Posts by pig

OK. I'll bite.

"Due to the very nature of Social Media, even 30 million can cause a lot of damage.

Here how it works. Hit the 30 million with targeted ads. Say 10 million take the bait and like or share it with all their friends. Some of those do the same. After a while it becomes a meme on Social Media and untraceable back to the original source.

To be honest 1 is to many"

1. How much do you think it would cost to send ads to 30m? Go find out. It is not cheap!

2. 10m out of 30m to like or share?!?! LOL!

(For comparison) Direct Marketing has a standard return rate of around 0.01. To even imaging 10m out of 30mil would respond is bonkers.

I think so many people are overstating the effects of this.

You have been served ads.

Are you all as fickle as to be directed by these ads? No. You are not.

So why do you all think everyone else is?

Finally, social media is a business with 2 products. The platform and us.

The platform is the product we buy, and we pay for it by being served ads (targeted via our data).

We are the product the advertisers buy. They buy it with money that funds the service/company.

I thought most people understood this? I do.

I expect my data to be used to target ads because they tell me they will do this.

A lot of this complaining is like my nan moaning about ads on ITV. . .

Re: When life imitates art...

"and if they were that helpful, they probably wouldn't have ended up as a network engineer"

LMAO. Funny and true.

Re: @Vimes

A smart scammer would now resend the phishing emails as being from Talk Talk.

Re: They're not all idiots, but ...

"the 12 year old suggested replacing it with an iPhone app. He and his team were hurt when we laughed"

LMAO. Digital Dan by any chance?

The sad thing is that group of shysters actually believe that their solutions will/can/do work. They seem to be hard wired into thinking everyone they talk to is just over complicating things and a shitty iPhone ap with a catchy name and a picture taking up all the real estate on the screen is what people want.

What Whitehall needs is a trap door system so that whenever someone says "Agile" the floor opens and they are deposited to some pit, where the only way to exit is via an iPhone ap that doesn't have the exit button yet as that is tricky and has been put off to a sprint that will never actually happen.

Re: One big problem with online storage is when you become too reliant on them and they shut down.

"To be fair, there's a world of difference between an corporate oriented provider, and one that hopes to make money slinging ads."

Not with 2e2 there wasn't.

Re: > with no physical connection ... they won't be able to break in, and data can't get out.

The large 24 hour ASDA near me has 16 self service tills.

They leave them unlocked. If you push the handle with the lock on, it clicks and the screen of the machine lifts up, revealing the PC (yes, these are XP based too) and 4 usb slots.

The usb slots are enabled as this is how they reimage them if something goes wrong.

Sadly getting physical acces is nothing like as hard as it should be.

I was discussing this with a friend who fixes cash machines, and he reminded me that almost all the threats he deals with are physical.

Re: Fine but whathappens when...

"> Some idiot with a JCB (backhoe) digs up your business critical network link and it is down for several days?

You would face a similar problem with on premise storage"

No, we wouldn't.

My organisation is going the full cloud.

At the moment we have our own onsite data centre. If the internet line to the building goes down than the only effect is a notable upswing in actual work being done.

In a year or so's time, once we have gone fully Desktop as a Service (I can't wait...) the effect of the internet line to the building going down will be that no work can be done.

And yes, we do have a backup. In fact we have 3 internet lines coming in to the building. Primary and 2 back ups.

Being Local Governemnt though the 3 lines are all Virgin cable and, most likely, anything to take out 1 would also take out the other 2.

@Eagle One

>>The "S.S. 2e2" may not sail again, but she won't leave those who depend on her high and dry.<<

Really?

Out of interest which part of the 2 people who we relied upon not being paid, being laid off, and us being told we are going to get f'all from 2e2 is not being left high and dry?

We will be ok, but only because we promised to pay the staff ourselves if they rock up and complete their work from here.

Re: 'Poll' position

Live subtitles are typed on a special type of keyboard which is phonetic.

This is why subtitles of live events will often have the correct word phonetically, but the incorrect spelling - like your Poll and Pole example.

In a live broadcast there is no time to double check these as they go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-text_reporter

Re: ummmm

You have 1?

That's 1 more than I know of here (but then, we only have 2000 employees on this site......)

Re: A bit more reading suggests . . .

"So HP actually paid $5M a head for a professional services firm. Very hard to scale"

Funny thing. I remember reading that, on these very comment pages, before the deal was concluded.

I find it hard to believe HP on this when a majority of articles and comments I read on the deal seemed to be saying "They are massively overpaying and won't be able to scale the business".

Re: It's life, we're not that special...

If you think finding life on mars would stop the religious types then you have a lot to learn.

To those people both finding and not finding life will prove the existance of whatever deity they want it to.

Re: There aren't many charities I give to nowadays

"I haven't checked, but I suspect that if the DD is cancelled before the collectors made any commission off it (why do you think they do it) then they will be able to clawback a fee from the charity"

Last I looked, the fees per sign up were around £80-£150.

This is paid up front by the charity who hope, and statistically do, make it up from the donator over time.

It does mean though that if you sign up, and cancel the DD, you are effectively losing the charity money.

I really thing the chugging model is wrong, and would love to see it stop (I'm not sure how, or rather "why" we could ban it though).

Not much of a sale

"A closing down sale was initiated at the weekend across stores due to be shuttered and more aggressive discounts will be applied to the other remaining 195 outlets, the administrator said."

