Posts by Fat_Tony 42 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2016
And then it opened for business in April 2020
Mistake #3
Probably not a terrible time to launch (although they could have planned it around a pandemic) - lots of bored people with time on their hands sounds like good fortune. Not being able to capitalise on that however...
While they did lose a big pile of money, they didn't lose much/any of their own money so they'll be back and ready to fail again no doubt
Reminds me of finger print scanner/readers.
We'd always see them failing a bit more in winter mornings. Root cause was people putting on a load of hand moisturiser as soon as they got into the office and it was a bit reflective so the scanner could read the prints properly. Once we figured it out, we did have one person put in a complaint that it was discriminatory because it was affecting women more than men
Another consequence, maybe unintended or maybe not, is that employers will look to reduce the number of permies to avoid sick pay, pensions, holiday pay, etc. Can put everyone on zero hour contracts, ignore unions, etc. Maybe it won't happen but it would make a lot of Tory donors pretty happy.
Another consequence would be to make Capita, TCS, etc, more attractive if a company cannot get a load of contractors in to help with a project.
Yep, stats in sport can generally help explain a past outcome but rarely predict a future outcome. There'll be lots of %ages of likelihoods given for predictions, which will just be ignored. So a 80% chance of penalty being successful (+/- 10%) will always be called as 80%
"And while that doesn't sound like a lot – and it isn't – it's worth remembering that this phone is targeted at casual users who are unlikely to accumulate mountains of apps."
Although the target market won't use apps, they're demons for storage usage. My sister in law sends about 70 photos a week and several videos of her kids via whatsapp. While I happily delete them, usually without looking at them, the grandparents keep them all. When they run out of space they hate deleting anything, never mind photos of the grandkids.
While it's not a big deal (it doesn't take long to get another load of photos), it does show storage is a bit of a consideration.
Is there something similar already in place with electric cars? Batteries are proprietary and are soft-coded to restrict capacity. Tesla or someone sent an update to car owners in Florida to lift the restriction when there was an evacuation order due a hurricane a couple of years ago.
El Reg had a story but can't find it, this seems to be the same thing though - https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/12/imagine-escaping-a-hurricane-in-a-tesla/
Is there any practical solution for your normal everyday user?
Moving to iOS is a different flavour of the same google juice and it's not completely possible to avoid google. Do people just have to suck it up until regulation does or doesn't come along at some point in the future?
Not sure it's a reinvention, and doubt the name is an accident either - one of the first attempts at something like a tablet in the 80s was called Go. Think MS skewered the company that made it (there's a decent book by Jerry Kaplan called Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, read it ages ago but forget the specifics)
"If TESCO knows, then NSA knows and by proxy GCHQ knows also"
and so too will other agencies such as the Welsh Ambulance Service, Scottish Food Safety Agency, Morpeth Otter Preservation League, etc thanks to the Investigatory Powers Act too
We moved into a new building and the new post room had a xray machine. All xray images were sent to HQ. One night around 3am 2 large images popped up and the security bods in HQ had a look as it was unusual to see xrays come in at that time, and even more usual for 2 large images to be generated.
Upon investigation the images were of 2 skeletons - the security guys were intrigued by the new xray machine and decided to give themselves full body xrays to see what it would look like.
HQ were not impressed and wanted to fire the guys. The powers that be in our building saw the humour in it and gave the guys a half hearted ticking off and posted a print out of the xrays on the wall saying it was forbidden to xray people in future
"Hah! I'm suspect that said farmer is in fact my father in law. He's got fingers the size of sausages, and often has to type on the computer using a pen as a stylus to poke the keys, in order to only press one key at a time"
Had a guy like that where i worked a few years back. He was a bit on the rotund side and his fingers struggled with the keys on his Blackberry Curve. Usually had to replace his blackberry every 6 weeks or so because he forgot he had it in his arse pocket and sat on it.
That's an incredible quote, it's like Abe Simpson has come to life!
Transcript of one of Trump's speeches:
"... you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me, it would have been so easy, and it's not - as important as these lives are - nuclear is so powerful. My uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power, and that was 35 years ago, he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right. Who would have thought? But when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners - now it used to be three, now it's four - but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger. Fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's going to take them about another 150 years - but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators. So, and they, they just killed, they just killed us."
Just one?
Most of IS guys I worked with find it easier to prevent work going ahead as it generally avoids introducing perceived risk. The perception is that saying no makes their lives easier, and as they tend to be super nerdy techie types, their interpersonal skills may not be the best which feeds the perception. That said if you ask the right questions, you usually find out what you need to do to get their approval but it does take several attempts
Worked in a call centre that done tech support for HP who insisted on shirts and ties in case any clients happened to drop by for a site visit. twice when clients were on site there was a power cut. The powers that be/were thought it was better to force people to wear uncomfortable clothes rather than fix the flaky power supply and generator.
The dress code cost them nothing whereas there was a short term cost in fixing the power issues
My first payg mobile phone (late 90's) cost a £1/min to make calls and 20p/min to receive calls. Much the same as roaming, prices back then were all about gouging customers as much as possible.
Suppose nowadays whatapp and the like mean there's some alternatives assuming you can find some wifi
"they may be cheaper to run, but the service satisfaction just drops through the floor.
What's even worse is that the service gets so bad that no-one bothers to call support anymore. The reduced volume of helpdesk calls is then used by manglement as an indicator of how good the outsourced IT services have made everything."
Usually when onsite support is outsourced and quality drops the usual solution is to set up Exec/VIP support (onsite of course) so the powers that be don't see a drop in quality but do see some sort of cost savings while the plebs suffer on
"Ministers last year spoke of UK employers needing to maintain lists of foreign workers and last week of an annual £1,000 tax per EU citizen they employ."
Expect more and more of these ideas from the government - they won't seem so crazy after enough of them are floated and one or two of them might slip by unnoticed by the public (a bit like the investigatory powers act and section 40).
one of my first jobs was tech/customer support for Compaq. They shipped out a ton of cheap machines around Christmas with an extra video card (cheap because the onboard video card was faulty, didn't update the user guide/set up instructions). We spent Boxing day telling people to hook their monitor up to the 2nd video card all day. Most folk figured it out and didn't call in, the majority of the people who phoned in were happy to get it working (a felt a bit sheepish about not trying the other video card) and a tiny minority whinged endlessly about how sh1t Compaq were (but we got that everyday!).
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