Posts by LewisCowles1986

Re: GDPR-exit

Why are you comparing minimum fines with maximum fines. That's like saying my boss pays me well, I'm on £5 an hour, he's on £100 a second.

Also £500,000 is a tiny fine for any moderately sized business. The point should be to make the fine high enough to cause damage, whilst low enough to not make the company go bust, as you cannot learn from mistakes that kill

In any case it's valuing the impacted at < £500 per-person.

Re: Crap indeed

I was thinking the same, but then I remembered that Linux also has to deal with this shit because it's on the CPU die itself.

Re: Niche player at a "High Cost"

So the logic there is "You bought a Mercedez, might as well keep buying ford's as well because otherwise, you'll have to take a taxi?"

Re: HMRC load peaks

Don't push for a damn quarterly return, it only benefits mega-corps. If I'm assessed per quarter it'd destroy my business and as a result I would turn to writing malware and attacking government and corporate infrastructure. The government has the table slid towards themselves on tax matters for normal people anyway, they need to punch the fat corporates in the mouth and start demanding their lunch money as well.

Short term, these strategies are amazing, but in the race to the bottom, everyone will be squeezed into a corridor of vendor-specific knowledge. If Amazon can keep that up for 2 decades, then they will have killed non-amazon offerings.

Are you saying this business was only ever part of an on-ramp process whilst HMRC built in-house infrastructure, or that for a time they thought it was acceptable to pay a supplier for 12 months when they needed 1 month?

Re: But which part?

All systems at beyond personal scale are a collection of things if not designed by some window-licking idiot.

The question is what those things are made of, which is a steadily exploding public account of mostly bad ideas https://github.com/alphagov

Re: Well this makes a nice change

It's kind of a dick move to require so much clearance though considering heaps of gov IT is a giant steaming pile of shit anyway. It's taken them decades to realise they need a central payment technology, and I bet it still won't be truly centralised (payment goes to central gov, earmarked as for ACC {X} authority {Y}, which would make checking for corruption and high-level oversight much easier.

It's the design of the systems that make the most problems, and the approach to buying. Have a conversation where it's not a given that past decisions are now hampering future work. Where you're not locked-in by vendors that at the least are raping the public purse for paid meetings to provide a price. Big picture it's easy to know what government needs. Effective government has lean, effective IT, no monoliths, just lots of tiny worker bee programs doing what they do very well. It's not bolting a web-app to a legacy system that would scream "kill me" if it could talk, where a central main server outside of the gov control is running on a program they don't have source code access to that's slowing things down.

The ONLY good thing about the conservatives is that they recognise there is a massive waste in government (and it's not just IT). They don't seem to be able to reason rationally about where to cut it from, but they recognise a problem.

Walk into the MoJ last year and you'd see a massive flat screen saying "We know how much orange juice prisoners need" as if anyone in their right mind gives a hoot if prisoners have enough orange juice... Someone was paid to do that. Not just to make the awful powerpoint/video presentation, but to research how much Orange juice prisoners need. They might be SC CC DV cleared, but they lack basic reasoning skills. What's the point of being trustworthy if you're not competent?

Re: Crickbait

Well there's a limited view, but lets take for a moment, maybe why you need multiple tiers of support. The software and training don't meet a business case.

I'll agree that there are some pretty high-profile F-ups with migrations to Linux, but there are always high-profile F-ups with existing system migrations.

I'm one of those "linux people" that isn't "working in IT and aren't likely to in any capacity above 1st line support." except I am. I've had people working on government IT fly in to ask my advice, so I don't give AF about your autistic screeching against non-windows advocates.

If we're going to talk about large companies with legacy, non-windows is the main-case. Ford uses mainframes running COBOL that came about before Windows existed; Facebook uses Linux, Netflix server uses linux in all their open-source projects. The top 500 super-computer index windows last was listed in 2015 in position 436.

You are basing your judgements likely on anecdotal experience from within a windows oriented business that might dabble in Linux, treating it's IT like a candy-shop. If your CEO is educationally subnormal enough to believe that spending min 5k per-server and .2k per-seat is a good idea (that's just pro windows and office at volume), then I worry for the future of your business, because software does augment business massively.

Re: about 12 per cent of servers run non-Windows OSs!?

It's BS is why it smells bad http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-foundation-finds-enterprise-linux-growing-at-windows-expense/

One of the limiting factors on Windows servers outside of Azure & AWS is licensing costs. Nobody with their head screwed on is buying windows servers, they either rent Azure or AWS or are wasting money by not engaging brain.