I suspect this means they will, at best, match Amazon prices.

And therin lies the problem. From my experience most of the time my friends or family have gone into a Comet recently is to look at a TV / Wahing Machine / Etc and choose which one they want. Then go home and order it online with a cheaper price, free delivery and no one hassling you for extended waranty or Monster (price) cables.

Re: alan sugar huh?

Failed?

He made a lot of money with Amstrad, and also the eMailer.

By my reconing if you can turn a profit from a godawful product like the eMailer you can't be that "bad" at business.

Re: Still playing the last one

Take your time.

I have played all the (released on the PS3) Creed games and was pushed by the wife to buy this one on release day.

Verdict: I'm sure it is good, but the bugs are annoying the hell out of me.

They seem to have released this too early. It blatently has not been bug tested to anything like the level it should have.

The first 2 days loading times were horendous, and gameplay frequently crashed or didn't work properly (like a mission to fight 8 soldiers where the attack button would not work) Another time we walked around with a random sword sticking out of our chest and 80% of the ladies seemed to lose their skirts when we went close to them (I quite liked that one actually).

It has got better the last couple of days, due to the obligatory patches, but still remains very, very buggy.

Just because companies can fix bugs with patches should not mean they can also release games that are patently unfinished. Does Sony or Microsoft have no quality control measures in place to prevent such things? It seems not.

Re: "Recess the lens please!"

They could move it back a bit?

Re: What about areas where 4G rollout will be a long time coming?

It sounds to me like IPTV over a 4G data connection is your best bet for a reliable TV service.

So 4G is likely to be anything but a problem for you.

Re: Far too much credit

I recently showed one of the FOI officers at the council I work at how to OCR in Adobe.

Previously, for the last 3 years, she had printed out PDF's and then re-typed them in word as a matter of course.

Seriously.

If an FOI turned up here asking about versioning none of that team would have the faintest what was being asked.

Re: Meyerson predicted Intel's move away from speed to cores?

Hang on, where does it say that he said processors could not get to 4 or 5GHz?

I read this in the article:

"Back in 2003 he predicted that Intel would never deliver on its promises of 4 to 5GHz CPUs and would, in fact, be forced to shift to multi-core processors."

And from memory I note that Intel did not release 4 to 5GHz processors and indeed shifted to multi-core processors.

He sounds pretty on the money to me.

Re: The problem with ARM..

Definitely the car. There is a reason doctors call motorcyclists "donors".

Sorry, not sure how relevant that is to the analogy.

Re: Banks are fibbers....

Sounds about right.

My uncle fixes cash machines and refused to use them until about 15 years ago, before that he fixed them but withdrew his money from the counter.

Security at that time was a joke, so much so that the emergency legislation - to block reporting of issues - was used (twice I think?) in the 80's for cash machine security issues. From memory once it was for the 'everyone has the same default pin' issue and the other for being able to access any account if you created a card withh the mag strip set a certin way.

Security now is much, much better, but banks are still bastards.

The last time I had money stolen (£600 of Ryanir flights appearing from nowhere) they tried to say that since the card was chip and pin they wouldn't refund it. I laughed down the phone and said I would send them articles on how to get around chip and pin and they relented straight away and refunded me. My worry is how many people just take them at face value and don't get refunded, for what is in reality the banks liability.

Yup.

London, Oyster card.

And on the bus, at least here in London, you only check in, you don't have to check out again.

I quite like it, but that said it hasn't had a noticable impact on speed of boarding. In fact if anything it is now worse as when someone gets on without an oyster card it takes 5 minutes of the bus driver huffing and looking through their pockets for change before the bus can move. That's right, pockets. They have no cash float anymore it seems.

A solution implemented where I work is that all staff need their ID card to print.

You send a print job then go to any printer and log into the printer via nfc "wave". You can then print out the jobs.

This solves the issue of people sending print jobs, then forgetting them and reprinting them multiple times. You can literally only print if you are physically at the printer.

It also cut down paper usage by nearly a half!

“There is clearly an underlying problem with data protection in social services departments and we will be meeting with stakeholders from across the UK’s local government sector to discuss how we can support them in addressing these problems,”

The underlying problem is that most staff, and more importantly managers, in the sector still think saying "I'm not very good at computers" and then chuckling is acceptable.

In my previous contract (which was in that sector), I was regularly asked by senior managers to remove the "annoying encryption" on their usb drives. They were unable to operate a basic encrypted drive and so thought it perfectly acceptable therefore to remove that encryption so they could easier access that data on their home pcs, which were more then likely jam packed with crapware and spyware anyway.

The head of the department also inststed that someone forward all her GSX emails to her non GSX email account as she "couldn't access it properly". This according to her was I.T's fault and she saw no problem in both giving an admin temp access to her gsx account and thaving the emails forwarded (copy and pasted and then sent) to a non gsx accoutn.

When this is the attiude of those who run the departments is it any wonder that such cock ups occur?

Sadly it is exactly these people who are meeting to discuss how to fix the issues.....

Forgive me if I don't expect them to be fixed in a hurry.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8417205.stm

Note, it's not that the top 1% pay 25% tax, it is that they pay 25% of the total income tax collected by the government.

And for good measure the top 10% of earners pay over 50% of the total tax revenue.