declaring to themselves. There were more than a few screams in IT that day.

Thought it was Just Me

Walked into an IT job interview and six identical lumberjacks looked up as I entered the room. I thought I was being pranked.

Management Fail

I have seen several times. By the responses, so have many others.

IT companies are complex rascals requiring many hands with many skills. Most of these skills are simply experience. A few, unique ability. Management, typically, has none of these.

If an IT firm has a fully documented system, an ITIL of policy and procedure covering all aspects of the system and a training system to utilize it, all is well. Any single employee is no longer indispensable and training can be done by any competent instructor.

This rarely happens. Documentation is costly, time consuming, and none wish to do it. A firm that is trying to squeeze every denari from the stone that is IT will never devote treasure to that which is of not immediate profit.

Middle management usually has no concept as to how to create an encyclopedia of operations and could see it as a way to eliminate or weaken their position in the firm. The MM's also have very little idea how daily ops are carried out although hubris convinces them otherwise.

Blood, this they, the C level muckety-mucks, the lovers of coin, have a passion for spilling. How they get the idea that people are costs and not creators of profit is beyond my capacity.

Anyway, nice to see ignorance, greed, and basic head up your backside stupidity punished. For once.

Failed To Launch

Own and use a BB Z10 daily (I don't use the social media apps unavailable or of really terrible quality for it). Many shortcomings but, the QNX based OS is IMO better than iOS and Android. The HW is superior in many ways to most phones of the time - although there were quality issues. It was the inability to fully use Android apps that killed it and the dearth of native apps and the poor quality of those apps that were available. BB OS10 did support Android apps that did not require Google services, many popular ones do, however this was not made clear to the consumer and when these apps failed the customer returned it. If BB would have fully supported Android it would have been a solid product.A recent incident confirms this. When the BB Drop Box app recently stopped working due to no updates , long time users announced that they would never purchase a BB again.

The high returns show that when you make a smart phone that looks like an Android phone, make it work as well as one too.

Money

It's a private telecom system, why is tax money involved? Make the carriers repair the telecom systems or have the operating licenses revoked?

The heart of the matter seems to be a land grab. By making Puerto Rico less livable people are moving and selling out cheap. The telecom system will be repaired (with what appears to be a big subsidy for the rich) when new wealthy enclave development starts.

Republicans love to spend on welfare for the rich.

DevOps - Yet Another Solution

We witness the multiple passings of each new fad - sorry! - exciting new development and operational deployment methodology. Each, in turn, offering vastly improved, um, improvement into the bin when the next comes along.

Communication, expectations, resource allocation, responsibility, accountability and adherence to policy and procedure are and were addressed by Waterfall, SDLC, Spiral, SSADM, V-model, RAD, JAD, ISO9001, KANBAN, Lean, 6 Sigma, Agile and DevOps. Where it breaks down is the lack of initial planning and documentation, or adherence to process.

BS artists flourish in an environment of confusion, miscommunication and lack of accountability. Those in charge can blame the consultant for the failures and enjoy some darn awesome PowerPoint presentations.

Fake News

The site crashed from good old fashioned IT infrastructure neglect/incompetence and a deadline for visa applications not related to the election. https://goo.gl/7iTnVO

Got Linux?

Chrome 58.0.3029.81 (64-bit) on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS displays the sample URLs as random letters.

Idiots

They're everywhere

SOP

Windows QA is astoundingly bad. Written on and sent from the Linux machine that was a Win10 until never ending updates fracked the WiFi and clock for the fourth time.

Innovation Over Security

Security (hard security anyway) is always (always) left as the last priority in SW projects. But, this is a lock. You'd think it would be first.

I was one of the 177 Million

I don't use the password for anything else so the LinkedIn hack didn't affect me but I did get a couple of attempts to play me on a social hack. The method was so pathetic (a couple of emails from a Chad Wentworth and a certain Jonathon Granger or some other obvious BS names) complimenting me on my great web site (which I do not have - great or otherwise) and would I do some work for them. Lucky for us it would seem that those smart enough to use the dark web to buy stolen user lists to run scams are too stupid to rig a good one. If they were they could make better money in a straight gig.

Sue This

Enigma Software is a confidence trick posing as an anti-virus software company. If the owners were burned alive in a horrible accident no one who trusted their products to fix a infected computer and just got the ransom note instead would care.

Evil is

as evil does...

It's Hard to Really Hate Anyone

but the Saudis are making it easier. I wonder what the reaction would be if an Arab Muslim where to be flogged for denouncing Christian violence? BTW - Three cane strikes can kill you. This is not a naughty school boy backside paddling. It's inflicted by a martial artist who takes a running start and the cane is several feet long to get a whip effect. Time to go electric and turn the Saudis back into the goat herders they were before BP mucked things up.

Sort of insulting

No manual formatting and no undo and no reason I would want to use it.

Good Police Work!

Lovely that the police are protecting the public from nefarious types that provide Internet services allowing access to sites very rich people and the corporations that run them object to. As a bonus - it makes life so much safer for rapists and thieves and assorted other baddies that police resources devoted to stopping downloads of the latest in Hollywood tripe are not available to thwart actual evil.

Hmm?

Is this a DeBeers commercial in disguise to make every woman on Earth feel her proof of commitment is now inadequate?